OUR STORY
The Collector
Rodney Muhumuza has been a journalist since 2005, a foreign correspondent since 2011, the editor of a literary magazine since 2023, and the curator of an art gallery since 2025. His work as a journalist for The Associated Press (AP) news agency often aims to discover “distinct realities” in the lives of ordinary people, whether he’s covering climate change or public health, politics or business, religion or nature.
His range as a journalist is wide: in a career spanning two decades he has covered Ebola in western Africa, labor unrest in South Africa, terrorist attacks in Kenya, armed rebellion in Central African Republic, avocado farming in Burundi, violence in South Sudan, the memory of genocide in Rwanda, deadly war in Ethiopia, and everything in his native Uganda. As an editor he also helps look after eastern Africa for AP, monitoring news coverage of a dozen countries. Muhumuza’s journalism career began in 2005 as a cub reporter for Uganda’s Daily Monitor newspaper, rising to the rank of a senior political reporter within three years of joining the news organization.
Muhumuza’s more recent work as the founder of The Weganda Review, a literary journal produced at the intersection of art and ideas, has clarified what he believes will be his final legacy: as a literary man doing something to shift the culture away from unprincipled materialism and towards the widespread love of books and art. The quarterly journal publishes fiction, poetry, art portfolios, and, especially, essays. He is a regular contributor to the journal, often writing on different aspects of art and life, in addition to being its top editor. In faithfully producing The Weganda Review, as in curating exhibitions for the Kampala-based Weganda Gallery, the mission is to be a superior force for intellectual culture in Uganda and across Africa. He has been praised for the elegance of his prose and for his ability to fashion existential narratives out of everyday stories.
Muhumuza is also at work on a fictionalized memoir of Credonia Mwerinde, a priestess who led a doomsday cult that caused the death of hundreds of people in south-western Uganda at the turn of the century. He has recently completed Children of Number Five, a book-length fictionalized memoir of growing up at the peak of the AIDS pandemic in the 1990s.
Born June 6, 1981, in Kampala, Muhumuza was educated at Makerere University, from which he graduated with first-class honors, and at Columbia University, where he was an honors student. He taught a graduate-level seminar on literary journalism between 2012 and 2014 at Makerere University. His honors and awards include the first prize in 2011 of the Foreign Press Association of New York, a Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship (as a staff reporter for The Kansas City Star), the Pulitzer African Fellowship at Columbia University, and the Gramling Journalism Award, AP’s highest internal award for reporting, for on-the-ground coverage of war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.
Muhumuza lives in Kampala with his wife and their three young sons.