{UAH} Salute the Badge: Missoula detective recalls past in Uganda

Salute the Badge: Missoula detective recalls past in Uganda

Posted: Feb 10, 2017 7:37 PM ESTUpdated: Feb 10, 2017 8:11 PM EST

By Jill Valley

CONNECT

 

To relax at the end of a long shift, Detective Glenville Kedie works with wood, creating some amazing pieces of furniture. (MTN News photo)

MISSOULA -

When someone asks him "where are you from?" it warrants a long explanation, so he wrote a book to answer that question.

He's a Missoula County Sheriff's detective who grew up with his parents and sister under the rule of one of history's most brutal dictators.

Tonight we salute the badge with a hair raising story of life in the midst of death.

To relax at the end of a long shift, Detective Glenville Kedie works with wood, creating some amazing pieces of furniture, just one of his many talents.

He designed the Logo for the UM Police Department and wrote a book called Fried Ants and Yorkshire Pudding. If that title seems strange, it won't when you learn it represents the two places he grew up. Sheffield, England and Uganda .

"It was a night and day difference from Sheffield, it was beautiful," Kedie said. 

In 1970 his father moved the family to Uganda to head up the government printing office. Months after the young family arrived. The man called one of the world's most evil men in history forced President Milton Obote out of power: It was now Idi Amin's country.

"All of the army officers who were loyal to Obote were just taken out and rounded up and shot," Kedie said.

Kedie recalls hearing the gunfire and finding those who had been executed lying along the road near his home by Lake Victoria.

After a while, death was just a part of his young life.

"We'd be playing on the beach and go around the corner in the rushes and there'd be a corpse of a soldier lying there wearing green army fatigues, bullet holes all over the place."

Four years later,  things became dangerous for Europeans so the Kedie family left Uganda. Kedie grew up, and eventually began a successful law enforcement career and wrote that book about his childhood experiences.

His hobbies help him turn it off when he's home from work, something he'd recommend to any law enforcement officer.

"Especially younger officers. They hang their entire identity on being a cop and I did it as well. But it can set you up so that there's two kinds of people in the world, cops and bad guys. "I think as you advance in your law enforcement career, at the end of the day I can take this off and put this down and be someone else. "

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Gwokto La'Kitgum

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"Even a small dog can piss on a tall building" Jim Hightower

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