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The Bakonzo people anguish over losing their god Kithasamba to climate change. [1]

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Date: 2023-01-17  

Located at the confluence of the Kabiri and Kithangetse rivers in Kyondo sub-county (Kasese district), in the Muyina Chiefdom of the Obusinga Bwa Rwenzururu, Kororo’s waterfalls are named after an obstinate man who once lived in the area. The site is significant for conflict resolution, the dispensation of blessings, and healing. CCFU The water spirit of the falls is named Ndyoka.

The god Kithasamba sits atop the snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains in western Uganda. According to the cosmology of the Bakonzo ethnic group, ice and snow – believed to be Kithasamba’s sperm – melts and carries life down through the valleys lined with giant heather trees and bamboo thickets, and into the savannah below. Thomas Lewton, Vice News

The Bakonza people are one of fifty-four tribes in Uganda and speak Bantu, as most do in east, central, and southern Africa. Originally from the Congo, they migrated to the Rwenzori Mountains in SW Uganda one thousand years ago.

They are short people with dark skin and call the Rwenzori Mountains the Mountains of the Moon.

Living on the lower slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains, where the land is fertile and lush with plenty of water, makes subsistence farming ideal for supporting a population of fewer than one million people in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

This land is home to Kitasamba, their primary spirit who oversees the mountains. Rwenzori translates to rainmaker, and alpine areas of the mountains were once covered with ice and snow, which is the primary source of fresh water. The ice and snow used to be visible on all the tops of the mountains in the 1950s, according to elders, but not anymore.

Being animists, the Bakonzo believe that all things “possess a spiritual essence.” Rocks, forests, rivers, ice, and weather systems are animated and alive. Many now are Christian, whereas indigenous people were forced to convert or else.

Climate change threatens their culture, and the ice made by Kitasamba with meltwater fills the slopes with gorgeous and sacred waterfalls. They fear what will be left for coming generations as their world changes. I worry about where these tribes will live. Do they move to Kampala, Kasese or Brazzaville? I can’t begin to imagine what that would do to their souls. The heartbreak would be unbearable.

Rainfall was heavy but always consistent, elders say. The alpine wetlands, lakes, and streams are supplied, “in part, by snowfields that occur primarily on three mountains, Mount Stanley, Mount Speke, and Mount Baker. These aquatic environments, headwaters of the Nile, are home to a diverse range of flora and fauna, many of which are endemic.”

The greenhouse gas emissions from developed nations have changed the environment completely. Rainfall distribution patterns have changed, with flooding and drought replacing the consistent rainfall they depend on.

From Vice:

In May 2020, unusually heavy rains provoked landslides high in the mountains. Five rivers burst their banks, triggering floods not seen in a generation that displaced more than 100,000 people. The destruction followed a series of flash floods that have hit the Bakonzo’s homeland over the last decade. “The long dry spells are becoming longer, and the rainy season is coming at a time when it never used to,” said local cultural historian Stanley Baluku Kanzenze. “Nature is shifting.” Each part of this vast and diverse ecosystem is inhabited by its own deity. For example, Kalisya is the spirit responsible for wildlife and Ndyoka is the water spirit. Water threads through Bakonzo cosmology. Where rivers meet, spiritual leaders consult with these gods; hot springs are spiritually and physically healing; while the Ekisalhalha kya Kororo waterfall is a site of conflict resolution for the community, and one of Ndyoka’s many homes. Many of these sacred sites are now under threat. Last year’s floods changed the course of rivers, and so their confluences shifted with them, hot spring ponds became silted and unusable, and boulders crashed down waterfalls carrying away Mikayir’s votive shrine. Medicinal and ceremonial plants that line riverbanks were uprooted and taken by the deluge too. Rising temperatures are also causing the Rwenzori Mountains’ glacial peaks to melt without being replenished. If, as geologists predict, they disappear totally within the next decade it would spell extinction for a worldview intimately woven into ice and snow. “This is a threat to Bakonzo identity itself. We can’t say they’ll be Bakonzo when the ice is not there,” said historian Kanzenze.

The BBC:

In 2012, forest fires reached altitudes above 4,000m, which would have been inconceivable in the past, devastating vegetation that controlled the flow of the rivers downstream. Since then, the communities living at the foot of the Rwenzori have suffered some of the most destructive floods the area has ever seen, coupled with a pattern of less frequent but heavier rainfall. In May last year, five local rivers burst their banks after heavy rains. The waters came down the mountain carrying large boulders, sweeping away houses and schools and razing the entire town of Kalembe to the ground. Around 25,000 houses were destroyed and 173,000 people were affected. While science may provide an explanation for these events, the local Bakonzo culture has another way of framing them - according to their beliefs, they happen because the gods are angry.

For further reading on the danger of warming the glacial mountain ice, Two billion people depend on mountain glaciers which now hold less ice than previously thought.

Tropical glaciers:

The Rwenzori lies only 23 minutes north of the Equator and almost 30 degrees east of the Prime Meridian. There are glaciers here because the life cycle of tropical glaciers isn’t about location but height. Reaching Rwenzori’s glaciers means climbing at least 4,000 meters (more than 13,000 feet) above sea level just to get to the foot of them. Still, in a warming world, height can’t protect these once mammoth ice formations as they rapidly retreat. Even for Kelly, the term glacier raises images of classic ice masses in the Swiss Alps, which partially melt during the summer and then grow again in the winter due to snowfall. “Tropical glaciers are really different because summer and winter temperatures are almost the same,” said Kelly, an associate professor of Earth Science at Dartmouth College. Studies on tropical glaciers have confirmed that they reached their maximum extent around the same time that high-latitude glaciers were at their maximum during the last great ice age some 18,000 years ago. This tells scientists that there was a synchronized warming at the end of the last ice age. “Tropics are located far from mechanisms of climate change such as summer insolation [exposure to the sun] in northern high latitudes or direct effect of ice-sheets. So, they might be responding to CO2 (carbon dioxide) or other mechanisms we haven’t defined yet,” Kelly said at the 2019 Comer Climate Conference held in southwestern Wisconsin in early October.

I periodically write about the people on the front lines of climate change. They are predominately indigenous people of color who reside in the tropics, where their land and lives are valued only for resources to be pillaged and sold to us. Most people don’t care about them; their lives, pain, and suffering have no value or consequence, and wildlife experiences the same indifference and vicious cruelty. They are throwaways, a buzz kill, and the media finds it a rating disaster.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/17/2147336/-The-Bakonzo-people-anguish-over-losing-their-god-Kithasamba-to-climate-change

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