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Old Scandals, New Memories: Mayanja’s Transformation in Buganda (18th-21st centuries)

Henri Médard
Traduction de Michael Paul

Résumés

Un léopard empaillé vieux de plus d’un siècle, baptisé Mayanja, a été détruit le 16 mars 2010 dans un incendie qui ravageait les tombeaux royaux de Kasubi (Kampala, Ouganda). Ces derniers sont classés parmi les sites du patrimoine mondial de l’Unesco. Mayanja était un léopard, un dieu, une rivière avec des lieux d’exécution qui traversent le cœur du Buganda et un jumeau né d’un inceste royal. Avec le temps, des significations successives ont été attribuées à la rivière. De nouveaux mythes furent nécessaires pour effacer les anciens devenus subversifs. Les mythes sur l’inceste associé à Mayanja se développèrent au XIXe siècle pour camoufler le sanctuaire du roi Kagulu, le plus haï et tyrannique souverain de la mémoire du royaume. Plus encore, leur fonction fut de camoufler la succession de femmes du clan Léopard au pouvoir durant le second quart du xviiie, siècle peu après la chute de Kagulu. La Mayanja est ainsi lieu d’oubli autant que de mémoire.

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Notes de la rédaction

This is a revised and translated version of Médard, Henri, 2016. “La mémoire comme oubli : les transformations de Mayanja au Buganda (xviiie-xxie siècle),” Journal des africanistes, vol.86, fasc.1: 130–169. https://doi.org/10.4000/africanistes.4930.

Texte intégral

1During the night of 16th to 17th March 2010, the tombs of the kings of Buganda at Kasubi—one of the hills in Kampala, the capital of Uganda—caught fire. Shocked and convinced that it was the result of a government plot, the crowds gathered at the site of the fire and faced off with the police who indiscriminately opened fire. At least three people were killed and many wounded. The main building, listed as a Unesco World Heritage site since 2001,1 was completely destroyed in the fire. Among the objects lost were the umbilical cords of the royal family and a stuffed leopard called Mayanja.

2With the disappearance of this animal, a new page in a complex history, dating back several centuries, was turned. “Mayanja” designated several entities: a panther, a river with its two “twin” branches, twin princes born from incest, a god and his medium. The meanings of this polysemic name are intermingled, they accumulated over time, they hide and exclude each other, all at the same time. Mayanja is both a place of memory and a place of deliberate forgetting.

  • 2 We have adopted a contrasting but complementary approach to that of Pennacini (2016) (published in (...)

3The study of places of memory constitutes a particularly promising path to explore the past of the African continent.2 It offers a way to disentangle the intermingled meanings accumulated over the centuries, an essential task for establishing a chronology and avoiding anachronisms. In a way, an approach built around an actual place of memory compels us to undertake this indispensable deconstruction of the sources, which can thus be subjected to a more critical scrutiny. The studies initiated by Pierre Nora (1984, 1986, 1992) on the “places of memory” in France were one of the most productive achievements of this kind. Along similar lines was the book by Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Jean-Louis Triaud (1999) on the places of memory in Africa. From the methodological point of view, the relation between the historian and the places of memory takes a different form in Africa and in Europe. Unlike historians of the West who have the benefit of a plethora of archives, historians of Africa are obliged to use their imagination dealing with sources that are heterogeneous, fragile and complex to handle. The places of memory are among the objects that cannot be ignored in African history.

  • 3 Cited in Garcia (2010, 282).

4The study of places of memory, despite its dangers and the risk of getting things wrong, constitutes one of the few possible approaches to explore the distant past. In a more explicit way than elsewhere, in Africa the process of history writing may be defined as a relation between present and past (following the expression of Henri-Irénée Marrou3). Historians of Africa are permanently locked in a chronological back and forth, even for relatively distant periods such as, in the case of the present study, the 18th century.

5In the kingdom of Buganda, all the important clan or royal places of memory are associated with sanctuaries and their sacred groves. Buganda is a kingdom of the Great Lakes Region of East Africa which saw extensive territorial development in the course of the 18th century. During the second half of the century, the country broke free from its bigger neighbour to the north, Bunyoro. It was a period of profound reorganisation. The religion and the State were extensively transformed. It was a violent time, a time of internal and external conflict; rare were the rulers who died peacefully in their beds. Crises were resolved through bloodshed, the princes were decimated preventively; a royal cult, of spectacular violence, glorified the power of the sovereign and imposed discipline and obedience. Well-organised, militarised and brutal, Buganda imposed its hegemony on the region throughout the 19th century and even, to a certain extent, during the colonial period. The period of independence was less propitious for the kingdom and for its inhabitants. The monarchy was banned from 1966 to 1993. Buganda lost its privileged position, suffered under the military dictatorship and then through the terrible civil war of the 1980s. If the Baganda still occupy an important position in Uganda, they no longer play a dominant role (Kiwanuka 1972; Ray 1991; Wrigley 1996; Médard 2007).

6In 1999, my research was focused on the sanctuaries of the martyrs of Uganda, built at the ancient place of execution at Namugongo (Médard 1999) from the perspective of places of memory. Places of execution—not only in Africa—are special sites where memory alternates between drawing a veil and forgetting and, alternatively, vibrant commemoration. The execution sites of ancient Buganda ceased to operate in 1889 with the arrival in power of the Christians. A list of 13 sites was compiled by the Protestant missionary anthropologist John Roscoe at the beginning of the century (Roscoe 1965, 331–338). They were established at isolated places, associated with a sacred grove and a spring or a stretch of water. They were intended for the victims of the highly procedural royal system of justice. From time to time, in addition to the criminals and rebels, there were victims condemned on futile pretexts solely to supply the royal cult with human sacrifices in order to bolster the power of the sovereign. Today, these places oscillate between places of forgetting, places of memory and religious usage.

Map 1: Mayanja (situation)

Map 1: Mayanja (situation)

Henri Médard, 2015.

Map 2: Mayanja (close-up)

Map 2: Mayanja (close-up)

Henri Médard, 2015.

7At least three of them, Kabojja, Busega and Seguku-Nakinzire, are situated close to the river Mayanja (see Map 1). This was the starting point of the present article. While visiting and mapping the sites, it became clear that the Mayanja river played a particular role. This water course, a “swamp river” typical of the region, has two sources: the source of the Mayanja Waswa is situated to the north of the city of Kampala, at Kawempe; that of the Mayanja Kato to the south, at Seguku. Waswa and Kato are names characteristic of masculine twins. The source of the Mayanja Kato is not far from Lake Victoria, half way between Kampala and Entebbe. It flows past Kampala, the capital (where the royal tombs of Kasubi are) and crosses the historic heart of Buganda, from south-east to north-west. About fifteen kilometres further east, the Mayanja Waswa follows a parallel course before the two branches converge at Busunju. Further on, in the borderlands of Buganda and of Bunyoro, the river flows into the Kafu, a tributary of the Nile. Many other rivers are also called Mayanja—a common name for a river—, but this one is the most important. The urban growth of Kampala is now a major threat for the Mayanja. The river is becoming more polluted and the swamps are getting filled in. A motorway linking the capital to Entebbe international airport follows the bed of the river at the entrance to Kampala.

  • 4 Close to Kyaka II refugee camp at the contemporary border of the kingdoms of Buganda and Toro betw (...)

8The three places of execution (Kabojja, Busega and Seguku-Nakinzire), which have been identified on the banks of the river, are located fairly close to each other, in the Kampala region. These three sites are not well documented, unlike the site of the Christian martyrs at Namugongo for which a considerable corpus of data is available. In 1886, the new King of Buganda, Mwanga, was not yet securely established on his throne: his court was splintered by intrigues and generational and religious rivalries. Concerned by the warning signs of impending colonial conquest, he launched a persecution of the Christians whose loyalty seemed to be divided between the king and the Christian missionaries. Most of the martyrs were executed at Namugongo in June 1886. Some of these martyrs were later beatified then canonised by Rome, thus becoming the first Catholic saints originating from Sub-Saharan Africa. More generally, in Uganda today, they symbolise resistance to tyranny. Much of our understanding of execution sites is derived from Namugongo. On the banks of the Mayanja, we can rely on original and complementary historical information of a different kind. Included in the dynastic history, certain myths related to the Mayanja have been preserved and provide information on these sanctuaries. In Uganda, the only other place of execution associated with a corpus of myths which has reached us is Bengo. Unfortunately, being situated outside Buganda perhaps in today’s kingdom of Toro between a barracks and a refugee camp,4 this site is very difficult to research. In any case, part of the available data on the martyrs may be extrapolated from one place to the other.

9Regarding Busega, one of these three sites on the banks of the Mayanja, there are accounts, written by Protestant missionaries, of the execution of Anglican followers on 31st January 1885, shortly before the better-known episode of the martyrs of Uganda. The Protestant mission of Nateete in the 1880s overlooked the Mayanja with a view of Busega and Kabojja, on the opposite bank. We find in the Protestant missionaries’ writings scattered references to the executions. This proximity gave rise to sources that are rare but unique. By chance, in 1880, a Catholic missionary left us a very brief description of the sanctuary and the grove at the sources of the Mayanja at Seguku-Nakinzire (but not, strictly speaking, of the place of sacrifice).

  • 5 Several visits were undertaken between 2008 and 2013, in particular with Remigious Kigongo of the (...)

10While the visit to the sites proved crucial and particularly instructive, the oral surveys only provided rare and fragmentary information.5 Because of urbanisation, very rapid and recent, the majority of those living in the neighbourhood were newcomers without any memory of its history. The inhabitants systematically mistook me for an “investor” on the lookout for land (who else would be walking around the countryside?). I was therefore generally met with suspicion as the Ugandans were afraid of being driven off their land. Furthermore, questions regarding the places of execution caused concern because of the current spread of rumours regarding child sacrifices. The traditional healers sought to deflect the suspicions of sacrifice away from themselves, and many passers-by feared I might have sinister designs.

11The adoption of a broad-based approach over a restricted space sheds light on the history of religious and royal violence in Buganda. Meticulous work focused at small-scale has enabled me to disentangle the intermingled successive meanings of these places of memory. I have compared the African and European writings, visited the places, questioned the inhabitants, read the newspapers, used maps and aerial photos. Places of memory tend to carry a multitude of successive meanings. To meet the requirements of the society that produces them, these meanings intermingle, accumulate, evolve (Mayanja is at once leopard, god, river, prince, twins, incest, executions, etc.). Certain memories are finally obliterated, disguised or subverted beneath new meanings. This is especially the case with regard to issues related to twinship. The more subversive is the memory (here, the brief rule of women, difficult to imagine in the 19th as in the 20th century [Hanson 2002, 219–236]), the more necessary it is for what takes its place to possess a strong meaning (here, incest and the violence of the sovereign). The symbols and tales must be strong enough to impose their hegemony and conceal the past. It is the overall interaction between these two different perceptions which confers meaning. It would be as dangerous to forget the cruelty of the religion and of the Ganda monarchy as to reduce it to this aspect alone. The spectacular horror should not conceal a complex system based on a wide range of facets and equilibriums (death/fertility, violence/security, etc.).

12Thus, by following the thread from the royal heritage of Buganda, I have been able to tease out the intermingled historical memories of the Ganda and bring to the surface the religious, symbolic and political issues concealed since the 18th century. Mayanja, whose remains were burned during the fire of 2010 at Kasubi, was a prince and a leopard, both associated with a river. I shall first tackle the myths concerning him which revolve around the waters of the Mayanja, royal incest and twinship, key concepts in Buganda. The paper then shows that in the 18th century, Mayanja became the princely god of this particularly murderous river. This cult of a river spirit, so ancient, is outside time. Yet it was during the 18th century that the cult of Mayanja was profoundly reworked. To conclude, it makes it apparent that behind the incest and this river god lie, concealed in reality, civil wars and the ephemeral and scandalous ascension to power of women.

