PETER KAGAYI is a Ugandan poet, playwright and a teacher at Nabisunsa Girls’ school. He has served as the Anglophone coordinator at Writivism and is the founder of Rhythmers poetry club. He shared his life story with Simon Kasyate, the host of Capital FM’s Desert Island Discs programme.
Welcome to the program Peter?
Thank you Simon.
What does it mean to be a poet?
A poet in the basic term is a person who writes and performs poetry. But in the grander scheme of things, when I went to school, I studied literature and I was interested in the language by being introduced to British poets, American poets, basically foreign poets. So, in the process of growth, I started creating, imitating, basically the culture…
Poetry is different from prose; so, what marks the difference?
The observations you make create the difference between the two but even beyond that, poetry is more rhythmic, more condensed. Because the trick with poetry is that you have to use less to say more and in prose you have the opportunity to be more elaborate.
Poetry is something that has been part of our culture and by culture I mean our heritage as Ugandans that when you go among the Banyankore, you will find the kyevugo, you go among the Baganda you will find the okutontoma, when you among the Basoga, you will find ebikwaite. A poet is everyone who uses language as a means of survival, as a means of livelihood.
In other words, everybody is a poet in their own right. Think about it in our culture, in a place like say Kampala, you will run into a poet as a taxi taut. Because they will have to condense their message by speaking with brevity, consistence and with some musicality. For instance, you will find him singing Nakawa, Bweyogerere, Kireka, Banda. Nakawa, Bweyogerere, Kireka, Banda.
You go downtown and you find these people are trying to sell their secondhand clothes and they are using these metaphors. Why it is exciting for me is that I have figured out that in our culture, unlike how we were groomed, us who went to school, the people who live amongst us, for lack of a better word what we can call the wretched of the earth, to them poetry is a functional tool. It is something that they use to survive and live by every single day.
Let us get time to know the man called Peter Kagaye, why they chose to do poetry. Who are you? Where were you born and to who?
I was born in Jinja. I was born in my late aunt’s house. I was born to Alimwengeza David and Ruth Namusobya, both primary school teachers. My mother is retired, my father is thinking of retirement. We then moved to Kampala. I started reciting poetry in nursery school.
Are you the only child?
We are four. I am the eldest.
What was your childhood like? What was that environment that made you a poet at such an early age?
My parents are teachers, so you can imagine we didn’t have much to run by, except they were both teaching English. So, w e had so many storybooks around. And then also it was a culture that during holiday time, you would go and visit your grandmother.
But I spent most of my time with my maternal grandparents. So, it was there with all the other grandchildren that I learnt how to riddle, tell folktales. We heard the gory stories of so and so who met a man of thirty feet tall and then met a running tortoise…you know?
So, this mysticism is something that kept us interested in folklore. But then also I grew up in Bakuli here in Kampala. So, we used to go and play games.
Whether it was hide and seek or skipping the rope or dduulu, all these game had rules, but nobody ever taught you these rules as children. But they were kept in song. So, everything we were learning, we were doing so in rhythm. I happened to go to a neighborhood nursery school that had a poetry competition.
Plays Agolo by Angelic Kijo
You said you started poetry in nursery, but that is what all of us did!
Well, I was the best at the competition I mentioned. As judged by the adjudicators. But even after that, as I was going into primary school, I went to Old Kampala primary school, just across, and then there was no culture of poetic performance.
Then after that I went to Reverend John primary school in Kitintale where incidentally I first met Isiah Katumwa as our band coach.Â
Was it a personal decision to go to this school or it was a change in family structure…
My father changed jobs and so he moved there. He was teaching at Kampala Parents’ school but then he moved to Reverend John. So, along I went. But then after that again we moved from Bakuli and started living in Banda, Kyambogo.
Again I changed schools. I started going to Kamuli primary school. So, it is at Kamuli that I encountered handcraft. First of all, I thought that this was just a waste of time; now looking back I figure out why it was very important, why we went through this skill because it teaches you patience, how to create something for yourself.
When I went into high school, I don’t like talking about my high school life. Maybe when I am talking about my life as a person who was meant to be a lawyer, may be then I can talk about it. Because exactly that is what the high schools intended to make me. But as a writer, a poet, I call myself a self-made writer.
Are you saying that in all this time you were moving from one school to another, none of them realized the inert talent in you that is poetry?
