Amr and the tragic ending of our collective aspirations

How do you start to eulogize someone whose life ends at 24? What do you say? They hadn’t even started to live. And that’s what hurts the most.” Those were my opening words, almost 12 years ago, as I spoke at the funeral of my friend Donvan. Over a decade later, many of us, friends and family of Amr, have found ourselves muttering different versions of the same.

The Leo Africa network, where I am a fellow, is mourning over the sudden loss of Amr Ainebyoona, the Institute’s Head of Communication and Partnerships. Amr was a good kid. Funny. Ambitious. Kind. Steady-green like broccoli. 

I would be remiss if I passed this off as just Leo’s loss. He was everywhere and belonged to everyone - because he somehow made the time for it. He was only 27 and had the world at his feet. Get out of the hood. Go to Aspen. Nothing was out of reach. He represented what’s best about Uganda’s young people. That ability to find humor in the absurd. The optimism to build a better society and country with the littlest of resources and faintest of will from the power centers. 

The understanding that you only live once and that if you do it well, once is good enough. So, in some ways, you look at his life and feel happy and proud of him because of how well he has lived it. Yet, you are overcome by sadness because of all the promise and potential he had and how much better the world would have been had he stayed a little longer.

The pain is both from the unexpected and unceremonious ending of a young life as it is from the lack of closure as to what might have killed him. What we know at least is that about three weeks ago, he traveled to Cyprus to pursue his master’s degree in communication. A week later, he started feeling unwell and deteriorated so badly that he was admitted into ICU. Acute Malaria, apparently. That same week, he died.

I was gifted a book last Christmas, titled ‘Remembering the Future’. It is a Ugandan book that assembled a couple of writers to draw links between where different societies have come from to make sense of why we live life the way we do. I am not an enthusiast of books with multiple writers and themes because that requires one to follow and make sense of different plot lines. I was worried that it would be the same with this book until I read it.

It helped me understand that the things that make us who we are aren’t as clear cut as we usually make them out to be. We are a complex cocktail of the influences of our cultures and traditional beliefs, our religious inclinations, our neighborhoods, social and professional networks, aspirations, and ideas - formed and unformed.

So, as we sat at the Lugogo Hockey Grounds for the Dua and ceremony to bid farewell to Amr, I thought deeply about who he was. Why we loved him so much. Why we shall miss him. He was empathetic. Generous. He was present for his friends and communities. He had time for everyone. He was aspirational. Ambitious. He loved and revered Allah. He loved a good time. He was funny and jocular. He was unassuming. He believed in people and their potential. He loved football. He had no airs about him. 

He was all those things and more, not because of his parents and family he came from, not because he was a Muslim or because he went to King’s College Budo, not because he worked for the Leo Africa Institute, or because he was a Rotaractor. But because of all those things. They are what made him who he was; and evidence that we are not this or that. We are more than one thing, to as many people.

It is Shakespeare who, in King Lear, put it succinctly when he said, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” There is no explaining or making sense of why young people die. It just happens and we must accept it and live with it. We can only hope - and this couldn’t be any truer for Amr - that they will have really given it their all while they still lived.

Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. [email protected]