Editor’s Note: This article contains descriptions of police abuse, abduction and torture.
The soldiers arrived at the Kampala home of Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, the award-winning Ugandan novelist, on a mid-afternoon in late December. Armed with machine guns and sledgehammers, they beat him and dragged him out, shoving him into the backseat of an unmarked car. The writer, desperate, attempted to call a lawyer, but his phone was swiftly confiscated by his captors.
Rukirabashaija spent the next two weeks in the bowels of a detention facility, where he was tortured daily. He emerged 26 pounds lighter and unable to walk on his own, with a map of deep scars across his back. Furious at his tormenters, and apparently uncowed by their treatment, the writer shared graphic photos of his scars on social media as evidence of what he had endured.