Relics of the Kibuuka shrine in present-day Uganda
By Alison Bennett
In Uganda’s national museum in Kampala, one of the most significant collections on display is a set of relics and regalia said to have belonged to the national war deity, Kibuuka. Although we do not know their exact age, some oral histories suggest that they are at least four centuries old (Welbourn 1962, p. 17). The relics include an umbilical cord (mulongo) enclosed in an egg-shaped leather case and decorated with cowries and glass beads, a lower jawbone stitched up in a leather case and dressed with fur, cowries and copper beads, and genital organs in a similarly decorated leather case. The objects in the display include a piece of head ware, a leather shield, and a waist ornament, all decorated with cowrie shells, as well as a leopard pelt, a wooden stool, and a knife with decorative markings on either side. These items were once held together in a goatskin bag, while the stool formed the receptacle in which the relics were all kept.
The story of how these extraordinary items arrived at the museum exemplifies the complex and often contested connections between places of worship and ‘collections’, especially in the context of empire, decolonization, and nationhood. Over their long lifetime, these objects have been transformed from a religious collection at a local shrine in Mpigi (in Buganda), to a collection associated with the legitimacy of Buganda’s royal state, and then an anthropological collection owned by a Cambridge museum, before circulating back to a newly independent Uganda and its own national museum collection. This remarkable trajectory has naturally led to questions and debates throughout their lifetime about their ownership, namely, whether they belong to the deity, the local community in which its shrine once resided, the British anthropological museum, or the museum of the Ugandan state. This short essay outlines the origins of the Kibuuka relics, how they came to be a ‘collection’ whose meaning, geography and purpose shifted over time, and why they are still significant today.
The origin of the Kibuuka story has been an alluring topic to historians of Uganda since the early twentieth century. It was first written down in the late nineteenth century by the Protestant Ganda politician and historian, Apollo Kaggwa. Drawing on oral clan accounts, Kaggwa wrote that Kibuuka was a warrior who supported a sixteenth century King (Kabaka) against a rival kingdom called Bunyoro. Following his death in battle, he became the Ganda deity or spiritual entity (lubaale) associated with war, and his collection of relics became part of a shrine managed by priests and priestess who served as his oracles. Christopher Wrigley argued that Kibuuka was a fictitious character invented by the nineteenth-century Ganda state and figures like Kaggwa (Wrigley 1996, p. 161). However, Richard Reid concluded that it was difficult to accept the story was pure fiction (Reid 1997, p. 292).
Regardless of whether Kibuuka was a real human being, it seems that in pre-colonial Buganda, Kibuuka was part of a larger group of gods and spirits, or departed ancestors, that commanded influence at both state and local level. Neil Kodesh has shown that Kibuuka’s shrine was once a crucial site of local community cosmology, public healing, and wellbeing (Kodesh 2010, pp. 143–154). However, it also became the focus of a major transformation in the power of the Buganda state when its kings sought to transform local clan spirits into national gods. Thus, as the power of Kibuuka’s oracle priests appeared to grow locally, the Ganda kings incorporated his relics and regalia into their own coronation ceremonies and expansionist state ideology, presenting Kibuuka as the national God of war. The ritual power that the Kibuuka relics once commanded locally was therefore re-appropriated as a new type of collection by the Ganda court. (Kodesh 2010, pp. 143–154).
These shrines and their material contents also bore significance to British missionaries and anthropologists. In the early twentieth century, Kibuuka’s relics were transformed into a new type of collection when they were taken by a British missionary ethnographer, Rev. John Roscoe, and given to a Cambridge ethnological museum. These events occurred in the context of religious and dynastic civil war in Buganda. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Buganda had exercised a broad and evolving set of so-called ‘Traditionalist’ beliefs and practices. However, the arrival of new religions altered this dynamic. Islam reached Buganda in the 1840s with the arrival of Swahili traders from Zanzibar. In 1877, British Anglican missionaries representing the Church Missionary Society (CMS) arrived, followed in 1879 by the French Catholic White Fathers. Prior to his death in 1884, Kabaka (king) Muteesa had shifted allegiance from one religious group to the another (Hansen 1984). His son and successor, Mwanga, meanwhile, had been a Christian reader (musomi) at his father’s court. But unlike many of his contemporaries, Mwanga came to believe that external religions were a threat to Buganda’s, and his own authority (Reid 2017, p. 154). Fearing for their lives, and armed with Western-made guns, newly converted young Muslim and Christian chiefs coalesced to overthrow him (Twaddle, 1972, pp. 67–68). Between 1888 and 1892, fighting then ensued between the Muslim, Christian, and Traditionalist factions, with Mwanga fleeing and returning to the throne several times. In 1894, Mwanga agreed to Uganda becoming a British Protectorate in return for Britain’s protection. However, in 1897, he fled for the final time, and British colonial powers replaced him with his infant son. The Uganda Agreement of 1900 solidified the power of the largely Protestant chiefs, led by Kaggwa, affording them partial self-government and symbolic power while marginalising their Muslim, Catholic and ‘Traditionalist’ rivals. Additionally, ‘Traditional’ religious specialists, spirit mediums, and diviners who once oversaw shrines like Kibuuka’s, had been losing respectability since the arrival of new religions in Buganda. This was partly because their roles in political divination and medical care were being taken over by Muslim and Christian missionaries, and partly because of a general scepticism towards their work engendered by increased contact with the outside world (Twaddle 1972, p. 66).
