When the Ugandan gomesi is more than a busuti

A young restless Ugandan with a bright future was under the mistaken impression that I had an “outside the box” view of the Pearl of Africa, and could help her solve a problem.

She was developing research ideas for an advanced degree and wanted something “crazy”, unexplored, about Uganda to study. Most things around were too boring for her, she declared.

I was glad to make mischief, but she found some of my ideas too much. One of them was my suggestion to do a Master’s degree in the economics and cultural politics of the busuti (gomesi). She thought I was joking. When she realised I was serious, I sensed she suspected I had been smoking something strong. After some back and forth, she took a more favourable view. One day, Ugandan women like her will rule this world.

The busuti is second on my list of the top five unsung proxy things that reveal a lot about Uganda.

Its history is both complicated and messy. Basically the foundation of the busuti is the barkcloth that women wore in the old Buganda Kingdom. Some trace its silky aspects and the sash to the reign of Kabaka Ssuna II following the arrival of Arab traders in Buganda in the mid-1800s. The modern Victorian look with the puffed shoulders traces to the missionaries and the British colonialists. Its evolution into a mass product in most of the country is attributable to the British policy of indirect rule and the Buganda Kingdom’s role in it; the development of cotton and coffee as commodity crops; the arrival and spread of the Uganda Railway; the dispersal of the Indian workers who came with it around the country as a trading community; and the development of tailoring in their textile stores.

That, needless to say, is a keep-it-simple-and-stupid summary, but you get the picture. It’s hard to think of another dress item, or product, in Uganda that has such a layered history.

To see the difference, let us compare three dominant women’s national dress movements today. There is the busuti, the mushanana, and the Kitenge/kanga-based “African dress”. There was a time in this country when the latter was called “Congolese”, which is another story of its own.

A peasant woman in the village can own a Sh10,000 busuti, use the same to go work her garden on Saturday, go with it to her local church on a Sunday, and use it as a blanket at night. That is not possible with mushanana or African dress. Meanwhile, a well-heeled middle-class woman in Kampala will wear her totally different cut of a Sh1,000,000 busuti to a kwanjula (betrothal ceremony). To use the more familiar language of mobile phones, the peasant owns a feature phone (kabiriti) busuti, and the Kampala middle class woman has an iPhone 13, but they are both mobile phones.

Mushanana is the traditional ceremonial dress of women not just in Uganda, but in Rwanda, Burundi, and the Indian sub-continent (India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan). The African dress, on the other hand, is pan-African and, lately, global, as it spreads across the coloured diaspora as part of the continuing growth of black consciousness, Afrofuturism, and new-era African feminism.

The busuti, by contrast, is quintessentially Ugandan, remaining mostly a heritage of these landlocked lands, as much as Texan boots have remained stubbornly American.

In the range; from the peasant woman coming at it in her own way, to the minister and rich Kampala businesswoman also taking a totally different approach, the busuti is profoundly democratic. Its versatility offers a low egalitarian entrance point for the peasant woman and also enables the rich woman to play out her vision of grandeur on it.

While the African dress is the most overtly political of the three, the busuti offers the widest spectrum for individual expression and aesthetic response of the wearers to the tides of their times. And in there lies the magic of the busuti.

After many decades, the busuti in Uganda underwent its most dramatic wave of creative expression between 1990 and 2000.

It was driven by the economic boom that broke out with the start of economic liberalisation, Ugandans starting to flock to Dubai to buy their stuff, and the development of “container” shops in downtown Kampala. The largest generation of independent women with their own money was about to be unleashed on the Ugandan stage.

While the NRM still ruled Uganda as a one-party state and the north/northeast were roiled by war, in the rest of the country, it was still a period of euphoria. It was the glory decade of President Yoweri Museveni’s rule. Next week, then, we examine how these factors, and the realities of the last decade, have manifested in gomesi.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3