John Ruganda is Uganda's best-known playwright and one of East and Central Africa's leading dramatists. Among his published plays, The Burdens (1972) and The Floods (1980) have been used regularly as required texts in the ordinary and advanced level syllabi of the Literature in English courses in Kenya and Uganda. Virtually all of his plays are studied in universities and other institutions of higher learning in East and Central Africa.

Since the early 1970s, Ruganda has featured prominently on the East African theater scene not only as a playwright but also as a stage director, actor, and teacher of drama and theater arts at various institutions of learning. He was one of the founding members of the Makerere Free Travelling Theatre and was elected its chief organizer in 1966. In 1971 Ruganda was instrumental in the establishment of the Makonde Group, an amateur theater company that performed plays in local languages all...