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Two Lives of Mpamizo: Understanding Dissonance in Oral History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2013

Justin Willis
Justin Willis*
Affiliation:
British Institute in Eastern Africa
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Extract

In August 1993 and February 1994 I conducted two interviews with a woman in Buhweju, a county in southwestern Uganda. The interviews were part of a series concerning the social and political history of Buhweju, which is now part of Bushenyi District. In the precolonial period, Buhweju was a small autonomous polity ruled by an hereditary “king;” in the colonial period it was subsumed into the neighboring kingdom of Nkore, which became known as Ankole.

The first interview, like most of my interviews, focused on the history of the family of the interviewee, and she said that her paternal grandfather, whose name was Mpamizo, had been a Hima, or pastoralist. In Buhweju, and elsewhere in Ankole, this meant, and still means, very much more than simply being a keeper of cattle. The agriculturalist Iru and pastoralist Hima share the same language and much of the same culture, but speak and behave differently in a number of significant ways (diet and mode of subsistence being prominent among these), so that whether one is a pastoralist or an agriculturalist is very apparent to any other member of society. The woman to whom I was talking is very evidently an Iru, an agriculturalist, in her manner and in the way she lives, as is her husband, and so I was surprised to hear that her grandfather was a Hima, a pastoralist. It was partly for this reason that I went back to talk to her again: but on the second occasion, there was an important shift in her presentation of Mpamizo—a dissonance in her account of the past. Mpamizo, she now said, was an Iru. This dissonance is the subject of this paper, for it holds important lessons both about society in Buhweju and about the ways in which we interpret oral accounts of the past.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 23 , January 1996 , pp. 319 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1996

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the members of the seminars at the Forschungsswerpunkt Moderner Orient in Berlin and the University of Nairobi, Ed Steinhart, and John Sutton, for comments on earlier versions of this paper, which is based on research wholly supported by the British Institute in Eastern Africa. In citing interview material, a number indicates the identity of the informant, and a lower case letter indicates to which of a series of interviews with that informant reference is being made. Thus Int 39b is the second interview with Informant no. 39. Details of informants and interviews, and transcripts and translations of interviews are held as the “Bu” series in the British Institute in Nairobi.

References

Notes

1. Roscoe, John, The Banyankole (Cambridge, 1923), 2, 16-18, 95.Google Scholar

2. E.g., Johnson, H.H., The Uganda Protectorate (2 vols.: London, 1902), 2:570Google Scholar; Gorju, Julien, Entre le Victoria, I'Albert et l'Edouard: Ethnographie de la partie anglaise du Vicariat de I'Uganda (Rennes, 1920), 27–31Google Scholar; Cunningham, J.F., Uganda and Its Peoples (London, 1905), 6.Google Scholar The suggestion that Iru could not own fertile cows is repeated by more recent commentators: Steinhart, Edward I., Conflict and Collaboration: The Kingdoms of Western Uganda, 1890-1907 (Princeton, 1977), 12–13.Google Scholar

3. Meldon, J., “Notes on the Bahima of Ankole,” Journal of the African Society, 6(1907), 136-53, 234–49Google Scholar, made explicit the idea of separate races. The impossibility of intermarriage is stated in Oberg, K., “The Kingdom of Ankole in Uganda” in Fortes, M. and Evans-Pritchard, E., eds., African Political Systems (London, 1966), 130Google Scholar; and Elam, Y., The Social and Sexual Roles of Hima Women (Manchester, 1973), 6.Google Scholar For the assertion of similar ideas by an educated author from Ankole, see Mushanga, M.T., “The Clan System Among the Banyankore,” Uganda Journal, 34(1970), 29–33.Google Scholar

4. Ints Bu38a, Bu52a, and Bu53a.

5. Int Bu6a, 4. The informants cited above were all Iru.

6. Some earlier sources did mention that Iru could in fact obtain productive cattle and achieve a degree of acceptance among Hima. E.g., Lukyn-Williams, F., “Hima cattle,” Uganda Journal, 6(1938) 17–42, esp. 24.Google Scholar

7. Karugire, S.R., A History of the Kingdom of Nkore in Western Uganda to 1896 (Oxford, 1971), 66.Google Scholar

8. Tonkin, Elizabeth, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge, 1992), 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has a clear example of informants offering different presentations of the same event depending on the historical perspective which they bring to it. There is discussion of similar issues in Willis, Justin, “The Makings of a Tribe: Bondei Identities and Histories,” JAH, 33 (1992), 191–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem., Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford, 1993), 13-16.

