Two Lives of Mpamizo: Understanding Dissonance in Oral History

In August 1993 and February 1994 I conducted two interviews with a woman in Buhweju, a county in southwestern Uganda. The interviews were part of a series concerning the social and political history of Buhweju, which is now part of Bushenyi District. In the precolonial period, Buhweju was a small autonomous polity ruled by an hereditary “king;” in the colonial period it was subsumed into the neighboring kingdom of Nkore, which became known as Ankole.The first interview, like most of my interviews, focused on the history of the family of the interviewee, and she said that her paternal grandfather, whose name was Mpamizo, had been a Hima, or pastoralist. In Buhweju, and elsewhere in Ankole, this meant, and still means, very much more than simply being a keeper of cattle. The agriculturalist Iru and pastoralist Hima share the same language and much of the same culture, but speak and behave differently in a number of significant ways (diet and mode of subsistence being prominent among these), so that whether one is a pastoralist or an agriculturalist is very apparent to any other member of society. The woman to whom I was talking is very evidently an Iru, an agriculturalist, in her manner and in the way she lives, as is her husband, and so I was surprised to hear that her grandfather was a Hima, a pastoralist. It was partly for this reason that I went back to talk to her again: but on the second occasion, there was an important shift in her presentation of Mpamizo—a dissonance in her account of the past. Mpamizo, she now said, was an Iru. This dissonance is the subject of this paper, for it holds important lessons both about society in Buhweju and about the ways in which we interpret oral accounts of the past.