CHAPTER FIVE: Bweyale: the ethnographic field site 5.1 Introduction
5.2 The history of Bweyale
In this section, I have attempted to put together the history of Bweyale around significant events or landmarks in this history. Relating this history around significant events is a back and forth narrative in which each event or landmark has its own particular history up to the present. Some of the events have concurrent history with similar and overlapping dates that do not permit a chronological narrative. These significant events are those that people refer to when taking about their history and those that I thought were important for understanding literacy, for example the introduction of school education.
I have started with what I call the early history, which is the history of Bweyale before the arrival of the Arabs and European visitors from outside Africa. I then go on to relate the colonial history around the introduction of school education. Other significant events like the construction of the roads and the explosion in human population are all seen as important landmarks in the history of Bweyale31.
5.2.1 The early history
Bweyale has a comparatively recent history by European standards. For example, Barton and Hamilton (1998) who carried out similar research in Lancaster were talking about a city of over two thousand five hundred years old. Bweyale as a known world inhabited by people is less than nine hundred years old. The history of reading and writing is even shorter, less than 70 years old. In this section, I will attempt to put together this history, starting with what the name of the place means.
According to local stories gained through informal conversation with local elders, Bweyale means ‘good place’, a place of freedom and happiness. The area in which this place of freedom and happiness is now located was under the rule of the Batembuzi and then the Bachwezi. Not much is known about the Batembuzi whose rule was taken over by the Bachwezi who established the Chwezi Empire around the 10th and 11th century.
The Chwezi Empire collapsed around the 15th century against the onslaught of the Luo migration from Southern Sudan. The Luo took over the leadership of the area and established the Babiito ruling dynasty of Bunyoro Kitara Kingdom on the ruins of the Chwezi Empire. From then on, this kingdom presided over a very large area stretching from north of the Nile to Karagwe in Northern Tanzania. It was a very powerful kingdom until its authority was challenged by the neighbouring Kingdom of Buganda in around the 18th century (Masindi Hotel, 2006; Wikipedia, 2006a, 2006c). The subjects of this
31 Most of the information used in this section was gathered through interviews with some local elders in the community and are not very precise and I did not have enough time to confirm this oral information against documented information that could be obtained from the Government archives in Entebbe or the colonial archives in Britain.
kingdom were largely the Banyoro who speak Lunyoro as their language. Bweyale was part of this Kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara. Therefore, the first people to settle in the area known as Bweyale were the Banyoro people who are still present in the area up to the time of this study.
Following the Luo migration from present day Southern Sudan into what is now northern Uganda, a group known as the Palwo occupied what is now the Murchison Falls National Park. The Palwo were part of the Luo group of people who migrated from Southern Sudan around the sixteenth century. The first wave of the Luo migration into Northern Uganda took place round 1550. At that time, Africa was still experiencing many waves of migrations by different ethnic groups moving from one place to the other in constant search of food, grazing land and water for people and animals.
Folk tales among the Luo people have it that Gipir and Labongo, who were the leaders of the Luo people as they moved down the river Nile from Sudan, had a major disagreement that led to a split between the Luo people at a point now called Wadlayi. After this split, different groups took different directions. One group moved to West Nile (the Alur people). The other groups moved into the present day Gulu and Kitgum Districts, and they were named by Arabs as the Acholi, meaning the people of Choli. The third group moved into Bunyoro and founded the Babiito Dynasty of Bunyoro. Other groups moved to Eastern Uganda (the Japadhola) and Western Kenya (the Jaluo). Some are said to have moved down to Northern Tanzania. The Palwo were some of the groups that moved into Bunyoro32 and settled in the present day Murchison Falls Park. According to local oral history narrated by the elders in Bweyale, in 1911 the Palwo were attacked by an epidemic of smallpox in the area where they had settled. To protect them from this epidemic, the colonial government moved them to where they are now in Kiryadongo in which Bweyale is located.
