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Womunafu's Bunafu
A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community
By David William Cohen PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03093-7
CHAPTER 1
The Birth of Womunafu
At the close of the eighteenth century, Luuka was a small and weak state. Political control was felt over distances no greater than thirty kilometers. To the west, south, and east, swamp-filled valleys constituted major obstacles to expansion. (See map 3.) To the north, the Nabisira River marked the frontier of regular administration. The Nabisira is a funnel which carries away excess water from the adjacent lands to the north and south. In the drier months the Nabisira resembles a long narrow swamp. In the two wet seasons of the year, the Nabisira becomes a papyrus-rimmed stream, carrying water away toward the east and depositing it in the northward-flowing Lumbuye River. The great Lumbuye, which separates western and central Busoga today, was always a substantial obstacle to movement east and west. The Nabisira, in comparison, presented no great inconvenience to those who sought to cross it. At Busanda on the east, there was a ford which was firm and easy during the two dry seasons of the year; at Makutu in the center there was a year-round shallow water track; and at Nawanhago along the western reaches of the river, it was possible to make a dry crossing most times of the year. (See map 4.) The river itself was no barrier to the expansion of the Luuka state, but its location some thirty kilometers north of the capitals of the Luuka kings made it the northern limit of expansion of the state in this period.
The Nabisira was also a horizon. While the early kings of Luuka clearly could not administer the region beyond the Nabisira, by the close of the eighteenth century their attentions were occasionally oriented in this direction. The second ruler of Luuka had sent his dedicated follower Kalalu north of the Nabisira as a first effort to bring the area to the north under the control of the Luuka capital. Kalalu was a commoner, a man of the Muluuta clan, one of a few migrants from the Lake Victoria coastlands to reach so far north before 1800. He established a home at Nasumiti, now called Budhuuba, at the northern edge of the Nabisira swamp. Over the next three generations the Muluuta chiefs at Nasumiti would bring most of the northern reaches of the region under the administrative control of the Luuka kings.
The second ruler of Luuka — Inhensiko — accelerated the program of expansion to the north through a strategic marriage. Kabalu was a young girl — of the Munhana clan. Her family had fled Bugweri in the center of Busoga some two generations before her birth. They settled at Nsambya on the Nakaibaale, a stream flowing southward into the Nabisira. Living to the north of the Nabisira, Kabalu's family was beyond the control of Inhensiko and, before him, his father Nhiro. Nevertheless, they sought contact with the Luuka capital-the gift of Kabalu to King Inhensiko was an early invitation to the ruler to formalize his influence north of the Nabisira. Kabalu traveled to Inhensiko's enclosure at Kiroba Hill, and there she became the senior, though not the first, wife in the palace upon his accession to kingship. Her son Wambu zi Munhana (as he was eventually called) was one of the many sons born to Inhensiko and his many wives during his long reign. Sixteen sons survived to maturity, but as the eldest surviving son of the senior wife, Wambuzi was in the best position to succeed to the throne upon his father's death. He spent much of his childhood north of the Nabisira in his mother's home at Nsambya. His presence there not only protected him from the dangers of palace strife and foreign wars, but also served to extend the influence of the ruling house of Luuka into the Nsambya area.
Inhensiko's reign was a long and active one, and Wambuzi was well along in years when his father finally passed away within his home at Kiroba Hill. Wambuzi was probably taken at night across thirty kilometers of countryside between Nsambya and Kiroba by his mother Kabalu, his Munhana brothers-in-law, the Muluuta chief at Nasumiti (then still, apparently, Kalalu), and a collection of other supporters. A long reign had given King Inhensiko and his followers various opportunities to prepare the way for Wambuzi's succession. The other sons were increasingly isolated from contact with the palace as Inhensiko advanced in years. They may not have been informed of their father's death until it was too late. Wambuzi most likely reached the palace on the day following his father's passing. He was soon thereafter seated on Inhensiko's throne at Kiroba Hill without resistance.
