War, Refuge and Self Soldiers, Students and Artists in Kampala, Uganda
ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT
ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. mr. P.F. van der Heijden ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Aula der Universiteit op dinsdag 19 december 2006, te 12.00 uur
door
Ellen Geraldine Lammers
geboren te Roermond
Promotores:
Prof. dr. J. Th. Schrijvers Prof. dr. Ph. Essed
Faculteit der Maatschappij- en Gedragswetenschappen
Members of the doctorate commission:
Prof. dr. Ton Dietz, University of Amsterdam Prof. dr. Gerd Junne, University of Amsterdam Dr. Gaim Kibreab, South Bank University, London Prof. dr. Achille Mbembe, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Prof. dr. Paul Richards, Wageningen University Prof. dr. Mineke Schipper, Leiden University
Printed by Thela Thesis, Amsterdam
Cover design Nicole Teuwsen
Paintings Vision of Hope by Yosief Endrias Habties, 2006 Portrait d’un Guerrier Traditionel by Daniel Kambere Tsongo, 2004
for
Hani, Layla, Malaika, Demere, Amani and Sara
may you be children of peace
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ...... i Introduction ...... v
PART I ~ CONTEXTS CHAPTER ONE Refugees in Uganda: The Political, Legal and Humanitarian Context ...... 3 1. HISTORIES OF CONFLICT AND MIGRATION ...... 4 1.1 Sudan...... 4 1.2 The Democratic Republic of Congo...... 9 2. UGANDA...... 13 2.1 Museveni’s NRA/M: new hope...... 14 2.2 The NRM government: growing criticism...... 15 3. ATTITUDES TOWARD REFUGEE SETTLEMENT: CAMPS AND CITIES...... 18 3.1 Refugees in Uganda ...... 18 3.2 Urban refugees...... 19 Motivations for leaving refugee camps ...... 20 The appeal of the city...... 23 3.3 Faults of the camp paradigm...... 25 4. REFUGEE LAW, POLICY AND PRACTICE IN UGANDA ...... 27 4.1 Legislation and status determination...... 28 The Control of Alien Refugees Act (CARA) ...... 28 Refugee status determination...... 30 4.2 Humanitarian and legal aid services for refugees in Kampala ...... 32 Humanitarian assistance programs ...... 34 Protection and legal aid services...... 36 5. CONCLUDING REMARKS ...... 37 CHAPTER TWO Young Men in Kampala: Daily Life in Exile...... 39 1. URBAN REFUGEES IN KAMPALA ...... 40 1.1 Numbers...... 40 1.2 Nationalities ...... 41 1.3 Background, age and gender ...... 41 2. SURVIVAL IN THE CITY...... 43 2.1 Kampala city...... 44 Kampala’s political history and urban economy...... 44 2.2 Shelter...... 46 Shelter and meanings of home ...... 50 2.3 Food ...... 51 Food and dignity...... 56 2.4 Employment...... 58 The jobs they found ...... 60 2.5 Security...... 62 Clandestine presence and the risk of arrest...... 63 Uganda’s foreign politics ...... 65 Ethnic and political conflict...... 66 3. CONCLUDING REMARKS ...... 70 CHAPTER THREE Researching and Writing about War and Exile ...... 71 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 71
2. DOING RESEARCH: CHOICES AND METHODS...... 73 2.1 Research subjects: choosing and being chosen ...... 73 Choice no. 1: young persons...... 73 Choice no. 2: young men...... 75 Choice no. 3: nationalities ...... 77 2.2 Challenges of urban research ...... 78 Meeting refugees and keeping in touch...... 78 Representativeness?...... 80 2.3 Methodological choices...... 83 Long-term relationships...... 84 Material and financial assistance...... 87 Advocacy and action ...... 91 3. EXPERIENCE, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE...... 93 3.1 The marginalised?...... 93 3.2 The primacy of experience ...... 95 Limits to communicating experiences of war and exile ...... 95 Non-verbal modes of understanding...... 96 Multiple identification and positionality...... 97 3.3 Questions of power ...... 100 4. TRUE KNOWLEDGE?...... 102 4.1 Truth and objectivity in the aftermath of war ...... 102 4.2 Dealing with ambiguity: changing and partial truths...... 104 Alternative approaches to objectivity...... 105 5. WRITING ABOUT WAR AND EXILE...... 107 5.1 Languages of conveyance...... 107 5.2 The anthropologist in the text...... 109 6. CONCLUDING REMARKS ...... 112
PART II ~ NARRATIVES INTRODUCTION TO PART II Young Africans in Transit ...... 115 Youth on the losing end? ...... 115 Youth and renewal...... 117 The study of young people in Africa...... 118 Soldiers, Students and Artists ...... 119 CHAPTER FOUR Soldiers ...... 121 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 122 2. WHY WE FIGHT...... 125 2.1 The politics of neglect ...... 127 2.2 A search for education ...... 131 2.3 Insecurity and no future prospects...... 134 3. SOLDIERS IN WAR...... 138 3.1 Military training camps...... 141 John Wani: SPLA training in Sudan ...... 141 Yosief Endrias: National Service in Eritrea...... 144 3.2 Social relationships in war...... 146 Yosief Endrias: young and old, educated and uneducated, city and village ...... 147 Lopithi Igom: commanders and bodyguards, educated and uneducated...... 150 4. SOLDIERS IN EXILE: LIFE IN KAMPALA...... 154 4.1 Lopithi Igom...... 155 4.2 Samuel Alim ...... 159 5. REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND EXILE...... 164 5.1 Proving manhood...... 165 5.2 Pride and regret ...... 168 5.3 The loss of youth...... 171 5.4 Marriage and family...... 174 6. CONCLUSION...... 177 CHAPTER FIVE Students...... 179 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 179 2. STUDENTS IN EXILE: RIGHTS AND ACCESS TO EDUCATION...... 181 2.1 Education for refugees in Uganda...... 183 Primary education...... 184 Secondary education...... 184 Tertiary education...... 185 3. JOURNEYS TO SCHOOL...... 186 3.1 Jean Mbisimo ...... 186 3.2 Mikael Woldeselassie ...... 191 4. EDUCATION AND PROTECTION...... 198 5. EDUCATION AND SELF-WORTH ...... 202 6. EDUCATION AND POWER...... 207 6.1 Getting into school ...... 208 6.2 Life at school...... 210 6.3 Diploma in hand...... 213 The role of students in society ...... 214 Responsibility towards family and relatives...... 217 7. CONCLUSION...... 220 CHAPTER SIX Artists...... 221 1. CONTENTIONS OF AFRICAN ART...... 222 1.1 Identity and authenticity...... 223 2. PROTAGONISTS ...... 225 2.1 Samy Kambale Tawite...... 225 2.2 Petna Ndaliko Katondolo...... 231 2.3 Yosief Endrias Habties...... 233 3. STORYLINES ...... 237 3.1 Dispossession / violence ...... 238 3.2 Memory / nostalgia...... 242 3.3 Transformation / hybridity ...... 244 4. ARTISTS IN EXILE ...... 253 4.1 Daily life in Kampala ...... 253 4.2 Merits of the artist identity ...... 260 Young artists’ role in society...... 261 4.3 Contentious artist identities...... 264 5. LOSS, VIOLENCE AND CREATIVITY ...... 267 5.1 Expression...... 268 5.2 Comfort ...... 271 5.3 Truth...... 274 6. CONCLUSION...... 276
PART III ~ REFLECTIONS CHAPTER SEVEN Reflections on Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War ...... 281 1. IDENTITY IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY...... 282 1.1 Identity in African philosophy ...... 283 2. WAR AND IDENTITY ...... 287 2.1 Anthropology and violence ...... 288 Operational and experiential approaches to violence...... 290 2.2 Violence and identity ...... 291 Reconstruction and creativity: responses to violence ...... 293 3. EXILE AND IDENTITY...... 294 3.1 Liminality? ...... 295 3.2 Labelling and refugee identity ...... 298 Labelling and self-definition ...... 300 4. FROM IDENTITY TO INDIVIDUAL AND SELF...... 302 4.1 The individual/self in anthropology ...... 303 4.2 The individual/self in African thinking...... 306 5. REGAINING A SENSE OF SELF ...... 309 5.1 Violence and self ...... 311 5.2 War, exile and the moral person...... 314 Family, gender and masculinity ...... 315 Manly contributions to society ...... 318 6. BEYOND THIS STUDY...... 320 Epilogue...... 323 List of abbreviations ...... 331 List of foreign words...... 333 Dutch Summary...... 335 Curriculum Vitae ...... 337 Bibliography ...... 339 Notes ...... 363
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Throughout the process of doing research and writing this book I have received invaluable support from many people, both in Uganda, where I lived and worked between 1998 and 2001, and in the Netherlands. It is with pleasure that I have the opportunity to remember them here. First and foremost I thank the persons central to this thesis. My deepest gratitude for your confidence and for the patience with which you shared some of your experiences and stories with me. I have been impressed by your courage, dignity and determination to look ahead. For all that you taught me, I hope that I have in some way preserved the integrity of your voices. I thank the eight protagonists of this book, as well as all others who contributed to it, some of whom prefer not to be named: Getachew Alfred, Woja Joseph Aggrey, Loding Joseph Dagama, Abraham Mawich Diap, Thomas Miteng Duku, John Elikama, Isabel Kavira Furaha, Bisrat Girma, Rwot James Goah, Amina Abdullahi Guled, Yosief Endrias Habties, Etienne Hamenyimana, Amos John, Yanga Kamilo, Jean- Louis Kayenga, Kennedy Kepa, Janet Kiden, Ben and Sam Kinity, Léon and Brigitte Kitenge, Moses Locheherk †, John Lomude, Michel-Pierrot Makala, Dunia Tristan Mastaki, Dilliga James Mogga, Nicolas Nibikora, Charlotte Nyiraneza, John Silvio Ochiang, Charles Okenyi, Elisabeth Remijo, Matho Richard, Sunday Rosalie, Hassan Ali Said, Léon Semajambi, Adrien Baguma Shumboke, Samy Kambale Tawite, Misago Venera, Cicily Yeno, Yekoyesew Belay Yirdaw, and the young men and women at Cresocret. You, Samy, were my first true friend in Kampala and I continue to admire your grace and originality. The Uganda National Council for Science and Technology kindly permitted me to undertake this study and I particularly thank Julius Ecuru. My affiliation to the Makerere Institute of Social Research provided the necessary institutional support and it was through MISR that I became involved with the EU-funded ‘Health and Welfare of Refugees’ research project (referred to in this book as the Refugee Rights project). Out of its legal aid component evolved the Refugee Law Project. I was fortunate to work alongside several dynamic individuals who were involved with both these projects: Zachary Lomo, Joe Oloka-Onyango, Mauro de Lorenzo, Unni Karunakara, Lisa Finch, Pamela Reynell, Moses Okello, Ruth Mukwana, Trine Lester, Shanti Rezia Cloafes, Ronald Kalyango, Doreen Lwanga, Julius Kayiira Lutakoome and Elias Lubega. Barbara Harrell-Bond, who headed the Refugee Rights project and brought these individuals together, I thank you for sharing your profound knowledge with us, for your unbending commitment to advocating refugee rights and for your personal encouragement of my work. For their time and openness to discussion, I am grateful to Abel Mbilinyi and Saidy Saihou at UNHCR’s branch office in Kampala as well as to Francis Filippa and Jimmy Obomba at the Jesuit Refugee Service. Thomas Elbert and Maggie Schauer from the ii War, Refuge and Self
University of Konstanz in Germany invited me to observe their work in Imvepi refugee settlement in northern Uganda, which I greatly appreciated and which gave me a useful, if fleeting, insight into life in the camps. Dunia Tristan Mastaki, Kiya Julius and Thierry-Noel Mageni I sincerely thank for their kind assistance in practical matters and their help with translations. Petna Ndaliko Katondolo started working with me in June 2000. I had not realised how much I had been lacking this: being able to share the weight of my daily visits and knowing that I was not alone in being shocked by the situation individual refugees found themselves in and at the same time being touched by their resilience. Thank you, Petna, for challenging me to reflect critically on my work, for your continued idealism and most of all for our dear friendship. In August 2000, Petna and I set up Yolé!Africa, a youth centre for art which under his inspired direction has grown into a well-respected organisation in Kampala’s art circles and beyond. Yolé!Africa’s success is also a tribute to the creativity, talent and drive of Antoine Kambere Tawite, Daniel Kambere Tsongo, Samy Kambale Tawite, Emma Vinywasiki Katya, Yosief Endrias Habties, Jayne Kisakye, Jeremie Sekombi Katondolo and Espérantia Sikuli. Special thanks to those who believed in and have supported our initiative from the start: Diny and Joop Lammers, Hetty Peters-Vlaar, Didier Martin and Saidy Saihou. My years in Kampala turned out to be a rite of passage in many ways, which I first and foremost shared with you, Wessel. I learned much from your honesty and your approach to life as a step-by-step (and never-ending!) learning experience. Your unquestioning support upon our return to the Netherlands as well as our continued friendship over the years I have cherished, which also merits a sincere thank you to Ine Visscher and your beautiful daughter Demere. Several friends and family came to visit and each added to a store of fond memories – and provided the perfect excuse to travel and discover East Africa’s beauty: my parents, my sister Brigitte, Donné van Engelen, Maikel van Sundert † and Gretta Broersen, and Maarten Hut. Nicole Teuwsen, my oldest childhood friend, you were the first to come and stay. Thank you for always listening and never judging. Among our Dutch and international friends in Kampala, I particularly value time spent with Ron and Clarissa Sloots-Mulder and their daughters Milenka and Anique – and it was great to be made welcome by friends during my two return visits. Mary Katugumisirize and Charles Etomet, thank you for keeping our home, and Morning and Eric for your sweet presence.
Making a geographical jump to the Netherlands, I would now like to thank the persons who have supported me there. My supervisors, Joke Schrijvers and Philomena Essed, I wish to thank both for their belief in me and for allowing me to write this book in my own at times unconventional way. Joke, you have been a witness to the full stretch of this project. Thank you for your critical but warm and thoughtful support and for your genuine interest in me as a person. Thank you for finding the time to accompany me to Kampala: you impressed me with your seemingly effortless ability to tune in straightaway, and it was inspiring to work together during that memorable week. Thank you, finally, for giving me a deadline! You, Philomena, joined us half-way this project and proved an invaluable asset to our team. Thank you for your incisive comments, your unparalleled enthusiasm, and your personal encouragement. It was wonderful to always receive your feedback by return post. For funding this project I am indebted to the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO), as well as to the Stichting Fonds Doctor Catharine van Tussenbroek for an initial grant. I thank the board, management and secretarial staff of InDRA, AGIDS and AMIDSt at the University of Amsterdam, my roommates (G.203!) and colleagues of whom I wish to mention by name Anna Laven, Acknowledgements iii
Cindy Horst, Hebe Verrest, Marlie Hollands, Perry Hoetjes, Margriet Poppema, Ton Dietz and Lorraine Nencel. I also enjoyed alternative workplaces in Amsterdam, and appreciate the waiters of Plancius and Spanjer & van Twist, where I spent countless hours revising my chapters fuelled by koffies verkeerd and the smell of home baked apple pie. For investing precious time in reading draft versions of (parts of) this book, and for their insightful comments, I am thankful to Carol Berger, Jacob Boersema, Jeff Crisp, Donné van Engelen, Barbara Harrell-Bond, Andrew Holden, Marlie Hollands, Cindy Horst, Salih Kaki, Gaim Kibreab, Loren Landau, Khalid Nasr, Lorraine Nencel, Danielle Olsen, Wessel Schulte, Simon Simonse and Andrew Tierney. Three persons deserve very special thanks. With joy and a hint of embarrassment I picture Hanneke Ronnes and Lisa Finch with my printed-out pages in all kinds of locations: Amsterdam, Dublin and London cafés, at the fireside in Winchcombe, in castle gardens, at la plage of Lac d’Annecy, on a windy ferry ride in the Aegean sea, in Dutch trains, English trains, Central Park ... Han, you probably read all chapter drafts and your sharp and imaginative mind helped structure this book and refine some of its arguments, for which I am immensely grateful. We happened to lead a near-parallel PhD life, and I could not have imagined my past few years without your understanding and ever close friendship. Lisa, perhaps more than anyone, you know the individuals and recognise the stories I have undertaken to tell. Our experiences in Kampala were not always easy, but our friendship and your generosity and humour helped sustain me a long way. Thank you, for going through my writing with you has been like a warm retrospective, evoking memories so precious to us both. Last but not least, my mother: for reading and re-reading my texts, for being as much of a perfectionist as myself about finding the best word in the right place and for constantly being on the lookout for relevant information. Above all, thank you for your positive outlook and for always being on call in my hours of need. In bringing the book to completion I owe you, Brigitte, great thanks. Thank you for your painstaking and meticulous work on the bibliography and text, for your quiet and unconditional support, implicit but deeply felt, and for being the best possible sister. I am very grateful to Puikang Chan for the professional way in which she organised the lay-out of my thesis at such short notice, and to Els Veldhuizen for creating the migration maps. Thank you, Nicole, for the beautifully designed cover. Hanneke Ronnes and Anna Laven, my paranimfen, I look forward to having you both by my side on that scary stage! The Ijayo Foundation also grew out of this research. Thank you, Nicole and Wessel, for setting it up together with me. Even though we discovered the challenge of undertaking this with close friends, to me it was one happily undertaken. Thank you for the patience and humour with which you responded to my sometimes emotional demands, and for putting their urgency in perspective. A huge thank you to my parents for being our untiring ambassadors and for the practical work they continue to put in to support the foundation; and to Bona Okwenje and especially Clarissa Mulder in Kampala for playing a pivotal role in the logistics of our projects and for efficiently distributing the money so generously donated by friends and relatives. For your hospitality in offering me such welcome working and breathing spaces away from my home in Amsterdam, I thank Ian Hooper, Nadina Al-Jarrah and Hani in London, Jan-Willem and Mienke Briët in Diepenveen, Lisa Finch and Andrew Holden in London, Ray Finch, my adoptive grandfather, in Winchcombe, and time and again my parents. Heading home has always been grounding and restorative. One spring morning this year, when I was in Melick to finalise the Soldiers chapter, I cycled to my father’s quiet vegetable plot. I found him there, among blossoming trees, bent intently over his seedlings – a world away from the false pressures of thesis-writing. I thank you for your reliability and unassuming willingness to help me out (and anybody) anywhere, anytime. iv War, Refuge and Self
Khalid, it looks like your home is going to be mine too. Thank you for your kindness during these stressful last months, and for making me look ahead, to life after this project, with a sense of excitement and anticipation. Finally, at the risk of repetition, I do wish to express my deep gratitude to those whose presence I have felt throughout this journey. To my father Joop, my mother Diny, and my sister Brigitte - and to Marc van Will, Nicole Teuwsen, Hanneke Ronnes, Wessel Schulte, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo and Lisa Finch, who have felt like family in the best possible sense of the word.
Amsterdam, 31 October 2006
INTRODUCTION
If anthropology continues to be based in ethnography it will have to focus on people in transition, who are uneasy about themselves in a world that ignores their desire and need for continuity ... Ethnographic time horizons will change: the one- shot time exposure will have to be supplemented by longitudinal research. And ethnographic accounts will reflect the violence and suffering, the precariousness of life, and the evils humans do to one another, in a way foreign to earlier ethnographic traditions.
Elisabeth Colson, Forced Migration and the Anthropological Response, 2003, p. 3
My first recollections of ‘seeing war’ are the television images of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war; at school I was told about children my age who closer to home, in Belfast, grew up in fear; yet foremost in my mind was the threat of a nuclear world war. In typical childlike fashion, I fantasized about what would happen if ‘the bomb’ fell and I were to be the single survivor. My parents took me to the anti-nuclear demonstrations, the 1980s passed, the Cold War ended. I never came close to war. The protagonists of this book are young men who come from Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea and who all personally experienced the chaos of war in their young lives. They saw parents and family being killed, were recruited into rebel armies, instigated student protests, or lived in ‘the bush’ as their villages were looted. Eventually, all of them fled and crossed international borders in search of safety and a more dignified life. They ended up in Kampala – on their own in a buzzing capital city.
War is death, the loss of lives. An estimated 150 million people were killed in war or genocide in the past century (Chen 1999).1 Yet war is about much more than death: the loss of belonging and the rupture of ‘normalcy’, changed family relations, fear, deep challenges to trust, and perhaps equally powerful, a realisation of one’s own and other people’s resilience and strength. It is these experiences that influence people’s lives even after fighting has stopped. The young men of this book dealt with them while in exile. The ten largest new refugee movements during the years of this research all took place on the African continent. Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo alone accounted for one in every ten of the world’s refugees. At the same time these two countries were host to one in every sixteen of the world’s refugees (UNHCR 2002b).2 What happens to the displaced persons in Africa that wars produce? Where do people go when they cross borders and how are they received? The general perception is that refugees in Africa live in camps. Countless people packed together, makeshift shelters, feeding queues, and an army of NGO workers. Putting refugees in segregated camps and settlements is indeed the conventional approach to assisting refugees in sub-Saharan Africa. However, it vi War, Refuge and Self is half of the world’s refugees at most who end up in such sites. All others are so-called ‘self-settled refugees’, who mingle with the national host population and live outside formal assistance structures. They stay in border areas and cross back-and-forth whenever it is safe, or they carry on to the towns and cities of their host countries. This book deals with individuals who made the latter choice: young men from Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, who sought refuge in Uganda’s capital city Kampala, who are dubbed ‘urban refugees’, and who live outside the purview of humanitarian structures of assistance – and beyond the media’s gaze. When I first went to Uganda in 1998, the literature on urban refugees was even scarcer than it is today. I decided on an exploratory study, looking at why young refugees come to Kampala, and how they secured their basic needs of food, shelter and medical care. My primary focus though was to be on these young people’s non-material or emotional well-being; on how their experiences of war, flight and exile affected their identities and ambitions. I lived in Kampala for two-and-a-half years (1998-2001). This period allowed me to build relationships and to gain the trust of some of the young refugees, who shared with me their memories of war and their experiences of life in exile. We kept in regular contact over the past five years, and twice I returned to Uganda. This gave me an insight into the transitions these young men went through as the political situation in their region developed. Kampala was this study’s research locale, but the refugees’ lives extended beyond the borders of the city’s green hills. They tried their utmost to keep in touch with relatives left behind at home, and some visited compatriots who lived in Uganda’s rural refugee settlements. As part of my research, I spent several weeks in different refugee settlements in northern Uganda and western Tanzania,3 which helped me in composing a picture of where the young refugees had come from (many of those who settle in the city previously lived in a refugee settlement) or of where they refused to go (back) to.
Before outlining the contents of this book, I wish to say a few words on its character. While preparing for this study, I consulted several regional experts about my research plans. I recall the words with which one professor closed our meeting: “All is well, as long as you don’t do something just for your own satisfaction... something that will look good on a shelf, or disappear in a drawer, but that will benefit no-one”. I admit to feeling slightly insulted at the time: of course I was going to do something useful! However, as it turns out this book has not become a showpiece of ‘usefulness’ in practical terms. I was often asked about my recommendations for the improvement of the situation of urban refugees, and though I certainly have suggestions, my study has not been a policy-oriented one. My curiosity mainly lies with the reflective and perhaps philosophical aspects of life, and this inclination, for better or for worse, is reflected in this book. At times I have found it hard to justify my scant practical research approach. The crude reality of suffering and injustice that I witnessed in Uganda triggers one to take action. Yet I believe that to attempt to understand others and convey this understanding in writing can be one such action. Today’s world could do with more compassion and more respect for people’s differences. Listening and allowing for dialogue seems to me an indispensable part of the process. I engaged in dialogue with the young men of this study, and quote their thoughts and reflections at length in this book, in order to illuminate refugees not as mere icons of our time but as individuals - individuals who fight to be granted their right to a secure, fulfilling and dignified life. Together with Petna Ndaliko Kantondolo, I undertook a more tangible action by setting up Yolé!Africa, a youth centre for art in Kampala where many young refugees, as well as Ugandans, are welcomed and encouraged to develop their artistic talents. The Ijayo Introduction vii
Foundation that two Dutch friends and I have set up supports young refugees in their academic ambitions.4 This study is set in Africa. Yet its implications are not limited to that continent. The conflicts taking place in Africa today are intimately connected to global politics and economics. For decades, Cold War politics fomented violent conflicts across the continent; the impact that the War on Terror has on Africa’s citizens is yet to be ascertained. It is an active role that the West plays in causing forced migration elsewhere. At the same time, the years during which this research took place were years of increasingly restrictive asylum policies in Europe. The general public would rather not have black refugees as their neighbours – and has no patience at all for those whose lives are not threatened by war but who are ‘merely’ triggered to migrate by the global economic disparities.5 Forced migration is a phenomenon of all times, and has always had the same roots: people’s search for physical security and security of livelihood. And yet, as Benmayor & Skotnes write: “there is a strong tendency to treat migrations, no matter what their scale, as isolated, random events, outside the central thrust of social development. After all, the dominating discourses of world capitalist culture tell us that modern society is supposed to be stable and prosperous” (1994: 4). That this is not so is evident from the individual histories of the young men of this study, which all include experiences of upheaval and deprivation, fear and humiliation. Their lives at the same time show the ability of people in dire straits to hold on to their beliefs, to exploit unexpected chances, to forge fruitful alliances, to improvise, to fight, to seek help… in short, to keep going. With their unique personalities and histories, these young individuals exemplify both human suffering and human potential.
My initial research question was: ‘Do the insecurities of war and exile affect young people’s identities, and if so, how?’ At an early stage in my research, I learned that a major preoccupation of the young refugees was with the question ‘Who am I’? This led me to rephrase my general question: their existential query became the main focus of this study.
Outline of the book
Part I - Contexts Chapter One, Refugees in Uganda: the Political, Humanitarian and Legal Context, discusses the political history and current conflicts in the countries that the young men of this study fled and introduces the socio-political situation in Uganda. Kampala is host to thousands of refugees who refuse to live in the rural refugee settlements run jointly by the Government of Uganda and UNHCR. By choosing to self-settle in Kampala, they defy government policy and consequently they are forced to live clandestine lives – a reality which goes against refugees’ right to freedom of movement as enshrined in international refugee law. Refugees’ motivations for leaving the refugee settlements as well as the attractions of the city are discussed, and a picture is drawn of the status determination process and the lack of humanitarian assistance available to urban refugees in Kampala. Chapter Two, Young Men in Kampala: Daily Life in Exile, examines the survival strategies of refugees in the city. The focus is on their housing, food and access to employment, discussed with a view to domestic and international refugee and human rights law. The chapter narrates the refugees’ reflections on their security situation, which is highly compromised by their clandestine presence in the city. Additional sources of stress are the Ugandan government’s involvement in the military conflicts in some of their home countries, as well as the ethnic and political conflicts between and among the various refugee communities. viii War, Refuge and Self
Chapter Three, Researching and Writing about War and Exile, explicates why, from among the diverse refugee population in Kampala, I chose to focus my research on male refugees between the ages of 15 and 30. It discusses the challenges of conducting research among an insecure and highly mobile population in a city environment. Questions are raised about researchers’ responsibility to advocate refugee rights and about the ethics and methodological implications of (financially) supporting one’s research subjects. No knowledge is produced in a vacuum: there is always a social and political context within which certain claims about the world, others and ourselves are situated. Chapter Three discusses the epistemological dilemmas that come with conducting research into the politically charged subjects of war and forced migration. The focus is on the limits to communicating and understanding experiences of war and loss, on issues of objectivity and truth, and on representation in anthropological writing.
Part II - Narratives Part II of this book presents the ethnographic core of the research, aiming to shed light on the past and present experiences, dilemmas and ambitions of young refugees living in Kampala. My research took as its starting point the experiences of war and exile of these young refugees in as far as they were willing to relate these to me. Because I wanted to gain an in-depth understanding of their individual lives, the number of people included in the research remained limited. While I spoke to and interviewed just over one hundred refugees, eight young men became the protagonists of this book. The length of my stay in Uganda provided the opportunity to get to know these young men rather closely. Thus I learned that their concern with the question “Who am I?” – triggered by their memories of war and their separation from parents and family - touched on issues of responsibility, ambition, manhood, and dignity. Based on the identities the young refugees presented to me, Part II is divided into three chapters: Soldiers, Students and Artists. The protagonists of these chapters are young men who find themselves faced with decisions and challenges that are common to the lives of young men of their age. They fantasize about marriage and becoming fathers; they long for knowledge and education; they aspire to be independent; they want to express their creativity and their visions for society. The circumstances of exile, however, put limits to their ambitions. War and exile caused a disruption of what had seemed a predictable path to maturity. The narratives presented in these chapters convey how differently individuals reflect on their past and deal with this fraught reality. They urge one to acknowledge, as Anthony Cohen suggests, “individuals’ consciousness of their difference from each other, of their distinctive identities, even though these may be masked by the social glosses of stereotype, orthodoxy, category or collectively imposed identity” (1994: 65-66).
The fictitious names by which I call the individuals of this study are partly names they suggested to me. The artists kept their own. They did not want to have their names disconnected from their work – a practice that was long applied to the African art shown to European audiences.
Part III - Reflections Chapter Seven, Reflections on Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War, presents a theoretical reflection on the ethnographic chapters of part II. It discusses how my focus on individuals, and the findings this yielded, led me to critically reflect on anthropology’s focus on groups/collectivities as well as on the discipline’s use of the concept of identity. I propose that in order to study the experiences and (self-)perceptions of individuals in the aftermath of war, the concept of ‘identity’ must be complemented by the notion of ‘sense of self’. The chapter shows that for the young men of this study, retrieving a positive sense Introduction ix of self was a precondition for regaining their dignity and humanity. Crucial to this process was overcoming the impact of violence, undergone and perpetrated, and recreating an image of themselves as moral persons. The moral conception of personhood as theorised in African philosophy offers a useful perspective to understanding this process.
Part I
Contexts
Samy Kambale Tawite, War, 1999
CHAPTER ONE
REFUGEES IN UGANDA:
THE POLITICAL, LEGAL AND HUMANITARIAN CONTEXT
This book narrates and reflects on the experiences of a selected number of young men who live in Uganda’s capital Kampala as so-called urban refugees. The total number of refugees that entered Uganda during the late 1980s and 1990s was well over 250,000. These people had fled civil wars and insecurity in their home countries of Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. The phenomenon of forced migration in Central and East Africa long predates the existence of specialised international law that confers legal status to a person deemed to be a ‘refugee’. Throughout this region, people have been on the move for centuries. They have done so for the same reasons that individuals and communities do today: searching for physical security and security of livelihood. The major causes for these early population movements were the Arab and European slave trade in the East African interior, the excursions of colonial armies, and disasters such as droughts, famines and epidemics. An accurate figure as to the scale of these migratory movements is impossible to establish. While matters of numbers are relevant, an even more pertinent issue is how forced migrants are perceived and received by governments and host populations. The Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani points out that the terminology used in talking about migration in Africa corresponds rather neatly to the history of colonialism: descendants of people who moved before 1885 are ‘natives’ or ‘nationals’, those who moved during the colonial era are ‘migrants’ and may under certain circumstances be integrated, and those who moved after independence are ‘refugees’ who, with rare exceptions, remain perpetual outsiders perceived by governments and hosts alike as ‘temporary’ (De Lorenzo 2002). The current perception of forced migrants as temporary guests is a factor that determines their treatment. Refugees are expected to eventually repatriate, and therefore are settled in spatially segregated camps in remote rural areas, often near the borders with their home countries. Their integration with the local population is discouraged. However, increasing numbers of refugees refuse to reside in the camps and settlements designated for them, and instead move to towns and cities, where they try their luck as self-settled refugees. Host governments in Africa as well as the international community (as represented by UNHCR and NGOs) are alarmed by the increasing numbers of urban refugees. This is 4 Contexts also the case in Uganda. This first chapter discusses the Ugandan government’s response to the presence of refugees within its territory. It introduces the legal framework and policies that pertain to refugees and discusses the services (humanitarian and legal) that exist for urban refugees in the city of Kampala. The chapter begins with a discussion of the political conflicts and wars that led to the arrival of refugees in Uganda from neighbouring countries.
1. HISTORIES OF CONFLICT AND MIGRATION
‘Who killed them really, the white men?’ ‘Who can tell these days who kills who?’
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep not, Child, 1964, p. 86
It is impossible to recount all the complex political and military events in the countries of concern to this study that led to prolonged population movement during the last few decades.1 I limit myself to outlines of the conflicts in Sudan and Congo, because these are the countries that the far majority of the individuals featuring in this study fled. Background information on the other countries is included in the ethnographic chapters of Part II when relevant to the narratives presented there. In this book Uganda stands out as the country that provides a more or less safe haven for refugees from at least seven different countries of the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa. For many years, however, Uganda was itself among the most infamous refugee-producing countries in Africa. Section two discusses the country’s current political economy and will include a few words on Uganda’s history of conflict and migration.
1.1 Sudan
The British-Sudanese writer Jamal al-Mahjoub once said that to understand the Sudan, you need a layered map like one of those cellophane diagrams of the human body that used to be in encyclopaedias … I have often thought that you need a similar kind of layered map to understand Sudan’s civil war. A surface map of political conflicts, for example – the northern government versus the southern rebels; and under that a layer of religious conflict – Muslim versus Christian and pagan; and under that a map of all the sectarian divisions within those categories; and under that a layer of ethnic divisions – Arab and Arabized versus Nilotic and Equatorian – all of them containing a multitude of clan and tribal subdivisions; and under that a layer of linguistic conflicts; and under that a layer of economic divisions – the more developed north with fewer natural resources versus the poorer south with its rich mineral and fossil fuel deposits; and under that a layer of colonial divisions; and under that a layer of racial divisions related to slavery. And so on and so on until it would become clear that the war, like the country, was not one but many: A violent ecosystem capable of generating endless new things to fight about without ever shedding any of the old ones.
Deborah Scroggins, Emma’s War, 2002, p. 79-80
Just under ninety per cent of the approximately two hundred thousand refugees hosted by Uganda in the late 1990s were southern Sudanese individuals. They had fled not only war and insecurity, but also the complete lack of social infrastructure. In southern Sudan, an area as big as France and England combined, there are virtually no medical services Refugees in Uganda 5 available and decades of war have left it with a very poorly developed educational system (Brown 2005). During the war, primary and secondary schools proved targets for the recruitment of children and youth, and some de facto became military training camps. For the young Sudanese men in this study, a search for education was among the primary reasons for leaving their country (see Chapter Five). It must be noted that the scarcity of educational institutions is not only a legacy of the war. A near century and a half of foreign rule over Sudan (Turco-Egyptian 1820-1883; Anglo-Egyptian 1899-1955) resulted in a divide between the North, in parts well-developed, and a highly undeveloped South. This regional inequality is the chief historical factor behind the civil wars that plagued Sudan in the second half of the twentieth century. Sudan is the largest country in Africa and the 10th largest in the world. A third of its nearly 30 million population lives in what is known as southern Sudan, which comprises a quarter of the country’s territory. Southern Sudan is commonly referred to as the ‘black’ or ‘African’ part of the country, as opposed to the ‘Arab’ north, where the majority are Muslims. The different peoples of southern Sudan are Christians or adherents of indigenous religions. The Dinka, who are pastoralists like the Nuer, make up about one third of the southern population; others are agriculturalists or agro-pastoralists.2 Southern Sudan currently comprises of ten states, each with their own governor. The history of Sudan can be traced back to ancient times when the area that today is northern Sudan was known as Nubia. It was home to the Kushite Kingdoms (2700 BC – 300 AD) with their close cultural, economic and military ties to pharaonic Egypt (Holt & Daly 2000). Christianity was introduced in Nubia at around 450 AD, with powerful Christian states developing from the 6th century onward. Islam was introduced in Sudan around 640 AD, and from that time onward the invasion by Arab tribes from Upper Egypt and across the Red Sea led to a gradual process of Arabisation and Islamisation in northern Sudan. By the 14th century the Christian states had collapsed. During this whole period, parts of what is now known as southern Sudan were the hinterland from which slaves were raided, and the source of the wealth and food which made the northern kingdoms flourish. However, though economic and political power was always concentrated in the central Nile Valley region, it was only in the 19th century that the whole of southern Sudan was opened up to the exploitation of a state centred in Khartoum (Johnson 2004). The groundwork of a system of second-class citizenship – ‘race’ determining who did and who did not have full legal rights within the Sudanese state - had achieved firm contours by that time. Sudan’s twentieth century civil wars built on and deepened the issues of race, but were also – like the violence of earlier centuries - about economic resources: people, oil, arable land, and water. The south has fertile soil, access to water and huge deposits of oil; the north is mostly arid, desert-like, with agriculture depending on irrigation schemes.
The civil war that the southern Sudanese young men of this study fled started in 1983. It was formally ended in January 2005 with the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the culmination of a peace process that had started in 2002. This war that the young men spoke to me about – there was no talk of peace yet during the research - was the second civil war since Sudan attained independence from Britain on 1 January 1956. The first civil war, known as the Anyanya, started with the Torit rebellion in 1955 and ended with the Addis Ababa Agreement in 1972. Ten years of relative peace followed during which southern Sudan was administrated as a partly autonomous region. The second civil war started during the regime of Jaafar Nimeiry, who in 1983 abolished the Southern Regional Government and imposed shari‘a as state law. In July 1983, the southern Sudanese rebellion, by name of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), was founded at a guerrilla base in Ethiopia. Under the leadership of Dr. John Garang the SPLA brought together defected government army units and Anyanya troops who had never accepted the 6 Contexts
Addis Ababa agreement. The SPLM/A’s stated objective was not secession, but the creation of a restructured New Sudan, a secular state with federal governments and based on the principles of pluralism and equality. The deliberate neglect of socio-economic development in southern Sudan on the part of the northern government was presented as a key motivation for taking up arms. Southern Sudan was to benefit from its own natural resources, and the SPLA Manifesto spoke against Nimeiry’s redrawing of North-South borders to incorporate southern oilfields and against the construction of the Jonglei Canal, which was to divert southern waters northwards for irrigation.3 Within six years after the start of its rebellion, the SPLA was in control of much of the Ethiopian border, the whole of the Kenyan border, and almost all of the rural area of southern Sudan. However, 1991 brought an end to the string of victories. From the start, John Garang had enjoyed significant military and logistical support from Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ethiopia’s military dictator, but in May 1991 Mengistu’s regime collapsed. The sudden removal of Ethiopian supplies, the loss of its military bases, and the end to Mengistu’s personal support seriously reversed the SPLA’s military momentum. The situation further deteriorated with the so-called ‘Nasir split’ in August 1991. Two senior SPLA officers, Riek Machar and Lam Akol, defected and created the SPLA-Nasir faction. The result was intra-SPLA fighting largely along ethnic lines, which culminated in the massacres of Dinka people in Bor and Kongor (Johnson 2004, Nyaba 1997). Over the next ten years there were offensives and counter-offensives by the SPLA and the Khartoum government army. At the same time Sudan’s civil war grew more and more complex. The situation became one of multiple, parallel wars being fought based on local grievances and shifting alliances. These “each fed into and intensified the fighting of the overall ‘North- South’ war” (Johnson 2004: 127).
The Sudanese civil war has often been presented as a religious conflict between the Islamic north and the Christian/traditionalist south.4 However, religion was only one factor; the political and economic interests were paramount and manifest. At the same time, as Scroggins’ metaphor of transparent layers quoted above so poignantly expresses, the history of the war, the regional and global involvements, the issues of race, natural and mineral resources, ethnicity, language and education all implicated, are dazzlingly complex. They are best conveyed by Johnson’s The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (2004). At the same time, however, a more superficial yet perhaps not less valid observation is that these decades of destruction were essentially about power and greed on the part of a number of self-interested men - both within and outside of Sudan. As Berkeley puts it:
“Sudan is … a textbook case of Big Men using little men, a handful of elites endlessly manoeuvring for power and booty while millions perish” (2001: 196).
It was a generous handful of ‘big men’ responsible for this conflict. First of all, the successive leaders in Khartoum: Jaafar Nimeiry, the military dictator who in 1972 negotiated a ceasefire in Sudan’s first civil war (Anyanya), yet reignited it in 1983 with his abrogation of the 1972 peace agreement by his de-centralisation policy and the imposition of shari‘a as state law on the whole country; Sadiq al-Mahdi, elected in 1985 after a bloodless coup that ousted Nimeiry and himself overthrown in another coup in 1989; and Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamist brain behind General Omar el-Bashir’s regime. Then, on the other side, were the leaders of the southern rebellion: John Garang, the SPLA chief commander who started the rebellion in 1983, and Riek Machar and Lam Akol, the officers who caused ‘the Nasir split’ in the SPLA in 1991, turning the liberation movement into a devastating factional war between the Nuer and the Dinka. And then, manoeuvring around these Sudanese stakeholders were individuals and governments of countries within and outside Africa who at different points in time had an interest in Sudan’s politics. The Cold Refugees in Uganda 7
War (which led to the distribution of arms on an unprecedented scale) and the much sought-after concessions of the oil fields with which the south is so richly endowed, played a major part. The ‘big men’ living outside of Sudan’s territory include, to name just a few, US presidents from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, Libya’s Muammar Qadaffi, Ethiopia’s former military ruler Mengistu and his Soviet backers, Uganda’s president Museveni, wealthy Islamic bankers, board members of oil companies such as Chevron and Arakis, and arms traders. In one way or another, all these powerbrokers used the tactics of shifting alliances and playing off rivals. Echoing the divide-and-rule strategy of Sudan’s colonial and slave-trading era, the guiding principle was ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ – a game mastered particularly well by the northern government, which maintained the long tradition of setting one black African tribe up against another. Yet it must be noted that the southern rebel leaders and their cronies went a long way down the same road, witness the 1991 massacres at Bor and Kongor, the killings of the Didinga, and many other episodes of ethnically inspired violence.5 In fact, while the Sudanese people I knew as refugees in Uganda, all of them ‘black’ southern Sudanese, had fled the general state of insecurity in their areas, this was as much attributed to the actions of the SPLA soldiers supposedly fighting on their behalf as to the violence on the part of the Khartoum government army. Indeed, civilians in southern Sudan, who bore the brunt of the violence and destruction of the Sudanese civil war, were often unclear as to which of the warring parties should be considered their worst enemy. It is very hard to say with a degree of certainty how many people lost their lives in Sudan’s civil war (Johnson 2004: 143), but that the human cost has been immense is indisputable. Perhaps as many as two million people were killed in cross-fire, attacks on villages and by war-induced starvation; four to six million people are displaced within the country; about eight hundred thousand Sudanese refugees live or lived in exile in Uganda, Kenya, Central African Republic, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Egypt; while no figures are available on the size of the global Sudanese diaspora. Generations of Sudanese have been brought up in war; this has affected their ways of living, and confronted them with moral, social and political dilemmas concerning the organisation of their societies (Hutchinson 1996). How the transition from war to peace will be dealt with is something only the future can tell.
On 9 January 2005, the SPLM/A and the Government of Sudan signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), marking the formal end to 22 years of civil war. The image of John Garang and Sudan’s First Vice-President Ali Osman Taha signing the agreement – witnessed by twelve African heads of state and government and US Secretary of State Colin Powell - was broadcast around the world. In Khartoum and Juba, Sudanese took to the streets and in other cities like Nairobi, Kampala and Cairo Sudanese refugees celebrated this historic moment. I was in Kampala that month for the last lap of my research. There was excitement among the Sudanese refugees I spoke to, but scepticism too. Their distrust of ‘the Arabs’ runs deep, and a recurrent comment was: “They have never taken us blacks seriously, who tells us that they will this time?” The fact that the same northern leaders who were guilty of years of dictatorial rule and gross human rights violations remained in power was considered anything but promising. But concerns about the South’s own divisions were also expressed. One young man, Lopithi Igom, said:
The SPLA has over five hundred commanders... all of them will want their share. They gave so much of their lives, and now they demand returns: they want land, authority, money to feed their wives and educate their children. How will Garang deal with that? There’ll be rebellion from within, it’s unavoidable.
8 Contexts
He added: “I heard that those big men who brokered our peace in Kenya got six hundred dollars per day in attendance fees, sponsored by America. But what about our people, they continue to suffer”. Lopithi, a deserted SPLA commander himself, also worried about the many children and youth among the ranks of SPLA soldiers. Even if demobilisation programmes succeed, what will be their future when all they know is how to fight?6 All Sudanese I spoke to worried about the issues of ethnic rivalry – between Equatorians and the Dinka, but also between and among other groups – all far from resolved by the peace agreement. Clearly, their worries are well-founded and recent literature reveals a host of complex issues that need to be tackled for this peace to be sustainable (Abbink 2004, Ajawin & De Waal 2002, FMR 2005, Johnson 2004, Marchal 2004, Rogier 2005, Simonse 2004). Lasting peace, for instance, depends on a durable solution for the millions of IDPs and refugees that are to return to their home areas (Kälin 2005, Malik 2005, Murphy 2005), and on the commitment of the international community to monitor and support the peace not the least by actually disbursing the monies pledged at the Oslo Donor Conference of April 2005 (Lanzer 2005, Sorbo 2005). The key challenges for the newly established Government of National Unity (with 30% representation of the SPLM) and the Government of southern Sudan (GosS) are found in three areas. Firstly, governance: the transformation from dictatorial and authoritarian power structures – both the Khartoum government and the SPLA are used to rule with iron hand - to democratic governments that allow political space for civil society. In the South, the capacity of the civil service must be built from scratch (Bennett 2005, Klugman & Kallaur 2005, Metelits 2004). Secondly, security: IDPs and refugees will only return, and reconstruction programs can only begin, if security is guaranteed. Large areas of the South, however, are not yet secure. Issues on the agenda are demobilisation and disarmament – I recall a comment from a Sudanese friend: “The problem is, guns are everywhere. In Sudan, you don’t need to go looking for guns: they come and look for you!” - as well as both North-South and South-South reconciliation programmes (Hilhorst & van Leeuwen 2005, Nyaba 2002, Ouko 2004, Robertson & McCauley 2004, Simonse 2004). Thirdly, development and wealth-sharing: long-standing structural inequalities between the North and the South must be addressed. This involves the sharing of oil revenues as well as the construction of physical infrastructure, educational and health facilities, and mechanisms for food security in the South. The success with which the issues of governance, security and wealth-sharing will be tackled in the coming years, will determine the outcome of the referendum on self- determination that is to be held in the South at the end of the six year interim period that the CPA provides for. At this moment it is still a matter of conjecture whether the Agreement will result in building a united and democratic Sudan. There is a great deal of criticism of the CPA, its omissions and imprecision.7 Yet, as Roland Marchal aptly summarised:
“Good peace agreements don’t exist, and anyway, they are just a piece of paper. What will happen depends on the spirit in which the government and the SPLA will interpret the agreement and on the determination with which they will commit themselves to act on this”.8
Both spirit and determination will partly depend on whether the stakeholders of the past war, both national and international, will find new areas of investment and interest - after all, “the business of Sudan’s war [was] central to its longevity” (Berkeley 2001: 201). The last Saturday evening of July 2005, I received worried phone calls from Uganda: “Ellen, have you seen the news today, did you hear our leader is missing in action?” It was the first blow to the fragile peace: on 30 July 2005, John Garang died in a helicopter crash caused by bad weather. It was three weeks after he had been sworn in as First Vice-President of Sudan and President of Southern Sudan – a fatal accident after Refugees in Uganda 9 having survived 21 years of guerrilla war. Again southern Sudanese took to the streets in Khartoum and Juba. No jubilations this time, but violent protests sparked by their disbelief about the true circumstances of Garang’s death. Cars were burnt, shops damaged and at least 130 people were killed. The SPLA responded by promptly electing Salva Kiir, Garang’s deputy, as Chairman of the SPLM, Commander-in Chief of the SPLA and President of southern Sudan. To me the responses to Garang’s death that I received from Sudanese friends in Uganda once more illustrated the intricacy of the war and the fact that people’s perceptions of it are anything but unequivocal. The young men who called and wrote to me had received military training as children, had fought for the SPLA, but had deserted from the army because they no longer supported its politics or because they wanted a more meaningful future than life at the frontlines afforded (see Chapter Four). Some had quite openly expressed to me their criticism of Garang’s military strategisms, which had affected their own and their families’ lives so deeply. Yet now they sent me emails wanting to share their mourning of “our great liberator”. Was it because they believed one should not speak badly of the dead, or had they, with peace now a formal reality, revaluated their position on the two decades of war? Of course Garang had played a vital role in bringing the war to an end, lauded too by the international community, but still I was struck by what seemed to me their ability to forget, and possibly even forgive, so promptly.
1.2 The Democratic Republic of Congo
As news of the white man’s soldiers and their baskets of severed hands spread through the Congo, a myth gained credence with Africans that was a curious reversal of the white obsession with black cannibalism. The cans of corned beef seen in white men’s houses, it was said, did not contain meat from the animals shown on the label; they contained chopped-up hands.
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 1988, p. 166
Congo is the third largest country in Africa and, due to its wealth of mineral reserves (among others diamonds, gold, coltan, uranium and copper), potentially among the richest of the continent. However, its 60 million population has never benefited from the presence of these natural endowments.9 Currently, the country is ranked as the 10th poorest in the world.10 Economic mismanagement, political repression and violent conflict have been rife from the country’s inception as the Congo Free State (1884, under personal rule of Belgian King Leopold) and throughout all following political eras – both colonial and postcolonial. It is the wealth of natural reserves that has fuelled the exploitation as well as the wars from which generations of Congolese have suffered. External parties (both state and non-state) have always played a significant role in shaping Congo’s history and in adding to its hardships. During Leopold’s rule over Congo (1884-1908) and its aftermath the population of the territory dropped by several million - caused by murder, starvation, disease and a plummeting birth rate.11 The practice of punishing labourers by chopping off hands at the rubber plantations, while the selling of rubber on the growing European markets made a fortune for Leopold, epitomised the brutality of the Belgian king’s regime. Under international pressure, the Congo Free State was transferred to the Belgian state in 1908, and the colony was renamed the Belgian Congo. The situation for its people, however, barely improved and the colonial regime failed to lay a groundwork of legitimate institutions needed for the effective administration of a nation state. 10 Contexts
On 30 June 1960, Congo became independent, but this historical moment did not put an end to foreign involvement in the country’s politics and economics. In 1961, Belgium and the US orchestrated the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s charismatic prime minister elected in 1960, and helped set Mobutu (then chief of staff of the army) up as de facto head of state. For the US, not only economic interests were at stake (the secessionist movement in the mineral-rich province of Katanga), but also Cold War politics: Lumumba was feared to be a communist and the US wanted at all cost to avoid a Soviet Union stronghold in Central Africa. During his three-decade dictatorship Mobutu, who renamed the country Zaire, proved a loyal friend to the US and the West, for which he was generously rewarded. Allegedly, Ronald Reagan called the president “a voice of good sense and good will” (Berkeley 2001) – this despite the stories about Mobutu and ‘his’ Zaire that had started to filter through: the personality cult skilfully constructed around the ‘Father of the Zairian Nation’ (who baptised himself “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake”); the corruption, clientalism and kleptocracy that plagued a state territory larger than western Europe; the Swiss bank accounts; the white marble palace in Mobutu’s rural birthplace - ‘Versailles in the jungle’.12 The lavish lifestyle of Mobutu has astonished – and often disgusted - foreign observers, and understandably so. It seems interesting to note, however, that Leopold’s palaces in Belgium, equally funded by exploitation of ‘the people’, barely trigger such reactions. Towards the end of the Cold War, the US no longer needed its ally in Central Africa, and relationships cooled. The IMF and the World Bank suspended their loans to the country - aid money that for many years had flowed directly into Mobutu’s pockets, distributed among his cronies and used to co-opt his enemies. Under pressure from national opposition and strikes and protests in Kinshasa, Mobutu declared an end to single- party rule in 1990 and the beginning of democratic reform. In practice, his rule continued until he was forced to flee Zaire in 1997.13
The war that deposed Mobutu started in eastern Congo in 1996. It was the beginning of ten years of conflict, still ongoing as I write this chapter and cited “the most deadly conflict since World War II” (IRC 2003: i). In this war too there has been a great deal of foreign involvement, primarily from neighbouring African states, but western and non-western corporate interests have also done much to contribute to the conflict’s longevity. The title of a recent report, The Curse of Gold (HRW 2005a), speaks volumes about the factor spurring the foreign interests. Also at stake in this ten-year conflict is control over land, especially in the densely populated Kivu provinces and Ituri region.14 Local disputes over land have increasingly become cast in ethnic terms, and it is argued that ethnicity has evolved into a crucial resource in the hands of local elites for the mobilisation of political and economic resources, and for recruitment into rebel groups (Lemarchand 2001, Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers 2005). While the issues of land and mineral resources are central to the current conflicts, it was the Rwandan genocide that triggered the start of the 1996 war. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda resulted in around 1.2 million refugees entering eastern Congo within the time span of less than a week.15 The people I spoke to from Kivu (children and teenagers when this happened) all vividly remember the crisis: now themselves refugees in Uganda, it was their first confrontation with what the word refugee stands for. They recounted how their town of Goma was flooded with ragged people fighting at the food distribution points set up by the army of humanitarian agencies; they spoke of the smell of death that filled the air during the cholera outbreak.16 But it was not only a humanitarian crisis: among the Rwandan refugees there were an estimated 100,000 Interahamwe (the Hutu militias responsible for most of the killings) and soldiers from the Refugees in Uganda 11 defeated Rwandan army (FAR). They presented a serious security threat to the new (Tutsi) government in Rwanda. Public opinion had it that Mobutu was not only providing a refuge for the genocidaires, but also enabling them to regroup and rearm with the purpose of reinvading Rwanda.17 When the RPA, the army of Rwanda’s new president Paul Kagame, in October 1996 destroyed the refugee camps in Zaire in a pre-emptive strike against such reinvasion, this set off a popular uprising against Mobutu. As one young man recounted to me: “So many volunteered, at least one kid from every family went, or sometimes a father and his two eldest sons. It was la rancune against Mobutu’s soldiers. They had disturbed us for so many years”. It was Laurent-Désiré Kabila, powerfully assisted by Rwandan and Ugandan forces, who headed the Congolese ‘war of liberation’ that overthrew Mobutu’s regime in May 1997. The two things about Kabila’s legendarily swift eight-months insurgency widely covered in the media were the killings of tens of thousands of Hutu refugees in the Congolese forests, and Kabila’s march into Kinshasa on May 17 with an army of kadogos. Michela Wrong, Reuters and BBC foreign correspondent, writes:
“And suddenly, there the rebels were. In flip-flops and bare feet, most of them no more than boys, staggering under the weight of shells and pieces of equipment, the column of AFDL fighters stretched as far as the eye could see down the Avenue des Trois Z. Housewives ran in their dressing gowns across the lawns, brandishing cartons of Kellogg’s Cornflakes and Cocopops as placatory offerings. But the adult commanders kept chivvying the exhausted kadogos (little ones) along, afraid they would fall asleep as soon as they stopped moving. “You must be tired,” sympathised an onlooker. “Yes. I’ve walked all the way from Kampala,” replied one boy, artlessly spilling the beans on Uganda’s involvement in the rebel uprising. “Sshhh,” remonstrated his superior” (Wrong 2000: 30).
It was no wonder that Mobutu’s overthrow happened so quickly: the Congolese “shell state” was “already a pushover” (Lemarchand 2001). The joy about what was the end of an era – Zaire was renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo - was widely shared. The humanitarian situation, however, was extremely precarious. The country’s GDP had declined to its 1958 level, access to health services and safe drinking water was extremely poor, and rates of malnutrition and mortality were high (UN 1998: 60). More significantly, Kabila soon proved little more sensitive to the demands of civil society than his predecessor, and he ruled with similar ruthlessness – Mobutism sans Mobutu is how his reign came to be known. One year into Kabila’s presidency, war erupted again, and again sparked off in eastern Congo. It was dubbed ‘Africa’s First World War’ as it drew in the armies of six different African states. It is from this latest phase of violence and insecurity, which has affected large parts of the country though mostly the eastern region, that the Congolese young men and women I came to know in Kampala had fled. On 27 July 1998, Kabila decreed that the Rwandan troops who had helped him seize power leave the country. While this won him popular support from large parts of the population who had resented the presence of the Rwandan Tutsis from the outset, it also led to the formation of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), a rebel movement serving as a proxy for Rwandan interests in north-eastern Congo. Uganda joined Rwanda in backing the RCD rebellion against their erstwhile protégé Laurent Kabila. The so-called ‘deuxième libération’ quickly picked up momentum, and many towns in eastern Congo – starting with Goma and Bukavu – were soon under control of the RCD. The population, who unlike two years earlier did not identify with this new war, badly suffered. The refugees who started arriving in Uganda in late 1998, and continued to do so throughout 1999, were fleeing the human rights violations in rebel-controlled eastern Congo, where massacres of several hundred people at a time were not unusual and a 12 Contexts situation of absolute impunity prevailed. Civilians were trapped between the various armed forces, each of which killed people for allegedly supporting the enemy (Amnesty International 2000a, HRW 2000). The Congolese refugees in Kampala were urban people who had fled from the towns of North and South Kivu, where resistance by civil society and church leaders was put down very firmly by the RCD.18 The situation worsened with the growing division within the rebel movement, the different RCD factions that emerged, and the proliferation of armed militias collectively referred to as Mai Mai.19 The fighting that broke out, in August 1999, between the armies of Rwanda and Uganda in the occupied city of Kisangani – the regional diamond market - further aggravated the crisis. Hostilities between these formerly close allies left thousands of Congolese civilians dead.20 Commentators maintain that the security imperatives invoked by the Rwandan and Ugandan governments to justify their presence in Congo (i.e. the defence of their borders) were a mere pretext, or at least secondary to the huge profits that both countries drew from this war.21 One cannot omit the observation that the Rwandan and Ugandan governments would have had few stakes in the Congolese conflict had it not been for western corporations being quite willing “to act as their business partners, or better still, as their partners in crime” (Lemarchand 2001: 42; see also Reno 2000). Peace negotiations supported by the OAU and the UN led to the signing in July 1999 of the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement by the six states and two of the rebel factions involved in Congo’s war. Several months later the UN Security Council sent a peacekeeping mission, MONUC, to Congo. Fighting continued regardless. An unexpected twist happened on 16 January 2001, when president Kabila was shot dead by one of his bodyguards. I was in Kampala with a Congolese friend that evening and remember how the news spread - disbelief all over, his phone kept ringing non-stop, and we rushed to an internet cafe to find out more. But there was little more we came to know, apart from the impromptu transfer of presidential power to Kabila’s 29-year-old son Joseph, the chief of army. I recall the expression on my friend’s face when he sighed, “Oh, mon Congo, toujours des intrigues! Will we ever be able to return home?” It turned out that Laurent Kabila’s assassination – which is still surrounded by mystery and speculation - meant the removal of one of the chief obstacles to peace in Congo. Kabila fils proved more dedicated to peace than his father and continued the negotiations with the different warring factions. On 1 July 2003, marking 43 years of independence from Belgium, Joseph Kabila named an interim administration made up of members of the different rebel groups that fought each other in the war and the political opposition in Kinshasa. The transition period was supposed to end with democratic elections in June 2005; however, the election date has been postponed to 2006. The situation in Congo remains fragile, with the goals of peace, effective administration and the reconstruction of an integrated, disciplined national army far from achieved (ICG 2005, ISS 2005). There is lack of unity within the “uneasy coalition of formal belligerents” (HRW 2005: 1) that makes up the Transitional Government, and a further challenge to peace are the armed groups outside the peace process. Rwanda and Uganda, who claimed full withdrawal from Congo in late 2002, continue to destabilise their big neighbour through their proxies. The MONUC peacekeeping force, with 16,000 troops the largest in the world but far too small to effectively provide safety, is very unpopular with the Congolese. It has not been able to prevent massacres of civilians in the Kivu provinces and Ituri region.22 The Economist (December 2004) quotes a witness saying: “Is MONUC here to do anything apart from count the bodies?” Its reputation was further damaged by revelations in mid 2004 about incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse of Congolese girls by the blue helmet soldiers – payment for the girls’ services ranged “from two eggs to $5 per encounter”.23 Refugees in Uganda 13
In December 2004, the IRC estimated that 3.8 million Congolese had lost their lives during the six years of conflict, with the majority having died from malnutrition, starvation and disease resulting from the war (IRC 2004). Over 2 million people had been driven from their homes, many beyond the reach of humanitarian agencies. Though the war affects everyone regardless of gender or age, its manifestations are gendered. Boys and young men are forcibly recruited to fight. Many of them become complicit in the widespread phenomenon of raping girls and women, as an act of war, especially in remote rural areas. The focus of the international community on creating a number of ‘islands of stability’ in Congo (the capital city and strategic provincial towns) while leaving the rural populations “in a general state of chaos” is increasingly criticised (Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers 2005).24
In September 2001, after the attack on the Twin Towers, I spoke to some of my Congolese friends. They were appalled, but also commented: “Well, what can we say? Does the world realise that in Congo we have a 9-11 every week?” Given the IRC (2004) estimate that 30,000 people die every month as a result of the conflict, their reaction was quite to the point. For two or three years they had been following the events and developments in their country from the Ugandan capital, and were dismayed, offended and hurt by the lack of attention to their country on the part of the international community. At the time of writing this chapter, late 2005, the situation has improved, and at times the Congolese young men included in this study allow themselves to be hopeful. However, they always retain a measure of scepticism. The situation is not straightforward. Though currently there is no full-blown war - the towns where they come from are relatively safe - they have this sense that at any time trouble may re-erupt. Some of them have visited their families at home - travel between Kampala and eastern Congo is possible - but those who do so are never sure of their safety. Yet when I talk to them, I get the impression some have decided that the only way forward is to accept their country’s status quo: the unrelenting insecurity, the ‘violent peace’.25
2. UGANDA26
The modern state of Uganda came into being with the declaration of its status as a British Protectorate in 1894. Historically, the many ethnic groups living in the territory now suddenly marked as a state, were organised under different socio-political systems. In the south and west of the country there were monarchical centralised governments, whereas the east and north (where a much more arid ecology prevails and many are cattle keepers) knew socio-political systems based on smaller units such as clans.27 When the British established the Uganda protectorate, they built it around the Buganda Kingdom, which was the largest and most prosperous of the five kingdoms in southern and western Uganda. As part of its policy of ‘indirect rule’, the British administration introduced the hierarchical political system of Buganda throughout its territory – including the north and the east where this model of government was alien. Social development (most importantly, education) took place in the south, while the northern and eastern population was considered more suitable for manual labour and soldiering. The legacy of this policy, Uganda’s north-south divide and the grudges and prejudices tied up with it, still pose a threat to the country’s national unity. The rivalry between the Anglican and Roman Catholic missionaries, and to a lesser degree the Muslim converters, moreover meant that by the time of independence religion and politics were inextricably linked, which has remained so. Today, around one third of the country’s population is Protestant, one third 14 Contexts
Catholic and one sixth Muslim. Others adhere to indigenous religions that have survived alongside. Uganda’s current population of around 25 million speaks over thirty distinct languages and dialects, of which Luganda, spoken in the Buganda region which encompasses Kampala, has the largest number of native speakers. English has been the country’s official language since independence in 1962. Uganda (its territory about the size of the United Kingdom) is currently divided into 78 districts, spread across four administrative zones: Northern, Eastern, Central and Western.
Flying into Entebbe airport on a day flight, one has this momentary sensation that the plane will do the last stretch gliding on Lake Victoria. Scary, yet a stunning sight: the vast expanse of water, dotted with green islands and miniature fishermen’s boats. Then comes the pleasurable thirty-mile drive from the airport to the capital Kampala: green hills, banana plantations, roadside stalls selling mangoes, passion fruit, pineapple and, in abundance, large bunches of matooke. Yet beyond this friendly first appearance, what is Uganda like? Its economy, politics and human rights situation – the issues that, more than its vibrant shades of green, are of real concern to the protagonists of this study? Uganda lies at the heart of a region plagued by civil conflict and war. Refugees from the Great Lakes Region (Congo, Rwanda and Burundi) and from the Horn of Africa (Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia) have all sought refuge in Uganda over the last fifteen years. However, Uganda has not always been a safe haven for those fleeing war and persecution: for many years the country’s population was itself faced with devastating social and civil conflict. During the regimes of Idi Amin (1971-1979) and Milton Obote II (1979-1985) an estimated eight hundred thousand Ugandan citizens were killed by civil war and politically motivated murders, and several hundred thousand people fled the country as refugees.28 Accounts of the terrors of Idi Amin’s dictatorship are well documented (Mamdani 1983), and his capricious personality as well as the sinister atmosphere in the country during his reign are captured in novels like The Last King of Scotland (Foden 1998) and Abyssinian Chronicles (Isegawa 1998).29 Among western audiences, the figure of Milton Obote did not leave a similarly lasting impression. Yet, according to historical sources the six years of Obote’s second presidency were equally harrowing in terms of the human rights violations and ethnic violence that the Ugandan population suffered.30
2.1 Museveni’s NRA/M: new hope
In 1986, Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA), which had been fighting a guerrilla war against Obote’s second regime since 1982, took power. This signalled a new era for post-independence Uganda. Museveni introduced his much-discussed ‘no-party democracy’ (elections were to be conducted on the basis of personal merit rather than affiliation to a political party), and reintroduced political and civil participation as well as an independent judiciary.31 His government ratified all key international human rights conventions, including the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights. Museveni managed to achieve what, in the mid 1980s, had been deemed near impossible: he brought back Uganda from “the abyss of its own huge-scale mass slaughter” (Berkeley 2001: 226). The new government also tackled the legacy of decades of economic mismanagement. In fact, this is what the international community has lauded Museveni most enthusiastically for: the significant economic growth – achieved by means of radical economic adjustment adopted under tutelage of the World Bank and the IMF – realised under his leadership. At 7%, Uganda’s annual average GDP growth rate between 1990 and 1997 was the second highest in sub-Saharan Africa (Amis 2001: 5). It remained high at 5.7% in 2004.32 Macro-economic policies like trade liberalisation and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises helped realise a revival of the manufacturing sector, increased industrial investment, and an Refugees in Uganda 15 improvement in infrastructure (especially roads and communication). The Ugandan-Asians, who were expelled during Idi Amin’s regime causing a heavy blow to the country’s economy, were welcomed to return, reclaim their properties and revive their businesses.33 Because four-fifth of the population earns a living through agriculture, the country’s economic base remains narrow, with foreign exchange dependent on the export of agricultural products. Coffee accounts for the bulk of export revenues; other foreign export earnings come from tea, cotton and tobacco, fish and flowers (and since the Congo war: gold (Reno 2000)). Nevertheless, in Uganda as a whole, the proportion of households living below the poverty line declined from 56% in 1992 to 44% in 1997/98 and to 35% in 2000 (Appleton 2001, Appleton et al 1999, UBOS 2003b).
Ten years after coming to power, Museveni won the country’s first presidential elections in 1996, and was re-elected in 2001. He has been embraced by the West as one among a ‘new generation’ of African leaders.34 His NRM (National Resistance Movement) government receives large sums of international development aid – not mere acts of charity: a plethora of four wheel drives with mzungu passengers litter Kampala’s traffic jams - and the country was among the first worldwide to benefit from debt relief.35 In 1998 alone, the first year of my fieldwork, honorary visits to Uganda included Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan as well as seven heads of UN agencies, among them the then High Commissioner for Refugees, Ms. Sadako Ogata. In 1986, Museveni recounts in his memoirs Sowing the Mustard Seed (1997), the NRA promised a “fundamental revolution” and not a mere “change of the guard” (Museveni 1997: 172). The West gave him the benefit of the doubt, perhaps hoping to find in this affable and witty new leader the person to make Uganda reflect once again the name Churchill had bestowed on it: “the pearl of Africa”. Museveni’s partners in Europe and the US still try to hold on to the positive picture; domestically, however, opposition to the Museveni government has grown considerably.
2.2 The NRM government: growing criticism
To many Ugandans, the widespread conception, mainly held by outsiders, that their country is an oasis of stability, economic progress, and democracy is a frustrating mirage.
Ssenkumba, quoted in Tripp 2004, p. 4
Despite its impressive recovery, Uganda is still among the world’s poorest countries. In 2005, it was ranked 145 of 177 in UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI).36 Social indicators like infant mortality and life expectancy at birth show a poor performance and appear to improve only very slowly (Amis 2001). Life expectancy, which was 48 in 1980 (a time of major social dislocation and civil war) had risen to 52 in 1990, but then dropped to 42 in 1997 and has remained this low, revealing the devastating impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. For many years, Uganda was infamous for its high percentage of HIV-infected people, but was also lauded for the government’s exceptionally open attitude towards the disease and its determination to employ active measures against it. Perhaps Uganda was the only country in Africa where AIDS was discussed – on the streets, on radio talk shows, in schools – without taboo. It is therefore very disconcerting that the massive billboard advertising ‘safe sex’, placed at the exit of Entebbe airport alongside the conventional welcome signs, has recently been removed. All over Kampala, these adverts have been replaced by ones exclusively promoting abstinence and faithfulness. Critics warn that this conservative, US-funded ‘abstinence-only’ program (part of George Bush’s global AIDS 16 Contexts plan and now endorsed by Museveni) will reverse Uganda’s successful fight against the disease (Barnett & Parkhurst 2005, HRW 2005b). There is fear that a revival of the epidemic, which primarily affects the economically productive segment of the population, will dwarf the country’s long-term macro economic development – not to mention the individual distress to be caused.37 Critics raise another point concerning the country’s economic development: Uganda’s oft-cited national growth rates conceal the reality of poverty and unequal distribution of resources caused by economic policies that do not reflect basic principles of human rights (Oloka-Onyango 2000). Oloka-Onyango argues that the government’s commitment to eradicating poverty does not go beyond lip service, and draws attention to the monies paid for “maintaining the coercive apparatus of the State (army, police, and to a lesser extent, prisons)” (2000: 43). His understated footnote: “This [Uganda’s high defence expenditure] might explain why Uganda is considered to be a military power in the region, but may also provide an idea why there is a prevalence of armed conflicts that have become more intensified over the years” (2000: 34). It is evident from the earlier discussions on Congo and Sudan that Uganda has been at the centre of regional violent conflicts for over a decade. Perhaps more pronounced than criticism on the NRM’s economic policies, are the political issues of contention put forward by Museveni’s critics. The system of no-party democracy has been justified by Museveni as one to minimise the salience of ethnicity: political parties are breeding grounds for the ethnic, religious and regional cleavages responsible for Uganda’s past woes. For some time it seemed to work. However, the no- party system became increasingly criticised when from the mid 1990s onwards the NRM government began to actively limit political space and centralise its power (Ahluwalia & Zegeye 2002, HRW 1999, Mugaju & Oloka-Onyango 2000, Tripp 2004). Few honest commentators today would dispute Uganda’s classification as a semi-authoritarian regime. Tripp writes:
“What distinguishes semi-authoritarian regimes from democratic regimes is their lack of consistency in guaranteeing civil and political liberties. At the same time, it is their regard for some of these liberties that distinguishes them from authoritarian regimes” (Tripp 2004: 5).
In Uganda, there is growing impingement on the freedom of press. For instance, under the 2002 Anti-Terrorism Act, radio stations can be closed down if they host exiled political dissidents on their talk shows, and those convicted of violating this law face up to ten years’ imprisonment or death by hanging (Tripp 2004: 11). Furthermore, human rights violations committed by Uganda’s military and government security services (arbitrary arrest, illegal detention and torture) are increasingly documented by national and international human rights organisations (Amnesty International 2000b, HRW 2004, 2005c).38 A particularly contentious subject is the coming presidential elections of 2006. There was controversy over the ‘free and fair’ character of the elections of 2001 (HRW 2001c, Tripp 2004), but the coming elections are regarded with much more apprehension. In July 2005, Ugandans voted to restore multi-party politics. For nearly 20 years, political parties had been allowed to exist in name, but all activities normally associated with political parties were outlawed, and they were barred from competing in elections. While the imminent transition to multi-party democracy is a positive development, it came with a shady side: despite a great deal of protest (also from within the NRM itself), Museveni’s cabinet amended the Constitution to enable the president to run for a third five-year term in 2006. Amid all the consternation this has evoked, are the concerns of refugees in Uganda, who fear they will be used as pawns by the different players in the political contest. Refugees in Uganda 17
Tripp writes: “Most semiauthoritarian rulers have only gone as far with political reforms as they have felt necessary to satisfy domestic and donor pressures” (Tripp 2004: 6). Museveni, though he retains a large support base, no longer satisfies domestic demands and has to deal with a growing opposition; donor pressures for reforms, on the other hand, have remained minimal. Already in 1999, the international community was accused of “publicly ignoring the abuses of civil and political rights” in Uganda (HRW 1999: 153). Among the reasons for this soft approach were regional and global political interests. For instance, through his support for the SPLA in southern Sudan, Museveni was seen to play a role in containing the Islamist government of Sudan. President George Bush’s visit to Uganda in 2003 – ostensibly focused on health and development, but with seeking cooperation in his war against terrorism as the obvious priority – further strengthened the bonds between the US and Uganda (Coleman 2003, Dumay 2003). The effect was felt by refugees from the Horn of Africa: ‘Arab-looking’ individuals were stopped on the streets and at times arrested, which presented a serious security concern for many refugees living in Kampala without IDs. As for the international community’s attitude, it appears particularly incredible that Uganda’s military involvement in the recent Congo war (see section 1.1) did not tarnish its reputation more critically (HRW 2001b, Reno 2000). It was the arrest on charges of treason of Kizza Besigye, Museveni’s rival for the 2006 presidential elections, which finally made the international community come out with rather forceful statements in November 2005, and freeze part of its aid money to Uganda. Lastly, a controversial issue of Uganda’s domestic politics which currently receives long overdue international attention is the civil war in northern Uganda. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel movement led by Joseph Kony, has been active in Gulu and Kitgum districts since the mid 1980s. Internal displacement is massive: 1.8 million people live in overcrowded camps set up by the government and euphemistically referred to as ‘protected villages’. This figure represents 80% of the entire population of the region (MSF 2004). Throughout my years in Uganda, the newspapers reported the terror that prevailed in the North, central to which were accounts of the LRA trademark: the forcible recruitment of children – notably in this war girls as much as boys - from schools, churches and villages. An estimated 30,000 children have been abducted and made into porters, ‘wives’ and soldiers since the start of the conflict. Not only Ugandan citizens are affected by the LRA war: Sudanese refugees living in camps and settlements in northern Uganda have also suffered repeated attacks (Hovil, Hovil & Moorehead 2002). In fact, out of 35 reported security incidents in Moyo and Adjumani districts in 2000, 30 were attacks on refugee settlements – particularly launched after food distribution or at harvest time - while 5 were directed against local Ugandan villages.39 In 2003, the LRA war was taken up as a case by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is to investigate the human rights violations committed by both parties in the conflict, i.e. the LRA and the Ugandan army (UPDF).40 The UPDF soldiers are supposed to protect the local population, but have a difficult relationship with the northern civilians. There are documented incidents of torture at UPDF barracks of villagers arrested as supposed rebel sympathisers. This difficult relationship must be seen in light of historical animosities. As was mentioned above, a longstanding issue of controversy in Uganda - and a major factor in the country’s history of ethnic conflict - is the divide, dating from colonial times, between the (underdeveloped) North and the (more developed) South of the country (Doornbos 1988, Kasozi 1994, Obbo 1988, Southall 1995, 1998). Northerners, who have lived with war and insecurity for twenty years while the rest of the country was largely peaceful and underwent considerable economic development, feel totally neglected by Museveni’s NRM government. They are unimpressed by the efforts of the national army to end the war in their area. The LRA war indeed bears testimony to the fact that the issue 18 Contexts of ‘national integration’ that Museveni was confronted with upon seizing power remains unresolved.
