Mwalimu in the Squared circle 




_While this effort was being made, Amin postured: 
            "I challenge President Nyerere in the boxing ring to 
            fight it out there rather than that soldiers lose 
            their lives on the field of battle...Mohammed Ali 
            would be an ideal referee for the bout." 

                                 -- George Ivan Smith 
                                    GHOSTS OF KAMPALA (1980) 

  
                 As the Tanzanians began to counterattack, Amin 
            suggested a crazy solution to the dispute. He declared 
            that the matter should be settled in the boxing ring. 
            "I am keeping fit so that I can challenge President 
            Nyerere in the boxing ring and fight it out there, 
            rather than having the soldiers lose their lives on 
            the field of battle." Amin added that Mohammed Ali 
            would be an ideal referee for the bout, and that he, 
            Amin, as the former Uganda heavyweight champ, would 
            give the small, white-haired Nyerere a sporting chance 
            by fighting with one arm tied behind his back, and his 
            legs shackled with weights. 

                                 -- Dan Wooding and Ray Barnett 
                                    UGANDA HOLOCAUST (1980)_ 

                             # 

     Nyerere looks up through the haze of blood masking his vision 
and sees the huge man standing over him, laughing. He looks into 
the man's eyes and seems to see the dark heart of Africa, savage 
and untamed. 
     He cannot remember quite what he is doing here. Nothing 
hurts, but as he tries to move, nothing works, either. A black man 
in a white shirt, a man with a familiar face, seems to be pushing 
the huge man away, maneuvering him into a corner. Chuckling and 
posturing to people that Nyerere cannot see, the huge man backs 
away, and now the man in the white shirt returns and begins 
shouting. 
     _"Four!"_ 
     Nyerere blinks and tries to clear his mind. Who is he, and 
why is he on his back, half-naked, and who are these other two 
men? 
     _"Five!"_ 
     "Stay down, Mwalimu!" yells a voice from behind him, and now 
it begins to come back to him. _He_ is Mwalimu. 
     _"Six!"_ 
     He blinks again and sees the huge electronic clock above him. 
It is one minute and 58 seconds into the first round. He is 
Mwalimu, and if he doesn't get up, his bankrupt country has lost 
the war. 
     _"Seven!"_ 
     He cannot recall the last minute and 58 seconds. In fact, he 
cannot recall anything since he entered the ring. He can taste his 
blood, can feel it running down over his eyes and cheeks, but he 
cannot remember how he came to be bleeding, or laying on his back. 
It is a mystery. 
     _"Eight!"_ 
     Finally his legs are working again, and he gathers them 
beneath him. He does not know if they will bear his weight, but 
they must be doing so, for Mohammed Ali -- that is his name! Ali 
-- is cleaning his gloves off and staring into his eyes. 
     "You should have stayed down," whispers Ali. 
     Nyerere grunts an answer. He is glad that the mouthpiece 
is impeding his speech, for he has no idea what he is trying to 
say. 
     "I can stop it if you want," says Ali. 
     Nyerere grunts again, and Ali shrugs and stands aside as the 
huge man shuffles across the ring toward him, still chuckling. 

                             # 

     It began as a joke. Nobody ever took anything Amin said 
seriously, except for his victims. 
     He had launched a surprise bombing raid in the north of 
Tanzania. No one knew why, for despite what they did in their own 
countries, despite what genocide they might commit, the one thing 
all African leaders had adhered to since Independence was the 
sanctity of national borders. 
     So Julius Nyerere, the Mwalimu, the Teacher, the President of 
Tanzania, had mobilized his forces and pushed Amin's army back 
into Uganda. Not a single African nation had offered military 
assistance; not a single Western nation had offered to underwrite 
so much as the cost of a bullet. Amin had expediently converted to 
Islam, and now Libya's crazed but opportunistic Quaddafi was 
pouring money and weapons into Uganda. 
     Still, Nyerere's soldiers, with their tattered uniforms and 
ancient rifles, were marching toward Kampala, and it seemed only a 
matter of time before Amin was overthrown and the war would be 
ended, and Milton Obote would be restored to the Presidency of 
Uganda. It was a moral crusade, and Nyerere was convinced that 
Amin's soldiers were throwing down their weapons and fleeing 
because they, too, know that Right was on Tanzania's side. 
     But while Right may have favored Nyerere, Time did not. He 
knew what the Western press and even the Tanzanian army did not 
know: that within three weeks, not only could his bankrupt nation 
no longer supply its men with weapons, it could not even afford to 
bring them back out of Uganda. 

