Kuliya ti La'Bi lo Kakwa

About the Book

While studying at the University of Guelph in the mid-1980s, Yuga was struck by the absence of written materials on most of the indigenous cultures like Kakwa even though the slave traders, colonists and missionaries had been in the Kakwa region as early as the 1870s. Kakwa is an undocumented language, and it is referred to in Greensberg (1966), though no particulars of the language are given. It is also mentioned in Spagnola's Bari Grammar (1937) and in Tucker and Bryan's (1967) survey of the languages of the area, with reference to few particular (mostly incorrect) features of the language. No grammar of the language exists.

Rough estimates suggest that there are approximately 500 000 speakers of Kakwa. However, the region in which Kakwa is spoken is rife with political unrest and upheaval. Until recently, there has been civil war in the southern Sudan and in the Congo, and these have been going since the 1960s. Although the Kakwa population has stabilized in recent years, the Kakwa people feel that there has been a significant decline in degree of speaker confidence due to pressures of war, illness, poverty, migration and political oppression. Currently, Kakwa children attending school are instructed, not in their own language, but in that of the other politically powerful neighboring language, Lugbara. The elders are concerned that they are the sole possessors of much of the Kakwa language and tradition, and are actively encouraging means of preserving the knowledge.

Yuga has been working on documenting the Kakwa language and traditional culture since 1984. In 1997, he became a visiting scholar to the Linguistics Department of the University of Toronto, whereupon he worked on a descriptive grammar of Kakwa which is now a little over 1600 pages long. He has also been working on a Kakwa-English Dictionary, called Ko'dote, in the Kakwa language. This dictionary is over 20,000 pages long. Some of the works Yuga is working on include: Kakwa Proper Names and their Meanings; a children's Alphabetical and Numbering book in Kakwa; the Fauna and Flora of the Kakwa Territories; a Kakwa website; Kuliya ti La'bi lo Kakwa (Kakwa Traditional Culture); Kakwa Historical Present (a chronicle of places, people and dates which have had directly or indirectly affected the Kakwa people and their land over the decades); Kakwa People, Land and History; the Calendar in Kakwa, etc.

In an effort to involve the entire Kakwa people in the documentation of their Kakwa language, Yuga established an organization called Authentic Kakwa Language Academy (AKLA) in Ko'buko District, Uganda. Members of AKLA include the entire Kakwa community - elders, youth and women - all of whom have taken a keen interest in the ongoing work being completed in Canada. Accordingly, materials from the Dictionary, grammar and the current book have been sent to Ko'buko, and letters and tapes have been returned. What began as a dictionary and grammar project in Canada, has now become a community project in Ko'buko and amongst the Kakwa everywhere, who view it with much enthusiasm and excitement surrounding the documentation of their language and traditional culture.

The materials sent to the AKLA members in Uganda were meant to:
- solicit blessings from the Kakwa elders
- seek help from the Kakwa elders in order to edit the entries in the dictionary;
- request the Kakwa elders to come up with an authentic Kakwa orthography and alphabet system;
- encourage the youth to appreciate their traditional culture;
- find out any entries the author might have missed.

Yuga had written down a number of questions regarding certain aspects Kakwa traditional culture and practices, and he needed some help from the Kakwa elders since some of this information is fast becoming lost. When these materials reached Ko'buko, all the Kakwa elders enthusiastically embraced the idea of a Kakwa dictionary which Ko'dote meaning 'unearthing the hidden meanings of things.'

The elders also responded to Yuga's questions regarding Kakwa traditional culture and traditional practices. These responses were taped and later sent to him in Canada. Yuga listened to these tapes very carefully, and with the elders' urging and blessings, he has proceeded to write them down - resulting in a catalogue of the Kakwa rituals and practices in this book, Kuliya ti La'bi lo Kakwa.

The questions were politely posed to our Kakwa elders by one of the AKLA youth, Stephen To'doko, and these appear in boxes in the book followed by the responses from the elders. These are their stories and thoughts on the different subject matters the author presented to them.

Finally, the elders have also consistently lamented the negative influences of modern governments and religions on Kakwa's traditional culture. Despite this, they believe that the Kakwa must constantly struggle to preserve and promote their traditional culture and practices.

