Alex Mukulu was a Ugandan playwright, director, actor, and cultural activist who was one of the most significant figures in modern East African theatre, best known for his play Thirty Years of Bananas, the satirical examination of Uganda’s post-independence political history that drew international attention and that used theatrical performance to engage with the country’s decades of political violence, misgovernance, and lost potential with a directness and creative power that established his reputation across Africa and beyond. He died on 12 August 2026 in Kampala at the age of 67.
He was born in 1958 or 1959 in Uganda, coming of age during Idi Amin’s presidency from 1971 to 1979, the most destructive period in Uganda’s post-independence history, during which an estimated 100,000 to 500,000 Ugandans were killed by state violence, the country’s Asian business community was expelled, the economy was devastated, and the cultural and intellectual life of the country was suppressed or driven into exile. Growing up in that environment and in the subsequent years of continued political instability under Milton Obote’s second presidency and the Bush War that brought Yoweri Museveni to power in 1986 gave him a formative experience of political violence and institutional failure that shaped his artistic engagement with Ugandan history throughout his career.
Thirty Years of Bananas, his most celebrated work, was written and first performed in the early 1990s and examined the period from Uganda’s independence in 1962 through 1992, surveying three decades of governance that had produced Amin’s atrocities, Obote’s authoritarian rule, the devastation of the civil wars, and the ongoing challenges of building a functioning democratic state in a country whose political culture had been profoundly damaged by sustained violence and political betrayal. The play used the theatrical tools of satire, music, dance, and direct audience engagement to examine these events with both critical analysis and emotional power, giving Ugandan audiences a performance that acknowledged their collective experience of political trauma and addressed it with the kind of artistic honesty that political and social censorship in non-democratic environments typically prevents. The play was performed widely in Uganda and was taken to international stages and festivals, earning recognition as one of the most important works of contemporary African theatre.
He continued writing, directing, and performing in Ugandan theatre for the remainder of his life, working in Kampala and in communities across the country and maintaining the commitment to politically and socially engaged performance that had defined his career from its beginning. He received awards and recognition from African and international cultural institutions that acknowledged his contribution to African theatre and to the use of performance as a space for political reflection and social critique in a region where such spaces are frequently under pressure from political authority. He was 67 years old.