The Bad Man From Kamwokya

Bobi Wine was born in 1982, during the liberation war that ushered in the incumbent Yoweri Kaguta Museveni. In the 2024 Academy Award–nominated documentary, Bobi Wine: The People’s President, Barbie Kyagulanyi, a Ugandan philanthropist and Bobi Wine’s wife, mentions that she met Bobi Wine as an orphan: with no ‘ma’ and no ‘pa’. Elsewhere, Bobi Wine recalls that his politically active grandfather and father joined the 1981-1986 liberation bush war. By the time he grew up, his family had scattered. His father had been imprisoned and Bobi Wine was living with his mother in the ghetto; ten children living in one room in the slums of Kamokya. As Barbie remarks, it’s a life that evades the imagination of many, ‘How could you survive there, with that smell, not knowing if you will eat the next day?’ Bobi Wine factually, and with no visible pity or embarrassment of where he is from, refers to the systemic abject poverty not just in his ghetto but across Uganda as akin to apartheid. While his mother had tried in vain to steer a younger Bobi Wine away from politics because she believed that his father’s political arrest was the reason they ended up in the ghetto, Bobi Wine always used music to speak about the social injustices that marred the lives of the poor attracting the following that is ready to meet death for his cause.

His father’s story is familiar to many. Yoweri Museveni was, in his own words, his father’s favourite revolutionary. While many Ugandans recall the ruling party as liberators whom their parents fought alongside or helped to hide, feed or direct through the guerrilla footpaths, as the years have progressed, the narrative has morphed into a glorification of only 27 guns. Benefactors are few with many Ugandans despairingly adjusting to the reality that the revolution was a farce as all signs indicate a political transition from father to son. The ruling party, on the other hand, believes Bobi Wine is inciting an insurrection engineered by Western elements citing Libya, Egypt and Sudan as past examples. For this, they have unapologetically opened fire on Bobi Wine’s supporters and bystanders during protests as well as taken in and sometimes killed for treason/questioning an unknown number of individuals. Bobi Wine maintains that he is non-violent.