How do you solve an enigma like Alex Mukulu?
Alex Mukulu may have left without writing the autobiography he once contemplated, but his work, his uncompromising vision and the memories of those who encountered his genius ensure that his story will continue to live on.
The late Alex Mukulu. (Courtesy)
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WHAT’S UP!
In January 2001, Alex Mukulu and his group, Impact International, staged a play at the National Theatre. In the Ugandan entertainment calendar, January is a very slow month. So, I thought that was the reason Mukulu chose to stage the play with the ungainly title Ancestors of Sense and Nonsense.
It was a typically Mukulu-like title, and I remember one of the media guys (we called them reporters, then) saying he got a headache just from reading the title. Anyway, afterwards (it was a Saturday afternoon), he called us into the Green Room for a discourse on the play.
He started by asking us if we had any questions about the play. Typically for the media then, there were none (we might hold modern-day media in disdain for their lack of ethics and journalistic professionalism, but they always have questions at press conferences).
Then he started asking us questions, and cracking jokes about the media. The gathered media laughed long and hard at his jokes, not realising that he was not laughing with them, but at them. And at the end he did blast them, and told them off for writing about things they did not understand. I don’t think any of them ever attended another Alex Mukulu press conference.
But I did hold my own with him, and perhaps gained his grudging respect. Afterwards, every time we met, he would refer to me as the only writer in the New Vision.
Theatre was then mostly what Stephen Rwangyenzi, in his eulogy on Tuesday afternoon at the National Theatre referred to as ‘katemba’. Katemba is the theatre equivalent of ‘bubble gum music’, consumed for quick satisfaction and just as quickly forgotten. Mukulu refused to do that, and many in the theatre fraternity disliked him for his ‘uppityness,’. Some of those were even there on Tuesday, paying glowing tributes to the man who made them look very ordinary.
Almost every tribute has described Mukulu as a genius, and we all know geniuses don’t suffer fools very gladly. For some reason, Mukulu reminds me very much of the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, an acclaimed genius who society declared mad and put in an asylum.
Geniuses do not see the world as mortal people do, and so are often misunderstood.
He suffered from anxiety all his life, and what some described as ‘crushing self-doubt ’. That is understandable if you are a painter and no one ever buys your work.
But some geniuses have no such doubt of their abilities, and are so confident of themselves it brinks on arrogance. Mukulu was such a person. He was brilliant, he knew it, and did not give two figs what anybody else thought.
It has also been noted that Mukulu lived alone, and some have even opined that he could have died of loneliness. ‘Buh humbug!’, I bet he would have said. Dying of loneliness means that one craved the companionship of others, and that lack of it drove them to the end. So, how can a person who felt the rest of the world was much inferior at the same time miss it? You spend all your life looking down on the world, and then at the end you want it with you? Real humbug!
Alex Mukulu died of a broken heart. He might have treated the world with disdain, but I think he still wanted very much for people to see it the way he did. And when they did not, that must have been a great disappointment. And hence, the broken heart.
The last time I met Mukulu outside the National Theatre, he mentioned casually that he was thinking of writing his autobiography, and that he would call me when he did.
Unfortunately, that call never came. So, we will never know the depth and breadth of the genius that was Alex Mukulu, Muzukulu wa Kabangala.