Nyoro Erotic

The Nyoro, who call themselves Banyoro, are the people of Bunyoro, a kingdom on the plateau east of Lake Albert in western Uganda. What identifies them first is not geography but a court. Bunyoro-Kitara is one of the older continuous kingships in the African Great Lakes, ruled by the Babiito dynasty since roughly the sixteenth century and headed by an Omukama whose office survived abolition and came back. Banyoro also reckon their history through what preceded the Babiito: the half-remembered Bachwezi rulers of Kitara, who left behind earthworks, cattle traditions and a spirit cult that outlived them.

Runyoro is an interlacustrine Bantu language, close enough to Rutooro that the two are printed and taught as a single standard, and broadly intelligible with the Runyankore and Rukiga spoken further south. Anyone spending time in Bunyoro learns the empaako early. Alongside a personal name and a clan name, every Munyoro carries one of about a dozen praise names, Amooti, Abwooli, Akiiki, Adyeri and the rest, and it is the empaako rather than the given name that people use to greet one another. Okaali belongs to the king alone. UNESCO listed the practice as heritage in need of urgent safeguarding, which tells you it is thinning among younger and urban speakers.

Most Banyoro are Christian, with Catholic and Anglican both well represented and a Muslim minority, though mbandwa spirit mediumship has not vanished so much as gone quiet and domestic. Society historically distinguished Bairu cultivators from Bahuma cattle keepers, a difference colonial administrators hardened into something more rigid than it had been. On the lake shore at Kibiro, salt has been drawn from saline springs in the same gardens for close to a thousand years, worked mainly by women, one of the few industries anywhere with that kind of documented continuity in a single place.

The nineteenth century ended badly. Omukama Kabalega fought the British for most of a decade with a standing army, the abarusura, and was captured in 1899 and exiled to the Seychelles. Bunyoro lost territory in the settlement that followed, and the counties of Buyaga and Bugangaizi went to Buganda. Banyoro spent sixty years calling them the Lost Counties and voted them back in a 1964 referendum. Obote abolished the kingdoms in 1967, and they returned as cultural institutions in 1993. The live argument now is oil: the Albertine fields lie under Bunyoro, and the questions are about land, compensation and who counts as local.