This article argues that ritual performances of song by a guild of healers called basamize situate humans and other-than-human familiars in an ecology that has a strong impact on ethnic identification in southern Uganda. An idiomatic song, ubiquitous throughout the region in focus, helps define the contours of this ecology. Primary and secondary sources link the song to oral traditions that suggest a move beyond descent as an organizing principle in Africanist discourses on ethnicity and ethnic formation.