Kakwenza’s pen gets one over his captors with prestigious award

What does not kill you will only make you stronger, they say. For Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, it has been much more than that. His boldness since emerging from a weeklong detention has often bordered on what many would see as naivety.

But if anyone had even a fleeting feeling that such was the life Kakwenza was treading on, then they might need to revisit that thought.

Perhaps no one put it more succinctly than UK-based Ugandan academic Kennedy Javuru. “They thought they were burying him, they didn’t know he was a seed,” Dr Javuru noted as he congratulated Kakwenza last Tuesday after the author of ‘The Greedy Barbarian’ was awarded the 2021 International Writer of Courage by the prestigious PEN Pinter Prize.

The award, for an author who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs, is part of the PEN Pinter Prize which was won by Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga, best known for her breakthrough 1988 novel, ‘Nervous Conditions.’

Kakwenza was not at the British Library Theatre for our annual award for freedom of expression in literature. This was a virtual ceremony streamed live to an exclusive audience but Dangarembga was. And here, as part of the conferment of the award, she was mandated to pick the International Writer of Courage with whom she would share her award.

After Sara Collins, a Jamaican-born Caymanian-British author of the award winning novel, ‘The Confessions of Frannie Langton,’ had serenaded the event with a resounding encomium for Dangarembga, it was time to pick the Writer of Courage award winner.

The Zimbabwean writer and activist chose Kakwenza. And it looked like a crystal clear choice.
On a giant screen, a video montage of Kakwenza’s acceptance speech was played. The writer thanked PEN International for standing by him during the detention, and thanked Dangarembga for sharing her award with him.

The 33-year-old writer then shared a brief story of how he had come this far. 
 
Daring boldness
On April 13 last year, Kakwenza was picked up by security operatives and detained incommunicado for days until his lawyer Eron Kiiza filed a writ of habeas corpus that saw the high court in Kampala order the State to produce the writer dead or alive.

He was arraigned before the Magistrate’s Court in Iganga and charged with “an act likely to spread the infection of disease [Covid-19], contrary to Section 171 of the Penal Code Act, Cap 120”, and remanded in custody to Busesa prison.

His lawyers and activists filed for his bail, which court granted days later.
At his home in Kigulu County in Iganga, a writhing and limping Kakwenza narrated his detention ordeal and told this writer he would never challenge the regime functionaries again.

“When I was hanging in the dungeons, in chains, I swore to my tormentors that I would never write again if they gave me a chance to live. I swore to them, as if they were some kind of deities, as if they were God,” Kakwenza would reiterate in his award acceptance speech.

Medical scan report showed injuries to his kidney and his ankles were swollen like they had been pumped up with air from a foot-pump.

Yet in a shocking twist, Kakwenza was back to his wits weeks later when he shared the cover of what he said was his second book. He was seeking edits to the title after detailing his torture ordeal.

‘Banana Republic: Where Writing is Treasonous’ was settled on. But what was not settled was the big ‘why’ question. This was a question his wife Eva was asking too.

That kind of boldness, which has continued in his socio-political activism with tweets that often go over the top, has left some suggesting Kakwenza was an ‘insider’ with a licence to abuse the President and his family.
“I wouldn’t dilute my conscience with associating myself with a rogue regime I’ve criticised for 21 years,” he retorts.

“I value my reputation. I’m not like the [Beti] Kamyas who make rumpus and brouhaha for crumbs of appointments.
“I was mentored by the best, Kizza Besigye and I would be a disappointment to him if I decided to begin bum-licking my tormentors.”

Turning to the award, Kakwenza said it showed that the pen will always win against guns and all the oppression.
Dr Danson Kahyana, president of PEN Uganda, echoed similar sentiments, adding that the award reflects the truth that “what writers communicate outlive horrible regimes.”

“There is no doubt that Kakwenza’s literary work will outlive President Museveni and his government. That nobody seems horrified by the account of the torture as recounted by Kakwenza shows how political barbarism has been normalised in the regime,” added the senior lecturer at Literature Department in Makerere University.

The controversial Kayibanda
It was in February last year that I first met Kakwenza after months of acquaintance on social media. He had for days been offering a copy of ‘The Greedy Barbarian.’

On this particular Saturday, he had ‘waylaid’; he was in Jinja town and insisted I went and picked a complimentary copy. After several excuses that he did not buy into, I jumped on a boda boda to Main Street in Jinja town.
We exchanged descriptions of physical appearance after he changed the rendezvous from a restaurant to Main

Street and he declared that he would have no trouble spotting me. It didn’t occur to me why until he texted that he had seen me.

The guy with a backpack was so tall that when he moved to hug me, I flinched from feeling so small. He fetched from the bag a copy of his book, tucked into the pages a Shs20,000 note and handed it to me.

I protested but he insisted I took the money which was actually a godsend that day.

“I will really be grateful if you can read the book and give me your opinion about it, or even share on Facebook,” he said.

As he hailed a taxi to Iganda, I wondered if his frame would fit into the vehicle. I feared he could maybe end up sitting with his had partly out of the window like a giraffe. But he somehow fitted his entire frame in.
Jimmy Spire Ssentongo, an academic and writer, in his review of the book says “the novel is bound for a bang.”

He could have as well emphasized the plural. From the way the character of the rascal Kayibanda was developed, it was clear to see that the first bang would be in a detention facility involving torture implements.

The book, set in two fictitious neighbouring countries, is an account of Kayibanda, a boy who partly raises himself up because his mother (Bekunda) is too busy to, until she meets with the a nomadic pastoralist Kagurutsi after fleeing her native country with her only son strapped to her back.

Kagurutsi tries so much to straighten up the already bent twig in Kayibanda that appears to have dried young. It is a hopeless effort.

Kayibanda is mischief personified, the antagonist within a protagonist. His actions keep you wondering what more mischief he will conjure up. You want to see if he will become a good boy or die in his ways. But he somehow lives on as the novel that dramatically takes up political undertones when Kayibanda is forced by circumstances to become a politician and goes on to wrestle state control.

It is from this point that the Kayibanda stops all earlier pretences of being human by diving down the precipice of corruption.

The Greedy Barbarian is bold, sarcastic and, indeed, a bang! Kakwenza might have won the award for coming out with Banana Republic after his detention but it is his first The Greedy Barbarian raised the props.

“In Africa, when you write fiction, especially political fiction, the leaders will always think that one is writing about them. Of course, every dictator will suspect that the writer meant to embarrass him,” Rukirabashaija says of his book.
“President Museveni felt that it was him that I had written about and so he sent his hoodlums to arrest and torture me. The idea was to completely stop me from being creative.”

Kakwenza took a swipe at the government, saying it should instead have been honouring his contribution to literary growth in the country instead of resorting to “barbarism and draconian methods of torture as though we’re still in the Stone Age.”

Dr Kahyana said the award meant a lot to him as president of PEN International Uganda and that it should encourage all writers of good will and all. 

About the award
The PEN Pinter Prize was established in memory of Nobel-Laureate playwright Harold Pinter, the prize is awarded annually to a writer of outstanding literary merit resident in the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth or former Commonwealth, who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize in Literature speech, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination... to define the real truth of our lives and our societies.’