The masque of Africa : glimpses of African belief.
by V. S. Naipaul.
CHAPTER 1.
The Tomb at Kasubi.
I SPENT SPENT eight to nine months in East Africa in 1966. A month in Tanzania; six weeks or so in the Kenya Highlands; the rest of the time in Uganda. Some years later I even used a version of Uganda in a piece of fiction; you can do that only when you feel you have a fair idea of a place, or an idea sufficient for your needs. Forty-two years after that first visit I went back to Uganda. I was hoping to get started there on this book about the nature of African belief, and I thought it would be better to ease myself into my subject in a country I knew or half knew. But I found the place eluding me. eight to nine months in East Africa in 1966. A month in Tanzania; six weeks or so in the Kenya Highlands; the rest of the time in Uganda. Some years later I even used a version of Uganda in a piece of fiction; you can do that only when you feel you have a fair idea of a place, or an idea sufficient for your needs. Forty-two years after that first visit I went back to Uganda. I was hoping to get started there on this book about the nature of African belief, and I thought it would be better to ease myself into my subject in a country I knew or half knew. But I found the place eluding me.
I had gone to Uganda in 1966 to be a writer in residence at Makerere University in Kampala, the capital. I lived in a little grey bungalow on the campus, which was s.p.a.cious and open and well-tended, with asphalted roads with kerbstones, and watchmen at the barred entrance. My allowance (provided by an American foundation) was enough to give me a driver and a cook. My duties weren"t too well defined, and I was living more or less privately, absorbed in a book I had brought with me, working hard on it every day, and paying less attention to Africa and the students at Makerere than I should have done. When I wanted some relief from the book and the campus, I would drive the fifteen or so miles to Entebbe, where the airport was and where, on the edge of Lake Victoria, which was very grand, the largest lake in Africa, there was also (as there was in other British colonial towns) a Botanical Garden, pleasant to walk in. Sometimes (a reminder of the wildness by which we were surrounded, but from which we were protected) the ground of the Garden was flooded in parts by water from the Lake seeping through.
The drive from Kampala to Entebbe was a drive through country; that was part of its restfulness in 1966. It was different now. You could see from the air, as the plane landed, how Entebbe itself had grown, with more than a scattering of villages or settlements far and wide on the damp green ground below the heavy grey clouds of the rainy season; and you understood that what was once bush in an unimportant area of a small colony had become valuable building land. The shiny new corrugated-iron roofs gave you the feeling that in spite of the bad recent past, forty years as bad as anything in Africa-murderous tyranny followed by war and little wars-there might be a money frenzy down there now.
The drive to the capital was no longer a drive through country. Once you got past the old administrative and residential buildings of colonial Entebbe, still somehow surviving (red corrugated-iron roofs and white-painted bargeboards still in good order), you found yourself in an improvised semi-urban development, flimsy-looking, where many of the buildings that had been put up (groceries, garages, flats) seemed only waiting to be pulled down, and in the meantime were bright, and repet.i.tive, with painted walls advertising mobile phones.
It was like that all the way to the capital. There was no view at some stage of the city and the green hills for which Kampala used to be famous. All those hills were now built over; and many of the s.p.a.ces between the hills, the dips, were seemingly floored over with the old corrugated iron of poor dwellings. But with all these dwellings there had come money and cars and, for people who didn"t have the money, the boda-bodas boda-bodas, the bicycles and motorbikes that for a small sum offered you a fast pillion-ride through the stalled traffic, a pillion-ride which in colonial days might have been illegal. The roads couldn"t deal with the traffic; even in this rainy season the roads were dusty, scuffed down beyond the asphalt to the fertile red earth of Uganda. I couldn"t recognise this Kampala, and even at this early stage it seemed to me that I was in a place where a calamity had occurred.
Later I got the figures for population. They told the story. In 1966 there were about five million people in Uganda. Now-in spite of the rule between 1971 and 1979 of Idi Amin (who was said to have killed 150,000) and the comparable rule between 1981 and 1985 of the feral Milton Obote, who liked his hair to slope up high from the parting, in a version of the style known here as the English style; in spite of those two, and all the subsequent little wars, still going on after forty years (a million and a half people said to be displaced in the north); and in spite of the AIDS epidemic-there were between thirty and thirty-four million people in Uganda. As though Nature, going against logic, wished to outdo itself, to make up for the blood Uganda had lost and didn"t want the little country and its great suffering to fade away.
There was a mosque or church at the top of every hill, and major ecclesiastical buildings everywhere else. All the Christian denominations were represented. And in the over-built-up poorer areas there were simpler "born-again" Christian structures, sometimes fancifully named, with signboards: as though religion here was like a business that met a desperate consumer need at all levels. There were competing mosques of various sorts, Sunni, Shia, Ismaili; the Ismaili community, considered heretical by some, was powerful in East Africa. There was even a mosque and a school of the Ahmadiya sect, which honoured a nineteenth-century Indian-born prophet of Islam and was not accepted by all Muslims. To add to the mix, Brother Leader Ghaddafi of Libya was due in a few days, with his stylish clothes and dark gla.s.ses, and with his famous female bodyguard (in addition to his two hundred security men), to open a very big Libyan mosque on a prominent hill site in old Kampala. In the commercial area of the town there were two newish Indian stone temples near the Indian places of business. The Indians had been invited back after their expulsion by Amin; and they had come back to an ambiguous welcome: a local paper was wondering whether they had been compensated twice, and asking its readers to comment. So the red flags flew on the stone temples, to say that the temples were in use.
