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The Cultural Topography of a ‘Bantu Borderland’: Busoga, 1500–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

David William Cohen
David William Cohen
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
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Extract

The terrain of Busoga and adjacent areas of eastern Uganda constituted a portion of the boundary of the broad Bantu speech community of southern, central, west-central and eastern Africa. By examining closely the settings and circumstances of contact between Bantu and non-Bantu in this portion of the ‘Bantu line’ between approximately 1500 and 1850, it is possible to see the complexity of the ‘face of contact’ between speech communities in eastern Uganda. The study reviews several different efforts to comprehend and represent the evolving contacts between Bantu-speakers in the Busoga area and, in particular, Luo-speaking immigrants. Over the long run, many groups associated with Luo immigration took over Bantu speech while gaining dominant statuses and positions within the largely Bantu-speaking communities in the area. The study distinguishes five distinctive and non-homologous zones within this narrow stretch of the Bantu borderland, emphasizing through comparative analysis the very local, immediate, and contextual character of contacts across speech boundaries. It brings forward the economic and political significance of the circumstances of contact, and locates patterns of resistance, flux, and reflux within the era following the linguistic incorporation of the ‘stranger’ Luo within Bantu speech communities. Indeed, some of the important population flows in Busoga appear to have developed out of reactions to elaborated forms of domination building over a number of years, rather than as instant expressions of boundary and cultural formation by the participants in the experience.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 29 , Issue 1: Special Issue in Honour of ROLAND OLIVER , March 1988 , pp. 57 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 The pages of the Journal of African History have constituted the principal venue for the exchange of findings and speculations concerning the ‘expansion of the Bantu’. See, in particular, Guthrie, M., ‘Some developments in the prehistory of the Bantu languages’, III (1962), 273–82Google Scholar; Oliver, R., ‘The problem of the Bantu expansion’, VII (1966), 361–76Google Scholar; Posnansky, M., ‘Bantu genesis – archaeological reflexions’, IX (1968), 1–12Google Scholar; Hiernaux, J., ‘Bantu expansion: the evidence from physical anthropology confronted with linguistic and archaeological evidence’, IX (1968), 505–15Google Scholar; Phillipson, D. W., ‘The chronology of the Iron Age in Bantu Africa’, XIV (1975), 321–42Google Scholar; Vansina, J., ‘Western Bantu expansion’, XXV (1984), 129–45.Google Scholar

2 In 1966, Oliver set out in a speculative way four stages of Bantu expansion. The latest, in this millennium, involved contact, at what he then referred to as ‘the northern frontier of the Bantu world’, with ‘invaders from the north and north-east’. ‘During the last five or six hundred years, for which we have a considerable amount of traditional evidence, the history of this region has been very much dominated by the pressure of Nilotic and perhaps also of Kushitic invaders…’ (‘The problem of the Bantu expansion’, 375).

3 On the one side there was a considerable number of mainly unpublished studies based on local research in oral traditions. On the other, almost as a distinct enterprise, there was the continuing work – along the boundaries of archaeology and linguistics – on the Iron Age occupation sequences in several regions of Africa, including the Lake Victoria region in which Busoga, of this present study, is located. In an important discussion of interaction between Bantu and non-Bantu speech communities, Oliver set these contacts firmly in the ‘Later Iron Age’. He saw the characteristic Later Iron Age pottery as superseding over a very wide area a previous distinctive pottery type. The new style was ‘coarse-fired, roulette-decorated pottery, which as all experts are agreed is indubitably of Nilotic origin…It is…the symbol of a new, much more varied and vigorously interacting life style, which can only have been brought to the interlacustrine region by migrants from the Nilotic north’ (‘The Nilotic contribution to Bantu Africa’, J. Afr. Hist., XXIII (1982), 435).Google Scholar

4 Unhappily, field research conditions in Uganda from the late 1960s have made such a reconstruction very difficult, though there have been a number of unpublished local studies, many of which were to be presented in the eventually aborted three-volume History of Uganda under the editorship of J. B. Webster.

5 Cohen, D. W., The Historical Tradition of Busoga: Mukama and Kintu (Oxford, 1972).Google Scholar

6 Fallers, L. A., Bantu Bureaucracy (Chicago, 1965).Google Scholar

7 Cohen, D. W., ‘The political transformation of northern Busoga, 1600–1900’, Cahiers d'Etudes africaines, XXII (1982), nos. 87–8, 465–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See also Cohen, D. W., ‘Luo camps in seventeenth century eastern Uganda: the use of migration tradition in the reconstruction of culture’, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrtka, V (1983), 145–75.Google Scholar

9 See Fig. 2. The Appendix presents in tabular form a summary of the comparative analysis of the five zones of northern and eastern Busoga on which much of the argument of this paper is based. The appendix comprises three parts. A section presenting comparative detail on the nineteenth century is omitted from part (3) as it lies outside the specific concerns of this discussion.

