Goodbye to one of the most iconic places in the European race to discover Africa in the 19th century. Goodbye to a national symbol of Uganda. At the end of February, torrential rains felled a century-old tree under whose branches some of the most important meetings took place between the Buganda king of the time, Kabaka Mutesa I, and the greatest adventurers of the golden age of exploration.
The management of Kyambogo University, owner of the land where the tree is currently located, located eight kilometers from the capital, Kampala, announced the death of the specimen of the Canarium species, at least 150 years old, although some experts believe that exceeds 200 years. “The tree fell due to the downpour last Monday night,” the university center explained in a statement.
The tree, known in the local language as Omuwafu, was part of the royal palace of the 30th reign of the Buganda kingdom a century and a half ago and it was in the shadow of its robust branches where the Kabaka monarch received the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley in 1875. , who was at the head of the mythical expedition to solve the last great mystery of African exploration: following the course of the Congo River to the sea.
According to Ugandan historians, under the now fallen tree was where the king wrote and gave Stanley a letter addressed to the Queen of England in which he invited missionaries and teachers to visit his lands. In its statement, Kyambogo University highlighted this event and praised the benefits of that pact. “Missionaries played a significant role in building an education system in Uganda by establishing schools and promoting literacy.”
But the visit of the Bula Matari or “Rock Breaker”, as the indigenous people nicknamed Stanley for his penchant for using dynamite to make his way, was not the only legendary visit to which the Omuwafu tree was a witness. A few years earlier, in 1862, the king welcomed another of the great explorers in history, the British John Hanning Speke, the first white man to see the sources of the White Nile, which he named Lake Victoria.
A sick James Augustus Grant, a renowned Scottish explorer, also attended that meeting. Grant himself left written in his memoirs the kind treatment that the Kabaka monarch had given him when he was so weak that he could not even get out of bed. “The king sent an officer and forty of his men to take me to his kingdom of Buganda, which I so desired to see… Not being able to walk, they placed me on a wicker stretcher and trotted me over the heads of four of them. ”.
Although the site no longer houses the royal palace, which is currently located in the Mengo neighborhood of the capital, the Omuwafu has enormous historical and cultural value for the Buganda people. Even the university management refused to build an educational complex next to the tree years ago due to complaints from the local community, who warned that the works could endanger the tree.
After learning of the fall of the centenary tree, the current monarch of the Buganda, Ronaldo Muwenda Kimera Mutebi II, asked the University to plant a new tree to replace the fallen specimen.
It is not the first time that torrential rains in recent months have destroyed a legendary tree in Africa. Last June, a strong storm in Sierra Leone toppled the Cotton Tree, which stood in the center of the country’s capital, Freetown.
The approximately 400-year-old ceiba tree was a national emblem since, in 1792, the first settlers of the city, freed slaves from America who had won their freedom by fighting for the British Empire in the American War of Independence , they gathered under its branches to pray together. Since that day, Freetown grew around that giant with a gigantic crown, up to 15 meters wide and 70 meters high. The country’s president, Julius Maada Bio, then described what happened as a “great loss for the nation.”
