Tooro Erotic

The Tooro, Batooro in their own language, are a highland people of western Uganda whose identity begins with a secession. Around 1830 a prince named Kaboyo declined to wait for his father's throne and carried Bunyoro-Kitara's southern provinces off with him. Bunyoro never really accepted the loss, and the two centuries since have left the Batooro as both an offshoot of Bunyoro and emphatically not Bunyoro, a distinction outsiders miss and Batooro rarely drop. The language makes the point awkward: Rutooro and Runyoro are close enough that speakers cross between them without thinking, and linguists usually file them as a single Bantu unit, Runyoro-Rutooro, in the Great Lakes cluster alongside Luganda and Runyankore. Home is the country around Fort Portal, in the foothills of the Rwenzori, the snow-capped range old geographers called the Mountains of the Moon. It is cool, wet and unusually fertile: banana gardens, millet and cassava, tea estates the colonial period left behind, and volcanic crater lakes scattered through the hills. Cattle mattered too, historically the business of the Bahuma, the pastoralist stratum that lived alongside the cultivating Bairu in a hierarchy the twentieth century largely dismantled.

What visitors notice, if they stay long enough, is that everyone has a spare name. The empaako is a praise name drawn from a fixed set of about a dozen, Abwooli, Adyeri, Akiiki, Amooti, Araali and the others, with Okaali reserved for the king. It is given in infancy alongside the ordinary name, and it is what you use to greet someone properly: addressing a Mutooro by empaako softens the exchange and takes the edge off rank. The names look to be Luo in origin, carried south by the Babiito dynasty, which is most of the region's history compressed into a word. UNESCO listed the practice as endangered in 2013, and it has held up better than that implies. Most Batooro are Christian, Anglican or Catholic, with a Muslim minority, and Cwezi spirit mediumship persists underneath. The kingdom was abolished by Milton Obote in 1967 and restored in 1993; two years after that a three-year-old, Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, was crowned Omukama and ruled through regents until he came of age. Its authority is ceremonial now, and its borders are smaller than they were: the Bakonzo and Bamba of the Rwenzori slopes spent the 1960s fighting their way out of Tooro rule and eventually won a kingdom of their own. At weddings and installations the runyege is still danced, men with seed-pod rattles bound below the knee, women answering, a courtship dance that has outlasted the courtship arrangements it was made for.