The Baganda Are Not Racist, It Goes Against The Buganda Kabakaship Ideals

The Baganda Are Not Racist, It Goes Against the Buganda Kabakaship Ideals

Tom Rogers Muyunga-Mukasa

The Baganda are notoriously accommodative, hospitable and obsessive hosts. 

This hospitable nature didn't come about abruptly. It is a tried and tested dignity-affirming ethos,  consciousness and  an aspiration that goes so many centuries back in time. 

Hospitality is driven by a dynamism and synthesis upon which the treatment of a human body and nature are central themes. 

The human-body  is provided opportunities to achieve its fullest potential.

Nature is treated as a provider whose resources are handled judiciously and responsibly.

 

The Baganda are defined at different planes.

There is a geographically-rooted determination of the Baganda.

There is a diasporic Baganda persons living and thriving outside the geographic Buganda region.

There are those who have affiliation to Buganda and wish her to thrive through the institutions and structures.

The Baganda can, therefore, be defined as all those persons in the Buganda Kabakaship or outside of it but have a vested interest in her survivability.

The Buganda Kabakaship is thus the geography, history and the continued robust cultural procession.

Buganda is a beacon which produces the experiences and realities one finds in the Buganda Kabakaship (the region and the existing political-socio mechanisms).

The Kabakaship thrives on the fuel of heterogeneous integrity of the many people who have lived in the region and contributed immensely to the character of the people, the history, culture and geography.

Buganda is a cultural union and social-welfare support mechanism whose principles guide people's interests, desires and will. 

These principles are weaved in the fables, mythology, folklore, proverbs, norms and practices and they are reminders of the inevitability of fate; futility of the search for immortality; the reward of persistence; recognition of effort; the sustenance drawn from productivity; the power provided through opportunity; the self-confidence that comes with being eligible; and agency whose outcome is upward mobility.

Buganda Kabakaship is one of the hallmarks of Buganda's contribution to how societies organize.

The Kabakaship is a conceptual conformity driven by ideals that coalesce the Baganda and is revolving around a cultural sense of purpose which holds together people, planet and productivity.

These were normalized and became the basis for navigating Buganda and making it useful to the people in that region. 

Buganda is built around intentional structures which ensure that individual people (irrespective of origin) survive and thrive to their fullest potential.

The Baganda have worked out ways to enshrine inclusivity through cultural means. 

However, the use of cultural means can only do so much in modern times. Financial and logistical support have to be injected into communities for them to be lifted out of social and economic inequities. 

But, these two opportunities have, unfortunately, been used to coerce, split and disempower the Buganda Kabakaship.

The Kabaka was subjected to a carrot and stick approach by the Colonialists and was hard-pressed to cease incentivizing the people in any form. 

The Kabaka was forced to comply and in the process also to cease presiding over the functions that held the Kabakaship together. 

The people were forced to cease paying their respect to the Kabaka and instead commit their obeisance to the Crown, Christianity and Islam.

This meant five things for the Baganda. 

They were forced to neglect the cultural duties toward each other, the planet and the people they hosted.

Secondly, they were forced to renounce their traditional beliefs, way of life, any claim linking them to the Kabakaship and all forms of action actualizing an African identity. 

Thirdly, they were forced to adapt the ways of the Crown, Christianity and Islam. They engaged in outdoing each other at being more British than the Britons, more Catholic than the Pope and more Muslim than Mahomet (SAW). In the process, they denied all forms of vestiges that connected them to Buganda. The ones who performed better at this game were rewarded by the British.

The fourth, were the resistors. These are the ones who failed to comply and were called racist, backward, parochial and all sorts of degrading and dehumanizing monikers.

The fifth and highest level of submission to the Crown was denouncing the Kabaka and everything that tied one to the Kabakaship.  Anything contrary to obeisance before the Crown and Christianity was taken to be racist and counter to what the British Colonialists desired.

This began a resent-agenda: path to hostilities, racist-related shaming, naming and baiting in Buganda.

The Baganda are not racist because they have no might, power, social nor economic means to deny equality to fellow Ugandans.

The term "Buganda" means two things: a geographic region or a spirit that binds people together.

As as a spirit, aspiration or vision, it is about harmonious co-existence that is possible through inclusivity, opportunity, liberty, happiness, empathy, compassion, democracy, institutions and shared care. This means putting resources, the will and wherewithal to make peace and not war.

