Reconfiguring the Omweso Board Game: Performing Narratives of Buganda Material Culture
2019; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00460
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture analysis
ResumoMy artwork titled Nakulabye, which is 4 meters long and weighs 440 pounds, is an intimidating sculptural replica of the Omweso game board (Fig. 1). The wooden sculpture, twenty times larger than an average Omweso game board, includes four cane stools to sit on during play. Its composition is derived from a human face, and it has thirty-two pits (8 × 4) in the configuration of a mancala board. This sculpture was inspired by my engagement with a group of men that I visited in July 2016 in Nakulabye, a town in an urban area of Kampala City, Uganda. At the Nakulabye Omweso Club, a shop veranda in Nakulabye Town, these men play Omweso and chat against the backdrop of a small television that mostly screens British Premiere Leagues. Observing their exchanges, which seem to be informed by moves on the Omweso board and reveal strong, clearly gendered power dynamics, I became curious about the performative place of Omweso as a cultural artifact of the Baganda people.1 In this article I posit that, despite centuries of cultural diffusion and relocation, Omweso continuously narrates and constantly contends a gendered functional space within the fluid cultural history, memories, and perspectives of the Baganda. I examine the idea that the unusual ethos of Omweso, as a primary (re)source, has contributed to ongoing creative representations and personal artistic visualizations.Omweso2 (Fig. 2) is a Luganda word for a type of mancala board game (Brauholtz 1932) played among the Baganda and several other ethnic groups in Uganda and other parts of Africa (Wernharm 2002). On the surface, the game is a simple and an ancient form of daily entertainment (Trowell and Wachsman 1953). However, Omweso consistently appears as a location for power and spirituality in the history of the Baganda: it can be a form of divination and may be associated with spirit possession, a ceremonial game as part of a king's coronation rites, and its play has been, at times, a prerogative of the royal court. These locations have developed as restrictive spaces,3 rife with taboos and gendered narratives. For example, in Buganda's material culture, women are restricted in numerous spaces: the playing of mujaguzo (the royal drums of Buganda); the brewing of mwenge bigere, also known as tonto (a local banana beer); the process of making olubugo (a traditional bark-cloth); and the making and, indeed, playing of Omweso (Nakazibwe 2005, Kabiito 2010, Nanyonga-Tamusuza 2014).As a sculptor—a particularly masculinist subdiscipline of the visual arts in Uganda—I have been actively engaged with cultural artifacts that speak to different historical narratives and their contexts within Uganda's societies.4 My first encounter with the Omweso board was in 2010, when my husband inherited a board from his father, Aloysius Kasujja (1927–2009). Although I had witnessed men playing Omweso, this situation was unique because the cultural taboo of obuko prevented me from handling that particular board—in Buganda, there are restrictions on a woman and her father-in-law in terms of touching, physical proximity to each other, or the handling of personal possessions (see Nyanzi, Nassimbwa, Kayizzi, and Kabanda 2008). My father-in-law's Omweso board (Fig. 3) piqued my interest and caused me to question how I, as a culturally situated female artist, might speak to and about indigenous artistic expressions that are shaped by specific gendered perspectives.Baganda are a patriarchal society5 that places emphasis on the sanctity of masculinity, denying women access to any intellectually or spiritually beneficial object or practice, such as playing Omweso. However, the do's and don'ts that governed (and may still govern) Baganda women's social life reveal subtle contradictions, denying power to women yet, in some instances, surprisingly allocating it to them (Bantebya-Kyomuhendo and McIntosh 2006, Tamale 2006). I first experienced these gender-restricted spaces when I was not allowed to touch my father-in law's Omweso board. Then, conversations with men in the Nakulabye Omweso Club established specifically that women in Buganda are not allowed to play Omweso. Nonetheless, in the course of my research I found people in three locations whose experiences challenge this restriction and became significant in shaping my perception of the role of Omweso as an artifact and a game in the gendered spiritual and cultural history of Buganda.The historical narrative of Omweso was informed by my almost chance discovery of a miniature Omweso board in a diorama at the Uganda National Museum6 showing the priestess Nakayima, whose divination practices have transcended time and space and are part of contemporary indigenous culture in Buganda (Ballarin, Kiriama, and Pennacini 2013).7 Second was a visit to Nakku Namusoke, a mukondo (descendant wife) and muzaana (royal servant) to Kabaka Ssuna II (1836–1856), who showed me the Omweso board that belonged to him. In both locations, Omweso silently intertwines with practices of kubandwa or spiritual possession (Pennacini 2009). Third was the Nakulabye Omweso Club, an archetype of masculine cultural idealization whose members perpetuate narratives from Buganda's patriarchal past that persist in the present, asserting that women are not allowed to play Omweso. They also describe okwesa (“playing Omweso”) with metaphors that include a winning move known as akakyala (referencing female passivity) and a counter, known as empiki buteba, that is used for divination sessions and contains lubaale or spirits. (Since empiki buteba in the Omweso game is rare, difficult, and embarrassing to obtain, medicine men usually ask for it as a price for a divination session.)8 The three locations—Nakayima, Nakku-Namusoke, and the Nakulabye Omweso Club—are central to this article in terms of holding and assigning meaning to the object (Kabiito 2010: 53–62; Brenner, Vorster and Wintjes 2016). They are significant in containing and unpacking subtle performative nuances in the personal creative reconfiguration of the Omweso board and game.In 2016, I created another sculpture, titled Akakyala (Fig. 4), that engages with Ganda narratives surrounding Omweso. In this work, I used a mannequin9 to create the figure of a young woman sitting on a stool. She is dressed in black and adorned with a trendy, brilliant red necklace and red shoes. Placed in front of her is a bench with four oversized Omweso-like pits containing both black and red counters (Fig. 5). Three of the pits are made of barbed wire, while the fourth is covered with brightly colored, patterned cloth.10 The figure bends forward, as if ready to play on the four-pit board and engage an imaginary player. The attitude and presentation of the sculpture is provocative, exhibiting the young woman's confidence in playing a forbidden game on a tangibly limiting barbed wire board. Akakyala confronts the Baganda narrative that “women are not allowed to play Omweso.”11 It is through this narrative that I present Omweso: the game board and how it is played as an object with power relations and gendered narratives in Buganda (Kiguli 2001; Tamale 2006).At first glance, the Omweso board presents itself as a simple traditional object utilized for sport and entertainment. It is carved from a flat piece of wood with round or square pits or cups.12 Omweso has thirty-two pits (amasa in Luganda) arranged in front of each player in territories of sixteen pits: eight lengthwise and four deep.13 The game requires sixty-four counters or black seeds known as empiki, from the omuyiki tree (Mesoneurum welwitschianum).14 This board type is sold in many tourist craft villages around Kampala. The performative function of playing Omweso (Fig. 6) is called okwesa or kwesa. According to Nsimbi (1968: 2), Omweso might be one of the oldest pastimes in Uganda, and as a cultural practice, it is still commonly played by men young and old. They assemble at kiosk verandas in small towns or at homesteads of many rural and semiurban communities and play board games while holding a wide range of conversations. Omweso as it is played in Buganda is a highly mathematical and competitive reentrant game, where all seeds remain in play, and the winner plays captured seeds on his side of the board. Rules and procedures require the player to comprehend patterns of arranging counters, making moves, and capturing an opponent's counters, leading to a calculated win (Nsimbi 1968, Weinharm 2002). In the traditional setting, two players squat or sit cross-legged facing each other, placing the board between them (Fig. 7).Yet its simple format disguises the Omweso game's importance as an interactive, highly competitive performance of power relations and gendered narratives. For example, the most important element of Omweso is to accumulate the most counters, and the player who does so is deemed the most powerful. As a gendered game, Omweso counters are referred to as “men”—thus framed as masculine—while the pits on the board are perceived to be feminine. I encountered this gendered aspect at the Uganda Museum, where the label for an Omweso artifact from Bunyoro (Fig. 8) in Western Uganda reads:The counters are referred to as “men” for reasons grounded in the gendered tenets of the Baganda, where individual roles, although interchangeable, are associated with situations or objects of power (Kiguli 2001: 6, Nannyoga-Tamusuza 2009: 368).16 Therefore, if women were allowed to play Omweso they would be figuratively controlling men. Among the Baganda, gendered power relations are reflected in taboos around many competitive situations, such as going to and winning a war, sexual performance, and playing Omweso.Tamale (2006: 22) notes that playing Omweso in ekisaakaate—spaces set aside in family compounds or the King's palace to instruct young individuals on the roles