There were 111 of us flying from Philadelphia to London, and then on an East Africa Airways charter flight to Zaire. We stopped at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda, to refuel, and were allowed out on the tarmac and in the airport’s transit lounge. While there, we saw Uganda’s president, General Idi Amin, saying goodbye to President Bongo of Gabon, who had been in Uganda on a state visit.
When we got back on our plane we took off for our training site in Bukavu, Zaire. But a few minutes into the flight our pilot suddenly returned our flight to Entebbe. We later learned that Amin’s government threatened that our plane would be shot out of the sky if our pilot didn’t comply. He, of course, did so. Our pilot was a brave man who, with his flight crew, tried to help us out as much as he could; I believe he was responsible for us eventually getting a meal.
We dutifully filed back into the transit lounge, which was pretty much one big room, and settled ourselves into what would become two nights of tedium bordering on certainty. I think each of us had the attitude that nothing can happened to me. I’m an American.
We were being supervised by Ugandan military, uniformed guys with guns. They took our baggage out to inspect it. They were very suspicious of an “older” guy who I guess was about 40 years old and had some maps in his luggage.
It took a while for us to be sniffed out by the American embassy and the press. Eventually, the story broke.
All our names were published in newspapers around the world. The New York Times reported that we were being held in Ugandan custody and that President Idi Amin would personally decide our fate. Ugandan radio speculated that we might be military mercenaries or even Zionists.
My father was then press spokesman—“Spooksman,” he used to say—for the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington, D.C. When one of the journalists saw my name on the list he called my father and asked if I were his daughter. My father said yes, but that I’d be in danger if anyone on the ground knew it. I appreciate that journalist!
Our own benign adventure at the Entebbe airport could have been a dress rehearsal for the arrival three years later of an Air France flight with 248 passengers that was hijacked in Athens by four terrorists. The terrorists found haven at Entebbe under the protection of President Amin. After seven days of tense prisoner-exchange negotiations and bloodshed, a hundred Israeli commandos successfully ended the hijacking.
Singing away
We were fortunate. We spent only two days and nights in the airport, sleeping on and off. At one point, a Peace Corps trainee with a guitar started picking through a familiar spiritual tune popularized by Harry Belafonte. We all joined in and started singing “A-aa-min! A-aa-min!” to the tune of “A-aa-men! A-aa-men!” We ended the chorus when one of us pointed out aloud that one does not want to poke the snake.
When some compassionate U.S. Marine guards from our embassy showed up, they very kindly brought us chocolate, cigarettes and malaria pills. However, we became a little distressed in conversation with the Marines because they did not think much of Uganda and local Ugandans; we were coming to Africa to work hand-in-hand with locals in Zaire who as far as we knew at the time be just like Ugandans.
“Those kids sang all night,” our American co-pilot told the Times and he chose to camp out in the passenger lounge along with the rest of us for those first two nights.
Then we were being moved from the airport to Lake Victoria Hotel down the road. The last time I was in the Lake Victoria Hotel I was a kid. My family was living in Ghana and we were about to start out on a Uganda safari. Now, as a new Peace Corps volunteer, the U.S. embassy arranged to transfer our cohort from the airport to the same hotel, where this time I slept for 18 hours. When I woke up I bought a postcard with a photograph of the hotel on it and wrote to my parents, “Having a wonderful time—wish you were here!”
When we got to our Bukavu training site and an athénée—a high school with dormitories—we asked the volunteers who had arrived the year before if they had been worried for us.
No, they replied. Our new mattresses had also arrived three days late. So everything had worked out perfectly.
Welcome to Peace Corps, welcome to Africa!
