Before the memes, Alex Mukulu Was the main character – Sqoop

For a generation discovering Alex Mukulu through TikTok clips, WhatsApp statuses and recycled social media sounds, the man can seem like an internet character who somehow wandered out of an older Uganda.

There is the blunt Mukulu. The funny Mukulu. The unpredictable Mukulu.

The Mukulu whose facial expressions and one-liners have found a second life among young Ugandans who were not even born when he was packing the National Theatre. It is an entertaining afterlife. But it is also a curious one.

Because before the clips, before the memes and before Gen Z turned fragments of his personality into social media gold, Alex Mukulu was not simply a funny old man with quotable lines. He was theatre royalty. And for those who never saw him in his prime, that part of the story is almost impossible to imagine.

There was a time when the National Theatre did not need to convince people to come.

People simply came. And when Mukulu was on the programme, they came in numbers.

Tickets could disappear days before a performance. Queues stretched towards Parliament. The theatre could become a marketplace of anticipation, with people scrambling for seats and even reselling tickets at inflated prices.

Mukulu had become an event. But the real spectacle began when the curtain went up.

Before social media made him famous again

Mukulu’s theatre was not the easy kind. He did not simply serve audiences a neat story, a few laughs and a curtain call.

His productions could be strange, political, satirical, musical, physical and deliberately difficult to digest. He wanted audiences to think. He wanted them to return. He wanted them to look again.

That was the peculiar magic of Mukulu’s work; you could laugh at it without immediately understanding it, then go home and realise there was something underneath the laughter. His theatre often operated like a parable. Music was not decoration. Dance was not filler. Lighting was not merely illumination. The human body itself became an instrument.

He could take satire and turn it into a national mirror. He could take a theatre stage and make it feel like a battlefield, a graveyard, a political chamber or somewhere entirely outside Uganda.

In Seven Wonders of Uganda, for instance, audiences encountered a terrifying stage illusion of a roaring lion descending from above. Through sound, lighting and staging, the creature seemed almost alive.

It was the sort of theatre that made people forget they were sitting in a room watching actors.

Then there was Wounds of Africa, one of the productions associated with his most striking theatrical imagery, and 30 Years of Bananas, where Mukulu himself became part of the spectacle.

This was not theatre made to disappear after the final applause. It stayed with people.

The man was bigger than the memes

That is where the social-media Mukulu becomes interesting. The younger generation has not necessarily met the artist. They have met the personality. And what a personality it is.

The internet loves people who are naturally quotable. Mukulu was that long before the internet arrived. His bluntness feels almost tailor-made for the age of short clips. His impatience, his unusual delivery, his facial expressions, his refusal to sugarcoat things, all of it translates beautifully into the language of memes.

A sentence that may once have been thrown across a theatre rehearsal can now be detached from its original context, placed over a video and sent around thousands of phones. And suddenly, Alex Mukulu is trending.

For young people, he becomes something close to an accidental influencer from another era. The irony is delicious. The man who once demanded that theatre audiences pay attention is now being consumed in 30-second fragments.

The man whose plays required audiences to sit through layered stories is now known through snippets. The man who built entire theatrical worlds is being remembered through his expressions. But perhaps there is something fitting about it.

Mukulu was always larger than the format available to him.

The original theatre disruptor

Long before anyone spoke about “content creators”, Mukulu was creating content at a scale that demanded a physical audience.

Long before social media celebrated people for being unconventional, he was unapologetically eccentric. Long before Uganda’s entertainment industry became obsessed with virality, Mukulu understood that an audience had to feel something. He could be funny without becoming a comedian.

Political without becoming a politician. Serious without becoming boring. And theatrical without making theatre feel distant. That combination was rare. He also understood the business.

At a time when many artists depended on percentage arrangements with venues, Mukulu was among those who could take the bigger commercial gamble and hire the National Theatre outright. His productions could run for extended periods.

He could make money from theatre. Serious money.

And perhaps that is another part of his story that younger audiences do not immediately appreciate. Mukulu was not merely an artist waiting to be discovered. He was an entertainment business.

Then the man disappeared

The relationship between Mukulu and the National Theatre eventually broke down.

He stayed away for years. Nearly two decades passed without the man who had once helped make the theatre one of Kampala’s most exciting cultural spaces returning to its stage. That absence created another layer to the legend.

By the time he returned, a new generation had grown up. The audiences had changed. The entertainment ecosystem had changed. Television had changed it. Radio had changed it. And then social media changed everything again.

Mukulu returned in 2024 for Kulumbisi and Kulunkalu. For those who knew his history, it was more than another production. It was a return of a theatre giant to a stage he had once effectively sworn off. For younger audiences, however, the significance may have been harder to grasp.

They were meeting a much older, physically diminished version of a man whose greatest theatrical years had already become history. And yet, somehow, the Mukulu spirit remained. The perfectionist was still there. The eccentric was still there. The uncompromising artist was still there.

The body had changed. The standard had not.

So who exactly did Gen Z lose?

Perhaps this is the real tragedy of Mukulu’s second life online.

Young Ugandans have inherited the punchlines without necessarily inheriting the context. They know the meme. They may not know the master. They know the voice. They may not know the theatre. They know the funny clip.

They may not know the man who could fill the National Theatre, command enormous casts, rehearse through the night and keep changing a production until it matched the picture in his head. They may never have watched his lion roar.

They may never have sat through one of his long, layered productions and left arguing about what it actually meant. They may never have seen why actors feared disappointing him and why audiences kept returning. And that is why Mukulu’s current popularity, even in death, is both funny and strangely beautiful.

The internet has given him a new audience he never planned for. A generation that missed his heyday is now discovering him backwards. Not through the theatre. Through the meme. Not through the full production. Through the clip. Not through the legend. Through the man.

Perhaps, then, the memes are not diminishing Mukulu. They are opening the door. Behind the funny face is a theatre giant. Behind the quotable lines is an artist who demanded excellence. Behind the eccentricity is a man who understood that theatre could entertain, disturb, challenge and hold up a mirror to society.

And behind the social-media Mukulu is the Alex Mukulu who once made the National Theatre feel like the centre of Uganda’s entertainment universe. Gen Z may have arrived late to the Mukulu party. But the party, it turns out, is still going.

Only now, the stage is a smartphone.