18 November 2008
Northern Uganda Messenger Post: SOS: Mexican Maquilladora-Type Industrial Zone Comes to War-Torn Acholiland#links#links#links#links
Northern Uganda Messenger Post: An ‘irresistible, awful, marvellous people’: The portrait of the Luos of East Africa#links#links#links#links
An ‘irresistible, awful, marvellous people’: The portrait of the Luos of East Africa
An ‘irresistible, awful, marvellous people’: The portrait of the Luos of East Africa
By DAVID KAIZA
THE EAST AFRICAN
Posted Friday, November 7 2008 at 19:31
A whitewashed set of commemorative rings erected at the spot where, on September 22, 1877, the European explorer Emin Pasha met Omukama Kabalega, the king of Bunyoro-Kitara in Uganda, is all that remains of the latter’s palace.
Behind it is the humped, grass-thatched tomb of Kabalega, whose death in 1923 marked the end of the pre-eminence of the ancient Babito dynasty.
Named Mpaaro, this area just outside the western Ugandan town of Hoima is nevertheless still a place of solemn potency.
The keeper of the tomb, Andrea, told me in April 2008: “People come here on their knees to pray. We pray for Obama to win the elections. If he wins, we will be very happy.”
Obama’s name is unavoidable anywhere, but when pronounced at Mpaaro, thereis an added urgency to its sound…
It is not altogether fanciful to say that, some 628 years ago, a time barely thought of now, the seeds of Obama’s ascendancy to the world stage were sown here.
Dates and facts are hard to pin down, details are much disputed. But it was here that a Luo man, perhaps one of Obama ancestors, changed for good the world of his time.
The scale was smaller, distances were not so great, but the assumption of power, in the year 1380, over the lands that now comprise Uganda by one Rukidi Isingoma-Mpuga Labongo, son of Olum, leader of the migrating Luo who entered Uganda from Sudan towards the last decades of the 14th century, set in motion cultural-political changes whose impact echoes in many of the conflicts still taking place in northern Uganda and the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
For Andrea, as indeed for scholars and guardians of the traditions of Bunyoro-Kitara, the emergence of Obama was marked by a polish, drive and determination that had not been seen before in this part of the world.
“These were men of substance,” Andrea says of the Luo aristocracy that invaded and occupied Bunyoro. “They were very, very intelligent. They were generous. The people liked them.”
Historians speak of the “immense impact” that the Luo migration had on the societies they passed through.
Historian and Catholic priest, J.P. Crazzolara in his foundational study, The Lwoo (1950), writes hyperbolically, “They marched on and came upon people who trembled at their sudden appearance. The Lwoo were at sight the absolute arbiters of this population, who had no time left to think and try to repel such an unexpected mass of invaders.”
He describes them as an “irresistible, awful, marvellous people” that “spread (their) shadow” over the older areas of western and southern Uganda.
The displacement of former rulers and inhabitants by this “appearance” is said to be partly responsible for the ethnic pressures and traumas afflicting eastern Congo, for those who lost out in those years were never to regain their footing and continue to be landless, stateless peoples to this day.
Crazzolara’s heraldic language over-privileges Luo achievements, yet 2008, emerging as a hyperbolic year for Africans, is on a scale Obama’s Luo ancestors would never have dreamt of scaling on the plains of Sudan, Uganda and Kenya.
The year started on a bad, but well-publicised note. With the horribly botched Kenyan election, the word “Luo” started to circulate internationally.
Barrack Obama’s candidature would bring in the phrase “son of a Luo father.”
On a smaller scale, outside Kenya, President Yoweri Museveni, in the middle of a face-off with the kingdom of Buganda, sought to reduce the Kabaka’s standing by publicly stating that the latter was a Luo.
Much of the descriptions made of the Luo are stereotypes like those applied to any other ethnic group, but unlike other ethnic groups in the region, the Luo are spread across five countries, forming a continuous chain that runs 1,200km from Sudan to the southern shores of Lake Victoria.
