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A Tribute to Festo Karwemera

The English had William Shakespeare, the Russians had Alexander Pushkin, the French had Jean Paul Sartre and Abakiga had Festo Karwemera. Well, you may laugh but the heart to which Karwemera devoted to the recording of the vernacular in Kigezi was most unusual. Karwemera also transcended all the visible and invisible boundaries in his work because even though we place his work amongst Abakiga and the language which they speak he was, in the daily reality of Kigezi, also an expert at the genealogy of families whose constitutional genetic material came from Abakiga, Abanyarwanda, Abafumbira, Abahororo, Abachimbiri, Abanyankole and others.

There was no family that Karwemera met and did not show interest in developing an indelible memory bank of information about what roots had forged its members. The bank he had found and began became the springboard from which to launch himself into the unfathomable world of culture, which had diminished via our own developing interest in Western education and future. As he embraced this as a student through the work of Christian missionaries at Kigezi High School and Kinyasano High School, Karwemera learned the academic intensity and persistence that enabled him to view language and culture not merely as accoutrements of traditional entertainment at an event that evokes the purposeful meaning of a wedding or a funeral. The knowledge gained via that education enabled him to plunge himself into the studies of language and culture without self-doubt or reservations even while he worked as a civil servant in the colonial and first post-independence governments.

It is hardly my intention to write about his work, which inspired me throughout life. I write this without blushing because I recall my mother telling us in my childhood that, for all of us who gained an education, we had a duty to promote and help decipher cultures, histories and language in much the same way her cousin, Festo Karwemera, did. It was, in fact, through my father’s work as a historian that I understood what my mother explained. While Karwemera worked as a civil servant, he began his quest to record the attributes of our cultural and linguistic strands in Kigezi. By the time of his death, his encyclopaedic knowledge of us all made him a great source of information. While my father read his BA degree at Makerere including the principles of analysis of history at Makerere, which was taught through the prism of European history by Frederick Welbourn and Kenneth Ingham, he extrapolated reasoning from it to give an explanation of our tribal and clan motivations for war, land relocation and all other actions in our history. A Scottish physics professor who had come to Makerere from Cambridge assured me that he was completely fascinated by that history, which was relayed to him through my father’s lectures at Makerere, and which paralleled that of the Scots, another mountain people whose clans formed the fabric of stability of their existence in Great Britain.

At a much later date in 1970, my father and Karwemera were among a group of early historians, oral and literary, who were gathered together by Donald Denoon to write the first anthology of Kigezi history. To date, that book remains the ultimate reference to our history. Known as A History of Kigezi in SW Uganda, it was re-issued last year by Fountain Publishers complete with its errors of commission and omission. In it are contributions from a vast number of historians but none as versatile in the humanities’ fields of studies encompassing Kigezi as the late Festo Karwemera. Once, while I was teaching chemistry in China, I was astonished to meet through the internet an English man who had been conceived in Uganda but born in Britain. Later, I learned that his father had been Hugh Fraser, who was the District Commissioner of Kigezi District in the late 1950s. When Hugh Fraser Jr arrived in Kabale in the 2000s and asked people to direct him to anybody that might have known his father, he was sent off to see Mr Karwemera, who recalled his father as a former District Commissioner but whom he had not known. This was not a small or unimportant opportunity because our land is a mountain of personal colonial histories and Karwemera understood this as well. Any number of relations of former colonial families had a history in our land.

I remember Mr Karwemera, as we called him in childhood, in crisp, ironed white shirts, yellow cabled sweater vests, cardigans, khaki shorts, gartered stockings all of which I recall standing on a highly-polished base of light-brown shoes into which African legs were neatly stacked. Karwemera was then the epitome of a British African gentleman. In that era, this was not a show of accomplishment of wealth but an integral part of becoming educated not just in academic ways but in cultural ones as well. There was not a milligram of the shame that is associated with this mode of existence today. All was well with the British culture into which Uganda steeped itself as soon as John Hanning Speke arrived there in 1862 in search of the Source of the Nile.

