We Refuse To Be Victims

WE REFUSE TO BE VICTIMS is a collection of prison poems, written by Sam Mugumya, a Ugandan political activist who has narrowly survived the abyss of the crunching injustice he has opposed for about a quarter of a century. The poet paints a lucid and lurid picture with not just words, but with blood, wrath and excruciating suffering. The 80 poems published in this collection for the first time were written by him in a tiny prison cell in the Democratic Republic of Congo, far from his home and family.

When Mugumya fled his home country via the Democratic Republic of Congo, he ended up being arrested there after Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni informed his Congolese counterpart, President Joseph Kabila, that Sam Mugumya was a terrorist who should be arrested. Paradoxically, Mugumya was more secure in his cell than he would have been in Uganda, where the dissident activist would most likely have been eliminated.

As the poet mirrors his life on paper secretly in his prison cell, he almost gives up, as one day in his sixth year of his incarceration the prison wardens confiscate his manuscripts, crippling his spirit. But with the encouragement from his inmates, he starts afresh, thus the rebirth of this collection, which entirely describes dictatorial regimes and ruthlessness in the most vivid manner, and the harsh realities of any political prisoner, especially in jail out of his home country.