Ugandan army troops removed the palace guards. A king’s own family stands accused of hiding an heir no one has met. In Britain, none of this would have happened, and that’s exactly the point, writes Celani Sikhakhane in Royal Mzansi.
A bitter battle over the throne of one of Africa’s oldest monarchies, the Tooro Kingdom in Uganda, has turned royal succession into a spectacle, and made the case for African monarchs to rethink how they choose their next king.
King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, who became the world’s youngest reigning monarch when he took the throne at age three in 1995, died on 27 August in the United States, where he was being treated for cancer, aged 34 after a 31-year reign. As the kingdom prepared for his burial, a bitter succession dispute erupted before his body had even been laid to rest.
A 21-member Royal Succession Committee of the Babiito clan announced Prince Edward Rukidi Kijanangoma, a television news anchor and the late king’s cousin, as the new Omukama of Tooro. The decision was immediately rejected by the king’s immediate family, Queen Mother Best Kemigisa and his sisters, Princess Ruth Komuntale and Princess Elizabeth Bagaya, who said the choice ignored a will left by King Oyo naming his own son as heir.
The dispute escalated sharply. The Queen Mother said Ugandan army troops removed the royal guards from the palace without notice and were deployed around it, with the family effectively confined inside during the standoff. Adding to the controversy, the reported son’s identity, age and whereabouts have not been publicly disclosed, and a prominent Ugandan commentator closely tied to the country’s army chief has publicly questioned the claim, saying the kingdom deserves to know the mother’s identity before accepting an unknown son as king.
The clan committee has stood firm, saying Oyo left no son by their reckoning, and that anyone who disputes their choice should take the matter to court.
This kind of very public, very messy succession fight is exactly what African monarchies risk when succession plans are unclear, unpublished, or open to dispute after a king’s death. Compare this to Britain, where Queen Elizabeth II’s death in 2022 caused no succession crisis at all, the line of succession had been public for generations, and King Charles III’s own succession by Prince William is already just as settled. In Monaco, Hereditary Prince Jacques, the 11-year-old son of Prince Albert II and Princess Charlene, is publicly recognised as heir, while Albert’s eldest son, Alexandre Grimaldi, born outside marriage, has been openly and clearly excluded from the succession, with no ambiguity left for dispute.
African monarchies don’t share one single approach to succession. Eswatini’s system already avoids the kind of dispute now playing out in Uganda: the reigning king cannot choose his own successor. Instead, a royal council known as the Liqoqo selects one of the king’s wives as Indlovukazi, the great wife, and her son automatically becomes the next king. The AbaThembu kingdom follows a broadly similar approach. Others, including the Zulu, amaXhosa, amaMpondo and Bapedi kingdoms, still rely on more open-ended succession customs, which have repeatedly led to court battles over the throne, since no single method of choosing an heir is trusted by everyone involved.
Perhaps more African monarchies should consider clearer, publicly known succession plans, along the lines of Eswatini, the AbaThembu, Britain or Monaco, to spare their nations the kind of public embarrassment, and real division within royal families and communities, that Uganda is now going through during what should be a period of mourning.
Pictured above: The late King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV of Tooro, whose will has been rejected by the clan’s succession committee, as a bitter fight over the throne unfolds in Uganda.
Image source: Tooro Kingdom
