Elders, Shades, and Women: Ceremonial Change in Lango, Uganda [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520309692

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Elders, Shades, and Women

Elders, Shades, and Women Ceremonial Change in Lango, Uganda

RICHARD T. CURLEY

UNIVERSITY

OF C A L I F O R N I A

BERKELEY, LOS ANGELES,

PRESS

LONDON

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England Copyright © 1973, by T h e Regents of the University of California ISBN: 0-520-0S149-5 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-634788 Printed in the United States of America

T O BIRDIE

Contents

Acknowledgments I. II. III. IV. V. VI.

ix

Introduction 1 The Changing Social Structure: Neighbors and Kinsmen 18 Etogo: Ceremonies of the Elders 51 Kwer: Ceremonies of Incorporation 108 The Adept and the Spirit World 151 Conclusion 191 Appendix I. The Career of an Adept: Elia Adongo 199 Appendix II. Thirty-one Cases of Spirit Possession 205 References 209 Index 215 TABLES

I. Incidence of Labor Migration in Obanya Kura II. Clan and Lineage Composition of the Three Neighborhoods in Obanya Kura III. Etogo Affiliation of Clans in Obanya Kura IV. Summary of Data on Etogo Ceremonies V. Kwer Ceremonies and Some of Their Features VI. Diagnostic Criteria Used to Determine Whether the Primary Agent of Possession is a Shade or a Wind

11 28 53 62 113 165

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Elders, Shades, and Women

FIGURES Figure

1: A Lango Household 30 2: Dispersal of Senior Males in a Jo Doggo la 37 3: Diagrammatic Representation of Elders Attending Ceremonies 56 Physical Arrangement of Guests at an Etogo Ceremony 4: 73 75 5= Membership in Meat Groups 6: Kinsmen Who Attended a Bringing Beer 117 for the Carrying Strap Patient and Her Affinal Kinsmen T Who Attended a Sprinkling the Eyes 121 8: T h e Atoro !33 Kinsmen Who Provided Beer 9: 140 for a Bringing Beer for the Ankle Bells 10: Artifacts Used in the Bringing Beer for the Ankle Bells 141 11: Classification of Kwer Ceremonies According to 148 Emphasis on Affinal or Consanguineal Relationships Participants in a Dispute 167 12: 187 13: Planes of Classification

Acknowledgments

T h i s book, like all anthropological studies, required the assistance and cooperation of many people. In 1964, Professor Elizabeth Colson conducted a graduate seminar on spirit possession in Africa, and my participation in the seminar stimulated interest in a topic that is central to this study. Professor Colson also read the manuscript at various stages and offered valuable advice. T h e field work in Uganda was supported by the Foreign Area Fellowship Program of the American Council of Learned Societies and by the Social Science Research Council. Professor Melvin Perlman initially suggested that I do research in Lango District, and he offered assistance, criticism, and advice throughout the research and writing. I am also grateful to Professors Aidan Southall and John Middleton for their suggestions concerning the feasibility of doing field work in Lango District. T h e field work was carried out with the cooperation of the Makerere Institute of Social Research. I am grateful to Dr. Josef Gugler and other members of the Institute staff for their assistance. Miss Mildred Brown, Mr. Matthew Okai, Mr. Isaac Ojok, and Mr. Otim, the rwot of Moroto County, introduced us to Lango District and offered advice on several occasions. Mr. John Odwe was my research assistant, interpreter, informant, and friend in Obanya Kura. Alberta Curley assisted in the field work, and her interest in the material and participation in the project led to many fruitful discussions and new ways of looking at the data. She also spent many hours typing and tabulating data, and the study owes much to her. E d Ottonello offered valuable criticisms. Linda Krone and Lynn Rives assisted with the preparation of the manuscript. ix

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Elders, Shades, and

Women

Tod Ruhstaller drew the illustrations. Rephah Berg read and criticized the manuscript with great care. Max Knight saw the manuscript through its final stages. My greatest debt, however, is to the subjects of this study, the people of Obanya Kura. Their hospitality and willingness to teach made this study possible. R.T.C.

