Reflections on Geoffrey Oryema

News came through that Geoffrey Oryema passed away on June 22. As a musician who had lived and worked in Paris, France, since about 1977, he became well-known in the then emerging sub-culture of music coming directly from a non-Western source, but being integrated into the Western industry, that was called “World Music”.
He came from the Acholi people, a community that suffered massive pogroms and human rights violations under first the regime of president Idi Amin (1971-1979), and then again just six years later, for the first full decade of the current government.
Oryema had a very unique sound and vocal style. He came from an extended family of musicians, poets and dancers, proponents of classical Acholi music.

Background
I first got to know Geoffrey while I was a young boy. I must have been no more than 11 years old. He was among the founding membership of the Abafumi Theatre Company, of which my father, Robert Serumaga, was director. The very first time I saw him was when his own father, Lt Col Erinayo Oryema, came with him to our home one evening to introduce him to my father. He had with him an Acholi harp known as the nanga, and played while singing along. It sounded like a gently rushing stream, and he had a voice that wove in and out from a deep baritone to falsetto on one lyrical swoop. I was mesmerised, and became a fan of his, and of Acholi music, ever since. As children, we admired him. With his great height and laid back manner, we thought he was incredibly cool.
Within less than a decade of that encounter, both his father and mine would be assassinated, he and I would both be in exile, and we would not physically meet again for forty years.
We need not dwell on details. Geoffrey’s father, a political figure, was murdered on Amin’s orders in early 1977.

Going to exile
Geoffrey, who by this time had left the Abafumi Theatre Company, also had to flee into exile, hidden in the boot of a car. Many of his siblings also fled.
Towards the end of the same year, my own family found itself sneaking across the same border, following our father, who, after months of living underground, had gone ahead. In 1980, he too was assassinated –not by Amin, and not by Obote- and, as Paulo Muwanga’s government would not allow his body returned, he was buried in Nairobi.
So, it was an eerily happy encounter I had when he decided to make a homecoming tour to Uganda in 2016. I managed to get backstage with my young son before his performance and re-introduce myself, and show him “your friend’s grandson”. There was much to say, and no time. I had my collection of old Abafumi photos, and showed them to him on my laptop. He seemed quite intrigued. Then he went to perform. Then he left for France. I tried to stay in touch, but after some initial correspondence, he went quiet. I was not surprised because I had always known him to be a bit private. Then he died. We are told that he had been unwell for some time.
Something very significant has occurred here, and I am not sure this has been understood.
I distinctly remember, in the first encounter, how his father initially interrupted him as he started playing, and after some gentle coaching words in Acholi, told him to start again.
I also recall his mother leaping to her feet in the audience during an early Abafumi performance as bwola was being danced and joining in with very loud ululation. She was then the head of Uganda’s National Dance Troupe. This was a family rich in their performance traditions.
Therefore, with the deaths of his father, his mother, and now Geoffrey; a critical body of living knowledge of a very unique musical art, belonging to a much traumatised culture, may have been terminated.
The world simply knew him as a multilingual exponent of World Music.
A burial of sorts will take place as, in accordance with his last wishes, the ashes of his cremated body will be scattered in Soroti, where he was born, and in his ancestral home in Nwoya.
The cultural leadership of Acholi are aghast that Oryema has chosen this route.
Their reaction is real. I recall a friend who is a long time London-based Ugandan telling me how she went to a friend’s funeral, and when the coffin started to be moved on a conveyor belt into the oven behind the altar, she actually walked out and went round to the back of the church, thinking this was just an automated way of taking it to the graveyard. She only worked it out when she asked a white person where all the smoke was coming from. She was deeply shocked.
That there is now a lack of harmony between Geoffrey Oryema’s immediate family on the one hand, and his cultural leaders and at least some of his siblings, on the other, should be a chance for reflection.