Crozzolara’s contradictory label “awful and marvellous” points to a central Luo paradox: Their descendants’ occupation of Uganda’s thrones contrasts with the depths of their suffering in wars in northern Uganda, southern Sudan and southwestern Ethiopia. The pendulum of Luo history has swang dizzyingly from immense success to immense failure.
However, to traverse this 1,200km is to be overcome by the similarities in the physical, cultural and personal characteristics of the Dinka, Nuer, Anuak, Shilluk, Wau, Acholi, Lango, Alur, Padhola and Kenyan Luo.
The numerous elders along the trail keep track of their kith and kin.
It is an identity with real cohesive power that can break out in a visceral possessiveness on discovering each other.
It grips, whether felt at the entrance of a tomb in one country, or in victory jigs on the streets of Kisumu.
Spread across centuries and continents, similar descriptions are made of their leaders as “intelligent,” “socialist,” “generous,” “driven,” “aggressive…”
Indeed, putting aside for the moment the adjective-defying import of Obama’s achievement, the weird thing is that his oratorical skills, penchant for the extravagant and appeal to the crowd are right out of the standard caricature of a Luo politician.
Descriptions of Obama sound like a recycling of phrases used of men like the Odingas, Tom Mboya, Apollo Milton Obote, Kabalega and Labongo before him.
For East Africans, seeing Obama reduce crowds to tears is oddly reminiscent of Ugandan independence leader Obote, a man said to be devastating with a microphone.
Indeed, Obama, who rose to fame through his “mobilisation skills,” was himself literally the (accidental) product of the mobilisation skills of a man with whom he shares his ancestry, Tom Mboya. It was Mboya who sent Obama Sr to the US.
There are many barroom jokes in Nairobi now. The funnier one is that when McCain elected to deliver his nomination acceptance speech to a modest, indoor audience, and Obama went for a mammoth event, it was typical of the “outsized” egos of Luo politicians.
“When I see Obama, I see a typical Luo man,” says Kenyan anthropologist Othieno Aluoka.
These wry observations belie the immense suffering undergone by the Luo peoples. Colonialism occasioned a decline in Luo societies. Bunyoro refused to surrender to British imperial forces, which as a result decimated its population on a genocidal scale.
Persecution was their lot under Amin, Kenyatta and Moi. They are by and large the poorest of East Africans, a people of whom the majority do not expect to know peace and prosperity in their lifetimes.
While Kenya has never been actively at war, the Luo experience remains a painful one.
Nearly all their prominent leaders have died violently — from the assassinations of Tom Mboya and Robert Ouko to the killings of the lawyer Argwings Kodhek, Prof Mbai Odhiambo and Otieno Oyo.
In Ethiopia, the Anuak, under their leader Ato Okello Nyegilo, charge that the Ethiopian government is fomenting genocide against them, claims also made in northern Uganda.
They are a people in tatters, with the lowest life expectancies and highest morbidity rates.
Yet again, Luo names grace the royal houses of Uganda and not just the US White House.
The current kings of both Toro and Bunyoro are called Oyo. There have been kings over the centuries named Olimi, Ocaki, Cwa. Names like Okwir (“elector”), are common along these lineages.
Former diplomat, actress and model Mubito Mugo (Princess) Elizabeth Bagaya carries the full name of her distant, Luo forefather, as does Princess Elizabeth Rukidi Nyabongo Bagaya — the Ba prefixing Gaya, said to be one of the earlier Luo groups in the area.
The word Babito itself originates from an area about 10 km north of Bunyoro, across the River Nile, in Acholi.
Because they came from the place called Te-Bito (2.25 degrees north and 31.4 degrees East) the Bantu referred to them as BaBito. The word was to acquire potency above and beyond this Western Rift Valley area, now part of a game park.
