Kintu and the Test That Cost Him Everything

He passes every test.

Gulu, the king of the sky, does not want to give his daughter to the man from earth. Nambi wants Kintu. She has come to the sky’s edge where the earth begins and looked down at the lone man and his single cow, and she has decided. Her family disagrees.

So Gulu sets tests.

Eat this millet — there is a mountain of it. Kintu eats it all overnight, and the Buganda elders do not explain how; they say Kintu ate it all and leave the miracle where it is. Find your cow among ten thousand identical cattle. Kintu searches until he finds, by some sign only he can read, his own cow among the thousand. Chop firewood with a copper axe. Kintu does it. Carry water in a clay pot with no bottom. Kintu uses a spider’s web to seal the pot — and the water holds.

Gulu is impressed.

He gives Nambi to Kintu. He gives them both permission to go down from the sky and establish themselves on earth.

Then he calls them back.

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The warning is simple.

Gulu says: when you go down to earth, travel quickly and do not turn back. Under no circumstances stop or look back or return, for any reason. If you do, my son Walumbe will come with you.

Walumbe is Death. Gulu’s son, Nambi’s brother, the thing that Gulu has been trying to keep away from earth. If Kintu and Nambi travel fast and without turning back, Walumbe stays in the sky.

They descend.

They are almost at the bottom when Nambi remembers: she forgot millet for her chickens. The chickens are her chickens, they are living things in her care, she cannot let them starve. She says: I must go back for the millet. Kintu says: Gulu’s warning. Nambi says: it is only millet. It will be quick.

She goes back.

She returns with the millet.

Walumbe, her brother, comes with her.

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Walumbe settles in.

Death enters the world not as punishment but as family — literally, as a family member, Nambi’s brother, someone with a relationship to the household and therefore a legitimate presence in it. This is the Buganda understanding of mortality: Death is not an outside attack but an insider, someone who has the right to visit, someone whose visits cannot be permanently refused, only temporarily postponed.

Gulu, when Kintu comes to complain, sends another son — Kayiimba the hunter — to try to capture Walumbe and remove him. This works for a while. Kayiimba chases Death through the bush and corners him in valleys. But Walumbe escapes, always, because if any human sees where he is hiding and calls out to their neighbors to look, he escapes in the distraction.

To this day, the Buganda say, when Walumbe is about to take someone, you must not call out. You must be quiet. The noise gives him cover.

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Kintu founded the kingdom.

Despite — or perhaps because of — the arrival of Death, Kintu and Nambi established themselves on the Buganda plateau, had children, and those children had children. The founding of the Buganda kingdom is Kintu’s work. The royal genealogy begins with him. The succession of kabakas — the Buganda kings — runs back to the first man who passed Gulu’s tests.

The death he brought home with him is the death that all his descendants live with.

The kingdom and the mortality came in the same journey.

The Buganda elders who tell this story are not presenting it as tragedy. It is the account of how things came to be the way they are: the kingdom, which is real and beautiful and the center of Buganda identity, exists in the same world as death, which is real and relentless and the companion Walumbe.

Kintu looked forward, not back.

He made it down.

He built what he went down to build.

The cost was not avoidable. It came with the millet, with family, with the care for living things that makes you turn around even when you have been warned not to.

It was not a mistake. It was Nambi being who she was.

And Walumbe is still here, visiting all of us in turn.