Karimojong, the name of one particular community, has been used by some writers as a general designation (as in “the Karimojong cluster”) for a larger group of peoples speaking closely related Eastern Nilotic languages in northeastern Africa. The name “Karamoja,” for the district in northeastern Uganda where many of this group live, is also derived from it. Most Africanists now use the term Ateker as the generic name for the group.
From all indications, the Ateker were the last of the Nilotes to move south from the Sudan, apparently in the early or middle centuries of the second millennium. Typical of African origin sagas, many Ateker traditions which recount migrations from a mythical homeland, often called “Longiro,” are highly stylized renderings containing elements of political charter and cosmological affirmation. Nevertheless, one can deduce that ancestral Ateker probably did move out of the southeastern Sudan in two separate streams. One, traveling via the wetter borderlands of western Karamoja, had close interactions with Central Sudanic-, Kuliak-, other Nilotic, and especially Luo-speaking peoples. Many became bilingual and most, although often keeping cultural attachments to livestock, developed a strongly agricultural economy, earning them the nickname Ngikatapa, “Bread People.” The second stream pushed south through the drier grasslands of eastern Karamoja into the Koten-Magos hill country. Their economic outlook was mainly pastoral, although they also practiced hunt-ing/gathering and dry grain cultivation.
By the early eighteenth century, the Koten-Magos group had begun to fragment, many pushing westwards into central Karamoja, apparently because of population increases linked at least in part to the development of more efficient pastoral systems featuring improved strains of cattle. These systems could be highly productive, but they were also, in many respects, inherently unstable. Their mobility could produce dynamic expansions resulting in fluid frontiers and constant interethnic contacts that might undermine group solidarity. Their livestock was vulnerable to a host of sudden disasters, such as drought, epizootics, and the raids of competitors. Therefore, broad and complex systems of livestock exchange between individual stockmen gave insurance against catastrophe and created bonds that gave some corporeal form to basically amorphous societies. Moreover, animals provided the essence of cultural outlooks, as well as political economies.
The western Ngikatapa groups, although less pastoral, were still open to natural calamities. Their more sedentary systems of cultivation, involving permanent concentrations of larger populations in areas of limited agricultural potential, could tax the resources of fragile ecosystems and bring on terrible famines. By the early eighteenth century, one such occurrence, a famine remembered by some as the Nyamdere, disrupted their communities and caused many to flee. In the course of these movements, Koten-Magos and Ngikatapa elements came into contact with each other in various parts of Karamoja, where some formed new communities, such as the Jie, Karimojong, and Dodos. Combining their agricultural and pastoral skills, they developed mixed farming economies better suited to the environment than either of the older systems had been. Some of the Ngikatapa, however, such as the Loser, Loposa, and Kapwor groups, abandoned Karamoja to migrate westwards to more fertile regions around Mount Otukei where they could maintain their primarily agricultural focus. The formation of the new societies in Karamoja entailed additional fissioning, as people who would become Toposa, Jiye, and Nyangatom moved back into the southern Sudan, and others, who formed Turkana and Iteyo elements, went east to the headwaters of the Tarash River below the Karamoja escarpment in Kenya.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, another famine, the Laparanat, devastated the Ngikatapa around Mount Otukei, and many moved off even further to the west and southwest, some as far as the Nile. Here they formed sections of developing Iteso, Kumam, and Langi. While all retained many aspects of Ateker culture, the three latter groups adopted the Luo speech of neighboring peoples.
Up to about this point, Ateker groups had tended to favor decentralized, egalitarian political forms. In the more mobile communities of the east, political activity was exercised largely by ruggedly individualistic extended families, which functioned—at least ideally— as self-sufficient economic units. For most Ateker, age-class systems with strong generational principles crosscut kinship and territorial groups, however, and, through participation in common rituals, imbued them with their broadest sense of corporate identity. A degree of gerontocratic control was exercised by venerable congregations of senior elders, although some authority might be invested in a few outstanding individuals, too, especially among some of the western societies. Nevertheless, the age-systems could also foster fission, as bands of young age-mates often hived off from parent societies to pioneer new areas and establish new political identities.