3. ATTITUDES TOWARD REFUGEE SETTLEMENT: CAMPS AND CITIES
3.1 Refugees in Uganda41
This study focuses on the experiences of young refugees from Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea who fled to Uganda during the late 1980s and 1990s. However, Uganda has a much longer history of hosting refugees. From the 1920s to the 1950s hundreds of thousands of Rwandan and Burundian peasants entered Uganda, fleeing, among other things, state- imposed forced labour by the Belgian colonial government and physical abuse by its representatives (Newbury 1988). Interestingly, these people were labelled ‘labour migrants’ and were considered an opportunity for economic growth. They slowly became assimilated into the clan structure in Buganda, took Baganda names, acquired land, married locally, and their grandchildren today may be only vaguely aware of their Rwandan or Burundian heritage. In the face of a ‘mass influx’ of this order today, such a response would be unimaginable (De Lorenzo 2002). In fact, when tens of thousands of Rwandan (Tutsi) refugees, fleeing the 1959 violence that accompanied the process of decolonisation entered Uganda, the then British administration organised rural camps for their settlement, starting a trend that has continued up to today (Gingyera-Pinycwa 1998a).42 From the mid 1950s onward, southern Sudanese refugees, fleeing the first civil war in their country, crossed into Uganda and were settled in the northern districts. Their arrival occasioned the adoption of the Control of Refugees from the Sudan Act (1955), perhaps the first piece of legislation in Africa specifically relating to refugees. By the end of the civil war in 1972, 72,000 Sudanese refugees were registered in Uganda, though the true figure may have been more than double that. An unknown number of Sudanese individuals did not stay in Uganda’s northern districts, but moved southwards. Communities of their descendants can nowadays be found in Kampala and also in Jinja, Uganda’s second town, where many found work on the sugar plantations. The on-off civil war in Zaire during the early independence years 1960-1967 also sent refugees to Uganda. Their numbers were estimated at 33,000, but again it is hard to know for certain since many of them did not live in camps but were self-settled and managed to find niches in the Ugandan economy (Pirouet 1988). Though many eventually repatriated to Congo, several thousand remained in Uganda in the late 1990s in their refugee settlement in Hoima District, where they were no longer assisted by international organisations. An unknown number integrated into the Ugandan society, and communities of these ‘old caseload’ Congolese and their descendants can be found in Kampala. Today, refugees in Uganda, as a matter of law and policy, are placed in rural settlements run jointly by UNHCR and the Government of Uganda (GoU), specifically the Ministry of Disaster Preparedness and Refugees in the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM).43 Both OPM44 and UNHCR claim that refugee settlements are the best way of organising refugee protection and assistance. They invoke the common argument of national security and limited resources, and moreover claim that rural settlements (unlike fenced camps) recreate an environment reminiscent of that of the refugees’ countries of origin. As we will shortly see, internationally this policy is subject to growing criticism. While the Ugandan government’s response to what is now referred to as the ‘old caseload’ refugees (those who arrived from the mid 1950s to 1970s) was still relatively flexible, today, with UNHCR being increasingly in charge of all matters relating to refugees, this is no Refugees in Uganda 19 longer the case. Refugees – considered a temporary presence - are ordered to live in spatially segregated refugee settlements; their self-settlement among Ugandans, and thus their local integration, is strongly discouraged.
In the late 1990s, Uganda hosted refugees from Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. There were a total of nearly forty transit camps and refugee settlements designated for them in rural areas in northern, western and south-western Uganda. Refugee settlements for Sudanese refugees are located in the northern districts of Arua, Adjumani, Moyo and Kitgum. The last transit camps were closed down in 1998 and all current settlements in these districts are agricultural settlements where refugees are supposed to become self-sufficient. For security reasons (attacks by the LRA and the proximity to the Sudanese border) smaller numbers of Sudanese were also sent to Kiryandongo settlement in Masindi District in western Uganda. Somali refugees as well as small numbers of Ethiopians and Eritreans are settled in Nakivale refugee settlement in Mbarara District in south-western Uganda, where there are also some Congolese and Rwandan refugees. More Rwandans live in Oruchinga refugee settlement also in Mbarara District. Congolese refugees fleeing the RCD rebellion against Kabila in the late 1990s were settled in Kyangwali and Oruchinga settlements. The UNHCR 1999 Global Report stated that “given their agricultural background and the quality of land made available to them in the settlements, these refugees rapidly progressed towards self-sufficiency in food” (1999: 165).45 No mention is made of the considerable number of especially young people from the towns of the Kivu Provinces, who refused to go to these settlements and sought refuge in Kampala city. This is all the more surprising given the fact that during the years of my research this very group caused a great concern to UNHCR’s Branch Office in Kampala and the Government of Uganda, who were both highly uncomfortable with their presence. In fact, all different nationalities of refugees have individuals and communities among them who are self-settled in both rural and urban areas. However, whereas the total numbers of refugees hosted in camps and settlements is monitored and statistics are readily available, the numbers of self-settled refugees are contentious. According to UNHCR statistics, the total number of refugees in refugee settlements varied roughly between 180,000 and 210,000 during the years of this research (1998-2001).46 The Government of Uganda estimate for unassisted, self-settled refugees not included in the statistics totalled 50,000. Yet other sources suggest that as many as two- thirds of all refugees in Uganda may be self-settled (Nabuguzi 1998), which would imply a total of around 400,000. The US Committee for Refugees came up with a number of 352,000 Sudanese refugees in Uganda in 2000. Statistics on the numbers of refugees are often highly flawed for political reasons,47 and the true number is thus impossible to ascertain. As we will shortly see, it must be attributed to political reasons too, that information on self-settled refugees in urban areas is often not just flawed but entirely lacking. Kampala city hosts refugees from all nationalities of refugees that have sought refuge in Uganda since the early 1990s: Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Rwanda and Burundi. It is these people, labelled urban refugees, that my research is about.
3.2 Urban refugees
Njoroge peered through the darkness and looked beyond. Far away a multitude of lights could be seen. Above the host of lights was the grey haze of the sky. Njoroge let his eyes dwell on the scene. Nairobi, the big city, was a place of mystery that had at last called away his brothers from the family circle. The 20 Contexts
attraction of this strange city that was near and yet far weakened him. He sighed. He could not yet understand why his brothers had just decided to go. Like that.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep not, Child, 1964, p. 41
Researchers, humanitarian agencies and governments have used the term ‘urban refugee’ meaning different things (Fabos 2003, Kibreab 1996, Rogge 1986). Some researchers refer to refugees with urban origins as urban refugees, while others use it for refugees who live in urban areas regardless of their origins. Humanitarian organisations may use the term solely for those who constitute their ‘urban refugee caseload’ and governments for those legally classified as refugees. For this study, an ‘urban refugee’ is defined as an individual who has crossed an international border to flee the violation of his/her basic needs in terms of physical safety and livelihood, and who has taken up residence in the city, however temporary, regardless of whether or not the relevant authorities granted this person permission to do so. This is not to say that this authorisation is irrelevant: the fact that the majority of urban refugees are forced to lead clandestine lives in African towns and cities has a considerable impact on their security situation as well as on their livelihood and survival strategies. Gaim Kibreab named urban refugees “what the eye refuses to see” (Kibreab 1996). What he referred to was that due to the dominant ‘camp paradigm’ (all refugees belong in camps) assistance to and protection of those who self-settle in urban areas is sidelined by both national governments and the international community. Moreover, he noted, academic attention to the situation of urban refugees has been extremely marginal. This is not coincidental: with policies being highly discouraging of refugees settling in urban areas, social science research into the issue is likely to be censored or contested (FMRS 2003). When I first went to Kampala in 1998, only a handful of studies dealing with the issue of urban refugees in Africa existed, all focused on refugees in towns and cities in Sudan (Karadawi 1987, Kibreab 1995, 1996, Kuhlman 1990, 1994, Post 1983, Weaver 1988) and Tanzania (Malkki 1995a, Sommers 1993). Over the past few years, interest in the subject has picked up. The number of researchers dealing with issues pertaining to refugees in urban areas is on the increase (Al-Sharmani 2004, Coker 2004a, b, Fabos 1999a, FMRS 2003, Jacobsen 2005, Kagwanja 1998, Kagwanja, Ndege & Odiyo 2001, Lammers 2006, Landau & Jacobsen 2004, Lejukole 2002, Majodina & Peberdy 2000, Marfleet 2006, Sommers 2001a, Willems 2003). UNHCR too appears to take steps in acknowledging that refugees in urban areas can no longer be ignored. In 2003 it published a “guiding principles and good practice” paper with a more progressive take on the issue than the organisation’s earlier statements (UNHCR 2003b). These developments, delayed as they are, are extremely welcome given the fast growing presence of refugees living in Africa’s towns and capital cities.
Motivations for leaving refugee camps
In the late 1970s refugee movements began to change their destinations. From having been primarily rural to rural, the movement of refugees to cities increased dramatically and an oft-quoted estimate is that by the mid 1980s the traffic of refugees to towns and cities accounted for one third of all refugee movements in Africa (Rogge 1986).48 No educated guess of numbers or percentages has been published since. UNHCR observes that the number of urban refugees “appears to have increased considerably in recent years” (2003: 3), but provides no statistics. How can the growing numbers of urban refugees in Africa be explained? Rogge (1986) points at structural changes in the causes of flight, which are the result of changes in the patterns of conflict. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he argues, one of the dominant causes of refugee movement was anti-colonial guerrilla war in peripheral rural Refugees in Uganda 21 areas. In the course of the 1970s, confrontations between African states as well as internal resistance movements came to have more impact on urban areas. Rebel movements started to draw much of their support from an urbanised and largely youthful population. More and more people from urban areas were forced to flee in search of international protection elsewhere, and it is hardly surprising that many of them chose to settle in towns and cities in their countries of asylum. However, it is not only urban people who avoid refugee camps and instead seek refuge in the city. The most important reason for the increase in numbers of urban refugees is that they are part and parcel of the large-scale migration movements from rural areas to cities, which are among the most significant economic, demographic and social phenomena in Africa today (Massey et al 2005). In many African countries, processes of urbanisation were in full swing by the late 1970s and urban growth rates in Africa have remained the highest in the world (Drakakis-Smith 2000, Gilbert & Gugler 1992, Parnwell 1993, Simone 2003). Several factors contribute to people’s leaving rural areas and their migration to the city. The agricultural sector - by far the dominant sector in most African countries - is under heavy pressure due to high rates of population growth, loss of productive capability of the land as a result of over-cultivation and over-grazing and the consequent environmental degradation, as well as due to the expansion of commercial agriculture. In most countries, property rights regimes are based on customary law and do not provide adequate protection against encroaching commercial interest, including development projects like the building of dams (Kibreab 2003). Many are left with few alternatives but to migrate to urban areas in search of other sources of livelihood. However, migration, both permanent and circular, is not limited to periods of distress or emergency – it has become a ‘normal’ livelihood strategy for increasing numbers of rural poor.49 The reasons why refugees migrate from rural camps and settlements to urban areas are similar in many respects (Kibreab 1996). Even though in camps refugees are supposedly taken care of by the international community and in settlements they are given land to cultivate, the reality is that food rations are often insufficient and the agricultural land unyielding. For instance, by the end of 2001, only 24 per cent of all Sudanese refugees in settlements in northern Uganda were reported self-sufficient. Three years earlier it had been envisaged that “almost all” refugees with land allocated would be fully self-sufficient (UNHCR 2001b). Droughts, followed by heavy rains, the shortage and poor quality of farmland, and the insecurity caused by rebel attacks in and around the settlements, are the key factors responsible. Thus, unable to cater for themselves or their families, refugees move on to towns and cities in search of gainful employment. But migration motivations cannot be explained in economic terms only. Literature on the subject mentions gender- specific social and cultural reasons; witness Southall’s remark about his 1950s research in Kampala that women come to town “as a more permanent escape … not only … from tribal sanctions, kinship obligations and male dominance, but in many cases from marriage itself” (1961: 224). These social issues were central to several of the personal accounts I received in Kampala. One young woman, Rose, arrived in Kampala after escaping her ‘home’ in one of the refugee settlements in Arua District. After both her parents had died and her brothers had rejoined the war in southern Sudan, she and her younger sister were taken in by an aunt. This woman tried to force Rose, who had just finished her A-levels, into a marriage with “an old man”, as his third wife. When she realised the deal had been struck, Rose left without informing anyone. She summed up her decision in one line: “I want education, not marriage, and how do I know if this man is not already sick [i.e. has AIDS]?” During her first weeks in Kampala, Rose was nervous and felt lost in “this big city”. She worried about her sister who would be wondering where she was and thought up ways of contacting her. Yet she was determined to stay where she was: a long way from 22 Contexts family interference. Some young Sudanese men also escaped to Kampala from the refugee settlements for reasons related to marriage and the social norms and practices involved. I was told:
If a boy in the camps has a girlfriend and she gets pregnant, the boy usually has to leave, because he cannot afford to marry. He cannot afford to pay the parents of the girl, or to provide for her and the baby’s upkeep. So he runs, even if he really loves the girl. He fears the parents of the girl, they may have him jailed on charges of defilement him or even kill him. But for the girl it is also really bad: getting pregnant kills her education. No parents or uncles will pay school fees for her anymore.
My findings agree with what is argued in other studies: refugees come to urban areas because of what they see as intolerable conditions in the camps, and the very limited possibilities for improving their quality of living (Horst 2006b, Sommers 2001a, Willems 2003). Key issues are insufficient food, no job opportunities, the prevalence of illness,50 family and social problems, and other concerns like the “dust and heat” mentioned by Somali refugees in Kenya’s Dadaab camps (Horst 2003: 143). Refugees thus move from rural refugee settlements to towns partly for reasons similar to those of average rural-urban migrants, but they also have additional reasons that are inextricably linked to their being refugees. The loss of physical security is the most important one of these.51 A country report for Uganda (UNHCR 1999) states:
“During 1998, Kitgum district has been affected by insecurity. The rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (led by Kony) attacked trading centres and even Kitgum town. Acholi-Pii refugee settlement has also suffered from rebel movement and ambushes on the Lira-Kitgum road ... In Adjumani and Moyo districts, settlements have been regularly attacked by rebels and bandits, whose main aim seems to be looting of food and medicines. These attacks have led to the abduction of refugees, renewed displacement and loss of life and properties” (UNHCR 1999: 4).
In August 1998, invited by the Refugee Rights research project, I spent a week in Adjumani going round to the refugee settlements for Sudanese refugees in the district. I recall how late one night the atmosphere in the LWF house where we stayed got rather tense when we were radioed that LRA rebels had entered one of the nearby settlements. The following morning we were informed that twelve people were abducted and seven men beheaded, their wives and mothers having been forced to watch.52 Such incidents confirm that all aspects of wartime violence have gender and age-specific manifestations. This is also illustrated by the fact that young, male refugees were particularly insecure due to SPLA activity in the refugee settlements. Sudanese young men feared the forced recruitment carried out by the SPLA on Ugandan territory, often with the knowledge or even active cooperation of the Ugandan army. Those who had been soldiers but had defected – and knew the punishment for desertion – feared for their lives. Despite the provision in the OAU Convention that “for reasons of security, countries of asylum shall, as far as possible, settle refugees at a reasonable distance from the frontier of their country of origin” (art. 2(6)), no effort was made to ensure this. The proximity of the settlements for Sudanese refugees to the Sudan-Uganda border allowed SPLA soldiers and recruiters easy access to the refugee population. Well-organised recruitment missions took place in the settlements in Moyo and Adjumani in 1998 and 1999, while individual Sudanese boys and men were “hand-picked” to go and fight in Sudan throughout the years (Matsamura 2001, Mugeere 2001, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). The majority of Sudanese young men in Kampala mentioned ‘insecurity in the camps’ as the number one reason for coming to the capital and availing themselves of the city’s anonymity. Refugees in Uganda 23
While the above examples refer to insecurity coming from outside the camps, research shows that ethnic or clan conflicts within refugee camps as well as domestic and sexual violence also contributed to people’s insecurity. In Ugandan settlements there were tensions between Dinka and other Sudanese refugees, between Rwandan and Congolese Tutsi, Hutu and Banyamulenge refugees, and between members of various Somali clans. Ethnically inspired violence is also reported to exist in Kenyan refugee camps (Crisp 1999a, Horst 2006b). Accounts of sexual discrimination and abuse (detainment of supposed adulteresses; forced marriages; prostitution; forced circumcision; rape) abounded in both countries (Mulumba 1998, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). While one would expect these forms of abuse to be a reason for women to leave the refugee settlements, it must be noted that only few women have the means to leave and come to town. Verdirame & Harrell- Bond write:
“A much-neglected reason for the high incidence of rape is that camps, like prisons, are institutions that generate certain types of violence. Within an artificial community, characterised by unemployment, lack of future prospects, total dependence on insufficient food rations, and at times, by a preponderance of single and often young men, it is hardly surprising that rape becomes endemic” (2005: 149).
In such a situation, the authorities (the GoU, UNHCR and NGOs) should be extra alert, but instead sexual violence and other forms of abuse often went unreported and unpunished. Verdirame (1991) writes:
“Settlements are spaces that are virtually beyond the rule of law and in which the life of refugees ends up being governed by a highly oppressive blend of rules laid by camp commanders and the humanitarian agencies and customary practices of the various communities”.
Insecurity was indeed often aggravated by those meant to safeguard it. Police and camp commanders were reported to use excessive force to maintain public order, and there were also incidents in which UNHCR and NGO staff were involved, at times as silent witnesses. The local security arrangements, endorsed by UNHCR and the GoU, also played a part: “Refugees hired as security guards in the camps and settlements often received inadequate training, and some of them were known to beat up other refugees” (Verdirame & Harrell- Bond 2005: 141). Besides, community leaders could impose a sentence of corporal punishment for conduct that would not constitute a crime under Ugandan law (e.g. shouting at night, selling or drinking beer at certain hours).53 All these incidents happened despite the fact that Uganda is party to the 1984 Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and other human rights instruments that prohibit such acts. Lomo concludes that refugee settlements create “‘lawless’ milieus in which refugee rights are trampled on with impunity” (2000: 3).
The appeal of the city
It is not only the difficult and sometimes dangerous living circumstances in refugee settlements that make people decide to leave. There are specific factors why towns and cities positively attract refugees. Of course the main reason is that which also attracts average rural migrants: the economic opportunities that the city is believed to offer. Another reason is UNHCR’s programme for resettlement to a third country. Alongside repatriation and local integration, resettlement to a third country is one of UNHCR’s three durable solutions for refugees. The ‘third country’ is usually one outside Africa, which 24 Contexts makes resettlement a highly sought-after prize. According to the Resettlement Handbook (UNHCR 2004c) individuals in urgent need of legal and physical protection not adequately offered in their host countries are eligible for resettlement. They may include persecuted human rights activists, high profile politicians, women-at-risk, survivors of torture, and unaccompanied minors. There are also places for refugees with complicated medical needs and for those with minimal prospects for local integration. Family reunification also takes place under the resettlement program. Despite the fact that criteria and procedures are meticulously spelled out in the 700-page Resettlement Handbook, in practice the criteria for selection often appear to be applied rather arbitrarily. At times it is primarily a matter of perseverance on the part of the refugee that determines selection. In Kampala, refugees were convinced that those who got resettled had paid the secretary to “get on the list”. Stories proliferated about how this woman had “grown fat” over the years as a result of “eating” the refugees’ money. Allegations of bribery were not denied by certain UNHCR staff in private conversations, but for a long time nothing was done to remove the woman concerned from her post for failure of catching her red-handed. At the same time, resettlement was approached as a business by and among refugees themselves. Individuals selected for resettlement were offered money by other refugees for taking someone as their alleged wife or husband. In one case a Somali man was forced, without financial compensation, by elders in his community to marry a girl, flown in from Ethiopia several days before the final interview, and take her with him to the US. During the medical test, the girl proved HIV positive, as a result of which their case was rejected at the last moment. The Somali man, who had been pursuing his resettlement for years, fell into a very bad depression, and the issue turned into a nasty argument between him and those who had orchestrated the marriage. What happened to the girl, whose HIV status became a public secret, I do not know. Not only in Uganda does the issue of resettlement cause much controversy among refugees and between refugees and UNHCR. In Kenya, certain UNHCR staff were put on trial and removed from office for accepting bribes (Blomfield 2002). In 2004, UNHCR introduced its Resettlement Anti-Fraud Plan of Action, which is also supposed to target the internet scams in which organisations claiming to be affiliated to UNHCR promise resettlement opportunities for an “administrative fee”.54 A major problem with the resettlement procedure in Uganda was not only that it appeared neither fair nor efficient, but also lacked transparency. Refugees were given inadequate information and thus many believed, wrongly, that resettlement was their right. The lack of transparency, in combination with people’s often desperate situations, gave rise to constant rumours and suspicions (Okoth 2001b). Some developed an obsession with trying to obtain this once-in- a-lifetime chance to the extent of losing their ability to work towards making a living in Kampala. A great deal more can be said on this subject, which will feature in some of the narratives in Part II of this book.55 The point here is that resettlement was one reason for refugees to come to the city. Kibreab shows that well over one third of the Eritrean refugees in Khartoum stated they had come to Sudan’s capital first and foremost to search for resettlement and emigration opportunities (1996: 161). Somali refugees in Kenya came to Nairobi because they “felt that in Dadaab they were too far away from where decisions were being made and they feared that information that was meant for them would never reach the camps” (Horst 2003: 142). Aware of this pull factor, UNHCR’s Branch Office in Kampala did its utmost to convince refugees that registration for resettlement could only be accessed in the settlements. There were individuals who left Kampala and (temporarily) returned to their respective settlements for this reason. However, given all the misinformation and controversy around the subject of resettlement it should come as no surprise that – regardless of what UNHCR claimed - people chose to remain in the vicinity Refugees in Uganda 25 of what they saw as the powers of decision making, i.e. UNHCR’s Branch office in Kampala and the foreign embassies in the capital. There are other reasons why refugees come to town, e.g. for purposes of trade, and, for many young individuals, because they are in search of opportunities for secondary and further education (see Chapter Five). Individuals also leave the settlements to join relatives or compatriots and to be able to communicate with family or friends back home or abroad (Kibreab 1996, Willems 2003). Maintaining contact is extremely important for social and emotional reasons, but also because relatives or friends who have gone abroad may be in a position to send money. The Western Union and MoneyGram offices used for this purpose are mainly to be found in towns and cities, where, moreover, phone calls are cheaper and access to Internet and e-mail is available. Research increasingly shows that refugees in urban areas in Africa are enmeshed in transnational networks that include refugees and compatriots in urban centres in Europe, the US and Australia (Fabos 2004).56 In line with this, the notion, especially held by young people, that the city is the place where “things move and happen” also explains their movement away from the settlements. Though it rarely came up as the first reason, an undercurrent to many of the young people’s accounts was that they had grown bored – or depressed - in the rural settlements and were curious to experience something new. They were looking ahead, saw themselves as the generation ready to make a change to Africa’s future and to do so they needed to be in a “modern place”. In order to be part of and experience the larger world - the world beyond East Africa - one ought to be, they reasoned, in the city. Last of all, migration theory stresses the relevance of social networks as an explanatory factor for migration to towns and cities: people move because others with whom they are connected have migrated before (Massey et al 2005). This is true also for refugees. Refugees who have moved to the city occasionally visit the refugee camps, and inspire friends and relatives there to also try their luck in the city. However, as we will see, the emphasis that migration theory puts on social networks for their vital facilitating role to newcomers in the city (in terms of financial assistance, employment and accommodation) does not always apply to the case of refugees. Most refugees in Kampala lacked these support structures.
3.3 Faults of the camp paradigm
Urban refugees and asylum seekers tend to include a wide variety of people, some, but by no means all, of whom have genuine refugee claims. They include opportunistic and dynamic individuals as well as those who have failed to survive as part of the normal migration (or refugee) flow – the mal-adjusted, the social outcasts, etc. – a factor which can make status determination particularly difficult. Furthermore, since such movement is often stimulated, at least partially, by a desire to improve their economic potential, urban refugees and asylum seekers tend to share a culture of expectation, which, if not satisfied, often leads to frustration and violence.
UNHCR, Policy and Practice Regarding Urban Refugees, Discussion Paper, 1995, p. 1
Refugees are often seen as sad and powerless victims in need of care and assistance. However, those who – against the policy dictum – refuse to live in settlements and choose to reside in urban areas receive a very different label. In its policy documents, UNHCR has referred to urban refugees as ‘irregular movers’ and in private conversations with the organisation’s staff in Kampala they were named demanding, troublesome, choosy, stubborn, and violent.57 Especially the young Congolese men and women arriving in Kampala from late 1998 onward, who expressed their refusal to go to the refugee 26 Contexts settlements with eloquent determination, were viewed in those terms (witness a little sequence in The Monitor: ‘Congolese refugees plan protest today’, 21 August – ‘UNHCR warns refugees’, 23 August – ‘Refugees protest’, 25 August (Kayizzi 2001, Okoth 2001a, c)). An interesting anecdote from Sudan is that in the early 1970s, when Ethiopian students started arriving in Khartoum fleeing government suppression of the militant student movement, the Sudanese Commissioner of Refugees (COR) admitted them as refugees, but UNHCR, questioning their true motivation for leaving their homeland, labelled them ‘education seekers’ (Karadawi 1987: 120).
People move for myriad reasons, yet ultimately all are centred on a person’s desire to achieve a more secure, more fulfilling life. “Migration”, Henrietta Moore writes, “is often not a single, discrete event, but part of a strategy for coping with economic change and opportunity which depends on multiple links being established across borders and between rural and urban areas” (1988: 96). It is indeed as simple as that. In many African countries, migrants are involved in circular migration: they keep a rural home, but move to the city for weeks or months at a stretch in an attempt to obtain the ‘best’ of both worlds by reducing expensive living costs in the city and retaining rural land revenues or food resources (Drakakis-Smith 2000). Refugees often do not have the means to move between refugee settlements and the city - for monetary reasons and because of the risks of travelling without permission - but some manage to lead a dual camp-city existence. This further illustrates why the camp paradigm is untenable: preventing people from moving freely presents a naïve attempt to thwart a natural imperative. People move all the time and look for their own solutions if given half a chance. Indeed, people “break laws and avoid restrictions in their determination to negotiate a life in exile on their own terms” – and do so “based on the careful assessment of risk and opportunity” (Sommers 2001: 350). At the same time, this “careful assessment” does not have the same outcome for everybody: many are those with no desire at all to move to the city. Therefore UNHCR’s worry that “soon we’ll have all this country’s refugees knocking the gates of Kampala!” is not only simplistic but also unfounded. It rather confirms the general image held of refugees: they are not regarded as individuals who make their decisions on logical grounds, but as people subject to forces beyond their control, who yield to herd behaviour. In addition to being unrealistic, the camp policy presents a serious example of non-compliance with the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees: it de facto violates Article 26 which states that “a host country shall accord to refugees lawfully in its territory the right to choose their place of residence and to move freely within its territory”. Lomo argues:
“the right to freedom of movement is the gateway to the enjoyment of other human rights by any human being ... Failure to uphold this right is perhaps the single most important obstacle to refugees recovering from the consequences of being forcibly uprooted” (2000: 36).
Restricting people to specific geographical locations inhibits their ability to devise coping strategies. The fact that the camp policy is applied indiscriminately to all refugees irrespective of their needs or abilities aggravates the situation. Individuals who have grown up in urban areas, professionals, graduates and skilled labourers, will be seriously hampered in their survival strategies when restricted to rural settlements. Like me, who grew up in an urban environment, they do not know how to build a hut and have never been taught how to ‘live off the land’. Because so many individuals’ welfare is not served by being restricted to life in a refugee camp, it is indefensible that refugees who self-settle in urban areas are excluded from international assistance and protection. It makes it very doubtful to say the least that the camp paradigm is devised with a view to the welfare of the people who have to live in Refugees in Uganda 27 them. Critics summarise the reasons why UNHCR and host governments endorse the camp paradigm as follows: 1) African host governments place refugees in spatially segregated sites because that would best serve the issue of national security. By controlling refugees, camps are meant to de-politicise them, although in reality it often has the opposite effect; 2) UNHCR promotes repatriation as the ideal durable solution for refugees from the South, and African host governments also see refugees as temporary guests. Settling people in camps keeps up the prospect of repatriation as a viable option;58 3) Camps are big business: apart from the jobs that are created and the foreign currency that they attract, the areas where camps are located experience a ‘make-over’ in terms of infrastructure and services (which often goes to waste if refugees are relocated or repatriate); 4) A policy of settling refugees in segregated camps and settlements facilitates the delivery of humanitarian assistance and makes the tragedies more visible for those expected to fund UNHCR’s operations (Black 1998, Harrell-Bond 1986, 1996, 1998, Hovil 2002, Jacobsen 2002, Kibreab 1989, Kuhlman 1994, Lomo 2000, Malkki 1995a, Schmidt 1998). Criticism of the camp paradigm is growing. It has been made an issue of international advocacy since 2004 and it has gained momentum with the North/South Conference on Refugees Warehousing held in Geneva in September 2005. The Anti- Warehousing Campaign is meant to inform governments and the public of the long-term detrimental effects of refugee camps for people’s well-being. It advocates alternative policy responses to the problem of refugees, central to which is a rights-based approach that is to replace or complement the humanitarian and emergency approach that has long been prevalent in most refugee situations.59
Between 1991 and 2002, the population of Kampala grew by 70 per cent: from approximately 775,000 to over 1,200,000 (UBOS 2003a). This is an ongoing trend. Among the many newcomers to Uganda’s capital city will be increasing numbers of refugees from neighbouring countries. As long as they judge their livelihoods and safety to be better secured there, they will continue to move to the country’s capital, whether or not this means defying government policies. If no measures are taken to acknowledge and act upon their presence, the well-being and security of many of these semi-illegal city dwellers, despite their individual ingenuity, will be seriously compromised. In the following section, I will expand on the policies and practice pertaining to urban refugees in Kampala.
4. REFUGEE LAW, POLICY AND PRACTICE IN UGANDA
The Government of Uganda, strongly supported in this by UNHCR, endorses the camp paradigm in its handling of refugees within its state territory. It emphasises, however, that refugees are not placed in fenced camps, but in rural settlements where they are given land to farm. The idea is that refugees become self-sufficient through rural agriculture. In 1998, UNHCR and the GoU launched the Self-Reliance Strategy (SRS) for Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda in order to “slowly but certainly bring refugees … to a situation where they are able to manage their own lives with as much ‘external aid’ as the national population”, and to “integrate the services in the five key areas of assistance (health, education, community services, agriculture and infrastructure) … into regular government structures and policies … to make a reality of the slogan from relief to development” (PMO & UNHCR 1998: 3).60 It is on account of this rural settlement policy that both the government and UNHCR claim that Uganda’s refugee program is the most successful as well as among the most generous and liberal in Africa (Kato 2000, Outa & Sesanga 2001). 28 Contexts
However, many critical voices are to be heard. Nabuguzi argues that despite Uganda’s rhetorical goodwill,
“the perception of refugees as a political/security problem, as an economic ‘burden’ and as a temporary phenomenon … has generally led to policies aimed at controlling, segregating, pacifying, depoliticising, and therefore marginalising the refugees” (1998: 57).
The evaluation of such a statement requires a closer look at Uganda’s policies and practices as well as its legislative framework pertaining to refugees. Several studies have evaluated Uganda’s domestic refugee legislation with a view to its compliance with the provisions of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the 1969 OAU Convention Governing Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa and other human rights instruments, as well as with the human rights standards contained in the Bill of Rights of the 1995 Uganda Constitution (Khiddu-Makubuya 1994, Kiapi 1998, Lomo 2000, Lomo, Naggaga & Hovil 2001, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). I fully endorse the premise of these studies that all refugee issues must be discussed using a rights-based approach. This section particularly draws on The Human Rights Dimension of Asylum Law and Practice in Uganda (Lomo 2000) and on Rights in Exile: Janus-faced Humanitarianism (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005) to discuss the human rights situation of refugees in Uganda.
4.1 Legislation and status determination
The Control of Alien Refugees Act (CARA)
In Uganda the legal and institutional framework for protecting human rights is to a large extent in place. The Bill of Rights of the 1995 Constitution incorporates all the fundamental principles of human rights guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenants on Civil and Political and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICCPR and ICESCR) as well as the Convention against Torture. However – in addition to the generally deteriorating human rights situation in Uganda discussed above - a major obstacle to the enjoyment of human rights by refugees is the Control of Alien Refugees Act (CARA) of 1960, a pre-independence piece of legislation, which forms the legal basis for the government’s refugee policy and practice. This law is inconsistent with international refugee law standards. The CARA incorporates neither the provisions of the 1951 UN and 1969 OAU Conventions (both of which Uganda has ratified) nor any human rights principles. Moreover, its definition of a refugee is arbitrary, and it confers great powers, without prescribing any checks, to the Minister in charge and other officials dealing with refugees.
Definition of a refugee: According to the CARA, the determination of who is a refugee is left to the Minister’s discretion without any rules or guidelines. Section 3(1) of the CARA reads, “‘refugee’ means any person being one of a class of aliens declared by the Minister by statutory instrument to be refugees”. There is no mention of “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” as in the 1951 UN Convention, nor of the 1969 OAU Convention, which provides that the term ‘refugee’ also applies to “every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disrupting public order in either part or whole of his country of origin or nationality is compelled to leave his Refugees in Uganda 29
place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality” (Art 1). Access to Courts: The 1951 Convention (Art 16) commands that refugees shall have ‘free access to the courts of law on the territory of all Contracting States’. Uganda’s Constitution provides that whoever considers his/her rights to have been violated may seek redress through the courts. However, access to the courts is not necessarily ‘free’, and refugees who seek redress through the courts must pay their own legal fees. Under the Control of Alien Refugees Act refugees have no right of access to the courts. Detention: The CARA provides that, ‘If the Minister is satisfied that any refugee is acting in a manner prejudicial to peace and good order in Uganda or is prejudicing relations between Uganda and any other government, he may by order under his hand direct that such refugee be detained in prison’ (Art 9(1)). There is no provision for appeal to the courts against this executive detention order. Similarly a refugee may be detained on the order of a settlement commander on being convicted of a disciplinary offence, and again there is no provision for appeal. As for the situation in prisons, research has shown that refugees are being held on remand for periods far exceeding the statutory period, that they are unable to access a lawyer, and that courts are unwilling to grant bail in the absence of a person to stand surety. Other difficulties are language barriers and due to the absence of family to provide for it, the lack of adequate food. Freedom of Movement: The 1951 Convention directs that each contracting state shall ‘accord to refugees lawfully in its territory the right to choose their place of residence and to move freely within its territory subject to regulations applicable to aliens generally in the same circumstances’ (Art 26). Ugandan law allows an alien who has lawfully entered the country to move freely and to live wherever he may choose. However, the movement of refugees and their right to live anywhere in Uganda is restricted. Under the CARA the Minister, at his absolute discretion, has the power to order any refugee to reside in a refugee settlement or any other place in Uganda or to move from one settlement to another. Refugees have no locus standi to challenge these orders through courts of law. Moreover, refugees may not move outside their camps or settlements without the permission of the camp or settlement commander. This presents a serious obstacle: in order to ‘legally’ leave the settlement, one must first get a letter from the chairman of the Refugee Welfare Committee (RWC) (who may or may not be disposed to provide it), to visit the office of the camp commander, who then may or may not provide a letter of permission to travel to a specific location for a limited period of time. Aside from the fact that these offices may be far away, a common complaint is that camp commanders abuse their powers, make arbitrary decisions and some demand to be paid for signing a travel consent form. Without such a referral letter from the settlements, refugees are in principle not received by UNHCR/InterAid personnel in Kampala.
The Ugandan government acknowledges that the Control of Alien Refugees Act (CARA) is outdated (Kisambira 2001, Nakazibwe 2001). In response to domestic and international criticism of this Act it drafted the Refugees Bill 2003. This bill incorporates the 1951 UN and the 1969 OAU Convention definitions of the term ‘refugee’ and recognises other rights such as family rights, rights of women to be granted refugee status on account of gender persecution, provisions for family reunification, and refugees’ rights to independent counsel. It has, however, retained the placing of refugees in settlements and hence restrictions on the freedom of movement. The Bill is also silent about the right of refugees to seek redress in courts of law. Despite continued lobbying by the Refugee Law Project and other local human rights organisations, the Refugees Bill 2003 to date remains shelved in Parliament. Even though the CARA is not always strictly applied, Uganda’s ad hoc practice of dealing with refugees is neither consistent nor transparent. It is highly dependent on 30 Contexts individuals, causing refugees to be “reliant on official goodwill that is unreliable at best, and profoundly unjust at worst” (Lomo, Naggaga & Hovil 2001: 10).
Refugee status determination
One cause of distress for refugees in Kampala is their strained interaction with the offices concerned with their presence: OPM, UNHCR and InterAid. This interaction includes the long and non-transparent process of refugee status determination. I briefly outline this process, which is discussed in detail in chapter 3 of Verdirame & Harrell-Bond’s Rights in Exile (see also Bernstein 2005, HRW 2002, Huff & Kalyango 2002). Both the Government of Uganda and UNHCR take part in the process of status determination. The vast majority of refugees to Uganda are ‘screened’ at reception centres near the borders, from where they are transferred to transit camps or rural refugee settlements. At the time of my research, Sudanese and Congolese refugees were given prima facie refugee status in Uganda, because the government recognised both countries as conflict-affected areas. These individuals did thus not need to go through the process of individual status determination. Refugees who did not report at reception centres in border areas, but who came to Kampala before presenting themselves, however, did have to go through some form of individual status determination. The ‘official’ procedure directed that every person seeking asylum in Kampala was to register at Old Kampala Police Station, where s/he was interviewed on the basis of an ‘Asylum Seekers Personality Report’. This was sent on to InterAid, where the asylum seeker was required to complete the ‘Asylum Seeker Questionnaire’. Theoretically, s/he was briefed on his/her rights and responsibilities as an asylum seeker. The person would be given an appointment with one of the UNHCR Protection Officers, who visited InterAid twice a week for the purpose of conducting status determination interviews. After the interview, the UNHCR Protection Officer might refer the person to OPM with the recommendation of granting him/her prima facie refugee status. If a case seemed to be atypical, or if it concerned an asylum-seeker from a country other than Sudan or Congo, UNHCR would refer the person to OPM for individual status determination. This might then require involvement by the Special Branch Police and the Refugee Eligibility Committee (REC).61 The above was the supposed standard procedure, however, it is noted that there was “a substantial number of exceptions, shortcuts and non-standardised avenues to gaining status” (Huff & Kalyango 2002: 7). The key issue of concern is UNHCR’s role in the status determination process. According to the 1951 UN Convention, responsibility for refugee protection is vested in governments, while UNHCR has a role in monitoring how states fulfil their obligations. In Uganda, however, most cases were determined by UNHCR and only a small number was referred to the government (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). The fact that UNHCR is heavily involved in status determination (not only in Uganda, but in at least seventy other countries) compromises the organisation’s monitoring role: “UNHCR cannot be both judge and advocate” (Lomo 2000: 18) . This issue continues to evoke contentious debate internationally.62 In Kampala, it meant that refugees were confused by what seemed to be two parallel systems of status determination. They speculated about which status – that given by the government or that by UNHCR – was more valuable. Moreover, given the fact that they were not informed about the differences, individuals who were referred to OPM were often highly suspicious of the motives for this – and at times too scared to follow this directive. The fact that they sensed the competition that existed between the government and UNHCR about who had the authority to grant refugee status further fuelled this confusion and suspicion.
Refugees in Uganda 31
There are more reasons why the asylum procedures in Kampala compromised refugees’ well-being and security. All are examples of non-compliance with the standards for fair and efficient procedures spelled out in the conclusions of the Executive Committee of the UNHCR (EXCOM, conclusion 8 (XXVIII), 1977) and the Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status (UNHCR 1992). Firstly, going from the police to InterAid and finally to UNHCR often took days, weeks, or even months. In the meantime, the applicant was given no identity papers to show that s/he was an asylum seeker. During this time refugees were liable to harassment, arrest or deportation as illegal immigrants. Being without an ID was a constant source of anxiety for many individuals I knew. It limited their movement through town and thus their avenues for securing their daily survival. Secondly, refugees opposed the practice of reporting to the police without representation by UNHCR. Refugees from the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi and Sudan realised that Uganda’s security system was anything but neutral given Uganda’s military involvement in the conflicts in their home countries. Nor did UNHCR itself pay due attention to refugees’ insecurity. Refugees had to wait outside the UNHCR and InterAid offices in full sight of any passers-by, and their names were posted outside the offices, either to call them for an interview or to give them the results of their asylum claims. In order to find out the whereabouts of their political opponents, all the Sudanese, Congolese or Rwandan governments and rebel parties had to do was have someone check these lists (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). Both RCD and SPLA intelligence were active in Kampala and security agents were regularly spotted at InterAid. Several refugees reported that their files, which were kept in unlocked filing cabinets, available even to reception desk staff, had ‘gone missing’ (De Lorenzo & Harrell-Bond 1999). These incidents, and the general lack of confidentiality at InterAid, caused many a refugee to keep away from this office. They would rather stay in Kampala without refugee status and ID than risk being spotted by representatives of the very armies or political organisations they had fled from. Thirdly, asylum seekers were neither allowed legal representation nor a free choice of interpreters. UNHCR used other refugees as interpreters, and despite the obvious security concerns, it appears that their political affiliations were not adequately checked. Many refugees did not want a stranger to sit through their interview, and thus preferred to “plough through it in poor English” (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005: 93). It is my observation that many refugees, including those who spoke good English, would come out of an interview having barely understood the content of discussion. Many complained that with one Junior Protection Officer in particular they were not given the chance to speak at all and found it impossible to interrupt his rattling monologues (note that the information obtained from these interviews is meant to substantiate their claim for asylum). Fourthly, refugees were not informed about either the refugee definition or the burden of proof they had to meet to be granted refugee status. Since in asylum applications the burden of proof falls on the asylum-seeker, this lack of information affected the whole process. People speculated about what was ‘the best story’ to tell, and those who knew no better than that UNHCR was a provider of humanitarian assistance, emphasised their economic hardship and were consequently viewed as ‘economic migrants’. However, the majority clearly fell under the OAU refugee definition in that their countries of origin were beset by “foreign external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order” (OAU, art. 1(2)). It would have sufficed for them to prove this obvious fact. I know of deserted SPLA soldiers, including those forcibly recruited when underage, who believed it was unwise to state their past involvement with the SPLA because they had heard “something about exclusion clauses”. By leaving out this very relevant part of their personal history, they weakened their claims for specific protection (they could not state their fear of SPLA intelligence in Kampala tracking down deserters) 32 Contexts and their testimonies were judged ‘not credible’.63 There was a widely shared frustration among refugees about the officials’ attitudes toward them and their testimonies. The climate of the interviews was marked by suspicion and disbelief, and officials appeared particularly set on ‘catching’ the ‘liars’. Furthermore, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond (2005: 104) point out: “It was often the credibility of the applicant as a person that was assessed rather than the credibility of the facts adduced in the application for asylum” (see also Kagan 2003). Even though this was not true for each interviewer, it was certainly how the refugees perceived the process, and advice about whether one should “dress well or dress poorly”, “be assertive or be docile” circulated accordingly. Issues of trust and truth concerning refugees’ testimonies will be further discussed in Chapter Three.64 Fifthly, asylum seekers whose applications for refugee status had been denied were not informed of the relevant reasons. A typical UNHCR rejection letter read:
“This is to inform you that your application for the assistance of this office has been carefully reviewed. On the basis of the information provided by you, we have reached the conclusion that you do not meet the criteria for recognition under the mandate of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Your application is therefore rejected”.
The failure to state reasons frustrated the refugees’ right to appeal against a negative decision. It furthermore illustrates a general irregularity of the approach to refugees in Kampala: the information people receive - about status determination procedures, their entitlements, rights and responsibilities, and what they should and should not expect from the GoU and UNHCR - was grossly below the mark. Those who actively sought information had a hard time. To begin with, accessing UNHCR and other officials was a serious hurdle. Refugees were not allowed to present their problems directly at the UNHCR Branch Office in Kololo, but had to wait to see the officials at InterAid, where they visited twice a week. There, procedures for appointments were arbitrary and often people had to wait for weeks or even months to be attended to. Many individuals came to consult me on the content of illegible scraps of paper supposedly indicating the date for their next appointment or a certain action to be taken. The UNHCR officials I confronted about these issues claimed that appointment procedures were transparent enough, but they clearly did not know – or want to know – about the informal deals brokered by the InterAid gatekeepers and the refugees. This frustrating situation gave rise to constant speculation and rumours, which fuelled people’s feelings of insecurity and caused antagonisms both among refugees and between refugees and the relevant offices. The situation was particularly serious with regard to the issue of resettlement – Huff & Kalyango rightly speak of “endemic misinformation” (2002: 20) concerning its criteria and procedures. Inadequate information systems for refugees are a problem not only in Uganda. The research I was part of in Tanzania confirmed my observations that few refugees know their rights and even fewer officials are inclined to inform them about these. In Mtendeli settlement in Kibondo District a young Burundian who asked the UNHCR field official for a copy of the UN 1951 Convention, was sent away with the answer “why do you think you need to know your rights?” When I approached the said official about this he did not deny his retort.
4.2 Humanitarian and legal aid services for refugees in Kampala
Uganda has committed itself to protecting the economic and social rights of all human beings living in its territory. It has done so through its ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social Refugees in Uganda 33 and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Like most African countries, due to poverty (and its high military budget) Uganda is not in a position to guarantee its citizens many of the rights enshrined in these conventions. For refugees, who according to international law fall under the same legislative directives, the situation is often worse. Like all citizens, refugees need food, shelter, employment and access to health care. Unlike many of their hosts, they need special services related to their being forcibly uprooted: legal protection, mental health or counselling services, language training, secure accommodation, as well as additional support to make up for the social networks they have lost. International humanitarian assistance caters for some of these needs, but not all refugees benefit from this assistance in equal measure. In fact, studies on urban refugees all comment on the lack of national and international humanitarian assistance, support of employment or income generating activities, and provisions for protection of refugees who live in African cities (Jacobsen 2005, Jacobsen & Landau 2005, Karadawi 1987, Kibreab 1995, 1996, Masabo & Mageni 2006, Rogge 1986, Sommers 2001a, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005, Willems 2003). Due to the dominant camp paradigm, assistance to and protection of urban refugees is sidelined by both national governments and the UNHCR. One obstacle to the development of urban programs is limited funds. Assistance to urban refugees is expensive compared to settlement programs because of the higher costs for accommodation, food, and services in towns and cities, and because of the individual approach required in urban environments (Buscher 2003, UNHCR 1997b, 2003b). But this overlooks the potential of development assistance rather than just doling out welfare money. Furthermore, it appears that the policy is based more on economics and politics: UNHCR (and governments) choose not to invest in urban refugees out of fear that this will lead to large-scale movement of refugees to towns and cities (thereby losing their ability to attract the vast funds through relief budgets that camps attract). In the remainder of this chapter I will discuss the (lack of) humanitarian and legal aid services in Kampala. For this to be a useful discussion it must first be explained that refugees in Kampala can be categorised into three groups: asylum seekers, refugees on UNHCR’s ‘urban caseload’, and self-settled refugees who live among their hosts. Firstly, asylum seekers are those who have applied for but not yet been granted refugee status. In Kampala, they are not included in any of UNHCR’s assistance programs. The slow process of status determination has serious implications for asylum seekers who cannot access any form of assistance before their cases are decided. The number of new arrivals presenting themselves at InterAid varies per month. During the first half of 1999, it was around 100 new individuals each month. Refugees on UNHCR’s ‘urban caseload’ form the second category. They receive humanitarian assistance through UNHCR’s implementing agency InterAid. Criteria for inclusion rest on an individual’s ‘vulnerability’: a) sick or disabled people referred from the settlements and in need of specialised medical treatment, b) security cases, that is, people who cannot be granted effective protection in the settlements, c) single mothers with babies or young children. The assessment of who is deemed ‘vulnerable’ is at least partly a subjective exercise; in practice often rather arbitrary. The urban caseload further includes those awaiting departure to a third country (resettlement) and some students granted scholarships by OPM to continue with secondary or tertiary education in Kampala. During my research an average of 500 individuals were included in the urban caseload.65 Thirdly, the great majority of refugees in Kampala are self-settled refugees, that is, people outside any of the formal assistance structures. These include a variety of people. Some have registered and been granted refugee status but refuse to proceed to their designated settlement. Others have left the settlements because of insecurity or bad living conditions and decide to live in Kampala clandestinely, knowing they will be ordered to go back if they make themselves known. There are also people who opt for ‘dual settlement’: 34 Contexts they live in Kampala but are documented as living in the settlements and make sure that their food rations are collected by a friend or relative who lives in the settlement. The majority of self-settled refugees in Kampala, however, have never registered with either the GoU or UNHCR. They have not seen any benefit in applying for refugee status, are not aware that as refugees they have a corresponding legal status, or for security reasons avoid all contact with officialdom.
Humanitarian assistance programs66
During the period of my research, organised assistance to refugees in Kampala was limited to the services provided by InterAid Uganda (IAU) and the Jesuit Refugee Services (JRS). IAU, its mandate the “care and maintenance of urban refugees in Uganda”, acts as the implementing partner of UNHCR for its urban caseload. IAU is located in Old Kampala next door to the Old Kampala Police Station where refugees are first interviewed. The services of this urban program are only accessible to people on UNHCR’s urban caseload (see above). The JRS is an international Catholic organisation set up to assist asylum seekers and refugees. In Uganda, the JRS started its Urban Refugee Project (URP) in January 1998, with the purpose of providing assistance to asylum seekers in Kampala for the duration of their status determination. The project office was located in Nsambya at the premises of the Catholic Secretariat. The JRS Urban Project had no relation to UNHCR’s urban assistance program, and had a strained relationship with the GoU, who viewed its work as an unwelcome incentive for refugees to stay in Kampala (Kalyango 1999: 26). The project had very limited funds: in the first half of 1999 when according to InterAid statistics 561 people registered as asylum seekers in Kampala, the JRS Urban Project was in a position to assist only 140 of them.
InterAid Uganda: Services available exclusively to refugees on the UNHCR ‘urban caseload’ Financial assistance: 25,000 USh for subsistence and 17,000 for housing per month, and an additional 5,000 USh for each child (up to a maximum of three children). [2000: 10,000 USh = 6,90 US$] Medical unit staffed by two nurses and a visiting doctor. Those in need of specialised treatment are referred to Nsambya and Mulago hospitals, with IAU meeting the costs of treatment. Educational support: payment of tuition fees and scholastic requirements for primary (120 in 1999) and secondary (20 in 1999) school students (priority given to girls who performed well at their Primary Leaving Examinations). Life skills program of training by apprenticeship: English language training, driving lessons, tailoring, hairdressing, and motor vehicle maintenance. No qualifications required for enrolling; participants receive certificates of attendance specifying that the training was achieved through a UNHCR-funded program. Number of staff in 1999: 17 (director and deputy director, counsellors, accountant, receptionist, visiting doctor, nurses, lab technician, translators, English teachers, tailoring teacher, security personnel, driver).
Jesuit Refugee Services, Urban Refugee Program: services available only to asylum seekers: Food assistance: distribution of 4,800 USh vouchers once a fortnight, to be exchanged at a given shop in Nsambya for specified quantities of maize, beans and cooking oil. In principle for a maximum period of six months; sometimes extended if an individual’s status determination period takes longer. 140 beneficiaries of food assistance; 25 of whom were accommodated in rented rooms. Refugees in Uganda 35
Outreach program: pastoral home visits. Emergency assistance: food and medical care. Number of staff in 1999: 4 (two counsellors, receptionist and security guard).
Alongside these two formal assistance programs, several spontaneous, small-scale initiatives to assist asylum seekers and refugees emerged. These included: emergency assistance provided to individual refugees by local churches; a refuge run by an American lawyer; AGAPE Centre set up by a Catholic priest out of concern for asylum seekers who had been sleeping in an old bus at Old Kampala Police Station for over six months; police officers of Old Kampala Police Station allowing homeless refugees to spend the night in the police compound; Centre Bandeko, run by a Congolese priest, housing over forty mainly girls and women from Congo. Occasional assistance (food, temporary accommodation, bathing facilities, use of phone and e-mail, a listening ear) was offered to refugees in Kampala by the Refugee Rights research project at Makerere University,67 the Refugee Law Project, Amnesty International and Yolé!Africa.
Given both the numbers of refugees in Kampala – estimates vary from 5,000 to 50,000 – and their needs, the available humanitarian services were highly inadequate. Firstly, in Kampala it is impossible to survive two weeks on 4,800 USh (the JRS food coupons), or to find reasonable accommodation for 17,000 USh (IAU’s housing allowance). Secondly, access to medical services presented a serious problem. The IAU clinic only served the few individuals on the urban caseload, and even then with limited resources. The criteria cited for treatment appeared arbitrary, perhaps because they were simply not available to patients. There were instances where “very old” refugees and those with terminal diseases like cancer were refused treatment. In 2000 there was outrage over the death of a Rwandan man who had been denied the medical treatment for which he had been referred from Kyaka II settlement to Kampala. On 14 January a headline in The Monitor read: ‘One dead after government, UNHCR dump refugees in Ntinda’ (Mohammed 2000).68 The editorial that same day - ‘How many refugees must first die off?’ – asked whether “all influential leaders in government today” had forgotten they had been refugees themselves in the 1970s and 1980s, and why they failed “to put pressure on bodies like the UNHCR to do the right thing”. Furthermore, reproductive health and maternal care services were virtually non-existent. I recall a disturbing incident when a Sudanese man I knew quite well came to my house in need of money for his wife to be admitted into hospital. She was having a miscarriage, he informed me, and I still picture him standing on our veranda, trying to keep his composure while explaining that “she’s bleeding, I left her when it was one Omo container full”. It was a weekend, for which InterAid had no emergency procedures. The hasty taxi ride to hospital came too late to save the baby, so I learnt when I visited them later that day. Realising the lack of medical services, the Refugee Rights project tried to establish a referral system, encouraging Ugandan and expatriate medical personnel of different medical institutions to treat people referred by the office pro bono. Some individuals benefited from this, but their numbers were very few. Studies in other African cities confirm the difficulties that urban refugees face in accessing public health services. They mention the different fee structures applied to foreigners and the fact that refugees are often charged for services that the law requires they be given for free. The fact that the majority of urban refugees do not possess IDs causes them to be refused treatment and at times is the reason why those in need of medical care fear to go to see a doctor in the first place (Landau 2005). Thirdly, access to education, a basic human right enshrined in all conventions relating to refugees, was an unaffordable privilege for the majority who chose to live in the city. Whilst children from refugee families were entitled to access Uganda’s UPE (Universal 36 Contexts
Primary Education) system, the small fees required were prohibitive for most families, not to mention the tuition fees required for secondary and tertiary education. The only children and youth who pursued their education were those who secured a scholarship through OPM or were privately sponsored. Their numbers were negligible. The desire for further education was a key reason why young refugees came to Kampala. Their (fruitless) search for scholarships remained a constant preoccupation. Chapter Five on Students is devoted to this subject. Fourthly, there was an acute lack of counselling services for refugees. It is not only the trauma of flight but also the accumulation of the challenges and distress of exile, which contributed to the ongoing, often visible, decline of some individuals’ mental health (Muhwezi & Sam 2004). The UNHCR document Urban Refugees: A Community-Based Approach, observes: “It is important to give the refugee the opportunity to talk as much as he/she wishes about the past, and even more, to express feelings about past experiences and the changes being experienced at the present time” (UNHCR 1996: 40). While both IAU and JRS offered counselling services, in practice, due to heavy workloads, lack of appropriate training and for some a disturbing lack of interest in their clients, I was not convinced of the efficacy of these services. The JRS, the Refugee Rights project and the Refugee Law Project occasionally referred people in need of specialised counselling to organisations like Hope after Rape and the African Centre for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture (ACTV). Given the lack of counselling services, researchers like myself came to fulfil the role of listener, adviser or counsellor for many refugees. Evidently, giving emotional and psychological support to traumatised persons should not be the sole responsibility of untrained individuals but is a task for professionals.
Protection and legal aid services
It will become manifest in this study that there were a great many problems with the security situation of individual refugees in Kampala.69 The UNHCR’s and GoU’s refusal to recognise their presence in the city as legitimate was the root cause for this. The Ugandan government’s involvement in cross-border conflicts in the countries that they had fled further detracted from the trust that individuals had in its ability and willingness to protect them. At the same time, few refugees counted on UNHCR to act in case they got into trouble with the police or other Ugandan authorities: they were well aware of the organisation’s uneasiness with their presence in Kampala. UNHCR’s activities to safeguard refugees’ security were indeed limited. They included organising resettlement to a third country for ‘security cases’, which as mentioned earlier was fraught with problems and usually took very long, possibly for reasons beyond UNHCR’s control. Nevertheless, many would agree with Buscher that: “Resettlement remains an often ad hoc, quota filling measure that serves the most vocal and savvy” (2003: 5).70 For a number of refugees with special security concerns UNHCR provided accommodation at the Salvation Army hostel in Ntinda. However, the initiative was beset with difficulties from the outset and a great deal of controversy surrounded its operation. Refugees were inadequately vetted for potential security problems among them; some slept in shared rooms - without locks - but because there was far too little space, many others (including single women with children) slept in the corridors; refugees in Kampala on medical referral or awaiting resettlement were at times housed with the ‘security cases’; there was repeated conflict over the lack of proper meals and the atmosphere was generally very tense. Ultimately, in 2000 the provision was terminated. Refugees who were not in immediate danger also suffered from the inadequate provision of protection and legal aid services. Many needed assistance when preparing an appeal against government/UNHCR decisions on their refugee status, the filing of a police report in cases of politically motivated threats, (sexual) harassment or robbery (Briant & Refugees in Uganda 37
Kennedy 2004). Most importantly, they needed to know their rights and obligations as refugees in Uganda, information that was scarcely available. The Refugee Rights research project at Makerere University tried to address the lacuna in legal/protection services by means of advocacy and offering legal aid to a number of individuals. By the time the Refugee Rights project was winding up its activities in early 2000, the Refugee Law Project (RLP) had been set up to take over its work. It was first located in a tiny shared office space in Nakasero and in July 2000 moved to new premises in Old Kampala. By now the Refugee Law Project has established itself as the number one organisation addressing refugee protection issues in Kampala, and has built up an international reputation. In addition to providing legal aid to refugees, the staff engage in action-oriented research, advocacy, training of police and immigration officers, and education in refugee and human rights law. In 2005, the office acquired funding for the employment of a professional counsellor.71 Other national organisations that occasionally took on refugee cases and/or advocated on their behalf are the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI), the association of Women Lawyers (FIDA), the Legal Aid Project (LAP), Amnesty International’s Regional Office and the Sudan Human Rights Association (SHRA).
5. CONCLUDING REMARKS
There is a great deal that can and should be improved on the provisions for protection and humanitarian services available to refugees in urban areas. With the growing numbers of urban refugees now an undeniable reality,72 UNHCR has come to realise this and is attempting to develop a policy on urban refugees that is “legally sound, politically acceptable and financially sustainable” (Jacobsen & Landau 2005: 23). The organisation’s internal evaluations have reported that its policies to date are “unclear, often ad hoc, inconsistently administered, punitive and often implemented with damaging effects on the refugee populations” (Buscher 2003: 3). This is not the place to develop detailed recommendations for the improvement of policy, which would evidently involve a number of intricate and thorny issues (Bernstein 2005, Buscher 2003, HRW 2002, Jacobsen & Landau 2005, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). What I would like to stress though is the importance of the issue of human dignity. I identify with Lomo (2000) that human dignity is a constant and should form the basis for dispensing assistance to refugees at all times. The African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR), the only human rights instrument that generically provides for a right to dignity, stipulates in Article 5 that
“every individual shall have the right to respect of the dignity (emphasis) inherent in a human being and to recognition of his legal status”.
The narratives of Part II of this book will reveal that in Kampala the refugees’ sense of dignity was often violated. The concerns of people in dire straits go beyond ensuring physical survival. The way they were treated at offices – with suspicion and indifference – was experienced as frustrating and humiliating.73 It may be true that some refugees have unrealistically high expectations, which has resulted in undue pressure on UNHCR offices and their staff. In my view though, this could be remedied a long way by addressing the issue of poor and inefficient communication and the highly inadequate provision of information to refugees. Not to be enabled to make informed decisions about one’s own life detracts from human dignity. 38 Contexts
The document Protection, Solutions and Assistance for Refugees in Urban Areas. Guiding Principles and Good Practice (UNHCR 2003b) promises a change of approach to urban refugees. Where the earlier Comprehensive Policy on Urban Refugees (UNHCR 1997b) spoke of urban refugees as ‘irregular movers’ who should be legitimately denied any form of assistance in the urban centres, the new document calls for the abrogation of such punitive approach and suggests to replace the term ‘irregular movers’ by the more neutral concept of ‘secondary movement’ or ‘onward movement’. Perhaps this can be seen as one step in recognition of refugees as individuals who make their choices on the basis of their individual problems, preferences and ambitions and who want to be acknowledged as persons with potential.
Chapter Two discusses people’s living circumstances in terms of their access to food, shelter and employment, and elaborate on the survival strategies they employed, with varying degrees of success, in the face of the lack of humanitarian services offered to them. CHAPTER TWO
YOUNG MEN IN KAMPALA: DAILY LIFE IN EXILE
The research site for this book was Kampala. On three occasions though, I visited rural refugee camps and settlements in Uganda and Tanzania. In January 2000, I spent two weeks in Kibondo District in western Tanzania. I was on a team evaluating the activities of the Tanganyika Christian Refugee Service (TCRS), one of the NGOs that had long been operating in the area (Harrell-Bond et al 2000). It so happened that we conducted our review in the midst of the arrival of thousands of refugees from Burundi. Kibondo District, one of the poorest districts of Tanzania, had become an emergency site: way-stations along the border were filling up and within three weeks of its official opening two days before Christmas, the new Karago Refugee Camp had reached almost half of its 50,000 capacity. One evening I jotted down:
A first for me: witnessing the arrival of truckloads of dazed and destitute people. Still see them getting off, exhausted, flat expressions after hours of being packed together in closed vehicles allowing them no view of their journey. Some arrive carrying bags and suitcases, chickens and the odd goat, others with no more than what they are wearing. NGO staff hand out high-energy biscuits, two rolls for every three people, then usher them to the nearby transit site to spend the night. The following days - people are registered and assigned to a plot in the new camp. I visit several of the new arrivals there: in a bushy area in knee-high grass they have constructed their first shelters out of tree branches and the blue-and-white UNHCR plastic sheets. They sit, with their cup of beans and half bottle of oil, sheltered from the piercing sun, seemingly waiting for what is to come next. Securing food and shelter are the two immediate challenges that people face after crossing a border into unknown territory. I will retain this image of their arrival: sunset, a group of individuals standing against a stunning landscape of hills rolling towards their home country. In this empty landscape, nothing can hide that they have nothing. I do see people, but what is unsettling: somehow it is difficult to relate to them. Several days later, with their beans and oil and provisional shelter, their situation was only marginally less horrifying, but the fact that they had food and shelter somehow, to me, brought them back within the realm of ‘the human’.
40 Contexts
Re-reading these notes makes me realise once again that cities like Kampala conceal many of the sufferings that urban dwellers endure day in, day out. There is too much to divert the onlooker’s attention. There are too many unseen corners that people can retreat into. In African cities, refugees who go hungry or are homeless are not more conspicuous than the many citizens who also struggle to survive. They do not stand out. They certainly do not contrast so sharply with their environment as do ragged people lost in a seemingly peaceful African countryside. But survival in the ‘jungle of stone’ has at least as many challenges as in a rural refugee settlement. For one thing, while new arrivals in refugee camps receive food rations, refugees in towns and cities have to make do without organised humanitarian assistance. Like their fellow urban dwellers they depend on their own skills and ingenuity, and their ability to make and maintain contacts. Unlike the Ugandans, however, refugees are faced with the problems of language, a lack of social networks, and insecurity as a result of their clandestine presence. Their coping mechanisms are furthermore affected by their traumatic experiences of war and flight. The current chapter discusses the living conditions of refugees in Kampala focusing on their security situation, their access to food, shelter and employment, and their relationships with other refugees and Ugandans. Even though most of the information presented is based on my contacts with young, male refugees – the protagonists of this book - no analysis of urban refugees in Kampala would be adequate without first introducing their diversity in terms of nationality, background and demography.
1. URBAN REFUGEES IN KAMPALA
The previous chapter discussed the different motivations with which refugees leave behind the rural refugee settlements and come to Kampala. Ultimately these all boil down to the desire for a better and more dignified life – be it in terms of safety, material or emotional well-being, or future prospects. I commented that it is primarily young people, and among them mostly men, who make this move to the city. Nevertheless, the refugees residing in Kampala constitute a diverse population in terms of nationality, age, gender, educational and professional backgrounds, as is outlined below. Refugees’ experiences of exile in the city depend partly on these attributes and identifications, while their personalities also to a large extent determine their success in rebuilding their lives.
1.1 Numbers
There is no reliable information as to the total number of refugees residing in Kampala. The reason is that most refugees settle there without making themselves known to the relevant authorities. They have different motivations for this: they are not informed about why or where to register, they fear authorities, or they want to avoid being sent to a rural settlement. Some refugees who reside in Kampala are registered in the settlements and lead a more or less dual city-settlement existence. The records on urban refugees kept by UNHCR and the Prime Minister’s Office (which mention a few hundred at most) in no way reflect the actual numbers of refugees in Kampala.1 The few studies done on refugees in Kampala estimate their total number at 10,000 to 15,000, but it must be noted that they quote each other and all lack accurate first-hand data (Bernstein 2005, Huff & Kalyango 2002, Kalyango 1999, Macchiavello 2003). Human Rights Watch quotes an estimate of 50,000 refugees in Kampala made by a government official (HRW 2002: 17). The fact that the figures are so wildly divergent illustrates the complexity and the political sensitivity of Young Men in Kampala 41 this issue (Crisp 1999b). Chapter Three will elaborate on the practical and ethical difficulties of ‘counting’ urban refugees.
1.2 Nationalities
Uganda hosts refugees from practically all countries of the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa. While the majority live in rural refugee settlements, individuals from all these countries (Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia) are also represented among Kampala’s urban refugee population.2 In Uganda, the presence of urban refugees became an issue of concern in the early 1990s, when over two thousand people who had fled the disintegration of the Somali state entered Uganda’s capital city. They settled in Kisenyi, one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods located near the taxi parks and Owino market. Soon they were ordered to leave the city and settle in Nakivale refugee settlement in south-western Uganda. Many, however, refused and many others came to lead a dual city-settlement existence. Presently, Somali refugees still reside predominantly in Mengo-Kisenyi. Due to their concentration, they are much more conspicuous than refugees of other nationalities; the situation is comparable to Eastleigh in Nairobi (Horst 2006b). Several decades before the arrival of the Somali refugees, between the 1920s and 1960s, refugees from Rwanda, Sudan and Congo crossed into Uganda and some of them also settled in Kampala. Their arrival, however, never instigated an official government response concerning their settlement. With time, these so-called ‘old caseload’ refugees integrated into Kampala society. Though their presence is not particularly conspicuous, some areas are known for housing (descendants of) these early refugees (e.g. Sudanese in Kibuli and Rubaga, Congolese in Katwe, Makindye and Luzira). I spoke to a good number of these ‘old caseload’ refugees, but they were not the subjects of my research. This study focuses on refugees who came to Kampala during the 1990s. They include, firstly, southern Sudanese refugees who fled the civil war in their home country, and who started to arrive in Uganda in large numbers in the late 1980s. Sudanese refugees who live in Kampala often spent several years in the refugee settlements in northern and western Uganda prior to coming to the city. Secondly, there are Congolese refugees in Kampala, who started arriving in late 1998 owing to the insecurity caused by the RCD rebellion against Kabila. Many of these new arrivals came from the towns of North and South Kivu, and their urban background explains why they were so adamant in their refusal to go and live in the rural refugee settlements. Ethiopian refugees have been in Kampala since the overthrow of Mengistu’s communist regime in 1991. Eritreans started coming since the Ethiopia-Eritrea border war which started in 1998. Due to the increasingly repressive regime in their country, the number of Eritreans seeking refuge is growing, which is also apparent in Kampala.
1.3 Background, age and gender
It is a common perception that urban refugees are different from rural refugees in terms of their backgrounds, the causes and patterns of their flight as well as their demographic make-up (Kibreab 1996). Firstly, as for their backgrounds, they are often assumed to be individuals who used to live in urban areas before their flight and who travelled straight to the towns in their country of refuge, intentionally avoiding border reception centres and refugee camps. While there are indisputably many urban people among refugee populations in towns, it is not a given that they constitute the majority. Considering the trend of rural- urban migration that refugee movements from camps to cities are part of, one should not 42 Contexts be surprised to find that refugees of rural background have also found their ways to towns (Karadawi 1987, Kibreab 1996). In Kampala, this is the case with the Sudanese refugees, who are predominantly from rural backgrounds, both agricultural and pastoral. In fact, the vast majority of refugees in Uganda are of rural backgrounds, but there is a significant minority of urban people, many of whom are students, traders or well-educated professionals. The conflict in Congo in particular has not only displaced people from the countryside but also from towns, and many of the latter sought refuge in Kampala. Secondly, as for demography, the assumption that urban refugees are almost exclusively young people and predominantly male is currently under debate.3 Within UNHCR there has been a “widespread and longstanding assumption that … unlike other refugee populations, the majority of refugees in urban areas are generally male” (2001: 2), however, its two latest policy papers on urban refugees state that “recent statistical evidence demonstrates that this is no longer the case in many countries” (UNHCR 2001a, 2003b). Unfortunately, the evidence provided is rather thin. UNHCR bases itself on statistics about “those people who are receiving assistance from the organization” (2003), but clearly such groups are unlikely to be representative of the overall profile of refugee populations residing in cities.4 The predominance of young males is neither refuted nor confirmed by these statistics. Nevertheless, based on my own observations, I would say that there is a predominance of young men among the refugees in Kampala - even if taking into account that men are more visible and for cultural and language reasons more open to contact with outsiders. This is confirmed by studies conducted in other African urban areas (e.g. Dar es Salaam and Johannesburg), even though these studies at the same time stress the increasing diversity of urban refugee populations (Jacobsen 2005, Sommers 2001a, Willems 2003). The reason for the overrepresentation of men must be the fact that men and women do not have the same opportunities to leave their families and community and cross international borders. Men moreover have more freedom to undertake secondary migration from the refugee camps to towns. These gender issues will be further discussed in Chapter Three. Twenty-five years ago, the Pan-African Conference at Arusha (1979) identified urban refugees as young people who move to towns in their host country in search of employment or educational opportunities (Karadawi 1987). Again, the fact that no reliable statistics on urban refugees in Kampala are available makes it hard to substantiate the perception still held today that the majority of urban refugees are young people. However, my observations show that - with the exception of the Somali refugee population - the majority is young, meaning individuals in their twenties or early thirties. This is hardly surprising. Young people also form the majority among the ranks of general rural-urban migrants (Khasiani 1991). Not only are young people economically most active, but also generally more innovative and risk-taking, and perhaps they have fewer responsibilities that tie them to their home areas. In the war situations that refugees come from, taking risks often proves a rewarding survival strategy. I learnt, however, that the serious risk of leaving behind everything and coming to an unknown city is more often than not a rational decision preceded by a careful weighing of alternatives. Young people come to the city not only because they are looking for economic and educational opportunities, but also because the city stands for exciting novelties and a break with cultural codes. It must be noted that there were variations in the demographic make-up of the various refugee communities in Kampala. The Somali refugees were generally organised into families of two or more generations while, with few exceptions, the young people of other nationalities did not form part of families but lived as singles, or in bachelor households. It must also be noted that not all Sudanese, Congolese, Ethiopians and Eritreans who live in Kampala are refugees. There are also businessmen, diplomats and Young Men in Kampala 43 academics, as well as nationals from all these countries working for UN agencies, NGOs and private companies.
2. SURVIVAL IN THE CITY
The seething, kidney-shaped bowl functioning as the taxi park had originally been a volcanic hill. During the last active phase two things happened: the hill shattered, creating this valley, and the surrounding valleys were transformed into the seven round-topped hills at the core of the city of Kampala. As I stood on the rim of the bowl, sniffing dirty whiffs from the notorious Owino Market and exhaust fumes from countless vehicles, Uncle Kawayida’s stories seemed to burst out of the dramatic confines of his imagery into the polychromatic chaos that washed the bowl like a caustic solution. The corroded asphalt, damaged by a million feet and a million tires, vibrated with its eternal burden of travellers, loafers, hawkers, snake charmers and all manner of other nebulous figures, calling to mind the bowl’s early swampy days, before the water was drained or diverted, the vegetation was cut or burned and the animals were displaced or exterminated. The volcanic fire dormant below and the solar fire blazing from above, the relentless surge of vehicles and all the souls on parade here, turned this vessel of cobwebbed fantasies, this cocoon of termite-ridden ambitions, this lapper of blood and chewer of flesh, into the most fascinating spot in the whole city. My chest swelled when I stood in this brewery of motion, dreams and chaos. I could not help trembling with the electricity of great things to come. I knew that both wonderful and dismal memories were trapped inside the asphalt. Like devil mushrooms, they popped up to give a hint of the past and a taste of the future. Just by looking at the crowd of marauders, van boys, lechers, beggars and other nameless souls adrift here, I felt I was privy to the secrets of things to come. Every visit felt like the first time. It made the air quiver with possibilities.
Moses Isegawa, Abyssinian Chronicles, 2000, p. 83-84
During the years I spent in Kampala, refugees from across international borders arrived in the city nearly every day. Most of them arrived in the very spot described above: Kampala’s notorious Old Taxi Park, which links up the capital with the rest of the country. The white Toyota minibuses – generally known as matatus in East Africa, but referred to as ‘taxis’ in Kampala – radiate from there into all directions. Across Luwum Street, towards the New Taxi Park, the big buses connecting Kampala with Rwanda’s capital Kigali, and from there with eastern Congo, arrive and depart throughout the year. What happens to people after they arrive in the taxi park? They need a meal and a place to stay. Where do they go? How quickly do they learn their way around? They need to find work to support themselves, but what jobs are available to foreigners? For those individuals who fled personal persecution, who deserted (rebel) armies or fear forced recruitment, the urgent question is whether Kampala offers the protection they so need and desire. It is these issues of security and livelihood that the remainder of this chapter discusses. Since Kampala city is the setting in which the young refugees struggle to rebuild their lives, I start with a brief description of Uganda’s capital in terms of its political history and urban economy. 44 Contexts
2.1 Kampala city
Kampala lies just north from the Equator, to the north-west of Lake Victoria, about six miles from the Lake itself. It enjoys an altitude of some 4,000 feet above sea level and a pleasant, equitable climate, a dominant feature of which is the frequent showers of heavy rain. The seasonal variations are slight. There are no real rainy seasons, and the temperatures rarely rise above 30 C during the day or fall below 16 C at night. Kampala and its environs are amply provided with green and lush vegetation all the year round.
David Parkin, Neighbours and Nationals in an African City Ward, 1969, p.1
It is with this paragraph that David Parkin opens his early urban ethnography, and although Kampala’s physical appearance has certainly changed since the late 1960s, it would almost still do as an apt first impression. Kampala is in many ways a pleasant city. It is hilly and green (its 1.2 million people live spread out over twenty or so hills), and its relatively small city centre does not have the overwhelming intensity of other African capitals like Nairobi or Johannesburg. However, it is highly dependent on where one lives whether the dominant experience is a pleasant one or rather adds up to the crowded madness epitomised in Kampala’s Taxi Park. For instance, the “frequent showers of heavy rain” may be agreeably refreshing for those living on the spaciously built hills of Kololo and Muyenga, but hardly so for the majority of urban dwellers who live in Kampala’s swampy valley bottoms. These areas were previously open spaces used by the poor for urban agriculture, but as a result of serious lack of housing they turned into slum areas, which suffer from frequent flooding. It is predominantly in these slum areas that refugees live.
Kampala’s political history and urban economy
Kampala has been the capital since Uganda’s independence in October 1962. At the time it made up the urban agglomeration known as Greater Kampala together with the adjacent Mengo Municipality, which accommodated palace, parliament and capital of the former Buganda kingdom. The Baganda people, who were politically dominant in Mengo at the time, make up the majority of Kampala’s current population.5 In 1968, the two municipalities were amalgamated into the city of Kampala, which during the post-colonial 1960s “was transformed from a Buganda to a Ugandan city with pronounced migration streams from various parts of the country” (Musoke 2001: 2). The 1959 census shows that already before independence people of different tribes and from different parts of the country lived in this urban centre (Parkin 1969). Remarkable in the context of this study is that as much as 20 per cent of the total African population of Kampala-Mengo hailed from neighbouring countries: half of these were from Kenya, others from Rwanda, Tanzania, Sudan and Congo. With an additional 25 per cent Asians and over 3 per cent Europeans, the total population of the city according to the 1959 census amounted to 107,058 people. In the four-and-a-half decades since, Kampala has steadily grown and its current population stands at well over 1.2 million (UBOS 2003b).6 This means that nearly 5 per cent of the country’s total population of 25.4 million people lives in the capital. Kampala district has a growth rate of 5,7% per year, which is double the national growth rate of 2,5%. The capital’s population moreover is very young, with 67% below 24 years (Republic of Uganda 2000). Kampala is administratively subdivided into five divisions: Rubaga, Kawempe, Nakawa, Makindye and Central Division. As part of the national Local Council system of government (until 1997 called Resistance Councils) introduced by president Museveni, Young Men in Kampala 45 these divisions have the status of LC3, with local government responsibilities similar to the sub-county level in rural areas. Kampala’s five divisions are further subdivided into parishes (LC2) and villages (LC1).7 The LC1 Chairman has administrative responsibilities for his or her neighbourhood, which includes keeping records of its residents. Refugees who come to live in a certain area have to make themselves known to the LC1 Chairman. Kampala has a democratically elected mayor, who heads the capital’s local government (LC5).