Until the 1840s Uganda had been isolated, living with itself. Then Arab traders had arrived from the east. They wanted slaves and ivory; in return they gave cheap guns and what in effect were toys. The Kabaka Sunna, known for his great cruelty, had welcomed the Arabs. He liked their toys. He especially liked the mirrors; he had never seen his face before, and couldn"t get over it. It was Sunna"s son and successor, Mutesa, who in 1861-2 met and entertained and for some months frustrated the explorer John Hanning Speke, who was within days of discovering the source of the Nile.
Mutesa was only twenty-five, almost as cruel as his father, but at the same time outward-looking, a man of intuition and intelligence. He liked the guns he got from Speke; he liked the compa.s.s and other instruments he saw Speke using. But Mutesa"s Baganda people, with their gift for social organisation, their military discipline, and their elaborate court ritual, evolved over some centuries, had a civilisation of their own. They built roads as straight as Roman roads; they had a high idea of sanitation; they had a fleet on Lake Victoria, with an admiral and naval techniques of their own, and they could launch invasions of Busoga across the Nile. They worked iron and made their own spears and knives; they knew how to make bark-cloth and were beautiful builders of gra.s.s houses-with roofs as neatly trimmed as though by a London tailor, Speke thought. Knowing that his people could do all these things, Mutesa arrived, quite marvellously, at the idea that the true difference between himself and Speke, very much a Victorian Christian, always ready to preach to the heathen, was philosophical and religious. Mutesa turned against Islam, which he had partly adopted; he said the Arabs were liars; and thirteen years later, when he met the explorer H. M. Stanley, he asked his help in getting English missionaries to come to Uganda.
The fruit of that decision of a hundred and thirty years before could now be seen in Kampala. Foreign religion, to go by the competing ecclesiastical buildings on the hilltops, was like an applied and contagious illness, curing nothing, giving no final answers, keeping everyone in a state of nerves, fighting wrong battles, narrowing the mind. And it was possible to wonder whether Mutesa himself, if he could come back, mightn"t have thought that he had made a mistake, and that Africa, left to itself in this matter, might have arrived at its own more valuable synthesis of old and new.
Why had the foreign-revealed religions wrought such havoc with African belief? These foreign religions had a difficult theology; I didn"t think it would have been easy, starting from scratch, to put it across to someone here. I asked Prince Ka.s.sim. He was a direct descendant of Mutesa, but on the Islamic side, a family division that reflected Mutesa"s early half-conversion to Islam. The prince said I was wrong. Both Christianity and Islam would have been attractive to Africans for a simple reason. They both offered an afterlife; gave people a vision of themselves living on after death. African religion, on the other hand, was more airy, offering only the world of spirits, and the ancestors.
2.
I THOUGHT THOUGHT I should go looking for my old bungalow. I had planted a tulip tree (bought at the Entebbe Botanical Garden) in the garden, and at the back of my head at the time was the idea that for one reason or another I might come back to Kampala one day and it might be good then to see how the tree had done. But the Makerere campus was not recognisable. It seemed to me that it had become part of the crowded dusty town. A letter in the local paper saying that university fences had been knocked down and not replaced appeared to confirm what I felt. But then I heard from a lecturer that in spite of the up-and-down history of the place (a vice-chancellor killed in the Idi Amin time, and other senior people jailed and beaten up) certain records, including staff housing, were intact. It was stated there that in 1966 I had lived at 80 Kasubi View. I should go looking for my old bungalow. I had planted a tulip tree (bought at the Entebbe Botanical Garden) in the garden, and at the back of my head at the time was the idea that for one reason or another I might come back to Kampala one day and it might be good then to see how the tree had done. But the Makerere campus was not recognisable. It seemed to me that it had become part of the crowded dusty town. A letter in the local paper saying that university fences had been knocked down and not replaced appeared to confirm what I felt. But then I heard from a lecturer that in spite of the up-and-down history of the place (a vice-chancellor killed in the Idi Amin time, and other senior people jailed and beaten up) certain records, including staff housing, were intact. It was stated there that in 1966 I had lived at 80 Kasubi View.
The name of the road rang a bell, but I wasn"t sure about the number; and when I was taken to the bungalow, which was ragged with decay, I felt I hadn"t lived there at all. I think that the house might have been selected for me because a big tree in the garden had been cut down a while before and the stump remained. I was taken to look at the stump, but I didn"t know what a tulip-tree stump would look like, and no one in my party knew either. But the setting was wrong. My memory of my bungalow and garden was a memory of openness. This was dark and enclosed. The ground fell away at the side, and there was a moraine of garbage where the ground fell away.
There was trouble about garbage in Makerere; it didn"t seem to be collected regularly. Here and there on the busy paths or walkways marabout storks, undisturbed by the pa.s.sage of students, were pecking with their long beaks at broken bundles of garbage. (Speke calls these birds adjutants, and with their big wings folded and their long, thin, yellow legs they did have an official appearance, long-coated and hunched and a.s.sessing.) These magnificent birds had become scavengers here, and the garbage they fed on seemed to discolour and deform their faces, giving them ugly, pendent growths. They had now to live with their deformities, for which Nature was not responsible. It was sad to see, and sad, too, for the students: they were crowded together in mildewed halls and dormitories hung with sagging lines of laundry; and, outside, they lived helplessly amid garbage. It would have gone against their instinct. Speke, a hundred and forty years before, wrote with admiration of the Ugandans" concern for sanitation.
