Kayemba Augustine Was Still Waiting for Home

A Ugandan refugee advocate crossed borders looking for safety and spent years asking the world to see the queer refugees left waiting beside them. Augustine Kayemba’s death in South Sudan leaves behind grief, an unfinished biography, and questions that cannot be separated from the life that came before them.

By Prince DeAndre, Duke of Hanumanteshwar
H1927LLC IP Library | Human Rights & Global Affairs

There are photographs of Augustine Kayemba that now carry more weight than they were ever meant to carry.

In one, Kayemba stands against a wall painted in broad blocks of yellow, green, pink, and orange, wearing a burgundy shirt and looking directly into the camera. In another, Kayemba sits in front of rough wooden supports and plastic sheeting, the materials of a temporary shelter. The surroundings are different, but the photographs share something important. They show a person looking back at us.

That is where I want this story to begin.

Not with a refugee camp. Not with an asylum case. Not with an institution. Not even with death.

With Augustine Kayemba.

Writing an obituary usually begins with the basic architecture of a life. Where was the person born? Who were the parents? Were there brothers and sisters? What school did they attend? What did they want to become before adulthood rearranged those plans? Who were the people who knew them before the world knew their name?

With Kayemba, much of that remains missing from the public record.

We know Kayemba was from Uganda. We know that in March 2025 Kayemba publicly gave an age of 32, placing the year of birth around 1992 or 1993. We know Kayemba left Uganda in 2019 after persecution connected to sexuality. What I have not been able to establish is the exact place of birth, the names of parents or siblings, the shape of childhood, or whether Kayemba’s own family rejected Kayemba for being queer.

That distinction matters.

There is a temptation, especially when writing about LGBTQIA+ refugees from countries where queer people face criminalization, violence, or social hostility, to complete the story for them. We assume there was a confrontation at home. We assume there was rejection. We assume there was a dramatic moment when everything changed.

Kayemba’s surviving record does not give us permission to write that story.

What it gives us is painful enough.

In a 2023 interview with Columbia News Service, Augustine Kayemba described walking home from a bar in Uganda with a partner when armed men opened fire. Kayemba survived. The person walking beside Kayemba did not.

That is not a policy point. It is not a statistic. It is the kind of moment that divides a life into before and after.

Someone was walking home with a person they loved.

Gunfire came.

One person died.

The other survived.

And then the surviving person had to continue living.

Kayemba eventually crossed into Kenya.

The word refuge suggests an ending to movement. You flee danger, cross a border, and somewhere on the other side there is supposed to be a place where the running stops.

For Kayemba, it did not.

A Refugee Who Became an Advocate

Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya became part of Kayemba’s life. So did a new vocabulary.

Protection. Documentation. Shelter. Food. Medical care. Resettlement.

But what stands out when you go through Kayemba’s public writing is that the story never remained only about Kayemba.

Through Free Hearts Kakuma, Kayemba became part of an LGBTQIA+ refugee community trying to survive inside a system that did not always feel safe to the people living within it. Kayemba wrote about hunger, illness, unemployment, violence, mental health, education, and the need for basic security. There were appeals for food. Appeals for medical treatment. Appeals for a fence to provide some protection against attacks. Appeals for people whose lives had already been interrupted once and who were discovering that crossing a border did not automatically restore what had been lost.

A 2022 fundraiser organized with James Goebel sought assistance for that larger community. More than a hundred people donated. Thousands of dollars were raised.

I keep returning to that because it tells us something important about Kayemba.

There is a difference between needing help and being helpless.

Kayemba needed help.

Kayemba was also trying to create help for other people.

The internet preserves those appeals in fragments, but together they reveal a person who kept trying to make people outside Kakuma see the people inside it.

People who were hungry.

People who were sick.

People living with HIV.

People who had survived violence.

People who were transgender.

People who wanted to work.

People who wanted to study.

People who wanted enough stability to stop organizing every day around survival.

Kayemba kept asking the world to look.

Not after someone died.

While people were still alive.

That may be one of the most important things to remember about Augustine Kayemba.

Another Border, the Same Search for Safety

By the end of 2024, Kenya was no longer the final stop.

According to Kayemba’s own later account, a group of LGBTQIA+ refugees left Kenya for South Sudan on December 19, 2024, after years of frustration and uncertainty around their cases.

Kayemba eventually became associated with Gorom Refugee Settlement.

The country changed.

The needs did not.

There were still questions of shelter. Food. Medical care. Security. Resettlement.

