For the Baganda people of Uganda, many tales revolve around the same man of how Baganda came to be. For them, he was the same man and the Bagandans were the first people.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, in the hills above the northern shore of the lake his people call Nnalubaale, a Buganda statesman named Apolo Kaggwa sat down to do something no one in his country had done before. Kaggwa was the Katikkiro, the prime minister of the kingdom of Buganda, the most powerful commoner in one of the most powerful states of the African interior. He was also, in his spare hours, a scholar, and he had resolved to write his people down: their customs, their clans, and above all the line of their kings, from the founder to the ruler he himself served. He wrote in Luganda, his own language, in his own hand, and the books he produced, on the customs of the Baganda and the kings of Buganda, remain, a century later, the foundation on which almost everything written about his people rests. Kaggwa was preserving a lineage against forgetting, which is to say against a kind of death.
The story Kaggwa set down at the head of his list is a story about the founding of Buganda and death, and about his people's decision to answer the latter, not by defeating it, which they judged impossible, but by outlasting it.
The Beginning of Buganda
Just as in many cultures, where a single story can travel through generations in multiple forms, the story of the founding of Buganda exists in more than one telling. The details shift from one version to another. Names change, episodes appear or disappear, and some narrations place different weight on the same events.
For the purpose of this article, we will explore two major narratives, both surrounding Kintu, a central figure in the founding of Buganda. In the first, Kintu is believed to have been the first man ever to exist. In the second he is believed to have founded Buganda through a political tussle.
Kintu & Buganda — A Political Tussle
Buganda, located in what is now south-central Uganda, was originally occupied by a people who had somehow managed to arrange themselves into social-political lineages units known to date as 'ebika.' These units usually had individual leaders who defended against attacks, settled disputes and protected its people and traditions. Every now and then, an ebika's leader could usurp other leaders and merge several ebikas under his rule. And this is how we learn of Kintu, who was one such a leader albeit several Buganda oral literature say that his original name was Kato, and had renamed himself Kintu after the founding father of Buganda.
Back then in Buganda, two brothers who answered the names, Bemba and Kintu were both in line for the leadership of Buganda. Before the death of their father, he had willed the throne to Kintu which resulted in a rivalry between both brothers. Kintu was eventually overthrown from the throne, leading to his exile while Bemba assumed leadership. Along with some loyalists — Kisoro, his aide; Wawumira, his bodyguard, and Lukwoto, a porter, Kintu headed northeast of Buganda and sought refuge in Abyssinia, present day Ethiopia. There, they developed a warm relationship with the Abyssinian king and lived for a long time. However, Kintu's heart was still at home and while still in Ethiopia, began to make plans for his return to Buganda. In these plans, Kintu would fight for the throne whether or not his brother was still alive.
When it was time to leave, Kintu and his men however realised that they had forgotten the way home. To solve this dilemma, the Ethiopian king offered them an ancestral spear that could lead them home and help them find the right spot to settle in Buganda. To use this spear, Kintu was to head southwest from Ethiopia and set the spear upright on any rock he came to per time. If the spear fell, Kintu would know that he was not yet home, if it remained upright, however, it meant he was at his destination in Buganda.
In this manner, Kintu and his men found their way back home, particularly to Ddindo where Kintu found a huge rock extending for miles. There, Kintu built his settlement, married his very first wife, Nambi, and had his only child, Nakyejwe. During this period, he learnt that Buganda had somehow managed to grow so large that the people had organised themselves into several clans with ebikes (leaders). He also learnt about how clan leaders usurped one another when strong enough and of how Bemba had managed to gain control over the whole of Baganda. Bemba was equally feared across the land and had earned himself the name Musota (snake) on account of his cruelty and the fact that even snakes obeyed him. He had also managed to kill a good number of Bagandas who disobeyed or opposed him.
These events assured Kintu that Buganda was ready for a change of leadership. To prepare himself, he journeyed to the Sesse Islands, the known home of the Baganda deities, to ask permission so that he may become king. There he met Mukiibi, a once powerful clan leader in Buganda who had fled because he had refused to execute a task for Bemba. Before Mukiibi fled, a fight had ensued between Bemba and Mukiibi which led to the death of one of Mukiibi's sons. Upon meeting, Kintu and Mukiibi became allies and journeyed back to Ddindo, after Kintu had obtained the permission he needed from the Bagandan gods. With them came two of Mukiibi's men, Nfudu and Kigave.
