Fly into the future but remember your past
Nov 25, 2006
Uganda in recent years has neglected its ancient and historical monuments. There are no brochures available to tourists or schoolchildren pointing out what monuments there are or where to find them.
BY MERRICK POSNANSKY
Uganda in recent years has neglected its ancient and historical monuments. There are no brochures available to tourists or schoolchildren pointing out what monuments there are or where to find them.
Foreign teams from Nairobi, the USA and the University of London have conducted excavations but few of the results have been fully reported in the popular media.
A nation’s monuments are the visible clues to its history. We all associate distinctive monuments with certain cultures like the pyramids with Egypt or the Coliseum with Rome. Uganda has significant monuments but they are hardly known to the public and not always well preserved. Lugard’s fort, a symbol of the founding of the first colonial town in Old Kampala was sadly destroyed a few years ago to make way for a large mosque.
An urgent need exists to protect Uganda’s visible past but first we have to recognise what it is that we should protect.
There is accountable pride that the Buganda royal tombs at Kasubi have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage monument but much more needs to be done.
There are monuments from all periods and of different varieties. They range from places of significance where Uganda’s heritage has been demonstrated such as sites in Karamoja where the ancestors of later apes and humans were discovered, to Nsongezi in southern Ankole where the earliest stone tools were found, to rock shelters whose walls are decorated with drawings of canoes at Nyero in Teso, of concentric circles on Dolwe island in Lake Victoria or of cattle on Mount Elgon.
Other places of great human interest are the great earthen enclosures like Bigo bya Mugenyi in Masaka district associated with the Bacwezi legends. There; great ditches, some three metres deep, stretch across more than four kilometres of rolling country by the swamps of the Katonga river. Nearby at Ntusi there are the vestiges of a large settlement with mounds of ancient cattle dung and remnants of a once huge dam.
The great “witch tree†at Mubende hill and earthen enclosures at places such as Munsa are all redolent of Uganda’s mythical ancestors. Closer to the present time there are Egyptian forts at Wadelai, Dufile and Patiko in northwestern Uganda where the earliest foreign imperialists interacted with local peoples some years before the first Protestant and Catholic missionaries came to Kabaka Mutesa’s court in 1877.
More recent historical structures exist throughout Uganda. There are fine mission buildings and churches, with reed ceilings and drum towers, now a 100 years old like those at Villa Maria, many classic buildings in Kampala and Mengo such as old chiefs’ houses on Kabaka Njagala. Nearer the present day there is the site where Uganda’s Independence was declared on the Kololo airstrip. Kampala has grown in a virtually uncontrolled manner and far too many buildings have been lost before they were even photographed or planned! We need to record our history.
In 50 years’ time our children will want to know what Kampala or Entebbe looked like in the 1920s. In 1964 the Uganda Government in its wisdom established a national Commission of Historical Monuments in order to schedule monuments to be saved for posterity.
Certain sites, like Nyero, were protected but in the uncertain times of the 1970s and early 1980s preserving monuments was virtually ignored.
It is time for Uganda to recollect its past. Among the Asante of Ghana the symbol of history is the Sankofa bird that has its head turned backwards, the meaning of which is “as we fly into the future look back and recollect your pastâ€.
Monuments are not only earthworks, rock shelters and buildings but also shrines, sacred groves and places remembered by the oral traditions lovingly handed down by the aged guardians of societies being swept away by modernisation.
Many of these places preserve a great deal of history. They provide details about events, forgotten sacred rituals and real and mythical ancestors. The names of such places should not, however, be forgotten. In many countries place names are recorded, place name societies exist to discover more about their origins.
Sometimes place names occur in languages different from that of the people in whose land the site exists and can tell the historian about past inhabitants or intruders from another area.
It is vitally important that the Commission on Historical Monuments be revived that representatives of different interest groups such as historians, city fathers, the Uganda Society, educators, traditional rulers or their advisors, meet together on a regular basis to evaluate which monuments be declared as nationally important.
A building register of old buildings complete with plans and photographs should be initiated without delay. Citizens interested in wildlife rightly campaign to save endangered species of animals.
It is just as important to save our endangered monuments as a testimony of our cultural history. At the same time a reorganised Commission should publish and distribute brochures about Uganda’s monuments.
In recent years both Kenya and Tanzania have issued stamps, “propaganda for the millions†as one expert has termed stamps, depicting historical buildings. It is time for Uganda to do the same.
In 2008 Uganda celebrates a significant centenary, the 1908 founding of the Uganda Museum, the first museum in Eastern Africa such a celebration should be marked by a resurrection not only in the Museum but in all those places that speak to us about Uganda’s past.
