Kiwanuka Goes Home, but His Heart Is Far Away

Kiwanuka Goes Home, but His Heart Is Far Away By SAM BORDEN           

Giants linebacker Mathias Kiwanuka is returning to his hometown, Indianapolis, for the Super Bowl. But he is drawn to Uganda, where his grandfather was a historic figure.   

Mathias Kiwanuka says he does not remember how old he was when he first found out his grandfather had been assassinated. He struggles to remember the point at which he realized the true meaning of his own last name. He is not certain when he became aware of his family’s importance in African history.

But that is not important, Kiwanuka said recently, because he knows now. He read about his grandfather Benedicto Kiwanuka’s becoming the first prime minister of Uganda and heard about the plight forced upon a man trying to mold freedom out of a society stiffened by chaos. He learned about the pain and suffering Benedicto saw and felt.

And so he knows, too, about Benedicto’s being killed by the despot Idi Amin , a death foretold by some, dreaded by many and seen by experts as a development that set back progress in East Africa for years.       

When he was little, Kiwanuka’s parents would talk generally about Benedicto. It was sterile and nonspecific; a young Mathias could glean few details about his father’s father.       
“They would say, ‘He was a great man’ and ‘He fought hard,’ ” Kiwanuka recalled. “They would leave it at that.”       
Kiwanuka did not press; it was only when he was older that Kiwanuka realized the glossing over was not only intended to spare him from gory details, but also to spare his parents the pain of reliving the experiences of the land they had left behind.       
His father, Emmanuel, a political activist, and his mother, Deodata, a nurse, fled Uganda when the country was under Amin’s tyranny. They married in the United States and had three children: Ben, Mary and Mathias, who was born in 1983, 11 years after his grandfather was murdered. His parents separated when he was in sixth grade.       
Kiwanuka remembers seeing pictures of his grandfather — “The man in the dress uniform,” he said — but did not fully understand the meaning of Benedicto’s life until he read about him in middle school.       
Only then did he realize that his grandfather had been an officer in the Ugandan army during World War II. Or that Benedicto studied law in Britain before becoming a lawyer in Uganda in the late 1950s. Or that after Uganda won internal self-government from Britain in 1962, he became the country’s first prime minister, a voice shouting for democracy.