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The Nyoro are one of a large number of peoples living in the region of the Upper Nile and the Great Lakes of eastern Africa. The Nyoro today live along the shores of Lake Albert in western Uganda, but they have legends of once having been the political masters of a region reaching into adjacent areas.
The most complete scholarly studies of the Nyoro were made by an Oxford University ethnographer named John Beattie (1915-1990), who arrived in the area in 1951 during the waning years of the British colonial administration. He lived among the Nyoro in the fishing village of Tonya on the shores of Lake Albert (on the Uganda-Congo border). [Click for Note 4. Click the note to hide it again.] There is considerable variation in the resources across Bunyoro. Beattie writes:
4 Because this essay is concerned with traditional Nyoro society, it is written in the past tense. However the Nyoro still exist, and many of their customs and understandings continue to influence their life in modern Uganda. At the time of Beattie’s fieldwork in the 1950s, there were estimated to be about 110,000 Nyoro (Beattie 1963: 27). The population by 2005 was about 700,000, about 3% of the Uganda population (http://www.photius.com/wfb2000/countries/uganda/uganda_people.html, consulted July 13, 2007).
The contrast between upland Bunyoro, with its lush growth of bush and elephant grass, its plantain groves, and its scattered fields of millet and sweet potatoes, and the arid Lake Albert littoral, 2,000 feet lower in altitude, is striking. Rainfall in the Western Rift Valley is minimal, and the only crop that can be grown there, apart from a few straggling fields of cotton, is cassava (manioc), which is planted in the sand close to the lake shore. There were no cattle in Tonya, and even goats did not thrive, but there were a few small flocks of scraggy sheep, at first sight hardly distinguishable from goats, and most people kept a few fowls. (Beattie 1975: 32)
Using all available sources, including extensive interviewing with very elderly people, Beattie was gradually able to develop a comprehensive account of the way in which pre-colonial Nyoro society most probably functioned, describing everything from childhood and neighborhood life to the rituals of the royal court. He is not the only author to write about Nyoro life, but his work is the most comprehensive account. The following description is therefore largely derived from Beattie’s research, and especially from his 1960 book, Bunyoro: An African Kingdom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston).
All Nyoro were associated with clans, of which there were 135. We shall learn more about them, but for now the important fact is that the Nyoro king always had to belong to the Bito clan. Why? What gave the Bito the right to lord it over everybody else? To hear the Bito tell it, history did. Not documented history, but history as handed down by word of mouth, usually believed to be true, but subject to gradual change over time as different speakers stress different aspects of it. Such “remembered history” used to justify present social arrangements might be called pseudo-history or mytho-history. The usual technical term is “charter myths” or “mythical charters,” since the history provides the “charter” for later institutions.
To find out why the Bito clan was regarded as the only group from which a ruler could be selected, Beattie plunged into the “charter myths” that explained where the Nyoro came from, and why the ruling Bito clan was inherently entitled to rule.
But simply having a myth doesn’t do the whole job, either among the Nyoro or among other peoples. The myth is the intellectual background to a body of practice. Just as an American president is inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony that requires particular participants and is performed for no one else, so the Nyoro king undergoes a ceremony that sets him off from the rest of the population. With a mythological charter justifying his position and a coronation ritual installing him in it, the Nyoro king is then in a unique position to govern the Nyoro people whether they like him or not.
The Nyoro speak a Bantu language characterized by a rich system of prefixes attached to roots. Their language is called Lunyoro (Lu-Nyoro) or Runyoro (Ru-Nyoro). Their territory is called Bunyoro (Bu-Nyoro). The people speak of themselves as Banyoro (Ba-Nyoro) and of an individual Nyoro person as a Munyoro (Mu-Nyoro). Although some writers carry these Bantu prefixes into English, in this essay, following Beattie, the un-prefixed term Nyoro is used except for the kingdom (Bunyoro) and the language (Lunyoro ). In some names I have taken the liberty of inserting hyphens to increase legibility or to differentiate roots.
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