User:Banana18902/Akiki Nyabongo (Pan-Africanism)

Akiki Hosea K. Nyabongo (c. 1907 - October 2 1975) was a Ugandan political activist and author. He was born a prince of the Toro Kingdom in West Uganda and received his university education in the United States and Britain. An Oxford-trained anthropologist, Nyabongo had teaching positions in the United States and continued anthropological research. He later returned to Uganda, contributing to its independence from Britain and lived there until death.

Akiki Nyabongo collaborated with various pan-African activists (e.g., W.E.B. Du Bois) and openly advocated African decolonization and development in his writings. His most noted novel was Africa Answers Back (1936), one of the first English-language novels from a Ugandan author. This novel noticed a syncretizing political and cultural reality in colonial Africa and symbolized his faith in African unity. Nyabongo represented the West Ugandan (Toro) people’s will for political freedom and made it heard in a global context.

Early life and education
Akiki Nyabongo was the son of the late Kyembambe III, Omukama (King) of the Toro Kingdom in Western Uganda. He was born in the Ugandan region Fort Portal in 1907.

The young prince attended secondary school at King's College in Budo, East Africa (New York Times). He pursued higher education at Howard University and Yale (New York Times). He attended Harvard University for his master’s degree, followed by a PhD in anthropology at Oxford University (Matera 395). In 1937, the Rhodes Trust started supporting his studies due to his high academic performance there (Monroe 394).

Career
After completing his doctorate, contrary to the British colonial government’s will to have him return to Uganda, in the 1940s, Nyabongo returned to the United States where he was a professor at the University of Alabama and later at North Carolina A & T University (Matera 395; Monroe 392). In 1957, he returned to Uganda to help negotiate independence from Britain. Before Uganda’s independence in 1962, he worked on the constitution committee. Nyabongo ran as an independent for a parliamentary position in Toro South, a constituency not far from his hometown Fort Portal and lost. Nyabongo spent the rest of his career in Uganda chairing the Ugandan government’s Town and Country Planning Committee until his death in 1975 (Monroe 396).

Connection with activists
Nyabongo lived a global life. He collaborated with prominent civil rights activists and shared the works he wrote in Uganda, the United States, and Western Europe. He lived and worked with George Padmore, collaborated with W. E. B. Du Bois for his abortive project “Encyclopedia of the Negro,” and introduced civil rights activist Eslanda Goode Robeson to Uganda during her trip to the African continent in 1936 (Monroe 389). Through these publications, relationships, and correspondences, Nyabongo challenged colonialism and furthered conversations about Black internationalism. Despite his consistent and global political activism, Nyabongo’s work has existed at the margins of mainstream Pan-African literature; nevertheless, Nyabongo remains a significant figure of political thought in western Uganda.

In 1936, while completing a thesis on Ugandan religious customs at Queen’s College, Oxford, and a year after publishing his first novel “The Story of an African Chief” (re-titled Africa answers back), Nyabongo sent a letter to Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a Bengali poet. (Mowtushi 17). The letter requested the translation of a morally charged poem that Tagore had composed about Africa, for the purpose of disseminating the text to all Africans. The poem protested Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) and critiqued the organized violence by European imperial forces on the African continent. In Tagore’s response to Nyabongo, he complied with Nyabongo’s request. As a result of this correspondence, British news source The Spectator published “To Africa”, which was the English version of the original poem translated by Tagore, on May 7 1937.

Political participation
In 1945, Akiki Nyabongo delegated at the Colonial Conference that Du Bois and the NAACP called in New York on April 6th at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. He was a member of the resolutions committee and helped outline four points that advocated anti-colonialism and development of the African peoples. These points were sent to Black and White presses and finally presented at the San Francisco Conference (Sherwood 77).

Akiki Nyabongo was a significant member and contributor to the Universal Ethiopian Student’s Association (UESA), which was formed by activist-scholars from the United States, the Caribbeans, and Africa in Harlem, New York in 1927 (Anthony v). In January 1947, Nyabongo served as the editor-in-chief for the UESA’s key publication: The African: The Journal of African Affairs. His editorship symbolised the entire Black intellectual community’s attention to the tense political climate in Africa, while Nyabongo contributed to this drifting attention by directing the periodical to concentrate on African politics (59). Moreover, by writing book reviews of note-worthy African activist scholarships recommended by the UESA, like W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Folk Then and Now, Nyabongo tried to advocate unity across the Black population. Both agendas echoed the journal’s call for liberation, end of imperialism, humanisation for Africans in the Diaspora, and developments of African states (54-55, 60).

In the late 1950s, Nyabongo led Ghana’s official opposition, the Ghana Congress Party. Subsequently, he became a Ghanian politician and the primary political rival of the first President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Eventually, the Ghana Congress Party merged with other opposition parties to form the United Party against Nkrumah. However, by 1959, Nyabongo fled Uganda out of security concerns. He began work as a professor of sociology and culture at the University of Leiden in the Hague, Netherlands.