A Prince-Leopard between Water, Incest and Twinship

An incongruous leopard

  • 6 Mwanga (1884–1897, dead in exile in 1903, buried in 1910), Daudi Chwa (1897–1939) and Muteesa II ( (...)
  • 7 See the illustrations and description in Pennacini (2009).

13Let us return to the sanctuary of Kasubi, the most important historical monument in Uganda. There, in 2010, a stuffed animal baptised Mayanja was burned. Until the construction of the tomb at Kasubi for King Muteesa I, each king possessed his own sanctuary (Ray 1991, 138–143). It would have been unthinkable for two sovereigns, even dead, to have shared the same kingdom or sanctuary. With colonisation, this custom was abandoned and the successors of Muteesa I, the father of Mwanga, were buried in their turn at Kasubi.6 Further down, on the hillside, there are the current cemeteries of the royal family of Buganda, those of the descendants of Muteesa I. The sanctuary extends today over a half-hill, mostly covered with banana plantations. The constructions are mainly built at the summit. They were dominated until the fire by an immense round reed hut (31 metres in diameter and 7.5 metres high), constructed at the highest point of the sanctuary of Kasubi. Visible from afar, it dominated the landscape.7

14The stuffed animal was unremarkable at first sight. It was tucked away behind the visitors or worshippers looking at the royal tombs, with the light behind it, close to the reed wall, facing the kings. It had recently been enclosed in a glass case (probably following the listing of the site by Unesco). Even when Western visitors had got used to the light and turned towards the animal, they generally did not take much interest in this old relic, rather bald and of dubious taste. There was though something highly unusual about its presence which should have drawn the attention. The leopard Mayanja was in fact the only one, along with the four sovereigns, to receive offerings (mainly in the form of money or coffee grains) in a small basket placed in front of it.

15While it was alive, this animal belonged to King Muteesa (1856/7–1884). There is a description, dating from 1880, left by Catholic missionaries at the court of the king:

  • 8 Diaire de Rubaga, 8-8-1880, typed, AGMAfr, Rome.

Two negroes led in a supposedly tame panther. It was only attached by two ropes that the negroes held to the right and the left of the animal. It made no attempt to charge the negroes, but at the sight of P. Lourdel, it became enraged and if, by mishap, one of the men accompanying it had let go, it would have torn him to pieces in a wink. This panther had been caught while young, and from time to time it was taken to greet Mtesa, who was supposed to be the king of the animals as of all the rest.8

  • 9 See for example the account and photos of an American visitor: Abbamonte (2009).

16Let us note that in the 19th century sources, the animal is not referred to by the name of Mayanja. This association is only found in contemporary sources. The text refers not to the cult of a pagan deity but to the greatness and sanctity of the king (Kabaka) whose power extended to the animal kingdom. According to what contemporary visitors to Kasubi were told, the animal became uncontrollable after the death of Muteesa, in 1884, and it had to be put down.9 Alexander Mackay, a Protestant missionary, was thought to have stuffed the animal, supposedly to show his skills and the superiority of Great Britain. In any case, the technique used to conserve the animal is of Western origin. At the time, the conservation of trophies and specimens of the fauna was an obsession among European travellers in Africa. As might be expected, the animal was then stored with others of the king’s treasures in his tomb.

17The Luganda-French dictionary produced at the beginning of the 20th century by the White Fathers indicated, in the entry for Mayanja: “deity incarnated in the leopard” (Le Veux 1917). Apolo Kagwa, the Protestant politician and a great scholar of colonial Buganda, added to this description in 1907 these words: “Mayanja was a river, at Seguku, which gave oracles” (Kagwa 1934, 123). Their contemporary, John Roscoe, a Protestant missionary and the first ethnographer of Buganda, combined the two versions:

“The river was afterwards worshiped under the form of a leopard, which some people account for by saying that the leopard was drowned in it. The ghost of this leopard afterwards took possession of a man, who, when under its influence, gave his oracle in gruff tone and made noises like a leopard.” (Roscoe 1965, 318.)

18Mayanja was not the only spirit incarnated in a leopard, far from it. On the other hand, it is very unusual to find a leopard accidentally drowned. These animals normally belong to the category of spirits referred to as misambwa. This term designates the spirits of nature and the spirits of place (trees, rocks, springs, etc.). For example, the musambwa of the Lubigi swamp that feeds into the Mayanja at the capital was a python spirit (Stock 2019). But Mayanja is different, it belongs to another category: that of the baluubale, the national or regional gods. David Schoenbrun, on the basis of linguistics and for much earlier periods, clearly showed the porosity of the frontiers between the two categories (Schoenbrun 1998, 203–207). Mayanja exemplified the transformation of certain misambwa into baluubale and the birth of a new religion, more powerful and more flexible. This was the cult of the spirit of a river which crosses the heart of the kingdom of Buganda and which, later (between 1400 and 1600, according to Schoenbrun), was transformed into a national god.

19It remains surprising that a deity might share the tomb of the kings of Buganda. In ancient times, the presence of several kings or gods in the same place was inconceivable. Furthermore, the conversion of Muteesa and of his successors to monotheism furthermore makes a cult to Mayanja incongruous. From the 1890s, the guardians of the tomb were confirmed Protestants. It would be unthinkable that they might have tolerated pagan practices. On the other hand, they would not have destroyed the work of their hero, the missionary Alexander Mackay. Fairly quickly, euhemerism (i.e. the humanisation of gods into kings or mythical and deified heroes), crucial in the conversion of the Baganda, made of the god Mayanja, as for the majority of the pantheon, a deified hero more acceptable in a Christian country. With the passing years, after the disappearance of the generation of the first converts, Christianity became somewhat tempered and today, neo-traditional practices are common in the royal sanctuaries. The presence of Mayanja in the tombs has become acceptable.

  • 10 “Long ago it was not allowed to put on a leopard’s skin. The leopards’ skins were for the royal ru (...)

20The leopard is often associated with royalty, in Buganda and more widely in the region of the Great Lakes (and still further afield: Kodesh 2010, 38). The king is often compared to a wild animal, his particular behaviour is supposed to reproduce that of the animal. “All the skins of lions and leopards were the property of the King,” Roscoe reminds us (Roscoe 1965, 451; Mackay 1898, 375).10

The birth of Mayanja and royal incest

21Significantly, Mayanja is more than a god, he belongs to the category of the prince-gods (lubaale mulangira), a god of royal blood, a god issued from the lineage of the kings of Buganda. “The river Mayanja was said to have taken its rise from the spot where a princess gave birth to a child and to have been caused by the loss of the waters [during birth]” (Roscoe 1965, 318) This was not just any prince but a twin born of incest, between the future King Kiggala (c.1490-c.1520), still a prince, and his sister Nazibanja. The river, in most versions, was born of the loss of the waters of the mother during the birth (Roscoe 1965, 318; Kaggwa 1971, 19).

“When they had grown up, the King [Tembo] took Prince Kiggala [he was to have several names: Sewannaku Kiggala Mukabya Kungubu] and his sister Nazibanja to be consecrated (to the gods) [at a sanctuary situated at Mugganvula].
He left them there, but after a few days, Nazibanja was found to be with child by her brother Kiggala. When he heard the news, shocking and shameful, the King ordered Mugema [one of the great chiefs of the kingdom] to designate a man to take Princess Nazibanja to the Nagaddya at Nkumba to give birth. The Mugema chose a man called Kikeera to escort her. When they came to the hill of Mawu, they made her carry a stone to delay the birth. Since then, the hill is called Jinja (stone). But the stratagem failed and she gave birth to Wasswa. Wasswa, however, was not a real baby and the place where he came into the world became the source of the river Mayanja Kato (Lesser Mayanja).” (Kaggwa 1971, 18.)

  • 11 “Nagaddya is of the Lungfish clan. Nagaddya was the King’s diviner also she was who used to cleans (...)

22A future king and his sister commit incest. In order to remove the stain, the princess, almost at term, was sent to follow the rites at Nkumba sanctuary, on the shores of Lake Victoria, with the goddess Nagaddya whose main temple stands there.11 Transfigured by the sacrilege of incest, she gave birth along the way to a river, the Mayanja Kato, and even, according to other sources, as we shall see further on, to one or two other rivers: the Mayanja Waswa and the Lumansi.

  • 12 A strict equation, Kiggala—end of the 15th century, would be presumptuous. But independently of da (...)
  • 13 Achte, 1900, AGMAfr, Rome.

23At first sight, it looks like a myth concocted to explain the royal incest. Royal incest is structurally a mutation of the nature of the prince into a king via a transgression which transforms him. Here, the incest gives King Kiggala monstrous power which, among other things, enables him to engender rivers.12 It was indeed along these lines that Father Auguste Achte, a Catholic missionary, described him in 1900: “Kigala […] soiled the beginning of his reign by incest committed with his sister. This crime is regarded by the Baganda as one of the most execrated […]. By some inexplicable aberration, this crime so abhorrent to the Baganda has always been the prerogative of their kings from Kigala to Mwanga inclusively, a sorry royal privilege.”13 The practice of incest within the royal family took on a new dimension in the 19th century, in particular from the reign of Ssuuna (Kaggwa 1971, 136–137; Roscoe 1965, 187). It became so common that the same word, bambejja, encompassed the king’s wives and the women born of royal blood.

Fig. 1: Incest in the royal genealogy of Buganda

Fig. 1: Incest in the royal genealogy of Buganda

The family tree is not represented in its entirety. The triangles indicate men, the circles women and the solid triangles the kings.

Henri Médard, 2022.

  • 14 Jan Vansina cited by Heusch (1987, 69, 100). The contribution by Luc de Heusch is fairly old (the (...)

24The majority of the sources, in contrast to Achte, do not associate the incest with the beginning of the reign of Kiggala but with a period when he was still a prince. In those sources it was not a matter of incest that transformed the prince into a king during the coronation rituals (the classical anthropological understanding). Incest between half-brother and half-sister was a habit among princes in Buganda, in Bunyoro and no doubt in other kingdoms in the region. The king stood apart from his brothers not because of incest as such but because of the extravagant scale of the incest he committed. Accession to the throne did not change the phenomenon, but only its scale. In a general way, the transformation of a prince into a king made the intrinsic characteristics of princes (depredation, violence, sexual impulses) even more excessive. Above all, it transformed and channelled this transgressive force into power beneficial to the kingdom. In this specific case, the message concerns the monstrous nature of the princes who position themselves above kinship and outside the lineage system and its rules.14

  • 15 Wampamba is the son of Nawampamba, daughter of Ggunju of the mushroom-butiko clan.

