BUGANDA: The Troubles of the King

In the East African kingdom of Buganda, a province of the British protectorate of Uganda, the night gleamed with bonfires. In the flickering light, huge gourds stood in rows, ready to be filled with the banana beer that was brewing in hollowed-out logs. Musicians gave an additional twist to the cow sinews binding their drums, bringing them up to concert pitch. Shapely dancing girls added extra layers of cloth to the bustles that accentuate their sinuous movements. Throughout the green and rolling land last week, 1,500,000 Buganda tribesmen were getting ready to celebrate the 35th birthday of their Kabaka (King), Edward Frederick William David Mukabya Mutesa II.

But the Cambridge-educated King, brooding in his bungalow palace on a hilltop near Kampala on his birthday eve, had other things on his mind. Summoning Uganda’s Anglican Bishop Leslie Brown and a selected group of government ministers and relatives, the King presented the testimony of palace servants. Their story: that very night they had caught the King’s wife, Queen Damali, and the King’s brother, Prince Juko, in the shrubbery of the palace grounds. Worst of all, Prince Juko had been clad only in underpants. The King sternly announced that Queen Damali was to be confined incommunicado to her room for the present, and would later be exiled to the lonely Sese Islands, 30 miles offshore in Lake Victoria. The assembled advisers were not terribly impressed by the King’s evidence, since they—and all Buganda—were well aware that the King wants to divorce Queen Damali so that he could marry his great and good friend, the Queen’s unmarried sister Sarah, thus putting Sarah’s two children in line for the throne.

Next morning, the King celebrated his birthday by attending service in Namirembe Cathedral, and listened thoughtfully to a sermon by Bishop Brown, which stressed that even Kings must obey God’s commandments and Christ’s teachings if they wish to be regarded as Christians. Canceling a ceremonial visit to Parliament because the British Resident, Anthony Richards, would be there (the King is constantly embroiled in quarrels with Britain as well as with his wife, his brother, and the Anglican Church), King Freddie went to a soccer game.

That evening, 50 guests arrived for the traditional birthday cocktail party in the palace grounds, found no one to welcome them and nothing to drink. Inside the palace, the troubled King was listening to two paramount chiefs as well as the father of both his wife and of his sweetheart Sarah. They urged him to reconsider his hasty action against Queen Damali. Prince Juko, far from being cast into a cell for a crime in the shrubbery, was gaily taking part in all the birthday celebrations. The consensus in Buganda was that Queen Damali had been framed and that, in order to marry Sarah, the King would have to try something else. One possibility: he might leave the Anglican Church and become a Moslem.