Cwa (prefixed also as AbaCwa) is a kingly title linkable to Chua (also county in Acholi) as in Omukama Cwa II Kabalega; also titular for Kabaka Mutebi’s grandfather named Daudi Cwa.
In a recurrent trajectory, these are Luo names from decrepit places that emerged to immense heights. In October 2005, the world-famous Obote was buried in a sorghum garden. Such was the poverty of his people.
Buganda’s distance from the Luo heritage is more sensitive (Bunyoro still maintains spiritual-cultural links with Lango and Acholi) but there are countless, ancient Luo words and practices now taken as being Baganda.
The Nilotic practice of burying men in their huts (kings in their palaces) in our times became the Kasubi tombs.
There are words too, like the term for lady, Nyabbo, which researchers say can be deconstructed to a Luo root – from Nyar-Bor (the exalted daughter).
Contestation of these pasts arises post-colonially, from the deliberate poisoning of African societies by the British practice of divide and rule.
The Luo-Bantu hybridisation in modern day southern Uganda, particularly of the Banyoro, Baganda and Basoga, means they are neither purely Luo nor purely Bantu. The terms may themselves be arcane.
Secondly, any talk of “immense impact” must contend with the influence of Bantu culture and language as well as intermarriage on the Luo.
The Acholi and Lango word for God, Lubanga (Lango Obanga), and presumably theology, comes from the Bantu word for God, Ruhanga while the more appealing social etiquette of the Ugandan Luo is mostly Buganda in origin.
But the dislocating contradictions have left Luo scholars and leaders puzzled.
Says Aluoka: “They tend not to give up on what is theirs, innately theirs. It’s why they suffered in Sudan and in Uganda.
If I see the rise and fall of Obote, a man who was not serving the British interest, I see the typical action of a Luo whose self-righteousness and public good was seen as socialist.
“In their own self-identities, what made them leaders in the past became their undoing.”
“The problem with the Luo is that they trust others so much they think the way they think is the way things ought to be,” explains Kenyan Luo Council of Elders Chairman Ker Riaga Ogallo. “If you look into history, without Odinga (Sr), Kenyatta could have died in jail. But he insisted that without him, there would be no Kenya. He made Kenyatta a gift of Kenya. But when Kenyatta became president, his first plan was to eliminate the Luo from power.”
Aluoka accounts for this apparent contradiction in two broad explanations, the first being that colonialism came as such an affront to Luo pride that they have never stopped trying to drive out its politics, structures, culture and impact.
“It’s like an itch,” he explains. “The colonial experience has been responsible for that jigger in the Luo foot. In every coup attempt in Kenya, there has been a Luo involved. In the 1971 coup attempt, Luo were indicted; in 1982, Luo attempted to overthrow the government; in 2007 it was the Luo who started the protest against vote-rigging.
“In Uganda, I see the same drive in Cecilia Ogwal (opposition politician from Lira). They will stand up for what they believe in, no matter how big the odds are against them.
“The Luo is the one who comes out barechested to stop a tank with a stone in his hand. Of course, many are killed.”
But there are darker traits too. Writes Crazzolara: “In their more than a thousand miles march they had played havoc on a large scale and it is unlikely that they would know much of the peoples whom they had trampled down and whose languages they did not understand.”
The actions of Joseph Kony and Alice Lakwena have led people, including the Luo, to question to what extent defiance should be carried.
Yet historically, they won by refusing to surrender, grinding their enemies down in logic-defying, self-depleting wars that over the ages demoralised vastly superior forces into giving up.
At its core seems to be a pride that switches off compromise, as Crazzolara puts it in a telling description.
“He [the Luo] clings to his freedom and independence with his whole nature; and if his personal tastes and instincts were in question, he would rather live quietly in a small group of close relations, ready at any moment to offer bravely his life in their defence.”
It is beguiling. The now notorious 20-year wars waged by the Dinka and an insular group of Acholi have frequently escalated at the merest hint of disrespect.