I often saw Mr Karwemera in the company of people I knew as relations or friends of the family. Even though he was also a maternal uncle and highly prized by my mother as one of the eminently achieved and behaved men of her clan, our association with a number of families including Mr Karwemera’s was largely due to the fact that they had strengthened relationships through a missionary education. Some of the British missionaries in question here were elderly and still alive and active and others were young and had arrived years later to replace the elderly ones, who had introduced them to their Christian converts and students including Karwemera. Sober-eyed and moustachioed, Karwemera was one of the bright stars of African achievement. I often saw him near my school, Kigezi High School Primary, or The Lower School, where he would stop and greet me and ask about my parents’ whereabouts. Having attended Kigezi High School, where my father found him after his primary school Kihanga Boys’ School, there was a residual boyish sense of humour that he shared with my father but one that was also coloured by their affinity for cultural history and language.

Festo Karwemera was born in 1925 in Karubanda, Buhara. He was 95-years old at the time of his death in August 2020. He was educated at Muyebe Primary School, which was built by my maternal grandfather, Andereya Nduluma, whose nephew he was. Receiving an education eliminated participation in World War II, which had absorbed many a young man from his era in the then Kigezi District. Many of them, including Balintuma and Kyarabakabize, had been trained in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and then fought against the Japanese in Burma, now Myanmar, where many were killed in action. Thus, education saved Karwemera and my father from military service. It is important to remember that there was an abundance of young men outside of school systems. Interest in scholarship was rare and many had not yet become accustomed to mental academic work. The military proposition was very attractive for many young men who were not assiduous in school.

For Festo Karwemera, travelling to Kinyasano on foot was an important investment. The 78-kilometre (48-mile) journey, which was undertaken at the beginning of each term, was to allay the payment of 15 Ugandan shillings at Kigezi High School, which was an easy distance from home. Thus, he went to Kinyasano, another prominent school in Kigezi at the time but with an affordable invoice of Shillings 7 per term. Later, in 1944, Karwemera joined Nyakasura Vernacular Teacher Training College. His education there led him into the unique role he would play, with deepening interest, for the rest of his life. From 1946 to 1954, Mr Karwemera taught vernacular and English in Native Anglican Church (NAC) schools. After 8 years as a Vernacular Teacher, Karwemera attended the Bishop Tucker Teacher’s College in Mukono, Kampala to upgrade to the higher level of a Grade II Teacher Certificate.

After his completion of his course at Mukono, Karwemera was then posted to Kantare Primary School, where he taught from 1955 until 1959. He was made Assistant School Supervisor in Kigezi’s NAC schools at the beginning of the independence decade. He retained that position until he joined ActionAid, a British-based charity organisation. His conviction that the local languages would disappear, however, turned him into a writer. Karwemera was, at first, deeply involved in writing Lunyankole-Lukiga folktales and proverbs. A few years later, he became the ultimate authority on the cultures of Abakiga, Abanyarwanda (Abafumbira), Abahororo, Abachimbiri and Abatwa. He has also been famous for exceptional command of the genealogy of the families in Kigezi. His life’s work in local cultures and languages has led to recognition beyond Kigezi, national institutions. Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda Christian University and British Broadcasting Corporation. Professor Manuel Muranga of Kabale University, an authority in linguistics, reported at the funeral service in Kabale on 1 September that the name Katondoozi, the equivalent of dictionary, had been contributed by Festo Karwemera for the work written by a number of authors in Lunyankole-Lukiga.

Karwemera, who elevated the study of local language and culture above all others in our hills, died of advanced age on Sunday, 30 August 2020 at 4 a.m. at the Rugarama Hospital in Kabale. Departing at age 95, Karwemera was the last of the group of the earliest African students who transformed their lives from the hardship of subsistence farming to the challenges of schooling from which they issued forth as accomplished members of an incorruptible civil service from which Uganda first learned the service of a self-respecting country. That Karwemera was one of the earliest primary school teachers to gain a qualification from the respected Mukono institution means that he would have widespread outreach and influence on a vast number of children among the inhabitants of the District of Kigezi during the decade of his teaching.