25Kiggala and Nazibanja would be the children of King Tembo and Nadjemba, of the clan of the otter-ngonge (Kagwa 1934, 20). They are thus uterine brother and sister. In general, royal incest is committed between children of different mothers. Between children of the same mother, an additional prohibition is transgressed: it would be inconceivable for either the king or his subjects to have sexual relations with a member of the mother’s clan. The prohibition is all the stronger for the king in that royal children are attached to the clan of their mother, whereas in the society as a whole the lineage is patrilineal. This system enables the circulation of royalty between the major clans of the kingdom. The failure to respect this prohibition would undermine the very core of the system of succession to the throne, thus enabling one clan to achieve a monopoly of power. This formal prohibition is recalled in a myth concerning a son of Kiggala, Wampamba, who was excluded from the royal succession because of an incestuous relationship with the daughter of the brother of his mother, Nakaima (Kagwa 1934, 2; 1971, 24).15 This act was interpreted as the scandalous union of Wampamba and of his classificatory mother. “Why did you marry your mother?” his grandmother asked the prince (Kaggwa 1971, 24). Let us note that this did not prevent Kayima, a son born of this union, from reigning. This succession of incestuous unions from one generation to another as narrated in the royal chronicle were connected. They formed an episode of the mythical charters concerning incest.

26Why did Kiggala reign despite his incestuous relation with his sister Nazibandja, while his son Wampamba did not? This appears to be contradictory. But it was not the same kind of incest. The prohibition on incest with the “mother” is universal. Incest is not of the same nature with a “sister,” the prohibition is less absolute. Nazibanja and Kiggala being of the blood royal, they have no patriclan, there is no royal clan in Buganda. They are associated with their mother’s clan but they are not full members (Stephens 2013, 14). On the other hand, Nakaima was a full member of the clan of Wampamba’s mother. She was the matrilateral cross-cousin of the prince, thus his classificatory mother. So Kiggala and Wampamba had not transgressed the same prohibition vis-à-vis the maternal clan.

27Nevertheless, Nazibanja is presented as a uterine sister of Kiggala, which does not correspond to the usual royal incest practices in Buganda or to those attested in the region which concern half-brothers and half-sisters, with the exception of the later example of King Mawanda and the queen-sister Ndege whose generation reigned towards 1730–1760 (we shall come back to this). Kiggala could accede to the throne despite his transgressions. More likely, these apparent inconsistencies indicate the a posteriori reworking of the myth. From the 19th century, the question that preoccupied the king was that of female hypergamy, or how to reconcile two contradictory tendencies: the increasing subordination of women to men, and the paroxysmal rise of the blood royal. Only the princes were worthy of and superior to princesses, and only consanguineous marriages did not debase the blood royal (Lowie 1920, 15, 58; Heusch 1987, 18, 9). Consequently, royal incest became more common.

28Along the same lines, Roscoe’s version of the origins of the Mayanja draws the meaning of the myth in a different direction from that of incest (Roscoe 1965, 334). What was shocking, according to this version, was not so much the incest as the fact that a princess had children. In the 19th century, as we have seen, the Kabaka often had sexual relations with their sisters. But these unions were sterile (via infanticide if need be).

29This account originates in a very distant myth regarding incest, the twinship that gave birth to the spirit of a river. It was then reworked in the 19th century in a context of monarchical re-sacralisation and debate regarding royal incest, the sterilisation of princesses, murders of princes and infanticide. It is clear that a succession of myths and meanings was built up around a same deity over the centuries.

Twinship at the core of the monarchical ideology

30Mayanja is also a twin divinity. Twinship was of crucial importance in Buganda in general, and for the monarchy in particular. Monstrous and symbolising unbridled and fertile sexuality, twins were closely associated with the sovereigns to whom were attributed terrifying power and excessive fertility. The king of Buganda was the Ssabalongo, the chief of the fathers of twins (Ray 1991, 205.). As is often the case with African monarchies, twins were often sent as pages to the court.

  • 16 As Ray explains very well, it is the root of the umbilical cord which dries on the newborn. It is (...)

31But the strict translation of balongo as “twins” is no doubt misleading. The balongo are everywhere in Buganda. According to Taylor, it is often the case that a child is attributed an animal mulongo (particularly the leopard, but also the python, the lion and even a frog or a rat) or a natural element (river and lake: Taylor 1958, 199–200)—both, in the case of Mayanja. This is what is known as “tonalism” in the jargon of anthropologists (Descola 2002, 9–25). Above all, the princes all have a mulongo (without having the status of twin: Ray 1991, 126–129): this is their umbilical cord.16 It is carefully conserved, wrapped up and decorated. Each relic is personified and has a name. The king’s umbilical cord is entrusted to the Kimbugwe, one of the greatest chiefs of the kingdom, whose main task is to guard it. The umbilical cords of the descendants of Muteesa were conserved at Kasubi, in the royal sanctuary, whence the destruction of many of them in the fire of 2010. This is one of the losses that has caused most grief to the ritualists of the tomb. Twinship occupies a really central role in Ganda monarchical ideology. Paradoxically, as was pointed out by Benjamin Ray, there is no explanatory myth. Ray proposes the hypothesis that the umbilical cords began to take on importance, as protectors of the royal progeniture, from the reign of Tebandeke (c.1700-c.1730) (Ray 1991, 127).

  • 17 “The life-history of Kiggala is very interesting and a famous saying that Princess Nazibanja, his (...)

32At first sight, this scenario of royal twinning would appear most suitable to describe the Mayanja. Nsimbi and Kasirye mention the birth of two other child-rivers in addition to Kato (so triplets, although the term is not used): “That is why she delivered on the way the rivers Lumansi, and Mayanja Wasswa which originates from Jinja and Mayanja Kato which starts from Sseguku in Busiro” (Nsimbi 1980, 13917). The sources of the Lumansi are indeed on the road from Mugganvula to Nkumba (see Map 1). Furthermore, other rivers are also attributed a twinship origin. Taylor, a former Anglican bishop, particularly well-informed on Kyagwe province in the east of Buganda, mentions the twinship of the Sezibwa and the Mubeya rivers, born of a child-mother exhausted by her journey (Taylor 1958, 200). To make things even more confusing, we have already mentioned that many rivers bear the name Mayanja in Buganda. This blurriness around the twinship of rivers reflects the existence of variants of the myth of the origins of the Mayanja, which is usual for oral transmission over a long period. The authors did not just copy from each other, as sometimes occurs. On the other hand, we can observe the rationalisation and the increasing humanisation in the transcription in writing of the myths, as is illustrated by the different versions of Kagwa and of Nsimbi, written more than fifty years apart, on the origin of the Mayanja.

33There is more frequent mention of the Mayanja Kato than of the Mayanja Waswa. If we refer again to the text of Kagwa (1971, 18, cited above), Prince Waswa though not a real baby had as twin the river Kato. At first, the association of the two arms of the Mayanja with twins was not made explicit, it is no doubt a notion that came later. The terms Waswa and Kato take on a topographical sense in a period that it is difficult to date, that of the genesis and the origins of the kingdom (16th century? 17th century?). The majority of historians place the origins of Buganda in the region of Bakka (see Map 1), that is in a strip stretching from north of Kampala to Busunju, about forty kilometres long and at the most 10–15 kilometres wide, a sort of peninsula enclosed by the imposing arms of the Mayanja (about 2 kilometres wide). Their double and twinned aspect here takes on real meaning.

34Later, when the centre of gravity of the kingdom had shifted towards Lake Victoria and the current region of Kampala, the confluence of the Mayanja Waswa and Kato and their passage to Busunju formed, until the mid-18th century, a defensive frontier against the powerful kingdom of Bunyoro. In the light of this, the association of the Mayanja with the defence of the kingdom is comprehensible. The presence of the executioners at the river crossings attests to this function.

The God-Prince Mayanja, the Spirit of a Murderous River

A waterway of truly regal violence

  • 18 “Mayanja, the ferocious demon in the leopard. (When the king was finishing a new palace, it was th (...)
  • 19 Sunday Vision, 9 June 2013.

35The first European and Arab visitors to Buganda were deeply shocked by the spectacular staging of royal violence. From the end of the 18th century, to affirm his power of life and death, the king had his subjects killed in a way that was routine, massive and arbitrary (Ray 1991). As in the case of the king, a characteristic of the god-princes is their link with death, which they cause, which they heal and most often both (Médard 2007, 349–354, 365–367). Mayanja was not linked to epidemics, like the god-prince of the plague (Kawumpuli) or that of smallpox (Ndawula) (Médard 2005, 87–94). But it was clearly a god which exacted numerous human lives.18 As a contemporary Ugandan journalist reported, “There are many people who believe that the river [Mayanja] is supernatural and “feeds” on human beings.”19

  • 20 Sunday Vision, 9 June 2013.
  • 21 Ibid.

36The passage of the river crossings was a liminal moment that was particularly feared in the region of the Great Lakes. In Bunyoro, the practice of human sacrifices during the crossing of the Nile and the Kafu constituted one of the key moments in the foundation myths of the kingdom, that probably occurred in the 16th century (Schoenbrun 2013). Further upstream, crossing the river Mayanja was particularly dangerous; drownings were frequent. Whence the saying: “The river simply swallows,” “Omuga guno gumira bumizi.”20 The river is deep, with strong currents. Even when the victims know how to swim, they are dragged down below the floating islands of papyrus which cover the surface of the water. The papyrus prevents them from reaching the air and drowning is likely. The unfortunate people were considered as sacrifices exacted by the god Mayanja. No action was undertaken to rescue them, for fear of upsetting the river spirit. This vision is still present today when people refer to the famous accident of 29th March 1998. A vehicle went off the road from Masaka at the entrance to Kampala and fell into the Mayanja. The passengers, a medical team at the forefront of the fight against AIDS at Mulago hospital, disappeared.21

37These dangers perhaps explain the prohibition imposed on the king against crossing the river. He was indeed banned from crossing the Mayanja. Since the end of the 18th century, during the coronation, to go from the royal capital to Buddo, the site of the coronation, the king and his suite would take a road that went through Seguku, their route thus going around the river at its source (Roscoe 1965, 192). The ritual of the coronation at Buddo dates from Namugala (c.1760-c.1790). It partly replaced a much more ancient enthroning, dating back to Ttembo (c.1460-c.1490), around the clan sanctuaries at Bakka, further north, during which the king did cross the Mayanja though (Ray 1991, 83–84; Wrigley 1996, 148–149; Kodesh 2010, 137–138; Kagwa 1934, 81). At Bakka, was it a transgression which transformed the human nature of the prince into a king, as we have seen for incest? Was the prohibition imposed on the king against crossing the river destined to highlight the breach between the two rites? These royal taboos mainly evoke the multiple prohibitions associated with the sacred nature of the monarchical power. The king-god (living and reigning) and a god-prince (Mayanja) must avoid each other. There cannot be two cocks in the same farmyard, two kings on the same hill, two gods in the same water.

Three places of execution on the banks of the Mayanja

38In the 19th century, quite apart from drowning accidents, there was a dramatic staging of the cruelty of the spirit of the Mayanja. It was on the banks of the Mayanja that the places of execution were concentrated. At least three of such places are attested, two at river crossings near the capital and one at Seguku, at the source of the Mayanja. There is a place of execution at Busega, not far from the Masaka road, almost directly opposite, controlling the busy crossings towards the capital, and another on the opposite bank at Kabojja.

39In Luganda, Busega means “the place of the vultures.” The former place of execution has been occupied by an Anglican church since 1905. A Protestant sanctuary to the memory of three martyrs, executed in January 1885, was built there. As John Rowe has clearly shown, these Protestant converts died following a misunderstanding between the king and the Protestant missionaries. This dramatic event should not be confused with the later more systematic persecution of “the martyrs of Uganda” (Rowe 1970, xvi-xx). The sanctuary of Busega is today composed of a church and a memorial to the martyrs, set among trees and flowers.

40The appropriation of the site by the Anglican church has come down to us through the minutes of the Lukiiko (Assembly of the chiefs of the Kingdom of Buganda):

  • 22 Lukiiko record book, p. 5, MISR.

