Kintu and Nambi: The First Journey of the Living

Before Kintu, there was nothing on the earth.

Not emptiness — the world existed, the land was there, the hills and the water and the forest were all in their places. But there were no people. There was one man: Kintu, the first. He had a cow. The cow was his only companion, and he lived on what the cow gave him, and the world below the sky was very quiet.

Gulu lived in the sky.

Gulu was the sky god — not the sky itself but its sovereign, living in the country that exists above the visible blue. His household was enormous: children, servants, cattle beyond counting, grain in stores that never ran low. His daughter Nambi looked down from the sky one day and saw Kintu walking with his cow across the empty land below, and she decided, with the decisiveness that marks all the important decisions in myth, that she would marry him.

She told her father. Gulu was not immediately convinced.

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He devised tests. This is the ritual of all fathers in all traditions — the impossible labor, the task that should eliminate the suitor and doesn’t. Gulu’s tests were specifically impossible:

He took Kintu’s cow and hid it among his own vast cattle herds. Without the cow, Kintu had nothing — no food, no milk, no companion. Kintu nearly starved in the sky country waiting for his chance. But Gulu’s son, who had taken Kintu’s side, found the cow and pointed it out. Kintu identified it correctly from among thousands.

Gulu then gave Kintu an impossible meal: ten thousand portions of food, enough for a village feast, to be consumed by one man in one sitting or the engagement was refused. Kintu sat down and ate. He ate until the dishes were clean and the grain bins were empty. Gulu’s servants, who had been given the task of watching, could not explain where the food had gone.

Kintu was then given a stone axe and told to cut firewood — but the wood he was given was made of rock. He set to work and found, in the first log, a crack where an iron tool was hidden. He used the iron and split the rock-wood into manageable pieces.

Each test produced the same result: Gulu devising an impossibility, Kintu completing it, Gulu watching with an expression that was not quite approval but was slowly becoming it.

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After the last test, Gulu called Kintu before him.

You may take my daughter, he said. But I am also giving you something else, because Nambi has a brother named Walumbe, and Walumbe wishes to come with his sister to the world below.

He paused.

Do not let Walumbe come. He will not help you. His name is Disease. His presence in your house will cost you more than you can pay.

Nambi’s face, during this speech, is not described. The tradition gives her silence here, which is itself a form of expression.

Gulu gave them the cattle and the provisions for the journey, and then he said the last thing:

When you leave, do not turn back. If Nambi has forgotten anything — food, seeds, any possession — do not return for it. Go straight to the world below and do not look behind you.

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They set out.

The journey was going well. The world below was getting closer. The cattle moved steadily. The sky country was fading behind them. And then Nambi stopped.

She had forgotten her millet.

It was the food she would need to feed her chickens — a small thing, a domestic provision, the kind of thing anyone might forget in the excitement of departure. She said: I must go back and get it.

Kintu said: Your father told us not to turn back.

She said: But it is only the millet. I will be quick.

Kintu said no. Nambi argued. The millet was real, the chickens would need it, the omission was a practical problem, not a cosmic one. What was a handful of grain against the welfare of livestock? She turned back before the argument was finished.

She collected the millet. She was quick. She turned south again and began to descend.

And Walumbe was beside her.

He had heard the instructions. He had been watching. The moment Nambi returned, the prohibition was broken, and the sky country was reachable again, and Walumbe stepped through the opening. He walked beside his sister back down to the world below, and there was nothing Kintu could do.

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Gulu sent Kayiimba — a hunter, his best — to pursue Walumbe into the hills of Tanda and kill him or capture him before he could spread through the world. Kayiimba tracked him for years. He came close several times. Twice he had Walumbe cornered, but in each instance there were people nearby — people going about their business, unaware of the hunt — and Walumbe hid among them and Kayiimba could not strike without hitting the wrong target.

The hunt failed. Kayiimba came back empty-handed.

Walumbe is still in the hills of Tanda. Disease is still in the world. It comes from the sky, carried down by a moment of forgetting, invited in by the ordinary need for millet — the most human of reasons, the most banal of catastrophes.

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Kintu and Nambi are the ancestors of the Baganda people. The clans of Buganda trace themselves through Kintu, whose totem is the mushroom. His name is invoked at the accession of every Kabaka — every king of Buganda — as the progenitor of the royal line.

But his story ends not in triumph but in resignation. The journey is completed. The marriage is real. The cattle graze in the world below. And in the hills nearby, in the place called Tanda, Walumbe moves between the people looking for the one he wants this season.

Kintu lives. Nambi lives. Their children live, for a while.

And then Walumbe comes.

He always comes. He was never meant to be here, but here is the only world there is, and here is where he lives now, in the ordinary hills, waiting for someone to turn back.