This vast territory was only transferred to British East Africa (Kenya) in 1902, for ease of administering the Uganda Railway, which at the time terminated at Port Florence (Kisumu).

So what is the truth of the matter? And, does it actually matter? Was Jomo Kenyatta sired by Omukama Kabalega, or is that just an urban myth?

In the weeks since Jomo’s son Uhuru won the Kenyan presidency, tongues have been wagging in Uganda over the old tale that Kenya’s founding father is the unacknowledged child of one of Uganda’s greatest kings (stoked by Omukama Iguru’s congratulatory message to Uhuru). Was Kabalega a Ugandan in any case? We’ll return to this.

The story goes that when Bunyoro’s Kabalega and his Buganda counterpart, Kabaka Danieri Mwanga, were being marched into exile (transport was by foot or donkey) by the British whose imperialist ambitions they had been resisting, they sojourned in the Mount Kenya area for some time in the year 1899-1900.

There Kabalega got a consort, or was it a nurse (he had been shot and wounded during capture in Lango), a woman from the local Kikuyu tribe, who got pregnant by him. He was shortly to continue his journey, onward to Kismayu, Somalia before ending up in the Seychelles islands, in the Indian Ocean for an odd 20 years.

Photographs have been flashed about, purporting to show resemblance between members of the Royal household of Bunyoro and the Kenyan political dynasty (see Kabalega, Jomo, right).

And so, if at all the Kenyatta household is descended from the Bunyoro royal lineage, would they be the first such leading family to be genetically linked to another foreign household?

To the first question, the answer is “well?” To the second it is “most certainly not.” Most prominent is US President Barack Obama, born to a Kenyan father. Of leading families, a most conspicuous are the British royals. Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, descends from the royal families of Greece and Denmark.

To marry the young Princess Elizabeth, he had to first renounce his Greek and Danish royal titles, and to convert from Greek Orthodoxy to the Anglican Christianity. None of this makes him any less a Briton.

Closer to home, Zambia founding President Kenneth Kaunda’s father was a missionary from Nyasaland (Malawi). This Malawi connection was used as a stick to beat Kaunda after he lost elections in 1991, to the extent that he was once declared a stateless person.

His own tormentor, Frederick Chiluba, was to suffer similarly, with unsubstantiated allegations that he was of Congolese descent.

Meanwhile Rupiah Banda, Zambia’s fourth President, was born in Zimbabwe, then known as Southern Rhodesia. His parents had left Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) to ‘beat kyeyo’ (do odd jobs) in Zimbabwe where he was born. That, too, has occasionally been used against him in the shallow superficiality of politics.

Back to Kabalega: was he Ugandan? You could argue no, on two fronts. First he was totally opposed to the entire Uganda Enterprise, pushed by the British and assisted by their Baganda allies (some say collaborators). It was in opposition to the Uganda Enterprise that he was persecuted and exiled.

So in spirit he was not Ugandan. Secondly, the place where he was born, Bulega, from which his name is derived akaana ka Bulega (child of Bulega) is situated in present-day Congo. He was born in the 1850s when, of course, the Uganda/Congo border had not yet been established, and when the frontiers of the kingdom he was to inherit stretched far and wide to obviously include Bulega.

And, if at all it bears any weight, here is a little reminder: Raila Odinga and Daniel arap Moi, too, could have been Ugandans had the inconvenience of administering the Uganda Railway in two territories not been so acute.

For by the time Kabalega was marching to the coast between 1899 and 1901, the Nyanza and the Baringo areas, Raila and Moi’s respective ethnic homelands, were in Uganda’s Eastern Province, with Uganda running up to Kiambu, Nyeri and Laikipia, pretty close to Nairobi.

It is a truism that power lies in the barrel of the gun, however many ballots and parliamentary seats one may have and, as such, our history shows that it is military muscle that determines how political power is exercised.

The unravelling fallout in the senior-most ranks of the armed forces between General David Tinyefuza Sejusa and his peers brings to mind military pivotal moments that have influenced Uganda’s history.

It is a truism that power lies in the barrel of the gun, however many ballots and parliamentary seats one may have and, as such, our history shows that it is military muscle that determines how political power is exercised.

