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The King whose name grew our environment
King Oyo planted ten million trees and protected two hundred kilometres of river, and asked for nothing in return. The truest way Tooro can mourn him is not with words, but by making sure that when our own children ask why the hills are green and the river still runs clean, the answer is still: because of him and because we never stopped.
The late Omukama Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV. (File)
By: Admin ., Journalist @New Vision
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OPINION
By Dr Juliet Kabasiita Kiiza
We are the Abatooro. We did not wake up one morning and choose to love Omukama Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, Hangiriza, Entale ya Tooro. We grew up inside that love, the way a seed grows inside a season it did not choose. We watched him grow from a boy of three, guided through a coronation and rites few of us fully understood but all of us felt, into a king of thirty-four who had spent thirty-one years being ours. Grief, for us, is not abstract. It is watching a life we measured our own lives against come to an end.
In Fort Portal and across our hills this week, the ordinary sounds have gone quieter. The markets that never fully close have felt this hush. Cattle move a little slower down the misty tracks at evening. It is the particular silence of a people who have never, in living memory, had to imagine Tooro without him on the throne.
He came to us one August, when his father's heart stopped without warning and left a three-year-old boy holding a kingdom too heavy for a child's hands. Thirty-one years later, in another August, his own heart called him home to be with the Lord he had given his life to. Between those two Augusts, he gave us everything he had, his childhood, his years, his name.
And what a name it was. Say Omukama in a village near the River Mpanga, and hands reached for seedlings. Say it near a threatened hillside, and ten million trees rose where there had been none not because anyone was paid to plant them, but because the King asked, and his people answered, the way a family answers when one of their own asks for help. That is what love looks like when it is planted in soil instead of only spoken.
He came to us one August, when his father's heart stopped without warning and left a three-year-old boy holding a kingdom too heavy for a child's hands. Thirty-one years later, in another August, his own heart called him home to be with the Lord he had given his life to. Between those two Augusts, he gave us everything he had, his childhood, his years, his name.
And what a name it was. Say Omukama in a village near the River Mpanga, and hands reached for seedlings. Say it near a threatened hillside, and ten million trees rose where there had been none not because anyone was paid to plant them, but because the King asked, and his people answered, the way a family answers when one of their own asks for help. That is what love looks like when it is planted in soil instead of only spoken.
We watched him write a twenty-five-year development strategy in 2021 that tied our culture to our children's future, as if he already knew he would not live to see all thirty-one years of it through, and wanted to leave instructions behind. We watched him protect two hundred kilometres of the river that waters our homes and our farms, the way an elder protects a grandchild patiently, without needing thanks, for as long as it took.
He never once asked to be repaid for any of it. Not for the trees, not for the river, not for the years he gave us before he had even finished being a child himself. He simply loved this kingdom the way a person loves something they cannot imagine living without, and let that love show itself in the ordinary things a seedling handed to a child, a riverbank left standing, a hillside that is green today because he once asked it to be.
So we will keep planting. Every tree that rises now on the hills he loved, every stretch of the River Mpanga that stays clean because someone remembered to protect it, will be ours to tend in his name. That is how a people keep a king alive after his reign has ended, not in stone, not in speeches, but in the small, patient work of continuing to do what he taught us to do.
King Oyo planted ten million trees and protected two hundred kilometres of river, and asked for nothing in return. The truest way Tooro can mourn him is not with words, but by making sure that when our own children ask why the hills are green and the river still runs clean, the answer is still: because of him and because we never stopped.
The writer is a Climate Change, Natural Resources and Green Economy Specialist, and a subject of the Tooro Kingdom
He never once asked to be repaid for any of it. Not for the trees, not for the river, not for the years he gave us before he had even finished being a child himself. He simply loved this kingdom the way a person loves something they cannot imagine living without, and let that love show itself in the ordinary things a seedling handed to a child, a riverbank left standing, a hillside that is green today because he once asked it to be.
So we will keep planting. Every tree that rises now on the hills he loved, every stretch of the River Mpanga that stays clean because someone remembered to protect it, will be ours to tend in his name. That is how a people keep a king alive after his reign has ended, not in stone, not in speeches, but in the small, patient work of continuing to do what he taught us to do.
King Oyo planted ten million trees and protected two hundred kilometres of river, and asked for nothing in return. The truest way Tooro can mourn him is not with words, but by making sure that when our own children ask why the hills are green and the river still runs clean, the answer is still: because of him and because we never stopped.
The writer is a Climate Change, Natural Resources and Green Economy Specialist, and a subject of the Tooro Kingdom