About the Author

The author, Yuga Juma Onziga, was born in 1956 to the Rugbuza clan of Ko'buko District, in the West Nile Province of Uganda. His mother, Jumiya Nyoka, had produced five other children before he was born and all died at an early age. Like most Kakwa children at that time, Yuga received most of his informal education through observation and hands-on, which focused on learning and culture - education which revolves around the real world. From the moment of birth, Kakwa children learn from all that is around them, and are actually preparing themselves for adulthood by observing and doing what their parents do. A Kakwa boy learns to till the land, to look after cattle, goats and sheep, to hunt and fish, to build houses, to play the drums, sing and dance, to play with their peers, to defend the society, to bury the dead, to respect the elders, to learn various ways of survival in the wilderness, etc. Adults and elders teach the children the skills they must know in order to participate fully in their society.

Mr. Onziga's formal education began with Islamic studies known as garaya, at Parikile-Oka, in the present-day Kakwa County of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Here, he was living with his grandparents from the mother's side. Later, he graduated for advanced Koranic studies which took him to Kaya Town, a town just off the Uganda-Congo-Sudan border on the Sudan side. At that time, he was living with his uncle (mother's brother) at Ora'ba, a Trading Centre overlooking Kaya, on the Uganda side of the border. When the Anyanya rebellion engulfed the whole of the Southern Sudan in the 1960s, Yuga was forced to abandon his Islamic studies at Kaya and he relocated to Nurunu village to stay with his mother's younger sister. While at Nurunu, he entered to elementary school at Nyarilo Muslim School, a primary school located within the Headquarters of the Ko'buko District, Nyarilo. After a brief study at Nyarilo, Yuga rejoined his parents at Rugbuza to start his more serious and stable formal education at Padombu Village School in Grades One and Two. In 1965, he joined Lobule Primary School for Grade Three, and in 1966, he joined Nyaniliya Primary School where he completed his Primary Four to Six education. All these schools are located over six kilometers away from his Rugbuza village, and Yuga had to walk to and from school everyday. In the evenings, weekends and holidays, he helped his parents in the fields and looked after the livestock.

On January 25, 1971, Yuga left his home District of Ko'buko and joined Sir Samuel Baker Secondary School (later renamed Pondwono Secondary School), at Gulu, some 200 kilometers away from Ko'buko District. After six years, he completed both his Ordinary and Advanced Level studies from 1971-1976. In 1977, he joined Makerere University for a program in Forestry. When the civil war in Uganda reached its climax in early 1979, Yuga abandoned the University and joined the thousands of Refugees who crossed into neighbouring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and into the Sudan. He, along with his siblings, settled with his parents at Parikile-Oka, the clan where his mother hailed from. In September 1979, Yuga crossed into the Yei River District (now Yei County) of the Southern Sudan and eventually settled to work as an Inspector of Commerce, in Juba, some 200 kilometers away from Parikile-Oka.

In 1983, Yuga was accepted by the Canadian Government as a Conventional Refugee, and he along with his wife, and a five-year old daughter, landed in Toronto, Ontario in January 1984.

In 1986, Yuga joined the University of Guelph, Ontario, to resume his interrupted University studies. This time, he chose the program of Agriculture and specialized in Environmental Sciences. He graduated in 1990. However, getting work in his field of studies proved an uphill battle. Unperturbed, Yuga put both his childhood traditional African education and formal education, as well as his Canadian experience, into good new uses by volunteering with a number of environmental, health and social groups in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). He lead conservation initiatives and awareness campaigns that soon spurred volunteers to begin composting, recycling, gardening community plots, cleaning garbage from river valleys and planting native trees and wildflowers. In November, 1993, he established his own environmental organization known as ECENECA-Environmental Centre for New Canadians, a charitable organization which encourages new immigrants, Refugees, Visible Minorities and people on fixed incomes to participate in protecting and enhancing Canada's environment. Mr. Onziga is supported by a team of professional volunteers. ECENECA also assists new immigrants and Refugees by offering referral services. It also offers free computer education, workshops on crime prevention, health and safety issues, etc.

In recognition of his diligent work on the environment, on June 6, 2005, Yuga received a Gold Award from the bilingual Canadian Environmental Awards 2005, in the category of Environmental Health. The gala event was held in Toronto, and was attended by the world renowned Canadian environmentalist, Dr. David Suzuki, Stephan Dion (then Federal Minister of the Environment, and now leader of the National Liberal Party), Toronto's Deputy Mayor, heads of major corporations and representatives of a numbers of other environmental groups. ECENECA's influence has also reached the Division of Early Warning Awareness (DEWA) of the United Nation Environment Programme which, from September 10-16, 2005, held an international conference on Global Environmental Outlook (GEO) in Bangkok, Thailand, designed to assess global environmental scenarios to 2050. Yuga was one of the 10-member North American delegation to the conference - thus promoting Canada and Toronto beyond the GTA.