Uccelli [née Pazzini], Carolina Uccellini, Marco

III. Buganda

The kingdom of Buganda, on the northern shore of Lake Victoria and to the west of the Nile, was settled at an early date by independent clans of unknown origin. Other clans arrived later to form one nation, a conglomerate of 38 clans under the rule of the kabaka (king). Much of Buganda's musical history is embedded in the oral traditions that record the contributions of the clans to the musical life of the nation. The kingship was interrupted with the coup of 1966 when Muteesa II fled into exile, later dying in London. When the monarchy was reintroduced and Muteesa's heir, Ronald Mutebi (b 1955), was installed as 36th kabaka in 1993, the royal mujaguzo drums were sounded again at his coronation, but in the intervening years many of the former palace musicians had become very old or had died. A ‘cultural village’ has been created adjacent to one of the royal residences, where such traditional musical ensembles as are discussed below might flourish again, but too short a time has elapsed to assess the chances for success of such a revival.

1. Instruments.

Instrumentalists at the court are under the charge of two hereditary chieftainships, Kawuula and Kimomomera, whose main concern is the royal drums. Next to the royal drummers, the trumpeters were the most conspicuous. They took turns (ebisanja) to serve at the palace for periods of four to six weeks in the year. The amakondeere (trumpets) are made of bottle-shaped gourds and are side-blown. They form an ensemble of at least five instruments played in hocket, each instrument being named according to its position within the pentatonic system to which the set is tuned.

The trumpeters lived on the kabaka's land; a settlement of trumpeters was known as the ekyalo ky 'abakondeere (‘trumpeters' village’). It is believed that the amakondeere came from the east because of their association with the Mmamba (Lungfish) clan, who claimed to have come west across Lake Victoria. Another trumpet set, amagwara, was obtained from one of the neighbouring Bunyoro counties conquered in the 19th century. It was played at the palace on rare occasions and is an example of the accretion of a musical style in the wake of conquest. Certain important chiefs in the past were entitled to trumpet music at their homes. Few members of the former trumpet bands appear to have survived the interregnum period.

The same is true of the former players of the kabaka's ekibiina ky'abalere, a set of five or six notched flutes (endere) played with a quartet of drums (see fig. 2 below). Although it was less prestigious than the trumpet-sets, it still constituted a court ensemble. The akadinda, a large xylophone with up to 22 free keys (see Xylophone, fig.5), was the exclusive instrument of the kabaka. While few specimens are extant, the two villages from which the king's akadinda players were recruited continued to maintain and teach the royal repertory throughout the interregnum. The amadinda or entaala, a xylophone with 12 free keys, was widely played in the homes of important and well-to-do Ganda, and its popularity in school music programmes ensured the continuity of this tradition. As in the case of the akadinda, in the 1990s the previous kabaka's amadinda players and younger kinsmen still practised the repertory in their villages.

The entenga (drum-chime) rose to great social heights within two centuries. First played as a spectacle for country people, later providing entertainment for the priest of an influential spirit cult, it eventually found favour with a kabaka. It became part of the court ensemble to which several refinements were added, and was held in great esteem. When a kabaka wished to favour a chief publicly, he sent entenga to play for him. From the 1950s entenga were made and played at one of the country’s leading high schools, a sure sign that, as regalia, the drum-chime did not rank as highly as certain royal drums.

The music of the court is inseparable from the music of the Ganda people. An example of this may be seen in the role of the omulanga (harpist) who, besides satisfying the musical aspirations of all the community, also held a privileged position at court; he was the only performer who played in the quarters of the king's wives, and his relationship with his lord was as close as that of David and King Saul. Since the beginning of the 20th century there have been few harpists, a mere handful in a nation of some two million people.

Consort music is so important in Buganda that even eng'ombe, the individually made and owned animal-horn trumpets of the hunters, are often sounded together. Like the amakondeere and amagwara, the eng'ombe are side-blown; each has a small hole in the tip which when stopped yields a grace note less than a minor 3rd below the open note, an interval of critical importance in the speech of the Ganda. Unlike the trumpets used in proper sets, eng'ombe are not tuned in relation to each other. Because the hunters rely on horn-calls for coordinating the practical and ritual steps necessary for a successful hunt, the calls tend to follow in fixed sequences; in this sense the horns perform in consort and their sounds acquire ‘musical’ coherence.

In the 18th century Buganda turned its attention to the east bank of the Nile, which resulted in an influx of music from Busoga. A striking example of such borrowing against a background of political supremacy occurred in the second half of the 19th century, when the ntongooli (bowl lyre) of Busoga first attracted attention at the kabaka's court – where, initially, ntongooli players were a distinct group of Soga entertainers – and in time became a popular favourite under the name endongo. Despite their whole-hearted adoption of the instrument, the Ganda still apply the epithet eya Soga (‘of the Soga’) to the endongo. When harp playing became an esoteric art in Buganda, the bowl lyre predominated because it was free from the ties of tradition and in no way diminished the prestige of the harp.