                             # 

     "I challenge President Nyerere in the boxing ring to fight it 
out there rather than that soldiers lose their lives on the field 
of battle..." 
     The challenge made every newspaper in the western world, as 
columnist after columnist laughed over the image of the 330-pound 
Amin, former heavyweight champion of the Kenyan army, stepping 
into the ring to duke it out with the five-foot one-inch, 112- 
pound, 57-year-old Nyerere. 
     Only one man did not laugh: Mwalimu. 

                             # 

     "You're crazy, you know that?" 
     Nyerere stares calmly at the tall, well-built man standing 
before his desk. It is a hot, humid day, typical of Dar es Salaam, 
and the man is already sweating profusely. 
     "I did not ask you here to judge my sanity," answers Nyerere. 
"But to tell me how to defeat him." 
     "It can't be done. You're spotting him two hundred pounds and 
twenty years. My job as referee is to keep him from out-and-out 
killing you." 
     "You frequently defeated men who were bigger and stronger 
than you," notes Nyerere gently. "And, in the latter portion of 
your career, younger than you as well." 
     "You float like a butterfly and sting like a bee," answers 
Ali. "But 57-year-old presidents don't float, and little bitty 
guys don't sting. I've been a boxer all my life. Have you ever 
fought anyone?" 
     "When I was younger," says Nyerere. 
     "How much younger?" 
     Nyerere thinks back to the sunlit day, some 48 years ago, 
when he pummeled his brother, though he can no longer remember the 
reason for it. In his mind's eye, both of them are small and thin 
and ill-nourished, and the beating amounted to two punches, 
delivered with barely enough force to stun a fly. The next week he 
acquired the gift of literacy, and he has never raised a hand in 
anger again. Words are far more powerful. 
     Nyerere sighs. "_Much_ younger," he admits. 
     "Ain't no way," says Ali, and then repeats, "Ain't no way. 
This guy is not just a boxer, he's crazy, and crazy people don't 
feel no pain." 
     "How would _you_ fight him?" asks Nyerere. 
     "Me?" says Ali. He starts jabbing the air with his left fist. 
"Stick and run, stick and run. Take him dancing til he drops. 
Man's got a lot of blubber on that frame." He holds his arms up 
before his face. "He catches up with me, I go into the rope-a- 
dope. I lean back, I take his punches on my forearms, I let him 
wear himself out." Suddenly he straightens up and turns back to 
Nyerere. "But it won't work for you. He'll break your arms if you 
try to protect yourself with them." 
     "He'll only have one arm free," Nyerere points out. 
     "That's all he'll need," answers Ali. "Your only shot is to 
keep moving, to tire him out." He frowns. "But..." 
     "But?" 
     "But I ain't never seen a 57-year-old man that could tire out 
a man in his thirties." 
     "Well," says Nyerere with an unhappy shrug, "I'll have to 
think of something." 
     "Think of letting your soldiers beat the shit out of _his_ 
soldiers," says Ali. 
     "That is impossible." 
     "I thought they were winning," said Ali. 
     "In fourteen days they will be out of ammunition and 
gasoline," answers Nyerere. "They will be unable to defend 
themselves and unable to retreat." 
     "Then give them what they need." 
     Nyerere shakes his head. "You do not understand. My nation 
is bankrupt. There is no money to pay for ammunition." 
     "Hell, I'll loan it to you myself," says Ali. "This Amin is a 
crazy man. He's giving blacks all over the world a bad name." 
     "That is out of the question," says Nyerere. 
     "You think I ain't got it?" says Ali pugnaciously. 
     "I am sure you are a very wealthy man, and that your offer is 
sincere," answers Nyerere. "But even if you gave us the money, by 
the time we converted it and purchased what we needed it would be 
too late. This is the only way to save my army." 
     "By letting a crazy man tear you apart?" 
     "By defeating him in the ring before he realizes that he can 
defeat my men in the field." 
     "I've seen a lot of things go down in the squared circle," 
says Ali, shaking his head in disbelief, "but this is the 
strangest." 