“[22-05-1905] Paulo Balintiuno reported back the work which was assigned to him to take the 2 Bishops of Namirembe and a visitor to the place where they used to kill people, at Busega near Mayanja swamp. The Bishops had gone to bury all the bones of the Christians martyrs who were murdered in January 1885. He said that they found there a few bones which they collected and buried.”22

  • 23 See too, cited below, Ashe (1970, 145).
  • 24 Tucker (1908, vol. II: 343–346). Less rigid regarding the cult of relics and the authenticity of t (...)

41Twenty years after the events, the Anglican church afforded the place some dignity. The foreign missionaries were horrified and fascinated by the display of the bones of the condemned. The places of execution were covered in human remains. “[14-02-1882] In the swamp near our gardens there are innumerable skeletons and skulls of natives” (Mackay 1898, 19723). Abandoned since 1889, these places attest more than anything else in their eyes to the success of the civilising mission of Christianity and of British colonisation. They had put an end to human sacrifices and to the blood-thirsty tyranny of the old regime.24

  • 25 Land survey map 71/1/21, Mutundwe Kaboja, s.d.

42One kilometre away, on the opposite right bank, at Kabojja, there is yet another place of execution. The inhabitants no longer remember the former function of the place. The only memory is a saying that recalls the hunger of the vultures and the need for the executioners to feed them with the flesh of passers-by seized at random. The site is situated today near a crossroads and a small market (which already existed at the beginning of the century25) on the way out of Kampala. The road is an ancient one, it led in the 19th century to Lake Victoria and the provinces to the west. This place of execution was situated on one of the bridge crossings of the Mayanja. The exact site is probably a few tens of metres away, in the grounds of what is now a highly reputed Catholic school, the Mugwanya Preparatory School. The school grounds correspond to part of the former estate of the head executioner, Sebata, mostly situated on the southern bank of the Mayanja, at Mutundwe. This sinister place, appropriated after the 1900 Agreement by Stanislas Mugwanya, the great Catholic chief, was neutralised when the staunchly Christian chief gave or sold the land to the Church (in the 1920s?). After being given to the Catholic church, it became the site of one of the most famous schools in the country.

43Neither the Protestant nor the Catholic churches were afraid of either the ghosts of the executed, or the spirits of the ancient deities. They often occupied land that Baganda would have been reluctant to settle in for fear of the spirits. Furthermore, this occupation made it possible for the Church to control the ancient religious practices and to show the supremacy of God. Kabojja and Busega lie below and are visible from the mission at Natete where the Protestants have been settled since 1877. The missionaries left some testimonies.

“[1-02-1881] It is dark; about 10 p.m. All is quiet, the last drum heard being the executioner’s across the small valley, announcing that he has secured his victims for the day, and will spill their blood in the morning.” (Mackay 1898, 182–183.)

  • 26 These testimonies from Protestant missionaries can be completed by those of the Catholic missionar (...)

“Feb 6th [1881] Once again, another Kiwendo is about to take place. Someone of the name of Mayanja (whether a sorcerer or not we do not know yet) has advised the king that to hasten his recovery it is necessary to slaughter people on several hills round the capital. For days the dozen or more executioners, each with his gang of twenty to thirty men have been lying in wait for people on the roads. Bakopi or common people only are caught; while sons of petty officers or chiefs, if caught by mistake, can generally purchase their release by a goat or a cow. The other night five were suddenly apprehended at our own gate; two days ago the executioner (Sabata) opposite went to catch men on another road, as it had got noised abroad that he was catching everyone that passed this way. People who had gone that other way to avoid this one, thus fell into the trap, and by evening we heard Sabata had captured forty men and thirty women. Last night we hear he had made a similar “take.” The other executioners in the other directions are also all at a similar work.” (Ibid., 185–15626.)

  • 27 Bakazirwendo Kawooya, mutaka of the colobus monkey-Ngeye clan, cited in Kagwa (1912, 4).
  • 28 “When Sebatta was the Sabaddu [i.e. Kago] he commanded great respect with the result that the memb (...)
  • 29 Mugwanya in Roscoe and Kagwa, A. 1906. “Enquiry into Native Land Tenure in the Uganda Protectorate (...)
  • 30 “Such was the complication in the execution of the king’s duties that they required permanent and (...)

44The executioner Sebata was responsible for the places of execution at Busega and Kabojja and for the capital’s main crossing on the Mayanja. Second chief executioner of the kingdom, he lived at Mutundwe, on the banks of the Mayanja. He was a mutaka (clan dignitary) of the Colobus monkey—Ngeye clan. This dignitary occupied, according to Kagwa (1912), the function of executioner to the kings of Buganda since King Kimera, one of the founders of the kingdom originating from the Kingdom of Bunyoro.27 This might mean that the holders of the office could lay claim to great antiquity, or indicate an office borrowed from Bunyoro. Until the end of the 17th century, Sebata combined his post as head executioner with the position of Kago, chief of the province of Kyadondo (Kagwa 197128). In the 19th century, the holder of this position took precedence over all the other provincial chiefs, although his province was small and his power limited. The function of Kago includes an important religious role (he passed on messages from the gods to the king29), and its holder held responsibilities in the management of the palace. The Kago saw to the prohibitions and rituals in the king’s name, for example the rituals that follow the birth of twins (Roscoe 1965, 73). Under the reign of Juuko (c.1670-c.1700), Sebata found himself downgraded and replaced at the head of Kyadondo province by one of the King’s favourites, a member of another clan. He kept his position as chief of one section of executioners. The religious and technical aspect of this function30 (the Ganda executioners were real professionals in matters of putting to death and causing pain) favoured having recourse to hereditary power within a clan (mutaka).

45It is not surprising that the Sebata ex-Kago guarded the crossings of the Mayanja in the region of the capital and thus ensured the King’s security. The royal capital (Kibuga) symbolically represented the whole of the kingdom; the plan of the settlement in the capital reproduced the spatial settlement of the kingdom as a whole (Ray 1991, 137; Hanson 2009). The places of execution at Busega and Kabojja thus contributed to making apparent and visible the frontier of the capital. They recalled, in the 19th century, the earlier role of the Mayanja as the redoubtable guardian of the kingdom’s border.

46What struck foreigners in Buganda was not the death penalty, common in Europe too, but the scale at which it was practised, and above all the arbitrary character of the death sentences. In Buganda, as elsewhere, it was the legal system that produced the people sentenced to death. They were targeted victims. But there was another practice, the kiwendo (biwendo in the plural), a mass sacrifice or ritual execution intended to make manifest the power of the king (Ray 1991, 167–182; Médard 2019; Médard 2007, 365–366, 371–374).

47The sections of executioners were assigned a contingent of arrests, then of executions. Even if the crimes were minor, the prisoners were executed. But their numbers were generally insufficient. To achieve the target, new crimes were therefore invented, trifling matters, but incurring the death penalty. Sometimes, seeking pretexts was dispensed with and passers-by were arrested at random. The crossings of the Mayanja were particularly favoured for capturing victims. The executioners always arrested more people than necessary. That ensured that there would be enough executed people, even after freeing those exempt from the death penalty and people who were pardoned or protected. The executioners also took the opportunity to enrich themselves, by freeing rich travellers in exchange for a ransom, or clandestinely selling women and children into slavery.

48The methods of execution were intended to cause suffering to the victims and to terrorise the population. They were also compliant with certain technical and religious requirements (not shedding royal blood, for example). For each place, a particular form of execution was associated. At Seguku, at the sources of the Mayanja, the victims were killed fairly quickly using whatever weapons were to hand, or cut to pieces (in reference to the claws of a leopard?)—and left to die slowly in appalling suffering.

“The victims were either clubbed or speared to death at this sacrificial place. The flesh was pinched up and cut off over the body, and the victim was afterwards killed. The executions sometimes extended over a week, because the executioners became weary and went off to drink beer and to talk over what they had done. The bodies were not removed from the place where they fell; the wild animals or birds fed upon them; no relative dared bury one who had been given to the gods.” (Roscoe 1965, 334–336.)

49At Busega and Kabojja, the method was different, the victims were mutilated and then burned.

  • 31 The text mentions the Mujasi as directing the execution. Mujasi was the commander of the King’s fu (...)

“Several days are said to elapse yet before the slaughter takes place. Some will have their throats cut, while others will be tortured to death—their eyes put out, nose cut off, the sinew of their arms and thighs cut to piecemeal and roasted before their own eyes, and finally the unhappy wretches burnt alive. Others, again, are tied hand and foot, dry reeds and firewood heaped over them, and then the whole ignited.” (Mackay 1898, 186.)
[Ashe obtained this account from a Christian, Kidza, an eye-witness, one of the subalterns (musali) of the Mujasi who supervised the execution.]
“He told me how the mob, carrying gourds of banana-cider, wound on their way till they reached the borders of a dismal swamp called Mayanja, a place I had often visited with Lugalama [one of the condemned Christians]. Here they halted. Part of the crowd bring firewood, others make a kind of rough framework, under which the fuel is heaped. Then the prisoners are seized, and a scene of sickening cruelty is enacted. Some lay hold of Seruwanga, others of Kakumba, and others of Lugalama, brandishing their long curved knives. Seruwanga has committed his cause to Him who judges righteously, and the cruel knife cannot wring from him a cry; bleeding he is cast into the fire. […] Mujasi bids them to treat Lugalama as they treated the others. […] They came nearer and he cries out “oh do not cut off my arms, I will not struggle—I will not fight! Only throw me into the fire!” (Ashe 1970, 145–146.31)

50The end of this text by Ashe suggests that the mutilation of the limbs was also a way to prevent the victims struggling on the pyre. These sordid details show once again the professionalism and the routine nature of the executions in Buganda in the 19th century.

Seguku: a small sanctuary in a sacred grove

51At the site of Seguku, at the sources of the Mayanja, about 8 kilometres upstream from Kabojja, there was in the 19th century the main temple of the god Mayanja, associated with a place of execution (Nakinzire). Today, this place is the site, in a small wood, of a sanctuary of the deity Mayanja with paved access for the public to the two main springs. The sanctuary has been preserved thanks to a combination of several factors. Mayanja is an important deity but the Ganda had very many gods and he was not among the most renowned. Since Seguku is further away from the Kampala conurbation than Kabojja and Busega, it was not necessary to construct a Christian establishment there (school, church). The swampy and steep nature of the terrain rules out (still today) its becoming a built-up area. Furthermore, the springs benefitted during the colonial period from the protection afforded to sources of drinking water, and more recently, since 1986, to wetlands.

  • 32 Aerial photograph no. 19. 15: UG 15: June 1955: 152.54 mm.: 24 000: 6’’, Survey, Lands & Mines Dep (...)

52A wood composed of planted eucalyptus but also four or five more ancient trees, of other species, surrounds the springs. It covers about one or two acres and is extended by the course of the Mayanja, which, for the first kilometres, is a papyrus swamp dotted with palm trees (in the aerial photos from 1955, the river is covered by a gallery forest32). The ancient trees have been preserved solely on the immediate banks of the three main resurgences of Seguku. In August 2008, I observed that the altars were dispersed beneath the ancient trees (or beneath the offshoots from old stumps) in three areas, then five, in January 2010, but only around two of the three resurgences. Perhaps there may be a relation with the twin nature of the god Mayanja? The built-up spring on the left bank, despite the presence of a large tree and the stump of another, does not seem to have any religious use today (let us note that the sanctuary was on the right bank in the 19th century, but that is no doubt unrelated).