How did we get here?
Is this an ancestral message? I don’t know. But if we go back to 2014, there was a similar kind of disharmony over the matter of according Erinayo Oryema a fitting burial.
As part of the Uganda Police Centenary celebrations. The government decided to re-bury Erinayo Oryema – a former Inspector General of Police, and the first African one in Uganda – with honours.
One can imagine the circumstances of the first burial in 1977. How do you organise a funeral for one so prominent, and murdered by the government still in power? Reports say, that in keeping with Acholi custom, he had been interred wrapped in goat hide as a sign that the death had been in as yet to be explained circumstances.
Media reports at the time of the second funeral indicated that there were strong disagreements among the surviving siblings about how it should be carried out. Basically, some (among whom Geoffrey was one) argued that the same grave should be used, and the homestead buildings destroyed during the war repaired, as well as looted farm machinery and cattle compensated. But in the end, the government had its way. Geoffrey did not attend.
I only recently got to learn of these disputes, and was really struck by how he and I continued to live parallel lives (except for the fact of him being a global success, of course).
In about 1993, the NRM government took up a proposal to exhume my father’s remains and have him re-buried in Uganda. A similar disagreement ensued. As his children, we were united on two points: that it should only go ahead if the government was willing to ensure that all the deceased’s children would be present, and that his wish to be buried next to his mother in Villa Maria, Masaka, was upheld. The government committee’s own view was that he should be buried in his ancestral home in Bukunda, Buddu, next to his father as required by culture, and that it could not afford to bring every one of us scattered as still were in exile, home. Only a few tickets were sent out. Some of us rejected them. I used mine to get off in transit at Nairobi and go to the Attorney General’s office to seek a court injunction. I failed, because Kenyan law listens only to the spouse of the deceased, and my mother was by then very, very stressed by the whole saga, and just wanted it to end. The government, as it would be with the Oryemas, got its way.
So when I read of these currently more recent disputes again over Geoffrey’s own burial, I think I can understand the arguments from all sides. It is an unfolding moment in an ongoing cultural discourse.

Impact of exile
A sudden return from exile – dead or alive – can find you confronted by these questions all at once. Ironically, that was the theme of the first Abafumi play, Renga Moi: a warrior who returns from a very long war to find that many, very personal things have been fundamentally changed in his absence, and nobody will tell him why. They just act like they don’t know, and his quest for answers tears the whole community apart.
In all my years abroad, I did try to make contact with all the former members of former Abafumi. But these were the days well before the Internet. Besides, the most I had heard was that Oryema had chosen to live a rather secluded life. This did not surprise me. Like many creative people, he always had a touch of melancholy about him, and could even be quite prickly. And he really was close to his father. So I think the whole set of tragedies never allowed his soul to settle, and could have pushed him into being a very private individual. Hence again the cremation, possibly. I don’t know.
But we need to reflect deeply on what exile means to a person, especially one whose life and work – as an artiste – springs from, and depends on a deep umbilical connection to their motherland.

Exile to an artiste
For an artiste, exile is a dilemma: To settle where you land, you need to forget home and the things it meant to you, but your only means of survival, not to mention your passion, is the very thing you need to forget. You are trapped, in a sense.
And then returning from exile is in itself a process, not an event. With his first tour, Geoffrey had really just begun the process. “It feels like the fire of a deep wound. I’ve lived with those wounds for most of my life. This is a rebirth and a new beginning.” he said to The EastAfrican at the time. Now, it has been cut short. Given all that unfinished business, this is just a many-sided tragedy.
His tour here was supposed to have an open-air concert in Gulu, but then it just did not happen, as far as I know, and no-one said why to my hearing.
It would have been both instructive and fascinating to see how such a consummate performer, then in his 60s, was going to play live music, wearing ripped jeans and with loc’d hair, to an audience whose average age is maybe 23, who mistakenly believe those visual aesthetics to be their own, and who have grown up listening to “playback” singers. And then with him singing in a phraseology reminiscent of their grandparents’ (which he would be) much more elegant speech.
I would say there probably was a gap to be bridged, as part of a restorative conversation. But I could be wrong.

Challenges
Part of the challenge of being a native performer in exile is exactly that: to avoid getting frozen in time to the moment you left home, but also to avoid pandering to whatever passes, in an attempt to remain relevant, or to lose your creative umbilical cord, and get trapped in folkloric abandonment, just surrounded by new acoustic technology.
To a great extent, Oryema avoided this. And I think it was because of how deeply grounded his family was in the tradition of classical Acholi/Luo music, which is very rich and very deep. Basically, they were Acholi griots. Apart from the nanga, he played the flute and the lukeme and seemed to sing in multiple octaves at once. His voice was amazing.
So, I wonder to what extent the younger Acholi generation could even fully relate to that, given the impact of globalisation, digital music, Amin’s and the NRA’s massacres, Kony’s war, as well, therefore, as exile, death of the older cultured country-dwellers, and even HIV.
Geoffrey’s was the generation of the early 1970s guitar heroes, like Jimi Hendrix, and the like (hence his style of slapping his strings, and holding the instrument above his head). But then still, how would they place him?
It would be like getting an audience in Buganda and then combining Kaz Kasozi, Fred Sebatta, Elly Wamala, Philly Lutaaya, Carol Nakimera, Albert Sempeke, Misuseera Ssegamwenge, Mzee Deziderio, Dan Mugula, Jimmy Cliff, Annette Nandujja and the Planets, Harry “The Lungfishman” Lwanga, and The Senkebejjes, into one human being, and then dressing him like Bob Marley. He just represented too many different types of excellence from too many different styles and epochs, but all rooted in his African Acholi identity.