The strange thing is that I encounter my poetry through my young brother. He was at Kiira College Butiki. I had topped my class in literature the previous year and so when he came home, he was in S5 and he didn’t have a good report.
Our mother suggests that I try to help him. So, the first thing I did was to look through his book. Then I figured Isaac was writing his own poems and they were not just poems, they were good poems. I believed I was a well-read critique at the time to know what a good poem is…
What gives you those bragging rights?
It was my brother and I. Our private fascination was that we just stayed about 200 yards away from Kyambogo University and we faked identities as students and during holidays, we would go into the university library and I can tell you Simon I read every single poetry book on the university book shelf.
You must be a social bore!!!
It was all about routine and dedication. Like I said, I was trying to help my brother become better. But then I came across this book that we had at home.
The Top Ten Of Everything and in it, it had the top ten anthrogised poems and so we set ourselves out to look for those particular ten poems; in the process, we met hundreds of others.
And then you are coming across how the book of Psalms was written, African poems you thought you may never encounter. Something in me started boiling. I started asking, why is it that my teachers in high school never introduced me to such kind of literature.
Plays Ab’eNamutamba by Alex Mukulu
How did you reconcile the academic forces that wanted you to be a lawyer and ending up where you are now?
Imitation is the greatest form of a compliment; that is what they say. Most writers, even artists, learn craft by imitating the people they admire. It is true I used to admire William Shakespeare a lot. I remember I wrote sonnets.
There is a particular friend of mine I remember, he was the head prefect and he was in S6 as I was in S4. I went to him to explain one of Shakespeare’s poems and from the explanation he gave, that is when I figured how great Shakespeare is as a writer and what he truly meant to the English-speaking world.Â
From then on, I started making an attempt at writing and it was haphazard then. It was not something that I could stand by and call true creativity. Because a huge chuck of it was imitation, but even then literature students were looked at as the weirdoes, we are the people who used big words in class, we were the argumentative type that always made sure that the teacher stays longer in class.
So, there was this general disdain that even our friends had for the literature subject. But then high school offered a great opportunity to access new literature that I could not access at home. So, I came across Chinua Achebe, Meja Mwangi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o…ultimately I managed to pass well, thank God…. What I wish up to today is that I wish I had been told that you have an option to be a professional writer so that I could have developed my interest then.
By then, with this love for literature, how much of it did you think was going to put food on the table in future?
I wasn’t thinking about that because someone told me that you can balance passion and profession and what I was looking out to be was to become a lawyer and thank God I got admitted to Makerere to study law.
It was at Makerere that I met a group of poets and it was started by an architect and majority of the members were either students from food science or medicine and the school of law. The perspective we had is that this is something we are doing for passion. But along the way, our professions will have to dictate our livelihoods.
Tell me something; are you a lawyer?
No no no. God no! I did my four years at law school and then I went to LDC and then dropped out in term two.
You speak with disgust about law! Why did you drop out?
I had the money, I had the tuition on my account for over two months; my father gave it to me but I just choose not to pay because I anticipated the time when I would not complete the term. But it was also visible for them.
It was turning into a different person. I was more agitated, more angry and I had become more reserved and I had this rage boiling in me. So, when eventually I told them you know what, I am done. I didn’t eat the money, here it is. It is a discussion we had as a family and they agreed that I should do something that speaks to my feelings.
So, you dropped out because you didn’t feel the course?
I felt the course until third year when I figured that it is never a straight line to success.Â
But after four years at university, what would have stopped you from bearing another year at LDC?
I had enrolled as a teacher at Nabisunsa Girls’ school and I was teaching literature and poetry but my focus was on performance poetry and we had started the culture of having the students that write their own pieces, publish them and then get them opportunities to perform either at the national theatre or in the other places at Kampala.
The examination time at LDC coincided with a performance of which I was the director. So, I had to make the choice. I was easy but I understood that the consequences were going to be painful.
Plays The Times They Are a-Changin by Bob Dylan
As a poet, I suspect you would write wonderful letters to girls.
Of course, I was the go-to guy if you wanted to write that letter to the girlfriend. I was a bit creative with words but it had to cost you a fee.
You didn’t have a girl of your own?
Ohh my goodness! I think I could compile a collection of poems that I wrote to girls. Certainly as a poet, love is a strong sentiment that you carry on your heart. In fact, women have inspired a generation of love poetry.
