Season 102 · Episode 1 — the opening of the Ugandan shelf of KacheliTV World Classics: folk tales of the Baganda, read aloud from John Roscoe's The Baganda.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
THE BOOK BEHIND THIS EPISODE
John Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs (London: Macmillan, 1911). Roscoe spent twenty-five years as a missionary in the heart of Africa and gathered his material at first hand from the Baganda themselves, from old people who knew the former customs and beliefs, much of it in the house of Sir Apolo Kagwa, Prime Minister and Regent of Uganda. The tales are read as Roscoe printed them, in the order they stand in his seventeenth chapter, the folklore chapter. Every tale in that chapter was read in full before anything was built: of its fourteen tales, five are told here and eight stand excluded by name, each with its reason, in the shelf register; the Legend of Kintu, the Baganda origin cycle, stands held by name for a later ruling, so no completeness is claimed for the chapter.
IN THIS EPISODE
0:35 Introduction
3:02 The Cat and the Fowl — the fowls lord it over the wild cats on the boast that their combs hold fire, until a young cat tests the sleeping cock's comb and finds it cold.
6:23 Sifirwakange and Kasokambirye — Sifirwakange, "I will not lose mine," hunts all Uganda for his debtors; Kasokambirye hides from him inside a bundle of firewood, and then inside the plantain food.
12:51 Ndyakubi and Ndalakubi — blood-brothers: the guest who eats a hundred men's food and still complains is answered by the host whose feet will not fit inside any house.
16:33 Why the Bats Hang Head Downwards — the bat loiters on his errand to call the sun, the moon takes the sun's office, and the bat may never look on the sun again.
18:35 Walukaga the Smith — the King orders his chief smith to forge a real man of iron, with blood and brains; Walukaga asks for a thousand loads of charcoal from the people's burnt hair, and a hundred pots of their tears.
Narration: Felix. Music: the instrumental theme "Cypress in the Soil" is heard at the opening and at the close, and in a short excerpt between the stories; there is no music under the narration.
