Guests enjoying luwombo. PHOTO/COURTESY- EWAFFE CULTURAL VILLAGE
Women with beaming faces and men singing and dancing to the pulsating sounds of the traditional alluring drums welcome me. Shaking their waistlines to the beat of the drums, the dancers’ feet and hands follow a homogenous pattern of the rhythmic Bakisimba-Muwogola dance of Baganda. The rays from the 10 o’clock sun coupled with the energetic and captivating performance, slowly start to ooze drops of sweat on the faces of the elated and agile staff of Ewaffe Cultural Village in Naggalama, Mukono, some 42 kilometres from Uganda’s capital city, Kampala.
The drummers happily express their gratitude with playful movement of their eyes and occasional frolics or quickly join their elbows in what seems as soundless clap. This as they busy their hands and spur on the dancers. The music is beautiful enough to tickle visitors- a mother, father, their son and two daughters- to join in and imitate the youthful performers. Metres away, Moses Mayanja claps for the drummers and young king and queen dancer’ in their parents' company.
As the sound of drums systematically subsides and fade into loud cheers and clapping, Mayanja extends a handshake to each of the guests before leading them to seats, near the entrance of a grass-thatched hut. And as they share their experience of the indulgence in the Kiganda dance, a lady emerges from the hut with a basket tray with a number of calabashes (read endeku in Luganda) as well as small banana pouches.
She calms to her knees. “Tusanyuse okubalaba (we’re glad to welcome you), " she says with a wide smile while she hands each visitor a calabash containing banana juice. The youngsters curiously sip on it and as their taste buds alight, they eagerly listen to one of our gracious hosts, Yudaya Mayanja, who explains that one of the main traits of Baganda is warmly welcoming visitors with a drink and coffee beans.
Dressed in a decent traditional Gomesi with her hair covered with a robe, Yudaya explains that Ewaffe is a Luganda word for ‘our home, our country’ and the cultural village is a showcase of how people in Buganda Kingdom used to live and behave. As such, Ewaffe reminds tourists about the norms and culture of the Baganda.
Besides the Ganda traditional dance, there are other immersive activities laced with the way of life of the people, allowing visitors an education tour and first-hand experience, taking them back in time. The itinerary at the cultural village is extensive enough to last a week, owing to the rich and elaborate detail of lifestyle and cultural traditions of the Baganda, but the proprietors creatively condense it into hours for illustrative purposes.
This still delivers an exciting experience for visitors to enjoy the hospitality that speaks to the soul of community, the healthcare system in the backyard herbal gardens, the well and springs that feed into different processes in the home and the culinary arts and the detail of customs in planting, harvesting, preparation, serving of the foods and intricacies of customary values and messages the different types hold and manifest. A day at Ewaffe is like an unwritten research trip that should allow a casual visitor in but also call for the deeper interest of those that seek to understand and appreciate culture. Ewaffe represents a community home with a welcome area compound, part of which serves as a parking lot.
There is a main house- a grass-thatched hut with a manic entrance and exit. In there, you will find a living room with mats, where the family and visitors interact in conversation over meals. There is a back-end with an extensive grassy area to accommodate home activities such as preparation of meals, washing utensils, a garden, washrooms, kitchen and boy quarters annex, cordoned with vegetal reeds.
At the back-end, tourists are guided to the garden to learn about different plants that serve as medicinal herbs and their purpose in homes. It’s situated on the lower side of the compound and house. While she points and plucks leaves to explain the herbs and their value, she observes that before there were hospitals, the Baganda had a garden behind the house, where they planted herbal plants that were used whenever one was sick. The educational session is followed by a visit to the well through a fairly rugged path in a greenery enclave.
A guide on the right teaches a guest how to draw water from the well with lillies. PHOTO/COURTESY- EWAFFE CULTURAL VILLAGE
The guide leads visitors with a pot on her head. Modern times have changed the traditional life for people to (voluntarily) detach from the beauty of simple rural life or life as was known in the past without chemically treated piped water. But the appetite for what’s as natural as spring water is still there with the demand for bottled mineral and spring water.
And as she guides visitors to the well, Yudaya portrays the traditional remedial woman, treading the beaten paths barefooted, still in her gomesi and head wrapped on top of which she has a round, locally crafted traditional banana head scarf (read enkata) that serves a lightweight carriage to protect the woman’s hair and help balance the pot on her head. When they arrive, she slowly walks down to the stream, calms and bends her knees, takes the pot from the head to start fetching the water, carefully sieving the water to only collect what’s clean.
She adds that the reason why Baganda chose to go fetch water from the well in the morning and not the afternoon, particularly between midday and 1pm, was because during that time, there would be snakes, so they avoided the hours for fear of being attacked and bitten by poisonous crawling mammals. Yudaya takes visitors through the process of making banana juice (read Omubisi).
There are things needed in order to start the process: Kayinja or Musa bananas, spear grass, sorghum and calabash in which to put the made juice or local brew. The local brew is one of the gifts presented at the introduction (kwanjula) ceremony. She says the norm is to tie a banana leaf around the calabash to show respect to the elders.
The ssenga takes on from Yudaya to explain the process of preparing food, her emphasis on Luwombo which is one of the main and unique culinary offerings from Buganda; a special meal prepared using warmed banana leaves in chicken beef, goat’s meat, mushroom with either mushroom or dried fish, meats is naturally cooked with different ingredients and condiments.
Ewaffe, founded by Aisha Nabwanika Mayanja, seeks to remind the world of the cultural values that define Buganda in particular but the pride we ought to have and attach to our roots and heritage. On the visit to the cultural village, your multimedia storyteller was in the company of two friends- Emmanuel Kintu a visual content creator and Godfrey Lule- the then acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Buganda Heritage & Tourism Board (BHTB).
After a sumptuous traditionally-prepared organic meal of steaming hot and soft matooke, aromatic rice, chicken luwombo, groundnut and bitter berries (read katunkuma) with some natural juice and pot (nsuwa) water to wash it down, our bellies were full and so were our hearts, thanks to the knowledge acquired and nostalgia from the things we either witnessed as children or heard in stories, some in passing.
