Grappling With the Truth: Uganda’s Amateur Wrestling ‘Orphans’

This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.

Thirty-five-year-old Ugandan Daniel Bumba, known to his friends as ‘Bumbash,’ has always loved wrestling. In fact, he loves it so much, he’s spent the best part of a decade commentating on WWE matches online, relaying faraway, razzle-dazzle bouts to Ugandan wrestling fans in their native tongue. “I always dreamed of becoming a wrestler, but didn’t have the funds,” Bumbash explains. Eventually, though, he found another way in. Maybe if he knew the aggro it would cause, he wouldn’t have bothered.

In 2023, Bumbash set up Soft Ground Wrestling (SGW), his very own promotion. Bumbash didn’t have a ring when he started, so he made one out of bamboo, rope, and mud, in a field beside a forest a short drive from Uganda’s capital, Kampala. He didn’t have any actual training either, but that didn’t matter; he’d watched a ton of matches over the years and reckoned he’d sussed out a few things. Any moves he couldn’t decipher himself, he’d simply look up online. Now, he just needed some warriors.

“I managed to call upon a group of youths who wanted to come together to learn professional wrestling,” Bumbash says during a video call with VICE, claiming he’s now coached over 120 wannabe pro wrestlers. “Most of the people who turned up were orphans. Their parents passed away due to things like HIV, conflict, accidents, too much responsibility, and trauma.”

It’s at this point that things start to get murky. As the wider world has started paying attention to SGW, greater scrutiny has fallen on some of Bumbash’s more outlandish pronouncements and operational practices. One unnamed source within SGW allegedly told reporters that the orphans story is “largely a myth.” Bumbash once said that a contract had been signed for SGW matches to be aired on Uganda’s NBS TV network; this has also been dismissed as a fib.

Then there’s the money stuff. After seeing SGW fights online, a teenager in the U.S. set up a crowdfunder to help Bumbash pay for a proper wrestling ring. Yet the campaign stalled amid accusations that threats, harassment, and abuse had been aimed at the well-meaning schoolchild, some of which (fairly conclusively) seem to have come from Bumbash himself.

When the money did eventually arrive, Bumbash claimed that so much had been spent on taxes, transportation, and bank charges, there wasn’t enough left over to build the ring. Another set of donations—this time totaling around $30,000—was raised and sent across to Uganda. Yet months later, SGW still didn’t appear to have a proper wrestling ring. No one really seemed sure what the money was spent on. There’s little point beating around the bush: numerous parties, including the writers of a 6,895-word exposé with 25 separate footnotes and citations, have basically accused Bumbash of embezzling it.

“I bought everything the money was meant for!” Bumbash says, defiantly. “Embezzling funds is a myth. People want news.” He then sends photographs purporting to show the ring and a van he’d bought with donations. “The ring is here, the van is here,” he says. “We have beds. Soft Ground is here to stay. We have an office. We have a food store. We do not beg people for money.” On the orphan thing, Bumbash insists that “60 percent of the kids” have lost at least one parent, adding that he will sue Ugandan newspaper the Observer for propagating claims originally reported by U.S. website BodySlam.net without “clear evidence.”

As far as responses go, it’s bullish. But is it true? Frankly, who knows. Just before going to print, Bumbash sent through pictures of what he says are the receipts for the purchases of the ring and the van. Either way, wrestling is all about the ability to spin a yarn, and there can be no doubting the bombast of Bumbash.

One storyline he dreamed up was a child abuse narrative that saw two wrestlers facing off to determine which of them would get custody of a real baby that was paraded around in front of crowds. In another, a wrestler playing Jesus was beaten to death with a chair, along with ‘Lord White,’ a despicable British heel who’d come to Uganda to re-colonize it, uniting the whole of SGW’s domestic contingent against him. (Bumbash has since fallen out with Lord White, who he accuses of masterminding the plot to spread rumors about the ‘missing’ donations.)

Whatever the truth behind the controversies, the SGW boom is continuing across social media, and the dream for a number of these wrestlers remains the same: for their skill to one day take them to the U.S. and the WWE.

Let’s meet some of them. Bumbash will do most of the talking.

RANGO

“Rango is a diabolical evil genius, who wears the ancient dress of Ugandan leaders,” explains Bumbash. For all his big talk, Rango doesn’t normally do the fighting—instead, he leaves that to his boys: Iron Yo, Odondgo, and Akram. “He also has two or three evil parasites on him that are trying to feast on everyone at Soft Ground Wrestling.” VICE asks Bumbash if he means that Rango is literally infected with invisible airborne monsters that are hell-bent on spreading themselves to other wrestlers and audience members. “Yes, of course,” he replies.

Rango has lived at SGW for six months. Before he was a wrestler, he was a shop attendant.

SANJUKI

“Rango believes he is a destroyer who can dismantle anyone in the ring. But Rango was recently conquered by Sanjuki,” says Bumbash, adding that Rango’s 22-year-old nemesis is a babyface, not a heel, so he “doesn’t have bad manners. He dresses like a night dancer. In Uganda, they perform rituals when someone is asleep to curse them. He wears banana fibers.”

Sanjuki, says Bumbash, is an orphan. Before he joined SGW, he worked on a farm.

MR LOVER LOVER

Mysteriously AWOL on the day of the VICE shoot, we couldn’t bear to leave out Sanjuki’s 24-year-old “grandson,” Mr Lover Lover, who is somehow both older than him and a total man-mountain. He’s a newer face in SGW, yet has already developed an insatiable personal vendetta against Rango that sees him constantly challenging the heel for his belt. A video of Mr Lover Lover manhandling Rango’s trio of hapless lackeys has over 150k views on Instagram. “He’s a savage that we’ve unleashed onto the battleground,” Bumbash smiles.

Away from the hallowed soil of SGW, Mr Lover Lover is a bodybuilder, fitness trainer, and social media influencer, with 1.9 million followers on Instagram and 3 million on TikTok.

HAMIS DIAMOND

Hamis Diamond and Meshe Williams do not get on, to the point where they’re willing to break the rules to torment each other. Meshe even hijacked one of Hamis’ recent fights and made himself a special guest referee, taking a phone call while Diamond had his opponent pinned, refusing to give him the win. Diamond responded with some instant payback, tossing Williams around the ring like a pack of sausages, before eventually launching him into a mud puddle.

Diamond says he’s loved wrestling for 11 years. He was a bouncer at a local nightclub before he joined SGW.

ZAMPI

“We call her a dark-skinned dynamo,” Bumbash says of Zampi, another baby face wrestler who wears a black swimming costume when she wrestles. She recently lost to arch rival Lipanda, “a short woman who believes she can beat up big women.”

Zampi’s been at SGW for three months and was a housemaid before she joined. “Her dream is to become one of the most prominent female wrestlers in Uganda,” Bumbash says.

COOLMAN

“Coolman is a refurbished beast. He wants to remove all elements of jokery and mockery in this kind of professional wrestling,” says Bumbash, who insists the 26-year-old is also “absolutely a good guy.” Coolman likes to interact with the crowd, challenging them to fight him; he wears sweatpants and his favorite move is something called the Burning Thorn Punch.

He’s been with SGW for a year. At his day job, he sells construction materials.

Bumbash is raising funds to purchase the four-acre site Soft Ground Wrestling is currently renting. You can donate here.

This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.

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