LONDON - The award-winning author was arrested and tortured for his work – and then tortured again for writing about his detention. Now he smuggles his latest banned book into Uganda to ensure it is read, according to The Guardian.
Kakwenza Rukirabashaija tries to keep his scars covered around his children. Even in the height of summer he never takes off his long-sleeved shirt and trousers. He is worried that evidence of the extensive, brutal torture he endured before fleeing Uganda, etched permanently into his body, would terrify them. The damage is so bad that he washes in the dark to avoid seeing them himself.
“The scars are not painful, but they trigger trauma whenever I am in the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. So I decided to turn off the light when I shower to avoid seeing them,” says the satirical writer, who was this month given the Václav Havel award for creative dissent.
His back is a crisscross of welts and his thighs are pockmarked with craters where his flesh was ripped away. Fractures in his ankles, viciously beaten more than a year ago, may take years to fully heal, doctors have told him.
“You know children are very inquisitive. They ask what happened to you. So even when it is sweltering hot outside, I try by all means to cover my body,” he says.
Rukirabashaija details his ordeal in a new book, The Savage Avenger. It is a chronicle of an abusive system and testimony to the power of the pen. He was targeted and forced into exile because his work humiliated and frightened Uganda’s president, the authoritarian Yoweri Museveni, who has led the country since 1986. Rukirabashaija’s first novel, The Greedy Barbarian, a thinly veiled broadside at Museveni, led to the author’s detention and torture.
His second, Banana Republic: Where Writing is Treasonous, details the regime’s attempts to silence him. It infuriated Ugandan authorities, and he was seized again. So, like reflections in a gruesome hall of mirrors, his third and most recent book is an account of the detention and torture he suffered for writing the second book.
The persecution derailed his career as a novelist, turning him into a chronicler of abuse and forcing him to flee the country, fearing for his life. His passport had been confiscated but he made it out through a route that he says in the book must stay secret for now, and found refuge in Germany.
He carries on writing mostly for his children, who are aged nine, five and three, but even they did not escape the fury of Uganda’s leaders. After Rukirabashaija escaped, authorities refused to issue his children with passports, so they were in effect held hostage for weeks.
He went public about the family’s situation a year ago, and the passports were issued after an outcry, including an investigation by the Uganda Human Rights Commission. They are now united in Germany, and Rukirabashaija says they help keep him going.
Uganda has received billions of dollars of development and security assistance from Britain and US, even as human rights failings have worsened in the country.
“I’m meeting foreign powers and asking them why they keep on supporting Museveni, who is terrorising us, forcing us to run out of the country. It amazes me that these people do not know exactly what Museveni is capable of, what he is doing”, he said.
