The murder of a general, and war of the sexes

THE STORY OF THE MURDER of Gen James Kazini, Uganda’s former army commander, has truly gripped the country.

As both The Nation and The Star reported on Wednesday, Kazini died in the wee hours of Tuesday morning after his mistress, Lydia Draru, allegedly shattered his head with a metal object in a drunken argument. Though Kazini was disgraced for allegedly creating fictitious battalions and pocketing ghost soldiers’ pay, he had countless military exploits to his credit.

From the 1990s, he led the fight against two rebel groups in northern Uganda, including the dreadful Lords’ Resistance Army. He then commanded the war against the Allied Democratic Forces in the mountains of western Uganda, and defeated them. He went on to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to lead Uganda’s fateful campaign there. It is there that Gen Kazini met his Waterloo when the Uganda forces fell out with their Rwandan allies, and were handed an embarrassing drubbing by their apprentices.

Kazini was notorious for living dangerously, and was mired in more than his equal share of controversies. But one thing you couldn’t take away from him, was sheer guts. He had lots of it. And that is what makes the manner of his death intriguing. That having survived 20 decades on the frontlines, he would be dispatched by an indignant mistress’ iron bar at dawn (she accuses him of pulling a pistol on her).

There is something else; almost everywhere else in the world, when men kill women, it will cause outrage, it will be denounced as an act of barbarity, but there is no novelty in it. It is the story of a dog biting man; it’s expected to happen. When a woman kills a man, now that is a man bites dog story. It is unexpected, and has novelty. Thus when some mad man kills women, there is horror. But if an angry woman were to kill a bunch of men, there would be no horror.

Rather we would have a lot of disquiet and unease, a sense that the world as we know it is about to end because something that is not supposed to happen had taken place – the fear that men are losing control. It is for this reason that a man might walk through Nairobi’s streets bare-chested when it is very hot, but a woman would not make 100 metres with her top uncovered. It would be a sign that “immorality is getting of out control”, and therefore responsible men must put a stop to it.

A BRILLIANT ARTICLE IN The Independent by author Al-Aswany examined men’s complex political attitudes towards women and their bodies. His take-off point is Sudan, where women are jailed and whipped in public for wearing trousers and, more dramatically, Somalia, where the hardline Islamist Al Shabaab militia have banned women from wearing bras in the areas under their control.

Al Shabaab banned bras because they constituted deception. If a woman’s breasts are flat, the fundamentalists reasoned, then they should be seen to be so. To make them look firm by wearing a bra is to lie about their condition – to men. And if they were just regular, by wearing a bra, they could look more ample than they are, and thus a man who is attracted to the woman for that reason will be short-changed when, in the end, he finds that he was misled.

Al-Aswany made the point that extremist groups like Al Shabaab, and the giant beauty and entertainment industries in the West, while so different in ideology, share one thing – the notion that a woman’s body is a commodity. It is either for pleasure, for commerce, or the source of temptation that results in the fall of great man (Shakespeare’s Caesar who is so smitten by Cleopatra, he forsakes the Roman empire for her).

Nothing new there. What we haven’t confronted enough is how this male view of women limits our ability to understand and prepare for female counter-insurgency. Gen Kazini had been out late with Draru. The Daily Monitor reports that a friend who found them at a club at 5am, encountered a distraught Draru.

When the friend asked Kazini to comfort her, the general dismissed Draru’s sobs as the “snivelling of a prostitute”. It is the stuff of which tragedies are made. Kazini became a war hero whose death denied him the possibility of redemption. And Draru will not see her righteous fury make her a heroine for women’s cause, but a murderer.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com