By Charles Onyango-Obbo

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Ugandan author Kakwenza Rukirabashaija was on Wednesday released after nearly a month in detention.

He looked emaciated, and his lawyer said Kakwenza was unwell and had been immediately taken to hospital.

His lawyer had previously said he was tortured in detention, and when a few weeks ago security officers took him back to his home in Iganga, eastern Uganda, for a search, he was bloodied and limping. His wife said the soles of his feet looked like he had walked on broken glass or nails.

Last Tuesday, after a court again ordered his release, armed men snatched him from prison and, it turns out, took him to a military barracks. From there they dumped him in Iganga.

It was a dramatic one month, in which court orders to produce or release him on bail were mostly ignored, except on two brief occasions — where his lawyer wasn’t present.

Kakwenza’s troubles started with the publication of his scorched-earth satirical novel The Greedy Barbarian, which was read as an attack on President Yoweri Museveni.

He set up shop on social media and continued to eviscerate Museveni, other occupants of State House, and his family.

In December, on Twitter he unleashed a particularly lethal barrage against Museveni, and his son, Lt-Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, who is commander of the country’s Land Forces. He was carted off, tormented, and charged with two counts of “offensive communication” against father and son.

Kakwenza’s tribulations, however, speak of something bigger. With the political space in Uganda getting more bitterly contested with Museveni having entered his 36th year in power on Wednesday, repression and violence against the vocal opposition has increased. More innovative forms of political critique have grown, and presently a venom-tongued generation of writers are carrying the mantle. One of them, Stella Nyanzi, took matters a notch higher and, besides her scathing poetry, even threw off her bras and underwear in public on a few occasions in the service of democracy.

The situation is comparable to Kenya in the late 1970s through the ‘80s, during which several writers, including the legendary Ngugi wa Thiong'o, were jailed and hounded into exile during the height of repression by the Daniel arap Moi regime.

Ms Nyanzi’s rebellious predecessors arose in the Kenya of that time, with women throwing off their clothes to protest dictatorship and to protect forests from being grabbed and cut down for “development”.

Besides the long-suffering Ugandan journalists, for a few years ago it was musicians, cartoonists, photographers, and bloggers who were hammered. Now it is the turn of writers who publish old-fashioned paper books like Kakwenza and Nyanzi, but they use a language, style, and have an irreverence that must be alien and shocking to a 77-year-old Museveni.

In that sense, they are proxies for a generational battle between an old Uganda, and a lively-minded, pepper-mounted youthful citizenry in the country with the world’s second youngest population.

The young ones have the imagination; they are wielding the internet and social media to deadly effect, and have the more compelling stories. Museveni and the older folks, however, have a monopoly of two of the biggest weapons in this war — money and guns.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3