Well, today started bright and early. Arne and I were supposed to be at the palace by 8:30, to meet Omutaka Nakirembeka. As per his request, I'd copied off a series of surveys to distribute to young Baganda folks to see what they knew about their clans. We arrived right on time. As we flipped through magazines aimed at Ugandans in the UK, a few folks joined us, including Anatoli (who was acting as Luganda translator for the day) and the heads of two other clans, the dog (mbwa) and the 'rainwater that falls off the roof' (ky'ababoobi). Now, that last clan leads me to an important point with regards to my original thoughts when coming here.
You see, at first I was thinking about helping to design a program that relates youth to conservation and the environment by focusing on animals and plants that act as traditional clan totems. Now, that's all well and good for things like leopards (ngo), wild potato vines (kkobe) and termite-mound mushrooms (butiko). But the clans also include a fair number of things that AREN'T animals or plants - ranging from lungs (maugwe) to cooking pots (ntamu). The picture here shows a section of a wall at Bulange palace depicting various clan totems - here we have a grasshopper (Nsenene), Monitor Lizard (Nswaswa), Snout Fish (Nsuma?) and ... excrement - yep, poop.
So, by focusing on an organism-human connection among Baganda clans, it's narrowed by not only the tribe - but by particular clans within the tribe. This fact makes me think that a better idea might be the idea of connecting people with sacred space, regardless of their clan.
Now.. this day was sooo busy that I'm going to divide it into 3 parts: the heir installation among the Ndiga, the celebration of the Musu, and crowd madness at UB40 (you'll see when you get there - which is ironically probably before you get here).
No comments:
Post a Comment