One Man Dancing

by Patricia Keeney

  “Theatre,” says Hansel, wanting to move them from violent strategies to artistic ones, “is an inter-medium where the audience is invited to participate in its resolution, in closure.”

  “That is what Robert believed,” says Charles eagerly. “It is what he tried to do with Abafumi. Losing nothing, neither the old way or the new, but fusing them in forms that we invented together, that the power of the stories revealed to us.”

  The day also offers a few quiet hours. Several of them have climbed up a hill behind the Mount Febe Hotel to discover an exquisite garden, a small peaceful paradise, a jungle of moss arching high into trees, fastened to earth by old round stone.

  Charles and Pat sit calmly talking. “It’s beautiful here. The rain cools off the bush.”

  “Pounds it into submission,” Charles agrees. “Lets us breathe.”

  “It was difficult wasn’t it, giving your speech.”

  “Yes, but it was my duty. I know Robert heard me. And others.”

  “I’m sure, he did Charles. Many heard you.”

  Together, they drift into a small museum behind the garden where she watches him finger pipes and tabourets in fine carved wood, calabashes and flasks, braziers and oil lamps. His attention is careful, loving. They stop at a decorated throne composed of abstract frogs, a chorus of thrumming fertility, surrounded by monkeys whose kindly duty is to help the dead rest.

  “Everything has a purpose,” she muses admiringly.

  “Including me.”

  Puzzled, she takes refuge in the obvious. “Robert and Abafumi gave you your purpose.”

  “But they are gone now.”

  “Unless you keep them alive.”

  “It is what I want,” he says. “To tell their story. Robert’s.”

  “Do it,” she urges him.

  “I am not a writer.”

  “But you must do it.”

  He hears but does not look at her. Turning away, he studies spider designs etched on the walls, spiders regenerating, individually and painstakingly, ensuring the continuity of their species by attending to their own programmed complexities.

  “I wish I could be as subtle as spiders,” he says. “With every new pattern, they reveal a secret. Language is so intricate.”

  “You have the language to tell your story.”

  “I don’t”

  “You can spin the right words.”

  Charles stares into the flooding bush a long time before finally turning back to her.

  “No. Once I could have danced it. But not now. I can only describe the steps. I can only speak from the darkness. Someone else has to choreograph the words. Maybe you,” he suddenly says. “You could write my story.”

  “Me?”

  “I will talk and you can write.”

  The thought sinks in. They gaze out at the gleaming green around them. Rain rinsing the world to deep new colours.

  Slowly the project takes shape. Over weeks, months and ultimately years of conversation.

  Charles’ obsession is magnificent.

  He and Pat agree to go beyond the facts, to create and dramatize as they recreate. His life, so much more than mere document will be the life of a hero, an African hero, filled with song and legend. Myth. His story must move from ice to fire, from tornado to torture, from here to there and back.

  After many discussions, they are as ready as they can be.

  Where shall we begin?” Pat asks, when they both feel right.

  “In the rain. That terrible day. In the wind and the rain. In the eye of the tornado.”

  He pauses. Then changes his mind.

  “No,” he says “Let’s start just before the storm. In the ice house.

  Smiling broadly at her, he finishes his thought. “At the top of that mountain.”

  IN FACT: SOME NOTES ON REALITIES

  As stated at the beginning of this book, Charles is a very real person. His full name is Charles Tumwesigye and he lives today in Toronto. Unable to work because of the injuries he sustained in the devastating Edmonton tornado of 1987, he has visited his native Uganda only once since giving his talk on Robert Serumaga in Cameroon in 1996.

  It may be of interest here for readers to understand that Serumaga’s theatrical aesthetic — Artaudian in its reliance on what has been called “total theatre” — has never been duplicated in Africa and has never been significantly documented anywhere in any public way. It is very much a myth still in the making. And for the record, the Robert Serumaga, who for parts of recent decades ran the National Theatre of Uganda, is actually Robert Serumaga Jr. whose father founded the Abafumi troupe at the centre of this book.

  As for Charles’ family, his father and mother in this book are based on the lives of the real Kanyunya and the real Kekinoni. One difference between this version and their reality is that they had eight children, not two. The eldest was named Mary and the second was named Wilson. Charles was the third to be born and he was followed by Betty, Stephen, Robert, John, and Herbert. For narrative and dramatic purposes, I have combined the real Mary and the real Betty into a single elder sister called here Debra. The real Betty now also lives in Toronto, having moved there to help Charles after his horrific accident. Charles’ best friend Samuel is a composite of his brothers and friends.

