Baganda

“ The Baganda are a very warlike people, who have constantly increased their territory at the expense of neighbours, with whom they have at all times been ready to quarrel. At times the king would lead his army in person, or again the task might be given to generals, who were always elaborately dressed in skins of animals. ”

“ But in a few years there were more Christians than before, and now in Uganda the king and nearly all the chiefs and people are Christians, as well as many of the tribes living near them to whom the Baganda have sent teachers. All through the Christian African kingdom there are schools and hospitals. The Baganda were always strong, and now so many are Christians they have stopped fighting the other tribes and killing and making slaves, and instead they spend their time learning to make useful and beautiful things, which make their homes happier and more comfortable to live in. ”

“ But the dead leopard, adorned with a chief's bonnet, is set up in the village, where nightly dances are held in its honour. The Baganda greatly fear the ghosts of buffaloes which they have killed, and they always appease these dangerous spirits. On no account will they bring the head of a slain buffalo into a village or into a garden of plantains: they always eat the flesh of the head in the open country. ”

“ In addition to their hunting and agriculture, the Baganda are very fond of trade and barter, and in many villages there is a market-place where a salesman must pay fees in order to get permission to sell his wares. ”

“ What is the good of trying to elevate the population of Uganda and to give it a free and hopeful life if some other population close at hand is competing against the Baganda worker under lash and tax? ”

“ The spirits of dead kings worshipped by the Baganda of Central Africa. Another African people who regularly worship, or rather used to worship, the spirits of their dead kings are the Baganda. Their country Uganda lies at the very source of the Nile, where the great river issues from Lake Victoria Nyanza. Among them the ghosts of dead kings were placed on an equality with the gods and received the same honour and worship ”

“ The Baganda will not be benefited either morally or materially by contact with modern money-making or modern money-makers. When a man is working only for the profits of his company and is judged by the financial results alone, he does not often under the sun of Central Africa acquire the best method of dealing with natives; and all sorts of difficulties and troubles will follow any sudden incursion of business enterprise 123 into the forests and gardens of Uganda. ”

“ It is not surprising that the Baganda should have attained to this power, for they are probably the most highly cultured and intellectual of all the many Bantu tribes of Africa. The same conception of Death as a person occurs in a story of the origin of death which is told by the Hos, a negro tribe in Togoland, a district of West Africa. ”

“ Transference of evils to human scapegoats in Uganda. A less harmless way of relieving an army from guilt or misfortune used in former times to be actually practised by the Baganda. When an army had returned from war, and the gods warned the king by their oracles that some evil had attached itself to the soldiers, it was customary to pick out a woman slave from the captives, together with a cow, a goat, a fowl, and a dog from the booty, and to send them back under a strong guard to the borders of the country from which they had come. ”

“ These other people are called the Pigmies, which means they are very small. None of the Congo people have made a kingdom of their own like the Baganda. They belong to different tribes, each with its own customs and language. Most of them wear a piece of bark-cloth or the skin of an animal for clothing, but some wear very little, and paint or tattoo their bodies. Their houses are built of reeds, some tribes covering the reed-walls with a thick plaster of mud, others leaving them unplastered. ”

“ Nor are the porters altogether easy to deal with. Very delicate they often are when moved from their own district and deprived of their accustomed food. Dysentery plays havoc in their ranks. For the banana-eating Baganda find the rough grain flour much too coarse and irritating for their stomachs. So our great endeavour is to get the greatest supply of local labour. Strange to say, it is here that our misplaced leniency to the German meets its due reward. ”

“ Fixing his keen eyes on the water around, Mbutu picked out the direction in which the depth of water was greatest and the reeds thinnest, and under his guidance the Baganda gently paddled the canoe to within thirty yards of the shore.
"Stop dis place," he said at last. "Sah say by-by to black man; black man go home now; home to pickin." ”

“ J. Roscoe says: “The Baganda are the only Bantu tribe in Eastern Equatorial Africa who do not mutilate their persons; they neither extract their teeth nor pierce their ear lobes”; nor do they practise any of the deformations which have been related in chapters concerning the Masai and Akikuyu.
There are to be found clans with Roman features, and others varying from this type to the broad nose and thick lips of a Negro; so too, in build there are tall athletic figures over six feet in height, while, on the other hand, there are thick-set short-built men only about five feet in height. ”

“ Baganda story how death came into the world through the forgetfulness and imprudence of a woman.
As these American Indians tell how death came through the curiosity and incredulity of one woman, the Baganda of Central Africa relate how it came through the forgetfulness and imprudence of another. According to the Baganda the first man who came to earth in Uganda was named Kintu. ”

“ Few African women can bear more than three or four children, and they age rapidly, although, notwithstanding all that is said by casual observers who have no sense of analogies, they work no harder than the wives of the ordinary European working man. Wherever in tropical Africa the people are driven into the European system, both political and economic, they wilter. The Baganda of Uganda are one of the most intelligent of African peoples. Yet they are dying out under the influence of the European system, or nominal system, of monogamous unions. ”

“ So in this chapter we have read about some other people who live in the very hottest part of Africa. The Baganda are among the cleverest Central Africans, and these Pigmies and the cannibal tribes are among the most ignorant. ”

“ To-day the Prime Minister of Uganda is Apolo Kagwa, who as a boy was kicked and beaten and stamped upon by King M'wanga for being a Christian; and the King of Uganda, Daudi, M'wanga's son, is a Christian. At the capital there stands a fine cathedral in which brown Baganda clergy lead the prayers of the Christian people. On the place where the boys were burned to death there stands a Cross, put there by 70,000 Baganda Christians in memory of the young martyrs.
Was their martyrdom worth while?
To-day all the slave raiding has ceased for ever ”

