The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

  10

  I HADN’T thought in 1966 of going to look for the source of the Nile. No one among the people I knew talked of that. They talked about the game parks and fishing in the western lakes; they talked about the politics of the country; they talked about their colleagues; they talked about doing long drives. I hadn’t myself read Speke at that time, and so I hadn’t been touched by the romance of the great river, though we crossed the river at Jinja on our way to Nairobi, a regular outing, and crossed it again when we drove back to Kampala. In Stanley I read that “jinja” meant the stones, the falls, which occurred just after Lake Victoria poured into the Nile.

  And now I was to see that this pouring into the Nile, seen from the Busoga side, was one of the majestic things in Nature: a great smooth sheet of water of immense force, not muddy like the Congo or the Mississippi, but fresh-looking, grey-green, dotted with mysterious small green islands, and between high green banks, dividing and coming to life over the stones. Speke, when he first saw it, the object of his dreams, sat on the bank on the Buganda side and “saw the day out” considering the play of water. It has that effect still, of encouraging the visitor simply to look, sending the mind back over the centuries, perhaps even over the millennia, when what we see now already existed (though a speeded-up camera would show islands and vegetation disappearing and reappearing); and sending the mind also on an unimaginable four-thousand-mile journey north to the Mediterranean.

  Speke saw thousands of “passenger fish” flying at the stones, and many rhinoceros and crocodiles in the river. They are not there now. Speke was himself a great killer with the gun, with a jaunty Victorian sporting vocabulary to match; and many thousands of sportsmen would have followed where he led. Even at that first sight of the stones, while his master was content to sit and stare, Speke’s well-trained assistant, Bombay, shot and killed a sleeping crocodile.

  In the next century a dam was built at Jinja. River dams alter river life and alter the aspect of things; and what we see now at the stones wouldn’t be quite what Speke saw. Another dam is planned for lower down the river; when that is done the visitor would no longer see what we see now.

  ON ONE of the islands of Lake Victoria a world wildlife or conservation body has set up a small chimpanzee sanctuary—forty-two animals, whose parents had been killed and eaten by Africans, who are great relishers of what they call “bush meat” and, given guns and left to themselves, would easily eat their way through the continent’s wildlife.

  The conservation people do boat trips to the sanctuary from Entebbe. It seemed to me a trouble-free way of being on the lake where a hundred and fifty years ago Mutesa I, with some boats of his navy, liked to go picnicking with his court and harem.

  The gardens or grounds of the conservation body grow lush and green almost to the water’s edge. It should be idyllic, but in the early morning the lake flies, feathery and brown, swarm over the lake. After what must be a life in the air, a short life, they are looking for places to settle down, and they do so on hair and clothes. For some inches below the boat-jetty cobwebs hang down pale-brown and heavy, like decorative swags, with their load of trapped flies—Africa prolific in life and death. The boat, starting up and moving on, cuts through another cloud of lake flies, which fall twice as fast on faces and clothes, and settle where there is no wind to blow them away, especially on the floor of the boat.

  Then, mercifully, the fly-cloud is no more. The water is choppy, dark-green, and you soon start to see fishing dugouts. There are two men to a boat, which sit so low in the water that the fishermen (who might be showing off a little) appear to be skimming the water with their bodies, and you find it easier to believe the newspaper item that five thousand people drown every year in the lake.

  The romantic lake islands begin to appear, forest and parkland, their colours softened by the haze. What seems near is farther away than you think. Much white smoke comes from behind an island, from a fisherman’s settlement which is slowly but surely polluting the lake, making it a carrier of typhoid and cholera. It would have been like that in Mutesa’s time, but there is no mention of it in Speke, who has trouble describing an asthmatic attack he suffered over many weeks.

  It was an hour and a half to the island of chimpanzees. Immediate order: mown grass, neatly thatched huts, paths and signs, with the brilliant yellow weaver birds busy about their extraordinary nests. Twice a day the chimpanzees are fed. The launches from the mainland arrive in time for this.

