ABSTRACT
The Lugbara are a Central Sudanic-speaking people of northwest Uganda and the adjacent areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Sudan Republic. They numbered about a quarter of a million in the 1950s, the era with which this entry is concerned. They were densely settled farmers, growing mainly sorghums as staples and keeping some livestock. There were some sixty dispersed patrilineal clans, segmented into territorially compact subclans, each of some four thousand people, and in turn divided into several levels of lineages. The minimal lineage was the core of a joint family, the basic residential group (Middleton 1960). They traditionally lackedcentralized political authority; those with the greatest authority were the rainmakers, one in each subclan. Beneath them were the elders of joint families. The British and Belgian colonial administrations appointed chiefs. This “traditional” social organization was greatly changed by the turn of century, but the situation remained uncertain. In the 1950s most Lugbara were illiterate. Although many younger people could read and write; theirs was not a literate culture. Formal behavior was dependent upon verbal communication, in which narrative skill, nuances of speech, use of proverbs, subtle allusion to local events, and preciseness in choice of words were necessary for the speaker to be counted as a mature person.