Uganda’s high level of economic growth (see Chapter One) has resulted in an expansion of the country’s urban economies. Each time I arrived back in Kampala over the past five years, it was hard to miss the changes in the city’s appearance: improved roads and roundabouts and traffic-lit crossings, scaffolding everywhere, foreign businesses, fancy shopping malls and massive billboards advertising Bell Lager and Nile Breweries, MTN, Mango and Celtel. The formerly dilapidated Crested Towers received a total makeover and the brand-new blue-glassed Worker’s House is now part and parcel of Kampala’s skyline. It is not merely the city’s appearance that has changed: research reveals rising living standards in accordance with the macroeconomic data on growth (Appleton, Kagugube, 1999). Poverty in Uganda’s urban areas is calculated as being four times lower than in rural areas. The national household surveys conducted between 1992 and 2000 show that while poverty fell significantly in both rural and urban areas, it fell twice as fast in urban areas.8 According to these statistics, nearly 30% of all urban households were living below the poverty line in 1992, as compared to 60% of rural households. In 2000, this was reduced to 10% for urban areas as compared to a near 40% in rural areas (Appleton 2001). However, there is no data on the distribution of these rising living standards. Musoke (2001) observes a polarisation of wealth in the city, which tallies with the sentiments expressed to me by fellow taxi passengers, newspaper vendors and the young boda boda drivers. Unemployment rates are high and as is the case in all African cities, at least half of the urban population earn their living in the informal sector (Drakakis-Smith 2000, Gilbert & Gugler 1992, Hansen & Twaddle 1998). The predominant occupation is trading, which accounts for 95% of the self-employed. They include wholesale traders, small-scale retailers, market and street vendors (Republic of Uganda 2000). Only a small proportion of the employed can be regarded professionals, such as bankers, lawyers, lecturers, teachers, doctors and nurses.9 A growing employment market is the national and international NGO industry. It must be noted that the stress of making ends meet does not apply exclusively to the urban poor. A general trend in African urban societies is that “neither government officials nor professionals – let alone workers – can support their families for more than a few days per month on their incomes from formal employment” (Wallman, 1996: 10). Nevertheless, Uganda’s capital keeps growing and rural people continue to migrate to the city. As Musoke observed: “Economic well-being is relative, and the collapse of rural Uganda’s coffee export economy and lack of clear-cut alternative economic mainstay options, makes trying one’s luck in the city attractive despite the odds” (2001: 23). Besides, the factor time must be taken into account – it is probably true that “many rural migrants are prepared for a long struggle before they or their children can reap the benefits of their hard work” (Drakakis-Smith 2000: 63). It is beyond the scope of this book to comment in-depth on the subject of urban poverty and to discuss the situation in Kampala in view of the growing literature on urban livelihoods and urban governance (de Haan & Zoomers 2005, Rakodi 2002).10 It is enough to say that poverty in Kampala is widespread. According to government statistics, a total of 27% of Kampala’s population lives in slums, which cover 10% of the total area of the city (Republic of Uganda 2000: 5).11 People in the street, however, tend to refer to most of the city’s neighbourhoods as ‘slums’. Though the living conditions in these areas may not be as miserable as for example in Mathare Valley in Nairobi (houses in Kampala are built of 46 Contexts mud, wattle and sometimes brick, not out of plastic, cardboard or flattened petrol drums), they are still deplorable. Open garbage dumps are found in between the houses, people often depend on springs (protected and unprotected) for water, and large areas go without electricity. All slum areas are overcrowded. Plots are crammed with houses squeezed together, and hardly any space is left for amenities such as shared pit latrines and waste water drainage. This congestion moreover disallows the option to rear animals to help generate an income (Republic of Uganda 2000: 85). Houses are not renovated and a major concern is leakage through roofs and permeable walls as well as repeated flooding of floors. Unhealthy living conditions and poor diets lead to high illness rates among the population of these areas. Many children of school-going age are kept at home. Refugees are among the city’s poorest residents and the majority of them live in slum areas. The Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Project (UPPAP) found that community members identify people vulnerable to urban poverty as “widows with dependants especially orphans, AIDS victims, the elderly and old, the disabled, unemployed youth, illiterate female youth and single mothers”. It concludes: “These vulnerable groups usually have very few or no productive assets, lack vocational skills, are sometimes isolated and excluded, and lack guidance and social support” (Republic of Uganda 2000: xvi). Even though refugees, or migrants, are not explicitly referred to in the above shortlist, they clearly resort under its specific categories. Securing a livelihood and making ends meet is a continuous struggle for the majority of Kampala’s urban population. Many of the concerns of forced migrants in the city are parallel to those of the urban poor generally. However, there are also major differences. Refugees, whose presence in town is undocumented and thus illegal, face obstacles to making a living that locals do not have, which includes discrimination when trying to access employment, credit or social services. Secondly, refugees, especially initially, have a much more limited access to social support networks of relatives and friends, so crucial to survival in the city. Nationality, age, gender, class and education all play a role in the coping and networking strategies of forced migrants. While the discussion below includes information on young women, children and older people among the refugees, it is mainly based on the information I gathered through my contacts with the young men who are the protagonists of this book.
2.2 Shelter
Batumba R. is in his sixties. He is one of the Congolese ‘old caseload’ refugees, fled in the early days of his country’s independence and talks about Lumumba. Recently he moved from Kyaka II settlement to Kampala to look after his brother’s widow and her three children. I go to see his place. It’s a tiny mud house - two by two meters at the most, 7000 USh rent p.m. [$4.50]. The floor is a very uneven stony surface, no windows. Only when my eyes have accommodated to the dark do I spot the small child and baby sleeping together on the one mattress. The mattress isn’t his, Batumba says, he borrowed it from the neighbours, so the children can have some decent sleep during the day. Two empty nylon rice bags on the floor: the old man’s bed. A girl who looks about seven quietly enters and is told to say hello to me, and the little one sleeping is woken up to do the same. We’re standing huddled together in half-dark. Batumba says there is family and land for him in Congo to go back to.
Field notes, 22 May 1998
A variety of international legal instruments address individuals’ rights to adequate housing. One is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), Young Men in Kampala 47 which considers the right to adequate housing of central importance for the enjoyment of all economic, social and cultural rights. It is true: only when the young refugees had managed to find a place to stay, could they begin to think of how to lead their lives in the unfamiliar city. However, finding shelter was anything but an easy task. Many spoke to me of spending their nights sleeping outside, mostly at the taxi and bus parks. Their situation was not unlike that of the growing numbers of street children found along Kampala and Jinja Road, in front of the Post Office and around the taxi parks. The majority of these street children are AIDS orphans left without a surviving relative willing or able to take care of them, but it would not be surprising if this colourful group of children increasingly comes to include young refugees from neighbouring countries. Refugees without a place to stay often spent their nights on the InterAid veranda, which during the day was filled with people waiting for their appointments with ‘the doctor’, ‘the nurse’, ‘the counsellor’ or - spoken of with a mixture of awe and frustration - the UNHCR protection officers. After office hours, the crowd dispersed, but those who had nowhere to go remained. If chased away by the security guard, they would try next door at the Old Kampala Police Office. In return for doing chores like washing plates and cups, cutting the grass or sweeping the compound, refugees were at times allowed to sleep at the police office premises, and given the food leftover from that fed to those custody in the police cells. They appreciated the goodwill of the police officers, but also said that receiving leftovers of prisoners was an insult. One of the young refugees included in this research, who spent his nights outside on the InterAid veranda was Misago V., nicknamed Kadogo. He was fourteen years old at the time I got to know him in July 2000. Petna, who had just started working with me, met this shy and stocky boy from Burundi late one night when, on his way home through Old Kampala, he found a group of young men sitting outside InterAid. There were ten of them that evening: four Sudanese, four Congolese, one Ethiopian, and Kadogo. A woman with young children also spending her nights there, they said, had gone “looking for food”. Petna happened to be carrying his camera and the young men agreed to be filmed. It is a disturbing fifteen minutes of footage. In pitch darkness, the young men take turns expressing their hardships and making angry pleas for assistance in front of the camera. A bare-chested young man sitting down cross-legged on the cement floor recites a poem deploring the war in his home country. Kadogo, the youngest among them, is the only one who keeps quiet. Petna spoke to him and arranged for us to meet him a few days later. Kadogo was from Makamba Province in Burundi. His father was a secondary school teacher, his mother taught in the village primary school where Kadogo was also schooling. Coming home one afternoon in February 2000, he found his parents slaughtered in their house. His five elder siblings, he told us, had been killed in December the year before, during an attack on their school in Bururi District. Kadogo fled together with other survivors of his village and crossed into Tanzania, from where it took him two months to reach Kampala. He had not set off with a plan of going to Kampala, a city he had hardly heard of before, but explained he ended up there because, “I just wanted to get as far away from Burundi as possible”. For four months Kadogo slept outside, alternately on the InterAid veranda and the police compound. In early August he was finally interviewed by UNHCR, and told to report to Kyangwali refugee settlement in western Uganda. InterAid paid his bus ticket and Kadogo set off. He spent his first night in Kyangwali at the office of the camp commander. The following morning he was registered and given several kilos of maize and peas, a panga, a jerry can and a blanket. He was told that the plastic sheeting and oil were finished. A plot was marked out for him to build his house and another one for cultivation. He did not know how to build a house, and thus he left his plot vacant and stayed with some older Congolese men. Four weeks later Kadogo was back in Kampala. He had fallen sick with malaria and decided he did not want to stay in Kyangwali. He had 48 Contexts hoped to go to school in the refugee settlement but soon realised that if he enrolled he would not have time “to dig” (to grow food for his daily consumption) and moreover stated that, “if you want to go to school, you have to dig for the teachers as well”. So he was back to sleeping outside at InterAid. Petna and I had several meetings with both the counsellor at InterAid and the UNHCR Community Services officer urging them to cater for this boy according to the rules set for unaccompanied minors, but to no avail. The InterAid counsellor simply denied that Kadogo was a minor - she said he “didn’t look like one”. In October 2002, about to turn seventeen, Kadogo set off on a journey back to Burundi. Tired of spending two-and-a-half years between the InterAid veranda, a shelter for refugees in Kampala run by an American lawyer, and Kyangwali settlement, he had decided there was no future for him in Uganda. He came to Yolé!Africa to inform Petna of his decision. He reasoned that some of his relatives must still be alive and that he might be able to find an aunt or an uncle in one of Tanzania’s refugee camps. He asked Petna to write down his email address for him and to promise to help in case “something will happen”. We never heard from him again.
Not all refugees who started their sojourn in Kampala on the InterAid veranda or in an empty corner of the taxi park found themselves stuck there as long as did Kadogo. Somehow they struck up friendships, found distant relatives or people from their home area, or hitched a ride back to the refugee settlement they had come from. If lucky they got money to pay for a hostel, or found a Ugandan who was willing to put them up for the night. Soon they were initiated into the clandestine ways of living in Kampala. The majority ended up renting or sharing a room in one of the city’s slum areas. They chose areas like Mengo, Kisenyi, Katwe and Namuwongo because of the low rent and for the relative closeness to the city centre, which allowed them to save on the costs of public transport. I visited around forty-five different rooms where refugees lived across town. I also went to see others in the hostels where they rented a bed and in the churches where they were given temporary shelter. A lucky few had joined school and showed me the dormitories which were their temporary homes. Out of all those I visited, five lived in furnished houses with a living room, kitchen and separate bedrooms. All others lived in single rooms. Time and again I was shocked by the state of these dwellings, the lack of facilities and basic furniture, not to mention the total lack of privacy. The rooms were never bigger than 3 x 3 meters. Those living alone rented one room; those sharing never had more than two rooms for between three and ten people. A single mattress on a bare cement floor was often shared by two or three young men. Emmanuel, a Congolese man in his early twenties and his Burundi friend confided to me how they had to put up with telling frowns from fellow guests in their hostel for sharing the top of a bunk bed. What is accepted as adequate shelter partly depends on cultural, social and environmental conditions and thus the criteria by which the housing conditions of refugees in Kampala were judged are bound to be subjective and ethnocentric (Gilbert & Gugler 1992: 114-117). However, coming to terms with the reality of living in a slum area - its leaking roofs, noise and stinking garbage, flooded rooms and the consequent loss of possessions during heavy rain – clearly was a serious challenge for many of the refugees. I asked Rose, the girl who left her settlement in Adjumani District to escape a forced marriage, how she had imagined Kampala:
Nice and beautiful with only tarmac roads, and clean! But to my dismay it’s not like that, it is very dirty with rubbish everywhere and when the floods come faeces and rubbish enter the houses. Adjumani is not like that. There every family is obliged to dig a rubbish pit and put their rubbish there. And if you don’t, you will be fined.
Young Men in Kampala 49
Several people wrote descriptions of the places where they stayed. Mikael Woldeselassie, a young man from Ethiopia (and one of the protagonists in Part II of this book) wrote:
My refugee life room in Kampala, which I share with two other refugees, has got no window. All the properties in the room belong to the friends I am living with. One hardly can say there are properties in the room, as the two foam mattresses are all the room can hold and they are laid to the right side of the room a few centimetres apart. Our only door is on the left side of the room and opens to the east, but it opens less than half a metre because one of the mattresses blocks the door from opening wider. But I always enjoy the good morning strike of sunrays passing through the cracks of the door. At times I continue reading whatever leftover I have from the night before. There is no way of staying in the room without being on the mattresses lying on the floor. Because of lack of space all of us have to be on our bed, no matter what we do. Somehow we manage to keep our shoes and a ten litres water jerry can and a water cup in one of the corners, which is left unoccupied by the two mattresses. The room can’t hold any additional mattress; they already occupy about 80% of the room. On hot days the room gets warm and I feel suffocated by the lack of ventilation. My few clothes I hang on nails on the wall, but my ever-growing reading material is a problem in the small room. Most of my neighbours live under the curse of deep poverty. I have a very special sitting place in front of my door. From there I monitor the neighbours’ activity, mostly in the evening while smoking a cigarette. I also enjoy the huge trees scattered around the area. One, which is the biggest of all, often reminds me of God. The neighbours are now used to my sitting and watching them. Opposite my room lives a family of eight, of which the family heads have already passed away. There is a mark of a graveyard on the right side of the house. In the beginning I found it very strange to have graveyards around the houses. Their kitchen is in front of their door outside under the open sky. Just in the same way as people do in the countryside. They have no properly built kitchen. The families in front of my room often cook in the morning and evening and it is not difficult to know the quality and quantity of food they manage to get. I have never seen any sign of any of the family members going to school. They have got very few clothes, which are already old enough to be thrown away. I think I have to tell you about the bathroom we have. It is probably 2x2 meters, made of tin sheet, without door and roof. The tin sheet has rusted very much and has big holes everywhere. I saw other users of the bathroom carry their own piece of cloth to hang on the door, using it to protect themselves from indecent body exposure. I also do the same, but it is a bit funny that when I am in standing position, I am only covered up to my shoulders. It is so for everybody, so one can monitor the outside world over the end of the tin sheet. And also be monitored. This is the same for many other bathrooms in the area. I also found out that many of the neighbours use the bathroom as a pissing room. The urine and water from the bathroom do not go anywhere, it is just being absorbed by the soil around the bathroom. This discourages me from going to the bathroom.
The conditions of ‘habitability’, ‘cultural adequacy’, and ‘availability of services, facilities and infrastructure’ spelled out in the Comments to the ICESCR are certainly not met in the neighbourhoods where refugees live. But they experienced the uncertainty that surrounded their access to accommodation as even more stressful. Having no stable source of income, they never knew for how long they would be able to afford the rent. Landlords threatened them with eviction, and the persons they shared their rooms with (sometimes friends, but more often vague acquaintances) became impatient with unfulfilled promises of contributing to the household expenses. The rent for the rooms that the refugees lived in varied from 7,000 to 30,000 USh per month, yet usually cost around 20,000 USh (which at 50 Contexts the time equalled just under $14). In Kampala, landlords as a rule demand a down payment of three months rent for new tenants. Considering that the odd jobs that refugees only occasionally managed to find paid 2000 to 3000 USh a day, paying such rent was impossible for most unless shared – a pattern confirmed by studies of refugees in other African cities (Al-Sharmani 2003, Grabska 2005). Furthermore, as foreigners who did not speak Luganda, refugees depended on so-called ‘brokers’ to assist them in finding accommodation. Brokers charge the sum of one month’s rent for their services – or slightly less if one is a very skilled negotiator. It is not unthinkable that refugees were regularly charged a higher rent than locals, as is mentioned in other studies on urban refugees (Grabska 2005, Jacobsen 2005). Given the insecure circumstances, it is little surprising that most individuals I knew moved house several times during my stay in Kampala. Legal security of tenure, which according to the ICESCR is part of the right to adequate housing, was never guaranteed. Of one young man, Samy, I saw seven of his different ‘homes’. An entry in my research diary reads:
Samy feels “not fine” because the landlady told him and his father’s friend to leave the house because her own relatives want to move in. She gave them two weeks to find something else. Samy: “She told us like animals”.
Clearly not all landlords were bad, and they moreover had their own interests to think of. It is also common among the Ugandan poor to move house frequently, and it is observed that “individuals who fail to pay their rent shift to poorer houses … house owners complain that many tenants quit before honouring their rent dues leading to high losses in income” (Republic of Uganda 2000: 85). Nevertheless, the pressure felt by the refugees was heightened because they feared that impatient landlords would report their illegal presence in the neighbourhood to the LC Chairman or the police. Moreover, they had few networks to fall back on in case of eviction and ending up on the street was a very real concern. Other researchers have rightly pointed out that the frequent moves that refugees have to make affect their ability to build ‘social capital’: the personal networks necessary to find employment, or gain access to schools and other social services (Jacobsen 2005, Landau 2005).
Shelter and meanings of home
The Comments to the ICESCR state:
“the right to housing should not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with, for example, the shelter provided by merely having a roof over one’s head ... Rather it should be seen as the right to live somewhere in security, peace, and dignity”.12
It is very true that the issue of housing encompasses more than merely securing physical shelter. I learnt that the rooms in which refugees in Kampala lived embodied the changes they had gone through and the challenges of their new lives. For quite a few individuals I knew, refuge in Kampala meant a decline in living standards compared to home. For some the difference was considerable. They came from well-established families in the towns of Kivu, or were raised in middle class areas in Addis Ababa or Bujumbura. Considering that the house is sometimes conceptualised as a person’s ‘second skin’ (Ronnes 2004), it comes as no surprise that the squalid living conditions affected some individuals’ perceptions of self and their feelings of dignity. Furthermore, for nearly all of them it was the first time that they were living on their own - without parents to look after them, without siblings to Young Men in Kampala 51 talk to, without the closeness of neighbours who were friends. Karadawi writes that in Khartoum the ‘old caseload’ refugees played an important role in the reception and orientation of newly arriving refugees: “New arrivals locate with or near them, which explains why refugees in Khartoum seldom live in the poorer squatter settlements where Sudanese rural-urban migrants live” (1987: 121). This did not seem to be the case in Kampala. Instead, Congolese refugees told me there was very little contact between them and their compatriots who had fled to Uganda in the 1960s. They even mentioned that the latter abused the naivety of the new arrivals. I witnessed a case where a teenager who had just arrived from Congo was tricked into handing over the little money he had to a compatriot who offered to find him a place to stay, but who promptly disappeared. One person commented: “Those old refugees, I don’t consider them Congolese, they’ve become Ugandans. You see what I mean? They’ve become crooks just like the locals”. The young men from the Kivu towns did not appear eager to be associated with the ‘old refugees’ – I got the impression that they looked down on these people who, having spent four decades in Uganda, still lived in poverty. Some newcomers to Kampala managed to form temporary communities. A group of Sudanese young men, ex-SPLA soldiers and school drop-outs, lived together in Makerere Kikoni, where they set up a small self-help primary school, tried to get a trading business going and held weekly get-togethers to share their problems, and ambitions. Congolese young men and women in Bugulobi organised themselves under the name of Cresocret and tried to lobby for assistance and job opportunities. But for most the absence of relatives was filled by strangers, and being forced to share a room with people they did not know was very stressful. The rooms in which the young men lived - on their own or with age mates, but without parents - also confronted them with their new, independent status. Some experienced this as a welcome novelty, but the material precariousness of their situation often stood in the way of enjoying it: always insecure about how to pay the next month’s rent, they lived with a constant fear of eviction. When I talked to people about their living circumstances, or when I visited their rooms, this nearly always triggered conversations about their homes at home. Their houses in Kampala served as a reference point, a well-spring for memories, reflections and comparisons. It was in the neighbourhoods where refugees lived that their relationship with Ugandans was given shape, and language barriers and cultural differences were felt as a constant reminder that one was ‘not at home’. Definitions of home and the meanings attributed to it are complex and often contradictory. Yet the question of what is home, relating to a physical locality on the one hand and to histories of flight and travel on the other hand, is an undercurrent to most narratives in this book.
2.3 Food
In the evenings, the entire extended family sits down to dinner on the lawn – for although a new life has begun, an old custom from the days of unremitting poverty remains: one eats only once a day, in the evening.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun, 2001, p. 37
In refugee camps and settlements, people’s food situation is monitored on the basis of Memoranda of Understanding between the World Food Program (WFP) and UNHCR. In camps refugees depend on WFP rations, but in refugee settlements such as in Uganda where people have access to agricultural land, they are only given rations for a limited period of time. On the basis of Food Assessment Missions and their evaluation of successful harvests, the rations received upon arrival are gradually phased-out – often an 52 Contexts issue of great controversy. Furthermore, though rations are determined according to international guidelines, in practice certain basic foodstuffs may be unavailable and especially the micronutrients and ‘complementary commodities’ (local fresh foods, spices, dried milk, etcetera) that people are supposed to receive are often not supplied. Extreme malnutrition is common in refugee camps and settlements, also in Uganda (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). Some may argue that it is inevitable that in emergency situations people’s basic needs are not always met, but there is no ground for discriminating refugees from other human beings in terms of their rights to “an adequate standard of living” as stipulated in international conventions, e.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The fact that these rights are violated cannot be solely blamed on host governments who, as in Uganda, cannot guarantee these rights for their own citizens. As Verdirame & Harrell-Bond point out, the fact that UNHCR and NGOs perform de facto government functions in refugee camps and settlements “means that they bear legal obligations that are analogous to those of states” and that they cannot excuse insufficient food supplies as an unfortunate ‘fact of life’ (2005: 227). Anyone who has spent time in a refugee camp knows the controversies that surround the issue of ration cards. Refugees mention the bureaucratic hurdles to be overcome to receive them, to add new family members - relatives who have joined them, a newborn child - to their cards, or to get replacements of cards lost or stolen. Officials are often sceptical of these complaints, and stress refugees’ fraudulent practices (forgery, selling of cards, ‘inventing’ family members) and are especially suspicious of ‘recyclers’, i.e. refugees who report at a reception centre a second time in order to receive an additional package of handouts or a ration card. I recall an incident at a reception centre for Burundian refugees in Tanzania, where a pregnant woman carrying a baby and the small child following her were pushed out of the queue by the sungu sungu (the refugee guards, who received ‘incentives’ from UNHCR) for allegedly being a recycler. The sungu sungu hit her on the legs with sticks, the woman was pleading and crying, the young child screamed. A group of UNHCR officials from Kibondo area visiting the reception centre (it was the day before Ms. Sadako Ogata’s visit) were chatting away a few meters from the scene. They did not look up, did not inquire what the commotion was about. When I approached them the UNHCR field officer said: “She must be a recycler, someone must have recognised her. You must know that this is a real problem, we have so many recyclers here”. The woman with the pretty gold jewellery standing next to him ignored my question and finished her sentence about her misfortune of being stationed in such a hot and godforsaken place. The fact that they felt no need to find out who this ‘someone’ might be who had recognised the supposed recycler, and that they permitted the woman’s physical abuse, was indefensible. But what baffled me most was the fact that they gave no second thought to the desperation a mother must feel to take the risk of being ‘discovered’, to subject herself and her child to such public humiliation for receiving an extra kilo of maize and a cup of oil. There were other issues our team encountered during the evaluation of the work of TCRS in Kibondo district. Every single day we found long queues of people attempting to rectify problems with their ration cards in front of the offices of either the camp commander or the UNHCR. Difficulties arose from mistakes in data entry causing people to be omitted from the food distribution lists; from new arrivals joining relatives without registration;13 and from the ease with which refugees could obtain extra ration cards under false pretences (by buying them from persons who had repatriated or from agency employees who controlled the supply of cards or who had confiscated them from other refugees). There was a tendency among agency staff to dismiss all persons with ration card problems as “cheaters”, and little willingness to identify and resolve the genuine cases, or to investigate what problems households were facing to make them ‘cheat the system’. One Young Men in Kampala 53 example described in our report (Harrell-Bond et al 2000), is of a 60-year-old man that a team member and I visited together with our guide and translator Jean P., a witty and committed primary school teacher, who was permanently on crutches as a result of a bullet wound. The man we visited had fled his village in Rutana (Burundi) in August 1999 and was settled in Mtendeli camp in Tanzania the same month. He had been separated from his wife and new born baby during the attack that caused his flight. He believed they had been killed, but four months later his wife and baby were found in a forest near the Burundi- Tanzania border and brought to him. The woman had not followed UNHCR’s family reunification procedures, and consequently she and the baby were not on the man’s ration card. He had tried to solve this problem with UNHCR in vain. As we were talking to him, his young wife was sitting at a distance, holding her child, not moving or saying a word. He had taken her to see a doctor and showed us the papers stating the diagnosis: psychosis. The woman’s five-month-old infant was so malnourished it looked a mere five weeks. With only one person’s ration, the family ate once a day. Before our visit, neighbours had given the man 2 kgs of maize, but he lacked the money for milling. We asked if we could have a look inside his tiny mud hut. Except for a construction of poles with straw on top - the family bed made for him by one of the neighbours – it was completely empty. The man had sold all household items received at registration, including the plastic sheeting for shelter. He had sold his saucepan to get money to thank the men who found his wife. He was waiting for the day of soap distribution, so that he could sell his ration of soap to pay for grinding the neighbours’ gift of maize. He mentioned that a community services worker had visited him twice in the past five months and that this person had put his name on a list to get a mosquito net. Five days later we saw him again, he was standing in the queue in front of the UNHCR office for another attempt at getting his wife and child added to his ration card.
If in the camps people’s food situation is precarious and fraught with difficulties, at least there is a system that can in principle be improved on. In Kampala there was no system. Except for the few people who were included in UNHCR’s ‘urban caseload’ and those who received food coupons from the Jesuit Refugee Service, all refugees had to cater for their own daily needs. Most of them lived with a constant worry about where and when they would have their next meal. For some the situation was extremely desperate. In August 2000, Petna filmed Tesfaye Abebe, a 25-year-old Ethiopian refugee and former soldier, on his daily efforts to find something to eat. Tesfaye had no place to stay and, like the young boy from Burundi, spent months on end sleeping at the InterAid veranda. Petna and I came to know him as a very expressive person, a joker who at times was rather aggressive. He was clearly disturbed: by his past, about which he would sometimes volunteer a few words – carrying the rocket-launcher on his shoulder, the decision to revenge his parents’ death – as well as by his present situation. The staff at InterAid had branded him “mad” and left him to fend for himself. Tesfaye was eager to talk and be filmed - his tone of voice shifted from matter-of-fact to sad to expressively angry. An excerpt from the footage:
Tesfaye in blue pants and chequered shirt, baseball cap, standing in front of the InterAid premises on Sir Apollo Kaggwa Road. Fiddling with the microphone on his shirt. Noise of the cars and matatus passing by.
This is my place, this now is my home. Because I stay here, three months now I sleep outside. Up to now there is not any assistance, nobody helped me. I sleep here with my friend from Burundi. We are staying here outside without food, we are sleeping outside without a blanket.
54 Contexts
Tesfaye walking down the road, talking non-stop, a monologue in front of the camera. Views of Makerere Hill in the background.
When I wake up in the morning I go to find somewhere somebody who can help me to get food to eat. And sometimes when I don’t find anybody, I go to the place where people drop bad things and I go to find my food there. Yesterday there was a bottle it cut me in my hand, [but] because I had hunger I [had to] go to find food there to eat. Now when I wake up in the morning, I go with friends to ask assistance, to ask for food. You can ask two days without finding any. Then we go to find a place where people drop bad things, to check inside there, to take food from there. It is the food that remains after people eat, they put it in the container. I can show you the place. I can also show you another place where I got food. And when I told the office to pay for that food, they refused to pay. And now I’m fearing to walk in this place, because I didn’t pay, and because I don’t know the language of this country to talk with these people, now I’m fearing. That is my problem. I can show you that place, it's around here.
Tesfaye stops briefly at one of the kiosks lining the street, exchanges a few words with the woman attending it. The kiosk is painted light blue from the outside, decorated with a few posters and a calendar. Vegetables and fruits – papaya, mango, bananas, pineapple - outside on wooden racks. Next to it an aluminium pot on a stove, boiling water for tea. Bright-coloured plastic plates and containers have just been washed and are drying in the sun.
Yesterday I got my food from here and I didn’t pay. Now this woman she’s asking me to pay her money. Now when I ask the office to pay that food, they say, that one is your problem. And I’m a refugee, where do I get that money to come to pay here? That one is my problem. We can go to show you another place where I get food.
Tesfaye and his Burundian friend, walking down the street holding hands. Part of the pavement washed away by rains. Children playing, more shops with fruits and vegetables laid out. Trees line the streets. Bright sun.
Also sometimes I wake up in the morning and it is Saturday or Sunday. I don’t have any place to find food. Then I come here, this is the church for Indians. They cook food every Sunday. And when they finish to eat, they take that food to give to people they don’t know, or who don’t have a place to eat. They take that food outside and they give it to you. They can’t give it to you on a plate, but they put it for you in the plastic bag. After that I sit down here under these trees, and I eat. And when I finish to eat, I sleep. Sometimes I don’t have soap to wash my body, but I just wash with water, and I go to sleep to wait for tomorrow. But also tomorrow, I don’t have the place to find food. But me I believe God knows my life. Yes. Maybe I can become crazy, because I think too much. Here, this is the church for Indians, this is where I get food on Sundays. And I say it is thanks to God. Because sometimes I can go two days without food. And nobody worries about my life. Yes. But God he knows. Let me show you the one place I get food. That food, people eat it and it remains. They come to drop it in the tank of the city council. I come in the night time or in the evening, I come to find something inside. When I find something like bread, like beans, I wash it, after that I eat. I will show you. Yes. When I die, nobody will cry. I will show you.
Busy street leading up to Kampala Road, noise of traffic and constant hooting. Tesfaye and his friend cross. They walk through the red mud, turn into a back street. A woman shouts something. Close-up of the sewage. Children washing clothes in a brown stream. The city council container bulking with garbage. Tesfaye walks around it, picks up some bits and pieces from the muddy soil, puts them into his pockets. He climbs on top of it. Stands in the dirt. Empties a big nylon Young Men in Kampala 55
bag used for transporting charcoal. Rummages through the mess. Close-up of rotten food. Flies. Banana leaves, rice, most indiscernible. Tesfaye squats down and collects some things. Puts them in his mouth. Empties a few more bags. Searches for edible bits. Climbs off.
Yes, this is the place where I find food when I don’t eat at the police station. Because when I go to InterAid, they tell me to go to the UNHCR office. But when I go there, they don’t give me anything. So I see it’s better to eat from here. I eat, and after that I sleep. When I find something, and when I find it’s dirty, I just eat. God he knows. Because I didn’t get any assistance. And also you, you know my place. I sleep outside, it’s now three months. So if there’s anybody, he can help me go back to my country. I can’t stay in this life. This is my food, you see, this is meat. You see?
He shows the camera a disgusting chunk of something and puts it into his mouth. Chews.
This is my food. I eat, I eat because I’m hungry. You see? This is my place. Yes. This is my life.
I cannot say how many refugees resorted to eating from garbage containers, but certainly for the majority their chief daily occupation was securing their daily meal. As will be discussed in the next section, only few managed to find a more or less stable source of income, and thus an oft-heard reply when I asked about someone’s whereabouts was: “He must have gone to find something to eat”. People moved around town for the sole purpose of ‘finding something to eat’. Strategies varied, and are consistent with what is known about survival strategies of the urban poor generally. Some visited friends hoping to be invited to share lunch or supper, or to borrow a little money to buy their own. Others searched for an odd job for the day, as a porter or in construction work, in return for either a meal at the workplace or just enough cash to buy a plate of cooked food from Owino market. Yet these odd jobs were hard to find. Some people convinced a local shopkeeper to give them a drink or a meal on credit. Tesfaye and many others, however, had too many debts to clear to still be given some. Others visited churches to ask for assistance, or spent days on end at InterAid or UNHCR to see if, against all odds, there was something to be had from these offices. Some must have simply begged for food on the streets. Refugees, always insecure about their accommodation, had no option of growing food in home gardens like some Ugandan urban poor have who are involved in urban agriculture to supplement diets, or have plots on the outskirts of town (Maxwell 1998). But if friends or relatives came to Kampala on short visits from the refugee camps, they would often bring part of the rations distributed there. Another strategy for those who lived with friends or acquaintances was to pool resources to share the costs of food and rent. However, whether this was a workable option depended on the constellations of their households. Some people shared rooms with fellow refugees that they did not necessarily get on with. They described their living together as an “alliance de circumstance”. In such cases, distrust often stood in the way of an effective system of pooling resources. At times roommates hid from each other the fact that they received assistance or had managed to earn some money. I remember a group of four young Congolese persons who lived together and, even though three of them were almost certain the fourth person received a monthly InterAid allowance, they did not confront him about this, but grudgingly accepted that he did not contribute to the household pot. I wondered why privacy in this matter was accepted when it was so obvious they did not have enough to eat. When much later I asked one of them, I got the cynical answer: “We would never have confronted him. The solution is either finding a way of chasing him without having to mention why, or looking for a solution yourself and leaving that house. We don’t speak about our grudges. That’s why we end up killing each other”. On another day the same person would have stressed the fact that there 56 Contexts are positive sides to this culture of non-confrontation – for one thing, without its tolerance any alliance de circumstance would certainly be unthinkable.
What did people eat, what was the product of their daily creative efforts? Virtually none of the young refugees included in this research ate three times a day. People skipped breakfast, or at most drank a cup of black tea, with several spoons of sugar only if available. Those who had a room with a stove and basic utensils cooked lunch or dinner; those without bought meals from the market stalls. In Kampala, cheap ready-made meals consist of a plate of posho and beans or matooke (cooked bananas, staple food in western Uganda) for about half a dollar. Very few ever ate fruit, fish or meat. The green vegetable they could afford was sukuma wiki, which in Kiswahili means ‘to push one through the week’. It needed no elaborate survey to ascertain that most refugees’ average daily intake of food seriously fell short of the criteria spelled out in the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response (Sphere Project 2000). It always somehow remained a puzzle to me how the young people I knew managed to survive. It is true that I was not in their company all the time and thus missed certain first-hand information about what or how they managed to secure their meals. To some extent, moreover, I faced the same difficulty as Willems (2003) did in Dar es Salaam: “the strategy of a large number of respondents to present themselves as “alone, poor and needy” ... turned out to be an obstacle in collecting certain types of information, such as, socio-economic background or class, network size, the actual amount of financial support received from social network members etceteras” (Willems 2003: 358-9).14 I want to stress that despite the gaps in information, it was an obvious fact that people did go hungry. I witnessed some individuals grow thinner over the time I knew them, and many suffered from all sorts of illnesses, which were evidently linked to their poor diets, and which affected their overall energy levels.15 One Sudanese young man gave a telling answer to my question how he would define a young person. He wrote:
“Young people need food every time because their bodies need food in order to grow healthily. Without that, compared to adults or mature persons, a young person is easily mentally confused”.
Food and dignity
The stress that came with the challenge, day in day out, of “finding something to eat” and of never going to sleep being certain where to get the next meal, was not only physically exhausting but also affected the refugees’ psychological well-being and their feelings of dignity. Some young men expressed their concern about losing weight, and with a mix of pride and shame they showed me photos of what their healthy bodies had looked like before flight. One Ethiopian man said: “Every day I’m thinking about my food, what I will eat. Even the birds don’t worry about that!” Not being able to cater for their basic needs affected the young men’s feelings of self-worth. They were at the age at which they should have been thinking about marriage and looking after a wife and children - instead they barely managed to fill their own stomachs. This was one aspect of why many confided to me they felt “less of a person” ever since they had become refugees. Their dignity was furthermore affected by the way (food) assistance was organised. I overheard many arguments among refugees about the inefficient procedures at the Jesuit Refugee Service and especially at InterAid. The long hours of waiting, at times full days, apart from being humiliating, were also experienced as a waste of time – time they could have used to look for other sources of sustenance. One young man came to me astonished after he had gone through an interview conducted by the Junior Protection Officer, who, without apology or Young Men in Kampala 57 second thought about the state of his interviewee, had been eating his own lunch while firing his questions. Frustration with some of UNHCR and InterAid’s staff’s insensitivity and the non-transparency of office procedures was often phrased like this: “We don’t know what they are doing, but look at their cars and big stomachs, it’s clear they are eating the refugees’ money!” Several Congolese young men reminisced about the shock they had felt years earlier at the sight of the Rwandan refugees in their hometown Goma: “They just came from a war and there they were, fighting to receive a packet of biscuits or a handful of maize”. It was a comment on the unpredictability of life - at the time none of them had imagined they themselves would be in the same situation only a few years later. But for some Kampala did not represent their first experience with going hungry and experiencing its indignity. I was told about the journeys of crossing the border back to Sudan from the refugee settlements in northern Uganda that many undertook to collect food from their abandoned shambas - “it was tiresome and dangerous and all the time we had to pray that the SPLA would not catch us”. Ex-SPLA recruits remembered the maize mixed with sand they were forced to eat during military training, and how they would sneak out to the surrounding forest to find wild fruits and leaves to eat. A few young men had experienced the torture of food deprivation in SPLA prisons. A Sudanese girl said this was her most painful memory: her frail grandmother being beaten for refusing to give to the SPLA soldiers her one remaining goat. A Rwandan young mother recounted how, when she lived in the refugee camp in Tanzania just after the genocide, she went on risky walks to the surrounding villages to beg the local women for food for her child. A man wrote to me that some people, with whom he had first fled from Sudan to (then) Zaire, had exchanged their children for food at the Zairian border. Despite all these experiences, most people stressed that even if food was an issue before flight, it was different then. One young man said:
In your own village or town you can’t go hungry for long, because there are always people who know you. But here in Kampala, who do I go to? Here I fear going hungry.
And he added: “I don’t talk about being hungry with my friends. It is no news”. It was not only no news, it was painful and humiliating news. I noticed that few people would state they were hungry with others around; they would tell me in a private moment, around the corner, away from the group. Or they would say their friends were hungry, or their wife or children. Even the people I knew quite well would hardly ever directly ask me for food. That food is tied up with interpersonal relations in terms of dignity and trust – and thus more than just a physiological need – became clear to me also from my response to the deprivations the young refugees suffered. I never got used to being confronted with hungry people. And yet at the same time something was strangely deceptive: often you cannot see that people do not eat. Like pain, hunger is an experience that defies language, however relentlessly present it may be for the person suffering from it (Scarry 1985). Thus, so as not to have to spend too many words on it, I tried to have my meetings with the young men in places where we could have something to eat. Inviting people for a meal firstly had the simple practical function of making sure they had something in their stomachs and thus one concern less for the day (- the way they gobbled their food away, and their flapping trouser legs, conveyed the pathetic inadequateness of those shared meals). Secondly, inviting them was a way of expressing a feeling of “we are two human beings who share a meal like millions of people do across the globe”. To add some sense of normality to their lives and mine, to make a gesture of “hey, I do see you”. Unfortunately, it was not always clear how to practically go about even this basic human communication. I could take people to a local restaurant for a chapatti, beans and posho, but to be seen having lunch with a mzungu in such a place went counter to their efforts to remain invisible. Besides, these 58 Contexts places were usually crowded and offered little privacy for having a personal conversation, let alone conducting an interview. But if instead we went to the more spacious up-class places with menu cards laid out on the table that also was uncomfortable: the money for our one meal could have lasted them for over a week. A few people I invited to our house. I prepared something to eat for them, and felt a particular satisfaction in the act of cooking – a universal wordless way of expressing feelings of concern, and friendship. Similarly, if people had the possibility they invited me to their traditional meals - accompanied by stories about their favourite food back home and how only their mothers truly knew how to prepare this - and I received gifts of groundnut paste and honey brought from Sudan. This is a truism indeed: food is a constituent of identity – especially in a foreign place. The constant confrontation with people going hungry also triggered another response in me, that is, to not eat. During the last year of my stay I lost about eighteen pounds – and started to receive worried looks and remarks from the young men of my study about becoming far too skinny. The reason that I often went without breakfast and lunch was partly practical (i.e. being too busy to eat) but must have also had to do with my identification with the people around me. Although I obviously still had a much healthier diet than my research subjects, over time I started to mirror my approach to food to their inadequate eating patterns – their preoccupation became my indifference.
2.4 Employment
Perhaps the greatest riddle of Africa’s cities is how these masses of people earn a living. How, and from what?
Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun, 2001, p. 69
One of the main reasons why refugees decide to come to Kampala is because of the opportunities the city is assumed to offer for making a living. Skilled labourers, traders and professionals expect to put their skills and experience to productive use in the urban economy, and also unskilled and uneducated individuals who fail to support themselves through farming in the settlements hope to find work in Kampala. However, irrespective of their nationalities, the individuals I got to know during my research unanimously agreed on the extreme difficulties of finding gainful employment in the city. The widely shared perception was that it was primarily their status as foreigners that prevented them from getting a job. While the high levels of unemployment among refugees must be seen in light of the generally high unemployment rates in Uganda’s urban economy, there are a number of structural constraints that hinder refugees participating in paid work. Firstly, language is a crucial issue. Not being able to speak Luganda, or to communicate in English or Kiswahili, was experienced as a major obstacle to gaining access to the labour market. Macchiavello, in her study of refugee livelihoods in Kampala, found that knowledge of English and Kiswahili was positively related to the number of working individuals as well as to their self-sufficiency (2003: 14-15). Secondly, jobs and contracts in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy are often obtained through relatives, friends or acquaintances. Refugees, certainly initially, had no social networks to help them gain access to jobs or credit. They experienced the job market to be very closed and evaluated this in terms of discrimination, nepotism and “tribalism”. Andrew, a Sudanese young man in his third year of theological college, was one of many who commented on this:
If I don’t know anybody, even if I have a PhD, I will not get a job here in Uganda. Even if you are an educated person they will not give you an office, maybe they’ll let you be a messenger. The high rank jobs are for Ugandans only. But most of the Young Men in Kampala 59
Ugandans don’t have jobs either, and you know why, it’s because they hate themselves. For example, when I am among Acholis but I’m not an Acholi myself, they won’t employ me. Only if for example I’m a Muganda and you are a Muganda, that’s when I can get a job. That’s the way they’re dealing with it. Unless if you came from abroad, from Europe or so, and if you went for further studies there, then automatically you will get a job. Otherwise it’s very difficult. Unless maybe if you bribe the person, because here people they like money too much, that’s their system.16
Others mentioned that in order to get a job one had to “promise to surrender your first pay or give some money in cash”. Thirdly and most importantly, the issue is how refugees’ access to gainful employment is organised by law. The Ugandan Control of Alien Refugees Act (1960) is silent on the issue of whether refugees are allowed to work or set up businesses outside the settlements. Under the Immigration Act (1999) “engaging in gainful employment without an entry permit” constitutes an offence. The conferral of refugee status should normally be equivalent to an entry permit, but, as a result of the uncertainties in the legislation and in the refugee status determination process, this was not the case (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005: 216-218). Besides, the majority of Kampala’s refugee population lives in the city without being granted refugee status and thus their involvement in gainful employment would be unlawful. This situation is not in compliance with international refugee legislation. The 1951 UN Convention provides for refugees’ right to “engage in wage-earning employment” and “on his own account in agriculture, industry, handicrafts and commerce and to establish commercial and industrial companies” (Art 17 & 19). In Uganda, refugees’ right to work was obstructed by the fact that no special work permits for refugees existed, while ‘normal’ work permits used for foreigners were very rarely given to refugees. The uncertainties in the legislation caused many Ugandan employers to refrain from employing refugees for fear of running into trouble with the authorities (Macchiavello 2003). Like in other cities like Cairo and Johannesburg, the refugees who managed to find work still had many things to worry about: having to work long hours, perform the physically hardest tasks, be paid less money than national employees or not be paid at all, and be sacked without a stated reason (Grabska 2005, Jacobsen 2005, Landau 2005). For instance, after many months of trying, Samson, a Sudanese professional with an MA from a British university and many years of work experience, managed to find a job with an architectural company. He was not paid for three months in a row. When he confronted his employer about this, he was told: “You cannot claim anything, you are a refugee”. He quit the job. Some employers expected special commitments from refugees in return for turning a blind eye to their lack of work permits. Other refugees, who initially had managed to circumvent the work permit issue with their bosses, lost their jobs when their employers discovered their lack of papers (Muhwezi & Sam 2004). The risk of exploitation was especially high in the informal sector. Rose, the Sudanese girl who escaped from her aunt’s household in Adjumani to avoid a forced marriage, was taken in by another (unrelated) ‘auntie’ upon arrival in Kampala. Rose was made to work all day, stayed at home as the family’s children went to school, was not paid, and received the smallest share of the family meals she had the task to prepare. She knew that if she did not accept this ‘deal’ she would be on the street. Girls and women working as domestics – often, like Rose, for room and board only – are moreover vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Young men looking for odd jobs in town were also faced with various forms of ill-treatment. An entry from the diary that Samuel Alim, a 19-year-old ex-SPLA soldier who lived in hiding in Kampala, kept, reads:
60 Contexts
9 January 2000: Very early I start moving around town to look for a job. I find work at Nakasero, Buganda Road at 12 PM and work to 5 PM. We transfer the sand, soil and stones. I am not paid because the work is not finished and because I started very late. So they tell me to finish the work first and then I will be given 2500 USh.
11 January 2000: I wake up very early in the morning and walk back to the place where I didn’t finish work the other day. I start at 7.30 AM and I finish at 1 PM. They give me 1000 USh for two days work, and I became very annoyed (unhappy) and was about to fight the man who gave me the job but I worried because I am a foreigner in this country.
Self-employed petty traders or business people were at the mercy of City Council tax collectors, who would not hesitate to close a shop or confiscate the precious weighing scales if they found permits or tax receipts were not in order. Of course, the informal sector, in which also a majority of Ugandan nationals also earn their living, generally lacks enforceable rules and regulations concerning work conditions. Yet undocumented refugees are more vulnerable to exploitation than Ugandan citizens, not the least because they have no access to any form of redress with local authorities or the courts of law in case of mistreatment or labour disputes. Refugees continue to be seen as ‘burden’ and not ‘boon’ (Kuhlman 1990). However, there is ample evidence that refugees contribute significantly to the local economy. Many urban refugees are entrepreneurs who bring in financial and human capital, others provide a cheap yet productive source of labour, and all are active consumers (Bakewell 2000, Grabska 2005, Jacobsen 2005, Kok 1989, Kuhlman 1990). At the same time, it is true that only when refugees are allowed to participate in the economic and social life of the host communities they can make contributions to the development of the host country (Kibreab 1987, 1996). Thus, if governments want to avoid refugees becoming permanent cases for international welfare, their access to gainful employment should be a top priority. Jacobsen & Landau rightly argue: “UNHCR should work with local lobbying organisations to use existing legislation and the courts to open labour markets to refugees” (2005: 23). The first requirement is the implementation of refugees’ rights to work and to freedom of movement. Secondly, initiatives to encourage people to use their skills productively should be developed and include programs for language training, employment services and access to credit (Jacobsen 2005, Jacobsen & Landau 2005, Macchiavello 2003).
The jobs they found
Of the refugees included in my research, around 25 per cent had a more or less regular income. Their jobs as well as their earnings varied, and included: working as a labourer at construction sites, giving French language lessons as a private tutor, working as a cook, office assistant, accountant, waiter, hairdresser, watchman or shop attendant, washing and ironing clothes, making and selling art, or otherwise engaging in petty trade (second hand clothes, Congolese textiles and sculpture, tablecloth knitting). Other sources of income for refugees in Kampala mentioned in studies by Kalyango (2001) and Macchiavello (2003) are: tailoring, carpentry, fishery, playing in a Congolese music band, being employed by an NGO, or working as a preacher. Macchiavello’s study, based on interviews with 221 individuals in Kampala, comes up with a higher level of employment among the urban refugee population than I found: just under two-thirds of her sample were (self-)employed. Given the fact that students, school dropouts and aspiring students made up the majority of my research group, Macchiavello’s conclusion that “students constitute the largest group among the Young Men in Kampala 61 unemployed” (2003: 20) confirms my findings. It must be noted, however, that only half of the (self)employed in her sample are actually self-sufficient, a concept that Macchiavello defines as: “being able to meet their own and their family’s needs for food and shelter, and provide for medical and educational requirements, both for themselves, if they had not completed their education, and for at least one of their children” (2003: 3). Macchiavello’s study suggests that the most successful group in terms of using their skills and becoming self-sufficient are traders and artisans. Professionals – (university) educated individuals who were employed in the formal sector back home – were much less successful. Of the professionals who did find employment, nearly half lost their jobs and thereafter remained unemployed. The two chief obstacles for this group in finding employment were their limited knowledge of the English language (especially for teachers and journalists from francophone countries), and the non-recognition of their qualifications (especially for lawyers and medical personnel). Her study furthermore showed that entrepreneurial skills prove an invaluable asset, essential for the utilisation of other skills in Kampala’s labour market. Prostitution and (petty) crime are among the general survival strategies employed by poor people in urban areas, and one can assume that a certain number of refugees in Kampala were also involved. However, I did not make either a focus of my research. In my conversations with the young men the subject of prostitution came up every now and then, though never directly with the girls or women.17 Most Sudanese men doubted that organised prostitution went on in the refugee settlements, or that Sudanese girls in Kampala were involved in it, but they did mention that girls at times had sex with camp officials to get favours - especially, to have their names selected for the educational scholarship shortlists. They did mention that such alliances were part of new survival strategies. For instance, two young men recounted the story of a friend of theirs who had married “a very old woman” who happened to be relatively well-off, which my informants thought disgraceful. However, they saw this as an isolated incident, and were more concerned about the cases of fathers and uncles giving their underage daughters and nieces away for marriage in order to relieve the household of another mouth to feed. I was also told about Sudanese girls in the refugee camps eloping with Ugandan truck drivers, who had more to offer than the girls’ parents in terms of food, clothes, and an escape from boredom. As for the Congolese refugees in Kampala, I knew of certain girls who, even if they did not work as full-time sex-workers in the Kabalagala bars or along Gaba Road, had sex in return for food, clothes, money and ‘protection’. One girl had such a relationship with a much older mzungu man. With her earnings she provided for herself and her boyfriend with whom she had fled from Congo. The impact that such novel arrangements have on gender relationships is an area that merits further research. As for petty crime, there were allegations of Congolese nationals being involved in money forgery, but I had no means of confirming this. While I imagine that stealing was one strategy of securing money for food or rent, I did not ask straightforward questions about this. The few individuals who brought up the subject themselves reasoned that stealing was undignified, would spoil the name of their beloved home country, and most of all was far too risky given their foreigner status and the seriousness of their situation should they get caught. While the latter was certainly a valid concern, their explanations must have been coloured by their perception of me – a white, middle class young woman with no experience of hardship or hunger and the behaviour this can induce. One man said:
Of course we can’t tell you all of what we do. We are no criminals but we have our ways of dealing with this suffering. When you are hungry you have to be creative. It was Mobutu who taught us: “Il faut ba beta libanga”, which means as much as ‘Survive! By all means…’ Casser les pierres, break stones if you need to…
62 Contexts
Several studies report that in the adverse circumstances of exile, it is especially the women who resourcefully develop new ways of creating a living for themselves, their families and communities (Bright 1992, Kibreab 1995, McSpadden & Moussa 1993, Moussa 1995). Eritrean women in Khartoum for instance became beer brewers and set up community restaurants that also functioned as information networks. Others took up work as domestic servants, and some were forced into prostitution in order to generate sufficient income for their family’s survival. Before their flight to Sudan, the majority of these women had never participated in work outside the home (Kibreab 1995).18 Men appeared to have more difficulty with their decline in status, which further affected their abilities to provide for their families. Similar patterns are observed in refugee communities elsewhere, such as in Sri Lanka (Rajasingham-Senanayake 2004, Schrijvers 1997) and among Sudanese refugees in Egypt and Uganda (Grabska 2005, Lejukole 2002, Mulumba 1998, SCDP 1998). Macchiavello (2003) comments on the particular entrepreneurial spirit of women refugees in Kampala. My study was primarily concerned with young men, and I thus gained little insight into the strategies that women developed to resume their lives in exile. Several young men commented on changing roles in the division of labour that exile had caused. The most significant example was that of girls taking care of their boyfriends by means of the money earned through their sexual engagements with other, sometimes mzungu, men. In my view women’s role in providing for their families and communities in exile is not quite the surprising finding it has been suggested to be. It is well-known that in most African societies, women generally have a crucial role as economic providers for their households – as farmers, traders, entrepreneurs – which traditionally has always been part of their gender roles. Lastly, it must be noted that people’s capacity to engage in income-generating activities is significantly affected by their state of mind. Individuals, who as a result of being traumatised are depressed or otherwise lack the will power, strength or energy to effectively work towards their daily survival, are in an extremely precarious situation, particularly when they have no social network to fall back on. As noted, there is an acute lack of psychosocial support structures for those who seek refuge in Kampala. This strongly affects people’s ability to regain strength and, in the long term, their ability to cope with the conditions and challenges of life in exile.
2.5 Security
It’s difficult to go without food for three days, but going without security for three days feels like three years.
Jacob G., Sudanese refugee
Refugees in Kampala have a hard time securing food and safe accommodation, and only few have access to gainful employment. The challenges to make ends meet are directly linked to the security issues that urban refugees are faced with. The majority have no refugee or other ID papers, which effectively means that their presence in town is unlawful. They therefore keep a low profile and do their utmost to avoid interaction with immigration officers or the police. The fears, preoccupations and practices that come with leading a clandestine life clearly are obstacles to earning a living. In order to find work, one is obliged to - as people put it - “move around town and expose oneself”. Most would have refrained from “exposing themselves” if given the option, but the reality was this: “I have to get out, even if I fear, I can’t sit in my house and die of hunger”. A search for security was among the key motives for individuals to leave the refugee settlements and come to the city. In May 1998, I had a conversation with two Young Men in Kampala 63
Sudanese women who had lived in the notoriously unsafe Ikafe refugee settlement in northern Uganda. I asked them why they had left and they listed in a matter-of-fact way:
In Ikafe there is killing and raping. Rebels burn houses at night and they burnt the clinic, they cut off people’s ears and put padlocks through people’s lips or cut them off completely. They take our children.
One of the women added: “We were thrown in there like rubbish”. The security problems in refugee camps and settlements – discussed in Chapter One - included rebel attacks, forced recruitment, ill-treatment by police, camp commanders and other officials, ethnic violence, domestic violence and rape. Individuals who had had experiences of this kind often commented positively on the security situation in Kampala. They no longer suffered the trauma of rebel attacks, and felt that the city’s anonymity granted them a veneer of protection and a degree of freedom they had not experienced in the closed environment of the settlements. At the same time, however, hardly any of the young refugees I got to know felt truly safe in Kampala. Their insecurity stemmed from their personal and their communities’ war traumas, from the political and military ties between the Government of Uganda and the countries they fled, and from their clandestine presence in the city.
Clandestine presence and the risk of arrest
During the years of my research, only a negligible number of the urban refugee population in Kampala had permission from the GoU to live in the capital, i.e. the around 500 individuals included in UNHCR’s urban caseload. A good number of others had managed to obtain a UNHCR or OPM ‘Protection Letter’ (an A4-size sheet of paper with a passport photo) but this letter, which needed to be renewed periodically, did not guarantee ‘protection’ to its bearers. In Kampala, as in Nairobi (Verdirame 1999), it did not prevent arbitrary arrest.19 Most insecure, however, were individuals without any letter or document – that is, asylum seekers still in the process and refugees who had for different reasons not made themselves known to the GoU or UNHCR. They could not prove their identity or their rightful presence in Uganda, and were thus vulnerable to arrest, relocation to the refugee settlements or deportation to their home countries. It must be said that the police in Uganda appeared more lenient towards foreigners than their colleagues in Kenya and Tanzania (HRW 2002, Verdirame 1999, Willems 2003). There were instances of police and security personnel arresting groups of refugees – witness the New Vision and Monitor articles ‘Aliens arrested’, ‘Arua deports 20 illegal aliens’ (Angulibo 2000) and ‘Police holds 17 asylum seekers’ (Mulumba 2001) – but regular large-scale roundups of refugees as took place in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam did not happen in Kampala during the time of my research. Nevertheless, people remained fearful: they knew that without papers they could easily end up in a police cell or even in Luzira prison without anyone to bail them out and stand surety.20 During the time I spent in Kampala, about a dozen individuals I knew were arrested, held in police cells for a few hours up to a few days, or taken to prison. Three of them were arrested following conflicts with neighbours or compatriots; the others were arrested for lack of valid IDs and/or on charges of being “idle and disorderly”.21 This testimony by Elias Laku is illustrative:
On 20/11/98, I was picked by military police, local defence units and plain-clothed security personnel. They took me to Katwe Police Station where I was kept in prison for five days before being transferred to the Central Police Station where I was set free by the CID Regional Police Commander, Special Branch at room 83, 64 Contexts
third floor. I was told not to tell or speak to anybody about what had happened because they would come back for me at any time. I was detained for five days without explanation, despite the fact that they picked me from my room at 6 o’clock in the morning. The charges were that I was idle and disorderly. Now my question is, is one really idle and disorderly while sleeping in his house? What else should a foreign refugee be doing at that time? The law in this country requires that one should have a work permit for getting any job. I cannot afford one. The police’s queries were: why did I leave the camp? What am I doing in Kampala? Where do I get money from? They warned me that if I did not go back to the camp they either will deport me to Sudan or send me to prison for living illegally in Kampala. They did not consider that I possess a proper refugee identity card, issued to me by their Ministry of Local Government’s refugee desk. I reported the incident to the Senior Protection Officer. He advised me to be patient because he would help me resettle in a third country of asylum or join my cousin in the USA.
This young man had escaped to Uganda after several months in captivity of and later fighting for the Sudan government army. His village had been attacked, his father, the sub- chief, was killed and his sisters “used as sex objects”. Elias was kept in captivity for five months, was tortured (“I received cigarette burns, my toenails were removed”) and forced to convert to Islam. He was circumcised (“without being given a pain killer, but worst was they used the same surgical instruments on everybody without sterilisation”) and worked as a “house maid” to his captors. He was later sent for military training, but managed to escape and fled to Uganda. He lived in one of the refugee settlements for several years and attended school. However, at some point he was taken back to Sudan by the SPLA on pretence of getting a job as a primary school teacher. Pupils and teachers were soon taken for military training, and Elias once more managed to escape. He was no longer safe in the refugee settlement in northern Uganda and fled to Kampala. I met him there and remember his amiable but very timid ways. He was one of those persons in whose presence trauma became something tangible. Even though his five days’ detention in Kampala stood in no comparison to his experiences of imprisonment in Sudan, the realisation that even in Kampala he was not safe fostered the anxieties that became part and parcel of him. Fortunately, the Protection Officer’s words in his case proved no idle promise - in September 2001 I received an e-card from Perth: Elias had been resettled to Australia.
Verdirame & Harrell-Bond write that in Uganda, “UNHCR’s response to the ... imprisonment of refugees was erratic, seemingly depending on who was the protection officer in charge” (2005: 170). Protection officers did visit Luzira prison on occasion, but UNHCR knew little about the refugees arrested and held in police cells across the town. These individuals were entirely dependent on friends to bail them out. If they did not have friends, or no way of communicating to them, they could be kept for days before either being released or transferred to prison. I was once called by a Congolese friend of mine who was arrested for carrying a video recorder. “Refugees are poor, so this recorder must be stolen”, was the policeman’s claim. I contacted my friend’s sister, who went to the police station with the original receipt and managed to have her brother released. This person had a mobile phone and had I not been around, he would have called other friends. Many refugees, however, would have neither a mobile phone nor a network of persons to call. Threatening refugees (and Ugandans without proper IDs for that matter) with arrest, or actually arresting them, is a much-practiced way for police officers to take money. Again, the situation was not as bad as in Nairobi – some individuals who had spent time there as refugees commented that “filling the pockets of the police” had been a daily affair – but also in Kampala many refugees had to pay up to avoid trouble. An excerpt from my field notes about a group of Congolese refugees living together in Bugulobi reads:
Young Men in Kampala 65
About their security: two of their group have been in prison. G. points at one of them, who shows me his release paper. He was in Luzira for 42 days, on charges of being ‘idle and disorderly’. He was picked up from the streets on a day when many Ugandans were also arrested. G. went to argue for his release, was told to pay – “You Congolese have gold, you pay!” He paid and got his friend out.
Refugees’ lack of identification documents not only made them vulnerable to arrest, but also to crimes committed against them by Ugandans or compatriots. The cases dealt with by the Refugee Law Project show the difficulties refugees experienced in seeking redress when a victim of a crime. When they reported incidents such as assault and theft, the police asked them for money, sexual favours, or simply no action was taken. Others were too scared to report criminal incidents to the police at all, either because of their lack of IDs or because they feared the police, given the close alliance between the Ugandan government and the rebel groups in their countries of origin (Bernstein 2005).
Uganda’s foreign politics
Uganda’s military involvement in the wars in Sudan and Congo had serious repercussions for the security of Sudanese, Congolese and Rwandan refugees living in Uganda. The Ugandan government maintained close ties with the SPLA in southern Sudan and with the RCD in eastern Congo, the two rebel armies that the majority of Sudanese and Congolese had fled from. Congolese refugees mentioned that “Here in Uganda we can’t be safe... we are sleeping with the enemy!” In 1998/1999, refugees from the towns of Kivu lived more or less in hiding in Kampala. Recently a Congolese friend of mine and I recalled the situation during those years, and he said:
Uganda at the time was supporting Wamba dia Wamba and the rumours were that “if you declare yourself as a refugee you will be arrested”. The RCD at that time was recruiting in Kampala and people had reason to be afraid. They were trying to convince people by offering them money to come back to Congo and join the RCD. Or they played on the sentiments of defending your country. I believe that only those who had personal issues with the RCD were taken by force, but still we were afraid, we couldn’t be sure.
RCD intelligence was indeed active in Kampala at that time, and the Refugee Rights project received regular accounts of intelligence agents posing as refugees at InterAid, and even of RCD personnel gaining access to refugees’ files. There were incidents of Congolese and Rwandan refugees being tracked down, interrogated, and even abducted (De Lorenzo & Harrell-Bond 1999, HRW 2002, Lomo 2000, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). A similarly charged situation existed for Sudanese refugees, in particular for young men who had deserted from the SPLA and had sought refuge in Uganda. SPLA presence in the northern refugee settlements was rife (see Chapter One) and therefore many deserters came to Kampala to be further away and avail themselves of the city’s anonymity. But high-ranking commanders’ families lived in Kampala, and SPLA intelligence operated in the city. When I asked whether the capital was safe for those who had run away from the Movement, I was told:
No, you can never be sure... slowly, slowly the SPLA will get them. They will be taken back to Sudan and killed, or put to the frontlines if fighting is heavy.
Threats of being caught or forcibly recruited from Kampala varied at different times. In 2004 a young man who himself had escaped an SPLA military training camp explained: “In 66 Contexts
1997, for instance, when there was a lot of fighting, when the government army was being pushed back, Sudanese men in Kampala were afraid to walk on the streets, they were afraid to be taken. But when fighting is low, or now since the peace talks started, people move much more freely”. Some of the ex-SPLA soldiers had specific security issues related to conflicts with their senior commanders or their escape from an SPLA prison. Others, I was told, ran because they were guilty of criminal offences such as theft or sleeping with the wives or girlfriends of their seniors. The extent of the young men’s insecurity, and their ways of handling this, remained hard to grasp – partly because, as we will see in Chapter Four, their relationship with the SPLA seemed so ambiguous: they had run from it, but many still carried their SPLA/M membership cards and spoke of the soldiers as their liberators. From the incidents that took place (deserters being tracked down and visited at home, attacks on the street, disappearances) it is nevertheless clear that their fears were justified.
Ethnic and political conflict
The discussion in Chapter One of the wars in the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa showed that the refugees in Uganda fled from conflicts in which ethnicity was employed as a means of power and a motive for violence. It is barely surprising that these issues also pervaded the different refugee communities in exile. There was discrimination and violence between different clans in the Somali community, between Ethiopians and Eritreans, among Ethiopians of different political conviction, between Hutus, Tutsis and Banyamulenge, between Nuer, Dinka and Equatorians. Usually these tensions reflected the ethnic and political divisions in the refugees’ home countries, but new tensions and issues also arose from the stress of life in exile. Resulting from these tensions, and people’s distress and trauma, were deeply harboured feelings of suspicion and distrust. People volunteered little information about themselves to other refugees, compatriots or Ugandans. They were extremely evasive about what they were doing or where they were headed. This attitude was infectious: I soon caught myself answering in terms of “oh, I’m just going down the road”. Even so-called friends shared very little information about themselves. It often struck me how little people who lived together in one house or room knew of one another. I remember that when talking to a group of Congolese girls who lived together on the outskirts of town and who always spent their days together I discovered that they did not know which of them still had parents alive in Congo and which of them did not. This may be explained by the fact that everybody was aware of the pain, and the painful secrets, each of them carried and did not want to make friends uncomfortable by asking too many questions. But I believe it was often a matter of fear, or at least caution. Most pervasive were the accounts of suspicion and distrust within the Ethiopian and Somali communities, which seemed to be ruled by internal antagonism both in the refugee camps and in Kampala. Some Ethiopians and Somalis who claimed their compatriots were the biggest threat to their safety, believed the solution was to be found in steering clear of every possible contact with members of their own communities. But most of them had difficulty doing so in practice – like Mikael (also see Chapter Five). Mikael’s credo was not to involve himself with a single individual from Ethiopia and he was relieved to leave Kampala when he started school just outside town. When back in town during the school holidays though, he felt himself “lured into their clutch” again. A few times he mentioned that he had become seriously drunk on the invitation of some more affluent Ethiopians. He felt disappointment at his own behaviour and disgust at theirs:
Young Men in Kampala 67
They don’t mind feeding you like a dog, but if there is any indication that you are growing, or planning for your future, they will push you down vigorously.
Many people constantly questioned the behaviour of others and interpreted even seemingly innocent actions as covertly ill-intentioned. Some individuals were convinced that ‘others’ were after them. The persons who shared these concerns with me are still alive today. But that is not to say their fears can be dismissed off-hand: they were a very real part of people’s daily lives and for some affected their coping mechanisms in terms of making a living and building relationships. And true, incidents did happen. A good example is the case of Ahmed, who had fled Somalia in 1993, after his entire family (his parents, three brothers and one sister) were killed. Ahmed believed that they were killed because of his parents’ mixed marriage: his mother was an Ethiopian Christian and his father a Somali Muslim. Ahmed, who was 22 years old at the time, fled via Kenya to Uganda. We met there in 1998. He felt not only dejected but also very insecure and consequently could not envisage a future in Uganda. Things had started off rough for him in exile. For a while he had lived in Nakivale refugee settlement in south-western Uganda. One day he had confided to a fellow Somali that he wanted to become a Christian. Not long after he was attacked and beaten, and had to be treated in hospital. The doctors noticed he suffered from severe depression and nightmares and he was admitted to the psychiatric ward. Upon his discharge, he managed to convince UNHCR he was no longer safe in Nakivale, and was included in UNHCR’s urban caseload. But in Kampala Ahmed continued to suffer intimidation and harassment by members of both the Ethiopian and the Somali community. Somalis called him an infidel and individuals of both communities accused him of being a spy. Ahmed felt threatened by the various Somali factions that tried to persuade him to join their political groups. He had no desire to partake in politics – “my only wish now is to be in peace” - which added to his isolation. In 1998, after five years of persistently visiting InterAid and UNHCR, Ahmed was short-listed for resettlement to Australia. When fellow Somalis learnt of his interview date, they sabotaged his chances by having him arrested on false charges of assault. Ahmed spent three nights in Kisenyi police station and missed the interview. Upon his release he feared going back to his room in Kisenyi – suspecting that his room mate was the person who had paid the police to arrest him – and found a priest willing to pay the rent of a tiny room on the edge of Nsambya, where I once visited him. One day later that year, he found a snake under his bed. He was in shock, convinced someone had put it there to threaten him. He left the room and was taken in by two Ethiopian friends, but they ended up effectively using him as a houseboy. He moved again. He wrote to me: “I now stay at Kyebando, Kisalosalo zone. It is a one-room house in a swampy area. I like the place because nobody knows it”. The following is taken from my research diary:
January 2000 Ahmed starts a catering course at GOAL vocational training centre, through Youth Alive. He has moved to Kamwokya. He found a job as a waiter, is working long hours, has not been told yet how much it will pay. He has been ill from sleeping on the floor. He has nothing in his new room - no cup, no plate, no mattress. He asked UNHCR to help him with basic utensils and with medicine, no response. P. [Junior Protection Officer] told Ahmed that his name was forwarded to the American Embassy for resettlement. He asks me to call UNHCR and confirm; says: “how can I trust P.?”
23 February 2000 Ahmed at our gate at night. Very sick and confused. Asked his boss at the restaurant for medicine, who refused but let him go home early. Normally he 68 Contexts
works 7 days till midnight. Is given 500 USh for transport in evening, 1 meal at 4 p.m., and salary of 30.000 USh at end of the month. He saves 100 from the 500 every day for a piece of bread in the morning, with water. He’s exhausted. Rumours about American Embassy doing interviews for resettlement. “Why not me?!” I try to explain what A. [Senior Protection Officer] told me. He believes it only partly. Says he feels very bad and wants to go to UNHCR to return his protection letter. “Six years I’ve been killing my time, they cannot do anything for me. Let me stay alone completely or die in my home country”. He has put together in chronological order all his correspondence with UNHCR, his police release papers, his letters to Geneva etc. - protection letter with his passport picture on top. Shows it to me. I tell him now is the time to wait, now that A. has confirmed his name is on the list. Says: “Ok, let me trust A”. He asks me to come and see where he lives. He’s afraid something will happen to him, he may die, and nobody will know where to look for him. I give him some money to buy medicine. He cries. Says: “I disturb you too much. Last Friday when I came here, you were still sleeping, and I ask myself, what am I doing here… who am I to come so early in the morning… she is sleeping. I disturb you too much”.
11 April 2000 Ahmed had his resettlement interview with JVA!!! He passed and is over the moon.
2 June 2000 Ahmed calls me that he has a serious problem, about his ‘wife’??
We met the following day and Ahmed explained that shortly before his interview, he had been approached by an Ethiopian acquaintance who requested him to forge a marriage certificate with his sister and take her along to the US. Ahmed had felt that he owed this person – who had secured his release on police bond at the time of his arrest in 1998 – a favour. The marriage was hurriedly performed and Ahmed and the girl had appeared for the resettlement interview as husband and wife. They passed the interview, but during the medical test the girl proved HIV positive. Their case was put on hold. My first thought was: ‘Ahmed! After all these years, how could you have jeopardised your chances like this?!’ But it was clear: the request had been made with too much pressure for him to resist, he had no authority to stand up against this supposed ‘big man’.
Friday 7 July 2000 Charles tells me that Ahmed came to the house this morning and was “crying tears” in front of him and the men working on our veranda. He is sick – “he told me he was passing blood” - and worried about his resettlement process. Ahmed told Charles that “all people interviewed at the same time as me know their dates of departure, except me”. Charles says he was in a very bad state and that he begged me to come and see him. I’m with Petna, we’d agreed on different work for today, but change our plans. I’m so glad Petna comes with me. I dread seeing Ahmed, I’ve lost ways of comforting him. He is SO lonely and SO worried. These past weeks I’ve been telling him not to worry, that we believe things will be fine as the US does no longer reject people with HIV per se. I’ve talked to him like a mother and it seemed to work, but for how long? Wish I could give him hard evidence that things will be fine, but I can’t.
Petna and I take a taxi to Kamwokya and search for Ahmed’s house. I eventually recognise it. We knock and call his name but nobody opens. We ask the lady selling maize opposite and she confirms it’s the house of “the Somali”. We sit in the grass opposite and wait. Children come and stare at us and then try to impress me with their karate skills. They copy my coughing (the last bits of my Young Men in Kampala 69
pneumonia). Petna thinks they are badly behaved. I’m struck by their poverty. It’s all around us - makeshift houses and ragged clothes, rubbish and mud. Ahmed’s house looks desolate and lonely, even from the outside. There’s a white bed sheet hanging from the locked wooden door, flapping in the wind. It reminds me of death. In front of his door is a green stream of smelly water, which you have to jump over to reach his door. The ‘veranda’ (two square meters of cement) in front of his door has recently been swept with great care, is spotless.
It is midday and we move to sit in the shade of an abandoned wooden kiosk. Petna reads my notes of last week’s interviews; I watch the street to see if Ahmed approaches. Passers-by look at us. A car slowly approaches on the bumpy road and the three men inside recognise Petna. They stop and call him, we go and greet them. They ask if we need a lift to town. When they’ve left Petna tells me the one at the wheel is a soldier. He knows all of them from Goma. They are now with the RCD, with Wamba dia Wamba. He says they are everywhere in Kampala. I wonder why it’s safe for Petna to meet them, and he answers he’s been very lucky to have people within the RCD who once were his friends. They warned him that he was being looked for. Petna says he’s blessed to be an artist and to be well-known at home – “friends is everything in this world, it can mean your life”. I only need to look across the road to know that he is right. An hour passes. I push a note under Ahmed’s door and we leave.
Saturday 8 July 2000 Ahmed comes to the house. He’s seen a doctor who gave him lots of medicine. He feels dizzy and can’t hear properly. He tells me he must have been asleep when Petna and I came to see him. He didn’t wake up from our knocking, he had taken three valium tablets.
Monday 10 July 2000 I go to IOM to inquire if there’s any progress in Ahmed’s resettlement case – there is none. In the afternoon he comes round again, very upset. Last week he had gone to seek advice from the Refugee Law Project and Amnesty International about his case. His ‘wife’s’ brother found out and was furious: told Ahmed he had no right to talk to anyone about his sister’s HIV status. Last night Ahmed bumped into him at S.’s house: he beat him, and threatened to have him killed or deported. I haven’t seen Ahmed like this before: he’s in a state of fear. I sit with him for an hour, give him something to eat. He says he’s lonely. I know we should report this incident to the police or to UNHCR, but he fears it will make things worse. As he leaves Ahmed asks me if I can keep his personal documents for him - he believes they are not safe with him in his room.
Later that week Ahmed handed me a small backpack stacked with official letters, printouts of emails, medical reports and resettlement rejection letters - the archive of his seven years’ stay in Uganda.
Even if Ahmed’s experiences were not typical for the majority of refugees in Kampala, they were certainly not unusual. There were many individuals whose traumas caused near paranoia, and whose fears were incapacitating, pushing them into isolation. Ahmed’s desire to please and be liked further contributed to making him an easy object of ill-treatment. The lack of counselling services for refugees in Kampala remains unjustifiable given the high numbers of individuals urgently in need of help. Furthermore, if people were adequately supported to deal with their traumas, UNHCR would be in a better position to assess the actual security situation of individual refugees. After all, to some extent security is an elusive subject, and the distinction between perceptions and realities of insecurity and 70 Contexts danger is not always clear-cut. Thanks to lobbying by the Refugee Law Project, Ahmed’s case was reopened and five years later, in 2005, he was resettled to Canada.
3. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Making ends meet in the city is a relentlessly stressful endeavour for all urban poor – whether citizen, migrant or refugee. Achille Mbembe speaks of the “temporality of emergency” of urban life in Africa.22 Life is at stake and the average urban dweller thus has to constantly find new resources and activities to cope with this situation. The capacities crucial to survival in the city are: the capacity to be a talker and to manipulate others, the capacity to have ambiguous relationships with several people at the same time, the capacity of mobility, the capacity to trick and manoeuvre, to negotiate one’s way through the social space of the city. The central actor, Mbembe states, is not the “bounded self”, but the self who is out of necessity opened and caught in a net of relations.23 Apart from some mosques and churches offering aid and social networks, institutional structures providing assistance were absent in Kampala, and refugees had to rely on their personal relationships, however temporary or fragile, to survive. They thus needed the above-mentioned capacities badly, but on many of these points, refugees were not in a favourable position. Save some exceptions, they were unfamiliar with the tricks of the trade in a capital city and they were hindered by language barriers. Their experiences of war and flight had affected their trust in others, which diminished their ability to be ‘open’. Xenophobia and racism do not appear to be as widespread as refugees in other African cities are reported to experience (Al-Sharmani 2003, Landau 2001, Simone 2004), but all the same opportunities to forge relationships with the Ugandans were limited for them as foreigners. Most of all, their lack of legal status had significant consequences for all aspects of the refugees’ lives, and for their mobility in particular (Grabska 2005, Lomo 1999). Evidently, the situation was not the same for all. Some general differences could be observed between the Congolese and the Sudanese refugees. They came from different backgrounds: on the whole the Congolese came from towns in eastern Congo and were students or professionals, while the Sudanese had rural backgrounds, and had usually achieved lower levels of education. The Congolese generally seemed more confident; they were equipped with entrepreneurial skills and proved streetwise. Their coping mechanisms seemed fairly intact and better suited to the city, as were their presentation skills in the way they dressed. The humanitarian staff saw the young Congolese refugees as ‘arrogant’, ‘stubborn’, and ‘proud’ and made it clear to them that they had unrealistic expectations. For most Sudanese refugees city life was a complete novelty. However, it is not only culture and background which determine people’s varying abilities to deal with the ‘temporality of emergency’ in the city. In the end, I would like to stress, it is individual experiences, personality, resources and a certain degree of luck, that play a decisive role. This will be made explicit in the ethnographic chapters of Part II on Soldiers, Students and Artists, which are built around the personal experiences and private narratives of individuals.
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCHING AND WRITING ABOUT WAR AND EXILE
1. INTRODUCTION
This book has two keywords: Africa and Refugees. The charged representation of ‘Africa’ and ‘Africans’ in Europe has a long history. In years past, western imagination was fed by diaries, public lectures and photos taken by colonial administrators, missionaries, and the odd adventurer. This resulted in caricature images of what ‘Africa’ was like. As Mbembe puts it: “Whether in everyday discourse or in ostensibly scholarly narratives, the continent is the very figure of ‘the strange’” (2001: 3). It also resulted in uniform images. I remember my late great-uncle telling me how, when he was on leave from his mission in Kenya, people in his village in the south of Holland would ask him: “So, tell us, what’s it like in Africa?” It both amused and saddened him: he could tell them about the forests near Kakamega, the brick making for the school and church in Busia, the family history of his Kikuyu cook, but what was he expected to say about ‘Africa’? Until today, despite the scale on and speed with which information is now made available/shared across the world, the knowledge people have is often remarkably superficial. Quite regularly, I am asked: “So you’ve been there, now what do you think, is there hope for Africa?” As an anthropologist I am in the business of building images and making claims about other people and their lives. In the preface to In My Father’s House, Kwame Appiah writes: “I believe – this is one of the central goals of the academy, which is my vocation – that we should think carefully about the issues that matter to us most” (1992: x). One crucial aspect of ‘careful thinking’ is to be aware of as well as account for the contexts within which one works and writes. ‘Refugees’ – like ‘Africans’ often an apparent category – is a word that receives extensive coverage in public and political discourse. The discussions on migration and refugees are infused with (racist) rhetoric and make-believe. Emotionally charged opinions are couched in factual terms. There are critical voices to be heard, but these are up for tough competition with the overdose of one-liners. While forced migration is a humanitarian issue, it is first of all a political one. It follows that forced migration studies is also politically charged. Therefore, academics writing about ‘refugees’ are to analyse the relationships between knowledge, politics and reality, and adopt a self-reflexive attitude to their work. Self-reflexivity entails “a continuous mode of self-analysis and political awareness” (Callaway 1992: 33) as to the process of gaining and presenting one’s knowledge. 72 Contexts
After returning from Uganda early 2001, I was confronted with a host of questions concerning both my fieldwork and the task ahead of me – writing this book. They were thoughts like: What defined my relationships with the young men I was studying? What did I choose not to see and why? Given that I cannot step outside the political field of power where my research takes place, the question is, what ‘better world’ do I believe to be struggling for? I write about other people’s lives - how can I avoid caricatures? Why am I interested in histories of pain and suffering? Who will be my audience? Thus, the first thing I had to do, before analysing my data, was to turn to the hows and whys of research and science, that is: issues of methodology, epistemology and representation.
For anthropologists, methodological and epistemological considerations invariably start with research among people ‘in the field’. Kloos recaptures how the attitude to fieldwork was long characterised by a conspiracy of silence. He quotes from Mead:
“There was, in fact, no how in our education. What we learned was what to look for ... ‘How anyone knows who is anybody’s mother’s brother, only God and Malinowski know.’” (1988: 20).
While this has changed - all graduate courses in anthropology nowadays include methods - in the average ethnography one still finds little information about how knowledge was gained and shaped in the field. Anthropologists eloquently theorise about the relativity and subjectivity of their work, but remain reluctant to show the arbitrary nature of their choices and scarcely reveal the factors influencing the interpretation of events and narratives. It is possible to know with certainty the identity of someone’s mother’s brother. One can also establish objectively this person’s material living conditions – shelter and diet, work and leisure activities. But why these are so, and what a person thinks, feels or believes is much more difficult to know. Yet if we think we know, we should at least explain why we think so. In anthropology and in refugee studies, such clarifications are far from the norm. Jacobsen & Landau (2003) observe that many forced migration studies do not reveal basic components of research design and methodology, like how many people were interviewed, who did the interviews, or how the subjects were identified. The authors reject this omission, which they suggest is a cover-up for unsound methodology coming with much refugee research. They are concerned about the repercussions not only on the validity of the research but also on the policy conclusions drawn from it. While I agree that “good scholarship demands that researchers reveal and explain their methods” (2003: 96), I remain unconvinced that in order to forge more “rigorous methods” it will suffice to “mainstream” forced migration studies by looking at the “wealth of methodological and theoretical traditions” of the more established social and political sciences. I am inclined to take a different track. Rather than borrowing from established traditions, refugee studies has the potential of contributing to these, for the very reason that issues of methodology and epistemology take on a particular urgency in refugee research. The phenomenon of forced migration challenges its researchers to tackle complex questions about the limits of gathering knowledge in the face of political interests and human suffering. Several of the methodological convictions and intentions which I had brought to the field lost their self-evidence as straightforward ideals. Furthermore, my opinion was confirmed that the role of the researcher as central in constructing ethnographic knowledge remains underestimated. It is the researcher as a person (identity, prejudices, soft spots, character and interests), raised in a certain intellectual, social and political tradition, who shapes the research project and its outcome. Certainly, the research subjects at all times have the power to ‘make or break’ the project, ultimately deciding whether to withhold, stretch and twist, or share their information. All this means that Researching & Writing about War and Exile 73 anthropologists can no longer be secretive about their work methods and the dilemmas they are faced with. I decided to allow the reader ‘back stage’, to be open about how I carried out my research, the choices made, its strengths and flaws, the inevitable regrets. The next section discusses the practical and logistical issues as well as some ethical dilemmas that come with research among refugees in an urban setting like Kampala. In the sections thereafter I will relate this to a more philosophical evaluation of the relationship between knowledge and reality: questions of experience and perspective, truth and representation.
2. DOING RESEARCH: CHOICES AND METHODS
2.1 Research subjects: choosing and being chosen
Chapter Two discussed the diversity of Kampala’s urban refugee population in terms of nationality, age and gender, as well as their urban/rural, educational and professional backgrounds. From among this diverse population, I chose to focus my research on young men. The current section explains my motivation for doing so, and discusses my choices as to the nationalities of the refugees in this study. It shows that research is as much about being chosen by one’s research subjects as it is about choosing them.
Choice no. 1: young persons
World Refugee Day 2003 was dedicated to refugee youth with the slogan ‘Refugee Youth: Building the Future’, accompanied by a rather emotional statement posted on the UNHCR website about “the plight of innocents”. It said: “Our aim is to provide refugee youth with a heightened sense of value and self-worth; to help them gather their strength and courage, spread their wings… and fly!” At least half of all refugees world wide are under eighteen (UNHCR 2004a). Given this number, refugee youth have received remarkably little attention in policy and assistance programs. ‘Vulnerability’ is a principal dictate for policy development and it is women and children who primarily bear the policy label ‘vulnerable’ (Ali 2006, Boothby 1994, Sadoway 2002, UNHCR 1985, 1994, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005).1 Because academic research often closely focuses on humanitarian and policy concerns, young people have been largely neglected in forced migration studies. However, my research showed that youth are subject to a myriad of insecurities – economic, physical and emotional. They face many of the risks that have normally been attributed to children, like forced recruitment, sexual abuse, abduction and other forms of exploitation (Kastberg 2002: 4).2 It is a welcome sign of increasing awareness that in 2001 UNHCR for the first time stated that:
“The inference [has long been] that male refugees are generally able to look after themselves and do not need particular attention from UNHCR. In reality, however … there are circumstances in which even able-bodied young men find it difficult to establish livelihoods and to attain self-reliance” (2001: 2-4).
At the same time young people merit special attention not only because of their vulnerability, but also because of the mechanisms they devise for dealing with the insecurities of exile and their persistent struggles for a dignified life. Children, adolescents and older youth are often regarded in terms of adult perceptions about who they are and what constitutes their needs. Tellingly, the studies on young refugees that do exist are 74 Contexts largely directed by mental health concerns.3 The fact that vulnerability and psychopathology have defined research foci reveals a great deal about the prevailing perceptions of (young) refugees. In response to this, I suggest an approach that starts neither from preconceived ideas about vulnerability nor from assumptions overrating agency and strength. In choosing to focus on young refugees, my academic and my personal interests converged. At the age of twenty-five, when I went to Kampala for my MA research, I found that it was particularly fascinating to talk to people of my own age and phase of life. Similarly, it was especially the young people among the refugees I met who were usually quite keen to make an effort to come and talk to me. Despite the obvious and disturbing differences in our histories and living circumstances, we found a lot of common ground as to our personal and political concerns and aspirations – and had pleasure in discussing these. My experiences in Kampala, and the way I have tried to represent them in this book, constitute an argument against ethnic reductionist studies which focus on the object of study, the ‘other’, as only very different from oneself (Essed 2001).
Defining ‘young person’
How did I define ‘young person’? Age is a relative concept and notions of childhood, youth and adulthood cannot be understood in universal terms: they vary cross-culturally and are attached to class, gender and other variables (Ariès 1962, James & Prout 1990). While in the West, the age of 18 has become the demarcation line between childhood and adulthood, in many African societies a chronological age cut-off is an arbitrary concept. Girls and boys achieve adult status ‘by degree’ – through sexual maturity, initiation, eligibility to fight, marriage, or acquisition of land (de Waal 2002: 14-15). On the one hand, the upper age limit of youth in Africa today is elastic (leaders of youth organisations can be in their late twenties or thirties, e.g., the ‘youth MPs’ elected to the Ugandan parliament), and on the other hand middle teenagers are often anything but dependent. They participate in social and economic processes, and are often politically engaged in the affairs of their communities and nations (Coles 1986, De Boeck & Honwana 2005, Honwana 2002). In situations of war, this is a pronounced reality. Jok (2005) writes about Sudan:
“To be a youth, it seems, is to be single, not to be steadily employed or independent of one’s family and, above all, to live under conditions of political conflict where fighting and defending one’s family and property is a major preoccupation. So a person as young as ten years of age who takes on the responsibility of protecting his family by joining an army qualifies as a youth rather than coming under the classification of ‘child’ that would be applied to other people of his age in different circumstances. This is not to suggest that young men who meet certain criteria, such as being married, necessarily graduate from the youth category and cease engaging in violent acts” (Jok 2005: 144-145).
De Waal concludes that ‘youth’ is a problematic and ambivalent category, chiefly defined by what it is not: youths are neither dependent children nor independent, socially responsible adults. This was revealed in the answers the young refugees gave to my question of what defines a young person. They wrote that youth are “active, energetic and innovative”, but also “mentally and physically, intellectually and emotionally still growing”, “independent in some decisions but need guidance in others”, “know to differentiate between good and bad, but they can be misled”, “allowed to participate in some ceremonies but not all”, “they can take responsibility but they also need care”. The ambiguities in their answers reflected their situation in Kampala. Many young men in their late twenties who lived as refugees in Kampala lagged behind in what they themselves regarded normal social development, with repercussions for their self-image and feelings of Researching & Writing about War and Exile 75 self-worth. Central to their concerns were the issues of marriage and education, both of which were seriously constrained by exile. On the other hand, there were children and teenagers who ended up in Kampala fending for themselves without the family environment that would normally have supported them. Some expressed that they had “lost their youth” in fighting. Taking all this into consideration, I decided on a wide definition of ‘young’ based on the social meaning of age rather than on age as the accumulation of years. I took the category of ‘young people’ to roughly include any person between the ages of 15 and 30, including a few individuals who were slightly outside this age group.4 The average age of my research group was 24 (age in 2000).
Choice no. 2: young men
The focus of this study is not on young individuals generally, but on young men. This was not a conscious choice from the start. It is true that young men far outnumbered young women among the refugee population in Kampala. At the same time, what proved true in Kampala was the pivotal feminist argument that if one is not determined to study women, one will end up studying men. Initially I too – despite ample warning - fell into this trap. Men are visible and easy to locate: they frequent the public spaces where most research starts. Even if women are present, cultural gender norms govern their public behaviour, including their interaction with foreign researchers. Liisa Malkki in her study about Burundi refugees in Tanzania writes:
“Efforts to work with women were frustrated ... [because] women seemed to be less accustomed, and to feel less of an entitlement, to assume authorship of narrative expression – perhaps especially in the presence of an outsider like myself. Women were visibly frightened by my presence in the beginning of the research, and even when more familiar with me, they readily referred me to their husbands, fathers, brothers, or other men. When women did speak, they did so timidly, in short sentences, in the give and take of dialogue, and not in longer, more sustained narrative form” (1995: 50-51).
Though less forthcoming than most men, the women who were present at the InterAid, JRS and UNHCR offices were not “visibly frightened” to talk to me nor did they speak only “timidly”. This difference may well be explained by the fact that Malkki’s research took place in a camp setting instead of in a town or city. Women refugees who have moved from rural refugee camps to the city are a select group and generally quite assertive. Moreover, the city offers more freedom to transgress certain gender codes than the refugee camp, where people are less anonymous and social control is stronger. At the same time, I strongly believe that the lack of interaction between researcher and refugee women cannot be explained only by the behaviour of the women. Instead, the researcher plays an important part when women are underrepresented or left out altogether. Henrietta Moore argues that the language of anthropology has been part of the dominant male mode of expression and therefore does not hear, or cannot understand, alternative languages – the languages of ‘muted groups’. She quotes Ardener who writes: “If the men appear ‘articulate’ compared with the women, it is a case of like speaking to like” (Moore 1988: 4). I can subscribe to this where it concerns the privileges of education. In some ways it was easier for me to speak with the well-educated men from the towns of eastern Congo than with women from rural Sudan. However, it was certainly not only about education or language. Ironically, it was my identification as a female with the female refugees in Kampala which partly hindered our interaction. After several months of research I realised 76 Contexts that I had subconsciously avoided more contact with the girls and women because I found it too disturbing. My research was tough enough as it was and engaging myself more with the women would have been so much tougher in terms of both identification and my feelings of powerlessness relating to their past and present situation. I quote from my research diary:
Wednesday 26 July 2000 I went to visit the girls Petna mentioned the other day. They are in Nsambya, near to the main road. There are six of them living in one room of 3 x 3 metres at most, no window: four girls (the oldest of them 22), a young man of 19 and a child. The room holds one double bed, two chairs and a small table. It is packed, no space to walk or stand. Under the bed a collection of fancy women’s shoes. The young man is sick (malaria). He’s lying on the bed with the child and one of the girls, and says: “If I die now, where will I be buried?” The girls laugh. The child also suffered from malaria, but is recovering. He looks extremely weak, can hardly sit up and doesn’t say a word. He’s the young brother of the eldest girl, who tries to feed him some pineapple. She then takes him outside to lie down on a towel on the cement floor. The landlord is threatening to chase them from the room, they tell me. He doesn’t want so many of them in it. One girl is half Congolese half Belgian, and very beautiful. Her father was a soldier – she never saw him, he left her mother when pregnant with her. Her mother was recently killed in the war. They all lost their parents. They ask me if I have any brothers to marry them. They ask what I can do for them. They want to learn English and get a job. One girl suggests she could work in a saloon, knows how to plait hair. They say and ask these things almost mechanically. The atmosphere is totally lethargic. And I didn’t ask many questions, make much conversation - couldn’t bring myself to, was lost for words. When I leave I feel bad for having been so quiet. I know I have to go and see them again. Petna later read and confirmed my thoughts: yes they earn their living by “selling their bodies”.
It was not only my being so disturbed that caused a distance between the young women and myself. It was also the tangible suspicion of some of them that made me feel ill at ease. They must have identified with me as well – a woman of their age – and felt the great discrepancies between our situations. It must be that in their eyes I had everything going for me: as a white European I was secure, free and working independently in a safe and respectable job of my choice. Their situation was one of insecurity epitomised by the dependence of probably many of them on their various alliances with men to obtain their basic needs. While I was disturbed by their situation, they perhaps felt ashamed by it. At the same time they may have been suspicious of my free interaction with ‘their’ men and considered me a rival. Had I found a way, and the courage, to discuss these things with them, it might have helped to break down some of the barriers. Reflecting on this situation, it is clear that the fact that I focused my research on young men rather than on young women was decided by personal reasons embedded in structures and realities of gender, age and race that are determinants of all research. Given that more researchers have noted the difficulties of including women (Malkki 1995a, Sommers 2001a, Willems 2003), the reasons for this should be openly examined in order to devise future research that focuses on girls and women among the growing refugee populations in urban areas, building on work done by Kibreab (1995) and Al-Sharmani (2006). It must be stressed that a focus on men does not preclude gender issues. A gender lens is probably relevant to most if not all social science research, including refugee research (Indra 1999, Lammers 1999, Schrijvers 1995). Social structures, practices and symbols throughout society are gendered and for one thing influence the choices of why Researching & Writing about War and Exile 77 young refugees decide to come to town and their relative freedom in choosing to do so. As one young Congolese man put it:
Men are always the first to come. Women can’t run without their husbands, fathers or brothers. Women will take the decision to run only when no-one is there to take that decision for her or to interfere. My sister wouldn’t have come to Kampala without me. Of course there are rebel girls who do and of course it is also different when people run, suddenly and unexpectedly, but when it happens as in Goma, where there was time to make decisions and no total chaos, girls are not free to make the same decisions as young men like me.
Once in exile, gender also determines how young refugees are able to live their lives. Realities of insecurity are gendered, but it cannot be assumed that young men by definition have an easier time than young women. It was discussed in Chapter Two that women often prove better survivors in exile: they resourcefully develop new ways of creating a living for themselves, their families and communities. Men appear to have more difficulty with the decline in status and the disruption of their plan and ambitions for the future, which affects their ability to provide for themselves and their families (Bright 1992, Grabska 2005, Kibreab 1995, Lejukole 2002, McSpadden & Moussa 1993, Mulumba 1998, SCDP 1998, Schrijvers 1997). Some even assert that “male refugees are often among the most vulnerable amongst urban refugee caseloads” (Buscher 2003: 4). For some time now, the argument has been made that anthropologists should write about men qua men, and study the ways in which masculinity is constructed and performed (Caplan 1997, Cornwall & Lindisfarne 1994, Gilmore 1990, Guttman 1997). In forced migration studies, a gendered focus on men has been very scant – a bias that my research addresses.5 The question ‘Who am I?’, central to the narratives in this book, is a question about the self in relation to others and a changed environment. Migration and (gendered) identity are issues profoundly interconnected (Benmayor & Skotnes 1994, Jolly & Reeves 2005). The young men’s ‘Who am I?’ involved questions about ambitions and available choices; responsibilities towards family and community and the masculine role of being able to provide and protect; love, marriage and fatherhood; education and self- development; and dignity. All of these were gendered questions – after all, gender is “central to a process of becoming, of acquiring an identity, of structuring one’s subjectivity” (Moore 1999: 155) – and they surfaced importantly because of the life stage they were in. Like with all experiences, the young men’s gendered experiences of forced migration intersected with age, as well as with race and class (Essed 2001, Moore 1994). Masculinity is constructed in different ways depending on social and historical context. And this happens on all levels: the symbolical, structural and individual (Harding, Moore 1988, 1994, Scott, van Santen & Willemse 1999). This study focuses primarily on the individual level. It looks at how the young men construct a ‘narrative of the self’ (Giddens 1991) that helps them to understand and cope with the new and insecure situation in which previously given sources for self-worth are no longer available (e.g. community membership, soldiering), and they have to search for new ones (e.g. education).
Choice no. 3: nationalities
Kampala is host to refugees from seven different countries of the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa: Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. I met with individuals of all these nationalities and initially wanted to include them all in my research. Sudanese and Congolese refugees, however, outnumber individuals of other nationalities in this study. They constituted the largest number of new arrivals at the time 78 Contexts of my research. Snowball sampling, upon which I relied for locating and meeting people (see below) reinforced this emphasis. However, it was not only a matter of numbers or research methods that dictated my focus, but also the ease with which my relationships with the Sudanese and Congolese young men developed. Most refugees from eastern Congo had urban backgrounds. They included students and educated professionals (journalists, human rights advocates, teachers) who had no desire whatsoever to live in remote rural areas where their livelihood options were limited to subsistence farming (about which they had little or no experience). They were eloquent and assertive in their refusal to go to the refugee settlements and consequently were considered a nuisance by the humanitarian/UNHCR personnel. The fact that they did not fit the image of ‘the passive refugee’ or ‘the victim’ bestowed on them, made them all the more interesting discussion partners to me. As for the Sudanese young men in Kampala, their determination to access education (this was often their primary motivation to leave the refugee settlements in northern Uganda) provided our common ground. They could relate to and identify with my role as student. They wanted to learn about my research (several aspired to be researchers, journalists or writers), about the educational systems in Europe, and asked if I could help them get scholarships or someone to pay their tuition fees. Unlike the Congolese young men who had come straight from their hometowns, the majority of Sudanese had spent time in the refugee settlements in northern Uganda before coming to Kampala, and nearly all had rural backgrounds. A city like Kampala was a novelty to them. Their interesting divergent backgrounds supported my decision to focus my research on Sudanese and Congolese young men. Six of the eight protagonists of this book come from these two countries: three Sudanese and three Congolese. The two others are from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Save the odd person, I did not include Somali refugees in my research mostly because of the particular demographics of this refugee group. The young Somali men lived in a social constellation very different from that of the young refugees from other countries. The latter were on their own or shared households with small groups of bachelors, while the Somalis were organised into families of two or more generations. I included very few individuals from Rwanda and Burundi. This is partly due to the drawbacks of the snowball method. The fact that I did not get in contact with Burundian and Rwandan refugees in the first place, may be attributed to the issue of their insecurity. Sommers (2001) and Willems (2003) both discuss the deep levels of suspicion that they were confronted with on the part of Rwandan and Burundian refugees in Dar es Salaam, who felt very insecure as illegal residents of Tanzania’s capital city. The fact that I interacted with so few Rwandans and Burundians could in part be explained by this insecurity and the fact that I did not have the opportunity to gain their trust.
2.2 Challenges of urban research
Meeting refugees and keeping in touch
Fieldwork starts with the task of locating the research subjects. In an urban setting this is not a straightforward exercise. Certain challenges that characterise anthropological urban research generally are reinforced in research about urban forced migrants. The first complication is that records stating the size and distribution of forced migrant populations in towns are either non-existent or highly flawed, and thus there is no information as to where people reside. In Kampala refugees live scattered through town. There are neighbourhoods well-known for housing foreigners, but most individuals and small refugee communities keep a low profile and consequently are largely invisible to others. This reality Researching & Writing about War and Exile 79 limited my range of viable research methods. I had to rely primarily on snowball sampling, even though this has the methodological drawback of producing a biased sample (Bloch 1999, Jacobsen & Landau 2003, Kibreab 2003), as discussed below. A second complication is the security situation of urban refugees. Because of their lack of ID documents and their clandestine presence, most refugees in cities do their utmost to let their presence go unnoticed (Kibreab 1996, Landau 2005, Sommers 2001c, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005, Willems 2003). The issue of insecurity was discussed in Chapter Two, and its impact on people’s lives will be felt throughout the narratives in Part II of this book. The difficulty of gaining access to people who have made it their second nature to hide their presence needs little elaboration. Sadly, this situation presents a classic ‘double bind’ problem. Because policies forbid refugees to self-settle in towns it seems unethical for researchers to disclose the presence of specific individuals or refugee families. At the same time, the lack of reliable data compromises the cogency of arguments about the growing numbers of urban refugees in African cities and the scale of their hardship in securing livelihood and legal protection. With no quantitative basis for lobbying, it is hard to put pressure on authorities to address the issue and put an end to the “what the eye refuses to see” situation of urban refugees (Kibreab 1996). A third challenge in locating refugees in urban areas and keeping in touch with them is their high mobility. Due to economic constraints and security concerns, refugees often shift house and move between different neighbourhoods. They travel between the city and the refugee settlements to visit relatives, to do business or register for educational scholarships and resettlement. Some individuals who cannot make ends meet move on and try their luck in other East African cities. When there is a lull in the conflicts they fled some visit their home areas, taking in their stride the dangers involved in crossing borders without legal documents or the risk of losing their refugee status. Several individuals I knew were incessant travellers who made remarkable journeys across East and Central Africa. My book illustrates that this is one defining characteristic of the category of young refugees: many of them are transnationals in the true sense of the word. In UNHCR terminology this reality was long captured with the disapproving label ‘irregular movers’, now replaced by ‘onward movement’ (UNHCR 2003b). Urban refugees’ high mobility means that for researchers it is near impossible to obtain a stable research population. Nevertheless, it was not impossible to build meaningful relationships with a considerable number of the young refugees, some of which lasted after I had left Kampala. Throughout the past six years I have kept in close contact with the eight protagonists of this book. This has been possible thanks to the internet cafés spread around Kampala as well as the quickly expanding mobile telephone network in East Africa. Occasionally I receive letters and postcards, but email has been the primary medium through which we communicate. By now all main characters of this study themselves or their friends have mobile phones, and thus we speak several times a year, and exchange text messages. During my return visits to Uganda in 2003 and 2004/2005, I met up with all of them again. If less regularly, I also kept in touch with many of the other refugees included in this study. Not all the young men I knew have remained in Kampala. Sometimes after a year or more of silence people unexpectedly re-appeared. I received emails from Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Nairobi and Addis Ababa from individuals who had decided to try their luck elsewhere. Refugees who had been selected for resettlement abroad wrote to me from Australia, the US and Canada. Email crucially helps refugees to stay in touch with relatives back home and friends in the diaspora in the same way that it is a great medium for researchers to keep track of people’s journeys and hearing of their experiences in ever- changing whereabouts – or as Horst puts it, to continue the “virtual dialogue” (Horst 2006c). 80 Contexts
Lastly, research in a city environment – with refugees who live clandestinely, scattered through town and who do not form a ‘community’ in the anthropological sense of the word – not only presents problems of access, but generally puts to the test conventional research methods. It was impossible for me to live among the people I studied. I could not ‘participate’ in their experiences of sleeping on the concrete floor of the InterAid veranda or in the Old Kampala Police compound. But also the idea of sharing the refugees’ rooms in Kampala’s slum areas was not realistic. Besides, the presence of a mzungu woman would have immediately attracted the attention of Local Council officials, which would have compromised the refugees’ attempts at remaining invisible. The fact that I did not live among my research population had its drawbacks. There was no fixed locality from which our relationships could develop and no place where people could come and find me. Around a dozen individuals knew my house, and some of them visited regularly, but generally I felt embarrassed inviting people because of the huge differences in our living standards. Furthermore, keeping my home private was the only way to avoid a complete mixing the professional and personal aspects of my life in Kampala. These circumstances taken together not only put limits to participatory methods, but even to doing structured interviews. Because I wanted it to be clear that I was an independent researcher, I preferred not to conduct my interviews at any one of the humanitarian or legal offices. Consequently, we were often literally moving through town while talking. There were enough places to sit and have a conversation - local restaurants, the university premises, random street corners or the Sheraton gardens – but these places rarely allowed for recording interviews, and even simply taking notes would have attracted unwanted attention. The lack of structure and the restlessness that defined the young refugees’ daily lives influenced my research. The issues of people’s mobility and insecurity were part of this, but also the simple fact that there was always something that required urgent attention: illnesses, eviction threats from landlords, disappointing meetings with UNHCR, fights with neighbours or compatriots, lack of food. Often I woke up determined to “be more structured and efficient, starting from today!”, yet the circumstances were simply not conducive to a structured process. Research among a ‘mobile’ population in an urban environment requires flexibility and creativity. Through trial and error, I came up with ways of collecting information that best fitted the objectives of the project and were also in keeping with my personal preferences and ethical concerns (see under 2.3).
Representativeness?
Limitations of snowball sampling In 1998, my initial contacts were established through the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), which ran a program of assisting a limited number of asylum seekers with food coupons. Over a period of three months I spent one day a week at the project compound, talking with individuals from Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea who were waiting to be attended to. Other points of entry were the office of the Refugee Rights project at Makerere University as well as, to a lesser degree, the InterAid and UNHCR (Kololo) offices. When in June 2000 the Refugee Law Project (RLP) moved from Nakasero to Old Kampala, the office came to serve as another place for meeting new people. At these offices I met a widely diverse selection of people. However, the fact that many of my initial contacts were made at humanitarian and legal aid offices, points to a bias in my research population. It is not hard to speculate about what ‘categories’ of refugees, certainly initially, were under-represented. Firstly, they were refugees who did not know about asylum procedures or the presence of humanitarian organisations in Kampala. Secondly, they were individuals who were informed but unable – for gender, financial, or Researching & Writing about War and Exile 81 physical reasons – to visit these offices. Thirdly, they were individuals and refugee families who were relatively well-established and had no need for financial assistance or legal representation. These included businessmen and traders, self-employed professionals and artisans who preferred not to be bothered with the hassle and humiliation of waiting for help at the various offices. Fourthly, refugees who were insecure and fearful to the point of avoiding all contact with national and international authorities and organisations also remained invisible to me. They included individuals who had been involved with either the SPLA or the RCD and who judged it too dangerous to appear in a public place like InterAid, which was visited by intelligence agents from these armies (see Chapter Two). During the course of my research, the initial bias was redressed to some extent when those I knew introduced me to their friends, neighbours, classmates and roommates, who were no regular visitors to the organisations from where I established my primary contacts. Furthermore, from August 2000 onward, the art centre Yolé!Africa that Petna Ndaliko Katondolo and I set up (see below) became an important place to meet new people and to interact with them in a welcoming environment. Especially new arrivals from Congo found their way to Yolé!Africa, but also refugees from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Rwanda. At Yolé!Africa I met individuals who represented a different group of refugees simply because what Yolé!Africa had to offer was so different from UNHCR and the other humanitarian offices.
Representativeness in terms of numbers The total number of individuals included in this study is one-hundred-and-ten. There are many more refugees that I shook hands with, exchanged formalities with or perhaps a joke or two, but their names I never got to know or did not keep a record of. The 110 are individuals on which I have written notes, interview transcripts and testimonies.6 What is the representational value of this number? A satisfactory answer to this question requires data on the total number of refugees residing in Kampala. It was pointed out in Chapter Two that this information is not available: guesstimates vary from 10,000 to 50,000. Initially I felt uncomfortable not having clarity on the size of Kampala’s refugee population. I considered carrying out a survey involving key informants from within the refugee communities as well as LC officials, but soon realised that the notoriously difficult exercise of ‘counting’ urban refugees was impossible given the limits of time and finances. Another reason for not conducting this exercise was the issue of security and the concomitant ethical considerations. I did not want to draw attention to the presence of people who did their utmost to blend in with the host population and hide their foreignness. The lack of data on the size of Kampala’s urban refugee population meant there was no meaningful sampling frame, and the corollary is that it was theoretically impossible to obtain a representative sample.7 Therefore readers must be careful when making inferences about urban refugees in general from the information and narratives presented in this book. What is more, the eight individuals who became the protagonists of this book were not chosen because of their representativeness, but because I got to know them as remarkable individuals with fascinating histories that they were willing to relate to me. Rather than being representative, these eight individuals stood out among their fellow refugees. This observation is of course subjective: they caught my attention – and I caught theirs - and other researchers would almost certainly have developed relationships with different individuals. I will expand below on the fact that ‘representativeness’ was never the primary goal of my research. This is not to say that the experiences of my protagonists are completely idiosyncratic: I believe that a great many of the other refugees I met would recognise themselves in the narratives presented in this book.
82 Contexts
Limitations in terms of issues/subjects The fact that I did not live among the people that my research was about limited the scope of the information I was able to obtain. Not being around all the time, I was obliged to rely on what people told me about certain issues or events rather than on my own observations. I visited people’s homes during daytime: I was not there when people went to sleep hungry, I do not know how they solved conflicts with roommates, who received what share of meals, or how they spoke about the politics of the wars they fled and their own roles in these. I missed information about certain livelihood strategies, like (petty) crime and sexual engagements. Not all people I knew asked me to visit them, for which they had different reasons. Some may have not wanted to disclose that they were better off than they had suggested; others may have been too ashamed about their living conditions. The personal situation of some of the young men may also have been different from what they told me. A few times I found out that a young man, who had presented himself to me as single and never mentioned having a child, was actually a father. It may be that these persons were embarrassed to say so because they felt they could not live up to what they considered good fatherhood. It may also be that there were simply differences in what they and I considered relevant information. This brings me to the second issue: how the identities of researcher and researched impact on the process and content of the research project. I was a young white woman working with young black men in an African city. Though the identities of all of us encompassed more than gender, age and race, these three did set some of the parameters of what we could share and talk about. In Chapter Four this issue is discussed in terms of what the ex-soldiers did and did not share with me about their participation in war and acts of violence. Here I want to say a few words on sexuality – an area of experience of all young people which however as a subject is largely absent from my research data. The young men – most of whom knew that I was living in Kampala with my Dutch boyfriend - told me their worries about stalled marriage and discussed what they thought important qualities of their future wives, but they were evasive about their current love life and sexual engagements and I did not press them to discuss these matters. Even if not on the surface, considering our age it would be naïve to think that the issue of sexuality was absent from our interaction. Moreover, enough has been written about societies’ perceptions of, and individuals’ experiences with, the relationship ‘black man – white woman’, to know that this must have impacted on our interaction in some way.8 At the same time I stress that my interaction with the young men had many different dimensions: in addition to being ‘the foreign researcher’, I at times was the outsider to whom a young man dares convey his weaknesses and transgression, the friend or sister with whom one can confidentially chat about daily things, the counsellor to whom a traumatised person may repeatedly narrate the same event, or the mother who makes sure her son has food to eat and listens to his stories. It was not even only such female roles I had: for some people and at certain moments I played the male role of provider, or even protector. With hindsight I realise that this at times made them, and me, slightly uncomfortable. Masculinity and femininity are, after all, defined and redefined in social interaction (Cornwall & Lindisfarne 1994: 3). That the interaction between researcher and researched is influenced by processes of identification became clear once again during my return visit to Kampala in late 2004. Where sexuality had been a barely discussed subject before, there now seemed less inclination to avoid it. I guess this was because we were all older and because our relationships had acquired more defined contours as a result of our continued communication during my years back in the Netherlands. What struck me too was the ease with which Joke Schrijvers, my supervisor who visited me then and with whom I conducted several interviews together, could bring up issues of sexuality (girlfriends, HIV/Aids, contraceptives) and received straightforward answers. Again this must be due Researching & Writing about War and Exile 83 to the specific interaction: older woman–young man, which mirrored relationships such as mother-son, or aunt–nephew.
2.3 Methodological choices
... one thing about which there is growing consensus: the need for much greater situationally specific, diversity-maintaining, in-depth knowledge of individual women and men who are forced migrants, and of the class, ethnic, cultural, subcultural, national and transnational systems with which they articulate.
Doreen Indra, Engendering Forced Migration, 1999, p. 21
As noted, representativeness was never the primary goal of my research. Central to this study was the concept of experience. I wanted to gain insight into how exile and the aftermath of war are experienced and reflected upon by individual young men in one of the world’s politically most volatile regions. I had to choose between breadth and depth and chose the latter. Only by conducting a relatively small-scale research in terms of the number of people included, was I able to build the long-term and meaningful relationships that are a precondition for in-depth knowledge. I spent my time in Kampala getting to know individuals and learning about their experiences, worries and ambitions first and foremost because I cannot think of anything more engaging than individuals and their life stories. But my choice was not solely one of personal interest. Together with other anthropologists (Abu-Lughod 1993, Caplan 1997, Horst 2006b, Myerhoff 1994 [1979], Nencel 2001) I believe that a thorough commitment to understanding the diverse and ever-changing experiences of individuals of a certain group (Bedouins, Swahili peasants, refugees, elderly Jews, prostitutes) may help to dismantle prejudices about these people, to build up a more truthful picture, and potentially, as a result of that, counteract a general indifference towards them. Superficial and false images of ‘refugees’, ‘young men in war’, or ‘African youth’ abound, certainly in the West. African youth are often referred to in terms of a ‘lost generation’: they have little influence in politics, are largely unemployed, and are most critically affected by both wars and the AIDS pandemic. These facts, however, do not speak for themselves. There is need to listen to young persons’ explanations for joining armies, the visions behind the social movements they form, the why of their desire for education, their individual struggles, choices and ambitions. Only a focus on the individual and his or her everyday life will bring to the fore the multiple realities that define all people’s lives – and the tapestry of differences and similarities between and among these (Essed 1991, Moore 1994). As the editors of Migration and Identity (1994) write:
“Knowing something of the utter uniqueness of particular individual migrant experiences certainly enhances our generalizations about the group experience, but it also elicits humility about the adequacy of these generalizations and a realization that few actual individual lives fully conform to the master narratives” (Benmayor & Skotnes 1994: 15).
Though this book aims to bring to life the experiences of eight young refugee men in Kampala, it is not intended as “a mere retreat to ethnographic particularism” (Moore 1999: 7). Personal narratives illustrate wider social processes (Caplan 1997). If done well, a focus on specific persons can enhance the understanding of the interplay between individual experiences and external events and processes, like for instance, a Sudanese teenager’s decision to leave school and take up arms vis-à-vis the realities of international post-Cold War politics. The lives of the young refugees in Kampala are clearly located on the 84 Contexts intersections of the local and the global. Their personal histories are brought about by the interplay between local manifestations of greed, frustration and survival and (inter)national interests coupled with global power imbalances and plain injustice. It is a truism that the local and the global can no longer be seen in isolation from each other (Castles 2001, Kloos 1997, Moore 1999a). The narratives and personal testimonies presented in this book thus also serve a political purpose. To the individuals who related them the very act of telling may have been, as Benmayor & Skotnes (1994: 16) suggest, “a strategy of resistance” (see also Agger 1994, Coker 2001, Westerman 1994). The challenge for me as the author of this book is to present these same narratives as illustration of the world politics of inclusion and exclusion, promoting awareness about the violations of people’s rights and dignity. This is no easy task, but I agree with Pat Caplan that:
“writing a personal narrative is perhaps worth a try because the prize is very great: that of some degree of transcendence of difference, of reaffirmation of common humanity” (Caplan 1997: 17).
Part II of this book puts forward an image of the young men in Kampala as self-conscious citizens of our world, struggling with dilemmas familiar to young people everywhere, but struggling with an intensity that fits the extremity of the situations they find themselves in. All of them are manoeuvring to find their way in the insecure world of exile. It is this very manoeuvring that illustrates a common human need to have a place and a name, to be seen, and to be seen to live a decent, dignified life. Research that purports to take individual experience as its lead asks for patience, discretion and a careful approach. I identify with the authors of Learning to Listen (1991) that it “demands a shift in methodology from information gathering, where the focus is on the right questions, to interaction, where the focus is on process, on the dynamic unfolding of the subject’s viewpoint” (Anderson & Jack 1991: 23). What has been most meaningful in contributing to my understanding of the lives of young people who live in Kampala as refugees, are on the one hand the long-term relationships with several individuals that took shape over the past six years, and on the other hand the way in which during my actual fieldwork period in Kampala (and continued upon return to the Netherlands) I became involved in what can by and large be classified as advocacy activities.
Long-term relationships
Tijd is een zelfstandige factor bij de kwaliteit van beschrijvingen van andere samenlevingen.
Peter Kloos, Door het Oog van de Antropoloog, 1988, p. 39
I lived in Kampala for two-and-a-half years (1998-2001). This considerable period of time allowed me to build relationships with the young refugees, which were enriched as a result of our continued communication when I was back in the Netherlands and my two return visits in 2003 and 2004/5. Time is a crucial factor in forced migration research because time is a precondition for trust to develop, without which there is little chance of meaningful research. Their insecurities of war and exile and the distrust with which they are often approached, cause refugees to be very cautious to trust others, and researchers are not spared their suspicion (Daniel & Knudsen 1995, Hynes 2003, Malkki 1995a, Sommers 2001a, Willems 2003). Individuals may doubt the real motives behind questions asked and information wanted from them – as a staff member of the JRS office warned me: “Some may be wary because they think you were hired to spy on them”. But even if they are not Researching & Writing about War and Exile 85 worried about my motives, many refugees get fed up with having to tell their experiences when the benefits are not clear. They are critical of the self-serving interest of researchers - “We talk so you can get your PhDs” is a comment I heard more than once. Refugees, not unlike anyone else, speak of their personal experiences only if the listener can be trusted. Trust can be established in a purely professional relationship, but in my experience is more likely to be gained by interaction in a more personal atmosphere. People want to be seen as individuals, not as objects of investigation. The refugees in Kampala, for good reasons, were sensitive to the attitude and behaviour of researchers and evaluated whether they adhered to the ground rules of human interaction, like keeping promises, being respectful and sharing not only meals but also some of one’s thoughts and experiences. Our meetings usually took place in town. We would agree to meet at Makerere University, the Post Office, the Clock Tower or the Refugee Law Project, and from there walk to find a place to sit and talk. This would be a quiet corner, an off-the-road local restaurant, or for those who were at ease about that a café on Kampala Road or near the taxi parks. Some Sudanese students and I met at a quiet spot near Rubaga Cathedral, where we sat in the grass, overlooking the city, and spent the afternoon talking. I went to visit some of them at their college outside Kampala for a walk to the lakeside after classes. Sometimes I went to see the young men in the hostels where they rented a bed and in the churches where they were given temporary shelter. I was invited to lunches of enjera in small family restaurants behind the Old Taxi Park or at people’s home. I saw around forty- five different rooms across town where refugees lived. Some who asked me to visit must have done so with the purpose of evoking sympathy and eliciting assistance, or to make the general valid point about the lack of recognition by the GoU and UNHCR of their hardship. But most of them, I believe, welcomed me to their homes for reasons held by people all over the globe. Initial contacts were largely based on chance meetings at offices, but once I got to know people we usually stayed in touch and went on seeing each other on many occasions. This was a (part) conscious, ethical choice, which had its positive effect on the research. Gradually as I got to know people, I was better able to contextualise their narratives. But also, the value of answers given in a one-time interview is very limited. In each social situation people make choices about what to disclose and what not, and they edit their histories and identities according to the circumstances. Certain individuals came back to what they had told me earlier, explaining they had withheld information since they had not been sure to what extent to trust me. For instance, on 15 June 1998 my research diary reads:
Isaac says last time he “dodged me a bit” about these two aspects of his background: his SPLA involvement and his marriage. He says now, after seeing me several times, he’s willing to talk about anything: “You’ve been showing so much kindness and openness, I think I can trust you now”.
The fact that self-representation was such a delicate matter, had painful consequences for some. After having known a certain Congolese young man for over two years, he told me he felt deeply uncomfortable about not having told ‘the truth’ during his refugee status interview. He said he had added certain things to make a stronger claim and implied that apart from feeling guilty about ‘lying’, it had also been an alienating experience: he had presented himself as a (partly) different person from who he was. It meant a fraught relationship with that ‘other self’ that continued to trouble him. The oral historian Allesandro Portelli writes: “Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did” (Portelli 1991: 50). I believe the long stretch of time I spent in 86 Contexts
Kampala and the trust relationships that consequently developed, allowed me insight into the very layers of experience and reflection that Portelli refers to. In the end, I managed to patch together the greater parts of the life stories of the protagonists of this study, but it did not come the way I had imagined and read in the literature. I did not sit down for several sessions of several hours per person, in a private setting, chronologically going through their lives, recording their words (Gluck & Patai 1991, Leydesdorff 2004, Thompson 2000, Tonkin 1992). As noted, Kampala’s reality was not conducive for this. Most individuals I met were new or recent arrivals. Their situation was insecure and volatile, their urgent needs and problems were many, and they were in no way settled. It proved hard to sit down for the process of recording life histories. Reflection fits better when one is somehow settled, having the space, both literally and emotionally, to look back at things. This must be the reason why other life history research took place in the context of resettlement (Agger 1994, Bek-Pedersen & Montgomery 2006, Ghorashi 2003, Omidian 1994). Most young men I spoke to stated that they were mostly interested in the future: “The past has passed”. Their immediate concern was making ends meet here and now, but their thoughts, they said, were with the future. This corresponds with their age and phase of life. In fact, it has been suggested that because of their strong orientation towards the future, conducting life stories is not the thing to do with young persons (Aalten 1995). I would argue, however, that this depends on what group of young people one is dealing with and in what situation. Pat Caplan in African Voices, African Lives (1997) writes:
“that .. which perhaps comes best in middle and old age, making sense of a life by putting it into some sort of order ... [has] as Langness and Frank suggest, less to do with life than with death: ‘In old age, spontaneous life review or reminiscence is a universal feature, prompted by a person’s recognition of impending death and the dissolution of self (1981: 103)’. They go on to cite Heidegger’s proposition that our consciousness in the face of death is the fundamental human condition. In the West, such consciousness is not usually achieved until relatively late in the life circle” (Caplan 1997: 232).
Many of the young men in this study had been confronted with death: they had experienced narrow escapes from death, they had seen their parents or friends killed, they had themselves killed other people. Does this explain the intense process of reflection that I observed in some people, the philosophical quandaries that teenagers shared with me? Clearly, despite all their acute problems, the young refugees had moments of reflection, reminiscences. They wanted to talk about their past. There were those who seemed to easily offer the most harrowing accounts: they were used to being asked, had been required to tell their story to many different officials. But the intimate, and often ambivalent, stories about life at home or at the front lines only came once I knew them better, when there was mutual trust and a measure of friendship. My attitude, commitment and willingness to share were crucial factors. Portelli is right:
“The less the historians reveal about their identity and thoughts, the more likely informants are to couch their testimony in the broadest and safest terms, and to stick to the more superficial layers of their conscience and the more public and official aspects of their culture” (Portelli 1998: 31).
For some of the young men, I came to serve as a sounding board and a mirror for their thoughts about the changing situation, the choices to make and ambitions to pursue. As Azza Karam points out: “our presence in the field itself leads to a certain kind of reflexivity on the part of those we are with and interviewing” (1998: 44). Because I depended on the Researching & Writing about War and Exile 87 young refugees’ accounts and recollections (having no firsthand observations of their pre- flight and flight situations) I needed people with a reflective inclination and who were able to express themselves, to convey experience. These individual qualities partly determined my selection of research subjects, and it is thus with little surprise that I ended up with the more eloquent and educated. I asked several people to answer on paper certain questions about their flight, their living conditions in Kampala, and their conceptualisations of what it meant to be a young person and a refugee. Some wrote long and eloquent epistles, which opened up new areas of conversation and discussion. I asked some of them if they wanted to read drafts of my chapters, which yielded interesting exchange, and showed the effect of the passing of time. One young man commented: “When I first read it, I thought, ‘Well, is that me?’ You know, I sound so different... I must have been really traumatised then... But I can’t deny it, I do recognise myself”. When still in Kampala, I gave some people print-outs of my notes of our previous meetings. These aroused surprise of how much, and how literally, I had remembered our conversations. ‘Is this your magic?’ some asked. I understood their unease with my putting the spoken word on paper: it created a dimension of permanence that may be anything but how they wanted to conceive of their lives (Nencel 2001). As the oral historian Thompson (2000: 126) argues, “the ambivalence of the spoken word brings it much closer to the human condition” (see also Lemaire 1988). On the other hand, they wanted things to be put down on paper. They wanted to make their stories heard, wanted ‘the world’ to know about their predicament, and considered my research one possible avenue. Several of the aspiring students expressed they wanted education because it would teach them to think critically, write convincingly, and thus find a respected way of imparting their experiences and opinions to the world. Due to the long time I spent in Kampala and the close contact I came to have with some of the young men, the boundary blurred between the purely personal and the ethnographic fieldwork (Behar, Bell, Caplan & Karim 1993). This was reinforced and became manifest by my getting involved in some of the young men’s lives in concrete ways.
Material and financial assistance
It has been a curious thing to discover the unease in anthropological circles that surrounds the issue of giving material and financial assistance to the people involved in one’s research (Lammers 2005c). Let me start by quoting from my research diary. It is my second month in Uganda and I am visiting a Congolese community – refugees from the 1960s – in Katwe, one of the slum areas of Kampala.
About ten elderly men and three younger women have gathered, called from their nearby houses by Wilfred [translator]. They come and greet me, we exchange a series of hellos, welcomes and thank yous, then they sit down on the trunks of the big tree that shades the central part of the compound. They don't talk to each other, watch me closely. I feel weird in my big chair. When one man shows me his documents all of them take theirs from their pockets. It sends a funny feeling down my stomach to see them waiting, silently, holding these scrubby pieces of paper, seemingly their most precious possessions, while in actual fact these have thus far taken them nowhere. One man, Roger B., touches a chord in me more than the others. Wilfred, taking on the hopeful expression I imagine was Roger’s, informs me that “he told me yesterday that now this was his chance, because he didn't speak to Hannah last time”. And I can only think that his talking to me is not going to bring any change for him. After a couple of hours I feel full with all their accounts and histories and the energy flowing between us. Wilfred suggests I tell those still waiting to come back some other time, but I could never do that. So 88 Contexts
we continue. First I ask to use the toilet. Small consternation ensues, they are obviously not too proud of their facilities. When I return my chair and the bench have been moved with the shade. I remember the biscuits in my bag and ask Wilfred whether I should offer them. The full five hours I have spent with them we don’t eat nor drink anything. Their enthusiasm in sharing the Orange Crunches hardly makes me feel less stupid about this ‘present’. I’m reminded of the scene in Life of Brian where the ex-leper sneers, ‘Ten pence, is that all I get for telling my bloody lifestory?!’
I set off for Kampala with the notion that giving assistance to my prospective research subjects would ‘not be done’. I cannot remember if anyone had told me so explicitly. I probably just knew this was the rule, engraved in the anthropologists’ collective subconscious. However, it did not take long for me to feel that it was impossible as well as ‘not done’ to stick to the anthropological rule of ‘no giving’. This arose first as a matter of ethics: is there a valid reason to say ‘No’ when requests for material or financial assistance come from people in life-threatening circumstances? Though this question invites and requires all sorts of qualifications, my principle answer is negative. What I encounter ‘in the field’ is a micro illustration of that enormous macro problem: the unacceptable levels of inequality in the world in which we live. One may easily be overwhelmed and just leave it at that, simply because there are no ready-made answers and very little one can contribute. Moreover, some people argue they do not believe in charity. I support the opinion that situations of injustice require “a ‘rights-based humanitarianism’ that goes beyond ‘private charity or governmental largess’ [and that] this approach is ‘not about discretionary assistance when the mood for benevolence takes us… it is about defending, advocating and securing enjoyment of human rights’” (Birch, quoted in Harrell-Bond 2002: 51). However, does this outrule charity? Even if charity would not help someone in the long-term, is that a reason to not give at all? I cannot do justice to this complex discussion here, yet believe it merits discussion among anthropologists who, by virtue of their profession, travel and see the world. My afternoon in Katwe was an early encounter with the destitute situation in which the majority of my research subjects found themselves. Many more encounters followed and I soon decided to stick to two basic principles: I gave people money for transport, and if possible combined our meetings with having a meal. I furthermore found myself providing for a variety of things: money for passport size pictures (constantly needed in the asylum bureaucracy), paying for people’s letters of recommendation, appeal, request and complaint to be typed and posted, money for photocopying and email services, money for blood tests, medicine, and hospital bills for acute malaria treatment and miscarriage, money for a month’s rent or a few nights in a secure hostel, money for food, for a blanket or stove, for paint and canvas, for transport to refugee settlements. While this type of giving assistance may already raise a few people’s eyebrows, I discovered the matter becomes particularly contentious when I mention that eventually I started supporting quite a few persons with school fees, and that several of the individuals supported through the Ijayo Foundation I set up when back in the Netherlands, are among the protagonists of my research. Many consider this to contradict principles of neutrality and the scientific ideal of objectivity. Giving assistance or rendering services to one’s research subjects – through the methodological problem known as reactivity – will distort the research process, generate biased information and thus compromise one’s findings. My question is: did anyone ever prove the opposite, that is, that people give ‘neutral’ answers - or even, speak ‘the truth’ - because there is no assistance involved? I believe this to be an unchallenged, taken-for- granted assumption. It is not difficult to come up with reasons why a person would purposefully give biased answers when there is no compensation involved - in whatever form - for knowledge, trust and time spent and shared. In refugee situations – and in Researching & Writing about War and Exile 89 camps particularly - where researchers and consultancy missions tend to come and go, disappointment and frustration with the empty promises of these visitors is common, and more than once I heard: “We have seen so many of them, it makes no difference, we tell them what they want to hear”.9 Anthropologists want to work with people who feel free to talk and share their knowledge, opinions and perceptions. What makes for such a context? Again, its primary condition is an adequate level of trust, which I believe goes hand-in-hand with respect for the other person and his or her dignity. How trust and respect are obtained and expressed is context-dependent, but it usually has something to do with the dynamics of giving and receiving. It may involve being an attentive listener, offering details about one’s own life, assisting a person to take her child to hospital or school, or simply sharing a drink. As researchers we enter into relationships with others and cannot avoid these dynamics. My experiences in Kampala confirmed that trust was only generated when I was prepared to enter into a personal relationship that involved sharing and giving. I remember one young man who fled from Ethiopia referred to another researcher, saying: “He has never given me anything, he has never shown me he cares, so why shall I trust him?” I fully acknowledge, and I believe this young man did too, that ‘giving’ can consist of being genuinely attentive and making time to listen to someone in dire circumstances, or in the case of my research, people traumatised by the experiences of war and flight (Schrijvers 1999b). However, depending on one’s length of stay and the consequent depth of relationships, one will in some way or other become part of the economy of reciprocity. Ken Wilson (1992) argues that fieldworkers in Africa must realise that they cannot be social members of a community without some sort of economic engagement. Being prepared to give or contribute not only is a matter of personal ethics, but also is in keeping with the prevalent social rules. I do not wish to paint a naive rosy picture, but my experience is that whatever little I gave to people was immediately distributed, often I saw it happening, notes or coins discretely changing hands. I believe that, though it may be easier to keep one’s distance and hide behind ‘I’m an anthropologist, I’m here to observe and take notes’, this attitude is no guarantee for more truthful information, let alone for a better understanding. Instead, being prepared to give when this is expected or needed will most likely contribute to the level of trust and as such positively contribute to the research process. I am the first to recognise the numerous difficulties surrounding this issue. Firstly, once the person who gives crosses that treshold, thorny decision follow. I found myself confronted with questions like: I can write to UNHCR on this man’s behalf, but should I not rather accompany him on his afternoon mission to see a protection officer… but really, I’m so busy, shall I tell him to look for someone else this time? And since back in Amsterdam: another email, what shall I reply, do I want to reply? Do I go to Western Union today or do I have other priorities and shall I go tomorrow, or next week? It never ceases to feel uncomfortable that I can make these choices, and that they are always, to some extent, arbitrary. Most confusing is that the choices I make concern people of my age, whose histories and troubles I know, and some of whom I have come to know quite intimately. Secondly, conforming to a community’s social or ethical rules, implies taking on a specific role, which in turn determines specific ways of interaction. Paying for someone’s school fees may confer the title of ‘mother’ or ‘father’ – something, in my experience, many anthropologists find distinctly uncomfortable. On several occasions I heard a researcher or legal adviser emphatically announce to a refugee who had just expressed his or her gratitude for the person’s help: ‘I am not your mother!’ My impression is that anthropologists from the West (this is a generalisation) tend to believe, and this is important to them, that they are either ‘inside’ or ‘outside’. We either choose to be with you in your world (‘going native’!) or we study you, or for that matter help you, but firmly stay 90 Contexts in ours. Actions or conceptualisations that require crossing the boundary between these two too often or too unpredictably appear confusing. I too remember struggling to reconcile within myself the identities of researcher/ helper/ friend/ sister/ mother/ colleague/ outsider/ insider, etcetera. However, as much as we might like to determine our own roles and positions, this is not the anthropologist’s prerogative. Certain roles are irrevocably conferred on us: we do not arrive, even less so leave, as blank individuals. Relevant in this context is Wilson’s point that while giving things in most African societies establishes relations of status, this becomes a problem only “when the researcher, unlike members of the local population, has little experience in making something positive out of a patron-client relationship, and clings to an ideological ideal of equality” (Wilson 1992). Thirdly, the most complex issue of this discussion perhaps does not concern the act of giving. I recall a conversation I had regarding international development work and the controversies that loom large in the act of setting out with the idea of ‘fixing’ other people’s problems. The person I was speaking with said she had come to realise that it is nearly impossible to enter into, and especially maintain, an equal friendship with people one meets ‘over there’. I was on the alert, sensitive to her implicitly writing off the feelings of friendship for certain people in Kampala that I had come to treasure dearly. She then added: “It is not because giving is difficult, in fact it is easy to give. What is truly difficult is to be the one who must receive”. It struck me in Kampala more clearly than it had before that it is indeed a hundred times easier to give than to receive. One paragraph in my field notes illustrates this. Samy, an aspiring artist, was eighteen and had fled from eastern Congo. He was one of the young men with whom I developed a close relationship.
When we finally get to my house in Kibuli, Samy wants to rest and lies down on the bed in the garage [which he uses as his temporary atelier], his paintings by his side. I leave him for a bit. Then prepare lunch. He’s still quiet. He says it’s not good to be a parasite. He feels he’s a parasite in everything. “It’s fine to be parasite to your parents, because you know they are your parents and one day when you grow old you will be their host. But with other people it makes you feel very bad”.
Marcel Mauss in his seminal Essai sur le Don, translated as The Gift, puts it categorically: “The gift not yet repaid debases the man who accepted it” (1970 [1950]: 63). In other words, operating exclusively on the receiving end makes it nearly impossible to feel a human being among others. The philosopher Simone Weil writes: “Initiative and responsibility, to feel one is useful and even indispensable, are vital needs of the human soul” (2002 [1952]: 15). Many of the young men in Kampala struggled with the fact that in their relationships with others they found themselves on the receiving end.10 The trials of being on the receiving end are often aggravated by the attitude of the supposed ‘helpers’. Everyone can faultlessly sense the attitude of his or her ‘helper’, and both extremes – “you are undeserving” and “you poor thing” - are equally disturbing. This issue is explored in the article The Experience of Refugees as Recipients of Aid (Harrell-Bond 1999), which poses the question: is it possible that the way refugees are ‘helped’ (including the role they are forced to assume to get assistance) is one source of debilitating stress for those who are in a position where they have no alternative but to receive? Of course, all human beings are dependent on others to a greater or lesser extent and thus the issue is not being ‘helped’ per se, but the relative powerlessness of the recipient vis-à-vis the helper. This subject of ‘giving’ is a huge one, invoking ethical, methodological as well as philosophical questions. I struggled with these issues and continue to do so. In Kampala, I followed my intuition, tried to think critically, observe closely, and welcome advice that people volunteered. Back within the walls of academia, I strongly feel this is a subject that merits anthropologists’ open and honest reflection. Researching & Writing about War and Exile 91
Advocacy and action
Perhaps more than other (sub)disciplines of the social and political sciences, forced migration studies enjoys a widely shared political engagement on the part of a great number of its academic practitioners. Many refugee researchers appear motivated by their political or moral principles. They aim at a critical evaluation of the controversial representations and dubious policies that define today’s refugee regime (Colson 2003, Essed & Wesenbeek 2004, Fabos 1999b, Frerks 2004, Hammond 2004, Horst 2006b, Kibreab 1996, Lomo 2000, Marfleet 2006, Oloka-Onyango 1996, Rajasingham-Senanayake 2004, Richmond 1995, Schrijvers 2000, 2004, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005, Waldron 1988, Zetter 1991). Students and scholars endorse the notion that research into other people’s suffering can only be justified if alleviating that suffering is an explicit objective (Turton 1996). This is no isolated standpoint. From the 1990s onward, social science research has increasingly had to defend itself as being at least “relevant” to contemporary social issues (James, Hockey & Dawson 1997: 12). However, there is a difference between conducting policy-oriented research and being politically engaged. The latter implies a commitment to speaking out against human rights violations and against the political and legal obstacles that infringe on the well-being of those one has chosen to study. It means choosing sides and embracing the notion of “conscious partiality” (Mies 1983). Such explicit engagement continues to arouse criticism with scholars who consider all political involvement during research opposed to principles of neutrality and the scientific ideal of objectivity. One such heated discussion, in response to Scheper-Hughes’ call for a “militant anthropology”, was documented in Current Anthropology (1995). While I do not want to dismiss the concerns about reactivity on the part of methodologically more conventional scholars, I strongly believe that the ideal of neutrality cannot be upheld in most contemporary anthropological research (Schrijvers 1993). Several months into my research in Kampala, I became affiliated with the Refugee Rights research project at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) directed by Barbara Harrell-Bond. This EU-funded project focused on the extent to which refugees were able to exercise their fundamental rights in camps/settlements, as opposed to refugees who had settled outside the aid umbrella in rural or urban areas. For the researchers on this project, the responsibility to engage in advocacy activities automatically followed from the explicit rights-based approach of the project. In the introduction to Rights in Exile (2005) the authors state that this research project “was intended to act as a catalyst for the reform of law and practice in line with international human rights and refugee law”, and: “The research was action-oriented ... we took every possible opportunity to intervene when a right was violated” (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond, 2005: 5, 13). My involvement in the activities that this project conducted included: providing copies of written cases to the Government and UNHCR, writing appeals on behalf of refugees, attending court sessions involving refugees, visiting Luzira Prison to find out about the circumstances of refugees on remand there, helping ensure legal guardianship for a Somali unaccompanied minor girl through the Magistrate (Children’s Court), accompanying people to UNHCR, IOM, InterAid and the African Centre for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture (ACVT), writing referral letters to doctors and accompanying people to hospital, trying to get refugees registered in Ugandan schools and helping them obtain refugee student scholarships from the Hugh Pilkington Charitable Trust. This hands-on advocacy work enriched my research and taught me a great deal about the subject of my academic inquiries. If my opportunities for ‘participant observation’ in Kampala’s urban setting were limited for reasons discussed above, the advocacy work partly redressed that. Lining up at one office or another, and the endless missions for an audience with a protection officer deepened my understanding of the 92 Contexts despair, anger, humiliation, and resistance that are born from the interaction between refugees and these bureaucratic organisations. It also taught me how this interaction, and the labelling practices implicated, affect (re)negotiations of identity. Several anthropologists have described a similar experience (Karam 1998, Scheper-Hughes 1995, Schrijvers 1995).
In August 2000, together with the artist Petna Ndaliko Katondolo, I set up Yolé!Africa, an art centre for young refugees and Ugandans in Kampala. My advocacy activities took on a new character. They changed from ‘for’ and ‘on behalf of’ to ‘with’; from rather negatively and hopelessly fighting a losing battle with bureaucracy (though necessary and instructive), it became taking part in something I believed in and sharing this vision with others. My research had shown that, in addition to the difficulties that young refugees faced in making ends meet, they desperately lacked a place where they were welcome and could meet friends to share experiences with, and where they were free to express themselves and feel at home. Before his flight to Uganda, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo used to run an art centre for youth in Goma, eastern Congo. We decided to start an art centre where both refugees and Ugandans would also be welcome. The focus on art (contemporary dance, painting, theatre, video & film) was chosen because of the value that artistic expression can have for persons who have experienced traumatising events. Furthermore we believed that art is a fundamental human expression, which, in times of crisis, can be a vector of hope. We believed that every society needs its artists. The small house with a backyard in Kabalagala that we rented soon became the envisaged centre of creative activity. Chapter Six focuses on several of the young refugee artists who came to work and develop their skills and talents at Yolé!Africa. My close involvement with the running of Yolé!Africa and the individuals who participated in its activities, allowed me new perspectives into the lives of Kampala’s young refugees.
I had written about political engagement and advocacy in my research proposal, arguing that, in addition to contributing to the body of academic knowledge, any research project about refugees should aim at ‘making a difference’. I intended to adopt a “transformative approach”, seeing the researcher as “an intellectual intermediary in a process of change from the bottom up” (Schrijvers 1993: 38). My work in Uganda taught me about the strengths and flaws of such politically engaged research. Firstly, I would be more cautious now using words like ‘transformative’. Despite the small successes and short-term practical solutions, what can be changed on an institutional level seems so little. Kloos (1987: 101- 103) writes about the anthropologist as partisan: knowledge is power, but to use knowledge as such some degree of power is a prerequisite. And this is what an independent doctoral student usually lacks. Secondly, good advocacy requires in-depth knowledge. Looking back at our work in Uganda, a fellow researcher and I agreed that we had often had too little detailed knowledge of what went on in eastern Congo or southern Sudan to make reliable and convincing arguments to UNHCR about the protection issues of certain individuals. It must be noted that UNHCR usually did not have this information either. Thirdly, it is important to reflect on the kind of knowledge that action-research produces and to be aware of inevitable bias. My ‘conscious partiality’ had an effect on my relationship with UNHCR and the Government of Uganda. Unfortunately, the climate of interaction between the researchers and UNHCR was often rather antagonistic. UNHCR was far from open to critical views from outside, which appears to be an institutional problem that only few of the organisation’s staff in Kampala were able to rise above. It needs skill and experience to bridge the gap of different views and attitudes without compromising on one’s political and moral convictions and yet obtain diplomatic returns.
ЖЖЖ Researching & Writing about War and Exile 93
Ever since the 1980s, epistemological matters concerning the politics of knowledge and representation have been on the agenda of critical scholars in the humanities and social sciences. In forced migration studies, despite its exemplary politically inspired scholarship (see above), such explicit critical reflection on the politics of knowledge inherent in individual research seems conspicuously absent (Lammers 2006).11 Drawing on my background in anthropology, the second part of this chapter aims at giving an impetus to discussing issues of politics, understanding, experience, truth and representation that apply to refugee research. I believe that a discussion at the intersection of forced migration studies and anthropology will be of mutual benefit, given that the context in which refugee research takes place - conflict, violence, displacement – is increasingly relevant to anthropology as a whole (Colson 2003).
3. EXPERIENCE, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge is not a copy of reality, but a response to living in the world.
Catherine MacKinnon, quoted in Judith Grant, 1993, p. 77
In Uganda, but especially when back in the Netherlands, I found myself confronted with issues concerning the knowledge I tried to gain about the lives of the young refugees in Kampala. Repeatedly the question came back to me: for whom am I doing this research and who is this knowledge going to serve? Refugee researchers are often politically inspired and claim to work from the notion of solidarity with the people they study. They aspire to produce their knowledge on behalf of, or from the perspective of, ‘the refugees’. But in their final products, be it a policy brief or PhD thesis, whose voices or perspectives are actually represented? Since it is anything but easy to see from another person’s perspective, my research findings are to a large extent shaped and coloured by me. What I as a researcher see or do not see about people’s lives or identities considerably depends on my personal experiences and outlook on life or even my state of mind. Some days I am convinced that the young men in Kampala are without exception incredible achievers. On other days, rummaging through the images in my mind, I see the chaos of people thrust in many directions. War cut them loose from their backgrounds and dropped them in places they had hardly heard about - Kampala, Nakivale refugee settlement, Houston, Perth, Winnipeg. But how can I truly know what they see? Observing their lives from the outside I see chaos, but they, within, may see change. This section deals with three related questions: can I define my research subjects as a group (3.1)? Is it possible and relevant for the foreign anthropologist to see and understand from their perspective (3.2)? Do power differentials between researcher and researched determine the accuracy and legitimacy of the knowledge gained (3.3)?
3.1 The marginalised?
When people ask me what I was doing in Uganda’s capital city and I tell them about my research among the young refugees - many of them ex-fighters - the most frequent responses I hear are: ‘Wow, sounds fascinating!’ and ‘Wow, that’s heavy!’ What they see, I believe, are images of refugee camps and the telling faces of child soldiers as shown on television these days. When I mention that I am still in contact with many of these young men, that we use email, and that the mobile network now covering nearly all of Uganda is 94 Contexts great for helping us keep in touch, people are visibly taken aback – “how do you mean, mobile phones?” That there is a network operational in Africa seems quite a novelty to many, but that refugees would actually have phones is almost considered a contradiction in terms. Anthropology for decades was synonymous with the representation of ‘whole cultures’. The inaccuracy of this holism has now been widely recognised and many heed the call to observe and portray the “competing claims and dissenting voices” that constitute all social worlds (James, Hockey & Dawson 1997: 7-8). I endorsed a model of culture that stresses “conflict, complexity and indeterminacy” (Moore 1994: 15), yet it was my research in Kampala that proved how tangible such concepts are. I had gone to Uganda with the intention to study the lives of, as phrased in my research proposal, “dis-empowered refugees”, yet soon I asked myself: “Well, Ellen, who exactly do you have in mind?” The young refugees shared the experience of being forcibly uprooted, but otherwise constituted a remarkably diverse crowd of individuals. There were men and women of different nationalities and walks of life, illiterates and university graduates, artists, farmers and journalists, mental patients, orphans and widows, Muslims and Seven Days Adventists, SPLA commanders, former child soldiers, introverts and street-wise kids. They did not constitute a group, let alone a shared culture. Most significantly, the adjective ‘dis- empowered’ that I had attributed to my prospective research subjects turned out to have little meaning. Words like ‘dis-empowered’, ‘vulnerable’ and ‘marginalised’ are widely used in development discourse. Policy makers and researchers focus their work on individuals and groups who fit these labels. Yet who determines who is vulnerable, and on the basis of which criteria? Are all refugees ‘dis-empowered’? The reality is that, unlike hundreds of thousands of their compatriots facing equal insecurity and deprivation, the refugees I met had made it from war and violence to the relative security of Kampala. I suppose the inference is that many of them were not among the most marginalised in their own societies prior to flight. This applies especially to urban refugees. Compared to populations in camps, exiles in urban areas are often professionals, entrepreneurs and educated individuals. However, there are young army defectors hiding in Kampala who made me reflect on marginalisation as well. While no one can downplay the human rights violations they suffered, in southern Sudan they did enjoy a certain status lacked by the civilian population which made the latter even more vulnerable. It may be worth asking who is more marginalised, the child soldier forcibly recruited or the mother who lost her son and faces the atrocities committed by children like her own? In my research population, ex-soldiers and aspiring students constitute the majority. Though they are vulnerable in many ways (blocked from education and other institutional resources, traumatised by their participation in war, without legal status in Kampala) they are also ambitious and determined to succeed in life. Many of them believe that their past hardship opened their eyes and made them stronger and more ingenious survivors. My research is thus not about the most vulnerable (young single mothers, orphans made houseboys, the chronically sick) – if only for the simple sad truth that they, being least mobile, are usually least visible (Schrijvers 1999b). ‘The marginalised’, ‘the disadvantaged’, and ‘the vulnerable’ are no self-evident qualifications but contested labels. The refugees in Kampala definitely did not feel that they all belonged to the same ‘vulnerable’ group. The objective common denominator of my research population is that they are all young individuals who fled their home countries in search of a more secure and dignified life. This is what, in their diversity, they had in common. Researching & Writing about War and Exile 95
3.2 The primacy of experience
I don’t want to talk about my history, I don’t, because when I talk about my history, I feel as if I have already died. I was very, very angry when M. told me: “We don’t understand your story, we can’t get it straight, can you tell us more?” I don’t want to talk about it to UNHCR or others. I know my problem, I know my history, I want to stay with it. I don’t want someone to decide for me whether it is true or false ... They write about my story, but what do they know about what happened ... do they know what it means that people died?! I didn’t tell my full story, I told them the facts that were necessary.
Field notes, 10 July 2000
These words were spoken by a Congolese young man. We were sitting in the shade having a soda. His frustration about having to tell his account of flight over and over again to different officials was written all over his face. At the same time, part of him wanted to share what he had seen and gone through – but not at all costs, and on his own terms. He wanted to be understood, not judged. He gave me snippets of what had happened the weeks before his flight and in his past. He smiled as he remembered the lyrics Kabila’s soldiers sang when they pushed through Goma on their way to oust Mobutu. He sang one of their songs for me. Then he was overtaken by an image of two years later. He had watched young boys being shot in the back by RCD soldiers – “... they told these children to say they were Mai Mai ... they forced them ... and when the children started running and they started shooting... I was there and I saw the blood… I can see it now…”. I listened to his half-sentences. He was my age – I tried to comprehend, but doubted: could I ever understand the world from his perspective? Anthropologists usually study people who belong to societies rather far removed from the their own in terms of experiences, culture, race, and history. The foreign anthropologist observes, reads, asks questions and participates and thus hopes to be enlightened about the ‘culture’ of these people – not a straightforward process. The conceptual problem in the way - a question that continues to inspire battle over meaning, use, and explanatory worth - is ‘what is culture?’ (Geertz 2000, van Binsbergen 2003). In addition, there are practical obstacles to getting to know and understand, like verbal language, time limits, gender and power issues. And thus the emic/etic discussion that has run through anthropology for half a century has not resolved the question of whether, as an outsider, the anthropologist can ever truly obtain an insider’s view (Headland, Pike & Harris 1990). My years in Kampala made me revaluate my optimistic intentions of “entering the perspective” (Omidian 2000) of my research subjects. I often sensed that it was impossible to truly understand the situation at hand. The combination of my curiosity, empathy and imagination were not sufficient to bring to light the twists and turns of the reality I was studying. The usual challenges of cross-cultural understanding that stood in the way were further complicated by the political and emotionally sensitivities of studying the subjects of war and exile.
Limits to communicating experiences of war and exile
Loss, pain and suffering are among the universal features of the human condition. And yet, actual experiences of this kind are difficult to communicate. Elaine Scarry in her seminal study about pain concludes that “pain defies language” (1985: 5). This is not only because the physical sensation defies words, but also because those inhabiting the “pain-full world” speak their own language (Jackson 1994). It is for this reason that chronic pain patients 96 Contexts suffer from not being taken seriously: the contestability of pain’s existence is a direct consequence of the lack of any intersubjective measurement of it (Good et al 1994, Greenhalg 2001). These issues apply not only to physical pain, but also to mental and emotional distress. Few people when speaking to me about the events that had happened to them – “our house was burnt down”, “my father was hanged”, “I killed that Arab soldier” – had words beyond these terrible facts to convey how these experiences had affected them. When it concerns experiences that have deeply affected people’s lives, the question is not only ‘must one have lived through something to be able to comment on it?’, but also: ‘must one have shared the experience to be entitled to speak about it’?12 Recently I sat in on a debate titled Oorlogstaal (The language of war).13 Afshin Ellian, poet and philosopher of law, debated the meaning of the word ‘war’. Ellian argued that one can only know its meaning if one has “been there”. He termed the politics of war a “physical sensation” that changes one’s perceptions. It reminded me of what a Mozambican woman quoted by Nordstrom said: “I don’t know if anyone really knows war until it lives inside of them”. Ellian’s discussion partners in Amsterdam objected that if only those who have lived through war are entitled to speak about it, this renders powerless all our talking and thinking. They seemed little aware of this aspect of gaining sensitive knowledge: victims and survivors are protective of their experiences. They fear that their experiences will be watered down by those trying to represent them, because they are aware of this mechanism:
“To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt” (Scarry 1985: 7).
