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Kakwenza and Nyanzi are a warning of woes yet to come
Author: Charles Onyango Obbo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- Kakwenza’s torture the second time seems to have been more horrific than the first time, and upon his release on bail, the court refused to release his passport so he could travel for medical treatment. He took matters into his own hands and left the country under cover of darkness.
On February 26, exiled Ugandan writer, researcher and activist Stella Nyanzi posted on her Twitter page, a photograph of her rubbing “healing oil” on the deeply scarred back of recently tortured writer Kakwenza Rukirabashaija. Detained at the end of 2021, Kakwenza is the author of the controversial “The Greedy Barbarian” and “Banana Republic: Where Writing is Treasonous”. The latter book is an account of the torture and abuse he endured on his first arrest over “The Greedy Barbarian”.
Kakwenza’s torture the second time seems to have been more horrific than the first time, and upon his release on bail, the court refused to release his passport so he could travel for medical treatment. He took matters into his own hands and left the country under cover of darkness.
The true account of it is riveting, and will likely be the subject of a future book. He is now in the German city of Munich where Ms Nyanzi, who also faced a painful ordeal at the hands of the state, is now on a writers-in-exile programme run by PEN Germany,
Nyanzi wrote in a 5-part thread; “Rubbing healing oil into @KakwenzaRukira’s scars is an act of resistance! Like the whore rubbing expensive perfume oil into Jesus’ feet, I recommit to a higher calling to fight for freedom from [President Yoweri] Museveni’s brutal dictatorship. These hands will write viler poems of dissidence.”
Nyanzi has the second book of poetry out which, in her vintage “radical rudeness” tradition, is entitled “Don’t Come in My Mouth: Poems that Rattled Uganda.”
In Kakwenza’s and Nyanzi’s travails, there are echoes from 50 years ago. It was the period of military strongman Field Marshal Idi Amin’s bloody rule when torture and murder were prevalent, and the majority of Uganda’s middle class and intellectuals fled into exile. Writers and playwrights like Byron Kawadwa, Dan Kintu, John Sebuliba, and John Male were murdered or disappeared.
ALSO READ: Open letter to Kakwenza Rukirabashaija
Legendary poets and writers like Robert Serumaga, the great Okot p’Bitek, John Ruganda, among an impressive cohort, fled into exile.
The killing and exile of writers snuffed out something that was special. At that time, Africa’s literary genius was concentrated in a triangle with Cairo in the north, Nigeria in the west, and Uganda in the east. If you could draw a straight line on the ground, the corridor of artistic creativity run between the Department of Literature at Makerere University, and the now pale National Theatre off Dewinton Road.
The exile and persecution of all matters, but poets and writers represent a special problem – it is very difficult to mint writers. You can graduate 2,500 doctors, and 10,000 lawyers in 15 years if you put your heart to it. But you can turn out 50,000 literature, social sciences, law, philosophy, art, and more, graduates combined in those same 15 years and not get a single author whose book is worth a trip to the bookshop. The flight and elimination of writers in the Amin period, therefore, represented the loss of nearly 100 years of creative writing capital accumulation.
It’s one reason why the nearly equally difficult years of Milton Obote II between 1981 and 1985 didn’t see the exile of notable writers, but thousands of other Ugandan professionals – there were none. There just hadn’t been enough time to build back enough of them.
The soon-to-be-40-years of President Museveni however, has been enough for some green shoots to sprout. From about 2000 a new generation of creative writers started to emerge in large numbers. However, by then, we had fallen far behind Kenya.
An equally greater, but intangible, loss happens when a country loses its writers. They take their imagination and reassemble it outside. They will write inspired by the country but from outside, transplanting its cultural essence and soul, or giving it a critical gaze in a mental and intellectual space where the powers that be at home cannot contest. This is how you get the enduring international image of Amin as a cannibal who kept his human leftovers in the State House fridge, a patently wrong depiction of the Field Marshal. But there is also a spiritual and intellectual hollowing out at home that happens when creative and imaginative writers leave it. Nature abhors a vacuum so a whole lot of intellectual charlatans, mediocre writers, court jesters, praise singers, clowns, and dimwits take their place.
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They soon suck the creative mojo from the air and fill it instead with false prophecies and bizarre conjuring. The quality of national debate falls into the sewer, and people start saying that the president talks to God, that the First Lady had her children through virgin births, and the 500 protestors weren’t killed by security forces but struck down by mysterious lightning. Uganda is not there yet, but it has boarded the flight.
Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist,
writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3