It was about the fifteenth year of Wambuzi's reign — some time in the third decade of the nineteenth century — when a small house was erected on the edge of the Nabisira swamp on the northern margins of the Luuka state. The house was constructed quickly of reeds and grass cut from the margins of the swamp, and it was sited in a small clearing near the Makutu crossing of the Nabisira. This was a rough shelter, the kind that new settlers in Busoga put up for themselves until they can put together the materials, time, and assistance to erect a larger and more lasting building. This particular shelter was built for a young woman named Mukanni. Mukanni was a commoner — of the Igobe clan — and her family's home and the home of her birth lay just across the Nabisira from Makutu. She was being taken home to her father and to her brothers, but she was undoubtedly anxious, worried, confused, seeking the safety and warmth of her home, yet concerned about arriving there pregnant. Mukanni had disgraced herself at home some years before. There may have been an earlier illicit pregnancy. Exiled from her home, too young and ill informed to seek out the protection of relatives elsewhere, she eventually reached the palace of Wambuzi. She joined the palace staff as maid and whore. There, tradition records, her small figure and enormous breasts attracted the attentions of most of the men in the palace, including Wambuzi. Wambuzi was particularly interested in her lovely body, tradition tells us, and he slept with her on a number of occasions. Within a year of her arrival in the palace, Wambuzi noticed that Mukanni was pregnant. For some reason he felt embarrassed, even threatened by the situation, and he ordered his closest advisors to remove her from the palace and "dispose of her." The assignment was an ambiguous one-the words of instruction could mean many things: should she be sold off, should she be returned to her home, should she be killed? For the advisors the problem was a difficult one; Mukanni was carrying a member of the royal family. The traditions suggest, moreover, that Wambuzi wanted to hear nothing about the decision finally made. It was a closed subject, or at least so it appeared.
We cannot explore the minds of the advisors of Wambuzi, and we cannot know with precision the reasons why Mukanni was not sold off or killed. We do know she was not harmed. There certainly were people at the court — people of influence — who did not want to see Mukanni "disposed of ," who did not want to see her and her child extinguished , who saw opportunity in the birth of yet another prince, even an illegitimate one. Wambuzi had six sons already, and several of these were, by the time of Mukanni 's pregnancy , vying for their father's title. It may be assumed that each son was a rallying point for intrigue at the palace, for adventurers arriving in Luuka sought to enhance their status through forming alliances with, and aiding the rise of, potential successors. Some may have sought to attach themselves to a prince who could possibly ensure them land , status, and office in the region north of the Nabisira where Mukanni's kin were established. This particular unborn child would have served the immediate needs of these adventurers, for it was recognized that it was a male, a prince, and that he had "spoken in the womb"; not only spoken, but that he had, in fact, requested regalia, the symbols of royal office. The hearing of the words from the womb and the recognition of possession wove a protective shroud around the pregnant Mukanni, at the same time narrowing the choices available to Wambuzi 's advisors. They would not kill Mukanni. The unborn child would be protected.
It was evidently determined that the unborn prince would be best protected at his mother's home just north of the Makutu crossing of the Nabisira. There was nothing novel in this decision to return Mukanni, with the unborn prince, to her home. This was the ideal for the royal families of the states located right across northern Busoga — that a son of a ruler should be raised at his mother's home. Born in the palace, yes; raised in the palace, no. Ibanda Ngobi, the father of the founders of the ruling houses of the Luuka and Kigulu kingdoms was raised at Nhenda Hill in the fenced compound of the father of Tegula, the girl who was his mother. Inhensiko I, the second ruler of Luuka, was raised at his mother's home, and his sixteen sons were brought up in the compounds of their mothers. Wambuzi Munhana, Inhensiko I's successor, was raised at Nsambya, at the home of his mother, Kabalu.
The raising of these princes at the homes of their mothers served to bridge the prestigious bearing and exogenous culture of the northern ruling families in Busoga with the commoner homes of the Bantu-speaking local families. In the reigns of the first rulers of Luuka (and of the first rulers of the other kingdoms of northern Busoga), two worlds coexisted. The first was the world of the enclosure where the values, the ideas, the cultural fabric of Lwo-speaking people were sustained. These Lwo speakers and their non-Lwo-speaking children were the descendants of migrants who had dispersed far and wide from the southern Sudan and northern Uganda over the preceding eight centuries and whose influence is noted today as far north as Khartoum and as far south as northern Tanzania.
The second world was that of the commoner families, whose Bantu speech and more settled lives gave them a distinct orientation. But these distinctions between coresident Lwo and Bantu could not survive. Royal men married local women and, as fathers, the princes and rulers played little part in the raising of their children. The sons of Mukama, the sons of Ibanda Ngobi, the sons of Inhensiko, and the sons of Wambuzi were born in one world and raised in the other. In the course of two or three or four generations, the Lwo world became increasingly less sustainable, and the royal enclosure lost its cultural distinctiveness. The raising of sons outside the palace bridged rulers and commoners and constituted one of the paths along which the rulers exchanged prestigious isolation for practiced domination.
