The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

  Mwanga also planted a tree, which is still honoured, as did Mutesa II, who was sent into exile by Obote and died in London in 1969.

  A footbridge led across the pool to a rocky slope. There was a stand of young eucalyptus trees on that slope. Our guide said they had been planted ten years before, but it was now accepted they were a mistake (perhaps because they were foreign), and there was a plan to have them replaced by purely local trees. The topmost line of eucalyptus had been hacked down with a machete, leaving small stumps. A slippery path zigzagged up the rocky slope, over the exposed roots of trees planted beyond the eucalyptus.

  At the top of the zigzagging path was the first part of the formal, religious shrine. It looked modest: a low cave in the rock, not going in very deep, where there were clay bottles, spears, and a few baskets with offerings. The guide said that eggs were the standard offerings. A python lived in the little cave and came from time to time to eat the eggs. I could see no sign of the python’s passage into or out of the cave.

  We were on the path to the shrine hut. It was hidden by trees, but there was no diviner present that morning and no one volunteered to take us higher. When the diviner was present there would of course be fees. But we were only visitors; we had no needs that called for a diviner’s attention. We didn’t have questions for the oracle of the waterfall; and I felt we shouldn’t intrude any more.

  Later I learned that the shrine—possibly only the shrine hut—had been burnt down more than once by Christians who, extraordinarily, were claiming this ancient site for themselves. A high man of the church had come to the shrine and cleansed it of its ancient spirits. To get rid of spirits, therefore, the church had to acknowledge that they existed. And, to add to the confusion, there was a signboard (close to the footbridge across the pool) that appeared to make a legal claim to the place in the name of the Kabaka Foundation.

  It was time to go. And time to pay. The guide had to be paid for attending, and for helping me up the slippery path over the exposed tree roots by the eucalyptus. And when we got to the iron gate there was a further charge, for entering. It would have been like that, too, at the oracles in the classical word. The world always had its dues.

  Later there were Prince Kassim’s words about the sacrifices of Mukono district and the sacrifices especially at the Sezibwa waterfall.

  I had asked about the burning down of the shrine there. It seemed to me a strange thing to have happened at a place sanctified by the visit of Kabaka Mwanga in the 1880s.

  Prince Kassim said, “The shrine was burnt because it is a place where a lot of human sacrifice was going on. Three months ago they found a body of a young child very mutilated.”

  As always, there were many sides to the sacred.

  PRINCE KASSIM stood for an important segment of the Ugandan jigsaw. He was a prince of the royal house of Buganda and was related to the Kabakas. At the same time, by this same royal descent, but from the Muslim side of Mutesa I, he was the Muslim leader of Uganda.

  He said, “It is true that the foreign religions took over the command of the society. They converted the leaders and the flock followed. They did it by putting up institutions of education where the young were taught that African gods were many and they required animal and human sacrifice. I am not an authority on traditional religion. I don’t know where traditional religion begins and voodoo starts, but I do know that both are entwined. The Kabaka was head of traditional religion in the old days, but he abdicated in favour of the Anglican church, and is now seen as the head of the church here. My own attitude is that the power of traditional religion is myth and superstition. Because of my educational background I have been told it is a pack of lies. I grew up comfortable with the idea of one God. The Arabs came to Kabaka Sunna’s court for ivory and slaves, and according to our history an Arab slaver called Ibrahim Battuta challenged Sunna’s brutality to his subjects. He told the king he could not behave in this brutal way to his subjects as there was life after death and accountability. The king who was a god in his own right was surprised, and fascinated that there was life after death. Before Sunna there was a belief that death was final and one just went in to the spirit world. They broke the king’s jaw, to make the king’s ghost powerless, and he simply went into the void. The saying that ‘he has dropped his jaw’ meant that the king was dead. Many things happened afterwards. The religious wars from 1888 to 1894 turned Bagandan society upside down.”

  I wanted to know about the royal tradition of music-making. There was so much about it in Speke.

  The prince said, “Yes, it was always there. What else was there to do in the palace? It was all about feasting and merry-making and fooling around.”

  But wasn’t it sad that so much of the tradition was lost? So much that came from so far back and linked people to the earth?

  The prince began to speak like a man of the Bagandan royal family. “Well, there is so much to feel sorry for. In 1966 the Kabaka went into exile. It was, and is now, a period of moral degeneration, and a period of anarchy. In which there was no respect for anything, and even the environment was destroyed. The Kabakaship is an institution. He is the fountain of honour for the Bagandans and when he went into exile the political institution was destroyed. It was unimaginable that it could happen. That the Kabaka and the palace could be attacked. Buganda was a nation in its own right and they spoke their own language. When people tell you of that world where honour meant everything you feel the shame.”

  “Within this decay, how do you live your life?”

  “I have a dynastic duty and I aim to do it. We have to have honour for the sake of our fathers and forefathers.”

  “Do you have any memento of your past?” I was thinking of the palace.

  “It was all destroyed. Our heritage was looted and destroyed.” Sunna’s tomb was in a bad way, and there were others. “We have to wake up to our responsibility. Rightly they belong to us. It is a unique architecture. Such amazing grass thatch where despite the heavy rainfall there are no leaks. There is a lot of skill and we have the human resources and they still hold on to their culture and are loyal to the king.”