/ Introduction

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

This study concerns social change among the people of Lango District, northern Uganda. Its focal point is the ceremonial life of a single community in Lango and how this life has changed in the past fifty years. It covers the period since the imposition of British colonial rule on Lango District and the beginning of extensive contact between Langi 1 and Europeans. The field work on which this study is based was carried out in Lango District from October 1965 until March 1967. The research covered a number of aspects of Lango culture which are only incidentally related to ceremonial change and which are therefore not included in this book. However, I have included some descriptive material so that the reader can understand the social and cultural context of ceremonial change. In selecting a problem for field work, my attention was first drawn to the Nilotic peoples of Uganda and the Republic of the Sudan. It became apparent to me in reading the literature on these societies that a great deal of ethnographic work is yet to be done (Beattie 1956; Evans-Pritchard i960). Several inquiries indicated that field work in the southern Sudan was impossible because of the political situation there. The Langi of Uganda 1. The word "Lango" can be used as an adjective: "the Lango people"; "a Lango spear." It can also be used as a singular noun to refer to a Lango person: " I am a Lango by tribe." However, the plural noun that means "the Lango people" is correctly "Langi." Hence, the title of Driberg's study The Lango (1913) is actually incorrect. In this study I adhere to Lango usage; I therefore use "Langi" to Tefer to more than one Lango person.

1

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Elders, Shades, and Women

appeared a good choice: little ethnographic work had been done in Lango since 1938, and the government and people of Uganda had long been noted for their cooperation with researchers. Moreover, Lango seemed suitable for the study of several theoretical problems that I wished to investigate. My investigation had two primary goals. The first was to collect ethnographic data among a people whose culture had not been greatly disrupted by external influences. For this purpose it was essential to study a community in which present-day practices could be seen as a continuation of precontact practices, and in which informants were likely to remember something of the precontact situation. I wished to avoid communities lying within the sphere of rapidly growing townships, and communities affected by radical innovations such as a group farm or a nearby industrial plant. My principal requirements, then, were that the community's subsistence patterns be similar to what they had been in the precolonial period and that social change in the community could be treated as a process of adaptation and accretion rather than one of discontinuity. The second goal was to study the changes in the roles of men and women and to see how these changes affected relations between the sexes and social organization in general. An initial assumption was that the roles of both men and women would be adapting to new economic conditions, such as the introduction of cash crops and participation in a market economy, which forced some Langi to deal with the outside world and some to leave their villages to become wage laborers in townships and industrial sites. I had a special interest in studying how the absence of a fairly large percentage of the adult-male population would affect village social organization. From journal and newspaper accounts of current developments in Uganda, I received the impression that labor migration was common in Lango, so that its effect on village social organization could be studied there—although, as it turned out later, such accounts overstated the importance of labor migration as a feature of Lango life. Another good reason for studying Lango lay in the realm of published source material. The Langi were the subject of one of the most complete studies to have been written on a subSaharan African society in the first decades of this century. Jack

Introduction

3

H. Driberg was sent to Lango District in 1914 and served there for five years, first as assistant district commissioner and later as district commissioner. While serving in Lango he undertook ethnographic and linguistic investigations which resulted in his publication of The Lango in 1923. This work was thoughtfully written and it contains much valuable information, although there are lacunae which can be frustrating when one tries to understand 1917 Lango society in a systematic fashion. For example, Driberg included much useful information about Lango religion and social organization, but not enough to allow one to understand them in the light of theoretical developments that have taken place in anthropology since Driberg's day. Nevertheless, I expected that The Lango would provide me with a good general picture of precontact Lango culture and would be especially helpful in the study of social change. For these general purposes it has been a valuable source. A second important written source is T . T . S. Hayley, The Anatomy of Lango Religion and Groups (1947). Hayley's field work was limited to a period of six months in 1936-37, but his book offers an excellent description of Lango ceremonial activities and beliefs as well as many data on social organization. T h e existence of both these written sources presented the possibility of comparing data from three well-separated periods in Lango history: 1914-1917, 1936-1937, and 1966. LANGO DISTRICT

Lango District (see Map 1) lies between latitudes i°3o' North and 2°44' North, and between longitudes 32°i5' and 33°i5' East. It covers 5700 square miles, including 500 square miles of open water and swamps. T h e gently rolling terrain lies at an elevation of 3000-4000 feet. T h e most outstanding geological formations are occasional outcrops of granite, many of them visible from a considerable distance. In the southern part of Lango District there are fewer hills, and streams and swamps become more frequent as one moves southward toward Lake Kioga, which forms most of the southern border of the district. Lango District is adjacent to Teso to the east, Karamoja to the northeast, Acholi to the north and northwest, and Nyoro to the southwest.

Elders, Shades, and Women

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