live in dense settlements, cultivate sorghum, groundnuts, simsim, telebun, and sweet potatoes, and keep large herds of cattle, sheep and goats. Cattle play a central role in social life, used in contracting marriages and performing rituals, and exchanged as gifts. The tribes have always indulged in cattle raiding, particularly during the dry season when the grass is short and cattle can be moved faster. There have always been conflicts between the tribes, notably in the Kidepo valley, using the traditional weapons of spears and sticks. In the past, the number of lives lost was limited, and peace would soon be made through formal ceremonies. The people of the region live by subsistence agriculture, mostly growing sorghum and millet, and livestock raising. 90% of the agricultural work is undertaken by women using hand tools. Crops are generally rain-fed, with no irrigation, making them vulnerable to reduced rainfall or drought in either of the two growing seasons. Fishing, natural resource exploitation, mining and trade are practiced in a small way. The people live in extreme poverty with no rights of land tenure, and chronic insecurity. There is no infrastructure and no legal framework to make investment practical. Colonial era Little is known of the Lango country before the arrival of Europeans. The explorer Samuel Baker was the first European to visit the region, travelling in the northwest and west of the area in 1863. He visiting Tarrangolle (Tirangore) and observed unnamed mountains to the south. Later he passed through these mountains, the western Acholi range of the Imatongs. Baker formally annexed the region around the upper Nile for the Khedive of Egypt in 1871. In 1878 Emin Pasha was appointed Bey of Equatoria, then nominally under Egyptian control, with his base at Lado. In 1881, Emin Pasha made a trip from Gondokoro on the Nile to Tirangore, and from there travelled south along the eastern side of the Imatong mountains along the valley of the Koss River, past the village of Ikwoto and then southwest to the Nile. Emin Pasha was cut off from Egypt by the revolt of Muhammad Ahmad in the northern Sudan, which began in 1881, and in 1885 withdrew to the south. Chief Lomoro Xujang was ruler of the Lotuko of Tirrangore from 1892, and extended his authority over all the Lotuko people and their neighbors. He cooperated with the Ugandan government, which sent Colonel (Later Major General)