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African King Worked Secretly as a Nurse's Aide

HARRISBURG, Pa. — It’s the kind of story that usually begins “once upon a time.” A man who tends the elderly and sick for a living — bathing them, dressing them, helping them eat, pushing their wheelchairs — turns out to be a king.

The story is set in Harrisburg, where Charles Wesley Mumbere works as a nurse’s aide, and in the snow-capped mountains of western Uganda, where he is called king.

At Spring Creek Rehabilitation and Health Care Center and the public housing project where he lives, nobody knows his story, he said.

He laughed, picturing the reaction to the news.

“They will get shocked,” he said. “Your majesty!” he added in a mocking tone. “They will be making fun of me.”

Mumbere, 56, left Uganda in 1984 for what he thought would be a few years’ study in the United States, but politics back home interfered with both the government stipend for his study and his return to Uganda.

Now, with the Ugandan government apparently ready to recognize the mountain kingdom known as Rwenzururu, is he going home for good?

The people there, mostly farmers, number about 300,000, according to the Ugandan embassy. That would make Mumbere’s kingdom about the size of Pittsburgh — or 1 percent of the Ugandan population.

Amiable, a little formal but hardly imperious, Mumbere agreed to an interview as he prepared for his departure — making his story public for the first time in the city where he has lived for nine years.

Shaped by the politics of a country halfway around the world, the story highlights the melting pot nature of the U.S.

“This country is a very big country. It’s just like an ocean,” Mumbere said. “In an ocean you find very many creatures in there.”

Mumbere said keeping his background secret and following a boss’s orders haven’t been so hard; he was trained as a soldier, he said.

And he likes working in a nursing home. “I find it was very good interacting with the people I was taking care of,” he said.

“It was very lovely and friendly.”

At Golden Living Center Blue Ridge Mountain in Susquehanna Twp., where Mumbere is a former employee, he is known as “very loyal, a very hard worker, a very nice person,” said Johnna Marx, executive director.

(c) YellowBrix 2008

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