Poem: The Red Bricked House

By Mwebe Morgan

Photo by Ayodeji Fatunla

For generations, the revolutionaries have walked around the red-bricked house.

It stood alone on a verdant green hill surrounded by centuries-old Mahogany trees, like a lonely sentry.

For many years, it served as a study centre for British missionaries.

Its Gothic colonial-style architecture represented the founders' goal. 

“These pious men” had chosen to throw some enlightenment on Africa's kindred souls.

They taught these ignorant Africans how to write and read,

The British had no clue what they had awoken in the African people: nationalist inclinations.

Musaazi, a young farmer, had come to terms with the political stakes.

While he rode his iron horse, preaching God's message, he secretly mobilized his people to rise.

And to unite against the yoke of imperialism.

The colonialists had grabbed and donated all the fertile lands to their kin and brethren.

Thousands of colonizing groups grew farm cotton, sugar, rubber, tea, and coffee.

The indigenous people were brutally evacuated and forced to dwell on the outskirts of bleak land.

A barren wasteland was devoid of fruit and nourishment.

A place teeming with wild animals and mosquitoes.

The majority of displaced Africans worked in mills, fuelling the Lancaster Industrial Revolution.

African nationalists gathered in the dark, at the stroke of midnight.

Under the red brick mansion, and plotted against the British colonialists.

They intended to destabilize the colonial economy.

Unknown to the nationalists, Sserukande, a tall, and outspoken nationalist, was a British undercover agent.

On that starry night, British imperial soldiers ambushed, shot, and arrested hundreds of patriots.

A couple of months later, Sserukande was promoted to regional chief.

He was tasked with reorganizing a political sanitation programme,

To clean up the indigenous enclaves, and the remains of the rebellion.

Most of the revolutionaries were put on trial, and many were hanged or shot.

The colonial government banished the lucky remnants to Seychelles Islands, where most never returned home.

The world was at war with Adolf Hitler and his Nazis in 1939.

German Panzer divisions forced the British to Dunkirk's beaches and established a beachhead.

The British were overwhelmed and outnumbered by the German Blitzkrieg.

Hitler would have won the war if he had completely destroyed the British army.

His most severe blunder was allowing the British to return to their own islands.

On the Asian continent, combat intensified in 1942.

Following a string of setbacks, the British enlisted the Ugandans in their King African Rifle regiment.

A British expeditionary force defeated the Japanese in the Myanmar jungles in 1944.

Following the Japanese empire's collapse in 1945, the African heroes went home to slavery.

These valiant warriors banded together once more beneath the red brick home to plot their liberation and independence.

The British informant, Sserukande, was apprehended and burnt as a lesson to all informants.

Another British agent was killed while ascending Namirembe Hill for Sunday prayers.

This change in public sentiment heightened the British proclamation of Ugandan independence in 1962.

The nationalists had embraced Franz Fanon’s teaching—that colonialism is a machine of “naked violence,” which “only gives in when confronted with greater violence”.

The red brick house still stands today, showing us that colonialism can be overcome using the same strategies that it once used. Blood in, blood out!