It seemed here that everything was working against the university and the idea of learning. And, again, figures told the story. In 1966 there were about four thousand students. Now there were thirty thousand. The main road to where in the old days I remembered a barred entrance was like a busy shopping street. Choked Kampala lay just outside.
There were at least two murders (by outsiders of outsiders) in the Makerere campus while I was in Kampala. In the first incident a young Pakistani car salesman was lured to the campus by bogus customers who said they wanted a trial drive. That would have seemed safe enough to anyone, but as soon as the car was in the campus the salesman was garrotted by a man sitting in the back, and knifed in the neck until he died. In the second incident a security guard, of all people, was killed in the early morning as he tried to rob a boda-boda boda-boda pa.s.senger. pa.s.senger.
Kasubi View, where I was told I had lived, would at some time have given a view of the 1884 tomb of Mutesa I, hill looking to hill across the city. The city was too built up now to give this view. I don"t think I had seen it even in 1966. Busy with my book, following the local situation with only half a mind, thinking that I had all the time in the world for local events and local sightseeing, never imagining that in pacific Kampala there would be army trucks on the streets, I had put Kasubi off until it was too late. I had been given a letter of introduction to the Kabaka, Sir Frederick Mutesa, otherwise Mutesa II. But I had not sent it till March. I got a civil reply-amazing in the circ.u.mstances-but then it was too late.
Obote, the prime minister, had sent in the army (under Amin) against the almost defenceless palace of the Kabaka. Most people thought that something so sacrilegious-the offering of violence to a man who was more than an African king, was an embodiment of the soul of his people-would never have happened. Somehow the Kabaka had managed to get away. He found a terrible kind of pauper"s sanctuary in England, painful for a kabaka, and died there three years later in 1969 at the age of forty-five. His tragedy and especially his early death is still mourned by some people in Uganda. (Though Sunna died at forty, and Mutesa I at forty-eight.) Near the end of my time in East Africa in 1966 I went to see the Kasubi tombs, where (at that time) two kabakas were buried. I have no memory of going to look at the Kabaka"s palace; I suppose it was still out of bounds. And I have only a vague memory of the tombs. I suppose there was still a discouraging army presence. I stayed only a short time, and (I imagine) was not allowed to see inside. But what I saw in those hurried moments stayed with me, becoming more and more magical over the years: a round gra.s.s structure, beautifully proportioned, with a high conical roof taller than anything I had seen in gra.s.s, the gra.s.s very fine, the eaves beautifully trimmed: an African fairyland.
Now at last I was given the chance to see more.
Kasubi had become a UNESCO heritage site. There was a little office outside the sacred area. We picked up a guide there, or perhaps we were picked up by him. Immediately within the site itself there was a gra.s.s gatehouse. It was dark, with wooden pillars in two rows supporting the roof. The pillars were a surprise; I didn"t know that pillars below the gra.s.s dome were a feature of this architecture. Beyond the gatehouse, and to the left, was the drum hut. It was full of drums. Drums were sacred; each had its own sound and different drums were used for different occasions. But our guide didn"t show us the drums, and though he said he came from the drum-beating clan that served the Kabaka, he didn"t offer to give us a demonstration. He added that the Kabaka"s drum-beaters had to be castrated, since they were always about the Kabaka and were likely to gaze on the Kabaka"s women. This was said more to thrill us than anything else. He himself was not castrated.
From the gatehouse a paved path as straight as a Buganda road led through the brightness of bare ground to the main building and the darkness of the entrance there below the eaves that came down almost to the ground. All about the edge of this bare area were little huts, some rectangular, some round. These huts were for attendants who looked after the place and especially looked after the fire in the open yard which symbolised the Kabaka"s life. Why was the ground so bare here? Wouldn"t gra.s.s have been more welcoming? It was suggested that snakes were easier to see on bare ground.
Inside the tomb itself, on the left of the entrance, in the abrupt gloom, and not immediately noticeable, was an old woman sitting on a purple-striped raffia mat, one of many raffia mats just beyond the entrance, these raffia mats providing the only colour in this part of the tomb. The old woman was bundled up in a long blue-patterned dress of cotton, a little restless in limb, withdrawn, unseeing, as became a watcher in the tomb. She was considered a wife of the dead Kabaka, and as such was privileged. If, as might happen, the spirit of the dead king bestirred itself and wished to be served in any way, she was there for him. She had a collapsed old woman"s mouth, and was pale from her life away from light. She did this vigil for a month at a time; she handed over then to another old woman as privileged as herself.
Kabakas did not die. They disappeared, and went to the forest. The "forest" was just in front, in the inner part of the tomb, screened by brown bark-cloth, hanging down all the way from the top of the dome, like a fire curtain in a theatre. It was absolutely essential, in this kind of building, for everything to come from the local earth. Nothing was to be imported. The religious requirement made for a kind of unity, and a strange beauty. The dome was held up by wooden pillars, trimmed tree boughs, which didn"t conceal what they were, and by twenty-two circular beams made from tightly-bound reeds. Those twenty-two beams stood for the twenty-two clans of Buganda.