“ The greater part of the surface of Uganda is hilly, fertile, and well watered, and the slopes of the hills are cultivated by natives who grow plantain trees, maize, sugar-cane, tobacco, and coffee. Here and there dense forests are to be found, and in such regions the Baganda hunt the elephant, buffalo, and hippopotamus. ”

“ A few days after we had settled down in our new camp, a great caravan of some four thousand men arrived from the interior with luggage and loads of food for a Sikh regiment which was on its way down to the coast, after having been engaged in suppressing the mutiny of the Sudanese in Uganda. The majority of these porters were Basoga, but there were also fair numbers of Baganda (i.e. people of Uganda) and of the natives of Unyoro, and various other tribes. ”

“ More Baganda have come to Kwihara, and will be used for the Mirambo war.
In many parts one is struck by the fact of the children having so few games. Life is a serious business, and amusement is derived from imitating the vocations of the parents—hut building, making little gardens, bows and arrows, shields and spears. Elsewhere boys are very ingenious little fellows, and have several games; they also shoot birds with bows, and teach captured linnets to sing. They are expert in making guns and traps for small birds, and in making and using bird-lime. ”

“ The ceremonies observed after the slaughter of a wild buffalo are of the same general character with variations in detail. 670. Rev. J. Roscoe, “Further Notes on the Manners and Customs of the Baganda,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxxii. (1902) p. 54; id., The Baganda (London, 1911) , pp. 289, 448. 671. Rev. J. Roscoe, The Baganda (London, 1911) , pp. 288 sq. Another curious notion which the Baganda have about sheep is that they give health to cattle and prevent them from being struck by lightning. Hence a sheep is often herded with cows to serve as a sort of lightning-conductor. ”

“ In duty bound I climbed one hill after another and endeavoured to make myself 115 acquainted with the details of mission work in Kampala. It comprises every form of moral and social activity. Apart from their spiritual work, which needs no advocacy here, the missionaries have undertaken and are now maintaining the whole educational system of the country. They have built many excellent schools, and thousands of young Baganda are being taught to read and write in their own language. ”

“ The Baganda already here said that most of the new-comers were slaves, and would be sold for cloths. Extolling the size of Mtesa's country, they say it would take a year to go across it. When I joked them about it, they explained that a year meant five months, three of rain, two of dry, then rain again. Went over to apply medicine to Nkasiwa's neck to heal the outside; the inside is benefited somewhat, but the power will probably remain incomplete, as it now is.
3rd August, 1872.—Visited Salem bin Seff, who is ill of fever. They are hospitable men. ”

“ The Batusi are the cattle herds of all this Unyanyembé region. They are very polite in address. The women have small compact, well-shaped heads and pretty faces; colour, brown; very pleasant to speak to; well-shaped figures, with small hands and feet; the last with high insteps, and springy altogether. Plants and grass are collected every day, and a fire with much smoke made to fumigate the cattle and keep off flies: the cattle like it, and the valleys are filled with smoke in the evening in consequence. The Baganda are slaves in comparison; black, with a tinge of copper-colour sometimes ”

“ We control the elements, fire and water: is He debarred from doing the same, and more, who has infinite wisdom and knowledge? He surely is greater than His own laws. Civilization is only what has been done with natural laws. Some foolish speculations in morals resemble the idea of a Muganda, who said last night, that if Mtesa didn't kill people now and then, his subjects would suppose that he was dead!
23rd July, 1872.—The departure of the Baganda is countermanded, for fear of Mirambo capturing their gunpowder.
Lewalé interdicts them from going ”

“ But in the absence of this dispensation the problem of how rulers are to be selected, and how, having been selected, they are to be controlled or changed, remains the first question of politics, 125 even in days when the functions of government are, in general, restricted to the modest limits of laissez-faire.
In Uganda, however, this difficulty does not exist. A class of rulers is provided by an outside power as remote from and, in all that constitutes fitness to direct, as superior to the Baganda as Mr. ”

“ The banana grows to perfection in Uganda; groves of it embower every village, and the Waganda in addition to being fat and prosperous have plenty of leisure for the arts of war and peace.
They are unfortunately inclined to war, though they make cloth, tan skins, work in metals, and build houses and canoes. Even literature is not unknown among them. Well might Speke have said of Ripon Falls at the outlet of the Nile, with “a wife and family, a yacht and a gun, a dog and a rod, one might here be supremely happy and never wish to visit the haunts of civilization again.” ”

“ The Bantu, who include, among other better known tribes, the Zulus, Basutos, Matabele, Makua, Wa-swahili, Wa-nyamwezi, Ba-ganda, Ba-congo, Uepongwé, Fang, etc., present a great variety of types, due, no doubt, to divers mixtures of race, which, as a rule, it is difficult to trace very far back. Their manner of life seems to depend chiefly on the country they live in; they are farmers, shepherds, and fishermen. Certain tribes, such as the Ba-ganda, have formed, and still form, large communities with regular institutions, generally in the form of an autocratic government. ”

“ The Waganda, for instance, report that their ancestors came from the northeast, the Watuta and Masiti from near the Zambesi river. Many of them are of a light, bright brown, and are devoid of the peculiar odor of the true negro. All the tribes from Lake Tanganyika to the Atlantic speak dialects manifestly akin.
They are divided into independent nations, some of large extent, and are subject to chiefs, who rule with despotic power. Their religion is fetichistic, and though they generally are agricultural, and possess a certain degree of culture, cannibalism is or was frequent among them. ”