Performance and Social Construction of Historical Tradition: Memories of Vulnerable Ancestors

The Jie people, who live in Najie in central Karamoja Plateau in northern Uganda speak a dialect of Nilotic languages. The Jie numbered about 60,000, most of who live within the borders of Najie, which has an area of approximately 1,300 square miles. Najie is a dry and warm high plateau zone with an altitude of more than 3,500 feet. As an ecological zone, Najie has a recognizable thin wild vegetation, and dry climate. The Jie cultivate many different crops, each of which is adapted to the dry environment. A number of different kinds of medicinal plants, tobacco, and maize, are all interspersed in the edges of sprawling sorghum fields. Sorghum is the most important crop in the Jie's diet and economy. Varieties of sorghum grow well in the cotton soil of Najie. There are numerous varieties of wild fruits, bushes, and clumps of thorny thickets that are all important to the economy of the Jie.There are two major territorial divisions in Najie. The larger one in the south is Lokarwokol (place of Orwakol) and the smaller one in the north is Lokalodiny (place of Lodiny), dividing the whole of Najie into south and north axis, which are named after the earliest politico-religious leaders of the Jie, Orwakol and Lodiny respectively. The Lokarwokol territorial division, which is the focus of this paper, is subdivided into seven territorial sections namely, Losilang, Kotyang, Kanawat, Kotido, Komukunyu, Panyangara, and Nakapelimoru, deriving their names from the seven mythical wives of Orwakol, the ancestral Jie politico-religious leader and the founder of the Lokorwakol territorial division. All of the subdivisions of Lokorwakol are strung out along the banks of the Longiro River, except Nakapelimoru, which is located in the southeastern part of the Karamoja Plateau. About thirty miles east of Nakapelimoru is the Koten Hill region, where the Turkana cattle are allowed to graze near the eastern edges of the Karamoja Plateau.The oral traditions I have studied among the Jie community are called eemut (plural ngiemuto) (literally, story-history). The past depicted in an eemut (henceforth historical tradition) usually contains occasion-bound scenarios encapsulating what Vansina (1980: 262) calls "remembrance-images."The Jie historical tradition is fascinating to study and thrilling to watch when performed. The "historical tradition" is a spontaneously created prose narrative, composed during a performance and performed before an audience. A performance of historical tradition, inherently dramatic and artistic, does not simply narrate certain past events but reflects on those past events in present (Bloch 1977). The discourse of historical tradition is one of the means by which Jie people rationalize the social and political realities of their contemporary world.The plot of historical tradition unfolds against the ancient geography of Najie, thematically encoding Jie ancestral values associated with the human ideals and moral virtues of living in a dry environment. The Jie people love their land and believe that they inherited the land they inhabit from their ancestors; these ancestors set the society's rules and customs and defined rights and access to resources. Thus, their perception of the contemporary world has at its base the memory of the moral authority of the ancestors who sanctified their land and enforced interdependent relationships in which (for the most part) male elders control various resources and provide for the women and young men and children. Because of the moral superiority of their ancestors, Jie people generally live their lives as defined by their ancestors. In Jie ideology, the primary source of this ancestral moral superiority is associated with the uncertainty of life in a dry environment, as well as the uncertain political relations recorded by historical tradition. Various institutions, rituals, and countless performances in the historical tradition (which are believed to be true stories) reflect the moral superiority of the Jie ancestors. …