But the leadership of these militaries as well as their political units deserves wider attention: At core sacerdotal, it combines politics with military and spiritual power to attain maximum hypnotic command.
Generals as warrior-priests are indeed not the exception in Luo history, a phenomenon notoriously displayed in our times by LRA leader Joseph Kony and the late prophetess, Alice Auma, “the messenger” (LaKwena).
As imperial ideology, this combination was crushingly imperious in Uganda and still ensures the BaBito cushy places in the upper echelons of Ugandan society.
To witness commoners in Western Uganda turn to jelly in the presence of the BaBito can be eerily unsettling.
On the lighter side, general stereotype describes the Luo as flashy, exuberant extroverts given to self-aggrandisement.
Kisumu FM radio producer David Odira (Radio Osienala) makes the common self-deprecating joke: “When you see the latest model car, it is likely to belong to a Luo. But he lives in a shack. He does not have furniture.”
17 November 2008
Why the ICC and Juba Processes are Inadequate
From Monitor Online
New report pins UPDF on human rights abuse
Posted in: News
By Tabu Butagira
Nov 17, 2008 - 1:41:19 AM
Kampala
UPDF soldiers deployed to fight the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels in northern Uganda often turned their guns against unarmed civilians during counter-insurgency operations, human rights group Amnesty International claims in a new report to be unveiled today.
But Maj. Paddy Ankunda, the Ugandan defence and military spokesman, who for many years served as the spokesman for the Gulu-based UPDF 4th Division, then responsible for the anti-LRA offensives, said the fresh allegations of human rights abuses by the UPDF chronicled by Amnesty International are “outrageous and indefensible.”
Amnesty International, a UK-based human rights group, is to report findings of studies conducted in five northern Uganda districts of Gulu, Amuru, Kitgum, Pader and Lira in the months of May and August this year.
It claims that widespread sexual and physical abuses perpetrated by both the government soldiers and rebels has left behind a traumatised and impaired population, unable to fend for itself yet discriminated by relatives and State authorities. “There was general impunity for soldiers who committed Human Rights violations against civilians,” Amnesty International says in its report to be officially released today.
“Many years on, victims and survivors of human rights violations still bear the scars of these violations [and] little has been done to ensure that they access effective reparations to address their continued suffering and help them to rebuild their lives.”
Mr Martin Abit, 38, a resident of Pader District told Amnesty International that UPDF soldiers arrested his elder brother, a non-combatant, during a counter-attack on LRA and he was later killed together with “several other people”.
“The UPDF battalion [in the area] took his body with them and promised to give the body to the family for burial but to this day, the body has never been returned to our family for burial,” he said.
It is not clear if the government army took the corpse away to destroy evidence that would otherwise incriminate them in committing murder or for ritual purposes, a common practice in some parts of the country. “That report cannot be taken seriously because people who should have given the side of the UPDF account were available but never contacted,” said Maj. Ankunda, “Otherwise, if our soldier kills anyone, there is no shortcut; they face the law.”
Maj. Ankunda questioned why no Amnesty International investigator bothered to corroborate their information with the army.
Dr Godfrey Odongo, the Amnesty International researcher for East Africa and lead author of the report, said they did not contact the Ugandan military because, “The report was forward looking; about reparations rather than what happened or the violations suffered.”
Daily Monitor has learnt that the government declined to reply a September 9 letter authored by Erwin Van Der Borght, the Amnesty International programme director for Africa, seeking government plans on the nature and amount of reparation to war victims in northern Uganda.
Mr Geoffrey Okumu, a war victim, said sometime in May 1990, government soldiers stormed their neighbourhood, arrested and eliminated his father and brother on allegations of being rebel collaborators and possessing illegal guns. “My father and brother denied the accusations but the soldiers took them away,” Mr Okumu is quoted to have said, “Not very far from where I remained I heard gunshots and later realised they had been killed. We had lost a bread winner [so] I dropped out of school to fend for my siblings.”
