John Beattie's Bunyoro: An African Kingdom is an account of the author's life with the Nyoro, a Bantu speaking people who live in the uplands of Uganda, in east central Africa. Beattie's field work, spanning 22 months between 1951 and 1955, includes six aspects of Nyoro life, including their political system and cultural means of perpetuating such a system. The political structure in place at the time of Beattie's investigation will be discussed, as well as traditional Nyoro methods of rule before European influence. Beattie's work will also be examined as a product of the neo evolutionism school of anthropology.
In addition, it will become evident that the Nyoro idea of "ruling" is not limited to the political sphere, but rather it pervades the gamut of social relations. As Beattie emphasizes throughout, "the notion that people occupy different categories, and that these are almost always unequal, is ubiquitous." This inegalitarian feature of Nyoro culture requires a thorough treatment of the idea of superordination and subordination.
The hierarchical structure of Nyoro political and cultural life will be compared to that of the Nuer, a Nilotic people of the Southern Sudan, as first studied by E. E. Evans Pritchard in 1940. E. R. Leach's landmark study of Kachin social structure in Political Systems of Highland Burma (first published in 1954) will also provide a means of comparison to the Nyoro of Uganda.
In Bunyoro, the top of the authority pyramid is occupied by the Mukama, or king. All power is ultimately derived from him, whether it is exercised in the political realm or the domestic sphere. As Beattie describes it, "the idiom of government, of ruling, is extended from the political into the community and even into the domestic sphere." This "feudal" structure of Bunyoro, in which all authority is derived from the top of the pyramid, has essentially remained unchanged because the Nyoro believe that the present Mu...