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Ugandan music icon Irene Namubiru, this week, dropped as promised her deeply personal memoir, an exposé of the long-documented breakdown of her relationship with her mother, Justine Nyanzi Namawejje, and extended family.
The book titled “My Mother Knows: My Journey to Healing” was launched at the Kampala Serena Hotel.
It details a profoundly strained and estranged relationship with her mother, a silence that has stretched for over a decade.
She reveals in the book how the estrangement was worsened by a harrowing incident in 2013 in Japan, where she was framed for a drug offence.
Rather than finding solace in her family, she was met with indifference and hostility from her mother and siblings, a betrayal that ultimately led to the severe breakdown of their relationship.
"Writing this book feels like a very heavy load taken off my shoulders," she said.
“I had not held onto this information in a bid to protect my mother, per se, because most of the things I went through, she knew, but she was shielding all these people who hurt me anyway.”
“I was trapped in the thoughts of, if I complain, I will look bad, and if I tell the truth, people would not believe me.”
Irene Namubiru,
The Breaking Point
The final catalyst for Namubibu’s decision to publish her story came when she overheard a phone conversation.
"The point I felt I was done protecting her was when I heard her speaking on the phone about things I could not believe," she recounted.
Her mother was telling a stranger that Namubiru hated her grandmother and was not helping them, which the singer says was untrue.
More chillingly, her mother accused her of exhuming her grandparents' remains to use them for witchcraft.
This scared me because at this point they even called the police, and they roughed me up," she recalled.
"I thought at this point that I could die, and I did not want to die with this truth."
Irene Namubiru
Protecting Her Children and Facing the Past
Namubiru is well aware that her story may draw criticism, and she admits to dreading "what people are going to say when they read the book, how they will judge and criticise her."
The decision to share such a private and painful narrative was made without her own children's knowledge.
While they often heard her "ranting about my family," she never provided the full, unfiltered details because the stories were "embarrassing."
“I did not want my children to hear the unfiltered stories of what happened to me because my mother and her children have no limits; they do not care. There have been cases where they told my 5-year-old son some inappropriate things. That is why I wanted to protect my kids,” she said.
Namubiru says the memoir is focused on her mother because "she pushed me to the point of cutting her off, which was very hard for me."
She reveals a childhood where her mother "denied me a lot as a child, including her audience," meaning she could not share her pain.
The songstress says much of her suffering was caused by her mother, who "never protected me" and dismissed her trauma by calling her a "drama queen."
Her journey to healing also involves confronting the absence of her biological father in her early life, whom she only met for the first time at age seven.
For Irene Namubiru, the book is an act of reclaiming her narrative, a brave step to heal from a lifetime of pain and finally shed the heavy burden she has carried for so long.