What is the Meaning of the Title 'Kabaka' and, Who was Kintu?
Understanding African Bantu Culture, its Intricacies and Enigmas.
Above: Sekabaka Muteesa I (1837-1884). Credit: source.
I recently hinted in an article that the custom of honoring elders in many African cultural groups is an extension to the practice of appeasement enshrined in African Traditional Religion. To understand many curious things about Africa, one requires knowledge of some African language(s) to begin with. The King of Buganda is traditionally addressed as ‘Kabaka.’ This is a curious term which needs to be etymologised. My attempt to explain the origin of the title will dovetail with the prosopography behind the name ‘Kintu’ to whom the Baganda trace their ancestry. He is then the Ssekabaka (father of kings) and not just an ancestor for the entire cultural group. As we probably know to the most extent, the Bantu ethnic group is distinguished for its exclusive usage of the suffix ntu in predicating a human person or persons (people). Since we can agree at least to an extent that the truth on the reality on which we speculate is quite frequently more or less probable, I will attempt to make a submission that some may not find strange.
Faupel points out that at a certain point in the history of Buganda, the kings claimed for themselves a station higher than that of the ancestral spirits or deities and were regarded as supreme over everything in the spiritual and material world.1 In truth, the reality is that the kings might have originally been regarded as living incarnations of the divine oracle. The word ‘oracle’ or ‘message’ is denoted as obubaka. The messenger is called omubaka. The king is termed Kabaka, but this is the same as how the subjects and descendants of Kintu are called abantu and the level of etymology is comparatively similar.
For whom could the king be a messenger? Certainly no ordinary human being, not even the leaders of the traditional cult of worship. In this respect therefore, we might have to acknowledge that the Kabaka was always a diviner of sorts, who was feared and honored by everyone.2 He was the supreme court of appeal and had powers over life and death. The kingdom of Buganda began as Joseph Nakabaale Kiwanuka explains, as an absolute monarchy.3 Gradually, the Bakungu became part of the ruling structure to minimise the risk of tensions between princes, powerful chiefs and the king, thus an aristocracy was created. Overtime, a parliamentary structure was integrated into the structure, the Lukiiko.4 It became a deliberative assembly that handles many affairs that would otherwise be troublesome for the king alone to handle.
All these changes nonetheless took place over the middle of the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. With time, the people came to acknowledge that the king is actually not a demi-god but a human being. Nonetheless, titles have been reserved for him such as baffe (‘our husband’).5 This strangely dovetails with the treatment of the King in the scriptures (1 Kings 5:1). In any case, the Malachim (kings) of scripture were also recognized as ‘the flesh and blood’ of the subjects. These words which are applied in Genesis 3 to the wife of Adam are reflected in the term baffe.6
cf Faupel, African Holocaust.
Hence the saying Kabaka tebamulaba mu’kamwa (Nobody gazes into the mouth of the king), literally the king’s word is final.
Joseph Nakabaale Kiwanuka, Church and State. Guiding Principles (1961). This work is the first attempt by a Ugandan native Catholic bishop of Sub-Saharan Africa to apply the social teaching of the Church to an African context.
More likely an attempt by the British to refashion the kingdom to reflect their own practice, as a method of weakening the powers of the king. They proceeded to ensure that their favourites and henchmen took up positions of influence, and the Kabaka himself becomes a protege of the colonial administrator.
This title more than being a mere appelation is reflected in the way people feel towards the king. Studies on the Kabaka Crisis of the 1950s illustrate this point lucidly. See Carol Summers, All The Kabaka’s Wives: Marital Claims in Buganda’s 1953-5 Kabaka Crisis, Journal of African History, pp. 107-27.
Even if this term humanizes the station of the Kabaka giving him the character of husband, a tender loving head of a family, the reality is that quite often the personality of the Kabaka is not that of an ordinary muntu (person) but rather muntunsolo (more than the human person, with character of a Lion). Since the Kabaka became a lion, he quite often had to take decisions single-handedly and be individually responsible for them, such as murdering his own subjects at a whim as Faupel records for Muteesa I. This one was also known as Mukaabya (one who brings grief, causes others to cry).