In George Seremba's remarkable story of survival, he plays the roles of the men who wanted to kill him, writes Paddy Woodworth

In 1988, eight years after he came back from the dead, George Seremba went with his mother to visit the villagers who had assisted his unlikely resurrection.

"You must listen to these people, you are the only one they have seen come out of that forest alive, you are their adopted son," his mother told him. So he listened, and the villagers asked: "You act in films, you are in the theatre, how come as a writer you have never told your own story?"

That night, as he lay in bed in the security of the village, he heard the rain begin to fall, just as it had fallen on the night he faced execution by a Ugandan army death squad.

"And I began to think, 'well, the people here have kind of commissioned me to write a play, but how can I put it in context?'"

He certainly faced a most unusual aesthetic dilemma: how do you stage events which, no matter how authentic they are, are so utterly incredible that the most shameless writer of melodrama would hesitate to invent them? He found the answer in a childhood memory.

He was fortunate enough to grow up in a family with a strong tradition of story-telling.

"My mum relished this tradition, and so did many of my relatives. And these people would tell beautiful stories and they would play every character, and almost invariably there would be a song and almost invariably there would be a dance as well."

Seremba himself stepped into this "magic circle of storytellers, a great responsibility", when he was nine years old. The story he chose to make his debut features that favourite monster of children's fairy tales, the evil stepmother.

In this case the stepmother cannot abide the beauty of her stepdaughter, and leaves her, in a strange premonition of Seremba's own fate, to die in the forest at night.

Thinking back on the night he nearly died, he remembered the words of the little girl in the story: "Will the forest be my perpetual prison? Perhaps all I can do is sing."

Seremba's terrifying and marvellous play, Come Good Rain, sprang from that intuition, and is framed, at the start and at the conclusion, with this ambiguous childhood story of cruelty and survival.

It is a play in which Seremba plays all the roles, including those of the soldiers who torture him and attempt to kill him. Recalling the process of writing the play, he slips almost imperceptibly into recounting memories of the experience it represents. "I could hardly move because of all the wounds, I could barely even crawl."

Seremba had fallen foul of a section of the Ugandan army loyal to Milton Obote, the dictator who had been overthrown by the equally murderous Idi Amin. In 1980, Obote was poised to return to power, after elections whose results were rigged by his military backers.

The playwright had recently graduated from Makerere University in Kampala, where he had already made a name for himself as an actor, a poet, and, perhaps more than he himself realised, as a political activist. During the violent and uncertain interregnum between Amin's fall and Obote's second dictatorship, Seremba had sought refuge in Kenya.

In Kenya, he worked for Robert Serumaga, whom he regards as the most important Ugandan playwright since independence.

Ugandan theatre had, oddly enough, enjoyed what Seremba describes as a "golden age" in the early part of the Amin period. However, Serumaga had felt that the pen was not a powerful enough weapon under the appalling conditions of the regime, and had espoused armed opposition to the dictatorship.

He was equally opposed to the return of Obote. Seremba broadly agreed with his politics, but insists that he was not a member of any armed group, and simply worked in a secretarial capacity for Serumaga in Nairobi.

"I just wanted a little bit of freedom, for people to be able to register, to vote, so that those who won with guns would not be those who ruled us."

Serumaga died, in suspicious circumstances, in September 1980. As the situation inside Uganda worsened, Seremba decided that his only opportunity to visit home, and to pick up papers he needed from the university, would be during the Christmas rush.

He knew he was taking a risk, but he convinced himself that a short term in prison was the worst risk he faced. He had no idea how inflated his reputation as a dissident had become.

As he walked across the university campus in Kampala on the evening of December 10th, he saw many military vehicles, and soldiers knocking on doors, "but it genuinely never struck me that the person they were looking for was me".

Even after he was arrested, and the beatings began, he still did not realise how bad his situation was. But when he was brought before Obote's senior military commander, he realised he had to prepare for the worst.

It seems the soldiers thought he had been trained as a commando by the Israelis, who were greatly feared in Uganda because of the spectacular success of their raid on a hijacked plane in Entebbe in the Amin period.

The interrogations were "ritualistic and sadistic", but he refused to give any names. Then his captors drove him to Namanve Forest, a notorious killing ground. He focused his energy, not on escaping or surviving, but simply in trying to ensure that his family would be able to find his body.

"I had seen too many mothers going from morgue to morgue, or going to mass graves to see if their loved ones were in there. I did not want that to happen to my mum. I also felt it was important that the soldiers should remember at least this one time, even when they were shooting me, that this was someone who defied them. I wanted them to remember the look in my eyes at them, even as they shot.

"There was still also perhaps some little hope that if I looked at them maybe some spark of humanity would be left in them, but obviously that wasn't going to happen. There was one soldier who was almost friendly, but he was the one who had the most lethal weapon, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher."

Oddly enough, it was probably this weapon which saved his life. The other soldiers began firing single shots, aiming to wound and humiliate him, and hitting him five times. But then a grenade was fired, and the blast blew him back into the forest. He rolled with the impact, and found himself in a muddy ditch.

Night had fallen, and the soldiers could no longer see him. Several bursts of automatic fire followed, and they left, assuming he was dead or dying. It was an assumption Seremba himself shared for the next few hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. Rain fell, and the drop in temperature increased his chances of survival. As he came to, he found it hard, even painful, to accept that he was alive. "I had had time to prepare to go, and coming back was more difficult."

It was then that a little boy from the nearby village found him. At great risk to themselves, the villagers contacted his family, who found him emergency medical aid for his wounds, all of which turned out to be superficial.

He escaped to Kenya, and with vital help from Amnesty International, was eventually given asylum in Canada. Since then he has enjoyed a successful career as a playwright and actor, both in Toronto and in Ireland, where he is currently working on a PhD in drama studies at Trinity College, where one of the people he most admires, Robert Serumaga, was a student in the 1960s.

• Come Good Rain previews at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin at 8pm tonight, and opens tomorrow night.

 Talking politics Seremba shares his views

On racism in Ireland: "Well, I've been on the receiving end, it is obviously sad, the only positive thing is that if I had any illusions, any idealistic notions of Ireland, they are out the window. I have experienced it five or six times, been spat on and so on. In the Celtic Tiger people do feel threatened by difference. And after the referendum [on citizenship] those people are more reckless, more brazen in saying racist things."

On deporting asylum seekers: "When I do the play now I can't stop thinking about those folks on that plane, because in many ways they are me; I could have been them. To think that you had to flee the political inferno in your own country and suddenly you find you are an asylum seeker, an unwanted vulture, worse than a robber, worse than a rapist maybe."

On Africa's troubles today: "I think it would be awful for Africa not to be judged as harshly as anywhere else. But the healthy attitude is to recognise there are good stories out of Africa too. Look at Botswana with such a free press, look at the Ugandan economy today. And how long did it take Europe to develop democracy?"

On a writer's role in politics: "I see my job as critiquing even those I support."