Karwemera was one of those relations about whom no mean stories were ever told except those of harsh criticism of people who indulged in the unfortunate misuse and ill-educated application of our language. A witness to this testified at his funeral that he had called him a pagan for saying something wrong in his language. The service, held on 1 September 2020 on the football and athletics grounds of Kigezi High School Primary, was not lacking in hallmark Kabale peculiarities. Hope Kiggundu, a niece of Mr Karwemera now living in Zimbabwe, complained when the Master of Ceremonies announced that a tent erected at the site was reserved for VIPs. Ms Kiggundu took offence to the idea that some of the mourners would bear more titles of importance than others when they had all come to pay respects to the same person.

Personally, I took umbrage to that and the fact that a senior local government official was designated Chief Mourner! Who could mourn more than a man’s widow? These are neither features of our local history nor those of ancient or modern British society from which Kigezi derived much of the character of our ceremonial behaviour. Festo Karwemera would not have approved nor would he have felt honoured by the set of customs and traditions we made up and which consist of quirks in conduct we dreamt up in an imagination aping foreign diplomatic protocols. Much of what we see today in wedding and funeral ceremonies across Uganda is copied and pasted but it bears no relationship whatsoever with our historical background.

At the most personal festivities and funerals, for example, the Master of Ceremonies announces names of guests as they arrive. One’s wealth or political status determines their social status and honours that precede their names at weddings and funerals. It is shocking to me that people will be paraded to lay their wreaths on the caskets of the departed to display their splendour and esteem for the departed as a means of displaying their ostentation. A Member of Parliament, I am told, was taken seriously before he was a candidate because he made contributions to weddings and funerals in his prospective constituency. When he was trapped and caught taking a bribe after he had been elevated to a cabinet position, everybody understood that he was trying to claw back his lost contributions. People felt sorry for him because of the numerous occasions he had been present in the important events of their lives.

The Master of Ceremonies was heard to say that the President of Uganda himself did not come because of the global lockdown due to Covid-19 but could not have missed the occasion otherwise. When the President attends a funeral, his visit supersedes all ceremonies and the attention is drawn away from the departed to the President and his entourage. When he sends a speech to be read, that alone sucks attention to itself and is always accompanied by a substantial cash gift, which is received with requisite pomp and circumstance. Arriving dignitaries are often received with announcements that say, for example, “The Honourable Chairman!” “Honourable MP!” “His Grace the Archbishop!” “All protocols observed!” This last phrase, apparently, is the substitution for a further assault on honours and names of people who may not have been noted or known.

Such was the order even for the traditionalist Festo Karwemera. He could not possibly have sanctioned such conduct but, again, he could not have influenced it if he tried in anticipation of his own death. The Master of Ceremonies is always out to outdo all the potential rivals. It has come to my understanding that Masters of Ceremonies are very influential people and are often approached, beforehand, by men and women who harbour political ambitions to ask them to carry favour with their names at the ceremonies and announce them with the necessary gravitas. The invocation of the names of the President at Karwemera’s funeral was probably seen as an honour for the griot but it is important that we, as a society, should learn that the end of life be seen as the measure of a person’s life through his interaction with society rather than who sent messages and monetary contributions.

The inhabitants of the former Kigezi District were the only natural republicans before British colonialism dawned on our land in 1911. Words from the French motto, “liberté, égalité, fraternité” would have been an intuitive path for inhabitants of Kigezi at the time. Or, indeed, the British maxim, “An Englishman’s home is his castle” would have worked handsomely for us in our hills. This purposeful private social pursuit, however, was replaced by a more community-based colonial structure in which one was asked to pay taxes through community labour by digging roads where cow-paths had been. In giving up our republicanism and ancient traditions, what we gained was not small.