9. Said to be the home of the ruling clan of Buhweju—and of many other clans in Buhweju.

10. I have not, in fact, encountered any other suggestion that Mpamizo is particularly a Hima name, and I have met at least one elderly Iru man called Mpamizo.

11. The grammar in Runyankore shows that the question refers to a Hima woman and an Iru man.

12. I have written on this at more length in “Killing Bwana: Peasant Revenge and Political Panic in Early Colonial Ankole,” JAH, 35 (1994), 379–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. For example, Roscoe, , Banyankole, 17.Google Scholar

14. Steinhart, , “Herders and Farmers: The Tributary Mode of Production in Western Uganda” in Crummey, D. and Stewart, C., eds., Modes of Production in Africa: The Precolonial Era (Beverly Hills, 1981), 130–32.Google Scholar See also idem., “Kingdoms of the March: Speculations on Social and Political Change” in J. Webster, ed., Chronology, Migration and Drought in Interlacustrine Africa (London, 1979), 195-96, 202-03.

15. Oberg, , “Kingdom of Ankole,” 135Google Scholar, saw client relations as confined to pastoralists (but see ibid., 149, where there is a reference to Iru seeking client relationships with the Hima ruler of Nkore). Lukyn-Williams, , “Hima Cattle,” 24Google Scholar, referred to the possibility of Iru clients achieving a kind of assimilation.

16. Ints Bu4a, Bu33a, Bu36a, Bu37a, and Bu42a.

17. Int Bu54a.

18. Int Bu63a; Int Bu5a mentions an Iru man being given a wife from among the Iru widows at the court of the ruler of Buhweju.

19. Int Bu7b offered an example of an Iru man marrying a Hima woman. For more general comments on the possibility of assimilation, see Ints Bu42b, Bu50a, Bu54a.

20. Hima clientship is mentioned in Lukyn-Williams, , “Hima Cattle,” 96Google Scholar; and the difference between this and the gift of cattle to Bairu is made clear in Ints Bu37a, Bu41a, and Bu42a.

21. Karugire, , History, 2-3, 69–71Google Scholar, refers to these developing tensions and the effect which they had on people's attitudes to and discussion of the past.

22. Int Bu47a, for example, makes this clear with regard to “sub-clan.” There is sometimes some ambiguity as regards clan (partly because there are clans which have both Iru and Hima members, which clearly suggests some contradiction) but essentially, these too are viewed as descent groups: Int Bu58a offers an example of an informant interpreting clan in this way.

23. “Emizimu come from the father of a person, or from the grandfather,” as one informant put it: Int Bu58a. See also Bu35b.

24. Informants disagreed as to whether they were inherited by clan or by homestead (compare Ints Bu35b and Bu47a) but the principle that emandwa are defined by descent group seems widely accepted. Though Berger argues that generally emandwa served to cut across ties defined by kin, she notes that in Nkore involvement with Cwezi emandwa was associated with lineage; Berger, Iris, “Fertility as Power: Spirit Mediums, Priestesses and the Pre-Colonial State in Interlacustrine East Africa” in Anderson, David and Johnson, Douglas, eds., Revealing Prophets: Prophecy in Eastern African History (London, 1995), 75.Google Scholar

25. Int Bu47a.

26. Int Bu35b.

27. Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, 1985), 147–85Google Scholar; Miller, Joseph C., ed., The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (Folkestone, 1980)Google Scholar, introduction. There are of course important differences between these two pieces (though Miller's collection contains an early version of the thesis which Vansina later propounded in Oral Tradition as History). In a clever twist of structuralism, Miller offers a precise schema for the dissection of oral accounts of the past into separate categories, only one of which categories is historically meaningful. Vansina, who has very cogently expressed his disdain for structuralism, offers rather an extended commentary on how oral accounts of the past come into being. But both are, implicitly, interested in the collectivity, rather than individual accounts of the past. By contrast, Tonkin, whose approach stresses the importance of genre, which is closely related to individual circumstance and performance, challenges the notion of collective memory: Tonkin, , Narrating Our Pasts, 131.Google Scholar

28. Vansina, , Oral Tradition as History, 167.Google Scholar For Vansina gossip is the raw material which is structured into “tradition” through the processes which he describes: ibid., 149. Miller suggests a similar understanding of accounts of the recent past, or “reminiscences:” African Past Speaks, 11.