Alex Mukulu: The voice that refused to be polite – Sqoop

Alex Mukulu was a complex man. Interviewing him was complex too. You needed to have your game on because he was always switched on, always ready with a remark that could turn a question back on the person asking it.

If you walked into an interview hoping to make Alex Mukulu look bad, there was a good chance you would leave looking bad yourself.

That sharp tongue became part of his mythology. He once told dancers during an audition that they were smelling. In another conversation, he argued that poor people did not deserve news because, in his view, it added nothing to their lives. He constantly reminded people that “ignorance was a disease.” These were not always comfortable things to hear, and Mukulu was not particularly interested in making himself comfortable for the sake of other people.

That bluntness drew people to him and pushed others away. In Uganda’s artistic circles, he was admired, respected, challenged and, at times, loathed. But even those who disagreed with him could hardly ignore him.

On Saturday afternoon, news began circulating that Mukulu had died. Information was initially scanty, but it was later established that the veteran theatre practitioner had died while receiving treatment at Kiruddu Hospital.

With his death, Uganda lost one of its most distinctive cultural voices: a theatre doyen, writer, composer, actor, broadcaster and cultural thinker whose work stretched across several generations.

For many millennials, his voice was already part of the soundtrack of their upbringing. Songs such as Banakampala, Obwavu, the soundtrack to his production Dances With Poverty, and Sekiriba Kya Ttaka carried his unmistakable ability to turn music into social commentary. In the days following his death, Sekiriba Kya Ttaka became an especially poignant reminder of how deeply his work had entered the national consciousness.

But theatre was where Mukulu’s legacy was most powerful.

Excuse Me Mzungu, Wounds of Africa, Dances With Poverty and, most famously, 30 Years of Bananas, established him as an artist who was not satisfied with entertainment. He wanted theatre to interrogate society.

I first encountered his work as a child, at the time, I was picking interest in the arts thanks to my brother who had secretly started acting with one Kampala outfit. As a child, I could hardly afford theatre but through my brother, I did manage to catch a few and at times, on the good days, Alex Mukulu’s rehearsals.

One time, I was at the National Theatre to see my brother and guess which people were doing their final dress rehearsals, Alex Mukulu and a team of young artists. Alex never went into the drama of creating crews in theatre or call them production houses… you know those ones whose names always ends with dramactors… He didn’t form those.

His productions always had a fresh audition where little known actors came and sweat it out; they were usually musicals where everything was left on the floor; dance, singing and acting.

Mukulu would produce, direct and act, most of the times, if not all the times, in the titular role.

That rehearsal turned out to be one of the best productions I had ever seen, when the curtains went up, it was clear none of the boys and girls were there for drama, they were there for business, back and forth, they sang and acted. It was theatre I had never experienced, not straight forward, but yet I seemed to understand it.

When I started working as a journalist, I quickly learned that the kind of theatre is called abstract, it is not straight forward, and basically it forces you to think.

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Which mirrors what he usually said about theatre, a place where people should come to think.

There I was watching a production I wasn’t prepared for nor invited, but I was in that auditorium, silent as everything unfolded. When they were done with the first act, I clapped, I couldn’t help it.

And that sort of distracted the whole team, they had not noticed me all through.

That was the first time the name Alex Mukulu meant something to me.

It was years later that I learned the play they were rehearsing was actually Dances With Poverty, sadly, I never got to see the full show.

In fact, the first time I saw Alex Mukulu’s production was in 2019, that was 30 Years Of Banana. It had been restaged by another legend, Philip Luswata, Mukulu was in the audience too.

It was the first time I understood why the Kaleekeezi character on Radio Simba used to mean a lot to my father in the late 1990s or why when the character was on, almost everyone in the neighborhood was listening to Simba.

My first time experiencing Alex Mukulu was in 2024, of course, a lot had changed with theatre, the people that used to come to these walls to listen and think were nolonger there. He was now dealing with people whose attention in lost after a 30 second reel.

His play Kalunkalu ne Kalumbisi was staged free of charge at the National Theatre, and yet it was a few of us that showed up in that auditorium. One show after the next, it was just a few of us. During one of the shows, we were barely 20 in that place.

It’s only when the Katikiro, Charles Peter Mayiga was there that the production registered some numbers, mainly made up of journalists and social media handlers that cared way less for theatre.

You can imagine, Alex Mukulu, struggling to fill the National Theatre auditorium for free.

What had gone wrong?

Kalunkalu ne Kalumbisi was an African adaptation of William Shakesppear’s Romeo and Juliet, juxtaposed with Uganda’s own political undertones, the yellow camp and the red camp.

For many that had followed the man’s craft over the years, they said the play had flashes of his other plays, Wounds of Africa and Excuse Me Mzungu.

It was abstract, but also abrasive and unnecessarily longer than what he would have recommended.

A few months after the production, I received a call from Faisal Kiwewa of Bayimba Foundation, he wanted me to host a conversation. On the other side of the line, I remember him saying, you’re one of the few people I know that could have this conversation with him.

I asked him who and he said, “Alex Mukulu…” Our conversation was about art as a soft power tool or something like that. Now, I host a lot of spaces and talks but most of the times, my preparation and research starts a day before, with Alex Mukulu, I started preparing a week before, revisited things people had written about his work, his interviews.

Then I visited him at home and we basically had a conversation about art and its role in international relations. Alex Mukulu, very unpredictable and could easily catch you off guard, he wasn’t afraid of contradicting himself in a space of an hour… I asked him if it was true he didn’t pay actors well, he told me some actors come and tell him that they can work for anything.

“Son, me putting you on stage is also something, people need to be specific,” he said.