The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,8

then who knew the terrible Sunna, and Stanley, with the newspaperman’s relish for a good story, got them to talk.

Sunna had a dog that he loved. He compelled certain villages to grow sweet potatoes to feed the dog (clearly a Ugandan dog); and when the dog died he compelled certain villages to produce bark-cloth for the dog to be buried in. So it was almost certainly Sunna who gave Uganda (and Mutesa in his early days) the heraldic device, so to speak, of the dog, the spear, and the woman.

Sunna was short and powerfully built. He had a habit of looking down. People couldn’t see his eyes and were on edge in his presence, since they believed that if Sunna looked up, someone was going to die. It was said that in one day he condemned eight hundred people.

The most famous story about him was his revenge on the people of Busoga. They lived on eastern side of the Nile. They had broken away from their allegiance to Buganda, and Sunna wished to punish them. There was war. The people of Busoga were great warriors, and resisted Sunna for three months. At length, however, penned up in an island on the lake, they were worn down, and offered to surrender and return to their allegiance. Sunna appeared content; he even gave the impression that he wanted the occasion of the peace-making to be festive. He fed the Wasoga chiefs and warriors generously and gave them much plantain wine. In what looked like a further gesture of forgiveness, he asked the Wasoga to do their war dance during the evening. They were pleased to be asked, but they said they normally did that dance with their spears. He said they shouldn’t on this evening; there would be warriors among his own people who would take that unkindly, after the three months of the hard war; better for them, the Wasoga, to use sticks in their dance on this special occasion.

The furious dance began. Thirty thousand Wasoga lost themselves in the drumming and the stamping, the stick-throwing and the competitive athleticism of their movements. They didn’t notice that they, only thirty thousand, were being surrounded by a hundred thousand of Sunna’s people. Sunna’s people had been provided with cords, the executioners’ tools, made from the fibre of the aloe. At a signal they fell on the dancers and bound them, and threw them to Sunna’s warriors, who with spears and other edged weapons began to cut the bound Wasoga up into small pieces, and were not concerned to kill their victims first. It had long been Sunna’s wish to make a little mountain, a pyramid, of Wasoga flesh and bone, to punish them for their disobedience and their valour and all the anxieties of the three-month war.

This act of terror brought other rebels into line. In the end, though, this reputation for awfulness worked against Sunna. He had a favourite son, physically very big and strong, whom he had trained in his ways. He would have liked this boy to succeed him as Kabaka. But the chiefs of the Baganda, already sufficiently tormented by the extravagance of the father, feared that the wildness of the boy, if given its head, might bring about the ruin of them all. And when, after Sunna’s death, the boy declared himself Kabaka, the chiefs didn’t allow him to act. They surrounded him and tied him up and very soon had him burnt. It was the fate of nearly all of Sunna’s more than thirty sons. Almost as soon as he died, then, almost as soon as his wonderful grave had been built, Sunna’s glory began to fade.

It was Mutesa, the wide-eyed son, who came to the throne and the first thing he did was to behead the chiefs who had given him power. And it is possible that Mutesa’s style of casual cruelty, before his formal coronation, was prompted by his wish to show himself as strong as Sunna.

“By my father’s grave” was Mutesa’s strongest vow. If I had not seen Mutesa’s own grave at Kasubi I would have thought this grave of his father at Wamala the most splendid thatched structure I had seen. In Mutesa’s time it would have been perfect in every way, with a relay of religious old ladies in attendance. Now there were no ladies, no breath of life, as it were. The dead king was truly widowed, and his grave, in spite of the sacrifices that would have attended the