The Teeth May Smile But the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda

"On Sept. 22, 1972, a dusty car carrying three soldiers skidded to a stop outside a county headquarters in western Uganda. They apprehended the county chief, Eliphaz Laki, and told him he was wanted at the local army barracks for questioning. Then they drove him out of town, stopped at a cattle ranch, walked him into the bush, shot him in the back of the neck and left. Nearly three decades later, Eliphaz Laki's son Duncan pushed a shovel into the ground under a short oruyenje bush. The metal met something hard—a badly decomposed clump of human bones. Duncan had found his father. Pushcart Prize-winning journalist Andrew Rice, who lived in Uganda, tells the story of the son's search for his father—and for justice—in the compelling <The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget. This book is much larger than a family tragedy. Through the experiences of the Lakis under the murderous dictatorship of Idi Amin, Rice takes on the age-old dilemmas of hatred, divisiveness, revenge, reconciliation and the corruption of power . . . During the trial of Laki's killers, conducted from Nov. 20, 2002, until Sept. 25 the following year, some decried opening up old wounds, while others welcomed the opportunity to drill for the truth. More than a few argued that the three soldiers were simply following orders, that because Eliphaz Laki had ties to an anti-Amin faction, his killing was justified. The trial stirred up repressed, but still very much alive, enmities—between Muslim and Christian, between northern Ugandans and southern Ugandans, between those who still held Idi Amin in esteem and those who despised him. 'Justice,' writes Rice, 'entered the courtroom as a pristine ideal; it would leave scuffed, muddled, and altogether Ugandan.' Like Francisco Goldman's engaging 2007 book, The Art of Political Murder, which explored the assassination of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi, the verdict mattered less than the process. In all its churning messiness, the trial of Laki's killers forced people not to turn their eyes away."—Donna Marchetti, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"From longtime African affairs journalist Rice, a provocative story of war, death and the quest for justice in the wake of Idi Amin's ruinous reign in Uganda. . . . As a ruler, having engineered a coup against his left-leaning predecessor and passed muster as a Cold War ally of the Western powers, he was seen as someone who could be reasoned with. Not so. Amin's lieutenants busily eliminated servants of the former administration and others suspected of being disloyal to the regime, which would become internationally infamous for its role in the hijacking of an Israeli airliner. One victim of the bloodletting was a county chief named Eliphaz Laki, who disappeared in 1972. In 1979, Amin's army, a haphazard lot of brigands, disintegrated after an ill-advised invasion of neighboring Tanzania. Amin fled into Saudi Arabian exile, after which many Ugandans took the view that it might be just as well to forget the past. Yet in 1986 a new leader came to power, Yoweri Museveni, and one of his first official acts was to establish a commission of inquiry about the crimes of the Amin regime, telling Ugandans that 'they could begin to mend their nation just by speaking the truth.' Helped by Laki's son, investigators determined that the murderers included Amin's chief of staff, as well as two soldiers, all of whom were brought to trial. Rice observes that, whereas most murder trials in Uganda's legal system took only a week or so to be settled, that of the senior official took more than a year, complicated by both the quality of the evidence and, it seems, a persistent refusal to fully engage the past. Reconciliation is an increasingly important process in nations once torn by fratricide. Rice's important book serves as an urgent case study, complete with a surprising outcome."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Journalist Rice . . . spent five years writing this account of a son's efforts to discover the truth about and seek justice for the 1972 murder of his father . . . His son eventually discovered his grave and tracked down his three executioners, who were brought to trial. Rice, who attended the trial, here considers the limits of reconciliation—an important question in today's world. The book reads as easily as mystery fiction, but Rice manages to weave in the complex history and even more serpentine politics of Amin's Uganda. He conducted more than 100 interviews and supports his text with 40 pages of notes."—Joel Neuberg, Library Journal

"Treating the Lakis' story as a microcosm of Uganda's own, the author weaves together the family's search for truth and justice with Uganda's history. From its intimate portrait of Eliphaz's grieving family to the wide-angle perspectives of the tumultuous post-independence years as Ugandans struggled to knit together a nation from the ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse peoples within their colonial borders, the book recasts a familiar history in an entirely new light."—Publishers Weekly