Going back to the 1890s, when the political entity Uganda came into being, it was the Maxim gun of imperialist Britain that, in the final analysis, clinched it. Existent polities like the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro, and all the other political entities, expanded and contracted owing to their military prowess or the lack of it.

The final jigsaw in forming the original Ugandan state came with the (military) defeat of the kings Kabalega and Mwanga in 1899 by British forces, with reinforcements from India, on the battlefield in Lango. Shane Doyle says in ‘Crisis & Decline in Bunyoro’ (James Currey/Fountain Publishers/Ohio University Press) that, “what is most interesting about the conquest is how the Banyoro responded innovatively to invasion by British forces armed with superior weapons.

Kabaleega chose to defend his kingdom by guerrilla warfare, hoping his will to endure was stronger than his invaders.” The two kings had briefly bolstered their fight by allying with rebelling Sudanese troops, but the resistance was broken with the killing of Bilal Amin, the leader of the mutineers, according to historian Samwiri Lwanga Lunyiigo (‘Mwanga II’, Wavah Books, 2011).
Even before British colonial interest, going back 200 years, the military factor was always there. Richard Reid notes in ‘Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda’ (James Currey/Fountain Publishers/Ohio University Press) that, “the Ganda fought wars for a number of reasons, with both short- and long-term gain in mind. Warfare is fundamental to the process of state-building, to the material basis of state power and to internal cohesion.

The Ganda had incorporated a strong strand of militarism into their culture by the 19th Century. The use of arms played a critical part in the kingdom’s foundation myths, and participation in military campaigns was a fundamental part of male life.”

Fast-forward to 1966, and the first major fallout in post-Independence Uganda which, inevitably, involved the armed forces. When Prime Minister Obote fell out with President Muteesa, he called in the Army but, as it were, not the Army Commander Brigadier Shaban Opolot, who was loyal to the President/Kabaka.

Instead he used Opolot’s deputy, Colonel Idi Amin, whose loyalty he could count on. That was the first fundamental political change in independent Uganda. The next came when Amin’s army was defeated by the Tanzanian People’s Defence Forces (Jeshi la Wanainchi) and Ugandan exiles. Subsequent political changes in 1979 and 1980 were all military-backed. In mid-1985, Ugandans heard what was to become a most quotable quote. “Those were uncoordinated troop movements”, Vice President Paulo Muwanga said, following a night of incessant shooting in the Kampala suburbs of Mbuya and Bugoloobi.

It turned out that the gunshots presaged a fallout in the Uganda National Liberation Army between Acholi and Langi factions that was to lead to President Obote’s ouster on July 27 by Generals Tito Okello and Bazilio Okello.

Matters military evidently do matter in Uganda, and only a fool would regard them as inconsequential. It is easy to dismiss Gen Sejusa as a rogue officer, but isn’t there more to him and what he is saying than meets the eye? After all he is Coordinator of Intelligence Services. His pronouncements are probably not anywhere as fundamental as the “uncoordinated troop movements” of legend, but then again they are not mere nursery rhymes. Because of our past, Ugandans have learnt not to dismiss issues to do with the Army – especially hostility and discord - with the lightness that some are urging. Time will tell.
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It is tempting to compare Alex Ferguson to Yoweri Museveni, if only because each took up their high offices in 1986, one as President of a Republic, the other as manager of a football club. They share longevity, tenacity, contempt for certain people, equal measures of public admiration and dislike, and some elements of success.

Their longevity – they acceded when Maradona, Tyson, Carl Lewis and Philip Omondi ruled sports; when Samson Kisekka, who would be 100 years old today, was Prime Minister; when Gorbachev, Thatcher and Reagan ruled global politics; when Billy Graham still thundered the Gospel; when Usain Bolt was being born; when Ugandan women had curly perm hair and Ugandan men drove the Nissan Sunny – is legendary. Since one has finally retired, is there any chance that his alter ego will do as well?

dsseppuuya@yahoo.com

One of them, with a malaria-struck baby, bade us stop a few km up the road for her to collect money. We stopped and she went to a group of men sitting under a mango tree drinking. It was 9.15am.

Here is a State of the Nation report from an itinerant observer, written on the go after four weeks criss-crossing the country. My verdict is that Uganda is in rude health, the working words being ‘health’ and ‘rude’.

