NOBODY would wish for a closer brush with death than that which George Seremba experienced at the hands of militia forces, following Milton Obote's rigged return to power as president of Uganda in 1980.
Seremba had what some in his country may have judged to be an idyllic, privileged childhood. A much loved junior member of a close knit extended family, he was sent to prep school, where he had his native vernacular speech beaten out of him in favour of more socially acceptable English. But the harsh treatment meted out by his teachers was the stuff of the playground, compared with the mass brutality that marked the reign of Id Amin, destroying the very fabric of Ugandan political and economic life and sending rebellious young dissidents such as Seremba into exile in neighbouring Kenya. On a brief visit home to his family one Christmas, the young writer was captured, imprisoned, interrogated, beaten and tortured, then taken out into the forest outside Kampala where so many others before him had perished shot like a dog and left to die.
The scarred, living proof of his nothing less than miraculous recovery stands triumphantly before us in this passionate solo performance, superbly framed by a lone drummer, Nigerian born Adedose Wallace. Seremba uses the traditional story telling techniques of his home, recalled, from the distance of his long years of residence in Canada, with a mixture of vivid reminiscence and instinctive stirrings in the blood. In his emotional recounting of his life and its Lazarus like centrepiece, there is at times, a little too much that is didactic and verbose. Hence, as a wholly absorbing piece of theatre, it occasionally falters and drags' its heels. But it is impossible not to emerge in awe of the courage and spirit of a man, who might so easily have been just another grisly statistic in the bloody 20th century history of the country, once known as "the pearl of Africa".
