Of all the decisions Aggrey Awori had to make in his storied life, perhaps the most consequential was the one he reached, consciously or not, about his citizenship as a young man. The question was pertinent for him and others in a family that straddled the Uganda-Kenya border at Busia, where the Awori brothers and sisters were born and raised. Most of the Awori children drifted towards Kenya, where one of them, Moody Awori, rose to the vice presidency of that country. Aggrey Awori chose Uganda, where he lived and died.
Aggrey Awori, as most of us know, didn’t quite fulfill his immense potential. But he enjoyed a political career just as illustrious and way more colorful than any of his siblings: as a journalist, a diplomat, a rebel leader, a lawmaker, a presidential candidate, a minister, and, finally, a grizzled old man pondering his decades in public life. So why did one who lived so vibrantly die a sad man?
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On July 5, 2021, the final bell tolled for Awori after being hospitalized with COVID-19 at a Kampala hospital. He was 82. Although he received a fair amount of tributes in the newspapers, the obituaries didn’t come close to explaining what this man, by his successes and by his failures, represented in the wider colonial construct called Uganda. There was mention, of course, of his gifts: the oratory power, the charm, the diplomatic hand, the pan-African credentials, and even the mischievousness that might have helped propagate unsubstantiated rumors that he once had been a foreign agent. Not much was said of Awori’s roots, first as the young man who makes a fateful choice of citizenship, for better or worse, and then as the larger-than-life figure trying to craft a path to the presidency he sees as his birthright. If there ever was one for him, it was very, very narrow.
In January 1986, when Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army took power in Kampala, Awori was serving as Uganda’s envoy to the European Union in Brussels, and under Museveni he kept the post until 1987. Exiled and adrift, he founded the rebel group Force Obote Back, or FOBA, saying later that his reason for doing so was mainly anger at the confiscation of his property. But in 1992, as Museveni cemented his hold on power, Awori dissolved FOBA and considered returning home. A 1993 meeting in New York with Museveni and Jim Muhwezi, then the director of the International Security Organization, sealed Awori’s homecoming. Awori was a member of the Constituent Assembly, which enacted and promulgated a republican constitution for Uganda in 1995. Then he won a seat in the national assembly as the charismatic lawmaker from Samia-Bugwe North.
An outspoken member of the Uganda People’s Congress party, Awori, by his articulate presentation, helped shape the image of the Seventh Parliament as a respected institution of debate, one in which he could be said to have been a leading man in a cast that included the likes of Ben Wacha, Nobert Mao, Okullo Epak, Martin Wandera, John Kazoora, Winnie Byanyima, and Beatrice Kiraso. Awori may have been a rabble-rouser, but he also was a welcoming figure who reached out across the political aisle to seek consensus with people he may have privately despised.
There’s an instructive photo of a cream-suited Awori as the focus of a jovial scene inside the parliamentary chamber, Eriya Kategaya and Abdu Katuntu turning their smiling faces in his direction. There’s another of him in relaxed conversation with a young Noble Mayombo in military fatigues. James Rwanyarare, the Uganda People’s Congress historical, has described Awori as “a good man, clever and charming,” dismissing accusations of perfidy. Mao, the newly minted justice minister, has asserted, most recently, that he wished Awori were around to help him make sense of some political things.
Moody Awori, the former vice president of Kenya, said of his brother that he was “blessed with a trait that enabled him to operate across all social classes.” Aggrey Awori had the ability, he told TWR, “to ‘rabble-rouse’ while at the same time being able to reach out across the political divide.”
Awori himself sometimes noted that, although he was widely perceived as an implacable adversary of the president, Museveni consulted him on sensitive security matters. He even claimed that his network of prominent contacts included Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gadhafi and Omar al-Bashir. Awori may have been exaggerating, but he was probably the only lawmaker of his generation who could believably make such claims. At least he had met those leaders.
At home, in the corridors of the House, there can be no doubt that Awori was beloved by his colleagues across the political spectrum. Yet this obvious gift that should have served him well in his quest for higher office didn’t, in the end, take him far. Thus his political career didn’t follow a natural trajectory. He served five presidents in a career that began with his appointment as the first director of Uganda Television and included stints as a diplomat and government insider. Then he was a lawmaker who unsuccessfully sought the presidency, returned to the national assembly, accepted a post in Museveni’s government, and was quietly ushered into retirement when Museveni dropped him. Inexplicably, he tried unsuccessfully to resurrect his career months before he died by seeking an affirmative-action seat in the national assembly.
Looking back, it can seem that the presidential election of 2001 sealed his fate, just as other elections have sealed the fates of politicians who tried to wrestle power from Museveni. Those who have not given up, like Kizza Besigye, are destined to die trying, but others like Awori who are co-opted usually end up being ejected and forgotten.
Awori came third in the 2001 election, with a paltry 1.4 percent. Museveni took 69 percent of the vote. The result was an obvious anti-climax for Awori, who had created excitement on the campaign trail with talk of flying a chopper as well as an intellectual style backed by his Harvard education and international experience.
Yet his performance was not surprising in a country where the voting culture favors candidates pandering to the whims of voters not interested in policy articulation. Thus, shadowed by the banality of local politics, Awori could not distinguish himself in a commanding way. As in the Washington Post social experiment with the classical violinist Joshua Bell, he faced a largely uncurious electorate. He would never get the chance to prove he could be the ‘philosopher king’ proffered in Plato’s Republic. In Museveni’s Uganda, teeming with canny operators and sun-scorched former Marxist guerrillas, Awori, who spoke the language of poets, was a promising but hopeless figure.
According to Moody Awori, who at 94 has long been in retirement, his brother “would have liked to leave Uganda as a thriving social welfare state, more like Sweden or those Scandinavian states where things work efficiently but the state is less visible.”
