Uganda: Random Facts and Trivia

Some random facts and trivia for the country of the world Uganda, Churchil quote about Uganda, the peasant people, size of Lake Victoria.

UGANDA

NOTES

"I had travelled through tropical forests in Cuba and India, and had often before admired their enchanting yet sinister luxuriance. But the forests of Uganda, for magnificence, for profusion of brilliant life and awful fecundity of the natural processes eclipsed all previous impressions. One becomes the spectator of an intense convulsion of life and death."--Winston Churchill, 1908.

Most Ugandans are peasant farmers but they are very prosperous, especially in the south where fertile, picturesque farms give Uganda its name "Pearl of East Africa."

Lake Victoria is larger than West Virginia, beautiful and inviting, but impossible to swim in. It is full of crocodiles and hippos, and its islands are infested with the tsetse fly.

Trade and commerce, until recently, were carried on by the Asians--mostly Indians--who made up Uganda's rather aloof and insular middle class. Because God "told him so" in a dream, strongman General Amin made war on the Asians; he gave them 90 days to leave the country or find themselves "sitting on the fire." His campaign expelled or scared most of them out, leaving a vacuum in the mercantile trades.

"Idi Amin Dada .... has established a sinister state that would startle fiction writers. Dissidents, real or potential, are dragged screaming from bar or cafe by gun-toting young men in dark glasses; bodies of well-known former citizens are washed up on the shores of otherwise picturesque lakes; swaggering glazed-eyed soldiers waylay and molest tourists and travelers in the bush... and the jails are witnesses to unmitigated brutality."--Christopher Munnion, British journalist who reported from Uganda before being jailed and expelled in September, 1972.

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