  But nearly at the end Prince Kassim let fall a sentence which seemed to reassert his pessimism. He said, “With the new religion people became insubordinate.” And that of course would have been true for both Christianity and Islam. To belong to either was to be part of a great world faith, approved and organised, with a great literature and famous solid buildings; the temptation to look away from the much smaller thing, of grass, that was one’s own was great.

  7

  IN THE 1840s Arab merchants from the east of the continent, great travellers and explorers in their own way, came to Uganda looking for slaves and gold. In return for what they got they gave poor guns and trinkets. They gave the Kabaka Sunna a mirror, and this murderous man was enchanted to see his face for the first time. Perhaps in gratitude he allowed the Arabs to talk about their faith and especially about the afterlife in paradise that awaited believers. Now the Arabs were no longer suppliants in Uganda. Their mosques, of every denomination, were on all the hills of Kampala, and the Brother Leader of Libya, Colonel Ghaddafi, of limitless wealth, was coming to open the biggest mosque in Uganda, the Libyan, in the presence of four or five African presidents.

  Habib, a Ugandan Muslim businessman now of great wealth, had fostered the Libyan connection. He came from one of the oldest Muslim families in Uganda. Habib’s grandfather had converted in 1846, almost at the beginning of the Arab presence, and they had lived through the bad years of the religious wars, between Muslims and Christians, in the late 1880s. The Muslims lost that war, and were exiled by the British colonial administration to the bush in the west.

  Habib’s grandfather did not give up his faith. He became a preacher for Islam. He went everywhere on foot, and lived to be a hundred and four. He walked with one hand behind his back; this was how Habib remembered the tough old man. Walking and preaching, he got as far as Rwanda, which was quite a dista
nce away, and he took three more wives there, one Hutu and two Tutsis. He had twenty-one children.

  It was a poor life for Habib’s father in the beginning. He was not well-educated. He kept cows—the kraal was three miles away from the house—and he also had a small business mending bicycle and motorcycle tires. There wasn’t a lot of money in that, and he later went to the Congo, which was just across the border. There—no doubt following other people—he began to mine gold, then traded in gold, and became rich.

  “We lived in a collective fashion. We all ate together. Each wife had her own vegetable garden and every wife had to cook for one week of the month. It was her duty to cook for the entire household while the others helped her. We were around thirty people at each meal. About ten in the morning the other wives and their daughters would gather in the garden of the wife whose turn it was to cook, and they would peel the green bananas. Then they would call the boys or men to lift the food or peeled bananas to the kitchen. Water was brought from the well by the boys. Water and firewood and picking coffee was the boys’ turf. No woman could do that.”

  They were a rich family now, with a car, and the only people in the village to have a concrete house with glass windows. Other people had mud-and-thatch huts. Habib’s family had outside latrines, but each wife had a room to wash and bath in.

  When Idi Amin was overthrown, in 1979, the people of the village went around killing Muslims. But Habib’s family was respected—they used to lend their car for village weddings, to fetch the bride—and they were not touched.

  Habib did well at school, and his father took him to Buganda, so that he could learn English in addition to Arabic. In 1971, when he was eighteen, he was one of thirty-two boys chosen for scholarships.

  He went to Libya, and studied Sharia and Muslim law. He became fluent in Arabic; it was the turning point in his life. He became an interpreter for the Ugandan embassy, and did the job well. There were not many people who knew the languages and understood both African and Arab ways. He impressed Amin (still at that time the ruler of Uganda). Later, after Amin, he came to the notice of the Brother Leader, Ghaddafi. It was the beginning of his Libyan connection, which flowered in all sorts of ways.

  Was he Libyan or Ugandan, African or Muslim?

  “I see myself as a Muslim. My grandfather was circumcised with a reed, and my father and I were circumcised by a Gillette blade. I still remember it. When the man came to circumcise the boys they were taken to a separate place and kept behind a kind of screen. I was five years old and very curious to see what was happening. I went to see, and they saw me and grabbed me too. I am still angry about that.”

  As a Muslim child he was trained to have nothing to do with African religion. “We were brought up in the faith, and that dictates that African religion is paganism. We were trained to despise it. I will not allow my children to go near it.”

  And then, speaking in the same voice, the same firm tone, Habib said, “Now that I have grown up and had exposure, I see it was a tool to control our African mind. It is how the imperialists worked.”

  I wasn’t expecting this. I asked whether he meant what he appeared to say, and included Islam among the imperialists seeking to control the African mind. He said he did.

  I would have liked to hear more. But at this stage he was called away by some business friends—the hotel was full of them after the Ghaddafi visit. He said he was going to come back to us, but he never did. And the next day he was off to Dubai.