  A pebbly red path led up to the fence that marked off the chimpanzee and forest area from the rest of the island. A tremendous racket from somewhere in the bush told us that the feeding had begun. There was no meat for the chimpanzees, only cut fruit thrown from a platform. This was fought over with mighty blows that when they landed on a chimpanzee seemed to strike hollow ground. The cries of beaters and beaten were overlaid with a continual squealing, relish indistinguishable from pain.

  The chimpanzees might have been orphans, but in the sanctuary old ideas of size and authority ruled. The leading male ran back and forth the length of the viewing platform and beyond, thumping males not as big as he was. Only the very small, close to infancy, and strangely melancholy, were allowed to eat quietly, long, jointed fingers fixed round their pieces of fruit. One or two chimpanzees were made to perform little tricks for the visitors, using sticks or twigs to drag within reach pieces of fruit that had been deliberately thrown outside the wire-mesh fence, so that we could see the trick.

  Gradually the feeding was over, and there again the bigger animals led the way, being the first to lope back to the forest, moving swiftly on arms and legs.

  One couldn’t help remembering that in times of national emergency, it was the zoos and the animals that were the first to suffer. Just a little weakening of the central authority here, and all the elaborate support of the chimpanzee sanctuary would wither away. The chimpanzees had skills, as we had been told; they were close to human beings; but against guns they, like all the world’s animals, were helpless. Fifteen minutes or less with a gun could reduce these animals to the African bush meat their parents had become. The paths of the sanctuary, maintained now with so much trouble, would become overgrown; the neat grass roofs of the huts would slip and collapse. When Speke and Stanley had come this way the forest and forest life would have seemed eternal; but now, like everything in Uganda, it felt frail.

  We returned by another route, going round an island where there was a fisherman’s settlement of about a thousand. So one of our boatmen said; but the settlement, with the dun-coloured shacks tight one against the other, looked like a very full mainland slum, and I thought there might have been more people there. This was where the thick white smoke of the morning had come from. On the way out we had seen a few fishermen’s settlements, and some had looked romantic, picture-book places, with dark dugouts drawn up on pale beaches. But this big settlement that mimicked a mainland slum would have had no electricity and no water except what came from the lake.

  Soon in one part of the sky there appeared the thin brown tornadolike whirls of the lake flies that had troubled us in the morning. Before we could get back to Entebbe five or more of these light-coloured whirls defined themselves against the pale lower sky, thin, rising high, wavering, constantly changing shape: like emanations of lake water.

  11

  THE BAGANDA people had great skills as builders of Roman-straight roads and majestic grass-roofed huts that didn’t leak even in the rainy season. They had a detailed social organisation; every clan was like a guild, with its special duties. Worshipping their Kabaka, they were ruled by the idea of loyalty and obedience. These qualities, taken together, made them a great fighting force, and gave the Baganda their empire, which lasted some centuries.

  Their history, however, has no dates and no records, because the Baganda people had no script and no writing, They have only a limited oral literature, which is a poor substitute for a written text that can be consulted down the centuries. Strangely, the a
bsence of a script doesn’t seem to trouble academic or nationalist people; it isn’t a subject that is talked about.

  I found only one man who had thought about this deficiency of the Ugandan or central African kingdoms. He was a middle-aged melancholic and he was from a neighbouring kingdom (or kingdom area). He was passionate about the kingdoms, believing in the power of the imprisoned and irreplaceable royal drum of his area, with its particular heartbeat. He grieved for the recent past. The terrible Milton Obote had imprisoned the royal drum and sixty-two items of its regalia in 1967; and though the kingdoms had been technically restored, nothing had been the same again; and the drum had still not been recovered. The drum still had power, but it suffered in its imprisonment. Like a wounded patriot, the melancholy man exaggerated the pain to come: he lived with the vision of all this part of Africa being swept away by some new political force. He pointed to the demure woman, a relative, who was with him. He said, “In a few years you wouldn’t see her here.” He wasn’t saying that the woman would migrate; he meant only that in a short while people of the royal clan, to which his relative belonged, people known for their fine and distinctive features, would be squeezed out.

