Are French Baganda?

 On 29 November last year I posted under the heading "Who are the Ialians?", that I speculated that the French were responsible for skinning animals. If they are indeed the workgroup that skinned animals, then they are Baganda, a tribal group found mainly in Uganda.

You see, the Kalanga word for hide/skin/leather is "ganda". You could write a book on the word "ganda" because like most Kalanga words, it can be split further into its components - gaa, meaning "ice" and "nda", whose meaning I am not too sure about. But that is a topic for another day. 

In leather processing there is something called "fleshing". In Kalanga this would be "ku pala". The effect of Sumerian language influence on the Kalanga language resulted in the letter "l" transitioning to the letter "r". The Shona language spoken in Zimbabwe, is just such a metamorphosed form of Kalanga. And so the Kalanga "ku pala" becomes "ku para" in Shona. A person who does fleshing in Kalanga would be "mpala" or "mpali", while in Shona such a person would be "mpari".

It is not beyond the realm of possibility therefore that the capital city of Uganda, namely Kampala (Ka-Mpala), could be sharing the same name as the capital of France - Paris. Ugandans traditionally wear beautifully made leather clothes. Paris, as we all know is the fashion capital of the world. There are many place names where the Baganda live, which are associated with animals, such as Mukono, "a bull" in Kalanga/Shona.

It is my hope that those who know Kalanga much better than me, and there are many such people in the world, will pursue this topic and prove me right or wrong.

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