Countries and Their Cultures: Alur

The Alur speak DhuAlur, a Western Nilotic language of the Lwo Group. They live in northwestern Uganda and in the neighboring parts of northeastern Zaire. Some two-fifths of the Alur live in Uganda and three-fifths in Zaire. The family is polygynous, patrilineal, and patrilocal, based economically on the house-property complex. A man with more than one wife is required to provide each woman with her own house, granaries, and fields. The elementary cell of the compound family is thus an independent inheritance group. Its land is inheritable by its male members; its female members inherit nothing except possibly a few ornaments, articles of dress, and household utensils from their mother. At one time, the Alur had begun to develop specialized political institutions, but they remained embedded in the extended kin-based structure of segmentary lineages through which political processes also were expressed.