  I took him back to the question of the absence of a script and writing.

  He said, “Script? They didn’t know the wheel.”

  This was news to me. But then, reviewing everything I had read about old Uganda, I felt that what I had heard was right; though it was hard to imagine everything being manhandled or loaded on to donkeys on those straight Baganda roads.

  He thought that the geographical isolation of Uganda in central Africa, beside lakes the outside world didn’t know, would have gone some way to explaining why there was no script. And I felt he was right. The Baganda had their own language; it would have been reasonably easy, given the stimulus of literate neighbours, for a script to be devised to match the sounds of the language. In the neighbouring kingdom of Bunyoro Speke found people writing Arabic: some people felt the need for a script and writing.

  To be without writing, as the Baganda were, was to have no effective way of recording the extraordinary things they achieved. Much of the past, the thirty-seven kings of which they boast, is effectively lost, and can be talked of only as myth. The loss continues. In a literate age, of newspapers and television and radio, the value of oral history steadily shrinks.

  The Baganda built roads like the Romans, very straight, up hill and down dale, filling the awkward depressions with the stalks of tall papyrus, which grow on this water-logged land in profusion, as they did in ancient Egypt. But the Baganda have lived for so long with the sight of their old roads that they take them for granted; there are some who even say that the roads were built by the British. And what must have been refined tools or systems for aligning and grading those roads have been forgotten.

  In about 1870 Mutesa I was fighting a war against one of his neighbours. For this war he built or caused to be built a road along part of the lake. Stanley saw this military road two years later. It still existed as a road. Very little grass had grown over it, which was quite remarkable in a fertile area, which had heavy rains in the rainy season.

  PATRICK EDWARDS was the Trinidad ambassador. He was an African expert, having served in Nigeria for some years. He was interested in my travel and did what he could to help. He thought I should move out of Kampala and have a look at some of the other kingdoms beside Buganda. He wrote an official letter to the kingdom of Busoga (which Kabaka Sunna had spectacularly punished in the 1850s). After some time there was a reply. The officials were concerned to an extraordinary degree about their expenses when I came to see them, and specified what these might be: meals, travel, hotel charges. I felt that in one bound, because of Patrick’s letter, we had gone back a hundred and fifty years to the arbitrary world of the tribal hongo, which could at any time be doubled for the traveller and then doubled again, before the drum of satisfaction could be beaten, to free the traveller. I decided to stay away from Busoga.

  PATRICK THOUGHT we should persevere, and try with the more famous and beautiful kingdom of Toro in the west. In the Serena Hotel, where we were staying, there was as it happened a man who, in addition to his hotel duties in the human resources department, was head of protocol for the kingdom of Toro. Patrick made his usual correct approaches to this man, whose name was James, and in due course we heard from James that the Queen Mother of Toro was going to be in the hotel in a couple of days.

  On the afternoon of the appointed day we sat in the Bambara lounge on the first floor of the hotel, waiting for the Queen Mother. In a far corner of the lounge were three big women, of brown complexion. They were there when we arrived. They made a distinguished group. One of the three was noticeably handsome and vivacious. She was wearing a shade of powder red that suited her complexion. I suspected that she was the Queen Mother, but we couldn’t presume without an introduction. That was made only when James, the protocol man of the court, came.

  The Queen Mother and her companions then left their corner and came to where we were sitting. The women with the Queen Mother were her sisters, and I imagine they were her official chaperones.