The burial of a Kabaka was not straightforward. It was hemmed in by rituals that would have come from the remote past (remote, since people without writing and books cannot remember beyond their grandparents or great-grandparents). The corpse of the king would have been dried over a slow fire for three months. Then the jawbone would have been detached and worked over with beads or cowries; this, together with the umbilical cord, also worked with beads, and the p.e.n.i.s and t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, in a pouch of animal skin, was what would have been buried here. The rest of the body, the unessential man, so to speak, would have been sent somewhere else; but this part of the ritual remained obscure. I could get no direct answer.
On a metal rack in front of the bark-cloth hiding the forest were the fearful spears of the great Mutesa, iron and bronze and bra.s.s, some of them truly imperial things, speaking of wealth and murder: gifts from the Arab merchants or obtained from them by barter. They were the only foreign things in the tomb. There was also a reproduction of Mutesa"s wide-eyed portrait; it was used everywhere in Kampala, though there was a more interesting and more regal one, based on a photograph by Stanley, in Through the Dark Continent Through the Dark Continent. The portrait of Mutesa, used here in the tomb, was unsigned and no one could tell me whether it was done in 1861-2 by Speke or Grant (both of whom were accomplished sketchers) or by someone who had come later. These were the things (though perhaps not the portrait, which might have been placed later) Mutesa wished to be remembered by.
The tomb was still a shrine, and important for that reason, one of the fifty-two shrines of the Baganda people. A shrine wasn"t a place for private meditation. It was a place where people could come to ask for boons. There were three baskets on the raffia mat before the spears and Mutesa"s portrait. You put money in a particular basket, depending on your need; perhaps then-but I didn"t find out-you might have a consultation with a diviner.
While, moved by wonder, I was considering things in the tomb-considering the relics of Mutesa that had been chosen for display, and the way the roof was made, and trying to think myself back to 1884-a little black-and-white kitten came in and tried to compose itself to sleep in front of the old lady. I thought the kitten might have belonged to the old lady or her family. It cheered me. Cats here are considered familiars of spirits, usually bad ones, and have a rough time. And then a st.u.r.dy little boy came from somewhere behind the old lady and began, casually, to kick the kitten, which got up and went somewhere else and tried again to sleep, until his tormentor came. I protested. The guide said something soothing about the boy and the kitten. Perhaps he said they were really friends. I didn"t believe him.
Some days later I was looking at a magazine programme on Uganda television. One of the items was about the Kasubi tombs. The woman presenter said-with a degree of ease, like someone only stating a fact about the monument-that nine men had been sacrificed at the time of the building. The guide hadn"t thought to tell us that. It cast a retrospective darkness over what I had seen: the bark-cloth screening the mythical forest where great rulers went to die, the pale old lady sitting on the raffia mat on the strangely uneven floor, waiting to be called. I couldn"t imagine, though, how the men would have been sacrificed; there was no picture in my head. So the magic survived.
But later, when I heard from Prince Ka.s.sim, Mutesa"s Muslim descendant, that in the old days human sacrifice was a common practice when they put up the pillars or laid the foundations of a tomb, I remembered the strangely uneven floor of Kasubi, covered by the raffia mats.
3.
WHEN S SPEKE went to Uganda in 1861 Mutesa was Kabaka, exercising the most despotic kind of power in his court, killing people "like fowls" (as a visitor said); and once-a difficult story-for no apparent reason taking his spear to his harem and killing women until his blood-l.u.s.t was sated. But Mutesa at that time had not yet been crowned. Preparations for his crowning took a year, and were going on all the time. Much of the ritual had to be secret. This may explain why Mutesa and his mother, fat and jolly when she was in the mood, gave Speke such a run-around, now friendly and welcoming and hospitable (Speke depended on them for food for his forty-five men), now distant, making him sit in the sun at the palace entrance for many hours. went to Uganda in 1861 Mutesa was Kabaka, exercising the most despotic kind of power in his court, killing people "like fowls" (as a visitor said); and once-a difficult story-for no apparent reason taking his spear to his harem and killing women until his blood-l.u.s.t was sated. But Mutesa at that time had not yet been crowned. Preparations for his crowning took a year, and were going on all the time. Much of the ritual had to be secret. This may explain why Mutesa and his mother, fat and jolly when she was in the mood, gave Speke such a run-around, now friendly and welcoming and hospitable (Speke depended on them for food for his forty-five men), now distant, making him sit in the sun at the palace entrance for many hours.
The most famous part of the crowning ritual was well known, and it concerned Mutesa"s mother. She had to get rid of Mutesa"s brothers, all but three, to do away with possible claimants to the throne. There were thirty brothers, and the ritual way of destroying them had to be by fire.
How was this done? We have a clue. Twenty-four years later, in 1886, Mutesa"s young and headstrong successor, Mw.a.n.ga, fed up with the troublesome new religions, ordered the burning of his twenty-two Christian pages. A proper martyrdom, it would seem, as good as anything in old Christian iconography, though the church was very young: it was something to be cherished, and the Uganda church has made the most of its early misfortune. There are a number of secondary schools at the site, so the place is always busy. There is also a modern cone-shaped church, architecturally adventurous (in the oil-refinery style), that by its shape suggests a bonfire, and has other symbolism: so many exposed beams on the roof, like sticks on the bonfire, standing for so many martyrs. And, as though this was not enough, a big painted board in front of the church shows pa.s.sers-by how the pages were burned in 1886.