Pre-Independence British and post-Independence Ugandan Civil Service, in which Mr Karwemera’s generation served and then saw dissipated during African “Home Rule” led by such men as Idi Amin lost us good governance, which was, in fact, the basis of a Middle Class even in Britain and the Commonwealth. This was the ultimate quid pro quo between the British Crown and cogs of men and women in the machinery that oiled the progressive success of the Empire. Later, of course, African leaders played their part in dispensing with working institutional instruments to render government a more pliable and corrupt machinery. Karwemera was certainly was not happy with the environment that encouraged corruption but he, like many, accepted that change had occurred in our land and had to be accepted. At his daughter’s funeral service 3 years ago — the fifth loss of a child for the family — one was given to understand that longevity accrued from the acceptance of inevitable circumstances.

In his collection of simple but elegant houses on a historically prime real estate that he and his wife acquired before Kabale had grown to its present size and importance, one can discern the classic values of a man who placed mental satisfaction above the shallow pursuits that characterise the nature of most Ugandans. Mr Karwemera and others, particularly if they played no role in keeping the President and his ruling party praised as heroes of war and economic development, would not have been able to gain their pensions. In their death, however, they received substantial lump sums that did not equal the worth and utility of their pensions while they lived. I had a personal conversation with him soon after my father’s death in 2014 and he told me how hard he had worked to try and obtain his teaching pension but to no avail after he heard of my father’s hardship and inability to gain access to his pension. Both had, of course, served their countries since colonial rule, during which time their pensions were first calculated, so their livelihood should have been handsome but for the corruption that seeped into the seams of government. I wondered how it was that, in the aftermath of past lawless governments of the past, the present one had found it inconvenient to merit the worthy contributions of its most deserving citizens. It is unconscionable that nobody thought it important to stoop low to be of use to a gem of a former Civil Servant who was an African pioneer across many fields. The President and a team of linguists seem to have consulted him for his knowledge of language but they were to remain aloof on the issue of his welfare.

For many years, Mr Karwemera researched and wrote books about the culture of a people known as Abakiga but his knowledge was not limited to them. All the cultures and languages of the inhabitants of the former Kigezi District, including Abachimbiri, Abanyarwanda (Abafumbira), Abahororo and Abatwa were covered in the studies of all cultural groups related to Abakiga. Karwemera researched, learned and retained data pertaining to generations upon generations of people in Kigezi and recited it over and over at weddings and other functions for everybody to hear. He was the ultimate recitative poet, putting forth a wealth of spoken oratorio not merely for cultural pride but an eternity of self-respect. For him, respect was widespread throughout Kigezi as early as the 1960s but, in time, he gained international fame through the BBC World Service.

In my visits home to see my father from England, I often called on him. Whenever he saw me, the subject that immediately visited his mind was the wonderful time he had with my father at Kigezi High School. This was interesting for me not least because his daughters and a niece were my classmates at The Lower School, on whose grounds his funeral service was later held, 10 metres across the road from his sprawling home. In awe of his gifts and keen to follow his example and my mother’s advice, I wrote my book, A Grammatical Study of Lunyankole-Lukiga. It is important that we, alone or in groups, continue to learn from him. To that end, I recall buying all his books in one of my visits to Kabale. Particular mention is made in my book of the vocabulary we adopted from other languages, including such a word as esafuriya, which comes to Lukiga from Swahili’s sufuria and means saucepan.

Kabale University, a relatively new institution in Uganda, benefitted in large measure from Karwemera’s work and awarded him an honoris causa doctorate of letters for his service, recognising his work as having deserved such special mention. The Covid-19 conditions meant that we were unable to give Mr Karwemera the broad spectrum of deserved honours but there is no tongue in the sons and daughters of Kigezi that is not still wagging about the huge contributions he made. In Heaven, the influences of the hills of Kigezi will be making a profound sound with their vibrant proverbs and stories with our gentleman scholar, who was comfortable in hides and tweed.