Ignorant promoters?
Unfortunately – and I have to say this – having observed them over a long period of time, it is clear that the promoters (who are my friends) that brought him just didn’t seem to understand any of that, or to have institutional capacity to begin doing so, or of even recognising that that there was something complex there, in need of understanding. They also just don’t know. But I must thank them for enabling us all to see Geoffrey once again for the last time.
Or perhaps Geoffrey was already too ill to do more. I don’t know.
(On a side note: it is for reasons like this that I made a formal proposal to the Professor Mangeni, Dean of the Makerere University Institute of Performing Arts to promote Afrigo’s Moses Matovu for an Honorary Doctorate in Arts Management. We have too much “basiima ogenze” going on.
Nevertheless, Geoffrey’s Kampala concert was brilliant. I could only find two chairs, so I initially sat on the grass, while my son and his mother sat above. I was quietly honoured that the curtain raiser used my poem “Red” about the then recent Kasese killings as its creative dance audio background. But mostly, I was determined, above everything else, to gift my son a repeat of the memory my father had gifted me of experiencing this master music spirit called Geoffrey Ochieng Oryema, way back in 1973. And it worked. A while later, the boy came to me holding his toy guitar saying: “Look! This is how your brother plays his guitar!” and closed his eyes dreamily while rocking his neck and waving the toy above his head. It’s a start. I sent the photo and anecdote to Geoffrey on whatsApp and he sent an amused reply. That was just about the last communication I had with him. Maybe he became a lot more ill. I don’t know.

Big loss
Something very huge has been lost, but this process began a very long time ago. Physical death has simply caught up with it.
Therefore, I don’t feel lucky. I certainly feel privileged, but more so, terribly burdened by all these insights born of these experiences. I don’t know what to do with them.
I just don’t know.
May his soul rest in peace. And may the full healing of Acholiland, something he worked and prayed for, come one day soon.

African cultures

Acholi and African culture has to struggle to remain relevant. Some things will not be winnable just on the day, but by decades of preparatory building beforehand. His Highness Rwot Acana’s representations, in support of some of Geoffrey’s relatives opposed to the cremation, to a court in France met the same response as the one I met in Nairobi: you are not the one who gets to decide. As Oryema was Acholi’s “son”, perhaps there was a need to reflect on their mutual obligations to one another over the years, and ask how many of these had been fulfilled, both in the case of the father, and of the living son. I don’t know.
Further, how much work do we do here to ensure that those customs of ours that we feel are valuable acquire the force of law, and to ensure that that is what our people also wish to follow? I don’t know.
As for Geoffrey’s widow Regine (whom I am not claiming to know in any way at all), a partner of very long-standing as well as mother of his children, it is only natural and logical that she would want to carry out her husband’s last wishes, and to also minimise any further emotional stress to herself and their children. How well did the two sides know each other in all the years before this death? Were they known enough to each other to allow for the possibility of a dialogue? I don’t know.
As for Geoffrey, he was a fully-grown man, well versed – perhaps more than most – in the ways of his people. He must have known what his decision would mean, and, therefore, must have had very strong personal reasons for making it.
I don’t want to be mistaken as a mere speculator, or to be intruding on private grief. This issue would be important for even the most ordinary of Acholi. But here, as I say, we are speaking about a gifted generation of a gifted time. How should we work with our human cultural assets?
Perhaps he felt he was not worthy of the kind of burial his family did not collectively deliver to their own father. Perhaps he did not want to have questions raised about why it took 37 years for anyone to organise a decent burial of any kind for his father. (This, especially since Amin’s basic accusation was that Lt Col Erinayo Oryema and the other accused were organising a coup so as to re-instate the then-exiled Milton Obote, and yet, between 1980, and 1985, when Obote was back in power, no such re-burial took place). I don’t know.
So maybe he just could not bear the prospect of big people now making long speeches over his casket, and ferrying it from place to place to “lie in state”, while cheap sheet-calendars with his ahistorical photos on them were hawked in the crowd, thus further upsetting his wife and children. That is the emotional quandary we went through when we re-buried my father: You are grateful for the gesture of respect, but remain deeply disturbed by a feeling of a lot of unpaid moral debts to the deceased, among those making you participate with them.