Uganda’s theatre world lost its most distinct voice over the weekend with the death of Edward Alexander Mukulu, the playwright, actor, director and educationist the country knew simply as Alex Mukulu. His passing drew an immediate and emotional wave of tributes from artists, colleagues and audiences across the country, all of them circling back to the same truth: that Ugandan theatre, as most people understand it, was shaped in large part by this one extraordinary man.
A Voice That Was Never Easy to Ignore
Mukulu was not a quiet artist. He wrote and directed theatre that had opinions, teeth, and a refusal to look away from the uncomfortable corners of Ugandan society. His plays, including Springs of Tears, The People’s President, Excuse Me Mzungu, and Gwanga Mujje, were not decorative works meant to sit pleasantly in a programme. They provoked, questioned, and on many occasions, unsettled the very institutions that might otherwise have celebrated him.
But it is 30 Years of Bananas, written in 1991, that remains his signature achievement. The title alone is a provocation, a reference to Uganda’s post-independence decades framed through the absurd image of a country going in circles, peeling the same problems over and over. It was the kind of work that made audiences laugh, then go quiet, then walk home slightly changed.
The Syllabus Rejection That Said Everything
In interviews conducted before his death, Mukulu spoke candidly about a chapter in the play’s history that most people outside the arts community never knew. According to reporting on Mukulu’s own account of events, 30 Years of Bananas was considered for inclusion on Uganda’s education syllabus but was ultimately turned away.
That decision, whatever the specific reasoning given at the time, follows a familiar pattern seen across the African continent and well beyond it. Art that holds power to account tends to make education bureaucracies nervous. Schools are institutions. Institutions prefer texts that celebrate or at least do not interrogate. A play that uses banana peels as a metaphor for decades of misrule and post-colonial dysfunction is not, in the eyes of a cautious curriculum committee, an easy sell to parents or politicians.
The irony is sharp. The very qualities that made 30 Years of Bananas too uncomfortable for a classroom are precisely the qualities that made it essential. Theatre that says nothing difficult teaches nothing worth remembering. Mukulu understood this completely, which is why he kept writing, kept directing, and kept performing work that scratched at the surface of power.
What Made Mukulu Different
There is a particular kind of artist who refuses to separate their creative work from their civic responsibility. Mukulu was that kind of artist. He was also an educationist, which makes the syllabus rejection even more layered. Here was a man deeply invested in what young Ugandans learned and how they learned to think, and the system he was invested in declined to use his sharpest tool.
His body of work covered a wide range of human experiences, but it always returned to the Ugandan condition. He wrote about governance, memory, colonial legacy, and the gap between what a country promises its people and what it actually delivers. He did this with wit rather than fury, which made his work accessible even when the subject matter was heavy. That balance is harder to achieve than it looks, and it is part of why audiences came back to him again and again over the decades.
The plays he left behind did not need a syllabus to travel. They found audiences on stages, in community spaces, and in the memories of everyone who ever sat in a dark room and watched Mukulu’s characters wrestle with the truth of their world.
A Legacy That Belongs to Uganda Now
The tributes that poured in after his death were not just expressions of grief. They were also, in a way, a reckoning. When an artist of Mukulu’s stature passes, a culture is forced to take stock of what it actually valued while he was alive and what it failed to protect or celebrate. The question of why his most famous work was kept off school syllabuses is not a historical curiosity. It is an active conversation about which stories a society chooses to pass on to its children and which ones it quietly sets aside.
Uganda now has the opportunity to revisit that question. The man who wrote 30 Years of Bananas is gone, but the bananas themselves, the circular frustrations, the post-independence reckoning, the comedy of power taking itself too seriously, are still very much part of the national conversation. A text that resonates that deeply across three decades does not become less relevant when its author dies. If anything, it becomes more urgent.
Alex Mukulu gave Uganda a theatrical language for talking about itself honestly. The least his country can do now is let students read it.
Keeping the Stage Lit
For those who never saw Mukulu perform or direct, the work is the entry point. 30 Years of Bananas in particular is worth tracking down, reading, and sitting with. It is not a comfortable text, but comfort was never the point. Theatre at its best is a conversation between a stage and a conscience, and Mukulu spent his entire career making sure that conversation stayed alive in Uganda.
His passing leaves a real gap, the kind that cannot be filled by any single successor but must instead be filled collectively, by a generation of Ugandan artists who carry his insistence on honesty forward into their own work.
So here is the question worth asking today: if Uganda’s education system had put 30 Years of Bananas on the syllabus three decades ago, what kind of citizens might it have produced? And more to the point, what is stopping it from making that choice now?
