John Roscoe (1861–1932) was an ordained Christian missionary who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society in 1912 for his contributions to the ethnographic record of Uganda. John Roscoe joined the Uganda mission in 1891 and upon returning to England in 1909 he began to publish the results of his investigations into the lives of the indigenous people in Uganda. This edition contains an ethnographic survey of six different indigenous Bantu speaking groups living near Lake Victoria, and was first published as part of the Cambridge Archaeological and Ethnological Series in 1912. In this work he describes the social, political and economic life of these groups before European influence from colonialism, drawn from interviews with local people in their own language. This volume contains views on ethnicity which were acceptable at the time this volume was published.