Lugbara

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Lugbara

ETHNONYM: Logwari

Orientation

The Lugbara people live on the plateau of the Nile-Zaire watershed in northwestern Uganda and northeastern Zaire. In the 1950s they numbered 244,000, of whom 183,000 lived in Uganda. They speak a cluster of dialects of the Eastern Sudanic Language Group, closely related to Madi, Logo, 'Bale (Lendu), and Keliko and distantly related to Azande and Mangbetu. They and the Madi, to their east, are the only representatives of this language group in eastern Africa. They refer to themselves today as "Lugbara" but also as "Urule'ba" ("High people") and "Andrale'ba" ("Low people"), others of the former being the Keliko and Logo to their west and others of the latter being the Madi to their east. Their plateau is very distinct from the landscapes of most of their neighbors, and they are conscious of their singular identity geographically, linguistically, and culturally.

History and Cultural Relations

The Lugbara came under colonial rule in 1900, as part of the Congo Free State. Arab slavers were active to the north and west during the nineteenth century, but the Lugbara escaped actual slave raiding because of their terrain and their military fierceness. Belgian administration was slight—and ceased upon the death of King Leopold II. The Lugabara were then handed over to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, after which Lugbara country was harassed by European elephant hunters until it was transferred to the British administration of Uganda in 1914, as part of the new West Nile District. After the independence of Uganda in 1962, the Lugbara were largely ignored during the first regime of Milton Obote, offered many favors by Idi Dada Amin (who came from West Nile District), and subjected to brutal near-genocide under the second Obote regime. Today the Lugbara population is certainly far less than in the early 1950s, and their social economy and organization have altered markedly from their preindependence form.

Economy

The Lugbara plateau is extremely fertile, supporting, in its center, a population density of more than 80 to the square kilometer during the 1950s. The Lugbara are highly efficient peasant farmers, their staples being grains (traditionally millets and sorghums, now with some maize), root crops (traditionally sweet potatoes, now also cassava), and legumes of many kinds. With increasing dependence on cassava, the formerly highly nutritious diet of the Lugbara has been drastically worsened. Cash crops were encouraged during the colonial period, but, owing to edaphic and climatic factors and the long distance to the nearest markets for cash crops (some 800 kilometers to the south), few have been profitable. Groundnuts, sunflower, cotton, and tobacco have all been tried, only the latter two with success. The main export has been that of male labor to the Indian-owned sugar plantations and the African-owned farms of southern Uganda; about one-quarter of the men are absent at any one time. Until the Obote atrocities of the 1970s, the Lugbara peasant society could maintain its members on a level of nutrition and health that was at least equal to those of most Third World societies.

The Lugbara keep some livestock: cattle, goats, sheep, fowl, dogs, and cats; before the cattle epidemics of the 1980s, they had far greater herds. Cattle, goats, and sheep are not killed for consumption, but rather for ancestral sacrifices (although the meat is actually consumed by those attending); the sale of hides and skins earns valuable income.

Traditionally, local exchange of surplus foodstuffs was in the form of gifts between kin and barter with others. Small local weekly markets came into being during the 1920s, with the introduction of cash, maize (used for beer brewing), and consumer goods such as kerosene, cigarettes, and cloth. (As late as the 1950s, women wore only pubic leaves and beads, and elder men, animal skins.)

The division of labor is sharply defined. Men and women share agricultural tasks, the men opening the fields and the women doing most of the remaining work. Men hunt and herd cattle; women do the arduous and the time-consuming everyday domestic tasks. Formerly, men were responsible for the physical protection of their families and for waging feuds and war. Men hold formal authority over their kin, but older women informally exercise considerable domestic and lineage authority. Land is held by lineages, as land is traditionally not sold or rented. Women are allocated rights of use by their husbands' lineage elders.

The country is open, composed of countless small ridges with streams between them; the compounds and fields are set on the ridges. Houses, round and made of mud and wattle and thatch, are dispersed throughout the almost continuous fields. Few settlements today have more than three or four houses. A century ago compounds were large for defense, but colonial administration removed the threat of war and feud. A house is the dwelling place of one wife and her children. If she is the only wife, her husband also sleeps there. If a man has more than one wife, he moves from one house to another in turn. The house, and especially its hearth, is very much a female domain. A compound, of one or more women's houses, is typically surrounded by a euphorbia fence, often with a nearby cattle kraal; beyond lie fields. The fields vary in type: small gardens typically on the sites of earlier houses, home fields under permanent cultivation and often irrigated, and farther fields under shifting cultivation, the fallow used for grazing. Stretching out beyond the fields is untilled grazing land, and near the edges of the country are wide extents of bush and forest, used for hunting.

Kinship and Marriage

The Lugbara recognized patrilineal descent, claiming a single origin from two brothers—Heroes—who entered the country from the north, found and cured many leper women, and then married them, their sons becoming the founders of some sixty clans. Genealogies from the founders to the present are usually between nine and twelve generations in depth.

The Lugbara have never formed a single polity and have lacked kings or traditional chiefs. The largest indigenous autonomous group is known as suru ("group" or "category"); it has an average population of some 4,000 people. The suru is formed of the members of a single clan, with many categories of attached groups; not all the members of a given clan will live in the same clan territory, which is given the clan name. The core members of this territory, a single jural community, may be referred to as a subclan. A clan is ideally exogamous; internal disputes should be settled by ritual or feud, in which women and children are not harmed, rather than by warfare, as between neighboring jural communities, in which women and children might be captured. The subclan territory is divided into smaller territorial units, there usually being three or even four levels; the smallest is the household occupying a single compound. These units are likewise each formed around a patrilineal lineage, a segment of the subclan; those who form the core of the household are a minimal lineage. The whole forms a segmentary lineage system. The lineage comprises kin who can trace their exact relationships, whereas those beyond it cannot do so. Lugbara recognize this distinction by referring to a lineage as ori'ba ("ghost people"), who together sacrifice to a single ancestor. Today this traditional pattern has become largely weakened and even destroyed by overcrowding, the events of Obote's genocide and later famines, and the consequent movements of populations.