  Abafumi’s reality is even more complicated than one finds in this narrative. While the essential facts are based on the realities of the company founded by Robert Serumaga, names have been changed throughout to protect the identities and lives of almost everyone involved. At its height, Abafumi had an acting company of twelve to fourteen plus six trainees. Some of its shows utilized all of the actors plus Serumaga himself who, for example, really did play the Priest in Abafumi’s most famous production, Renga Moi, which really did tour to rave reviews world-wide in the early and mid-seventies. The actors named in my version are, in fact, composites, their circumstances based on reality but not necessarily on specific individuals.

  For the sake of historical recognition, I think it is important here to name the members of the real Abafumi as Charles recalled them and to recognize their unique contributions to theatrical art. All were trained by Robert Serumaga as actors, dancers, drummers, and musicians, and all contributed collectively to the creation of Abafumi’s extraordinary non-verbal, myth-based works.

  They included: Alice Bitamba, Charles Buyondo, William Ddumba, Friday Kibombo, Marie Kirindi, Jones Kiwanuka, Jane Kobusingye, Stephen Lwanga, Rwandan-born Jane and Dede Majoro, Frank Mbaziira, Paul Mukasa, Victoria Nakazaana, Sarah Ntambi, Geoffrey and Margaret Oryema, Agnes Sabune, Deborah Sentongo, Richard Sseruwagi and, of course, Charles Tumwesigye. Sara Kibirige served as company secretary.

  One more real character who makes some brief appearances in this novel is the playwright Byron Kawadwa who was the Artistic Director of the National Theatre in Kampala for a time and who was, in fact, also executed on Idi Amin’s direct orders. Kawadwa was not the first artist to die under this regime nor was he the last. His plays, too, remain an important part of modern Ugandan dramatic literature.

  The character of Mr. Makuba is a composite based on several real characters Charles discussed over our extensive two-year-period of interviews. These included his female drama teacher at Mengo Collegiate and several others who led him both into Abafumi and into the world around it.

  In attempting to make decisions about whether or not to use real names or to create pseudonyms and/or composites, I tried to read Charles’ sensitivities as well as my own sense of clarity and effective storytelling. When in doubt, I asked myself what would most be in the spirit of Abafumi with its mythic sensibilities. Charles’ goal and mine have been to recognize how profoundly this story is connected to myth. Having spent an extended period of time in probing conversation with Charles about his life, both personal and artistic, I apologize to any who might feel there is even the slightest i
njustice done to their memories or failures of understanding around this amazing, complicated and often contradictory story of extraordinary survival. Charles Tumwesigye, an artist all his life, has consistently encouraged me in this process and I thank him heartily for trusting me.

  Another choice I felt I had to make concerns the play put on before the infamous gathering of African heads of state in Kampala. It was not in fact Renga Moi done that day but Amyrikiti. The latter play had a scene in it involving security guards throwing someone in the trunk of a car and driving away. Set in South Africa, Idi Amin took this “South Africa” at face value. It was only later when he realized it was intended to reflect Uganda’s own situation that he issued the order to wipe out Abafumi. Because Renga Moi is treated more significantly in the novel, I opted to use it rather than Amyrikiti for dramatic effect.

  One final word on reality. The CIA really was, in fact, all over Africa during this period of time. It is documented that it funded numerous African cultural activities both inside Uganda and out. Was Abafumi on the CIA payroll? Despite research, I have not been able to prove this for certain. And, to the best of my knowledge, Robert Serumaga never admitted it. Yet there is enough circumstantial evidence about this issue that I feel comfortable including it as an assumable fact in this novel.

  Whatever the ultimate truth here, the real miracle is that Charles is still alive to tell his story and Abafumi’s. Both are stories of artistic risk, endurance, courage, faith, and the bearing of witness. Such risk creates powerful images of pain and joy, fate and truth. Such risk affords us all a glimpse of the madness inherent in both a capricious universe and the political world. Charles and the spirit of Abafumi have been my own inspiration in the writing of this book. Hopefully their realities will inspire others to dance their own dance in the face of direst adversity.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This story first came to me some years ago when my husband and creative partner, York University theatre professor, Don Rubin arrived home from a lunch meeting with the Ugandan actor-dancer, Charles Tumwesigye. They had been discussing the Ugandan article for Routledge’s six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, a project that Don was in the long process of editing and in which I, as a theatre critic and editor, was also actively involved.