                             # 

     "You cannot do this," says Maria when she finally finds out. 
     "It is done," answers Nyerere. 
     They are in their bedroom, and he is staring out at the 
reflection of the moon on the Indian Ocean. As the light dances on 
the water, he tries to forget the darkness to the west. 
     "You are not a prizefighter," she says. "You are Mwalimu. No 
one expects you to meet this madman. The press treats it as a 
joke." 
     "I would be happy to exchange doctoral theses with him, but 
he insists on exchanging blows," says Nyerere wryly. 
     "He is illiterate," said Maria. "And the people will not 
allow it. You are the man who brought us independence and who has 
led us ever since. The people look to you for wisdom, not 
pugilism." 
     "I have never sought to live any life but that of the 
intellect," he admits. "And what has it brought us? While Kenyatta 
and Mobutu and even Kaunda have stolen hundreds of millions of 
dollars, we are as poor now as the day we were wed." He shakes his 
head sadly. "I stand up to oppose Amin, and only Sir Seretse Khama 
of Botswana, secure in his British knighthood, stands with me." 
He pauses again, trying to sort it out. "Perhaps the old _mzee_ of 
Kenya was right. Grab what you can while you can. Could our army 
be any more ill-equipped if I had funneled aid into a Swiss 
account? Could I be any worse off than now, as I prepare to face 
this madman in" -- he cannot hide his distaste -- "a boxing ring?" 
     "You must _not_ face him," insists Maria. 
     "I must, or the army will perish." 
     "Do you think he will let the army live after he has beaten 
you?" she asks. 
     Nyerere has not thought that far ahead, and now a troubled 
frown crosses his face. 

                             # 

     He had come to the office with such high hopes, such dreams 
and ambitions. Let Kenyatta play lackey to the capitalist West. 
Let Machal sell his country to the Russians. Tanzania would be 
different, a proving ground for African socialism. 
     It was a dry, barren country without much to offer. There 
were the great game parks, the Serengeti and the Ngorongoro Crater 
in the north, but four-fifths of the land was infested with the 
tsetse fly, there were no minerals beneath the surface, Nairobi 
was already the capital city of East Africa and no amount of 
modernization to Dar es Salaam could make it competitive. There 
was precious little grazing land and even less water. None of this 
fazed Nyerere; they were just more challenges to overcome, and he 
had no doubt that he could shape them to his vision. 
     But before industrialization, before prosperity, before 
anything else, came education. He had gone from the bush to the 
presidency in a single lifetime, had translated the entire body of 
Shakespeare's work into Swahili, had given form and structure to 
his country's constitution, and he knew that before everything 
came literacy. While his people lived in grass huts, other men 
had harnessed the atom, had reached the Moon, had obliterated 
hundreds of diseases, all because of the written word. And so 
while Kenyatta became the _Mzee_, the Wise Old Man, he himself 
became _Mwalimu_. Not the President, not the Leader, not the Chief 
of Chiefs, but the Teacher. 
     He would teach them to turn away from the dark heart and 
reach for the sunlight. He created the _ujamaa_ villages, based on 
the Israeli _kibbutzim_, and issued the Arusha Declaration, and 
channeled more than half his country's aid money into the schools. 
His people's bellies might not be filled, their bodies might not 
be covered, but they could read, and everything would follow from 
that. 
     But what followed was drought, and famine, and disease, and 
more drought, and more famine, and more disease. He went abroad 
and described his vision and pleaded for money; what he got were 
ten thousand students who arrived overflowing with idealism but 
devoid of funds. They meant well and they worked hard, but they 
had to be fed, and housed, and medicated, and when they could not 
mold the country into his utopia in the space of a year or two, 
they departed. 
     And then came the madman, the final nail in Tanzania's 
financial coffin. Nyerere labeled him for what he was, and found 
himself conspicuously alone on the continent. African leaders 
simply didn't criticize one another, and suddenly it was the 
Mwalimu who was the pariah, not the bloodthirsty butcher of 
Uganda. The East African Union, a fragile thing at best, fell 
apart, and while Nyerere was trying to save it, Kenyatta, the true 
capitalist, appropriated all three countries' funds and began 
printing his own money. Tanzania, already near bankruptcy, was 
left with money that was not honored anywhere beyond its borders. 
     Still, he struggled to meet the challenge. If that was the 
way the _Mzee_ wanted to play the game, that was fine with him. He 
closed the border to Kenya. If tourists wanted to see his game 
parks, they would have to stay in _his_ country; there would be no 
more round trips from Nairobi. If Amin wanted to slaughter his 
people, so be it; he would cut off all diplomatic relations, and 
to hell with what his neighbors thought. Perhaps it was better 
this way; now, with no outside influences, he could concentrate 
entirely on creating his utopia. It would be a little more 
difficult, it would take a little longer, but in the end, the 
accomplishment would be that much more satisfying. 
     And then Amin's air force dropped its bombs on Tanzania. 