The pages, in white gowns falling off the right shoulder, were first clubbed or scourged by the palace executioners, and slashed with machetes. Seven executioners are shown, including one who has gone down on one knee and is using a long pole, like a baker"s shovel, to keep the fire going. The executioners are all in brown cloth hanging from the left shoulder; this cloth is almost certainly bark-cloth, which is official and religious and correct wear. In the foreground an executioner, wielding a blade, and making room for himself for another blow, pulls hard at the left wrist of a page, whose white gown is already stained with blood spurting from a bad wound on his left arm. The page has his back to us, and he already has both knees on the ground. He turns to look at the executioner, as if in complaint, (though as a court page he would have prepared many for brutal execution), and the fingers of his left hand are widely separated: this involuntary gesture is the only sign of pain in the painting.
After their roughing-up the pages would have been wrapped in reed mats from neck to toe-and the painted board (only as good as the artist, after all) for some reason appears to show this as a kind of delicate attention by the executioners, as though the pages were being tucked in for the night-before being thrown into the bonfire with their fellows, where in an unsettling matter-of-fact way, amid the flames and smoke the artist shows an exposed face at the end of each rigid, rolled-up mat.
Mutesa"s brothers were princes, sons of Kabaka Sunna. The Buganda tradition was that the blood of princes was not something that could be spilt; this was a religious prohibition; so there could be no clubbing or slashing for them. They could only be burned-in reed mats no doubt. This was their fate; this was what Mutesa"s mother had to arrange. In the meantime they went around with Mutesa; they often played music together, flute, lyre, marimba and drum. Once Mutesa took them all up to the top of a hill to show them the extent of his kingdom. Unless you knew what was going to happen you might miss the drama in Speke"s pages. This being together with his brothers was Mutesa"s way and Mutesa"s mother"s way of controlling the brothers, potential claimants to the throne, and keeping them away from dangerous intrigue. Speke mentions only once that during a music-playing session half the brothers were manacled.
A good story, though, has come down to us from this part of the grisly ritual. Mutesa and his mother must be imagined discussing who to burn next. Mutesa"s mother speaks a name, but then Mutesa says, "I like that man." So the man in question is spared: he was the great-grandfather of Prince Ka.s.sim, who told this story.
4.
THERE WAS another piece of the coronation preparation that Speke witnessed. The woman who cut Mutesa"s umbilical cord was now a figure of honour in the court. She was a kind of diviner. For the coronation she had a special mission. She had to go to the tomb of Sunna, Mutesa"s father, and study how certain herbs and plants (perhaps planted by her) had grown. According to what she found, Mutesa after his coronation would either stay quiet in his palace or make war on his neighbours. Mutesa made war. It suited his temperament; but at the same time he was in tune with the spirits he served; he would never have been totally free, acting on his own. The Romans, the Roman historian Livy said at the beginning of his great history of Rome, were successful because they were the most religious people in the world; they always acted after consulting the G.o.ds. Mutesa could say the same for himself. another piece of the coronation preparation that Speke witnessed. The woman who cut Mutesa"s umbilical cord was now a figure of honour in the court. She was a kind of diviner. For the coronation she had a special mission. She had to go to the tomb of Sunna, Mutesa"s father, and study how certain herbs and plants (perhaps planted by her) had grown. According to what she found, Mutesa after his coronation would either stay quiet in his palace or make war on his neighbours. Mutesa made war. It suited his temperament; but at the same time he was in tune with the spirits he served; he would never have been totally free, acting on his own. The Romans, the Roman historian Livy said at the beginning of his great history of Rome, were successful because they were the most religious people in the world; they always acted after consulting the G.o.ds. Mutesa could say the same for himself.
Modern Kampala does not always follow the layout of the old city. Sunna"s tomb is close to Mutesa"s in Kasubi, but it has to be approached in a more roundabout way. Speke, walking in the neighbourhood of Mutesa"s palace one day, came across Sunna"s palace. He looked away, because it didn"t do to look too closely at the palace even of a dead king. Sunna"s tomb would have been near that palace. The place is called Wamala, which means "far enough." The story is that was what Sunna exclaimed when he chose the spot for his tomb. And, indeed, today you need to know where to look. The taxi-drivers don"t always know; they a.s.sume you want Kasubi.
Sunna would have been pained. He was a fearful warrior who built for eternity; he wished his name to go down; he established the pattern for Kasubi. But gra.s.s is gra.s.s and, only one hundred and fifty years after his death, much of him has disappeared. His tomb is in great disrepair. Prince Ka.s.sim thinks it is a disgrace to the Buganda royal family; and other people think it is a loss to the culture of Uganda, where there is already so little.
To go to Wamala you have to go down one of the straight Buganda roads to the edge of Kampala, the city that spreads and spreads. The driver says at a certain stage that it is better for us to leave the asphalt road and take a shortcut: this is a red dirt road, and on this morning it is raining. The dirt of the road is holding, but the water has begun to lodge in the fields of coa.r.s.e gra.s.s on either side. This is a land of water. If the rain doesn"t stop, a flood seems likely, and it may wash away the red road. That will be a profitless adventure; but we can only go on, and the driver is game.
