RONALD MUKASA SSEBUNYA

Kadongo kamu singer-songwriter who taught Kabalagala's children music every Saturday

The first song Ronald Mukasa wrote was about a hen that refused to cross the road, and he sang it to his grandmother in Masaka when he was seven. She laughed so hard she dropped the cassava, and he decided on the spot that making people laugh with a guitar was the best job in the world. He spent the next twenty-six years proving it.

He was born in 1988, the third of five children, and learned his first chords from the choirmaster at his parish. After secondary school he went to Makerere University to study music, and in 2011 moved to Kampala with a guitar, a suitcase and a notebook of lyrics, playing for tips in Kabalagala bars and at wedding receptions across Buganda. He mixed the storytelling tradition of kadongo kamu with acoustic guitar and a light Afro-fusion touch, singing in Luganda and sometimes English, and his song 'Enyanja' became a wedding staple that couples still request.

But his proudest work happened on Saturday mornings, when he opened the doors of a hired hall in Kabalagala and taught free music lessons to any child who turned up. There were thirty on the first day and more than a hundred by the last. He lent out his own guitars, fixed broken strings with whatever was to hand, and made every child perform at the end of term, however nervous, because 'a song is not a song until somebody hears it'. He was a loyal friend, a terrible cook and a very good listener.

Ronald died in August 2022, aged thirty-three, after a short illness. He leaves his mother, his siblings and a hall full of children who keep singing.

“A song is not a song until somebody hears it.”