Scarry’s statement resonates with the prevailing culture of disbelief that surrounds refugees’ testimonies. Simply because listeners are unable to imagine the extraordinary events narrated, they choose to dismiss them as false or fabulation. Are there limits to the stretch of the imagination when confronted with extreme, disturbing, experiences? Feldman, drawing on his research of the political violence in Northern Ireland, asks about perpetrators and victims of violence: “How can they be understood and depicted if they dwell on the other side of the border of conventional or known bodily sensory and moral experience?” (1995: 245). What “dwelling on the other side” means is a point of discussion, yet the principle that Feldman refers to makes sense. We all know from our daily encounters that a notion of ‘where the other person comes from’ makes communication easier and that shared histories facilitate mutual understanding. It took some effort for me to grasp the extreme fears some refugees had of others and the relentless suspicions that incapacitated them – but also to understand their resilience, their ability to forgive, and their desire for a future after witnessing friends and entire families be killed. In the end, however, differences do not necessarily make understanding impossible. A great deal is possible if one is willing to make an effort.14
Non-verbal modes of understanding
Pain may not have a ‘voice’, but it conveys and communicates.
Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story, 1997, p. 22
My study aimed not at judging or to distinguishing true from false, but at comprehending people’s experiences. A great deal of the knowledge and understanding I gained during my three years in Kampala was not through my rational or analytic capacities, but by being alert to non-verbal modes of communication. Essential to my learning about the fear and Researching & Writing about War and Exile 97 despair of the young men was not just their telling me how and why and when they were scared, but looking into their eyes and when sitting next to them or shaking hands physically feeling something of the strong emotions they carried. And thus, I agree with Ghorashi “to situate the emotion, the unconscious and the unspoken within rather than outside the scientific framework” (1999: 52, my translation). This applies to both research subjects and researcher. After all, understanding other people’s social and mental processes is directly related to one’s personal experiences, both cognitive and emotional. I can only comprehend something about the lives of the young refugees by mentally placing myself in their world and then searching myself for my passion, my uncertainties, and my beliefs. I can only grasp something of the choice made by a fifteen-year-old boy to go and fight at the front lines in southern Sudan if I try to imagine what the feelings of dead-end, despair, revenge or youthful idealism would stir up in me. As the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues in her Upheavals of Thought (2001), emotions are not animal energies or impulses, but “essential elements of human intelligence” (Nussbaum, 2001: 3). Emotions are highly discriminating responses to what is of value and importance. Knowing requires reflexivity - in terms of who I am as a person and the experiences, values and convictions I bring to the field. When I discussed a first draft of my chapter on violence with a colleague, she observed that the wording revealed my strong personal uneasiness with the subject. My initial response to the accounts of war and deprivation indeed was one of shock and incomprehension. Yet it is not as if I had no knowledge of the privations of the majority of people across the globe. I am exposed to images of poverty and war every single day on television, and I had visited Africa and Asia, even as a young child, which had left me with strong and also disturbing impressions. But during these earlier visits I had never been drawn into individual people’s lives and stories to the extent that I was this time. It challenged me to rethink some crude facts of life. After all, crucial for how we see and interpret certain phenomena is how we conceptualise these. Whether or not I manage to understand acts of violence partly depends on how I have conceptualised ‘violence’ – situating it as something inside or outside my world and myself. Nordstrom writes:
“There is a curious irony in the popular epistemologies that surround violence in the west. Violence is presented as something both integral to the human condition and as antithetical to it ... It is cast as the excessive, the abnormal, the other, and yet as intrinsic” (1997: 16).
Had I situated violence outside my world (and kept it there) and was this no longer possible? How was I to tackle my confusion regarding building up friendships with people who possibly had been perpetrators in gruesome acts of war? It challenged my ability to identify with the young men. For the researcher whose primary aim it is to get to know ‘others’ the issue of identification is an essential and recurring issue.
Multiple identification and positionality
Anthropologists working in their own local or national context have written about the issue of identification when doing research among one’s ‘own’ (Abu-Lughod 1993, Essed 1991, Ghorashi 1999, Karam 1998, Kondo 1986). My early questions about this were poignantly summarised years ago by my best friend at SOAS: “How come, Ellen, you’re so into this refugee thing? You are the furthest from a refugee that I can possibly imagine!” She herself had been forced to move between continents, and considered that my parents still lived in the house my father had built in the year I was born, and that all my wanderings had been purely voluntarily, a curious privilege. In Kampala there were moments when I sensed the 98 Contexts disadvantage of sharing so little of the experiences of the young men in my research. At times I felt like a prier curious about the impact of war but without a meaningful goal. Ghorashi, for instance, was motivated to study Iranian exiles from her shared experience, which appeared so much more valid. I searched for grounds of identification but some tension always remained: the differences were too obvious and too substantial. And I also wondered if these young men assumed I could understand things that perhaps I could not. Did they realise their accounts of horror fell on ‘green ears’, that they were talking to someone with few frames of reference for understanding what they had witnessed and experienced? However, even if my frames of reference for understanding the experiences of war and exile are inadequate, this does not mean I cannot comprehend at all. We are all marked by multiple experiences and identities (Essed 2001), and thus issues of positionality and insider/outsider take place along multiple lines. I can distinguish between what I as an individual share with the young men of my study and the things that set us apart. This provides a more differentiated starting point. It rephrases the question ‘Is it possible to see from another person’s perspective?’ into ‘Which are the positions from which I can see and come to understand?’ In Kampala several things connected the young men and me. Like me, many of them were (former) students, ascribing great value and finding great pleasure in getting on with our talents and interests. We were all in our twenties and shared questions about friendship and love, politics and justice, the world’s future and ours. The fact that we approached these questions coming from different backgrounds and experiences made this the more interesting. We set up (and continue to run) the art centre Yolé!Africa together - the most powerful factor in connecting us: we shared a vision. Lastly, none of us were at home and we shared some of our feelings of being a foreigner. At the same time, their experiences of war, poverty and insecurity as opposed to my ‘uneventful’ life, in that respect, placed us far apart. However, the wars that disrupted these young people’s lives are not something ‘exotic’ happening ‘out there’. As a white European woman I am part of the same violent world history and present situation as individuals who have been forcibly uprooted in the Great Lakes Region. I cannot study the recurrent violence that people of my age are faced with in Central Africa as a phenomenon disconnected from who I am: I must examine my own ‘roots’ and ‘identities’ and ‘histories’ while I study theirs. Interesting in this respect is Abu-Lughod who criticises Bourdieu for failing to break with the doxa that the anthropologist is an outsider. She writes:
“The obvious point he ignores is that the outsider self never simply stands outside; he or she always stands in a definite relation with the “other” of the study, not just as a Westener or even halfie, but as a Frenchmen in Algeria during the war of independence, an American in Morocco during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, or an Englishwoman in postcolonial India. What we call the outside, or even the partial outside, is always a position within a larger political-historical complex” (1993: 40).
I indeed experienced in Kampala that I was at all times, like the young men, a bearer of political/historical context. But at the end of the day we were also individuals interested in talking and joking, prepared to share something about ourselves, wanting to remember each other’s names. We entered into conversation and even true dialogue. Dialogue requires ‘common ground’. This may be expressed in seeming trivialities, like the comments I got in Uganda: “Hey, aren’t we all students?”, and “Ellen, that’s good, now you talk/sit/eat/welcome like an African!” Richard Bell writes: “The key lies with my ability to see and ‘make room for’ the others’ categories and concepts that give expression to their life” (2002: 4). This ‘making room for’, an openness and receptiveness to see the other person as a partner in dialogue, is expressed in different ways by authors who in essence Researching & Writing about War and Exile 99 refer to the same thing: empathy. Wittgenstein speaks of ‘going up to’ another person. Others have phrased it such:
Peter Kloos: “Apart from pen and paper, ‘sympathy and compassion’ are still the most important tools for studying other societies” (1988: 117, my translation).
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: “Seeing, listening, touching, recording can be, if done with care and sensitivity, acts of solidarity. Above all, they are the work of recognition” (1995: 418).
Clifford Geertz (1977): “We can apprehend [another people’s imagination] well enough, at least as well as we apprehend anything else not properly ours; but we do so not by looking behind the interfering glosses which connect us to it but through them” (quoted in Bell 2002: 3).
Langness & Frank (1981): “To fail to understand another person’s life history is, in general, to reject one’s own humanity” (quoted in Caplan 1997: 233).
To come to dialogue requires awareness of both one’s own and the other person’s positionality. Bell starts his Understanding African Philosophy with the premise that: “If I come to a significant, that is, considered view of the world I inhabit, then I have a starting point for venturing to understand another’s world. In this way there is the possibility of moving toward mutual understanding” (2002: 1). Following Winch, he refers to these ‘considered views of the world’ as landmarks to take our bearings. Thus, before I can engage in a dialogue, I must discover the presuppositions which guide my thoughts and action. True dialogue involves putting oneself in a vulnerable position (Imbo 2002). Not only shall I need to reveal things about me, if I really wish to hear what the other person is saying, I shall have to adjust my opinions and convictions, and worse still, I myself may have to change. Once more I quote Richard Bell:
“Recognising our own capacities, or lack thereof, helps us discover the lacunae in our own self-understanding. We may lack a developed life-view of our own, have few hopes, have suffered little, and our anxieties may be trivial. Not feeling what is sinister in the fire-festivals, or joyful in an installation of a Shilluk or Asante king, or tragic in Rwanda or in Lear, or beautiful and graceful in Namibian rock art, may reflect our own bereft lives; it may reflect our own inability to understand something that is fundamental to others’ lives and to our humanness. We may not be, or may never have been, hospitable, and thus fail to understand another’s simple (or ritualised) gesture of hospitality. In our own arrogance or power we may overlook or be blind to what is human in others – a characteristic of all forms of imperialism and virtually built into forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism” (Bell 2002: 11-12).
Dialogue in terms of a cross-cultural, inter-personal dialogue is not a mere pastime without engagements, it is a moral act. ‘The world’ needs more acts of true listening, witnessing and understanding and anthropologists can choose to play a role in this. Ideally, as Moore (1999: 15) writes, ethnography amounts to “a discourse of responsibility, in the sense of a discourse of reflexive awareness achieved across difference” (see also Battaglia 1999, Scheper-Hughes 1995, Schrijvers 1991b, van Binsbergen 2003). My attempts at dialogue are laid down in this book. 100 Contexts
3.3 Questions of power
Reflexivity forces us to think through the consequences of relating to others – whether they are relations of reciprocity, inequality or even potential exploitation.
Azza Karam, Women, Islamism and the State. Contemporary Feminisms in Egypt, 1998, p. 48
Power relations are an inherent part of anthropological research, present in the hierarchies (based on class, age, gender, birth) and inequalities in societies studied, as well as in the relationship between researcher and researched. In Kampala, it was impossible to miss the many inequalities that pervaded my research. The position from which I as a foreign researcher operated (visa in hand, research approved by UNCST, comfortable home, free to leave whenever I should wish to) could not have been in starker contrast with the situation of the majority of refugees who, in addition to a constant worry about food and shelter, went without a valid ID and thus lacked the minimum condition for being safe. This unequal situation raised questions about the conflicts and responsibilities entailed in the everyday research encounters. The issue of giving material/financial assistance was discussed in section 2.3. The question here is: to what extent do the power differences between researcher and researched affect the knowledge that is gained and the analysis that is put down in writing? Inspired by the epistemological standpoints I took with me to the field, I intended to conduct my research in a ‘dialogical’ manner (Schrijvers 1991a), aiming at a reciprocal mode of exchange and communication between the young refugees and myself. Dialogical approaches belong to a politically motivated stream within academia that poses critical questions, first formulated in the 1960s, about the responsibilities social scientists have beyond university walls. In the face of inequality and injustice, its proponents reason, researchers should demonstrate solidarity with and commitment towards the people they study.15 The various schools that contributed to this discussion – known for its catch phrases like ‘action anthropology’, ‘the view from below’, ‘subjugated standpoints’, and ‘liberation anthropology’ – aimed at “making heard the voices of the marginalised”. Soon, however, critical sounds were also heard. Feminist researchers had to conclude that ‘making heard the voices of the marginalised’ or ‘seeing from below’ - the goals of their emancipatory projects - were not self-evident strategies (Grant 1993, Schrijvers 1995, 1999b). Postcolonial scholars dismissed outright the possibility of egalitarian relationships. A lot of also feminist research, they stated, reflects the arrogance of white scholars purportedly ‘giving a voice’ to ‘Third World’ citizens while in fact appropriating these people’s voices for their own purposes (Minh-ha 1989, Said 1989, Spivak 1988). The issues of voice and giving voice are pertinent political matters and the way in which some anthropologists deal with these calls for a critical note. I thought Amina Mama, founding editor of Feminist Africa, summed it up poignantly:
“Giving a voice is not the issue, it is deafness that is the model: who can afford to be deaf?”16
Indeed, anthropologists still too often make it sound as if ‘they’ - their informants - are passive victims, while ‘we’ have all negotiation power on our side. I do not believe this to be so. Ultimately, people decide what to tell, how to tell it, what to hide or when to be quiet. I ally with Nencel who, reflecting on her research among prostitutes in Lima, writes:
“A good anthropologist always tries to protect the group participating in her project… However, because the research group is envisioned as vulnerable, it is Researching & Writing about War and Exile 101
often assumed they find it difficult to protect themselves, overlooking the fact that most vulnerable people are continuously protecting themselves and usually more experienced in this area than the anthropologist” (2001: 112) .
She concludes: “Why does the projection of power relations in the field reflect a nearly binary opposition between the powerful and the powerless instead of as in other areas departing from a notion of difference and the multipositioned subject?” There indeed appears to be a conceptual difficulty: not to equate the fact that people’s rights are being violated and their living conditions appalling with the perception of these people as helpless individuals. Refugees are especially affected by this discourse of powerlessness, and it is often overlooked that power springs from many sources: power that comes with wealth or status, physical power, creative power, the power of personality, intellectual power, the power (or ability) to have rewarding relationships with others, to love and be loved. In discussions concerning fieldwork relationships it is usually only the power of wealth and status that is taken into account. Is it true that a great deal of the power debate boils down to our preoccupation as anthropologists from the West? We are shocked by the realities in the field and it makes us feel uneasy about our own positions. I wonder, are ‘they’ concerned about my supposed powerfulness, or am I? Am I trying to cover up because I cannot stand to see reality in all its barefaced truth? Having grown up in the Netherlands also played its part: I wanted ‘equal relations’ all the time and with everybody, and tried to brush aside suggestions of me being different, or even worse, being the expert. I now realise this attitude made some people feel uncomfortable. Besides, part of my problem with being approached as ‘the expert’ or ‘the powerful one’, was that I felt I had to, and wished to, live up to those expectations. But instead it confronted me with my limitations. With my white skin I got people past the gate and into the UNHCR premises, and if lucky to a desk, but was that actually any help? However much I wished I did, I had no access to their files, could barely influence their refugee status determination or resettlement applications. It was thus not mere modesty that made me not want to be approached as the expert: I found it unbearable to be confronted with my own powerlessness in the face of so much hardship. Most young refugees I met were much more straightforward about existing inequalities - these belonged to their daily lives - and so the shock of difference was probably more unsettling to me than to them. In my view, certain self-critical anthropologists inflate the notion of not wanting to abuse the power and privileges bestowed on them. They make too much of their potential influence, or even their possible exploitation. In the grand scheme of things, the way we carry out our fieldwork hardly makes a difference of life and death to the people we study. To us as anthropologists that one experience may potentially change our lives. However, to most people we meet we are merely another passer-by, judged in terms of ‘is she helpful, funny, kind, does she keep her promises, does she make an effort to understand?’ Thinking back on my first few months in Kampala and the many days I spent at the JRS office, I believe my presence there was, more than anything else, a welcome diversion from the tiresome and frustrating hours of waiting that the refugees were subjected to. This is not to say that one’s attitude does not matter. Of course treating people with respect and integrity is important: humiliation can stay with a person a lifetime (Essed 2006, Margalit 1996). 102 Contexts
4. TRUE KNOWLEDGE?
‘There is no story that is not true,’ said Uchendu.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 2001 [1958], p. 103
The previous section addressed the limits to knowledge gained by researchers who have not themselves experienced the events they study, and the question of how power differences affect the process of gaining knowledge. Both issues naturally lead to a critique of objectivity. Objectivity and rationality, the core elements of Enlightenment epistemology, came under threat in the early 1970s. Feminists, arguing against the dualistic premises underlying this epistemology – nature/culture, body/mind, subjectivity/objectivity – equated objectivity with maleness and labelled contemporary science an androcentric ideology (Grant 1993, Harding 1986). ‘Native’ anthropologists and minority writers in the US elaborated on the queries concerning truth and objectivity that during decolonisation had been raised by members of the communities described in early anthropological studies. These criticisms fed into the 1980s postmodern discourse that profoundly challenged generally accepted beliefs about reality, knowledge and truth.17 With the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus 1986) this postmodern critique of objectivity became an integral part of anthropological reflection and theory. Some postmodern thinkers came to adhere to an extreme form of deconstructionism articulated in slogans like ‘science is rhetoric’, ‘knowledge is a node in an agonistic power field’, ‘content is form’ (Haraway 1991: 184-5). I do not endorse this radical deconstructionism. Given the political urgency of my research, it would simply be wrong to do so: war cannot be reduced to ‘form’; studies of the human rights violations of refugees are no mere ‘rhetoric’. But while I do not uphold extreme relativism, I neither endorse a neo-positivist paradigm of fasifiable and static truths. I steered a middle course and have searched for one that is compatible with the particular context and subject of my study.
4.1 Truth and objectivity in the aftermath of war
I was admitted to Nsambya Hospital on 11/07/99. At my own request, I was discharged on 16/07/99. An Ethiopian friend warned me that those who had attacked me could bribe nurses to effectively poison me when they administered injections to me. It was for this reason that I chose to be discharged.
Aragai G.
The introduction to this chapter mentioned that the issue of forced migration must be approached not only as a humanitarian but also as a political phenomenon. For refugees this political context is anything but an abstract, external given. It is political conflicts that caused them to leave their homes; in exile, due to the prevailing political stance on urban refugees, they have no access to humanitarian assistance or legal protection. Political antagonisms played out between and among refugee communities further affect people’s survival. The statement above, taken from an account by an Ethiopian young man relating the details of an assault he suffered close to his home in a Kampala slum, is one of numerous illustrations that refugees not only find themselves in a political field, but that they become part of it, and ultimately contribute to constructing it. In Kampala, where people’s minds were jammed with memories of wartime violence, suspicion and fear were their daily companions. I believe it is hard to overestimate how intricately sensitive Researching & Writing about War and Exile 103 everything – every appearance, every comment, every visit – is in such a situation. This reality raises questions about truth and the level of objectivity in refugees’ testimonies. Issues of trust and truth played a central role in the contentious relationships that many refugees had with UNHCR and its implementing agency InterAid. A great deal can be said about this relationship, from both parties’ points of view, and it was a popular topic of conversation in Kampala. Relevant to the current discussion is that refugees are frequently accused of ‘telling the same story as everyone else’, or in short of ‘telling lies’. This open distrust was reinforced by the fact that government and UN officials interviewing refugees operated within an institutional context that rejected their presence in the city. The issue at stake - the credibility of people’s accounts – must be considered within the context of the encounter between interviewer and interviewee. Firstly, the interviewee is often hampered by feelings of confusion and anxiety, and the power inequality of the interview situation does little to relieve this. As UNHCR acknowledges: “A person who, because of his experiences, was in fear of the authorities in his own country may still feel apprehensive vis-à-vis any authority. He may therefore be afraid to speak freely and give a full and accurate account of his case” (UNHCR 1992: 32). Well-trained staff and appropriate interview techniques are crucial to avoid favouring educated, multi-lingual and articulate individuals who are better able to handle the demanding asylum process (Kagan 2003). Secondly, interviewers base their credibility assessment partly on non-verbal cues about an applicant’s trustworthiness, i.e. body language and demeanour. However, such body language varies widely from culture to culture and is especially prone to misinterpretation (Kagan 2003, Kälin 1986). Thirdly, neurological studies show that as a consequence of having experienced traumatising events people often cannot recall – let alone narrate - events in chronological sequence, even not recall certain episodes at all (Cohen 2001, Elbert & Schauer 2002, Neuner et al 2004, Thompson 2000, Williams & Banyard 1998). How the human memory operates is terribly complex as it is, yet when dealing with people who are traumatised, it is especially foolhardy to expect a straightforward way of remembering or recounting. Incoherence and inconsistencies in refugees’ testimonies, the most widely cited reason for rejection, are not in itself proof of fabrication. Several articles have been written on the relationship between memory, narrative and credibility in refugee testimonies, on the stylistic and narrative devices used by refugees to support their claims for asylum, and on the power structure of the status determination interview (Blommaert 2001, Cohen 2001, Hegel 2002, Kagan 2003, Kälin 1986). These articles stress that credibility assessment is a delicate and complicated task and put forward suggestions as to the principles and standards that should govern credibility assessment with the purpose of making it less prone to subjectivity. Though it is unavoidable that emotional impressions and personal interpretations on the part of the interviewer regarding the trustworthiness of the applicant play a part in status determination, these should be minimised as much as possible.
As an anthropologist primarily interested in individuals’ perceptions of their changed lives in exile, I was not concerned with issues of credibility in the same way that those responsible for asylum procedures are. At the same time, I could not forego questions about the truthfulness of the stories people told me and the knowledge I constructed out of these. Section 2.3 discussed how the issue of trust played a part in my relationships with the refugees (Daniel & Knudsen 1995, Hynes 2003). But it is also crucial to note that in exile, where the stakes are high, it is hard to cope or survive without a good story. Refugees need clever narratives to position themselves vis-à-vis cagey compatriots, as a means of protection against nosy neighbours, to deal with the piercing questions during a police interview, and for some, a sound story can pave the way to the imagined blessings of 104 Contexts resettlement. The foreign researcher represents a specific audience and people phrase their accounts according to the role they attribute to this person. For instance, many refugees saw me as an ombudsman who would relate their hardships to ‘my people’ at home. For this and other reasons – many of which I could only guess about – they told me certain things upfront, but edited and omitted others. For this reason I cannot uncritically endorse the rhetorical question, “what could be truer, after all, than a subject’s own account of what he or she has lived through?” (Scott 1992: 24) Analogue to Marx’s classic contention that a correct vision of class society is available only to the proletariat, some scholars have argued that “subjugated standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world” (Haraway 1991: 191).18 In feminist studies this translated into the argument that the more marginal a woman and her experience - as measured from the centre of white, male, middle-class heterosexual - the more true (Grant 1993). In my field of study this would imply that refugees have better claims to truth than all those working with or for them because they are the victims, the trampled people. This is turning things upside down. When I think of what the young men in my study would have to say about this, I realise that quite a few of them expressed scepticism about the way in which they and fellow refugees interpreted reality. They were aware of the biases brought about by the difficult position they were in and because there were facts they needed to hide from each other. They knew that competition over ‘the right to truth’ is an inherent part of war (Malkki 1995a, Nordstrom 1997, Robben 1995, van de Port 1998). I also observed that people who feel cornered have a tendency to be dogmatic in their opinions and constrained in their outlook on reality. One could argue that ‘the powerful’ have more reason to be biased because they have something to lose – “the only position from which objectivity could not possibly be practiced is the standpoint of the master” (Haraway 1991: 193) - but simple projections about this will not do. After all, people in despair also have something to lose: their dignity. The idea that ‘victim’s knowledge’ should be privileged because it holds better claims to truth must thus be questioned. Leon Wieseltier, author of Kaddish (1998), a philosophical and historical narrative of grief and the Jewish ritual of mourning, was quite definite about this at the Nexus Conference The Anatomy of Loss.19 I noted down a few short phrases:
“Survivors cannot say ‘the world is like this’. My philosophy (or, my truth) cannot be based on or explain only my experience. One life is too limited. The mourning mind is not a stable mind. I wish to diminish the privilege of suffering to wisdom”.
I would argue that not one specific perspective can ever be a priori seen as yielding truer insights or more objective knowledge. This is no call for relativism: certain perspectives, if not more true, can be validly argued to be more relevant. That is a political rather than an epistemological argument but not less important for that. Choosing to study a certain group on the basis of one’s political convictions is perfectly valid, and discussions about such choices do belong to academia.
4.2 Dealing with ambiguity: changing and partial truths
The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature, 1991, p. 196
During my years in Kampala I often felt I could not get much grip on the reality I was studying, not only because I was extraneous to the situation, but also because I was Researching & Writing about War and Exile 105 constantly confronted with its disparities and controversies, its silences, the hidden tales. I had discarded the concept of truth with a capital T before starting my research. Nevertheless the ambiguity I encountered, and the fact that truth in Kampala had so many faces, made me feel uncomfortable. The western philosophical legacy of non-contradiction appears obstinate, even in these (post)postmodern times. I sense this also when talking about my research to friends or relatives. They generally show a preference for ‘whole’, non-confusing, non-contradictory stories - ‘true’ stories so to speak. At the same time, I seek people’s interpretations more than I want facts. As an anthropologist I am interested in how people use narratives to make sense of their experience, rather than in assessing their truth value. I am reminded of what Petna said one day when we were discussing this issue. It was one of those days that I felt haunted by the thought that I had no tools for knowing whether what people told me was true. What Petna said was:
“Maybe that exact story is not true for that person, but it is true in the sense that it is somebody’s story. Maybe it happened to an aunt, neighbour, brother or friend, but it could have happened to him”.
Alternative approaches to objectivity
I turned to African epistemological traditions to see whether these could provide alternative approaches to knowledge and the questions of objectivity and truth. After all, not only specific bodies of knowledge differ over time and place, but also the “epistemic threads in the fabric of culture” (Kaphagawani & Malherbe 1998: 210), i.e. the methods by which knowledge is acquired and the ways in which it is certified as reliable or true. What is at stake is perhaps not so much the issue of objectivity but the concept of justification. I believe that one might gain better insight into refugees’ experiences if the question ‘is what you tell me true?’ is replaced by ‘why do you tell me this?’ In African philosophy, rationality and justification are linked to the practice of living. Kaphagawani & Malherbe write: “[O]ur situation in the historical context, as both inheritors and transmitters of an intellectual tradition, makes it necessary for us to consider what we commend as ‘rational’” (1998: 208). Knowledge is indeed a tool for living. It is this that the young men of my study are ultimately concerned with: which perspective on my current reality, which knowledge, is practical and useful? Useful in terms of helping me get to terms with the past, reducing my present feelings of insecurity and confusion, serving my future ambitions. Anthropologists recognise this attribute of knowledge, and have stressed the dependence of people on stories that convey meaning and significance. Mattijs van de Port quotes from Geertz and others whose work is “permeated with the idea that the interpretative frameworks within which people confer meaning on their experiences are intended to keep absurdity and, in its wake, the ultimate alienation at a distance” (1998: 105). Van de Port’s study is essentially about the role of narrative and he manages exceptionally well to render the tension involved in all story-making, yet enlarged and intensified in times of war. As a result of the rapid escalation of the violence, van de Port writes, the city of Novi Sad was no longer itself.
“The dramatic events succeeded each other so fast that the stories people related about one another and their world sounded increasingly hollow. The Novisadjani had been telling each other for decades that they were true Europeans, and that they belonged to a modern society in which civilised people lived together according to the principles of reason and harmony ... But the war had broken this story wide open” (1998: 20). 106 Contexts
Processes of story-making during and after war are not the same, but I recognise the tension that Van de Port highlights. I believe that the young men of this study also knew that what they were telling each other and me were not necessarily unquestionable truths, but things they needed to believe – even if temporarily – to cope with their current reality. In Part II of this book this will be amply illustrated. For instance, the young men told me emphatically about how their parents had had no choice but to let them join the war or send them away into exile, and about their mothers who had done all they could to protect them, their favourite child. Others phrased their reflections on their past in such a way that exile became a positive thing: it was only because of their experience as refugees that the artistic aspirations they had felt as a child had had a chance to come to fruition. Apart from these specific meaning-giving stories, easy to follow and innocent, there was also a ‘genre’ of communication inherent to refugee life that seemed rather disruptive: gossip. Gossip is a means of social control in many (migrant) communities, which serves other functions as well: to kill time, to deflect one’s attention from one’s own regrets, worries, failings. With so few certainties to go on, gossip and speculation at times seemed the only stories that were left. It remains difficult to say to what extent the interpretations and stories people depended on actually helped them. Van de Port writes:
“My stay in Novi Sad … taught me, however, the extent to which the social and psychological need to render the world in stories that give it meaning conflicts with the chaotic and unpredictable dynamism of reality itself, a reality that has a force of its own and that often displays its refusal to conform to whatever individual or collective stories have been made to accommodate it” (1998: 30).
Reality has a force of its own, and therefore truth is by definition multidimensional and ever-changing. This notion is part and parcel of African epistemology (Kimmerle 1995, Owomoyela 1996) and particularly salient in the philosophy of ubuntu. Ubu means openness, movement as the basis of being, the ontological principle (Ramose 1999). It follows that no truth is static, immutable or eternal. Movement is the basic principle, which implies a rejection of all absolutism and dogmatism. The Nigerian philosopher Sophie Oluwole asserts that in Yoruba there is no preoccupation with absolute truth, but a strong belief in the relativity of knowledge and wisdom. An important saying is: ‘An object that faces you has its back towards another person’. All this is relevant to the study of refugees, whose lives are defined by change, ambiguity and movement. If this is people’s reality, one must not be surprised to find changes or seeming contradictions in people’s accounts and interpretations, and not dismiss these a priori as unreliability. As time passed, the young refugees revaluated their stories, added to them, changed their opinions, and expressed that they had come to see and deal with things differently over time. Peter Kloos’ observation is to the point:
“The human condition is riddled with opposites and contradictions. A science that puts opposites and contrasts down as unreasonable implies more about the cultural background of the researchers than about their subjects of research” (1987: 116, my translation).
Rather than truth, Kloos writes, truthfulness or trustworthiness (geloofwaardigheid) is what counts in the relation between account and reality. Trustworthiness depends on the extent to which the researcher makes his theoretical framework explicit, the degree to which the reader can follow the researcher in the choices leading to the material presented, and the complexity of reality in a coherent story (Kloos 1987: 46-48; 1988: 129-130). Researching & Writing about War and Exile 107
It is with the above perspective in mind that I approached the practice of my research as well as its analysis. Some may argue that the objectivity debate is passé, but in it is not in forced migration studies: questions of truth and objectivity remain at the heart of the refugee discourse.
5. WRITING ABOUT WAR AND EXILE
Recently I came across a book about Picasso’s work on the theme of childhood, which has a chapter titled ‘The limits of representation’ (Spies 1994). It is preceded by the chapter ‘The dead children’, which describes the images of children that Picasso drew during the period that his figures and faces were subjected to extreme distortion. Spies writes: “To his contemporaries the liberties Picasso took with the elements of the human body seemed entirely unacceptable … Then as now, those who were willing to tolerate such imagery did so for the sake of the symbolic message it was thought to contain – Picasso’s abhorrence of war and destruction” (1994: 74). Referring back to these pictures in ‘The limits of representation’, the author writes:
“they were relatively radical, but one should remember that they were all of children who did not belong to Picasso’s family. With his own children, he took a quite different approach. This raises a number of questions. What is the relationship between this tender, personal subject and the radical pictorial means Picasso then had at his disposal? It would seem that he found the extremes to which he had taken his style in the 1930s unsuitable for portraying his own offspring. Can one say that he approached this subject like any other, or did he devise a specific strategy for dealing with it? … The problem at issue here is that of the extent to which a given motif is compatible with the intrinsic expressive potential of a particular style” (Spies 1994: 75).
If style and subject are meaningfully connected in the arts and in literature, then could - or should - they not also be in academic writing?
5.1 Languages of conveyance
During the course of this study I started to question the suitability of the academic language for conveying my understanding of the young refugees’ lives in Kampala. My first question related to what was discussed above: how much room do I have for bringing in the nuances, ambiguity and contradictions encountered in the field? Theoretical models order and structure reality with the aim of making verifiable, generalized statements about it. The complexity of people’s wartime experiences and the partial truths exile generates, make generalisation implausible. Therefore, like Van de Port, I felt I needed “other concepts, other approaches, other types of anthropological writing that would make it more feasible to do justice to the shifts and turns of reality” (1998: 23). Van de Port not merely asserts that ‘reality is contradictory’ but actually succeeds in representing this through textual means. By availing himself of different resources of language, including literary language, and through “a constant messing up of my own claims” (1998: 27) he shows that the human mind – particularly the mind in distress – is able to believe in different and contradictory things at the same moment.20Another inspiring example is Lila Abu-Lughod’s Writing Women’s Worlds (1993), in which ‘storytelling’ is the strategy. She explains:
108 Contexts
“A story is always situated; it has both a teller and an audience. Its perspective is partial (in both senses of the word) and its telling is motivated” (1993: 15).
Instead of offering generalisations which contribute to the erosion of time and conflict, the dailiness of stories “trains our gaze on flux and contradiction” (Abu-Lughod 1993: 27). These merits of storytelling are exemplified in her book: it gives an impression of the Bedouin community she studied that is as profound and complete as an academic analysis should be, and at the same time no less powerful in its conveyance than a novel. The ethnographic chapters of this book (Part II) also partly employ a narrative style as way of rendering the experiences of the soldiers, students and artists in a more powerful way, and with integrity. There was a second reason why I came to have reservations about the aptness of the academic language. Let me start as follows:
No Madonna and Child could touch Her tenderness for a son She soon would have to forget… The air was heavy with odors of diarrhoea, Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs And dried up bottoms waddling in labored steps Behind blown bellies. Other mothers there Had long ceased to care, but not this one: She held a ghost-smile between her teeth, And in her eyes the memory Of a mother’s pride… She had bathed him And rubbed him down with bare palms. She took from their bundle of possessions A broken comb and combed The rust-colored hair left on his skull And then - humming in her eyes - began to part it. In their former life this was perhaps A little daily act of no consequence Before his breakfast and school; now she did it Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.
This poem by Chinua Achebe is called ‘A mother in a refugee camp’ (Achebe 1998). On first reading it evoked the material images of refugee camps, with bare-bottomed crying babies and all. Reading it twice, I felt the mother come alive. And now as I read it again, I feel it captures Life. Does this poem perhaps convey more meaning and truthfulness than extended academic analysis would? My years in Uganda brought home to me stronger than ever before the blatant inequalities in the world we live in. Global acts of exclusion and injustice are connected to the superficial and a-historical images people have of themselves and of others. As an anthropologist I am in the business of building up images of other people. How do I portray the young men in Kampala, these individuals who have been forced to leave behind all that was dear to them, who are frustrated, angry and hurt, but are also looking towards the future? What words do I use to capture their experiences? I came to doubt that I could write this book in the reductionist language of science only. If my work is about the lives (tragedies, celebrations, labours, deaths, dreams, songs, flights, nights, fights...) of real people (young, black, exiled, talented, hopeless, hopeful, hungry, proud, confused, determined...) interacting with a living anthropologist (young, white, educated, curious, bewildered, trustful...) how can I write truthfully in a language that asks me to divorce my rational from my emotional capacities? Researching & Writing about War and Exile 109
In the field of feminist scholarship alternatives of subjective, embodied and experiential knowledge have been put forward (Grant 1993, Haraway 1991, Harding 1986) and several scholars have paid attention to issues of emotion, sensation, intuition, creativity and spirituality in both research and writing (Abu-Lughod 1993, Behar 1993, 1996, Collins 1990, Ghorashi 1999, 2003, Kloos 1990, Nencel 2001, Schrijvers 1990, 1996). But so far their ideas have not been widely elaborated upon. Reflecting on this before writing this book, I particularly wondered whether artistic devices would help me bring across the emotion, imagination and intuition that I saw as an inherent part of my research process and outcome. I wished to explore the boundary between science and art in order to discover the different language I envisaged – “critical, engaged, exciting and true-to-life” (Lammers 2002). This exploration was primarily inspired by my involvement with the artists at Yolé!Africa. What I sensed was that their painting, dancing and acting - in the face of repetitive hardship - was a conscious and powerful counter move: creation versus destruction, as a way of asserting their being alive. Art is about processes of creation from within, and as such it is very much about life. It is that quality of life that I wanted to make tangible in my writing. I also felt supported in my search by the question Joke Schrijvers posed:
“I more and more feel the need for beauty. Is the difference between science and art really as rigid as we have been made to believe?” (Schrijvers 1996: 301, my translation).
I do not take the above discussion lightly. I agree with the editors of After Writing Culture that:
“styles of ethnographic writing go beyond the question of personal preference, training or skill and instead provide us with a means of connecting our epistemological standpoints with our mode of representation” (James, Hockey & Dawson 1997: 11).
As an anthropologist I must keep in mind why I would experiment with writing styles. Much of postmodern writing is couched in veiled language, abstract jargon and too long sentences. I do not see whom that serves: expressing the complex qualities of people’s lives does not require complex styles of writing. Furthermore, when immersing myself in my research data and the gut-wrenching narratives I collected, I ask myself: will an approach that brings together science and art run the risk of romanticising violence, or making it poetic? That, of course, is not what I aim at. The purpose of my experimentation would be to come to a better conveyance of ‘the real world’ - and ultimately to making a difference in that real world. Ideally, I would learn to be witness, scholar, advocate and artist all at the same time.
5.2 The anthropologist in the text
The major change in anthropological theorising has come about through placing the anthropologist within the same frame of reference as the subjects of anthropology...
Henrietta Moore, Anthropological Theory Today, 1999, p. 19
Knowledge comes about through a dialectic process in which the person of the researcher plays a central role. How does this process resound in written work? In the mid 1980s Peter Kloos observed that the growing awareness of the dialectic character of 110 Contexts anthropological knowledge and the need for reflexivity (a concept coined by Scholte in the early 1970s), had had remarkably little effect on the way in which ethnographies were written. Some researchers had published their personal reflections on fieldwork in separate volumes, but it was never tied in with the actual ethnography.21 By the 1990s, this situation had not changed very much (Pool 1991, van de Port 1998). Give or take a few exceptions and despite the many theoretical reflections on new styles of ethnographic writing, this remains so today.22 I myself went through different phases of arguing either for or against the anthropologist’s presence in her text. Influenced by my reading into postmodern anthropology at SOAS, I was ‘for’ before going on fieldwork to Uganda. Then, in Kampala, I became ‘against’: the subjects of war and exile dictated that I ‘cut the crap’ and write solely about what is at stake, perhaps even attempt at a ‘factual’ account of events. However, when reading through my data and reflecting on my years of research when back in the Netherlands three years later, I gradually got back to the standpoint that the anthropologist does have a place in her book. I must make my presence known because this book is an account of a particular time-bound encounter between the young refugees and myself; it is our interaction which shaped it. Only if I present it as such can it
“de-essentialise the anthropologist / informant dyad so as to permit a more detailed and nuanced understanding of how subject positions and identities are shaped within anthropological encounters” (Moore 1999: 15).
Furthermore, my only justification for revealing the intimate events that took place in the lives of the protagonists of this study – even if they gave me explicit permission to do so – was putting myself in a similarly vulnerable position by including myself in the text. The subject of this study is particularly susceptible to personal biases and to looking through coloured lenses. I would not get persuaded by people who can research war and exile being left unmoved. Thinking of how to deal with that in the text, I was again reminded of Kwame Appiah’s book In My Father’s House, which investigates “how we are to think about Africa’s contemporary cultures”, a subject which involves issues that for the author are “deeply personally important” (1992: ix). Therefore, aware that “sometimes along the way my history has not only formed my judgment (which I delight in) but distorted it (which, of course, I do not)”, Appiah introduces himself and his history to the readers, inviting them to respond to his possible distortions. Because, he writes:
“it would be foolhardy to suppose and unpersuasive to claim that in such a situation it is always one’s dispassionate reason that triumphs, that one can pursue the issues with the impartiality of the disinterested” (1992: x).
When I read other people’s work, I am interested not only in the genealogy of the concepts and theories used, but also in the personal reasons and motivations behind the origin of a particular project. It is not only fascinating to learn why people embark on certain academic expeditions, it also helps to understand and evaluate their claims and interpretations (Kloos 1987: 29-35). In fact, because anthropology is always to a certain extent personal and subjective, it seems a must that the anthropologist is transparent and writes openly about his or her positionality. It is as Devereux states: recognising subjectivity through self- reflexivity is a means to achieving more objective science (Behar 1996: 6). This said, I fully subscribe to Ruth Behar’s word of warning that it is far from easy to think up interesting ways to locate oneself in one’s own text. Perhaps most importantly, the ethnography is not there for the purpose of channelling the anthropologist’s emotions:
Researching & Writing about War and Exile 111
“My colleague had made an all-too-common mistake: she paced her story in such a way that the ethnography paced along, steady, like a train cutting through a field, and then boom! Bang! Crash! There was the wrenching personal story of the suffering anthropologist. How, I asked, might we make the ethnography as passionate as our autobiographical stories? What would that take? And how might we unsettle expectations by writing about ourselves with more detachment and about others with all the fire of feeling? Can we give both the observer and the observed a chance at tragedy?” (Behar 1996: 18).
Genuine and critical self-reflection during the writing process is needed to strike a right balance, to be clear about what is relevant to the argument and what is not. In the end it is up to the reader to evaluate this, and to some extent it also comes down to a matter of taste. There is no tape measure for what is or is not appropriate, for the maximum number of ‘I-s’ written on a single page. For instance, Behar’s reflections on the subject of authorship are illuminating, but in my opinion in her The Vulnerable Observer (1996) she herself is too emphatically present. Abu-Lughod in Writing Women’s Words (1993), I find, is more successful in pacing and choosing the traces of herself. Emotion in academic writing remains a largely unexplored area. Mattijs van de Port expresses the dilemma poignantly:
“Isn’t it utter nonsense to suppose that you may bridge the gap between the world of the academy and war, between human experience in former Yugoslavia and in the serene university library? Isn’t the distance simply too great to allow the creation for any basis for understanding? … Certain aspects of the culture of the academic community (and, more broadly, of the culture of the prosperous middle classes of Western Europe) fill me with misgivings about this possibility. Is it possible for knowledge to be produced about the significance of senseless violence in surroundings in which (as I recently experienced) merely calling for a meaty discussion is felt to be going too far, and where the least tendency to raise one’s voice immediately provokes general condemnation of a lack of self-control? … When I note the determination with which people all around me (out of an entirely understandable desire for self-preservation, of course) had shielded themselves from a full awareness of the events in Croatia and Bosnia, I am forced to wonder whether we truly want ... to understand how ‘the beast in man’ is mysteriously connected with urges and motives that derive from social reality, whether such research does not run up against our strongest inhibitions in its path. Are we prepared to give up our neat picture of the world? (I am only too aware of my own reluctance to do so.) Do we really want to read an academic text that is disturbing?” (1998: 27-28)
I recall one morning at the workshop ‘Methods and ethics of studying refugees in urban environments’ held at the American University in Cairo in April 2003. Fabienne Le Houérou showed her film ‘When refugees refuse to go home’ about Beni Amer nomads who used to live in an area straddling the border between Ethiopia and Sudan, but who fled the war in Ethiopia and took refuge in Sudan. They find themselves in no-man’s land, no longer entitled to aid because they have lost their refugee status and are unwelcome at home because they backed the wrong side in the war of independence. The footage showed people barely alive in a most inhospitable desert landscape. Something struck me about the audience. Le Houérou showed her film with an engagement that was first and foremost emotional. Her commentary was not phrased in rehearsed clever terms, but sprang from the heart. This was not appreciated. Some people started fidgeting, others exchanged frowned looks. There was nothing to prevent people from asking ‘intelligent’ questions about the content of her research, but nobody did. They were put off, I believe, by Le Houérou’s emotion, they were uncomfortable. Though nobody spoke out loud, their 112 Contexts body language was defensive and seemed to express exactly what one man in Scheper- Hughes’ (1995: 416) audience said: “‘Why are we being served this?’ he asked. How are we supposed to feel? … And what in the world are we supposed to do?’”
6. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Cross-cultural understanding is the raison d’être of cultural anthropology. The question of the possibility of understanding across cultural boundaries has been among the major philosophical debates of the last four decades of the twentieth century (Bell 2002: 2).23 Some obstacles to understanding (perspective, experience, power) have been discussed in this chapter. I have argued that in spite of these, some degree of understanding can be reached, and it is the anthropologist’s task is to convey this. This is a tricky task in a world still full of prejudice. Refugees pre-eminently are stereotyped and subjected to discrimination. Not only have people in the West generally interiorised a national consciousness which makes them consider it normal that there are foreigners, “people who do not have the same rights as we do” (Kristeva 1991), fantasies about what these foreigners are like also abound. Much of this imagination must be placed in the historical discourses on Africa and Africans, in the field of both fiction and academic writing (Achebe 2000, Mbembe 2001, Mudimbe 1988). Much of it, ultimately, must be placed in the long-standing histories of racism (Goldberg 1993, 2001). These histories imply a challenging paradox for forced migration studies. On the one hand it is the political character of refugee research which requires researchers to analyse the relativity and partiality of their knowledge. On the other hand, the national and global politics that force people into exile call for a “no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a real world” (Haraway 1991: 187), or, as Wole Soyinka puts it, require us to “enthrone, once and for all, the desirable goals of Truth” (1999: 12). I do not believe in truth as a disinterested, objective fact, but I do believe in truth as a political, or rather moral concept. One can objectively say that it is wrong to treat people with indifference and let them queue endlessly and in vain – there are plenty of experts in the field of organisational management to change that. Similarly it is wrong when an expat lady working for UNHCR dismissively turns away two Sudanese teenagers who want to go to school only to start complaining about the posh Lincoln International School in Kampala that her 5-year-old is attending. Something is wrong with this person’s resources of empathy, and something is wrong with ‘the system’. I believe it is right to voice these things when observed – not just to point out the accused, but to find out why and investigate the processes through which people become socially constructed as they are. Official ‘cultures of disbelief’ linked with popular racism have a deep impact on the lives of so many individual refugees. It is therefore that the politics of knowledge and representation bear immediate relevance to the field of forced migration studies, and must thus become an intrinsic part of its analysis and writing.
Part II
Narratives
Daniel Kambere Tsongo, Portrait d’un guerrier traditionel, 2004
INTRODUCTION TO PART II
YOUNG AFRICANS IN TRANSIT
Africa is a continent of the young. Any serious study of society, politics and economics in Africa must recognise the importance of young people.
Alex de Waal, Young Africa, 2002, p. 13
In short, ‘youth’ stand for many things at once: for the terrors of the present, the errors of the past, the prospect of a future.
Jean & John Comaroff, Reflections on Youth from the Past to the Postcolony, 2005, p. 20
The past four years saw the publication of four edited volumes devoted to the theme of youth in Africa (Abbink & van Kessel 2005, de Waal & Argenti 2002, Honwana & Boeck 2005, Trudell et al 2002) as well as a special issue of the African Studies Review (2003) on the same subject. The contributors to these publications all agree on three points: firstly, the fact that youth in Africa have only recently become an important subject of social inquiry (a notable exception being Mbembe’s Les Jeunes et l’Ordre Politique en Afrique Noire (1985)); secondly, that young Africans, who on the whole have little or no access to education, employment, health care and sources of livelihood, are confronted with “a crisis of unprecedented proportions” (De Boeck & Honwana 2005: 1); thirdly, the ambivalence of the situation and representation of African youth, who despite their difficult situation are actively participating in social, political and economic developments on the continent. This ambivalence is expressed in the very titles of two of these recent volumes: Makers & Breakers (2005), Vanguard or Vandals (2005).
Youth on the losing end?
Youth constitute the majority of the population in African societies.1 Traditionally across Africa, children and youth are highly treasured: a “deeply rooted moral and cultural matrix” defines them as a social good (De Boeck & Honwana 2005: 10). Children and youth are valued for the contributions they make to the productive work of the family and are considered a source of future security. However, since the failing of the post-independence 116 Narratives nationalist project, which put young people at the centre of its plans for economic development and national liberation and during which years youth represented “the promise of restored identity” (Jok 2005: 144), youth have suffered a loss of status (Diouf 2003). While they currently are “a preoccupation of politicians, social workers, and communities in Africa” they are so in a rather negative sense. They have been constructed as a threat, provoking within society as a whole, Diouf argues, “a panic that is both moral and civic” (2003: 3). This panic concerns young persons’ recourse to violence as well as their pleasures and leisure activities – which in public perception are directly related to the AIDS pandemic and young people’s supposed loss of morals. This societal attitude towards youth at times takes very disconcerting forms, witness the witchcraft accusations of children in Central Africa. Offering to exorcise the ‘possessed’, certain Pentecostal churches stir up the fear of children (especially of those living on the streets) who are accused of being witches, nocturnal cannibals or agents of Satan feeding on unsuspecting adults (De Boeck 2000, 2005).2 Negative perceptions of African youth are also expressed by observers from outside Africa, summarised by Kaplan’s oft-quoted claim that African youth are “loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid” (1994). The apprehension with which youth are approached is no new phenomenon and not limited to Africa. Politicians and the media in Europe and America similarly contribute in fabricating a fear of youth, with (male) minority youth in particular being portrayed as delinquent ‘others’ (Giroux 1996, Males 1996, 2001). Foucault suggested that, in the twentieth century culture of exclusion of all that does not answer to the ‘rational image’, youth were increasingly considered a socially problematic category (Durham 2000, Lutters 1999). Because generational tension and conflict are part and parcel of all times and societies, the relevant issue is how these conflicts are socially resolved. There is rather extensive literature on generational conflict, past and present, in Africa (Abbink & van Kessel 2005, Aguilar 1998, Carton 2000, Cruise O'Brien, Kagwanja 2005, Kurimoto & Simonse 1998, Richards 1996, Summers 2005, van Dijk 1999). These studies agree that until recently the acts of rebellion on the part of children and youth were structurally embedded in society, with rites of passage and rituals of initiation not threatening but instead strengthening the social equilibrium. “In Africa”, De Boeck & Honwana write, “the counter-hegemonic reversal of roles and behaviour associated in the West with adolescence and teenage counter-culture were liberated, socially channelled, and ritually embedded within the overall social system” (2005: 6). In many African societies today, however, this seems no longer the case. Youth no longer have a well-defined place in society (Abbink 2005). The overwhelming numbers of young people and their fierce competition for resources in the context of malfunctioning or failing states, have led to a situation where social and generational conflict have taken on forms that work against the social order instead of reinforcing it (Abbink 2005, De Boeck & Honwana 2005). The majority of African youth has failed to gain access to the powers of the modern state, and remains marginalised in the gerontocracies that continue to control much of daily life. They have to make a living for themselves in a climate of social instability and endemic conflict. For many of them, especially in the cities, it is increasingly difficult to attain a level of independence required to become a full and respected member of society. Even those who have finished school or university are often without employment in the formal sector, and consequently not in a position to set up an independent household. This issue came up time and again in my research: the young men in Kampala felt hugely frustrated that exile forced them to be ‘dependents’ whereas given their age they had hoped and expected otherwise. Essentially they feared their youth was at risk of becoming indefinitely prolonged. Young people across Africa often hold the older generation responsible for the dire situation in which they find themselves. As Abbink puts it: “There is a pattern of moral Young Africans in Transit 117 obligation that many youths in Africa feel is being flouted by the older generation” (Abbink 2005: 5). Okwir Rabwoni, a young Ugandan who was personally involved in the political history of his country from the age of fifteen, first as one of Museveni’s under-age guerrilla soldiers and in the late 1990s as Youth MP, comments:
“Our political experience is that young people are forgotten except when politicians need to mobilise them for war or for electoral campaigns” (Rabwoni 2002: 167).
The language with which African youth express their desperation and frustration is increasingly one of violent conflict. The refugees of this study all fled wars in which young people, including children, were among the fighting forces. Many of the Sudanese refugees in Kampala had themselves participated in the war in their home country before fleeing to Uganda. Several scholars have noted that the mobilisation of violence in Sudan was for a large part spurred by the tensions between a dominant generation of elder men and aspiring youths who challenged their authority and who refused to accept their lack of social mobility (Jok 2005, Kurimoto 1994, 1998, Simonse 1998, Willis 2002). Similar patterns are evident in civil wars and violent political conflict in other African countries like Ethiopia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Liberia (Abbink 2005, Honwana 2002, Peters 2005, Peters & Richards 1998b, Richards 1996). However, the irony is that while youth define their political visions and draw their willingness to fight from their opposition to an in their view incompetent and corrupt older generation, this dynamic is also used against them. Having little to lose, young people are a natural opposition, but on the whole they are poorly equipped to make their opposition effective on their own terms. Due to their limited resources, youth across the continent remain easily manipulated by their elders, also in times of war (Cruise O'Brien 1996, Mbembe 1985, Richards 1996).
Youth and renewal
Nous ne sommes pas montés sur les épaules de nos aînés pour regarder le bout des doigts de leurs pieds.3
The above sketched sombre reality is not the only reality. It is equally evident that many young African men and women do not accept their limited options or succumb to the domination by elders and political leaders, but continually search for alternatives.4 In the face of current realities of poverty and insecurity, African youth display a remarkable creativity in their social, economic and political engagements (Abbink 2005, Argenti 2002, Comaroff & Comaroff 2005, De Boeck & Honwana 2000, 2005, de Waal 2002, Trudell 2002). Argenti points at the informal and covert forms of participation in national politics that youth develop across the continent. Student movements, innovative performance groups and new religious movements are all examples of the “vital fields of political activity and social renewal” that are pioneered by young people today (Argenti 2002: 144). It is noted that those who deplore a lack of political participation by young Africans overlook the fact that overt political activity is often simply not practicable, and that to avoid state censure young people seek participation in activities that can pass for religious, theatrical or folkloric. Recent studies of youth in Africa have begun to address the religious and cultural activities (music, theatre, fashion, sports, film) through which African youth express themselves, as well as the local NGOs and (transnational) movements they establish – often creatively appropriating ICT – to put across their ideas about development, justice and democracy, and to create new and meaningful identities for themselves. These studies unmistakably show that youth aspire to be, and in many ways are, constructive partners in 118 Narratives the reconstitution of African societies (Abdullah 2002, Adogame 2002, Argenti 2005, Behrend 2002, Dolby 1999, Durham 2005, Gondola 1999, Maxwell 2002, Meyer 1998, Moyer 2005, Neate 1994, Nuttall 2004, Peterson 2002, Remes 1999, Samper 2004, Sarro 1999, van Dijk 1992, 1999, Willis 2002). In line with these studies, the narratives in Part II of this book reveal that in Kampala there were many young refugees with clear visions about what a ‘better society’ should look like and about their own potential role in achieving this.
The study of young people in Africa
It is only recently that youth and youth cultures in Africa have become a recognised subject of anthropological inquiry. Though not entirely neglected in ethnographies, the subject was given sporadic and secondary attention (Durham 2000), especially if compared to the fields of sociology and cultural studies.5 Anthropological interest in youth has mainly come from the discipline’s traditional focus on family, kinship and rites of passage, with Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead 1928) and The Forest of Symbols (Turner 1967) as the standard examples. The few studies that explicitly focus on ‘youth cultures’ are strongly biased to work in the United Sates and Britain, and they mostly deal with urban, male, working-class youth (Wulff 1995). Not only have studies of youth been limited in geographical scope, the analytical approach, based on the concept of class, and later, ethnicity, has been biased towards a focus on either delinquency or resistance. The 1995 volume Youth Cultures, which aims to “open up the concept of youth culture from that of spectacular, deviant, oppositional, marginal groups to include all young people” (Wulff 1995: 6) is a recent publications that explicitly distances itself from this legacy. Indeed, there is no straightforward answer to the question of whether African youth are ‘makers or breakers’, ‘vanguard or vandals’. It is not without reason that De Boeck & Honwana call it a “fundamental paradox” (2005: 2). There is increasing awareness of the need to integrate the youth factor as a necessary element in any social analysis of African societies (Abbink 2005, de Waal 2002, Richards 1996). The editors of Makers & Breakers suggest researchers should “look at young people as a window to understanding broader socio-political and economic transformations in Africa” (De Boeck & Honwana 2005: 1). Youth cannot be overlooked because of their sheer numbers, yet especially because generation appears to become “the dominant line of cleavage” (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999) across much of Africa. Social and political developments will increasingly be affected by this reality; hence it is crucial for youth to become more integrated into social theories on present-day Africa. The question what it means to be a young person in Africa today cannot be meaningfully answered without considering the young people’s gender, ethnicity, educational background, rural or urban livelihoods, religion, and the political contexts of their particular countries. Though a ‘crisis of youth’ (Richards 1995) is indisputably widespread, this general observation should not dominate all perception. It should indeed remain a matter of discussion, based on detailed empirical research, whether it is right to perceive ‘being young in Africa’ as “problematic in essence” (Abbink 2005: 2). In-depth knowledge about young people’s lives, problems and ambitions, despite their overwhelming demographic prominence, is still remarkably scant. Detailed and long- term studies are needed to build up a more nuanced and diversity-maintaining picture. Such studies should move away from regarding young people solely as “proto-adultes” or “des êtres en devenir” (De Boeck & Honwana 2000, 2005). Bucholtz, discussing the drawbacks of earlier approaches that were almost exclusively influenced by western psychological perspectives, writes: “The lived experience of young people is not limited to the uneasy occupation of a developmental way station en route to full-fledged cultural understanding. Young Africans in Transit 119
It also involves its own distinctive identities and practices, which are neither rehearsals for the adult ‘real thing’ nor even necessarily oriented to adults at all”. Young people are to be seen as social agents in their own right, and thus, she argues, the anthropology of youth should emphasise
“the here-and-now of young people’s experience, the social and cultural practices through which they shape their worlds” (Bucholtz 2002: 531-532).6
Paying attention to “the more informal ways in which young people socialise themselves and one another” (2002: 529) is particularly relevant in the context of this study. The vast majority of the young refugees had fled without their parents and left the family environment behind. In Kampala, they lived and acted within changing constellations and alliances often made up primarily of age mates. This break with familiar social practices and structures of authority proved a liberating but at the same time daunting experience. It meant they had to fend for themselves or turn to friends and age mates for advice and assistance. The young refugees in Kampala present a rather extreme case in terms of the rupture of family and community structures they are confronted with. However, given the demographic consequences of war and HIV/Aids, this is an inescapable and increasingly pressing issue for youth across most of Africa.
Soldiers, Students and Artists
The young refugees of this study had fled chaos in eastern Congo, war and recruitment in southern Sudan, genocide and its aftermath in Rwanda, political repression in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and bloodshed in Somalia. They saved their lives, they reached Kampala, and ipso facto were not only survivors but also achievers. Compared to where they came from Uganda’s capital provided them with relative safety. Yet exile harboured its own painful experiences: poverty and loneliness, random arrests, assaults, sexual abuse, instances of discrimination and violations of their dignity. But exile in Kampala also offered new avenues, new friends, and new things to learn: some with determination, others hesitantly, they started rebuilding their lives. Part II of this book relates how young refugees in Kampala respond to and deal with their experiences of war, flight and exile: whether, and if so how, these have affected their perceptions of self and their future ambitions, the ways in which they think about their relationships and responsibilities towards others and society. Part II consists of three chapters: Soldiers, Students and Artists. Each of these chapters is built around the narratives of three or four protagonists. ‘Student’, ‘soldier’ and ‘artist’ were not these individuals’ sole identities, but – certainly initially – their dominant ones, and defined the way they presented themselves to me. Some protagonists feature in more than one chapter: they were soldiers and are now students or artists; they occupy more than one position at once. By choosing these three foci this study connects to three important areas of budding research into youth in Africa: war/politics, education and culture.7
CHAPTER FOUR
SOLDIERS
My first memory of Samuel Alim goes back to Barbara Harrell-Bond’s office at Makerere University, early May 1999. Samuel sat quietly in the full-size armchair, seemed undisturbed by all the activity going on: visitors walking in and out, people on the phone, stacks of papers scattered around, conversations everywhere (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, balcony), water and coffee served, cigarettes lit, students searching the bookshelves. He sat there as if in a familiar place, patiently waiting for someone to attend to him, one of his long legs dangling over the armrest. I greeted him in passing. Later that afternoon Barbara explained to me this young man had come from Rhino Camp in Arua, where he had been sent by UNHCR just a month ago when he had first arrived in Kampala from Sudan. He had been assigned a plot in the camp, which he cleared and built a shelter on, and had joined other Sudanese refugees doing leja leja for Ugandan farmers. However, he did not feel safe in Rhino Camp. The very day he arrived in Arua he spotted his former SPLA commander in the small town’s Louis Lodge. The man did not see him. But when a few weeks later another SPLA officer on leave visiting family resident in the same camp recognised Samuel, he decided to use the money earned doing leja leja for a bus ticket back to Kampala. He did not inform the camp commander that he was leaving, but discussed his concerns with a neighbour who agreed to look after his properties – the shelter he had built and the hoe, jerry can and plastic sheeting he had been given upon registration in the camp. Back in Kampala, the few nights before I first saw him, Samuel had been allowed to sleep on the kitchen floor of the Salvation Army hostel that the UNHCR rented to accommodate its ‘security cases’. At the time of writing this chapter – Spring 2005, nearly six years after our first meeting - Samuel is living in Nairobi. He has travelled long distances, seen different parts of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, and moved house at least thirteen times. He turned twenty-seven this year. His history of being on the move started in December 1997, when he was nineteen years old. Samuel, who was born and grew up in Juba, the capital town of southern Sudan, was in Senior Three at Juba Commercial Secondary School when soldiers from the Khartoum government army abducted him from school. Samuel explains:
They came with a vehicle to the school, they were not wearing uniforms. They called for all boys of 18 and above. We didn’t know who they were or where we 122 Narratives
were going. We only realised when the military training started. Maybe they negotiated about us with the teachers. Before, people who were idle used to be taken from the streets of Juba. We knew that they were taken to the front lines. Maybe they came for us students because these first recruits had died. At that time rebels were high and many government soldiers were dying.
Samuel and his schoolmates received two weeks of military training before being sent to Torit and Liria areas to fight at the front lines. In April 1998, he and two other soldiers were sent ahead scouting and they decided this was their chance to escape. One of them was from the area and managed to lead them to an SPLA base, which they considered their only option. They joined the SPLA in Magwe and the three young men were sent to different areas. Samuel was sent to Yei and then to Maridi for four months of further military training, after which he was promoted to the Special Forces. He was then sent to fight in Tindilo. One day in February 1999, when Samuel had served with the SPLA for nearly a year, he was put in charge of guarding two government soldiers captured in fighting. He was to keep them in prison – an enclosure of thorny bushes – until his commander came back to give orders for execution. During the third night the two POW’s escaped and Samuel, by way of punishment, took their place in the prison. He says:
During that night it rained very heavily, but I don’t know how those prisoners escaped. Maybe their God is great.
He was convinced he was to be killed for his negligence, especially because he was still regarded with some suspicion as he first fought on the side of the Khartoum government.
With good luck I was assigned to bury the dead bodies of my fellow soldiers who had been killed in the same fighting. I was to bury them in the bush. After burying one person I took his shirt and boots and escaped. I moved a long way from Tindilo to Yei, which is a very, very far distance. In Yei I found my friend Joseph. We knew each other from the training for the Special Forces. He hid me for two weeks in the storage room. Then he took me from Yei across the border to Arua. He suggested it would be better for me to become a refugee in Uganda. I never knew of this possibility to ask for asylum. The place that I come from is far, people there don’t know about Uganda. And the other soldiers also didn’t talk about it.
Six months after his arrival in Uganda his situation remained precarious. He was recognised as a refugee, but UNHCR did not offer him an alternative to living in the refugee camps in northern Uganda, where SPLA presence is rife. When I talked to him in December of that same year he suggested he would rejoin the SPLA if only he knew he would not be executed for having escaped prison, and in effect having deserted. In his soft-spoken manner he said:
I can go back and fight. I don’t fear to die. Everybody must die. The only thing I fear is when they tie you, when you know you are going to die. But when the bullet comes from behind, I don’t mind.
1. INTRODUCTION
Among the refugees in Kampala there were many young men who used to be soldiers before their flight to Uganda. They had served with different armies and militias fighting the wars in Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Rwanda and Burundi. They had each for Soldiers 123 their own reasons deserted from these armies and – though some contemplated rejoining - were busy trying to build their lives in Kampala. Given the charged political relationships and the alliances between the Ugandan government and the governments and rebel groups of their home countries, the majority of escapees and deserters felt insecure and were sceptical about the protection that Uganda afforded them. They kept a low profile, avoided the humanitarian, government and UN offices if possible, and had to ensure their survival by living on the margins of society. My research explores the ways in which young refugees, who arrived on their own in Uganda’s capital city, deal with the questions ‘Who am I, where do I stand, and where am I going?’ These existential and experiential questions accompany all of them on a daily basis, yet the relative importance of the questions as well as the answers the young men formulate differ considerably. The fact that the protagonists of this chapter had been active soldiers meant that they brought with them into exile experiences and traumas that were not necessarily shared by the majority of refugees from their home countries. This chapter explores in what ways their previous occupation as combatants was a distinctive element in the young men’s approach to the above existential questions. The chapter follows a straightforward time-based arrangement: before flight (in war), and after flight (in exile). The first two sections following the introduction focus on why young men become involved in war and what this reality entails. In section three and four their reflections on their past occupation as soldiers – have their experiences affected the way they see themselves? - as well as how they (re)shape their world and deal with the realities of exile in Kampala, will be portrayed. Even though anthropological literature on war is growing, in-depth research into the experiences of soldiers and rebel fighters is rare. For the obvious reason of security, the research that is done, like mine, usually concerns primarily demobilised fighters or deserters (Boyden & de Berry 2004, Nordstrom 1997, Peters 2004, 2006, Richards 1996, Schafer 2001). This implies that researchers have access only to a certain kind of information: “the stories people tell in the post-war period are very different from those they told while the war was still raging, because of current pressures and influences as well as simply the tricks of memory” (Schafer 2001: 217). It does not mean the information is less useful or evocative, as there is “both a war-time bias and a post-war bias” (2001: 218). It must be noted that the fact that my discussion partners had all left or escaped the SPLA when it was still fighting its war against the Khartoum government army - and that several left after disagreements or personal incidents – influenced the way they spoke about the liberation army to which they had belonged. Readers must bear in mind that it was not the purpose of this chapter to give an academic analysis of the political and military history of the SPLA, and the Movement’s justifiable reasons for fighting the oppression by Khartoum, but to convey the narratives of young people who used to be among the Movement’s fighting force. It must also be noted that the research took place before the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that was signed in January 2005. If new research were to be done, it may turn out that with the (fragile) peace that now exists in southern Sudan, the narratives and reflections of the same ex-soldiers have changed in emphasis, content and justification. For the young men of this study who had themselves been involved in warfare in their home countries, this was not usually something they eagerly or openly spoke about. An uncomfortable moment occurred early on in my research when I visited a group of Sudanese young men living together on the outskirts of town. We were ten altogether and barely fitted in the square brick-built room with one window that was their house. We shared the few chairs carried in from elsewhere and the one bed to sit down. During our round of introduction – a recurring ceremony, performed with much respect and patience - one tall young man mentioned he had been a soldier before fleeing to Uganda, whereupon I assumed this was a topic open for discussion and asked how many of them shared this 124 Narratives experience. They did not respond, became fidgety and spoke among themselves until one of them addressed me and politely suggested that I ask each of them about this privately. He said it was not suitable for them to talk about it in a group, since “some of us know each other, but some of us don’t, and we often have visitors among us from the camps”. From then on, my discussions about this subject took place in private, one-to-one conversations. The young men of this study recounted their experiences through the lens of exile. However, not all of them felt the war was far away. They realised that if they did not make it in Kampala, their only option might be to return to the war, but more than that they were fearful of being spotted by former commanders or intelligence agents and deported back to the front lines against their will. The reservations many people had in talking about their military past illustrated these feelings of insecurity. Even though I made it clear that I was an independent researcher from a Dutch university, not all were confident that the information they gave me would not, by ill-intention or bad luck, end up on the wrong desks. How the ex-soldiers perceived me obviously influenced what they chose to talk about and what was left untouched. They were talking to a young foreign woman - who moreover at the time, as they surely realised, was not particularly well-grounded in the political and military intricacies of the wars in their home countries – and both my being European and my being a woman shaped our conversations. It struck me how openly some spoke about their emotions and fears, and about how they missed their families, especially their mothers. I happen to know that some male researchers, also working in Kampala, were treated more generously to information about the technicalities of war, the sequence of battles, and political intrigues. However open some young men were, they were reluctant to speak of what they had done. This was particularly apparent in terms of the subject of sexual abuse. Rape is used as an instrument of war (Cockburn 1998, Giles 1999, Hutchinson & Jok 2002, Meznaric 1994, Nordstrom 1999), but this was not something the young men and I talked about at length. Chapter Three discussed the ways in which my being a white woman among black men, and us being of the same age, may have influenced the research, and caused the absence of sexuality as a subject of this study. If I did not push to hear about their sexual relationships or preferences generally, I believe I avoided knowing the details of what these young men had themselves done. Having this intimate knowledge would probably have been frightening to me; and I believe they too felt little reason to face the confrontation with this part of their past with either themselves or me. With hindsight I think that they were as concerned as I about the repercussions that sharing this information might have for our future contact.1 Thus, apart from the fact that all of them, on inquiry, indicated that rape is a criminal offence, I did gain little insight into their more personal views - how they would respond if it were their mother or sister who was raped, or about their own possible compunction. If the young men did not talk much about their military past, this may also have been for the simple reason that to them it was no novelty. They had grown up in war and so many of their friends had been, or still were, soldiers. At the same time, this was probably the very reason that some of them did speak to me, and speak at length – I was the ready audience that some desperately lacked. Besides, towards an outsider it is possible to ‘reinvent’ oneself, or the parts of oneself that prove particularly thorny. There must have been things about their histories as they recounted them, which I accepted but which their friends or compatriots would have dismissed. This chapter has four protagonists: Yosief Endrias, Samuel Alim, Lopithi Igom and John Wani. They are the four ex-soldiers with whom I built relationships that generated enough mutual trust for them to talk about their experiences of war, and for me to ask about these, in a quite personal way that went beyond the platitudes that often prevail when touching on such sensitive subjects. Lopithi, Samuel and Wani served with the Sudan Soldiers 125
People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and Yosief served with the national army of Eritrea.2 Lopithi, Samuel and Yosief were in their late teens when they got involved in war. Wani was twelve when he received his military training.
Samy Kambale Tawite, 1999
2. WHY WE FIGHT
Assumptions regarding the innate ‘rebelliousness’ of children and young people as nothing but a phase or cycle without further implications are inapplicable to the contemporary situation in Africa - young people in Africa address crucial social issues with real political implications.
Alex de Waal, Young Africa, 2002, p. 20
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers roughly estimates that around 300,000 children under the age of eighteen are participating in conflicts worldwide as either combatants or auxiliaries (porters, spies, cooks, concubines), and that approximately 100,000 of these children are found in Africa. It is not just children who are prominently involved in conflicts in Africa, but rather youth more generally, and I agree with de Waal that both human rights advocacy and research agendas should start to include the subject of young people and militarism.3 This chapter, which focuses on young people (teenagers as well as men in their late twenties) formerly involved in war, aims to contribute to this broadening of scope. That children and youth participate in warfare is not a historically new phenomenon,4 yet the question of why so many young African people today are fighting wars is an urgent one. Africa’s ‘favourable condition’ for the recruitment of youth, that is, its demographic make-up, is often cited. With at least 50% of most countries’ populations being below the age of eighteen, young people are “not a scarce resource”, and as a result “political and military leaders tend to regard them as expendable” (de Waal 2002: 21). Besides, the impact of poverty, protracted civil wars and the HIV/Aids pandemic together play a part in the break-up of family and other social networks, which leaves children and youth susceptible to both forced and voluntary recruitment (Grant 2002, Machel 1996, Twum-Danso 2003). The most mundane reason that wars happen, and that their prolongation often becomes an end in itself, is that they are profitable for their key stakeholders. War is ‘mercalised’ and the engineers of this business need a suitable labour force. The reasons why children and youth are considered particularly suitable are well- known (Boyden & de Berry 2004, Brett & McCallin 1996, Cohn & Goodwin-Gill 1994, de 126 Narratives
Waal 2002, Furley 1995, Galperin 2002, Honwana 2006, HRW 1996, Machel 1996, McKay & Mazurana 2002, Peters & Richards 1998a, Peters, Richards & Vlassenroot 2003, Rabwoni 2002, Twum-Danso 2003):
- Children are easy to press-gang. - Children are courageous and determined fighters, who fight without inhibitions, sometimes as an extension of play; they are good in ambush situations; they lack realistic assessment of risk; they are pliable and develop fierce loyalties to their superiors. - Children, and especially girls, are very useful as spies and infiltrators, since they attract less attention than adult males. - Young girls are wanted as providers of sexual services and as ‘wives’ for army commanders. Just as in the wider society where men seek younger and younger sexual partners in order to avoid HIV/Aids infection, rebels are recruiting younger girls for the same reasons. - Technology facilitates the use of very young fighters: battle kit is no longer too heavy or too expensive for children to handle. Cheap, light and easy to handle rifles are available through legal and illegal trade, from sources within Africa as well as from external suppliers. - Children and young people are often unaware of their legal rights as citizens and of the international treaties concluded to protect them from neglect and abuse.5
Emotive media coverage of child soldiers focuses on the above issues, and determines the perception of its audience. In discussions about young soldiers, the portrayal of African youth mentioned in the Introduction to Part II, is often stretched in one of two directions: the epithet ‘troublesome’ becomes ‘destructive’; the label ‘underprivileged’ becomes ‘powerless puppet’. The experiences and reflections of the ex-fighters in my study belie this dichotomous depiction and I therefore ally myself with those who call for a more balanced approach to the phenomenon of youth violence. ‘Why we Fight’ is the title of an article by Peters & Richards (1998) which presents excerpts from the testimonies of eight young fighters from Sierra Leone. It is among the first publications emphasising that youth participation in war is often based on conscious and motivated choices. The testimonies illuminate young people’s frontline experiences as well as their reflections on why they joined, stayed, and sometimes, after demobilisation, re-enlisted. The authors leave it up to the reader to decide whether the young fighters “are the dupes and demons sometimes supposed” (1998: 184). Following the report by Machel (1996) and Richards’ earlier book Fighting for the Rainforest (1996), they do caution against seeing child soldiers exclusively as either victims or criminals, and argue in favour of paying “due attention to their agency in conflict” (1998: 183). Most people in Europe are familiar with the images of young fighters in Africa broadcast on television and printed in newspapers: boys with guns as tall as they are, young men looking into the camera with eyes that betray the traces of drugs and other intoxicants. We see these fighters, but only rarely do we hear them speak for more than a few seconds - or minutes at most. This chapter will show that there is a lot these young men have to say and that in doing so they reveal themselves as, in anthropological jargon, agentive individuals. I asked them why they joined armies and militias and their answers often showed a considered clarity and rationality. However, one may object: these boys and men had so few real choices, how can you speak of the ‘rational’ choice to join a militia? And: are these young men’s reflections on their past involvements truly independent and original, or instead a mere rephrasing of the brainwashing they were subjected to? Questions like these rightfully point at the reality that, as Durham (2000: 117) puts it, Soldiers 127
“warfare is one of the sites where the agentive nature of young people is most ambiguous” (see also Honwana 2002, Peters 2004, Richards 1996, West 2000). Honwana in her article Negotiating Postwar Identities (2002) discusses the relationships between age, voluntarism and the actions/decisions of young fighters by introducing the term ‘tactical agency’, based on Michel de Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics.
“He [Michel de Certeau] sees strategies as having long-term consequences or benefits, and tactics as means devised to cope with concrete circumstances even though those means are likely to have deleterious long-term consequences. Applying de Certeau’s distinction it seems that these young combatants exercised what could be called a ‘tactical agency’ to maximise the circumstances created by the constraints of the military environment in which they were forced to operate” (Honwana 2002: 291).
This is an apt way of capturing what is at stake. A long-term perspective is virtually non- existent for young people living in areas of protracted war - which does not mean they do not harbour long-term dreams and ambitions – and they thus make tactical, concrete decisions, at times well-reasoned and thought through, but within given limitations. Becoming a soldier may be a tactical decision, with subsequent survival at the front lines requiring young men to exercise constantly their (tactical) agency. In the next section I will discuss how the protagonists of my study and other ex- fighters I spoke to, came to be soldiers and how, for those of them who chose this occupation, they present their reasons for doing so. Whatever valid reasons young people give for their participation, in some way or other these are related to their marginal situation and their want of other meaningful avenues of personal development. Poverty and soldiering are inextricably linked: joining an army can prove an effective survival strategy, or minimally a ‘meal ticket’.
2.1 The politics of neglect
Samuel had the rather exceptional experience of fighting for both the Sudanese government army and its opponent, the SPLA. He compares the two as follows:
The government army feeds you well. When you are in the front lines they give you canned food. And every so often you are replaced. With the rebels there is no replacement, and the food is only cooked maize. Only when you have just captured a new place there is a chance you get some extra food, like goat meat that you get from the villagers. But I preferred fighting for the rebels, because I know that the Arabs do many bad things in southern Sudan. They take the boys from school, they take the minerals and export them outside, they have blacks work for them as slaves.