The English had William Shakespeare, the Russians had Alexander Pushkin, the French had Jean Paul Sartre and Abakiga had Festo Karwemera. Well, you may laugh but the heart to which Karwemera devoted to the recording of the vernacular in Kigezi was most unusual. Karwemera also transcended all the visible and invisible boundaries in his work because even though we place his work amongst Abakiga and the language which they speak he was, in the daily reality of Kigezi, also an expert at the genealogy of families whose constitutional genetic material came from Abakiga, Abanyarwanda, Abafumbira, Abahororo, Abachimbiri, Abanyankole and others.

There was no family that Karwemera met and did not show interest in developing an indelible memory bank of information about what roots had forged its members. The bank he had found and began became the springboard from which to launch himself into the unfathomable world of culture, which had diminished via our own developing interest in Western education and future. As he embraced this as a student through the work of Christian missionaries at Kigezi High School and Kinyasano High School, Karwemera learned the academic intensity and persistence that enabled him to view language and culture not merely as accoutrements of traditional entertainment at an event that evokes the purposeful meaning of a wedding or a funeral. The knowledge gained via that education enabled him to plunge himself into the studies of language and culture without self-doubt or reservations even while he worked as a civil servant in the colonial and first post-independence governments.

It is hardly my intention to write about his work, which inspired me throughout life. I write this without blushing because I recall my mother telling us in my childhood that, for all of us who gained an education, we had a duty to promote and help decipher cultures, histories and language in much the same way her cousin, Festo Karwemera, did. It was, in fact, through my father’s work as a historian that I understood what my mother explained. While Karwemera worked as a civil servant, he began his quest to record the attributes of our cultural and linguistic strands in Kigezi. By the time of his death, his encyclopaedic knowledge of us all made him a great source of information. While my father read his BA degree at Makerere including the principles of analysis of history at Makerere, which was taught through the prism of European history by Frederick Welbourn and Kenneth Ingham, he extrapolated reasoning from it to give an explanation of our tribal and clan motivations for war, land relocation and all other actions in our history. A Scottish physics professor who had come to Makerere from Cambridge assured me that he was completely fascinated by that history, which was relayed to him through my father’s lectures at Makerere, and which paralleled that of the Scots, another mountain people whose clans formed the fabric of stability of their existence in Great Britain.

At a much later date in 1970, my father and Karwemera were among a group of early historians, oral and literary, who were gathered together by Donald Denoon to write the first anthology of Kigezi history. To date, that book remains the ultimate reference to our history. Known as A History of Kigezi in SW Uganda, it was re-issued last year by Fountain Publishers complete with its errors of commission and omission. In it are contributions from a vast number of historians but none as versatile in the humanities’ fields of studies encompassing Kigezi as the late Festo Karwemera. Once, while I was teaching chemistry in China, I was astonished to meet through the internet an English man who had been conceived in Uganda but born in Britain. Later, I learned that his father had been Hugh Fraser, who was the District Commissioner of Kigezi District in the late 1950s. When Hugh Fraser Jr arrived in Kabale in the 2000s and asked people to direct him to anybody that might have known his father, he was sent off to see Mr Karwemera, who recalled his father as a former District Commissioner but whom he had not known. This was not a small or unimportant opportunity because our land is a mountain of personal colonial histories and Karwemera understood this as well. Any number of relations of former colonial families had a history in our land.

I remember Mr Karwemera, as we called him in childhood, in crisp, ironed white shirts, yellow cabled sweater vests, cardigans, khaki shorts, gartered stockings all of which I recall standing on a highly-polished base of light-brown shoes into which African legs were neatly stacked. Karwemera was then the epitome of a British African gentleman. In that era, this was not a show of accomplishment of wealth but an integral part of becoming educated not just in academic ways but in cultural ones as well. There was not a milligram of the shame that is associated with this mode of existence today. All was well with the British culture into which Uganda steeped as soon as John Hanning Speke arrived in Uganda in 1862.

