Patrick Businge
Most people believed that before the Europeans colonised the Africans, the African continent was occupied by black people who had no history. Like its inhabitants, the African continent was filled with darkness and was uncivilised and uncultured. Since darkness was not a subject of history, there was nothing to study in Africa.As the content of this book will testify, this is not true. The African continent was and continues to be culturally rich, economically strong, politically organised, and most of all, to use the words of the Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti, “The African is notoriously religious”. The Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta observed that when the missionaries arrived, Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. He goes on to say that the missionaries ‘taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible’. This reminds me of another story of children in Africa who were playing with stones without knowing their value. When the explorers saw the stones which were diamonds, they asked the children to give them the stones in exchange for sweets. The children willingly exchanged their stones for sweets. Little did the children know they were holding treasures in their hands. This continues to happen on the African continent even up to today.Day by day, we continue to exchange the stones in our hands without thinking about their value. The word stone here could be replaced by anything that the African is giving up such as local languages and valued cultural beliefs and practices in the name of globalisation. In the midst of these loses, most Africans do not have the power to tell or write their own history. The great American Poet, singer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou said, 'There is nothing more painful than an "Untold Story" buried in your soul'. As most Africans cannot and do not want to tell or write their own stories, people from foreign places have told a different story about Africa and its people.In effect, this book is an attempt encourage Africans tell their own story. It reconstructs and rewrites the history, culture, civilization, and treasures of the Batooro people found in Tooro Kingdom located in Uganda in East Africa. This book gives a platform to the African to use his or her voice to tell his or her true story. This book allows the sons and daughters of Tooro to look into their past, to examine their present, and to develop the courage to reright their lives and rewrite their futures.