He preferred fighting for the SPLA “because the Arabs do many bad things in southern Sudan”, but adds that:
I realised they do these bad things when I was in the SPLA. Before, they never did anything bad to me, and my parents didn’t talk about the Arabs either. And what I knew was that many blacks like the Arabs because they can be a way to good money. For example, the blacks who work for the Khartoum government, they profit a lot.
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Samuel grew up in Juba, the capital and largest town of southern Sudan, which during the two decades of war always remained in the hands of the Khartoum government. Juba is located west of the river Nile, with mountains both east and west - Jebel Kujur and Jebel Bilinyan. It has an airport, the main roads in town are tarmac, while murram roads – “with a lot of putut (dust)!” - leave town in the directions of Yei, Kajokeji and Torit. The army Head Quarters are to the south, and “the ministries and university building are flats”, I was told, “and there are slums in between - like any other town in Africa, Juba also has slum areas”. The few times Samuel spoke about his youth in this town, he focused on his education and the fact that he was “the first of my tribe” to attend secondary school.6 He said his parents came from very poor backgrounds, but both worked hard and he appreciated their efforts to come up with money for his tuition fees each new term. His father was a photographer – “as a child I always used to move with him, or I helped in my mother’s bar and operated the disco if people wanted to dance. It was a big place and she made three kinds of local brews. I had a bicycle and during the holidays I used to do some sort of business, taking salt and sugar and clothes from Juba to the village.” His parents did not talk about politics, and Samuel focused on his schoolwork.
Lopithi, who also grew up in Juba, expresses a very different take on things. He was nineteen when he joined the SPLA in 1989 – the same age Samuel was at his abduction in 1997 - but unlike Samuel, Lopithi made a conscious decision to join the Movement. I met Lopithi, through the office of the Refugee Rights research project, in July 1999, two months after he had escaped from an SPLA prison in Lobone near the Ugandan border. He was twenty-nine years, had served ten years with the Sudanese liberation army and had attained the rank of Major by the time he escaped. In Kampala, UNHCR labelled him a ‘high security case’. Lopithi and I came to meet regularly (according to my research diary, twenty-eight times over a period of eighteen months) and he never needed any encouragement to talk. Especially in the first few months our conversations centred on the war he had just left. There was urgency in his way of speaking. It betrayed his struggle to come to terms with breaking away from the Movement with which he had identified throughout his twenties. I soon realised how little I knew – the intricacies of this war, its military strategies, the political power play and decision-making processes at the top – and that I thus depended on what Lopithi chose to tell me. He must have realised as well, and in his alert and attentive manner phrased things in such a way that I did not need to feel embarrassed by my meagre knowledge. Lopithi grew up and went to school in Juba. He was the Benjamin of the family, the youngest child of thirteen. During his teenage years he lived with just one brother and sister. The elder children had left home, his mother had returned to the village and his father worked in northern Sudan. From the age of fifteen Lopithi started visiting his father’s village during school holidays and it is those visits that became a major reason for joining the liberation movement.
My village is a little deeper into the jungle, in the hills. It is surrounded by hills, it is a jungle surrounded by hills, rivers and streams. It is called Lofiriha. No government has ever set foot there. But I like the culture, the traditional values of the people of Lofiriha. They are very hospitable people, and they are people who do not envy, who are not jealous. You see, development, relative development I should call it, was taking place in certain areas surrounding Lofiriha, and although it didn’t reach Lofiriha, people did not envy. Because they believe in their traditional values, in their own way of life. This is something very unique about our people, they don’t put a problem in their heart. Sometimes they have a strike with nearby villages, but afterwards they will call for the people from those villages to come, and they exchange food for things like ivory, leopard skin, and even dry Soldiers 129
meat. Sometimes they accommodate the tribes coming from nearby for up to three days. They drink beer, they dance … I too participated in some of these things, you know, during the dry season starting from Christmas. I used to stay up to April when we start school again. It’s a long holiday, and I used to enjoy it with the people in the village. We dance, we drink our locally brewed beer called kwete. I often regretted having grown up in Juba, because I could not perform some of the duties that are expected of a child who grows up in the village. In Juba we were dependants, but in the village… You see, the way things were in the village with my age mates, it was somehow embarrassing, disappointing… because I couldn't do it the way they were doing it. At the age of fifteen I was expected to have my own garden and my own tukul, and I was supposed to participate in some rituals in the village, in the age group activities, which of course included wrestling and contests for ladies. But I couldn’t. They call us weak, in the village they call us “children of chai”, you know, children of tea. You're coming from town, you're taking tea and Blue Band and bread, so you cannot wrestle with us, people who eat hot fire, hot food. So this was a setback to me. I had to be on a learning expedition, I had to start learning again, as if I was a child of five years old, in order to grasp what life was like in the village. Otherwise I would have put myself in trouble.
Then he continues:
Yet at the end of the day it was very delightful that I also came to be seen as a light in the village. Because where these people grow up there are no schools, yet they need communication with their people who are in town. At times the village chief is summoned to go to Torit, to submit to the senior chief in Torit, and he has not gone to school… So they came to me. Communication was important and they wanted me to help them, to coach them and their children, how to write their names, start ABCD… That’s when they realised my importance ... The life I had with them is a life I will never forget. And when I went back to Juba, I became very revolutionary, I became very conscious. I started feeling neglected because of what I had seen in the village. And I started thinking, is it my village alone that is neglected? Is it my people alone who are oppressed? Is there another Sudan beyond southern Sudan? And then we went to check in our history books, and we found that Sudan is in fact a large country, comprised of so many tribes, multiracial, multireligious, multicultural… And I started thinking: is the same thing happening to my people happening to people outside the circle of southern Sudan? No, it is not, but why? And I realised: it is because of the participation of their people in the process of administration, it is because of the training they have had, and their representation. I was now becoming articulate. And I read articles about liberation, about revolution. But I realised that we cannot liberate ourselves only by discussing, we liberate ourselves through physical confrontation. Because I remembered what people in the village were doing. They wrestle, but afterwards they are able to forget.
Sudan’s second round of civil war started in 1983. At a guerrilla base in Ethiopia, the SPLA/M was founded in July of that year – just after Nimeiri’s abolition of the Southern Regional Government (established as part of the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement that brought an end to the first civil war), and just two months before the imposition of shari‘a as state law.7 In the period that Lopithi talks about, the second half of the 1980s, the SPLA was still regarded with significant suspicion by the population in the southern region of Equatoria. However, in towns like Juba where the Khartoum government’s policies and commitment to a militant Islam were strongly felt, it enjoyed considerable support.8
130 Narratives
Things were not really very stable at the time of my studies, you know, we were really upside down. Sometimes the schools were closed, sometimes our parents could not get money to pay for our fees. And then came the introduction of Arabic as a medium of communication in all the schools. I was in my last year of secondary education. I was about to join university. But they changed the language of instruction at university to Arabic, so I could not have joined. So there was a student group that organised a peaceful protest against this system. And as I happened to be from Comboni, which was a leading school in southern Sudan, I was called to serve as their press secretary. But unfortunately we had security organs buried among ourselves. They were the sons and daughters of military security personnel. Including me, I was the son of a Colonel. My father is a Colonel in the Khartoum army, and he and I used to disagree. So when I was appointed press secretary to the student protest group, he opposed the idea. My father’s opinion was that I should keep off politics. But I told him, “You are a Colonel, and that’s a high rank in the army, and the army is politics, so how can you tell me to keep off politics?” Anyway, we disagreed. Then things became difficult for me in Juba. We were identified as insiders of the student movement, so of course the intelligence had to go after us. One day when I came home, I found some relatives in the house. The place had changed and they told me, “Some people just came here and they were looking for you. One of them, dressed in uniform, looked like one of the students you used to bring home”. We were six of us, we were in danger, so we came, we crossed… That night we crossed the river, some people helped us to cross with a boat. And we came to join the SPLA. All along we had known the SPLA was in the bush, and we knew among them were students who had been with us in Juba. We heard them speaking on the radio, you know, we used to hear that. And we saw pictures of them. So when I came to join them, I had a clear idea of where I was going.
Although Lopithi said he knew what he was doing when he joined, he also regularly mentioned that it was only gradually that he came to understand the objectives of this war.
When we first took part in operations in the front line, we were sometimes scared, yet at times we were excited. We felt very victorious, because we believed we were liberating the people. In the shortest possible time we were going to liberate this country, our people, and recover the opportunities that we had lost. We were going to reconstruct the country, rehabilitate and develop ourselves. That was our excitement. But at the same time we were ignorant. We didn’t know about death. And we didn’t know about the politics of this movement. And I can honestly tell you that up to today there are many people who do not know the objectives the SPLA is fighting for. You can even find a 2nd lieutenant, one star, who does not know what the SPLA is fighting for. You’ve been told and trained to fight a war, but for what reason you do not know, you don’t have the conscience, right? So here, clearly, I see a big danger. Because the interests of the students who became soldiers was indeed compromised by the interest of the political leadership … It was the same for me. In 1996, when I was still at the rank of Captain, I was unable to reason about the deep political objectives of this war. Then I climbed the ladder and found myself a Major. That was when I started to be able to reason. I was entrusted with assignments of going deep into the local communities, and it is through the questions that we got from the local communities that I started to develop an understanding of what this war should have been all about. Rather than… because the questions they ask are always controversial of what we are doing. I had to defend [our agenda] and reason with them. Yes, it is the local people who helped us a great deal to develop my career, or rather, I don’t call it a career, but experience, to gain experience about what the resolutions to our problems should have been all about. You know, if you don’t unite with the locals, the population, you cannot win this war. Soldiers 131
Lopithi often referred to “the people”, the civilians, as the very raison d’être for the SPLA’s liberation struggle. Reflecting on why he himself had joined, he highlighted the issues “oppression” and “neglect” of “his people” by the central government, coupled with the unfulfilled promises of the Addis Ababa agreement that had ended the first civil war. Given the fact that Lopithi served ten years and was thus well versed in the Movement’s liberation discourse, it is no surprise that he espouses these political/ideological motivations. The nostalgia with which he speaks of his father’s native village, where he never lived but which he portrays as an ideal and harmonious society, can also be seen in this light. It is for the rights of these people – uncorrupted in their way of life yet oppressed by the central government – that Lopithi was willing to take up arms. At the time it seemed improper to question this romanticism, because I sensed there was a psychological purpose in remembering it this way, which served as an anchorage. I clearly do not want to imply that Lopithi’s or other young fighters’ political convictions are not genuine or deep-felt. Schafer (2001) argues that for young RENAMO fighters in Mozambique - who have often been portrayed as little more than ‘killing machines’- political ideology, however crude, was a critical motivating factor in their fighting. Young people across Africa search for avenues to challenge what they consider their social and political exclusion and the corruption of the state and its leaders, and one such avenue is armed conflict.9 A prominent issue on young people’s political agendas is fair and equal access to education. Though in his reflections Lopithi emphasises more conventional political issues like “representation in administration”, it needs stressing that what triggered his joining the SPLA was the fact that his chances of joining university – due to the imposition of Arabic as a language of instruction – were nullified.10
2.2 A search for education
Education is a pivotal issue in youth participation in war. Young people who like Lopithi are blocked from educational opportunities, and thus from social mobility, are often willing to fight for this. Jok (2005) argues that school children’s protests about the crumbling educational system in southern Sudan in the early 1980s was one instrumental factor in initiating the country’s second round of civil war. He writes:
“The reaction of the Nimeiri government to student protests was to stigmatise the entire southern youth as being anti-government. Sweeping arrests were made and security agents throughout the southern towns embarked on a policy of incessant harassment of young men. A manhunt was unleashed against certain individual youths who were identified as the ringleaders. This propelled many more to join the SPLA” (2005: 146).
Peters & Richards observe that also in West Africa many fighters are in fact “frustrated students” (1998: 187). Paradoxically, in the short-term, war only threatens young people’s access to schooling due to insecurity and the consequent closing of educational institutions, falling incomes and inability to pay for school fees, and because school buildings are often explicitly targeted and destroyed (Machel 1996, Peters 2004). Even more ironic is that schools have proved effective recruitment places. In southern Sudan, but also in northern Uganda and many other countries, children have been taken out of class and forcibly enrolled into the armed forces. Churches, which have played a significant role in providing education in southern Sudan, have for this reason shown reservation towards opening new schools during the last two decades (Haumann 2004). Literature on young fighters also points out that, where there are no opportunities for going to school, joining a (rebel) army 132 Narratives is seen by some as a substitute education. Fighting can be a useful skill to learn, with the added advantage that “weapon training pays quicker dividends than school ever did” (Peters & Richards 1998: 188). And even if expectations in terms of learning are not quite met, demobilised soldiers do bring up things the army taught them that are of use in a post- war situation. At the very least, ex-fighters in Sierra Leone say, ‘our eyes are now open’, that is, nobody will manipulate or fool them again (Peters 2004). To me ex-fighters mentioned that because of ‘the military tactics’ they learnt, they now know ‘how to protect themselves’. Samuel put it: “In the army they taught us how to box. Because when you finish your ammunition and the enemy is still there, you have to know how to fight”. Another young man stated that his leadership skills “started in the military training, and since then they have been growing”. Many young Sudanese joined the SPLA not in the first place to learn to use a gun or because they saw it as a way of fighting for their educational rights, but because of the Movement’s promise of offering formal education to them. However, the line between formal education and military training was always very thin (HRW 1994, Johnson 2004, Nyaba 1997, Willis 2002).
Jacob, an ambitious young man in his mid twenties, was attending Senior Four in Kampala when we met. He shared a room with friends and worked every night as a watchman for a Ugandan family to pay for his tuition fees. I asked him where he had received his primary education and the question led him from Upper Nile in southern Sudan to south-western Ethiopia. Jacob spent his early teens in Itang refugee camp in Ethiopia, where feeding and education were provided by UNHCR and where he went to school for the first time. In the late 1980s, this region of Ethiopia was host to a couple hundred thousands of Sudanese refugees, both in camps and self-settled. The same area also provided the main training and supply bases for the SPLA. Mengistu Haile-Mariam, Ethiopia’s military dictator at the time, was the Movement’s key ally and Ethiopia served as its lifeline in terms of military supplies and logistical support. Thousands of boys, of whom Jacob was one, not only received education in Itang refugee camp, but also military training.11 When Jacob had completed Primary Three, he was taken for three months of military training, after which he was allowed back in school and started Primary Four. He recounts that during the second term of Primary Four he was taken out of his refugee school to fight near Juba. He does not know his exact year of birth but thinks he must have been sixteen at the time. When I ask him how he ended up in Itang, he initially says he was taken from his village in Upper Nile to Ethiopia by force. He later qualifies this by saying that it was the local chiefs who selected the boys that were to go with the SPLA, one boy from every family.
They told us we were going for education and we thought it was a chance because there are no schools in our area. When the government was pushed out from Bentiu no schools were left.
Jacob is from a family of nine children, three of whom had died when he left his home in 1987. His mother was looking after the children, his father had died in 1985. One elder brother had joined the SPLA as early as 1984, yet died during the training. Jacob says, “We were told he died of diarrhoea and mental disturbance”, and continues:
When the SPLA came to our village, my younger brother, the one who follows me, was chosen to go with them. But I suggested that I would go instead, because I was active by that time and strong, and he was still young. Of all the children, I was the most active. My parents had not supported my elder brother’s decision to join the SPLA. At that time there was no forced recruitment, it only started in 1987- 88.12 I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was because of his age mates who had joined and used to come back to the village being disrespectful to all civilians. Soldiers 133
Maybe he also wanted his gun. But I don’t think my parents tried to stop him from joining because people were also proud to have a son in the Movement. They hoped it would protect them from the other armed soldiers who would come back to the village to make trouble and use their guns to settle previous disputes. But when they came for us, my mother advised me not to go. She said it would be better if I stayed with the cattle. I refused. She then gave me the customary blessing. She suggested I would sell one of the cows to have some pocket money for on the way. But I said no. I didn’t know the value of money. I said I would just do as all the other children: walk when they walk, rest when they rest. I wanted to go because all the children were going. What would I do if I stayed behind? I didn’t know I was going to fight, but it was what my mother feared. She feared I would die just like my brother. Maybe I believed it in my heart [that I was going to fight], but what I knew was that I was going for education.
During the late 1980s large numbers of boys in their early teens or even younger, mainly from Dinka and Nuer origin, went to south-western Ethiopia with the anticipation of going to school. Some were forcibly enlisted on the basis that they could do both military training and attend school. Their parents and communities, in the hope that these boys would find both education and a refuge from the war, voluntarily released many others.13 The plight of these boys and young men became known especially when after the fall of Mengistu in May 1991, and the consequent (fear for) attacks on the refugee camps14, a mass evacuation of these Ethiopian camps was organised. Under SPLA guard, around two-hundred-and-fifty thousand people returned to Sudan within two weeks, the majority among them children (Johnson 1996, 2004, Nyaba 1997, Scott-Villiers, Scott-Villiers & Dodge 1993).15 Several Sudanese young men, also those who had not been there themselves, spoke to me about this dramatic return movement. I heard accounts of how the returning refugees had to cross Sobat river – “women and children were put on tyres, men pushed them across, many drowned” – and about the far distances people marched to reception centres and, when relief aid was not forthcoming, beyond. One young man recalled:
If you say you are tired, you are shot and your gun is taken. It makes you very courageous, there is a force that comes from within, you don’t know from where. But you keep walking.
Jacob had left Ethiopia just before these dramatic events. But his journey from Upper Nile to Ethiopia four years earlier was probably comparable in terms of physical hardship. He never told me about it, but it is well-known that hundreds of boys going with recruitment missions died en route of exhaustion and attacks from rival militias. Lopithi, who also received military training in Ethiopia, did speak about his journey there from Sudan. He walked from Isohe near Torit to Itang – 350 kilometres as the crow flies – and each time he recounts bits of that journey he visibly enters a different frame of mind. He says it is “something difficult to explain.”
Before we crossed into the desert when we were still in the area of the Didinga, one of us, he was my classmate from Juba, was attacked by a snake. He lost his eyesight. We had to leave him. It was terrible... I don’t know what happened to him later because we really left him because he was now blind. And we continued with the journey. The other thing I can remember is we were escorted by vultures and hyenas, waiting for you to fall… because they know you are tired, in the middle of the desert, there is no water, no food… The moment you just try to fall down like this they start eating on you.
жжж 134 Narratives
In their search for education, rather than joining the SPLA, tens of thousands of young Sudanese men and women crossed the borders to Uganda and Kenya. That education is a key reason for flight and for young people’s continuously being ‘on the move’, will be discussed in Chapter Five on Students.
2.3 Insecurity and no future prospects
In addition to the issue of young people’s political neglect and the lack of educational opportunities, there is a third reason for becoming a soldier, which may well account for the largest numbers of new recruits: a general state of insecurity, and frustration about the complete absence of future prospects. Inside southern Sudan, poverty and insecurity are inextricably linked to soldiering. Notably, a similar situation is found among the Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda. In July and August 2000, I visited Imvepi refugee settlement in Arua District, staying with colleagues conducting a research project there.16 On 31 July 2000, after a ‘tour’ through the settlement, I wrote in my research diary:
The area is beautiful. This morning is particularly stunning. The soft morning light, the sharp lines of the blue mountains in the distance - behind them lies Sudan -, the landscape of green and bushy hills that unfolds itself endlessly, the mist that reveals the passage of the river Nile. And all is quiet. This morning buzzing Kampala seems a million miles away. Our white van rattles over the sandy, stony murram roads. Here the colour of the soil resembles that of home, and doesn’t have the poignancy of the famous red African earth. And apparently it’s also less fertile. I comment on the beauty of the area, but I’m being reminded that “to live here is hard”. Of course. The land is vast but mostly uncultivated. The earth is rocky, rains have failed to come, though tall grass is growing everywhere with shrubs and small trees. We pass people, most of them walking, some on bicycles. Imvepi refugee camp was established when people had to be resettled from Ikafe settlement in Aringa county a couple of years ago. Insecurity there was rampant and unbearable - rebels from the West Nile Bank Front raided the camps, killing people and torturing others, most notoriously cutting off people’s ears and lips. Imvepi, we have been told, is safe. No intrusion from rebels, no forced recruitment by the SPLA. But the fact that this settlement’s population is largely made up of young men is a scary thought - couldn’t it easily become the ideal place for recruitment in the future? Twice we pass groups of houses - villages, which together form ‘points’, the administrative units of this settlement. Children wave at us. We stop in point B, near the house of Joseph, the ‘secretary general’ of this point. Unni and Claude get out and greet a middle-aged man dressed in ragged trousers, bare-chested, a slipper on only one of his feet. Mary and I follow and are introduced to Joseph. His exceptionally well-spoken English strikes me. In no time we are surrounded by a group of people - children, young men, two girls in the background. Unni explains why he is back and hands Joseph a list of people whom the team would like to interview from tomorrow onwards. They agree the interviewers will come after eleven, so as to not completely disrupt people’s daily schedule and give them the chance to dig their gardens first. I don’t feel uncomfortable but not completely at ease either. It’s the confrontation with glaring poverty again. The kids circling around us are obviously malnourished and their brown, fuzzy hair betrays that it is chronic. Except for one boy in bright pink shorts, standing apart and holding a self-made plastic ball to his chest - I suspect he is mentally disturbed - all children are dressed in dirty and torn rags, if wearing anything at all. A small girl is drumming on her head with an empty water bottle. When I look her way a young man comments on the fact the plastic bottle is empty - the girl is thirsty. The young men talk to us of the rains that have refused Soldiers 135
to entertain their fields for the past two months. It rained only once, on the 24th of July, six days ago, but their crops desperately need more. They invited traditional rainmakers - Ugandan owners of the land - and people from the point contributed to slaughter a goat for the well-wishers, but it has done no good. Unni suggests that next time they eat the meat themselves. Joseph tells us that they have held meetings to discuss the possibility of moving away from this place to more fertile grounds, wherever those could be found. They obviously feel betrayed being put in such an ungodly place. I see the ramshackle houses, mud walls and thatched roofs - some seem ok, others are falling apart. What strikes me are the shades of colour of this village - brown for their houses, sandy for the soils, green for the shrubs, black for the bodies. There’s no sign of the usual presence of bright yelling colours of plastic cups and plates and jerry cans and blue UNHCR sheeting. They talk of the Self Reliance Strategy and how it is being imposed on them. It’s the showpiece of the government of Uganda and the UNHCR, but they as beneficiaries were never consulted, let alone involved in the planning process. Joseph argues they have not been given enough time to establish themselves and secure sufficient harvests. A tricky issue: one can hardly tell people in such dire conditions that at least they have land to cultivate, and are not packed together like the Somalis were in Ethiopia or the Rwandans in Goma. There is little point in comparing. Maybe the worst thing about the media is that we can quite easily not be shocked by Imvepi refugee settlement. I look at the young men and try to guess their ages - 14, 19, 25? I wonder how many of them fought at the front lines in southern Sudan, and how many will opt to do so in the near future. Frustration and boredom must be rampant in this place. I wonder how many have taken to drinking. I wonder how many have babies with the young girls who have not joined us. I wonder what they expect of their future. I look around me and I’m again struck by the false image that is publicised of refugees: the situation of these people is not temporary. Their country has been in war for nearly two decades, fathers and sons are fighting and get killed, children grow up in refugee camps where, on bright days, they can see their homeland in the far distance. We say goodbye and drive off. Claude tells us that Joseph graduated from Makerere University and was once working for the Bank of Uganda in Kampala, until Milton Obote chased the Sudanese from their positions. That explains his English. How drastically can lives change? We drive towards the river as a little sightseeing for me. Again a beautiful spot. The river is the dividing line between Imvepi settlement and Rhino Camp. Twenty meters wide, a brown stream with green banks. Cows are drinking, men are bathing. All seems quiet, a textbook village scene.
The situation in many of the settlements in northern Uganda causes young men to be easy targets for SPLA recruitment. Commanders visiting their families resident in the settlements try and persuade the youth to return and fight for the cause. Several large-scale forced recruitment exercises were organised in cooperation between the SPLA and the Ugandan army.17 However, there are also young men who feel useless, bored and disappointed with the opportunities of life in exile and decide to return to the war voluntarily. Rose, the girl who came to Kampala to avoid being married off to an older man by her aunt under whose care she had been since the death of her parents, told me this is what her brothers did:
My brothers all left the transit centre to go back and fight with the SPLA. They went without our father’s advice. We never heard from them again. So before his death, my father performed the mourning rituals for them.
These few lines reveal something about the differences in social expectations and also in the choices available to young men and young women in times of war. In this case, both 136 Narratives
Rose and her brothers defied the advice and wishes of their family, however with rather different consequences: her brothers got lost in war, while Rose rebuilt her life in exile. Peter L., during our conversations in Imvepi settlement, spoke about frustration and boredom too. At the time, though I knew him vaguely from Kampala, I did not know Peter had been involved with the SPLA - and possibly still was. He had always been an elusive character to me. I wondered what he was doing at the staff compound of DED where I stayed and where we bumped into each other one late afternoon, yet chose not to probe. Peter was an interesting discussion partner, sharp and opinionated, but he was extremely restless. Each time we met he seemed fired up with yet another ‘mission’ taken upon himself: collecting fees for entering university (requesting me to send emails to his various contacts in Europe), convening meetings for fellow Sudanese refugees in Kampala, reciting poems at the JRS Christmas do, and typing numerous project proposals for setting up libraries or scholarship schemes for refugees in northern Uganda. Peter was twenty-five, bright and it seemed over-burdened with the experiences of his young life. That evening in Imvepi he said: “People inside Sudan are so frustrated, they come out to see what opportunities are here”, and for the nth time I realised that indeed, low and behold, that’s the whole point about migration. Many young Sudanese, however, are disappointed with the few opportunities they find on the Ugandan side of the border. Peter said:
More and more young Sudanese boys and girls are suffering from complicated and serious diseases. Many suffer from chronic headaches and there is nothing that can be done for them. Psychiatrists realise it’s because of their traumas and experiences, but they are not helped, only told to stay at home and relax. Drinking and smoking opium [marihuana] is a big problem for those who are traumatised. And when they are drunk they start talking about war and shooting and blood. In fact, many men in the settlement take to drinking, they are bored and frustrated. They are idle all day. Some run to the SPLA because they have impregnated a girl and fear her parents. But many just get disillusioned and go back to fight. They are too frustrated. They think there is no difference, they might as well go back and fight. They think that if they survive, it’s fine, but if they don’t, they don’t care. You have to be very strong-hearted not to make that decision. You have to convince your heart. I know how hard it is… I went through it myself. I was thinking… I can’t kill myself, I can’t hang myself, but I can go and fight.
At the time of speaking to Peter, early August 2000, I had become more familiar with the pervasive presence of the war in the lives of the young Sudanese men. When Samuel, with whose words I started this chapter, said to me, “The only thing I fear is when they tie you, when you know you are going to die. But when the bullet comes from behind, I don’t mind”, it upset me. I looked at him sitting opposite me, young and healthy, and wondered how he could “not mind” about being killed. Had the violence numbed him, or the terror of the front lines convinced him that death is a normal thing for youth? At the time I underestimated the fact that being a soldier is obviously experienced by many as very meaningful compared to idly waiting for changes that may never happen. Death then is part of the deal, or perhaps no big deal – especially if for a meaningful political cause from participation in which one can draw self-respect. It remains a fact that a crucial determinant of young men’s willingness to fight is the utter loss of purpose and having nothing at all to look forward to. Schafer (2001) suggests that for some who joined Renamo, coming from areas in Mozambique where labour migration and underpaid, backbreaking work were a long-established tradition, being a soldier seemed like ‘just another job’. In desperate situations, small incentives can be enough. Richards quotes a female ex-combatant from Sierra Leone who explains why she came to identify with the rebels: “They offered me a choice of shoes and dresses - I never had decent shoes before” (Richards 1996: 28). In contrast with what some get out of war, the economic gain for rank and file soldiers is Soldiers 137 often minor, merely enough for their sustenance. But holding a gun does give power over civilians who are unarmed and thus in no position to refuse food, drinks or animals. Besides, joining an army can seem a challenging kind of adventure to young people who are bored and feel useless. Several people phrased (part of) their motivation to join in such terms: “We thought it was interesting to do military things, it was sort of an adventure and we felt excited. It was tantalising, it was like a joke, I felt no danger or risk in it”. Apart from boredom or bleak future prospects, the periodic insecurity in refugee settlements also caused young men to return to the war. Chapter One mentioned the rebel attacks on refugee camps and settlements in Uganda’s northern districts. Wani is one Sudanese young man who, as a twelve-year-old and as a result of such insecurity, ended up in an SPLA training camp. Wani was born in 1983 in Torit town, Eastern Equatoria province of southern Sudan, where he lived his early years together with his parents, an elder sister and younger brother. In early 1989 the SPLA attacked and took Torit town. The family house was shelled by the SPLA tracking down the retreating government soldiers, whom, so Wani was told, were passing through the maize field adjacent to the family compound. On the day of the attack Wani was staying with family friends: “I had been staying with them for over a week, because they liked me, because I always talked a lot”. Both his parents as well as his infant brother were killed in the shelling. A cousin took him and his sister to Lainya, his original home area, located between Yei and Juba, where they stayed with their paternal grandparents. They lived from subsistence farming - cassava, groundnuts, lubya (cowpeas), durra (sorghum) and simsim (sesame) – and Wani remembers that during groundnut harvest the children helped taking off the peanut skins. Wani did not go to school. Because of the war, he said, “people were often up and down, and at times they couldn’t work their fields because of the insecurity”. In 1993 the situation had become very volatile, fighting was near and his grandparents feared he might be recruited into the SPLA forces. Ten years old, Wani with one age mate from the same village joined other people fleeing to Uganda.
There were many, it was an exodus. I think we walked for about one week. We slept when we were tired and joined new people when we were ready to walk again. We ate kisra, the bread, you know, which is made of sorghum or millet. My grandmother had prepared it for us. And some people who cooked on the way also gave us some of their food. All of us reached safely, but our feet were so swollen that we couldn’t walk for one whole week after that.
From Koboko they were taken to Camp II, a transit camp for Sudanese refugees, where Wani stayed with a cousin. I asked why his grandparents did not accompany him to Uganda, and he explained:
They were already old, they said “even if we die, we’re old, no problem, but you are young, you still have a chance of learning much”. They hoped I would have a chance of getting into school in Uganda.
He did join primary school in the refugee camp, but could not stay for long, because in 1994 rebels from the West Nile Bank Front started their infamous attacks on the refugees. Properties were looted, buildings burnt or stripped of corrugated iron or wooden beams, people were grotesquely mutilated and more than two hundred killed (Amnesty International 1998, Hovil & Werker 2001, Karunakara 2004).18 Wani recalled:
People became extremely frustrated with the situation in Uganda, and the common feeling was that it was better to go back and die in our own country. I also left because the bigger people influenced me to go back to Sudan with them. 138 Narratives
From Camp II in Koboko, via Moyo, they walked to Kajokeji town just inside Sudan. When in March 1997 Yei fell to the SPLA again, many more refugees from Camp II who had been transferred to Ikafe and Imvepi refugee settlements returned to Sudan. Wani’s sister was among these returnees. He later learned that she was shot on the way and died. She left a baby son, Wani’s only close living relative. Wani had by that time joined a school called Gore, located near to Kajokeji town.19 Part of the day was spent in class, another part working on the land.
They also started to train us. Then, so that the international community would not see what was going on, we were transferred to a place called Moroto. We were deceived that we were going to school, but in fact it was a training camp for the Red Army, what they call jesh amer in Arabic.
Wani spent three very difficult months in this training camp, yet he says that, because of the continued rebel attacks, “those who stayed behind in the refugee camps suffered even more than us in the training”.
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What this section showed is that many young men – those who are not forcibly recruited – have clear motives as to why they decide to take up arms. Often these are a mix of very personal reasons combined with a widely shared frustration about a lack of resources, education, jobs and political representation. Wars, however, have a dynamic of their own into which its combatants are drawn, and which may trigger them to engage in activities that do not necessarily serve the initial cause. The next section turns to the daily realities of war.
3. SOLDIERS IN WAR
Wars are news. Journalists and war correspondents write about them every single day and satellites send their footage to the world’s television screens. A handful of academics do research in war zones. Who are these people’s sources? It is mostly civilians who speak of the atrocities committed by armies and militias, about how villagers stood together, or how chaos and fear made people fend exclusively for themselves. Far less often does one hear the people speak who actually fight these wars - army and rebel commanders are at times interviewed and quoted, but rarely rank-and-file soldiers. They do not often get to a microphone. They may not be eager to talk. Throughout my stay in Kampala I kept in touch with Samuel, the young man from Juba who fought for both opposing Sudanese armies. Today, we are in contact through email, and if he is in the position to borrow a mobile phone to use his SIM-card, we talk. Samuel never wasted one word on his experiences at the Sudanese front lines. Our conversations about it have been few and far between, partly because I found it hard pressing for things that I suspected he did not want to speak about. I have notes of a conversation we had in late May 2000, by which time I had known Samuel for exactly one year. We are sitting at a tiny open-air restaurant in Nakasero. Samuel has a chapatti and we both drink a soda. I told him when we made our appointment that I wanted to ask him a few questions about his time as a soldier. He is wearing his red and white soccer jersey, a fifty-fifty chance of seeing him in that - as far as I know he owns two shirts. Soldiers 139
When you were fighting, were you ever hit?
Yes, but only one time, here, on the side of my leg. It was a bomb that exploded. God has been good to me. But if I would die it would be God’s punishment.
Why would he want to punish you?
It is not personal. He punishes everybody because of Eve who ate the apple.
What did the prison look like where you were put after those government soldiers that you were guarding had escaped?
It was a space in the open air, fenced by these thorns, you know? No roof. What the prison looks like depends on where you are. In some places, it is down in the ground, in other places it is a building. They take off your shirt and shoes and belt. If it is not very crowded, if there are not too many suspects inside, you can lie down to sleep, but without anything to cover you.
Do prisoners get anything to eat?
Yes, but they get little, and the food is not well prepared. It is boiled maize.
Are prisoners beaten?
Yes, sometimes the guards beat them, especially when the in-charge is not around. Because if he is around, he is the one to authorise you to beat the prisoners. He can give the orders to punish them. He doesn’t need a reason. But if you yourself beat them properly when the in-charge is not there, and if they die, you will be punished. But for me I’m kind, I didn’t beat them.
Are prisoners ever killed?
Yes. It depends on the in-charge’s feeling. If you capture an enemy you can kill him before you report to the in-charge. But if you report the man to the in-charge, it’s no longer your decision to kill him.
When do you capture people?
You can capture soldiers who are lost in the bush. When they are scattered after an ambush.
How do you kill them?
You can kill him with your gun. But when you fear that people will hear the gunshot, you slaughter him.
How do you slaughter him?
You tie his arms on his back and use your knife. That knife is called sonki in Arabic and every soldier has one.
But you are not allowed to do that?
No.
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What are the rules for soldiers?
The rules for soldiers are many. You are not allowed to rape, you know, or to kill civilians. And you must not kill soldiers that you capture outside the battlefield.
What happens when soldiers break the rules?
That depends. If it is a newly captured place where they rape or kill civilians, the punishment is not very strict. Because in taking that place many soldiers also lost their lives. But if it is in a place that was captured long ago and where the civilians already got used to the soldiers, then you will be punished. The soldier will be put in prison or in front of the firing squad. They tell the soldiers lined up that they broke the rules and then they shoot them.
Did you see that happening?
Yes, I saw it.
I remember this as a difficult and awkward conversation. Samuel, who especially back then was a cautious speaker, rarely very talkative, though answering my questions, regarded me with a look that seemed to say ‘why do you need to know, is all this still relevant, now that a new life has started and I am back in school?’ The interview-type nature of our conversation felt odd and out-of-place, yet I did not manage to turn it into our normal more flowing kind of talk. I realised then, but more strongly now, that for Samuel speaking about those past deeds and frontline realities was out of place in the context of Kampala. It was irrelevant to his new challenge of building his life in Uganda. To him it probably felt more appropriate to leave the memories of his former and very different life there where they belonged, that is, in the past. Also, he may have hesitated to let me in on this part of his history because he feared my disapproval of the things he had done. It conflicted with the image he knew I had of him: a polite young man, willing to work for his upkeep by working at construction sites, and interested more than anything in pursuing his education. I did not start my research in order to uncover the horrors of frontline fighting. I primarily wanted to learn about it for the purpose of contextualising the young men’s current lives and thoughts. The disturbing details of what people – children, youth and adults – do in wartime can be found in human rights reports and some rare academic studies. Do I need to include these details in order to convey what war is about, or must I be careful, so as not to risk sensationalism? Reading Twum-Danso’s monograph, in which she quotes from other studies instances of extreme violence perpetrated by child soldiers, I was not convinced of its value. I feel that it is perhaps ‘good enough’ to know what happens in southern Sudan or eastern Congo from the news and human rights reports coming out of there. I need not press for the revelations of what the young men I got to know did and did not do. I was not in a position to offer a suitable (therapeutic) environment for that, other than offering my genuine interest in them as individuals. I therefore let people speak about the war in the ways they chose – that is, within the contextual limitations of our interaction. It turned out they hardly talked about the details of wartime violence. Like the ex-Renamo guerrillas in Mozambique, it was “the more mundane, everyday suffering” which they voiced in their recollections (Schafer 2001: 237). Samuel spoke of the rain that fell on them day and night – “we were washed like animals” – and many recalled tasteless food, endless walking and little sleep. Two other headlines, to which I will turn now, were the time spent in training camps, and the social relationships of war. Soldiers 141
3.1 Military training camps
John Wani: SPLA training in Sudan
The previous section introduced Wani, who two years after having fled from Sudan to Uganda, returned to Sudan because of the terrible security situation in the refugee camp where he stayed. He was twelve years old when he ended up in Moroto, the SPLA training camp for minors located between Kajokeji and Morobo in Eastern Equatoria. In January 2005, Wani and I had several meetings in which he told me about his military training, then exactly ten years ago.20 I had known Wani since 1999, but we never before discussed the subject at length. I knew he had carried a gun as a very young boy, but all he had previously said about it was: “It was never so bad, I was a bodyguard, I was never so much in the front line”. He now talked openly, and tirelessly answered my questions. The highlights of his account are the hierarchical organisation of the camp, the harsh punishments and the awful food they got to eat. Moroto was a training camp specifically for minors, the Jesh Amer, which Wani said meant boys below the age of fifteen. “There were thousands of us”, he says, and upon arrival the new recruits were organised into squads (jama, 7 boys) and platoons (fesila, 25 boys) and told to clear the bush surrounding the school compound where the camp was located, and to build tukuls to sleep in. For this task they were given one panga per fesila and told to improvise and use stones to clear the bushes and cut grass and poles for their tukuls. It was their introduction to the camp regime: those who did not finish the clearing and building in the allotted time, were punished.
Our punishment was caning on the buttocks, first one buttock then the other, usually between one hundred and two hundred canes. Or being pushed into cold water. There was a prison, a big hole in the ground that was surrounded by thorns. Sometimes they pour water inside and the prisoners sit in the cold water. Urinating you have to do it inside, but for defecating they escort you out.
The training in Moroto included evening and afternoon parades, digging trenches, target shooting, military tactics like ‘manoeuvres’ and ‘conceal and detect’, and learning how to assemble guns. Wani excelled at target shooting, which earned him the position of leader of his fesila. He adds he also got this leadership position because he knew how to count and speak Arabic, which he had learned to during the first five years of his life in Torit town, and which is also used as lingua franca in the refugee camps for Sudanese in Uganda. Many of the young recruits, Wani says, were taken from villages in Sudan, had never gone to school and only spoke their local languages. As a fesila leader Wani was responsible for ensuring that all orders were carried out successfully and within the allotted time.
My task was also to report every morning and evening, after whistling and counting I had to report if all boys are there, who is sick, who has died, everything. You know, in the military everything is organised according to hierarchy, we call it agdamia. You have to follow the standing order, it’s called talimat, and always report to the next in line. I also had boys reporting to me, the leaders of the jama.
In order to avoid group punishment from above, Wani had to punish the boys in his fesila when they refused orders or did not perform up to standard. The offences included: “being lazy, getting up late, disappearing during work, or not finishing the work in time”. His means of punishing was to order boys from within the group to cane the offenders. I suggest that to me this seems a tricky task, having to command a group of twenty-five boys, some of whom older than himself. But Wani explains: “It was not very difficult. 142 Narratives
Everybody knows they have to follow the order, the hierarchy, that is the only way.” Wani spent one day in prison, “not a night”, he says. It was punishment for not finishing their group work in time. He was caned, put in prison, caned again upon release.
After caning you get up and say “De jesh!” It means, “I’m a man, I’m a soldier, I don’t care, this is what happens in war”.
After his day in prison he put more effort to ensure that his fesila finished all jobs and assignments in time. One “good assignment”, he remembers, was going for food.
You leave the camp, you are gone all day, and in the villages that you pass through some villagers who sympathise with you sit with you and give you food and booze for free. Some even slaughtered a goat for us. It made you happy. But you are not allowed to take food back into the camp. Because in the camp the only food they gave us is this belila. It is maize grains with beans, without salt and without oil. Salt was for the big people, and only on big days they sometimes added some oil. We were told that eating belila would make us strong. Eating was called our salary. But some boys escaped to villages or fields nearby to get cassava and other things. If they were caught with that food they were beaten, sometimes so badly that you die. And boys who fell ill because of the conditions, or who complained of being sick, they were seen as not serious, and they were also beaten. But you know, the one who is responsible for beating a boy up to death is not taken to prison. They say it is part of the training.
The most serious offence was to try and escape from the camp. Wani explains that some boys tried to escape when on assignment taking ammunition to the front lines. If caught, they were first put into prison and then, during evening assembly, placed in front of the firing squad. The offenders were adorned with leaves to make them unrecognisable. They were tied to a pole and given the opportunity to speak and defend themselves.
Some did not speak, they knew they were going to die anyway. But some tried to explain their offence, for example the eating of forbidden food, by saying they were hungry. But they were told, “What hunger are you talking of? You are eating!” There was no excuse that could be accepted. The system is that you are guilty until proven innocent, not like here in Uganda where it is the other way round. But it never prevented people to escape.
The firing squad, Wani adds, “used thirty-one bullets per soldier, that is a full magazine plus one bullet in the barrel.” The recruits were forced to watch without showing signs of fear or any other emotion. I ask Wani whether he ever thought of escaping. He answers:
Seeing the people put in front of the firing squad I realised that if I tried to escape I would die without achieving anything. I did not want to be a coward, I wanted to reach the peak.
Many boys died during the training: “They must have been as many as seven hundred, but I don’t know exactly. I lost one friend.” The boys had to bury their fellow recruits who died or were killed and it had to be done immediately: “Because it will scare the others, if they have to stay with a dead body.” When Wani got orders from above to prepare a burial – this could be for any boy, not necessarily from his own fesila - he would order five boys to go and dig the grave, and send one along to supervise and report back to him when the work was done. Done meant: grave dug, body put in and covered.
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Then they had to call a big man to do the gun salute. And he would fire his gun and say “Ita mut asan belet bi tak”. It means, “You died because of your land, you gave your blood for your soil”.
The recruits were not informed how long their training would take, they were only told that “soon the big man is coming with guns for each of you and with animals.” It was after three months that this “big person” came to address them at their pass-out ceremony. Each boy was given “a very new gun” to assemble, “your gun is your certificate”. They had to swear the oath ‘Sila de abu taki, uma taki, kulu haja taki, ita bi ligo akil miu pogo’. Wani writes down the words for me conscientiously. Many others have cited this line and I know it loosely translates as ‘This gun is my father, my mother, my everything, even my food I will get from it’.
And we had to swear that we will look after the gun, that we will keep it and make sure it will not get lost. That day you are happy, you can’t even think of eating.
To prove their newly acquired skills and their courage, all graduates are sent on an assignment – to attack a town or convoy - the day after the ceremony. Those who survive are deployed with one of the battalions, to join the fighting or sometimes, to cook food for the jesh asabi, the adult forces. “But even that is dangerous,” Wani points out, “a bomb can easily fall on you while you are cooking.” Wani was exempted from going for this final assignment because at graduation he and three other boys were selected to become bodyguards to “the headmaster” of the training camp.
Wani tells me all this while we sit outside under the shade of the Acacia trees at St Anthony’s Restaurant in Nakasero. It is a hot January and we drink big glasses of fresh passion fruit juice. The sun goes down and mosquitoes start to attack us. Wani speaks with care, wants me to understand things correctly. He hardly passes judgment about what he tells, but there are a few moments his expression reveals some emotion: when he speaks of the horrible food, when remembering the things he was good at and when I ask about the singing of morale songs.
There is a lot of singing, during work and all evening. Singing makes you comfortable, because the songs give you meaning, they tell you why you are suffering and give you hope. They tell you that even if you die those who come after you will enjoy the fruits of your work.
At our next meeting he hands me a piece of paper on which he has written down, translated into English, the lyrics of one of the liberation songs as he remembers it: “... the problem of slavery and the corrupt bourgeoisie dictatorial government of Khartoum force us to go to the bush ... there are no taps, tarmac roads, schools and industries in southern Sudan, and even hospitals are not there ... today we shall storm Juba and the Arabs will be forced into the bunkers like rats, and we will even storm Khartoum ... ”. Though the reasons stated are revealingly concrete, it is still difficult for me to imagine these words would greatly help a twelve-year-old to deal with the misery and shock of the training, and tell Wani so. He hesitates and offers what he thinks was the only way of coping: to forget.
You have to forget otherwise you get mentally disturbed. Some went mad. When they came out of the training they went and raped women. For that they are put in front of the firing squad.
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‘You have to forget’, because there is no doubt, also in Wani’s mind, that it was a lot they had to take in. One of our conversations he ends by saying:
Yes, the treatment was very bad. Boys were kicked, even stepped on the head. It was as if they were revenging, but we didn’t know for what.
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Wani’s account was about an SPLA Red Army training camp inside Sudan. Until the SPLA lost its main bases in Ethiopia with the fall of Mengistu in 1991, large-scale training of recruits took place in Ethiopia’s Gambela and Bonga regions. To what extent the training centres that were run by the SPLA and the Ethiopian army outside each of the refugee settlements – Itang, Pinyudo, Dimma – indeed operated without the knowledge of the UN, is hard to establish. Scott-Villiers et al mention that: “It was widely accepted that the three [refugee] camps were closely linked to SPLA military training and supply activities” (1993: 203); others argue that there was only open knowledge about training going on in Bilpham in Bonga Hills. No literature is available about what went on in these Ethiopian training camps, or in those later established inside southern Sudan. The accounts I received from the few people who were willing to talk about it confirmed Wani’s experiences. I was told that in 1998 a new program was drafted concerning the organisation and content of the SPLA military training, which included a revision of some of its harshest practices.21 I have little reliable data as to the presence of girls in the military camps, that is, no information on their relative numbers and only a few comments about their treatment, one of which was: “The girls are good in training but are disappointed afterwards. They are taken as cooks and all that comes with it, because of course in the front lines, commanders don’t move with their wives”. Research into girls’ and young women’s participation in and experiences of war is still very scarce (de Berry 2004, Nordstrom 1999, Swaine 2004, West 2004).
Yosief Endrias: National Service in Eritrea
Yosief is another person who related his experiences of military training. The context in which he received his training differs from that of Wani: he was not a minor recruited to a rebel army, but he was trained as part of Eritrea’s National Service Program. Yosief was born 1978 and grew up in Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea, where he lived with his mother and his grandmother. His father, who was fighting for the country’s independence from Ethiopia, he saw only once. In 1991, after thirty years of liberation struggle the Eritrean freedom fighters won the war, under the leadership of Isaias Afewerki who fronted the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF).22 Yosief’s father did not return: he is one of the illustrious 65,000 Eritrean martyrs. There is a good deal of literature about the Eritrean war of liberation, the dedication of its fighters and the progressive organisation of the forces, in which women fighters took up a significant position (Burgess 1989, Connell 1997, Davidson, Cliffe & Habte Selassie 1980, Habte-Selassie 1992, Iyob 1995, Kibreab forthcoming, Papstein 1991, Pateman 1990, Wilson 1991).23 In our conversations, Yosief repeatedly refers to the astounding fact that a guerrilla army of a country of 3,5 million people defeated the national army of its formidable neighbour Ethiopia, a country of 63 million.24 Within one decade after independence, however, Eritrea under the presidency of Afewerki, has changed from being the promising new African nation invested with high expectations both nationally and internationally, to being classified as a “highly repressive state” (Abbink 2003b, Hedru 2003, HRW 2005c). One controversial issue is the country’s National Service Soldiers 145
Programme, which was introduced in 1994 and written into the 1997 Constitution. It obliges all women and men between 18 and 40 (called ‘youth’) to undergo six months of military training and a year of work on national reconstruction projects. The objectives of the program, as stated by the government, include: utilising the war-torn country’s human resources for reconstruction efforts, reducing dependency on foreign aid, connecting young people to the liberation-war generation, encouraging cross-cultural understanding and social integration of different ethnic and religious groups, and promoting gender equality. Despite its initial good intentions, criticism of this program is mounting, especially now that in practice the time for service is repeatedly prolonged, with it becoming almost “a permanent condition”. Dorman writes: “with those who have turned 40 since 1998 not yet excused, multiple generations of families are serving together” (2005: 194), and several authors point at the repercussions of the consequent loss of labour power especially in rural areas. Youth in Eritrea are starting to question not only the strong state regulation of their lives, but also the very notion of ‘sacrifice’ - glorified as the backbone of Eritrea’s political culture. The government responds to this growing youth criticism with frequent and increasingly severe round-ups of draft-evaders and the detention without trial of student leaders (Bereketeab 2004, Dorman 2005, Hedru 2003, HRW 2005c). In 1996, after graduating from Technical College in Asmara, Yosief was called to join the so-called 5th round of National Service. He underwent six months of training in Sawa Military Camp, western Eritrea, after which he was deployed with the army’s Navy base on the Dahlak Islands in the Red Sea - which thanks to the beauty of the area and the opportunities for diving also happens to be a popular holiday destination for tourists. When Yosief had completed his eighteen months of service, the border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea had started and all recruits were forced to stay with the military. Graduates from the previous four rounds were also called to report for action. In 2000, Yosief escaped from Dahlak, and after crossing into Sudan and later Kenya, he found refuge in Uganda in 2001. He is one among the growing number of especially young Eritreans (students, draft-evaders, soldiers and journalists) who are fleeing the country to seek asylum in Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. When I ask Yosief why he deserted from the army – judged as unpatriotic by still a great majority in Eritrea – he mentions his deep aversion to the indiscriminate killings he witnessed during his two weeks of frontline fighting. He considers himself a pacifist unwilling to participate in the human rights violations perpetrated by his country’s national army led by the former liberation war fighters (Yekaalo).25 He also keeps coming back to the treatment of girls during the military training and afterwards in the Navy.
The Fighters are playing with the girls. They look for the beautiful ones and tell them to come to their offices to work for them and stay with them. Many of these girls get pregnant. If they disobey, if they try to refuse, they are sent to the front line. They don’t want to go to the front line, so they have no choice. But for us, we were not allowed to have girlfriends and boyfriends in the training camp. Boys and girls are housed in different parts of the camp. I remember there was one boy who had a girlfriend, but this girl was demanded by one of the Fighters. From the window in his barracks the boy could see the place where the Fighter was keeping his girlfriend. He got so angry. He confronted the Captain, he said: “She came to work for her country, not for you!” Then he shot and killed the Captain, and himself.
Yosief remembers the six months of military training as extremely harsh. Arbitrary punishments included lying on the ground with one’s legs up in the air, forced to keep one’s eyes open and stare into the sun for hours on end, or having legs and arms tied together, “so that you look like a helicopter” and being left like that. He adds that it was 146 Narratives particularly difficult for the sons of rich families, jestingly called ‘mama-boys’. Nobody is exempted from National Service, “there is no bribing by rich parents,” Yosief says, “for that I respect our government.” Yet in his memory it were especially the girls who “got a lot of psychological problems”. He says they “couldn’t walk straight anymore, they started walking backwards and made a noise from the throat like the sound of a dog”. I am not sure what to make of this last comment, and my questions for further explanation do not help, but it is clear that to Yosief these memories are very disturbing.26 He speaks in a lighter tone when he remembers the food they got: bread “as hard as stone” and a watery soup with ades (lentils) and peas.
There were so few peas in that soup, we made it a competition to fish for the peas and the person who found one was the winner! And if we complained the Fighters would tell us: “You’re eating this bread every day, we used to get it once a week, we used to eat leaves and drink the blood of donkeys. What did you think, that you would spend your military training being fed on ice cream?!”
One other interesting theme of Yosief’s account is the difference in attitude and status between conscripts from towns and villages, and between the conscripts (the Warsai) and their trainers (the Yekaalo, or as Yosief calls them, the Fighters). The social dynamics and relationships of war are the subject of the following section.
3.2 Social relationships in war
In the literature on the social dynamics of military groups, it is argued that the company of comrades-in-arms often comes to serve as a family substitute. From what several ex- soldiers told me, I indeed got the impression that they reconstituted a sense of family/community within the armies they voluntarily or involuntarily joined, and that this comradeship eased some of the pain of the separation from home and family. Creating a sense of family, it must be noted, is often used as a crafty strategy by commanders and recruiters who present themselves as “surrogates for civilian life” (McIntyre 2005: 231). The Lord’s Resistance Army, which has wrought havoc on the Acholi communities in northern Uganda, presents a disturbing example of this. Veale & Stavrou (2003) write that its camps are modelled on a village, and that the basic unit of the LRA ‘family’ consists of a soldier and his wife or wives together with abducted children. The experience of becoming part of this new family is made ‘official’ through certain practices, which include new recruits being forced to kill someone from their own village, a relative or neighbour, so as to “bring about an irrevocable break between conscripts and their communities” (Honwana 2002). Such practices, also observed in Sierra Leone and by Renamo in Mozambique, have the purpose of ending resistance from the communities and blocking the possibility of the children to return home (Nordstrom 1997, Richards 1995).27 Such extreme practices are unheard of in Eritrea and SPLA recruits in Sudan are also not known to have been forced to commit such acts. Instead, SPLA soldiers often returned to their home communities during the wet season’s lull in fighting. Nevertheless, Jok mentions the SPLA’s policy of “the conditioning of youth to identify more with the revolution than with their families” (2005: 151). Soldiers 147
Yosief Endrias: young and old, educated and uneducated, city and village
One afternoon, in January 2005, I am talking to Yosief and a close friend of his. We have come to the Botanical Gardens in Entebbe, a forty-five minute drive from Kampala, and are sitting in the grass overlooking Lake Victoria. In the evening I recapture their words in my diary:
People usually only talk about the bad things of war, but there are also good things in it. The best love is in war. You share because you realise time and life are short. There is no longer a need to keep everything to yourself: you may die before the goat you have slaughtered is cooked. Another reason for sharing is that you know you may need the help of this same person tomorrow. But when people get a good life again, they forget everything, the suffering and the sharing, they become selfish again.
A few days later on our next appointment, Yosief brings with him a collection of photos from his time with the Navy. His hair is longer, his expression more juvenile, and for a moment it is odd to see him in army uniform. The photos show young men, laughing, their arms around each other. There is one of a group of them proudly showing their early morning catch of fish. Yosief has told me about the beautiful fish in Dahlak. Another photo shows Yosief and a fellow soldier, sitting on a rock with their guns in hand, Yosief is cuddling a little goat. “That’s us keeping guard,” he explains, “that’s the time when you talk and share, about home and about your girlfriends”. The last photo shows a disorderly group of young men, most of them in uniform, in a desert-like place. Metal bed-frames are standing scattered in the sand. “There we were preparing to go to the war”, he says. Yosief talks warmly about his fellow soldiers, but distinguishes between ‘those from the city’ (i.e. Asmara) and ‘those from the villages’. He suggests there is a big difference in attitude to the National Service Program’s military training between these two groups of conscripts. The impression he gives is that the young men from Asmara, apart from finding the physical part of the training very taxing, also felt they were wasting their time. These city boys used to say to the villagers: “When you came to fight you just tied your donkey, but we left much behind, we closed our supermarkets, we locked our cars”. He explains:
When you are from the city you know the cost of life. The illiterate and the educated see the value of life differently. When you are educated you think much about life. Villagers believe in patriotism, they are always ready to fight, they want to be heroes. They are uneducated and more obedient, more devoted. They come back to the villages with half their legs missing and they feel heroes.
He adds, smiling:
We from Asmara wanted friends from the village because they are tough, they have no problem doing the hard work. When they respect you because of your education you make them your friend. He cuts wood for you, you write letters for him.
Yosief makes it sound that, even though he and his city friends made fun of the village boys, their interaction at the end of the day was good-natured.28 However, their relationship with many of the Fighters, their seniors and trainers, was often antagonistic.
The Fighters have an inferiority complex, especially towards those of us who come from Asmara. The Fighters have only been in the bush, they are illiterate. We call them fara, it means ‘ignorant people’. In 1991 when Eritrea was just liberated they 148 Narratives
were very much respected. But later they became very tough. They force everybody into the military service, even the daughters of some Muslim groups and the Jehovah.29 But that is wrong, their religion tells these people that they are not supposed to fight. At first people loved the Fighters but you know what they are saying now? “We wish we had derouted them, past Asmara, straight to Sudan, and locked them there!”
It must be noted that Yosief’s description of the Yekaalo as all illiterates from rural backgrounds is an unwarranted generalisation. A substantial proportion of the liberation war fighters were secondary school and university graduates, a fact that Yosief may have been aware of, but that he chose, for his own reasons, to leave out of his account. It may be true though that many of the educated liberation war fighters are no longer with the army, which may in turn explain Yosief’s recollection of how he and other conscripts from Asmara played tricks on their superiors. Yosief recounts their strategies for being excused from work. He says that when the young recruits wanted to get permission to stay in the barracks, “they would complain of sickness of the stomach or sickness of the heart”, but the Fighters had no regard for what they considered mere physical or emotional weakness. The recruits from Asmara used their city language and slang to confuse their superiors.
We used to say we were suffering from the lekaleka disease. Lekaleka means lollipop! Or we said in our slang: “I suffer from the sickness of Bob Marley, reggae music is disturbing me from inside”. And the Fighters, they didn’t want to show that they didn’t understand our words and we were allowed to stay in bed! In the evenings we used to sit together and sing in our city language. It annoyed them and they could never allow the girls to sit with us. In the 1st round [of National Service] there were many street boys who were taken from Asmara and other towns, they really played a lot of tricks on the Fighters, so when we were there they were already suspicious. They knew it was easy for us to cheat them. The Fighters feel that “you educated ones you are complicating things”. The President says he needs the farmers more than the educated ones, that it is the farmers who made this country free.
Yosief had completed a diploma in ‘architectural draftmanship’ at a Technical College in Asmara when he joined the National Service. In the Navy, he was employed in construction work, and when the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea started in May 1998, he worked as assistant to the personnel officer. It was partly an office job, but also included travelling to the front with convoys of new detachments, handing over the lists of soldiers that it was his task to keep and update. I knew from earlier references he had made that he himself also spent a brief period in actual battle. I assumed this was in the Ethiopia-Eritrea border war, and one day asked him about it. Yosief explains he instead fought in Sudan, across the north-eastern border of Eritrea. He says it was “a secret war”, the objective of which at the time was unknown to him. He later came to know that the fighting he was involved in was against the Eritrean Islamic Jihad fighters and other Islamic militants backed by Sudan’s Khartoum government. The Eritrean army, he says, was backed by America and the mission was carried out in cooperation with the SPLA. Yosief explains that he was sent to fight as a result of a quarrel with one of his superiors.
I was surveying at a construction site inside Eritrea, near to the border place where the fighting was. I was carrying my theodolite [surveying instrument] and one of the Fighters came and asked me whether that was an anti-aircraft weapon. I laughed. Well, I didn’t laugh, I smiled. He was upset, he felt inferior. He ordered me to go and fight. My own Captain, who was superior to this Fighter, was not there when it happened. So it was easy for him to send me just like that. Soldiers 149
Yosief responds openly to most of my questions, but is reserved and speaks slowly when I ask him about the two weeks he spent fighting. He recalls that they attacked and took the border towns of Karura, Agetay and two smaller towns of which he does not remember the names. He says they fought for one week non-stop. Agetay was a beautiful little town, he says, “but we left it completely destroyed”. Then he describes the many bodies of dead soldiers thrown together, whom he believes were prisoners of war, executed by the army he was serving.30 He says he asked his superior: “Why, why kill these people?”
He told me: “You, you’re thinking like a civilian. These people are garbage, they spoil Eritrea”. And he ordered me to shoot one wounded soldier. I refused… Then this Captain ordered me: “In the name of the martyrs, shoot him!” When they say that, when they say “in the name of the martyrs”, it is very difficult to refuse.
Back at the base camp Yosief was punished with the helicopter exercise. I ask whether disobeying could have meant risking his life, but he says: “No, for disobeying they don’t kill you but they punish you severely”. Yosief was sent back to the Navy HQ in Dahlak, where he discovered that his family had been sending messages and trying to reach him. He asked for permission to go to Asmara. Arriving home he found his mother and grandmother were both not at home and sensed something was not right.
Many people were around and I knew someone had died. I sat drinking coffee with our neighbours and friends and then I saw my mother coming, she was crying... then I discovered it was my younger brother who had died. I couldn’t believe it was him... I was supposed to stay with my mother for thirty days or more, that’s our tradition of mourning, but I only stayed for three days. Then I went back to Dahlak.
Yosief was “very angry” with the Captain who had kept the news from him. He says: “Can you imagine, my brother had died and they sent me to the war!” He went to confront his superior about it and says he was determined to kill him: “I was so annoyed, also because he didn’t apologise to me. And I had just come from the war, at that time my mind was not good”. He describes how he reached the Navy base, and how he set off to go and get his gun from the barracks.
It was a far distance I had to walk to go and get my gun, like from here to Yolé!Africa. The Navy camp is a very big place. I walked… the sun was very strong. In that place it can be up to 48 degrees. I sat down. That was the moment I started thinking. If I kill him and I will be killed or jailed, that is another hurt for my grandmother and my mother. It was the long distance that made me not kill that Captain.
It is this episode, which still visibly pains him, that Yosief brings up as his principal reason for deserting from the army. The resentment he expresses at the insensitive manner in which this delicate family matter was handled, underlines the observations of several authors about the conflicts that have arisen between today’s youth and the veterans of the war for liberation. Eritrean youth have been told that they owe their service because of the debts they have incurred to the generations of fighters who ‘gave them their country’. However, young (educated) Eritreans who are no longer “overawed by the nationalist mystique” (Hedru 2003: 439) start to reject some of these expectations and obligations. Dorman (2005) claims that by doing so they fundamentally challenge the way in which youth, the military, service and sacrifice are symbolically linked in Eritrea’s political culture. 150 Narratives
Lopithi Igom: commanders and bodyguards, educated and uneducated
When Lopithi talks to me about the war in southern Sudan that he has escaped from after ten years of serving the SPLA, he also organises his account around the social dynamics of the war, rather than elaborating about battles or the details of wartime violence. He speaks of the relationships between commanders and recruits, between army and civilians, and about his bond with his bodyguards and fellow soldiers. On the relationships of the young fighters among themselves, he says:
Sometimes, when you see a young colleague of yours lying down, slain by bullets and so on, it becomes very sad. You start to feel sad, sad to miss another dear comrade at the front line. In fact it was very possible we could shoot ourselves, just when I see a dear friend of mine, you know, falling down during an assault, during the attack, falling down… In fact it was possible for me to even commit suicide, I could turn my pistol onto my chest and then I shoot myself, then I die. Because what you feel is, “Why, why they, why not others, why…?” And you realise that the adults often are not in the front line, that it is only the young ones.
Are there children or young soldiers who do kill themselves, who commit suicide because they are too scared or too sad or …
Oh yes, there are many of them who commit suicide. And most of them do it during an attack, when they see large numbers of their colleagues lying down, killed by the snapping bullets of the enemy. Some commit suicide by just running towards the enemy... you know, randomly without reasoning, so they die there. Some go with grenades inside the tanks of the enemy and they commit suicide with the enemy. Some of them on the way coming back [from battle] just shoot themselves. Many of them did that at the front line. And it’s basically for having lost their dear friends, their colleagues.
Were you ever close to doing that?
Yes, I had three attempts. The first was during one of the operations in 1992, in N. I was brought to be a radio technician, installing the radios, the communication system and so on at the front line. In that place, there was a huge attempt to recapture the whole of Eastern Equatoria. We knew the enemy was attacking and we were frustrated, because our force was smaller. There I lost three colleagues of mine, officers, 1st Lieutenants, with their bodyguards. And these were officers who had been very close to me during the time we spent in the Cadets. We were advancing assault, we were on a jeep, and their jeep was ahead of us. Their jeep came at the range of what we call 106… this is a big gun, you know, made in Russia. And the shell took off their jeep, blew up their jeep, all of them including the driver, the gunner, the officers and their bodyguards. We just saw it, one minute the shell took over the jeep and the next minute it had disappeared in the flames. And we were following them, single files… so the second shell came over us and fell behind. And with this anger, because I was in direct command of the jeep, I told the officers, the driver and the bodyguards with me, I told them: “Let us attack the position of this big gun!” They said: “No, this is suicide!” I said: “Let us attack, what is our difference with those people who died? There is no difference, let us attack.” And they refused, they refused and I just pulled the pistol, I wanted to shoot myself. Then they caught me. One of them kicked the pistol from my hand and they tied me on the jeep, and they injected me. Because we have this medicine, this drug… So they injected me and I slept until the operation was finished and then one of them came to explain to me why they had tied me. Soldiers 151
When Lopithi recounted this incident, he added that at the time he was still relatively inexperienced with the realities of war and unaware of all that was to come. In subsequent years, Lopithi made several promotions, but also grew increasingly critical of the SPLA politics and actions. He attended NGO workshops on gender and the rehabilitation of wounded soldiers, and was sent as an SPLA delegate to a two weeks’ Human Rights course facilitated by ICRC in Kenya – remembers: “I was the only one in uniform, I liked the discussions, it changed my attitude”. In January 1999, Lopithi was arrested as a result of a “provocative argument” with fellow officers about the violence that the SPLA was engaged in against the Didinga tribe in Chukudum, east of Torit.31 He phrases his account of this traumatic experience in terms of the differences between educated and uneducated officers, and focuses on his bond with his bodyguards.
You see, there was a war between the SPLA and some tribes. The SPLA had withdrawn forces from the ground to go and fight that tribe, the Didinga, with the intention of annihilating them, simply because there had been a misunderstanding between one commander, a Dinka, and the people in that village. They had started shooting, killing, raping and, you know, looting people’s properties, shooting their cattle… So these civilians brought a protest to Dr. John Garang about which Dr. John Garang did nothing. So the civilians thought, “Ah, this is becoming personal…”. So they got rid of that commander. The Movement was very quick to respond to his death by dispatching commando units to go and fight with this tribe. They’ve been fighting this tribe for at least six months.
Lopithi was on assignment near M. and received orders to release some of his convoys and send them to Chukudum to back up the fighting. He was against it. He did not want to fight “a private war”, and besides needed his forces because “we were in such a strategic place, the enemy was just across the river, in the morning we took tea with them by shelling each other”.
I called the officers and I told them: “This is the message I received, I want to convey it to you so that you won’t say I haven’t told you, let us discuss this message and see what we can do about it”. And I told them: “This is not my idea, I am opposed to it. Our enemies are here, let us finish our war with the Arabs. Let us forget… let us not fight a tribally motivated, private war, which will bring more bloodshed between the Equatorians and the Dinkas”. I told them I opposed the idea. But as we were discussing I found out that two-thirds of them were people who were thirsty.
People who were…?
Thirsty - who were thirsty to kill civilians. They were undisciplined. I said: “Well…” I found myself as the only officer who had come from the Cadets. I couldn’t compete with them, who had been locally recruited and trained. What I was trying to say to them was from the perspective of the military administration and human side of…
You mean to say they didn’t understand you?
They didn’t. Because if you talk too much administrative language with them, they tend to look at you as controversial. But I told them, “Look, we cannot go and fight a tribally motivated war triggered by an individual. That problem needs a local solution. Let it not bring war between civilians and the army”. The officers just 152 Narratives
kept quiet. We continued our meeting until twelve o’clock midnight. The first shelling started and we stopped the meeting and we said we will resume tomorrow. We responded to the shelling, we even assaulted them, pushed them back. Then we came back. And then… these guys had the courage to send three officers, armed with AK47s to attack me in my tent! I was sleeping in my tent, as we do in the front line, you don’t remove your shoes, you don’t even remove your combat belt. They came at night and my bodyguards were outside. I started calling them but they didn’t respond, they had been arrested already. So I came out. “Hands up!” “What’s happening?” “You are under arrest!” “Who arrested me?” “Orders from the above!” So they took me to prison, this horrible … I was locked, buried under the ground. They beat me, lashed me, they pierced my private parts with a needle. But at the general headquarters they didn’t know I was in prison.
Four months later, mid May 1999 Lopithi was still in prison “for further interrogation”. He had been transferred to Lobone, near the Ugandan border. Two more officers were arrested on the same issue and kept in next-door cells.
They stayed for only one day. The following day they were executed. I didn’t know this. But the day after they disappeared there was a change of the guards. And I was surprised to see a face I knew, this boy from the Nuba Mountains who had been under my command, my bodyguard. He saw me, ah… he didn’t want to acknowledge knowing me because it would have brought replacement immediately. So he just kept quiet. In fact he showed his bad face to me, even aggressed me. Then in the evening he brought me a nice meal … because you know, the interrogation involved denial of food for 36 hours, before the interrogation, the needles… and then of course we looked at each other. He came in the night, he had prepared food and brought me a mat. He sat down. The first thing he did was cry. Because he knew I was scheduled. I told him: “Listen, don’t do that, you are still young. What is the problem? Are you surprised to see me in prison? We knew this could happen”. And he said: “Do you know where your colleagues are?” I said: “Why, what happened to them? They disappeared?” And he said: “If indeed they are ghosts by now, what are the chances of you living tomorrow?” He said that if I didn’t trust him, there would be nobody to trust the next day. The next morning he took me for a bathe in a stream. I was on tyre sandals. He walked with me up to the border, all the time praying we would not run into SPLA patrols. We walked through the forest for one full day, armed with one pistol and three grenades. Once we reached the border I argued with Kamal, tried to persuade him to stay with me for his own security, that he would not be safe if he returned. But he insisted to go back. His wife was expecting and he said he couldn’t leave her alone.
When Lopithi relates this story to me in November 1999, six months after his escape to Uganda, it visibly troubles him that he still does not know what had happened to his bodyguard. I ask why Kamal was prepared to take such risks for him. He says because they had been together for a long time. He says he “got” them, Kamal and another young boy, when just after his military training eight years earlier he passed through a minor’s camp. Lopithi was twenty-one at the time. He says: “They were weak and sickly and I shed tears when I saw them so weak, because they were from the Nuba Mountains and fighting a war that was not theirs”. He stayed with them for some time, “sharing my rations”, then left them in the care of the commander of that training camp when he had to go for the Officer Cadet training. When he returned he found them “recovered and self-confident”. They became his bodyguards. He speaks of them affectionately, uses the word ‘love’ when he speaks of his attachment to them. “They were with me when I was wounded, I was in their hands. And they gave me a good fire to avoid that I was captured by the enemy”. Soldiers 153
When Kamal left Lopithi at the Ugandan border, he was, Lopithi thinks, eighteen years old.32
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Peters & Richards, who write about Sierra Leone, observe that young fighters who are separated from their kin, are “fiercely loyal” to their bra [Krio, lit. ‘big brother’], the officer responsible for recruiting and training them (1998: 186). The Sierra Leonean army operated as a ‘personalised system’, with a typical patron-client relationship between commanders and the young ‘irregulars’. Under the given circumstances, Peters argues, this was a profitable relationship for both parties – even though the ‘client’ ran a greater risk of facing serious problems, for example if the commander died or a dispute arose between them. Besides, when the war was coming to an end, many commanders abandoned ‘their boys’, much to the disappointment and anger of the irregulars “who considered the ties as ever- lasting, having fought together and survived for many years” (2005: 278). Peters concludes: “To the younger irregulars, the commander was probably considered as a substitute for lost family, but the older and more experienced ones consciously evaluated whether or not the relationship was beneficial to them” (2005: 293). Wani and Samuel both worked as bodyguards in the Sudanese war, and both young men confirm the strong bonds that exist in the SPLA between commanders and their bodyguards. Wani explains these primarily in utilitarian terms:
The commander always makes sure he treats you well so that you will protect him. He gives you of his food, from his own plate, and he makes sure you have a good- looking uniform, so that you are respected. Being smart is very important in the army, it earns you respect, or even promotion.
After his three months of military training in Moroto, Wani, who was 12 years old, was selected to become a bodyguard to the commander in charge of the training camp. Wani is clear about his feelings of the time: he was “very disappointed” to be appointed as bodyguard, he wanted to fight and prove his courage, like all other boys. But he had no say in this and was taken to Kajokeji town to guard his superior’s residence, which he remembers as “a big house with a very big compound”. After a few weeks there, enjoying “the good food and good sleep”, his disappointment vanished and “I was ok”. Wani was one of fifteen bodyguards staying with the same commander. His task was to screen all visitors coming to the house, ask them the reasons of their visits, order them to put their hands up while checking for possible weapons they carried. When I show my surprise at the fact that he, as a child, had to give orders to adults, he says:
Yes, I was still a child, but I was not the youngest, some of the bodyguards were not even ten. Adults fear the young ones very much, because they always do what their superiors tell them. We’ve learned that’s why they recruit young boys.
The few times that Samuel, the young man abducted from his school in Juba, referred to the war without me asking about it, it was always in terms of his relationship with his commander. Two excerpts from my field notes:
Samuel: “My commander liked me very much. Because I was always ready to do what he asked from me and because I could speak some English. I used to show him around whenever he came to visit the front lines. I would go and get ammunition, do some calculations for him. One day I fired the tank that came 154 Narratives
running straight at him. He immediately promoted me and gave me a rank, so then I had two”.
Samuel in his diary: “I am someone who can forgive others, but if I become annoyed with [someone] it will be at once. Then if I forget of the problem I cannot mind of it again. I worked as [an] army [man] but I would not kill someone without problem, unless when it is during crossfire or if I am being told by the commander to do so. My commander loved me very much because I do what he wants me to do”.
I asked Samuel whether his commander was like his father. His answer was unambiguous:
No, he was not like my father. My commander liked me because of the work I did at the front line. My father liked me very much because I am his son. He always used to do whatever I asked him, he always planned for me. Before I joined school, he used to take me everywhere. But my commander couldn’t plan for me.
4. SOLDIERS IN EXILE: LIFE IN KAMPALA
I myself was no witness to the circumstances of military training and the war situations discussed above. I got to know Samuel, Lopithi, Wani, Yosief and many other ex-fighters in Kampala, their place of refuge, far away from the front lines. My aim was to learn about the impact of their past lives as combatants, and to understand how they dealt not only with their experience of, and responsibility for, violence and death, but also with the challenges of a return to civilian society. This section deals with their lives in Kampala. Because they do not usually flaunt their soldier identity, it is impossible to say exactly how many of the refugees in Kampala are former soldiers. As for the Sudanese young men, there is reason to assume that a great majority of them had had at least some level of involvement with the SPLA. Several of my discussion partners confirmed this, plainly stating that “all Sudanese men in Kampala are soldiers”. They distinguished between those who had deserted from the army and more or less lived in hiding, and the children of SPLA commanders sent to Kampala to study and be safe. As for Eritrean young men, my contacts with them were limited. The number of Eritrean refugees in Kampala increased significantly only towards the end of the Ethiopia-Eritrea border war (late 2000) and especially thereafter. When I visited Kampala in December 2004, I was told that the majority of young Eritrean refugees (both men and women) were ex-soldiers or draft- dodgers, but I had no means of verifying this. In Kampala there are no rehabilitation programmes, and demobilised soldiers live like any other refugee. Some make their presence known to UNHCR and/or the government, many do not. Some are relieved to have left behind their ‘fighter community’, for others this is a very ambiguous reality. Generally, their main concern is how to get by and where to get money for food and rent, and school fees. They have traumas to deal with, yet the demands of working for daily survival leave little time for reflection. Like all young refugees I met though, these ex-soldiers think and worry about the future in terms of their position in society and their desire to raise a family. For ex-SPLA fighters a major issue was their personal security. Uganda’s long-standing support to and cooperation with the army they had deserted from, required constant vigilance. High-ranking SPLA officers regularly visited Kampala for political meetings or to see their families for whom they had secured homes far away from the Sudanese warfront. Rank-and-file soldiers were afraid to be spotted by these visiting commanders; high profile deserters feared being tracked down Soldiers 155 by SPLA intelligence. After all, it had been drilled into them that escape or desertion meant firing squad.33 They were on their own, without social networks to help them deal with the unfamiliar realities of city life. It was in this challenging context that the ex-soldiers used their common sense, agency and possibly some of the skills learnt in wartime, to rebuild their lives. This section focuses on Lopithi and Samuel. Wani’s and Yosief’s experiences of daily life in Kampala will be narrated in the following two chapters on students and artists.
