Otiato GuguyuWhen confronted with the age old question of who I was, where we come from, my young mind never quite got contented with the answer our people gave, we were Manyala, simply interpreted as ‘Yes We Can’.
My own parents are Christians and fancied the explanation that we descended from Adam and Eve sufficed and they never sought to discover the much more ancient oral narratives that could explain our origin and geography as the only people who never left the shores of this lake since the first men walked on earth.
Read also: Namuonja the Manyala who ruled North East Nyanza before we became Kenya
To our neighbours we were only referred to as damu mbaya-bad blood which I assumed was for the struggle to fit into the postcolonial stereotypic luhya frame that had amalgamated varied bantu tribes north of Kawirongo gulf of Nyanza.
But research shows that the name of our tribe may have been a creation post 1800 when one of our great ancestors Khasamba broke the 400 year reign of Abakhone in Kawirongo by organising all the small tribes of Buongo to defeat the once invisible owners of the soil. It is these wars that explain the different groups of Manyala broke apart, some travelling along Nzoia to present day Kakamega.
Then it gets dark real quickly where these inglorious ancestors go on a genocidal rampage that drives the Abakhone into exile. They only return after the Banyala make peace with them in order to fend off the new threats of Abasamia who assassinate Nakhabuka the tribes most powerful female ruler at the time.
Several tribes along the north east of the lake may have been exiles fleeing genocide from the Kabaka succession wars and assimilated into local cultures to avoid death.
If so now that the world has outgrown the blood debt, now that Kabaka is not god and has died like the sun in the west, in Yimbo, shall we not re-emerge like the stars in the night?
This December Orals East Africa will begin the journey of mapping local Nyanza epics, beginning with the history of political intermarriages between Nyanza royalty.
It was a project we picked up in Yimbo known as Chuny piny the heart of earth where the sun dies, when one of our client Florence Anam asked us to shoot a small get together his father, George Anam was organising at the end of December. In our recce we met the old man and he began tracing his history.
Among his ancestors are the Mukudi’s, who are incidentally my maternal uncles- bakhocha from Namalo and we easily trace our ancestry to one of Ex Senior Chief Mukudi’s sisters who was married to Chief Okello Anam Ulwa of Yimbo.
My father had also told me to ask about our own lineage the Abalubanga of Goye in Yimbo, where his aunt was married. It turns out two of my paternal great grandmothers, Nanjala and Amduba were also married to this very house of Anam Ulwa.
I was hooked on the story, which coincidentally unravelled like a yarn. George’s cousin, Francis Okomo Okello had also just launched his book, “The Concert of Life” a gem of more than a decade of research into his great lineage that he traces back to the architecture of villages in Bar El Ghazel, South Sudan. (Read the Review Here).
Surprisingly, Mr Okomo served as nation Media Director when I worked there as a reporter but our paths never crossed. When I visited him recently he gave a link to a chapter of my clan’s history that I remain ignorant, our link to Luo relatives called Awaluwanga and perhaps hints as to why we are married to royal houses across Lake Nyanza and Kavirongo channel.
This door opened even further corners in the great house of Nyanza royals when I found out the descendants of Namuonja the great precolonial King of Banyala were also organising the first ever memorial in his name. It was this King whose wives were Namanjaba Nalubanga and Sirali Nalubanga who married his daughters to royal houses around Kavirongo that saw him rule peacefully before the first white man saw Inyanza.
Now we have the great opportunity to follow this story and ask fact from fiction, myth and reverence in resurrecting a great pre-colonial chief through the houses of his over 30 wives and daughters who established the old peace through marriage and totemic religion.
It also will offer me dark insights into a book epic that I am writing that explores the deep fissures and tragedy that followed succession of kings as the original sin.
The story explores our break with the Old Kingdom to the court politics of Kabaka era in which brothers killed each other for the throne. One of our ancestors was decapitated during these wars for refusing to kill a Kabaka and the other for killing one, which means we were dammed either way.
What we should have prevented was the rise of Kings in the first place. Myth has it that before Kabaka became god he was a man who craved another’s crown and came to Ssese Islands, home to Baganda deities, to ask for permission to become king of Buganda and overthrow Bemba. That when the man called Kato met our people on the Island we asked him why he wanted to be King and he claimed to have descended from Kintu himself and that he could prove he was god if we could kill Bemba for him.
When Nfudu the tortoise tricked and killed Bemba and presented his decapitated head to Kintu, the new Kabaka could not prove his godliness to offer immortality to the champion trickster, instead he claimed that Nfudu was supposed to bring back Bemba alive.
We were marked from the beginning as the people who always knew the King was not a god, nor the direct descendant of Kintu, but like many before and after him, usurper of power.
May Were Hagaba Rachar bless this sojourn.
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