The Masque of Africa (3 page)

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 Kassim, who told this story.

T
HERE 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 gods. 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 assume 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 grass is grass and, only one hundred and fifty years after his death, much of him has disappeared. His tomb is in great disrepair. Prince Kassim 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 coarse grass 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 grass
slipping here and there, and with a bright-green vine threading its way through the grass 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
penis and testicles 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 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 …

I
N 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.