Bereft, Selfish, and Hungry: Greater Luhyia Concepts of the Poor in Precolonial East Africa.

POVERTY; LUYIA (African people); EAST African history; ECONOMIC conditions in Africa; SOCIOECONOMIC factors; COLONIAL Africa; HUMAN life cycle; SOCIAL reproduction; HISTORY; ECONOMICS

“Bereft, Selfish, and Hungry” is a history of “the poor” as a concept in East Africa in the Common Era. It shows how people speaking Greater Luhyia languages reconceptualized poverty as they settled new lands, interacted with other communities, and dealt with social and political change. Their notions of the poor ranged from connecting them with bereavement to associating them with selfishness; from an early emphasis on want to later ideas of deceit. Paying attention to these changes in different, yet related, historical speaker communities allows us to see the dynamism in Greater Luhyian economic thought. This article thus makes the case for writing longue durée histories of vernacular ways of knowing in oral societies. Doing so requires drawing on methods from other disciplines. In this case, comparative historical linguistics allows for the reconstruction of words and their meanings to different proto-languages, whether proto-Greater Luhyia or its descendant languages. Those words and meanings can then be contextualized with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnographic descriptions. Through this approach, we learn a great deal about how people in eastern Uganda and western Kenya historically conceived of the poor and how those ideas changed over time, well before the advent of colonialism, Christianity, and capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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