One People, Two Borders

Bagisu and Bukusu oral history and comparative ethnography agree that the two groups were, within living historical memory, one Masaba speaking people settled around Mount Elgon, dividing into named lineages as families spread around the mountain rather than as separate peoples with separate origins. The border that now makes them citizens of different countries, and members of officially distinct ethnic categories, Bagisu in Uganda and Bukusu in Kenya, dates only to the colonial partition of East Africa in the decades either side of 1900, a line drawn for administrative convenience rather than to mark any pre-existing cultural boundary.

Jan de Wolf's comparative study of circumcision on both sides of the border reconstructs the shared history behind the modern division and argues that the ritual cycle itself, the age-set organisation, the seasons in which circumcision is performed, and much of its accompanying belief, remained closely aligned on both sides well into the twentieth century despite decades of separate colonial administration. Suzette Heald's fieldwork, focused on the Uganda side, documents the same institution as continuing to organise Bagisu male identity into the present. The atlas records Imbalu as belonging to this one historical people rather than crediting it to only the Ugandan or only the Kenyan half of a border that their own history does not recognise as original.