The other day I learned from a friend that across a valley from our Tank Hill neighbourhood, near the spot where, from our porch, we can see the silhouette of two tall palm trees, is a high security prison. I’m not sure if the solid line visible over there is actually the prison wall. Anyway, they keep lots of death row inmates there, in conditions that even the local media characterize as deplorable. The planned maximum capacity of the facility would only accommodate a fourth of the prisoners currently there. The record shows that the Ugandan state has not murdered anybody in the last five years (the last time they did, several dozen were executed within one day), but the courts still keep handing out the capital punishment. This means that the death row continues to grow. Imagine: the sole purpose of life, its only discernible function, is to wait for it to end. And still – even though it has been shown that killing people does not lower crime rates, even though the mindless brutality of this method of punishment has a poisonous effect on society, even though it is merely a barbaric form of revenge – there are always those, people who can read and write and who seem to walk erect, who support this madness. Almost all over the world.

Some inmates in this country, I hear, have been waiting for 25 years to die. I cannot help making the connection to Idi Amin, whose era of dictatorship closed in 1979. Perhaps – I almost hope – some of these veterans of death anticipation were friends of his.

A natural and inevitable parallel thought: how free are the rest of us, this side of the valley, and elsewhere? My windows have bars too. We too have someone with a gun guarding our walled dwelling at night. I don’t think it is terribly relevant whether the obstacles were originally put here to prevent entry or exit.

13:35