De’Veon Smith
Professor Ampene
AAS 366
Sept 15, 2015
Reflection Paper 2

Before I started reading Music in a Uganda Court, I was thinking about what I knew about music in Africa and then thought about is there a difference between Music in Africa and music in Uganda. I know the Africa is a continent and there are different parts in Africa, but I didn’t know if all the different parts of Africa had the same types of music. After reading Music in a Uganda Court I learned that there are different instruments that are used to make different music, how there are different groups that play for different palaces.
While reading Music in a Uganda Court there were many things that caught my attention, I found very interesting, and learned about. The first thing that I found interesting was how Cooke found “12 termite-riddled keys from a large xylophone and the wooden shells of six drums” and that they were one of the sacred palace ensembles, which was called the entamiivu and it was “played for Kabaka (King) Kyabaggu” (Cooke) who was the ruler of a Kingdom named Buganda.
I also learned that while Kyabaggu’s time as king of Buganda was one of the most powerful and largest kingdom states in Uganda and that music played a big role during his time as King. This was surprising to me because when I think of Africa the words flourishing and powerful don’t come to mind. Another interesting fact I grabbed from the text was how the King in a sense had his own band of musicians that were for the most part handpicked form a pool of musicians. “The palace musicians were drawn from a large pool of musicians belonging to specific clans”. It was also strange to learn about how they would live in their villages but be expected to come and play at the palace for days, weeks or sometimes months. “They lived for the greater part of each in their home villages, but took turns to come into the palace for periods of service of from ten days to two months”.
The second thing that I found interesting and caught my attention was when King Kabaka Mutebi was crowned in 1993 he kept the tradition going with music being a big part of Uganda. Another thing that caught my attention was “Ronald Mutebi’s father Muteesa II was a great patron of music and was how all the kings had a number of musicians involved with their court was an indicator of their strength and wealth. I learned that Muteesa II was forced to flee Buganda because it lost its “autonomous status” (Cooke) his palace which was at Mengo and was near Kampala which “was more royal than any court in the world” (Cooke).
The third thing I found interesting was how the palace walls lived seven groups of musicians who performed at different times of the day for everyday. The seven different groups that performed were the Abakondere, the Abadongo ba kabaka, the Abalere ba kabaka, the Akadinda, the Entamiivu, the Entenga, the Omunnanga. The musicians in the palace were chose from a large pool and they all pretty much lived in villages. The only time that all the music groups were expected to come the palace was for coronations, anniversaries, or visits of important dignitaries.
The most interesting group to me was the entenga drum-chime. Lashed together side by side, the row of 12 tuned drums in the entenga drum-chime ensemble takes up more length than either of the xylophones.
I also learned about the different instruments that they using when performing or making the music. The different instruments they use are the Harp, the two royal xylophones, the entenga drum-chime, the abakondere trumpet orchestra, the abadongo ba kabaka- the king’s lyre band, the abalere ba kabaka – the king’s flute players, and the postscript. All of these things I found very interesting and I learned so much about Uganda and its music from just reading this article.

The last thing that I found pretty interesting was how the singers skill wasn’t measured by how well they sung but how “successfully, when singing one of the old songs, he makes use of poetic devices, such as parallelism, satire, deviation, and allusion” (Cooke).