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Seeing Uganda through the big eyes of Kato Lubwama yet not understanding it
Author, Benjamin Rukwengye. PHOTO/FILE.
What you need to know:
...some of the standout eulogies of Kato from his peers were strongly-worded disapproval that an artist of stellar repute debased himself by going into Parliament.
Only recently, I started taking piano lessons. Whenever I get asked, “Why?”, my answer is that music is perhaps the only part of our life where someone creates something that didn’t exist before.
Music like all the other forms of creative arts is mesmerizing for its ability to aliven. A sound, an image, a picture, a phrase, a move, a joke, an expression, a word, a language, a beat. Something that the world has never seen, heard, touched, felt, or experienced.
Art is timeless and transcendent. And I dare say, the highest form of creation. It also probably explains why creatives are some of the highest-earning and most respected professionals across generations.
Of course, in Uganda and across the continent of Africa, some forms of art are more rewarding and respectable than others. This brings us to this week, where we must start by admitting how unfamiliar we were with Kato Lubwama’s game.
The image of him that sticks for most is not of the titan of theater, the playwright and lyricist, acclaimed actor and comedian, businessman and mentor, teacher and dreamer who was ahead of time and dared to create the future.
It took the entertainment industry stopping for a week to eulogize the man, for many of us to reflect on his significance outside of the comical video clips and soundbites from news reports and TikTok videos filled in the five years when he was in Parliament. Not since the death of the divisive-yet-revered Brigadier Noble Mayombo in 2007, has the demise of a public figure in Uganda felt this consequential. Make no mistake, the two couldn’t be any farther from each other on the spectrum of similarities.
Yet in death, it is easy to find that their unwavering dedication to their masters defined Uganda in ways that live on. Mayombo’s, to Museveni and the NRM/A; Kato’s to the arts and creative industry. It must also be noted that for both men, the intersection was a Uganda in which one was a regime enforcer whose larger-than-life personality and the transcendent notoriety of the shadowy security outfits he presided over were quite often the subject of Kato’s artistic expressions in theater, comedy, and music.
Coincidentally, I had my first-ever theater experience watching Kato and the Diamonds Ensemble at the Bat Valley Theater. It was the later 90s when as a little boy, I went with my auntie, Penny, to watch the Diamonds Ensemble at Bat Valley Theater. I don’t remember the play’s title or its plotline. Last weekend, together with a couple of friends, we were at the National Theater, to watch an incredible rendition of Okot P’Bitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol. The rendition was staged by the Okere City initiative. I mentioned to one of my friends that it was quite embarrassing for Uganda that a country with as much artistic and literary history talent as Uganda has just one public theatre. Let alone one that looks the way that it does. It is a travesty. But it also points to the broader theme in which politicking has over the years become the central theme of our existence. It is reported that there are over two million elective positions in Uganda – a leader for every 20 or so Ugandans. Politics is by far the most lucrative industry and the fastest route out of poverty. Laughable.
It scraps the base where there is little appreciation of anything beyond today’s survival, for recruitment. Perhaps as a pointer to the same, some of the standout eulogies of Kato from his peers were strongly-worded disapproval that an artist of stellar repute debased himself by going into Parliament.
In no uncertain terms, they chastised the idea of creatives engaging in politicking – mind the difference between it and politics. They pointed out how disappointed they were that Kato – a giant of the industry, the foundation on which the contemporary arts space was built and the pillar on which it leaned – had, as a result, turned into a thing to be ridiculed as is to be expected of politicians.
Something tells me that if you juxtaposed the central theme of Kato’s play from that Sunday afternoon at Bat Valley Theater in the late 90s, with today’s Uganda, you would find that the more things have changed the more they have remained the same. In some instances, the worse they have got. The only constant is that art survives everything.
Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds. @Rukwengye
