TRIBUTE: Book Dedicated To Rt. Hon Kirunda Kivejinja And Busoga History Out

By Our Reporter

BRUSSELS, Belgium [SHIFTMEDIA] His passion for Busoga and its history was remarkable, but death robbed us of him even before he released his book, Enkaana.

We are celebrating the life of fallen ‘Hero’, the Rt. Hon Kirunda Kivejinja, who passed on due to COVID 19 in December 2020. He was a veteran politician, Senior Presidential Advisor and 2^nd Deputy Prime Minister.

All, however isn’t lost, a book in dedication of the memory of Rt. Hon. Kirunda Kivejinja, Enkaana is out.

Born in 1935, Kivejinja had much love for Busoga and its history, before his death he dedicated his life to promoting and enabling education of the masses in Uganda. He interested many to contribute to his life-long goals and whenever he saw such efforts similar to his own, exercised by anybody, he supported them wholeheartedly.

“This book was initially set for publication in 2020. However as final touches of the book were being made, we got news that Rt. Hon. Kirunda Kivejinja was in hospital from where he succumbed to Covid-19 on December 19th, 2020,” said Dr. Minah Nabirye, one of Kivejinja’s daughters.

She said further: “The plans for completion of the book stalled for a while but we managed to finally rejuvenate them. The lessons captured in this book and those learnt from the loving father to whom this book is dedicated are captured very well in the title ‘Enkaana,’ said Minah who has been so instrumental in having this book published.

She notes that in Busoga, if you received seeds to plant from someone, when you harvested your crop, you give a gift back to the one who gave you that seed. “The name of that gift in Lusoga is Enkaana. We may not have been able to give this book back to Rt. Hon. Kirunda Kivejinja but we have made it available to a wider audience,” she explained in her interview.

Minah said David William Cohen, the co-author of Enkaana who also got the seed of knowledge on the History of Busoga from the Basoga people is enabled to give the gift back of the stories he collected from Busoga.

Details about Enkaana

This book is their collective Enkaana. The fieldwork texts of the book were compiled by David William Cohen on the origins of the Basoga people for over half a century old. They were collected in Busoga between 1964-1972. Some had field notes written all over them or the typewriter ink used to type them had faded or discolored making them almost unreadable.

Both the orthography and languages used varied continuously. Gilles-Maurice de Schryver scanned all these texts and sorted them into the categories of either interviews or letters. Minah Nabirye made them machine readable either through retyping or OCRing. Nabirye also sorted them into their respective language categories and formatted each individual text.

All the original texts were allocated a title that shows the name and clan of the person interviewed or letter correspondent plus the name of the clan’s place of origin whenever it was mentioned. Respondent’s names are arranged alphabetically. Subtitles were used to show either the language varieties used or the special information entailed in the texts on topics such as folk stories, food production, famine, technological advancements and war tales.

The final book is divided into three main parts. The first part has two chapters which introduce the book. These chapters show the contributions and implications that the stories in the fieldwork texts have to the study of African history and legacy data documentation. The second part has the fieldwork texts presented in two chapters. The original fieldwork interviews and narrations are in Chapters 3. Letters sent to the Radio Uganda Talk Show hosted between 1964-1965 by L .K. Bagimba regarding inquests into Busoga clans are in Chapter 4. The third part is the appendix which has a list summarizing the clans of Busoga plus the respective totems and taboos mentioned in the texts, some fieldwork-work related photographs and the lemmatized wordlists in both Lusoga and English. This book provides the best possible rendition of Cohen’s fieldwork.

Technical details  

Main title: Enkaana

Subtitle: Fieldwork Texts Compiled by David William Cohen on the History of the Basoga people

Authors: Dr. Minah Nabirye and Prof. Dr. Gilles-Maurice de Schryver

Publisher & year: Menha Publishers, 2022

Size: 215 x 280 mm

Pages: 802 PP.

Binding: Soft cover Weight: 2kg

ISBN: 978-9970-402-02-1

Price: UGX150,000/- (usd$45)

How to acquire a copy?

This book is available at an outlet bookshop at CMS in Iganga. The contact addresses of Menha Publishers (U) Ltd are given here below: Postal address: P.O. Box 35409 Kampala Telephone contacts: 0773 940999 / 0782 374210 / 0779 464956 Email: contact@menhapublishers.com Visit their website for more details at: http://www.menhapublishers.com/