There are people who make history.
There are others who write it.
And then there are those rare people who spend their lives fighting against the possibility that history might be forgotten.
Owek. Isaac Kalembe Biromaiso Akiiki belonged to the third category.
He died on Tuesday, August 18, 2026, leaving behind the public record of a scholar, author, journalist, cultural leader and former Speaker of the Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom Parliament. But for those of us who encountered him through his work, the description is still inadequate.
Kalembe was, above all, a keeper of memory.
His particular obsession was Omukama Cwa II Kabaleega: the king of Bunyoro-Kitara who resisted British conquest, was eventually captured and exiled, and whose name Kalembe believed had to remain alive in the historical imagination of future generations.
Kalembe’s most notable work, Omukama Cwa II Kabaleega: A Life and Legacy, 1853–1923, became one of his principal contributions to that mission. The Kabalega Foundation describes him as a historian, author and cultural enthusiast who served as its Research and Documentation Lead, overseeing efforts to preserve Bunyoro-Kitara’s history and heritage.
But I knew him before I knew him as a former Speaker of the Rukurato.
I knew him as the man sitting in his home, surrounded by history.
The beginning of a journey
I first met Kalembe in 2016 at his home in Nsumbi, Kyebando, Nansana, Kampala.
I had been introduced to him through Dr Cindy Evelyn Magara Amooti, a Ugandan film director and academic, at a time when I was beginning research for a historical series titled “Conquer or Die”, about Omukama Cwa II Kabaleega and the Bunyoro-Kitara Empire.
I did not know then how consequential that meeting would become.
Kalembe opened up his research and writings to me. He spoke about Kabaleega not simply as a historical king, but as a man whose life had become a battlefield over memory itself.
He connected me with other people who became important sources for the project.
Those conversations became part of the intellectual prehistory of Tuko Pamoja, the 13-part historical docuseries that would eventually take us across Uganda, following the traces of kingdoms, communities, conflicts and memories that have shaped the country.
The first conversation was therefore more than an interview.
It was an opening.
And Kalembe was opening a door into a world he had spent decades documenting.
The historian inside the film
When we began filming Tuko Pamoja in 2021, Kalembe became one of our most important interviewees.
He was not there merely to provide information.
He became one of the voices that helped connect the series across time and geography.
We filmed him at Katasiiha Fort, where Kabaleega confronted British forces and where the history of his resistance remains embedded in the landscape. We filmed him at Mparo Tombs, the former capital of Bunyoro-Kitara and the final resting place of Kabaleega. We filmed him at Kibiro salt mines, where history is not confined to books but remains alive in work, land, memory and community.
He could move effortlessly between these places because, for Kalembe, history was never simply a collection of dates.
It was geography.
It was language.
It was memory.
It was the question of who tells the story after everyone who witnessed it has died.
His research also went beyond Bunyoro. He studied and wrote about Buganda, Ankole, Tooro and Busoga, while also paying attention to communities and societies outside the traditional kingdom structures, including Acholi and Lango.
He understood something that modern Uganda sometimes forgets: the history of a country cannot be reduced to the history of its political centre.
The unfinished journey to Seychelles
There was one historical journey Kalembe wanted to make but never did.
He wanted to travel to the Seychelles Islands.
Why?
Because that is where the story of Kabaleega intersects with that of Kabaka Mwanga II of Buganda, both of whom were exiled there by the British.
Kalembe wanted to find the archives, traces and forgotten records of what happened to these two African kings after their resistance had been broken and their freedom taken away.
That journey remained on his list.
He never made it.
And this is where his death leaves a strange obligation behind.
One day, I hope to travel to the Seychelles myself.
Not simply as a filmmaker.
As someone following a trail left unfinished by the historian who first showed me where to look.
I want to find the archives he wanted so badly to see. I want to ask the questions he wanted answered. I want to return with something that can be placed alongside his work.
Perhaps that is one way the living repay the dead.
Not with flowers.
With unfinished work.
A life beyond Kabaleega
Kalembe’s public life was considerably broader than his historical scholarship.