4.1 Lopithi Igom
The great majority of refugees residing in Kampala do so without having access to any form of humanitarian assistance. An exception to this are people on UNHCR’s ‘urban caseload’, which in 1999/2000 included about five hundred individuals selected on the basis of criteria of ‘vulnerability’. Among the ‘vulnerables’ were so-called ‘security cases’, that is, people who could not be effectively protected in Uganda’s rural refugee settlements. Lopithi, because he was a high-profile SPLA deserter seriously at risk in Uganda, was labelled as such. He was housed in the Salvation Army hostel where, apart from ‘security cases’, people from the settlements who were in Kampala for medical treatment were also accommodated by UNHCR. This hostel, located in a residential area some forty-five minutes by matatu from the city centre, was supposed to be a secret and safe place, that nobody was to enter or leave without the guard’s notification. I remember it as enormously depressing. Entering the gate, one would find children, half-dressed, sitting listless on the drive or on the patches of grass that were the hostel’s garden. Inside, regardless of the time of day, people were lying down, asleep or awake, on mats in the corridors. There were not enough rooms for the individuals and families accommodated; meals were provided but always an issue of contention. The generally edgy atmosphere was hardly surprising given the presence of individuals from Congo, Rwanda and Sudan, unfamiliar with each other and all traumatised and to a greater or lesser degree fearing for their personal security. When I visited Lopithi, we always left the hostel to find a more private place to talk. Often this was the outside eating-place at the Shell petrol station, a fifteen-minute walk up the murram road lined with small shops selling all daily necessities from fresh chapattis to washing powder. On days that Lopithi had appointments with UNHCR or InterAid we met in town, and twice he came to my house in Kibuli. Lopithi had entered a different and to a large extent unfamiliar world: being out of what he called ‘the bush’, he was in civilian clothes for the first time in ten years. He had to socialise with and explain himself to people who did not know what it meant to be at the front lines, or to deal with the responsibilities that come with fighting a war. “If you’ve never had such a life before, you find that civilian life is very difficult”, he said. “Your language is military. It makes people fear you”. Lopithi was used to being listened to – “I used to get things before I even asked for it” - but now had no power to demand anything and given the way his case was handled by UNHCR, he felt a nonentity, reliant on the whims of charity. Well aware of the SPLA presence in Kampala, he felt insecure and feared to be located. Besides, the war was still very much present within him.
I remember coming for an appointment with him one afternoon in August 1999. He is not the solid and resolute person I have come to know over the first few weeks of our acquaintance. He sits on his bed, looks disturbed and trembles. With a hint of embarrassment he tells me he had a very bad night, plagued by nightmares and “a feeling that my back was breaking.” He says: “The agonies and memories of the war are coming back to me at night”. Apparently he screamed and his roommates “had to tie me down”. The fact that he can remember so little of it distresses him. Lopithi received treatment 156 Narratives from a psychiatrist at the African Centre for the Treatment of Torture Victims (ACTV). I accompanied him there a few times. From my notes after one such visit:
He is not satisfied with his treatment. Says that the psychiatrist keeps asking him questions instead of giving him advice. He said to Lopithi: “These things are just temporary, go back to the war, you are the type of African we don’t want to lose”.34 Lopithi asked the psychiatrist whether that was the only advice he could give him after all his years of expensive study! He is pleased though with the medication. He needs it. Is taking the tablets and they do help, but there are problems with the food supplies at the hostel: meals don’t come at set times, or are skipped altogether, which disrupts his taking the drugs.
Lopithi was diagnosed as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and panic attacks. He gave me a copy of his ‘mental status examination’, suggesting that it might be useful for my research:
This revealed a young-looking 29 year old man who was very articulate in describing his problems and those of Southern Sudan. He was not psychotic but mildly depressed. His cognition and judgement were intact. He was not suicidal nor homicidal. He was emotionally pre-occupied with the problems of Southern Sudan and the strategy to liberate it.
During our early meetings Lopithi indeed spoke mainly of the war he had left, but in subsequent months he started focusing more and more on his situation in Kampala. Early September 1999 was the first time he admitted regretting having left Sudan and the war. He said:
This is the worst part of life I have known so far. I feel totally defenceless, unlike when I was in the jungle. I think one day I’ll do it, it’s very easy… just pull the trigger, two seconds and you’re gone, everything is finished.
I could not look into his mind and know what the exact thoughts or feelings were that made him be so desperate. It was clear though that his being disconnected from his former life, and the fact that nothing meaningful had replaced it, proved increasingly difficult to bear. The issues that he spoke about with particular urgency, were his personal security and his interaction with UNHCR.
Late November 1999, I have been away to Dublin and Amsterdam and it is six weeks since Lopithi and I last met. We have come to Kabira Club – swimming pool, tennis courts and restaurant - which is located on the same side of town as the Salvation Army hostel and which Lopithi considers a safe place to talk. We have a look in the pretty, jam-packed gift shop. Parents arrive to collect their children from the international school on the same premises. Among them is the wife of UNHCR’s Junior Protection Officer, who comes for her little boy and girl. I once watched a Dutch match in the World Championships at her house, but am no longer in contact with her husband because of our differing views and his, in my opinion, professional incompetence. She does not recognise me. We receive curious glances from other parents and the waitress. Lopithi and I – he is not tall, but his muscular build makes him appear double my size – are conversing seriously, tape recorder on the table, sharing a plate of chicken and chips. From my notes:
L. updates me about his “process” with UNHCR – his disappointment and frustration are growing – then relates the incidents that have happened and which emphasise his insecurity in Kampala. He saw a car in town, the Pajero with a New Soldiers 157
Sudan number plate that belongs to his commander. He considers himself very lucky not to have been spotted. But he is more worried by the fact that one evening two “SPLA boys” were brought to the Salvation Army by the ICRC to spend the night. They had been arrested in September 1998 for selling pistols (to earn their way back to Sudan) and served over a year in Luzira prison. They recognised L. and asked about his plans and why he was in Kampala. They did not know of his detention and escape from the army and Lopithi lied to them that he would be coming back to “the field” soon. He fears the boys may have gone to the SRRA35 office in Kampala before leaving for Sudan and will have mentioned meeting him.
A few weeks later when I visit the Salvation Army hostel, I find Lopithi in his room sharing a jackfruit with Pontianus, the guard hired by UNHCR, and Claude, his roommate from Burundi. They welcome me enthusiastically and invite me to a taste of the slimy fruit. From my research diary:
We discuss an incident that occurred last night in B’s office, at which both Claude and I were present. They speak of their disapproval of how all refugee offices work: no concern for privacy, everything is said in front of everybody, and the rushing and jumping to conclusions. They believe it is typical American behaviour, and Lopithi says “these fucking Americans” – a phrase he’s never before used in my presence. Mentions his appointment yesterday with the lady from Human Rights Watch at Speke Hotel, laughs ironically and says he will tell me about it later. Says: “These Germans and Americans are so arrogant”. And then: “God made three mistakes: the Arabs, the Jews, and the flies!” I have never heard him so aggressive in his tone as this morning. Edgar, Evelyn’s little boy walks into the room. He has a bad burn on his wrist: happened last Thursday at the JRS Christmas celebrations where his mother helped prepare the food. Lopithi: “I wish it was my wife who did that to the child, then she would have really got it…”
Pontianus listens attentively and is rather amused at Lopithi and Claude venting their frustrations. He seems familiar with this mood of theirs more than I am. I feel unpleasantly closed in. When the jackfruit is finished, I suggest to Lopithi that we leave the hostel compound. Caude walks with us. Both know I am going to Tanzania in early January with a consultancy team evaluating the work of TCRS in the camps for refugees from Burundi.36 They sound rather sceptical about the project and warn me about the security situation in western Tanzania. When I take their words lightly they insist: “Ellen, you must take care, life is not bought in the market!” Claude leaves us and Lopithi and I sit in a small noisy bar near the main road. The first thing he mentions is that ESO personnel (the Ugandan government’s External Security Organisation) paid an unexpected visit to the hostel last Wednesday. Lopithi happened to be out at the time.
M: the names of all people present were taken and all rooms inspected. P. (the guard) at first refused them entrance, argued they had to ask UNHCR for permission. ESO response: “This is Uganda, no need to ask UNHCR!” Lopithi says the Protection Officer told him to be careful, and preferably spend his days outside the hostel (so much for a ‘security’ hostel!) … He still looks nervous but as the afternoon goes by, speaks less agitatedly and gradually becomes his considered, measured self. When I get up to leave L. starts saying a few things about the war. That his heart is still with the people and that it is a pity he has temporarily fallen out with the SPLA/M, but that from wherever he will be resettled (“resettlement is not forever”) he will continue to work and struggle for his people. Says: “I’m one of very few senior officers from my tribe, which means I am responsible.” He will stay in the bar for a couple more hours, reading the dailies and Nevil Shute’s On the 158 Narratives
Beach – one of several books I bought at Lincoln International School’s jumble sale. When I say goodbye he says: “Now if something happens to me, I think you can be the one to write my biography”.
Three months later Lopithi was attacked on Kampala Road. Four Sudanese men beat him to the ground, kicked him in his chest and head. A policeman intervened but the assailants escaped. This is only one concrete example of how the war in southern Sudan spilled over into Kampala. Exactly how it worked, I felt at the time, was difficult to grasp. I went to see Lopithi at the hostel, he was down with a bad headache and his one comment was: “It’s what I told you, life is bloody cheap”. From this attack, and a similar incident that happened earlier, it is clear that UNHCR’s protection capability had its flaws. While UNHCR acknowledged that Kampala was unsafe for Lopithi and therefore strongly advised him not to move around town, they made no special arrangements and expected him to travel to their offices by his own means. It was at these very offices that SPLA intelligence personnel were known ‘visitors’. Lopithi became increasingly frustrated with his dealings with the UNHCR and InterAid staff. He felt left in limbo, and totally out of control of his own life. The security situation did not allow him to look for work – “I’m jobless, I have no assignments like I used to have” - yet apart from accommodation and meals provided at the hostel, he received no allowance for transport, communication or any other needs. The situation at the hostel worsened towards the end of 1999. People felt insecure and letdown and antagonisms among the refugees ensued. Lopithi said he often found his mattress upside down and though he had wanted to read the transcripts of our conversations that I printed out for him, he had nowhere to keep them safe. All along UNHCR assured Lopithi they were looking into resettling him to a third country, but little progress was made and the process was notoriously non-transparent, with no indication at all as to the likely timeframe. One day when I met up with Lopithi after he had come from yet another visit to UNHCR, he said: “I want you to know that people are different. I never thought these things could happen in a reputable organisation like UNHCR”. As an afterthought he added, “And the worst thing is they are not concerned with your well- being, they never ask how you are doing”. An entry of my research diary, mid February 2000, reads:
Lopithi v. frustrated about UNHCR: he met A. [Senior Protection Officer] at InterAid, who starts asking him questions in the reception area (where everybody is all ears and eyes). Lopithi asks if they can speak in private - response: “What do you need privacy for?” A. lets him into his office, doesn’t invite him to sit down. He asks Lopithi why he is always protesting… “first in Juba as a student, then in the Movement, and now again here”. Lopithi tells him he is not protesting, but has only come to hear about the progress on his case. Answer: “There is something in the pipeline but I cannot as yet tell you what it is”. L. waited from 9 am until 4.30 pm to receive this information. Says: “I want to know what their position is regarding my protection. Are they still protecting me? Being under the care of UNHCR gives you some strength. People will not go for you straight. But if they no longer agree to protect me, I cannot stay here. It’s not safe and I don’t want to become a hostage of their bureaucracy. I am not asking them for favours, why should I belittle myself? I have never asked them for a single coin”. I am reminded of what a Kenyan refugee said to me the other day: “The staff of UNHCR and InterAid, they make you feel as if they are paying you from their own pockets!”
One more subject large on Lopithi’s mind was his family and relatives. Lopithi was married and had a young son, whom he spoke of longingly but whom, he realised, barely knew his father because his periods of leave from the army had been so few and erratic. The process of getting in touch with his wife in Sudan and eventually being reunited with her and his Soldiers 159 son was fraught with difficulties, and I have chosen for ethical reasons not to write about it. Lopithi himself came from a family of thirteen children, some of whom, he learnt when he was in Kampala, were scattered around the globe. From an elder brother, who lived in the USA and whom he spoke to in 1999 for the first time in thirteen years, he learnt that his mother was in Egypt and one sister in Denmark. He was very excited to hear about his family. He wanted to find someone with a digital camera, said: “Ellen, what do you think, they need my photo urgently!” In a next phone call, his brother told Lopithi that his favourite sister had passed away not long ago. She was the sister with whom Lopithi lived when he was schooling in Juba, who used to spoil her little brother, but whose advice he had ignored. I knew the story of how his sister had sensed that he was thinking of joining the SPLA and how she had pleaded with him not to do so. Lopithi was deeply disturbed and said: “I loved her very much. But she died with the bad feeling that her brother didn’t reciprocate the love she felt for him”. She left behind four children, who stayed with their grandmother in Egypt, and a husband who was in prison in Khartoum. Lopithi said, “I wish you could look into my heart now. It is all worries. I don’t even notice whether I’m eating or not. Well there’s no food at the hostel anyway.” It turned out that keeping in touch with his siblings and mother was not easy. Lopithi had no means of contacting them: no money for emails or airtime. I sent a few messages on his behalf and gave his brother my number. Top on Lopithi’s wish list that late 1999 were a box with a lock, a mobile phone, and a world receiver.
4.2 Samuel Alim
Samuel is not a high profile deserter like Lopithi, but a former frontline fighter. Kampala is home to many ex-SPLA soldiers like him, who choose the city because of its anonymity and physical distance from the refugee camps and the Sudanese war. As said, Samuel fled to Uganda because he feared for his life after two POW’s had escaped from the prison he had been given the responsibility to guard. He was given shelter in Rhino Camp in northern Uganda, but soon realised the high SPLA presence there, and when he spotted his own commander in the nearby Arua town, he straightaway left the refugee settlement and fled to Kampala. The reasons why rank-and-file soldiers are in hiding in Kampala are plenty - I was told: “because of criminal offences, like the theft of a generator”, “because they have slept with the wives or girlfriends of their commanders”, or, as Samuel put it, “some retire themselves because they are tired of fighting”. As far as PMO and UNHCR were concerned, Samuel still lived in Rhino Camp. He never asked for permission to leave the refugee settlement, and in order not to be found out kept his distance from the government and UNHCR offices in Kampala. Although Samuel had grown up in Juba, the largest town in southern Sudan, he said he would have been happy “to go and dig and build my house” in any rural area, and would not have come to Kampala if he had not felt that the refugee settlement in northern Uganda was unsafe for him. One day I asked him how it was to be in Kampala, where there was no war and where people could not read from his face what he had been through. He said: “When there is war, you adjust to war, when there is peace, you also adjust”. I had come to know Samuel as a sensitive and gentle young man; by no means someone presided over by indifference. But I realised the two do not clash: on certain days he may express indifference to being shot from behind, while on others he can be thrilled – as I saw him be - by holding someone’s newborn baby. Rather than unconcern, his was probably a practical and realistic attitude to the vicissitudes of his young life. In the refugee settlements, young men like Samuel work their shambas where they grow food for their consumption, or do leja leja for Ugandan farmers to earn a little bit of cash. In Kampala, where life is much more expensive, Samuel’s daily occupation was 160 Narratives looking for odd jobs to pay for food and rent. He lived – after first having spent several nights outside at the IAU veranda - with a loose group of young men, all ex-SPLA soldiers. The agreement was for all of them to contribute to the household expenses. Most early mornings Samuel left the area where they stayed and would spend just under an hour walking to the city centre, where he would try and find a job at one of the many construction sites. The chances of finding work on an average day were about fifty-fifty, and not always earned him cash, at times just a plate of food for lunch. Samuel kept a diary and shared this with me.
26 December 1999. Today is Sunday. I move around and fail to get work. I come back by 3 pm and I remain sleeping in the room.
27 December 1999. It rains throughout from morning to 12 pm. From 1 pm I move around and fail to get work. At 9 pm the landlord comes and he tells us he doesn’t know us, that we are not the boys with whom he made the agreement. We tell him those colleagues are now in the camp. He gave us three days to find a new room. By Thursday he may lock our room. And he doesn’t want any excuses.
28 December 1999. We move around looking for the new house. We also receive a visitor from the camp. I go to the well to wash my clothes and I buy shoe polish.
29 December 1999. We have divided into two and move into different directions looking for a new house. The landlord has forgiven us and given us three more days.
30 December 1999. We get a house but the owner of the house asks the advancement of three months. I find work cutting sacks. I receive 1000 USh, that is from 11 am to 6 pm.
1 January 2000. I go to church, from 9 am to 1 pm. Then up to sunset I remain inside sleeping.
4 January 2000. I arrive home at 5 pm and I find the whole place is full of water from the rainfall.
5 January 2000. We remain at home from 6 am to 11 am pushing water from the room and from the gate. My mattress remains wet and very dirty because I sleep on the floor and the rain came when I was not at home. At 11 am I start moving in the city looking for jobs but they are telling me that I have to come the following day because I am late.
And so it goes on. I remember leafing through these pages in Kampala, but rereading them years later, in Amsterdam, the sore monotony that emanates from his scribble feels even more disheartening. Some pages further on, a reflective moment that may help explain this young man’s stoic perseverance:
The life in Kampala is a bit good because here you cannot listen to any gun sound and you will not be commanded. You are free and if you work for someone, you will be rewarded. And here you cannot be wasted by the rainfall because you are inside. In our own country, the problems we face are because of the war. Before I became an army man I did not have many problems, because my parents did everything that was necessary. But when I became an army man I started to face difficulties. But even if I faced difficulties, it was because it was my job. So there is no need to blame anyone, because if you are an army man you have to suffer because it is your job. But in my case, I would say it was bad because I had no Soldiers 161
interest in becoming a soldier. It was the Sudanese government that had its plan of making some of us share the same suffering with others who were interested in it. In Kampala there is no war so that is good. I like Kampala because there is no war.
It is true that Samuel never complained. He seemed to take things matter-of-fact. It is not just his staccato way of jotting down his daily events that makes me think so, I remember it from when we used to meet and talk. On the other hand, clearly this is only half the truth: Samuel’s worries at that time were many. Indicative is what I wrote in my diary on 22 May 2000, a few days after my return from a month’s visit to Amsterdam.
My first day back ‘in the field’. I go to see Pam and Lisa at their new (tiny!) legal aid office in Nakasero. I bump into P. and Samuel. An enthusiastic ‘welcome back’ – and his first question: how long will you stay this time? Slightly upset when he finds out I never received his message: someone had promised to email me on his behalf. He looks tired and it strikes me how thin he is. He says there are no jobs and thus no food. He was staying with Jacob G. but there were too many people to accommodate. He worries about more and more Sudanese coming to Kampala. The Captain from Sector III is still in the same hostel as him, he avoids meeting him. He is still concerned about his health, joint pains and rashes on his skin. Says: “I worry about the pain I feel inside”. I ask whether in Sudan he was ever injured. In his unhurried, typically concentrated manner he rolls up one leg of his trousers: “You see, here, it was a bomb exploding. But it happened only once, God has been good to me”. He worries about the elections, what will happen if Museveni doesn’t win. He says LC officials have started stopping Sudanese on the streets, asking their names and whereabouts for registration: “I worry because I’m staying here illegally. What if they tell all the refugees to report to the place where they belong?” He didn’t eat anything yesterday, just drank water.
I wanted to do something for Samuel and asked my parents to assist in getting him back into school. He was twenty-one by the time he enrolled in Senior Two in Kampala - the average age of the pupils in his class was fourteen. I knew he felt the shorts he had to wear, the school uniform for the lower classes, were not quite on a par with his self-image. In my notes I find this one line:
He’s not only the eldest by far, but also a (slender) giant compared to his classmates. He shows me his school ID: he’s put his age at eighteen. He smiles.
By the time I left Kampala in 2001, Samuel was well settled into his new school rhythm, and after he had taken some computer classes, we started communicating through email. He wrote to me that he wanted to try and compete for the position of Head boy. However, already into his campaign, he was told by the school administration that as a non-Ugandan he was not eligible. Though on the face of it things seemed to be going well and he probably acted like any other student, Samuel remained apprehensive about his security situation. He was still an SPLA deserter. Security is an elusive concept, and the situation of the young SPLA deserters in Kampala, their chances of being caught, is hard to objectify. What the young men were fairly blunt about though, was what would be his fate would an escapee be caught. They said things like: “If these soldiers left their gun behind when they ran it’s ok, but if they left with their gun, the SPLA will still look for them. Kampala is not secure - slowly, slowly they will get them. They will be taken back to Sudan and killed, or put to the front lines if fighting is heavy”. Samuel formulated it this way:
If you go without proper document, without your departure order, you are to be killed. But if you are lucky you will be taken to prison, then you will be taken to the 162 Narratives
front line in a place far from where you were. If you are unlucky then you are likely to be killed.
In October 2002, when Samuel was preparing for his GCSE exams, he got news through the grapevine that his former commander was in Kampala. He wrote me a one-line email:
I have rented a room far away from the school around Makerere towards Bwaise on Kawempe Road in a very hidden place in order to avoid all contact with Sudanese.
In November of the same year he sat for his final exams, and a friend from school invited him home for Christmas. They travelled together to eastern Uganda. Three months later I visited Kampala, and together with Samuel looked for a school where he could start his A- levels.
Four months later, on 30 July, I received an email from Nairobi. A person had come to his school, on the outskirts of Kampala, with the information that he was again being looked for. Samuel abruptly decided to leave. He took a bus to the Kenyan border, which he crossed illegally on the back of a boda boda. He arrived at Akamba Bus Park in Nairobi in the evening, approached a young man who took him home and who later arranged for him to stay with a Sudanese lady awaiting family reunion with her husband, who had previously been resettled to the USA. The woman suggested that Samuel would look after her children during the day and in return let him stay in her spare room. Samuel had only brought a few shirts and a spare pair of trousers with him from Kampala, and had left his other properties (mattress, bed sheets, metal box with padlock, mosquito net, cup and plate) with his school friend. He emailed me this lady’s mobile number, and I asked him why he thought his commander was still looking for him. He said: “Because he loves me so much. Because of the herbal medicine he shared with me. It’s a sort of witchcraft in the head. He did it to me when I was his bodyguard. Because of all the battles we went through together. Because I saved his life during one of those”. It was one of those moments that brought home to me the message loud and clear: there is much about these young men’s lives that I may never come to understand - and Samuel was never one to lose himself in details. The line was bad, children were shouting in the background, it was a late afternoon in a lively Nairobi neighbourhood. First week of November 2003: Kenyan police arrested Samuel on charges of residing illegally in the country. I received an email with subject heading “sad news”:
I am really sorry to inform you about this. I was arrested and I was to be deported back to Uganda. And I was taken up to Busia that is the Uganda Kenya border. I have just come back this morning. I spent much to bribe the police to allow me to come back in Kenya. Anyway I am not feeling well right now I will write to you later.
In the meantime I had been corresponding to the UNHCR Kampala office to get their advice about Samuel’s situation. I had heard enough stories about the Kenyan police to know it was a matter of time before he would be found out. UNHCR Kampala responded: “He will have to go through the whole status determination procedure in Kenya. Likelihood of success may be limited as he was registered in Uganda and UNHCR in Uganda is not aware of any problems he faced”. True, in theory, Samuel should have reported the security incidents before packing for Nairobi. But in the end he had some luck: after countless trips to UNHCR, and one to Kakuma refugee camp in the far north- western corner of Kenya, Samuel was given refugee status in Kenya. Had he been less Soldiers 163 lucky he would have met a UNHCR staff bent on curtailing the ‘irregular movement’ of urban refugees, but quite miraculously he managed to slip through the net. However, his being ‘in transit’ was not over. 11 December 2003: I was in London, staying with my friend Lisa and enjoying SOAS library during daytime, reading and writing drafts of this book. In an idle moment - waiting for our Thai Curry delivery - I called and checked the voicemail of my Amsterdam landline, and listened to the message that was left a few days earlier. Samuel sounds distressed: could I please call a certain Mr Banda? I made out he was in Lusaka, Zambia, and that Mr Banda wanted money and that if not Samuel would go to prison. I called the number he left – and several variations to it - but it did not go through. One month later I heard what had happened:
Three people attacked me at night. They were neighbours, I recognised one of them. I couldn’t report to the police. They told me to turn my eyes down. They don’t realise I recognised them. I had a little money under my carpet, they didn’t find it. They took only my blanket.
The following day Samuel boarded a bus from Nairobi to the Tanzanian border, and from there another one to Dar es Salaam. He continued to Zambia. About to cross the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, he was caught by immigration officers. He spent one night in detention at the border before being transferred to Lusaka. Mr. Banda was an immigration officer who suggested that for US$ 250 he could be so kind as to let Samuel go – and was willing to let him use the office phone to organise for this cash. Samuel spent three nights in a cell at Lusaka Central Police. He was beaten and left with cigarette burns on his back. When no money was forthcoming, he was transferred to Kamwala Remind Prison. Together with nationals from several other countries - Cameroon, Ghana, Congo, Uganda and Kenya – he was detained on charges of being a PI (prohibited immigrant).
They took my shoes and jacket. The situation was very bad. There were more than two hundred people in one cell. We could sit only, there was no space to lie down. Every day from 9 till 4 we were outside in the compound. At 4.30 we got supper, then they sent us back to the cells until morning time. There were nights that three people died.37
A UNHCR official visited the prison (a routine check on refugee detainees?) and interviewed Samuel. He suggested Samuel could go to one of Zambia’s refugee camps. Samuel agreed and was told to wait until further notice. Shortly after, a Zambian human rights spokesperson visited the prison with a list of PIs to be released and returned to their countries of origin. Samuel was on the list - he said: “People in my cell clapped for me when my name was called”. Samuel was put on a plane to Nairobi – his first ever travel by air – together with other PIs and accompanied by a representative of the same organisation. In Nairobi, he went back to his landlord and requested to rent a different room outside the area where he had lived. He wrote to me the same day. The Sudanese woman with whom he had initially stayed, had left Samuel with her Kenyan SIM-card when she departed to the USA and Samuel borrowed his landlord’s mobile phone so we could talk. His cough sounded awful and he admitted to feeling ill and weak. Halfway our conversation Samuel said he knows he is being a burden and that he should not be at his age, but Nairobi is cold at night and is there any chance I could send him money to buy a blanket? 164 Narratives
JubaJuba Sudan
Ethiopia
Maridi ToritTorit YeiYei Magwe KakumaKakuma KobokoKoboko AruaArua Somalia Uganda Kenya
KampalaKampala Mpigi NairobiNairobi
D.R.Congo
Tanzania DarDar eses SalaamSalaam
Zambia 0 450 900 LusakaLusaka Zimbabwe kilometers
5. REFLECTIONS ON WAR AND EXILE
Before and after military service you are not the same. Those who were lazy before became hardworking after. Some started working in construction, which before they used to consider “cheap work”. This change is a positive thing about the National Service. A bad thing is the death you see. After military service you don’t cry anymore, even if before you had a light heart. You don’t cry, you don’t reflect it on your face, but you feel it from inside. The Fighters say it’s because you are becoming strong … It is good to have been a soldier before going into exile, because you have seen much, and exile becomes a very easy thing. Those who came straight from the house into exile, they complain. But for us, in the army we learned to accept change.
These are Yosief’s words. I ask him whether he would want his four-year-old son Finhas, when he grows up, to have this experience and “become strong”. The expression on his face changes, his tone of voice urgent.
Finhas? No, I want him to be innocent. In truth, you don’t even want your enemy to pass through that situation! You tell yourself that you became strong and that it was ok. But it was very bad. It’s like that, I’m fooling myself. With complaining there is no solution, so that’s why sometimes we feel it’s better to fool ourselves.
The last section will discuss how the ex-soldiers, from the vantage point of living as refugees in Kampala, reflected on the war they had been involved in and on the effects of this involvement on their present and future lives and their self-perception. Soldiers 165
5.1 Proving manhood
“Worthy men are no more”, Okwonko sighed as he remembered those days. “Isike will never forget how we slaughtered them in that war. We killed twelve of their men and they killed only two of ours. Before the end of the fourth market week they were suing for peace. Those were days when men were men”.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 2001 [1958], p.145.
Traditionally, in the societies that the ex-fighters of this chapter come from, it is the role of young men to defend and protect their communities. This is so for the Nuer, the people that Jacob, who walked all the way to Ethiopia with the hope of going to school, belongs to (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 1990 [1951], Hutchinson 1996) as well as for the Dinka. About the latter, who are the largest group in southern Sudan and prominent within the SPLA,38 Jok (2005: 150) writes:
“It is only when a child matures and begins to develop the unique kin bonds acquired at birth through generosity with his labour and his ability to come forward to protect his people and property that he acquires the status of a real man” (see also Deng 1984).
Lopithi is from a society – the Lokoya - whose social and political organisation is based on the monyomiji graded age-set system (Kurimoto 1998, Lako 1995, Simonse 1998). Monyomiji is the name of the ruling middle-aged grade, and means ‘fathers’ or ‘owners’ (monye) of the village (amiji). Its members have political, military and legal authority and are responsible for maintaining law and order, assuring the security and welfare of the village, as well as for the community’s moral integrity and its harmony with cosmic forces. About once every twenty years their authority is transferred to the junior generation in an ostentatious changeover ceremony. The juniors have to earn their take-over of power, and one way of proving their competence is through military feats and “a show of bravery in the face of the enemy” (Simonse & Kurimoto 1998: 12). Up until this changeover, the aspiring youth, some of whom may be in their late twenties or even thirties, are considered ‘children’ vis-à- vis the ruling generation of monyomiji. Kurimoto writes:
“Youngsters have no say in the monyomiji’s decision-making and are the target of bullying. As they are the embodiment of the ‘warrior ethos’ they are often punished and fined by the monyomiji for their misbehaviour” (1998: 33; see also Simonse 1998: 66).
Lopithi tells me about the duties of the olojingat, those who are not yet initiated.
The monyomiji are the defence force of the village, in case of fire or any cry that is heard in the night. It’s important for the olojingat to go with them wherever they go, you always move behind them. Be close to them and learn from them, how they respond to a crisis. There is a whole list of things the olojingat have to do. Go to the mountains to trap animals, then dry them and present them to the monyomiji together with g-nut paste and four jerry cans of kwete, our local brew. And cultivate for old women whose husbands died, and lay our own gardens together with our age mates. Another task is to pass messages to other villages, even if in the middle of the night or if the grass is tall or if it rains. Some people would say those rites you have to go through to become monyomiji are mistreatment, but we believe it is a process of bringing us up with the realities of life. You feel happy.
166 Narratives
I asked Lopithi whether he saw similarities between the rituals of becoming a monyomiji, and the training for becoming a soldier. He says they are “quite different”. Though both entail “courage and tough decisions”, he says the village rituals do not include training. Training in his mind is Bilpham in Ethiopia. I did not include Lopithi’s experiences in the earlier discussion of SPLA training camps. Wani, who recounted his difficult months in Moroto, emphasised that everyone knows how much tougher the training camps in Ethiopia were than those later established inside Sudan. Lopithi’s recollections are indeed disturbing – and in stark contrast with his fond memories of ‘life and the rituals in the village’. The forty-five days ‘hunger lesson’ (one cup of grains per fesila per day); the ‘tree exercise’ to practice for parachute jumping that left many boys crippled; the sexual abuses of both boys and girls by the instructors and military police;39 and most upsetting to him, the boys who collapsed during endless parades, picked up by bulldozers and dumped in mass graves. Lopithi said: “Some of them hadn’t even died, but they were buried. You can hear them crying from there”. Though Lopithi denied similarities between the traditional initiations and those of the military, Kurimoto argues:
“age systems appear to have some common features with modern military organisations. The modern army, be it a national or guerrilla army, also has a well organised hierarchy, visible and spectacular ceremonies, songs and flags. Put in other words, age systems, the warrior ethos of young people, and the modern army have interacted and overlapped, forming a new, but tradition-based, politico- military culture” (1998: 49).
This is a sensitive area of discussion, especially when phrased in terms of whether the use of children in armed conflict in Africa can be attributed to ‘culture and tradition’. Honwana states:
“The issue of child soldiers cannot be explained in terms of Africa’s pre-colonial military history, nor does it have roots in African traditional culture. Rather, the phenomenon is rooted in the crisis of the post-colonial state in Africa. The crisis is reflected in ethnic conflicts over power sharing, identity, and access to resources; in the incapacity of the state to provide for and protect its citizens; and in the collapse of social and economic structures in rural areas and the massive migration to urban areas” (2002: 280-1).
Twum-Danso makes a similar statement: “If child soldiers can be linked to culture at all, then it is likely to be a global culture driven by socio-economic and political pragmatism” (2003: 46). Undeniably, today’s youth violence is directly linked to post-colonial crises and global inequalities. I too do not believe there is a causal link between culture and child soldiering. Besides, ‘traditional’ fighting and current full-scale frontline battle can in no way be equated. Jok, referring to Nuer and Dinka, speaks of the “progressive abandonment during this war of former restraints on regional patterns of intra- and inter-ethnic violence”, which used to be governed by “a complex set of ethics and religious taboos aimed at ensuring the immediate identification of the slayer and the payment of blood- wealth cattle compensation to the family of the deceased” (2005: 156).
“Both Nuer and Dinka men and women, old and young, spoke at length about specific Dinka/Nuer confrontations that occurred before this civil war as ‘the real wars’, the wars in which ‘the manhood’ of Nuer and Dinka men was tested. They characterised “today’s wars”, in contrast, as ones dominated by the gun: “Today’s wars are fought by cowards who kill defenceless women and children”” (Jok & Hutchinson 1999: 132).40
Soldiers 167
On the other hand, certain cultural traditions have been manipulated to contribute to contemporary patterns of violence. While an in-depth discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this study, it cannot be denied that the conceptual link between manhood and the ‘warrior ethos’ has played a part in contemporary participation in violence.41 Simonse (1998) and Kurimoto (1994) give examples from both rounds of civil war in Sudan to show that it was especially those not yet initiated who played a part in stirring up revolution (Torit mutiny of 1955) or who joined the SPLA (Pari youth in the 1980s), and that early resistance to colonial rule also came not so much from the monyomiji but from the aspiring juniors. Wani admits that already as a twelve-year-old he was influenced by this notion. When the “bigger people” encouraged him to leave the refugee camps in northern Uganda where they lived unprotected against rebel attacks, it was also because “as a man you are supposed to defend your people”.
In the villages where there is war, the young men are told: “What is wrong, are you all women, can’t you do something?” If you don’t want to join, you are called a woman, it doesn’t feel that good to be called a woman, it is annoying. Because in Sudan they think a woman can do nothing. And sometimes when boys are caught fleeing after an attack on a village or town… they are caught by SPLA soldiers who treat them badly, they are beaten or ordered to carry their food. They think: “Why am I beaten, why am I treated like a woman?”
For the young men it is not only a matter of proving their worth vis-à-vis the elders who expect them to defend the village, but also of peer pressure. It was often pointed out to me that young men who did not join felt inferior to their ‘brothers’ who carried guns and walked around in army boots. Without these, they said: “you undergo a lot of social problems” and “you are not respected”. Lopithi told me that when his chances for further education were blocked and he had to leave Juba, he contemplated retreating to a quiet life of farming in the village. But he wondered: “If I go to the village now, I will stay there like who? My age mates will come and let me carry their things. I can’t do that. Let me first get my gun and uniform”. The cultural notion of the male duty to defend the community is thus pursued in the current context. John Garang on his visits to the refugee camps in Uganda, urged the young Sudanese refugees to come back and assume their responsibility of fighting for the New Sudan. Referring to UNHCR’s resettlement program, he is reported to have lamented: ‘Why is America taking all my boys?’ In the SPLA training camps the emphasis on manhood was very outspoken. Young recruits were told again and again: ‘You shed your blood to get back your soil. You have to suffer, nothing comes for free’. If they complained, Wani said, their instructors would draw an analogy between their situation and that of a child suffering from malaria. A child, who is told to swallow the bitter quinine, will refuse because s/he cannot yet reason and thus cannot judge what is good for him or her - the adult providing the medicine knows. Similarly it is the commanders who know what is good for the conscripts, that is, they know the path through which the boys can achieve what is expected of them: manhood. Jok puts it strongly:
“Like military movements worldwide, the SPLA and the many splinter militia groups have sought to inculcate a kind of ultra-masculinity in their recruits, equated with demonstrations of aggressiveness, competitiveness and the censure of emotional expression” (2005: 152).42
The discourse of manly responsibility is not neutrally pursued but actively manipulated. Some argue that the notion of ‘defending one’s community’ degenerated, through the strategisms of the leaders of war, into a ‘politicisation of ethnicity’ (Elikana, Eman & 168 Narratives
Buogo 1998) or a ‘militarization of ethnicity’ (Jok & Hutchinson 1999).43 This devastatingly impacted on Nuer and Dinka communities, whose youth militias – established following the Nasir split of 1991 - played on the sentiments of manhood. As for the Titweng, or ‘cattle guards’, the civilian-based militia force armed by the SPLA-Mainstream, Jok & Hutchinson write: “The name and purpose of this militia attracted many young Dinka herders. Having failed to defend their cattle from repeated SSIA incursions, these youth viewed this militia force as an opportunity to redeem their dignity, and many of them readily joined up” (Jok & Hutchinson 1999: 134).44 The SSIA also armed a civilian militia: the Dec in boor, or ‘White Army’ that consisted of loosely organised groups of Nuer youth. Both militias, it is argued, played a prominent role in the polarisation and militarisation of Nuer and Dinka ethnic identities (Nyaba 2001).
From what Yosief mentioned about his military training in Eritrea, one also gets the impression that bravery and physical strength are closely linked to notions of manhood. He recounted the phrases that the Fighters repeatedly told the young recruits during the National Service training: “If you are a man, you have to be a man. You are an Eritrean. An Eritrean has to change the situation, the situation should not change him”. They were told, Yosief said, that a man should not be weak, not talk about his problems, and not show emotions, because that was the attitude that the Fighters showed in the war of liberation and which made them victorious. Yosief, who considers himself a pacifist and who refused to kill a prisoner of war, reflected: “To the Fighters and the soldiers from the villages I am a coward. They have no respect for me”. It must be noted, however, that in Eritrea’s political culture there is a very strong emphasis on youth as a whole having to sacrifice for their country, which includes girls. They equally have to spend eighteen months in the National Service Program. Nevertheless, I imagine Yosief is not alone in his conclusion that: “The Eritrean women are so tough, so as a man you have to be even tougher”.
Manhood is not only defined by being able to physically protect one’s people, but also by being married, having an independent home with children, providing for the family, knowing the cultural traditions and acting as a role model for one’s children. It is thus very much dependent on the views of other members of society whether one can ‘feel a man’. It would have been interesting to hear (young) women’s opinions about the young men’s behaviour – in particular their participation in violence. How would the women have considered men who stayed at home with them and the children, those who did not join the ranks of rebel armies? Questions that I equally have no answer to are whether the ex- soldiers actually felt that the military training or their participation in war had made them into men; what they thought of the military definition of manhood; or whether they had developed alternative definitions. What I do know is that the notion of ‘taking care of’ was central to their perception of being a man, but that they acknowledged there are different ways in which one can ‘take care of’ women, family and community – rather than losing oneself in war, some said, men should focus on education and get a profitable job.45
5.2 Pride and regret
In this chapter we saw that the ex-fighters tended to speak to me about their experiences in terms of the social relationships of wartime rather than dwelling on the actualities of battle. The terror of frontline fighting is probably easy (or attractive) to talk about for very few people, and this moreover depends on the context and the individual listening. Stories about how one was clever or quick enough to kill an unmindful enemy soldier, or dared take the risk of ignoring the superior’s orders and ‘finished’ a POW, may be in style talk among fellow soldiers, but not quite the thing to mention to a woman anthropologist from Soldiers 169 abroad. If anything, one may expect expressions of remorse, based on the assumption that this anthropologist probably disapproves of the wartime acts of violence. Grant in her research about the Lord’s Resistance Army, reports the feelings of guilt of ex-LRA child soldiers over the atrocities they committed. These feelings were reinforced because their fighting lacked any political agenda, and especially because the acts were often committed against their own communities. In the conversations I had, people did not readily use the words guilt or shame. And though I probably could have, I did not ask any of them directly, ‘how do you feel about having killed?’ Lopithi was the only person who made one plain-spoken reference to it.
You know, when we were first in the SPLA, before we came to the Cadets, we used to see soldiers doing contrary things. Even I myself may have done it to some people, but I regret it, I do regret it so much. What kind of things? For example, you go to a village. In order to force people for recruitment I can just go and say, you are my… you are… you take someone who is married. I just walk in and take you from your husband. I ask your husband to sit down, I tie him on a string, he sits down in the house and I rape you in front of your husband. You see? I loot things, I can even torture your husband in front of you, and then, off I go, I say: “This gun, this kalashnikov, AK47, oyé! This gun is my mother, it is my food, it is my everything, including my wife!” Now if you inject this in the brain of a little kid in the training centre, what do you think will happen?
This quote points at a distinction between ‘justifiable’ and ‘wrongful’ killing in war. Lopithi, who pre-eminently is someone who values debate and discussion – he spoke animatedly of the political and philosophical education that was part of his training in the Cadets46 –, was clear in stating that: “We cannot liberate ourselves only by discussing, we liberate ourselves through physical confrontation”. Wars bring casualties – that in itself is not something to feel guilty about. This does not mean that Lopithi was not occupied with questions of responsibility and morality. One of his conflicts of conscience concerned his inner struggle with the fact that he had left behind the Movement – its cause, his colleagues and friends – that he had identified with for so long. Part of him probably felt this was an unmanly thing to have done.
One late afternoon in September 1999, I bump into Lopithi when on my way out of Barbara’s office. For the first time I see him in another shirt than the faded black one, see- through at the shoulders, that he always wears. I am tired and want to go home, but cannot bring myself to tell him so. We lean on the balcony balustrade and Lopithi talks about the session he just had with the psychiatrist. He says the psychiatrist promised to contact UNHCR to give them his professional opinion: that Lopithi needs resettlement abroad in order to be safe and get peace of mind. He has changed his mind: instead of suggesting that ‘as a good African’ he should rejoin the Movement, he now believes Lopithi should be somewhere where there is freedom of movement and speech – as he assumes his client will want to continue his political involvement with the SPLA/M from a distance. I ask Lopithi what he thinks. He says he agreed with the doctor, because he did not want to be rude, but that in truth he has his reservations. He says that although he still supports the cause of the SPLA, he can no longer support it wholeheartedly if there is no change of politics. He looks at me and says: “I’ve not been a coward, I left to avoid more disagreement within the Movement, and thus to avoid more bloodshed which would inevitably have followed and made victims among the civilians”. He sounds torn and is obviously trying to convince himself – and perhaps also me. I offer that his decision to leave the SPLA seems reasonable to me. He answers: “Yes, maybe it was, but now it’s becoming unreasonable”, and adds that the situation he is in now feels like “more than death”. 170 Narratives
19 September 1999. Lopithi calls me from the GPO at Kampala Road and I go to meet him. Seems in an elated mood, wants a chat. Says the Senior Protection Officer came to see him a few days earlier with the reassuring news that he should start preparing for a resettlement interview. Talks a lot about the war. When I ask him if he could imagine living his life without this war, he says it will be hard, that it is part and parcel of him. Says he wants to go somewhere where he can “stay active” – preferably The Netherlands or the UK, not the US.
29 Nov 1999 Lopithi: “I become very sentimental, especially at night. I lose direction and become angry with myself. I thought I had escaped the dark forces of life but now I am still haunted. If I had known it would be like this, I wouldn’t have come out. But if I had stayed, so many people would have suffered. The Movement would have confronted me again and again, and everyone knows that when bulls fight it is the grass that suffers”.
How a soldier deals with what he has seen or done depends, among other things, on the perspective from which he acted. Relevant to this is whether one was an abductee forced into war or a conscious joiner supporting the struggle’s political ideology. When Lopithi was with the SPLA – despite his doubts and criticisms - he felt engaged in something meaningful, epitomised in his belief that “we were liberating the people”. He shared the cause and dream of the New Sudan with his comrades. “Having been in the war is the most immediately tangible claim for having been in history”, is the fitting statement of one historian (Portelli 1998). In exile in Uganda, however, Lopithi was totally bereft of any meaningful engagement. Once he said: “There is no acknowledgement of my contribution, however little it may have been”. More aggravating than this lack of personal recognition, it was clear, was that he escaped without having achieved the cause for which he fought. And at the same time, does he still merit congratulations if and when the SPLA does reach its goal? Most painful, I think, was that he had to come to terms with the fact that the ideals he joined for were tainted by much of the Movement’s actions. I believe Lopithi recognises himself in Jok’s description:
“Young men who were involved in the fighting found themselves increasingly questioning the whole revolution as there was a deepening experiential equation in people’s minds between political assertions of the ‘right of the south to liberate itself’ on the one hand, and militarized demonstrations of people’s abilities to kill their own people with impunity on the other” (2005: 151-2).
Lopithi could retain satisfaction or a sense of pride from focusing on how he had distinguished himself in his contribution to the future liberation of southern Sudan. Much of his confidence he based on ‘being educated’, which he linked to having a more progressive outlook than many of his fellow officers on how the war should be conducted. He emphasised that his interest was never with ‘those ranks’, but with ‘bringing up a disciplined force’. Being disciplined meant: being fair, and ‘knowing right from wrong’. While many Sudanese will argue that positions and promotions followed the logic of nepotism and ‘tribalism’, Lopithi insisted that the reason he always chose his bodyguards from ethnic groups that were not his own, was to fight that very attitude. He said: “Tribal selections, that was not my idea. I wanted disciplined bodyguards, those who know why they are there, who are enlightened and know their boundaries”. I think this preference was given in by his early experience as a recruit. I remember he said about his months in Bilpham: “The instructors, when they see reason in you, they like you, but they don’t show it to you in public”. Soldiers 171
‘Being disciplined’ was a theme also in other young men’s accounts. Samuel, who only vaguely identified with the SPLA cause or ideology, used those terms when emphasising that he had always followed his commander’s orders and never failed to do what was expected of him. He found pride in his ‘good behaviour’ and his loyalty to his superiors. Following the proper conduct of war, he stressed, implied no unnecessary killing. Samuel wanted me to know that he was ‘kind’ and ‘someone who can forgive others’. He wanted me to know that he had stuck with his moral standards even in the often lawless reality of battle. “I worked as an army man”, he wrote in his diary, “but I would not kill someone without problem, unless if it was in crossfire”. Wani also emphasised the merits of being disciplined, which he referred to as “not being like all the others”. Most soldiers, he said, spend all their money on drinking and smoking, “for them that is all that is there”. They look dirty, and wear ragged clothes instead of uniforms. Wani felt that a sense of pride or self-worth could be had from “looking smart”: instead of losing “the money you get after capturing a place” to transient pleasures, one should use it for buying clothes. I asked Wani what he thought of the ‘stubborn ones’ in the training camp, those who, quite bravely I thought, refused their instructors’ orders. He did not have much recognition for them:
You can be stubborn and yes that may be brave, but they were always beaten and kicked and they spent day and night in prison. In the end they were left to nothing.
The Sudanese ex-soldiers I spoke to – not only Lopithi, Samuel and Wani – all expressed at least some degree of self-recognition for having partaken in the southern Sudanese struggle against political and religious oppression, and socio-economic neglect, by their national government in Khartoum. The Eritrean Yosief, however, seems to find no pride whatsoever in his military past: he struggles with his brief stint at the front lines to such an extent that he can barely talk about it. He shows a very strong desire to serve ‘his people’ and promote the good name of his beloved country, but he does not believe he can do so by means of being a soldier. In Chapter Six he will speak at length about the path he has chosen to make his contribution: through his painting and art.
5.3 The loss of youth
The physical distance between southern Sudan and Kampala, made Lopithi reflect on the impact that this war had had on his life. He spent his entire twenties ‘in the bush’ and often lamented the things he has missed out on. He spoke of a loss of youth, his own youth, as a result of this war. He says: “I have lost enjoying the young stages of my life”.
There is something that I need to make very clear: an opportunity lost is an opportunity you never recover. That’s to put it plain. And by opportunity lost you mean the things that you've lost during the last ten… yes, in the last ten years when I was in the bush. This period that I spent with the SPLA, if I had been secure in Juba, it would have been a period in which I would have done so many things that would, you know… things to do with my development, my own development. There are things I could have planned for. But the war came and the insecurity against me as a person and against the students as a whole, and we decided to join the SPLA. So that is what I call an opportunity lost, a golden opportunity in fact… education and, well, the guidance of our parents. We’ve lost that while it could have given us some wisdom, you know, it could have given us wisdom. And also, we have lost the love that we were supposed to get from our parents. When I think of myself, I left at an early age… I was only nineteen and I was so young. And I also was so weak. I was not used to the hostile environment. Yes, there are things that we have 172 Narratives
lost, and on top of that our involvement in the war has also affected the way we think about solving our problems. Because now we look at it in a different way. We have been taught only one way, and not the other. You know what I mean? That is: you are in the front line, you are with your gun, you identify your enemy and you eliminate him. That's what we have been exposed to so much for all this period of time. So we’ve not been brought up in a very peaceful environment, where, you know, love prevails.
Schafer argues that according to the young men taken into Renamo, “the main element of their suffering was being removed from their homes and having to suspend the pursuit of their life plans” (2001: 231; see also Peters 2004: 21). Lopithi’s explanation to me has always been that he fought this war for ‘the next generation’, for Sudan’s children.
If this revolution is for a just cause you must look towards the future. If not your own future then that of your blood. They should come and enjoy the success of this revolution. This is what we believed when we went there. Although we were still young, we were able to think of this and say, ‘well, if I die now, on the front line here, I die for the liberation of my children or my child’.
Lopithi has lost ‘the young stages of life’ and realises that thousands and thousands of boys are currently losing out on the exact same. He often spoke to me of the position of young boys within the Movement. He considered the contribution of under-aged soldiers indispensable to win the war - nonetheless he was affected by the tragedy of it.
The children are not lucky. We thought their generation would be the one to enjoy a liberated Sudan, but now they are still spent in this war. We managed to dig the foundation, to build a shelter for our children. But now we are ourselves destroying what we built. And our children in Africa are so exposed, they are taken when they are nine or ten. And if you ask them, they don’t know why they are fighting, they are just taught to enjoy shooting. In Europe or America I don’t believe this happens. The other day I heard, it was the first time I heard something like that, an American child shot his classmates. Of course he was diagnosed as mentally disturbed. But our children here are vulnerable to political conflict, they are always the first to be taken to form the military wing of that conflict … You see, children can be good when you use them for the moment, but they can be bad if you don’t rehabilitate them in the longer term. Because they are likely to become your enemy, out of frustration and because of the techniques they got in the bush. They can become even a threat to you. What I mean is, don’t put them so much at the range of fire every day, every minute of their lives. Let them have it once in a while when there is a state of emergency, and only if it is necessary, once in a while. And then withdraw them immediately and replace them with able people, adults. Withdraw them and get them rehabilitated. And moreover adults can fight a more meaningful war than the one these young ones fight. Because these minors, they fight with these injections of drugs and so on, you see, they just wake up in an assault, they don’t care whether the bullet is passing by. They just get killed straight. Because of their being ignorant, their being innocent, they have been injected with a poison that the enemy... a poison that does not want to smell the nearness, the closeness of the enemy. So they have been taught to identify the enemy and fight, in a random way like that, no matter how powerful that enemy is, they just go, because they are fighting for the revolution.
Lopithi has one son, the child he imagined fighting the revolution for when he and his friends first joined. His son is six years old and Lopithi says: “The future of this war is gloomy. My son and me, we are already destroyed because we have been exposed to Soldiers 173 horrible things. That’s two generations”. When I suggest the possibility that his son may one day want to follow in his father’s footsteps, he becomes chillingly outspoken:
I would not like to see my son wearing any combat material on his body. No violent films. These are my future plans if I will ever have my family back with me. And if my son decides to go, I will shoot him and bury him. There will not be any question, he is my blood.
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It is clear that the fact that the youth are so hard hit by this war – their future prospects eroded, no schooling, no farming, bred and skilled in violence – affects society at large. In southern Sudanese societies, children are considered enormously precious – for emotional, but also spiritual and material reasons. And yet parents have had to impotently watch how their offspring is taken away from them, killed in fighting or through war-related famine and disease. Every Dinka, Hutchinson writes, fears ‘true death’ or ‘complete death’, which means “a death without children to extend one’s line, remember one’s name and revitalise one’s influence in the world” (1998: 60).47 I do not know if this is phrased in similarly strong terms among other Sudanese peoples, but did hear references to it. Wani stressed that as soon as boys or young men have joined the Movement, their parents push them to get married, “so that there will be a child”. Parents, he said, refer to their soldier sons as glass: “they may break any time”. Many people emphasised that parents do not want their sons to join the SPLA. They said things like: “Parents will not allow you to join, unless they are in the army themselves. So you don’t tell them your plans. You go and come back only when you’ve already got your stripes”. Wani elaborates:
They don’t want it, because they assume you are going to die, nothing else. Parents try to convince their sons not to join, especially the mothers. The threat from the mother will make the father to accept [to not let his sons go]. Because if the father allows his sons to go to the army there will not be peace in the house. It’s difficult because soldiers always come to the villages and they beat the fathers and demand ‘where are your boys?’ Mothers are also beaten but not so much. It’s the same when soldiers are on leave. They need a departure order to go home and visit their families. But those who go without… if they are found in the villages they are in trouble. Their animals are taken, they are beaten and their parents too. That’s why many soldiers don’t go home often. But the women don’t care, even if they are beaten, they want to see their children.
At the same time, the relationships between parents and children, the old and the young, have not been left unaffected by the civil war. Jok speaks of “sharpening generational cleavages of value and perspective” (2005: 154) and Hutchinson quotes a Nuer elder who remarked that “the smoke and sound of the gun has caused the youth to become crazy” (1996: 355). The war has provided a backdrop against which the authority of the elders can be challenged. For example, Wani told me that “when there are problems in the house”, sons put pressure on their parents to get things their way by threatening: “If you don’t want me, I’ll go and join!” People also referred to changes in the relations of authority that resulted from the power structures within the SPLA. They said: ‘In the Movement, what counts is how long you served and how you served, your strength and courage in fighting; command and authority have nothing to do with age, but with what a person has on the shoulder, his stripes and stars’. This echoes Peters’ findings about the RUF in Sierra Leone. Young RUF commanders often were in control of fellow fighters and civilians double or triple their age - an attractive aspect of the rebellion, Peters argues, to many marginalised and neglected youngsters. Illustrative moreover, is the SPLA ‘graduation oath’ cited earlier: 174 Narratives
‘This gun is my father, my mother, it is my everything!’48 I am reminded of what Lopithi said when speaking once more about the children that make up the so-called Red Army.
Myself, at the time I joined the Movement I did not understand how human beings die. I only knew a person can die of old age, or due to sickness. I didn’t even know about car accidents. I was still very ignorant. Then we started seeing a new form of death. One minute you had been with somebody, the next minute he is gone, just close to you. You know, it is a very indescribable feeling, you cannot really describe it clearly, but it shocks... it shocks you, which you may not realise at the time. But when you go back, because when you are in that thing there you still feel that it is like playing, you reflect at how it would have been had you been shot there. You realise that people would miss you and that you are missing those ones who have been killed. And again, because you have killed, you say, ah now we are even because I have killed... now we are balanced. You mean to say you killed for your friends? Yes, for our friends. That way you try to extract some balance and strength to continue in the next campaign. But in fact it keeps haunting you, it keeps haunting like I told you the other day. So I know, the memories remain in the minds of the young ones. The older ones know that this situation is temporary, that sooner or later it has to stop. But for the young ones, it becomes an imprint, it leaves a mark in their hearts and it leaves an ideology in their brains. They become very addicted. They are over-exposed and they feel intoxicated. They become addicted to what they’ve become over-exposed to. To the war? To the war.
People in southern Sudan have to deal with the consequences of the fact that an entire generation grew up in war. This is not just a problem for and of the youth, but an acute challenge for all members of society. And yet the notion of young people’s waywardness should not be generalised or blown up. Many young people I spoke to showed a considered awareness of the value of older people’s knowledge and experience, and besides acknowledged that they too had contributed to their societies’ suffering.
5.4 Marriage and family
One way in which the young men’s respect for their elders was made known to me, was through the often strong sense of responsibility they felt towards their parents whom they had left behind in Sudan or Eritrea. As soon as his financial situation allowed him to do so, Yosief paid a ticket for his mother to leave Asmara to come and live with him in Kampala. As for the Sudanese ex-fighters, I came to realise that the silence with which some of them surrounded the subject of parents, was not a sign of indifference, but rather revealed their distress at failing to live up to their responsibilities. Samuel almost never spoke of Juba or his life with his parents. His father passed away just before he was abducted from his school. He does not know whether his mother is still alive. Recently, after the Sudan Peace Deal was signed in January 2005, I asked him on the phone if there is a way for him to get information about his mother and siblings, and whether he would try to contact them. He hesitated, and then said: “I only want to go home if I can help my mother. Otherwise it will be another headache to me”. He agreed that after more than seven years of not having any news, his mother would be overjoyed to hear her son was still alive, but he strongly feels he cannot go back empty-handed. He is a grown man, twenty-seven years old, and knows what is expected of an eldest son. To me as an outsider this comes across as painful, especially because I have seen the deep longing he has to be accepted and be part of a family. During his early days in Uganda, Samuel was taken in by a Ugandan family, and the way that ended deeply troubled him. He lived with this family for about six months, went to school and after classes helped fetching water, splitting firewood and cutting elephant Soldiers 175 grass to feed the animals. The father, it seemed, remained apprehensive of Samuel’s presence among his own children because of his history with the army, and one day after a disagreement about school fees, told him to leave. Samuel “kept quiet”, he said, and “put it in my heart”. He admitted to me that this experience was more painful than all his memories of his time as a soldier. His brief but revealing comment was: “How could he have done that – we were already a family”.49 Later, by the time I had become quite involved in his life and schooling, he asked me if he could add my family name to his, and since then, without failing, signs every email, letter, exam paper or school ID with one Sudanese and one Dutch name.50
Jok writes that “many parents are losing confidence in the material support their children will be able to provide in the future” (2005: 159). This is not only a worry for the parents, but very much also for the children. Isaac was a witty young man, always faultlessly dressed, whom I met during my first months in Kampala. He was a Nuer but did not have the scarifications (the gaar) on his forehead that would reveal this identity. He explained it was his father’s decision that he should not have them, “because we never know what will happen in the future”. Isaac spoke to me about his distress of not ‘doing what he was supposed to do’ for his community. He said: “I fear that my parents forget me. I feel very sad because if I was there with them I could keep them physically, but now I can only be with them in spirit, through my prayer”. It was a pressing issue that often kept him awake. Like Samuel and Isaac and so many others, Lopithi too had not been in touch with his parents for years. When after fleeing to Uganda he came to know that his mother was in Cairo, it plagued him that he could not do anything for her apart from sending her his photo. He spoke of his sadness about not having grown up with his age mates in the village, and said:
It is not just me, quite a number of us were affected by being taken for military training. The decisions we made overweighed our age. Some of us were courageous… you block your mind and just do it. But at the same time you keep asking yourself: “Why am I here?” I had a plan to escape from Juba, what stopped me from that plan I do not know. I hear that some of my classmates are now in Europe. A UN cargo plane took them from Juba to Khartoum, from there they fled to Egypt, then Europe. They are now well established and helping their families at home.
It is not only the issue of helping their parents that Lopithi referred to, but also that which is of primary concern to all young men I met: getting married and having one’s own family. Being married confers status; it takes away any doubt as to one’s being an adult and is essentially tied in with issues of manhood. Those who come from societies that know the monyomije age system, bring up the afore-mentioned duties of defence and protection in one breath with the responsibility of providing for the family and community in terms of bringing in food, and especially meat. For young men this was an additional motivation for joining the SPLA: fighting gives access to money or goods that can be used to give to others. Peters & Richards quote a female ex-combatant who said: “lots of young girls followed the rebels because they offered them items, and their regular men did nothing for them” (1998: 191).
On 8 March 2000, I meet up with Samuel and Jacob. It is International Women’s Day, which in Uganda is a public holiday and brings us to the subject of men and women, love and marriage. They talk about the changing marriage arrangements in Sudan: “These days the parents are less involved, the girls and boys organise themselves”. Samuel says: “This is what I saw in Juba. The parents are not involved. My sister married in an illegal way. The 176 Narratives man just took her and they went to another district, since then we never saw her again”. They refer to the problem of brideprice that many have mentioned to me before: “Previously it was cattle, or sometimes goats or sheep, these days some pay money. But because of the war, many can’t give anything”. Then Samuel says: “What I saw is that girls like the soldiers very much. SPLA soldiers but also Arabs”. Jacob backs up: “They see them as the real men”, and Samuel elaborates:
Women like the things the soldiers capture from the enemy after a fight. But some soldiers also take women and girls by force, I can’t deny that. Especially the young soldiers, when they reach the adolescent period, whenever they see a woman it is rough. I think you know the adolescent period? Whenever he sees a girl, he must get her. Sometimes the commander may punish them badly, so that they leave the villagers.
Jacob and I both want to hear whether the girls were also after him. Samuel confirms:
When I was there, many girls also wanted me. They tell you frankly that they want to marry you. But I couldn’t do that because of that promise of my father. You remember, he promised me I would be married when I was twenty-five. And I was still young, I had to tell them that. I was a commando and we never stayed long in one place, so where would I keep her? I had to reason.
I make bold to ask if he was never tempted to ‘take’ a girl. Jacob blinks. Samuel looks up seriously and says:
It is rough, I am experiencing it now. But I know the Ten Commandments and it is difficult to break them. Although sometimes there are some conditions to break them. But for me, I couldn’t because I knew that it was only God who was keeping me alive in this dangerous place.
Jacob is quick to add:
There is that, but there is also another reason. How will you take care of a woman? You are not educated, you have no job. You must think of that also.
All the young men felt deeply concerned and spoke about exile in terms of its repercussions for their future family lives. Being on their own, I believe their desire to create something that could fulfil their lost sense of belonging was particularly strong, but it was also a matter of culture and upbringing. They said things like: “If you are thirty and not married it is bad according to our culture. People will think there is something wrong with you or your family, maybe witchcraft”. The only one thing that could potentially alleviate this scenario, many agreed, was education. Jacob said: “These days, when you’ve been in school, people will not blame you so much because they know you wanted to be educated before getting married”. Samuel, who has exchanged his military fatigue for a school uniform, concludes:
It depends on the personality of the girl if she prefers a soldier or an educated man. Some girls give in to commanders because they have money. These days, girls are after someone who can sustain them. Soldiers 177
6. CONCLUSION
Even if they survive the rigors of combat, it’s often too late to salvage their lives. Unrelenting warfare transforms them into preadolescent sociopaths, fluent in the language of violence but ignorant of the rudiments of living in a civil society.
‘Boy Soldiers’, Newsweek, August 1995 (quoted in Twum-Danso 2003: 30).
When in January 2001 I returned to Amsterdam, I fell ill with an undiagnosed virus and was unable to work for over a year. I am sure that my nearly three years’ exposure to the narratives of war played a considerable part in this. When rereading my notes and writing this chapter, I again at times felt the energy slip away from me. I realise now that the situation at the time in Kampala was deceptive: I came to know and spent my days with remarkable individuals, full of power, for whom I came to feel a great deal; but these same persons carried with them, and radiated, the brutal experiences they had participated in and gone through. Despite all that clogged their minds back then, some were aware of how ‘heavy’ conducting this research proved, and at times warned me not to get too mixed up in a world unknown to me. In January 2005, when we met again, I was touched by their genuine expressions of relief at the fact that I looked stronger and healthier. It will be clear that in the sensational Newsweek description cited above I do not recognise the young ex- fighters I got to know quite well. At the same time, I acknowledge that the protagonists of my research do not necessarily represent a wider population of ex-soldiers, in Kampala or elsewhere. It might even be argued that they were exceptional, or in some way ‘chosen’. Lopithi had enjoyed a considerable, and to a certain extent rewarding career within the SPLA; Yosief was spared being sent into the devastating Ethiopian-Eritrean border war thanks to his vocational training and the fact that his skills could be put to use on construction projects; Wani and Samuel were no average rank-and-file soldiers, but were selected as bodyguards on the basis of their language skills and formal education – and, I imagine, their intelligence and strong personalities. I did not come to know the most marginal among the young soldiers (see also Chapter Three). Those with the fewest assets (in terms of education, material resources, character, a strong physique, family relationships, wit or luck) remain invisible, or in the case of war, perish. The reason that I happened to meet Wani, Lopithi, Yosief and Samuel is that they had all made a decision to leave the armies they had been attached to - for different reasons and under varying degrees of external pressure, yet all with considerable risk, both emotional and physical. Their agency revealed itself in this very decision. And yet this statement asks for the concept of ‘voluntarism’ to be touched on again. I met these young men after they had left the front lines behind, but how did they get involved in war in the first place? In spite of what the list of reasons given at the start of this chapter suggests, how and why young men get drawn into war is not straightforward. Wani initially explained to me that he was ‘deceived he was going for education’, but later qualified that he was influenced to join because of the notion that it was his manly duty to defend his people. On one occasion he suddenly claimed: “I joined because my parents were killed, it was out of revenge”. Lopithi, having previously recounted at length, and with a certain sense of self-importance, the chronology of how he came to join the SPLA, at one point concluded: “I joined voluntarily, but I was forced by the circumstances”. It was difficult for me to get an accurate picture of the reasons and avenues of their involvement, but it may not have been terribly clear-cut for them either. ‘How did I end up here, in war?’ is not only a practical but also an existential question.
178 Narratives
The protagonists of this chapter reflected on the impact of war through the lens of exile, from the perspective of having left its acute insecurity behind. My impression of them would have been different had I seen them ‘in action’, just as their answers to my questions would have been different had they still been in the midst of fighting. Besides, what I learned (and what was cogently confirmed by Schafer’s article): my notion of conflicting truths pre-eminently applies to both the circumstances and the accounts of war. The same war can be differently fought out and experienced in different places, even if only because of the varying leadership styles of individual commanders or the divergent responses on the part of civilians. There is an overall dynamic to civil wars such as those in southern Sudan, but that does not negate local variations. Ultimately it is individuals who make the reality of war, and it is their experiences and reflections that make up its mental picture. My interpretation of the young men’s accounts and recollections must thus allow for differences that have to do with who they are as individuals - social context and cultural beliefs do not account for everything. For example, not all young men who joined the warring factions in southern Sudan were triggered by their society’s concept of masculinity; or, even though it is true that “the lure of ideology is particularly strong in adolescence” (Machel 1996: 16), when young people develop personal identities and search for social meaning, some pay no heed to these allurements. War is an experience that cuts deeply into everyone’s existence (Gevers & Tak 1995: 11), but the ways in which people respond to their experiences of war and violence vary. That Lopithi, eloquent and engaging speaker, reflected so extensively on the war he ‘belonged to’, may be partly explained by the fact that he was a father who felt he needed to define himself vis-à-vis his child. Samuel, on the other end of the spectrum, rarely talked about the war, his parents or life at home – and was no fervent BBC ‘Focus on Africa’ listener like his friend Jacob and most others. He probably had multiple reasons for this, which I may never fully grasp. Wani spoke to me frankly and with precision, but although he did not deny what he went through as a child had been harrowing, he markedly refrained from judgments about the SPLA. Yosief, as will be shown in Chapter Six, believed that speaking about violence served little purpose and took it upon himself to convey messages of peace through his paintings, which he worked on obsessively. The questions that this chapter has raised about the experiences and memories of war and violence, and the extent to which these infringe on a person’s course of life and self-perception, will be taken up again in Chapter Seven, where this will lead to a critical examination of the concept of identity.
CHAPTER FIVE
STUDENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
Nyokabi called him. She was a small, black woman, with a bold but grave face. One could tell by her small eyes full of life and warmth that she had once been beautiful. But time and bad conditions do not favour beauty. All the same, Nyokabi had retained her full smile - a smile that lit up her dark face. ‘Would you like to go to school?’ ‘O, mother!’ Njoroge gasped. He half feared that the woman might withdraw her words. There was a little silence till she said, ‘We are poor. You know that.’ ‘Yes, mother.’ His heart pounded against his ribs slightly. His voice was shaky. ‘So you won’t be getting a mid-day meal like other children.’ ‘I understand.’ ‘You won’t bring shame to me by one day refusing to attend school?’ O mother, I’ll never bring shame to you. Just let me get there, just let me.
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Weep not, Child, 1964, p. 3
The institution of education asserts its presence throughout Kampala. All early weekday mornings scores of children in school uniforms walk along the ‘shoulders’ of busy streets on their way to class. Parents or their drivers drop off and pick up children at school gates, causing queues of luxury four-wheel-drives to block the road for other traffic. Hand painted signposts point at schools hidden in both posh and slum areas: Jack & Jill Nursery, Rubaga Martyrs Secondary School. The slogans printed on school t-shirts tell us that pupils and students ‘Labour for a Future’, or read: ‘If others can, we can’, ‘Akwana Akira Ayomba’, ‘Exploring the Heights’, ‘Trust in God and Toil’. The tower of Makerere University’s main building, perched on one of Kampala’s hills, can be seen from almost everywhere in town. At the beginning of each year, pupils and their parents eagerly await the big and bold typeset headings to appear in Uganda’s dailies, announcing that school results are out. Given this strong presence of education, it is hard to miss the many children not going to school. They linger in front of their houses, lend hands to all sorts of chores, or play on heaps of sand that lay idle after another construction project has prematurely come to an 180 Narratives end. They are on flip-flops or barefooted instead of in diligently polished black shoes and white ironed shirts. Some of them would call after me: can I help them with school fees? Throughout Africa, formal school education is extremely highly valued by children, youth and their parents. It is considered the key to a successful life and the avenue for becoming a ‘modern’ African – and as such the pathway to community respect. I had not planned to write about education or ‘student identity’ when I first went to Uganda, but it was impossible to miss the centrality of this topic: education propped up again and again in nearly all conversations with the young refugees. I recall talking to two young Sudanese men standing outside the office of the camp commander in Imvepi refugee settlement in northern Uganda. They explained they had been chased, together with forty of their friends, from their nearby secondary school because their fees had not been paid. They were calm yet articulate, and looked prepared to wait until their problem was solved, no matter how many days of standing in the blazing sun it would take. When I mentioned our conversation to the program coordinator of DED (Deutsche Entwicklungdienst, UNHCR’s implementing partner in Imvepi), he related the incident of a group of thirty Sudanese young men who had occupied his office earlier that week. They had refused to leave without him giving his word that their secondary school fees would be paid for by the organisation. The police stationed in the settlement had to be called upon to intervene. The two young men I had spoken to may well have been among this group. After all, education was their one reason for being in Uganda. One had given me this brief summary of his life: he was taken from his home in Upper Nile in Sudan in 1987, received military training in one of the SPLA camps in Ethiopia, escaped after several years of frontline fighting. After that he had travelled for six years: from Sudan to Nairobi, to Dar es Salaam, back to Kenya and Kakuma refugee camp, and lastly to Uganda. His journeys had been inspired by this: his search for education.
For the young refugees in Kampala, gaining access to education was top on their list of concerns. What is more, for young men and women the search for educational opportunities is often a chief motivation for fleeing their countries. In southern Sudan, after decades of civil war, there is a serious shortage of educational opportunities, especially in secondary education (Brown 2005).1 In eastern Congo, school buildings were destroyed during the late 1990s and if still standing, insecurity threats caused students to not dare attend (Lemarchand 2001). Many of the young refugees came to Kampala first and foremost to look for educational opportunities. Moreover, their search for education was often the reason why they continued to be ‘on the move’: between camps and the city, rural and urban areas, or even between different countries. Mikael Woldeselassie crossed the national borders of six different countries to find a way and a means of getting back into school after fleeing Ethiopia as a high school graduate. Thirteen-year-old Jean Mbisimo was sent from his village in north-eastern Congo to Kampala by his father who could no longer afford to take care of him. Today, at the age of nineteen, Jean continues to travel between Congo, Sudan and Uganda in order to keep in touch with his father and younger siblings, and to stay in school at the same time. Apart from the costs and risks of long- distance travelling for people who do so without valid IDs, there are other difficulties that refugee youth endure to not forsake their access to education. For instance, to be separated for long periods of time from one’s wife and child, as Isaac was, or from one’s father, like Jean; to work as a guard and lose countless hours of sleep in order to pay for school fees, which is what Jacob G. and Julius did; the awkwardness of sitting in class with students five or even ten years younger than oneself, as Samuel Alim and Mikael experienced; and the frustration that all of them felt when begging at offices for scholarships, and writing letters and emails that largely remained unanswered. This chapter deals with such experiences.
Students 181
The right to education and its benefits for refugees are widely discussed in the forced migration studies literature (Hamilton & Moore 2003, Landau 2005, UNHCR 2003a, 2004b) and some, policy-oriented, research has been carried out on the issue of education in emergency situations and refugee camps in Africa and elsewhere (Crisp, Talbot & Cipollone 2001). To my knowledge, however, there is no in-depth research focused on education and refugees in Africa’s urban areas. This chapter aims at giving an impetus to this highly relevant subject.2 It firstly discusses the issue of rights and access to education for refugees in Uganda, outlining the differences for refugees in refugee settlements and those who are self-settled in urban areas. Section three introduces two young men (Jean from Congo and Mikael from Ethiopia) who are among the protagonists of this chapter and whose lives in exile have been strongly shaped by their desire to attend school and university. In this chapter more individuals will be heard than in the chapters on Soldiers and Artists, simply because, regardless of their divergent preoccupations and backgrounds, all the young refugees were concerned with and had something to say about education. The great value attributed to formal education in Africa is routinely explained by the fact that education and diplomas are regarded the key to advancement in society. This is undeniably true. However, I came to understand that for the young refugees there were other purposes that access to education served, which were equally (or even more) important. These were self-worth, protection and power/prestige, which are the subjects of discussion in sections four, five and six of this chapter. Schools and universities serve a key purpose in answering the central question posed by many of the young refugees – “Who am I?” The subject of education, of being or becoming a student, gave special meaning to the contacts between the young men included in this research and myself. The fact that I was a university student was something they related to – it was the very identity they aspired for themselves. Of the different terms they addressed me with, that of ‘student’ was as prevalent as that of ‘young woman’ or ‘white/European’. I was often struck by how keen many of the young refugees were to participate in my research. I came to understand that in their eyes to do so would offer them an opportunity to learn. They said things like: “Who knows, later we may have a chance of doing our own research, and then this experience will help”. To me, our shared interest in education also provided an immediate basis for identification. And inevitably, the value I attribute to learning in my personal life made me empathise with their longing for access to school and university, and made it difficult not to support them in this. As soon as I got to know these young people more closely, lending novels or buying notebooks seemed highly inadequate, and it was hardly an issue whether I should try and assist them to get funding for tuition fees. When back in the Netherlands, I set up the Ijayo Foundation to give this support a more solid base and structure.3 As will be indicated in this chapter, the fact that I represented the prototype product of western-style education must have coloured some of the answers they gave to my questions. One young man good-humouredly remarked: “Ellen, don’t think you are the only one with a skill for getting to know people, I’m also doing my research on you!”
2. STUDENTS IN EXILE: RIGHTS AND ACCESS TO EDUCATION4
Education is not merely a ‘prize’ that children and young people in Africa are after – it is a basic human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) in Article 26 (1) states that:
“Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory.
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Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit”.