I often saw Mr Karwemera in the company of people I knew as relations or friends of the family. Even though he was also a maternal uncle and highly prized by my mother as one of the eminently achieved and behaved men of her clan, our association with a number of families including Mr Karwemera’s was largely due to the fact that they had strengthened relationships through a missionary education. Some of the British missionaries in question here were elderly and still alive and active and others were young and had arrived years later to replace the elderly ones, who had introduced them to their Christian converts and students including Karwemera. Sober-eyed and moustachioed, Karwemera was one of the bright stars of African achievement. I often saw him near my school, Kigezi High School Primary, or The Lower School, where he would stop and greet me and ask about my parents’ whereabouts. Having attended Kigezi High School, where my father found him after his primary school Kihanga Boys’ School, there was a residual boyish sense of humour that he shared with my father but one that was also coloured by their affinity for cultural history and language.

Festo Karwemera was born in 1925 in Karubanda, Buhara. He was 95-years old at the time of his death in August 2020. He was educated at Muyebe Primary School, which was built by my maternal grandfather, Andereya Nduluma, whose nephew he was. Receiving an education eliminated participation in World War II, which had absorbed many a young man from his era in the then Kigezi District. Many of them, including Balintuma and Kyarabakabize, had been trained in Sril Lanka, then called Ceylon, and then fought against the Japanese in Burma, now Myanmar, where many were killed in action. Thus, education saved Karwemera and my father from military service. It is important to remember that there was an abundance of young men outside of school systems. Interest in scholarship was rare and many had not yet become accustomed to mental academic work. The military proposition was very attractive for many young men who were not assiduous in school. For Festo Karwemera, travelling to Kinyasano on foot was an important investment. The 78-kilometre (48-mile) journey, which was undertaken at the beginning of each term, was to allay the payment of 15 Ugandan shillings at Kigezi High School, which was an easy distance from home. Thus, he went to Kinyasano, another prominent school in Kigezi at the time but with an affordable invoice of Shillings 7 per term. Later, in 1944, Karwemera joined Nyakasura Vernacular Teacher Training College. His education there led him into the unique role he would play, with deepening interest, for the rest of his life. From 1946 to 1954, Mr Karwemera taught vernacular and English in Native Anglican Church (NAC) schools. After 8 years as a Vernacular Teacher, Karwemera attended the Bishop Tucker Teacher’s College in Mukono, Kampala to upgrade to the higher level of a Grade II Teacher Certificate.

After his completion of his course at Mukono, Karwemera was then posted to Kantare Primary School, where he taught from 1955 until 1959. He was made Assistant School Supervisor in Kigezi’s NAC schools at the beginning of the independence decade. He retained that position until he joined ActionAid, a British-based charity organisation. His conviction that the local languages would disappear, however, turned him into a writer. Karwemera was, at first, deeply involved in writing Lunyankole-Lukiga folktales and proverbs. A few years later, he became the ultimate authority on the cultures of Abakiga, Abanyarwanda (Abafumbira), Abahororo, Abachimbiri and Abatwa. He has also been famous for exceptional command of the genealogy of the families in Kigezi. His life’s work in local cultures and languages has led to recognition beyond Kigezi, national institutions. Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda Christian University and British Broadcasting Corporation. Professor Manuel Muranga of Kabale University, an authority in linguistics, reported at the funeral service in Kabale on 1 September that the name Katondoozi, the equivalent of dictionary, had been contributed by Festo Karwemera for the work written by a number of authors in Lunyankole-Lukiga.

Karwemera, who elevated the study of local language and culture above all others in our hills, died of advanced age on Sunday, 30 August 2020 at 4 a.m. at the Rugarama Hospital in Kabale. Departing at age 95, Karwemera was the last of the group of the earliest African students who transformed their lives from the hardship of subsistence farming to the challenges of schooling from which they issued forth as accomplished members of an incorruptible civil service from which Uganda first learned the service of a self-respecting country. That Karwemera was one of the earliest primary school teachers to gain a qualification from the respected Mukono institution means that he would have widespread outreach and influence on a vast number of children among the inhabitants of the District of Kigezi during the decade of his teaching.

