Son of a Rat Catcher, the autobiography of a man who has witnessed many key events in the making of modern Uganda from a vantage view point, does not set out to push any specific theme.

The author, Jenkins Kiwanuka, simply tells his life story. But because of his many years of contact with the top leaders of the country, his story in a way is the story of Uganda’s political development seen from the eyes of a ringside observer. And in the process, he helps the reader to feel the ordinariness of the high and mighty.

His struggle to acquire a modern education gives the book its title, as his father raised part of his school fees by trapping rats and submitting their tails to colonial authorities in exchange for money as part of their campaign to fight the plague.

Unfortunately, Kiwanuka lost the struggle for modern education due to a brief illness that made him lose his place at one of the few good high schools then. After a series of odd jobs and artisan apprenticeships, Kiwanuka landed a clerical job in the colonial army and was posted to Kenya.

Life in the barracks exposed him to all manner of people who were involved in quelling the Mau Mau insurgency, including one burly non-commissioned officer, Idi Amin Dada, who was later to become the president of Uganda.

By the time he returned to Uganda in 1956, Kiwanuka was now politically aware and went into journalism. Though he does not say it, exposure to the military seems to have sharpened his determination.

His further education was attained through correspondence courses, and it did not take him long to rise through the ranks to become chief reporter of key media houses and eventually an editor.

As a top journalist during the days of the struggle for Independence, Kiwanuka became politically active and an executive member of Uganda’s first serious nationalist political party, the Uganda National Congress.

Two years after Independence, he joined the country’s foreign service but never really left journalism, serving as a public information officer at many of the country’s missions and at the ministry headquarters.

Though he served as a senior diplomat for nearly 30 years, working closely with top political leaders, both Ugandan and foreign — until he even became friends with a Pope — Kiwanuka never became an ambassador. His lack of high education militated against his prospects.

After serving and living in different capitals of the world, Kiwanuka was recalled to Kampala to run the Foreign Ministry’s public relations department and was seconded to the Information Ministry, where he headed the Uganda News Agency.

He also headed the government newspaper, then called Voice of Uganda, and served as deputy director of information. It was during this time that he was conscripted into the jury of the kangaroo court that tried an archbishop and two cabinet ministers and sentenced them to death for treason against President Idi Amin’s regime.

Kiwanuka worked with Milton Obote, the country’s Independence prime minister and later president. There has never been any love lost between Obote and the Kingdom of Buganda, to which Kiwanuka belongs. Obote abolished it in 1967, a year after he overthrew the king, who narrowly escaped to exile where he died four years later in unclear circumstances.

But in Son of a Rat Catcher, Kiwanuka portrays Obote as an efficient leader who cherished merit, had a sense of fairness and apparently meant well for the country during his first reign, which ended when he was overthrown in 1971. (Obote’s second reign from 1980 to 1985 was a disaster on the security front though he laid the foundation for the economic liberalisation that has somewhat transformed the country.)

For Idi Amin, whose excesses do not have to be emphasised, Kiwanuka gives the reader a peek into the man’s meanness, pettiness and inferiority complex, which the author experienced first hand. For they were together in the barracks in Kenya, where the author witnessed the future dictator’s brutality and womanising, and later interacted with him as his head of state, with Amin reminding Kiwanuka that he was a “mere” civilian.