A Song Whose Time Has Come: Northern Uganda, Apocalyptic Futures, and the Oral Jurisprudence of Okot p’Bitek

2020 ◽  
pp. 78-110
Author(s):  
Peter Leman
Keyword(s):  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Conflict Reconciliation ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army

In Artist, the Ruler (1986), Okot p’Bitek claims that the oral artist in Africa “proclaims the laws but expresses them in the most indirect language: through metaphor and symbol, in image and fable. He sings and dances his laws.” This provocative observation was one of the starting points for this book as a whole, and, here, I examine Song of Lawino (1966) and Song of Ocol (1967) in light of his claim that the oral artist is a lawmaker. I also situate his work in relationship to recent conversations about law and modernity in Northern Uganda’s struggle against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Although his work appeared long before the LRA, many of Okot’s texts have reemerged as part of a conversation about how to achieve reconciliation now that the conflict has largely ended. To account for this reception, I draw on Russell Samolsky’s concept of “apocalyptic futures,” arguing that the oral jurisprudence of Okot’s texts has “revealed itself to be ahead of its time,” taking on new significance in the context of the LRA, particularly in portraying Acholi legal principles critical to post-conflict reconciliation.

scholarly journals The Lord's Resistance Army and Forced Conscription in Northern Uganda

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 404-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phuong N. Pham ◽  
Patrick Vinck ◽  
Eric Stover
Keyword(s):  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army

scholarly journals Being Normal: Stigmatization of Lord’s Resistance Army Returnees as ‘Moral Experience’ in Post-war Northern Uganda

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Macdonald ◽  
Raphael Kerali
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Moral Experience ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Ethnographic Methods ◽  
Multiple Functions ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Post War ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army

Abstract The literature on Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) returnees in Acholiland, northern Uganda tells us that those who returned from the rebel group are likely to experience stigma and social exclusion. While the term is deployed frequently, ‘stigma’ is not a well-developed concept and most of the evidence we have comes from accounts of returnees themselves. Focusing instead on the ‘stigmatizers’, this article theorizes stigmatization as part of the ‘moral experience’ of regulating post-war social repair. Through interview-based and ethnographic methods, it finds that stigmatization of LRA returnees takes many forms and serves multiple functions, calling into question whether this catch-all term actually obscures more than it illuminates. While stigmatization is usually practised as a form of ‘social control’, its function can be ‘reintegrative’ rather than purely exclusionary. Through the northern Uganda case study, this article seeks to advance conceptual and empirical understanding of the manifestations and functions of stigmatization in spaces of return, challenging the logic underpinning those interventions that seek to reduce it.

scholarly journals Influence of reconciliation programmes on the reconciliation attitudes of war-affected adolescents in Northern Uganda

Afrika Focus ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Benjamin Alipanga ◽  
Maarten De Schryver ◽  
Stella Neema ◽  
Eric Broekaert ◽  
Ilse Derluyn
Keyword(s):  
Social Situation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Hierarchical Regression ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Daily Stressors ◽  
Limited Impact ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
The People ◽  
Intervention Community ◽  
Conflict Reconciliation

Whether post-conflict reconciliation programmes are able to change hostile behaviours is not known. This study sought to assess the influence of reconciliation programmes on the reconciliation attitudes of war-affected adolescents in two communities in Northern Uganda. Four hundred and forty five adolescents within two communities, one with and the other without interventions were assessed for exposure to war-related and daily stressors and place of residence using hierarchical regression analysis to predict reconciliation attitudes. Adolescents in the non-intervention community recorded more positive and also more negative reconciliation attitudes; exposure to daily and war-related stressors was more positively associated with increasing reconciliation attitudes among adolescents in the non-intervention than those in the intervention community. Overall the programmes recorded limited impact on reconciliation attitudes, perhaps due to the pervasive adverse social situation of the people. Conclusion: there is a need for multi-pronged, collaborative programme efforts targeting holistic recovery programmes with focus on changing negative reconciliation attitudes.

