The Fireside Never Went Out: Remembering Alex Mukulu

There is a word for what Africa loses when a certain kind of elder dies, and it is older than any English word we might reach for. Griot. A keeper of memory who works not with the pen alone but with the voice, the drum, the body, and the courage to say in public what a nation often only says in whispers. Alex Mukulu Kabangala has died, and the LéO Africa Institute joins the country he spent nearly five decades interrogating, defending, and loving in mourning a man who was, long before we had a fellowship to name it, exactly what we mean when we say the word.

The LéO Africa Institute's Griots Fellowship honors Africa's ancient tradition of storytelling, supporting the journalists, filmmakers, writers, and cultural practitioners who carry history forward through narrative rather than let it be lost to silence or rewritten by others. It rests on a simple conviction, that a continent's leadership is not shaped by policy alone, but by the stories a people tell about themselves. Alex Mukulu lived that conviction for nearly fifty years before we ever wrote it into a program description.

Born Into an Unfinished Sentence

Byron Kawadwa is the figure Mukulu is most often measured against, though he predates Mukulu's career by roughly a decade. Kawadwa founded the Kampala City Players and created a new type of music theatre in Luganda, his most successful opera being Oluyimba Lwa Wankoko, a political allegory of President Obote's 1966 abolition of kingdoms. Under Amin's regime, it was read as a searing attack on state power, and it cost him his life. Soldiers dragged him from rehearsals at the National Theatre in 1977 after a secret military tribunal condemned him and five colleagues to death, and his death caused many theatre artists to flee into exile, silencing a generation of dramatists.

It was in the years after that killing, when Ugandan theatre had gone comatose and the National Theatre stage was given over to imported British comedy, that few names besides Rose Mbowa and Alex Mukulu raised much attention. Mukulu's first play, Muzukulu wa Kabangala, was staged in 1977, the very year Kawadwa was murdered. He was one of the very small number of artists who kept politically engaged Ugandan theatre alive precisely when the state had just taught everyone else to go quiet.

A Style That Belonged Only to Him

Where Kawadwa's allegory was transparent enough that it was noticed and punished quickly, Mukulu built something sturdier and more durable. With 30 Years of Bananas, he used an extended, almost absurdist agricultural metaphor, politicians as bananas that begin with promise but decay into self-serving rot, characters echoing real figures in Museveni's circle without ever being named outright, sustained across an entire play and later a published book with Oxford University Press in 1993. The title carried a double meaning, playing on the fruit that sustains much of Uganda and on a slang word for madness. The play followed Kaleekeezi, a Rwandan refugee who survives one government after another without loyalty to any, a device used to question how much the country had actually gained since independence. Audiences disagreed for years over whether it satirised the achievements or the failures of the post-independence era, and that interpretive openness was itself part of the design.

His method involved collective improvisation with Makerere University students, a shift toward accessible, protest-oriented theatre rooted in Ugandan oral traditions rather than a script handed down from a solitary desk. This traced back to his own formation, the tradition of theatre by the fireside, where community elders recounted historical events through storytelling and impromptu performance, embedding theatre in communal reflection rather than commercial spectacle. At a time when comedic troupes dominated the Luganda stage, Mukulu carved out his own space with theatre that demanded more of actors, audiences, and the story itself. He was, by every account, a perfectionist, and much of his most demanding and formally ambitious work never reached the more casual medium of television, which tended to flatten him into a more familiar comic or musical persona than the fuller version of his stage work actually was.

A Career Measured in Decades

" "Theatre is not entertainment for the lazy mind. It is a mirror placed in front of a society that is afraid to wash its own face." — Alex Mukulu, Ugandan griot, playwright, actor, instrumentalist and author.

From 1977 onward, he produced roughly a play a year, building a catalogue of more than thirty works: Wounds of Africa in 1988, Peasants Cry in 1989, 30 Years of Bananas in 1991, Excuse Me Mzungu in 1992, The Guest of Honour in 1994, all the way to The People's President in 2022. In 2007, when Uganda hosted the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Mukulu presented Journey to Self-Realization at the opening ceremony in Kampala, held from the twenty third to the twenty fifth of November. He received a standing ovation for the production from Queen Elizabeth II and President Yoweri Museveni, among sixteen presidents and twenty prime ministers in attendance. In 2012, he directed the production marking Uganda's Golden Jubilee of independence at Kololo and was among those awarded an Independence Medal for service to the country.

His musical life ran alongside all of it. He played in the River Nile Band in the early 1970s alongside the late Philly Lutaaya, before either man had built the reputation history would remember them by, and their joint recordings on the album Ashita remain treasured among Uganda's serious vinyl collectors. His own catalogue of songs, including the enduring hit Banakampala, which satirized urban life and behaviour in Kampala, carried the same narrative and satirical sensibility from stage to record.

Even his final major production, the 2024 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet titled Kulunkalu and Kulumbisi, pulled the story toward the specific, unhealed tensions between Baganda and Banyoro communities, using symbolic red and yellow scarves to represent feuding groups and prompting audiences to reflect on personal accountability. For Mukulu, it was as much an opportunity to mentor a younger generation of theatre-makers as it was a return to the stage, a fitting reflection of the role he had come to occupy in Uganda's creative industry as a bridge between generations. In later years he also sat as a judge on televised talent competitions, keeping him visible to audiences who had never seen his early plays, and he took that role seriously, holding young performers to standards he never softened for popularity's sake.

A Mentor Who Did Not Spare the Truth

His mentorship was never gentle for its own sake. As a judge on televised talent competitions, he brought young people the same standard he brought to his own stage, and he was known for a wit sharp enough to sting and clear enough to remember. In April 2021, judging a talent show, he pushed a group of young dancers on their grooming and presentation with characteristic bluntness, a moment that drew public debate at the time. It reflected the same conviction that ran through his whole career, that discipline and self-respect were inseparable from artistry, and that a mentor's job was to say the hard thing plainly rather than let a young performer walk offstage unprepared for the standards the world would hold them to.

He lived, too, through the country's harder history directly and not from any safe distance, the desecration of the Lubiri, the overthrow of Milton Obote, the expulsion of Asians, and the long succession of coups and governments that followed. Where politics transformed the country around him, theatre became his way of interpreting Uganda and communicating its realities back to itself.

What He Leaves

This is what leadership looks like in the griot's register. Not a title. Not an office. A lifelong discipline of telling the truth in front of the people who most need, and least want, to hear it. At the LéO Africa Institute, where our work is to nurture ethical, entrepreneurial leaders for the continent's transformation, we recognize in his life the very thing our Griots Fellowship was built to honor, that a storyteller working in his own language, drawing on his own people's oldest forms, can shape a nation's conscience across generations of turbulence.

Alex Mukulu Kabangala leaves behind more than thirty works, a legacy of mentorship that shaped younger Ugandan theatre-makers well into his final years, and a body of work that tracked his country's own unfinished story almost in real time, from Idi Amin's Uganda through the bush war and into four decades beyond. He was Uganda's griot before there was a fellowship to call him one. The fire he tended, from that first fireside inheritance all the way to his final stage, is still burning. It is now ours to keep alight.