10 See Batala-Nayenga, F. P., ‘An economic history of the lacustrine states of Busoga, Uganda: 1750–1939’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1976)Google Scholar; Cohen, D. W., Historical Tradition, 155–67Google Scholar; idem, Womunafu's Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community (Princeton, N.J., 1977), 39–52, and ‘Food production and food exchange in the precolonial Lakes Plateau region’, in Rotberg, Robert I. (ed.), Imperialism, Colonialism, and Hunger: East and Central Africa (Lexington, Mass., 1983), 1–18.Google ScholarVincent, J., Teso in Transformation: The Political Economy of Peasant and Class in Eastern Africa (Berkeley, 1982), 61–74Google Scholar, presents a similar picture for those parts of this zone which were eventually incorporated in Teso to the northeast of Busoga. See also Tosh, J., ‘The northern interlacustrine region’, in Gray, Richard and Birmingham, David (eds.), Pre-Colonial Trade in Africa (London, 1970), 103–18.Google Scholar

11 See Batala-Nayenga, ‘An economic history’, and Cohen, ‘Food production….’

12 Cohen, , Historical Tradition, 158–70.Google Scholar

13 Ibid. In the 1972 work, the spelling was given as ‘Lwo’ as opposed to the more recently adopted ‘Luo’.

14 Ibid., 168–70; and Ogot, B. A., History of the Southern Luo: Migration and Settlement (Nairobi, 1967), 101–3.Google Scholar

15 See Fig. 2.

16 Cohen, , Historical Tradition, 173–9.Google Scholar

17 See map in Cohen, , Womunafu's Bunafu, 136–7.Google Scholar

18 Crazzolara, J. P., The Lwoo, 3 parts (Verona, 1950, 1951, 1954), 334.Google Scholar

19 Ogot, , History of the Southern Luo, 148–50.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., 144–52.

21 See discussions of Budoola and Banda zones below.

22 See Fig. i.

23 Local histories of the abaise Igaga ruling house of Busiki relate that an early Kisiki (the title of the rulers of Busiki) had a capital (tnbuga) on Kisiro Island, while the treasures of the Kisikis were stored on Namakakale Island. Cohen, D. W., ‘Selected texts, Busoga traditional history’, xerox (1972), i, 50.Google Scholar

24 Cohen, , Historical Tradition, 177Google Scholar; also Cohen, D. W., Towards a Reconstructed Past: Historical Texts from Busoga, Uganda (Oxford, 1986), 150–3.Google Scholar

25 They are also referred to as Owiny Karuoth.

26 For discussion of these later processes, see Cohen, ‘Luo Camps’, and Herring, R., Cohen, D. W., and Ogot, B. A., ‘The construction of dominance: the strategies of selected Luo groups in Uganda and Kenya’, in Salim, Ahmed I. (ed.), State Formation in Eastern Africa (Nairobi, 1984), 126–61Google Scholar; and Cohen, D. W. and Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno, Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape (London and Nairobi, 1988).Google Scholar

27 Cohen, ‘Luo camps…’

28 Ibid.

29 Professor J. B. Webster was general editor of the project which was to include ‘The states of northern Busoga in the nineteenth century’, and which reached page-proof stage but was not finally printed. The paper was presented in a draft form in 1972 to the Department of History, Makerere University. See also Cohen, D. W., ‘Sharing authority in pre-colonial northern Busoga’, African History Seminar, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 7 05 1972.Google Scholar Renée Tantala has done excellent focused research on the workings of the Kigulu polity in central Busoga: see ‘ Gonza Bato and the consolidation of abaiseNgobi rule in southern Kigulu’, History Seminar paper, Makerere University, 21 08 1972Google Scholar; ‘Community and polity in southern Kigulu’, History Seminar paper, Makerere University, 27 11 1972Google Scholar; and ‘The circulation of Abaise Ngobi rule in southern Kigulu, Busoga’, B.A. History Thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973.Google Scholar

30 Vincent, J., Teso in Transformation, 145Google Scholar, writes ‘The large number of Basoga in southern Serere [Teso] reflects the distillation of the eastern Kyoga social network described earlier, especially the extensive marriage ties of Bakenyi and Basoga, as well as the entry of further Basoga into Teso as a result of displacement from their home region’. Evidence from Busoga indicates a strong reverse trend during the same period. See Cohen, , Womunafu's Bunafu, 147Google Scholar, and Batanda, S. J., ‘Bulamogl's relations with its neighbours, 1820–1850’ (graduate essay, History Dept., Makerere University, Kampala, 1971).Google Scholar

31 Cohen, D. W., ‘The face of contact: a model of a cultural and linguistic frontier in early eastern Uganda’, in Vossen, R. and Bechhaus-Gerst, M. (eds.), Nilotic Studies. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Languages and History of the Nilotic Peoples, Cologne, January 4–6, 1982 (Berlin, 1983), 339–52.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., 353.

33 For an important modeling of such extended associations and networks, see Buchanan, C., ‘Perceptions of ethnic interaction in the East African interior: the Kitara complex’, Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies, II (1978), 410–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 A very clear example of this is the relocation westwards, in the nineteenth century, of a collection of groups and lineages in southern and central Bugweri whose ancestors lost their precedence in the aftermath of the arrival of the Jo-Koch from the north some two centuries earlier. This example of a submerged wave is presented in an extended reconstruction in a volume which the author is preparing on Busoga 1700–1900.