Procursus:

Myth and ritual provide critical supports for social order and political power. For so-called “archaic states” this is well exemplified in the traditional Nyoro kingdom of what is today Uganda, as represented in the splendid ethnohistoric reporting of John Beattie.

This essay derives almost entirely from Beattie’s work. For years, all or part of his very brief 1960 book was assigned in UCSD’s Making of the Modern World course. But his book was intended to be a general ethnography, covering topics that were not related to the job it needed to do in our course.

As the syllabus became more and more crowded with material, it became desirable to create a far more compact description of traditional Nyoro society, focusing much more single-mindedly on the way in which myths and rituals provided political support for the “feudal” Nyoro monarchy. This paper was created to that end.

Deliberately kept extremely simple and very carefully organized, the reading was a huge success with students, far more so than Beattie’s original work had been. For many students, the Nyoro became their favorite part of the course.

The text is offered here in the hope that other students and teachers may find it helpful considering how myth and ritual are utilized in organizing and sustaining social order, at least as exemplified a couple of centuries ago in one traditional African kingdom.

DKJ