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9. The Rationalization of Power, 1925-1931: The Deposition of Musinga
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211 9 The Rationalization of Power, 1925– 1931 The Deposition of Musinga Inkuba ebyiri ntiziba’mugicu kimwe [Two thunders cannot live in the same cloud] Greatly shaken by his loss of power in 1924 and 1925, Musinga sought immediately to regain the initiative against the Inshongore. He let it be known that Bandora would reopen the case against Kayondo, and he confidently predicted that this time he would win. Most of the notables still respected Musinga’s political skills, and they remembered too how unpredictably he had first lost, then regained Belgian support in 1917. They could not ignore the possibility that he might regain his former power, and so they still did not dare to desert him completely. But they did deem it wise to try to please the Europeans and their men as well as the mwami.1 Caught in Competing Loyalties: The Younger Notables While the older men among these notables, like the original Inshongore, hoped to draw on European power without being touched by European culture, the younger men found European civilization increasingly attractive . Especially after 1925 and 1926, when the Belgians began to insist that the Court and notables appoint only men who had had some European education, ambitious young men began to regard European learning as a privilege. Just as in the past young men had competed for a place in the most distinguished groups of ntore, where they hoped to Musinga in his colonial uniform (courtesy of Jan Vansina) [44.220.41.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:18 GMT) win the favors of an important notable or of the mwami himself, these young men now scrambled for seats in school, especially in the school at Nyanza, the seat of the central court, where they hoped to attract the attention of the administrators. While the older men themselves refused to study and ordinarily preferred not to send all their sons to school, they usually permitted one or two of those sons to learn European skills so that they could represent their fathers with the administrators. When fathers did oppose European education, some young men placed ambition over obedience and stole away to class anyway. One such secret scholar recalled that he had learned the vowels and was just beginning the consonants when his father appeared at the school door to drag him home.2 Although the Belgians declared forthrightly their desire to have notables become literate, they indicated more subtly their wish to have them become Christian as well. The young notables nonetheless understood their meaning. By 1928 virtually all the young men at the Nyanza school were Christian or in the process of becoming Christian. Once the young men at Court had shown the way, the young notables in schools elsewhere began to flock to the churches too. Most of the older notables hoped to accomplish by friendship with the missionaries what their sons expected to achieve by beginning religious instruction, but by 1928 and 1929 even some of them were reluctantly attending the classes in catechism. The movement toward Christianity, which had originally been a way of opposing the Court, now became a general effort to accommodate European wishes. It paralleled the rush for secular education . The notables counted on their acceptance of Christianity as a means both to raise their standing with the Belgians and to ensure the support of those powerful protectors, the White Fathers.3 Just as the notables regarded conversion as one important way of paying court to the Europeans, many of their clients and subjects felt obliged to change their religion to follow the notables. Often the mere announcement that a notable was about to begin learning the catechism sufficed to bring his clients and subjects to the church as well. In describing the conversion of subordinates of the Christian Rwabutogo, one of his clients recalled: “When he had begun to take instruction and he had just received command over this region, not even the old men here could keep themselves from going to take instruction. If you were at Rwabutogo’s home and he went down on his knees to pray, you could not just stand there and look. It used to be like that: what your patron loved, you loved too.”4 When the pressure of example had no effect, The Rationalization of Power, 1925–1931 213 some notables frankly ordered their people to begin attending catechism classes. Others preferred to offer the grant of cattle as an incentive to beginning instruction.5...