At 9:20pm on Friday, Grace Nakimera walked onto the stage at Kampala Serena Hotel’s Victoria Hall and immediately went back to where much of her story began.
Kiva Kuki, her 2008 club banger, was the opening statement.
It was a sensible choice. Nakimera did not need much introduction. The song was part of the soundtrack of an era when she was one of the most exciting female performers in Ugandan music, and the audience had come carrying memories of that Grace.
But there was a question hanging over the Power of Grace concert from the moment she stepped onto the stage: Which Grace had come back?
For more than a decade, fans have known Nakimera largely through her absence from secular music and the dramatic change in her life. The singer who once commanded club stages with unapologetic energy turned towards Christianity, gave her life to God and largely stepped away from the secular music that had made her a household name.
Her last major concert was in 2011. So, Friday was never going to be an ordinary concert. It was a reunion. And reunions are dangerous things for artists because audiences rarely remember you exactly as you were. They remember you as they felt you.
The Grace they remembered was the young woman from the Anfukula era; vibrant, energetic, daring and seemingly incapable of standing still.
The 2007 hit had announced her arrival in spectacular fashion. In its music video, she danced inside a boxing ring with the confidence of somebody who had already decided that the industry was hers to conquer.
She left very little for anyone else. Nearly two decades later, that Grace was still somewhere inside the Victoria Hall. But she was not the Grace who came out. And perhaps that was the point.
By the time she moved through Sukuma, a duet with her brother Juju and later brought in Riziki, followed by Bumper ku Bumper, it became apparent that the audience would not be getting a carbon copy of the performer from the late 2000s.
Nakimera was more reserved. Her dancing was present, but measured. Her wardrobe was decent and deliberately restrained. There was none of the old attempt to overwhelm the stage through youthful exuberance.
For some fans, this may have initially felt like a missing ingredient. After all, they had waited years to see her again. They wanted that Grace. But then came Anfukula. And it was probably here that the evening found its real meaning.
The song still carried the memory of the woman who once performed it. Yet the woman singing it in 2026 was no longer that 20-something performer. She was older, a mother and a woman whose life had taken a very different direction.
She could not realistically recreate 2007. And she did not really try. Instead, she offered a more mature performance built around her strongest surviving weapon: the voice.
Nakimera leaned into her vocals, testing her range, pitch and control across different sections of the concert. The result was not the physically explosive performance some had anticipated, but a performance that allowed her musicianship to breathe.
There was also a new confidence in restraint. At one point, she joked about keeping her dress code decent and not overly revealing because she is now a Nalongo (twin mother). It was funny, but it was also her way of explaining the transformation without making a speech about it. This was not the old Grace returning from a long holiday. This was the new Grace coming home.
And that distinction became increasingly important as the concert progressed.
The Power of Grace was deliberately split between the secular catalogue that built her reputation and the gospel music that now defines her life. Rather than pretending the two versions of her do not exist, Nakimera allowed them to occupy the same stage. That was perhaps the smartest thing about the concert.
Her gospel set gave the audience another dimension of her musical ability. Songs such as Yansasira allowed her to move away from the expectations of the old club Grace and demonstrate the vocal discipline that has developed over the years. The live saxophone work by Happy Kyaze added warmth to this section, giving the performance a more intimate musical character.
It was also where Nakimera’s present seemed to make the most sense. She was not abandoning her past. She was putting it alongside her present.
The collaborations helped keep the evening moving. David Lutalo brought his familiar stage personality and shared a playful stage moment with Nakimera, while Aziz Azion also joined her for a collaborative performance. Pastor Wilson Bugembe, another figure whose career straddles Uganda’s secular and gospel worlds, also took the stage.
These appearances helped reinforce the concert’s unusual identity. It was neither entirely a gospel concert nor simply a nostalgia trip through Nakimera’s old secular catalogue. It was both.
There were moments when the show lost some of its momentum. The main stage experienced patches of dead air, particularly when the programme leaned heavily on advertisements playing repeatedly on the screens. For a concert that had spent years building anticipation, these pauses interrupted the emotional rhythm of the night. The repeated thank-yous also became excessive. Nakimera appeared determined to acknowledge everyone who had supported her journey, but the frequency of these acknowledgements occasionally took attention away from the performance itself.
Then came one of the night’s more unexpected moments. Hajjat Hadijjah Sharifah Namyalo, who has become a familiar face at major Ugandan music shows, stepped onto the stage and performed bits of Nakimera’s Nkwagala Kufa. It was an unusual addition, for a concert produced by a strict John Segawa but it fitted into the celebratory nature of the evening.
And then Nakimera did what experienced performers often do best. She saved some of the strongest material for last. The final stretch became a reminder of why people had come in the first place. Kawonawo, Sexy and some of her biggest secular songs brought the old catalogue back to life.
Suddenly, the years between 2011 and 2026 felt considerably shorter. The songs still worked. The audience still knew them. And Nakimera still knew exactly how to perform them. This is perhaps the biggest reason the concert worked.
Nakimera had four things going for her before she even walked onto the stage. She is a good performer. She had created a considerable thirst among fans simply by staying away. She has a deep catalogue, much of it packed with hits. And she has been around long enough to know what it takes to construct a show.
The full house at Serena was evidence that the interest had not disappeared. What the audience discovered, however, was that a successful comeback does not necessarily mean resurrecting the person you were. Sometimes it means introducing people to who you have become. That was the real story of Power of Grace.
There was the Grace of Anfukula, the fearless young performer who entered Uganda’s mainstream music scene almost 20 years ago with the energy of someone kicking open a door. Then there was Friday’s Grace; more reserved, more deliberate, deeply shaped by faith and motherhood, but still vocally capable and still able to command a room when the songs demanded it.
She did not give the audience all of the old Grace. She gave them a taste. And perhaps that was enough. Because a comeback should not be judged only by how closely an artist resembles their younger self. It should also be judged by whether they can make an audience accept the person standing before them now.
Kampala had tasted the new Grace. For those who came looking for the old one, there were enough familiar songs to satisfy the nostalgia. The thirst had been created over more than a decade.
On Friday night, it was finally quenched.
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