During their initial expansions, Ateker communities sometimes had clashes with others, and livestock raiding among the more pastorally oriented was endemic. From the late eighteenth century such conflicts apparently were becoming more frequent. In far southern Karamoja, the Karimojong raided Southern Nilotic peoples and dispersed an earlier group of pastoralists, the Iworopom. Many defeated remnants were absorbed into developing Ateker communities, especially the Iteso, who were also making contacts with Bantu societies to the west and south. In central Karamoja, the Jie and Dodos destroyed a last remaining Ngikatapa group, the Poet, assimilating many. In the far west, the Langi fought a wide variety of peoples, including the Jopaluo, Alur, and Madi. By the latter part of the century they were pushing vigorously to the south and west against the Kumam, Iteso, and Acholi. By then they also had contacts with the powerful Bantu-speaking Nyoro kingdom, for whom many became mercenaries.
The most dramatic expansion of all was that of the Turkana in the east. From the upper Tarash, the Turkana decimated a multilingual confederation, the Siger, already stricken by a serious drought in the early nineteenth century. They then advanced relentlessly across the rugged, arid plains west and south of Lake Turkana against the previous occupants, the pastoral Kor, retreating elements of whom helped form Maa-speaking Sumburu and Cushitic-speaking Rendille. They also drove Southern Nilotes out of the plains and up into highland areas. In a remarkably short time, Turkana thus gained a vast territory and absorbed huge numbers of outsiders.
Competition for resources, especially in the more pastoral regions, became increasingly intense as the century progressed, and soon individual Ateker societies, especially in Karamoja and the Sudan, began battling each other. In the west, internal tensions developed within the Lango and Iteso, leading to further dispersions, and, in the case of the latter, hard fought civil wars by the end of the century.
All this escalating conflict was accompanied by political changes among many of the Ateker. Among some, such as the Jie, Toposa, and Dodos, hereditary firemakers provided a deeper corporate unity, although their authority remained largely religious. With the Iteso, powerful military leaders used territorial bases to forge large confederacies. Similarly, among the Lango, military leadership became greatly expanded and institutionalized. Among the Turkana, hereditary prophet/diviners became emergent centralizing figures
Tions Among the Central Paranilotes.” In R. Vossen and M. Bechhaus-Gerst, eds. Nilotic Studies. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1983.
. The Traditional History of the Jie of Uganda. Oxford:
Maasai family beside their huts, twine structures covered with clay. When the group moves on, the huts decay. In a new grazing area huts are built again. © SVT Bild/Das Fotoarchiv.
Who directed their territorial expansion. In addition to these general tendencies to consolidate power in the hands of individual “big men,” some Ateker societies altered their age-class systems. Among the Lango and Iteso, gerontocratic functions apparently disappeared altogether. With the Turkana, principles of biological age became dominant over generational ones, facilitating the more effective mobilization of fighting men.
By the eve of the colonial conquest, Ateker peoples were thus having a tremendous impact on the whole course of East African history. They also were proving themselves extraordinarily adaptive, adjusting economic and political features to conform to local conditions, and thus providing a cultural and linguistic bridge between Bantu - and Luo-speaking riverine agricultural states in the west and Eastern and Southern Nilotic - and Cushitic-speaking pastoral nomads in the east.
John Lamphear
Further Reading
Dyson-Hudson, N. Karimojong Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Gulliver, P. H. The Central Nilo-Hamites. London: International African Institute, 1953.
Gulliver, P. H. The Family Herds. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1955.
Lamphear, J. “The Evolution of Ateker ‘New Model’ Armies.” In Ethnicity and Conflict in the Horn of Africa, edited by K. Fukui and J. Markakis. London: James Currey, 1994.
-. “The People of the Grey Bull: The Origin and Expansion of the Turkana.” Journal of African History. 29 (1988). “Some Thoughts on the Interpretation of Oral Tradi-
Clarendon Press, 1976.
Muller, H. Changing Generations: Dynamics of Generation and Age-Sets in Southeastern Sudan (Toposa) and Northwestern Kenya (Turkana). Soarbrucken: Breitenbach, 1989. Tarantino, A. “Lango Wars.” Uganda Journal. 13, no. 2 (1949). Tosh, J. Clan Leaders and Colonial Chiefs in Lango. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Vincent, J. Teso in Transformation. Berkeley: University of California, 1982.
Webster, J. B., ed. The Iteso During the Asonya. Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1973.
World History
