On Certain Events Along the Shores of ‘Nnalubaale, Separated by a Century

History is almost always written by the victors and conquerors and gives their viewpoint.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India.

In his account of his circumnavigation of ‘Nnalubaale (now known as Lake Victoria), Henry Morton Stanley, furthering the explorations of Burton and Speke, describes a moment of tension and violence on the Lake. It is March 27th, 1875, somewhere along the south coast of the Island of Uvuma — now Buvuma — off what is now Uganda’s Lake Victoria coast. Perhaps interestingly, Stanley had sailed past the peninsula of Entebbe just a few days before.

The canoes astern clapped their hands gleefully, showing me a large bunch of Mutunda beads which had been surreptitiously abstracted from the stern of the boat. I seized my repeating rifle and fired in earnest, to right and left. The fellow with the beads was doubled up, and the boldest of those nearest us was disabled. The big rifle, aimed at the waterline of two or three of the canoes, perforated them through and through, which compelled the crews to pay attention to their sinking crafts, and permitted us to continue our voyage into Napoleon Channel and to examine the Ripon Falls.

— Through the Dark Continent, Vol. I, chapter VIII.

In dispassionate legal terms, Claus Kreß and Benjamin K Nußberger describe an event that occurred about a hundred kilometers west of and about a hundred years after Stanley’s encounter on the lake:

Shortly after midnight on 4 July 1976, as ‘the sand in the hourglass [is] about to run out’ the Israeli machines land ‘by surprise and without any authority from the Ugandan Government’ at seven-minute intervals at Entebbe International Airport. Only fifty-three minutes later, they depart with the freed hostages. The Israel Defence Forces had stormed the airport terminal, killing seven hijackers and liberating the prisoners. Yet, the rescue operation also results in four casualties, three Israeli passengers and one Israeli officer, and a number of serious injuries. About twenty Ugandan soldiers are fatally wounded and the airport building is heavily damaged. Furthermore, allegedly in order to ensure their safe return flight, Israeli soldiers destroy a number of Ugandan aircrafts, which are parked nearby, and other military equipment. After a refuelling stop in Nairobi in Kenya, which is allowed ‘purely on humanitarian grounds’, Israel’s rescue mission safely returns to Israel

— from “The Entebbe Raid—1976” by Claus Kreß and Benjamin K Nußberger, Case 19 in Part I The Cold War Era (1945–89) in The Use of Force in International Law: A Case-Based Approach, Edited By: Tom Ruys, Olivier Corten, Alexandra Hofer. p. 220.

The Knesset of Israel also offers a description of this incident:

. . . Following the Government’s decision to go forward with the plan, four transport aircrafts took off from Sharm el-Sheikh en route to Entebbe. The raid on the airport resulted in five Israeli casualties: IDF officer Yonatan (Yoni) Netanyahu (brother of MK and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu); Dora Bloch, an elderly woman hospitalized during the raid and murdered after the raid (her remains were returned to Israel in June 1979); Ida Borochovitch, Jean Jacques Maimoni, and Pasko Cohen were killed during the Operation. On the return flight, the planes landed in Nairobi, Kenya for refueling to attend to the fatally wounded with medical care. IDF Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur announced it at first as an emergency landing, but it seemed to have been coordinated with Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. . . .

Narrative. The Stories that get told. The Stories *we* tell. The Stories we tell each other and ourselves. Look at these stories.

We know Stanley’s name. We can look at photographs of him. Read his words. His Story.

The man holding the beads in the canoe and his uncounted and barely visible companions at the receiving end of Stanley’s “big rifle” are cyphers, placeholders, unknown tokens, indistinguishable but readily extinguishable pawns on the black side of History’s chessboard.

We know Yoni Netanyahu’s name. We can see his photograph with a few key strokes on Google. We can hardly fail to know about his kid brother Benyamin. We can find out about all the hostages and hijackers, about Mordechai Gur and Jomo Kenyatta and Idi Amin. But there are “about Twenty” Ugandan families who lost sons and husbands and fathers that day. What are their names? Where are their pictures? What did they have for their last meal that July day in 1976? Did they laugh in joy as they left their mothers/wives/children for their work? What are their stories?

Taking a crazy and ultimately pointless long view, what would have become of the man brandishing the beads in the canoe off the shore of Buvuma that March day in 1875? Would the flapping butterfly wings of his genes and his influence in his community  — his story — have led Uganda to a different 1976? And what of the unknown number of young Ugandan soldiers killed that July night at Entebbe? What did the world lose by their deaths, by history’s erasure of their very names?

And, because the victors, the conquerors have preserved his name for us, what would the story have been if Yoni Netanyahu had returned alive from Entebbe? What would his kid brother have been like under the influence of an older brother who, as a young man, had seen, who had been in command of the erasure of “about twenty” young men so very much like him?

We can never know.

Victory?