Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/480

 446 Traditions of the Baganda and Bushongo.

origins of the institutions and customs of the people, and how their empire came to be founded. As for the chronology, one might as well attempt to date the amours of Zeus.

Nor are the subsequent events for nearly a thousand years in a much better case. The next reign in which any- thing remarkable happened was that of the forty-first sovereign, a woman named Gokare. What then happened was indeed remarkable, if true. It was nothing else than a change to the disadvantage of women in the right of suc- cession. The sovereignty is represented as strictly heredi- tary. Up to this point both sexes had possessed an equal right to the throne : thenceforth it was conceded to women only when there was no heir male. Now it might be supposed that the Bushongo were a warlike nation which had suffered from the want of a king to lead them to battle, consequent on a plethora of heiresses possessing a prior title to the throne. But according to their own account they were nothing of the sort. During the five centuries which had elapsed from the creation not a single war is asserted to have been waged by the Bushongo. They had migrated from an unknown country in force, it is true. Yet it is not affirmed that they met any resistance by the way ; and they took peaceable possession of their present country, because it was waste and void of habitants. If we examine the list of monarchs, on the other hand, we find that Gokare was only the second woman to occupy that position, the previous one being Lobamba, the daughter of the first " God on Earth " appointed by the Creator. So that for nearly five centuries, while women had an equal right of succession, an uninterrupted line of kings ruled the nation, and moreover ruled in peace ; whereas during an equal period following Gokare, with the right of women limited to the default of male heirs, no fewer than seven women wore the crown, among them her own, immediate successor. Add to this the improbability that such a law