Kayiza.
To his shock, the soldier was grabbed, manhandled and kept under arrest in the hot field for the entire day.
74 years on, Elismus Katende believes he was arrested because the British thought he had said “Kaiser” in reference to Wilhelm II, Germany’s emperor of 1888-1918 – a figure he had not even heard of.
“The British thought I was a spy for the Germans,” the 91-year-old says in his home village of Mugomba, south-east of the capital, Kampala. He was nevertheless allowed to continue serving in the British army.
The memory that haunts Katende reflects the confusion Ugandan World War II soldiers felt over fighting a war about which they knew little – an effort for which, they say, they have never been honoured nor adequately compensated.
“The British told us we would get a lot of money to start businesses and build houses after the war,” says Katende, whose expectations were bitterly disappointed.
Hundreds of thousands of Africans were deployed in the King’s African Rifles (KAR) regiment to fight Italy in East Africa, Japan in Burma and Vichy-controlled France in Madagascar during World War II.
Ugandan troops totalled about 77,000 men, according to 4KAR Luncheon Club, a British association of veterans from those battalions.
The young Katende, like many others, joined the war because “I was excited by war. I wanted to wear … uniforms and boots.” Holding the profession of soldier also raised recruits’ status in their home villages.
The British prepared recruits with pictures that allegedly showed Germans and Italians killing defenceless people, Katende recalls.
Another veteran, Stephen Kayebe, repeatedly crossed battle lines in Abyssinia – today Ethiopia – to take messages to and from headquarters.
“The Italians shot people even when they put up their arms to surrender. We lost many friends,” the frail 97-year-old recalls, sitting on his bed in the village of Kikusa, south-east of Kampala.
“On some days, it was not possible to eat or take water for a whole day … I would crawl … on my stomach for long distances to advance towards the enemy or withdraw. It was hell.”
More than 7,000 East Africans were killed in the war, though the exact figure is not known, according to historian Timothy Parsons from Washington University in St Louis.
About 820 of the Ugandan veterans are still alive. Their lobby, the Uganda Ex-Servicemen’s Association, is campaigning for them to get financial compensation, which most of them direly need.
Katende, who became a farmer after the war, lives in a small room, where he sleeps on a mattress on the floor. Kayebe cannot afford sufficient food and suffers from malnutrition.
Aloysius Lubega, 94, leans on a wooden pole as he walks because he cannot afford a proper walking stick.
But despite the veterans’ poverty, there is controversy over demands coming from men who voluntarily fought for the interests of the former colonial power.
“They helped to stop the war from spreading and should be compensated,” said Jim Kato, a civil servant. But police officer David Waiswa said that “they did it … without being forced” and that they received salaries during the war.
After the war, Ugandans were not eligible for pensions because they did not meet the condition – also applicable to British soldiers – of having served 21 years in the army.
However, reports in Uganda that veterans received no post-war compensation are incorrect.
They were eligible for a lump sum and possibly disability pensions, but sloppy administrative procedures and poor communication in East Africa prevented some of them from receiving their money, Parsons said by e-mail.
British charity the Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League meanwhile assists 703 Ugandan veterans to “help provide a meal a day,” said Christopher Warren from the league.
In 2010, a Ugandan judge ordered that independent Uganda must compensate veterans, but the government only has plans to include them in general assistance programmes for impoverished elderly people.
“They fought for colonial Britain,” spokesman Shaban Bantariza said. “The government does not owe them anything.”
Feeling forgotten by both Britain and Uganda, “[the veterans] are dying very angry, distressed and miserable, without honour,” said Ramadan Tambula from the Uganda Ex-Servicemen’s Association.
Aloysius Lubega is gradually losing his memory of the war in Burma. “I was thrown away into the bushes, lay unconscious for hours,” he says, struggling to remember a mine blast that severed a finger.
One thing, however, is clear in the old man’s mind: “We will be forgotten even in death.
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