The Crown and the Muzzukulu

Photo: Giant groundsels and orange moss in Rwenjura Mountains

The Crown and the Muzzukulu

What one word in a condolence message tells us about the state and the kingdoms

By Muniini K. Mulera

When the remains of Omukama Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV came home on Thursday, President Museveni stood on the tarmac at Entebbe to receive the casket. He had a claim to be there: at the enthronement of the three-year-old king in 1995 he took the office of Omukuza, a guardian, and for thirty years blended paternalism with presidential oversight.

Beneath the half-masted flags, a succession quarrel ignited within days. Tooro's Prime Minister announced that the King had left a prince as heir. The Queen Mother told the President as much, and he repeated it. Omujwera Omusuuga Kayondo Kamurasi, head of the royal Babiito clan, rejected it flatly: “The king had no child.” On 1 September elders were kept from the palace council chamber by police, and Omusuuga said something worth wider quotation: “Our kingdom is being ruled in Buganda.”

Oyo will be buried at Karambi on the anniversary of his coronation. The Babiito say his successor will not be announced but revealed there by rite. That is a family matter, and the state has never been able to leave such matters alone. In Uganda, and much of Africa, the relationship between republican governments and historic kingdoms is not preservation. It is a cold, transactional exercise in containment, co-optation and leverage.

Nothing shows this more sharply than the words the President chose. In his statement of August 29, he sent condolences “on account of the death of the prominent Muzzukulu, His Highness Oyo, the King of Tooro.” Muzzukulu means grandchild — the folksy Luganda label he has used for years for Uganda's young, of which many have wearied. Applied by a head of state to a reigning monarch, it is something else.

Read the honorifics too. In Tooro protocol the Omukama is Rukirabasaija, the greatest of men, and Agutamba, the reliever of the afflicted. Set those beside grandchild and the demotion is complete. The Kingdom styles him His Majesty, twice in the opening sentence of its own announcement of the death. The President wrote His Highness, then H.H. twice more, and never Majesty. Majesty belongs to sovereigns. Highness was the style the British reserved for the princes of India — rulers supreme in their own states, beneath an imperial paramountcy. Three times in one message is not a slip of the pen.

And the framing does more than diminish. In our customs a grandfather holds the standing to arbitrate family disputes and validate a lineage. On September 3, Lt Gen Henry Tumukunde said the government would not pronounce on a successor “before receiving appropriate guidance from the President.” A succession at Karuziika, belonging to a clan and a set of rites, now awaits guidance from Rwakitura.

None of this is clumsiness, and it would be a mistake to read it so. Uganda is a hard country to govern — a federation of memories, a dozen restored and half-restored crowns and cultural institutions, a hundred grievances with long roots. Museveni has held it together for four decades, longer than any Ugandan before him, through a period in which more than one neighbour came apart. He reads its fault lines better than his critics allow. That is precisely why the vocabulary matters. A man with that much skill does not reach for a word by accident.

For the state regards monarchies not as heritage but as rival centres of power, holding a legitimacy no post-independence regime can manufacture. The answer is a masterclass in political engineering: the existential threat, the resource vault and the model proxy.

Buganda is the existential threat. Wrapped around the capital, it can challenge the state directly. The response is containment and fragmentation: shielding breakaway chiefdoms inside Buganda's borders while withholding the gazettement that would settle them, and refusing the persistent demand for Federo.

Bunyoro is the resource vault. Marginalised by colonial policy, it sits atop the Albertine Graben's petroleum, and containment gives way to pacification. Billions have gone into its infrastructure – thirteen brand new asphalt roads, the Kabarega petrochemical park, the Hoima stadium, an international airport nearing completion at Kabaale - not from affection for the monarchy, but to secure compliance and forestall resistance to the pipelines.

Tooro was the model proxy. Because the crown sat on the head of a three-year-old, the state had a rare chance to raise its own royal partner. Read the statement again and the terms are plain: Oyo, the President wrote, “worked well with the Central Government, thereby avoiding the mistake of trying to use the Cultural Institutions that were restored by the NRM to promote sectarianism. It would be good if all the Cultural leaders understood the importance of this.” A tribute that praises the dead for compliance, and reminds the living who restored the institutions, is not a tribute. It is terms.

The one time the crown tested those terms, the paternal mask slipped. When the government recognised the breakaway monarchies of Rwenzururu in 2009 and Bwamba in 2014, carved from territory Tooro claimed, Oyo announced he would fast in protest. Museveni's reply, before the fast began, was a public dismissal: “If my son has decided to fast, I don't mind, let him fast, it will help him shape up and be healthy.” The twenty-two-year-old fasted for six days. The breakaway crowns stayed where they were.

Those who believe that peoples with kings are better treated than historically stateless ones should think again. Such wealth as exists in Buganda owes less to modern favour than to the 1900 Agreement and the mailo titles that concentrated capital long before our republic existed - an arrangement peculiar to Buganda, and no gift the other kingdoms received.

One hears Bakiga wondering aloud whether chronically neglected Kigyezi's salvation lies in inventing a kingdom that would win us a seat at the table. It is a mirage. No state investment has come to Kigyezi on the scale of Bunyoro's oil roads or Acholi's reconstruction. The tarmacking of our tourism roads stalls and restarts and stalls again. We have a formidable advantage in manpower and education and nothing local to hold it. We bleed capital and talent, and our best-educated build Kampala rather than Kabaare, Gisoro or Mparo.

Why, then, does the President retain the reputation of a friend to Kigyezi? Through cabinet capture. Rather than fund regional infrastructure, the state pacifies us by handing our prominent sons and daughters high-profile dockets — including two consecutive prime ministers. When citizens see their own at the top table, they mistake the elevation of individuals for the development of a region. A minister is a gatekeeper of budgets he does not control. The farmer is left with pledges only.

Africa's kingdoms do not flourish through the benevolence of governments. Stateless regions do not suffer merely for want of a crown. Modern rulers tolerate traditional institutions only if they can be converted into voting blocs, quiet conduits for extraction, or ornaments of managed stability.

As Tooro buries its king on Saturday and waits to see who crosses the palace gate, the lesson is stark. The resilience of a people rests neither on the patronage of presidents nor on the fantasy of a king who would rescue it, but on its own capacity and its own stubborn unity.