they are going to play in the social system17—can be a metaphor for contests or sex, illustrated in the Baganda saying Omukazi okukwata mu mweso nga abasajja bagenze okutabaala kyaletanga ekisirani (“A woman who plays the game of Omweso when men have gone to war brings about misfortune”), where playing Omweso is both a gendered taboo and a metaphor for sex. If men were killed or unable to bring home wealth during a war, this misfortune was ascribed to a woman having played Omweso. Or if a man was not sexually successful, he might suggest that the woman played Omweso, intimating that she tampered with her sexuality.18Omweso is also an instrument of power and a measure of a candidate's suitability for kingship. A ceremonial Omweso board known as buteba (Fig. 9), made of only one cup or dip, is found at Njayuya in Wakiso District, Uganda. This one-pit board carved on a rock is used during a coronation rite where the kabaka (king) plays Omweso with his katikiro (prime minister) (Ray 1991:86). On the eve of his coronation, the ssabataka (head of the royal clans), who is a prince and the heir apparent, plays on the coronation board with an empiki buteba (winning counter), which medicine men in Buganda consider significant in determining the outcome of a divination session. During this rite, a winning move—okutebuka (“to go back”)—is used to enable the king to win. This is to demonstrate his superior political power, knowledge, and strategic thinking over that of his male subjects (Nsimbi 1968: 5). Driberg (1927) indeed attests to how the valued qualities, including intellectual prowess, attached to mancala games lead to local prestige and social status. Among the Acholi in northern Uganda, such games decide between rival candidates for succession to a chieftainship (Driberg 1927: 169).The terms used in conversations around and during Omweso to indicate important moves describe the players' relationships and positions. There are undertones and intonations for game moves, such as each player's losses and achievements. For instance, when a player wins by capturing counters on both ends of the board in one turn, it is known as emitwe ebiri, a “double head win.” Okutema akakyala refers to capturing seeds from the opponent in two separate moves before they have made any move. Akakyala here connotes the passive character of a woman and is a metaphor for a quick win. Therefore, when two people are playing and one presents a weak stand or easily loses the game, okutema akakyala comes into play and the winner is able to jest about the loser, saying, “twesa n'abakazi abasajja bagenda kutabaala” (“we are playing with women, the men went to war”). My sculpture Akakyala consciously confronts these narratives by presenting a self-confident woman playing on a challenging Omweso board.Ugandan academic, feminist, and human rights activist Sylvia Tamale says that there is a significant relationship between gender and power in the game, to the point that the game is viewed as being sexually provocative (2006: 21).19 The space in which Omweso is played is clearly gendered with words and phrases that have multiple meanings, allowing men to engage in sexually uninhibited conversation. I also learned at the Let's Talk About Omweso symposium and through interviews at the Nakulabye Omweso Club that restrictions on women playing Omweso can only be lifted by a royal decree. Despite my attempts, I have failed to find evidence for how and when this restriction was imposed. There are many reasons why women are not allowed to play Omweso, and given its cultural, social, and political significance, it is not surprising that it has, for the past century, maintained crucial gendered narratives within Buganda's historical landscape (Marias and Wintjes 2016).The existence of mancala board games in Uganda and other parts of Africa points to its widespread function, distribution, and adaptation by groups of people who may have learned the game through cultural diffusion (Brice 1954, Culin 1971, Binsbergen 1997). For example, mancala boards of similar design and playing patterns exist among the Banyarwanda, Banyoro, and Baganda, who are a Bantu-speaking group in Central Africa. Binsbergen (1997), citing well-known game historians Murray (1952: 158–59) and Bikić and Vuković (2016: 183), notes that mancala board games are ancient, first attested in the Kitab al-Aghani (Book of Songs) by the Arab author Abu'l Faradj (897–967). This situates their origin in the second half of the first millennium ce at the latest. They are still widespread in many parts of Africa, having descended from the royal tombs of Ur in Mesopotamia and the pharaonic tombs of Egypt, filtering down to Sudan along trading and migratory routes, giving birth to numerous variations in sub-Saharan Africa (Binsbergen 1997). The most common mancala games are bao in Tanzania and Kenya; oware among the Ashanti in Ghana, and moruba (or maruba) among the Pedi, in South Africa (Robbins 1982).20 There are, however, missing links in its