The death of Alex Edward Kabangala Mukulu in August 2026 must mark more than a season of tributes, Prof. Isaac Christopher Lubogo has said. It must mark the moment Uganda’s premier university decides how it treats theatre as knowledge.
In a detailed scholarly paper released this week, Prof. Lubogo argues that Makerere University should confer upon Mukulu a posthumous Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa, not as a funeral gesture, but as an academic judgment rooted in evidence.
“Uganda lost more than an entertainer. We lost a historian who worked in dialogue, a satirist who worked in metaphor, and a teacher who worked in rehearsal,” Prof. Lubogo stated. “The question before Makerere is no longer how loudly we mourn him. It is how seriously we intend to remember him.”
Prof. Lubogo traced Mukulu’s career from 1977, when he began writing approximately one play a year, through the 1990s and early 2000s when he became central to Uganda’s theatre. He cited Mukulu’s Makerere training in Film and Drama, and his subsequent role in building the very theatrical tradition that Makerere’s Department of Performing Arts and Film now studies.
The centerpiece of the case, Prof. Lubogo said, is 30 Years of Bananas. First staged at Uganda’s 30th independence anniversary, the play was later published by Oxford University Press in 1993 with ISBN 0195726804 and catalogued by the British National Bibliography and WorldCat.
“That movement from stage to library is critical,” Prof. Lubogo argued. “A performance can disappear. A published dramatic work becomes part of the bibliographic record. It can be taught, cited, and preserved. That is precisely the terrain of the Doctor of Letters.”
He noted the play’s durability. It was revived in 2019 before new audiences. It has been the subject of peer-reviewed academic analysis, including Christopher Odhiambo’s study of youth, healing and reconciliation in postcolonial drama. It also traveled internationally, with Mukulu’s Impact International troupe performing Wounds of Africa in the United States in 1994.
Prof. Lubogo further argued that Mukulu functioned as a public intellectual. President Museveni’s tribute described Mukulu’s work as confronting questions of governance, society and identity while addressing the experiences of ordinary people. That, Prof. Lubogo said, is the work of the humanities.
On procedure, he cited Makerere’s Honorary Awards Guidelines. The Guidelines permit awards to persons who have “excelled in any sector of life” and expressly contemplate exceptional posthumous conferral. The D.Litt., according to Makerere’s own explanation, recognises outstanding contributions to the arts, literature and public communication.
Prof. Lubogo cautioned that the proposal should not be confused with Government’s decision to accord Mukulu an official burial. “An official burial recognises national service. An honorary doctorate recognises intellectual contribution. The two are complementary,” he said.
To ensure the honour has lasting impact, he proposed the Alex Mukulu Legacy Initiative. It would include an annual Alex Mukulu Memorial Lecture on African theatre and cultural memory, an Alex Mukulu Archive of Ugandan Theatre to house manuscripts, posters, recordings and oral histories, an Alex Mukulu Young Playwright Award, and a digital catalogue of his corpus.
“An archive preserves a civilisation’s memory. A degree honours a man. We need both,” Prof. Lubogo said.
PROPOSED CITATION
Prof. Lubogo proposed the following citation:
Alex Edward Kabangala Mukulu
Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa
In recognition of his exceptional and enduring contribution to Ugandan and African theatre; for his distinguished work as playwright, actor, director and cultural custodian; for using dramatic literature and performance to interrogate Uganda’s history, governance, identity and the lived experience of ordinary citizens; for taking Ugandan theatre to international audiences; for mentoring generations of artists; and for bequeathing to the nation works of lasting literary and cultural value, including 30 Years of Bananas, which has entered Uganda’s intellectual heritage.
He concluded: “Alex Mukulu spent decades using theatre to make Uganda look at itself. The decent response now is for Uganda’s premier university to look carefully at him. Not through celebrity. Not through sentiment. Through scholarship and evidence.”
TEU Editorial.
A Doctorate for The Drama: Why Institutions Must Honour Their Mukulus.
There are men a nation buries with flags, and there are men a nation must graduate into history. Alex Mukulu belongs to the second category.
To call him merely an actor is to call a library merely a building. Alex Mukulu, now deceased was Uganda’s conscience in costume. For nearly five decades he took our politics, our poverty, our absurdities and our aspirations, and returned them to us as theatre. He did not just entertain us. He explained us to ourselves.
That is why Prof. Isaac Christopher Lubogo’s call for Makerere University to confer a posthumous Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa, on Mukulu is not sentimental. It is necessary.
Honoris causa is Latin for “for the sake of honor”. It is the full term for what we commonly call an honorary degree.
It is a university degree awarded to a person not because they studied, sat examinations or wrote a thesis at that university. It is awarded because of their exceptional contribution to society, a field of knowledge, arts, science, public service or culture.
It is as if the university is saying: “we did not teach you but what you did taught the world, so we honor you”.
Universities use Latin names depending on the field:D.Litt. Honoris Causa ia Doctor of Letters for Literature, theatre, arts, journalism. This is what Prof Luboogo proposes for Alex Mukulu.
Universities across the world have long understood this duty. They do not reserve their highest honours only for those who publish in journals. They reserve them for those who expand what counts as knowledge.
Wole Soyinka received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge long before his Nobel, because his plays were treated as political philosophy.
Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been honoured by Yale, Leeds and the University of Bayreuth for using drama and fiction to decolonise the African mind. In South Africa, Athol Fugard was given honorary degrees for holding apartheid up to the merciless light of the stage. In Ghana, Efua Sutherland was honoured for building a theatre that was also a school of citizenship.
Even Makerere has precedent. It has, in its history, recognised that cultural architects are also intellectual architects.
The logic is simple: when art becomes an archive, the academy must archive the artist.
Mukulu meets that threshold with disturbing clarity. He was formed in Makerere’s own halls. He then built a body of work that was staged locally, published internationally by Oxford University Press, revived decades later, and analyzed in scholarly journals. 30 Years of Bananas is not a memory. It is a text. It is in libraries. It is in curricula. It is in the conversation about how Uganda remembers its first 30 years.
To deny him a D.Litt. on the grounds that he was “not academic” is to misunderstand what an honorary doctorate is. Honoris Causa exists precisely for those who teach without a syllabus. For those whose classroom was the National Theatre. For those whose dissertation was a lifetime of performance.
Some will say: why now, why him, why not others? The answer is: because the moment has arrived, and because precedent must begin somewhere. Honouring Mukulu does not close the door.
It opens it. It tells every young Ugandan playwright, poet, filmmaker and dancer that this country will not only clap for you at your funeral. It will study you in its lecture halls.
But let us be clear. A degree alone is not enough. It risks becoming a gilded wreath. That is why Prof. Lubogo’s proposal for an Alex Mukulu Archive, a Memorial Lecture and a Young Playwright Award is the more important part of the call. The doctorate is the crown. The archive is the inheritance.
Government has honoured the citizen with an official burial. That is right. Now let the University honour the mind. That will also be right.
Nations that forget their dramatists forget how to feel their own history. Nations that archive their artists teach their children what greatness looks like.
Makerere must not miss this moment. Let it bring Alex Mukulu before Senate. Let it read the citation. Let it confer the Doctor of Letters.
Not as charity to the dead. As a curriculum for the living.
Because if we do not honour our Mukulus, who will we ask to tell our story when we are gone?
