The world lost a remarkable soul with the passing of Daniel Ndarubweine wa Keisho ka Mikaro ya Bugashu bwa Rushwiga rwa Nyamiyonga, a man whose warmth, laughter, and unwavering loyalty touched the lives of all who had the privilege of knowing him.
To those who loved him, Ndarubweine was far more than a friend — he was a confidant, a source of strength, and a constant reminder of what it meant to live with genuine kindness and purpose. He was one of the great men of Kigyezi that raised us with loving sternness, and a resolute drive to turn our generation into successful participants in a modernizing post-colonial world. His absence leaves a void that words can scarcely begin to fill, and yet it is with words — however inadequate — that we attempt to honour a life so beautifully and fully lived.
Ndarubweine was born on April 30, 1930, into a family that instilled in him the values he would carry for the rest of his life: industry, integrity, generosity, and an enduring love for community. From his earliest years, Ndarubweine possessed a spirit that seemed impossible to dim. Those, like my father, who knew him as a child recalled a boy of boundless curiosity and infectious energy.
He began his formal education at a very early age, most probably at Kihanga Boys Primary School “in the 1930s”, embarking on what would become a lifelong journey of learning and intellectual curiosity. His father enrolled him at Kigezi High School in 1940.
Kigezi High School gave him not only knowledge but the foundations of a character that would define him for decades to come. It was also there that he forged one of the most enduring bonds of his life. Among his schoolmates with whom he was admitted to that great school on the same day in 1940 was a boy named Ezra Kisigo Mulera from Kahondo ka Byamarembo. The latter, aged about twenty-two, joined primary three. The friendship that took root between them would prove to be one of the defining relationships of both their lives. Even as the years passed and life carried them in different directions, and as adulthood brought its inevitable distances and demands, the bond between Ndarubweine and Kisigo Mulera did not merely survive — it deepened.
The most extraordinary testament to that friendship came in 2018, near the end of Mulera’s life. By then, Kisigo Mulera had been struggling for several years with painful physical decline, and dementia that had drawn a heavy curtain between him and the world he had once known so vividly. The disease had robbed him of much — including, heartbreakingly, the ability to recognize even his own children.
And yet when Ndarubweine came to visit him that year, something remarkable happened. Mulera looked up at his old friend, and across the vast silence that the illness had imposed, something stirred. A smile broke across his face. And he spoke one word, clear and certain: Daniel.
The bond, forged in the schoolyards of Kigezi High School nearly eight decades earlier, had remained unbroken. It had outlasted time, distance, and even the cruellest ravages of the mind. That single moment — that one luminous word of recognition — stands as perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the kind of friend Ndarubweine was. He was the kind of man whose presence reached places that nothing else could. Ezra Kisigo Mulera passed away in November 2019, and Ndarubweine carried the memory of their friendship with him until his own final days.
True to his restless and inquiring spirit, Ndarubweine’s academic and professional path had been anything but linear. He first pursued public health science, then turned to postal communications, before settling on animal husbandry, his true calling within which he carved out a remarkable specialization. He became a dedicated ornithologist with a particular focus on poultry — specifically the study and care of chickens. To those unfamiliar with the discipline, it might have seemed a humble pursuit, but Ndarubweine understood what many did not: that avian science and poultry farming sat at the very heart of food security, rural livelihoods, and community resilience. He brought to his work the same depth of passion that a musician brings to his instrument or a poet to his pen. It was a vocation in the fullest and most dignified sense of the word.
Beyond his professional life, he was a devoted husband and father whose family was the great anchor of his world. For over six decades, his wife Jenina Tindimurekura, now 91, was his partner, and his steadfast companion through every season of life. They successfully nurtured their five children into some of the finest citizens of Uganda. The best known among them is Maj. Gen. Henry Masiko, their oldest son, who has had a distinguished career in the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF).
It was with the deepest sorrow that we received news of not one death in the Ndarubweine family on April 16, 2026, but two. Ndarubweine’s 61-year-old son Joseph Twinomujuni, after a courageous battle with cancer, drew his last breath just six hours before his father died. Father and son departed this world on the same day — an occurrence so rare that theoretical calculations place the probability of a parent and child dying of natural causes on the same day as low as one in 840,000,000.
Whether one calls it coincidence, providence, or mystery, there was something in that shared departure that felt less like cruel chance and more like grace — as though, having walked so much of life together, Ndarubweine and Joseph were simply unwilling to make the final journey alone. In the end, a father waited for his son, or a son waited for his father. Perhaps both.
Ndarubweine died just fourteen days before what would have been his 96th birthday. Memorial services for father and son were held at All Saints Cathedral in Kampala and at the District Stadium in Mparo, Rukiga. The gathering at Mparo was a profound testament to the reach of Ndarubweine and Joseph’s lives — a vast crowd that included mourners who had travelled great distances to pay their respects, drawn from across the country and beyond by the force of a man and his sons whose influence had spread far wider than Ndarubweine perhaps ever knew.
Father and son were laid to rest together at their hillside home at Kihanga. During the service at Mparo, the rain came. Then it stopped. It came again at the interment at Kihanga. Those present will not forget it — the sky opening quietly, as if in acknowledgement, as if the heavens themselves had something to say about the two souls being returned to the earth that day. Heaven’s tears, falling on a hillside in Rukiga, for a man who had lived nearly a century with grace, purpose, and love, and for his son whose premature death had interrupted a distinguished career in laboratory medicine and had robbed his wife Enid Namara and their five children, of his loving presence on their journey.
To every person whose life Ndarubweine touched: grieve fully, for he deserves our tears. But remember him also with laughter, because laughter is what he would have wanted. Remember that single luminous smile — the moment an old man lost in the fog of dementia looked up and saw his friend and remembered. Remember a father and son who left together. Remember the rain.
That is who Daniel Ndarubweine was. That is the mark he left. That is the love he carried. Daniel Ndarubweine — beloved, irreplaceable, and forever remembered.
© Muniini K. Mulera