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The Reign of Kabaka Nakibinge: Myth or Watershed?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Richard Reid
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Extract

Reliable data relating to Buganda's pre-1800 past has come to historians in the form of a thin trickle. Students of more ancient Ganda history have been compelled to rely on the accounts by literate Ganda composed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably the work of Apolo Kagwa. The effective usage of these accounts is fraught with difficulties, difficulties which are well-documented in the case of Buganda and which have been explored by, in particular, Wrigley, Kiwanuka, Rowe, and Henige. These writers have justifiably questioned the validity of such recorded political history. The idea that Buganda was governed by a Western-style royal dynasty, with a chronologically-structured succession list, was first put in writing by Speke, who provided the earliest such kinglist.

Over the ensuing forty years this kinglist was gradually lengthened and virtually set in stone, largely through the writings of Kagwa. The explanation of precolonial Ganda government in die terminology of Western constitutional monarchy doubtless served very well the purposes of the new colonial power, which was able to claim that it was merely backing up an extant political organization able to articulate the practices of ‘civilised’ governance. This arrangement also clearly suited the Ganda, as Wrigley and Twaddle have suggested. Both authors incisively argue that the Ganda kinglist was manipulated to meet the challenges of the colonial period.

There seems little reason to doubt, and every reason to believe, that the recording of Buganda's more ancient past (for which there is no corroborating written source) was indeed often carefully engineered to produce the desired results. The attempt to ‘clarify’ local power struggles, the legitimization of particular claims to authority, and die opportunity to provide the world with the definitive account of one's own ‘national history’ (an opportunity, surely, which few could resist) were all factors which have combined to demand skepticism among historians concerning the historicity of ‘traditional’ accounts.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 24 , January 1997 , pp. 287 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997

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References

Notes

1. The translated works of Kagwa, which should in terms of translation alone be read with caution, are most easily accessible to non-Luganda scholars: see for example [tr. & ed. Kiwanuka, M.S.M.], The Kings of Buganda (Nairobi, 1971)Google Scholar; [tr. Kalibala, E.B., ed. Edel, M.M.], The Customs of the Baganda (New York, 1934)Google Scholar; and [tr. Wamala, J.], “A Book of the Clans of Buganda” (manuscript in Makerere University Library, ca. 1972).Google Scholar

2. Henige, David, “Reflections on Early Interlacustrine Chronology: an Essay in Source Criticism,” JAH 15 (1974) 27–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The Disease of Writing:” Ganda and Nyoro Kinglists in a Newly Literate World” in Joseph C. Miller, ed., The African Past Speaks (Folkestone, 1980) 240-61; Kiwanuka's “Preface” to Kagwa, Kings; Rowe, John A., “Myth, Memoir, and Moral Admonition: Luganda Historical Writing, 1893-1969,” Uganda Journal 33 (1969), 17–40Google Scholar; Wrigley, C.C., Kingship and State: the Buganda Dynasty (Cambridge, 1996), esp. chapter 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Speke, J.H., Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1863), 252.Google Scholar

4. Wrigley, , Kingship and State, 113Google Scholar; Twaddle, Michael, “On Ganda Historiography,” HA 1 (1974), 303–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. According to Kagwa's account, Nakibinge belongs to the twelfth or thirteenth generation back from the imposition of colonial rule. Calculated at thirty years per generation, this places Nakibinge in the first half of the sixteenth century. See Appendix 3 in Kagwa, Kings, 195. Kagwa's is the standard chronology, although there was an alternative kinglist, used by Stuhlmann and Johnston and gleaned from the Catholic Ganda chief Mugwanya, in which two Nakibinges are mentioned. The first of these corresponds chronologically with that of Kagwa: see Wrigley, , Kingship and State, 30–31.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., 160.

7. Ibid., 162-63.

8. Ibid., 210.

9. See his “Introduction: the Relation of Oral Tradition to Written History,” in Kagwa, Kings. Kiwanuka suggests that comparison between, for example, the traditions of the Ganda and those of Nyoro can assist in clarifying relatively ancient events and developments. Alongside Wrigley” analysis, this approach seems hopelessly simplistic, but why it should be disregarded in the pursuit of narrative history is by no means clear.

10. Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History (London, 1985). 172.Google Scholar

11. Kagwa, , “Clans,” 67.Google Scholar

12. Ibid., 85. At this time, Buganda's control of Kyagwe ssaza to the east would have been minimal to begin with.

13. Kiwanuka suggested that the Nyoro ruler contemporaneous with Nakibinge was “Olimi”: see Kiwanuka's, “Introduction” to Kagwa, , Kings, xvii.Google Scholar Wrigley, however, disputes this, although he does not venture a view as to who it may have been instead: Wrigley, , Kingship and State, 204–06.Google Scholar

14. Kagwa, , “Clans,” 68.Google Scholar

15. Kagwa, , Kings, 27.Google Scholar As with many such details, this may merely be a romantic twist added to embellish the tale; it almost certainly represents a moral message. To have Nakibinge himself kill Juma would have represented just revenge for treachery; as it is, however, Juma's death at the hands of the Nyoro portrays the latter as bloody and untrustworthy, as well as indicating that betrayal on such a scale is rewarded by death in the most tragic of circumstances.

16. Kiwanuka, M.S.M., A History of Buganda from the Foundation of the Kingdom to 1900 (London, 1971) 60–61.Google Scholar As Wrigley has pointed out: “As a Ganda patriot [Kiwanuka] was upset by the suggestion that his country started life as a Nyoro colony:” Wrigley, , Kingship and State, 25.Google Scholar

17. Kiwanuka, , History of Buganda, 63.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., 64.

19. Kagwa, , Customs, 23.Google Scholar

20. One version suggests that Kibuka was joined by Mukasa, who by the nineteenth century was regarded as the most powerful of Buganda's deities: see Kagwa, , Kings, 27.Google Scholar

21. Kagwa, , “Clans,” 9–10.Google Scholar

22. Wrigley, , Kingship and State, 161.Google Scholar This might be true generally, but Kagwa also challenged certain abstract presentations of Buganda's past in his own writing. He found the story of Bemba the snake, apparently a contemporary of Kintu, historically unpalatable: “…the story of Bemba cannot be true. How could a mere snake have been the ruler of a country? It is possible that Bemba and others were real human beings:…:” Kagwa, , Kings, 5.Google Scholar Kagwa may have searched for realism in other areas of the past which he recorded and, as I suggest below, he may have been perfectly justified in doing so. Notably, though, Roscoe states that Nakibinge actually sought the advice, not of a secular ruler, but of the god Mukasa himself: “Mukasa consented to send his brother Kyobe, who was also called Kibuka”: Roscoe, John, The Baganda (London, 1911), 301.Google Scholar

23. See for example Knappert, Jan, African Mythology: an Encyclopaedia of Myth and Legend (London, 1995) 43–44.Google Scholar

24. See Kenny, Michael, “The Powers of Lake Victoria,” Anthropos 72 (1977), 717–33Google Scholar; idem., “The Stranger from the Lake: a Theme in the History of the Lake Victoria Shorelands,” Azania 17 (1982), 2-26.

25. Wrigley, , Kingship and State, 161.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., 161-62.

27. It is true, of course, that there is little point in posing this question if one believes, as Wrigley does, that both Nakibinge and Kibuka are fictitious characters. But the question left begging is still one of origin.

28. Kagwa, , “Clans,” 69.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., 58.

30. Kagwa, , Kings, 27–28.Google Scholar

31. Kiwanuka, , History of Buganda, 64–65.Google Scholar

32. Kagwa, , Customs, 24Google Scholar; idem., “Clans,” 63.

33. Schiller, L., “The Royal Women of Buganda,” IJAHS 23 (1990), 455–74.Google Scholar

34. Kagwa, , Customs, 160.Google Scholar

35. Ibid.

36. Kagwa, , “Clans,” 69.Google Scholar Stanley was told the detailed story of how Kibuka was actually betrayed by his Nyoro wife, who discovered his ability to take to flight and duly related this information to the Nyoro army. The latter, who had been mystified by attacks made on them from above, set a trap and were able to kill Kibuka, Nakibinge's “faithful flying warrior” Stanley, Henry M., Through the Dark Continent (2 vols.: London, 1899), 1:275.Google Scholar

37. Wrigley, , Kingship and State, 161.Google Scholar

38. Kagwa, , “Clans,” 69.Google Scholar

39. This is the earliest mention of Nakibinge: the first kinglist, compiled by Speke, contains only seven rulers, and Nakibinge is not one of them: see Speke, J.H., Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (Edinburgh, 1863), 252.Google Scholar

40. Stanley, , Through the Dark Continent, I:274.Google Scholar

41. Stanley, ibid., did after all refer to Nakibinge as “the Charlemagne of Uganda.”

42. Kagwa, , Kings, 29.Google Scholar

43. Zimbe, B.M. [tr Kamoga, F.], “Buganda ne Kabaka” (ca.1939) 111–12.Google Scholar

44. Kiwanuka, , History of Buganda, 99.Google Scholar