It was the taxi driver who announced, “The royal tomb of Kabalega is here.” At that point Kabalega was quite unknown to me.

I was whiling away days in Masindi visiting friends. With time on my hands and no intention of doing Murchison Falls, in my late grandmother’s footsteps to Hoima.

Kabalega’s Royal Tomb

Ten kilometres to Hoima, across a large green field and circled by a low wall, the guard at the gate asked, “Do have permission to enter?”

We did not which meant driving to Hoima to pay the entrance fee and get the key to open the royal tomb that looked exactly like the Kasubi royal tomb of the Buganda kings in Kampala.

Too complicated. Instead we walked around the wall of the tomb to stop at a poster where Samuel Baker and his wife had met the king in 1864.

The Bakers had marched from Equatorial Province to the North of which he was governor in search of the Nile’s source.

Hoima

The road between Masindi and Hoima is being tarmacked with few papyrus swamps or thick forest visible unlike the Baker’s time.

The present king has his royal residence in Hoima but has little power. It’s a small, crowded busy town.

Few Indian buildings of the pre-colonial days stand amid modern multi-storey ones. But Hoima is in the process of becoming big for oil has been discovered in Lake Albert, with an oil refinery and pipeline under construction.

In anticipation of the good times is a spanking new international airport.

Lake Albert

We stand on the escarpment overlooking the African Great Lake. The Bakers were the first white people to see the lake and name it after Victoria’s late consort.

The name Victoria had already been bequeathed upon Nam Lolwe (by the Luo) in 1858 by John Speke—who guessed it to be the source of the Nile but only confirmed by Henry Morton Stanley who sailed around it between 1874 and 1877.

Masindi

Back in Masindi, there's another monument dedicated to Kabalega meeting the Bakers’ in 1872.

Baker asked the king to cede his kingdom to the Equatorial province. The king instead sent the couple packing with showers of spears passing within inches of them.

Kabalega was a visionary, building his kingdom on the strength of trade. A celebrated war hero, he kept the British off for five years until he was shot and captured in 1899 and exiled to Seychelles until 1923. He died en route home.