OKELLO HERBERT ANDREW: Telling the Untold Stories of Uganda

Okello Herbert Andrew is a reticent and shy figure, striving hard to be unremarkable, anonymous and unseen. He flees attention like the plague, keeps women at arms-brotherly-length and moves along the streets of life with heavily guarded privacy. His is a well preserved intimacy with silence and solitude.

While open about his reverential regard for watermelons, Okello is rather closed about his repertoire of devilish writing excellence- of which Untold Stories Uganda (USU) is just but one.

Untold Stories Uganda is the product of its creator Okello’s primal commitment and passion towards meaningful storytelling. The page, which has over 20,000 followers and is about five years old, is an arts and humanities site that chronicles with moving insight and compelling narrative, the unending range of experiences of just about anybody. It highlights powerfully, humanity’s shared emotional, experiential and relational joys and pains, using the power of storytelling and photography. The revelations within; and the tone and narrative of these stories are nothing short of captivating.

What started for Okello as a personal initiative to confront his predisposition to crippling shyness has evolved into a lifelong project, whose reach has grown to serve a purpose bigger than both the page its enigmatic founder. As he hoped it would, his work with USU has helped him to curb and outgrow the worst parts of his social anxiety. Now, the platform exists to make voices, stories and faces of the lived human experience heard, told, and seen respectively.

As many quiet people tend to be, Okello has a keen eye for perfection and beauty; hinged on the kind of attention to detail that one might suspect makes one particularly fussy, complicated and outright difficult. Or a gift. He is a brainy young man abandoned to his many talents and romantic sensitivities. Such things as stories, poetry, flowers, pets and plants move him deeply. This sensitivity and attention to detail, is perhaps the channel through which Okello is able to perceive with empathy; the pain, fear, joy, regret and hope in the eyes and voices of his story subjects; and later retell their narrations captivatingly with his mastery of the written word.

Then there is the gem of a simultaneously cool and warm personality coupled with his indefatigable sense of humor- a beautifully lethal combination that allows him to revel in all his passions without being consumed by either one of them. Okello is a lawyer, writer and photographer and all these he commands with enviably calm flair.

Because his works severally precede and exceed him, he cuts as a bewildering find; one that is as ubiquitous as it is elusive; appearing to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. His presence is largely windy, only felt by its literary effects – an over ten year-trail of writing footprint, with articles online, non-inclusive of social media sites, going as far back as 6 years ago.

A couple of these are writings he made as a reporter for the Ugandan universities’ news website, Campus Bee, a company he worked with for a brief stint while still only a second year student at the University. In one of these he wrote with compassionate and descriptive delight, through the lens of his youthful innocence, the 2014 solo and nude protest by then Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) professor and now political activist, Stella Nyanzi.

While he hardly describes himself as such, Okello is ambitious, hardworking and a tireless pursuant of the noble, human side of life. He is rather modest when it comes to his many accomplishments and pursuits, and gently dismisses the implied compassion behind his volunteering work at a legal aid clinic in Kampala. That he returned to his former school to volunteer as a supplementary teacher of English literature and poetry, throughout his University days, is also another feat he does not consider unusual.

This, though, is the disposition of all genius; from Ugandan satirical comic Uncle Mo, to photographer Moses Dipak – the inability to see oneself in the light of their own greatness. For now, at barely 30 years of age, Okello continues to shatter the space of social media with his sustained, low intensity but strong and frequent seismic literary vibrations.