My friend Rhoda Kalema, a politician and women’s rights activist, who has died aged 96, was known as the “mother of Uganda’s parliament”.
When her husband, William, a minister in the government of Milton Obote, Uganda’s first post-independence leader, was murdered by Idi Amin’s thugs in 1972, Rhoda, though now a single mother of six children, decided to enter politics herself. In the interim government that followed Amin’s removal in 1979, she served as deputy minister of culture and community development.
