According to witnesses at the scene as well as statements from Mr. Serumaga himself, the writer was accosted and dragged into a car, as he was leaving the television station where a weekly talk show in which he is a regular guest, had just ended.

“I came out of the TV station and four guys grabbed hold of me and forced me into a car,” Mr. Serumaga said by telephone on Sunday from the Central Police Station in Kampala. “They were dragging me literally on my back and dumped me into the back of the car. They were punching and kicking me and for some strange reason trying to undress me.”

Mr. Serumaga was abducted after leaving a weekly television talk-show, Kibazo on Friday, which was discussing the on-going stand-off between the Museveni government and the Kingdom of Buganda. His partner Maria and fellow panelists Charles Rwomushana and Bernard Tabaire plus show host Peter Kibazo witnessed the abduction.

That state forces were brazen enough to abduct a well-known media personality in the presence of witnesses is an extremely worrying indication of the direction the Ugandan government is taking against perceived critics. It is chillingly reminiscent of similar scenes from Uganda’s violent past during which prominent personalities were abducted and disappeared by the State.

Itinerary for the Caine Prize 10th Anniversary Tour in UK

Why was I so pissed off by your letter, Mr. Pike? For you to say, that any kind of writing is “freely available” is disingenuous. You are no fool, and are playing the ignorant and naive African paper that “does not know better”. You show little concern for what I see as an act of theft masquerading as an innocent “error” - as you put it. For, nowhere have I said that my work is free, and no law or practice I know of, assumes that just because somebody’s work is available for reading on the internet, it is available for stealing for the purpose of profit, without consulting the writer, the newspaper that first published it, without even indicating where it was first published.

I was terribly excited about all this. It seemed, just two years ago, that the world was one great website and you could use code to make it as you wanted. Touch screens could move Gondwanaland apart and together; the cellphone revolution would replace ideas, ideology and the imagination; text message banking would connect the trader in Lagos with the consumer in Johannesburg.

I watched a TV show online last year in which a woman went to Los Angeles and got a makeover. She was hesitant and wanted to “look natural”. They glued new lashes to her eyes, then highlighted them gently to “bring out” her cheekbones; then various scourings and balancings and panel beatings were performed and she emerged looking windswept and free and organic. It took a whole day.

But if faith is the oxygen of a young state, faith in a viable future, there is very little oxygen in Kenya right now. What these suits mask is an escalating free for all, as people use the fronts of respectability and institutional credibility to collect what they can before Armageddon.

A successful brand management strategy is one that makes people pay remarkably high prices for products that are inherently cheap to make. This is called creating value. The idea is to manipulate the image of the product or service so that people are willing to pay what the brand planners want them to pay, rather than pay the total cost of production, plus a reasonable added margin. So, on television adverts, we see expressions that humans designed for orgasms and religious rapture applied to plastic things the job of which is to go tick tock tick tock, or to say things like “Beige is the new Fuck”.

Nowhere on the planet are there countries as oddly shaped as in Africa. You have all those West African nations — whose kingdoms run strangely horizontally and vertically on the map. Tiny Gambia is stranded inside Senegal — and I know they told me why in school, but I’ve, erm, forgotten.

You have heard that in some places this sort of skill, built upon from the local pasts of people, from skills from other places, is taught in schools and community centres. Because it is a human thing to do.

Now that the very Rift Valley, home to mankind, has groaned and shuddered. For a while, it seemed about to faultline again for the first time in a few million years, and drown this nation in a red sea. Now that planting is paralysed; national schools are balkanised; a city burnt down, “foreign” wives evicted to home areas. Now that whole slums of Nairobi packed up their paper bags and corrugated iron to move elsewhere; now that landlords evicted Luo tenants before asking who would come and rent; now that rich St Mary’s yuppies who once played rugby with chemical perms – have met in a chi-chi Nairobi bar to raise millions of shillings for a panga wielding militia to defend the honour of their “elected” president…
After all that.
We find one thing has not yielded. Every single Kenyan has had to make room these past few months: to lose homes, incomes, supermarkets, shares, land, hope, faith, schoolfees, food, jobs, whole industries, your oldest friends, many in-laws. Rich, poor, middle-class, rural, urban – we carry heavy shitty costs.