Cerinah nebanda biography definition

Sitting askew on a hill in downtown Kampala, with its angular white columns it could be a modernist African Parthenon. I teach and write about public health and have been coming to Uganda for twenty years.

In life, fallen young Butaleja Woman MP, Cerinah Nebanda Arioru, was flamboyant, vocal, and controversial.

In August , I spent a few days watching videos of old debates in the basement archives of Parliament. In , Uganda passed an important public health bill, and I wanted to find out more about one of the MP s who had worked on it. It was a quiet Saturday morning when I found the tapes I was looking for. As I watched the scratchy VHS recordings, the technician who had kindly agreed to open the studio for me on a weekend sat in the adjoining anteroom working at a computer.

Cerinah Nebanda (–) was a member of the parliament of Uganda, representing the Butaleja District Women's Constituency.

Most of the politicians in the videos were men in dark suits, some with spectacles creeping down their noses. Some spoke with passion and clarity, pounding the air with their fists; others—the scoundrels, mainly—droned on and on. After a few hours, the Speaker of Parliament, a formidable Ugandan woman in a British-style judicial wig, called on a twenty-four-year-old MP named Cerinah Nebanda, the person I was interested in.

Before I knew it, the technician was standing beside me, his eyes glued to her as she spoke. Nebanda was beautiful, in the zaftig African way, with a warm face, a powerful voice, extraordinary charisma, and, it would turn out, unusual courage. As she shook her finger and leaned over to emphasize a point, it was impossible not to watch her. Nebanda died in December , poisoned, some of her parliamentary colleagues maintain, by Ugandan government operatives.

Then, in August , an online magazine published an interview with General David Sejusa, the former coordinator of Ugandan intelligence services, who had fled into exile in the UK in May Those who claim that Nebanda was assassinated maintain that these leaders wanted to intimidate anyone considering a challenge to their grip on power.