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  The long migration seems to have prompted a bellicose period in their history, as the newcomers developed a reputation for being aggressive and dangerous. The expertise they had developed in iron-making in their cradleland meant they were probably better armed and more practiced in warfare than the tribes to the south whom they were about to displace.5 For a period of two or three generations, the Luo effectively became riverine pirates, plundering villages along the length of the Upper Nile; they operated rather as the Viking marauders had along the European coastline some five hundred years previously. Although the Luo canoes were flimsy, they were light, fast, and maneuverable, allowing small bands of young Luo warriors to make daring raids up and down the banks of the Nile, stealing cattle, crops, and women.

  The Luo became adept at incorporating captives into their societies, so their numbers increased at an astonishing rate. And as their numbers increased, their military strength grew; but this also put greater demands on their food supply, which in turn increased the rate of their territorial expansion. Father Joseph Pasquale Crazzolara, a Catholic missionary who worked for much of the first half of the twentieth century in East Africa, undertook some of the very earliest research into the migration of the Luo (or, as he chose to call them, the Lwoo). In his epic history of the traditions of the tribe he wrote:

  On the march, as still in big hunts, the tribal, clan and family groups kept closely united.… Female prisoners were absorbed and became completely submerged.… For male captives the case was different in theory, but scarcely in practice. Prisoner slaves were allocated to a family or clan-group, and treated as blood-relations, and even given wives, or cattle as dowry. But with their children and descendants they started their own sub-clans and social life, as a clan-segment, related and hence exogamous, to the main Lwoo clan.6

  In these early days of the southward migration, the various communities on the move were based around patrilineal clans, which recognized an aristocratic or “dominant” clan; this was usually the largest clan in the region, or the first to establish in a particular area. The leaders in this hierarchical system were, in descending order of authority, the ker or king, the ruoth or chief, and the jago or subchief. They ruled over both the subjects living in the chief’s enclosure—the jo-kal—and the lwak or “herd” of incoming subjugated people.7 Over time, the two peoples became one, mainly through polygamous chiefs fathering huge numbers of children with jo-kal and lwak women alike. As the early Luo society developed, so too did their belief that they were superior to the other tribes in the region. Their leaders believed that their royal lineage and ritual powers gave them the right to rule over others who did not have these special attributes, foreshadowing a conceitedness and arrogance that many Kenyans would claim is characteristic of the Luo today.

  As the Luo moved south along the length of the Upper Nile during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, they entered what is now northern Uganda. It had taken several generations for the Luo to cover the 220 miles from southern Sudan to the site of Pubungu, near Lake Albert. Here they built a great military encampment beside the river, about ten miles downstream from where the Nile exits the lake.8 Today, Pubungu-Pakwach is a forlorn little town with a single main street and a stout but simple steel-girded bridge over the White Nile. The modesty of the modern-day town notwithstanding, the early Luo chose their spot well: this bridging point is still an important strategic position on the river, and even today the Ugandan military will try to stop people from taking photographs of the bridge. For the Luo, Pubungu marked a dramatic change in their lifestyle, from nomadic pastoralists to a ruling elite, and for this reason the period is seen as the second major stage in the migration of the Luo.

  According to Luo oral history, the leader who helped build Pubungu up to become an impressive war camp was named Podho II. He is said to be the (15) great-grandfather* to President Obama. Podho II’s citadel became a springboard for the Luo to radiate outward and dominate the region for several generations. Little remains today of the imposing fortress at Pubungu, but the many old villages and archeological sites in western Kenya that display similar construction methods can give us some idea of what Pubungu was like at its peak. These settlements, with their distinctive dry-stone walling, are called ohinga in Dholuo, a name that means “refuge” or “fortress.” One particularly fine example in south Nyanza is called Thimlich Ohinga (thimlich means “frightening dense forest”). Archeological evidence suggests the site was occupied by Bantu tribes more than five hundred years ago, but it was the Luo who started to build in stone when they occupied the region circa 1700, about two hundred years after the Pubungu period.

  Today, Thimlich Ohinga is preserved as a national museum, but its remote position in an isolated part of south Nyanza means that it gets very few visitors—a pity, because the fortress is built on a low hill that gives a magnificent view across the region. Euphorbia candelabrum—a great, spiky succulent that is traditionally found in many Luo homesteads—towers above all the other vegetation here. The curator, Silas Nyagwth, took me around the site, which covers more than ten acres and includes six large stone enclosures nestled among the trees and shrubs on a gentle slope.

  Inside the stone compound, the wall was reinforced with stone towers where guards kept watch over the flat plain below. In the early days the main tribe here was the Maasai, who had a formidable reputation for fighting; the stone walls, between three and ten feet thick, were well constructed from loose stones and large blocks to protect against both hostile neighbors and wild animals. Inside the stone enclosures the original huts have long since disappeared, but the outlines of house pits and cattle enclosures can still be seen.

  Pubungu’s considerable size—it was probably substantially larger than Thimlich Ohinga—suggests that the Luo made a conscious decision to halt their migration, at least for a time, and establish themselves in northern Uganda on the banks of the river Nile.

