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The Quest for Kintu and the Search for Peace: Mythology and Morality in Nineteenth-Century Buganda

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

John Yoder
John Yoder*
Affiliation:
Whitworth College
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Extract

While Africa has produced ruthless and aggressive individuals, Africa has also provided thinkers and public officials with deep moral sensitivity and vision. The following essay discusses a perceptive and powerful African plea for peace and justice in nineteenth-century Buganda. In a country torn by strife, certain Ganda leaders expressed their deep distress about the growing incidence of state violence by reformulating the Kintu myth, the theological, constitutional, and social cornerstone of their kingdom. These concerned individuals boldly reshaped the Kintu story, the Ganda people's most sacred symbol, to describe the tension between peace and violence as the most important issue in Ganda politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 15 , 1988 , pp. 363 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1988

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References

Notes

1. Rowe, John A. “The Purge of Christians at Mwanga's Court,” JAH, 5 (1964), 68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Low, D., Buganda in Modern History (London, 1971).Google ScholarUnomah, A.C. and Webster, J.B., “East Africa: The Expansion of Commerce” in Cambridge History of Africa, ed. Fage, J.D. and Oliver, Roland (Cambridge, 1976), 5: 304–09.Google Scholar

3. Roscoe, John. The Buganda (New York, 1966), 460–64.Google Scholar

4. Kiwanuka, M.S.M.The Kings of Buganda, by Sir Apolo Kaggwa (Nairobi, 1971), 1–14.Google Scholar

5. In describing the place of myth and symbols, Clifford Geertz argues that they not only provide an explanation of present social reality, but that they give guidance in making decisions and serve as a social DNA to transmit contemporary ideas, attitudes, and practices to the next generation. Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

6. Stanley, Henry M., Through the Dark Continent (2 vols.: New York, 1878), 1: 330.Google Scholar

7. Sabadu's account was recorded in ibid., 345–48.

8. Ibid., 346.

9. Ibid., 347.

10. Ibid., 345.

11. Kiwanuka, , Kings, 69–70Google Scholar; Roscoe, , Baganda, 222–23.Google Scholar

12. Kiwanuka, , Kings, 71–72.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., 72.

14. Ibid., 72.

15. Although Stanley recorded Sabadu's story several decades before Roscoe and Kaggwa committed the myth of Kingu and the history of the Kabakas to writing, I assume here that the latter accounts are the “official” version and that the Sabadu story is the variant.

16. Stanley, , Dark Continent, 1: 351–58.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., 351.

18. White is a color commonly linked to the order and peace of the ancestral world. The connection between red and immoral violence is explicitly established when Kintu says the land has become red and filthy with the blood of innocent people. Stanley, , Dark Continent, 1: 356.Google Scholar For a discussion of blood as a symbol of violence see Heusch, Luc de, The Drunken King or the Origin of the State (Bloomington, 1982), 144–86.Google Scholar

19. Stanley, , Dark Continent, 1: 353.Google Scholar

20. Ibid., 356.

21. Ibid., 358.

22. Mazrui, Ali, “Shaka to Amin: The Function of Fear in Some African Systems.” Address to the 1973 African Studies Association Meeting, Syracuse, New York.Google Scholar