occurrence in Buganda as a functional object and as a critical agent of its lineage, except for similarities to nsumbi in Zaire (Fig. 10), isingiro in Rwanda, and bare in Ethiopia (Fernald 1978, Wernham 2002: 5, de Voogt 2001). The account that follows is thus based not on any particular antique artifact but on the concept of the Omweso game as it lived through Uganda's colonial and civil wars (1900–1986) to become part of Buganda's contemporary material culture.Omweso is not found in Buganda exclusively, as the Baganda—such as members of the Nakulabye Omweso Club21—would like to believe. Mancala board games occur in many parts of Uganda under various names: soro among the Madi and Alur, olusoro among the Banyoro, and ekyesho among the Banyankole.22Mancala board games such as choro among the Dodoth of Karamoja in northeastern Uganda and pereauni among the Didinga of southern Sudan (Driberg 1927) are still played. There are variations in the specific gaming procedures or codes found in groups with other social structures—mostly chieftaincies—but many share rules and taboos that are observed in the neighboring Baganda culture, which is a monarchy.The oldest Omweso board in Buganda could be the miniature board displayed in the Uganda Museum, which houses the diorama of Nakayima, a priestess of Mubende Hill. Nakayima is said to have descended from the Bachwezi, a migratory group who formed a Bunyoro-Kitara dynasty (ca. 1350–1890) in western Uganda.23Schiller (1990: 456) says that, as the Buganda kingdom emerged out of the Bachwezi's political demise, they could have acquired the culture of playing Omweso from the Bachwezi in Bunyoro (Beattie 1964).24The importance of Omweso among the Baganda has been attested over centuries by Western explorers and missionaries. Young Buganda herdsmen dug small holes in the ground (or rock) and collected seeds or pebbles to play games to pass time (Nsimbi 1968, Zaslavsky 1999, Namono 2010). Articles and notes about Omweso in the Uganda Journal25 (Lanning 1956a, 1956b; Wayland 1931, 1936, 1938) mention sets of mancala-like engravings found at the bank of Muzizi River, Toro Kingdom, in western Uganda. There are also prehistoric rock engravings similar to an Omweso board (Namono 2010: 50) found at Nsongeza and Namunyonyi Hill in central Uganda (Wayland 1938, Pearce and Posnansky 1963, Chaplin 1974: 24, White and Nkurunziza 1971: 175). At Sanzi in eastern central Uganda (Fig. 11) a rock shows clear engravings of multiple Omweso 4 × 8 boards carbon dated to the late first millennium (Namono 2010: 42, 53; Reid 2003: 40–43). These boards attest to the functional importance of Omweso in precolonial communities. Lanning (1956a) says that the spiritual survival of those communities was anchored in the belief that balubaale (gods) carved Omweso boards on rocks there—some are over 400 years old, others recently carved by herdsmen. They have been used over the decades for cultural rituals and political ceremonies (Lanning 1956a).The designation of Omweso as a royal artifact is found in Buganda's precolonial political history. For example, the kabakas Ssuna II (1836–1856) and Mutesa I (1856–1884)26 owned Omweso boards that functioned as spiritual instruments, symbols of political power, and royal regalia. They played Omweso for entertainment in the lubiri (royal palace) with important ministers and chiefs, and sometimes with their sisters, whose social rank was equal to the king (Nsimbi 1968, Musisi 1991). Men had played Omweso at the royal court even before the reign of Kabaka Ssuna II, but the influx of Arabs, white missionaries, and colonialists during that time changed the dynamic of Omweso from a game played in the king's private quarters to a “traditional pastime and sport” among the commoner Baganda. Its role as an object representing spirituality and authority again shifted when Uganda became a British Protectorate under Kabaka Mutesa I. From this point onwards, Omweso was detached and alienated from its traditional functions, becoming a marker of the superseded past in colonial journals (Ashe 1895: 58–59) (Fig. 12). Colonial and Western religious ideologies insistently positioned Omweso as either a tool of witchcraft and sorcery or a pastime that promoted idleness, an economically nonproductive traditional village activity. According to Nsimbi (1968), the need for labor to work in the new economy of cash crops such as coffee and cotton, introduced in Uganda in 1904, left no time for playing Omweso. In the mid-nineteenth century, Omweso continuously struggled, degenerating into a recreational activity and then regenerating as representation of political interest. The migration of labor from traditional villages into towns or the new kibuga reversed the regal use of Omweso to benefit new cultural-political ideologies and ideas of Africanness (Nsimbi 1968: 7, Musisi 1999: 178, Tumusiime 2017: 64–65).The political events following Uganda's independence from British rule in 1962 again realigned Omweso from an ideological focal point