Kakwenza: Spirit and the sword

Kakwenza Rukirabashaija is a satirist with a taste for the dramatic. By using a rich-poor mosaic of historiography and urban legend, he creates an accessible literary landscape with clear language punctuated by ironic undertones. It is this use of irony which overturns his fictions to the right-side-up world of political agitation.
As a result, he was arrested and allegedly tortured during the lockdown by soldiers thanks to his first book, The Greedy Barbarian. 
Kakwenza says the soldiers swooped down on his home with guns, a misplaced enthusiasm and an unhealthy desire to break Covid-19 regulations. Fifteen soldiers ignored social distancing in order to socialise the distance between him and their AK-47s.   
Last week, he was arrested again. This time for a new book, Banana Republic.
We are not sure what manner of violence Kakwenza experienced while in custody. 
However, we are sure that when President Museveni came to power promising to restore sanity to our country after 14 years of tyranny and massive violations of human rights, he wasn’t talking about stamping out free speech. 
“As soon as NRM takes government, State-inspired violence will disappear,” President Museveni said on the eve of the “revolution”. 
At the time, Kakwenza was a baby who the NRM/A dreamer had turned into the dream. For the revolution was about transforming Uganda’s conception of the future into a place where President Museveni’s bazukulu didn’t have to experience the eerie twilight of Uganda’s past. 
For a while, this appeared to be the case as the NRM/A sought to unmake Uganda’s old worlds with a flourish of revolutionary thinking.
Militarism was put to the sword across the country as was amply evidenced in March 1986 when Museveni said, “The fact that we are arresting and punishing soldiers within our army is in itself a healthy attitude. The past regimes never dared punish a soldier.”
The NRA was governed by a strict code of conduct as Legal Notice No. 1 of 1986 defined relations between the military and the public. Any breach of this code by the solider was punishable by ‘fatigue, corporal punishment, suspension, demotion, dismissal with disgrace’ to ‘death’.
At that time, writers of Kakwenza’s stripe were toasted and feted so that they could affiliate strands of Uganda’s contradictory mind and connect us to each other through a unity in diversity. Then, in 1993, the brilliant writer and scholar Prof Dan Mudoola was killed in a grenade attack in Wandegeya, below Makerere University. 
Mudoola’s assassination was the day the war on intellectualism in Uganda began. In short order, our best minds died mysteriously and, in other cases, not so mysteriously.
Kakwenza is reaping the whirlwind for titling against a State-inspired regression into Aminism. Sadly, when we persecute writers: we attempt to extinguish the spirit awakening us to the dangers of ignorance, conformity and a tyranny of the soul related thereto. 
On April 8, 1933, the Nazis proclaimed a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit,” which was to climax in a literary purge or “cleansing” by the burning of books across Hitler’s Germany. 
The blind writer Helen Keller said: “You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on.”
The Nazis tried to destroy the literary spirit in its secondary form: books. Our government seeks to crush this spirit in its primary form: the writer. 
However, the spirit is appreciably mightier than the sword. 
That’s why Hitler failed in his devilish designs and Kakwenza will live to witness a change of government in Uganda.

Mr Matogo is the managing editor Fasihi Magazine. 
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