Kampala — WHILE attending a function in honour of the trustees of the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation who were here recently I was approached by one of the trustees who asked me a direct question.

The question was: "So what was the influence of the Cush kingdom in your country?" This was just before President Museveni told us that all the Ugandan kings are Luo. I was floored by the question since I had not addressed the issue of ancient African migrations in any serious way but I casually recalled that once while preparing a paper for a seminar I discovered that many of the rituals associated with our monarchies existed in ancient Egyptian kingdoms as well.

On hearing this, the visitor readily suggested that the connecting point for the two cultures must have been the kingdom of Cush which can be traced to the Nilotic people who lived in the vicinity of Khartoum during the middle stone age in a land known then as Nubia.

The interactions of these people with the Egyptians and later on with people from the present Libya centuries later ended in the dispersion of the Cushites into the southern parts of Africa around the 15th century AD including the Bito clan which established the interlacustrine kingdoms here.

Further investigations led me to the discovery that the first contact between Egypt and Nubia occurred at the end of the 4th millennia when the kings of Egypt's First dynasty conquered upper Nubia thereby introducing Egyptian culture. The next five centuries saw Nubia become a supplier of slaves and building materials for Egypt interspersed with the arrival of people from present-day Libya.

The arrival of the Libyans resulted in the development of a new civilisation in Nubia largely due to the departure by a weakened Egypt following the fall of the Sixth dynasty. The Egyptians returned to Nubia with the advent of the Eleventh dynasty when it recovered its strength but this time around it was resisted and was forced to maintain its presence through a chain of forts.

During this second occupation, Nubians were employed in large numbers as mercenaries against the Hyksos invaders of Egypt and this led to their being absorbed in the Egyptian culture as never before. With the defeat of the Hyksos, Egypt turned its attention to the conquest of Nubia which it divided into two administrative units at Wawat and at Kush with its headquarters at Napata.

Each of the two provinces was governed by a viceroy who was normally a member of the royal house who was responsible to the Egyptian king and below him was a hierarchy of lesser officials. With the decline of Egypt in the 11th century, the viceroys of Kush with the support of their Nubian armies established themselves as kings in their own right independent of Egypt and actually acquired control of Egypt between 751 and 716 BC before they were driven out by the Assrians with their superior iron-forged weapons around 654 BC. With the Egyptian ties severed, the Cushites continued to rule over the middle Nile for the next 1,000 years while preserving the unique Egyptian-Nubian-Libyan culture in which the Cushites developed their own language, worshipped Egyptian gods, buried their kings in pyramids but not in the Egyptian fashion until their extinction in AD 350 when the king of Aksum marched down from the hills of Ethiopia and destroyed their capital.

The destruction of their kingdom led the surviving Cushites along with the Luo to migrate southwards and spread all over East Africa. However, it is in the region bounded by Lakes Victoria, Kyoga, Albert and Tanganyika that the Cushites and the negroids from Cush left their lasting mark.

Vague accounts exist of rulership in this area from the 2nd millennium AD which climaxed in the cultural and political dynasty of the Chwezi rulers who are associated with great earthwork sites in Mubende and Bigo in Sembabule.

The supersession of the Chwezi dynasty led to the establishment of the interlacustrine kingdoms by the Bito clan people who were absorbed by the Bantu people they found.

The Bito dynasty brought with it a lot of the Egyptian royal customs and rituals which they had acquired during the Egyptian-Nubian civilization as well as during their interactions with the Libyans in Cush. For example, on accession to the throne, the ancient Egyptian kings used to discharge arrows towards the four points of the compass to symbolize the extent of their domain. Interestingly, the kings of Bunyoro used to perform a similar rite on accession exclaiming as he did so: " Thus I shoot the countries to overcome them."

Other examples of Egyptian influence include the internment of dead kings in conical tombs with retainers who were supposed to look after the departed spirits. Interesting also is the fact that all thrones had an item of spiritual value hidden underneath them an Egyptian custom which is also found in the United Kingdom where such a stone stolen by the English 300 years ago was only returned recently.

Although our ancient history has been largely neglected, it provides an interesting explanation about our social organization as influenced by the Cushite civilization.

Cushtic languages are still spoken in some parts of Ethiopia and Somalia. It would seem that the Cushites introduced ironmongery in parts of East Africa. For example, there is a major iron age site in northern Tanzania at a place called Engaruka which experts say existed for 1,000 years and whose style of pottery suggests that its inhabitants were Cushtic people.

Books on the subject indicate that the people of the Bito clan who established the Bunyoro kingdom were light skinned which raises the question whether this clan was a product of cross-breeding between the negroid (Luo), the Libyan and Egyptian people.

Many barriers are bound to come down as we discover our common originality as a people.

The writer is a lawyer