  8

  TO BELIEVE in the traditional African religion was to be on the defensive. There was no doctrine to hold on to; there was only a sense of the rightness of old ways, the sacredness of the local earth. It was, in a small way, like the fourth- and fifth-century conflict between Christianity and paganism at the time of the religious changeover in the classical world. Paganism could not be a cause; the most that could be said for the old gods and temples was that they had been around for a very long time and had served people well. The doctrines of Islam and Christianity, world faiths, had a philosophical base and could be expounded. The traditional African religion had no doctrine; it expressed itself best in its practices and in things like the hundred fearful charms the witch doctors presented to Mutesa I before the naval battle against the Wavuma in 1875.

  And now people who cherish the old African religion have begun to develop—or rediscover, it may be—a cosmogony, a kind of Paradise Lost, for the people of Buganda: an affair of God and the angels, the first people, their disobedience, the replacement of the angels by the ancestors, the appearance of mediums who can invoke the ancestors. The powers of God, the guiding being who knows all and has been in existence forever, can reside only in a royal person, a Kabaka. The Kabaka is linked to the spirit world; the mediums are linked to the ancestors. This is where the cosmogony touches earth and the Baganda.

  This theology—difficult when it separates from Paradise Lost—was outlined in the Bambara lounge of the Serena hotel by Madame Sehenna, a former cultural minister, who now gives cultural and religious talks on the radio and generally guides culturally troubled young Bagandans. Susan brought her to us one afternoon: an educated middle-aged woman with a close-to-English accent sometimes. We sat below a beautifully carved wood panel—the Serena is full of fine African carving—and heard about the stigmata or signs of the Kabaka.

  He has a mark on his right hand and is born with two umbilical cords. Only people of the monkey clan, one of the fifty-two clans of the Baganda, can install the Kabaka. When he is holding court he hears a voice from above that speaks to him alone. A separate house has to be created for him where he sits in seclusion and no woman can enter. It is here that the angels come and guide him. Now that things have begun again to go badly for the Baganda—the government is even claiming some of the nine thousand square miles of the sacred land of Buganda—there are people who say that the installation of the Kabaka was not well done. Perhaps certain rituals were left out; now as a result the people are suffering and lost.

  Madame Sehenna said, “But you mustn’t think it will end. We are doing work. Many of the angels who were protecting the Kabakaship have now come back. We have a prince of the royal blood who has the connection. He gets revelations and he tells us. The prince can be consulted. He lives in his shrine. You buy an exercise book and write the name of your first ancestor, your name, and your problem.”

  The first ancestor, known to God, was not born but created, and this ancestor doesn’t die; he disappears.

  “The exercise book with your name and your problem is taken to the shrine, and the answer is given. You have to buy back the answer. The royal drum is tuned by someone from the lion clan, and the lion is the symbol of Buganda. You also have the fallen angels who live and are underground. If you offer them great sacrifices, like your mother or your child, something very near and dear to you, they give you great riches. Wealth beyond your dreams. In this case you go to a medium and you go to the lake and, if you are a woman, you meet a handsome man, a spirit, who takes you beneath the lake. If you are a man it is a beautiful woman who will take you and give you the wealth you want. But once you invoke the spirit world you have to obey their rules. You cannot marry a human then, as the spirit of the man or woman will live with you. You see many such people driving these big cars and living in big houses like palaces here. You cannot escape their rules. If you do, the riches vanish and you are punished.”

  FOR A FEW days Luke was my guide. He didn’t have much to show me because he didn’t know a great deal, and because he lived in a far-off part of Kampala where the roads were unpaved. When it rained the roads around his house became impassable, and then he would telephone to cancel whatever arrangements we had made. Later, when we tried to work out what I owed him, he would claim these blank days as working days because he had set them aside for me.

  He worked in a university, one of the many new universities of Uganda. He got 170,000 shillings a month, a little under 600 pounds or 1200 dollars a month, which I
thought sufficient for his needs. But he and the other teachers and many of the students as well were on strike. This meant that he had great needs. And when he came late one morning and said he wanted to take me to a diviner or witchdoctor I became anxious. I was worried about the fees those people might charge. I said I thought we were going to look at Bassajadenzi that morning, a famous rock-shrine. He had spoken at length about it the day before. He said no, I had asked for witchdoctors. That was why he had asked a friend of his to come with us, a man in touch with witchdoctors. This man was waiting for us at a police post. This official-sounding detail made me doubt my memory. We went to pick the friend up.

  The police post was in an awful part of the city, the ground scuffed down to red earth, children everywhere, the ditches unsavoury, and there was often a spread of garbage between the rough shacks.

  The sloping dirt road we turned into had been diagonally trenched by rain, and the car bumped up and down in the most worrying way. A further side road, narrowing, suddenly full of green, brought us to the witchdoctor’s house.

  It was a proper little cottage, modern and newly painted and pretty, fenced with concrete blocks. Luke and his friend, suppliants in their demeanour, as though they didn’t want to make too much of a noise, undid the two leaves of the wide side gate, and went into the yard and waited for the witchdoctor. He came out of his house wearing what was clearly his home clothes, an off-white singlet and red jogging shorts. He looked sour; it seemed he didn’t like being disturbed. Many words passed between the three men, the witchdoctor firm, Luke and his friend speaking more softly, as though they didn’t want me to hear.

  The driver told me that the witchdoctor was saying it was Wednesday and he didn’t receive on Wednesdays. That was his day for gathering herbs.