We turn off into another red road, narrow and twisting. It seems we are asking for trouble. But, happily, the driver is right. We are near the tomb now, but nothing announces it. There is no barred entrance, no gatehouse, no reed fences, no young men offering their services as guides. The bush begins to seem ordinary: no romance, no history, seems possible in that wet red earth.
And then we are there, driving right up to a tomb which is like a smaller Kasubi, but with a broken roof, great thick sheaves of old gra.s.s slipping here and there, and with a bright-green vine threading its way through the gra.s.s and looking like moss. We might have come to the abandoned barn of a ruined farm. Magic and wonder might one day be restored; but they are not here now. There is no well-defined yard, no small huts, round or rectangular, for attendants; no attendants; no gatehouse, no drum-house. There is a rectangular grey wooden shed at one side of the lot. It is of modern carpentry, with no religious feel, and out of keeping with the style of the tomb. It must serve some purpose, but there is no one I can ask. I know, without going into the tomb, that there will be no old lady waiting, after a hundred and fifty years, for the spirit of the dead king to request some service. There isn"t the money for that now: and it is strange that rituals which would once have seemed necessary and vital, serving what was divine, beyond money, have to be disregarded when there is no money.
Mutesa"s tomb at Kasubi was level with the earth. His father"s here is on a platform two feet high. Concrete steps take you up and the slipping thatch touches your head. The steps might be modern, but the platform would almost certainly have been created with the foundations and the sacrifices. Inside now, past the thatch, is darkness and desolation, though to the left and right sections of the roof have fallen away and the grey light of the rainy day comes in. It takes a little while to pick out details. There are the two rows of pillars supporting the domed roof, the royal style. To the left, below the missing thatch, is a modern brick wall, no doubt to provide support for the roof and also perhaps, in a remnant of old belief, to hide the "forest" where Kabakas go when they die. The bricks of the wall, being of local earth, would just have been religiously acceptable; but the mortar, made of imported cement, wouldn"t have been right. But ideas of right and wrong, important in 1860, when Sunna died, no longer mattered here, where there was chaos.
For three months after his death (from smallpox) devoted old women would have lovingly dried Kabaka Sunna"s body over a slow fire. Where were the precious parts of that body-the umbilical cord, worked over with beads or cowries, the jawbone similarly treated, the p.e.n.i.s and t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es in a sack of animal skin? Had they been buried here, as they should have been, to save them from violation, to prevent other people from misusing the extraordinary powers of the Kabaka? Did the brick wall hide the relics, or were they hidden in the grey wooden shed outside?
There was still royal symbolism in what survived of the structure. Tightly wrapped reeds served as circular rafters below the dome, each rafter standing for one of the clans of the Baganda. But below this proud symbolism-the clans: the Kabaka: the dome of the world-was abject decay. No bark-cloth here, rising from floor to ceiling, theatrical magic, to preserve the mystery of the forest where the spirit of the Kabaka eternally resides. Far to the right of the brick wall, on the other side of the tomb, where the light of the grey day coming through the gap in the roof was like vapour, one piece of bark-cloth hung down, like a rag on a nail, damp from the rain, dark-brown and dirty-looking. The floor was wet. But just in front of the rack with the old Kabaka"s short iron spears there was still a raffia mat on the floor and three old raffia baskets for offerings to Sunna"s murderous spirit; and perhaps-though it was hard to make out in the gloom-there were a few dark coins in the baskets. The tomb had not been totally abandoned. It was still a shrine; a few people were still prepared to make the journey to ask the difficult Kabaka for a special boon.
Stanley says that Sunna was born in 1820, became Kabaka in 1836, and died in 1860. He was dead when Speke came to Uganda in 1861-2, and Speke, a geographer above everything else, writes about him only tangentially. For living details of Sunna you have to turn to Stanley, though he came to Uganda many years later, in 1875, during his east-to-west crossing of the continent. Many people were still alive then who knew the terrible Sunna, and Stanley, with the newspaperman"s relish for a good story, got them to talk.
Sunna had a dog that he loved. He compelled certain villages to grow sweet potatoes to feed the dog (clearly a Ugandan dog); and when the dog died he compelled certain villages to produce bark-cloth for the dog to be buried in. So it was almost certainly Sunna who gave Uganda (and Mutesa in his early days) the heraldic device, so to speak, of the dog, the spear, and the woman.
Sunna was short and powerfully built. He had a habit of looking down. People couldn"t see his eyes and were on edge in his presence, since they believed that if Sunna looked up, someone was going to die. It was said that in one day he condemned eight hundred people.
The most famous story about him was his revenge on the people of Busoga. They lived on eastern side of the Nile. They had broken away from their allegiance to Buganda, and Sunna wished to punish them. There was war. The people of Busoga were great warriors, and resisted Sunna for three months. At length, however, penned up in an island on the lake, they were worn down, and offered to surrender and return to their allegiance. Sunna appeared content; he even gave the impression that he wanted the occasion of the peace-making to be festive. He fed the Wasoga chiefs and warriors generously and gave them much plantain wine. In what looked like a further gesture of forgiveness, he asked the Wasoga to do their war dance during the evening. They were pleased to be asked, but they said they normally did that dance with their spears. He said they shouldn"t on this evening; there would be warriors among his own people who would take that unkindly, after the three months of the hard war; better for them, the Wasoga, to use sticks in their dance on this special occasion.