Amid these turbulent events, British missionaries began to remove objects from the shrines of Buganda’s pre-colonial Traditionalist gods and spirits, including Rev. John Roscoe who took the Kibuuka relics and objects in 1906. Roscoe documented this story in the anthropological journal Man in 1907. Describing their extraction from the country as a mode of protection, Roscoe claimed that when he found the relics, they had been hidden by the temple’s priest as their shrine had recently been burned down by Muslims who ‘were trying to destroy the old temples and other historical places’ (Roscoe, 1907). Abiti Nelson, the present curator of ethnography at the Uganda Museum, believes that Roscoe acquired them via coercion (Nelson 2021, p. 33). Roscoe himself stated that the priest gave up the relics with great reluctance, though he perceived that the priest feared being discovered giving up something that was still understood by many as a real deity, as well as personal vengeance from the God himself. According to Roscoe, the priest sold the relics to him for a sizeable sum. The two men agreed that no indignity would come to the deity. The priest gave strict stipulations that the deity should not be examined in the country, nor travel by the direct road. A nervous porter wrapped the god in bark cloths and mats and spent a month on the journey to the coast, where it was posted to England and deposited in the Museum of Ethnology and Archaeology in Cambridge, as it was then called.
Figure 1: Uganda, Kibuka (War God), LS.139254.TC1, Roscoe, John R., 1907, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
In Cambridge, Kibuuka’s relics were re-appropriated along European anthropological lines (See Fig. 1). For example, they were studied and theorized by scholars such as James Frazer who believed that comparative studies of religion would reveal correlations between the religious practices of the ancient world and the ‘primitive’ worlds of present-day Africa (Frazer 1890, p. 1967; Michaud 2016, p. 68), thus adding to hierarchical and racist stereotypes about the continent. Benjamin Ray has examined Frazer’s and Roscoe’s correspondence and argues that Frazer distorted Roscoe’s ethnographic research to support his own theories about divine kingship and ritual magic without considering how they expressed socio-political realities and change (Ray 1991, p. 29). Later anti-evolutionary anthropologists would forcefully discredit such ideas. The Egyptologists Aylward Blackman, Margaret Murray and Charles Gabriel Seligman also studied them and wrote articles in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology between 1911 and 1916, linking them to Egyptian kingship and birthing rituals (Seligman and murray 1911; Blackman 1916). These articles supported their belief in the Hamitic theory which attributed all significant cultural achievements in sub-Saharan Africa to a supposedly ancient pastoral Caucasian race called the ‘Hamites’ who had travelled south into sub-Saharan Africa and assimilated with the supposedly inferior ‘Negroid race’ (Sanders 1969). The Hamitic theory was also later strongly discredited, though we can see from these examples, how the Kibuuka collection informed some of the most prominent anthropological thinkers of the early twentieth century.
Almost fifty years later, the character of the collection shifted once again. In 1961, anti-colonial nationalist and Muslim politician (also a barrister and Cambridge graduate) Abubaker Kakyama Mayanja, in his capacity as Ugandan Minister for Education, wrote to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge requesting the return of the Kibuuka collection to Uganda. In his letter, he questioned Kaggwa’s authority in giving away parts of Buganda’s material heritage:
You will appreciate that at the time, i.e., at the turn of the century when Christianity had just captured the imagination of our people making them very devout believers who were anxious to forget their pagan past, such things would have been regarded as of little value. Indeed, it is quite possible that they might have been destroyed if they had not been taken out of the country and preserved by your university. We are not disputing the legal title of Cambridge to these relics although it is doubtful whether Sir Apolo had the right to give them away; on the contrary, we are very grateful to the university for having preserved them. Our request is rather that your university will consider sympathetically our great interest in these things especially now that Uganda is about to regain her independence. We do not have many such things as these which portray our cultural past and hence our anxiety, if possible, to get back what you are keeping (Mayanja, 1961–2).
The Chancellor agreed to his request and the items were presented to the Uganda Museum on permanent loan for the occasion of Ugandan independence. Once there, they became a centrepiece for the museum within the wider ethnically defined displays which were designed to speak to the character of the new nation state (Nelson 2021, p. 36). As Derek Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool write, ‘the museological work of [Kibuuka’s] repatriation and reassembly was contemporaneous with the political work of self-constitution’ (Peterson, Gavua and Rassool 2015, p. 16). Abiti Nelson further states that on their return to Uganda, they were ‘first remade into historical objects and subsequently, national treasures’ to support a nationalist agenda at a time, ethnic divisions were rampant (Nelson 2021, p. 37). However, since its return, the Kibuuka collection has been interpreted in other ways by different political and cultural groups. In 2007, for example, Kibuuka’s present-day followers entered the museum to seize the items and return them to their shrine site, believing that they were never intended to be publicly displayed as art or ethnographic specimens (Thomas 2016, p. 88). These different, and often passionate interpretations of Kibuuka reflect the broader complexities around history, identity, religious belief, and nationhood in Uganda in the postcolonial period. Moving from the hidden and sacred, to the public and profane, the journey of the Kibuuka relics and regalia reflects shifting identity, and ongoing religious, cultural, and political significance of Gods’ Collections from the precolonial, to the colonial, and postcolonial world.
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Primary Sources
John Roscoe photograph collection. 1907. LS.139254.TC1. Archives of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Papers of Abubaker Kakyama Mayanja. 1961–2. AA 4/5/15. Archives of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Dr Alison Bennett is Hallsworth Fellow in Political Economy, Dept of History, University of Manchester
