The Sor or Tepes of Karamoja (Uganda): aspects of their history and culture by John M. Weatherby (review)

John Weatherby went to Uganda as an art teacher, grew interested in the people he taught, and earned an MA at Makerere University for an ethnographic thesis on the Sebei on Mount Elgon in 1967, when that was quite an achievement. Indeed, the history department there, containing J. B. Webster, R. S. Herring and J. E. Lamphear, produced irreplaceable research on north-east Uganda. Now Weatherby’s daughter, Joanna, has had the University of Salamanca publish her father’s ethnographic monograph on the So/Soo/Sor, a Kuliak people living on Mount Moroto, above the high school where her father was posted to teach art before President Amin effectively ended all research in Uganda. This offering from 1974 is therefore a valuable record of the past twice over, since the oral memory of most of his contributors went back four generations to the first half of the nineteenth century, and one to 1779, not only in Sor clans on Moroto but also on Mount Kadam. I have been able to check the prophecy of a female Sor seer, Larubekume Namodang, who reputedly told the Cubae age section in waiting of the Karimojong to delay its first initiations, or else the Europeans would come (pp. 115–16). According to my research, the Cubae started initiating in 1913, and according to that of my internal examiner, James Barber, the government first visited the Karimojong at Moroto in March 1914 and started building in July in the Léa Valley. They should have listened to her!

Although he died in 2003, Weatherby is surprisingly up to date, matching Roger Blench’s 2006 dating of the Sor’s proto-Kuliak ancestors to 3,000 BP (p. 47), but he does not consider, like Blench, that they might have shifted their language from Cushitic to their peculiar Nilo-Saharan. Nor does he note their 500-mile, north–south spread, despite referring to a memory of their being at Lokapel, the granite inselberg overlooking the Dopes River (p. 102). Places associated with the Kuliak, whether Nyangea, Ik or Sor, are identifiable by their Nilotic names: the Tepes Hills in Ethiopia, the Dopes River running south along the length of Karamoja, Endebess in Kenya, and caves on Mount Elgon, where Weatherby does record Sor fleeing famine in the 1830s (p. 108).

Weatherby makes a case for the historical continuity of Sor culture (pp. 117–19, 121, 133, 215). Nowhere is this more evident than in his special interest in the Sor spirit cult. There are two levels of initiation into different charismata, Kensan and Arras:

It is when the Kensan initiated advance into the Arras school of initiation that they are trained to become as if they were ‘possessed’. In their Kensan group they are strong men wearing feathers and a skin cape, but in the Arras school during the whole year of initiation, separated from the world of their homesteads, they become like helpless children, never allowed to eat alone, fed by the Arras, beaten [very hard by vengeful wives], degraded, and unable to retaliate. It seems they thus reach a state of ‘dissociated personality’.

(p. 123)

Indeed, the Arras often live like widowers, with only a grandson, as they are ‘living with their God’, Belgen. Yet this is in tension with the infringing ‘modern world’ (p. 119) and ‘the more recent changes which press in upon their community from all sides’ (p. 133). This begs the question of how much – and where – the Sor have changed, for religion itself may reflect as well as carry, and even cause, social change. It is a pity that Weatherby was not aware of the survey made in 1957 by the Assistant District Commissioner, John Cleave. While this might not have penetrated the spiritual silences, it was more methodical in visiting virtually every Sor homestead on Moroto. He found that the...