The highways are generally good, most freshly paved. Masaka-Mbarara, Kabale-Kisoro, Soroti-Lira, Karuma-Pakwach-Arua, Matugga-Kapeeka-Semuto, Kawempe-Kafu, and Jinja-Bugiri are excellent. Work is going on on Mbale-Soroti, Mbarara-Kabale and Gulu-Atiak-Nimule.

You would not want your pregnant sister travelling the Tororo-Mbale or Soroti-Katakwi roads for anything, so horrible are they and, as it happens, eastern Uganda presently has the highest fertility of an already runaway national birth rate. Anecdotally, your columnist was astounded by a busy hive of activity at an antenatal and postnatal clinic in Mbale, all babies and mothers, at the foot of Elgon.

The bigger shock, though, was Mbarara’s cow – the old iconic sculpture of an Ankole breed at the town gate is now a grotesque figure, more like a buffalo with bad genes. What’s happening, Mr Mayor? Mbarara is vibrant commercially and socially, but also on the verge of the boda boda madness of Kampala.
Progress seems to have by-passed Masaka, Mubende, and also Tororo, which just won’t cash in on the 720 trucks of cargo cleared daily at nearby Malaba border post. Down the road from Masaka is Kyotera which, for a town with hardly any tarmac, is remarkably neat. The same cannot be said of Kabale, which today is an unbelievable mix of dust and mist. Rakai town is a bowl that looks depressed – probably a reflection of its past as a centre for HIV/Aids.

Gulu is pulling itself up by the bootstraps, and its efforts should be paying off with a population boom and new money. Pakwach and Masindi will benefit from oil investment, Atiak from Sudan trade, but nearby Kigumba remains a little flyblown place. Lira and Soroti are shocking for the garbage strewn all over town – what are the mayors doing? Fort Portal’s smartness and freshness is breath-taking, rivalled a little by Kasese, even for bad English.

Jinja has semblance of traffic jams in the evening, and is collecting parking fees (as is Mbale and Mbarara), but up the road, Iganga still struggles between past, present and future – it just won’t shed its Asian ‘dukawala’ heritage while sitting astride a highway carrying a considerable volume of our GDP. Most trading centres are obsessed with old Indian architecture, even the new buildings. There is simply no authentic Ugandan style.

There is a near-total absence of public transport in places – it was depressing not to offer lifts to requesting hitchhikers on the Kabale-Bwindi mountain route. We did, though, take a mother and child in Kasese, and two on the Soroti-Katakwi road.

One of them, with a malaria-struck baby, bade us stop a few km up the road for her to collect money. We stopped and she went to a group of men sitting under a mango tree drinking. It was 9.15am.

It all culminates in Kampala – high rises, streetlights and dust. The construction industry is alive and kicking, with new residential neighbourhoods opening out. But fantastic new private houses are shamed by lack of access – most suburbs will have narrow roads where neighbours have to squeeze vehicles past each other, highlighting the huge gap between private personal investment and public spending.

School kids, especially in North and East, are barefooted, but is the glass half-full or half-empty, given that at least they go to school? Homes in Buganda, most of West and parts of East are no longer grass-thatched, being of ‘mabati’ roof, but the pity is that they don’t harvest rainwater. Small holder land tenure will make it hard to mechanise farming.

Countrywide the numbers of idle people is rather alarming. A discordant urbanisation takes youthful hordes to pool tables and makeshift sports clubs. The most ubiquitous signs of change are supermarkets, telecom masts, FM radio stations, and satellite TV dishes – you will get a phone signal even in Bwindi’s forests, Murchison Falls Park jungles and Teso’s scrublands. Cows basically still graze in urban centres; most towns have decent hotels, courtesy of private capital and the building boom. Construction though is complimented by boda boda terrorism.

At the odd roadblock, shillings exchange hands between truck or bus drivers and security officers, otherwise roads are pretty free and security is good.

Development is still (too?) focussed on Buganda – agglomeration as economists put it. There are two conurbations developing: the industrial belt of Kampala-Mukono-Jinja, and Kampala-Entebbe which is municipal-residential and catering to the education and leisure industries.

