John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
It was a bit disconcerting. It was my first visit to the city of Kampala, capital of the East African state of Uganda. It was an important moment. Uganda, which the national tourist board is pleased to promote as “the pearl of Africa”, is a lush, verdant para-dise, very possibly the place where the Biblical Garden of Eden was really situated: the cradle of humanity, and the source of many of its myths and legends.
Uganda is also the place where some of humanity’s worst human atrocities of recent times took place, during the era of Field Marshall Idi Amin Dada, that legendary invention of the British army.
Kampala is a little rundown, like so many African cities, but boasts a certain charm in spite of it, or because of it. The British, during their time of ruling Uganda as part of British East Africa, tried to obscure this natu-ral African beauty beneath manicured lawns and disciplined hedgerows. Now the image is inverted, and the remnants of lawn struggle to keep the stiff upper lip in place through the vengeful profusion of jackfruit trees and several varieties of banana that dominate them. The “African renaissance” has kicked in from deep inside the undergrowth.
One of the romantic myths left behind by the colonials was that Kampala was a city built on seven hills, just like Rome. So, looking out of my hotel window, I asked my Ugandan host if this was really true, of if it was just another of those wishful exaggerations that missionaries and explorers are prone to when trying to describe life in the tropics to the credulous folk back home.
My host looked at me with soulful eyes. “Well, yes, it used to be true that Kampala was built on seven hills,” he said. “Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. We no longer have seven hills.”
The bunny-hugging, green-power-fellow- traveller in me was startled. Could it be that the wars that had been waged to dislodge the hated Amin had been so ferocious that the landscape itself had become a casualty, and several of the hills that had given Kampala its spectacular setting had been razed?
My host was looking at me deadpan. “We no longer have seven hills,” he continued. “We now have about 13.” Pointing out of the window, he showed me what he meant.
In the old days, so the story goes, when the kabaka of Buganda was still a political force to be reckoned with, an imposing edifice was thrown up on each of seven hills overlooking the king’s palace, an ornate, post-Victorian building sitting in the valley at Mengo down below. Each edifice represented some aspect of modern life that was encroaching on the ancient civilisation of the Baganda. The Anglican cathedral stood on the hill at Namirembe; the Catholic cathedral was constructed on Lubaga Hill; the Great Mosque was constructed on Kibuli Hill, and the foundations of what was to be one of Africa’s great universities were dug on the hill at Makerere.
Muyenga was the hill on which colonial and Baganda dignitaries built their houses, a hospital sprang up at Mulago, and telegraph communication facilities were set up at Kololo. Thus were established the seven pillars of modern civilisation at Kampala.
Far from being obliterated during the years of growth and turmoil that ensued, the life that took root on each of the seven hills eventually spread to the point where each hill became overcrowded, and construction began to spill over on to the naked, neighbouring hills. And that is how the seven hills of Kampala gradually grew to 13 and now probably number even more.
Buganda, the most powerful kingdom when the British came to call, learned to absorb these new elements into its structure while generally maintaining its traditional values. The dress codes that have become accepted as traditional to Buganda are a case in point. An upright Muganda lady will wear the busuti, a long dress with short puffy sleeves, offset with a wide sash in different material – a colourful adaptation of the Victorian dress code introduced by missionaries in the late 19th century.
The male dress code is a little more complex. The dignified Muganda man will appear at formal occasions dressed in a kanzu, the long, white robe introduced by the Arabs at about the same time the European missionaries were arriving with their own sartorial ideas. Over the kanzu, the man must wear a dark, formal, European-style suit jacket. The trousers that make up the rest of the suit are worn under the kanzu. Thus both invading civilisations are appeased at the same time, and the Muganda is able to get on with his life.
The current king of Buganda is a further extension of this image of adaptability. Kabaka Ronald Mutebi was exiled at the age of 10, when his father was deposed by president Milton Obote, and grew up in England. He is impeccably British, with a Cambridge degree, and yet is impeccably Muganda as well. In 1985, as the era of dictatorships drew to a close, he chose to return to Uganda and take up the mantle of kingship that he had been groomed for.
“We are effectively trying to modernise the old Buganda,” he says, “and at the same time strengthen the old cultural institutions. This isn’t such a great dilemma as people might think. When we had the new religions coming in, when we had the Arab slave trade, when we had colonialism, there was always the question of how you deal with a foreign culture. So it’s not such a new thing, really. The way to handle it is to keep in touch with Buganda’s culture as it has always been – keep in touch with those aspects which must be kept, at the same time as finding out what can be changed.”
And so, as new hills appear on the Kampala skyline, the old kingdom adapts into the folds of the modern political dispensation.