  The Queen Mother said of one sister, when she introduced her, that she was a born-again Christian. That meant she was part of the Pentecostal crop of Uganda, where there were hundreds of Pentecostal churches, extravagantly named, and matched in their number only by the private junior and secondary schools, whose signboards (“Day and Boarding”) appeared in unlikely places, like the boards of the churches, a kind of private enterprise gone mad: an unlikely, twisted fulfilment of Mutesa’s wish in 1875 for British missionaries.

  “Do you want to be saved?” the Queen Mother asked ironically.

  But the irony had no effect on her born-again sister who, in an undertone, immediately began to talk to us about the need for Jesus.

  With equal irony the Queen Mother said that the other sister was married to an old man, leaving us to work out what that meant.

  The Queen Mother told her own story easily. She had clearly done it many times before. Her husband had been in the foreign service of Uganda. He had served in Latin America; and she, in her jolly way, spoke some Spanish phrases she still remembered. “Cómo está? Todo va bien?” (“How are you? Everything all right?”) They were a happy couple, although he was older than she. They had three children, two girls and a boy. One of the girls became very ill with leukaemia. They took this girl to the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. For three years, while the girl was in hospital, the family stayed in London. At some stage her father, the diplomat, had to go back to Uganda to deal with various matters. While he was there he died of a heart attack; shortly after, the girl with leukaemia also died. So, at the age of twenty-seven, the Queen Mother became a widow and regent.

  Her son was now sixteen. In two weeks or so he was going to open the parliament at Toro. It was going to be a splendid three-day occasion. Prince Kassim had spoken of this as part of the culture and discipline of the old ways; it was moving in Toro, he said, to see distinguished old men reverencing the boy king. And the Queen Mother now told us a little more about her son. He loved animals. He allowed no one to kick a dog or kill a cat. She was hoping to send him to England to be educated. She invited us all to come to Toro for the opening of the parliament. And Patrick, returning courtesy for courtesy, invited the Queen Mother to come to Trinidad for the carnival in the coming year.

  James, the protocol man, seemed delighted that the meeting in the Bambara lounge had gone so well. He was as squashed in appearance, and dry and formal, as the Queen Mother was full of bounce. He said later, in his delight, “The royal family of Toro are big and handsome and light-skinned.”

  It was strange hearing this from him. He himself was very dark.

  I HAD BEGUN to feel that I had done what I could do in Uganda, and I was planning to move on. But now, after the Queen Mother’s invitation, I thought I should hang around until the opening of the Toro parliament.

 
I had a few memories of the kingdom from 1966. The main town was Fort Portal, named after an early British surveyor of the protectorate. In 1966 it had a kind of expatriate life. There were tea planters. Unwillingly one day I went fishing with one of them in Lake Albert, to the west, and quickly made a mess of things, fouling up line and fly on an underwater snag and amusing no one. The best known bar was The Gum Pot. The ruler was the Omukama, and his palace was at the top of a hill. There were stories about him (or, possibly, his father). When he had drunk too much his majordomo would keep visitors away, saying, “The Omukama is tired.” One year, in a decorating mood, he laid a coat of green paint on the stones beside the hill road to the palace.

  The days passed. No word came from James about the arrangements that had been made for us. Patrick, with his ideas of diplomatic etiquette, didn’t press. On the Saturday when the boy-king was to open the parliament Patrick telephoned James in the morning, and we were told that there were many guests and we couldn’t be fitted in. The ceremonial weekend passed. James said, “You know these royal people. They don’t care.”

  On the days that followed—perhaps Patrick had delivered a diplomatic rebuke—James became more and more agitated. We had been let down; he felt responsible and very much wanted to make it up to us. He wanted us to go to Toro. He even wanted us to spend the night there. He became quite frantic. He said he had planned everything, and he was so full of remorse for his royals we thought it would be churlish, for his sake, not to go to Toro.

  At the last minute, however, some good fairy made us decide not to spend the night there, but to drive back to Kampala. Patrick, always correct, put on a formal grey suit for what could be thought of as his visit to royalty; and we went in his ambassador’s car, with his Trinidad standard unfurled.