BANTU NEGROES 591 



Uganda Protectorate, where, as a rule, the people are a very honest lot 

 of negroes. Under the old native Government, if a case of theft took 

 place in the daytime, it was punished by a fine, but if at night, the 

 culprit was left to the mercy of the people he had robbed, and this 

 usually meant his being beaten to death with clubs and his body thrown 

 on to the main road. Nor are the Banyoro at the present day quarrel- 

 some, the race seeming to have spent its vigour and exhausted its energy 

 in the continual fighting which has gone on in that unhappy land for 

 the last forty or fifty years. Their chief vice at the present day is 

 drunkenness. Philanthropists in England who have never visited Africa 

 seem to imagine that the negro of the far interior who is carefully 

 shielded from contact with European forms of alcohol is a total abstainer. 

 On the contrary, he is far more frequently drunk on his own fermented 

 liquors than is the case with the negro of the west coast, who may have 

 easy access to European gin, rum, whiskey, or wine. Mr. Wilson describes 

 the Banyoro as " splendid liars," proud of their powers of deception, though 

 he considers that this duplicity was chiefly exercised in the past to evade 

 the intolerable exactions of their own chiefs, and that in contact with 

 Europeans who attempt to treat them justly they are fairly truthful. 



The 'population of the District of Unyoro is estimated at the present 

 day as not exceeding 110,000. From the native point of view — an 

 arrangement which has received some official cognisance for the purposes 

 of tax-collecting — the country is divided into the following sub-divisions, 

 which correspond a good deal with tribal territories : Bugoma, Bugaya, 

 Kibanda, Kihukya, Bugungu (Magungu), Kahara, Bisu, Busindi, Buruli, 

 Chiope, Kikangara, and Kibero. Bugoma, which is largely forest, is the 

 most populous sub-division, as it has received and sheltered a good many 

 refugees from foreign and civil wars. Bugaya was formerly the name of 

 a very large country which is now divided between the kingdoms of 

 Unyoro and Uganda.* The people of the Chiope sub-division, which is a 

 region in the north of Unyoro bordering on the Victoria Nile, are largely 

 mixed with the Nilotic Acholi people from the north bank of that river, 

 and this mixture makes them quarrelsome and independent, besides filling 

 their speech with many non-Bantu words derived from the Acholi tongue, 

 though the basis of the Chiope dialect is Urunyoro.f This mixture with 



* It would be interesting to inquire into the meaning of this name " Bugaya," which 

 is most widely spread (sometimes misspelt as Bugaihya or Ugaya), not only through- 

 out the Bantu-speaking regions of the Uganda Protectorate, but also reappearing on 

 islands and coast-lands all round the Victoria Nyanza, even in regions which at the 

 present day are inhabited by non-Bantu Negroes. 



t Among the Chiope are a people calling themselves the Japalua (the " Shifalu of 

 Emin Pasha), who speak the same Nilotic dialect as the Alum of Albert Nyanza and 

 the Ja-luo of Kavirondo. 