53In an earlier period, this sanctuary had a place of execution, but the memory of it (including the exact name of the place name used for executions: Nakinzire) has been lost or is denied, even by the traditional healer who is the guardian of the sanctuary today. In the context of the renewal of child sacrifices in the region over the past few years (the 2000s), this type of denial is not surprising. The guardian boasts nonetheless of being the omu-mbowa of Mayanja. This title, atypical for the clergy, designates unequivocally the executioners who constitute the king’s guard, which shows clearly that the guardian knows more than he would admit.

54Two descriptions of the temple of Mayanja and of its place of sacrifice in the 19th century are available, one issued from the ethnographical study of Roscoe (1911), the other from an account of a journey by White Fathers in 1881. These two texts are at once complementary to each other and give a very different point of view:

“The sacrificial place Seguku.
The sacrificial place Nakinzire, on the Seguku hill in Busiro, had a temple and a medium, who was the son of a princess, and ought therefore to have been put to death at birth according to the restrictions placed upon princesses. The reason for his choice of a medium is said to have been the fact that a prince Kungubu [another name of Kiggala], took his sister to wife, and had a son by her; the child was born at the place Nakinzire, and the river Mayanja took its rise there owing to the birth. […]. Near the temple stood the sacred tree, where the prisoners were given the doctored beer to drink, and where the clothing of some of them was taken and hung up.” (Roscoe 1965, 334–336.)

55In 1881, some White Fathers left the usual route from the capital to the lake at Entebbe and crossed the domains of Mayanja.

“From there, we found ourselves with Maandja. Maandja is a great prince of Buganda, he is also a … leopard or panther. So it is a man and a leopard who share the possession of the country. The man recognises the rights of the leopard and the leopard also recognises (when he cannot do otherwise) the rights of the man. The man who is a prince of the country is nominated by the king, the leopard is recognised by the superstition of these poor people.
All the men in this country say they are slaves of the leopard or if you prefer it this way, of Lubaale Maandja. He has in the middle of a sacred wood his hut surrounded by reeds. Each person who passes will with a very serious air cut a stalk of grass and throw it near Maandja’s hut as the tribute he pays to his master and recognition of his servitude. If he failed to do this, he would be afraid that within a few days, the fierce lord would make him pay for his rebellion by coming to devour him with his royal teeth. Sometimes during the night the leopard comes to visit the houses where the smell of the goats has attracted him; he begins by using his claws to make a hole in the reed palisade. Then the poor people who sometimes if they wished could stun him with a blow of the axe when the animal has still only managed to get his head sticking out through the hole, shout, make a noise, strike the posts of their houses to scare off the aggressor, but they think they are lost if they touch a hair of the beast. If the animal does not withdraw, then the people run away, leaving their goats between the claws of the ferocious animal which has soon dealt with them: the poor people are convinced that the leopard will not harm them: they say that Maandja has taken our goats; that is his property; but Maandja does not eat men, we are his slaves, if he ate us, he would be eating his property. Who would then supply him with goats?
Our catechumens are quickly divested of these superstitious prejudices; when they pass the hut of the lubaale they have a good laugh at the naivety of a Mganda who has just left a stalk of grass for Maandja. The Maandja does not eat grass, they tell him; you should pick more, he won’t thank you for giving him so little, take care tomorrow night, he’ll come and pay you a visit. Soon after passing the sacred wood of Maandja we arrive at a stream which we cross on foot over a long wild palm branch that has been thrown across there as a bridge.” (Diaire de Rubaga, ms Alger, 21-06-1881, AGMAfr, Rome.)

56Both texts present a characteristic description of a Ganda place of execution, with a tree (generally designated under the term spirit tree—lubaale tree) on which the clothes of the condemned are hung, a spring, some woods. The religious sanctuary is more developed at Seguku than elsewhere, but that is to be expected, since it is as much a temple as a place of execution.

57The text by the French missionary is nevertheless very strange. It is a rustic description of a pagan sanctuary where the leopard deity is fed with stalks of grass. This is an astounding contrast with the heaps of corpses that one might imagine. In reality, stalks of grass are a symbolic offering that was perfectly normal for a passer-by. Nonetheless, where are the bones strewn over the ground? The stench of putrefaction? It is all the more bizarre in that, four months earlier, numerous sacrifices were performed for Mayanja, as the missionaries knew perfectly well. How could they not make the connection? The only explanation, apart from self-censorship, is that this place of execution was a little further away from the sanctuary and the road taken by the missionaries. Generally speaking, the sources do not provide a clear indication of the position of the places of execution and sacrifice in the spatial disposition of the religious sites. In contrast to the temple of Mayanja, not all the temples have a specific spatial disposition for the execution of human beings. The majority of deities only demand human victims, royal sacrifices, during very special events.

The medium Prince of Mayanja and royal infanticide

  • 33 On trances and possessions in the religious system in Africa of the Great Lakes in general, see Pe (...)

58The temple of Mayanja at Seguku is a fairly standard sanctuary. The medium was possessed by a spirit which also inhabits a wild animal. As is often the case, during the trances which are at the heart of the religious system, the possessed is distinguished by behaving in a manner reminiscent of his spirit, in this case like the wild animal. “The medium was thought to be possessed by a leopard; he growled and rolled his eyes about like an angry beast when under the influence of the leopard ghost” (Roscoe 1965, 334–33633). The trance constitutes an ideologically crucial element, facilitating the putting to death of the victims. In this way, the guilt is transferred from the king and the executioner to the spirits (here, to Prince Mayanja; at Namugongo, to Prince Bengo, etc.). They are in this way protected from the vengeance of the ghost of the victim.

“[The executioner] Announced to them all, “It is not I who am killing you, or who is giving you away to death, it is Kibuka and Mukasa [two important deities] who are killing you” [this is a ritual phrase which precedes the executions]. He also mentioned some other gods. The reason the responsibility was thus shunned by the executioner and the king was that they feared the ghosts of these men. Immediately after this proclamation the prisoners were executed.” (Kagwa 1934, 81.)

59The banana beer, which recurs constantly in the texts, is doubly useful in this context. The condemned must imperatively drink a beer specially prepared so that his spirit will not haunt the living; the executioners drink it too, to facilitate the state of trance or collective fury which possesses them during the execution. The role of the trances is particularly clear in the case of the executioner Senkole, who specialised in the execution of princes from the reign of Kyabaggu (c.1760-c.1790) (Kaggwa 1971, 86). The king himself, when he condemned someone to death, was thought to be possessed by a spirit (Médard 2007, 355; Roscoe 1965, 324). It is the recourse to these death-dealing trances that facilitated, at the end of the 18th century, the surge of monarchical violence and the extermination of the princes which put an end to the civil wars.

  • 34 See Welbourn (1962, 175); Mukasa, H. 1914. Simuda Nyuma, part III. p. 272, Center for Research Lib (...)
  • 35 “Nasiwa, the eldest princess [mistake by Ashe, see the rest of the paragraph] and nominal wife of (...)

60The sanctuary of Mayanja was sufficiently important for the king himself to designate the person in charge. Roscoe and Lourdel mention only the princely medium (mmandwa). Usually, the medium’s trances were controlled and given meaning by one or several priests (kabona). Many other ritualists, attendants, servants and executioners served the temples. This is confirmed in the case of Mayanja by scattered references in the sources34. Most of the district of Seguku was settled by them and their followers. Mayanja’s main medium was very particular. He was of royal blood. The members of the royal family were numerous in the temples.35 For the monarchy, it was a matter of controlling and drawing under its influence the places of independent religious power and of acceding to the vast wealth of the sanctuaries. The classificatory and sterile marriage of princesses to divinities was also a way to manage the issue of hypergamy mentioned earlier. Before the 19th century, princes certainly occupied functions in the sanctuaries, as the account by Kiggala reminds us. He was himself entrusted to a god along with his sister. But that was no longer the case in the 19th century. Since the reign of Semakookiro (c.1800–1812), the king’s brothers were systematically executed in order to eliminate competition for the throne (Médard 2007, 230–234). So although from this reign on, because of polygamy, there were dozens of princesses in each generation, the princes were for their part very few in number and too much under surveillance to perform a ritual function. The handful of surviving brothers of kings, despite polygamy, had few sons since the midwife was under orders to eliminate potential heirs to the throne at birth (Kagwa 1934, 71). The presence of a prince medium of Mayanja was thus an anomaly which raises questions.

61The first possible explanation is that this ritualist was a prince, genealogically distant from the throne. This was the case for the descendants of kings of the 18th century or before. They can still hold ritual positions up to the present day. In the present case, for Mayanja, one might expect to see, as hereditary medium, a prince of the lineage of Kiggala, probably from the clan of the otter-ngonge, that of the mother of the former king. This was indeed the case for Jinja, at the sources of the Mayanja Waswa (Kasirye 1954, 7, 389). But our sources do not inform us about the clan of the prince at the sources of the Mayanja Kato, at Seguku. This is very unusual. Furthermore, such a distant degree of kinship with the reigning king is not consistent with the claim by Father Lourdel: “Maandja is a great prince of Buganda.” So the shrine at Seguku was probably not hereditary clan land (Butaka) in a princely lineage.

62Even more surprisingly, Roscoe informs us that “a medium, who was the son of a princess, and in consequence should have been put to death at birth because of restrictions [concerning births] imposed on princesses” was designated by the King (Roscoe 1965, 334). Was the medium issued from a lineage of princesses prior to the prohibition on marrying which dated from the reign of Kamaanya (c.1812-c.1830)? Might not the rest of the explanation be an anachronism on Roscoe’s part? Despite the prohibition, certain princesses did have children, and sometimes they managed to save them from infanticide at birth. The transformation of these beings, whose existence was then unthinkable and scandalous, into mediums would constitute a logical way of managing the ritual danger that they represented, and an alternative to putting them to death. This would be a very satisfying and culturally consistent explanation for the existence of this prince medium. It would also explain why the position was not attached to a specific clan.

63Beyond the prince medium, three clans, the colobus monkey-ngeye clan, the lungfish-mamba clan and the seed-nvuma clan were involved in running Mayanja’s temple. We know very little about their role, but with their function, they would have held hereditary clan land (butaka) in the vicinity of the temple.

64In testimony recorded by Neil Kodesh (2010, 2), a dignitary of the colobus monkey-ngeye clan claimed Mayanja as the spirit (musambwa) of his clan. His ancestor would have given the skin of the leopard Mayanja and the protection of this spirit to the first king of Buganda, Kintu. Thus, the protective spirit of their clan would have become, on a shared basis, that of Buganda. There is no other information along these lines. A reference to the princely lineage of the medium of Mayanja is improbable. This clan did not provide a wife either to King Ttembo, nor to his son Kiggala (none is mentioned either for the 18th century, an important period for the sanctuary, as we shall see). One might imagine that before the installation of a prince at Seguku, the land belonged to the colobus monkey-ngeye clan. In many sanctuaries, the clan that welcomed the divinity there is remembered. It often played an important ritual role. The executioner Sebata, belonging to the colobus monkey-ngeye clan, also managed the execution site in Seguku as well as those of Busega and Kabojja as noted above (Faupel 1962, 85). He would have had a say in the running of the sanctuary and probably played an important ritual role. As already mentioned, while putting people to death, Sebata would have been seen as possessed by the god Mayanja.

