Reading old letters of Lucki’s I came upon exciting descriptions of his sojourns in South India, in Goa, in Kathmandu, in Jakarta. And by chance too there were several letters from Field Marshal John Okello, who influenced the characterization of my Aguirre in Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Okello, an orphan, came from northern Uganda. He grew up very poor, made his way by laboring, and only later managed a couple of years at school. He embarked on a wandering life in Uganda and Kenya, and was apprenticed to a carpenter. In Uganda he served a two-year prison term for an unspecified sexual offense he always denied. Later, he worked as a mason, a trader, and finally as a traveling preacher. He came to the island of Zanzibar where, still very young, he was radicalized. He had extraordinary gifts as an orator and organizer of farmworkers. Zanzibar was historically the great Arab-run slave-trading post in East Africa. The Arabs were still the dominant power in the twentieth century, though they constituted a small minority of the otherwise African population. Okello organized a rebellion against the Arabs, which began without weapons or uniforms or training or money. On January 12, 1964, with a ragtag army of about four hundred men, he struck. Their first need was for weapons, so they stole the sentry’s rifle at a police station and stormed the arsenal. At the last moment before this attack, almost his entire force melted away because they were afraid of how the matter might end. He had about thirty men who were still following him. At the age of twenty-seven, Okello declared himself a field marshal and appointed generals, brigadiers, and colonels as the fancy took him, and in the space of a few hours, the Africans of Zanzibar had thrown in their lot with him because they sensed that the dynamics were on the side of the rebellion. The Arab sultan escaped to the mainland on his yacht, but there were bloody massacres of Arabs by Okello’s troops and the population at large. For a few days, Okello was famous—at least insomuch as the Western press mentioned him on the inside pages among “miscellaneous international news.” In Munich, I was struck by the weirdness of the speeches he gave on a small local radio station. He challenged the chief of police to hand himself in over the air: “Or else I will see myself compelled to visit you. In such a case, things would be more terrible than any living creature could bear.” I seem to remember reports of his circling over the island in a small plane, transmitting his radio broadcast: “Anyone who steals a bar of soap, or who eats one grain of rice too much, will be thrown into prison for a hundred and fifty years!” He gave the sultan an ultimatum: “You’ve got twenty minutes to surrender, otherwise we’ll have no option but to scrub you from the face of the earth. You’ve got twenty minutes to kill your wives and children and then yourself. Should you fail to do so, I will come and kill you in person and your chickens and goats and I will burn your body with a furious hungry fire.” My Aguirre speaks in the tones of Okello:
AGUIRRE
I am the great traitor. There must be no other. Anyone who even thinks about deserting this mission will be cut up into 198 pieces. Those pieces will be trampled upon until what is left can be used only to paint walls. Whoever takes one grain of corn or one drop of water . . . more than his ration, will be locked up for 155 years. If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees . . . then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the Wrath of God. The earth I pass will see me and tremble.
At a press conference two days after his uprising, Okello explained that he had had the rank of brigadier general for the past ten years as a fighter in the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya and had worked as an interpreter of dreams. The entire rebel hierarchy including the leader, Jomo Kenyatta, had had their dreams transcribed and interpreted by him. To me, this sounds doubtful, as Okello would have been no more than seventeen, and because the Kikuyu-dominated Mau Mau would hardly have looked to an outsider from the Ugandan Acholi tribe, who had only just begun to learn the principal language of Kenya, Swahili. Following the triumph of his revolution in Zanzibar, Okello repatriated the former prime minister Karume from exile on the mainland and restored him to office, but Zanzibar and Tanganyika on the mainland were planning a fusion of both their states, to be called Tanzania. At the end of a few weeks spent on the mainland himself, Okello was prevented from returning to Zanzibar. They wanted to be rid of him. At this point, he becomes hard to trace. He probably returned to Uganda alone. He wandered around impoverished, sometimes, by his own account, begging to survive. He was last seen in public in 1971, in the company of the new military dictator of Uganda, Idi Amin. Thereafter, all trace of him was lost.
Two years previously, I had made a film in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda for an international organization of doctors that was in some ways a forerunner of Médecins Sans Frontières; the film was called The Flying Doctors of East Africa. The cameraman was Thomas Mauch, who had worked on my film shot on Cos called Signs of Life, and with whom I went on to make a whole series of films, among them Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. Mauch was a formative figure for me, ready for everything, secure in his style, with an extraordinary aesthetic sense but at the same time firm and self-assured as to the substance and dynamics of a scene. Cameramen are my eyes. I have worked with the very best—Thomas Mauch, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, later Peter Zeitlinger, with whom I made my last twenty-eight films. It’s always cinematographers who set the tone for a film team. After we’d finished our 1969 film about the flying doctors, Thomas Mauch went with me to Uganda—to look for John Okello. We drove right across Kenya to Uganda because I had heard rumors that Okello might be in northern Uganda, where he hailed from. We reached the small town of Lira, where we asked around and finally found some of his relatives, who seemed somehow reluctant to give us information. The police noticed us, which was something I had already had bad experiences with in the making of my film Fata Morgana, when I had been picked up several times with my small team in Cameroon. That wasn’t pleasant, and we didn’t fare any better in the Central African Republic, where my cameraman Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein and I also came down simultaneously with malaria and bilharzia. We didn’t stay long in Lira with the interested police. Mauch remembers how we slept in the car somewhere and woke up in the morning to find children’s faces pressed against the windows on all sides, silently staring at us. I left a message with Okello’s relations with my German address—and lo and behold, the “field marshal” got in touch with me some months later. In several letters, he urged me to translate his book Revolution in Zanzibar and get it published across Europe. He had written the book during a fifteen-month jail term in Kenya, at the end of which he was repatriated to Uganda. He also offered to play the lead in a film about himself and asked about his fee. But none of that came to pass. He was presumably murdered in 1971 by Idi Amin, and in any case, the character I had in mind was a Spanish conquistador. But there is an echo of Okello in the deranged monologues of Aguirre. There is also a Black slave in the film whom the conquerors take with them. I gave him the name Okello.