It is falsely alleged that the word Bugisu or Bagisu comes from the word cow. This is completely misleading and should be rejected by any right-thinking Umumasaaba and the entire community.
As our nearest neighbors who belong to the Marakwet language like the Sabiny, a cow is called teta, and among the Kalenjin and Maasai, a cow is called ekiteng. Many people want to tag wrong connotations to the word cow for selfish reasons, and now allow me to venture into detailed discussions on how such a name came about.
Names of any community can come from anything or be given by anyone, and such names are never ritualistic in character, meaning you don’t conduct any cultural-related ceremonies as we do with people. Among the Bamasaaba people, if you are giving a child a name, there must be some cocks or hens on standby for conducting such rituals.
If this process is avoided, then there will be certain consequences including a child zigzagging around or developing some abnormality because of the absence of such rituals. However, such thinking has been swept away by Christianity, but in some communities, the practice is still prevalent.
Community names come in through different formats. Sometimes the names come as insults, funny descriptions, or attachment to certain incidents. For example, when the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498 on the shores of the Indian Ocean and saw huge smoke on the islands of Makua and the Mwenemutapa Empire, he asked his minders about the huge smoke thousands of miles away on the island and enquired who stays over there. He was told by his minders that there was an Arab man called Musa bin Bisque, and perhaps during those years back then there were issues in pronunciation and Vasco da Gama just named the place Mozambique. That is how the name Mozambique came about.
Among the ancient people who lived in the present-day Masaabaland at the footsteps of Mt. Masaba, anybody who was not from Masaabaland was called Umumya (foreigner), and this applied to anybody who didn’t speak such a language. People had limited knowledge of anything beyond their communities within a radius of 10 km. There was limited knowledge about fellow community members since there was almost zero interaction. It was by magic that one could know somebody in a radius of 5 kilometers, since there was limited trade coupled with dangerous environs inhabited by animals with fewer human settlements.
The Bakiga of western Uganda, also called Banyakigezi, refer to anybody who was not their kith or tribe mate or didn’t speak their language—even up to now—as Umukooko or plural Ebikooko, meaning wild animals. So strangers were equated to wild animals.
Bamasaaba people live in Masaabaland. This place is variously called legally, as per the colonial constitution of Uganda enacted somewhere in the early 1900s, and even orders-in-council made by Her Majesty herself while Parliament was in recess, this place was confirmed as Bugisu. This place was collectively given that name based on what our neighbors had christened us, and currently, when you read the Third Schedule of the 1995 Constitution, the same name is maintained. Bagisu are one of the notable tribes in Uganda.
Any scholar interested in understanding better the legal implication of this name should rummage through the pre-independence constitution of Uganda dating way back in the 1900s. Bagisu are listed in section 2 of that constitution alongside other major tribes like Buganda, Busoga, Acholi, Bunyoro, Banyankole, and Bakiga, etc.
As already alluded to much earlier, names of places may not be determined by the community but rather by outsiders, but the people can determine how they call themselves. When a journalist who was later to get married to Captain Frederick Lugard and was working somewhere among the Ibo and Yoruba tribes, working for the London Times, was asked where she was staying in the “Dark Continent,” as Africa was known then, she told them she was in the Niga area, and Nigeria eventually got its name from that description. Here back home, Kampala is named after animals (impalas) that roamed about on the current hills that the Ugandan capital is located. The current Ankole was called Kaaro Karungi, etc.
Therefore, Bamasaaba are either children or descendants of Kundu or Seera or Masaba, who is said to have had many children beyond the current three—Mwambu, Wanale, and Mubuya—while some prehistoric micro-legend of Bugisu says that the children of Masaba should have been about five, with four boys and a girl, and one of the boys, Konyi, went and established himself in the Marakwet area on top of Mt. Elgon and produced his own lineage.
Masaabaland or Bugisu is an area lying between the twelage of Lwakhakha (Ririma River on the side of Kenya) and noticeable features in Bulambuli. It has its coordinates, which are now well documented even in the present constitution including the pre-independence constitutions and through folklore. We know where we end and anybody who crosses our boundary can be killed or arrested for straying into enemy territory. Many of our people have lost lives especially when one strays into foreign territory on top of Mt. Elgon.
Origin of the word Bugisu
The word Bugisu, in the neighboring Marakwet languages (our immediate neighbors to the north of Mt. Masaba / Mt. Elgon), means a grazing place for cows. The people living on top of Mt. Elgon—especially the Keiyo, Kipsigis, Nandi, Pokot, Sabaot, and Sabiny—were a little bit on a higher plane, and we were at the lower plains/flat areas downhill of Elgon. Since they were cattle keepers, they admired our land so much and wished they could use it to graze their animals, and hence referred to us collectively as Illuwasinkishu (a grazing area) because of the flashy grassland. Indeed, the word inkishu or illuwasinkishu in the Kalenjin language means grazing place.
Among the Nandi, Kalenjins, and generally the Marakwet cluster, a cow is called teta, and enkiteng among the Maasai.
In the olden past, communities were absolutely enclosed and knew little about the outside world—or at the extreme knew nothing. After all, didn’t the Buganda king His Majesty Paul Mwanga kill his own visitor out of superstition simply because he had come through the wrong direction as dictated by custom, that whoever came from the East could be a source of trouble? In my home area, Bukalasi-Bukharela, about 150 years back, it was entirely an enclosed area with people hardly having information beyond what they could see. There was no radio to carry information from one area to another, and the drum was the reliable source of information when it came to summoning the natives then for any common cause. It is even doubtful if anybody could be summoned because none had authority over the other.
During those years, biodata information was not necessary, and Christianity had not yet percolated through. Many people born in these communities—especially around the 1860s—had only one name. My grandfather was called Nasasa, and the additional name was on account of his extremely huge head. So he could be described on account of this extra feature as Nasasa Omurwe (Nasasa with a big head). Many of his descendants bear this feature he had.
People at that time understood less beyond their own environs, and many people—especially in Bumulye, Bunandutu, Mabono—were heavily connected to people in Kenya with whom they had some sort of relations. People who populated these areas came from neighboring communities. For example, the Sabiny were brought about 100 years back by the colonialists to inhabit the Sebei region. There were also efforts to make Eldoret a Jewish community, and some Afrikaans from South Africa—about 60 families—are currently inhabiting part of Eldoret.
