Following the death of Uganda’s former security minister Gen. Elly Tumwine on Thursday (August 25), we are republishing excerpts from an interview Umaru Kashaka had with the now late military officer in 2019. Tumwine hated the uniformity of formal Western suits that were the dress code in Parliament. He had been appearing in his creatively designed shirts without neckties and at one occasion, he was thrown out of Parliament.
When was the last time you put on a tie?
I decided to stop putting on a tie the day Mwalimu Julius Nyerere (former Tanzanian President) died. I decided on that day (October 14, 1999) that I would never put on a tie and that it should never be put on my dead body.
This is in honour of former African leaders such as Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia), Nelson Mandela (South Africa) and even Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire now DR Congo).
They demonstrated how we should get away from the colonial identity of a tie. This hanging piece of cloth serves no purpose, but a mark that you were colonised by a designer of the last century.
And when did you start wearing your own traditional clothes?
I have not put on anybody’s clothes since 1989. I only design my own clothes and every week, I come up with a different design. I am looking forward to the day I will put out my unique designs. But I have a bias towards green colour and it is because of the analysis and observations of nature.
I wonder why the most important colour that God found necessary to create that we live with is green. The best environment people want to live in is green. It is the one which you stay with for the rest of your life.
