On Friday, as the country cast its attention to Entebbe International Airport bracing for the sobering moment when the casket of the deceased Omukama (King) of Tooro, Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV would emerge, many empathized with the bereaved Queen Mother Best Kemigisa. But even with the universal grief that the entire nation shared, no person levelled with Best Kemigisa’s sense of loss like 90-year-old Princess Elizabeth Edith Christobel Bagaaya Akiiki of Tooro.
Tooro’s mornach considered the world’s youngest traditional mornach passed away on August 27 at the age of 34, while receiving medical treatment for cancer in the United States.
Few people have lived long enough to endure the turbulent times that dot Tooro Kingdom’s history let alone the sacrifice that comes with being a Royal.
Princess Bagaaya was alive (at age 29) when she lost her father, Omukama George Mathew David Kamurasi Rukidi III. She was there in September of 1967 when Prime Minister Milton Obote abolished all traditional kingdoms in Uganda by constitutional decree. Engulfed by fear that what had happened to Kabaka Mutesa II of Buganda Kingdom in April of the same year when Obote’s forces stormed the Lubiri in Mengo, could reoccur in Tooro, Princess Bagaya’s brother – Patrick David Matthew Kaboyo Olimi III – who was the Omukama of Tooro fled to neighbouring Kenya to continue with his studies.
Bagaaya witnessed the short-lived (two years) reign of Omukama Kaboyo, following the restoration of kingdoms in 1993, that was cut short by his sudden death.
A photo of the Queen Mother captured on the tarmac at the airport shortly after the arrival of Omukama Oyo’s casket, quickly went viral on the internet. The virality had much to do with how much the photo which shows a distressed Best Kemigisa experiencing overwhelming emotion reinforced by a downward-turned gaze, accurately summed up the mood of the entire nation.
Photos that followed also showed Princess Bagaya seated side by side with the Queen Mother in what seemed like a fitting attempt to absorb the emotion that weighed on the mother who has so far lost two children to cancer. In the unmissable absense of the Firstlady (who herself has battled illness for months) whose natural role is national comforter in times of crisis, there was no better person to stand with Best Kemigisa than Bagaaya.
Born a royal herself in 1936 in Kabarole, Princess Bagaaya has witnessed the demise of three monarchs of Tooro kingdom in her lifetime. Three years after she had graduated from Cambridge University in London with a law degree and was called to the bar (to legally practice law in the U.K), Bagaaya received the tragic news that her father (then reigning Omukama) had died.
“My father had increasingly been depressed by the way the British (colonial administration) had imposed their will on his kingdom. They had restricted our ability to make our own wealth and they were wholesale cutting off the wealth of our kingdom,” Princess Bagaya said in June while appearing on a podcast dubbed Women And Resistance.
“My father had determined that he would never go into exile again and that he would go out on his own terms. The last time I saw him, I said ‘I think you are dying’, and he said ‘How would you know?’ And I said ‘All the time I have spent with you, I know you well’,” she adds.
On March 2, 1966, Patrick David Matthew Kaboyo Olimi III was coronated as the 12th Omukama of Tooro and by extension in accordance with the Tooro traditions, Bagaaya was bestowed upon the title of Batebe (Princess Royal), the most powerful woman in the Tooro kingdom. Her role would be principal advisor to the King.
As Fort Portal town buzzed with cheer and celebration, Bagaaya was in fact seated right next to the new King in the 1965 Cadillac DeVille Convertible that chauffeured them to and from St. John’s Cathedral Kabarole where the coronation ceremony took place.
Twenty-two years later, loss would strike again, this time claiming Bagaaya’s husband.
“I have outlived so much but nothing prepared me for the loss of my love,” she says, recounting the demise of her husband.
Prince Wilberforce Nyabongo, an aviation engineer, and Bagaaya met in London while she was in exile in 1988, and the two fell in love. Later that year, he died in a plane crash.
“He was 18 years younger than I was. I felt love, I felt joy and I fell with my heart. I brushed his hair daily, I washed his feet with warm water, I massaged his body. And I was a Princess, a Barrister, a Minister, an international figure, a model. I did this for the man I loved. Both things entirely true,” she said on the podcast.
The loss of her husband set her on a new course to pursue charity and writing.
When President Yoweri Museveni took over power in 1986, Omukama Kaboyo Olimi III returned to Uganda from Kenya where he had been exiled, he entered the Ugandan Foreign Service, serving as a Minister-Counselor at the Ugandan High Commission in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, between 1987 and 1990. It was during this period that he married Best Kemigisa, daughter of Prince Mujungu from Bundibugyo district.
Kaboyo had been on duty in Cuba where he served as Uganda’s Ambassador when in 1992 Kemigisa gave birth to their first son, Oyo Nyimba at Nsambya hospital in Kampala. The following year, when President Museveni restored traditional kingdoms, Kaboyo returned to Tooro where he regained his crown as Omukama.