He served as Speaker, or Omutalindwa, of the Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom Parliament from October 2018 to October 2023. During that period, he presided over the Rukurato’s legislative work and participated in the development of kingdom policies and ordinances.
He had also worked in public relations at the Uganda Communications Commission, where colleagues remembered him as a knowledgeable and dependable partner to journalists.
Before that, he had been involved in broadcasting, including work with Bunyoro Broadcasting Services in Masindi. Former colleagues have remembered him as a mentor and experienced journalist who encouraged publications on Bunyoro’s history and culture.
His cultural work continued long after his formal positions ended.
The Kabalega Foundation described him as its Research and Documentation Lead, responsible for cultural research, historical documentation and knowledge preservation.
In 2023, during the centenary commemorations of Kabaleega’s death, Kalembe was among those involved in efforts to publish and promote works about the king’s legacy. He also spoke publicly about the importance of documenting African history so that future generations would have records from which to learn.
That was perhaps the thread running through everything he did.
Write it down.
Because what is not written can be denied.
What is not recorded can be distorted.
What is not remembered can disappear.
The man I remember
My memory of Kalembe is not primarily of the Speaker, the author or the public intellectual.
It is of the man I encountered in that house in Nsumbi.
He was generous with knowledge.
He did not behave as though research belonged to him.
He shared.
He opened his contacts.
He pointed towards other sources.
He gave the impression of a man who understood that history is too large for one person to possess.
And there was something else.
He was deeply invested in Kabaleega.
Not in the shallow sense in which historical figures are sometimes turned into cultural ornaments. Kalembe wanted the record of Kabaleega’s life to survive scrutiny: the victories, the defeats, the resistance, the exile, the politics and the contradictions.
He wanted Kabaleega remembered as a historical actor.
Not a statue.
Not a myth emptied of human complexity.
A man.
A king.
A strategist.
A resister.
And, above all, an African whose story had to be told by Africans.
My regret
There is one regret I cannot escape.
Kalembe did not live long enough to see “Conquer or Die” come alive on screen.
The project we began researching in 2016, partly because of the material and connections he gave us, is still unfinished.
The man whose life he spent documenting will therefore have to wait a little longer for another telling.
I wish Kalembe had lived to watch it.
I wish he could have sat somewhere in a screening room and watched Kabaleega emerge from the pages of history and become flesh, landscape, sound and image.
I would have wanted to ask him afterwards:
Did we get it right?
That question now has no answer.
Or perhaps it does.
It is the answer every historian eventually gives a filmmaker: keep looking.
What remains
Kalembe died at about 70 after illness, according to reports on his death. The Kingdom announced that he died in the early hours of August 18 at Kirudu Hospital in Kampala, while other reports said he had recently been discharged from hospital before his condition suddenly worsened.
He was laid to rest yesterday 21/08/ 2026 at his ancestral home in Dwoli, Hoima District.
His death has been mourned by the Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom, former colleagues, journalists, scholars, family and cultural leaders.
But perhaps the most appropriate tribute to a historian is not mourning.
It is preservation.
The Kabalega Foundation has already described his scholarship and documentation work as part of a legacy that will continue through the records he left behind.
And that is where the larger question begins.
What happens to the history of a people when its historians die?
Who remembers the things they were trying to remember?
Who continues the journeys they never completed?
Kalembe spent his life answering those questions through action.
He researched.
He wrote.
He interviewed.
He collected.
He connected people.
He preserved.
He insisted that Bunyoro’s past mattered.
And now he has become part of that past.
That is the cruel paradox of the historian: you spend your life rescuing the dead from oblivion, only to eventually join them.
But perhaps Kalembe understood this better than most.
The historian does not defeat death.
He leaves breadcrumbs for those who come after him.
I was one of the people who found some of his.
And I intend to keep following them.
One day, I hope to stand in Seychelles and search the archives that Kalembe never reached.
One day, I hope to complete “Conquer or Die.”
And when Kabaleega finally walks onto that screen, I will remember the man who first helped me find him.
Isaac Kalembe Biromaiso Akiiki is gone.
But the history he spent his life trying to save is still speaking.
We should listen.