Is there any of your most memorable poems that you can recite for us?
To what places do clouds go when they tire of watching us doubt our existence?
Into what spaces do they climb to hide from the sad scenes of our movie scripts?
What words do they scream when they watch God eventually spit at the disgust of our careless dreaming?
And we call it a thunderstorm when the clouds wonder?
********
Your eyes hide something beneath your smile
What bird has built its nest there?
Yet, you, woman, you simply sing intimacies clasping me with the makings of love but I fear the warmth of dreams, I fear to walk in dreams, I fear to fear.
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Ohhh, and did this earn you a free dinner?
And a lot more!
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Is it that simple?
No, it’s not. It comes with practice. Eventually you can do it in the spur of the moment. But you have to remember to train your mind to think in a certain way.
Did these escapades make you a bit more of a celebrity at school and in the communities you lived in?
The irony is, when I was in high school, there is a girl I wrote to at Gayaza high and she rejected me. But then after some time, another guy comes to me and I write a letter for him to that same girl and then she accepts.
So, that is when I figured it is not just about the letter, it is about the perception of the other person. She met me recently and she was so excited and had read my book and, unfortunately, I couldn’t even remember her surname!
But still, as a young folk, didn’t this perception kind of give you an exaggerated bit of self-worth?
No, because even as much as we wrote the love letters, it was always a private experience. The public experiences and expressions we shared were actually political sentiments.
The greatest political poets are the love poets, especially the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda said that his advice to all political poets is that they should just start writing about love. It could not get to our heads because we were conscious of what we were doing.
We knew that our first duty as poets was not about ourselves, but it was to the people that we were writing to/for/of. We recognized that we were Ugandans and so we had to find a way of Ugandanising our message.Â
We work for a living: has poetry translated into earning? For instance, you have written books but do people buy books here.
No, they do not. And again it is something that we were aware of. People will not buy the book, but they will come and attend the show. If they like what they listen to, then they will buy the book.
It is no longer the time of the [Timothy] Wangusas and the Austin Bukenyas where the influence of the media was minimal as compared to today. Today people are keener to performance. So, we figured that if I put up a show at national theatre that brings a humble 370 people, they will come and like what they see and they will know what they are buying into.
But such shows are once or twice a year. My concern is do you earn enough to cater for your family needs?
Yes. Because I do have that consistence in performance.
Maybe that is because you only feed yourself: do you have a family Peter?
I come from an extensive family; even when I am not married, I have people that I fend for.
Sincerely 370 people for a show is a small number: do you have some strategy to change this?
The true patrons of art are very few in Uganda and Africa at large. The idea is that you craft your art, take it around the world and eventually when you have gained something, come back and build the country. For example, what [Stephen] Rwangyezi has done [with Ndere Troupe]…
Do you have world tours to your name?
I start mine this year in June to Germany, Cologne and thereafter to Lagos.
Plays Beera Nange by Toniks
Peter you are basically enjoying your dream of being a poet, but to your parents, don’t they look at you as a disgrace and someone who wasted their school fees?
That was the idea until they came to my book launch and they figured they were part of the crowd and they were never part of the true story of success. The sentiments along changed.
While I understand why some parents find it challenging to support the talents of their children, why I don’t understand is why they are not willing to learn along the way. There was a time when my father and I could not see eye-to-eye because he thought poetry was just a waste of time. And then he came across one of my poems and then he asked me why such poems were not being shared.
I said well, we have people like you who are not willing to pay attention to what we have to offer. But I have some friends who have fallen out entirely with their families; their parents are uncompromising on career and they also become uncompromising.
So, that is the challenge of our generation to give confidence back to the older generation that writers are very important people in society. They document the history of the people. They document our stories of everyday.
Peter, are you seeing somebody?
Yes, I am seeing somebody but I would rather not talk about it.
Ten years from today, where will Peter Kagayi be?
I do not know. I hope I am alive.
What is you plan?
Take poetry to the communities, make everybody realize that we are all poets, start a poetry performance school this year and I am now on the journey of discovering old works and bringing them to performance.
I am already in touch with some of the senior writers. I have also picked interest in handcraft, football and singing.
If you were marooned on a desert island and were allowed to take one thing or one person, who or what would you take?
Notebook and pen
Plays Olulimi by Paul Kafeero
TRANSCRIPT: JOSEPH KIMBOWA.