                             # 

     _The insanity of it._ 
     Nyerere ducks a roundhouse right, Amin guffaws and winks to 
the crowd, Ali stands back and wishes he were somewhere else. 
     Nyerere's vision has cleared, but blood keeps running into 
his left eye. The fight is barely two minutes old, and already he 
is gasping for breath. He can feel every beat of his heart, as if 
a tiny man with a hammer and chisel is imprisoned inside his 
chest, trying to get out. 
     The weights attached to Amin's ankles should be slowing him 
down, but somehow Nyerere finds that he is cornered against the 
ropes. Amin fakes a punch, Nyerere ducks, then straightens up just 
in time to feel the full power of the madman's fist as it smashes 
into his face. 
     He is down on one knee again, 57 years old and gasping for 
breath. Suddenly he realizes that no air is coming in, that he is 
suffocating, and he thinks his heart has stopped...but no, he can 
feel it, still pounding. Then he understands: his nose is broken, 
and he is trying to breathe through his mouth and the mouthpiece 
is preventing it. He spits the mouthpiece out, and is mildly 
surprised to see that it is not covered with blood. 
     _"Three!"_ 
     Amin, who has been standing at the far side of the ring, 
approaches, laughing uproariously, and Ali stops the count and 
slowly escorts him back to the neutral corner. 
     _The pen is mightier than the sword._ The words come, 
unbidden, into Nyerere's mind, and he wants to laugh. A horrible, 
retching sound escapes his lips, a sound so alien that he cannot 
believe it came from him. 
     Ali slowly returns to him and resumes the count. 
     _"Four!"_ Stay down, you old fool, Ali's eyes seem to say. 
     Nyerere grabs a rope and tries to pull himself up. 
     _"Five!"_ I bought you all the time I could, say the eyes, 
but I can't protect you if you get up again. 
     Nyerere gathers himself for the most difficult physical 
effort of his life. 
     _"Six!"_ You're as crazy as _he_ is. 
     Nyerere stands up. He hopes Maria will be proud of him, but 
somehow he knows that she won't. 
     Amin, mugging to the crowd in a grotesque imitation of Ali, 
moves in the for kill. 

                             # 

     When he was a young man, the president of his class at 
Uganda's Makerere University, already tabbed as a future leader by 
his teachers and his classmates, his fraternity entered a track 
meet, and he was chosen to run the 400-meter race. 
     I am no athlete, he said; I am a student. I have exams to 
worry about, a scholarship to obtain. I have no time for such 
foolishness. But they entered his name anyway, and the race was 
the final event of the day, and just before it began his brothers 
came up to him and told him that if he did not beat at least one 
of his five rivals, his fraternity, which held a narrow lead after 
all the other events, would lose. 
     Then you will lose, said Nyerere with a shrug. 
     If we do, it will be your fault, they told him. 
     It is just a race, he said. 
     But it is important to _us_, they said. 
     So he allowed himself to be led to the starting line, and the 
pistol was fired, and all six young men began running, and he 
found himself trailing the field, and he remained in last place 
all the way around the track, and when he crossed the finish wire, 
he found that his brothers had turned away from him. 
     But it was only a game, he protested later. What difference 
does it make who is the faster? We are here to study laws and 
vectors and constitutions, not to run in circles. 
     It is not that you came in last, answered one of them, but 
that you represented us and you did not try. 
     It was many days before they spoke to him again. He took to 
running a mile every morning and every evening, and when the next 
track meet took place, he volunteered for the 400-meter race 
again. He was beaten by almost 30 meters, but he came in fourth, 
and collapsed of exhaustion ten meters past the finish line, and 
the following morning he was re-elected president of his 
fraternity by acclamation. 

