Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2003. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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New Vision (Kampala) - November 26, 2003
A play traversing the topics of former Uganda president Idi Amin and AIDS does not sound like a night bursting with joy, but this monologue weaves these heavy topics into a rivetting discourse, reports Camden New Journal.
Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine writes, performs, and governs the stage in this tale of a Ugandan soldier fighting for liberation, and then trying to survive in the sprawling loneliness of mid-America.
Lengthy army training followed by hysterical female adulation seems to make joining the ranks of an African despot an enticing one. It is not, especially when it is explained that when dividing up the female support, the generals picked the prettiest while the soldiers get the ladies whose qualities have been somewhat diluted.
Shipped off to Cuba, a random test reveals that the soldier has AIDS -- a disease that spreads through his comrades like a plague. In America, with a photocopied social security card pursuing a job, our protagonist is fighting the disease, fighting to keep his son and displaying a will that lays bare the enduring strength of the human spirit.
A stock semi-inspiring passage this could be, but it becomes a whole different beast amidst the authority of the performance.
With only a spotlight for company, Ntare carefully measures out the tale, impaling each account with such startling fervour and passion, it's guaranteed to put you to shame.
He bridges the uneasy chasm between topics and delivers a story of true inspiration. You may not recognise the context but it is one that, as it intensifies, transforms into something quite awe-inspiring.
"I will do anything to survive even if it means going to hell," he says in the grip of the terminal disease.
"I'll do it to survive, then move on." A maxim we would all like to believe in.
Meanwhile, Time Out - London reports that Biro is short for Mwerindebiro, meaning "beware of time because it has all the answers" and it is the name of the central character in this slow-moving but impressive monologue. It opens with Biro holed up in a Texas jail.
He is an illegal immigrant, living with AIDS, but doing well on medication.
Dressed in the familiar regulation orange uniform, head shorn and radicalised beard bristling, he is trapped in a tight spot light, twitching with unexpressed thoughts and fears.
His thoughts go to his son, at home in Uganda, and back further to his childhood under the regimes of Amin and Milton Obote, and his revolutionary career in the National Resistance Army.
Biro is played by Ntare, who researched the play in Uganda and the US, and as a composite memoir of a generation blighted by political oppression and AIDS, it works well.
Mwine's performance is wired, vivid and insistent. Although he carries the audience with him for most of the two hours, the really electric moments are when Biro oversteps the limits of our sympathy for his hard life -- when for instance, he admits to practicing unsafe sex even after being diagnosed HIV-positive.
For all of Biro's hectoring, though, this is no lecture.
Time may have all the answers, but Mwine does not claim to.
His play is a strong addition to the margins of the burgeoning documentary theatre genre.
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