Photo: Karuziika Palace, Kabarole, Tooro
Your Majesty the Queen Mother, Best Kemigisa:
Thirty-one years ago, you handed a three-year-old boy to a kingdom. Uganda watched him carried through rites he could not have understood and seated on a throne his feet could not reach, and we all felt entitled to an opinion about him. Only one person had to be his mother. Last Thursday you sat with him in a hospital far from Karuziika. There is no protocol for that. I write to you first.
Princess Ruth Komuntale:
You have already buried a sister. Now your brother, at thirty-four. You are the one who remembers him before he was anybody’s king — the small boy, the ordinary irritations of a brother, the private jokes no subject was ever admitted to. Hold on to those. They will outlast every tribute printed this week, including this one.
To the Babiito and Babiitokati, to the elders under Omujwera Omusuuga Akiiki Kamurasi, and to every Mutooro who has turned a royal drum upside down: Uganda grieves with you, and Uganda does not know what you have lost. You lost a person. The rest of us lost a symbol. Those are not the same weight.
I did not know him well. I knew what anyone could see: a man born to pomp that would have ruined most of us; one crowned before he could read and arrived at adulthood gentle. Humble, wise and calm, in the words of his own deputy premier, Henry Basaliza.
That is the man the country watched for thirty-one years. I never once heard of him raising his voice or throwing his weight about, which for a monarch is an achievement. His people called him Agutamba, the reliever of the afflicted. He took the name as an instruction rather than a compliment.
I think I know where the gentleness came from. It was some years before I learned that he was a born-again Christian, and I remember the gladness of it. There is a particular relief in finding that a young man carrying that much ceremony had somewhere quiet to stand. His own bishop, Reuben Kisembo of Rwenzori Diocese, said this week that the King knew Jesus to be King of kings and Lord of lords. The King put it more plainly himself. He spoke of Jesus Christ as his Boss.
Consider what it costs to say that from a throne. A man surrounded from birth by people who bow does not naturally announce that he himself answers to someone. That he said it easily, and in public, tells me he was secure in a way that eludes far more powerful men in our country. A leader who knows he is not the highest authority in the room is a safe leader. We have had a great many who believed the opposite, and we carry the scars.
He was also, unfashionably, interested in the future. He launched Tooro Vision 2045, a twenty-five-year plan drawn up by a man of twenty-nine. He opened Tooro’s first ICT skilling centre at Muchwa in 2022. He climbed to Margherita Peak to argue for the Rwenzori. (It ought to be renamed in his honour.) In April this year he gave fifty acres of his own land for a public stadium and sports academy. Cultural leaders are usually asked to guard the past. This one kept trying to buy his people a future.
He was a bridgebuilder, just like his grandfather, Omukama Kamurasi Rukidi III. A Munyakigyezi writes this with evidence. In August 2019 King Oyo travelled to Kigyezi and honoured the late Paul Ngorogoza of Bukinda, Rukiga. Ngorogoza was the Secretary-General of Kigyezi who, in the mid-1950s, sat with Oyo’s grandfather and negotiated permission for land-starved Bakiga to settle in Tooro. Tens of thousands went, including my relatives. Their grandchildren are Tooro-born.
When a young Omukama travelled to Rukiga to honour Ngorogoza — and to say plainly that Abakiga in his kingdom were his people and not his guests — he was settling something older than himself. Migrant communities in this region have learned to expect the opposite from men who inherit thrones. They have been subjected to humiliation and harassment. King Oyo went the other way, deliberately, and in person. It was profound. Ours tears come from a deep place.
Now the part I would rather not write. He sought treatment in Germany, then in the United States, and he died there. I do not fault a family for going wherever there is hope. I would go too, and I would have advised the same for the king. I fault the rest of us. Four years ago, I wrote about Speaker Jacob Oulanyah, who died in Seattle, Washington, USA and asked why a country that once built hospitals and offered world-class medical education at Makerere Medical School, had taken to exporting its patients. Nothing in that argument has aged.
Our country once undertook, on its own prosperity, to build twenty-two district hospitals; then came the wars and the plunder, and the doctors left. I believe that had Omukama Oyo had the financial or executive power to build a first-class hospital in Kabarole, he would have done so. Unfortunately, he did not.
The people with the power to rebuild the health system are the same people who can afford the airfare and treatment abroad. That is why it is not rebuilt. A king died abroad this week. Ordinary Ugandans die at home of conditions a working system treats. Both sentences are true, and they belong on the same page.
Twice in my lifetime Tooro has buried a king — Kamurasi Rukidi III in December 1965, Rwamuhokya Olimi III in September 1995 — and twice found the next Omukama without tearing itself apart, which in this region is an achievement and not a formality. It will not be spared the whispering now; no throne ever is. My prayer is plain: that the Babiito elders proceed with the patience their office demands, that anyone tempted to press a claim remembers whose funeral this is, and that whoever is enthroned inherits what Oyo actually leaves behind, which is not property.
The tears are flowing in the land. There is an oppressive silence. Gone too young. He was thirty-four. He had prepared himself for eternity, and in that I take real comfort. The King he served was waiting for him.
©Muniini K. Mulera