At the same time, these bridges spanning the gulf between ruler and commoner served to protect the ruler from the ambitions of his royal brothers. Bearing royal status, the ruler's kin were difficult to discipline and not infrequently sought separate status through secession and civil conflict. The circle of involved and trusted commoners, tied to the ruler through marriage, served to protect him from the ambitions of his royal kin. These commoner in-laws could be used to discipline recalcitrant princes in times of civil war or in disputes over succession. It was Inhensiko I who first and most extensively utilized this principle of alliance. His sweeping network of marriages brought to his side new and trusted followers, many of them — as in the case of Kabalu's family — from outside the existing domain. Inhensiko placed some of these immigrants in important territorial offices, the duties of which included overseeing princes residing within the division. While all of Inhensiko's sons were granted village estates and enjoyed substantial authority within them, commoners such as Kalalu — the Muluuta clan client of Inhensiko — were given chiefly offices outranking those of the sons of the ruler. This striking insertion of commoner clients between the ruler and his royal kin was the great hallmark of the reign of Inhensiko I.
In giving precedence to delegated authority as opposed to inherited status, Inhensiko I tempered the alliance between a prince and his mother's family among whom he was raised. This in turn opened the way to more formal incorporation into the Luuka kingdom of the areas within which Inhensiko's sons were raised. King Inhensiko and his closest followers had created a new style of politics within the emerging kingdom, one joining the traditional ideal of grooming princes away from the palace to a heightened recognition of the potential role for commoners within the state and an increased concern for discipline within the royal family. Within a generation, Inhensiko I had transformed the world from the Luuka Hills to the Nabisira River, had exchanged his father's prestigious, enclosed isolation and Lwo orientation for full involvement in the world outside the enclosure.
In turn, Inhensiko's son, Wambuzi Munhana, maintained this recognition of the crucial importance of the commoner within the kingdom. Trusted commoners had prepared the way for his own peaceful investiture, and commoner officials were continuing the process of expansion of the state begun in his father's reign. But the tasks of commoners within the kingdom were nonetheless complex and delicate. Princes were above commoners in the arena of social status, yet commoners were charged with the responsibility for disciplining princes in the arena of politics. The incongruence between role and office was not neatly resolved. Innovations and traditions that could weave together the very different fabrics of appointed power and exalted and inherited status into a larger and still stable political realm tended to be affirmed by Inhensiko I and Wambuzi Munhana when dealing with their kin and clients. In this sense, it was politic to permit, even encourage, the ruler's wives to raise their sons at their homes away from the palace. There, the prince might gain a local following and enjoy local power, but such authority would be limited by both the competitive activities of other princes and the commanding presence of a commoner overseer loyal to the king. When Wambuzi's trusted advisors decided to lead Mukanni, with unborn child , back to her home north of the Nabisira, it was, then, a response to an ambiguous assignment worked out within a framework of strategic norms.
But if this was their intention, why did the party halt at the southern bank of the Nabisira, less than 3,000 meters from Mukanni's home? Even in a normal rainy season, the river could be crossed, and even if Mukanni were already in labor, the last stage of the journey would take no more than two hours, considerably less time than it would take to clear the ground and construct a sturdy shelter. Perhaps the explanation lies in concerns we may suppose weighed heavily on the minds of Mukanni and her companions. First, the lands on the other side of the river, where the homes of Mukanni's family were located, may have been unfamiliar political ground to the men of King Wambuzi. Nearby Nsambya, Wambuzi Munhana's home for some years, was presumably well known but not the lands to the west and southwest of Nsambya; that is, to the northwest of Makutu. This was Nafa's place. Naf a was of the Muganza clan, a strong man in the area just to the northwest of Makutu. (See map 5.) He had had, apparently, no links of any kind with the rulers of Luuka, had sent no girls to Inhensiko's or Wambuzi's compounds, presumably paid no tax or tribute to either Wambuzi or Kalalu at nearby Nasumiti. Could Nafa in fact be a representative in this area of Kagoda, the ruler of "Budiope" (Bugabula) which lay to the west and northwest of Luuka, much as Kalalu was the trusted representative of Wambuzi along the northern horizon of Luuka? Whatever the evidence before the men of Wambuzi, Nafa's world was clearly beyond the boundaries of Luuka, and the crossing of a party from the palace into Nafa's world could only be construed as a serious intrusion.
Moreover, it could not be expected that Mukanni's father, living in the midst of Nafa's world and having himself previously expelled Mukanni, would urge Nafa to welcome the king's party. Mukanni herself probably had serious second thoughts about returning to the abusive atmosphere at home, which a year or two before had driven her away. And her companions may have fretted about the propriety of a prince being born at his mother's home outside the royal domain, something that had not occurred previously. So, very likely the outcome of the play of several concerns rather than merely the exigency of labor, the house was built at Makutu on the southern banks of the river, and there Mukanni had her child.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Womunafu's Bunafu by David William Cohen. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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