Marriage is forbidden between members of the same clan or with a man's or woman's mother's close kin. It is effected by the transfer of cattle bride-wealth from the groom's to the bride's close patrilineal kin. Polygyny is a male ideal, about a third of the men having more than one wife; most secondary wives, however, are those inherited from their brothers or fathers' brothers. Divorce, which is relatively unusual, may traditionally be made only by the husband, the cattle being returned except for one beast for each child born; the most common grounds are adultery and the wife's barrenness.

The household is a close-knit and mutually dependent unit. The socialization of children is traditionally by parents and older siblings. There are no forms of initiation at puberty, but children of about 6 undergo forehead cicatrization and excision of the lower four incisors.

Political Organization

The segmentary lineage system was traditionally self-controlling. The rainmaker ("chief of rain," the genealogically senior man of each subclan) was the only holder of political authority until colonial administration and is still today the only one whose authority is freely accepted. Otherwise, only the heads of minimal lineages—"big-men"—held local authority. Disputes between households and small groups were settled by feud, which was fought subject to strict rules of conduct; feuds were brought to a close by the subclan rainmaker's threatening a curse upon the participants unless they settled their dispute. Between jural communities, disputes were settled by war, which ended through the joint action of the two rainmakers involved. Disputes were almost always over repaying bride-wealth, trespassing, or stealing livestock.

The Belgian administration appointed locally influential men as chiefs, making them responsibile for controlling feuding and warfare to the best of their abilities. The British, who marked boundaries between clusters of jural communities and divided the country into chiefdoms and subchiefdoms, continued the system of appointing influential local leaders. Over time, many units were amalgamated, and, by the 1950s, there were five Lugbara chiefdoms in Uganda and the same number in the Belgian Congo, each chiefdom comprising some five or six subchiefdoms, all under appointed chiefs; below the chiefs were headmen. During the 1950s, the British administration introduced elections for these offices, with some success; in general, however, those elected were looked upon as "Europeans" and often as exploiters who worked under the supervision of European district officials. The European officials numbered one district commissioner and two assistants for the district, of which the Lugbara comprised something over half the population.

Religion and Expressive Culture

The Lugbara recognize a single deity, Adroa (also known as Adro), who created the world and its inhabitants. Two Heroes then formed Lugbara society itself. Beneath Adroa are two categories of spiritual beings: the spirits and the ancestors. Spirits are known as adro, a word of complex meaning that essentially refers to a source of power. The spirits are of many kinds and have different degrees of power over human beings. First are the numberless spirits of sickness and disaster, their motives unknowable to the living (although female diviners are thought able to make some contact with them). Second are the spirits that inhabit the bodies of the living, together with the soul. The spirit in the body leaves at death, dwelling in the forests with an immanent aspect of the Adroa. These spirits take the form of small human beings, and both they and Adroa kill on sight.

Ancestors who left male children are "ghosts"; they send sickness to their descendants as response to disobedience. Sacrifices of meat, blood, and beer are offered to the ghosts individually, by elders. The ancestors without male children form a collectivity to which grains and milk are offered, as do the spirits.

Living elders act as priests for their lineages and also as oracles who discover the identity of the ghosts sending sickness. Today many people attend government and mission clinics to ensure physical healing, but the clinics cannot discover the underlying mystical causes of sickness. Diviners, mainly women, are possessed by—and can contact—spirits in order to ascertain the causes and suggest means of removing them. Prophets have appeared at moments of crisis; they bring with them extremely powerful spirits who give divine messages regarding the reorganization of traditional systems of authority. The most famous was the prophet Rembe, who led an anti-European healing cult in 1916. Lugbara also believe in specters of the recently dead.

The most important rites of sacrifice are those to the dead, especially senior men and women; rites of birth and marriage are little elaborated. Sacrificial rites are a central aspect of the authority of the elders, who control them and so gain sanction for the authority given them by their dead forebears. Death rites, mainly in the form of death dances, are highly elaborate; they reestablish the disturbed distribution of lineage authority. There is only a vaguest belief in a land of the dead, but none in a journey to it after death.

Lugbara beliefs in witches and sorcerers, which are clearly distinguished, are strong. Witches are men, especially elders, who pervert their legitimate lineage authority for their own selfish ends. Sorcerers—women and young men—lack legitimate authority and are thus thought to use "medicines" and poisons. Both witches and sorcerers are feared but can be dealt with by diviners, who can identify them. Witchcraft is linked to the lineage system; as that system has weakened in the late twentieth century, beliefs in sorcery have been strengthened.

Christian missions (Italian Verona Mission and the Africa Inland Mission) entered the area soon after 1914 but made few converts until the latter half of the century; today most Lugbara are Catholics. There is little adherence to Islam except for the "Nubi" in the few small townships.

The Lugbara do not practice painting or elaborate carving in wood or metal, their main aesthetic products being fine basketry and pottery. Ironworking for tools and weapons is by a specialists' ethnic group (Ndu) regarded with awe and some fear, who live dispersed among the Lugbara settlements.