The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget by Andrew Rice

From the Publisher

From a new star of American journalism, a riveting murder mystery that reveals the forces roiling today’s Africa

From Rwanda to Sierra Leone, African countries recovering from tyranny and war are facing an impossible dilemma: to overlook past atrocities for the sake of peace or to seek catharsis through tribunals and truth commissions. Uganda chose the path of forgetting: after Idi Amin’s reign was overthrown, the new government opted for amnesty for his henchmen rather than prolonged conflict.

Ugandans tried to bury their history, but reminders of the truth were never far from view. A stray clue to the 1972 disappearance of Eliphaz Laki led his son to a shallow grave—and then to three executioners, among them Amin’s chief of staff. Laki’s discovery resulted in a trial that gave voice to a nation’s past: as lawyers argued, tribes clashed, and Laki pressed for justice, the trial offered Ugandans a promise of the reckoning they had been so long denied.

For four years, Andrew Rice followed the trial, crossing Uganda to investigate Amin’s legacy and the limits of reconciliation. At once a mystery, a historical accounting, and a portrait of modern Africa, The Teeth May Smile But the Heart Does Not Forget is above all an exploration of how—and whether—the past can be laid to rest.

The New York Times - Howard W. French

Once in a while…the experience of much of the continent is crystallized in the story of a single country, and when that story is told with a combination of attentiveness to historical background and genuine care for the lives of real people, the small world of serious Africa books for nonspecialists becomes enriched. With The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder and Memory in Uganda, Andrew Rice has written just such a book.

Publishers Weekly

Pushcart Prize-winning journalist Rice captures the horrors of Idi Amin's eight-year reign of terror over Uganda. At the core of the book is an unsolved disappearance: Eliphaz Laki, a local leader with ties to the anti-Amin opposition, vanished in the early days of the Amin regime. When his son, Duncan, uncovered a clue to his father's disappearance 30 years later, the investigation eventually implicated Amin's second-in-command, Maj. Gen. Yusuf Gowon. With Amin living out his years safely in Saudi Arabia, the trial of Gowon forced Uganda to confront its brutal past. Treating the Lakis' story as a microcosm of Uganda's own, the author weaves together the family's search for truth and justice with Uganda's history. From its intimate portrait of Eliphaz's grieving family to the wide-angle perspectives of the tumultuous postindependence years as Ugandans struggled to knit together a nation from the ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse peoples within their colonial borders, the book recasts a familiar history in an entirely new light. Photos. (July)

Joel Neuberg - Library Journal

Journalist Rice, who lived in Uganda from 2002 to 2004 as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, spent five years writing this account of a son's efforts to discover the truth about and seek justice for the 1972 murder of his father. A county-level government official, Eliphaz Laki "disappeared" in the early days of Idi Amin's regime. His son eventually discovered his grave and tracked down his three executioners, who were brought to trial. Rice, who attended the trial, here considers the limits of reconciliation-an important question in today's world. The book reads as easily as mystery fiction, but Rice manages to weave in the complex history and even more serpentine politics of Amin's Uganda. He conducted more than 100 interviews and supports his text with 40 pages of notes, but, given the popular writing style and focus on a single case among the hundreds of thousands killed in Uganda, this work will appeal to a wider audience than the available histories of Uganda.

Kirkus Reviews

From longtime African affairs journalist Rice, a provocative story of war, death and the quest for justice in the wake of Idi Amin's ruinous reign in Uganda. Amin, writes the author, was beloved there, at least for a time. In British service, he was "a skilled tracker and an excellent shot, though he was a bit trigger-happy." As a ruler, having engineered a coup against his left-leaning predecessor and passed muster as a Cold War ally of the Western powers, he was seen as someone who could be reasoned with. Not so. Amin's lieutenants busily eliminated servants of the former administration and others suspected of being disloyal to the regime, which would become internationally infamous for its role in the hijacking of an Israeli airliner. One victim of the bloodletting was a county chief named Eliphaz Laki, who disappeared in 1972. In 1979, Amin's army, a haphazard lot of brigands, disintegrated after an ill-advised invasion of neighboring Tanzania. Amin fled into Saudi Arabian exile, after which many Ugandans took the view that it might be just as well to forget the past. Yet in 1986 a new leader came to power, Yoweri Museveni, and one of his first official acts was to establish a commission of inquiry about the crimes of the Amin regime, telling Ugandans that "they could begin to mend their nation just by speaking the truth." Helped by Laki's son, investigators determined that the murderers included Amin's chief of staff, as well as two soldiers, all of whom were brought to trial. Rice observes that, whereas most murder trials in Uganda's legal system took only a week or so to be settled, that of the senior official took more than a year, complicated by both the quality of the evidenceand, it seems, a persistent refusal to fully engage the past. Reconciliation is an increasingly important process in nations once torn by fratricide. Rice's important book serves as an urgent case study, complete with a surprising outcome.

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