LANGO. The Lango (sometimes incorrectly called Miro and Bakedi) are a Nilotic tribe of Uganda, combining agriculture with animal husbandry. A well-built, tall, upstanding race, they live in the marshy and lowland country north and east of Lakes Kwanya and Kioga, arriving there after a series of migrations from the north-east dating from the 17th century. They remove the lower middle incisors and in their primitive conditions are unclothed, the women only wearing small aprons of metalwork or fibre suspended from a belt. Both sexes, however, are inordinately fond of bead and wire ornaments, and cicatrise their bodies with fantastic and often charming designs.
They live in compact villages varying from ten to iso huts, the village representing an aggregate of families which have united for mutual support. Their dome-like huts exhibit the flounced thatching typical of the Nilotics, and the diminutive bachelors' huts raised from the ground on piles are a distinctive feature of the culture. In each village there is a communal girls' hut super vised by an aged duenna.
They cultivate a large variety of millets both for food and for making the beer, which is their staple drink, and numerous vege tables are also grown in the vicinity of the village. Men and women share the agricultural duties, but men have the sole cus tody and management of the cattle, while women concern them selves with the domestic duties of the village. Men manufacture pots, but women make baskets and mats. Their weapons are spears and light hide shields of a rectangular pattern.
The tribe is divided into a number of exogamous clans with totemic or pseudo-totemic characteristics, inheritance and descent being through the male. Polygyny is practised. Society is also classified by a system of age-grades, which has been borrowed from their Nilo-Hamitic neighbours, probably before their final migrations. These grades have their special functions which are
chiefly religious and are concerned with the magical processes of rainmaking. They are governed by hereditary clan leaders, who have gradually acquired a territorial status and might be called petty chiefs, with powers and duties in regard to all who dwell in their vicinity irrespective of clan allegiance. Above these are the chiefs, who control from three to six clan chiefs, winning their position by personal merit, generosity and ability. Their title (rwot), however, is not hereditary, and their tenure of office is precarious and depends largely on their success in war and on the conduct of their civil responsibilities.
The Lango are skilful hunters, and though all land is held communally by the tribe, or in a few cases by the clan, the whole country is divided into a number of hunting areas, in which the rights of hunting are vested in an individual and pass to his heir on his death.
They believe that every human being (and a few animals) has a guardian spirit called winyo or "bird" which attends him during life and has to be liberated from the corpse by certain rites. There is also the shadow-self or immaterial soul called tipo, which after death may be renamed chyen and is eventually merged into a vague entity named jok, found in one form or another in all the Nilotics. Jok and the ancestors, of whom jok is thus the universal sublimation, are worshipped at shrines and sacred trees by prayer and sacrifice, and jok manifests himself in a diversity of forms, to each of which a specific name is given as to a divinity, some of them being anthropomorphic in conception, and all having special functions and individual spheres of activity appropriate to the different needs of humanity.
See J. H. Driberg, The Lango (1923). (J. H. D.)