At Ddindo, Kintu and Mukiibi started making plans to take over the kingdom. Kintu's first attempt was to try negotiating with Bemba. To this effect, he kept sending messengers, whom unfortunately, Bemba killed every single time. Seeing the way things were going, Mukiibi offered that his men, Nfudu and Kigave, help Kintu. Nfudu was a very witty man who had been nicknamed Nfudu because he was believed to have an uncanny ability to make himself look like a tortoise (enfudu). In reality, Nfudu was just a master craftsman who had made a very real tortoise looking mask which he used at night. Hence, Nfudu became the next messenger sent to negotiate with Bemba, and even bring him back alive. As a reward, Nfudu was promised immortality by Kintu.
Upon reaching Bemba and relaying the negotiation message from Kintu, Bemba told them to report to him the next day as their meeting had extended into the night. He also told them to get a good night's sleep, albeit with the intention of killing them like the previous messengers.
Nfudu, however, had a trick up his sleeve; he wore his tortoise looking mask, which whenever he wore, made him look headless. This trick became his saving grace that night. As the guards Bemba sent to kill him approached, they were shocked to see a tortoise person. Bemba, after hearing what had happened, was eager to meet the tortoise man. Nfudu explained himself by cooking up a story about how he cut off his head every night to protect himself from his enemies and kept it safe until morning while wearing his tortoise mask at night. He further embellished the story by linking it to how he gained immortality.
Bemba, excited by the idea of immortality and understanding just how many enemies he had made, wanted to become immortal himself. So he made an appointment with Nfudu to teach him the same trick the following night. The next night, Bemba went to Nfudu's quarters and asked him to first explain the procedure before they could proceed. Nfudu accordingly explained how Bemba just had to put his head on the chopping block for it to be hacked off. And after, Bemba would get his own tortoise mask every night while keeping his head safe. Bemba put his head on the chopping block and as soon as it was hacked off, several snakes are said to have poured out of it. Nfudu wrapped the head up and with Kigave's help, took it back to Ddindo. The people of Buganda, on the other hand, rejoiced upon receiving the news of Bemba's death.
Kintu, upon being presented with Bemba's head, was furious. He had specifically requested that Bemba be brought to him alive. Although he was glad about the demise of his enemy, he however refused to grant Nfudu the immortality he promised. Kintu subsequently assumed the throne and became the Kabaka of Buganda. He further gave the clanship and their leaders more political structure which has subsisted to date in present day Buganda. Somehow, Kintu would disappear and Chwa Nnabakka would inherit his throne, beginning a long line of Buganda kings.
Kintu & Buganda — A story about gods.
In one of the best-known tellings in Baganda, Kintu was the only man on earth. He lived alone with a single cow, and the cow was everything to him: he drank its milk and lived on nothing else, and the two of them kept each other company in an empty world.
Up in the sky lived Ggulu, whose name is the word for heaven itself, and Ggulu had children. One of his daughters, Nambi, came down to earth with her brothers, saw Kintu, and the two of them fell in love. They proposed a marriage but Nambi's family was unimpressed. What kind of creature was this, who owned nothing and lived on the milk of one cow? To expose him, they drove his cow up into the sky, and Kintu, left with nothing, survived by stripping leaves and bark from the plants around him. When Nambi told him where his cow had gone, Kintu climbed to the sky to get it back, and to make his case for her hand in marriage.
Ggulu wanted Kintu to prove himself and set him up for a test. First, he was shut in a house with food and drink enough for a hundred men and told to finish all of it or die; he ate and drank what he could, poured the rest into a pit he found in the floor, and called out that he was done. Next, he was given a copper axe and told to cut firewood from solid rock, and he found a rock already cracked and split it. He was also told to fill a pot with dew and not with water. Kintu set it out and the dew came. And at the last he was shown Ggulu's vast herds and told to pick out his own single cow from among thousands, an impossible task, until a bee offered to help and told him to choose the beast on whose horns it settled. The bee flew to Kintu's cow, and then to the calves the cow had borne in the meantime, and Kintu named them all. Then, Ggulu was satisfied. Kintu was no longer an ordinary man to him, so he gave him Nambi, and sent the couple down to earth to marry, to plant, and to multiply into a people.
