Logo Erotic

The Logo are the people of Faradje. In that remote territory of Haut-Uele Province, in the far northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they form the majority, and the local chiefdoms carry their name: Logo-Ogambi, Logo-Doka, Logo-Lolia, Logo-Obeleba, Logo-Bagela. Smaller communities live around Watsa and the border town of Aba, across the frontier near Yei in South Sudan, and in small numbers in Uganda. Estimates put them somewhat above 200,000. In their own usage the plural is Logoa and the language is Logoti.

That language is the clearest marker of who they are. Logoti belongs to the Moru-Madi branch of Central Sudanic, which makes the Logo linguistic cousins of the Lugbara to the east and close kin of the Avukaya and Keliko, whose speech sits nearest their own. It sets them apart from the Kakwa to the north, who speak a Nilotic language, and from the Zande and Mundu to the west, whose Ubangian languages belong to another family entirely. Logo dialects follow roughly the same lines as the chiefdoms, a reminder that before the Belgians drew administrative boundaries the Logo had no king and no paramount chief. Authority sat with clan and lineage elders in scattered farming settlements, and the chiefdom structure was a colonial arrangement laid over that.

Their position has rarely been comfortable. In the nineteenth century they stood in the path of Zande expansion from the west and of slave and ivory raiders working down from the Nile. Belgian rule brought compulsory cotton growing and the gold mines around Watsa, which pulled labor from the whole region. More recently the area absorbed refugees from Sudan's civil wars, lived through the Congo wars, and then faced the Lord's Resistance Army, which had based itself in nearby Garamba National Park. On Christmas Day 2008 the LRA attacked Faradje town, killed more than a hundred people, abducted many others, mostly the young, and emptied much of the countryside for years.

Most Logo farm: cassava, sorghum, millet, maize and peanuts, with hunting, fishing and small cross-border trade toward Yei and Arua filling the gaps. Most are also Christian, Catholic or Protestant, the latter largely through the Africa Inland Mission, which set up a station at Aba in the colonial years and left behind the CECA-20 church. Obligations to ancestors and to the elders who speak for them have not vanished. They tend to run alongside church life rather than against it.