Mwenda opens a staff meeting by showing off a wall hanging for The Independent's new offices: a framed quote by Thomas Jefferson on the importance of the Fourth Estate. (Wolf/TYG)

“They take my belt. They take my telephones. They even remove my watch,” Mwenda recounted, excitedly replaying each action. “They handcuff me, they put me into the boot of a car, they close me there and drive off.”

Police drove Mwenda around the city as other officers ransacked his house and offices, confiscating computers, CDs, flash discs, au- dio tapes, DVDs, books, and even an unpublished manuscript. “Every single thing that could have information was taken,” he recalled.

Andrew Mwenda was not under investigation. On the contrary, he was conducting one. As managing editor of The Independent, a controversial news magazine in Uganda, Mwenda was working on a series exposing the practice of torture in government safe houses. After learning of his project, the government arrested him and in- discriminately confiscated his journalistic and personal material. Mwenda was undeterred: the torture series soon ran in eight issues of The Independent.

Mwenda is not shy about playing the hero in the fight for press freedom in Uganda—indeed, he thrives in the role. After the April confrontation, Mwenda called the BBC to share his personal run-in with police brutality, which then made international news. In a later account of the same night, told to a South African journalist, the drama had risen: this time, he claimed he took an officer’s gun and point- ed it at his own head during the raid, demonstrating his willingness to die in defense of the truth. Such brazen determination, combined with a touch of theatrics, has made “Andrew Mwenda” a household name in Uganda. His unabashed criticism of Uganda’s government and the consequences he has endured for his views have earned him a reputation for commitment to uncompromised truth. “Andrew Mwenda is perhaps more courageous than any journalist in Uganda,” said James Nangwala at Kampala’s law Development Center, who successfully represented Mwenda in a landmark 2004 petition to the Constitutional Court declaring the offense of publishing false news unconstitutional. The case was only one of many times Mwenda has been at the frontlines defending the Fourth Estate.
 
Coming from a privileged and well-connected family, Mwenda is in some ways an unlikely rebel. However, the combination of high- level access and a passion for drama make him a more effective, if less conventional, force for change in Uganda. In person, Mwenda can be overwhelming, even overbearing, putting first-day interns at his magazine on the spot over office decorating decisions with an intensity perhaps better reserved for the Cabinet ministers and in- ternational aid donors he is accustomed to skewering. His rhetoric, delivered at breakneck speed, often climaxes in his willingness to die for his cause, evoking the oratory of his childhood reading: speeches by Nelson Mandela, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice lumumba, and others, which he learned by heart.

Mwenda operates in a transitioning political environment. In 2006, Uganda ended “no-party” rule by President Yoweri Museveni’s Na- tional Resistance Movement (NRM) and instated multiparty democ racy; however, the NRM has been reluctant to loosen its hold on state power and recognize the constitutional rights asserted by Uganda’s nascent opposition. In summer 2007, police violently suppressed op- position party demonstrations and Museveni commissioned a special committee to tighten media restrictions, which already proscribe “promotion” of sectarianism, prohibit interviewing “terrorists,” and criminalize defamation.