^{page 1 note 1} ‘Nyoro Kinship’, Africa, xxvii, 4, October 1957. The research on which these two articles are based was carried out at intervals during the years 1951–5. It was mostly financed by the Treasury Committee for Studentships in Foreign Languages and Cultures, London, whose support I gratefully acknowledge. I am also grateful to the East African Institute of Social Research, Kampala, for a generous contribution towards the cost of publishing these over-long articles in Africa.

^{page 1 note 2} Or obuswezi. It is extremely difficult to say whether or not the initial vowel should be given in the case of substantives and infinitives. Banyoro themselves include or omit it in accordance with rules not all of which have yet been clearly formulated. In the interests of consistency I have omitted it throughout, even in cases where the word would sound strange to a Nyoro ear without it.

^{page 3 note 1} Thus, even though Bunyoro is no longer a pastoral country and cattle are only available as bridewealth in one or two favoured corners of the district, an angry wife may abuse a husband who has ‘married’ her kya busa by demanding of him ‘zika-nyaraha?’ which may be freely translated ‘and where have your cattle urinated, may I ask?’

^{page 3 note 2} Sometimes a man may doubt whether the character of his daughter or of her prospective husband is such as to make a permanent union a probability, and he is unwilling to put himself in the position of having to repay a large sum of money in the likely event of separation. I have heard a very few fathers claim that they did not wish to bind their daughters, but preferred to leave them free to leave their husbands without formality if they wanted to. Also relevant may be the greatly enhanced authority which a father may enjoy over a son-in-law who has not paid mukaga but who yet accepts the subordinate status of son-in-law.

^{page 4 note 1} Traditionally it was made in cattle, at least by those who owned cattle (cf. Roscoe, J., The Bakitara or Banyoro, Cambridge, 1923, pp. 226Google Scholar et seq.). The word mukaga itself means ‘six’ in Lunyoro, and is popularly supposed to refer to the number of cattle formerly paid.

^{page 5 note 1} As outside a small area in the north-west there are practically no cattle now in Bunyoro, what I describe as the ‘traditional’ type conforms rather to Roscoe's ‘marriage ceremonies among the serfs’ (op. cit. pp. 274 et seq.) than to his ‘marriage ceremonies of the pastoral people’ (pp. 266 et seq.). Roscoe's account is (despite some inaccuracies) useful so far as it goes, but of course his interest was in the particular usages involved rather than in their structural implications.

^{page 5 note 2} It is still not uncommon for girls to be forced into marriages against their will, and I have recorded cases of suicide arising from this cause. Increasingly, however, young women, like young men, are taking these matters into their own hands, and the new ways in which they can achieve some financial independence, for example by growing their own plot of cotton, enable the more strong-minded of them to defy their parents and, in some cases, to free themselves from an uncongenial husband by themselves repaying the mukaga paid for them.

^{page 6 note 1} This attitude is of course consistent with Mauss's view of marriage (developed by C. Lévi-Strauss) as forming part of a complicated system of exchange in which the givers and receivers are predominantly men, and women among the‘things’ given and received. (Cf., in particular, Lévi-Strauss, C., Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté, Paris, 1949, especially Chap. V.Google Scholar)

^{page 6 note 2} Bakwenda (sing, mukwenda). The use of intermediaries is institutionalized in a wide range of political and social situations in Bunyoro. It would seem to be typical of hierarchically organized societies of this type, where the ‘premiss of inequality’ (to use the term employed by Maquet, J. J. in Le Système des Relations sodales dans le Ruanda ancien, Tervuren, 1954, Chap. VIIIGoogle Scholar) pervades the social structure.

^{page 8 note 1} Great quantities of beer and foodstuffs (including two or three goats for slaughter) have to be provided by the bridegroom's family. In one marriage at which I was an observer the total marriage payment was about £13, while the total expenditure in connexion with the marriage feast amounted to £19. So the business of getting his son married cost this father and his kinsmen about £32. The father in this case was an important village headman, but I do not believe that his expenses were a very great deal above the average.

^{page 8 note 2} Z'okubukara. Before the girl leaves her parents' home she is seated on the lap of each of them: when she arrives at her husband's home she will also sit on his parents' laps. This formal act expresses a close tie of intimacy and affection, such as is appropriate between parents and children. It is performed also on certain other ceremonial occasions, such as initiation into the mbandwa spirit possession cult.

^{page 8 note 3} The hair of both bride and bridegroom is shaved close to the skull before the ceremony.

^{page 8 note 4} Ebigenda hali Omukama tibigaruka.

^{page 9 note 1} They include the sitting on the parents' laps of both bride and bridegroom, and a ceremony called kucwa magita, the ceremonial undoing of the bride's girdle by the bridegroom, which is made the occasion for levying a further penalty on him for his ineptitude.

