ABSTRACT
Most of the Chiga, well over 100,000 by all estimates, live clustered in small hamlets in the eastern half of the province, which is certainly the most densely settled and intensively cultivated part of Uganda. The Chiga people speak a Bantu dialect which is related to Nyoro. Except for a few simple consonant shifts it is virtually identical with that spoken in Ankole and Mpororo. As an independent one-class peasant people in this region of sharp caste differentiation, the Chiga are of particular historical and comparative interest. The Chiga were being further harassed by a series of organized raids by Pygmy peoples who were hiding out in the forest country to the north-west and across the border in the Congo. The Pygmy raids seemed particularly terrible to the Chiga because they were entirely destructive. While the Chiga were being harried in the south, they were successfully pushing their own boundaries out toward the north.
