The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,7

broken roof, great thick sheaves of old grass slipping here and there, and with a bright-green vine threading its way through the grass and looking like moss. We might have come to the abandoned barn of a ruined farm. Magic and wonder might one day be restored; but they are not here now. There is no well-defined yard, no small huts, round or rectangular, for attendants; no attendants; no gatehouse, no drum-house. There is a rectangular grey wooden shed at one side of the lot. It is of modern carpentry, with no religious feel, and out of keeping with the style of the tomb. It must serve some purpose, but there is no one I can ask. I know, without going into the tomb, that there will be no old lady waiting, after a hundred and fifty years, for the spirit of the dead king to request some service. There isn’t the money for that now: and it is strange that rituals which would once have seemed necessary and vital, serving what was divine, beyond money, have to be disregarded when there is no money.

Mutesa’s tomb at Kasubi was level with the earth. His father’s here is on a platform two feet high. Concrete steps take you up and the slipping thatch touches your head. The steps might be modern, but the platform would almost certainly have been created with the foundations and the sacrifices. Inside now, past the thatch, is darkness and desolation, though to the left and right sections of the roof have fallen away and the grey light of the rainy day comes in. It takes a little while to pick out details. There are the two rows of pillars supporting the domed roof, the royal style. To the left, below the missing thatch, is a modern brick wall, no doubt to provide support for the roof and also perhaps, in a remnant of old belief, to hide the “forest” where Kabakas go when they die. The bricks of the wall, being of local earth, would just have been religiously acceptable; but the mortar, made of imported cement, wouldn’t have been right. But ideas of right and wrong, important in 1860, when Sunna died, no longer mattered here, where there was chaos.

For three months after his death (from smallpox) devoted old women would have lovingly dried Kabaka Sunna’s body over a slow fire. Where were the precious parts of that body—the umbilical cord, worked over with beads or cowries, the jawbone similarly treated, the penis and testicles in a sack of animal skin? Had they been buried here, as they should have been, to save them from violation, to prevent other people from misusing the extraordinary powers of the Kabaka? Did the brick wall hide the relics, or were they hidden in the grey wooden shed outside?

There was still royal symbolism in what survived of the structure. Tightly wrapped reeds served as circular rafters below the dome, each rafter standing for one of the clans of the Baganda. But below this proud symbolism—the clans: the Kabaka: the dome of the world—was abject decay. No bark-cloth here, rising from floor to ceiling, theatrical magic, to preserve the mystery of the forest where the spirit of the Kabaka eternally resides. Far to the right of the brick wall, on the other side of the tomb, where the light of the grey day coming through the gap in the roof was like vapour, one piece of bark-cloth hung down, like a rag on a nail, damp from the rain, dark-brown and dirty-looking. The floor was wet. But just in front of the rack with the old Kabaka’s short iron spears there was still a raffia mat on the floor and three old raffia baskets for offerings to Sunna’s murderous spirit; and perhaps—though it was hard to make out in the gloom—there were a few dark coins in the baskets. The tomb had not been totally abandoned. It was still a shrine; a few people were still prepared to make the journey to ask the difficult Kabaka for a special boon.

Stanley says that Sunna was born in 1820, became Kabaka in 1836, and died in 1860. He was dead when Speke came to Uganda in 1861-2, and Speke, a geographer above everything else, writes about him only tangentially. For living details of Sunna you have to turn to Stanley, though he came to Uganda many years later, in 1875, during his east-to-west crossing of the continent. Many people were still alive