In Amuru district, Ms Rose Apio said she watched four of her relatives die after being shot by government soldiers, and is now struggling to raise four orphans left by her eldest brother killed in the bizarre shooting.
“Survivors need medical attention, counselling and psychological support. Formerly abducted children need access to education. Families need compensation for the deaths and injuries that occurred, restitution for their destroyed land and property, an apology for the violations and proper reburials for their loved ones. The government needs to start acting on these needs now,” the Human Rights body said.
The chairman of the Acholi Parliamentary Group, Livingstone Okello-Okello (UPC, Chwa), however, told Daily Monitor in a separate interview yesterday that what the rigts body highlighted is just a “tip of the iceberg.” “For instance, during the government-initiated ‘Operation North’, UPDF soldiers huddled 12 people in Pajimu Sub-county [Pader District]into a hut, which they bombed but one person survived and is still alive to tell the story,” said Mr Okello-Okello.
While this is not the first report to question the conduct of the UPDF in the north, it will put government under renewed international pressure to roll out the post-conflict recovery plan faster and likely reignite debate about the need to hold all parties to the conflict accountable for their actions while ensuring that the peace efforts do not fail.
© Copyright 2008 by Monitor Online
16 November 2008
Northern Uganda Messenger Post: The Problems of Amuru is testament to the failure of Acholi leadership#links#links#links#links
The Problems of Amuru is testament to the failure of Acholi leadership
The Problems of Amuru is testament to the failure of Acholi leadership
When some of us point out from the sidelines, the afflictions that have for the most part been wilfully imposed on Acholi, we are dismissed as a lunatic fringe, more emotional than rational, and out of touch with the realities at home. We are the spoilers.
You would think that, given constant flogging and cynical and snide remarks against such voices, we might recoil into our inner selves and shy away from opening our mouths when it is least of our business to meddle. Unfortunately, we are still egragious animals; we seek and like community and we are not going to fold our hands and watch a community we still feel and think we are part of, consumed by fires whose sparks we should have put out and whose conflagration, should have been contained if not prevented.
Which brings me to the shame that is Amuru District; that enclave of greed, the symbol of the worse of the vesitiges of ancient regimes, where carts actually push horses rather than horses pulling carts; and where, you can actually choose not to go to work and get paid and be proud of it, not because you are snowed in and the bridges are washed out and there is word on the street that the sherrifs and their deputies are out and will shoot on sight and to kill, anybody and any vehicle other than the police, ambulances, snow ploughs and other emergency crafts and personnel, found abroad and obstructing emergencies operations and rescue efforts.
Of course there is no such emergency edict, and Amuru, in northern Uganda, has not been blasted and blistered by the fiercest blizzard and the heaviest snow storm ever recorded in human history, and never will. But what you might have fallen for, for some ingenius inventions for circumventing clogged roads and red eyes and road rage and pollution suffered and caused by commuting motorists to and from work, is infact not telecommuting as you and I in the real world know. It is in fact, civil servants in a tiny enclave of northern Uganda, by the might River Nile, foregoing the bother to travel to their offices 50 miles away, for trying to accomplish their tasks at bars, and such other places of leisure. They cannot commute, not because they are green minded about CO2 emissions from their vehicles; nor that the roads are clogged chokeful of traffic and they would rather not take the risks. But it is that, the roads are empty and light carbon footprints be damned, if these guys and gals could hop onto even the worse CO2 emitting vehicle to take them to their non-existent offices in the new Amuru District.
