He was already old when the internet was born. He outlived that too.
One hundred and nine years. Not one of them got the better of him.
Most of us knew him simply as BABA — a term of endearment that held a unique, deeply personal meaning for everyone whose life he touched.
Jaja (Mama Brenda), Aunt Susan (Min Miria), and Aunt Joze (Min Koma) have lost a devoted father. Uncle Dickson has lost his closest friend and confidant. The rest of us have lost a grandfather — and for our youngest generations, a great-great-great-grandfather. Having lived 109 remarkable years, he effectively lived two or three of our lifetimes in one. He truly saw it all, and leaves behind an extraordinary legacy.
He filled our lives with joy, steady encouragement, and an infectious zeal to press on. You simply could not meet him and remain unchanged.
Baba, this page is here to celebrate you. We hope it stands as a humble attempt to honor a life so fully lived — and to carry forward the towering standard you set for us all.
He was not merely alive for a century and nine of them. He was present for it — upright, working, watching — while the rest of history simply happened to everyone else.
Some men live long. Fewer men live loud enough that the length stops being the point. This is for him.
Every decade had a reason. None of them won.
Born in Pajule, in a Uganda that did not yet belong to the people living in it — while the guns of the First World War were still firing on the far side of the earth. He was barely walking by the time they finally went quiet. He would hear the next war's soon enough, and not from a distance.
A global collapse that never once asked Pajule's permission to reach it. He grew up hungry in years when most of the world did. He grew up anyway.
When the second war came, it came for him too. A young man from Pader was put into the uniform of the King's African Rifles and sent to fight — for an empire that would not have let him vote in it — somewhere between the highlands of Abyssinia and the jungles of Burma. He carried a rifle he did not choose, into a war he did not start. And he came home.
Uganda's flag went up for the first time. He was forty-five years old — and for the first time in his life, the country he had already bled for finally belonged to him too.
Idi Amin's years. Years when being Acholi, being from the north, being from Pader, was reason enough to disappear. Neighbours did. He did not.
Two more decades of war — and this time it did not stay on a map far away. The Lord's Resistance Army turned his home into a front line and turned a generation of northern Uganda's children into its weapons. He was already an old man by then, holding a family together in a place with every reason to fall apart. It did not.
A virus shut down the planet. He was one hundred and three years old. He had already outlived worse than a thing too small to see.
In the same soil he was born into, surrounded by the family his own life built, he went at dawn — the one hour that has never, in the history of the world, failed to arrive. Just like him.
You do not reach a hundred and nine by accident. You reach it by refusing, over and over, for eleven decades, to stay down.
Colonial rule did not break him. A war that was never his did not break him. A dictator hunting his own people did not break him. An army of stolen children marching through his own village did not break him. He simply kept going — kept farming, kept fathering, kept fixing what was broken and building what wasn't there yet — until "kept going" was the only description anyone needed for him.
That is the bar now. Not the number. The number is only proof. The bar is what the number cost him, and what he did with it anyway.
We are what's left running. Every one of us is carrying a piece of that engine now. So when it's our turn to take the hit — and it will be our turn — we already know exactly what to do.
Point a phone camera at this. It opens straight to this page — share it, save it, come back whenever you need to.