to a passive cultural activity. For example, in 1966, Apollo Milton Obote (1925–2005) declared himself president of Uganda and abolished traditional kingships, including Buganda's monarchy, alienating the place of indigenous cultural institutions (Young 1966: 8, Kakande 2017: 51). Obote's government further destroyed social practices, art forms, and cultural activities that had been either banned or discouraged by colonialists. During this period, Omweso fell victim to new policies of political control, as the Baganda convened underground for political propaganda about ethnic federalism. Then the dictator Idi Amin Dada (ca. 1925–2003) took political power in 1971. He maintained Obote's status quo of dysfunctional traditional political institutions (First 1971: 132; Oloka-Onyango 1997: 175–76). However, Idi Amin patronized and developed sports to distract the public from his reign of terror, and thus recreations—including Omweso—which had been spaces for conversation about life and politics, became instruments of subversive political activity (Nsimbi 1968: 7). In 1986, after a gruesome civil war (1980–1986), a National Resistance Movement (NRM) took power in Uganda, and in 1993 the current president, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, restored traditional institutions and reinstated the precolonial kingdoms as cultural institutions with no political governing significance. This seemingly manipulative political gesture opened a debate among the Baganda about indigenous culture known as ebyaffe, or “our things”27 (Kiguli 2001: 198). Omweso was reinstated to the public political domain28 and a reserve of Baganda enthusiasts who, through spaces of instruction like ekisaakaate, restore Buganda's traditional values to the younger generation. It is against that fluid historical backdrop that Omweso has silently but firmly continued performing narratives still critical to the survival of Buganda. Art historian Ruth Simbao examined the crowns of ChiBemba-speaking Lunda-Kazembe as objects that reflect styles of regalia but also, most significantly here, as materials in performance that establish the identity of the Lunda crown and of “Lunda-hood” (Simbao 2006: 27). Similarly, cultural sites, activities, and objects such as those found at Nakayima's shrine on Mubende Hill, mukondo at Wamala Royal Tombs, and the Nakulabye Omweso Club have taken center stage as the Baganda proclaim and preserve their culture.In the Uganda Museum is a diorama of Nakayima, wife of the fourteenth century Bachwesi king, Ndahura. The figure represents a mystical woman seated on a stool mounted on a throne of animal skins (Fig. 13). She is garbed in bark cloth and a beaded headdress and holds a staff in her right hand. Her skin is the hue described by the Baganda as kataketake, a coveted coppery color, and she has the elongated facial features common to the Bachwezi. The display case holds other objects such as spears, shields, pipes, skins, a ntimbo drum, and, significantly, a collection of miniature fetish objects and amulets (Lanning 1967, 1966). The objects were excavated and collected in the 1950s from an archaeological site on Mubende Hill, western Uganda (Pennacini 2013: 24, Lanning 1953: 182, Robertshaw 2002).29 Among those fetish objects and amulets is a miniature Omweso board (Fig. 14). This object raises questions: Why is it in this diorama? What is its function in the regalia of worship among the Bachwezi and what is its later significance among the Baganda?The miniature Omweso object is made out of wood, and its proportions (4 cm × 6 cm) and appearance are those of a standard 4 × 8, thirty-two-dip Omweso board. Previous studies have shown how miniatures are used not for the actual purpose of the original piece, but for certain religious functions (Nichols 1997: 813; Binsbergen 1997). In some cases, they form part of royal regalia or masquerades. Examples of such boards are found in the oracle baskets containing small objects that are used by diviners among the inhabitants of Southern Central Africa (Binsbergen 1997), along with miniature 2 × 6-pit mancala boards (Delachaux (1946: 70). In essence, the size of the Omweso board and its placement in this diorama suggest that it was intended to be used not for recreation but for spiritual power.30I began searching for answers about the miniature Omweso object at Nakayima's shrine under a huge tree at Mubende Hill.31 According to Ballarin, Kiriama, and Pennacini (2013: 5) the power dynamic created by Nakayima in this space can be appreciated only by analyzing the divination practices surrounding the natural phenomenon of this enormous tree.32 The priestess Nakayima possesses three identities: a museum artifact, a person associated with the tree, and a mukongozi (mediator or carrier of Nakayima's spirit).33 These provide occasions for conversations about Baganda spiritualities and women's agency.First, Nakayima the female spiritual figure, presented in the context of the Uganda Museum, contributed to the artistic