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Uganda Karamojong Cluster
The relatively sparse rainfall in northeastern Uganda
supports a pastoralist economy, and most people also raise
crops
to supplement their diet that centers around meat, milk,
and
blood from cattle. Even after independence in 1962, most
Ugandan
governments dealt with the Karamojong as rather difficult
rural
citizens who sometimes impeded administration of the
region. Most
Karamojong resisted government pressures to abandon their
herding
life-styles, but officials estimated that as many as 20
percent
of the population may have died in the drought and famine
that
swept through much of the African Sahel in the early
1980s.
Karamojong, Jie, and Dodoth oral historians have
recounted
their forebears' arrival in the region from the north.
According
to these accounts, they found an indigenous society, the
Oropom,
who were forced to move southward, leaving an Oropom clan
among
the Karamojong as an apparent remnant of this society. The
Dodoth
people were believed to have separated from the Karamojong
proper
in the mid-eighteenth century. They migrated northward
into more
mountainous territory. As a result, their culture
resembled that
of the Karamojong in many respects. Dodoth homesteads were
generally in valleys, with dry season pastures on nearby
hillsides. As a result, the Dodoth did not practice the
transhumant migration patterns that required other
Karamojong
peoples to establish dry-season cattle camps.
Cattle are of great symbolic and economic importance,
and
people recalled the devastating rinderpest epidemic that
swept
the area in the late nineteenth century. Using that
tragedy to
educate the young, they also told of cattle herds that
were saved
by being moved to highland grazing areas.
British control of the region was fairly ineffective
well
into the twentieth century, although successful trading
centers
had been established as early as 1890. Traders brought
ivory and,
occasionally, cattle to augment local herds, and received
grain,
spears, and other metal products in return.
Most Karamojong peoples supplement their pastoral
economy
with crop cultivation, which is almost entirely in the
hands of
women. Millet is an important staple, but many people also
grow
corn and peanuts. Tobacco is often grown within the
stockade that
surrounds most homesteads. The homestead is usually a
circular
configuration, and within this enclosure, each married
woman has
a house built of mud and brushwood walls with a thatched
roof.
The center of this is a cattle kraal, usually with only
one
opening to the outside.
Wives live in their husband's homestead after marriage.
Each
wife has a separate, small house that serves as a kitchen,
and
some women also cultivate plots of ground several hours'
walk
away from their homes. Men were traditionally scornful of
widowers and old men who cared for their own gardens, but
after
plows were introduced in the 1950s and farming became more
financially rewarding, many young men claimed plots of
ground for
their own use and hired women to work in them.
Dodoth homesteads are larger than those of the
Karamojong
proper and more isolated from one another. Surrounding the
homestead, upright poles are thrust into the earth,
intertwined
with branches and packed with mud and cow dung, forming a
sturdy
wall with only one or two small openings to the outside.
As many
as forty people often live in one homestead. Each wife has
her
own hut and hearth, and adolescent girls often build huts
of
their own next to their mothers' huts. Adolescent boys
also build
a larger "men's house," where they live before marriage.
People
keep cattle and other animals inside the fortified wall at
night.
A woman often keeps a small garden near her hut, but
fields and
pastures are outside the homestead.
Among most Karamojong peoples, men living within a
homestead
are related by descent through male forebears. This group,
the
patrilineage, is augmented by wives and children, and
occasionally by unmarried brothers of the lineage head. A
group
of brothers usually shares the ownership of a herd of
cattle,
although animals are divided among individuals for milking
and
other domestic purposes. Cattle are usually branded with
clan
markings, although a man normally knows each animal in his
family
herd. Only when the last surviving brother dies is the
herd
divided among the next generation, with each set of full
brothers
inheriting a small herd.
Grazing areas are common ground outside the stockade,
although milk cows sometimes stay near the homestead.
During the
driest months, usually February and March, cattle are
moved to
seasonal camps some distance from the homestead. In these
camps,
men live almost entirely on milk and blood drawn from live
cattle, and, occasionally, meat. In the homestead, women,
children, and old people forage for food, including flying
ants,
if stores of grain are depleted. In very lean times, milk
is
reserved for children and calves before adults.