Against Humanity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Dubal
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
The Common ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army

This book is not about crimes against humanity. Rather, it is an indictment of “humanity,” the concept that lies at the heart of human rights and humanitarian missions. Based on fieldwork in northern Uganda, this book brings readers inside the Lord’s Resistance Army, an insurgent group accused of rape, forced conscription of children, and inhumane acts of violence. The author talks with and learns from former rebels as they find meaning in wartime violence, politics, spirituality, and love—experiences that observers often place outside the boundaries of humanity. Rather than approaching the LRA as a set of possibilities, humanity looks at the LRA as a set of problems, as inhuman enemies needing reform. Humanity hegemonizes what counts as good in ways that are difficult to question or challenge. It relies on specific notions of the good—shaped in ideals of modern violence, technology, modernity, and reason, among others—in ways that do violence to the common good. What emerges from this ethnography is an unorthodox question—what would it mean to be “against humanity”? Against Humanity provocatively asks us how to honor life existing outside normative moralities. It challenges us to shift toward alternative, more radical approaches to humanitarian, political, medical, and other interventions, rooted in anti-humanism.

scholarly journals What Happened to Children Who Returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Allen ◽  
Jackline Atingo ◽  
Dorothy Atim ◽  
James Ocitti ◽  
Charlotte Brown ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Best Practice ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Vulnerable Children ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Best Practice Guidelines ◽  
Displaced Children ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army ◽  
Reception Centre

Abstract In northern Uganda, more than 50,000 people were recruited by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) between the late 1980s and 2004, mostly by force. Around half of those taken were children (under 18 years old). A large number were never seen by their families again, but more than 20,000 returned through aid-financed reception centres. Endeavours were made to reunite them with their relatives, who were mostly living in insecure displacement camps. Relatively few were subsequently visited, even after the fighting ended in 2006. Thousands of vulnerable children were largely left to their own devices. This article draws on research carried out in 2004–06 and from 2012 to 2018, and compares findings with other publications on reintegration in the region. It argues that implementing best-practice guidelines for relocating displaced children with their immediate relatives had negative consequences. The majority of children who passed through a reception centre are now settled as young adults on ancestral land, where they are commonly abused because of their LRA past. With few exceptions, it is only those who spent a long period with the LRA and who are not living on ancestral land who have managed to avoid such experiences.

Unwilling and Unprepared: Collective Responsibility for Traumatic Wartime Motherhood

2020 ◽  
pp. 174387212096471
Author(s):  
Andreea M. Prundeanu-Thrower
Keyword(s):  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Child Trauma ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Systemic Violence ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army

What does it mean to mother children born of illicit wartime relations? This article examines the detrimental effects of motherhood as a patriarchal institution shaped by nationalism/ethnocentrism and its impact on “sentimental collaborators” in WWII France, survivors of genocidal rape in Rwanda, and returning Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) “wives” in Uganda. Using a corpus of written and oral testimonies by/about mothers of children born of war (CBOW), it argues that all mothers experienced trauma in their maternal roles and that communities were often complicit in perpetuating mother–child trauma post-conflict. Understanding such collective responsibility is crucial to our capacity to help future survivors of systemic violence.

scholarly journals The Lord’s Resistance Army and the arms that brought the Lord

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Henni Alava
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Temporal Distance ◽  
Northern Uganda ◽  
Lord's Resistance Army ◽  
Extreme Violence ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Lord’S Resistance Army ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Catholic Church

This article develops the notion of polyphonic silence as a means for thinking through the ethical and political ramifications of ethnographically encountering and writing about silenced violent pasts. To do so, it analyses and contrasts the silence surrounding two periods of extreme violence in northern Uganda: 1) the northern Ugandan war (1986–2006), which is contemporarily often shrouded by silence, and 2) the early decades of colonial and missionary expansion, which the Catholic church silences in its commemoration of the death of two Acholi catechists in 1918. Employing the notion of polyphony, the article describes how neither of these silences is a mere absence of narration. Instead, polyphonic silences consist of multiple, at times discordant and contradictory sounds, and cannot be consigned to single-cause explanations such as ‘trauma’ or ‘recovery’. Reflecting on my own experience of writing about and thereby amplifying such silences, I show how writing can serve either to shield or break silence. The choice between these modes of amplification calls for reflection on the temporal distance of silence, of the relations of power amid which silence is woven, and of the researchers’ ethical commitments and normative preconceptions.

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