  • 36 Mukasa, H. Simuda Nyuma, part III. p. 272, Center for Research Libraries, University of Chicago, C (...)
  • 37 Louis Masimbi, 13-1-1914, in “Procès Diosocésain,” 1916, p. 280, AGMAfr, Rome.
  • 38 Faupel 1962, 85; Louis Masimbi, 13-1-1914, in “Procès Diosocésain,” 1916, p. 280, AGMAfr, Rome ; R (...)

65More is known about the involvement of the lungfish-mamba clan. One hereditary clan chief from the lungfish-mamba clan held the title of Kabega and he “looked after” the god.36 He is described as holding a “seigneury” in Seguku.37 This is as expected, all titles and positions were associated with a specific land holding, a butaka. If the holder of this position was a prince, it would most likely have been stated, so we can exclude any likelihood that he was the prince medium of Mayanja. Further information is available because one of the Uganda Martyrs, Saint Musoke Gyavira, was the son of a priest of Mayanja from the lungfish-mamba clan. His life is not among the best documented. Very little is said of him in the oldest sources, but over the years some information about him has been collected (Faupel 1962, 85–86). It is likely that Saint Musoke Gyavira’s father, Ssemalago Mubiru, held the position of Kabega in the 1880s. But it is never explicitly stated, so we cannot exclude that members of the lungfish-mamba clan may have held several high-ranking positions in the Mayanja sanctuary. That would not have been unusual. Ssemalago Mubiru is said to have had fifty wives, which would be consistent with the wealth of a clan leader of average importance (great chiefs had hundreds of wives; the King thousands). Both Kabega mentioned in the source had held junior chieftainships before inheriting the position (Keeper of King Suna’s umbilical cord in his sanctuary at Wamala for one and first Subchief of Gomba province [probably with the title of Malanti] for the other).38

66In a study from 1962, Welbourn mentioned a priest belonging to the seed-nvuma clan that served Mayanja at Seguku, but no other information is given about him (Welbourn 1962, 175).

67All of this is consistent with the description of a standard Ganda temple of average importance at the end of the 19th century. Ritual functions, duties and privileges were shared among several clans and the royal families, as was usually the case in Ganda national sanctuaries. It held a privileged position because of its proximity to the capital, but was unusually feared because of the bloody nature of the cult. An anecdote illustrates this: because he was born in Seguku, the future Saint Musoke was nicknamed ‘Gyavira’ by his fellow pages when he first arrived at court. This means “the place he comes from is feared by all” (Faupel 1962, 85).

Behind an ancestral cult, the wars of succession of the 18th century and the interlude of female rule

68All this imprecision is not usual: it indicates that there are hidden issues around this god who was somewhat strange, even in the local context. One detail concerning the kiwendo (mass ritual executions) of 1881, mentioned earlier, enables us to better discern the hidden issues. In February 1881, the missionaries horrified by the prospect of human sacrifices were given the following answer:

  • 39 Diaire de Rubaga, typed. 5-2-1881, AGMAfr, Rome.

“They tell me at the court that Maandja eats goats and not men. Where have you seen, they tell me, that people have been taken to be killed? No, those who told you that are liars. Where in this country can you find a witness who would come before the king to attest that he had seen innocent men taken to cut their throats?”39

69But this was not a sordid joke that was told to foreigners. It was a recurrent theme which referred to an episode in the fall of the very cruel King Kagulu (c.1730-c.1760):

“[King Kagulu was abandoned by all and vanquished.] He fled to Seguku and hid himself there for very many days. But during that time, he had no meat to eat. Hence he took someone else’s goat, but when the owner tried to rescue it, Kagulu speared him to death. Thereupon the people of Seguku expelled him.” (Kaggwa 1971, 64.)

70At each killing at the sanctuary of Mayanja at Seguku, the euphemism of the goats is used to recall the end of the reign of Kagulu. But this last anecdote mentioning the presence of Kagulu at Seguku conceals a key to decrypt the history of Buganda in the 18th century. The 18th century saw the development of the cult of god-princes which went in tandem with the rise of royal absolutism and its bloody rule. This chronology is confirmed by the genealogical inscription of the other princely divinities in the royal chronicles, with the exception of Mayanja. The genealogical position of the latter even constitutes an anomaly which precluded any claim that the bloodthirsty shift in the display of power and of religion dates from the 18th century.

71Mayanja was an atypical god. He was associated with the reign of Kiggala (c.1490-c.1520). For Wrigley, Kiggala was not even a king but a fearsome divinity, associated with Buggala, the main island of the archipelago of Sese in Lake Victoria (most of the Ganda pantheon had their origins in these islands). He would have been added to the royal genealogy later. Wrigley also noted that the geography of his reign contrasted with that of the kings that preceded him or succeeded him. It was more southerly and lacustrian than that of the other kings in that epoch, more centred on Bakka (Wrigley 1996, 155). Another anomaly was the reconquest of Mugganvula, the sanctuary where Kiggala had committed incest with his sister, then in the hands of a Munyoro chief. “From Kansanga [a hill to the south of Kampala] he attacked a Munyoro called Toko, because he had settled at Muggavula [Muganvula, in the original, in Luganda], the very place where Kiggala and his sister had been dedicated to the gods by their father while they were still young. Having defeated and killed Toko, Kiggala himself built his capital at Muggavula” (Kaggwa 1971, 21). These are fairly distant regions, conquered from the Kingdom of Bunyoro, in the reign of Mawanda (c.1730-c.1760). The remote geography and the great precision of these accounts (here, we even know the name of the Munyoro chief: Toko) are surprising, they suggest they may have been rewritten and reworked in the second half of the 19th century.

The fall of King Kagulu: where the river and the leopard meet

  • 40 Nasolo is the title of the first daughter of the king. Nsimbi (1980, 54); Ashe (1894, 105, quoted (...)

72The reference to the overthrow of King Kagulu opens up another page of the complexity of the cult of Mayanja and offers a basis for understanding in a radically different way this sanctuary and its significance, in particular as concerns the role of the princesses in this rite. It was in fact from his sister Ndege Nasolo40 that Kagulu, after being forced off the throne, hid at Seguku.

73This civil war that opposed Kagulu to his sister is unique in the history of Buganda, which nonetheless featured many. It was the only case where a king was overthrown because of his tyranny, without a pretender to the throne making a claim. Before the rebellion, to escape from Kagulu, the enlisted princes, including the future King Mawanda and Princess Ndege, headed for Busunju (the frontier of the kingdom). It was there that they met a chief, Mawuba, who agreed to fight Kagulu and to liberate the Baganda from the excesses of this tyrant (Kaggwa 1971, 63–66; Schoenbrun 202, 307–308).

74The rebel princes or those in flight, terrorised by Kagulu, refused to be candidates for the throne before his death. “The princes refused to ascend the throne, until Kagulu died” (Kaggwa 1971, 64–65). Princess Ndege Nasolo, Kagulu’s sister, was the cornerstone of the rebellion. She commanded her brothers and nephews, organised the overthrow then the capture, and above all supervised personally the putting to death, by drowning, of Kagulu (the blood of a king must not be shed).

Fig. 2: The kings of Buganda in the 18th century

Fig. 2: The kings of Buganda in the 18th century

The family tree is not represented in its entirety. The triangles indicate men, the circles women, the full triangles the kings, the names in italics are titles.

Henri Médard, 2022.

75Uniquely in the annals of Buganda, Ndege also chose the new king. “After Kagulu had been killed, Mawuba asked the princess to choose the successor, whereupon Princess Nasolo chose Kikulwe” (Kaggwa 1971, 66). Then Mawanda who was presented as Princess Ndege Nasolo’s uterine brother, that everything seemed to designate as a usurper, drove out King Kikulwe and seized power. Ndege Nasolo then became the queen sister (Lubuga) of King Mawanda (Stephens 2013, 138–139).

  • 41 “[The uninvited presence of Senkoma caused the failure of the interview between King Mawanda and N (...)
  • 42 The localisation of these sources raises a problem. Senkoma is not listed among the place names of (...)

76Many other authors writing about Buganda insist on the fact that the monarchy was a diarchy or a triarchy. The royal function was fully shared between the king (Kabaka), his mother (Namasole) and his sister (Lubuga), chosen together by the assembly of chiefs (Stephens 2013; Heusch 1987; Hason 2002, 219–236). For Rhiannon Stephens, the strong imbalance between the female and male powers became more accentuated and developed in particular during the 19th century. The Lubuga Ndege reigned fully beside her brother. Apart from her role as uncontested leader during the civil war, she was famous for having killed with her own hands the Namutwe Senkoma, a disobedient chief.41 This was a major transgression, the sovereign should not shed blood herself. As if by chance, on the site of this act, there appeared a river with the same name as the victim.42

77The very choice of Ndege as Lubuga was a transgression. The norm forbade the Lubuga from having an uterine brother (who would be a potential candidate for the throne), and her mother should belong to a different clan from that of the king’s mother. It is risky to project the 19th century rules onto a more distant past, but we may understand too that the political power of Ndege was such that nothing could be refused her, whether it were proscribed or not.

78Authors debate whether the King and the Lubuga engaged in an incestuous relationship that was carnal or merely symbolic, in particular during the rituals of the coronation. Virtual or actual, this incest was of particular gravity as Ndege and Mawanda were uterine brother and sister (and not only patrilinear half-brother and half-sister, as was the usage). Despite strong suspicions regarding the real filiation of Mawanda, the king and the queen-sister were both attached in a classificatory way to the clan of the leopard. The parallel between them and their predecessors Kiggala and Nazibanja is absolutely striking.

79The royal women were generally active and present in the dynastic conflicts alongside their brothers. Ndege was exceptional because no other princess had played as central a role in a rebellion, and because in the case of Ndege, there was no candidate for the throne. Only one other female personage, Nannono, played as important a role in the history of Buganda (Kaggwa 1971, 28–29; 1934, 23–24; Stephens 2013, 109). Nannono was the wife of King Nakibinge. She distinguished herself by her courage and her determination in the war against the Banyoro. Pregnant, with her husband killed in combat, she took power and reigned for eighteen months. Having given birth to a princess and not to a boy, she had to hand over power to Mulundo, the very young son of another of Nakibinge’s wives. In the royal genealogy, the episode dates from long before the 18th century, but Wrigley has clearly shown that it was, in reality, an 18th century reign that later authorities had decided to push back to a more distant past for reasons that have not reached us (Wrigley 1996, 204–206, 210–215). Wrigley even insisted on the proximity of the reign of Nakibinge to the reign of Mawanda; Nakibinge would have reigned shortly before Mawanda.

  • 43 “SSEGGIRINYA: The work of Ssegirinya and his assistants who are called Abagirinya is to decorate a (...)

80In this case, Ndege and Nannono were related. Nannono was indeed the daughter of Segirinya. He was also the father of Nakide Luiga, the mother of Ndege Nasolo and of Mawanda. Segirinya was thus the maternal grandfather of Ndege. The Segirinya was a hereditary chief of the leopard-ngo clan one of whose main tasks was furthermore to decorate the twin (the umbilical cord) of the king.43 Of course, this concerns a title, not necessarily the same person. The Segirinya, considered here as the grandfather of Ndege, in fact perhaps designated a successor, a brother, a son, etc., of the Segirinya, father of Nannono. But this kinship between the two most powerful women in the history of Buganda is intriguing and puzzling. The lead of the leopard-ngo clan can be followed further. The civil war which opposed Ndege Nasolo to Kagulu was also a civil war which opposed the princes and princesses of the leopard-ngo clan, (Ndege, Mawanda, Kikulwe, etc.) to those of the elephant-njovu clan (Kagulu) (Wrigley 1996, 187–191).