predicaments I encountered while investigating Omweso as a divination object. My sculpture Buteba (2015) (Fig. 15) is a small wood and copper piece with stone counters that was inspired by Baganda divination practices,34 where Omweso is used by fortunetellers and medicine men (Lugira 2009). The taboo on women (other than royal princesses) playing Omweso creates an ambiguous and intriguing narrative out of the juxtaposition of a divination object with Nakayima's figure in the museum. There is no evidence that Nakayima or her descendants played Omweso; her descendants told me they had never seen a board at the shrine. The caretaker35 at Mubende Hill said that the board at the museum might have been an instrument of divination and spirit possession as used by lubaale (male deities), such as a Ganda high priest named Jjaja Muwanga. The assumption, therefore, is that the miniature Omweso is not Nakayima's prerogative as a woman, but as a princess and Chwezi demigoddess. Secondly, I found a community of tourists and believers visiting Mubende Hill to worship beside the tree, known by the locals as Nakayima's Tree (Fig. 16). They believe that the tree possesses the spirit (emandwa) of Nakayima, which turs it into a shrine for Buganda's cultural worship.36 There is a woman at the shrine called Nalubega Restetuuta (b. 1931) (Fig. 17), who claims to be an intermediary and the current omukongozi (“carrier of the spirit”) of Nakayima (Pennacini 2013:30). Nalubega continues the legacy passed on by mediums of Nakayima who have worked under this tree. As Nakayima's medium she says, “nze Nakayima” (“I am Nakayima”). According to Bell (1991: xi, 1993), mythology can be a basis for understanding the situation being dealt with today of an eternal woman who, through her descendants, still seeks solutions to problems that have followed her down the ages. Sadly, due to the legacy of gendered cultural restrictions, Nalubega does not know how to play Omweso. Of Nakayima's three personas—artifact, tree, and omukongozi—only the diorama at the Uganda Museum has a physical association to the Omweso board.To conceptualize the disconnect seen between Nakayima and Omweso in her other facets, one needs to comprehend the implications of her roles in all spaces and how those roles speak to the cultural space of the Baganda. Omweso only manifests in gendered locations that have a history of spirituality and in public, male-dominated spaces of power. Since women in Buganda were not allowed to play Omweso unless they were related to the king, the implication of its presence in one of Nakayima's spaces could only point towards her social status as princess and wife to King Ndahura. In addition, Nakayima was considered a medium and later a spirit, so her divination practices gave her high rank in the Baganda political hierarchy (Kiguli 2001: 23).The evolution of Omweso within the cultural practices of Buganda is not restricted to a single function or significance. It was first a divination object, then an instrument of kings' political power and a gendered recreational artifact. Like Nakayima, there are other women who embody notions of spirituality and power, transcending time and space by being part of indigenous culture in contemporary Buganda.In June 2017, I visited Nnaku Namusoke (b. 1981) (Fig. 18a–b), who belongs to the Ffumbe (civet cat) totem, one of the clans of Buganda, and lives at the palace and tombs of Kabaka Ssuna II, also known as amasiro, at Wamala, Wamunyenye, approximately 12.5 km out of Kampala. She is a hereditary mukondo (wife of a king) and also a hereditary muzaana (royal servant to a king), the king in question being Kabaka Ssuna II. Her great grandmother, she says, was the favorite among the king's 148 wives (Rosco 1965, Summers 2017).37 She said that the spirit of Kabaka Ssuna possesses (kubandwa) any of her descendants in her lineage—including herself—to continuously become heirs of mukondo and commands them to care for his palace and tombs.Nnaku Namusoke showed me an Omweso board in her custody that is approximately 160 years old and belonged to Ssuna II (Fig. 19). This is a spiritually functional object through which gendered complexities and contradictions are performed. Nnaku Namusoke is a powerful and enigmatic female figure, given that she is the contemporary wife to a dead king. In our first interaction, she—just like Nalubega Restetuuta at Nakayima Tree—introduced herself with, “Nze mukondo, mukyala wa Kabaka Ssuna owokubiri” (“I am Mukondo, wife to Kabaka Ssuna II”). In Buganda, mukondo is the title given to a woman who manages the king's wardrobe38 and only relates to her place at the royal palace. Her positions and roles in the royal palace reveal gendered continuities in contemporary public space.The life and role of a mukondo and how her life manifests alongside the game of Omweso is indeed a revelation. Despite the taboo, Nnaku Namusoke plays Omweso on the antique Omweso board that belonged to Kabaka Ssuna II. As already mentioned,
Referência(s)