CHAPTER FIVE: Bweyale: the ethnographic field site 5.1 Introduction
5.3 Present-day life in Bweyale
5.3.2 Social and economic activities
5.3.2.2 Economic activities in the villages
are use for travelling to distant towns like Kigumba, Masindi, Kampala, Lira, Gulu, and the West Nile region. Both Bodaboda and minibus operators are organised in associations that regulate the behaviour of those involved in their kind of transport business. Their organisations have elective posts for a chairperson, who is the overall leader of the group.
A secretary and treasurer are the key positions in the organisation. They hold meetings during which they make decisions that are recorded by the secretary of the organisations.
In Bweyale, bicycles are also owned by most families. They are cheap to buy and maintain and for that reason, most families have at least one bicycle. People use bicycles to travel between different villages and to the trading centre to sell or buy things and pass time during market days. In addition to bicycles, motorcycles are also used because they can also move easily around the village paths. However, only those who can afford to pay for their higher cost in terms of price, maintenance, hire or fare choose to use
motorcycles. The only problem with motorcycles is that, because of their weight, they cannot be carried across streams that have no bridges over them.
Figure 9: A typical homestead and hut in Bweyale.
In addition to the huts, some families who can afford to, build modern houses made of iron sheet roof, bricks and cement walls. The defining feature of a household is not a house or hut but a homestead that may extend over several hectares of land under the headship of one person, usually a man. Some huts serve as a kitchen and others are used for sleeping and keeping valuable items like books. Other huts are for visitors. During non-rainy days, family members work and relax outside under the shade of a hut or big trees that are planted in the compounds of most homesteads (see Figure 8 and 9). Even visitors are sometimes hosted outside the huts under trees or hut shade. Cooking and eating are sometimes done or enjoyed outside the huts in the shade of the huts or trees except for important visitors or on rainy days (see Figure 10 below).
Figure 10: Cooking in the open 'compound'.
Inside the huts, calendars are often plastered on the walls and young boys (traditionally girls don’t own huts) sometimes decorate the inside walls of their huts with pages of newspapers or magazines used more like wallpaper as shown in Figure 12. Some huts are partitioned into rooms with a line of wall as shown in Figure 11 below.
Bedroom entrance Private Room/Bedroom
Sitting room
Position of central supporting pole (not all huts have this) Entrance
Figure 11: Plan of a hut.
Figure 12: Newspaper plastered on walls.
Different homes are linked up by small foot-beaten paths (see Figure 13 below).
Figure 13: Foot-beaten path in the village.
The reason for using more than one hut in a homestead is that in Luo culture, mature boys, sons and daughters, and visitors like in-laws do not share the same house or hut
with their fathers and mothers-in-laws. Furthermore, the internal structure of the huts does not allow for more than three rooms in one hut, and there is usually no roof ceiling to provide sufficient privacy for people using the different rooms. This rather open
architectural fashion does not permit the sharing of one house by all the family members and some category of relatives. Therefore, instead of different rooms in one house there are different huts to accommodate different family members who cannot share a hut.
Outside of the trading centre, the main economic activity is peasant cultivation. This is the major occupation in the villages, in which people go to their fields or farms in the morning to plough the land using hand-held hoes, and come back home at around midday (see Figure 14 below).
Figure 14: People ploughing using hand-held hoes (Photo by M.J Florino in 2004).
The crops grown include maize, beans, cassava, potatoes, sesame seeds, and groundnuts.
The crops are harvested for consumption by the family members. Some crops like fresh vegetables such as spinach, fresh beans and potatoes are harvested and enjoyed fresh from the gardens. For this reason, the vegetable gardens are often near the homes. Long-term crops like dry beans and groundnuts are processed by sun drying and stored for the season’s food supplies to last until the next season’s crops are harvested. This is a subsistence mode of production.
However, some crops like maize, cassava, potatoes and some groundnuts, are grown solely for selling to raise money that can be used to buy non-crop items like clothes, salt and soap, pay school fees for children, and other household luxuries like bicycles, radios and the batteries needed to power the radios. On harvesting, these crops are loaded onto bicycles and transported to Bweyale trading centre to be sold to other people in the village or intermediary traders from Kampala. Such transactions are usually handled by men.
Even the fields are often owned by the men, and the money is spent by men. Responsible men use some of the proceeds to buy some goods for the family like clothing.
Irresponsible men drink off the balance after buying what they have been planning to buy during the year like a bicycle or radio for themselves.
In addition to growing crops, some people rear a few domestic animals and birds, for example goats, pigs, cows, chicken, ducks and pigeons. Chicken and ducks are left to roam around the homesteads to look for things to feed on. Goats and pigs are tethered in the bushes around the homestead. People who have a few cows also tether them. These birds and animals are sources of food and income for the family. To supply food the family can slaughter a chicken for a family meal or on occasions like Christmas day, marriage ceremonies, and welcoming important visitors. When the family needs money, a chicken, goat or a pig is sold depending on how much money the family needs. The animals and birds therefore act as banks for emergency cash. Sometimes people sell a small portion of their own food crops like groundnuts or maize or cow’s milk. For paying school fees, for marriages, and for funerals and other big expenses, cows or bulls may be sold or a large amount of farm produce from designated fields as discussed above.
People who have large herds of cattle keep them on large pieces of land, far away from the trading centre. These groups of people do not engage in agricultural activities and in Bweyale land conflict between the crop farmers and the cattle keepers is very common.
Cows’ milk is also brought to the trading centre and sold for cash while the rest is packed in 20 litre plastic containers (like those used for fetching water see Figure 8 above) and taken to Kampala on pick-up vehicles.