Like a dog’s breakfast, Uganda is coming together, chaotically but progressively.
dsseppuuya@yahoo.com

Embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad refers to his opponents as terrorists; chances are that by the end of this year, they will be in full control of the country, having liberated it from the Assad Dynasty.

Question: When is a bandit not a bandit; or when is a terrorist not a terrorist?
Answer: It depends on who holds the whip hand. Or when they eventually take power, or if they turn out to be Nelson Mandela.
Of course Mandela was once labelled a terrorist; today he is the world’s most celebrated liberator.

Embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad refers to his opponents as terrorists; chances are that by the end of this year, they will be in full control of the country, having liberated it from the Assad Dynasty.

Here at home, in the early 1980s, President Obote used to refer to Yoweri Museveni’s NRA as bandits (rolling his eyes and looking over his spectacles, Obote used to say, in whisky-laced voice: “Those are ‘ben-dits’ [sic]. We shall find them there [in the bush] and leave them there”). Guess who is in power today.

Curiously enough, the Obote and Museveni forces were at one time jointly referred to as ‘kondos’ (common armed thugs). When he came into power in 1971, Gen. Idi Amin found a social problem of ‘kondoism’, or gun-based crime. The country was grappling with armed robbers, and ‘kondoism’ was actually one of the 18 points the army cited for overthrowing Obote to install Amin. And so there was a legitimate fight against violent crime, for which Amin pronounced a shoot-on-sight policy.

Resistance to his rule by the forces of Obote’s Kikosi Maalum and Museveni’s Fronasa (Front for National Salvation), among others, culminated in the abortive invasion of 1972, after which it became easy for Amin to round up his opponents under the guise of fighting ‘kondos’.

So both a social problem and a political challenge were conveniently rolled into one, settled mainly at the firing squad.

Of course it has been said that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s liberator”, and how true it has turned out throughout history.

When you hold the whip hand, when you have power behind you, because of a culture of political intolerance, it becomes easy to paint your opponents with whatever brush you want. Thus George W. Bush, in 2002, pinpointed the ‘Axis of Evil’, comprising Iran, Iraq and North Korea, all America’s enemies with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

It eventually turned out, to Bush’s eternal embarrassment, that Iraq did not have WMDs, the reason America used to invade that country.

Which brings us to Niwagaba, Sekikuubo, Nsereko and Tinkasimire – ‘rebel MPs’; so-called because of their outspokenness from within a quiescent ruling party on national issues and matters of governance.
In the newsroom, we once debated whether it is technically correct, in formal newspaper reportage, to refer to them as ‘rebel MPs’, and the conclusion was that it was incorrect; any such references is the media being gullible to the people who so label those they disagree with. Rebels they are not – you may call them maverick, for they can be cheeky, but for the most, these four are people representatives who are brave enough to voice misgivings that many others think but will not say.

They are labelled rebels for not slavishly following an increasingly errant party line. That is all.

Various people have been called various things by those who disagree with them. That is the prerogative of holding power or having influence. Ronald Reagan once called Muammar Gaddafi the ‘Mad Dog of the Middle East’, to which the Libyan leader retorted, calling the US President the ‘Mad Dog of the Atlantic.’ Both were awfully powerful men.

Shall it turn out, one day, that the so-called ‘rebel MPs’ will be rehabilitated and referred to in loftier terms? You would be foolish to count against it as many who have been previously demonised have eventually popped up in positions not only of influence, but of real power. It is only the fullness of time that shall tell.

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He was supposed to have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth but, as it turned out, Prince David Kintu Wasajja’s life got caught up in the turmoil borne of political intolerance in the early years of Independence.

Born as his father, Kabaka Sir Edward Muteesa was fleeing into exile, Wasajja’s is a life of not just foregone privilege as also of an ordinary bloke with feet firmly on the ground. He is the people’s prince, accessible, sensible, level-headed.

What will happen when a foreign dignitary, a fashionista like Yvonne Chaka Chaka or Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, comes to Uganda? Will they be waiting for her in the airport arrivals lounge with a ‘busuuti’ or a ‘mushanana’ or a ‘ekyishaato/eshuuka’? Get her to take her pick of decent Ugandan women’s dress?

