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The most enduring lesson from the Bachwezi legends

What you need to know:
- However, two lessons stand out from the Chwezi traditions that are relevant to our political situation.
- From the oral traditions of Bunyoro, the Bachwezi are thought of as demigods who reigned before the emergence of the Babito dynasty.
Some weeks back, the Commander of the UPDF Land Forces tweeted about the security situation in Uganda, making a reference to the ancient Chwezi civilisation and how it’s descendants cannot be vanquished.
As with most social media posts from him it was greeted with comical reactions.
However, two lessons stand out from the Chwezi traditions that are relevant to our political situation.
From the oral traditions of Bunyoro, the Bachwezi are thought of as demigods who reigned before the emergence of the Babito dynasty.
Their empire is thought to have encompassed a big part of modern Uganda as well as parts of Kenya and Tanzania. The ruling kings of Bunyoro and Nkore mentioned their descent from the Chwezi because this gave legitimacy to their divine right to rule.
During the colonial era, European scholars took an interest in studying the ethnic societies of Africa.
Where legends and oral traditions mentioned migrations from north or an advanced ruling class, the European scholars pointed this to infer that these migrants had origins from a superior race (read Caucasian) which conquered the native Negro lands they inhabited in the equatorial regions of Africa. In his Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, Speke comments:
“In these countries, the government is in the hands of the foreigners who had invaded and taken possession of them, leaving the agricultural aborigines to till the land.
“Through successive intermarriages with the Negroes, they came to resemble more their subordinate race and even took on their culture and language.”
In the texts we have adopted for our education system, the Chwezi are often referred to as of being of a lighter complexion than the other ethnicities in Uganda.
Prof MSM Kiwanuka in The Empire of Bunyoro Kitara: Myth or Reality, points out that majority of texts about African history were written by Europeans “who included hard bitten slavers as well as colonial administrators.”
In most cases they were social scientists or anthropologists, hardly trained in history and they knew very little about the cultures on which they were writing.
One would be right to assume these writers had an impetus to plant the idea that Africans have always been governed by a superior class of foreigners, believing this would make them more accepting to the colonial rule.
In line with the altered origins of the ruling clans of Africa, the present-day ruling governments of Africa are the blue-eyed boys of the Eurocentric institutions. If Uganda were an individual applying for a loan in a commercial bank, their application would be rejected on several occasions.
However, the Bretton-Woods institutions keep approving loans and grants to Uganda irrespective of the country’s repeated economic mismanagement and poor human rights record.
The oral legends about the Chwezi conclude with their “disappearance”.
In reality, the Babito ruling dynasty could have vanquished the Bachwezi and proceeded to establish the Bunyoro empire and the subsequent ruling houses of Bunyoro and Toro. It is a telling lesson that the Bachwezi, despite being superior to their subordinates, could only manage to rule for two generations.
In reference to the tweet from the commander of UPDF Land Forces, we are coming to the end of the first-generation ruler from the “Bachwezi descendants”.
Perhaps it’s safe to assume there’s one more generation to go before the second “disappearance occurs”.
Joseph Isabirye, Master’s in Economic Policy and Planning candidate at Makerere University.