Ronald Mutebi

A Kingdom of Their Own

Tribe: The Hidden History of the Mountains of the Moon

By

Stacey International 540pp £19.95 order from our bookshop

One of the most striking and pertinent examples of the legacy of colonialism in Africa and the misconceived plans of the rulers that followed is the predicament of the Bakonzo people, who live in the far west of Uganda. The Bakonzo, together with their close relatives the Baamba, live in the upper reaches of the 15,000-foot, snow-capped Ruwenzori Mountains – Ptolemy’s ‘Mountains of the Moon’ – which straddle the border between Uganda and Congo, struggling to cling on to a tribal identity that the modern world, with its emphasis on bland, soulless conformism and human monoculture, now considers to be obsolete.

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