  We had encountered problems getting material about the fabled Abafumi company. Charles, a former member of the troupe who was now living in Toronto, promised to be the best lead. Don was excited. During that conversation, Abafumi sprang to life for him along with the international journey that brought Charles from Uganda to Canada.

  “You must meet Charles,” Don said to me after that lunch. “His story is incredible.” A week later I did. And it was.

  Over the next month or so, Charles continued to share his extraordinary artistic and personal wanderings. We soon became friends and sometime later, at an African symposium in Cameroon, Charles asked me to tell his astonishing story.

  There had been earlier journalistic attempts. Charles was dissatisfied with them all. Most seemed more interested in the sensational elements surrounding his survival of the Edmonton tornado than anything else.

  After two years of interviewing him, my first attempts at writing Charles’ story were straightforward and documentary. But I found I could not get at the dramatic truth of events in that format so I turned, with Charles’ blessing, to another form, the novel, where I found the freedom to draw much closer to the story he wanted to tell. It was an approach that recognized more dramatically his passion for dance and theatre, an approach that stayed true to his faith in ultimate good, an approach that built a “Charles” myth evolving naturally out of the Abafumi context.

  Charles has been puzzled at many points about what to make of this new version of his life. This is, no doubt, an occupational hazard of bio-fiction. But from the beginning we built trust and for that I am hugely indebted to him. This book truly belongs to him just as it also belongs to the brave, creative, and iconoclastic Robert Serumaga and to everyone else who was ever a member of Abafumi. I am sure that ultimately there will be many versions of the Abafumi story. I am honoured that I have been given the opportunity of writing the first.

  I also want to give great thanks to those friends and colleagues who, having heard a piece of the adventure, have thought this book important to complete. And once I began working on the narrative, everyone — in and out of Africa, in and out of the theatre world — encouraged me to finish it, insisting that it needed to be told not just as a theatre story but also as a political story, an African story, a story of human endurance. A story about the power and importance of art in times of political repression.

  Over several years, I have also read excerpts from the manuscript to audiences, sometimes with Charles present, sometimes when he was unable to be there. Often, people in those audiences were more expert than I was about specific things African. To them and to all who made suggestions and corrected my errors, I say thank you sincerely. You know who you are.

  From time to time, I have also shared the process of this book with my Creative Writing students at York University and they too have made important comments that have helped me with what was always a sensitive and challenging manuscript.

  One Man Dancing owes its final realization to the ongoing support of Luciana Ricciutelli and her team at Inanna Publications who have cared deeply about it. I cannot express enough gratitude to Luciana for believing in this project, for being absolutely true to her word on matters large and small, and for providing her special brand of publishing imagination, dedication, and enthusiasm.

  Patricia Keeney is an award-winning poet, novelist, theatre and literary critic. Born in the UK, she moved to Canada with her parents and grew up in Ottawa and Montreal. A graduate of McGill University, she later completed doctoral studies in the UK, subsequently returning to Canada where she began teaching Creative Writing and English at Toronto’s York University. A well-known arts writer for many years for CBC Radio, Canadian Forum, Scene Changes, Canadian Theatre Review and Canadian Literature, she continues this work in such publications as Arc, and the online journals Critical Stages and Critically Speaking. In 1989, her first collection of poetry, Swimming Alone, appeared and attracted serious critical attention. British poet Ted Hughes said he saw “real life burning way” in her poems and praised her “very natural voice.” Now the author of ten books of poetry and two novels, her poetry has been translated and published in French (winning the Prix Jean Paris in 2003), Spanish, Bulgarian, Chinese, and Hindi, while her Selected Poems carries an introduction by the distinguished Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Keeney’s Orpheus in Our World—poetry and dialogues based on the oldest of Greek songs in verse, the Orphic Hymns—will also be released in the fall of 2016. An avid traveller, Keeney has taught and lectured in Europe, Africa, and Asia. For additional information, see her website: Wapitiwords.ca.