As the article from The Daily Monitor Monitor:
http://www.monitor.co.ug/artman/publish/news/Amuru_s_remote_controlled_civil_service_74999.shtml
made clear, all the civil servants for the new district reside in Gulu Town, the siamese twin of the young and doomed Amuru district from which it was curved out. The problem is that, the dictator of Uganda, General Yoweri Museveni, who rules by decree behind a veil of parliamentary formalities, woke up in a dream in the middle of the night and decreed that there shall be a new district curved out of Gulu District, to be called Amuru. And lo and behold, it was done. The problem is, there was no infrastructure to support the kind of activities, that have been proclaimed over the area-no housing, no transport, no administrative blocks, but just open country by the bank of the Nile, dotted with a few private homes here and there, but largely just humble wattle and thatched huts for humble victims of Dictators Museveni's 23 year pogrom against the Acholi people who are the inhabitants here.
Why on earth wasn't the capital of Amuru not located in Anaka-with all its ready infrastructures? What were the people who sit on these committees that planned and recommended for siting and facilities locations for the young district of Amuru thinking?
If these woes are as bad as they are told, then woe betides the man or woman who stands in the way of dissolving Amuru District so it reverts to the status quo ante when there was bigger, better, robust, and viable Gulu District and Acholi a lilttle more unified than divided as it is today.
If I were to offer any advice, I would say without hesitation: Liquidate Amuru. It is not viable. It is a detraction and a waste of scarce resources and a source of destructive, rather than constructive conflicts for Acholi.
For those Amuru elite who think of two or three administrative posts the district offers, and are more content with symbolism rather than real, tangible, and measurable development and positive impacts on the lives of our people, let us resolve to have them made chiefs of their clans. If every clan in Amuru already has chiefs as I am afraid they might, then there must be vacancies for court jesters at Rwakitura, a job they have been doing already. So a change in location does not matter, since the job description and functions remain the same.
As things stand at the moment, Pathetic, is too mild to sum it up. And the blame for the failures in Amuru cannot be limited only to those now directly charged with working for a district that does not exist. The responsibility for this debacle extends far and wide. When I hear some of Acholi's most enlightened and gifted, are waiting to win party leaderships and become presidents before they can show leadership and concerns at home, I shudder for the hapless people who must perenially be used as blank canvass and solid but dead and unfeeling plinth to hoist or shore up every upstart and dubious politician's personal agenda. Even if they happen to be Acholi, let their record for the past 23 years speak for themselves on their positions and a ctions on the major issues critical to the welfare of the Acholi people. It is not enough to wrap oneself in an Acholi flag, on the 11th hour, of the last day of the 11th month, of the last 23 years, and think that Acholi must vote solely on kinship and primeval ties, when the most notorious gaolers and hangmen in the last 23 years have been kins and kith for whom, wealth amidst poverty and career advancement over dead kinsmen's and kinswomen's bodies were marks of patriotism and loyalty and diligent service.
The problems of the last 23 years does not need that a president must come from Acholi or northern Uganda before it can become legitimate national issue requiring firm and decisive state action to remedy. It is a moral, rights, leadership, national policy failure and civic citizenship expectations in its own rights; and as legitimate as any, regardless of who is in power and from which region the next Ugandan president comes. In the our view, and in the broader interest of Acholi, an Acholi identity for the next Ugandan president is not such a sure selling point than that he or she be one committed to justice, civic citizenship rights, obligations and expectations and that he or she is a true believer in constitutional democracy and the rights of people to demand better of their government. And that, its less fortunate members and those victimised by the state and its agents, will get their just desserts.
If the last 23 years in Acholi, the failures of meaningful Acholi-centred leadership on peace talks and settlement to the conflict, and shambles of public service and social infrastructurres symbolised by Amuru District is any indicators to go by, it is prudent to say that it is a great leap of faith, to think that there is an Acholi leader in local or national government now, capable and deserving of Acholi confidence in their leadership credentials and that of their party, for the Acholi to vote for him or her, and his or her party, as the next president and ruling party of Uganda. Or even as compromise candidate for the opposition.
Charity begins at home. What have you done for Acholi lately? As my brother and compatriot at
http://www.odiyatalks.9hz.com/
would say, talk is cheap. It has been 23 years. Where have you been buddy?
14 November 2008
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