Meet Mercy Geno Apachi, Uganda's shyest poet

Her technical virtuosity as a spoken word artist cannot be denied, her wordplay is an interpretive tool used to chisel out meaning from hers and society’s feet of clay.

Her genteel manner may serve as a moniker for her poetic presence, however it is also a feature of her classy and understated personality.

She also has a playful side Pulse

“I am Mercy Agenorwot and another name I usually hide from the world for personal reasons. I use the pseudonym Mercy Geno Apachi. The Geno got from high school when the classmates failed to properly enunciate Agenorwot so I had to make a choice between TB2 (an abbreviation for Tom Boy 2. Yes I was the second “boyish-lady” in class) and Geno,” she says.

“The Apachi was given to me by a nanny when I was younger, she could not pronounce my English names so she resorted to the closest thing her mouth could form but the name stuck with everybody else and even feels like a pet name.”

Mercy is so mercilessly on point with her lyricism, one might think she’s been writing even before she was born!

Mercy is a proud African Pulse

“One may ask what writing is to me and I always say it is as joyful as finding Christ is to a Christian and as fulfilling as orgasm is to sex,” she says, not so shyly.

“I honestly started writing from as young as in Primary three. My dad was always excited and in awe when he found me reading newspapers or story books therefore him and the fact that I grew up mostly alone for most of my elder siblings were in schools in the central, fueled my writing.”

In high school, she wrote stories meant to be novels in her counter books and rented them out at 500 shillings per chapter to interested readers. The attention she gleaned from such readers set the stage for her desire to get even more attention for her preternatural lyricism.

With fellow Scrivener, Canary Mugume Pulse

To further highlight and enhance her evident verbal skills, Mercy embarked on a journalism career in her senior six vacation at a local community radio station in Kitgum district. The station is known as Mighty Fire FM, where she co-hosted a weekend show and later became their youngest English News Anchor.

She then enrolled in Uganda Christian University where she joined the Inter Universities journalism competitions organized by Media Challenge Initiative and won a clutch of awards as Best Business reporter in 2015, second runner-up best English news anchor in 2016, and was selected among the best 20 students to look out for in Journalism in the first ever Media Challenge fellowship program in 2018.

In 2017, she participated in the East African Students Film Festival held at Daystar University in Nairobi where she was first runner-up in the Documentaries category for her story on Nodding Syndrome in Northern Uganda.

She was also a contributing writer to her class’s end-of-year film project and later she acquired a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism in 2018.

In an initiative with Konrad Adeneur Stiftung-Uganda and Media Challenge, she was picked as a student to go for a media trip in Berlin, Germany, in 2019. After which, she returned to be a part of a theatre fellowship with Tebere Emerging Artists Lab where she wrote her first play “Ojwiny”.

Not so camera-shy Pulse

Mercy officially started doing spoken word poetry in 2017, drawing inspiration from within herself that was heightened when she started attending poetry shows within Kampala and meeting poets who led to even greater inspiration by introducing her to the poetry of Saul Williams, Nick Makoha and others.

As a poet, Mercy has managed to stage two shows under a poetry group called Echo Minds poets: One staged at the Uganda National Theatre named “She 4 She”, a show highlighting the woes of women and how they can overcome them.

The other show was staged at the German Institute- Goethe Zentrum named “We Silently Hurt” highlighting stories on depression.

As a solo spoken word artist, she has occasionally graced various prestigious platforms as Kwivuga, Ntebeza, Stubborn poetry, Ink-liners, Native voices, She is Hip hop as a workshop facilitator, Human Rights Conference 2019.

In 2020, her poems “I Want Humanity”, “My New Husband” and “Jailbird” were published in an Italian Magazine named One Voice Global, A U.S anthology named “Home” and Writers Space Africa as the Editor’s Choice.

She was picked to participate in the Africa Writers Trust Publishing Fellowship Program, where she has a poetry collection in the initial stages of editing.

Through the fellowship, she partnered with Timwa Lipenga, a Malawian writer, to be a poetry judge for a Malawian journal named Daughters of Makwena, meant to uplift women’s self-esteem and writing capabilities.

Further, she was a poetry judge with Voluntary Initiative Support Organisation in Gulu for a poetry project themed: “Promoting better understanding, building trust, tolerance and peaceful co-existence.”

In mid-2020, her short story “Who Stole the Chicken,” was long-listed in Writers Space Africa under creative fiction for the theme “The African Identity”.

Not bad for a shy poet.