Kayemba continued speaking publicly about people who were becoming ill. In one appeal, 18 members of the LGBTQIA+ community were described as needing urgent medical attention.

In another, the appeal became personal. Kayemba described needing medical treatment and said pneumonia had followed nights spent sleeping in tents.

That does not tell us what eventually caused Kayemba’s death.

It should not be made to do that.

But it tells us that health, shelter, and survival had already become part of Kayemba’s public story long before anyone began writing an obituary.

And still, there were moments when the requests were almost painfully ordinary.

Around Easter, Kayemba asked supporters to help the refugee community share a meal.

That detail stays with me.

Because sometimes the clearest measure of displacement is not found in legal language. It is found in the fact that a holiday meal becomes something people have to ask strangers on the internet to help provide.

Kayemba was not asking only how people could survive.

Kayemba was asking whether they could still have a life.

There is a difference.

A life includes food, but it also includes celebration.

It includes shelter, but it also includes privacy.

It includes medicine, but it also includes laughter.

It includes safety, but it also includes the ability to stop thinking about safety every hour of every day.

For years, Kayemba seemed to be asking for that ordinary life on behalf of an extraordinary number of people who had been forced to live without it.

Waiting for Somewhere Permanent

For people who spend years moving through refugee systems, the future begins to sound bureaucratic.

Registration.

Interview.

Referral.

Case.

Approval.

Departure.

Resettlement.

Kayemba wrote about the possibility of resettlement to the United States. For people who had already moved from Uganda to Kenya and then from Kenya to South Sudan, the possibility of another country represented something different.

Not another camp.

Not another temporary shelter.

A beginning.

Then U.S. refugee processing changed, and the future became uncertain again.

It is important to be careful here. I have not seen Kayemba’s individual U.S. resettlement file. I cannot say exactly what stage that case had reached. I cannot say that a departure was imminent.

What I can say is that waiting had become one of the defining conditions of Kayemba’s life.

Uganda had already been left behind.

Years had already been spent in Kenya.

Another border had already been crossed into South Sudan.

Still, somewhere beyond all of that was the hope of a place that might finally feel permanent.

Augustine Kayemba was still waiting for home.

Then Doreen Wrote the Name

In September, Doreen Nasaala posted a memorial.

The heading read:

“REMEMBERING KAYEMBA AUGUSTIN.”

There was nothing bureaucratic about what followed.

Doreen called Kayemba “my brother.”

Doreen described Kayemba as “a fighter, a brother, and a beacon of hope.”

Then came the sentence I have kept returning to throughout this reporting:

“Your life mattered.”

Those are Doreen’s words, and they belong to Doreen.

Our own narration does not need to assign Kayemba a gender to understand the intimacy of what was being said. Doreen was naming a relationship. A bond. A loss.

The memorial also carried something else.

Anger.

Doreen wrote that Kayemba had been found dead in the bush at Gorom Refugee Camp.

A separate community account later described a period of illness, treatment at a private clinic, mounting medical costs, Kayemba leaving the facility, a disappearance, police reports, a search, and eventually the discovery of the body.

Those details are serious.

They are also, at this stage, community testimony.

I have not located the medical records.

I have not located the police report.

I have not located a publicly available postmortem report.

I have not located a death certificate establishing an official cause and manner of death.

That means there are things this obituary will not say.

It will not say Augustine Kayemba was murdered when that has not been established.

It will not say pneumonia caused the death.

It will not say hunger caused the death.

It will not call the death a hate crime without evidence establishing that.

And it will not assign legal responsibility to a government, refugee agency, or humanitarian organization simply because grief and unanswered questions surround this death.

Facts matter too much for that.

Especially when the person at the center of those facts can no longer correct us.

But uncertainty about how Kayemba died does not require us to pretend we know nothing about the conditions surrounding the life.

Kayemba had been speaking publicly for years.

About insecurity.

About food.

About medicine.

About shelter.

About protection.

About the possibility of resettlement.

About people trying to build lives in places they had reached because somewhere else had already become impossible.

Those facts were present before there was a death to investigate.

The Questions Were Already There

Only weeks before Doreen wrote a memorial for Augustine Kayemba, Doreen had stood before institutions gathered in Nairobi for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

I wrote about that moment separately.

Doreen had asked what protection actually meant for LGBTQIA+ refugees trying to obtain documentation, healthcare, education, safety, and a durable future.

At the time, those were policy questions.

Now it is impossible to read them only that way.

What does access to healthcare mean when a refugee community says it could not afford to keep one of its advocates in a private clinic?

