Luo

The Luo are Western Nilotic peoples, including the Shilluk and Anuak of South Sudan, the Acholi of Uganda and the Joluo of western Kenya, tracing their origins to the Bahr el Ghazal.

From the early second millennium southern branches drifted south through Uganda, a journey preserved in clan genealogies; in the mid-fifteenth century the chief Nyikango led a branch north along the Nile to found the Shilluk kingdom. Kenya was reached in waves: the Joka Jok settled at Ramogi Hill near Lake Victoria around 1490 to 1517, the Jok'Owiny and Jok'Omolo following between 1598 and 1625.

They mixed with, absorbed or displaced older Bantu and Southern Nilotic communities, building stone-walled homesteads like Thimlich Ohinga. Herders, cultivators and fishermen, they lived in decentralised clans under elders and hereditary ruoth chiefs, and by the seventeenth century their lands ringed Lake Victoria's northern and eastern shores.