Most societies of northeastern Uganda are organized
into
kinship groups larger than the lineage. Among the Jie,
patrilineages maintaining the belief that they are
distantly
related often keep homesteads near one another, but this
practice
is less common among other Karamojong. The clan comprises
related
lineages, often numbering over 100 people. Jie clans are
exogamous, meaning that two people of the same clan can
not marry
one another. In addition, men generally avoid marriage
with a
woman of their mother's clan or that of her close
relatives. Jie
clan members share some symbolic recognition of their
common
identity, such as jewelry, but they do not observe the
ritual
taboos of animals or foods that are characteristic of many
other
African clan groupings.
Two important sources of social solidarity link members
of
unrelated lineages to one another. Intermarriage forms
bonds
based on brideprice cattle, which are given by a man's
family to
that of his bride, and children, who are important to
their own
lineage and to that of their mother.
Age-sets (see Glossary) form
bonds among groups of men close in age. (Clan leaders
establish a
new age-set about every twenty-five years.) Members of an
age-set
are generally obligated to maintain ties of friendship and
assist
each other when in need.
Cattle are so vital in Karamoja that it is often
difficult
for Westerners to understand the attitudes surrounding
them.
Owning cattle is a mark of adulthood for men. Being
without
cattle is almost as onerous as being seriously ill; it
threatens
life. Moreover, a man can lose his entire herd of cattle
in a
brief raid. A mistake in judgment, such as a poor choice
of
pastures or travel routes, can cost a life's work. At the
same
time, outsiders are sometimes surprised to realize that
these
herders perceive themselves as poverty-ridden or
uncivilized. In
fact, the value of their cattle is often much greater than
the
value of the salaries received by government civil
servants who
come from the south to administer the region of the
Karamojong.
Living among the Karamojong peoples in the far
northeast are
several small ethnic groups who rely on hunting and
cattle-
raiding for much of their subsistence, but some have also
gained
a reputation as spies and informers in the local system of
raiding and warfare. One such group, the Teuso, were moved
from
their homeland in the 1960s to clear land for Kidepo
National
Park. Most of their Karamojong neighbors despised the
Teuso, so
much so that people were willing to see them starve rather
than
allow them to join nearby villages. Some Teuso died, and
others
left the area to become low-wage earners in nearby towns.
The
social system that developed in response to depopulation
and
deprivation emphasized individual survival at the expense
of
other people. The Uganda government reacted strongly
against the
unfavorable publicity generated by one anthropological
account of
this society in the early 1970s, and security problems
limited
travel in the area. As a result, by the late 1980s,
information
about their society was scarce.
The Tepeth also lived among the Karamojong, although
they
were usually classified as a separate Eastern
Nilotic-speaking
group. Oral histories relate that they were forced by
government
edict to vacate their homes in caves high in the mountains
in
northeastern Uganda. The move increased their
vulnerability to
attack by people and disease, and an influx of refugees
from
Sudan further disrupted life. Warfare and conflict
increased, and
the Tepeth developed a variety of religious cults and
rituals to
maintain their cultural integrity in the face of
Karamojong and
Sudanese influence. In the late 1980s, little was known of
the
life-style of the remaining Tepeth people.
The Labwor people, who live on the border between
Acholi and
Karamoja, are historically and linguistically related to
the
Karamojong but have adopted much of the life-style of the
Acholi.
The Labwor region is also a center of trade between
cultivators
to the west and pastoralists to the east. The local
economy
centers around crops--chiefly sorghum, eleusine, maize,
gourds,
sweet potatoes, beans, and peanuts--but people also raise
cattle
and goats. A small number of men from Labwor have achieved
substantial wealth as itinerant traders in northeastern
Uganda.
Labwor society is organized into homesteads centered
around the
core of patrilineally related men and their wives and
children.
In addition, age-sets are important stabilizing factors,
forming
cross-cutting ties among lineages.
Data as of December 1990
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