Exile's Return

When the signal came from the airport, the royal drums thundered into life for the first time in two years. To Buganda's 1,300,000 people, the noise announced the return of their beloved Kabaka (King). Thousands of gallons of banana beer had been brewed, garlands fashioned, 16 arches constructed over the processional route with banners proclaiming: "He has triumphed." Stiffly upright in his immaculate grey suit, 31-year-old Edward William Frederick David Walugembe Luwangula Mutebi--Kabaka Mutesi II--bowed stiffly to the right and left from his Rolls-Royce convertible as it rolled triumphantly toward his palace in Kampala past throngs of his screaming, weeping, dancing subjects. They beat their cheeks in the Baganda brand of war whoop, thumped tom-toms, flung themselves prostrate as the Kabaka passed. And for four days and nights, an orgy of welcome roared on.

No Time for Change. For young King "Freddie," as his London friends call him, it was a proud moment and sweet revenge for the humiliation back in 1953, when he watched Uganda's British Governor Sir Andrew Cohen touch a button in his office to summon a policeman. Then, King Freddie was unceremoniously hustled aboard a plane for exile in London without so much as a chance to change his clothes or say goodbye to his wife. King Freddie's sin was that he had dared defy the governor's plans for Uganda, of which Buganda is officially a province.

The British were talking of melding Uganda into white-dominated Kenya and Tanganyika to form an East African Federation. The Kabaka, ruler of a proud old kingdom where white men cannot even buy land without great legal difficulties, wanted no part of a multiracial federation. He demanded separation from Uganda and that the British set a date for self-government. Furthermore, the Kabaka balked at Governor Cohen's proposal to allocate to Africans only 20 of the 56 seats in the protectorate's new Legislative Council--less voice for 5,300,000 Africans than for 57,000 whites and Asians. The British colonials were aghast; this troublesome young man had to go, and the Lukiko (Parliament) could elect somebody more malleable to replace him. The decision, said Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton, was "final."

Hollow Triumph. To the British it had seemed simple and tidy. Lyttelton silenced Laborite criticism and moved himself nearly to tears with an emotional speech about his own affection for the Kabaka. "It was the more painful to me because he was a member of my university, and of my regiment [the Grenadier Guards], and a friend of my son's at Cambridge!" The press applauded, the critics subsided chapfallen.

Scarcely anybody noticed that parliamentary triumphs in London had no effect whatever in Buganda. There the Lukiko refused flatly to elect anyone to replace the Kabaka. Cohen was hissed and booed in Kampala. Thousands of the Kabaka's subjects swore never to shave until he returned. Even when the British offered concessions, the Lukiko refused to accept them in the Kabaka's absence. King Freddie, ensconced in a West End apartment at Britain's expense, behaved as a young ex-guardsman should.

Price of Mistake. Finally, Her Majesty's government was forced to recognize that they had made a mistake. Under new Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, agreements were worked out which changed the Kabaka from an absolute to a constitutional (and therefore more manageable) monarch, and King Freddie agreed to swear renewed loyalty and obedience to the Queen. But Freddie got more than he gave. The British reshaped the protectorate's Legislative Council to include, for the first time, more Africans than whites. They promised not to press the East African Federation. They gave Buganda control over its own natural resources, schools and local government. Africans were allotted three jobs in the protectorate "Cabinet," the first time that African hands have been allowed to touch executive power.

With typical Whitehall urbanity, the Colonial Office represented the Kabaka's exile and return as designed from the first for the Baganda's own good, which had been practically forced on them to save the Baganda from the stubbornness of an absolute monarch. They should have told that to the Baganda. At the ceremonial signing of the new agreements last week, 10,000 roared noisy applause as King Freddie spoke. Then Governor Cohen rose. "Who does not believe that this friendship [of Britain and Buganda] has emerged not diminished but strengthened?" he asked rhetorically. The assembled tribal chiefs burst into raucous, mocking laughter.

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