Karwemera was one of those relations about whom no mean stories were ever told except those of harsh criticism of people who indulged in the unfortunate misuse and ill-educated application of our language. A witness to this testified at his funeral that he had called him a pagan for saying something wrong in his language. The service, held on 1 September 2020 on the football and athletics grounds of Kigezi High School Primary, was not lacking in hallmark Kabale peculiarities. Hope Kiggundu, a niece of Mr Karwemera now living in Zimbabwe, complained when the Master of Ceremonies announced that a tent erected at the site was reserved for VIPs. Ms Kiggundu took offence to the idea that some of the mourners would bear more titles of importance than others when they had all come to pay respects to the same person.

Personally, I took umbrage to that and the fact that a senior local government official was designated Chief Mourner! Who could mourn more than a man’s widow? These are neither features of our local history nor those of ancient or modern British society from which Kigezi derived much of the character of our ceremonial behaviour. Festo Karwemera would not have approved nor would he have felt honoured by the set of customs and traditions we made up and which consist of quirks in conduct we dreamt up in an imagination aping foreign diplomatic protocols. Much of what we see today in wedding and funeral ceremonies across Uganda is copied and pasted but it bears no relationship whatsoever with our historical background.

At the most personal festivities and funerals, for example, the Master of Ceremonies announces names of guests as they arrive. One’s wealth or political status determines their social status and honours that precede their names at weddings and funerals. It is shocking to me that people will be paraded to lay their wreaths on the caskets of the departed to display their splendour and esteem for the departed as a means of displaying their ostentation. A Member of Parliament, I am told, was taken seriously before he was a candidate because he made contributions to weddings and funerals in his prospective constituency. When he was trapped and caught taking a bribe after he had been elevated to a cabinet position, everybody understood that he was trying to claw back his lost contributions. People felt sorry for him because of the numerous occasions he had been present in the important events of their lives.

The Master of Ceremonies was heard to say that the President of Uganda himself did not come because of the global lockdown due to Covid-19 but could not have missed the occasion otherwise. When the President attends a funeral, his visit supersedes all ceremonies and the attention is drawn away from the departed to the President and his entourage. When he sends a speech to be read, that alone sucks attention to itself and is always accompanied by a substantial cash gift, which is received with requisite pomp and circumstance. Arriving dignitaries are often received with announcements that say, for example, “The Honourable Chairman!” “Honourable MP!” “His Grace the Archbishop!” “All protocols observed!” This last phrase, apparently, is the substitution for a further assault on honours and names of people who may not have been noted or known.

Such was the order even for the traditionalist Festo Karwemera. He could not possibly have sanctioned such conduct but, again, he could not have influenced it if he tried in anticipation of his own death. The Master of Ceremonies is always out to outdo all the potential rivals. It has come to my understanding that Masters of Ceremonies are very influential people and are often approached, beforehand, by men and women who harbour political ambitions to ask them to carry favour with their names at the ceremonies and announce them with the necessary gravitas. The invocation of the names of the President at Karwemera’s funeral was probably seen as an honour for the griot but it is important that we, as a society, should learn that the end of life be seen as the measure of a person’s life through his interaction with society rather than who sent messages and monetary contributions.

The inhabitants of the former Kigezi District were the only natural republicans before British colonialism dawned on our land in 1911. Words from the French motto, “liberté, égalité, fraternité” would have been an intuitive path for inhabitants of Kigezi at the time. Or, indeed, the British maxim, “An Englishman’s home is his castle” would have worked handsomely for us in our hills. This purposeful private social pursuit, however, was replaced by a more community-based colonial structure in which one was asked to pay taxes through community labour by digging roads where cow-paths had been. In giving up our republicanism and ancient traditions, what we gained was not small.

