The worst thing about death row at the notorious Luzira Maximum Prison outside Kampala is not the grim physical conditions, although Edmary Mpagi, who knows the place well, says they are grim indeed.
Nor is it the bad food or the occasionally violent cellmates. It is the waiting that can drive a prisoner mad, Mpagi said, the years of anticipation, never knowing exactly when the hangman will arrive.
That waiting is all the worse if one happens to be innocent, as Mpagi was found to be after living for 18 years in the shadow of the gallows at Luzira.
The man Mpagi was convicted of killing in 1982 was actually alive and well for all the years Mpagi sat behind bars. There was fabricated evidence, coerced testimony and a generally slipshod trial -- all things that legal experts say are not as uncommon as they ought to be here.
Mpagi emerged from prison in July 2000 showing surprisingly little bitterness. Much of his time now is spent on a campaign against government-sponsored killing.
He is part of a growing movement trying to wipe out the death penalty in Africa. The critics say they face formidable obstacles from politicians and everyday people fed up with lawbreaking and intent on severely punishing those who engage in it.
Religion is one of the hurdles. Islamic courts in Nigeria continue to sentence women found guilty of adultery to death by stoning, although higher courts have repeatedly blocked such killings.
The biblical eye for an eye is also a factor. In one bizarre case in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a Kinshasa court sentenced a prosecutor to death because he had been conducting his own private trials of defendants, not only sentencing them to death but also executing them himself. Soon he will probably die too.
But foes of the death penalty say they are making steady progress, with fewer Africans than ever before being hanged, beaten, shot, shocked, stoned or poisoned by their governments.
Fifteen years ago only one African country, the island of Cape Verde off Africa's west coast, did not have capital punishment on its books, activists say. Today 10 countries have outlawed the death penalty, according to a recent tally compiled by Amnesty International, and another 10 have abolished it in practice.
The anti-execution movement has been especially powerful in West Africa, where the number of countries in the Economic Community of West African States that have either banned executions or halted them has risen to 10, from one.
Southern Africa has also been moving away from capital punishment. It is outlawed in five countries in the Southern African Development Community: Angola, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. While it is still on the books in Malawi and Zambia, the presidents of those countries have said they will not sign execution orders.
In Kenya, President Mwai Kibaki has commuted the sentences of nearly 200 people on death row and vowed not to allow any government-sponsored killings on his watch.
Tallying how many executions occur each year in Africa is difficult, activists say, because many countries carry out the killings quietly to avoid unwanted attention. Not so in Uganda, where 417 people languish on death row, and where radio stations inform listeners of coming executions and daily papers have been known to recount the grisly details on their front pages.
The last executions in Uganda were in March last year, when military firing squads killed three soldiers convicted of murder. The gallows at Luzira, the main prison where civilians await execution, have not been used since 1999, when 28 men were hanged.
Uganda would seem to be fertile ground for death penalty foes. It was here, after all, that Idi Amin vented his rage on his populace, unleashing soldiers on anyone deemed a critic. During his brutal rule in the 1970s Amin had no use for a death row. People were just summarily shot.
Those days are past. Relative calm has come to the country, although there is still a rebel insurgency in the north and human rights groups continue to criticize the government for sporadic acts of torture.
But it is crime that many consider the biggest hazard, and that is what motivates death penalty advocates. Those who dare to take the life of another, violate a woman or commit a crime while wielding a gun ought to pay with their lives, proponents say.
What about false prosecutions, opponents like Mpagi ask. What about cruel and unusual punishment? What about evidence that suggests that having a death penalty does not deter people from killing, raping or robbing?
Then there are the less conventional arguments offered by opponents of the death penalty.
Some critics point out that the death penalty is a phenomenon introduced into the Ugandan legal code by British colonialists. Before colonialism, they add, African tribes preferred mediation to retribution.
Joseph Etima, the commissioner of prisons, who is also a critic, argues that such killings are unfair to the prison guards who must end the prisoners' lives.
Executioners become drunkards and lose their minds after years of manning the noose, Etima says. "The first execution they do throws them out of balance," he said. "They isolate themselves from others. They suffer hallucinations. Socially, people fear them, even their families. Everybody keeps away from these guys out of fear that they are going to hang them."
Opponents hoped to wipe out capital punishment this year as the country goes about rewriting its Constitution. But the blue-ribbon commission charged with reviewing the document recommended replacing the gallows with some other method that "ensures instant death."
Godfrey Ssebuwufu, an activist with Uganda Citizen's Rescue, puckers his lips and contorts his face when asked about that decision. An ardent death penalty foe, Ssebuwufu says he opposes capital punishment on human rights grounds and will not speculate whether lethal injection or electrocution is more humane than the noose.
Ssebuwufu is a detective, right down to his long trench coat. He pores over court documents and sniffs around the city seeking clues that might spring some of those on death row. In one case he has been researching, the man sentenced to death for electrocuting his wife did not have electricity in his house at the time of the crime.
It was a similar investigation that dug up enough evidence to free Mpagi from jail. Now on the outside, he offers stomach-churning tales about life on death row to anybody who will listen.
He tells about how he was sometimes forced to wash the gallows. He tells about hearing the crank turning, lifting the prisoner up, and the awful, indescribable sound as the prisoner then came plummeting back down.
"It was 18 years and three months that I spent in there," Mpagi said. "There wasn't one day I didn't think I was going to die. Others should not go through what I went through -- the guilty ones or the other innocent ones like me."
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