                             # 

     There are 43 seconds left in the first round, and his arms 
are too heavy to lift. Amin swings a roundhouse that he ducks, but 
it catches him on the shoulder and knocks him halfway across the 
ring. The shoulder goes numb, but it has bought him another ten 
seconds, for the madman cannot move fast with the weights on his 
ankles, probably could not move fast even without them. Besides, 
he is enjoying himself, joking with the crowd, talking to Ali, 
mugging for all the cameras at ringside. 
     Ali finds himself between the two men, takes an extra few 
seconds awkwardly extricating himself -- Ali, who has never taken 
a false or awkward step in his life -- and buys Nyerere almost 
five more seconds. Nyerere looks up at the clock and sees there is 
just under half a minute remaining. 
     Amin bellows and swings a blow that will crush his skull if 
it lands, but it doesn't; the huge Ugandan cannot balance properly 
with one hand tied behind his back, and he misses and almost falls 
through the ropes. 
     "Hit him now!" come the yells from Nyerere's corner. 
     "Kill him, Mwalimu!" 
     But Nyerere can barely catch his breath, can no longer lift 
his arms. He blinks to clear the blood from his eyes, then 
staggers to the far side of the ring. Maybe it will take Amin 12 
or 13 seconds to get up, spot him, reach him. If he goes down 
again then, he can be saved by the bell. He will have survived the 
round. He will have run the race. 

                             # 

     Vectors. Angles. The square of the hypotenuse. It's all very 
intriguing, but it won't help him become a leader. He opts for 
law, for history, for philosophy. 
     How was he to know that in the long run they were the same? 

                             # 

     He sits in his corner, his nostrils propped open, his cut man 
working on his eye. Ali comes over and peers intently at him. 
     "He knocks you down once more, I gotta stop it," he says. 
     Nyerere tries to answer through battered lips. It is 
unintelligible. Just as well; for all he knows, he was trying to 
say, "Please do." 
     Ali leans closer and lowers his voice. 
     "It's not just a sport, you know. It's a science, too." 
     Nyerere utters a questioning croak. 
     "You run, he's gonna catch you," continues Ali. "A ring ain't 
a big enough place to hide in." 
     Nyerere stares at him dully. What is the man trying to say? 
     "You gotta close with him, grab him. Don't give him room to 
swing. You do that, maybe I won't have to go to your funeral 
tomorrow." 
     Vectors, angles, philosophy, all the same when you're the 
Mwalimu and you're fighting for your life. 

                             # 

     The lion, some 400 pounds of tawny fury, pulls down the one- 
ton buffalo. 
     The 100-pound hyena runs him off his kill. 
     The 20-pound jackal winds up eating it. 
     And Nyerere clinches with the madman, hangs on for dear life, 
feels the heavy blows raining down on his back and shoulders, 
grabs tighter. Ali separates them, positions himself near Amin's 
right hand so that he can't release the roundhouse, and Nyerere 
grabs the giant again. 

                             # 

     His head is finally clear. The fourth round is coming up, and 
he hasn't been down since the first. He still can't catch his 
breath, his legs will barely carry him to the center of the ring, 
and the blood is once again trickling into his eye. He looks at 
the madman, who is screaming imprecations to his seconds, his 
chest and belly rising and falling. 
     Is Amin tiring? Does it matter? Nyerere still hasn't landed a 
single blow. Could even a hundred blows bring the Ugandan to his 
knees? He doubts it. 
     Perhaps he should have bet on the fight. The odds were 
thousands to one that he wouldn't make it this far. He could have 
supplied his army with the winnings, and died honorably. 