Years later, with his efforts towards East African integration most of all, Aggrey Awori would prove himself a reliable pan-Africanist, suggesting that perhaps for him it didn’t matter which side of the border he had ended up in. His brother may have admired what Gadhafi and Fidel Castro achieved for their countries, Moody Awori said, “but he also very much believed in pan-Africanism and what the continent was capable of achieving for itself.”
Still, it’s perplexing even to his own family that Awori was so patriotic, choosing to stay and live in Uganda when he had good reason to settle in Kenya, where his siblings such as Mary Okello were succeeding spectacularly. Okello, the first woman in East Africa to head a Barclays Bank branch and the founder of the Kenya Women Finance Trust, said in eloquent notes to TWR that Uganda was attractive to Awori because the country “did not have the kind of deep ethnic biases” still felt in Kenya today.
“His choice of country to live his life, starting with his education, was informed by its institutional and more inclusive social set-up,” Okello said of Awori’s Uganda. “Yet still, his loyalty to Uganda was unwavering because, even after living in tough conditions while in exile, starting with the Amin regime for many years, whenever an opportunity for peace and resettling in Uganda appeared he always returned to Uganda and yet he had the other option of reviving his roots on the other side of the border.”
Awori was briefly detained at the start of Idi Amin’s 1971 coup against Milton Obote, the only journalist to be taken into custody. “That nearly ended my life,” Awori once recalled, asserting that he only escaped murder because Amin, who suspected the young UTV director knew of his plot, believed Awori had not warned Obote. Yet Awori had alerted the president, who apparently took his time. Freed from jail, later that year he fled to Kenya with the help of the Amin-era military officer Francis Nyangweso, who died in 2011.
Awori taught journalism at the University of Nairobi until 1976 and then travelled around Africa, visiting countries such as Senegal, then led by the flawed philosopher-king Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Liberia under the tragic figure of William Tolbert. If Awori drew great inspiration from his African travels in exile, or even from the political intrigues he witnessed, it’s a shame he never wrote his memoirs.
Awori returned to Kenya in 1979, monitoring events in Uganda from there. He tried, for example, to have Obote appoint Museveni a minister in the aftermath of the disputed election of December 1980, as a containment measure. But Obote, who was attacking Museveni personally, didn’t make his move. Museveni’s group of rebels attacked Kabamba in February 1981, launching the guerrilla war that weakened Obote amid tribal bickering among senior military officers.
Awori, then Uganda’s ambassador to Washington, was apparently among those who knew of the plot against Obote by the Okellos. Acholi army officers had rebelled against Obote after he appointed Smith Opon Acak, a Langi, as the chief of staff to replace the very capable David Oyite Ojok, who had been killed in a helicopter crash while flying over the war scene in Luweero. Awori recalled the coup plotter Tito Okello Lutwa calling him in Washington about Obote disrespecting him: “He said, ‘I have been trying to see your friend but he [Obote] won’t see me. Tell him if he won’t see me by lunchtime I am gone.’” In this way Awori may have been among the first to know that Obote soon might lose power, as he did, in the coup that galvanized Museveni’s bush-war effort to take power by force.
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Aggrey Siryori Awori was born on February 23, 1939, in the Busia village of Budimo, the tenth of seventeen children. His father, Jeremiah Musungu Awori, was a pioneer African priest of the Anglican faith in East Africa and his mother, Mariamu Odongo Awori, was a nurse. He attended Nabumali High School, where he was a gifted student, then went to King’s College Budo. For his college education he was offered admission to Cambridge, the British military college at Sandhurst, and Harvard. He chose Harvard, which gave him a scholarship, studying nuclear physics in his first year and switching to political economics as a sophomore. He was an exceptional athlete there, breaking college records in heptagonal track and field championships. He also represented Uganda in the 110-metre hurdles at the 1960 Summer Olympics and then again in 1964. Still in his twenties when he returned to Uganda, Obote made him the first black director of Uganda Television. Awori had the world at his feet.
A decade before he died, Awori looked into the crystal ball and predicted that he was in the evening of his life in the material sense of things. So he commenced the construction of his final resting place, a tomb dug in an extension of his house in the hamlet of Kibimba, where one still can imagine him sitting in an easy chair and staring at treacherous rows of rice fields. Not many people literally dig their own graves, and one wonders why Awori didn’t reveal this strange decision to some close relatives. Was this a final act of patriotism by a man concerned that his dead body might be shipped across the border for burial? Perhaps it was, not for the first time, an expression of Awori’s choice. He lived in Uganda, would die in Uganda, and wanted to be buried in Uganda. At Kibimba he rests now, in the white-washed tomb he built for himself.
No longer a member of parliament, he had retreated to Kibimba, mellowed but no less mischievous. Although his speech was slurred, he always received visitors. To a television journalist he complained about the growing influence of money in politics, and once he even advised Bobi Wine, the new face of the opposition, to aim for power by means other than elections.
But, coming from Awori, what could this all mean? We know that there’s a picture of a desultory-looking Awori in a yellow shirt canvassing for support to win a seat in the national assembly as a representative of elderly people — an obvious betrayal of his earlier decision to retire from politics but also a statement of his unfulfilled potential. What could he hope to achieve in politics at this late stage, under a president stronger than he ever was, with an imperial presidency virtually in place?
His offspring prefer to remember him the way he was at home, as “a family man of the entire Awori clan (who) loved to know how our cousins across the border and all over the globe were doing,” said his daughter Nafula Awori, a businesswoman and writer in Kampala. “He treasured the time he had with his grandchildren, encouraging them to achieve their highest heights.”