Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/475

 Traditions of tJic Jntgaiida and Bnshongo. 44 1

less than twenty-one times from Magembc, the fourtli king, down to Kikulwe, who is said to have been the twentj'-first king and to have lived eight generations before the late King Daudi Cwa.^^ At that point it ceases. I venture to suggest that it is an undesigned disclosure that the real names of the ladies to whom it is applied were unknown, and that to that extent at all events the genealogy is fabri- cated. In the pedigrees of ordinary people the wives are disregarded, for the Baganda are patrilineal; they claim descent through the male line only. But in the case of royalty the wives and the clans to which they severally belonged are carefully noted. Now the clans that contri- buted from time to time wives to the king's harem con- sidered themselves honoured by so doing. They became related to royalty through such of the wives who bore sons; and the royal pedigree is constructed to exhibit these relationships, and thus to minister to the vanity of the clans concerned. In these circumstances we may well beware of attaching more credit to the pedigree of the kings of Uganda than to those that have been so freely manufactured in our own country to prove descent from ancient Norman knight or Anglo-Saxon noble.

On the whole it may be said that there are very few events comprised in the traditions, of which we can be reasonably sure prior to the discovery of Uganda by white men. Some confirmation of the story is indeed to be found in the traditions of the Bahima of the adjoining kingdom of Ankole; but it extends no further back than the reign of Suna, already mentioned, who was the great-grandfather of Daudi Cwa.^*^ He probably reigned towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Additional research is needful ajiiong the Baganda and their neighbouring kinsmen in Banyoro, Busoga and Ankole, to enable us to estimate more nearly the process by which the legends of all these

'* Roscoe, 175, 231.

2 G
 * ^ Major J. A. \Veldon,y<?«r«. Afr. Soc, vi., 243-245.