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As far as Beattie was able to reconstruct it, the Bito rulers really were an immigrant group, biologically slightly different from other Nyoro. They apparently really did come from further north, and they moved in upon a society already composed of pastoralists (huma) and agriculturalists (iru), with both groups considering the pastoralists as the aristocracy of the system. [Note 10]
10 Many historians of Africa argue that pre-Chwezi Nyoro society had originally consisted of Bantu farmers (iru) who were invaded, probably sometime in the 1400s, by non-Bantu-speaking pastoralists (huma) from further north along the Nile. In that case, the terms iru and huma may originally have been names of ethnic groups, even though today they are used mostly to mean farmer and herder.
(If one considers the term Huma to be the name of an ethnic group, then some prefer to use the alternative form Hima, since Huma is also the name of a lower Mississippi Indian tribe.)
However, there are few traces of independent “Huma culture” to suggest an actual movement of people. There are, for example, no non-Bantu, Nilotic language borrowings in common use in the Lunyoro language, even for matters related to cattle. That makes the probability of an “invasion” unlikely, although one can imagine a small herding group perhaps staging a kind of “coup” by which they managed to gain control over the iru/Iru.
Just who the Chwezi actually were is still unknown. One of Beattie’s Nyoro colleagues speculated that they might in fact have been Portuguese, since tradition held that they had been light skinned and possessed exotic technology (Beattie 1969: 159). But what mattered to the Bito myths was linking the mukama to a universal understanding that he was descended in a designated ruling line to the dawn of everything. The mukama, in other words, was God’s choice as lord of the Nyoro.
Did anybody besides the Bito believe that these self-serving stories about their right to rule were true? Beattie tells us that the nearby Ganda to the south, traditional enemies of the Nyoro, certainly did not believe that they had been ruled by Brother Number Three. And one can imagine that some Huma had doubts about their subordination from the dawn of humanity to the offspring of Ka-kama.
But as long as the Bito remained in charge of the kingdom, they were in a good position to propagate their self-serving versions of these stories.
The stories, like all myths, had a life of their own. They weren’t just lectures given by Bito. Beattie noticed that all Nyoro seemed to enjoy telling him these stories, and that,
… all Nyoro, share in the glory of their ruling line and the wonderful feats of its progenitors. The exploits and conquests of Isaza and the Chwezi rulers are known to every Nyoro. When people think of themselves, as Nyoro sometimes do …, as being in decline, there may be compensation in the thought of past in default of present greatness. (Beattie 1960: 16)
If the Chwezi left by 1500 and there was still a Bito mukama on the throne in the 1950s, what happened in between? In other words, what happened during the reigns of the kings of the Bito line?
It is estimated that between the time of Rukidi and the arrival of the first European visitors in the nineteenth century, the land of the Nyoro passed through roughly eighteen generations and the reigns of 26 mukamas (Dunbar 1965: 34-37). The myths about the beginning of this long period evolve into the documented history of the last part of it. Beattie, like other authors, divides the process into two parts:
During the first period, up to the time of the seventeenth Bito king, the great empire believed to have been inherited from the Chwezi was maintained in much of its former greatness. The fourth Bito Mukama fought with the Ganda, who had by now asserted their independence, and killed their king. Other Bito kings are said to have fought successful wars as far away as the borders of Zande country in the Congo, and in Ruanda and Ankole, the latter of which is said to have been a part of the Nyoro empire until about the end of this period. There were constant wars against the small but aggressive Ganda kingdom. At all periods there were numerous revolts, but these were usually successfully quelled. (Beattie 1960: 16-17)
The second, more recent period, roughly from the reign of the seventeenth mukama until the dominance of the Europeans, brought gradual decline in Nyoro fortunes and the rise about 1800 of the formerly subordinate Ganda people, who, enriched and emboldened by their success in exchanging slaves and elephant tusks for cloth and firearms, began to dominate more and more of the lands formerly under Nyoro sway. Although Nyoro fortunes waxed and waned (and warfare was constant), the general trend was toward Nyoro political contraction.
This decline was finalized with the arrival of the Europeans in the 1800s. The famous explorers James Grant and John Speke, seeking the source of the Nile River, unfortunately arrived in the reduced Nyoro territory directly from the court of the king of the Ganda, the traditional enemies of the Nyoro. This made the Nyoro suspicious of them, and the Ganda had filled Grant and Speke with suspicions about the Nyoro. They reported that the Nyoro were far less cooperative than the Ganda had been.
In the end, the Ganda found it in their interest to cooperate with the British, who therefore viewed them positively. Britain established the Protectorate of Uganda across the region in 1894, and unwittingly ended up making many Nyoro regions subordinate to the cooperative Ganda king, who in fact had little or no interest in looking after the welfare of his traditional Nyoro enemies.
The land of the Ganda, and with it the land of the Nyoro and other kingdoms in the region, did not thrive under European administration. War and disease took their toll. Colonial administrators and missionaries, seeking to suppress witchcraft, created resentment by forbidding fertility rituals. And generally the kingdom of Buganda was laid low by about 1900, becoming part, like Bunyoro, of Britain’s Protectorate of Uganda (“place of the Ganda”).
From 1900 to the time of Beattie’s visit in the 1950s, things improved, despite Britain’s involvement in the two World Wars and the stresses that war brought to colonial administration. By the time of Beattie’s work, the colonial government was both better informed and better provisioned than previously, and more authority had been returned to the Nyoro mukama and his chiefs and to popularly elected “chiefs’ councils,” established in an effort to democratize the formerly autocratic system. [Note 11]
11 Beattie had the good fortune to study the Nyoro while the king and his court were still, to a limited extent, functioning. Uganda became an independent nation in 1962, with the king of the Ganda taking over as the first president. Countless warlords immediately arose to challenge central authority, and between 1966 and 1986 over half a million Ugandans were killed in the many attempted coups and general civil war. The royal houses of Uganda were abolished in 1967 and their personnel eventually sent into exile or exterminated.
The régime of Idi Amin, 1971-1979, one of the most vicious dictators of the twentieth century, tortured and killed large numbers of Ugandans as the world looked on in horror but did nothing in particular because of Uganda’s status as an independent state. (After Amin was overthrown in 1979, he successfully found comfortable sanctuary in Saudi Arabia and died in 2003 at the age of 80 without standing trial.)
A successful coup in 1986 ended most of the bloodshed, and elections were established in 1994. Interestingly, the monarchies of Uganda have been “restored” to a limited extent, although the similarity to the earlier, let alone the pre-colonial, Ugandan monarchies is debatable.
Very little of this late history is enshrined in myth. As history, it explains the subordination of the modern Nyoro to their Ganda enemies, but it hardly glorifies or “justifies” it. The myths that Nyoro love to tell are set in the earlier periods, when Bunyoro was contentedly glorious, and when the Bito rule was coming into being as the normal state of things.
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