  Before the arrival of the Luo, the region around Pubungu had been the land of the Madi tribe, whose homesteads extended on both sides of the White Nile. Soon the Luo were sending out raiding expeditions, and their warriors brought back plunder and captives from the Madi and other local tribes. The Luo also attacked the prosperous kingdom of Kitara, home to several tens of thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of cattle, and routed the pastoralist Chwezi people who lived there.9

  It was during this belligerent period that the events in one of the most powerful and enduring Luo legends are claimed to have occurred. I heard the fable of the lost spear and the bead from several different people in Nyanza, and it takes on many forms among different African groups who originated in southern Sudan.10 Although the story cannot be true in all its variations, the legend nevertheless gives us a fascinating insight into the centuries-old beliefs and customs of the Luo.

  One common version of the spear and the bead story begins with two brothers, Aruwa and Podho II, who lived in Pubungu in the second half of the fifteenth century. When their father, Ramogi I, died (perhaps around 1480–90), his eldest son, Aruwa, took over the chiefdom and the two brothers lived in relative harmony.11 However, one day an elephant came into their fields and began to trample the crops. One of Aruwa’s nephews was sitting on a raised platform watching over the millet field. When he sounded the alarm, Podho rushed out to protect his son and chase away the elephant. As he did so, he grabbed the nearest weapon, which happened to be a spear belonging to Aruwa. Podho wounded the elephant, but not fatally, and it escaped into the forest with Aruwa’s spear still hanging from its side. What Podho had not realized was that in the rush to protect his son, he had grabbed Aruwa’s sacred spear in error. He confessed his mistake to his brother, but Aruwa was furious; he refused any substitute and insisted that Podho should go and retrieve the missing weapon. Podho had no choice but to honor his brother’s demand.

  The next morning, at the first crow of the cock, Podho set off alone for the forest, taking with him his own spear and shield, and food prepar
ed by his wife: some kuon anang’a (ground maize cooked in milk), grilled meat, and sweet potatoes. It was a dangerous journey for anyone to undertake alone, and he decided the best course of action was to follow the setting sun. After traveling west for several days, Podho left behind the land of human beings and entered the kingdom of the animals. He roamed the remote forest for many days and became worn and weary, miserable at his failure to find the spear. One afternoon, exhausted, he dozed off under a tree and woke to find an old woman watching him: the queen of the elephants. She led Podho to her kiru, where she fed him and allowed him to rest. Then she took him to a larger kiru, where she kept all the spears that had been hurled at her elephants at various times in the past. The old woman told Podho that he would find his brother’s weapon among them. Podho spent several days looking for the sacred spear before he eventually found it. As he thanked the woman and prepared to leave, she presented him with a handful of magnificent beads, unique in pattern and color.

  Podho’s return journey was difficult, and he was sick with exhaustion by the time he reached Pubungu. He called a village meeting and ceremoniously presented his brother with his sacred spear. His family was concerned about the dispute between the two brothers, but everyone hoped that now the spear was found, the animosity between them would diminish. Time passed and the argument seemed to be forgotten until another confrontation opened the old wound. Aruwa’s children were playing with Podho’s prized beads when one of Aruwa’s daughters accidentally swallowed one. Podho, still feeling aggrieved about being forced to recover his brother’s spear, demanded that Aruwa return his bead, refusing any substitute or replacement. Aruwa waited for three days to allow nature to take its course, but the bead did not emerge. Podho continued to insist that the bead should be returned, until the infuriated Aruwa took a knife and cut open his own daughter’s stomach to recover it.

  After this traumatic event, the brothers realized they could no longer live together, and their families would have to separate or risk civil war. Together they walked down to the Nile at Pubungu and drove an axe into the riverbed as a symbol of their separation. Aruwa went west with his family from Pubungu, and Podho traveled east of the Nile toward western Kenya. A third brother, Olak, is said to have remained behind in Pubungu, where his descendants became farmers and fishermen.

  The legend of the spear and the bead is of course apocryphal; similar stories are told by many tribes as far afield as the Congo. Often the names of the participants change when the story is told by other tribes, sometimes a python takes the place of the elephant, and in other versions the stories of the spear and the bead are told as separate events. These stories of migration, lineages, and clanship often contain threads of historical detail, but they are really as much about the present as they are about the past; they played an especially important role in societies that had no written language and where a society’s morals and principles needed to be well defined. And at the most simplistic level, the story of the spear and the bead is a reminder of the historic separation of the clans at Pubungu and the new migration that eventually brought Podho’s people to western Kenya.

  According to the oral history of the Luo, when Podho II left Pubungu he took his whole extended family, traveling east from what is now Lake Albert. This was the third stage of the Luo diaspora, which consisted of several pulses of Luo migration into western Kenya between about 1450 and 1720.12 The movement of the Luo during this period has been compared to the shunting of a freight train in a marshaling yard; as one car is pushed, it knocks into another, which in turn pushes a third and fourth, and so on. In this way the Luo clans nudged their way into Kenya, and as more people came later, the early settlers were pushed farther east.