81Mayanja is thus not identified as a leopard by chance. The reference to the drowned animal (Roscoe 1965, 318), which we cited at the beginning, is certainly a distorted echo of the death of Kagulu drowned by Princess Ndege Nasolo in Lake Victoria. The incestuous episode refers as much to Mawanda, who reigned with his uterine sister, as to the distant and mythical sexual relations of two other uterine relations, Kiggala and Nazibanja.

  • 44 “A very great liar went and told him [Mawanda] that Kagulu had risen from the dead and that he was (...)

82As at Namugongo (site of the execution of the Christian martyrs), the spirit of the victim (Kagulu) possessed the executioner (Princess Ndege? Her male descendants?). This hypothesis is all the more attractive in that Kagulu was the only king of Buganda without a sanctuary to take care of and to channel his spirit (muzimu), with a hugely fearsome potential. The rumours of the offensive return of Kagulu from among the dead44 terrorised Mawanda at the end of his reign. The sanctuaries of dead kings were controlled by the queen sisters (the Lubuga, who then took the title of Nnaalinnya) of the deceased kings. On the death of the Nnaalinnya, another princess of the same clan succeeded her. The choice of a medium born of a princess for the spirit of the Mayanja has more resonance with Ndege Nasolo than with the distant Nazibanja, sister of Kiggala. It was an irony of his defeat that Kagulu was perhaps left in the charge not of his queen sister Lubuga, but of one of the sons of the murderer Ndege, the queen sister of his successor and enemy Mawanda.

83The reference in Seguku of Kagulu, an 18th century king, the stereotype of the tyrant, particularly cruel, arbitrary and sadistic, restored order. Following the civil war which saw Kagulu overthrown and executed, the cult of a major river, Mayanja (musambwa or, already, lubaale, if there had been an intermediate stage), was transformed into the cult of a royal divinity (lubaale mulangira) which specialised in executions. The parallel with a later cult of the god-prince Bengo is, in this respect, highly enlightening. Bengo was the son of King Mawanda (c.1730-c.1760), captured then executed in a civil war that opposed him to the son of Kyabaggu (c.1760-c.1790). He became the divinity of his place of execution. The executioner Senkole, responsible for putting him to death, also became the medium of Bengo. The nuances of difference between the two cults offer an inkling of a transformation of the practice of executions between the beginning of the process, under Kagulu, and the maturity of the system, at the end of the 18th century.

84The sources of the Mayanja conceal, behind the temple of an ancient divinity, a royal sanctuary and a place of execution dedicated to the very bloodthirsty King Kagulu.

Conclusion

85From a stuffed leopard, one perceives fragments of the history of an ancient divinity and of the multiple religious reconfigurations of Buganda in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. A river spirit (musambwa) whose origins are lost in the mists of time is transformed into twin rivers marking the frontiers between the kingdoms of Buganda of Bunyoro (from the middle of the 17th century?). In the 18th century, during the terrible internal and external conflicts that ravaged Buganda (or, more simply, gave birth to it), this river spirit was transformed into a new category of spirit, a princely god (lubaale mulangira) who was particularly bloodthirsty.

86His sanctuary was typical. It was located near springs and a sacred grove. When the Christians and Muslims took power, the ancient religion was banned. The sanctuaries were profaned and abandoned. The places of execution were closed from 1889. The royal executioners were dismissed. Aided by the demographic decline, these fearsome places tended to be avoided, abandoned. Lying fallow, they were quickly covered over by abundant vegetation. At the beginning of the 20th century, the demand for real estate began to make itself felt at Busega (which was already part of the Mengo-Kampala conurbation), then in the 1920s on the opposite bank at Kabojja. These accursed places were neutralised as soon as they were given over to the Christian churches.

  • 45 See for example: Sunday Vision, of 9 June 2013.

87The sources of the Mayanja were probably not reoccupied by traditional healers until after the restoration of the monarchy in 1993. This was the case of the majority of other sacred sites. Paradoxically, that no doubt corresponds to the clearing of the sacred grove and the planting of eucalyptus, which, in 2013, seemed to be about twenty years old. Desacralisation and resacralisation went hand in hand. The giving of offerings and the practice of discreet minor rituals in honour of Mayanja certainly continued during the whole of the 20th century and especially after 1955 (the year marking the return from exile of King Muteesa II). Even after 1993, the sources of the Mayanja did not regain their former glory and remained a very secondary sanctuary. It has little in common with the more famous sites and the clinics of the fashionable traditional healers (Obbo 1996). It has none of the attractiveness of Mubende, for example (Pennacini 2016). The established cult of Mayanja declined in the 20th century, and only recovered a little of its former greatness in the 21st century. The myth, on the other hand, remains very popular and well-known.45 It is the whole river that carries its history, and not only the sources at Seguku (whence the article in the newspaper New Vision in 2013, which focuses on Busunju not Seguku).

88This brings us back to the miserable remains of the tame leopard of Muteesa. In its lifetime, it had no doubt no particular relationship with Mayanja. Its stuffed corpse was placed in the tomb of the king as was the king’s whole cabinet of curiosities. It was one of the first animals preserved in this way and exhibited in Buganda. Its presence in a royal tomb was incongruous, disturbing. Visitors explained it via their culture, in other words, via Mayanja, fearsome god-prince, parent of the kings of Buganda. To pay him homage, he was given offerings. The greed of the guardians prevailed over the orthodoxy of practices and did the rest.

89The cult of Mayanja was among the major religious and political transformations of the 18th century. We confirm here the invention, in the 18th century, of princely divinities. Since the 1970s, historians have suspected that the royal chronicles might conceal a considerable number of manipulations regarding the reign of Mawanda (1730–1760), the enemy of King Kagulu. The omissions and manipulations add to the confusion and the tangle is very difficult to unravel. Little by little, genealogical manipulations have emerged—the transfer to a distant past of the reign of Nakibinge, for example. The chronicles conceal the traumas generated by the civil wars, the usurpation of the throne by commoners (unthinkable, for the radical royalists of the 19th century).

90This study on Mayanja confirms these interpretations. The drama of the civil wars of the 18th century is clearly the main issue in the manipulations. Nyoro interference, which we have not highlighted here (Médard 2012, 124–137), is clearly there in the background. The flight to Busunju of princes and princesses hides an appeal for help from the powerful neighbour. The singular contempt with which the remains of Kagulu were treated perhaps marks the unfamiliarity of foreign soldiers who do not feel compelled by local customs. One perceives then the desire to mask the interference of the kingdom of Bunyoro to the north behind the detailed accounts of civil wars in the chronicles. It was also a period of great political and religious experimentation, which led to the creation of the powerful and effective kingdom of Buganda, as it was known in the 19th century. It is not surprising that the relation between the king-brother and the queen-sister should be at the heart of the transformations. The big surprise is the scale of the misogynous manipulations of the chroniclers who play down and camouflage the political domination of female personages of the leopard-ngo clan in the middle of the 18th century.

91That no doubt is the most fascinating discovery. At the end of the 19th century, the rule of a woman, even of the blood royal, had become more obscene even than royal incest. From the very beginning of the 19th century (reign of Semakookiro, c.1800–1812), Ganda society tilted towards a slavery-based system. To maintain control of a mainly female population, the patriarchal ideology was radically strengthened. Yet following the reforms of Ssuuna (c.1830–1856), royal incest became common. Thus this scandal of female rule and regicide is hidden in the memory via incest.

92From a methodological point, going backwards in time, step by step, starting from certain places of memory, offers a way to reconstitute fragments of the past. This procedure highlights the multilayered elaborateness of the Ganda myths. The sources are too fragile to draw from them irrefutable proof, but we have collected, little by little, a very variable set of clues. Considering them together and linking them up has enabled us to propose new interpretations and raise new questions.

93Paradoxically, the shrine and place of execution of Seguku proved to be still more a place of forgetting than of memory. Less for the expected reasons (the desire to forget the horror of the executions) than because of the scandal it evoked: the murder, by drowning, of a king of Buganda by a woman, without respect for the rank and the soul of the deceased.

1. Africana Library

2. Makerere Institute for Social Research

I wish to thank Marie-Pierre Ballarin, Pauline Bernard, Shane Doyle, Valérie Golaz, Ikram Kidari, Claire Médard and Rhiannon Stephens for their reading of the text and their comments.

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Médard, Henri. 2012. “Identity, Religion and Race, Kintu’s, First King of Buganda, Many Facets, (18th–20th century).” in Lives in Motion, Indeed. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Social Change in Honour of Danielle de Lame, edited by Cristiana Panella, 187–223. Tervuren: Éditions du Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale de Tervuren.

Médard, Henri. 2018. “Exécutions et esclavage au Royaume du Buganda (Afrique de l’Est, xixe siècle). In Un demi-siècle d’histoire du Burundi. À Émile Mworoha, un pionnier de l’histoire africaine, edited by Jean-Marie Mukuri Melchior Nduwayo and Nicodème Bugwabari, 303–316. Paris: Karthala.

Médard, Henri, and Ikram Kidari. 2019. “The Kagera River and the Making of a Contested Boundary: Territorial Legacies and Colonial Demarcations in Buganda (19th–20th Centuries).” International Journal of African Historical Studies 52 (1): 11–30.

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Pennacini, Cecilia. 2016. “Esprits des lieux. Sites sacrés naturels dans le Buganda contemporain.” Journal des africanistes, 86 (1) : 106–129. https://doi.org/10.4000/africanistes.4898.

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Roscoe, John. 1965 [1911]. The Baganda. London: Franck Cass.

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Schoenbrun, David Lee. 1998. A Green Place is a Good Place. Agrarian Change. Gender and Social Identity in the Great Lake Region to the 15th Century. Oxford: James Currey.

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Archives

Archives Générale des Missionnaires d’Afrique (White Fathers) Rome (AGMAfr, Rome)

Diaire de Rubaga, typed version and manuscript version of Algiers.

Achte, Auguste. 1900. “Histoire des rois du Buganda.” 33 p.

Martyrs de l’Ouganda, Procès Diosocésain, Nyanza Septentrional, copia publica, 1916.

Rhodes House, Oxford

Roscoe, J., and A. Kagwa. 1906. Enquiry into Native Land Tenure in the Uganda Protectorate. MSS Afr.s.17, p. 7.

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Makerere University, Kampala

Kagwa, Apolo. 1912. Ekitabo Kye Bika Bya Baganda. Mengo: Apolo Kagwa Press. Translation: A Book of Clans of Buganda, typed, Wamala James. AF 301.2 KAG.

Kasirye, Joseph F. 1945. Abateregga ba Mulondo ya Buganda [Royal princes of Buganda], Rubaga. In Sources Material in Uganda History, vol. II, 377–464. AF PSF 967.61MS4

Lukiiko Record Book, 1894–1918 (translation conserved by John Rowe).

Aerial photograph no. 19. 15: UG 15: June 1955: 152,54 mm: 24,000: 6. Survey, Lands & Mines Department, Entebbe Air Photo, Library set no 4.

Map of Uganda, Kampala 71/1, 1/50,000, 1967, Department of Lands and Surveys.

Land Survey Map 71/1/21, Mutundwe Kaboja, s.d. [Certainly the first land survey map produced in the early 20th century to demarcate mailo property.]

Land Survey, Entebbe

Aerial photograph no. 19. 15: UG 15: June 1955: 152,54 mm: 24,000: 6. Survey, Lands & Mines Department, Entebbe Air Photo, Library set no 4.

Map of Uganda, Kampala 71/1, 1/50,000, 1967, Department of Lands and Surveys.