^{page 9 note 2} That is, you must learn for yourselves the best way to deal with her, and we are not to be blamed if she turns out badly.

^{page 10 note 1} Partial exceptions to this statement could be quoted; it was noted that the relationship is modified in uxorilocal marriage (kyeyombekeire), and it is also reversed where a woman occupies a markedly higher hereditary status than a man, as for example if she is a Mubitokati (a member of the royal lineage) and he a peasant. But the statement is in general true.

^{page 10 note 2} The use of these names, which are of Nilotic origin, implies both close friendship and respect.

^{page 11 note 1} Of course in polygynous marriages new interpersonal relationships are also brought into being between co-wives, conflict between whom (especially if one wife is childless and the other not) is one of the commonest sources of sorcery accusations in Bunyoro.

^{page 11 note 2} Banyoro say that the original meaning of the word buko is an affliction like ague or palsy which affects a woman who enters into any kind of close contact with her daughter's husband.

^{page 11 note 3} The case is apparently otherwise in the not very distant interlacustrine state of the Basoga (Fallers, L. A., Bantu Bureaucracy, Cambridge, 1956, pp. 68–71), and also, I believe, in Buganda.

^{page 12 note 1} This is the term Banyoro: use muntu w'aheru.

^{page 13 note 1} He is not strictly, of course, a lone‘individual’, but his position may fairly be represented as that of one man seeking a wife, while the other party to the relationship is not one woman seeking, or receiving, a husband, but the whole group of which the wife is a member.

^{page 13 note 2} Even where these relations are with the wife's brother, the latter in this situation assumes his father's status and in a real sense ‘becomes’ his father.

^{page 16 note 1} For example if a man visits the home of a married brother of his wife he has to avoid that man's wife, for she is one of his banyinazara and he so refers to her. Thus his wife's married brother is in this context isezara rather than muramu. In Buganda a wife's brother is apparently referred to by the same term as a wife's father, mukodomi (cf. Roscoe, J., The Baganda, London, 1911, p. 131).

^{page 16 note 2} Reciprocally, a man will in certain contexts regard the man who has married his sister as muko; he will certainly do so if he becomes his father's heir.

^{page 16 note 3} A number of thoughtful Banyoro to whom I put the suggestion agreed with it, but of course not too much should be inferred from this! It is worth noting, however, that according to Roscoe the neighbouring Baganda reserve the term muramu for the wife's sister, the wife's brother being called mukodomi (father-in-law). (Roscoe, op. cit., p. 131.)

^{page 16 note 4} Banyoro sometimes refer to such arrangements as ‘to guard against the rats’ (kulinda mbeba). Rats creep into houses while the owner is absent or asleep and bit by bit destroy his goods.

^{page 17 note 1} Bwihwa is the abstract term for the relationship; mwihwa (pl. baihwa) is the junior partner to it, nyinarumi (pi. banyinarumi) the senior.

^{page 18 note 1} It combines conjunctive and disjunctive components, to use Radcliffe-Brown's terms (‘On Joking Relationships’, Chap. IV of Structure and Function in Primitive Society, London 1952, p. 95). Like all present-day students of this kind of relationship, I owe much to Radcliffe-Brown's brilliant analyses.

^{page 18 note 2} For example, that between muko and nyinazara.

^{page 19 note 1} Not, it should be noted, fot mwihwa; it is he who ‘rules’ and ‘wields power’ (busobozi) over nyinarumi, not vice versa.

^{page 19 note 2} The situation is apparently similar among the Thonga and elsewhere (Radcliffe-Brown, op. cit, p. 98). But Nyoro, unlike Thonga, do not call mothers' brothers ‘grandfathers’; they seem to feel no need to rationalize this reversal of the usual intergenerational respect relationship.

^{page 19 note 3} Nayesunga habwaki? Akakurra mu banyinarumi?

^{page 19 note 4} Ozika kubi omwihwa, kunu omwijukuru akurolerrire, literally ‘if you bury your mwihwa badly, then your grandchild will look to you’.

^{page 20 note 1} This point has recently been stressed by Winter, E. H. (Bwamba, Cambridge, 1956, p. 187)Google Scholar, to whose stimulating treatment of the mother's brother-sister's son relationship among the Amba I am also indebted.

^{page 20 note 2} This is also done in cases where other grave ritual offences have been committed and a condition of serious ritual danger created, for example if a man defecates in the house of another.

^{page 21 note 1} Of course the affinal aspect of the mother's brother-sister's son relationship is no new theme in social anthropology. Cf., for example, Sol Tax, ‘Some Problems of Social Organization’, in The Social Anthropology of North American Tribes, Chicago, 1937Google Scholar, to which I am much indebted, and Dumont, L., ‘The Dravidian Kinship Terminology as an expression of Marriage’, Man, vol. liii, No. 54Google Scholar. But it has not always, perhaps, received the attention it deserves.