Livelihood at that time was based on peasant cultivation of food crops for household consumption and rearing domestic animals such as goats, sheep and cows. People owned large pieces of land to sustain that way of life. Bweyale was said to be a huge forest full of wild animals up to as late as the 1930s and hunting wild animals was one of the major sources of food for the people. Huge hunting expeditions would be organised involving over one hundred men and women. The animals hunted included deer, buffalo, antelope, hippopotamus, and rhinoceros from the river Nile. Small animals like edible rats, squirrels, and wild birds were hunted individually or in small hunting parties around the
32 They seem not to be part of the group that founded the Kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara over the ruins of the Chwezi Empire.
villages as the supplementary sources of livelihood. There were few people living in the area then. The small population meant that there was enough land for cultivation and large numbers of animals to hunt. These were the two major sources of food in Bweyale during that time. Generally, food came from the small family farms, domestic animals and birds that were occasionally slaughtered for visitors and important occasions, and hunting. With the exception of huge hunting expeditions, this way of life is still prevalent.
Interaction with people from outside Africa, as in most parts of East Africa, came through the Arab traders who came from Egypt through Sudan down to Bunyoro. The Arabs were later followed by the European explorers, John Henning Speke and James Augustus Grant in 1862. These explorers came through Buganda and extended to Bunyoro. These visits by the explorers paved the way for the missionaries and colonial administrators. The missionaries arrived in Bunyoro Kingdom during the early 20th century in about 1910.
The King in whose reign both the missionaries and the British colonialist came to Bunyoro was Omukama Kabalege King of Bunyoro. The activities of the explorers, the missionaries, and the colonial administrators changed the way of life in Bunyoro including Bweyale. This change included the introduction of reading and writing.
5.2.2 Colonial history and the introduction of school education
School education was introduced by the missionaries from 1900 to all parts of Uganda.
Through school education, literacy became more widespread in Uganda (see Chapter Four above). The missionaries started from Buganda, and spread out to other parts of Uganda including Bweyale.
The first and nearest school to Bweyale was established at Kiryadongo in the 1940s.
When this school was established, young people from Bweyale, especially boys, were sent to school in Kiryadongo. These students were the first people to learn how to read and write. Some of the boys moved on to became teachers and came back to participate in establishing the first school in Bweyale in the late 1940s. According to the only surviving teacher, Mr. Yowana Ladaah, the first school in which he taught was established by a Church of Uganda missionary called Yovani Waarwo. The school was located in one of Bweyale’s villages called Kichwabugingo and the students were taught under a big tree called Mutubura. Unfortunately, the church was not able to continue financing the school activities so the local missionary Yovani Waarwo left and the school collapsed before it could make any significant impact.
According to Mr. Yowana Ladaah, in the early 1960s, the Catholic Church established another primary school at a neighbouring village called Katulikire, and children from
Bweyale attended this school. In the 1980s, the Church of Uganda again established a primary school in Bweyale. This school was operating in a church building. However, after some time, one good Christian, Mr. William Dadau, decided to offer his own house to serve as classroom and land for building the school, which is now called Bweyale Primary School. The government later came in to take over the school’s management from the local Christian population of Bweyale in 1995. Since the early 1990s, many private primary and even secondary schools have been established in Bweyale to respond to the large demand for education created by the influx of displaced people.
5.2.3 Building of the Kampala-Gulu Highway
Another significant landmark in the history of Bweyale was the building of the Kampala- Gulu Highway by the British colonial administration during the 1950s. This road was later extended to the West Nile region. To date this road is the main link between Northern Uganda and Kampala. The road opened up Bweyale to modern trade links with other parts of the country and the world. It also affected the settlement patterns in the area because most people moved to settle near the road to have easy access to transport and communication with other parts of the country. Even the administrative centre had to be moved to the roadside to ease communication with the administrative headquarters located in Masindi town.
