By Mulengera Reporters
Like his wife Janet Kataaha Kainembabazi, Gen YK Museveni was originally born in and hails from Ntungamo District. That was years before he acquired land and relocated his parents and siblings to Rwakitura in the Mbarara District.
Museveni, who took up a teaching job in his S6 vacation in the mid-1960s, accumulated his modest savings from what he was paid teaching in a primary school to buy the Rwakitura land for himself as a young man.
Having been presumably born in 1947 (coinciding with the return of members of the KAR’s 7th Battalion from the 2nd World War into which the British forcefully conscripted them), Museveni was barely 20 years old as of 1966 when he is supposed to have bought the land at Rwakitura.
The same person was to later on take up a teaching job at Moshi Agriculture College to make ends meet while living in Tanzanian exile through the 1970s. So, as of 1973 when he met and cajoled Janet into becoming his wife, Museveni already had some land ownership at Rwakitura though Janet and their four children including 1st born Muhoozi Kainerugaba and 2nd born Natasha (respectively born in April 1974 and March 1976) didn’t get to access and see the same until December 1986.
After settling into State House Entebbe and generally the Ugandan life, having lived in the Sweden exile for 6 straight years (1981-1986), Museveni felt that year 1986’s Christmas recess was a perfect opportunity to take Janet and the children to see their burial place.
Rwakitura, to which the Family members had never been, is roughly 240kms from Kampala. And Museveni, then a very frugal President, insisted they had to travel to their ancestral home for the first time by road.
What today ordinarily takes roughly 4 hours, took the Musevenis the whole day. This was largely because of the bad state in which the roads were. Rwakitura was extremely bushy and Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba (barely 13 at that time) and his sisters shed tears on seeing how demoralising their birth and burial place looked like.
Their mum Janet Museveni had days earlier sent emissaries there (as the eventful trip was being prepared) who got some casual workers to do some bush clearing besides erecting a small bricks hut which had two rooms namely a small sitting room and bed room in which herself and Museveni slept during the Christmas recess.
Once at the bushy Rwakitura, the Museveni core family members (children and mum) were joined by large extended family members including uncles, aunties and cousins. Some of them being fortune-hunters, trying to leverage on their relative who had just become President of Uganda, these relatives came in large numbers but ironically had nowhere to sleep.
Quick improvisation had to be engaged and that’s how MK (then aged 12) ended up sleeping on an anti-hill that was covered with one of the army tents that had been carried around by the President’s security. His sisters slept with the aunties in the small tents which had been erected next to the hut where the President and his wife slept.
So cold were all those nights that the uncles had to every evening lit up a huge fire for people to warm themselves. Having failed to sleep partly because of extreme excitement and coldness, the aunties and uncles resorted to telling endless stories which caused a lot of laughter for much of would-be sleep time.
There was also daily fellowship and endless thanks giving prayer sessions which Janet (who had just increased her dedication to the Almighty God after His greatness manifested in the miraculous way she found herself in State House) enthusiastically tolerated and encouraged.
Every morning, Museveni (who insisted his children had to fully learn their native Ankole culture while unlearning the European way of life to which fate had exposed them for the preceding 6 years) would wake up all of them early in the morning to go and herd cattle with him and farm workers.
It was during such moments that Museveni would teach his children history of the different Ankole cattle. This included showing them offsprings that descended from the cow on whose back he was made to sit as a child.
He would also lead his children into long treks around his bushy farmland at Rwakitura. And such walks, which have since been modernised into the famous Mzee’s walk, would go on up to past mid-day and by that time, the children would all be thirsty and very exhausted.
They would be nursing wounds from the many thorns that were everywhere on his farm which clearly required urgent reorganising as of that time. As MK and his sisters complained and displayed their small thorns-inflicted wounds, their hassle-hardened father Yoweri Museveni would sarcastically tell them: “These are not streets of Paris and you have to be resilient.” (For comments on this story, get back to us on 0705579994 [whatsapp line], 0779411734 & 041 4674611 or email us at mulengeranews@gmail.com).