The Kabakaship is the physical means and a model of mechanisms where difference is recognized as a means for potential and not antagonism. 

The term "Baganda" means those drawn together to put into practice the Buganda ideals. They are the animators or enforcers.

The Baganda, are a union of diversified tribes (the united tribes) who were organized around a desire for lifting up all people socially and economically. This is in line with the Declaration of  the “Nnono” and the vision of “Obuntu-bulamu.”

By the time the Colonialists came in the picture, Buganda Kabakaship had reached a recognizable societal-hegemony shaped by history, forged by geography, propelled by commerce, animated by culture and nourished by agriculture.

Pre-Colonial Buganda was a marketplace in which centrality and proximity of the cultural norms influenced the level of development that awed the British, Arab, French, Belgian, American and German explorers or visitors.

The Buganda Court displayed a system of information and service flow that characterized managed orderliness. Eligibility in Buganda was rooted in outcomes such as dignity for all, tolerance and respect. This set up incentivized a zeal to contribute to the integrity of Buganda. 

This ideal picture was, however, disrupted. The Colonialists had to have an upper hand. 

So, they devised ways to be the sharpest knife in the box and thus began the protracted and insidious commission by all concerned to destroy the Buganda Kabakaship goals of “Nnono” and “Obuntu-bulamu.”

The typical Muganda was forced to be loyal to one too many and denounce one thing too many at the same. This set up a sequence of events whose outcome were apathy contexts. 

A rejection sensitive dysphoria gripped the typical Muganda. The best way to delegitimize, silence, neuter, demasculinize and defeminize the Baganda was through race and ethnicity baiting. 

The Baganda were quick to deny they were anti-people at the slightest provocation, they easily felt embarrassed, they went through a phase of quiescence once they were said to be racist or anti-people. Such remarks like: “A good Muganda is a dead one,” or the insipid trope "Baganda are racist," are the recipe of many anecdotal tales.

Many politicians vying for electoral votes within Buganda won seats in this region on tickets that provoked the Baganda on racial matters.  

To call the Baganda racist is an oxymoron that no longer serves its political ends. 

If using stale racially divisive provocation to get the Baganda behind the provocateur had worked for many years back, it no longer does so now. The Baganda are awake now.

The Baganda can no longer be controlled by emotional manipulation. 

They have since awokened to the knowledge of their rich legacy and story.

They can figure out things, explain to themselves who the real racist and anti-people are.  

They are aware of whom is accumulating wealth, dispossessing and oppressing the people.

There are past precedents meted by the British. In fouling the Baganda, the British soiled themselves too.  

But, the British were quick to reconcile to the fact that all communities in their colonies must be left to organize authentically around their indigenous,  appropriated, tried and tested beliefs. 

Among the Baganda, differentness is not ground for withholding dignity-affirmation.

Today, the question is not whether Buganda has moved away from listing her fears or motivations. Lifting the social and economic standards of humans;  and entrenching eco-mindfulness are the thrust of major aspirations. 

One wonders, once Buganda Kabakaship is given the economic and social logistics will she reinvigorate the agility she is known for, take up the challenge to recommit her platform to the “Nnono” and “Obuntu-bulamu” ideals? 

It is time for African communities to be supported through "assisted indigenization" which in turn restores a people, production and planet balanced interplay. 

The policy, law and gaze that foster social and economic transformation as well as a rising middle-class African population need to look into the potential of the cultural identity of Africans to promote population-wide development. 

Cultural identity and institutions are the yet to be fully tapped into Reformation and Renaissance platforms for Africans. 

The Buganda Kabakaship (Kingdom) has demonstrated that Africa is brimming with social organizational pockets that will move her toward a livable and thriving continent. Is this the spirit  and gaze of say, the West, Japan or China about Africa?

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Epilogue:

In writing this essay, I was searching for a healing. A cultural healing not much different from Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing.' I wanted to process the dignity inherent is African craftwork (this term is used figuratively, metaphorically and iteratively) as well as reckon with the effects of systemic racism. I use indigenous nomenclature and lexicon to show case ways that pre-Colonial Africa enabled people to navigate life. I get uplifted and feel authentic. I am sure this is one way, I can figure out the remnants of structures that promote directly perpetuated racism and provide solutions which return the dignity of people.