The furious dance began. Thirty thousand Wasoga lost themselves in the drumming and the stamping, the stick-throwing and the compet.i.tive athleticism of their movements. They didn"t notice that they, only thirty thousand, were being surrounded by a hundred thousand of Sunna"s people. Sunna"s people had been provided with cords, the executioners" tools, made from the fibre of the aloe. At a signal they fell on the dancers and bound them, and threw them to Sunna"s warriors, who with spears and other edged weapons began to cut the bound Wasoga up into small pieces, and were not concerned to kill their victims first. It had long been Sunna"s wish to make a little mountain, a pyramid, of Wasoga flesh and bone, to punish them for their disobedience and their valour and all the anxieties of the three-month war.
This act of terror brought other rebels into line. In the end, though, this reputation for awfulness worked against Sunna. He had a favourite son, physically very big and strong, whom he had trained in his ways. He would have liked this boy to succeed him as Kabaka. But the chiefs of the Baganda, already sufficiently tormented by the extravagance of the father, feared that the wildness of the boy, if given its head, might bring about the ruin of them all. And when, after Sunna"s death, the boy declared himself Kabaka, the chiefs didn"t allow him to act. They surrounded him and tied him up and very soon had him burnt. It was the fate of nearly all of Sunna"s more than thirty sons. Almost as soon as he died, then, almost as soon as his wonderful grave had been built, Sunna"s glory began to fade.
It was Mutesa, the wide-eyed son, who came to the throne and the first thing he did was to behead the chiefs who had given him power. And it is possible that Mutesa"s style of casual cruelty, before his formal coronation, was prompted by his wish to show himself as strong as Sunna.
"By my father"s grave" was Mutesa"s strongest vow. If I had not seen Mutesa"s own grave at Kasubi I would have thought this grave of his father at Wamala the most splendid thatched structure I had seen. In Mutesa"s time it would have been perfect in every way, with a relay of religious old ladies in attendance. Now there were no ladies, no breath of life, as it were. The dead king was truly widowed, and his grave, in spite of the sacrifices that would have attended the laying down of the foundation and the raising of the pillars, was in ruin. The rain came in, snakes were said to be in the gra.s.s roof, and the sacred relics of umbilical cord and jaw were not in the place intended for them.
The spears against the iron rack were short and black, not like the long, burnished imperial spears which the son was to get from the Arabs and which were to make such a show at Kasubi. To the right of the short, workaday spears were Sunna"s amazingly narrow shields with a clutch of black spear heads or arrow heads close to the floor, seemingly dusty or grimy, and not easy to see in the gloom without treading on the sacred area.
We had come by such a roundabout way, through what towards the end looked like real country, I had no idea where we were. But I saw now, when we had left the tomb, and had a view through the trees at the end of the yard, that it was on one of Kampala"s many hills, which at one time might have been thought to give Sunna or his spirit a clear view of the approach of his enemies. But now it was only wretched Kampala, its shacks and garbage ever spreading, that pressed on the king"s tomb. Against that ordinariness, which consumed everything, there was no defence.
"Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair." Nothing beside remains...
5.
IN 1875, WHEN Stanley pa.s.sed through Uganda on his east-to-west crossing of the continent, he saw Mutesa, then about thirty-eight, at war against the Wavuma people on the northern sh.o.r.e of Lake Victoria. Mutesa"s army was vast. Stanley, doing a rough and ready calculation (and perhaps exaggerating), makes it 150,000, adding in 100,000 followers and women (Mutesa went everywhere with his harem), to make a grand total of 250,000 in Mutesa"s camp. Stanley pa.s.sed through Uganda on his east-to-west crossing of the continent, he saw Mutesa, then about thirty-eight, at war against the Wavuma people on the northern sh.o.r.e of Lake Victoria. Mutesa"s army was vast. Stanley, doing a rough and ready calculation (and perhaps exaggerating), makes it 150,000, adding in 100,000 followers and women (Mutesa went everywhere with his harem), to make a grand total of 250,000 in Mutesa"s camp.
There were musketeers now in Mutesa"s army, but this did not give them anything like an overwhelming advantage. The Wavuma, who used only spears, knew about muskets and were not frightened of them. They were also skilled fighters on water. Mutesa"s people were better on land; on water they were nervous of tipping over; and for much of the time the advantage seemed to be with the Wavuma. People came out on to the hills above Lake Victoria to see the battle. The engravings in Stanley"s book, many of them based on photographs by Stanley, show what the watchers would have seen. They show the beautiful boats lined up, and the formations of the two disciplined armies, though the details of boats and fighting men in the distance are crowded and not always clear. The battle would have been frustrating for the watchers; since the fighters took their time, seeming to retire after every little episode. When Stanley sought Mutesa out to give advice about the battle, Mutesa appeared to have lost interest in it, and wanted to talk only about religion.
War was noise, to frighten the enemy. Mutesa had fifty drummers, as many flute-players, and any number of men ready to shake gourds with pebbles. There were also more than a hundred witchdoctors, men and women, specially selected, fantastically dressed (the Wavuma were no doubt meant to notice), who had brought along their most potent charms, to keep the evil eye off Mutesa and to sink the Wavuma. Before any action they presented their charms to Mutesa who, already half Muslim and half Christian, acknowledged these precious things of Africa-dead lizards, human fingernails and so on-with great style, pointing an index finger at what was presented, not touching it, and then, like a sovereign at a levee, waiting to see what came next.