The writer is Professor Emeritus, University of California and Founder Chairman Uganda Historical Monuments Commission
Uganda in recent years has neglected its ancient and historical monuments. There are no brochures available to tourists or schoolchildren pointing out what monuments there are or where to find them.
Foreign teams from Nairobi, the USA and the University of London have conducted excavations but few of the results have been fully reported in the popular media.
A nation’s monuments are the visible clues to its history. We all associate distinctive monuments with certain cultures like the pyramids with Egypt or the Coliseum with Rome. Uganda has significant monuments but they are hardly known to the public and not always well preserved. Lugard’s fort, a symbol of the founding of the first colonial town in Old Kampala was sadly destroyed a few years ago to make way for a large mosque.
An urgent need exists to protect Uganda’s visible past but first we have to recognise what it is that we should protect.
There is accountable pride that the Buganda royal tombs at Kasubi have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage monument but much more needs to be done.
There are monuments from all periods and of different varieties. They range from places of significance where Uganda’s heritage has been demonstrated such as sites in Karamoja where the ancestors of later apes and humans were discovered, to Nsongezi in southern Ankole where the earliest stone tools were found, to rock shelters whose walls are decorated with drawings of canoes at Nyero in Teso, of concentric circles on Dolwe island in Lake Victoria or of cattle on Mount Elgon.
Other places of great human interest are the great earthen enclosures like Bigo bya Mugenyi in Masaka district associated with the Bacwezi legends. There; great ditches, some three metres deep, stretch across more than four kilometres of rolling country by the swamps of the Katonga river. Nearby at Ntusi there are the vestiges of a large settlement with mounds of ancient cattle dung and remnants of a once huge dam.
The great “witch tree†at Mubende hill and earthen enclosures at places such as Munsa are all redolent of Uganda’s mythical ancestors. Closer to the present time there are Egyptian forts at Wadelai, Dufile and Patiko in northwestern Uganda where the earliest foreign imperialists interacted with local peoples some years before the first Protestant and Catholic missionaries came to Kabaka Mutesa’s court in 1877.
More recent historical structures exist throughout Uganda. There are fine mission buildings and churches, with reed ceilings and drum towers, now a 100 years old like those at Villa Maria, many classic buildings in Kampala and Mengo such as old chiefs’ houses on Kabaka Njagala. Nearer the present day there is the site where Uganda’s Independence was declared on the Kololo airstrip. Kampala has grown in a virtually uncontrolled manner and far too many buildings have been lost before they were even photographed or planned! We need to record our history.
In 50 years’ time our children will want to know what Kampala or Entebbe looked like in the 1920s. In 1964 the Uganda Government in its wisdom established a national Commission of Historical Monuments in order to schedule monuments to be saved for posterity.
Certain sites, like Nyero, were protected but in the uncertain times of the 1970s and early 1980s preserving monuments was virtually ignored.
It is time for Uganda to recollect its past. Among the Asante of Ghana the symbol of history is the Sankofa bird that has its head turned backwards, the meaning of which is “as we fly into the future look back and recollect your pastâ€.
Monuments are not only earthworks, rock shelters and buildings but also shrines, sacred groves and places remembered by the oral traditions lovingly handed down by the aged guardians of societies being swept away by modernisation.
Many of these places preserve a great deal of history. They provide details about events, forgotten sacred rituals and real and mythical ancestors. The names of such places should not, however, be forgotten. In many countries place names are recorded, place name societies exist to discover more about their origins.
Sometimes place names occur in languages different from that of the people in whose land the site exists and can tell the historian about past inhabitants or intruders from another area.
It is vitally important that the Commission on Historical Monuments be revived that representatives of different interest groups such as historians, city fathers, the Uganda Society, educators, traditional rulers or their advisors, meet together on a regular basis to evaluate which monuments be declared as nationally important.
A building register of old buildings complete with plans and photographs should be initiated without delay. Citizens interested in wildlife rightly campaign to save endangered species of animals.
It is just as important to save our endangered monuments as a testimony of our cultural history. At the same time a reorganised Commission should publish and distribute brochures about Uganda’s monuments.
In recent years both Kenya and Tanzania have issued stamps, “propaganda for the millions†as one expert has termed stamps, depicting historical buildings. It is time for Uganda to do the same.
In 2008 Uganda celebrates a significant centenary, the 1908 founding of the Uganda Museum, the first museum in Eastern Africa such a celebration should be marked by a resurrection not only in the Museum but in all those places that speak to us about Uganda’s past.
The writer is Professor Emeritus, University of California and Founder Chairman Uganda Historical Monuments Commission