Pre-Independence British and post-Independence Ugandan Civil Service, in which Mr Karwemera’s generation served and then saw dissipated during African “Home Rule” led by such men as Idi Amin lost us good governance, which was, in fact, the basis of a Middle Class even in Britain and the Commonwealth. This was the ultimate quid pro quo between the British Crown and cogs of men and women in the machinery that oiled the progressive success of the Empire. Later, of course, African leaders played their part in dispensing with working institutional instruments to render government a more pliable and corrupt machinery. Karwemera was certainly was not happy with the environment that encouraged corruption but he, like many, accepted that change had occurred in our land and had to be accepted. At his daughter’s funeral service 3 years ago — the fifth loss of a child for the family — one was given to understand that longevity accrued from the acceptance of inevitable circumstances.

In his collection of simple but elegant houses on a historically prime real estate that he and his wife acquired before Kabale had grown to its present size and importance, one can discern the classic values of a man who placed mental satisfaction above the shallow pursuits that characterise the nature of most Ugandans. Mr Karwemera and others, particularly if they played no role in keeping the President and his ruling party praised as heroes of war and economic development, would not have been able to gain their pensions. In their death, however, they received substantial lump sums that did not equal the worth and utility of their pensions while they lived. I had a personal conversation with him soon after my father’s death in 2014 and he told me how hard he had worked to try and obtain his teaching pension but to no avail after he heard of my father’s hardship and inability to gain access to his pension. Both had, of course, served their countries since colonial rule, during which time their pensions were first calculated, so their livelihood should have been handsome but for the corruption that seeped into the seams of government. I wondered how it was that, in the aftermath of past lawless governments of the past, the present one had found it inconvenient to merit the worthy contributions of its most deserving citizens. It is unconscionable that nobody thought it important to stoop low to be of use to a gem of a former Civil Servant who was an African pioneer across many fields. The President and a team of linguists seem to have consulted him for his knowledge of language but they were to remain aloof on the issue of his welfare.

For many years, Mr Karwemera researched and wrote books about the culture of a people known as Abakiga but his knowledge was not limited to them. All the cultures and languages of the inhaibtants of the former Kigezi District, including Abachimbiri, Abanyarwanda (Abafumbira), Abahororo and Abatwa were covered in the studies of all cultural groups related to Abakiga. Karwemera researched, learned and retained data pertaining to generations upon generations of people in Kigezi and recite it over and over at weddings and other functions for everybody to hear. He was the ultimate recitative poet, putting forth a wealth of spoken oratorio not merely for cultural pride but an eternity of self-respect. For him, respect was widespread throughout Kigezi as early as the 1960s but, in time, he gained international fame through the BBC World Service.

In my visits home to see my father from England, I often called on him. Whenever he saw me, the subject that immediately visited his mind was the wonderful time he had with my father Kigezi High School. This was interesting for me not least because his daughters and a niece were my classmates at The Lower School, on whose grounds his funeral service was later held, 10 metres across the road from his sprawling home. In awe of his gifts and keen to follow his example and my mother’s advice, I wrote my book, A Grammatical Study of Lunyankole-Lukiga. It is important that we, alone or in groups, continue to learn from him. To that end, I recall buying all his books in one of my visits to Kabale. Particular mention is made in my book of the vocabulary we adopted from other languages, including such a word as esafuriya, which comes to Lukiga from Swahili’s sufuria and means saucepan.

Kabale University, a relatively new institution in Uganda, benefitted in large measure from Karwemera’s work and awarded him an honoris causa doctorate of letters for his service, recognising his work as having deserved such special mention. The Covid-19 conditions meant that we were unable to give Mr Karwemera the broad spectrum of deserved honours but there is no tongue in the sons and daughters of Kigezi that is not still wagging about the huge contributions he made. In Heaven, the influences of the hills of Kigezi will be making a profound sound with their vibrant proverbs and stories with our gentleman scholar, who was comfortable in hides and tweed.

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