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AFRICA: King In Exile

4 minute read
TIME

A few miles north of the equator, not far from where the Nile rises, the Mountains of the Moon face east towards a mighty lake that could drown the state of West Virginia. On the northern shore of Lake Victoria sits Kampala (pop. 22,000), the chief city of the British protectorate of Uganda and the ancient tribal capital of 1,300,000 Baganda tribesmen.

Kampala, like Rome, is built on seven hills. There are Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals, a glittering white mosque and a Hindu temple, each on its separate hilltop. Makerere College, the university of East Africa, occupies hill No. 5; on the sixth live 2,000 Britons, communing—or so it seems—with Kipling and Queen Victoria, whose spirits brood above the sahibs’ hill. But the summit that matters most in Kampala and in all Buganda is No. 7. There, in his white palace, ringed with pacing sentries and a ten-foot-high stockade of elephant grass, the Kabaka (King) of Buganda got an urgent message last week. It was an invitation from Uganda’s British governor, Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen, to His Highness Kabaka Edward William Frederick David Walugembe Mutebi Luwangula Mutesa II. It said: Come and talk.

Get Out & Stay Out. A Cambridge graduate (third-class honors), Mutesa II is a handsome, 29-year-old Muganda of the ruling Mushroom clan. He put on a dark brown suit, knotted his regimental tie (the blue and scarlet stripes of the Grenadier Guards, in which Mutesa is an honorary captain) and drove off in his black limousine. He and Governor Cohen talked for two hours. The interview was not a success. Out stalked the governor; in strode a British policeman with a warrant for the King’s arrest. Forthwith, His Highness got orders to clear out of his native Uganda and to stay out for the rest of his life. He was hustled to Entebbe airport, bundled aboard a waiting R.A.F. transport plane and flown directly to London. No one bothered to tell his wife and four-year-old child.

State of Emergency. News of their ruler’s exile hit the Baganda like a tropical rainstorm. The Kabaka’s 300-lb. sister, Princess Zalwanga, collapsed and died; his pretty young Nabagereka (Queen) retired with her ladies in waiting and sent out a message that she was “bewildered and grief-stricken.” Buganda nationalists, who have previously attacked the Kabaka as a playboy and British puppet, quickly reversed themselves and cried for “our beloved King.” In the Great Lukiko (native council), Prime Minister Paulo Kavuma announced that he had radioed London, beseeching the British government to please send Mutesa home.

The British declared a state of emergency and called out the Uganda irregulars, a collection of elderly colonials.

Many of them were of the opinion that the Kabaka had been meddling in politics to divert public attention from the previous frivolity of his personal life. Explaining the government’s decision to the Lukiko, Governor Cohen, a close friend of Mutesa II and one of Britain’s best colonial administrators, accused the exiled Kabaka of “persistently refusing to accept British decisions.”

Under the agreement of 1900, signed by Britain and Mutesa’s crocodile-worshiping father, the Kabaka is required to “conform . . . and cooperate loyally with Her Majesty’s Government.” But since last summer, the Baganda have been demanding 1) a definite date for Buganda independence. 2) the transfer of Buganda affairs from the British Colonial Office to the Foreign Office. This would have meant splitting the Uganda protectorate into two unworkable enclaves—one for the proud Baganda. another for the 4,000,000 less-advanced tribesmen. Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton turned down both requests, but when he ordered the Kabaka to withdraw them, Mutesa said no. He also threatened to boycott the more liberal constitution that Britain was planning to establish in Uganda in 1954.

Remembering Freddie. In exile in London. Mutesa II last week proved almost as popular in Britain as he became overnight in his own country. Englishmen remembered him from his Cambridge days when his tall, dandified figure, complete with tightly furled umbrella and dudish Edwardian jacket, was a familiar sight, in Mayfairs poshest bars. His friends called him Freddie, and last week the name caught on all over Britain. Amply subsidized by the British government, Freddie took a suite in the Savoy, bought a hat and slipped out to see his old friends.

Next day, dressed in a chalk-striped grey suit, the Kabaka of Uganda sat in the gallery of the House of Commons and heard British democracy wrestle with its conscience (see below).

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