The Interlatustrine Area
State-building processes that may have begun as early as the fifteenth century in southern Uganda soon spread to northwestern Tanzania when immigrants from the more northerly states, perhaps displaced as rulers by newcomers, established dynasties west and southwest of Lake Victoria. The keepers of the official dynastic histories portray the process as one of conquest, but as historians Edward Alpers and Christopher Ehret point out, it may he seen as one of absorption of immigrants with special qualifications into traditional roles of leadership, which then expanded in power and scope.
The Hinda dynasties in what is now the West Lake Region were founded by Ruhinda (and his descendants) who had fled a Ugandan kingdom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Karagwe was the largest state in the area and maintained a degree of ritual. but not political, supremacy over the others. The heads of these states ruled populations composed — in different degrees — of agricultural peoples and pastoralists. The former may have stemmed at least in part from the early Iron Age Bantu: the pastoralists, non-Bantu in origin, filtered down from the north later. By the time they settled down, however, all spoke a Bantu language, Haya in Karagwe and most other states, Zinza in one case.
The pastoralists may have enjoyed a higher status than the cultivators, but the castelike inequalities that later developed in some states in Rwanda and Burundi slid not emerge here. The clans and lineages that had prevailed among the cultivating peoples continued to be important providing a kind of buffer against royal excesses. Moreover, although members of the royal family might he important administrative officials, the first minister (katikiro) of the king (mukama) was always a commoner.
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