Those Who Came Before Us

Those Who Came Before Us tells the history, myth and spirit lore of Uganda and the wider Great Lakes region. David Ibanda, who introduces himself by name on the show, treats the past as a set of stories with characters, stakes and loose ends. Kings matter here. So do the spirits people feared after dark. Take the Buganda court episodes. In Kabaka Muteesa I’s 1879 Mission to London: Survival Diplomacy in Buganda, chiefs bombard a missionary with questions after a sermon on the end of days, and the king cuts through the noise to complain that Egyptian stations are creeping into his territory. What follows is a portrait of a ruler sorting foreigners by usefulness: Alexander McKay, an engineer who reluctantly repaired guns; the French Catholic White Fathers, cast as a scalpel to the Protestant hammer; Zanzibari Arabs warning that the British would one day take the country. The follow-up, The Envoys Who Saw the World: The Story I Didn’t Say, traces the ambassadors' road through Khartoum, Berber, Cairo, Malta, Algiers and Lisbon to London. On arrival, one envoy took the crowded river for a welcome, imagining it had been cleared for them as Buganda would have done for foreign guests. Ibanda flags the exaggerations in their reports, such as thirty children to every English family, and reads them for what they reveal about values back home. The folklore episodes work differently. Under the African Book of Monsters banner, Ibanda follows the night dancer through its pranks, its rumored appetite for human flesh and the charms said to stop it, from ash scattered around a house to a stool smeared with medicine. He sets one woman's account of her grandmother's nightly torment beside sleep paralysis and parasomnias. On cannibal accusations he presses hard on the evidence, noting that the colonial administrator Harry Johnston repeated what mainland Baganda said about the Sese Islanders without any islander being asked. Beyond those threads, the episode titles cover a wide span: Busoga micro-kingdoms such as Bugweri and Bukooli, Kasubi Tombs and the royal women who still serve there, Mukasa and the serpent spirits of Lake Victoria, the Maasai creator god Enkai, warfare in Bunyoro-Kitara, and a multi-part series following the missionary James Hannington toward Buganda. Some episodes retell Busoga folk tales and credit the tellers and collectors behind them. The delivery is conversational without going slack. Ibanda drops in wry asides, admits when he is speculating, and asks listeners to send in their own night dancer stories. Episodes also run as YouTube videos, and at least one comes with a Substack transcript, maps and a Google Earth flyover of the route. For court intrigue, start with the paired Muteesa episodes; for the folklore side, try Prankster Witch of the Night: The Night Dancer.