Najib Nsubuga Ssekikubo confesses that a wetland is more than a waterbody. When it is destroyed, Nsubuga adds, he feels a personal loss. This should not come as a surprise if anything because Nsubuga belongs to the Mamba clan, associated with the lungfish whose habitat is water.
The lungfish and the wetland is part of a much older idea in Buganda where clans are associated with animals, plants, fish and insects as totems which are traditionally protected. If one belongs to the lungfish or any totem, they do not eat and are expected to protect and preserve it. As such, Nsubuga argues that if such a rule or idea is followed, culture becomes environmental conservation since in protecting the totem, people will think of its habitat.
‘If we follow our clans to the book, we’ll preserve our biodiversity,’ he says, underlining the crust of Buganda’s heritage. He notes that forefathers looked for what sits underneath the obvious.
In his career as a lecturer of journalism and communication, Nsubuga observes that cultural research and kingdom responsibilities in cultural research and heritage, and eventually leadership of the Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board, continue to open his eyes and mind to new knowledge. Small wonder, when we meet in the Kampala suburb of Kasubi, Nsubuga opts to have luwombo for lunch.
Full of questions
When the luwombo arrives, Nsubuga is in the midst of telling about his quest for knowledge. Much of the knowledge he is looking for is not written down, so he has had to turn to elders. As such, Nsubuga believes young people interested in understanding their culture must spend time with older people because elders carry knowledge that may not be found in books. And beyond getting information, he seeks to understand the reasoning behind the traditions.
‘When you eventually know why they did what they did, you can understand why we must protect and conserve it,’ the history enthusiast explains as the unfurling of the matooke banana leaves gives off steam.
That question, why?, runs through his understanding of Buganda. A clan, for instance, is more than an identity. He describes it as a network of relationships. He also explains that a member of your clan can be regarded as a brother or sister. Likewise, your mother’s clan creates another relationship, while marriage connects still more families.
Traditionally, a Muganda does not marry within his or her own clan, or the mother’s clan. The restrictions, he says, also helped spread relationships across communities.
‘You keep creating links that strengthen unity amongst the people,’ he says before digging into the luwombo.
The clan system also carried responsibilities, Nsubuga discloses after shooting a look that is suggestive that the luwombo is tickling his taste buds. He points to the fact that different clans have particular roles, including crafts and duties within the kingdom, citing that during the construction and restoration of traditional royal houses like the Kasubi Royal Tombs, for example, different clans and lineages handle specific tasks, from roofing and decoration to rituals.
Getting it right
Nsubuga recalls one occasion when a task had to be repeated because the right clan had performed it, but the people involved were not from the particular lineage expected to do it. To someone looking only at the finished building, that may seem like a small distinction but to a cultural enthusiast like him, it is the heritage. The building and knowledge surrounding it are separate.
The same thinking applies to barkcloth. How did earlier generations discover that bark from a tree could become cloth? Nsubuga says that the question opens a window into indigenous knowledge and ingenuity. He says Buganda once lost some of its pride in barkcloth, although it had long been part of its cultural heritage. Today, artists are finding new uses for it. A piece worth about Shs100,000, he says, can be transformed through painting into artwork worth several million shillings.
Again, he sees the connection, from how a tree becomes bark and a cloth and then becomes art. In turn, heritage becomes a possible livelihood. That way of thinking has shaped his work at the Buganda Heritage and Tourism Board, established in 2015 to bring heritage and tourism together. The argument is that people are more likely to preserve traditions when they also see their value. Nsubuga’s tourism thinking therefore begins with things many Ugandans overlook.
Take jackfruit. For a Ugandan, a jackfruit tree may barely attract attention which is different for a visitor encountering the fruit for the first time. When they pick it fresh from a tree, and open it and taste it, that becomes an experience. The same applies to food, farming and craft. Nsubuga commends that a visitor should not only eat matooke but also see where it is grown and learn how it is prepared. Likewise, they should not only buy barkcloth but be allowed the opportunity to meet the people who make it.
‘Culture is unmatched’
To that end, he advocates for a homestay experience where a tourist is able to go to the garden or a small workshop in the community where a visitor is taught how a traditional craft is made.
The board has been exploring cultural villages and community-based experiences built around such possibilities. Nsubuga emphasises that culture offers Uganda something wildlife cannot always provide, noting that animals can be found elsewhere in the region but particular traditions of a people cannot simply be copied.
‘Culture is the unique thing that any community can sell that no one else can sell,’ he says.
Yet turning culture into tourism carries its own danger. For instance, a ceremony altered too much for tourists can eventually stop being the experience it claims to represent. That is why Nsubuga keeps returning to understanding, arguing that one cannot properly market what they do not understand.
Similarly, people cannot preserve what they no longer value. Nsubuga recalls travelling on a bus with a family spanning three generations, a grandmother, her daughter and children. The children did not understand their grandmother’s mother tongue. To communicate, the middle generation had to translate. Grandmother spoke, then her daughter translated and the children replied. The mother translated again. Nsubuga saw more than a language barrier.
‘We are losing ourselves,’ he says, his luwombo reducing in size ever so fast.
The traditional fireplace
The experience brought into focus what Nsubuga had been discovering through his work with elders. Some traditions survive because people continue to practise them while others survive because someone remembers the meaning behind them. But memory has limits. When an elder dies, a language fades. In that scenario, a child grows up knowing a clan name but not what it means. Also, a ceremony remains on the calendar while the reasoning behind it disappears.
This is where Nsubuga’s old profession meets his new one. He believes the traditional fireplace has changed. Children spend long periods away at school and parents are busy.
In the end, families have less time for the conversations through which cultural knowledge once travelled. But young people have not disappeared. They have moved to digital spaces.
‘The modern fireplace is the media,’ he says.
Heritage, therefore, must go where young people are. Stories about clans, food, barkcloth, ceremonies and traditional knowledge need to be told through radio, television and digital platforms.
‘If we think we’ll get them at the traditional fireplace, we are lying to ourselves,’ he says.
There is something fitting about Nsubuga carrying that message. He began as a communications teacher. Curiosity took him into cultural research. Kingdom service took him to elders, and the elders led him deeper into a heritage held not only in monuments, but in people, relationships and the natural world.
Now, through his work in heritage and tourism, he is trying to make those connections visible to others. The lungfish is a fish but for him, it is also a clan identity, a wetland and a reason to care for what surrounds it. The same can be said of the luwombo, which he has finished eating. It can be deconstructed.
Perhaps that is the larger lesson buried in Buganda’s traditions. The past was not always divided into neat categories called culture, family and environment. For those who understood how the pieces fitted together, they were part of the same story.