Land Survey Map 71/1/21, Mutundwe Kaboja, s.d. [Certainly the first land survey map produced in the early 20th century to demarcate mailo property.]

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Notes

1 See the Unesco website page Tombs of Buganda Kings at Kasubi: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1022/documents [archive].

2 We have adopted a contrasting but complementary approach to that of Pennacini (2016) (published in the same issue of the Journal des Africanistes in which the initial version in French of this article came out). She starts from the past to look at how the heritage is constituted. We start from the present to reconstitute the past. In the first case, the concept of heritage takes on its full meaning, in the second that of place of memory is preferable. It is more descriptive, more neutral and its meaning in English is easier to understand for East African readers.

3 Cited in Garcia (2010, 282).

4 Close to Kyaka II refugee camp at the contemporary border of the kingdoms of Buganda and Toro between Kaborogota and Kabamba barracks.

5 Several visits were undertaken between 2008 and 2013, in particular with Remigious Kigongo of the Uganda Museum in August 2008.

6 Mwanga (1884–1897, dead in exile in 1903, buried in 1910), Daudi Chwa (1897–1939) and Muteesa II (1939–1966, dead in exile in 1969, buried in 1971).

7 See the illustrations and description in Pennacini (2009).

8 Diaire de Rubaga, 8-8-1880, typed, AGMAfr, Rome.

9 See for example the account and photos of an American visitor: Abbamonte (2009).

10 “Long ago it was not allowed to put on a leopard’s skin. The leopards’ skins were for the royal rugs of the King. Namasole, Nnaalinnya and Nassolo were also permitted to put on bowl-like shoes that have strings of leopard’s skins. The major mediums like Kibuuka, Nende and Mukasa also had leopard’s skins.” Nsimbi (1980, 88).

11 “Nagaddya is of the Lungfish clan. Nagaddya was the King’s diviner also she was who used to cleanse. That is why we see that princess Nazibanja, the daughter of King Ttembo, when she was conceived by her brother Kiggala when he was still a prince, her father wanted to send her quickly to Nagaddya to be cleansed and to deliver from there. But by the time he sent her, the pregnancy was ready to be delivered. That is why she delivered on the way the rivers Lumansi, and Mayanja Wasswa which originates from Jinja and Mayanja Kato which starts from Sseguku in Busiro. For cleansing marriage problems is why that deity was called Nagaddya. Nagaddya used to give women a blessing for getting more food to cook for their husbands and children.” Nsimbi (1980, 140).

12 A strict equation, Kiggala—end of the 15th century, would be presumptuous. But independently of dating by reign, this practice may be very ancient since the phenomenon appears to be fairly widespread among the monarchies in the region (and among African monarchies in general).

13 Achte, 1900, AGMAfr, Rome.

14 Jan Vansina cited by Heusch (1987, 69, 100). The contribution by Luc de Heusch is fairly old (the reference refers to a re-edition of a publication of 1958). The question of incest in Africa of the Great Lakes is ripe for a complete reassessment, but we shall not undertake it here. For a recent survey and a different approach concerning the marriage of princesses, see Stephens (2013, 142–143).

15 Wampamba is the son of Nawampamba, daughter of Ggunju of the mushroom-butiko clan.

16 As Ray explains very well, it is the root of the umbilical cord which dries on the newborn. It is sometimes confused with the placenta which, as among the Gourmatché studied by Cartry, is also considered as a twin by the Baganda. See Ray (1991, 126–127); Nsimbi (1980, 63); Cartry (1979, 265–288).

17 “The life-history of Kiggala is very interesting and a famous saying that Princess Nazibanja, his sister, is the mother of River Mayanja is attached to it. The river that flows through Jjinja is called Mayanja Wasswa and the other one which flows through Sseguku is called Mayanja Kato.” (Kasirye 1954, 7.) “Nazibanja is also alleged to have given birth to River Lumansi.” (Ibid., 389.)

18 “Mayanja, the ferocious demon in the leopard. (When the king was finishing a new palace, it was the custom to have a feast, and at that particular feast it was laid down that the demon Mayanja should be appeased. As many as seven hundred men were caught and slaughtered during such feasts, and then the demon was quite satisfied).” (Cunningham 1905, 215–216.) No doubt the numbers estimated by the author, an early twentieth century colonial officer, are an exaggeration. But this reflects clearly the singularly murderous reputation of this deity.

19 Sunday Vision, 9 June 2013.

20 Sunday Vision, 9 June 2013.

21 Ibid.

22 Lukiiko record book, p. 5, MISR.

23 See too, cited below, Ashe (1970, 145).

24 Tucker (1908, vol. II: 343–346). Less rigid regarding the cult of relics and the authenticity of the bones than the Catholics, the Anglicans buried human remains even if it was impossible to distinguish the bones of Christians from those of other people executed.

25 Land survey map 71/1/21, Mutundwe Kaboja, s.d.

26 These testimonies from Protestant missionaries can be completed by those of the Catholic missionaries: Diaire de Rubaga, typed 5-2-1881, 16-2-1881, AGMAfr, Rome.

27 Bakazirwendo Kawooya, mutaka of the colobus monkey-Ngeye clan, cited in Kagwa (1912, 4).

28 “When Sebatta was the Sabaddu [i.e. Kago] he commanded great respect with the result that the members of the Ngeye clan monopolized this post (Obwasabaddu bwa Bassekabaka) up to Kabaka Juuko who gave the post to Kisolo belonging to the Nsenene-grass hoper clan. Kabaka Mawanda however completely expelled them and gave the post to Mpemba belonging to the Lugave clan. Sebatta therefore basically stripped of this other job and then remained with the responsibility of killing criminals and up to now he holds this position. He was also in charge of burying deceased Kabakas.” (Kagwa 1912, 4.) Kagwa reported the remarks of one of the leaders of the Ngeye clan, Bakazirwendo Kawooya. “Sebata Ngeye clan at Mutundwe, who had been Kago, the kings’ aide. Later he was made the second police man.” (Kagwa 1934, 85.)

29 Mugwanya in Roscoe and Kagwa, A. 1906. “Enquiry into Native Land Tenure in the Uganda Protectorate”: 7. MSS Afr.s.17. R.H.

30 “Such was the complication in the execution of the king’s duties that they required permanent and expert officers who knew exactly what to do, and what not to do.” (Kagwa 1934, 80.)

31 The text mentions the Mujasi as directing the execution. Mujasi was the commander of the King’s fusiliers, in this case he was the envoy and representative of the King but it was probably the real executioners who supervised the killing.

32 Aerial photograph no. 19. 15: UG 15: June 1955: 152.54 mm.: 24 000: 6’’, Survey, Lands & Mines Department, Entebbe Air Photo, Library set no4. The interpretation of the photo is confirmed by the Uganda Survey 1/50,000 map of 1967.

33 On trances and possessions in the religious system in Africa of the Great Lakes in general, see Pennacini (2016; 1998).

34 See Welbourn (1962, 175); Mukasa, H. 1914. Simuda Nyuma, part III. p. 272, Center for Research Libraries, University of Chicago, Chicago. Louis Masimbi, 13-1-1914, in “Procès Diosocésain,” 1916, p. 280, AGMAfr, Rome.

35 “Nasiwa, the eldest princess [mistake by Ashe, see the rest of the paragraph] and nominal wife of Mukasa, the Divinity of the Nyanza. Every Mumbeja (princess) is supposed to be a vestal virgin and nominal wife of a Divinity, but unlike the truly virgin keepers of Budo and Kibuka, their virginity is only nominal, since the Bambeja (the princesses) used to be notorious for their amours, and for the utter licentiousness which characterised them. In Mutesa’s days Princess Nakamanya was wife of god Kibuka, Princess Nasolo of god Wanga, Princess Kagere of Lwanga, Princess Nakati of Budo. In the olden time, when Kibuka was killed, god Mukasa had asked the reigning king for his daughter, and the king gave him his daughter, Nasolo (The name which the eldest of the princesses is always called as Kiwewa is that of the eldest of the princes). Nasolo like Kiwewa, has the royal title of Kabaka, and is over all the princesses who are not kept in durance like their brothers. The God Mukasa, as a return for this princess, sent to the king the famous warrior Kibuka […] Thus Princess Nasolo is wife of god Mukasa, Princess Nabweteme is wife of god Nende, Princess Nabaroga is wife of the lubare of Musongole etc. etc.” Ashe (1894, 105.)

36 Mukasa, H. Simuda Nyuma, part III. p. 272, Center for Research Libraries, University of Chicago, Chicago.

37 Louis Masimbi, 13-1-1914, in “Procès Diosocésain,” 1916, p. 280, AGMAfr, Rome.

38 Faupel 1962, 85; Louis Masimbi, 13-1-1914, in “Procès Diosocésain,” 1916, p. 280, AGMAfr, Rome ; Roscoe (1965, 255).

39 Diaire de Rubaga, typed. 5-2-1881, AGMAfr, Rome.

40 Nasolo is the title of the first daughter of the king. Nsimbi (1980, 54); Ashe (1894, 105, quoted note 35).

41 “[The uninvited presence of Senkoma caused the failure of the interview between King Mawanda and Ndege and their ancestor Kintu, first king and first man.] Mawanda went away full of grief and the queen sister was so enraged that when they reached a small valley, she speared Senkoma to death. Her action was perfectly justified because the king had given his chiefs strict warning not to follow him. The place where Senkoma was killed became the source of the river which is still known by his name.” Kaggwa (1971, 73); Roscoe (1965, 222).

42 The localisation of these sources raises a problem. Senkoma is not listed among the place names of Uganda. On the other hand, the sources of the Sekoma are about 5 km east of Mugganvula, where it flows into the Lumansi. This is consistent with the geography and the symbolism of the myth concerning the incest of Kiggala and Nazibanja. Errors of transcription are frequent, even if we cannot be certain regarding this identification.

43 “SSEGGIRINYA: The work of Ssegirinya and his assistants who are called Abagirinya is to decorate all kings’ property that is decorated. Sseggirinya is of a leopard clan. Abagirinya are the ones decorating the Kings’ head combs and of their twins and of the ones who paint and decorate generations in king’s houses. The estate of Sseggirinya is at Lubanja in Ssingo.” Nsimbi (1980, 63).

44 “A very great liar went and told him [Mawanda] that Kagulu had risen from the dead and that he was already on his way from the direction of Entebbe to fight him.” Kaggwa (1971, 73). Seguku would be from the direction of Entebbe.

45 See for example: Sunday Vision, of 9 June 2013.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Map 1: Mayanja (situation)
Crédits Henri Médard, 2015.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/docannexe/image/1689/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 400k
Titre Map 2: Mayanja (close-up)
Crédits Henri Médard, 2015.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/docannexe/image/1689/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 377k
Titre Fig. 1: Incest in the royal genealogy of Buganda
Légende The family tree is not represented in its entirety. The triangles indicate men, the circles women and the solid triangles the kings.
Crédits Henri Médard, 2022.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/docannexe/image/1689/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 183k
Titre Fig. 2: The kings of Buganda in the 18th century
Légende The family tree is not represented in its entirety. The triangles indicate men, the circles women, the full triangles the kings, the names in italics are titles.
Crédits Henri Médard, 2022.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/docannexe/image/1689/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 344k
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Référence électronique

Henri Médard, « Old Scandals, New Memories: Mayanja’s Transformation in Buganda (18th-21st centuries) »Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est / The East African Review [En ligne], 57 | 2022, mis en ligne le 29 août 2022, consulté le 07 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/1689 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eastafrica.1689

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