After the death of King Oyo Nyimba at 34, a potentially sour succession struggle looks set to turn his Tooro Kingdom into turmoil.
A feud broke out when the royal Babiito clan’s succession chose his cousin, Prince Edward Kijanangoma Rukidi, to take over the crown as Edward Rukidi Nyabongo I.
King Oyo’s family and a royal faction strongly opposed the announcement. Queen Mother Best Kemigisa called it an illegal usurpation, insisting the throne should go to Oyo’s alleged secret biological son designated in the late monarch’s written Will, which the pro-Kijanangoma Rukidi supporters claim is a forgery.
Intervening in the dust-up, the Ugandan government declared the throne in legal limbo. Justice Minister Norbert Mao said the succession is not complete until a king is officially gazetted, while Attorney General Sam Mayanja advised that King Oyo’s Will must legally guide the process.
Right now, Tooro is in a fix.
For us commoners, all we can do is sift through old history to try to see how this might end.
First stop is “Sundiata”, a great West African epic from Mali. It was passed down by griots (professional oral historians) for nearly 800 years before the Guinean writer Djibril Tamsir Niane recorded and published a written version in 1960.A king has a son, Sundiata, who is sickly and cannot even walk as a small boy.
Everyone laughs at him. When the king dies, another wife’s son takes the throne instead, and Sundiata and his mother are sent away in shame. But Sundiata becomes strong in exile. He returns years later, defeats the cruel king who has taken over, and becomes one of Africa’s greatest rulers.
Sundiata shows that the ‘obviou” heir isn’t always the right one, and that people written off too early sometimes come back to prove everyone wrong. Tooro doesn’t have a ‘weak child’ being underestimated. It has a ‘hidden child’. But the lesson remains: don’t crown someone just because it’s convenient, and don’t dismiss a claim just because it’s inconvenient.
The next is the glorious Ethiopia’s royal story, “The Glory of Kings”. It was compiled by Ethiopian scholars and church scribes around the 1300s. King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba have a son together, Menelik, born far from Solomon’s palace.
Solomon does not see him grow up. Years later, Menelik goes to Jerusalem to claim he is the king’s son. He has to prove it; through signs, through his mother’s testimony, through the resemblance people see in him. Only then is he accepted, and becomes the ancestor of a whole dynasty.
This is partly Tooro’s dilemma: A king. A hidden child. A mother who has to be believed. In Kebra Nagast, the story ends in the son’s favour because he can finally show himself. Tooro’s unknown ‘prince’ hasn’t done that yet (as of Monday of writing this). Until he does, this story is open, unfinished, still to be resolved.
We leave Africa and land on Life Is a Dream, the old 17th-Century Spanish play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, first published in 1636. A king named Basilio hears a prophecy that his son will grow up to be a cruel tyrant, so he locks the boy away at birth and tells no one.
Years later, he tests his son by drugging and freeing him for one day. The son behaves badly, throwing a servant through a window, so Basilio puts him back to sleep and tells him it was all a dream.
The people revolt, and eventually the son is freed for good, and having learned self-control, becomes a wise king after all.
This play isn’t about a hidden child exactly. It’s about a bigger question: who gets to decide, in advance, that someone deserves the throne or not?
Finally is the English play, The Coronation, written by James Shirley (who might be more familiar to Ugandan literature buffs) around 1635. A kingdom is run by a regent while the true queen is still young. It turns out the old king hid two baby sons years earlier, scared the regent would kill them to get power himself. One hidden prince is found and accepted.
Furious, the regent tries to fake the identity of the second missing prince, using a nobleman who simply looks like the old king. The trick almost works until witnesses step forward and expose the truth.
This is Tooro’s story almost scene for scene: a committee moving fast to install their choice, a family countering with a hidden heir, and everyone waiting to see who the trusted witnesses will believe.
Which story will be Tooro’s fate?
Right now, it’s living all four at once: the doubted heir, the unproven son, the committee playing judge, and the standoff over who’s real and who’s convenient. The only part still unsettled is the ending.