Beyond Entebbe Airport lies Uganda’s ancient secret

Jul 19, 2002

THE majority who fly in and out of Uganda know Entebbe Airport –– 36kms from Kampala. Many of the foreigners come in that way, and never see it again until they fly back home

By Craddock WilliamsTHE majority who fly in and out of Uganda know Entebbe Airport –– 36kms from Kampala. Many of the foreigners come in that way, and never see it again until they fly back home.However, they rarely go beyond the airport to the headland of the Entebbe Peninsula. If they did, they would see a wonderful lakeside landscape, like a parkland of blossoming trees, and vivid green grasslands or reddish exposed volcanic rock reaching down to sandy beaches.They would also see first-hand evidence of Uganda’s early history, for it was here on the sandy foreshore of Kigungu Village that the first Christian Missionaries from Europe landed on February 17, 1879.The brick monument of 1935 for that epoch-making arrival has been rebuilt, as its new tablet of 1999 declares, “with the help of the People of France.”For the first Christian Missionaries to arrive in Uganda were French-members of the Catholic Society of White Fathers, –– The Rev. Father Simeon Lourdel, and Brother Amans. ‘Ekifo kya Mapeera’ (the Father’s place ......) the tablet says in Luganda.Behind the monument is a new brick built Church with bright blue roofings, which you can see from aircraft windows as you land at or take off from the Entebbe Airport runway.The White Fathers were well received, as were the followed by Missionaries of the Protestant denomination who had arrived in 1877. The Religion of Islam had already been present in what became Uganda for at least a century, though it came in via Muslim Arab traders from the coast, –– trading in ivory and slaves.The White Fathers throughout Africa have been pioneers of helpful comprehensive development, with farms, gardens, schools, libraries and hospitals proliferating wherever they established missions. Uganda was an early beneficiary of their work.The Catholic ethic is probably less well-followed than Catholic liturgy, for many traditional tribal practices survive in Kigungu as elsewhere in Uganda. Such practices include: ancient superstitions, witchcraft, polygamy, pre-marital sex, fetishism, and child sacrifice. These residual archaic taints are not entirely absent in the so-called civilisations of Europe, the Christian Churches accommodate some and preach in vain against the others.We saw evidence of surviving superstitions when we visited the rocky headland of the Entebbe peninsular, just south-east of the end of the airport runway.Within the gently sloping rocky ridge of the headland, 110 paces long as we measured it that day, you can see an almost perfect archway leading to a sandy cove on its eastern side, formed more it seems by the hand of a practiced mason than by nature; and beside it, a low deep cave, where it is said, a serpent sacred to Buganda tradition is the centre of occasional rituals.We walked through Kigungu, and saw the new EU-funded Fish Landing and Handling Jetty, fenced and prepared to meet European food hygiene standards. We saw more ducks than in any other village of Uganda, suggesting great dishes of caneton a l’Orange at Kampala’s not so petit Bistro, and we saw prodigious avocado trees with fruit on a Mombasa scale, –– that is , half a kilo each at least. And giant spiders in their giant webs as strong as pilots’ nylons, feasting on the swarms of lakefly that engulf the Lake Victoria coastline this time of the year.Further on, at Kigungu’s western end, a chrome yellow school, with three statues, one of two men wrestling both in endobe, another of a man wrestling with a rather nonchalant crocodile, and an abstract sculpture in white cement.Not many schools have such adornment in their grounds, nor the great sweep of blue Lake water beyond.Led by our vice-chairman Nelson Kiggundu, we were on what was a rather unusual Sunday walk for the Mountain Club of Uganda unusual in the sense that the monument and headland cave are special and unique, while Kigungu has that smiling welcome, which is the usual greeting for the club whenever we wander through the villages of Uganda.

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