Northern Uganda Messenger Post

MAKING AUTHENTIC CHOICES IN TIME OF CRISIS. Sverker Finnstrom’s recent work on northern Uganda picks up and continues a particular theme of existential inquiries that echo Shakespeare, de Sade, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka and Moravia. Living With Bad Surrounding re-states the nature of daily human and individual struggles to live under turbulent circumstances (Piny Marac) in northern Uganda. Read in broad existentialist terms, the Ugandan State and regime are absurd worlds, from which its citizens in the north have been alienated from themselves and estranged from the popular view of national normalcy. Trumpeted NRM/A revolution, liberation, peace and prosperity, contrast very sharply with their lived realities of violence, abduction, murder, rape, diseases and social dislocation. The fish-bowl existence in the concentration camps, characterised by rights abuses, sexual violence, suicide, prostitution, idleness, and a host of other social ills and diseases, is for many individuals and fam...

Acholi Unity as a goal is a mirage. Whether unity of action or shared values or common aspirations that rely on our alleged common culture or ethnicity, or common external threats, is a goal that does not exist and therefore cannot be achieved. Not that we do not want or wish we could, or that it would not be a good thing, but it is just that, it is the stage of social and economic development that history, the world and human nature have imposed on us. In my view therefore, setting achievement of Acholi unity as a goal, urging Acholi unity rather than harmony, collaboration and coordination of individual and group interests in order to achieve certain shared but limited objectives that may benefit the majority or everyone equally, is an illusion. It is unbelievable to some that I would even say a thing like this. But I think we need to realise that the world keeps changing and Acholi society is part of the world and it has undergone comparable changes herself. Unless we can accept suc...

The individual, rational choice, elite politics and the erosion of ethnic bonds. In my previous musings, I indicated that the scramble for land in Acholi is the result of class conflict and the struggle for political power by elite groups. This involves the national elite allied to the state, with easy access to political power and resources, in alliance with their friends and class ideologues in Acholi on the one hand (national resistance movement, ie NRM & Co). On the other hand, we got another section of the Acholi middle class and political elite, outside of the ruling party but affiliated with opposition politics, articulating national democratic positions and seemingly committing class suicide by championing the rights of the poor and marginalized (Acholi parliamentary Group, ie APG & Co). I drew the attention of the reader to the fact that under normal circumstances, both of these elite fractions belong to the same social and economic class, and would all strive to maxim...