02/06/2025
RWARAMBA FAMINE IN KIGEZI
It was during the last quarter of the nineteenth century that the worst happened to Kigezi, a beautiful land in the Western part of Uganda. Kigezi is mainly inhabited by four tribes – the Bakiga, the Bahororo, the Bafumbira and the Batwa. From 1894 to 1897, the region suffered the pangs of a merciless famine that later came to be notoriously known as Rwaramba.
Rwaramba, also referred to as Rwaranda, plagued not only Kigezi, but the entire East African region. However, Kigezi was the most hit. The famine was caused by two major factors – the invasion of the locusts and a great drought.
It is said by historians that large swarms of enzigye (locusts) descended upon the land and depleted nearly every green thing, leaving behind mainly brown soil. The devastation inflicted on crop-gardens was too much to bear; even the strong-hearted had no mouth with which to tell the story.
Before Kigezi could recover from the shock of locusts, there came an infamous drought that scorched the few surviving crops, culminating into Rwaramba.
These catastrophes struck at a time when strange people, whose skin colour was in between white and pink, were hurriedly conquering most parts of Uganda. Thus, many natives blamed Rwaramba on these strange people’s bad omen.
It later turned out that these pink-white people were normal human beings from a far away land called Europe. They had come to bring civilization and good governance to Black people. They had been given a go-ahead by the Kabaka (King) of Buganda.
Later, these pink-white people who were now being referred to as Whitemen signed the famous 1900 Buganda Agreement and then began to subdue other regions under their rule.
At that time it was being rumored that these foreigners were planning to impose a king over the people of Kigezi. But Kigezi being an egalitarian society, where every man was a ‘king’ in his own home, all the people unanimously agreed to reject the idea and fight it to the last drop of their blood if the Whiteman dared introduce it.
One of the fundamental reasons they protested against these White foreigners’ influence was that the misfortunes of the locust invasion, the draught and the famine coincided with their arrival into the land of Kigezi.
Rwaramba hit Kigezi like Heavy Weight Champion Mike Tyson raining ferocious punches on a child. That’s how shortchanged the natives felt as hundreds of them, including animals, were reduced to helpless skeletons by hunger and starvation. For the Whiteman who observed its effects, Rwaramba was reminiscent of the infamous potato famine in Ireland – the “Great Hunger” – that is said to have killed nearly one million people between 1845 and 1850.
It became understandable that the survival instinct dictated that the people of Kigezi eat anything. Humans started threatening to eat fellow humans, and parents became alert as cannibals began prowling the villages looking for unattended children and other vulnerable people to devour. It is also said that hundreds died as they tried to eat unpalatable plants that were poisonous.
Children would task their parents to explain why they produced them for that kind of suffering.
Wailing echoed up and down the hills and valleys of Kigezi like persistent dirges. Families would huddle together for warmth around the fireplace, watching an empty cooking pot. To forget the sorrow, they would burst into mournful songs, their voices rising with the intensity of their suffering, and then falling with sapped energy.
Every evening, sounds of these songs would be heard everywhere. One of the well remembered songs of grief goes:
Oh heavens, the seat of our gods,
How you have pierced our souls,
And crushed our spirits,
The back of a woman,
Who carries a child to suffer,
To have tears instead of pears.
Oh our ancestors, the source of our hope,
When did you start to fail,
For how long shall we wail?
Our hearts are growing frail,
When shall we have some grain?
To end all this pain.
Amidst all hopelessness, there were some few individuals that remained hopeful. They were converts to Christianity, the new faith that the Whiteman had introduced. They kept hoping that one day God would remember them and end the drought. That he would return the rains and that crops would once again blossom. Life would be revived.
These Christian converts continued to gather at missions to learn reading and writing, to pray, and to give counsel to desperate community members who were still despairing over the Rwaramba scourge. They also shared some food and clothes that the Whiteman had brought from the coast of Zanzibar.
The ruins of homesteads still stood naked. Tree stumps marked what used to be forests. Everywhere you turned, empty kraals, empty granaries, and empty lives stared at you. Lives emptied of hope, and engulfed in misery. No matter what good thing happened, celebrating had a tinge of superficiality like laughing at your own funeral!
One day, the rains suddenly returned. Plants and animals started regaining life. People resumed smiling. Marriage celebrations resumed. Life was starting to happen again.
However, the devastation left by the famine was so enormous that the recovery process took two decades. It was slow and painful. The people were still feeling as angry, hopeless and helpless as a mother hen staring at a kite that has just snatched its chick and is now soaring in the sky to go and feast on it. They did not know where to begin from nor how. Rwaramba had robbed them of three full years.
For the next two decades, Rwaramba and its effects became the central theme of folk-stories in Kigezi. Its worst effect was the evil-mindedness it had sown in the lives of the people. The hustle for survival had killed some humaneness. As a result, many people no longer found it hard to steal, embezzle, bribe, or even kill to get food or money. The famine was gone, but Uganda was never to be the same again. Rwaramba had stolen something from society that would be difficult to regain – the moral fiber.
In a few years’ time, young girls and married women were rushing into the business of prostitution. Some of them were ending up with unwanted pregnancies. Some nurses who had been trained from the colonial schools started secretly conducting abortions to get money to support their families. It was even reported that some leaders were beginning to use religion to cheat their followers.
Nevertheless, there were some positive developments as well. The Whites were continuing to construct more schools and hospitals around missions in the region. They were treating the sick and teaching those interested how to read and write.