Bagaaya would still feature in the inner ring when Kaboyo and President Museveni arrived at St. John’s Cathedral Kabarole on July 24 1993, for the ceremony to restore him as the Omukama. Kaboyo’s premature death in 1995 handed Baagaya a new role of regent to the 3-year-old Oyo Nyimba who had succeeded his father as the Omukama.
Throughout the 31 years that Oyo ruled Tooro, Bagaaya has been steadfast, offering counsel in the numerous storms that the reign has withered, key among them, the episodes that saw sections of the Babiito (ruling) clan challenge the legitimacy of the King. On May 17, 1998, Princess Bagaaya assumed control of the Karuzika Palace following the forcible entry by a faction of the Babiito royal clan. The palace had been under lock and key since Omukama Oyo and the Queen Mother, Best Kemigisa were out of the country.
Beyond personal loss owing to her royalty, Bagaaya’s resilience is a summation of the intricacies that she has had to manoeuvre in her broader service to country, the most trying of them all being her dicey relationship with former President Idi Amin which almost cost her her hard-earned reputation. On return to Uganda from exile having fled Milton Obote’s regime, Bagaaya was appointed by Idi Amin as Uganda’s Foreign Minister in 1974. A notable win for women in Uganda by all measure, the appointment, it would quickly become vivid for 38-year-old Bagaaya, was a snare. The President’s motive would be exposed by Amin’s repeated advances to her (Amin wanted Bagaaya to be his wife) which she repeatedly declined.
“Idi Amin made his most calculated move of all. He appointed me his foreign affairs minister – the first woman in Uganda’s history to hold a cabinet post. That was not generosity. That was a trap. He seemed to feel responsible for my personal achievements and that marrying me would be a way of increasing his stature,” Bagaaya has said previously.
“He thought that appointing me would make me grateful and that this office would make me compliant. He did not know me.”
In October of 1974, Bagaaya led a delegation to the 29th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York during which she electrified the Assembly with a speech highly critical of the Weest. She defended Amin’s decision to expel the Asians emphasizinf Ugand’as right to exercise sovereignty over its own resources and economy.
Ten months into her appointment, Amin fired her after accusing her of engaging in sex with a white man in a public toilet at an airport in France.
“Having still rebuffed Idi Amin, he launched a smear campaign. He told the world on public radio without shame, that I Princess Elizabeth who had just addressed the United Nations General Assembly, had had sex with a Frenchman at Orly Airport. The oldest slander – take a woman’s body and destroy her credibility.”
Amin ordered Bagaaya’s arrest and she was taken to the State Research Bureau in Kampala, arguably the most feared address in Uganda at the time due to the infamous extrajudicial murders that were associated with it.
“They tortured me, they shaved my head with broken glass. They couldn’t find a crime to charge me with so I survived. Because of that speech I made at the UN, the connections I had made around the Western world and my deep and personal relationship with Jomo Kenyatta (Kenyan President at the time) is what saved me.”
Kenyatta had threated Idi Amin warning him against causing any harm to Princess Bagaaya. Later, she succesfully fled the country and crossed into before she connected to Europe. In the U.K., she (with the help of one of the most formidable libel lawyers in U.K) sued leading news publications including The Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, that had publicized the false allegations and won the case, collecting costs in damages.
At 90, Bagaaya still remains an integral figure in Tooro Kingdom’s story, devoting a large amount of her time to the Batebe of Tooro Foundation whose work is to preserve and promote the cultural heritage as well as champion the development of Tooro Kingdom and its people.
“We must plant our seeds into our young people. It’s a work of restoration. It is the slow, necessary work that must be undertaken across the landscape of Africa to remember and recover who we are. And to figure out how we use that to rebuild,” she said.
As the grieving mother to Oyo navigates a murky phase characterized by an uncertain future partly stemming from voices in the ruling clan that are already stoking dissent on the issue of succession, one of the consequential voices that could potentially be Best Kemigisa’s North star will be Princess Bagaaya. On the second day of mourning as Oyo’s body lay in the palace, a frail Bagaaya who was being supported to walk, moved around the palace compound approaching groups of mourners to appreciate them for condoling with the family.
“We thank you for the love. He (Oyo) too loved you. Had he been here to witness the love you all have showed him, he would be humbled. May God strengthen you. Don’t be get tired of loving each other,” she told mourners.
On the Women And Resistance podcast, Bagaaya underscored courage and the need to face grief. Courage is not the absence of fear, she says, instead defining it as “deciding that what you are moving towards is worth more than your terror of what stands between you and it”.
“You must learn to grieve but not giving up. To grieve and to go on. You are allowed to break, to retreat, but you are required to return,” Bagaaya said.