                             # 

     It is not the same, he decides, as they rub his shoulders, 
grease his cheeks, apply ice to the swelling beneath his eye. He 
has survived the fourth round, has done his best, but it is not 
the same. He could finish fourth out of six in a foot race and be 
re-elected, but if he finishes second tonight, he will not have a 
country left to re-elect him. This is the real world, and 
surviving, it seems, is not as important as winning. 
     Ali tells him to hold on, his corner tells him to retreat, 
the cut man tells him to protect his eye, but no one tells him how 
to _win_, and he realizes that he will have to find out on his 
own. 
     Goliath fell to a child. Even Achilles had his weakness. What 
must he do to bring the madman down? 

                             # 

     He is crazy, this Amin. He revels in torture. He murders his 
wives. Rumor has it that he has even killed and eaten his infant 
son. How do you find weakness in a barbarian like that? 
     And suddenly, Nyerere understands, you do it by realizing 
that he _is_ a barbarian -- ignorant, illiterate, superstitious. 
     There is no time now, but he will hold that thought, he will 
survive one more round of clinching and grabbing, of stifling 
closeness to the giant whose very presence he finds degrading. 
     Three more minutes of the sword, and then he will apply the 
pen. 
                             # 

     He almost doesn't make it. Halfway through the round Amin 
shakes him off like a fly, then lands a right to the head as he 
tries to clinch again. 
     Consciousness begins to ebb from him, but by sheer force of 
will he refuses to relinquish it. He shakes his head, spits blood 
on the floor of the ring, and stands up once more. Amin lunges at 
him, and once again he wraps his small, spindly arms around the 
giant. 

                             # 

     "A snake," he mumbles, barely able to make himself 
understood. 
     "A snake?" asks the cornerman. 
     "Draw it on my glove," he says, forcing the words out with an 
excruciating effort. 
     "Now?" 
     "Now," mutters Nyerere. 

                             # 

     He comes out for the seventh round, his face a mask of raw, 
bleeding tissue. As Amin approaches him, he spits out his 
mouthpiece. 
     "As I strike, so strikes this snake," he whispers. "Protect 
your heart, madman."  He repeats it in his native Zanake dialect, 
which the giant thinks is a curse. 
     Amin's eyes go wide with terror, and he hits the giant on the 
left breast. 
     It is the first punch he has thrown in the entire fight, and 
Amin drops to his knees, screaming. 
     _"One!"_ 
     Amin looks down at his unblemished chest and pendulous belly, 
and seems surprised to find himself still alive and breathing. 
     _"Two!"_ 
     Amin blinks once, then chuckles. 
     _"Three!"_ 
     The giant gets to his feet, and approaches Nyerere. 
     "Try again," he says, loud enough for ringside to hear. "Your 
snake has no fangs." 
     He puts his hand on his hips, braces his legs, and waits. 
     Nyerere stares at him for an instant. So the pen is _not_ 
mightier than the sword. Shakespeare might have told him so. 
     "I'm waiting!" bellows the giant, mugging once more for the 
crowd. 
     Nyerere realizes that it is over, that he will die in the 
ring this night, that he can no more save his army with his fists 
than with his depleted treasury. He has fought the good fight, has 
fought it longer than anyone thought he could. At least, before 
it is over, he will have one small satisfaction. He feints with 
his left shoulder, then puts all of his strength into one final 
effort, and delivers a right to the madman's groin. 
     The air rushes out of Amin's mouth with a _woosh!_ and he 
doubles over, then drops to his knees. 
     Ali pushes Nyerere into a neutral corner, then instructs the 
judges to take away a point from him on their scorecards. 
     They can take away a point, Nyerere thinks, but they can't 
take away the fact that I met him on the field of battle, that I 
lasted more than six rounds, that the giant went down twice. Once 
before the pen, once before the sword. 
     And both were ineffective. 
     Even a Mwalimu can learn one last lesson, he decides, and it 
is that sometimes even vectors and philosophy aren't enough. We 
must find another way to conquer Africa's dark heart, the madness 
that pervades this troubled land. I have shown those who will 
follow me the first step; I have stood up to it, faced it without 
flinching. It will be up to someone else, a wiser Mwalimu than 
myself, to learn how to overcome it. I have done my best, I have 
given my all, I have made the first dent in its armor. Rationality 
cannot always triumph over madness, but it must stand up and be 
counted, as I have stood up. They cannot ask any more of me. 
     Finally at peace with himself, he prepares for the giant's 
final assault. 

                             -end- 