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A Mask of Calm: Emotion and Founding the Kingdom of Bunyoro in the Sixteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2013

David Schoenbrun
David Schoenbrun*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
dls@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

Rich vernacular traditions about the aftermaths of the social trauma of a major famine, sometime in sixteenth-century eastern Africa, narrate the founding of a new dynasty in Bunyoro, one of the region's oldest monarchies. Scholars often understand such traditions about the founding of new dynasties as chartering the new political order. Whether traditions credit that order with the aura of antiquity or strengthen it by excluding social elements discordant with the new orchestrations of power, they are exercises in legitimation. When scholars recognize that such traditions were set in the aftermath of widespread violence, a spirit of mourning emerges in them. Spirits of mourning, joined to those of legitimation, shape traditions about the founding of a new dynasty by deftly inflecting the problem of accountability. In Bunyoro, traditions about its founder depict him as a barbarian cultural neophyte, of fluctuating emotional stability, improvising a new political order. These unflattering, realistic representations of the founding dynast's affective comportment were designed to appeal to emotional repertoires in the different life experiences of audience members, enlisting their participation in the project of reviving sovereignty in the aftermaths of traumatic violence. Mourning and legitimation run through historical narratives initiating an aftermath to structural violence, and reveal that loss and worry shape narratives of transformed sovereign authority, and revive it in the aftermaths of structural violence. Mourning lends emotional depth and counterpoint to matters of bureaucracy, economy, gender, and so forth, in crafting satisfying accounts of transformation and accountability in political life. That emotional depth, in turn, helps explain the durability of traditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 634 - 664
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013 

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84 Doyle, Crisis & Decline, 134–63.

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87 Fisher, Twilight Tales, 115.

88 Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 41; Nyakatura, Abakama, 73; Nyakatura, Anatomy of an African Kingdom, 54.

89 Fisher, Twilight Tales, 115; Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 41.

90 Fisher, Twilight Tales, 116; Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 41; Nyakatura, Abakama, 72; Nyakatura, Anatomy of an African Kingdom, 54. One of four sons of one of two creator figures, Kantu's envy and jealousy bring death to people; see Fisher, Twilight Tales, 72–76.

91 Nyakatura (Abakama, 72) and Bikunya (Ky'Abakama, 41) both convey this anxiety by having Mpuga Rukidi say “Baitu tibaligaruka?” to Kasoira. The negative copula (tibali) implies an urgent question concerning the action (-garuka) it modifies, giving, “Won't they come back soon?”

92 Nyakatura, Anatomy of an African Kingdom, 54–55; Nyakatura, Abakama, 72; Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 41. Fisher, Twilight Tales, 116, reports insomnia was the result.

93 Fisher, Twilight Tales, 116; Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 41–42; Nyakatura, Abakama, 73.

94 Nyakatura, Anatomy of an African Kingdom, 55; Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 41; Fisher, Twilight Tales, 116.

95 Fisher, Twilight Tales, 117.

96 Ibid., 117; Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 42–43; Nyakatura, Abakama, 73; Nicolet, “Essai,” 198–99.

97 Kasoira identified himself to Mpuga Rukidi with his clan's patron Cwezi spirit (“Owanyamumara”)—“Nyinowe nyamumara,” or “It is I, the tree with poisonous bark [Erythrophloeum guineense]”; see Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 40, 32; Nyakatura, Abakama, 72.

98 Connerton, Spirit of Mourning, 55.

99 Fisher, Twilight Tales, 117, uses “Mulimba,” but Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 43, and Nyakatura, Abakama, 73, have “Mubimba.”

100 Fisher, Twilight Tales, 117; Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 43; Nyakatura, Abakama, 73–74.

101 Nyakatura, Abakama, 75; K. W., “Abakama,” (1936), 65; K. W., “The Procedure in Accession to the Throne of a Nominated King in the Kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara,” Uganda Journal 4, 4 (1937): 289–99Google Scholar, here 292; Tantala, “Early History,” 434–35.

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104 Cyprian Lwekula, “The Story of Mount Mubende,” Cooper trans., in “Historical Remains at Mubende,” Uganda Protectorate Secretariat Minute Paper 603/09, cited in Berger and Buchanan, “Cwezi Cults,” 54; Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 52.

105 Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze, 125–26.

106 Nyakatura, Anatomy of an African Kingdom, 56–57; Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 51–57.

107 Kathryn Barrett-Gaines, “Katwe Salt in the African Great Lakes Regional Economy, 1750s–1950s,” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2001, 52–61.

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109 Fisher, Twilight Tales, 121–22, and Karubanga, Bukya Nibwira, 8, both have Mpuga give him Kikonda in Ssingo in Buganda. Bikunya, Ky'Abakama, 49, and Nyakatura, Abakama, 86, have Mpuga Rukidi give Nyakoka “Kikonda and Sweswe.”

110 Berger, “Deities, Dynasties, and Oral Traditions,” 73.

111 Nyakatura, Abakama, 82–85; Nyakatura, Anatomy of an African Kingdom, 61–64.

112 Fisher, Twilight Tales, 121–24; Nyakatura, Abakama, 85–86.

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