During this same period, gold was discovered in Bwindi, an impenetrable forest that separated Uganda from Zaire, which was later to be renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). People started mining the gold and selling it to European businessmen.
In kashija, one of the villages in Rubuguri, Bufumbira County, there used to live a man called Tayebwa. He was so lazy that his major service to the community was just to reproduce. He had twenty seven children from six wives. It’s as if there was a procreation award competition he wanted to win.
The burden of taking care of such a huge family at a time when the land was recovering from a brutal famine robbed Tayebwa of all happiness. He always carried around a bitter face like someone chewing a concoction of pepper, garlic, bitter lemon and chloroquine. Misery had exclusive rights over his heart.
Out of personal frustration, Tayebwa continued to blame Kigezi’s problems on the Whiteman and for that reason his entire family refused to get converted to Christianity except one daughter who was baptized Hannah. She chose the name out of admiration of the courage of the biblical woman Hannah who she considered a great role-model.
Hannah’s conversion did not go well with her father but she ignored him and kept assuring him that one day she would revive his name. ‘Tayebwa’ is a Rukiga name that means ‘God does not forget’. Hannah took her father’s name as a prophecy to mean that one day God would remember the people of Kigezi and deliver them from the immoral culture whose seed had been planted by Rwaramba.
Years came and years went. The moral mess continued to strangle society to near-death. By then, many people had lived in this evil long enough to accept it as culture.
“It is perhaps too late to do anything about it,” Tayebwa often remarked. But Hannah would retort: “It has never been too late to change. Any time, any day, anyone can choose the kind of life they want to live. We can choose to rid society of evil.”
With the inspiration she received at Church, Hannah began to feel a calling to change her society. She kept praying that, through her, God would transform the morally bankrupt generation into a new creation. She vowed to learn wisdom from school, become a leader and grow into a society-changer.
However, in 1943, when she was only 16 years old, she got married. She did not get the chance to study beyond primary school level. Slowly by slowly she came to admit that she wasn’t the person to realize her dream of changing her entire society, but she believed that somehow God would send someone to accomplish it.
“Perhaps it will be my son,” one day she thought with a glimmer of hope. From that day on, she started praying fervently for a child; a son who would grow into a tall and broad-shouldered man of substance and majesty that would deliver the land from the doldrums it had descended into since the invasion of Rwaramba.
“Dear God, when you give me a son, I will train and inspire him into the kind of visionary I had longed to be. My son will have a big dream, not only for his community, but for the entire country,” she always prayed and promised God. Unfortunately, she failed to conceive. For forty years in marriage, there was no cry of a baby in her home.
Her father, Tayebwa, used that predicament to keep tormenting her, claiming that her barrenness had resulted from the act of disobeying him when she joined the Whiteman’s religion. Hannah kept ignoring her father’s words until one day when it became too much for her to bear and so she responded.
“Fruitless daughter, you are a disgrace to this family. What brings you here?” Tayebwa started his usual abuses as soon as he returned from drinking and found her home visiting.
“Dad, is that how you greet your daughter who has always tried so hard to obey and respect you?” Hannah shot in.
“If that’s the case, then what are you doing with that bunch of fools who have chosen to forsake our ways and instead sold their souls to the Whiteman and his strange religion?”
“If you are talking about my involvement in Christianity, I don’t consider that disobedience in any way because everyone has a choice when it comes to spiritual matters.”
“That’s where you go wrong. None of us has a choice. Our ancestors made the choice for us and they chose what was right for them and for us and for all future generations.”
“But dad why are you going into all this? What does it have to do with my childlessness?”
“Everything. By conversion to that stupid religion you disobeyed me and I cursed you so that you...”
“God forbid!” she interrupted before he could finish what he was saying. “You have no authority over my womb; only God does,” she insisted with a firm and brave voice.
Whenever Tayebwa brought up that discussion, Hannah refused to be offended, and only reiterated words of unquenchable faith, declaring: “No one can curse one whom God has blessed. At the right time, God will give me a child.”
To cope with the frustration of childlessness, Hannah learnt to inspire herself by reflecting on Bible stories in which God intervened and turned barren women into happy mothers. She seemed to rejoice in the fact that when God decided to grant children to these barren women, they weren’t just ordinary children but special ones. Sarah gave birth to Isaac from whom a great nation of Israel was born; Hannah produced a powerful prophet – Samuel; while Elizabeth gave birth to John the Baptist, the man that baptized Jesus.
Despite her childlessness, Hannah remained an extremely jolly woman. She was the direct opposite of her father, Tayebwa. Her mood was always like that of a person who has a full-time appointment with happiness. In fact her friends would joke that she smiles from ear to ear and sometimes from head to toe. The natives agreed that no other human being in the life and times of Kigezi ever oozed joy like the joy of Hannah, and no one would probably ever radiate joy like the joy of Hannah!
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The above piece was picked from my novel published by World of Inspiration Publications. Full of educative content, inspiration, suspense, twists and turns, this story will captivate you and keep you at the edge of your chair waiting to know what happened next till you finish the last sentence. Whichever country you are in, get this unputdownable book either in hard copy or in soft copy (PDF) for just 39,000 Uganda Shillings (approximately USD 11). Those around Kampala can find copies at Obunuzi Restaurant & Cafe in Wandegeya, opposite YMCA main gate or you can call/WhatsApp 0765032083 | 0758852130 for delivery. Those outside Uganda, you can reach me via WhatsApp on +256757256237 | +256779911844 to purchase a soft copy.
Shalom!
