Chapter One / A Regular Plunder

With several wives to oversee the care of a substantial count of children, my maternal great-great-grandfather’s homestead was enormous and respected on the hillside in which his family’s lives were anchored. He made his mark in the village because his genealogy was assured by starting a family. The cycle made its turn again and again and children were born from one generation to another. The facts of which I am more confident historically, however, concern my maternal great-grandfather, Katooka.

I have always been surprised by the fact that he, among established elders of my mother’s clan, was the only one of his time who had a household that was based on the offspring of one woman! If there were others, I never heard of them. That in itself is a miracle because a family in our region at the time prided itself in the number of mothers or wives one found there. On the same green hill on which they lived, generations of his ancestors had made their own links in the long chain of family history. It would have been a great aberration if he had failed to forge his own in the continuation of that chain. This was, I suspect, immediately before the dawn of the great era of European colonial rule.

European rule was all around our land but, at the time, still hesitating greatly about what fighting with the strange people in our hills would entail. The hills were alive with a forbidding demeanour and still a vast scape of No-Man’s Land, bound on all sides by British, Belgian and German spheres. The climate itself was hostile to outsiders but would have been suitable for European invaders. They had, however, imported into our interior region coastal or Sahara African and Arab soldiery, none of which could cope in our very cold hills and among a very hostile and armed people, adjacent to Rwanda, then known as le paradis du Congo. 

Like Scotland in the Roman conquest of Great Britain, our hills kept ambitious and bellicose forces out of our land. Regrettably, Europeans were persistent and refused to acknowledge that they had been defeated by the prospect of climbing them or the fear of the inhabitants therein. Eventually, we joined the throng of nations conquered by small "European" armies made up of Africans and Arabs on behalf of British colonial architects. Thus, in 1911, British, Belgian and German powers had a meeting of minds and decided to divide among themselves the formidable No-Man’s-Land. In 1913, my region joined the British Sphere of Influence.

Meantime, the strenuous efforts of members of my great-grandfather’s household yielded a robust seasonal agricultural output. The family earned the equivalent of their periodic income in the form of food. One of them, my great-grandfather, Katooka, was prone to the life of a rebel as a young man. During his late teenage, a German soldier from a military camp in the hills above their own often came to call. His visits were not courtesy calls or social but expeditions of plunder. People who lived in the village resented him but nobody could act. The German soldier came and went after he had emptied their kraals and granaries of their best insurance against future hunger and famine. These repeated visits challenged the pride and self-discipline of men but none could act.

One day, as the German soldier visited the village on yet another attack on the dignity of my mother’s clan, my grandfather Katooka was prepared to meet him on the same terms. Thus, Katooka reached for his spear and slew the German soldier with a swift motion of the arm. The villagers were shocked. Such an act of revenge had never taken place, carried out by one of their own young men instead of their elders. Killing a European was, after all, equivalent to calling a pack of dogs to a meal at which you were the main dish. The prospective colonial powers were exacting in their own acts of vengeance.

Katooka fled to Rwanda immediately, perhaps sure that the Germans would desist from entering Belgian territory. Nobody knows how he lived there in his exile but, eleven years later, Katooka returned home to his village a more mature man and a hero. In his company was an elegant, beautiful and tall Tutsi woman. Katooka confounded his home village by bringing back a Rwandan woman of unsurpassed beauty. Tutsi women were well known for their beauty and brains. 

According to stories I found among Bakiga as I grew up, Tutsi women had a taste for questioning authority, largely by sanctioning death by poison! Our disbelief that Katooka had brought back an independent operator was such that none in the village expected her to stay. In her step, according to our narrative, lay all the ingredients of a fatal attraction! Each morning, they wondered aloud about whether she had fled in the middle of the night, leaving her husband at his hearthstone as a victim of murder. Early-rising, charming and assiduous she, as any of them, joined the throng of labouring women who went into the hills or down to the swamps for a day’s work. Still, however, the villagers pondered, how had Katooka won the heart of such a woman?

His reputation as the village rebel made many people wonder if he had won her by diplomatic romance or terrorising force. There had been no wedding or performance of traditional “asking” or “bride-pricing” occasion with her family. It was natural for the village to speculate that she had been forced into a relationship with my great-grandfather but the Tutsi woman stood firmly beside him and performed her role as a dutiful wife. She had a royal bearing that kept her aloof and out of the loop of village gossip. The story of how she had become a wife from across the border remained hidden from everybody except the parties concerned.

In the Court of Public Opinion, my great-grandfather was guilty of extracting a girl from her community in Rwanda without the normal functions that attended a marriage. He had, after all, gone there after an illegal act. Thus, the means by which he had found my great-grandmother were a subject of profound rumours. She, however, remained beside him and bore a shoal of children. In her regal bearing, the rumours withered and died and were buried as the smiling faces and wonder of her offspring rambled through the village.

After his self-exile in Rwanda, Katooka was an honourable man. He was sought after for his experience, wisdom and views because he was a historical hero for an act of violence against an enemy. The time he spent in Rwanda had expanded his horizons and experience because he lived in an enclave of colonial rule. In all of Africa, there is no population that did not revere European systems even if they resented them.

In exile, Katooka had observed the way authority dealt with social organisation. His was a period in which men and women crossed borders between different colonial enclaves and told stories of what they had seen in each colonial sphere. Even at the time, the differences between the British and the Belgians were well established among African societies. As Queen Victoria’s reign surrounded an area the British had named Uganda after the Kingdom of Buganda in 1893, life was known to Africans in the region as new and intriguing in the British sphere of influence not least because, in Buganda, they had established unprecedented systems and structures that benefited people. It should be remembered that, up to that date, foreigners of any shade were a suspicious lot.

Zanzibari traders had, in particular, convinced Africans that their purpose was to raid their lands and reap it of its human resources and wildlife in the form of slaves and ivory. Britain was seen as the European colonial power that had the best interests of Africans at heart. This was not difficult because, in Rwanda as in the rest of the Congo, Belgian repression and mutilation of African subjects of Leopold II was such that they became loathed throughout the region. In Kigezi, there was no greater curse for an African than death at the hands of Belgians, whom we knew as Ababirigi, or the Germans, Abagirimani, who had also become notorious for their murder of Africans in Tanganyika.