My Husband Has Gone
My Husband Has Gone is a poem by Ugandan writer Mukotani Rugyendo. He wrote it in Runyankole-Rukiga in 1969 while he was in Senior Six at Ntare School in Mbarara. It was translated into English and later included in an East African poetry collection, and the English version became a common piece in East African schools and was picked up by Oxford for a regional English anthology.
Rugyendo sent two poems, in both languages, to Uganda Publishing House when Richard Ntiru, the editor of the poetry collection Tensions, invited writers to submit works originally written in local languages and translated into English. He almost forgot about the poems when he went to Dar es Salaam for university studies in 1970.
In January 1971, Idi Amin came to power, and the Uganda Publishing House project was disrupted. The poem remained unpublished for a long time. Later, Oxford University Press in Nairobi asked for permission to publish the English version in a collection of East African verse. Rugyendo agreed, not asking how they found the poem or what happened to the original Runyankole-Rukiga version.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 17:33 (CET).