Refugee elected Liberal riding exec three months after arriving in Canada

When two men kidnapped him, beat him and left him for dead in a village in Uganda, Samuel Kisitu knew it was time to go. He looked to leave East Africa for a city where half the months — and half the faces — are white, settling at a 50-bed men’s shelter at the corner of Oakwood and Vaughan in early September.

Now, just three months later, the 30-year-old refugee is one of six newly elected directors-at-large for the St. Paul’s Liberal riding association. “I was so happy to see my story changing from nobody to somebody,” he says.

He’s hoping to use his grassroots ambition and newfound political connections to help Ugandans and other African refugees in Toronto.

He knows too well their struggles don’t end when they cross the border. Two months after moving into the men’s shelter, Kisitu was able to rent a converted pantry just big enough for a bare mattress, a throw rug and a small heater for $750 a month — $150 more than Ontario Works gave him for housing. But it’s his room and his room only, and he says it makes him feel safe to have a lock on his door for the first time.

One of the few decorations he has in his chilly, spartan room is a poster of the prime minister. “I started following up on current affairs and I was seeing headlines of how Justin Trudeau is answerable for mass immigrants in Canada,” he says, explaining his involvement in Liberal politics. “I found out St. Paul’s is my riding, and my Liberal candidate is Carolyn Bennett.”

He started canvassing for Bennett, wanting to get behind his party of choice. Even though he couldn’t vote, he says he saw it as a “privilege” to be able to participate in a “free and fair election” for the first time in his life.

William Watson, the chair of the St. Paul’s Liberal riding association, says Kisitu spoke to them about “the absence of democratic processes in his homeland and his excitement at the chance to participate in Canadian democratic politics.” He added that it was “no surprise” that Kisitu turned that drive into a seat on the association’s executive.

For Kisitu, local political organizing is one of the few things he brought with him from Uganda. He’d advocated for veterans of that nation’s five-year bush war that saw Yoweri Museveni seize power from Milton Obote in 1986.

His father and grandfather were veterans of the bush war; they were never compensated despite a decades-long letter writing campaign requesting assistance that Kisitu took up after their deaths. They requested repayment of cassava, bananas, beans and sweet potatoes given to the guerrillas. They requested the return of three bicycles used for reconnaissance. They requested the rebuilding of their ruined home, first for his grandfather; later, his widows. Nothing came of it, Kisitu says.

“I only managed to get their medals of honour,” he says, showing two gold medals adorned with the images of hands breaking chains and the words “People’s Resistance Struggle” on the back. That was in 2015, a decade and a half after his father and grandfather died.

It was this neglect of veterans that drove Kisitu to support independent opposition MP Bobi Wine and his People Power movement. Wine’s followers, including Kisitu, adopted Wine’s red beret as their symbol.

That set off the chain of events that had him flee to Canada.

He was coming home to his village from working in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, with his red beret. “A taxi had just dropped me off,” he says, when two armed men grabbed him, tied him to a tree and beat him, according to his refugee claim.

He says what started with them asking what he was thinking talking to veterans about politics ended with them dumping him in the neighbour’s coffee plantation overnight. He was discovered the next morning by a villager fetching water from the well, who hired a boda boda, a Ugandan motorcycle-taxi, to take him to the hospital.

When he heard that men started coming to his house in the village asking about him, he decided to sell his family land to secure a Canadian visa and airfare to Toronto.

Like his involvement in local politics, the drive to help the average Ugandan wasn’t something Kisitu left in Africa. He volunteered to be the secretary of the first province-wide Ugandan town hall meeting in mid-November, where topics ranged from insurance coverage to managing credit to affordable housing to continuing education.

Fred Kinene, who organized the town hall, estimates that the Ugandan population has “grown about 30 per cent in the last 10 years” across the GTA. “There’s no community, nothing. It’s so spread out,” he says.

Uniting the Ugandan diaspora is a major challenge, Kinene says, because not only are the migrants spread out, there are other dividing factors: “Some of us are Christian, some of us are Muslim. Some of us support People Power, some Forum for Democratic Change, some of us support the government.”

To Kisitu, those divides are real. “The Forum for Democratic Change has been the leading opposition party for nearly 20 years. We’ve gathered enough facts to lose our trust in them,” he says. “When I see members of the Forum for Democratic change, I’m concerned that they’re spies for the government.”

“I just remember that we’re all Ugandans and that we all want change.”