From the beginning of the 20th century migratory labourers have come from abroad in large numbers, bringing their music with them. The most important instrument introduced in this migration, the box-resonated lamellophone, reached Buganda in two different forms, one from Rwanda and Burundi in the south-west and the other from the Alur in the far north-west, by way of Busoga. Labourers from the south-west also brought the gourd bow with tuning-noose, but it has not become established. Although the lamellophone is popular in Buganda, it is rarely played by the Ganda themselves but by immigrants who constitute half the population of some villages.

In 1906–7, a young musician, Eriya Kafero of Mityana, created the endingidi, a single-string tube fiddle that is the only Ganda bowed instrument. The invention was probably inspired by both the indigenous sekitulege (ground bow), a child's string instrument, and the foreign rebab, which was played by Arab travellers from the east coast of Africa introducing to Kafero the technique of bowing. Circumstances favoured the endingidi; like the bowl lyre, it was free from traditional ties and was used to accompany topical poetry. With the endongo it is still favoured by wedding musicians.

Social occasions are often marked by the use of a particular instrument or ensemble. Thus traditional wrestling matches require drumming on the engalabi, a tall, single-headed drum with an exterior profile reminiscent of an ancient cannon (fig.2). The monitor lizard-skin head, struck with bare hands, gives a crisp note. Spectators participate with long choral ostinatos at a remarkably slow tempo for Ganda music. The engalabi is also indispensable to the funeral rites during the stage at which the clan elders appoint a successor to the deceased; to attend the ceremony is okugenda mu ngalabi (‘to go where the ngalabi is’). This drum was of minor importance at the palace compared with the embuutu, a kettledrum with a wooden shell either in the form of an egg truncated at both ends (fig.3) or in a combined cylindrical and conical form, with a sharply angled profile where the lower conical section meets the upper cylindrical section.

Music for the baakisimba, the best-known Ganda traditional dance, at one time required a trio of two embuutu and an engalabi (figs.2–3), but during the 1980s extra embuutu drums were included in the ensemble as a drumming style from the Kooki tribe in south-western Buganda became popular among the semi-professional groups of drummers and dancers. Wedding feasts call for an ensemble in which the embuutu plays a major part. The ensemble, embaga, literally ‘the wedding feast’, consists of a bowl lyre, one or two spike tube bowed lutes, one or two notched flutes and an embuutu. The embuutu is also used for drumming emizira (clan slogans), phrases that name a clan ancestor or hero and recall important events in that clan's history.

Drum names can be confusing. For instance, musicians usually call certain embuutu drums baakisimba because of the role they play in that dance. A drum may have a proper name as if it were a person (virtually the rule for drums in the palace); others have names derived from their use at certain functions or their part in a certain ensemble; alternatively, they may be called by a generic term that identifies them by type. The word eng'oma (Ngoma) means ‘drum’, ‘feast’ or ‘dance’ in Ganda, as in many other Bantu languages.

2. Form.

The solo-chorus or antiphonal form, ubiquitous in Africa, is also practised in Buganda. Choral responses are disciplined and at times accompanied by hand-clapping. Instrumental music in several parts predominates, and the successive entry of parts is characteristic. Parts interlock like fingers of folded hands, and the only interval that is struck simultaneously is the octave. These features have been studied extensively in xylophone music, which is especially rewarding because it also demonstrates practices such as octave transposition and the existence of the miko, a modal system. Data on miko were first published by Kyagambiddwa (1955) and later studied by Lois Anderson (1968).

Luganda is a tonal language, and musicians claim that the tonal and accentual profile of the language determines the shape of the chanting. However, it is the poetry of the song texts that is of supreme importance; listeners attend to the words rather than to any other feature. In this sense it is justifiable to speak of parameters other than poetry as accompaniment. The text line is the unit of the song, each line usually of four and a half to five seconds' duration. People refer to a particular song by its opening line or lines, many of which are familiar to most Ganda. The performer's task consists of elaborating on the imagery in those lines; he executes his elaborations on different tonal frames, rather like vocal registers, thus producing complex and formal musical and poetic schemes. The manner in which these changes are applied can make the difference between an inspired and a pedestrian performance.

Poetic creation and the use of different tone levels is essentially improvisatory; the singer may use many stock phrases and exclamations to achieve continuity and to mark climaxes. The improvisation of a performer may be repeated on another occasion and eventually become a song in its own right. The various aspects of improvisation, especially those that lead to the creation of a new song, are termed ekisoko, a concept difficult to translate into a Western language. Ganda historians record the political and social circumstances out of which an ekisoko has sprung, even though it be centuries ago, and quote the model for the new ekisoko.

Patterns of accompaniment are likely to be rigidly fixed. It is impossible to say how conservative these patterns are and for how long they have remained intact; however, one has been recorded as having remained stable for over 25 years, and this single case may well be representative of most music in Buganda and may be valid for a much longer period. The music lends itself to notation in 3/8 or 6/8, but Kyagambiddwa has also published several transcriptions in 5/8. He believed that heroic songs of the past were sung in 4/4, a pattern he called biggu (‘witch-doctor's rattles’). The melodies are pentatonic, probably of the pen-equidistant variety, which tends to adapt to Western diatonic tuning. A study of xylophone and harp tuning processes provides an insight into the tunings themselves (Wachsmann, 1967; Cooke, 1992).

Uganda