| This study is based on recorded oral traditions about the Tembuzi and the Cwezi, two early dynasties in the grasslands of western Uganda. After the last Tembuzi ruler disappeared into the Underworld, his gatekeeper became king, but he was overthrown by the founder of the Cwezi dynasty. The Cwezi are depicted as marvellous people who came to Kitara and ruled there briefly as kings and chiefs. After diviners predicted their demise, they left Kitara, calling their kinsmen the Bito to come and inherit the kingdom. Although the Cwezi disappeared, they were remembered in the spirit possession cults of the region.;Collectively these traditions are referred to as "the Kitara epic." This prose epic is a complex cultural artifact, embodying historical conceptions about events in the remote past and also expressing fundamental cosmological and religious ideas. For the historian, problems of interpreting the epic are centered on the historicity of the Tembuzi and Cwezi personae and on their place in Kitara's religious complex. Analyzing how this material was shaped and transmitted as religious ideology (serving the interests of Cwezi mediums) and as political ideology (serving the interests of pre-Bito and Bito rulers) was essential to discovering its historical value.;The goal of the study is to re-evaluate the cultural context in which possession rituals for the Cwezi spirits emerged as different from those performed for ghosts and local gods. To explore how processes of religious and political change were related, a model of the late Tembuzi period is presented, followed by a reconstruction of the early Cwezi period. An approach combining literary and anthropological techniques, and utilizing linguistic and ethnographic data, is used to identify the historical referents of key personae. Traditions situate these personae in the same locality and it is concluded that they represent nodes of ritual-cum-political authority in that locality. The Tembuzi to Cwezi transition in this area may be explained as the result of a religious movement spread by itinerant mediums of the Cwezi spirits. Cwezi mediums established local networks which became alternative nodes of authority, capable of challenging existing nodes. In this way, religious change became interwoven with political change. |
