The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief Read online

  The furious dance began. Thirty thousand Wasoga lost themselves in the drumming and the stamping, the stick-throwing and the competitive 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 grass 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 passed 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 shore 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 passion 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 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 dismemb
ered 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 God 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 God 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 God as benevolent. God 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 identity—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.”

  And now, though the name was given her by her father, she felt a love-hate for the name Susan.

  “I feel that it is so much part of the colonial experience, which was not pleasant. When a person or race comes and imposes on you, it takes away everything, and it is a vicious thing to do. Much as I think the West and modernity is a good thing, it did take away our culture and civilisation, and even if it is gentle it does make us doubt our roots. For example, the missionaries brainwashed you into rejecting the gods, and imposing their own ideas, dogma and doctrines, saying that theirs were the best. There was no two-way dialogue and them trying to understand how our minds and heritage or culture worked. I feel that people had a civilisation. It was different but it was their own. I taught myself to write in Luganda.” After writing her poems in English. “I feel humiliated that the school did not teach us our mother tongue.”

  Her sister was writing a book on Speke, Grant and the missionaries.

  “They took away our land, religion, customs and social structures. Our king, our everything. When the kingdoms were restored”— strangely enough, in a tactical move by Amin, who had led the assault on the palace in 1966—“our king asked for the return of ‘our possessions.’ ” He meant everything associated with the kingship and culture of Buganda. “The palace was handed back. People suffered great humiliation. They thought what had been done to the palace was sacrilege. It was a great trauma to have the king removed and for him to die in exile. So Amin brought the body back for burial.”

  At the beginning Susan had said that she was a Christian; she respected the traditional religion, but did not believe, as some African traditionalists did, that Uganda was going to suffer retribution for adopting other religions and turning away from the ancestors. But there was so much in her quick heart and mind that couldn’t be contained in a simple religious definition, so many separate ideas and emotions had tumbled out of her, that she emerged as another person.

  I did not, after this, ask her about African history, the oral tradition, and myth. There was obviously no special African way of dealing with, neutralising, a bad history or a bad present. It seemed more likely that it was like dealing with a very long illness. It announced itself one day, and you dreamt then of waking up well one morning. Gradually then you sank into it, and you lost your idea of the quick return of health and wholeness. You made your peace, so to speak, with your illness; and the time began to pass. You began to live in this half-and-half way. It became all you knew; it became life.

  6

  THE OLD Germanic peoples, according to the first-to-second-century Roman historian Tacitus, thought it was an insult to their gods to imprison them in temples or within the walls of any building. Better for them to be worshipped in the open, in beautiful groves, or glades or rivers: places which then become instinct with the spirit of the god. And there is something like this in the Baganda idea of shrines. The tombs of the Kabakas are obvious shrines. But there are others, and they are all over Buganda—waterfalls, say, or unusual rocks—and even to the visitor who doesn’t have the Baganda idea of sanctity, doesn’t know how to conduct himself in such places, and cannot respond to the complicated tribal stories, they are at once like a celebration of the natural world and a claim on that world.

  The most spectacular of these natural shrines is the Sezibwa waterfall in Mukono district, less than thirty miles from Kampala. Prince Kassim told me later that Mukono was known for sacrifices. I believe he meant human sacrifices. But I didn’t know this when I went. It would have given another value to everything if I had known.

  We left Kampala by the Jinja road, and as always it seemed that the mess of semi-urban development had destroyed the nature of the land and almost destroyed old systems of community. Near a “trading centre” we turned off the main road and drove for some time along a red dirt road: old Uganda again, the green bush acting as a screen, so that it is often a surprise what lies at the end of these unremarkable roads. There was a sign for the waterfall; and then in the middle of simple bush a high iron gate barred the red road.

  Some young fellows were sitting about the road cutting above the gate, apparently idle. But one was our guide; an arrangement had been made with him on the telephone. He began to work right away. He slid down the cutting and said the site was of cultural value. That was promising, but he didn’t really have much English. In fact, he had pretty much shot his bolt with that sentence.

  We heard the falls before we saw them: in the opening before us, a stream or river, coming from our left, falling over a rocky cliff, which was about a hundred feet high. Unexpected, this opening in the land, this flow of water, this violence. The water
split into many channels as it slid down the rock and crashed into the river pool. Around the pool, away from the violent fall of water, was a grassy basin, lush from the spray. Everything here was very green. Much diminished now, but still brisk, the river continued out of the quieter end of the pool, running from left to right, and then winding away at the foot of a low hill until it was lost to view. On a clothes line in front of us, after the sublime falls, were men’s clothes hanging out to dry, perhaps the laundry of the guardians of the shrine. Above the disappearing stream, on the sunny hillside far to our right, were the conical thatched roofs of small huts, perhaps the quarters of the guardians.

  The most sacred spot is at the very top of the falls. The spirit of the place dwells here, and there is a tribal story that tells you why. The water there washes away curses. You must be barefooted, though, to show respect for a holy place; and you must wash your face and hands nine times.

  I had seen a greenish picket fence up there and had thought it was to prevent people getting too close to the falls.

  It was easy to understand how people would have been moved by the beauty of the place. Its beauty would have always been known, and the idea of its sacredness must have come from far back, but the puzzling story was that the first person to visit the site and recognise its qualities was the Kabaka Mwanga, the successor of Mutesa I, who in 1886 ordered his Christian pages to be burnt.