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The mukama Isaza, a descendant of Ka-kama, of course, was a proud young man, who had great scorn for the elderly men who had served in his father’s court and who acted as advisers also to the young king. So he drove them all away from his compound and invited in his young friends, who loved fun, and with whom he liked to go hunting for sport. One day he shot a zebra, and he decided to wear its beautiful striped hide as a “kingly costume,” but it was hard to keep it on, and finally his friends sewed it in place for him.
This turned out to be a bad idea. As the day warmed up, the sun dried the skin, and it began to contract and squeeze poor Isaza more and more until he was truly suffering and thought his bones would surely break. He begged his friends to cut it off for him, but they thought he looked so funny in his suffering that they just laughed and laughed, and they did nothing to save him. The skin squeezed him tighter and tighter and he knew he was about to die, but still his “friends” did nothing but laugh, but in fact the skin had become so tight that they could no longer untie it or even get their knives behind it to cut it off. So, cruel as their laughter was, in fact they had no way to save him.
Now as it happened, two of the old men whom he had driven from the compound had not gone very far away, and they saw Isaza in his misery. Seeing Isaza’s suffering and hearing his frightened screams as the skin continued to tighten, they at last agreed to help. They told the young men to throw Isaza into a pond. Naturally when they had done this, the water gradually penetrated the zebra skin, which loosened again. And so Isaza was saved from a hideous death by the wisdom of the old men he had so foolishly driven away earlier.
Having learned his lesson, Isaza called all the old men back to his service, and he scolded the young men, and told them always to respect the wisdom of old people. And that is how Isaza, who had been foolish, became wise.
This story is about the need] even for a king to respect the old and the wise, of course. But as Beattie examined Nyoro responses to the story, other lessons were also drawn from it. One was that it was quite normal for young people to hold authority. Just as Ka-kama was the youngest son, supported and advised by his older brothers, but reigning over them, so Isaza was a young king with elderly advisers.
Nyoro cited this story (and others) in connection even with ordinary inheritance: for the Nyoro an older brother was his younger brother’s guardian, but it was the youngest son who was the heir. And in the case of the mukama or king, the eldest son of the previous mukama was prohibited from succeeding him.
So seniority made one an adviser and a source of wisdom, but leadership came with being junior. [Note 6]
6 It is tempting to see a broader African pattern in this. For example, Colin Turnbull’s analysis of Mbuti Pygmy society assigned an important disciplinary role to adolescents, who could manipulate the ceremonial molimo musical instrument, understood as a divine voice, in ways that approved or disapproved of adult behavior.
There are no early written records of Nyoro life because the Nyoro had no writing system. However Nyoro had definite ideas about their history. They told Beattie about a series of three “dynasties”:
That complicates things. If the modern mukama was the heir of Father Ki-ntu, and was supporting this claim with a charter myth about the subordination of the other lines, then who were the Chwezi and how did they fit in? Were they an inconvenient historical fact that could not be ignored? Or was there a way to integrate them into the justification of the modern king’s authority? Tales of the Chwezi are many, but we can digest them into a quick outline, which will come with the next story.
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