Political ideology
Akiki Nyabongo advocated for the unity of ethnicities and religions. He took inspiration from Dr. Aggrey and promoted his educational philosophy. Akiki Nyabongo had also been in contact with the members of the African Association (Sanders 418) and advocated for a united tribe, characterized by brotherhood with no “tribe against tribes '' or “sects against sects”. This ideology directly influenced many East African states that have many ethnicities, including the British Uganda Protectorate and the Toro Kingdom. Akiki Nyabongo further emphasized that there should be no religious quarrels among Africans and that one’s religious beliefs must be respected (Sanders 418). He pushed for religious inclusivity in his political agenda. For Nyabongo, religious inclusivity was an important way to promote the general well being of the whole continent. The erased distinction between backgrounds created a shared African identity and therefore supports a pan-African political awakening.

Writing and research
Akiki Nyabongo was an active author and editor. He was one of the first Ugandan authors to publish an English-language novel (Monroe 389), and was the editor of African Magazine . His most well known work is the novel Story of an African Chief, published in 1935, which in 1936 was reissued under the title Africa Answers Back .

Africa Answers Back
This semi-autobiographical novel is set in Uganda and follows the life story of Abala Stanley Mujungu: son of a Bugandan chief who ascends the throne. The main character struggles with his identity throughout his life, trying to balance the indigenous values instilled by his parents and influences of Christianity and western culture from the local missionaries. African and European knowledge systems repeatedly clash in conflict throughout the book.

In one scene, the main character Mujungu, who has been recently appointed chief, requests a local healer to treat a fractured man's arm after seeing the English doctor has bandaged it. A German doctor expresses surprise, unable to fathom an alternate medical procedure without the use of bandages. Both the German and British doctor ask to sit in and learn how the local healer will operate, using the experience as a learning opportunity. This scene exemplifies the legitimacy of African knowledge systems of medicine compared to western medicine, a theme Nyabongo continues throughout the novel.

Religious Syncretism in Africa Answers Back
The relationship between Christianity and African religious systems in Uganda is also evident throughout Africa Answers Back novel, in the form of religious syncretism. Religious syncretism is when one religion’s characters (e.g., rituals) are absorbed into another one in the mutually interactions between two religions. An indication of this ideology took place early on in the novel, when the chief decides to name his son, the novel’s main character Abala Stanley Mujungu. “Abala” was a traditional Ugandan name, whereas Stanley stemmed from the chief's fondness of a Christian missionary named Stanley.

However, Akiki argued that “religious syncretism is an  African  phenomenon  that  is  here  to  stay  as Africans  have  not  yet  completely  embraced Christianity”. In other words, the practices in Ugandan culture have not departed from their traditional ways of life. Although to some extent, significant aspects of Ugandan life, like childbirth, marriage, and death burial, have witnessed tremendous Christian influences, this African system has not been totally submerged by the foreign religion, thus making it a hybrid of traditional religions intertwining alongside Christian practices.

Reception of Africa Answers Back
Africa Answers Back is one of the first English novels with an African-informed perspective on colonial narratives. The novel is considered a “foundational text of postcolonial African literature” by offering critique of the then cultural and racial stereotypes circulating academia and society.

Despite praise from the literary world, Nyabongo encounters criticism for Africa Answers Back. Literary scholar Martina Kopf claimed that Nyabongo took a similar approach to the very colonial institutions he criticized. She focused on the medical scene, where the injured man was not included in the conversation of his own medical treatment. Instead, the chief took a top-down approach, using assumptions and biases to inform his decision making on behalf of his villagers, similar to the arbitrary decision-making of colonial leadership. Moreover, Nyabongo use of 'savage' throughout the novel left scholars like Mahruba T. Mowtushi to question the negative connotations of locals in contrast to the 'civilized' society (Mowtushi, 2015, p. 19).

Other Projects
Nyabongo published a few other novels in the 1930s. In 1937, he published Bisoro Stories (Matera, 2010, p.9) which was succeeded by Bisoro Stories II (Nyabongo, 1939, p. 5). Winds and Lights: African Fairy Tales was published in 1939 (Nyabongo, 1939, p. 5). His last known project published was a Rutooro-language book, Oruhenda, which described the Toro region’s culture, tradition, and arcane palace language (Monroe 396).

Death
Akiki Nyabongo passed away at Jinja Hospital in Uganda on October 2, 1975 at the age of 65 (New York Times). He was survived by his wife, Ada Naomi Nyabongo, and his son, Amoti Nyabongo (New York Times).

Selected works
Story of an African Chief (1935), reissued and renamed Africa Answers Back (1936).

Bisroro I (1937)

Bisoro II (1939)

Winds and Lights: African Fairy Tales (1939)