Nabongo Mumia's Straw Crown

Nabongo Mumia of Wanga

The assertion that Nabongo Mumia was the 'ruler' of the region spanning from Naivasha to Jinja in modern Uganda is laughable.  This particular claim has its origins from the coastal Arab traders who in the 19th century carried regular commercial expeditions inland in search of ivory and other valuables. They incorrectly rationalized sparse settlement in the vast areas they traversed for some kind of power vacuum and thus grossly misjudged the diverse polities in the hinterland . These traders placed greater importance on Nabongo for the sole fact that he was the only monarch in the  region between Naivasha and Jinja and more importantly one with whom they could conduct business with.

An Arab Caravan

This was immensely appealing to the caravan traders, more so as Nabongo exercised authority and was a leader of a form of government that they could easily comprehend.
King or not Nabongo had no military superiority whatsoever or the power to dictate his terms to his populous neighbours the Luo, and the pastrolist communities of the Riftvalley, primarily the Kalenjin and the Maasai.

All these communities were well known far and wide for their warlike ferocity, territorial consciousness and implacable sense of freedom. They also had well refined military structures, well established traditions in military discipline, great expertise in conduct of warfare besides all of them (as individual communities) being far much more potent and superior to any forces that Nabongo himself could have marshalled.

Closer to the truth, Nabongo was more of a respected sage and a merchant than an all powerful monarch. He was perceived as an honest broker who provided assurance of security for all those who came to trade in his area of jurisdiction. And through diplomatic concessions Nabongo could claim some sort of assurance of safe passage to caravans that passed through neighbouring tribal territories.

For his co-operation with the British (who had inherited the Nabongo affiliation from the Arab caravan traders), and to encourage others to act similarly, Nabongo was given (on paper) the formal recognition by the British of being a monarch and suzerain of a region that far surpassed his area of influence -- to include those which he never had any nominal contacts with.

Dr Johanne Ludwig Krapf

This British action was mainly taken to ward off German colonial adventurism in the area. Such activities were not lost on the British who were all too wary of the perfidious entreatments of German colonials and the Kaiser's officials on local tribes. The Germans at the turn of the century still felt entitled to the region for having been the first on site. Johanne Ludwig Krapf and

Dr Johanne Rebmann

Johanne Rebmann who got to the Kenyan coastland in the early 1840s had in fact even signed treaties with local tribes all the way from the coast going inland to establish a German protectorate in Kenya.

 Naturally stemming from a sense of having been short-changed or outmanouevred the Germans surreptiously kept eyeing Britain's East African sphere of influence even after the Berlin Conferences. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, an otherwise foresighted schemer, was slow in recognizing the importance of African colonies in his imperial calculations -- he gave up these German claim rights during the Berlin Conferences. Bismarck stuck on this path against the wishes of many Germans, in 1891 he renounced the treaty that Karl Peters (an over ambitious official) had signed with the Kingdom of Buganda in favour of German protectorateship . . . in exchange for a minuscule, insignificant island (no bigger than Mfangano Island on Lake Victoria) in the North Sea called Heligoland .

Karl Otto von Bismarck;

To put it into context, Bismarck gave up claims to more than a million square kilometers across Africa for a barren island less than ten miles across. If apathy had a face it would have looked like Bismarck as he blissfully signed away those colossal rights.

The German menace to British interests in East Africa only ceased to exist after the Germans were gleefully rooted out of the entire region as one of the terms of the peace treaty following their defeat in the First World War.

The whole hollow edifice of Nabongo's primacy was crowned by the British with the bestowal on Nabongo of grandiose but politically insignificant titles of King, Paramount Chief and so forth. It was a farcical exercise that turned Nabongo into a British agent and a pandering collaborator.

Nabongo's position vis-a-vis the various inhabitants of the region can be easily demonstrated with well known accounts of British struggles as they forged ahead to establish their rule. It took the British with all their military might, 11 years proper in ruthless military expeditions, but altogether close to two decades just to forcefully crush and pacify the intransigent Nandi, a single sub-tribe of the Kalenjin.  

In fact no tribe was ever subjugated to another, the Kikuyu resisted the British (Kikuyu seers, particularly Mugo wa Kiibiru had long foretold the coming of invincible whitemen, and perhaps this dampened the Kikuyu pre-colonial resistance) so did the Mijikenda under the female chief and warrior Kinjekitile Ngwale amongst many others in assertion of this independence.

Captive members of the MajiMaji rebellion who were led by Kinjekitile

Right in what can be considered Nabongo's own backyard , rebellion in the Nandi region against the British (a well documented historical fact) poignantly brings out the sham of Nabongo's purely imagined prepotency. The relentless intensity of Nandi attacks and successful sabotage of the railway was such that the British, out of desperation, finally felt compelled to  resort to cheap duplicity.

Koitalel Samoei, murdered in 1905

In one of the most shameful and despicably devious acts perpetrated by the British in Kenya they assassinated Koitalel Samoei, the leader of the community and his entire military council in broad daylight at a peace meeting the British had appealed for. Although this was by no means a new innovation and had been used by Europeans amongst themselves in many instances in the past, it was utter abomination amongst Africans (they began to rob us of our dignity and destroy our value systems even before they had had control!).

Having killed Koitalel the vindictive British who had been given such a fright by the Nandi, exiled to Seychelles Koitalel's remaining son Barsirian Arap Manyei -- born 1882. Barsirian was the Nandi leader from 1919 until 1922 and it is from this year that his long detention at the pleasure of the British began. The elder brothers of Barsirian had all been hunted down and killed but the British still believed Barsirian was acting as a unifying symbol for elements of resistance amongst the Nandi. It was for this reason that he was a hostage in Seychelles for 42 years and like Harry Thuku (who had also been exiled to Seychelles), he returned in 1964 a broken man. This makes him the longest-serving political prisoner in Kenya's history.

The Murderer of Barsirian's father, (Koitalel Samoei) the demented British officer Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen 

A grey, old man he died soon after his return, and rested his lifelong sorrows on the soil for which much of his family's blood had been shed. His father's entire clan, the Talai clan,  was uprooted by the British in the 1920s at the time of his exile from Nandi to modern day Kericho where they were rigorously quarantined in ignorance to forestall any further resistance. To this day they languish in abject poverty in a slum right where the British shipped them.

Little chance there is then, one rickety Nabongo Mumia could have stood against such a willfull show of might and formidable sense of martial confidence amongst his supposed subject vassals -- who knew nothing of the denigrating claim prior to the establishment of colonial rule; a claim  which if made known without British military presence would have goaded the supposed vassals (Luo, Luhya, Maasai, Kalenjin and others) to a frenzy of wrath and possibly sparked off wide spread  war-hysteria against the pretentious Nabongo. 

Nabongo and his clan would have been annihilated in retribution -- there is no question about it, for none of the said tribes (including most of the other sub-tribes amongst his own Luhya people) would have brooked the slight or taken lightly the implication of being branded mindless subjects or wholesale slaves.

What more can be said about the reality of the situation other than by the lengths the British had to go to to quell the resistance to foreign rule amongst the various tribes --  exposing the fiction of Nabongo's control more candidly than any number of spurious claims that can be put to the contrary.