But Ggulu gave them a warning, and the warning is the hinge of the whole story. Go quickly, he said, and whatever you do, do not turn back, for if you delay, Nambi's brother Walumbe, whose name is Death, will see you and insist on going with you, and you will not be able to refuse him. So Kintu and Nambi set off down to earth with their provisions, their seeds and plants and a hen. And on the way down Nambi remembered that she had left behind the grain to feed her hen, and against the warning she turned back to fetch it. When she returned to the sky, Walumbe saw her, and he came down to earth behind her, and he has never left.
At first Walumbe only asked. He asked Kintu for his children, to keep some as his own. When Kintu refused him, Walumbe began to kill them, one after another. Kintu appealed to the sky, and Ggulu sent another of his sons, Kaikuzi, the digger, to seize Walumbe and drag him home. Kaikuzi fought his brother, and Walumbe fled underground, and Kaikuzi dug after him. He nearly had him; he told the people of the earth to stay indoors and make no sound, so that he could corner Death in the open. But some children saw Walumbe and cried out in fear, and Death bolted back into the ground. After this had happened more than once, Kaikuzi went up to his father and said he could not do it. Let him stay, then, said Ggulu; those who must die will die. And so Walumbe remained, and remains, living in the earth of Buganda, at a place of deep pits the Baganda still name, coming up to take the living, and never again to be sent home.
A Kingdom Built To Outlast Death
Read the story for its shape and a whole worldview comes into focus. Notice first what kind of founder Kintu is. He is not a sacrificed innocent, like the Nommo of the Dogon; he is not a god murdered by his brother, like Osiris. He is a capable man who earns everything he receives by passing tests that call for endurance, for cleverness, and for the humility to accept help from a bee. The founder of the Ganda world is portrayed as a proven man, and what he founds, in the fullness of the tradition, is a throne: Kintu is remembered as the first Kabaka, the ancestor from whom the kings of Buganda descend. Merit, in the beginning, becomes authority. The man who proves himself is the man fit to rule.
Notice next how death arrives. It does not come as punishment for sin, and it is not simply decreed by the creator, as in the Akan saying that Odomankoma made death and death killed him. Death comes through a small, tender, human failure, a woman turning back for the food of her hen, committed against an explicit divine warning. Responsibility is genuinely mixed. Walumbe is a being of the sky, Nambi's own brother, so death is in some sense already inside the divine family; and yet it need not have followed them home, and it did so only because someone disobeyed and turned back. The Baganda, unlike the Kongo, do not let human beings off entirely, and unlike a doctrine of original sin, they do not crush them with it. The fault is real, and it is small, and it is forgivable, but its consequence is nonetheless permanent.
That permanence is the heart of the matter. When Kaikuzi cannot recapture Walumbe, Ggulu does not rage or grieve. He accepts. "Those who must die will die." The Baganda looked squarely at death and concluded that it could not be defeated and would not be undone, and then they asked the only question left worth asking: if death cannot be beaten, how does a people outlast it? Their answer was to build things that do not die although the individuals in them do. The clan outlives its members. The lineage outlives the father. And the kingship, above all, outlives the king. The Ganda genius was to pour the whole force of a civilization into the making of immortal institutions, so that the mortal person, dying, would die inside something that did not.
This is why, when things went wrong in the Ganda world, the questions asked were questions about relationships and about divine order. Was a lubaale offended — one of the great balubaale, the gods, Mukasa of the lake who gives health and plenty, or one of the powers of affliction; Walumbe who is death? Kawumpuli, who is plague? Had an ancestor been neglected, a muzimu left without offerings? Had a clan taboo, an omuziro, been broken? These were read by mediums and diviners and answered with sacrifice and observance. More importantly, behind every particular misfortune stood the founding certainty that death itself was not an injustice to be protested but a permanent tenant to be endured, while the real work of the living was to keep the lineage and the kingdom filling faster than Walumbe could empty them.
