The last kings and queens of Africa who ruled before Black Independence swept through the continent after it had experienced the 1960 “winds of change” generally ended their lives either in penury or through assassination.
An example of the way they passed on into the pages of history is the life story of the Kabaka of Buganda, Sir Edward Mutesa ll, a Cambridge University graduate and former member of Britain’s highly esteemed Grenadier Guards.
As head of East Africa’s Ganda people, King Edward lived in a major palace atop Mengo Hill in Buganda, a powerful 19th century kingdom of East Africa located along the northern shores of Lake Victoria and forming the major province of Uganda.
I first met this particular African royal leader when I worked throughout the African continent in the 1950/60s as a journalist and foreign correspondent.
He soon became one of my favourite royals — to the extent that I was invited on one occasion to stay with him and his family in his famous Bugandan palace.
When we first met for an interview, he introduced himself to me simply as “King Freddie” with the explanation that he was the father and shepherd of his people.
Although a son of the African soil, Mutesa ll was a pukka dark-skinned Englishman equipped with the best of British educated voices, language and attitudes. He also possessed one of the best heads of knowledge I had met on the African continent between Cairo and Cape Town.
During my two-day visit to his royal home, Edward took me on a tour of his domain and its adjacent royal compound, very reminiscent of one of the British royal family’s grand old country homes. At one point I was ushered into ‘special spiritual’ rooms where many of Edward’s historic records, traditional coronation drums and other head-of-State royal trappings were kept.
Unknown to me at the time, this part of the palace was where, in 1962 after Buganda was thrown into eventual Independence, Idi Amin, Uganda’s notorious dictator and president, later held his political prisoners, torturing well over 1,000 of them to death.
Among the Kabaka’s royal treasures were carvings and highly decorated memory and story staves and sticks dating back to the first Kabaka, Kintu, in the 14th century.
Edward reigned for 28 years from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. During this time, he was responsible for making his Buganda empire one of the most progressive until the end of its African colonial rule. His motto always was ”having pride of service to the nation.”
Throughout my stay at the palace, I saw just how well Edward was regarded as the Kabaka by his followers. Literally scores of eager African men and women were continually arriving at the palace entrances to pay their respects to their beloved monarch who always, it seemed, was prepared at all times of day and night to greet them with kindly words in his colourful Buganda language.
Imagine my sadness, however, when in 1967 I received word that my kindly king of the Ugandan jungle had been forced to flee alone from his palace and home by feverishly jumping over the palace’s back wall and then to run for his life as Idi Amin and his armed pro-Communist Ugandan Peoples’ Congress members attacked his beloved palace with fire and a battalion of guns.
From my journalistic investigations at the time, I learned that Edward had quickly realised that Idi Amin — a soldier in the Ugandan Army — had launched a coup d’etat against his royal rule and was after his royal blood, forcing him to immediately escape Amin’s brutality.
As a result, Edward was forced to make his way alone across the rugged mountain fringed Ugandan border and undertake a penniless several hundred kilometre walk into far-off Burundi from where supporters sent him to London by air.
Once on supposedly safe British territory, he was housed by Bugandan friends in a small, dilapidated house in what turned out to be a poor part of the city. Edward is believed to have quietly lived there for seven years, still without any substantial personal funds and knowing he was still a threat to the blood-thirsty soldier who had caused his downfall and had taken over his country at the point of a gun.
The few people with whom Edward associated in London all described him as a man fearful of being recognised as a deposed king while also being a target for the new wave of African politicians desperate to support non-royal ideals as espoused by both Black and White Communist and Socialist agitators.
This was my friendly king’s life until one day in 1969 when he unexpectedly fell ill, collapsed and died a painful death after eating a solitary evening meal. It was, in fact, his 45th birthday.
From the start, the hated hand of Idi Amin in Africa was highly suspected as this arch- enemy of the king had once boasted he would have the Kabaka killed in London to ensure an end to his Bugandan royal lineage for all time.
Although the former self-exiled king of Buganda thought he was safe in Britain, officials investigating his sudden passing suggested he had been finally assassinated by having been secretly poisoned.
At the time, this fact was kept under very secure wraps by Britain’s Colonial Office. Top government officials there feared that the idea may spread to other African and foreign Independence-seeking terrorists who may attempt to assassinate the other heads of State seeking political shelter in the United Kingdom.
Whitehall was also concerned that King Freddie’s murder may destabilise the West’s relations with what was then Uganda and those African States suffering wars and revolts for eventual independence from all colonialists and kings.