Sunday: A Ugandan Samurai in Japan and other tales of Uganda at 64

Sunday Bamweyana

Born in 1970, Sunday Bamweyana is one of 60 children. And that might be the least remarkable detail about Sunday. Sunday, like millions of Ugandans, has a dream.

In an Al Jazeera October 1 documentary, Japan’s Black Samurai: A Ugandan Asylum Seeker Turns to Filmmaking, Sunday smiles and shares his dream, “I want to be a filmmaker like Rambo, Schwarzenegger on Jackie Chan.”

Tired of waiting for life to happen to him as he waits on his asylum application in Japan, Sunday has decided to happen to life and become that movie star of his dreams. Yet Sunday is in Japan, a country known for being notoriously resistant to outsiders including refugees and asylum seekers.

Before his life in Japan, Sunday was an ordinary Ugandan man. Like many ordinary Ugandans, Sunday was passionate about politics. And not without cause. Refugee Voices Japan (RVJ) reveals that at the tail end of the Luwero Bush War, government forces killed Sunday’s father, a devout Democratic Party (DP) member.

Sunday felt duty-bound to continue in his father’s footsteps and took to political activism alongside doing business to support his family at the tender age of 18. In 1996, Sunday was on the ground campaigning for his candidate, Paul Kawanga Ssemogerere (RIP), a longstanding DP stalwart.

William Muhumuza, a political science lecturer, noted that, “For a country like Uganda, which had experienced many years of turmoil and political hopelessness, the 1996 elections were a remarkable step in the transition to democracy.”

President Yoweri Museveni won with a 74 per cent landslide, beating his two opponents. In 1996, the incumbent regime, despite its landslide win, was criticized for monetizing the election and harnessing the incumbent to win massively; 2001 found the regime locked and loaded.

During the 2001 elections, Sunday, flowing with patriotic fervor, was once again in the trenches supporting his political party – a right freely ordained by the Constitution. He was at a polling station when state agents attempted to seize the ballot boxes, which Sunday protested.

For his patriotic fervor, Sunday was arrested. Political scientists Sabiti Makara, Lise Rakner and Sabastiano Rwengabo, in a 2008 paper, Administering Uganda’s 2006 Multiparty Elections, described the 2001 political context as follows: “The 2001 elections were among the most controversial and contested elections in Uganda’s political history. Rivalling the 1980 multi-party elections, these elections were violent, poorly managed and the outcomes were questioned by the opposition…”

It is worth recalling that Uganda’s longstanding patron and living saint of the brutalized and whipped opposition, Kizza Besigye, first ran for president in 2001 and was the main challenger to the ruling party’s lifelong sole candidate, President Yoweri Museveni.

Besigye, a bush war veteran, had broken ranks with the regime when he accused the ruling party of losing its way, abandoning the ideals for which the Luwero Triangle became a bloodsoaked ground littered with bones and bodies.

The same political environment that shaped Besigye’s challenge also framed the risks faced by activists and supporters like Sunday. For his foray into politics, Besigye would face an unrelenting baptism of premium state brutality and intimidation. (Today, in 2026, an ailing Besigye is in jail facing treason charges in a court case that has seared off the judiciary’s face.)

Besigye contested the 2001 election outcome in the Supreme Court, which ruled that while the election was marred by extensive electoral malpractice, it was not substantial enough to annul the result. (We would repeat this pattern in 2006: hotly disputed elections followed by a more questionable Supreme Court ruling which can be substantially summarized in the internet meme, “But did you die?”)

Dear reader, we return to Sunday. Sunday told RVJ, following his arrest during the 2001 elections, “They arrested many people and took us underground. I disappeared for around six months. I don’t know where, around which place, but there was a lot of torture.”

How surreal that his 2001 experience is easily a day in the life of an opposition supporter in Uganda in the year of our Lord 2026.

We have evolved: where we once whispered about illegal detention centres, sardonically named ‘safe houses’, today, thanks to President Yoweri Museveni’s brazen remarks in 2025 about two Kenyan activists who had been disappeared in Uganda, we can openly call these nefarious places ‘fridges’ or ‘freezers.’

And if that is not too viral for you, you may walk in the unapologetic Steps of the First Son and Chief of Defence Forces, General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who openly boasts about illegally detaining opposition supporters in the ‘basement.’

Muhoozi is such a trendsetter that the ‘basement’ is entering our everyday speech and light banter – the punchline of torturous jokes and clincher of asinine arguments. Sunday was disappeared for six months, during which time he was interrogated, amidst a barrage of torture, about his political activism and accused of trying to overthrow the government.

He still carries physical scars on his forehead and hands, and lives with post-traumatic stress disorder. Sunday tells RVJ that some people were tortured to death. He soon wizened up to the moral of his torturous detention – the method to the madness of state impunity: “Understanding how much power the security agencies held, Sunday realized he could not always be against the government. Sunday was trapped in the safe house, with no chance of getting out.”

When he was finally released, he made his way back to his party headquarters – to the shock of his colleagues. Perhaps he seemed like a dead man walking. Despite his ordeal, Sunday bravely continued his political activism, his ordeal having solidified his resolve to continue advocating against injustice and impunity.

He would be detained incommunicado two more times in 2004; each time the torture and intimidation progressively worse. By the 2006 elections, state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and torture had achieved their purpose – for what is the purpose of state intimidation and brutality if it does not leave you worn down, mangled and begging for water?

Imagine a day in the life of a torturer in the basement – they do their best to put the fear of the regime into their captives, only for some captives to keep going like the underdog in a blockbuster movie who refuses to die no matter how many times they are bombed and shot.

Repeated detentions and escalating threats had narrowed Sunday’s liberties. A friend in the state security circles warned him, “They (government) are targeting people like you, who talk. I advise you, get out of politics. If you cannot manage, move out of the country.”

Suicidal, fearful for his life and worried about his family’s safety, he eventually resolved to leave his beloved country. “I left everything, I left my children, I left my mother, I left everything, it is better to live.”

In 2007, he arrived in Japan, where he is still fighting to legalise his refugee status. In the Al-Jazeera documentary, Sunday reflects on the years since he fled Uganda, the family he left behind, the promising livelihood he abandoned, the degradation of living on the thin margin in a land so removed from his own, the stark vagaries of fighting for his dignity, and the tender mercy of strangers that have become his family and community in Japan.

Yet, he remains unbowed in his quest for justice, participating in public advocacy campaigns to highlight the plight of political prisoners in Uganda and also advocating for refugee rights. Nearly 20 years since he fled Uganda, Sunday would probably find the October 9 Independence Day theme for this year, “Embracing Our Sovereignty with Hope and Visionary Leadership,” a tad problematic.

Twenty years later, he is far from embracing any hope that he can return to Uganda under the current regime. Speaking in Luganda, he tells Al-Jazeera, “In Uganda, all the prominent people are in prison, people are abducted day and night.”

Long after I watched Sunday’s documentary within the safety of my four walls, the parallels between his experience and increasing reports of state-sponsored abductions and torture, are harrowing.

Yet a singular comment under the Al-Jazeera video disparaging Sunday’s experience stayed with me longer. The comment: “Man Don’t Put Your Country Down Because You Are Looking For Green Pastures.” Dear reader, I had hoped fervently for a happy ending. It is not yet Uhuru.

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The writer is a tayaad muzzukulu

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