The Ganda frame lets its inheritors see certain things with unusual steadiness. It lets them look at death without illusion. There is no promise here that the righteous will not die, no bargain by which mortality can be escaped; there is only the sober recognition that Walumbe is in the ground for good, and the resolve to build what will stand above him. It let them prize competence and continuity: the tested founder, and the institution engineered to survive its members. And it produced, out of that resolve, one of the great state-building traditions of the continent, a kingdom of roads and courts and offices and craft that has survived conquest, abolition, and the exile of its kings, and stands today.
But a frame built on the immortality of the collective has a characteristic blindness. Where the Igbo made the individual sovereign, the Baganda made the collective immortal and could be slow to protest the death of the individual. If the clan endures and the kingship endures, the single mortal person becomes, in the last analysis, expendable to the continuity of the whole. A civilization that has made its peace with death this profoundly can find it harder to be scandalized by any single death in particular.
Kingship in Buganda
We have just seen, among the Igbo, a people who refused, on principle, to let power gather into a throne. Travel east, to the northern shore of the great lake, and you find a Bantu people — the Bagandas — who did the very opposite, and did it with genius.
Buganda was one of the most centralised states in precolonial Africa. At its head stood the Kabaka, a sacred king who held, in principle, the power of life and death over every one of his subjects. The Buganda court and social structure astonished its very first external visitors with its order and etiquette. Every Baganda belonged to a clan (the ebika), each with its totem and its hereditary duties at court. The Kabaka alone belonged to no clan of his own; he took the clan of his mother, so that as kings married across the clans, the throne passed, reign by reign, through one clan after another. No single lineage could capture the crown, and every clan could hope that a son of its daughters might one day wear it. The kingship was bound to the whole people rather than to one family, which is a large part of why it has endured.
Set the Igbo and the Baganda side by side and the point of the comparison comes clear. Both are answers to the danger of power. The Igbo answer was to scatter power so that no one could seize it. The Ganda answer was to concentrate power in a single sacred office, and then to build that office so that it belonged to everyone and outlived everyone who held it.
Elements of Kintu Mythology in Bagandan Culture
The Kintu mythology left its fingerprints on the things the kingdom made, and nearly every one of them speaks of continuity against death.
It made the bark cloth. From the inner bark of the mutuba fig, beaten for hours with wooden mallets until it becomes a soft russet fabric. The Baganda also produced olubugo, the bark cloth in which they clothed the living and wrapped the dead, in which kings were robed and corpses were shrouded, so that the same cloth from the same tree accompanied a person from the height of life down into the grave.
It also made the mujaguzo — the royal drums — which were bound to the institution of kingship. A Kabaka was not fully king until the drums had sounded for him. These drums passed from reign to reign as the office itself passed, beating for one mortal king after another.
The myth also made the tombs. At Kasubi, in Kampala, the Baganda raised over their dead kings, a vast thatched palace that became a royal burial ground, a great domed house of poles, reeds, spear-grass and bark cloth. The site contains the tombs of four Buganda kings within the Muzibu Azaala Mpanga, the main building. There the Kabakas are laid to rest behind a curtain of bark cloth that screens the sacred space within.
For the Bagandans, a dead Kabaka did not simply depart. His jawbone, understood as the seat of his spirit, was preserved and honoured in its own shrine, and through a medium the dead king could still be consulted by the living, still counsel his successors, still belong to the kingdom he had ruled. The ethnographer, John Roscoe, working in Kaggwa's day, recorded the practice in detail.
When fire destroyed the great tomb at Kasubi in 2010, the Ugandan authorities, the Buganda Kingdom, UNESCO and local communities undertook its reconstruction, which was completed in 2023. A people whose entire philosophy is the outlasting of death could hardly let the house of their deathless kings stand in ashes. The tomb is to the Baganda what the mbari was to the Igbo and the pyramid to the Egyptian. But where the Igbo built to surrender their cosmos back to the earth, and the Egyptian built to carry the judged soul into an unchanging eternity, the Baganda built to keep the dead king present and working among the living — one more institution engineered so that death, though it takes the man, does not take the office or the line.
