Acaye holds her own in provocative Awinju

Acaye on stage. PHOTO BY GEOFFREY LUGAJJU

What you need to know:

  • Announced to start at 6:30pm, the show was tricky for many revelers.
  • Delivered in multiple languages, Awinju was heavy on sound, truly Ugandan but never limited to a genre.
  • It was hard to know if the audience enjoyed the show in its entirety.

Pamela Acaye Kerunen is not constant as a performer on the Kampala art scene, she keeps around though, a familiar face at festivals, showcases and symposiums as well.
Last week, on the Women’s Day eve, Acaye was one of the many people that had a show.
For a person many associate with yoga, dance and art activism, her show on March 7 for many people was unprecedented.

Announced to start at 6:30pm, the show was tricky for many revelers. They had to attend it and then another poetry-driven show in a different location. With a poetry audience still at its infantry, you could understand many people’s reasons to watch the show at the fence.

With an accompanying band, Acaye came out loud to give a voice to some of the controversies the arts may know her for. At one point, she was spitting poetry that paid homage to her ancestral land, yet at another she was diving into one of her favorite topics - feminism.

For some reason, through her writings on social media, she has managed to come off as a person that stopped taking feminism serious - not that she says it, the underlying message with in her posts online seem to suggest.

And it was the same thought many shared as she recited what she insisted was based on a rumor of a ‘feminist that fell in love’ - of course you could sense the irony of what the said feminist believed in and what she was doing when she met the ‘right’ one.

Of course this was abstract content that got one questioning their beliefs and whether people do take certain positions because of their current state and frustration, a conversation some people in the audience eventually carried on even as they left the show.
But that wasn’t all, in an earlier piece, she seemed to have hinted onto something activists usually avoid - a fact that behind many failing women there’s a woman or an army of them as she talked about fighting for space from fellow women.

Delivered in multiple languages, Awinju was heavy on sound, truly Ugandan but never limited to a genre. For instance, there were times she was more drawn to a local organic sound with the adungu taking the lead while in other cases, she let her instrumentalists play with the sound to border jazz with a folklore touch to it.

But the highlights of the show were always those she performed in her local dialect, very foreign for many of her expatriate audience yet very powerful to be ignored and every time she took breaks to explain what the message in the performance was, it was easy to connect between the message and the emotions involved earlier on.

A song that depicted a sound chicken makes when it falls in the sauce pan got more audience reaction as it talked about a woman that fried her chicken as opposed to the norms. But it was one of Freedom that many in the audience seemed to relate with; “this is a parody of a woman whose cry is for freedom, not to converse but to be heard,” she later said.

Acaye’s show may have hit lots of blocks from conception late in 2017. The show had to be moved because of reasons not known and this time much as it went on - it had an audience with divided attention. Some only stayed around for some time while others were coming in from somewhere else. It was therefore hard to know if the audience enjoyed the show in its entirety.

But it remains a bold show that talked for women and later put them onto the spotlight as well.