Northern Uganda Messenger Post

By Yoga Adhola Elections in preparations for independence were held in Uganda in 1961 and again in 1962 . To understand these elections we need to go back in history to the governorship of Sir Andrew Cohen. Andrew Cohen became Governor of Uganda in 1952. Prior to that, he had been Under-Secretary at the colonial Office in London. In that capacity he had earned the reputation of being dynamic and very positive to decolonization of Africans. He had been involved in the formulation of the Creech-Jones dispatch of 1947. Two major principles guided Cohen's administration. One, the belief that it was urgently necessary to increase the participation of Africans in the formulation and implementation of government policy at all levels of government. Secondly, that Uganda must move towards independence as one unit, and not fracture into several rival tribal states. There had been strong fears that the kingdom of Buganda might want to sever itself from the rest of the colony from around 1949....

Are Acholi proponents of backwardness or justified sceptics of state-led development? The land issue in Acholi has mainly been looked at from journalistic reportage or conventional ethnic or regional analytical framework, which precludes any serious analysis and conceptual understanding of issues beyond their obvious manifestations. Lacking in theoretical depth, whether of the contending theories of social change and historical development, and taking as an article of faith, the class neutrality of the state, it simply amplifies dogmatic state assertions, which portrays the dispute as a struggle between the forces of change or modernisation, against those of reaction of primordial irrationalities. Their tacit logic is that Acholiland is a backward pre-capitalist social formation, under siege by the forces of traditionalism who use tribal ideologies to resist modernisation, so that the market and capitalist formations are necessary as agencies for socioeconomic transformation (See Achol...