5.2.4 Establishment of the trading centre
According to interviews with five elders, the first shops in Bweyale were established by Jabuloni Kasigwa, Thomas Kaheru, and an Indian trader who came from Atura called Gulamsi. These traders constructed small shops made of iron sheets. They traded in goods like safety pins, soap, salt, paraffin and other small items, which they brought from Masindi. The activities of these traders marked the beginning of the trading centre in the area of Bweyale. Some of the old buildings are still in use although they are in a state of disrepair.
The trading centre remained small until the late 1990s when the population of Bweyale increased due to the influx of refugees from Southern Sudan and the displaced people from Northern Uganda. The result of this influx of people in Bweyale was an expansion in the number of shops; to cater for this increased population demanding, salt, soap, clothing, bicycles, and necessities of life.
5.2.5 The increasing peopling of Bweyale
As stated in section 5.2.1 above, the Banyoro are the indigenous people who had sparsely settled in Bweyale. Their neighbours were the Palwo who had migrated from Southern
Sudan together with other Luo groups and settled in what is now the Murchison Falls National Park. In the early 1900s, the Palwo were evacuated from the Murchison Falls area by the colonial government and settled in the area that is now Bweyale.
Bweyale had plenty of unsettled fertile land with a good climate that can support agriculture. This is one a major attractions that brought different groups of people including refugees to come and settle in Bweyale. The different groups of people who were attracted to Bweyale included the Alur, the Kuku and the Lugbara all from the West Nile region of Uganda. Some of these migrants were brought in to serve their prison sentences of hard labour on the government farms that had been established near Bweyale. After serving their terms of hard labour, a few opted to stay in Bweyale and established their homes. The people who settled in Bweyale invited their relatives to come and join them. More people came voluntarily to work in Kinyara sugar plantations in Masindi and later moved to establish their homes in Bweyale.
According to Rev. Oryama, a retired Anglican Priest who came to Bweyale in the 1960s, refugees came from Sudan following the Anyanya I civil war that broke out there in the late 1960s. Other groups of refugees who came from Congo in 1960 were fleeing from civil wars. Only a few of them went back to Congo after the war. In the late 1980s, another wave of refugees came from Sudan and they were settled in the Kiryadongo refugee camp, which is located in Bweyale. In the 1990s, yet another group of people came from Gulu, Kitgum and Pader districts fleeing from a civil war in Northern Uganda.
Other groups that moved to Bweyale from neighbouring areas include the Bagwere from Bugwere, the Langi from Lango, the Karimojongs from Karamoja, and the
Banyarwanda33, refugees who moved out of Kyangwali refugee camps. Bweyale is therefore composed of different groups of people coming from different places with different cultures and languages.
Although availability of land was the main attraction of Bweyale, with the influx of people from all parts of Uganda and the neighbouring countries, the pressure on land became too much and most of the displaced people are not comfortable with this
situation. Some of them are just waiting for the civil war in Northern Uganda34 to end so that they can go back to what they call their home. These people see Bweyale only as a place of refuge and not a home. The lack of land has meant that people who cannot afford to buy and own larger pieces of land are forced to live on very small pieces of land near
33These are the descendants of refugees who came to Uganda in 1959 from Rwanda, who decided to become Ugandan.
34 This war has been going on since 1986 between the Lord’s Resistance Army headed by Joseph Kony and the Government of Uganda headed by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.
the roadside in very congested settlements, and rent land for cultivation for which they pay the landowners for every crop they harvest. Land sale, renting and land disputes are therefore common features of life in Bweyale.
According to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (2005), there are 19,794 households in the whole of Kiryadongo Sub-County and the average number of people in each household is five. Two-thirds of this population of Kiryadongo Sub-County is estimated to live in Bweyale. This is approximately 13,196 of all the households in Kiryadongo Sub-County.
Information relating to gender and age was not available. However, from ordinary observation there are more women than there are men.
From my observation and interaction with people in Bweyale, the majority of this population consists of people displaced by the civil war going on in Northern Uganda and most of them are staying with the hope that one day they will return to their homes when the civil war ends. As one elder from this group stated during an interview, “I am not born of this place. If the war ends, I will go back to my home”.