What does protection mean when someone flees Uganda, reaches Kenya, leaves Kenya for South Sudan, and is still looking for safety?

What does self-reliance mean when food and medical care depend upon fundraisers?

What does resettlement mean when years of a human life are spent waiting for somebody, somewhere, to determine what comes next?

And what does the word refuge mean when refuge keeps requiring another journey?

None of those questions tells us why Augustine Kayemba died.

They tell us why the death cannot be separated from the life that came before it.

The Life Behind the Refugee Story

There is a danger in writing about people whose lives become publicly known through persecution.

Suffering begins to consume the biography.

We learn about the attack.

We learn about the camp.

We learn about the fundraiser.

We learn about the illness.

We learn about the death.

And somehow we never learn enough about the person.

That is what troubles me most about Augustine Kayemba’s story.

The internet can tell us what Kayemba needed.

It can tell us what Kayemba asked for.

It can tell us what conditions were being described in Kakuma and Gorom.

It can show us photographs.

It can preserve appeals.

But somewhere behind all of that was a life the internet cannot reconstruct for us.

There was a childhood in Uganda.

There was a family, whatever shape those relationships took.

There were teachers.

Friends.

Neighbors.

Private jokes.

Arguments.

Favorite meals.

Music.

Plans.

There was a time before Kayemba knew the vocabulary of refugee status determination.

There was a time before one partner was killed.

There was a time before borders became part of the biography.

There were dreams that had nothing to do with survival.

Those things matter because Augustine Kayemba did not begin at Kakuma Refugee Camp.

And this life should not be remembered only for ending at Gorom.

Look at Us While We Are Alive

Refugees often become visible to the wider world at the moment ordinary life has already broken apart.

A home is lost.

Someone is attacked.

A border is crossed.

An application stalls.

Food runs out.

Medical treatment cannot be paid for.

Someone disappears.

A body is found.

By then, the world is looking at the emergency instead of the person.

Augustine Kayemba spent years trying to turn that relationship around.

The message running beneath those public appeals was remarkably consistent:

Look at us while we are alive.

See the people inside the camp.

See the person who is sick before illness becomes a crisis.

See the person who is hungry before hunger becomes desperation.

See the refugee who wants to work before years of waiting make independence almost impossible.

See queer people not only as people escaping persecution, but as people who want careers, relationships, holidays, privacy, stability, laughter, and a place they can finally call home.

That is why Doreen’s memorial matters beyond the circumstances surrounding the death.

Doreen called Kayemba “my brother.”

Doreen wrote that Kayemba’s life mattered.

On that point, there is nothing left to investigate.

Augustine Kayemba’s life mattered.

There are still records to seek.

There are still people in Gorom who may know what happened during the final days.

There may be medical records that clarify the illness.

There may be police records that clarify the disappearance.

There may be refugee and resettlement records that explain how close Kayemba came to leaving South Sudan.

And somewhere in Uganda there may be people who can answer the question I find myself asking more than any other:

Who was Augustine Kayemba before the world knew the name because of persecution?

If those people can be found, and if they wish to speak, their memories belong in this story too.

Because Augustine Kayemba crossed borders looking for safety and somewhere along the way became an advocate for others searching for the same thing.

A permanent home never arrived.

The questions did.

They remain with us now.

And whatever those answers ultimately tell us about how Augustine Kayemba died, this life deserves to be remembered for far more than its ending.

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Reporting Note

Public records use both Augustine Kayemba and Kayemba Augustine. H1927LLC uses Augustine Kayemba in this article after reviewing repeated first-person usage and independent reporting that identify the subject by that name. Where Doreen Nasaala wrote “Kayemba Augustin” in the memorial that prompted this reporting, Doreen’s original wording is preserved when quoted.

Public sources also contain differing descriptions of Kayemba’s gender and identity across different periods. H1927LLC therefore uses Kayemba’s name throughout its own narration rather than assigning a gender. Where Doreen described Kayemba as “my brother,” that wording remains Doreen’s expression of relationship and remembrance.

The circumstances of Augustine Kayemba’s death remain incompletely documented in publicly available records. Community accounts describe illness, treatment at a private clinic, a subsequent disappearance, and the eventual discovery of Kayemba’s body. At the time of publication, H1927LLC has not located a public death certificate, postmortem report, medical record, or police report establishing an official cause and manner of death.

Editor’s Correction

Updated September 20, 2026: An earlier version of this article rendered the subject’s full name as Kayemba Augustine. After reviewing first-person usage and independent reporting, H1927LLC standardized the name as Augustine Kayemba. Quotations from original source material remain unchanged.