  Reverting to form when they left Pubungu, Podho’s clan stayed close to the waterways to the east of the settlement. First they followed what is now known as the Victoria Nile from Lake Albert, through the forest that today makes up the Murchison Falls National Park, before arriving at the swamplands at the western end of Lake Kyoga. From here they followed the northern shore of the lake, always making sure to secure water, food, and shelter.13 Along the way they built temporary kiru from branches and leaves. They lived off their cattle, caught what fish they could in the rivers and lakes, and hunted in the forests. The younger men, the clan’s warriors, scouted ahead for game and suitable places for their next stop. The migration from Pubungu to western Kenya took at least three generations, and the Luo speakers settled for a period at a place called Tororo, close to the present-day border between Uganda and Kenya. On the way from Pubungu to Tororo, Podho II fathered at least six sons. The eldest son, Ramogi II, in turn produced a son, Ajwang’, who would at last lead the Luo into Nyanza.

  Ramogi Ajwang’ and his clan finally made their historic crossing into Nyanza in the early part of the sixteenth century, perhaps around 1530. (For further details, see “Notes on Methodology.”) Ajwang’s people, the Joka-Jok, were pioneers, the first of three main waves of Luo-speaking people who moved into western Kenya. Here Ajwang’ built his first defensive stronghold on a good strategic high point: the ridge that is now called Got Ramogi.

  The region that Ramogi Ajwang’ chose for his new settlement resembled the swampy landscape which the Luo left in Sudan some half dozen generations before. The densely forested ridge of Got Ramogi towers above the snake-infested swampy grasslands of Gangu like a vast, sprawling medieval fortress, and the highpoint provides a perfect view of the surrounding countryside. The hills here rise to more than 4,300 feet above sea level, and they are protected on three sides by water: the Yala swamp to the north, the Yala River to the east, and Lake Victoria (which the Luo call Nam Lolwe) to the south. In addition to its natural defenses, Got Ramogi was a good position from which to mount offensives into new territory. And the region was fertile, with plenty of water for their cattle, space to establish their farms, and abundant wildlife in the forest for hunting. The Luo had been migratory for two centuries before Ramogi Ajwang’ established this settlement in western Kenya, and for this achievement he has taken on a mythical status among the Luo. Today every schoolchild learns about the famous warrior ancestor; if Ramogi is their King Arthur, then Got Ramogi became his Camelot.

  Life was not easy for the newcomers. Ramogi and his clan faced a hostile reception from the indigenous tribes, which soon turned into open warfare; granted, the conflict was caused mainly by the Luo getting up to their old tricks of raiding the Bantu homesteads for cattle and women. The indigenous Bantu were a farming people of medium stature, and they were no match for the tall, powerful Luo with their long history of warfare. The Bantu fled the region; in some cases the tribes moved to another location only to find themselves being displaced again by new waves of Luo invaders a generation or two later. In this way the Luo consolidated their hold on this part of western Kenya over several generations.

  Scattered around the flatlands today at the foot of Got Ramogi are clusters of small, isolated traditional homesteads: simple Luo houses with mud walls and thatched roofs, and a sprinkling of cattle grazing lazily in the hot tropical sun. William Onyango, a local farmer in the hamlet of Dudi, explained to me that this is no longer good land to cultivate:

  In the past, this place used not to be swampy. Here it used to be very good. There came some very big rains about 50 years ago that made this place become swampy.

  Nyanza Province (Luoland) and the region into which the Luo ancestors migrated between 1530 and 1830; also showing the adjacent Luhya, Nandi, and Kisii tribal areas.

  Today, Onyango struggles to make even a basic living from his land:

  In this place I grow my maize—you can see my maize here. You call it corn—corn on a cob. Then we have cabbages, onions, and all this. That is what I do here to survive. I have ten children to look after—I’m not like you who might have two children. I am a real African! I have one wife and ten children: six boys and four daughters.

  Like most subsistence farmers in Kenya, William Onyango struggles t
o find the money for even the most basic necessities in life. He can feed his family adequately with the food that he grows himself, but he can earn cash only by selling his surplus at the market. But competition is fierce from other farmers in a similar position, and his surplus crops rarely earn him very much income. And a lack of money is only one of William’s concerns in this very remote part of western Kenya, which lies just a few miles from the Ugandan border and is accessible only along rough dirt tracks:

  We have many animals here … warthogs, antelope, gazelles, and we have lots of hare. We also have hyenas and leopards—these are the most common ones. And the snakes—we have lots of snakes here. We have the puff adder, the cobras and the spitting cobras, the rock pythons, the green and black mambas. We really fear the three main ones: the cobra because they can spit a long distance and blind you, the puff adders because they are so aggressive, and the mambas because they are so poisonous.

  It struck me that in many ways William’s lifestyle has changed little from that of his ancestors, all descended from Ramogi Ajwang’, who first settled in the area some four centuries previously:

  Ramogi is my very great-grandfather. He passed through the river Nile to this place, Got Ramogi, and he settled at the topmost part of the hill. I asked my grandfather what is the significance of the top of Got Ramogi. He told me that in those times, there used to be many enemies. So he liked this place because it was like a castle, and he could use this to view all parts of these lower lands.