Brotherhood for life among candidates for the big knife

This year, being an even-numbered one, marks a new imbalu season all over the lands of the Bamasaba. Teenage boys from the Bagisu, Tachoni and Babukusu communities around Mount Elgon/Masaba will be crisscrossing the valleys and hills from

Kamonkoli through Mbale, Bumutoto and Bungoma to Webuye, dancing to greet their relatives before they bravely face the big knife of the circumciser (umukhebi).

The year also happens to be one of the General Elections in Uganda and the candidates are crisscrossing the country wooing voters before they face the ordeal of the Big Ballot Box (BBB).

The wooing has now reached feverish pitch, as the day of decision is February 18, two days before you read the next edition of this column.

Curiously, there happens to be a close connection between the imbalu and the campaigns of the Ugandan politicians. It is the kadodi. These hauntingly throbbing drums accompany the songs of the Basinde, the circumcision candidates, and their voluptuous

dances as they celebrate the sexuality into which they are about to be initiated. The female variety of the dance is also appropriately suggestive, as my daughter Ayieta Anne Wangusa has described it somewhere in her writings.

I had been aware of the kadodi dances since my childhood days just outside Kampala, since we had a sizeable Bamasaba settler community among us. As you probably know, whenever the imbalu season comes round, the relatives from the mountain dance

out to their families in the diaspora, either to introduce the candidates from home or to identify and initiate candidates from those diaspora families.

FACING THE KNIFE

No Masaba man is allowed to go through life without facing the knife. Indeed, one is not a man until one has been cut. Why, even corpses are circumcised, as a musinde (an uncircumcised male) cannot be buried by Bamasaba, until he has “paid the debt of

the Mountain”.

Those who try to dodge the knife risk dire consequences. I remember our village church preacher, a very personable and respectable gentleman, being seized one fine day, wrestled to the ground and forcibly cut by a small group of “visitors”, who then

mysteriously disappeared. Apparently, the man of God had left Masabaland in his youth and never bothered about that “small detail” until his fate caught up with him. Such incidents are not uncommon during the imbalu seasons.

Anyway, wherever the circumcision parties go, the kadodi drums and songs accompany them, hence their familiarity and popularity all over the country. So, it is little surprise that many politicians in Kampala and

elsewhere have adopted the rhythm as their signature tune.

My close acquaintance with the imbalu and kadodi, however, came in1972, when I was part of a Makerere inter-departmental research team that spent several months in the Elgon area looking into the imbalu

initiation phenomenon. In folklore and orature,

we call such events rites of passage, marking the major transitions in our lives, birth, naming, initiation into adulthood, marriage and funerals.

Among the Bamasaba, the imbalu seems to be the most prominent rite of passage. It brings together the whole community not only to witness the initiation of their youth into manhood through circumcision but also to review their identity, history and current

state of their relationships. For the initiands, the imbalu is their unique opportunity to learn about unflinching courage, the responsibilities of family and parenthood and the crucial role of solidarity among members of the community.

The physical operation is obviously a preparation of the young men for sexual activity (a prudent move validated by “modern” medical findings). But it is also a challenge to them to display endurance and bravery in the face of extreme pain. A musinde

candidate is not supposed to even wince as he is cut.

In some areas, the young man is supposed to hold a stick above his head as the knife “eats” him, and woe betide a candidate who drops that stick during the process. Out in Bulucheke during our research, we

witnessed an incident where a candidate was

expected to continue dancing while rubbing his wound after the operation. Suddenly, a group of young men pounced on him, raining slaps and punches on him, claiming that he had not shown “enough” courage!

At the social level, the imbalu is a very important binding factor among the people. Those with whom you are circumcised are special brothers, “Makhoki or Bakoki”, with undeniable claims on their agemates. So, when I call my brother Prof Chris Wanjala,

Bakoki, he knows what I mean.

I was lucky to have as my guide during the research another bosom friend from Masaba, Prof Timothy Wangusa. He clarified to me quite a few of the intricate and intimate details of the imbalu, about which we might chat another day. Wangusa’s own

lyrical novels, Upon this Mountain and Betwixt Mountain and Jungle, are treasure houses of insights into Bamasaba culture, including the importance of the imbalu.

I should also confess that the idiom of my play, The Bride, was significantly inspired by the rhetoric of the imbalu and kadodi songs and other sayings. Our findings from the research were collected in a symposium, edited by the late Ghanaian musicologist

Atta Anan Mensah, and were to be published by Vienna’s Institüt fur Volkerkunde in their Acta Musicologia et Linguistica series. But I have never seen a copy. My contribution to the symposium was called Imbalu: the Dance to Manhood (Impressions of Applied Aesthetics).

As for the Ugandan politicians who are dancing kadodi to the ballot box, we can only hope that they will work for their people with as much courage as that with which the Basinde candidates face the knife. Their loyalty to the wananchi should also compare

favourably with that of Makhoki to those with whom they shared the knife.

Otherwise, we will be justified in calling them, the politicians, out to face the big knife again.

Prof Bukenya is one of the leading scholars of English and literature in East Africa