Protected in this way, Mutesa began to threaten his commanders. He was going to strip the cowards of all their dignity and all the blessings he had given them. They had started life as peasants; they were going to be returned to that state. Some he was going to burn over a slow fire. (Burning: Mutesa"s mind often went back to this punishment, which he had narrowly escaped as a young man.) The chief minister, recognising the pa.s.sion of his ruler, threw himself on the ground before the Kabaka and said, "Kabaka, if tomorrow you see my boat retreating from the enemy, you can cut me into small pieces or burn me alive."
When Stanley next saw Mutesa, Mutesa was in high spirits. His men had managed to seize an old chief of the Wavuma and Mutesa intended to burn the old man alive, to teach the Wavuma a lesson. Stanley talked him out of that, and Stanley also, to everyone"s relief, mediated a peace between the parties.
This happened in 1875. In 1884 Mutesa was dead and was being buried in the tomb at Kasubi, which he had modelled on the tomb of his father Sunna at Wamala. He was, indeed, like his father. The country had given him no other model.
So Amin and Obote have a kind of ancestry. The British colonial period, with law and without local wars, has to be seen as an interlude. But how do Africans live with their African history? Perhaps the absence of a script and written records blurs the past; perhaps the oral story gives them only myths.
I HAD GOT HAD GOT to know Susan. She was a poet of merit and a literature teacher at Makerere. She was less than forty and slender and delicate, with a beautiful voice. Her family history could hardly be thought about without pain. She had lost her grandfather and her father. They lived in what was known as the Luweero triangle, north of Kampala. It was a fertile, populous area, and the worst fighting of the civil war or wars had taken place there. to know Susan. She was a poet of merit and a literature teacher at Makerere. She was less than forty and slender and delicate, with a beautiful voice. Her family history could hardly be thought about without pain. She had lost her grandfather and her father. They lived in what was known as the Luweero triangle, north of Kampala. It was a fertile, populous area, and the worst fighting of the civil war or wars had taken place there.
Her grandfather kept cows. He loved these creatures in the African pastoral way. He knew them all by name and temperament; he knew their colour, the shape of their horns. When the fighting started he had to run away. This was in the second period of Obote"s rule, after Amin had been overthrown, when the soldiers were vicious and cunning and could only think of finding people they wanted. In his hiding place the old man was worried about his cattle. They couldn"t look after themselves; they would soon start to suffer. He thought of them one by one, their needs and habits. At last the idea came to him that he could take a chance and go back to his house and be with his animals for a while. He went back. The soldiers were waiting for him. They killed him with an axe and dismembered the body. They stuffed the pieces into a termite anthill, one of the red anthills of Uganda, and that was where the broken-up body stayed while the war lasted. Afterwards the family recovered the bones and gave them a proper burial.
Her father"s fate was worse. He had been taken away before, in the Amin time, and he had never been seen again. No one knew how he had died or where he had died. Not knowing made for a special kind of pain. The subject was never closed; the mind would play always with terrible possibilities. The subject was too painful for Susan"s mother; she never talked about it.
This was not an exceptional family story, Susan said. Many people could tell stories like that. The Luweero triangle, where her family came from, had been ravaged by Obote"s soldiers.
"They launched a reign of terror that included rape and death. You can see the devastation even today. Luweero is an empty district. You can see unoccupied land. It looks like a ghost district."
What was it like, living with terror for so long?
"I was very young. I was five then and I only remember there was no sugar. If you asked for sugar it was not there. When Amin was overthrown"-in 1979-"I was eight. But when Obote was overthrown I was twelve, and so I was aware of what was happening around me. You feel very insecure for your parents and your neighbours. You cannot get an answer because your parents who would normally give you an answer are suffering too. You start to see the government as a monster. Somebody taking over this place that G.o.d has placed you in, and is treating it with impunity. I still don"t understand why there are tyrants and why they are allowed to rule."
Did people feel that the ancestors had let them down?
"I remember people placing their faith in G.o.d for a better tomorrow. They had the defiance of despair. That doesn"t make you fight with the enemy. You look over him"-she meant focusing on what should be there in the good time-"and you do not engage with him. I have been brought up to understand G.o.d as benevolent. G.o.d rescues you from the clutches of evil. I know some friends think we had displeased the ancestors by taking other religions or by denying the existence of the ancestors, and retribution was sure to follow. I was brought up as a Christian so I did not have that traditional religion. But I know that it exists and I respect it. I was born after the colonial period. I find that period traumatic."
So here, for Susan and people like her, was another cause for disturbance, something before the horrors of Amin and Obote, something that went back to the time of the British protectorate (which Mutesa had wanted). It made now for a full century of disorder.
Susan said, "It is a case of being aware that there are so many influences vying for my being. I become a melting pot of experiences. I have many parts coming into one another rather than being one holistic whole."
She worried about her name.
"My first name is Susan. It was given me by my father." Who had disappeared in the Amin time. "He had an aunt whom he adored, and she had this name. So it was a sentimental choice for him. Yet I know it is a Judeo-Christian name, and when I came to the university I added my clan"s name-Naluguwa, which means "of the sheep clan." I feel it is very much a part of my ident.i.ty-here you have your own name. I could go as Susan Naluguwa, but I use my father"s surname too-Kiguli-because this is how the school registered me."