Acholi

The Acholi country stretches across the savannas of northern Uganda, where communities cultivate the land and keep livestock. Their Luo language and traditions link them to other peoples who moved south from the upper Nile region. Villages were organised around lineages, whose elders settled disputes and represented their members in dealings with neighbours.

From around 1600, successive migrations helped shape the population of this region. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, chiefdoms grew under rulers known as rwodi. Each drew together a royal lineage and villages attached to it, along with land used for cultivation and hunting. Political authority was shared with lineage elders and clan heads, and the chiefdoms themselves changed as groups separated and formed new communities.

The later city of Gulu lies here.