What Agather wants the world to know
Activist Agather Atuhaire.
What you need to know:
- Not just for herself, but for the countless Tanzanians who suffer without a platform. She wants the people who tortured her and those who ordered it to be named and held responsible. Because impunity feeds on invisibility. And she refuses to be invisible.
- What she wants, more than sympathy or applause, is justice. Not just for herself, but for everyone who has been broken, buried, or beaten by power.
What the Tanzanian regime wanted was silence. What they got instead was defiance louder, bolder, and more unshakable than before.
They thought abducting Agather Atuhaire and Boniface Mwangi would be a warning to all of us who dare to speak, stand, or show solidarity.
But if anything, it’s become a rallying cry. Because Agather did not crawl out of that darkness broken. She emerged with fire in her eyes and her voice louder than ever.
They wanted to teach her a lesson but she became the lesson that even torture cannot kill truth. This is not just her story.
It is a mirror held up to every regime that uses fear as policy. To every uniformed coward hiding behind state power. To every system that gambles on our silence.
For years, my friend Agather Atuhaire carried a quiet, specific fear. Not the fear of death she had made peace with that but the fear of being tortured. It wasn’t hypothetical.
It was real and recurring. She used to speak about it with a strange calm, sometimes even a hint of dark humour.
“I think I should start moving around with poison,” she once said, only half-joking. “So that if they ever get me, I can just swallow it and die quickly, before they torture me.” It was a coping mechanism, the way many of us activists try to make light of the things we know could happen and might happen because of the work we do.
Denied entry
In May 2025, that fear stopped being a distant possibility. It came for her in full force.
Agather was in Tanzania, not to protest or to expose anything, but to accompany a group of us activists from Kenya and Uganda as we tried to attend a court hearing for Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu.
That morning, three of us were detained and denied entry at Julius Nyerere International Airport. As we sat in cold airport chairs, stripped of our passports and rights, Agather was on the outside, working her phone relentlessly to get us lawyers. That was her role , support. Solidarity. Making sure no one felt alone.
But by evening, the tables had turned. The one helping was now the one who needed help. Agather was abducted by Tanzanian security agents, blindfolded, shoved into a dark vehicle, and taken to an undisclosed location.
She hadn’t even posted anything radical, hadn’t shouted slogans, hadn’t broken a single law. But in authoritarian regimes, even quiet solidarity is seen as rebellion.
What happened next is the stuff of nightmares only it wasn’t a nightmare. It was real. They ordered her to strip. They beat her. They mocked her. They dehumanised her.
Banality of evil
And then, when they were done, they treated her as if nothing had happened. Offered her water. Told her to rest. Like it was just another workday. Like they hadn’t just crossed every line of decency.
“They looked like they do this daily,” she told me later. “They treated me nicely immediately after inflicting immense pain. Like, ‘it’s not personal, this is my job.’”
But how does someone make a job out of torture? How does someone reconcile violence with professionalism?
These weren’t monsters from a movie, they were ordinary men in uniforms, carrying out orders with detached precision. And perhaps that’s the scariest part. The banality of evil. The ease with which people can justify brutality when they’re insulated by state power.
Agather and Boniface Mwangi who was abducted alongside her endured hours of torment. But they also endured something more insidious: the weaponisation of silence.
Their abductors operated with such confidence, such impunity, it was as if they believed not only that they owned Tanzania, but that they owned the entire narrative. That no one would hold them accountable. That no one would care.
And that, precisely, is why Agather wants the world to know what happened.
She wants people to understand that if this is how they treat someone with visibility, someone with networks, a journalist, a mother, a woman whose voice carries then the violence visited upon lesser-known Tanzanians must be unfathomable. The daily beatings. The disappearances. The bodies no one reports on. The families too afraid to ask questions.
Fragility
Yet even in that darkness, there was a moment that revealed who Agather truly is. After the long night of pain, she found herself smirking.
Not because the torture was over, but because her worst fear, the thing that had hung over her like a shadow for years had finally happened. And she had survived it.
“They’ve helped me overcome my worst fear,” she said. “Now they have nothing on me.”
That moment of inner triumph, even in the middle of immense suffering, is what resistance looks like. It’s not just protests and speeches, it’s surviving the thing meant to break you and walking out of it freer than before. They didn’t silence Agather. They sharpened her.
She even looked forward to returning to the police station not to beg, but to stare down the officer identified as Faustin Mafwele, the man who oversaw her abuse.
She wanted to look him in the eye and ask, “Has what you did finally made you feel like a man?” Because what she saw was not strength. It was insecurity. Fragility.
A man so threatened by her intelligence, her composure, her refusal to cower, that he interpreted every word she spoke as a challenge. Not to the law, but to his ego.
What shook me most was not the violence she endured, but what came after. When she returned to Uganda and reunited with her children, she realised they too had been preparing silently for the possibility of her not coming back.
When she went to pick them up from her sister’s, she found them with their school bags packed.
“We came with our uniforms and school stuff,” they said, “just in case you don’t come back.”
That sentence broke me. Because it meant her children, young as they are, had already factored in the possibility of life without their mother. That they, too, carry the weight of her activism.
It made Agather incredibly sad, and yet, strangely content. Because if nothing else, they are prepared. Like she is. For whatever comes.
And still, Agather remains unshaken in her convictions. In Uganda, many know her as fearless. And people often warn her, “They will kill you. You’ll leave your children motherless.”
But she always responds with the same clarity: not all motherless children are motherless because their mothers speak out.
Some are motherless because a corrupt politician made sure there were no doctors at the hospital when they went into labour. Some die because there was no ambulance.
Just recently, in Uganda, an entire community was buried alive when a mismanaged landfill collapsed. No emergency response. No rescue teams. No accountability.
“So no,” she says, “I can’t fear to speak up just so they don’t kill me. Their bad governance will likely kill me anyway.”
What happened to Agather and Boniface cannot be allowed to pass quietly. This was not just a violation of their rights it was a warning to all of us.
A declaration from those in power that dissent will be punished, even across borders. That human rights have become a crime. That fear is the currency of governance.
But fear only works if it leads to silence.
Agather is not silent. And she doesn’t want the world to be silent either. She wants international pressure. Accountability.
Not just for herself, but for the countless Tanzanians who suffer without a platform. She wants the people who tortured her and those who ordered it to be named and held responsible. Because impunity feeds on invisibility. And she refuses to be invisible.
What she wants, more than sympathy or applause, is justice. Not just for herself, but for everyone who has been broken, buried, or beaten by power.
She endured the worst, and she walked out stronger. Let the world know that.