My favourite aunt, had she been alive, would probably have laughed the entire sorry episode of a possible miniskirt ban into a safe busuuti-clad retirement.
A teenager in the ‘Swingin’ Sixties’, we have pictures of her, with her sisters, wearing the kind of mini dress that has our fuddy-duddy old men today cringing in self-appointed moral outrage of what our womenfolk can or cannot wear.

By the time the ‘Swingin’ Sixties’ ended in Uganda, Idi Amin was in power and subsequently banned mini dresses. Poor old Idi: he did not have to, as fashion, in any case, had taken care of it with the coming in the early 1970s of the ‘maxi’ (maximum) dress on the Ugandan fashion scene. Young and old looked regal in flawless ankle-length maxis, frequently supplemented with colourful headgear.

That really is fashion: it takes care of itself, unless you are the Taliban, and I do smell some Talibanesque behaviour in the tabled Bill that proposes heavy fines or jail for minis, among other perceived misdeeds. But Uganda is more enlightened than the Taliban.

The other influence that takes care of fashion is age. My aunt, by the time she passed away, had had a total makeover, wearing matronly skirts and the national dress, the busuuti. She never went into her twilight years, let alone middle age, as a mini-clad woman. Hardly any woman does. Fashion shifts with time and age. Period!

This is what our Parliamentarians should understand. You cannot take a one-eyed view of social life and think that you are a true people’s representative. You cannot enact outrageous laws and expect them to be respected.

Who, in any case, is going to enforce this? Shall we, like Saudi Arabia, have a Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice? These, then, would be the people engaged to ensure that women’s clothes fitted the lawful dimensions? Would they be equipped with rulers and tape measures to evaluate the woman disembarking from the bus, the teenager at the beach, the worshiper at church, the professional in the bank, the waitress at the restaurant? Actually, would the morality police be men or women?

Will the vigilantes go into boutiques and shops and take down fashions deemed by the old fogeys to be offending? Will cat-walks and fashion weeks be proscribed? What will happen when a foreign dignitary, a fashionista like Yvonne Chaka Chaka or Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, comes to Uganda? Will they be waiting for her in the airport arrivals lounge with a ‘busuuti’ or a ‘mushanana’ or a ‘ekyishaato/eshuuka’? Get her to take her pick of decent Ugandan women’s dress?

Come to think of it, will the morality police be sent helter-skelter to Karamoja, where our women famously wear beads over some strips of cloth? Or will those vigilantes be manning roadblocks to prevent Karimojong women getting to Kampala, where they might offend parliamentarians?

What Parliament should worry about is if women strip naked (a few have threatened to parade in the nude if unfair laws are passed on the Marriage Bill, and if land in Northern Uganda were ‘stolen’, as some communities there are fearing). Now that would alarm all of us, even the most liberal-minded. The fuddy-duddies would probably faint. There is a precedent in Ugandan folklore, when a woman named Nambwere, in the 1950s or 1960s, was dared to strip naked by men in downtown Kampala’s taxi park. She promptly did and walked around, eventually having a song composed out of her feat: “Nambwere yakola ekyafaayo/n’ajjamu engoye nassa wali/ n’atambula nga bweyazaalibwa” (“Nambwere did the unthinkable/stripped naked, clothes aside/and walked in her birthday suit”).

Nambwere has an ideological forebear in English lore. Lady Godiva’s story is told, the way Nambwere’s used to be in Uganda, to British kids in many homes.

Lady Godiva was a noblewoman who lived in the city of Coventry about 900 years ago. She is said to have been alarmed by the terribly high taxes her rich husband imposed on their squatters. She continuously appealed to reduce them, but the man (men!) refused. Fed up with her pleas he pledged that he would cut the taxes if she rode naked in public. She stripped, climbed on a horse, and rode the city streets after all men were ordered to stay at home and shut their windows (the legend of ‘Peeping Tom’ comes from a naughty man – wasn’t an MP - who decided to look).

We are fed up of laws which do not make sense being enacted by our Parliament, and the critical ones that should propel this nation forward in stability and development being left out. Shall we protest like Madam Nambwere or Lady Godiva? Probably not, but for now I fear that if they go ahead with this ridiculous miniskirt ban, Parliament would have gotten their proverbial knickers in a twist.

dsseppuuya@yahoo.com