Kabalega’s Bunyoro had caesarean births in 1879, and other great African stories

If you can, please, please make a date to watch a re-run of the documentary series on DSTv called Africa’s Great Civilisations. I have recorded and watched it twice. Here is a pithy description of it that I found online:
“This six-hour documentary series chronicles 200,000 years of Africa’s untold history, beginning with the origin of man and the formation of early human societies. Hosted by Emmy Award-winning Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., the series details significant historical events, including the rise of African kingdoms and the growth of trade networks with the Middle East, Europe and China. The series also traces the roots of agriculture, writing, artistic expression and iron working.”

The series, which first featured in the US in 2017, has some mind-blowing bits. Even Gates himself is wont to pose and ask in wonder; “how can it be that African children aren’t taught this in school?”
I believe one of the “next frontier” items is African history is it. It will be a great period when Africans finally get soaked in the story and inspiration of their great past. But it will also be a dangerous time. It will arrive toward 2040, and could become fully ripe around 2050. It will be at a time when with, by far, the world’s youngest population and work force will be African, and Africa will be definitively ascendant. I think one aspect one result of this history, will be the unleashing of a dangerously chauvinist Afrocentrism – the young Africans will be “too proud” of their heritage, and possibly begin to espouse some forms of superiority.
I generally consider myself less excitable these days, and sufficiently cynical. Like many Ugandans, one of my heroes is the nationalist Bunyoro king Chwa II Kabalega (1853-1923).

Kabalega was many things, including being a genius military strategist – with an imperial ambition to match. He was an innovator like no other. People talk themselves hoarse about “value addition” and all that, Kabalega did it. He “stole” the mzungu’s technology, and his blacksmiths made guns for him, including the one he personally fought with.
From time to time, I still blindsided by the new things I find out about Kabalega. I remember when I first read a report attributed to medical missionary R. W. Felkin, that in 1879, Kabalega’s Bunyoro was the only place in the world where caesarean section was performed to save both mother and baby, I became hopeless hysterical.

To imagine that today with all the advances, women in Uganda are still butchered during caesarean surgery, or childbirth in general, and that 240 years ago in Kabalega’s kingdom, they were pulling off world firsts in this area, you have to take a big bow of respect.
But there is something else, which one will not see in the documentary, but which is relevant to Uganda. “Skip” Gates is also Director of the Hutchins Centre for African and African-American Research at Harvard University.
The centre publishes a magazine, Transition, which is doubtless one of the leading journals anywhere on what we could describe as the “Black world” and ideas.

Transition was founded in Kampala in 1961 by Ugandan-Asian Rajat, at the age of only 22. It became the most influential such magazine in Africa. All the politicians who thought they were smart, and the smart people who weren’t politicians, wrote in it. Milton Obote held forth in its page, so did Ali Mazrui, and Wole Soyinka.
It ended like many such things do in this part of the world. In 1968, Neogy was charged with sedition, after a series of articles critical of the Obote government. He was jailed, and released after some months. Transition also got embroiled in a controversy about being a “CIA front”, because one of the donors that supported it at one point, was said to have received money from the agency.

He moved to West Africa, Ghana specifically, from where he published the magazine, and later to the US. The Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research subsequently bought Transition. Neogy died in the US in 1995 at the age of 57. His represents one of the things we have lost. The early intellectual movements in Uganda, and East Africa were quite broad, and quite cosmopolitan, despite the nativist streaks that were everywhere. So were the early nationalist movements, trade unions.

It is probably inconceivable that anywhere in East Africa today, a citizen of Asian descent could head a trade union, be Speaker of Parliament, mayor of the capital, or Police chief. But there was a time when it was common. Even less likely, is a Neogy publishing Transition. One of my uncles was a big man in the Kenyan Police. It was a different East Africa. Until his death, he travelled across the border frequently to cash his pension cheque. So where do we start?

Mr Onyango-Obbo is the publisher of Africa data.
visualiser Africapedia.com and explainer site. Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3