Fear came first for Augustine Kasansula, who had just fouled Oyo during a football game at The Aga Khan Primary School in Kampala. The fall was hard, the young king was visibly angry, and, to Kasansula, physically bigger than him. When Oyo took off in pursuit, Augustine ran. He remembers being genuinely afraid of what would happen if Oyo caught him. Then Oyo caught up with him. What followed was the last thing Kasansula expected. Instead of hitting him, the angry boy wrapped his arms around him and hugged him. The quarrel ended in the duo making peace.
Nearly two decades later, it is that embrace, more than the chase, that Kasansula remembers. It is also a fitting doorway into the childhood of Omukama Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, who died on August 27, aged 34, after more than three decades on the Tooro throne. To many Ugandans, Oyo was the child king who became an institution. To the pupils who shared his classroom at The Aga Khan Primary School, he was simply a schoolmate called Oyo.
‘We just knew him as Oyo’
Kasansula, now an accounting officer with a manufacturing company, joined The Aga Khan School in Primary Two in 1999, the same year Oyo joined the school, and was in the same class. At that age, neither he nor his classmates understood what it meant to have a king among them. Oyo attended lessons, played with them and joined the ordinary rhythm of school life. His status existed, but for young children, it remained an idea they were too young to process.
Primary Four changed that. During a school cultural day, where everyone had to dress in their cultural attire, Oyo appeared in full royal regalia for a photoshoot. The sight gave the pupils a reference point. They were now old enough to reconcile the title with the boy sitting beside them.
‘It was only in Primary Four that it became quite clear to us that he was a king,’ Kasansula told the Weekend Monitor.
Once they knew, details that had been invisible became noticeable. There were private guards stationed around the school, although discreetly away from the main grounds. Oyo also received special meals brought exclusively by his family. He ate from a car with people entrusted with his care rather than joining the other pupils in the ordinary lunch routine.
Yet those arrangements did not turn him into a distant figure. His classmates still called him Oyo. He did everything with them. Kasansula remembers that Oyo would hurry through his special lunch because he wanted to return to playing. Sometimes he invited friends to eat with him so they could finish quickly and get back to the playground.
‘He was really a normal pupil like most of us,’ Kasansula says.
Football was his particular passion. On the pitch, the royal distinction disappeared.
Oyo later left The Aga Khan midway through Primary Six for Kabira International School. He subsequently continued his education abroad, and the two never re-established direct contact.
The king’s campaign manager
Marylin Achola, a tax officer at Uganda Revenue Authority, arrived at The Aga Khan in Primary Four. She encountered Oyo as a classmate at a time when his royal identity was becoming better understood among pupils. Her most vivid memory is a school election. Their class teacher, Ms Irene Ntambi Nabossa, selected a team to help Oyo campaign for health prefect. Achola was appointed campaign manager, with the task of seeking support across different classes. The campaign had an obvious selling point: Oyo was a king.
‘My role was to get support for him from all classes,’ she says.
‘It was easier to sell him because he was a king of an entire kingdom.’
The royal family was also visible within the school. Oyo had blood relatives in other classes, including his elder sister, Princess Ruth Komuntale, who was two classes above them.
Oyo won the election. For Achola, his victory had an unexpected effect. She was inspired to contest for the same position the following year and won it herself.
Like Kasansula, Achola lost direct contact with Oyo after he left the school. A mutual friend, who moved with him to Kabira, remained closer and occasionally passed news about their former schoolmate through class social networking platforms.
The boy they had known was increasingly becoming a public figure whose position made ordinary communication difficult.
The teacher entrusted with him
For Ms Ntambi, the connection began with an instruction. Then headteacher David Ogaja introduced Oyo to her and made it clear that, as his Primary Four class teacher, she was to handle and monitor the young king closely. He was her responsibility. That responsibility brought her into contact with Oyo’s mother, Queen Mother Best Kemigisa, and other close relatives.
There was regular communication, with Ntambi checking on Oyo and family members checking with her about him. But inside the classroom, her first impression was of a child. She remembers him as lovely, peaceful and lively, and as an unusually inquisitive pupil. During open discussions, his hand was almost always up. He wanted to ask questions and was equally eager to answer them.
English was one of his strongest subjects, and it gave Ntambi another window into his personality. She taught him English and encouraged his interest in reading news during school assembly. He repeatedly volunteered to do it.
‘He loved the English Language,’ Ntambi recalls.
King Oyo read swiftly, paused in the right places and used intonation. He had an accent, she says, but read perfectly well. Ntambi also witnessed the moment his classmates began changing how they addressed him.
After the cultural day, and as pupils learnt more about him as the world’s youngest king, some began calling him King Oyo.
He was uncomfortable. He would tell them that his name was Oyo.
‘Don’t call me King Oyo, my name is Oyo,’ he always reminded classmates.
For Ntambi, this captured the central challenge of teaching him, as the school had to respect the king without overwhelming the child.
He could not simply be placed in ordinary food queues, so his meals were brought separately, while security was handled discreetly.
But the school also had to leave him room to play, learn and make friends without constantly reminding him that he was different.
‘We had an obligation of treating him as a king with respect but also allowing him room to be a normal pupil,’ Ntambi says.
Ntambi believes they struck that balance. The three accounts converge on a portrait of childhood. After he left The Aga Khan, those everyday connections became memories as the schoolmate grew into adulthood. But the intimacy of those early years remained.
Ntambi, who now lives in the United Kingdom, continued to follow Oyo’s progress after he moved to Kabira.
Her friendship with Best Kemigisa also endured.
‘To the point of his death, I looked at him as my very own son,’ she says.
‘He was an innocent child; we just helped him mature into a responsible leader.’
As Tooro prepares to lay its king to rest on September 12, the history of his reign will dominate the public farewell. But there is another history, quieter and less ceremonial, held by the people who knew him before they fully understood his crown.
That is the child that his former classmates still remember.