In national and international law, the right to education comes under the heading of social and economic rights, for which the fundamental instrument is the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), adopted in 1966. Uganda has committed to protecting the economic and social rights of all persons within its territory, including refugees, through being party to the ICESCR and other relevant instruments, which include: the 1981 African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the 1990 African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child.5 The 1995 Uganda Constitution in Chapter 4 (Human Rights & Freedoms) provides that: “All persons have a right to education” (art. 30). While these international instruments are the sine qua non for children and youth to be secured the right to education, the relevant question is to what extent these rights are granted. A worldwide concern with the translation of rights to education into actual access is evident in that this has long been a prominent issue on international developments agendas, as well as the subject of many (inter)national conferences. At the World Conference on Education for All (EFA) in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 goals were set for universal primary education, adult literacy and gender equality in education. The World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal in April 2000 reviewed the progress ten years later, and formulated the “Dakar Framework for Action”, which reconfirmed the commitment to achieve Education for All by 2015. However, in Sub-Sahara Africa Education for All remains a great challenge: despite commitment to international treaties and declarations by most of its countries, all education indicators in Sub-Saharan Africa are below world and developing countries averages. For instance, only an estimated 58% of children of primary school age were enrolled in 2000, far below the 84% world average. This corresponds with 44 million children in Sub-Saharan Africa aged 6 to 11 not attending school. Half the countries show gross enrolment rates of no more than 26% for secondary, and 2,5% for tertiary education. Participation in secondary and tertiary education is moreover often the privilege of boys and young men only. Among the reasons for these poor results are the over-stretched national budgets of most African states, and the poverty of parents of children of school-going age. The situation is aggravated by the HIV/Aids pandemic, which is likely to claim the lives of 10% of teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa within the coming five years, and to cause 20% of school-age children to be Aids orphans. Furthermore, and of particular relevance to this study, a major barrier to attaining EFA are the civil conflicts and wars that affect or even destroy countries’ educational systems. At the World Education Forum in Dakar (2000), UNESCO presented a thematic study on education in conflict situations, and later published its strategy paper Education in Situations of Emergency, Crisis, and Reconstruction (2003). It argues that the restoration of access to education is crucial to the psychological development of war-affected children and adolescents:
“Education provides a sense of normality to the young and to the whole community, and it is a primary means of protection and outreach to traumatised children and young people. Group activities in a school-like setting represent an important tool of healing. Education moreover means hope for the future. It can absorb the energies of adolescents and youth whose alternative options in camp situations might be talk of revenge, recruitment by militias, rape, violence and drugs. Education can redirect students’ energies and anxieties into positive channels, toward acquiring knowledge and skills that can build their respective futures and serve as the basis for future economic and social development … Education is a basic right and it is likewise the means to the achievement of the
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basic rights to life and to health. It is therefore now seen as the fourth pillar of humanitarian assistance to victims of conflict and natural disasters, alongside nourishment, health services and shelter” (2003: 7-8).
UNESCO acknowledges that “some donors and field staff of humanitarian agencies do not recognise yet the urgency of restoring access to education” (2003: 11), which in careful terms confirms Verdirame & Harrell-Bond’s statement that: “While for humanitarian organisations, education is the last priority in an emergency, for refugees it is among the first” (2005: 254).6 My research confirms the observation that:
“for some [adolescents and youth] the trauma of discontinuation of education can be as traumatising as the emergency itself” (UNESCO 2003: 22).
Refugees’ right to education, provided in the legal instruments dealing with social and economic rights mentioned above, is further determined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, to both of which Uganda is party. The 1951 UN Convention provides that:
“The Contracting States shall accord to refugees the same treatment as is accorded to nationals with respect to elementary education”, and “shall accord to refugees treatment as favourable as possible … with respect to education other than elementary education and, in particular, as regards access to studies, the recognition of foreign school certificates, diplomas, and degrees, the remission of fees and charges and the award of scholarships” (art. 22).
The extent to which these rights are granted to refugees in Uganda, is discussed below.
2.1 Education for refugees in Uganda
Uganda’s education indicators corroborate the bleak scenario sketched above for Sub- Saharan Africa as a whole. In 2000, the country’s public expenditure on education was only 2,3% of its GDP (only Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gambia and Guinea spent less).7 Uganda was invited to participate in the Fast-Track Initiative (FTI), designed by the World Bank and launched in 2002 to provide quick technical and financial support to countries that have policies for, but are not on track to attain, Universal Primary Education by 2015. Given Uganda’s inadequate educational infrastructure, what are the prospects for attending school and university for those who have sought refuge in the country? Answering this question requires taking into account the differences in situation for refugees in refugee settlements and those who are self-settled in urban areas. Educational services for refugees, like all other services, are provided in the refugee settlements, and no separate program of provisions exists for urban refugees. Primary schools operate in the rural settlements, and the few secondary and university scholarships that UNHCR offers are solely awarded to refugees who reside in refugee settlements and hold ration cards. In brief, educational opportunities are dependent on where a person resides, and not on his or her legal status as a refugee. This discriminatory allocation of educational opportunities has no legal basis (Bernstein 2005, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005).
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Primary education
In 1996, the Government of Uganda introduced a programme of Universal Primary Education (UPE), exempting four children from each family from paying primary school fees. As a consequence, primary school enrolment increased by 39 percent between 1997 and 2002 (UBOS 2003b), and currently 61 percent of primary school aged children is estimated to be in school.8 However, there remain insufficient schools, classrooms, and trained teachers for this high influx of pupils. Furthermore, despite the UPE policy, primary school education in Uganda is not completely free. Parents often have to contribute to the costs of books, writing materials, school meals, and uniforms. Many schools, while licensed by the government and receiving government aid for teachers’ salaries, charge parents to pay for the construction of new school buildings, the hiring of teachers to decrease the pupil-teacher ratio, and the expansion of recreational and technology programmes. Especially relevant to this study is that UPE in Kampala is governed by guidelines different from those in rural areas. UPE schools in Kampala as a rule charge school fees of USh 10,400 per pupil per term to cover the higher teacher salary costs, water and electricity. This amount is prohibitive for many families, both Ugandan and foreign (Dryden-Peterson 2003).9 For refugee families who are self-settled in Kampala, it is often very difficult to produce the USh 10,400 per term (in addition to books and uniforms) that is needed to get their children a place in a Ugandan school (Bernstein 2005, Dryden-Peterson 2003). Only the negligible few families on UNHCR’s ‘urban caseload’ receive financial assistance from InterAid to meet the costs of educating their children. Parents and youth try to come up with alternatives. For instance, I knew a group of Sudanese Nuer (most of them ex- soldiers) who attempted to establish a self-help primary school for the children in their community. They used a church building as their classroom, and secondary school dropouts acted as voluntary teachers. A similar initiative was started by Congolese refugees in Kampala who set up a school called Bandeko (Lingala for ‘Brotherhood’) in the residence of Father Michael Lingisi. These initiatives, however, faced recurrent problems of limited funding, uncertain commitment from parents, unstructured curricula and the lack of recognition by the Ministry of Education and Sports (Dryden-Peterson 2003). The situation in Uganda’s rural refugee settlements is different. All well-established settlements have primary schools funded by UNHCR, in which the majority of refugee children are enrolled, though differences exist between settlements.10 I collected accounts of children and youth (mostly unaccompanied minors) who could not attend school because it clashed with their efforts for survival, i.e. working their plots or doing leja leja for Ugandan farmers. Occasionally they stated that they had to work in the personal gardens of teachers or headmasters as a condition for being admitted into school. A group of unaccompanied girls explained they had to miss school for several days each month, because they had no access to sanitary napkins and only one pair of knickers each.
Secondary education
Following the 1997 introduction of UPE, enrolment in secondary schools across Uganda increased by 47% between 1997 and 2002. In 2005, the estimated gross enrolment rate was 16 %. Of those, however, nearly 30% lack adequate writing or sitting space (UBOS 2003b). There is no system of universal secondary education in Uganda, which means that all students in secondary schools must pay tuition fees. Different fee structures exist for rural and urban schools, and for government and private schools. Secondary education in Kampala is expensive, ranging from 150,000 USh (app. € 75) per term for the cheapest day school to 350,000 USh per term for an average boarding school.
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In 1999, InterAid assisted 20 students from its ‘urban caseload’ with secondary education. Considering the numbers of young refugees in Kampala, this support was absolutely negligible. For young refugees in Kampala who fled without their families and lack social support networks, it is near impossible to produce the amount of money needed for secondary education. Their primary struggle is to scrape together money for food and rent. Only the few well-established refugee families, including families of SPLA commanders and some Congolese traders, succeed to pay for their children’s secondary education. InterAid runs a Life Skills Program for refugees in Kampala. It includes: English language training, driving lessons, tailoring, hairdressing, and motor vehicle maintenance. No qualifications are required for enrolling. Participants receive certificates of attendance specifying the training was achieved through a UNHCR-funded program. The situation in the rural refugee settlements appears different, because most well- established settlements have (self-help) secondary schools subsidised by UNHCR. However, tuition is approximately 20,000 USh per term, which many youth and their parents again have difficulty producing. I have no reliable data on enrolment rates in these settlement schools. Moreover, statistics on the number of refugee children passing their Primary Leaving Exam (PLE) in relation to the number of places available in the self-help secondary schools are not available. The quality of these secondary schools varies. Teachers (most are from the refugee communities) are paid incentives rather than salaries. The schools follow the Ugandan curriculum,11 and some Ugandan students attend the settlement schools. Youth who reside in the refugee settlements are eligible for a scholarship program for secondary education funded by UNHCR. This program used to be operated by the Directorate of Refugees at the Ministry of Local Government, but in 2003 was transferred to the Hugh Pilkington Charitable Trust.12 In 2004, the program provided 680 scholarships for secondary education, awarded exclusively to refugees in settlements who hold ration cards. The HPCT office is based in Kampala, and hundreds of refugees who reside in the city have come to file an application for a scholarship, but as a rule these are turned down.13 The program officer of HPCT during an interview in January 2005 told me:
“In each single one of my reports I write: why not also take on some urban refugees? But the response is always negative, and always along the lines of: refugee policy in this country is a settlement policy”.
Ironically, those awarded scholarships in the settlements are taken to schools outside, that is, “to the nearest good quality educational institution in the area”, i.e. to Ugandan national schools. The message this policy sends out to students who attend the self-help secondary schools within the settlements is not hard to guess.
Tertiary education
Makerere University was established when Uganda was still a British protectorate, and during early independence (until the Amin years) was a leading university in Africa (Dinwiddy & Twaddle 1988). Makerere currently has 22,000 undergrads and 3,000 graduate students. There are several other government universities in Uganda and a considerable number of private ones, which are often religiously oriented. Annually, approximately 18,000 students take A-level exams in all of Uganda, of which some 10,000 qualify to enter university. The Ugandan government awards scholarships to the top 2000 of these. It is a competitive system, for which only Ugandan citizens are eligible. For the majority of national citizens, and definitely for refugees, university tuitions fees (ranging from € 700 to € 1200 annually) are prohibitive.14
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The Hugh Pilkington Charitable Trust awards a limited number of vocational and university scholarships to refugees, but again only applicants from the refugee settlement are eligible.15 The Trust encourages students to apply for practical courses like nursing, law, education or engineering. The HPCT program officer expressed that there is a lack of follow-up activities, i.e. the organisation is badly informed of what happens after students finish their diplomas or degrees. Occasionally it refers graduates to its employment agency called Skills for South Sudan.
Government and UNHCR officials routinely comment that Uganda’s policy towards refugee education merits praise because refugees are allowed to attend national schools as long (as they are able to pay the tuition fees). This, it is argued, positively encourages their integration into Ugandan society.16 While it is true that certain countries completely deny refugees and asylum-seekers their right to education (UNESCO 2003: 7), Uganda’s policy of allowing refugees to attend national schools should not be overrated: it merely shows a minimal compliance with the provisions of (inter)national law. Fact is that for the great majority of refugee youth and especially for those self-settled in Kampala, it is extremely difficult to access education beyond the primary level. Even if they would manage to obtain the required tuition fees, spending the full day at school clashes with “finding money” for food and rent, which is a fulltime occupation for most.
3. JOURNEYS TO SCHOOL
3.1 Jean Mbisimo
In August 1999, a Congolese boy of thirteen was brought to the office of the Refugee Rights project at MISR. He spoke no English or French, and I interviewed him with the help of Thierry Mageni, who addressed him in Lingala and some words of Kiswahili. During most of the conversation, the boy averted his eyes. He told us his name was Jean, and that he was a Zande born in a village near Dungu town in north-eastern Congo. His mother had died in 1995 during pregnancy. Jean had one younger brother and two younger sisters, and another brother had died very young. He said his parents were farmers. He was in Primary Seven when his school was closed down because of the war. I asked Jean about his flight to Uganda. Tentatively he began his account:
One day the rebels came marching into our village. Kabila’s soldiers tried to fight them. They fought for one day… then Sudanese soldiers came to help the rebels. Then Kabila’s soldiers fled… they took the road going to Central Africa.
Jean described how “the rebels” destroyed and looted the village shops, and shot any civilian who also tried to get his share. People’s houses were looted too, but Jean’s father’s house was spared because “they only came to the ones that looked nice”. He recalled the day after the initial attack when the rebels started throwing the bodies lying around into the Dungu River. Jean’s family, like most others, fled into the forest. His comment: “We ran with only a saucepan”. They built a shelter out of sticks and grass and stayed in “the bush”, he said, for two weeks. They did not know what was happening in the village but feared that Kabila’s soldiers would return to take revenge. After two weeks, when continuing rains made the situation untenable, Jean’s father took his children back to the village. They found their house raided - chairs, beds and mattresses had been stolen. I asked Jean how
Students 187 his father responded when he saw the empty house. He looked at me uncomprehending, probably found the question superfluous, and answered: “He couldn’t say anything”. In the months thereafter life became very difficult and at one point Jean’s father decided to send his eldest son to an aunt in Kampala – “Auntie Alice”, who was his late mother’s younger sister. A businessman driving a lorry between Congo and Uganda took Jean with him. I asked Jean how he said goodbye to his father and his answer came without a pause:
When I got onto the lorry my father told me: “Why you are going is because I can’t feed you. My son, avoid stealing, lying, killing, and God will open the way for you. If you need something, ask for it and they will give it to you”.
Jean added that he felt pity for his father because he could see the pain his forced departure caused, but he left with “hopes for a safe life”. He said the driver was kind to him, and fed him “from his own pocket” when the money Jean’s father had given to his caretaker got finished. At night Jean slept outside underneath the truck. Due to “mechanical problems” the journey from Jean’s village to Ariwara on the Ugandan border (450 km as the crow flies) took about one month. From Ariwara, Jean crossed into Uganda and walked to Arua, where he met a woman who helped him get a free seat on the bus to Kampala, a one-day drive. Jean’s father had told him to look for his Aunt Alice at Kampala’s Old Taxi Park. The latest information was that she ran a small restaurant near there. Jean asked around but did not find her. He said: “I got confused”. He must have looked it, because someone took him to a policeman, who took the boy to Jinja Road Police Station, where he stayed for five days and nights. Then, he said, the police took him to the Snow White Hotel & Bar near Owino Market, which is frequented by Congolese. Nobody, however, happened to know Jean’s aunt. But they comforted him and one Roger (the same person who later brought him to the Refugee Rights project office) took him to his sister Janie in Katwe. Jean stayed with this woman and her five small children for several weeks. According to Jean, Janie had “no job and no husband and her children don’t go to school”. This was the reason for his being brought to our office: “She tells me she cannot feed me and that I have to look for another place to stay or for transport money to go back home”. I asked Jean what he wanted, what he thought could be a solution to his situation. He suddenly cried. He said the only thing he wanted was to go back to his father in Congo. He said: “My father needs me…” He tried to stop but kept sniffing and we ended the interview. We gave Jean an appointment for the following week, to take him to the Tracing Officer for unaccompanied minors at the ICRC. I have a photo of Jean standing on the balcony of our Makerere office - a boy in shorts and an oversized t-shirt. I remember his tired and apprehensive look. Only now does it strike me that his t-shirt has FLOAT written across it in pointy capitals.
The journey from his home village to Kampala was Jean’s first long journey. Many more were to follow. When Jean and I met again in January 2005 (in my notes I wrote: “he’s eighteen/nineteen now, tall, grown a man, open, slightly nervous, determined”) I asked him again about the circumstances of his departure from his village, then almost six years ago. The emphasis of his account had changed - to education. “Why were you sent to Kampala?” I asked, and Jean said:
It was pressure from my aunt… she used to come from there and tell my father it was important to educate his children. She liked me very much, you see the way I am… the way you know me… I was like that, she saw that I was active and aware… that’s why she liked me. So when the situation got very bad my father sent me, he was hoping that my aunt could help educating me. And also my father feared that I will join the soldiers. Many boys did. And these days they still join
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them. Did you hear they are promised 75 dollars per month? They lure them with the money. But when they are paid the only thing they do is drinking. They are illiterate, it’s just useless, they will never have a big post.
“And you never found your aunt?” “No”, Jean said, “nobody knows what happened to her, maybe she married and her husband took her somewhere”.
Back to August 1999. Jean came promptly for his appointment with ICRC. We filled the form and the Tracing Officer – who offered us tea that Jean declined – asked him to include a personal message to his father. He gave Thierry a questioning look – he had never written a letter before. “Can your father read?” the officer asked. Jean gave a hesitant yes. He then scrawled and scribbled. We were told it would take a minimum of two months to get a reply, whether positive or negative. Thierry, Jean and I boarded a taxi to Katwe. We thought it a good idea to go and thank the woman who was looking after him. But Jean did not recognise any of the roads, and our taxi driver started to complain. I suggested he drop us off at my house in Kibuli. I called a taxi driver friend of mine and we tried again. We crossed all back streets of Katwe slums for another two hours and at last we found the house. It was dark. The woman, Janie, was not around. Jean had told us earlier that Janie’s brother – “he often comes in at night when he has had too much to drink” – had been knocked by a car. Janie was spending the nights at Mulago hospital looking after her brother, and had left Jean in charge of her five children. Both Thierry and I went quiet when we saw the house. It was tiny, one room only, a construction of mud walls and iron sheet roofing. Janie, her five children and Jean all slept in there on the floor. Jean pointed at the spots on his arms: insects (lice?) that bit him at night. Thierry exchanged courtesies with some neighbours. We told Jean he was always welcome to come and see us at MISR. It seemed he had put some trust in Thierry and me after the three of us spending half the day together, and he insisted he would be able to find his way to our office. He gave a half- guilty smile: “I only got confused because we were using different roads, and because we were using a car instead of walking”. It was not until late September that we saw Jean again. He proudly came to tell us that he had found a new place to stay. He had approached two mzungus at a religious gathering in Katwe, and though I do not know what language he used to explain his situation to what turned out to be a British evangelist couple, they took him to the Ugandan pastor of Gaba Church Community. In only four weeks his English had improved a great deal and his best news was that he was in school. Because of language problems he had been put back three classes, to Primary Four, but that was alright, he reasoned, at least he was in school. I went to visit him. He introduced me to the pastor and showed me around. He had been put up in a house together with thirteen other children, all of them Ugandan orphans. The school and the colossal church (under construction) were located at a beautiful spot on the shores of Lake Victoria. Gaba Church Community, established in 1992, had an education programme for ‘disadvantaged children’, the pastor told me: six hundred pupils in primary school and a secondary school under construction. Jean’s tuition fees and upkeep were funded by the British NGO Signpost. In the weeks before, I had tried with Thierry’s help to get information about Jean’s whereabouts from the people we thought were taking care of him. One of them, Roger, gave the strong impression he had brought Jean to our office hoping to get something out of it himself. I had known this man for some time and much of what he did confirmed my impression that I should not trust him. Another Congolese man we asked evaded the subject altogether and merely pressed me to buy some of the “authentic Congolese art” he had in the boot of his car. We should have insisted to speak to Janie. Towards the end of the year, Jean started frequenting our office saying he wanted to go home to his father. He cried a lot. We tried to get news about his father, and sent him
Students 189 letters (in French, Lingala and English) with businessmen and truck drivers. Jean drew a map of his village to direct them. He claimed he could travel back to Congo by himself as long as he had money for on the way. But we feared he would be an easy target for any of the three armies moving in north-eastern Congo at the time. We went to ICRC but no response had reached the Tracing Officer. We decided to try and find someone willing to accompany him home during his school holidays, but Jean clearly did not see the point of all this caution. He had reached Kampala on his own and he would manage the return journey. Perhaps to show us he was both serious and resourceful, he went to the Congolese Embassy and managed to get a Laissez-passer, which stated: Motif de Voyage: RETOUR AU PAYS. In January 2000, while I was in Tanzania for a consultancy, Jean disappeared. We asked the pastor and the British evangelist couple - they had no news. There was no trace of him for over seven months.
In January 2005, when Jean and I were having lunch at St Anthony’s Restaurant, we recounted this period. Only then did he tell me that the woman hired to look after the orphans in Gaba Church Community ill-treated him.
She said I was different, that I was not a relative. And she always gave me the smallest share of the food. That’s why all the time I was crying, you remember? I thought if I was at home this couldn’t happen. Even in class… I was sitting in class but my mind was very far. I was all the time thinking, I was not concentrating… it was easy for me to be knocked by a car. I told the woman: “You pray hard, you never know, the situation may change, now you mistreat me as an orphan, but in future what happened to me may happen to you, it’s just a condition”.
I asked him what he thought of the Refugee Rights team back then. He said:
At first I wasn’t sure if I should trust you. I believed you were blocking me from going to see my father, that it was some trick. But later, when I saw you in Arua I trusted you. My teacher also told me: “Jean, these must be good people. They have come all the way from Kampala to see you”. You know, I just thank God so much, because I always think of 1999, the situation I was in… the pastor was very good to me but that woman was bad. And you know that Roger died? His sister is still there in Katwe with those children. Sometimes when I have something little I go there, to give her something because I can’t forget. She was good but she had no way of feeding me.
I recall our meeting in Arua he referred to, it was in August 2000. I had not come specifically to see him, but was in northern Uganda visiting Imvepi refugee settlement. A few weeks before, a colleague from the Refugee Rights project had bumped into Jean in Arua town, and told us Jean had secured a place for himself at Arua Public School. That is where Unni (a friend and fellow researcher) and I went to look for him. We started at Primary Four but found him in Primary Six. Jean looked at us eagerly but remained in his seat. When the teacher allowed him to leave the classroom, he was one big smile. He told us he had found somebody to pay his fees and rent, and lived on hand-outs, mainly from Congolese. He said: “I’m happy now, because I know my father is alive and he knows that I am alive”. He explained about the months that had passed. In early January, having lost his confidence in us, he had begged a Congolese businessman to put him on a bus to Arua. From there he had gone to Ariwara, across the Congolese border, and found a relative who told him his father and siblings were no longer in Dungu, but had fled to Yambio in southern Sudan. Jean said he wrote to his father (I wonder how his message travelled) and he received a reply. “My father said I should try my best to go to school, and that he will visit me if it is possible”. So that is what he did. Jean and I had a meal together, Unni took
190 Narratives some Polaroid pictures. I gave him money to buy a mattress and my postal address in Kampala as well as a telephone number for the Refugee Law Project. During the Christmas holidays later that year Jean went to look for his father in Sudan. At ten o’clock one evening in early January 2001 I got a phone call. The line was bad but I could hear Jean’s elation: he was back in Uganda, had crossed the border an hour earlier, to start the new school year. But what he mostly wanted to tell me was that he had found his father: “Ellen, when I came my father didn’t believe it! He cried with tears and seeing him cry also made me cry”. It is by all means a remarkable accomplishment for a teenage boy without money to travel all those kilometres in areas that are for the most part considered extremely insecure. Maybe that first truck journey he had made had not seemed particularly challenging to Jean and he took that as his touchstone. Even considering the resourcefulness with which so many of the young refugees lived their lives, Jean’s exceptional determination and intrepidity set him apart.
Several weeks later, in late January 2001, I left Uganda. I tried to keep in touch with Jean, but with no email services in Arua this proved hard, and things went silent again. In April 2002, by sheer coincidence, Mauro (another researcher of the Refugee Rights team) bumped into him in the centre of Nairobi. Jean’s face again lit up with incredulity as he recounted to me, in January 2005, what had happened.
I was in Arua, but the man who sponsored me left. I had no money and no way. I met some people from Dungu, who were going to Nairobi and one of them had a cousin there with relatives in Switzerland. I went with them… I wanted to go to Kakuma because I heard it was easy to get resettlement from there. But when we reached in Kenya, I had no way of going there, I was left in Nairobi. That’s when I met Mauro. You know, something directed me there… I was not supposed to go to town on Saturday. First I was walking near Uhuru Park… then I walked to where the French Embassy is. I saw this man, he was wearing sunglasses, and I thought he looked like Mauro. I went up to him, but he didn’t see me. But then I was sure. I went up to him again and I asked: “Sorry, are you Mauro?” He couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t believe it. It was only after three days when I started believing it.
Kenyan schools were in the middle of term, and to “tide him over” to the next school year, Mauro helped Jean get a place in Kabiria. This school with mainly Rwandan and Burundian refugee children took new pupils at any time. However, less than a year later Jean was back in Kampala. His reason: “Life in Kenya was very expensive and the level of the school was not so good”. And so after almost four years, in early 2003, he went back to the same pastor in Gaba to ask if he would let him stay. He no longer feared the woman caretaker who had ill-treated him. Mauro continued funding his education, and Jean still lived in Gaba when we met again in 2005. He proudly stated he was “a Candidate”: he was going to sit for his O-level exams. Although he lived with the pastor, he did not attend the Gaba Community’s school for ‘the disadvantaged’ – he had thought it better to enrol elsewhere. His bright red t-shirt had the school motto printed onto it: ‘Blossom Wherever Planted’. I asked Jean how he chose his school and with a hint of self-satisfaction he said:
I asked around for good schools. I went to many schools and I asked the students how many first graders they got, how many got government scholarships for university... You know, you have to ask the students, you can’t ask the administration, they can’t tell you, it’s a business.
Students 191
Sudan Ethiopia
YambioYambio
KobokoKoboko AriwaraAriwara AruaArua
Uganda Kenya DunguDungu
D.R.Congo
KampalaKampala
NairobiNairobi
Rwanda
Tanzania Burundi
0 150 300 kilometers
3.2 Mikael Woldeselassie
Mikael and I had our first lengthy conversation in early February 2000. He had spent two years in Uganda and, thanks to the persistent lobbying of the Refugee Rights project, had finally been granted refugee status. Mikael approached me when he heard I had managed to get a Somali young man into school, and wondered whether the same school might take him as well. I suggested he first go and see it. He did and reported back to me that it was not the place for him. GOAL Vocational Training Centre, offering courses in tailoring, catering and woodwork to school dropouts, was “impressive and practical”, he said, but was not for him. He had completed high school in Ethiopia and wanted to get into university. We sat at the kiosk that sold buns and sodas at the premises of Makerere’s Faculty of Fine Art. Mikael spoke of many things that afternoon, and when I commented on his reflective mood, he said: “Yes, I like to think. That’s the only thing I still own now, my freedom of thought”. When I had to leave he asked if by any chance I had a book or two at home to lend him, and said: “I’m desperate for something to read.” Mikael was twenty-nine when I met him in 2000. He had grown up in Ethiopia’s capital city Addis Ababa as the son of a Tigrinya father and Oromo mother. He said these ethnic affiliations did not mean anything to him: “At home we spoke Amharic and all I knew was that I am Ethiopian”. Mikael grew up during Mengistu’s military regime and got involved in politics – the EPRP opposition - at a very early age.17 Before reaching Uganda, he had spent ten years in exile in other African countries. It was during our seventh meeting that he started telling me about his past.
I was in prison for 100 days. I was twelve years old. It was very uncommon, I was the youngest. And many people couldn’t believe I was there. A friend of mine was taken first and my father heard about it. That day my mother came to tell me that my father wanted to talk to me. He was not in the living room and not in the garden. My mother said he was in the kitchen. He never entered the kitchen and so
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I knew that something was wrong. He asked me if I was also involved [in the EPRP] and that if I was he would help me to leave Addis immediately. I denied, I denied everything, I even got angry. But my father knew [that I was lying]. It hurt him very much and I don’t think he has ever forgiven me for that. Then 10 days later I was taken to prison. It was not a prison like other prisons I have seen. Other prisons can be fun; people sing and make jokes so that you can’t stop laughing. But in this prison nobody was making jokes. Because every day people were taken to be killed, every day people were taken to the torture room, and every day new prisoners arrived. We were made to jump on ropes lying on the floor. They hit you and make you jump until your feet are swollen. Some people’s feet started oozing water and blood. But they didn’t want you to bleed, because they might want to torture you again. I was the only one who received treatment. My mother demanded that she could take me to hospital. On our way she would take me to a place where they sell cakes, very nice cakes and I was allowed to choose anything I wanted. There was always a guard with us. And we would make unnecessary detours through town in the car. I enjoyed that very much, but I never said a word. I was sitting in the back of the car and my mother would talk with the guard in front. They tortured us because they wanted to know the names of all the people in the [EPRP] structure. But we only knew people by their codes, we didn’t use names. But they didn’t believe that, or if they did they would still continue because maybe there was still something more you could tell them. You had to convince them. Sometimes you would lie, and sometimes you would tell the truth but they didn’t believe you. Then you were locked. Then there was nothing you could do. That hurts … I think what confused and affected me the most was how I saw people change. Overnight they would change in the prison. I had known them and they would now talk to me campaigning in favour of the government. But we had all made a commitment to be willing to die for the Movement. I could not understand that. They were afraid for their lives and that’s why they changed. This is what happened to the person who had recruited me. He was a medical student in university. He was my guide, he helped me with my school and gave me books to read. Then slowly he introduced me, he started putting these ideas in my mind. I joined a year before I was imprisoned. I loved the Movement very much. But after I was released from prison, he was already back in medical school. He had changed his mind, he was not even tortured. I went to ask him this question, why? And he answered that he had to save his life. That was all he said. And it hurt me because he was the one who had taught me to be willing to give my life.
Remembering my conversations with Mikael of that year and reading my notes and our e- mails, it is obvious that a central theme was his complete loss of trust in others. Interestingly, it was not only the actual violence as such that had so deeply unsettled him, but also people’s unexpected overnight changes and unreliability. He recalled an instance of disappointment with his own parents:
One day my mother came to the prison. My father had guns. He kept them in the garden because it was forbidden to own guns. He also had illegal businesses. That day my mother tried to hint to me. They were afraid I would reveal this secret when I was tortured. She came because they were afraid for themselves. I know that she was also sorry for me. But when you come to support somebody, you can’t show that you are afraid yourself. If somebody is afraid and I am with him, I have to tell him that things will be fine, that I will take care.
His anger at other people’s changes and weaknesses can be extended to the changes he himself went through and with which he visibly struggled. He often commented on the extreme difficulty of giving up his belief in an ideology that he had thought a sacred truth, and the feelings of alienation that came with this. “Communism”, he said, “possessed me
Students 193 like a demon”. Mikael was adamant about never again wanting to adhere to a political ideology, or be part of any group. He distrusted all groups (and certainly not always without reason): his compatriots in exile, the Ugandans, UNHCR and the humanitarian regime. He led a solitary life, the roots of which, he thought, lay at home and also in his personality:
I’m individualistic. I’m different from other people. When I was young I always had a room to myself, and a desk, and I used to write. I always see myself sitting next to a stream or river and everything flows by, people’s lives and many stories. I’m never a part of it. But I can write about it.
When he was seventeen, five years after his first imprisonment, Mikael fled Ethiopia because he did not want to serve in the army, and military service was obligatory for high school graduates. He recalled: “The first time I saw more of my country Ethiopia is when I fled. I crossed two provinces… I used the desert”. In all the years I have known him, Mikael has hardly elaborated on the ten years before he reached Uganda. I know he first fled to Sudan, and stayed there for nearly eight years. He lived in a refugee camp in Gedaref, which he left because of the rivalries between TPLF and EPRP supporters, who both scrambled for membership among the Ethiopian youth in the camp. Then he lived in Khartoum, but due to security threats, he felt forced to leave the city. He got a false travel document and crossed into Chad. I believe he had one companion who joined him during the two following years of being ‘in transit’, but he never told me much about this person. From his accounts one gets the impression that he was on his own during most of this time. I got snippets of what he thought of the countries he had passed through. Chad, according to Mikael, was “the poorest and most corrupt country”, and he called it “empty pride” that he was refused refugee status there. About Cameroon he said:
I watched the ships in the port of Cameroon. For three months I studied them… where they came from and where they were heading. I wanted to go with them and climbed on their decks. But you had to pay US$ 300 to go. Travelling is the best thing.
The Central African Republic he “liked best” because the people he met were generous and unpretentious, but he did not stay because it was “so poor” that he saw no future for himself, and no chances of getting back to school in a francophone country. He crossed into southern Sudan and finally into Uganda. He said to me:
I want to marry and live an isolated life with my family. I want to be able to breathe again… to sit down and breathe. I have only been in a hurry all these years after I fled Ethiopia. I’m always running and solving problems… and I’ve lost a sense of time. It doesn’t matter to me whether it is Monday or Tuesday, January or June. There is nothing inside. There has been nothing good in the past twelve years. My reading, yes that was the only good thing. I’ve always been reading.
In March 2000, I went to see Mikael at his house: a room of seven square meters at most, no window. Two single mattresses lay on the floor, clothes hung from nails, there was a stack of Mikael’s books and papers, a candle, and a toothbrush stuck from a small hole in the wall. We sat down and Mikael brought two sodas. The mattresses were damp. He had told me earlier that he had chosen this area of Kampala because of its proximity to Makerere University: “I always identify myself as a student even though it is twelve years ago that I left school”. That evening I wrote:
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First thing, Mikael asks me if I want to see the photos that his sister sent him. On the photos are his mother, father, sister, sister’s first born and some other relatives. There are dates on the back which reveal the seven years, seven months and seven days difference between the Ethiopian and the Gregorian calendar. Mikael: “I had many photos but I always burn them when I move to another country. That is to avoid questions. They always want to know who these people are, photos ask for questions. If and when I need to leave Uganda, I will also burn these. My mother has grown old. My sister is the only one concerned about me. The others never sent me letters or a photo. My father died the year I fled Ethiopia. He had a gland in his neck which needed operations every two years. That year he didn’t wake up from the anaesthetics. If he was still there, I could not be in this condition now. Nobody from my family has ever visited me, but he would have”. “Would you like your family to visit you?” I asked. “Oh, yes, when somebody loves you that is a big, big thing. I had a better relationship with my father than with my mother. In our family, my mother is the man, my father was the woman. My father cried, I have seen him cry. My mother managed the household and represented the family. My father was often away from home. He worked as a civil servant in water. One time he was gone for nine months to another district, because all the water systems had to be in place before the 10 years anniversary of Mengistu’s regime. I liked my father very much. He was a good man and a hard worker. He was only interested in making money for his family. We had a farm, cows and chicken, outside Addis. And at some point my father had a taxi. All this was forbidden. As a civil servant you were not allowed to have other jobs on the side. But my father did it anyway”.
Rather abruptly he changed the subject – that was enough on the past. We talked about him going back to school. I had managed to get funds from the Netherlands to support him in his education. UNEB (the Uganda National Examination Board) equated Ethiopian high school with O-levels, and thus Mikael had to start in Senior Five, to do two years of A-levels before being allowed into university. He was going to be by far the oldest student in class, but said those are trivialities, and besides: “I think I will be a big brother to many of the students there”. Mikael’s sister had sent him his high school certificate from Addis, required for registration. He showed the paper to me. I could hardly recognise Mikael in the passport picture attached to it. His face was so much fuller, an adolescent with a remarkably intense look. I handed it back to Mikael. I believe he was touched by it too, and said: “This is how I looked when I left Ethiopia. I don’t think it is me. These years have changed me”.
Mikael: “I can’t believe I’m going to school! I thought a lot about it and changed my choice of combination. I no longer want to do Physics, Biology and Chemistry. I want to do the arts. I was a science student in Ethiopia but I don’t need to be stubborn and stick to that. I want to do Geography, History, Philosophy, or Literature. I have been reading so much the last ten years. All that would be wasted if I do sciences. I will not have inspiration for equations and velocity anymore”. “Why did you do sciences in Ethiopia?” I asked. “There nobody wanted to do arts because everybody was fed up with politics and history, and talk of material dialectics. Everybody wanted to be either a doctor or a pilot”. Then: “My whole life hangs on whether or not I will go to school. If I fail to go, I will go back to the camp to be in control. I can dig. I don’t like to sit on the back of the car when somebody else is controlling the wheel. Everybody here wants to go for resettlement, but resettlement brings many problems. When you reach in America or Canada, you will face a hard time. Like Abebe, I heard he’s now putting price stickers in the supermarket, and he will never get out of that job”.
Mikael chose a boarding school just outside Kampala. He was so eager that he wanted to report even before the official first day of term. I doubted whether the school would admit
Students 195 him in but he said he would find out. “I will start reading, I want to read everything from Senior One to Senior Four. I want to start because now I’ve become frustrated… because I’m waiting for something so big. I can’t wait anymore”.
Tuesday 21 March 2000 Mikael calls me that the headmaster has told him he is welcome whenever he wants to come. When do you want to go? “Tomorrow if possible!” So we decide to meet tomorrow.
Wednesday 22 March 2000 I’m told to stay at home (pneumonia) but want to say goodbye to Mikael. Unni drops me at Makerere, and Mikael and I walk to his room. We talk, mostly practical things about school. I call Pam and arrange that Elias will take him to school with his mattress and box-with-lock tomorrow morning. He has told his roommates he is going to school, not which school or how. “Nobody needs to know. I am starting a new life. I want to forget about UNHCR and about refugees”. I ask him to write to me, he will and wants to send me his stories. I give him money to buy stamps and envelops. He hands me the pillow and a bed sheet he bought for school to sit more comfortably. Can’t remember very well what we talked about, his total excitement about going to school was overriding.
During his first term I went to visit Mikael once. I took a matatu from the taxi park. After passing the massive Mandela Stadium, the city atmosphere suddenly vanished. Beyond the Coca Cola bottling factory the vibrant green hills would start (matooke and tea) through which the road winds up all the way up to Mukono - the turn to Mikael’s school came too soon for me. Among a dozen or more hand painted signposts of different sizes (among which: “STOP! Coffin Giant. All sizes”), I just in time spotted the one that said: Progressive Senior Secondary School, with a big arrow pointing left. I went to the school administration to ask for Mikael. He got permission to leave the premises, and we sat at a nearby shop. He said:
Can you see, I’m a student now, I’ve forgotten all about my former life just like I hoped! But I’ve also become more angry, because now I know what I’ve not been doing all these years. I was living like a horse with blinkers. I thought getting into school was an insurmountable mountain, but it is not. And I realise it’s all about money. I was worried I wouldn’t be admitted, but as long as you pay…
Boarding schools in Uganda do not usually allow students to remain in the dormitories during holidays (which is always a worry for refugee students who have no family to go to), and Mikael came to stay in his old room in Kampala during the first school holidays.
Late May 2000 I spend from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. with Mikael. We meet at MUK gate and have a mineral water in the small shop nearby. He says next time he will spend his holidays at the school. He got drunk every evening on beer and waragi [Ugandan gin]. He is disappointed in himself. “There’s nothing good coming from them [the Ethiopians]. They can spend money buying me beer, but they will never buy me a pen or a book. I don’t know why I’m still involving myself with them. I don’t need to interact with them to know that I’m Ethiopian. I still have my family and other ties to Ethiopia, which is enough. But it’s almost like a mental slavery. And you know, I’m a human being, I can’t live and spend all my time alone. But now that I’ve been in school for these two months, my mind has been washed and I can see things clearer… how they behave, that there is no reason for hating each other like they do. It’s good to get away for seeing things clearer. I need to focus, I need to
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read, Kampala and its people distract me so I don’t want to come here anymore”. Then he talks about the border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the talk of the day in both communities. Mikael: “This war has united the Ethiopians and they are very proud because Ethiopia proves to have the upper hand. All Ethiopians here are soldiers, they know every mountain in Eritrea, so when they listen to the news they know exactly how far their army has progressed. The hostility between the Ethiopians and Eritreans is very deep but also deeply covered. This war is a serious crisis on the people in Kampala. I feel sorry for them, also because I don’t believe in this war. My former room mate is Eritrean, and I try as much as possible to avoid the subject of the war, I don’t want to make him feel uncomfortable. If we talk about it, we talk as if we are Europeans or Americans, as if we are not ourselves involved in it. But the Ethiopians are very bitter, they say: ‘The Red Sea is ours’. I don’t think Ethiopia can be defeated from outside by Eritrea, because it’s so much bigger. Population is important in war. Even if all soldiers are killed now, there are always others willing to fight. In Ethiopia every man used to be a soldier and everybody owns guns… my father did. In Ethiopia being a man means being able to kill two birds with one bullet”.
We went into town to pay his fees, but because queues at the bank were endless, Mikael suggested he would try to pay cash to the school administration. We went to Aristoc bookshop and bought an English dictionary, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and a book on drawing. Mikael kept saying how excited he was about all the things he was to learn, especially in literature and art. Most importantly, he said, he wanted to learn how to express himself and expected these two subjects to teach him that.
He says he’s happy, several times. He’s never said that before. For the last 12 years it’s been his one and only wish to go to school. He says: “Even if I wouldn’t get anything from my education, or if I would die at the end of it, it will have been very good for giving me two years of happiness”.
His all-consuming passion to study slightly worried me, especially when he told me his habit of getting up in the middle of the night (“the only time when everything is quiet”) to read. When I suggested he might want to make a bit of time for other things as well, perhaps socialise with fellow students, he said: “The reason why I’m there is to study, that’s the only reason, so if I spend a minute without focusing on that, why should I be there? Opportunity knocks only once and never again, it’s the truth, I know that from experience!” That morning before our meeting he had gone to his old room and found his former room mate lying in bed and “staring at the roof”. He said:
That’s what I’ve been doing all these years, staring at the roof. But there’s nothing to see at the roof! But I can tell you, images will always come, images of UNHCR, of family… they come to confuse you. I want to forget all about them, the UNHCR, the government, other refugees. I want to integrate with the civilians and remove the label of refugee. I’m not interested in refugees. I don’t want to hear the stories of refugees while I’m helpless to do anything for them.
Among the many reasons why Mikael wanted to go to school, the most important one, I believe, was what he called his desire for the world to “unfold itself”. He wanted to better understand other people’s and his own behaviour and motives. The constant questions he asked himself (and me) nearly all had to do with the relationships between others and him: what characterised those relationships, whether they could change, and if so how, and whether he would have a say in those processes. One day he handed me a story he had written, titled The Two Girls.
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I always like travelling. There always seems some good reason to travel in my life. One time I was in my usual travel in Sudan from Gedaref to Khartoum. I was going back to Khartoum after staying some days in Gedaref. On the last day some Ethiopian refugees approached me, they asked me if I could take two refugee women with me to Khartoum. The two girls were high school graduates from Addis Ababa. They came from a well to do family, and they were really beautiful, and never married. Their being beautiful is the most difficult obstacle of the journey to reach Khartoum. Accompanying them as a man is also dangerous for me, I know that, but I agreed to help them what ever I can, to let them reach Khartoum. We started our journey in the morning. We travelled for three hours without any problem, there were only three hours left to reach Khartoum. There was a police checkpoint near Medeni, a big city in between Gedaref and Khartoum. Two policemen entered the bus and began checking the passengers, and they ended up investigating the two girls and me. The two girls had the same kind of pass paper as I had, but the policeman returned my paper and commanded the two girls to come down the bus. Even though I was not supposed to come down the bus I followed the two girls out of the bus. The two policemen said, there is something wrong on their paper. The policemen didn’t know English and the girls didn’t know Arabic. I knew some Arabic, I tried to explain, but to no avail. I knew there was nothing wrong on the paper, it was the same kind of paper as I had. Both me and the policemen grew angry with the conversation. The bus began warming up the engine to show that he is starting to move. The two girls begged me to go, because we all know what is going to happen, and it was extremely dangerous for me, since I am a man and the policemen will do everything to sleep with the two girls. I hesitated to go back to the bus. The bus is almost to start moving now, the engine has got a louder voice now, as a sure evidence to start moving. The two girls continue to persuade me to climb onto the bus, saying that I have done all I can and I shouldn’t sacrifice my life for them. I was split into two parts, going or not going. It was really hard to abandon the two girls in that situation. There was nothing I could do about it except to share the pain, or maybe die. I know most Sudanese men are sex maniacs because of their Islamic law. At last I climbed onto the bus, because of the girls begging me to do so, and the bus moved immediately. The bus drivers are used to such a problem. I turned my head to see through the bus back window. There was nothing except the two policemen and the two girls and the tent for the police who work on the checkpoint. There were no other people, house or even a tree around there, just only them and the road to Khartoum. I still can see that scene even though it was many years ago. I met the girls after several months in Khartoum. There is no doubt that they have been raped, maybe by more than two policemen, as usual. But the girls and me have never been able to talk about that incidence, not even once. The two girls were more afraid about whether I will talk about it to other refugees or not. This is the first time I have ever talked about it, but no wonder I always remember it, and wonder who is responsible for it.
Mikael successfully completed his A-levels, and he went on to university to study International Relations and Diplomacy. He had wanted to do Psychology, but he did not qualify because his A-levels were in the arts subjects. University, he was sad to learn, did not give him the stability he was looking for – nor the answers to questions like those captured in the above story. One time he wrote to me: “I am only more despaired now and see more vanity and the absurdity of life. Forgive me but what I learned is more ambiguity, controversies and dilemmas”. He had difficulty socialising with his fellow Ugandan students, found them racist, and always considered himself the odd one out. His recurrent question – triggered by the traumatising events of his early youth, his being in exile, and his personality – was: Who amI and why do I not fit in? He remained preoccupied with how others saw him (refugee, student, spy, elusive character, old bachelor?) and with the labels
198 Narratives he could rightfully attribute to himself. He moreover remained constantly restless, always thinking about moving elsewhere. It seems quite an achievement that he has remained in university for three years and has not run away. But then, I remember his line about opportunity only knocking once and another thing he once said to me. It was rush hour - traffic a mad chaos – when I arrived on the boda boda while Mikael was already waiting for me, the only person I know who is never late. He looked pensive, and treated me to another unexpected welcoming line:
I want to die in school. Education is all I want. Now I know it’s not very difficult to reach up to your level, to do a PhD. What do you think, Ellen, I could be like Karl Marx and die on my desk!
4. EDUCATION AND PROTECTION
According to UNHCR, education is an essential and effective tool of protection:
“Measures to promote universal primary education will help identify children who are being exploited as labourers or servants, who are subject to physical or sexual abuse, who are disabled or who need medical help. The process of education helps children to learn about the way society functions, their duties and their rights. Education should include awareness that children under 18 should not be recruited into military forces” (UNHCR 2003: 3).
For the young men of this study, going to school indeed served protection purposes: it made them feel more secure because it made them part of a community, a structure, with students and teachers who knew them and would look out for them. Equally important were the school and university identity cards they obtained. For refugees who reside in Kampala clandestinely, an ID from an institution recognised by the Ugandan government is an extremely valuable asset: to present to police and immigration officers at roadblocks, to present to the LC chairman of one’s area, to be allowed into public buildings and libraries, or to collect money sent from abroad through Western Union. Even those who have a valid refugee document prefer to use their school ID for these purposes. Furthermore, I was often told that having a school ID protected young men from being recruited: “If you have a school ID the SPLA soldiers leave you because they see you are doing something productive that will help the New Sudan in the future, when there is peace”. In the period from June to August 1999, SPLA recruitment took place in and around the refugee camps in northern Uganda. A woman working for TPO (Transcultural Psycho-social Organization, an NGO with its base in the Netherlands) reported:
Freedom Square in Adjumani was filled with men and soldiers. I was told they wanted able men to go and work in the Sudan, and that they were looking for SPLA deserters. I noticed that both the [Ugandan] government soldiers and the SPLA soldiers were there. They screened people in the square with the help of the LCs and the police, releasing those who could be identified. The camp commander of Adjumani came to have people freed. He brought the list of registered refugees and the SPLA released those ones … I eventually learned that this operation in the town was just a cover. All the men assembled in Freedom Square were eventually released after they could prove they were working, students, registered refugees, etc. The main operation was in the Miryei and Olua refugee camps, from where they took between 70 and 100 people … The truth is that the people who were finally taken were the ones without documents, without any school or refugee
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identification … In the week after the incident, our work was very difficult. When we went to the camps, we found the youth hiding in the bush, because they feared the operation would be repeated. There was a rumour that women would be taken next because they were hiding their sons.
The fact that they possessed school IDs saved many young refugees in Uganda from being recruited into the fighting forces. John Wani (see Chapter Soldiers) had an especially remarkable story to tell. Wani was twelve years old when he underwent SPLA military training in Moroto in southern Sudan. At the end of the training he was selected to become a bodyguard to the commander of the training camp. However, he was bailed out of service by his uncle, his late father’s brother. This uncle was an old friend of the commander Wani was serving. Both men had come to Uganda as refugees during the first civil war in Sudan (1955-1973) and had studied together at Makerere University. When Wani’s uncle learned that his nephew – the only surviving son of his late brother - was a bodyguard he requested his friend to release him and to allow the boy to come to Uganda. Wani remembers he was “not pleased” with his uncle’s intervention:
I thought, “why disturb me… I have come out alive [of the training], I’m eating good food”. And also I remembered the conditions in Uganda when we were there as refugees and I didn’t want to go back there.
Yet he did not have a say in the matter: “It was orders, I had to accept”. He was instructed not to tell anyone of his coming release “because it was like smuggling someone out of there, out of the Movement”. Wani was taken in a lorry, which travelled between Kajokeji and Moyo (Uganda) to transport food, and from there was sent on to Jinja, Uganda’s second town, where his uncle lived. He was welcomed by his uncle, aunt and cousins, and stayed with them. His aunt, he said, was very good to him and treated him like her own child. He skipped a class and joined Primary Five. Wani’s uncle had a well-paid job with an NGO, but after his death in a car accident on the infamous Jinja-Kampala Road, the family’s situation became precarious: “From the big house all of us had to move to the boys’ quarters”. His widowed aunt could no longer afford to pay her own children’s and her nephew’s school fees. It was at that time, in late 1999, that I met Wani, who then was in Senior Two. With support from the Ijayo Foundation he completed his O-levels and A- levels, and in 2004 started a bachelor’s degree. During one of our conversations in January 2005, he referred back to the circumstances of his leaving the SPLA. With hindsight, he was thankful to his late uncle for that “wise decision”, but at the time, he repeated:
I didn’t want to be taken out. At that time I was just like a warrior. The anger of a warrior was in me. It was there even before the training, because of the death of my parents and the situation we had gone through in the refugee camps. But when I reached Jinja, my uncle consoled me and explained to me that I am the only son of my late father and that it is important for me to be alive and be educated.
The observation that in Sierra Leone “to most young fighters the main incentive to lay down their weapons was the opportunity offered to learn a skill or to go back to school” (Peters 2004: 23), applies to many young Sudanese men in Uganda – even if some, like Wani, may at first instance have been hesitant. My impression is that in the minds of many Sudanese youth there were two options: to be a soldier, or to leave Sudan to search for education. If they tried the latter and it failed, some returned to Sudan to join the SPLA after all.18 But the choice between education and soldiering is not always one or the other. Firstly, young people join armies and militias because - having no access to formal education, or with the educational infrastructure largely destroyed - they see military
200 Narratives training as a useful alternative education (Peters 2004, Peters & Richards 1998b). Secondly, young people like Lopithi (see Chapter Soldiers) join armies because they perceive this as the only way of fighting for (equal) access to educational opportunities. For the southern Sudanese, access to education was a highly political subject ever since independence. Reading and writing were unknown to the southern areas before the nineteenth century, whereas the north had an old tradition of literacy owing to its contact with Islam and the Mediterranean world. At independence in 1956 less than five per cent of the southern Sudanese population (the “children of the missionaries”) was literate, and the whole of southern Sudan had only two secondary schools (Scroggins 2002: 138-139, 175). This was generally seen as a terrible handicap, and education assumed an “incantatory, almost ritualistic importance” (2002: 139). Moreover, when the British left, the mission schools became government schools and Arabic replaced English as the language of instruction. This met with resistance, as it would do again in the mid 1980s, when the Khartoum government – some time after the introduction of shari‘a – imposed Arabic as the language of instruction for all schools and universities in southern Sudan. For many young men this was the reason to take up arms and join the SPLA.
In Chapter Four I wrote about Jacob, who received both primary education and military training in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, which at the same time served as an SPLA base. Jacob initially told me he was taken from his village by force, but later he qualified: “I wanted to go because all the children were going. They told us we were going for education and we thought it was a chance because there are no schools in our area”. The first time I saw Jacob was in May 1999. I had an appointment with a roommate of his whom I had met while waiting outside the UNHCR premises in Kololo. This young man was eager to hear about my research and we had agreed to meet a few days later at InterAid. He introduced Jacob to me and the three of us walked from InterAid, which they felt was “too crowded to talk”, down through Old Kampala in order to find a quiet place. Two more of their ‘brothers’ caught up with us and joined in the conversation we had in a small café near Hotel Equatoria. They were between nineteen and twenty-four years old, the oldest three had been in Uganda as refugees for six years, the stuttering nineteen-year-old had come “through Kenya” only a few months earlier. Jacob was the most articulate, yet all four of them were very serious about learning more about my research and participating in it. They explained they lived in a small community of young single men (all ex-soldiers I was to learn later) and a few families, and proposed that perhaps I could organise classes or workshops “or anything from which we can learn”. I visited them twice, but then unfortunately lost contact with this group. It was only Jacob and I who happened to meet again a year later, in February 2000. I recall us sitting at the small Afria-Asia restaurant. Jacob was slender, shorter than most adult Nuer men, but had the six parallel scars on his forehead (gaar) that betrayed his background. He looked impeccable in ironed white shirt, and had the same courteous yet frank way of speaking that I remembered from the previous year. Only now did he elaborate on his history. Jacob spent four years in the refugee camps in Adjumani after he had fled to Uganda in 1993. He had deserted from the SPLA (under whose auspices he had been for six years) and explained the two reasons for his break-away. Firstly, he said, he and other Nuer “were treated very badly” after the so- called Nasir split. In 1991, a group of commanders, led by Riek Machar and Lam Akol, rallied various Nuer groups in an attempt to overthrow John Garang. It proved to be a disastrous move in terms of loss of territory to the North and massive loss of lives that the resultant intra-SPLA fighting caused (see Chapter One). Jacob said:
I came out [of southern Sudan] actually not because of the Arabs but because the way we were treating ourselves within the Movement, my tribe and the Dinkas. I came to escape the killings. These problems are there because many are illiterate
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and [therefore] encourage tribalism. If you are educated you understand that all people are the same. But most people join the Movement when they are not educated.
His second reason for taking the considerable risk of deserting was exactly that: he wanted to pursue his education, to pick up from where he was left in the Ethiopian training camp (i.e. Primary Four). He ended up living in Ogujebe refugee settlement in Adjumani District with a group of twenty-seven boys, all ex-soldiers between the ages of thirteen and twenty. They built their shelters and lived in groups of four per hut. By 1997, Jacob said, two of them had returned to the SPLA. But he completed primary school, then earned a place at a Catholic seminary in Adjumani town. In 1997, when in his second year, he travelled to Kampala in order to get medical treatment for his persistent chest and stomach problems. From my notes:
He spent 21 days waiting at InterAid’s gate before being interviewed by one of the counsellors. Told her he had just arrived from Sudan and come straight to Kampala, and was given a letter to report to one of the settlements in Adjumani. He did not inform them this is where he was in fact living. He did not receive any medical treatment. He did not complain. He “just took the message and left”. He has never again reported to InterAid or UNHCR. He “got discouraged” by the long time he had had to wait. “I was weak at the time and spending my days waiting at the office, I could not try to get any money for food”. He believes he might have been given treatment had he “complained more”, but “I was also unaware of what are the best ways of approaching the humanitarian staff”. He decided to stay in Kampala, because he doubted he would be allowed back into school in Adjumani, and because he hoped for “better opportunities” in Kampala in terms of education and jobs.
I failed to ask why the seminary staff did not see to his health problems, and realise there may have been other reasons (the appeal of the big city? he no longer wanted to become a priest?) for his move to Kampala. When Jacob and I met again in 2000, he was in Senior Four. He was paying for his education by working as a night watchman. Every evening he walked for over an hour to the Ugandan family’s residence, back home again early morning for a cup of tea, then off to school. That term he had not managed to save enough money to be able to pay his tuition fees, and had made a deal with the headmaster: he would not attend classes, but would be allowed to sit for the end-of-term exams. Every day he met with some classmates after school to copy their notes. He seemed calm and organised, spoke with care. It was six years since he had left the SPLA. He said: “I decided I have to be serious and focus on education, to improve my life, so that one day I may be an important person who can help my country, and also so that my children will not suffer like me”. What he worried about was the monthly rent that he and his roommates always had trouble getting together, his sleep deprivation and his stomach pains, which still disturbed him. I know Jacob sat for his O-level exams in 2000, but have lost contact with him since. Through the grapevine I heard he went back to Sudan.
Lastly it must be noted that even if education can serve protection purposes, the flipside of the coin is that school-going children and youth are often especially vulnerable. In many conflict areas schools are deliberately destroyed in a military strategy that aims at (psychological) destabilization (Galperin 2002, Machel 1996, Twum-Danso 2003).19 Secondary and university students are targeted because they are considered potential rioters or members of an unproductive bourgeoisie. Teachers too are often prime targets because they are important community members and tend to be more than usually politicised (Machel 1996). For instance, in Rwanda in 1994 more than two thirds of all teachers were
202 Narratives either killed or fled (Galperin 2002). Furthermore, thousands of pupils and students in Africa are forcibly recruited from schools. Lopithi (see Chapter Soldiers), told me about the “jungle schools” that he and other SPLA officers had tried to establish. But, he said:
The jungle schools are against the interest of the Movement. In January 1998 we had thirty-six schools. Then some started to be closed down for recruitment. Now there are only four left, one each in Yei, Blue Nile, Bahr el Gazal and Nuba Mountains. We had twelve schools in Equatoria, but all have been closed down.20
The opposing Khartoum army may not have forcibly recruited from schools in northern Sudan, but it did make the merits of education dependent on military service. An article in The Monitor (2 June 1998) with heading ‘Sudan govt military to recruit 650,000 by 2000’, quoted the military service coordinator in Khartoum: “Students who graduated this year will not be given their degree certificates before doing national service, and the obtaining of personal documents, permits and licenses and employment will all be made conditional on completion of military service”. In practice this meant that university graduates had to follow several months of military training and were then sent off to the front in southern Sudan. Those who survived the fighting were awarded their degree certificates.
5. EDUCATION AND SELF-WORTH
Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, article 26-2
Isaac, a Nuer from Upper Nile Province in Sudan, was twenty-two years old when he fled to Uganda in 1994. His mother had died when he was a child, his father when he was in his late teens. He had completed secondary education, after which he served the SPLA for several years. I knew he had earned the rank of Captain by the time he left, but never came to know in any detail the circumstances of either his joining or his leaving the army. Isaac and I met in 1998, at the JRS office, where he came every two weeks to collect food coupons. He was a conspicuous presence – tall, talkative, dressed in a light blue suit - and entertained those waiting with his good-humoured criticism of the slow proceedings of the office. He was in his third year of All Nations Theological College, founded by Korean missionaries of the Presbyterian Church, located a few kilometres inland off the Kampala- Entebbe road. He and other students without means of paying for their education worked in the school garden before and after classes and in weekends to earn their tuition fees. In late June 1998, I visited Isaac and Maria, a friend of his, at their college. Maria had announced my visit and been given permission to skip the afternoon classes. Jordan, another fellow student, joined us on our walk to Lake Victoria. In my notes I wrote:
When we’ve walked for about a kilometre, Isaac comes running after us, he’s sneaked out of class. We talk, joke and get to the lake. There’s a tiny village of mud houses on the shore: fishermen and their families. The water is high and the wind is strong. I feel wonderful being out of town. We see a large half-built house, and the three of them quarrel about whether it was Amin or Obote who had started building it as a holiday resort for himself and his cronies. It’s a beautiful location,
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right on the lake, now home to cows and the odd goat. One of the islands in the distance, they tell me, is called Paradise Island … We sit in front of the only little kiosk and I buy us sodas. Maria and Isaac – unusual! - exchange some agitated remarks. Isaac jokes that Maria is a “senior bachelor”, but she doesn’t take it as a joke. She denies his being married, ridicules him for not having his wife with him, alluding to the fact that he hasn’t been able to pay the brideprice.21 Isaac retorts that he will go back to Sudan to take care of that, and Maria responds: “You cannot go back, you don’t even have a home there, your home is destroyed!” Jordan puts in that he wants to marry “from far away”. They calm down, and Isaac speaks of something else that worries him: his duties as a male member and eldest son of his family. Says: “My father died in 1991, my mother died when I was seven years old, and I don’t know where my sister is. I’m the one in charge of the household. When I was still with them, they thought ‘our son is here, later we are going to benefit from him’. But now that I’m no longer there, they will think that they lost me, they will forget me, they will say ‘maybe he has been killed during this instability’”. He says he feels “very sad” because “these days I can only be with them through my prayers and in spirit, but I cannot contribute to them as I am supposed to”. And: “I don’t want this title of refugee, it means you have no freedom in many ways and you can’t be self-reliant”. Jordan adds that “in Sudan we were very rich, we have cattle and gold, here we have to ask for everything”. They say the financial problems are the worst, because these take away your freedom. Isaac says he’s fed up, that maybe it would be better to leave this world and just go to heaven. Maria laughs and asks if he will jump into Lake Victoria, and he responds: “There are many ways to leave this world!” I’ve seen this expression of his once before at the JRS. It contrasts sharply with his usual joyful energy. I suppose it shows that he’s both a bright and playful young man and a married man in exile with a history of guerrilla warfare. Maria changes her tone and says that he shouldn’t think like that, that God has many plans and his current suffering may have a reason. He looks at his feet, thanks her for the encouragement. Last time he told me he was happy that God gave him this ability to joke and entertain and see things lightly, and: “They think because we are refugees, we should just sit still and mourn?!”
I asked several people to write down their definition of ‘refugee’. Among the characteristics people mentioned were: “having no land”; “being dependent, living as beggars”; “having no political rights”; “being lonely”; “no school and education”; “eating poor and inadequate food”; “restricted movement”; “being unprotected and insecure”; “being separated from relatives”; “no employment”; “looking at themselves and each other as useless persons”; “being fearful and frustrated”; “being discriminated”; being always affected by a sad feeling”; and “vivre dans l’inquiétude”. All answers point either at the hardships of lacking basic needs like food and shelter, or at their feelings of not being free, being overlooked and not taken seriously. My research clearly showed that going to school, being able to call oneself a student, was perceived as having a positive impact on this testing and undignified situation. First of all, going to school meant being engaged in something useful and meaningful. “Being idle”, Mikael said, “is being only half alive”. For many years, reading had offered a way of temporarily removing himself from reality – a diversion that was like a fundamental need. But it also had served a concrete learning function, something he believed would be stepped up if he could go back to school. He wrote to me:
I was the only one in our family involved in politics. My parents didn’t like communism because it made them poor. I never seize from trying to understand why all this happened to me. That’s why I want to go to school. My brain will grow and I will learn the methods of understanding things, splitting big questions into
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smaller ones and using definitions. So that I will not have to find out everything by myself. I can feel that many things are going to change. Because now that I’m going to school, I want to work on myself. My behaviour and my discipline. You know, all my life I remained a student even if I did not go to school like any other student. I carried books all the time, I read all the time... I have never stopped studying. My coming back to school is simply the continuation of my reading. The same motive I had as a child is the same drive I have now: I just want to know. It is a life long research to know my self and my environment.
Often Mikael was disappointed with his education, but at times he felt he was gaining something. One email of his read:
There is an increasing feeling of awareness of myself, my environment, the entire universe. I feel like I am elevated above the confusing world that troubled me in the past, this was what I was seeking for and it is a wonderful feeling. I am busy widening the already punctured black wall of ignorance and confusion. Whether this world likes it or not, it is going to unfold itself!
Secondly, education is future-oriented, which fits the attitude of many refugees: too much dwelling on the past is unproductive or even disruptive. In my notes I found this remark by a southern Sudanese young man, which expresses what I heard so often:
I don’t mind about the past but about the present and the future. Whatever they did to my family in the past, whatever I missed, no problem, but where and how to live is my big question. The thing is, there is no work or job minus qualifications, and no life minus money and security. That is my main line of thought.
Education holds the promise of becoming self-reliant in the future, which has a particularly strong appeal to refugees who almost as a rule find themselves in positions of dependency. Mikael had his way of putting it:
This constant trying to get something out of the iron fist of UNHCR is the worst thing affecting my dignity. I dream to see the end to this playing the victim. Believe me, I prefer to die than to ask for money, I’m really tired of asking for money like a small boy or a disabled person.
Thirdly, being a student helped people to feel “normal” again - a young person like so many others, the distinction between refugee and citizen for once irrelevant. Having a student identity card meant they could afford to let go of the ‘refugee identity’ and the friends they made in school were considered proof of this. Samuel (see Chapter Soldiers) was delighted when in the Christmas holidays after his O-level exams a school friend invited him home to eastern Uganda. He asked me to write a few lines to his friend’s mother, which he would then print out and give to her. I believe this expressed his longing to be able to present himself as someone with meaningful social ties of his own, rather than as a lone refugee cut off from his home and family. When I asked Wani (the former bodyguard who referred to his younger self as a “warrior”) in what ways his education had changed him, “having international friends” was the first thing he mentioned. In university his closest friend is a Kenyan, and as a token of that friendship he gave Wani his mobile phone when he went to Kenya for the Christmas holidays. Wani: “It is good to learn about different cultures and ways of associating, it will help you to fit anywhere”. He also wrote that education “has given me self-control”. I asked him to explain.
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I’ve learned to think before you speak. Many people who are not educated talk or say anything that comes in their mind without knowing or thinking of the repercussions. And I have learned to talk to a person, to ask her “do you love me or not?” and if not, I will leave her. I can’t force her.
It sounds very mature, but I suppose it makes sense given his teenage experience with on the one hand the rigid authority and on the other hand the impunity of the military training camp. Then I think of how he signed off one of his emails to me not long ago, and realise his maturity does not refute his want of something in the way of parental encouragement. He wrote: “I will be happy if you send me an examination success card for my finals”. I also asked Jean, who had been sent to Kampala by his father to find his Aunt Alice, what he had learned through his education. It was in 2005 and he had just turned nineteen. We were checking our emails in an internet café in Kabalagala and the slow connection gave us ample time to talk. His answer came easily, and later I scribbled down in my notebook:
Jean: “Many academic things, but also how to socialise with other people. To not make your decisions on your own. To trust others and share your thoughts. To ask for advice, also from bigger people. And to always think about the past and the future. You can’t just go straight into the future, you learn from the past”.
The past, for the young men in Kampala, had been one of insecurity and war. Interestingly, many of them attributed these wars to a lack of education. Summed up in one line, their opinion was that “wars happen because people are uneducated”. “Only if you are educated”, Jacob put it, “you understand that all people are the same”, and Wani commented: “There are many commanders in the SPLA who cannot read… even Captains who are illiterate! On every paper they want to see a stamp. As long as there is a stamp, they will believe you”. Many of those I spoke to seemed to consider formal education not only as the source of knowledge, but also as a vital instrument for solving problems of war, tribalism and poverty. I wonder whether their opinions had been influenced by the ‘peace education’ programs, which (especially since the late 1990s) have gained ground as part of the international humanitarian response to situations of war and forced migration (Sommers 2001b). Verdirame & Harrell-Bond are critical about such programs. They write:
“Leaving aside the old Socratic question as to whether virtue can be taught, it is hard not to be sceptical about peace education programmes, which seem to be based on an oversimplified assumption about conflict: the idea that wars happen because people have not been taught that war is bad, and the corollary that hiring consultants to ‘teach’ peace amounts to ‘conflict prevention’” (2005: 259).22
Probably most of the young men did not simply think that chalk and a blackboard would do to learn about right and wrong. They were aware of the deeper issues: that when people are educated they can participate more fully in civil and political arenas of daily life, are less easily manipulated, and probably have more opportunities to make a living for themselves and their families. Wani said:
It’s true, politicians forget people after elections… they only come to disturb them during elections. Good leadership doesn’t depend only on education but also on character and family background. Peasants are helpless, they are engineered by the middle classes, like in the French Revolution. Most wars are not caused by the innocent villagers. Politicians give empty promises, they deceive the people, they can even say “we will build for you a bridge”, where there is not even a river!
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Not only heads of states or the commanders of national armies, but also rebel leaders are often highly educated individuals. Berkeley gave his chapter on the war in Sudan the mocking title: Three Ph.D.s and a New Kind of African Leader (Berkeley 2001). Many war- affected people in southern Sudan may well concur with what the (non-literate) Nuer chief quoted in Jok & Hutchinson had to say:
“They used to tell us that the reason why Nuer and Dinka fight is because we are not educated. But now look at all this killing! This war between the Nuer and the Dinka is much worse than anything we experienced in the past. And it is the war of the educated [elite] – It is not our war at all!” (1999: 131).
Jok & Hutchinson write that according to the civilians they interviewed the “war of the educated” transgressed all the ethical limits on violence that had been honoured by previous generations, “swiftly transforming earlier patterns of intermittent cattle raiding into no-holds-barred military assaults on Dinka and Nuer civilian populations armed with little more than spears” (1999: 131).23 Riek Machar, the commander (and PhD-holder) who broke away from the SPLA in 1991, was one of those whom the Nuer call the “bull-boys”: uninitiated men (without the gaar) educated in the mission schools. The term bull-boys expresses “the unease with which the average Nuer regarded these men who were not quite men. There was something slippery about the bull-boys, something not quite trustworthy. They had not accepted their people’s moral code” (Scroggins 2002: 174).
Thus, while the young refugees believed their education had enlightened them, something from which they drew self-respect, they also were aware that it remained to be seen whether the educated leaders-to-be of their generation would put into practice the ideas about democracy, equality and human rights they so readily professed.24 Nevertheless, the social division between the educated and the non-educated remained a popular subject of discussion, 25 and the outspoken civilisation discourse some individuals used seemed rather deeply engrained. A Congolese voluntary teacher in a self-help school in Kampala said:
“When we were studying… they [our teachers] gave us examples of… if we were to arrive in the middle of a forest, where there was no education, but where we would find people, children. It is in the middle of the forest, there are indigenous peoples, people who are not civilised. It is up to you, if you find yourself in that forest, to struggle to teach those children so that they will have something in their heads. And, for me, here in Kampala with these refugee children, I find myself as someone who is in the forest where there are children who do not know schooling… And I, I have this vocation. I must struggle so that these children can study … And even though there is no salary, even though there is no assistance, I still have, in my heart, this vocation” (Dryden-Peterson 2003: 25).
The Sudanese also used metaphorical notions of ‘the uneducated’ and ‘the illiterate’ - cultural poverty, ignorance, disability – to refer to their home land or even their own parents. They phrased this not only in terms of a generational issue but also in terms of race/ethnicity. In December 2005, I had a conversation with two Sudanese young men from Kajokeji area about the forthcoming peace deal between the SPLA and the Sudan government. Their view was that:
It’s mostly the Dinkas who get promoted, even if they are not learned. They have been killing others who are learned and educated. This tribal thing should be put aside. But someone who is not learned is not convincible, he cannot understand others. But for some, even if they are educated, their character remains, they are still arrogant. Especially nomads like the Karamojong and the Dinka. The Dinka
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brought their animals to Equatoria and the cattle started eating all our crops. That’s how fighting started. They kill you if you chase their animals. Generally all tribes feel they [the Dinka] should be taught a lesson. That will be the reason for renewed fighting, even if peace is signed.
I imagine that, even if certain individuals had doubts about the blessings of formal education, they might have found it difficult to express this to me. In their eyes, what was I but a product of western-style education, which had moreover quite nicely taken me on an extended paid visit to a different continent? And did I not seem to believe in the value of what I was doing? Only Mikael was not fazed by this perception of me. He said:
It seems to me there is a pattern of generating highly corrupt people from the university. Maybe there is something wrong in education. I think education strongly misses ethics and morality and therefore it is a dangerous power that many people possess without learning any moral responsibility how they should use it. That explains why we have such a mess in the world of educated people. And another thing I’m thinking is I am increasingly uncomfortable about research and its attached meaning as finding truth… I am feeling one can easily draw and collect exactly the kind of findings he or she wants by designing the research to give a particular outcome. Even research like yours, I know it is easy to manipulate the findings.
All this said, by virtue of the fact that education, and especially higher education, remains a scarce resource, it also remains a potent status symbol. Young students feel proud to belong to the privileged few, which of course is not only an issue of self-worth but also one of power. As Cruise O’Brien puts it: “Education remains a political subject, a matter of access to political power (or of closure from that power) at all levels from the university to the primary school” (1996: 68). It is evident that only few university graduates may reach to the highest echelons of political power, but even those who do not, feel, as one person put it to me: “Now that I’m educated I am more recognised in the world”.
6. EDUCATION AND POWER
Bourdieu (1972) is one scholar who elaborated on the truism that education provides a pivotal function in the transmission of power and privileges. Several African intellectuals too have questioned the blessings of the modernity paradigm, that is, the supposed triumph of scientific and rational enquiry over ‘traditional obscurantism’. Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president, summed up the deficiencies of the (neo)colonial educational system, stating it: a) is elitist, b) divorces students from the society which it is supposed to be preparing them for, c) teaches people to despise knowledge other than that which comes from books, and d) removes strong young people from productive work. Mazrui (1978) pointed at the double-edged sword that African universities were from the start: mechanisms of political liberation and at the same time agencies of intellectual and cultural dependency. He criticises what he calls Africa’s infatuation with modern education, and argues that colonialism transformed the ‘natural’ basis of stratification from ‘who owns what’ to ‘who knows what’. Altbach (1977) argues that colonialism altered education from being a largely religious institution to a “certifying institution” for social mobility and access to power – a development that Dore (1976) refers to as “the diploma disease”. All these are indeed real flaws of the current educational system in Africa. My suggestion is, however, that the young men of this study could not afford to be so critical. Their approach was pragmatic and based on a common-sense evaluation of their marginal position in society, which was
208 Narratives aggravated by the fact that they were foreigners as well as by the reality that their countries were in war. A diploma, western-style or not, was what would give them a sense of control and opportunity. The remainder of this chapter will discuss the power issues that were implicated in all stages of the young refugees’ association with school and university in Uganda, as well as the ways in which they turned these to their advantage.
6.1 Getting into school
Knowledge was a resource, and its circulation a primary activity. One of the most surprising foci of information was that dealing with education. Many of the homeless children were concerned with going to school. Information on what schools might accept them, what resources they needed to attend schools, and how they could obtain these resources was a common topic of conversation. Education was viewed as a means to get off the streets, as a valuable survival tool. Information on education circulated like a commodity: a symbol of hope for the future.
Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story, 1997, p. 208
Nordstrom writes about homeless children in a town in war-ravaged Mozambique. Also outside war-affected areas, gaining access to education is something sought after with a passion. The stress of competition for educational access has been cited as the source of outbreaks of witchcraft-induced health problems among students in Botswana (Burke 2000), and of violent behaviour caused by spirit possession among schoolgirls in Madagascar (Sharp 1990). I recall an anxious moment when a group of Sudanese young men, who had had a few drinks too many, vowed that they would “get” a certain young man who used to live with them but was now in boarding school. They did not dispute that he deserved his luck, but why did he refuse to tell them how he had achieved what all of them longed for? They insisted to know where he had found the money to pay his fees. But this was information people did not readily share. When I asked Mikael if he told anyone about his scholarship, his look and tone of voice demonstrated he thought me terribly naïve. He said: “I don’t tell anybody where I hide my gold!”
Getting into school or university in Uganda is first and foremost an issue of money. As long as you pay, you will most likely be offered a place. Primary and secondary schools charge the same tuition fees for all pupils, but universities usually charge higher fees for foreign students, including refugees. Moreover, foreigners are required to pay in hard currency instead of Ugandan shillings, and must deposit a certain amount with the school treasurer in case of emergency expenses. Additional expenses are incurred by having one’s foreign certificates and diplomas to be equated by the national education board. In 2004, UNEB suspended all equation of Congolese certificates because of allegations of large- scale forgery. As a result, HPCT had to withdraw several scholarships they had awarded to Congolese students. (I do not know how, but resourceful Jean managed to get his Congolese primary school diploma – for which he had travelled to north-eastern Congo during school holidays - equated by UNEB and was registered for the O-level exams!) Then there is the issue of those (presumably the majority) who flee their countries without carrying their school or university certificates. Mikael, who had graduated from high school in Ethiopia, went back to secondary school in Kampala to do his A-levels because his Ethiopian high school diploma did not allow him access to university. The disappointment was very great when after two more years of schooling and performing well enough in his A-level exams to be admitted into Makerere, Uganda’s top university turned down his application for bureaucratic reasons. He was told that prospective
Students 209 students need to submit not only their A-level but also their O-level certificates, the latter of which Mikael did not have. There was no way the university was going to make an exception, and Mikael had to resort to applying to a private university with a more lenient admission policy. For those refugees (the great majority) who have no funds to pay for their own education, the selection procedures for scholarships are a serious source of stress and possible exploitation. Earlier in this chapter I mentioned the UNHCR scholarship program operated by the Hugh Pilkington Charitable Trust, which awards secondary school and university scholarships to refugees in rural settlements. The selection procedure is in the hands of a committee composed of the UNHCR Field Officer, the camp commander (OPM), the HPCT Field Officer, delegates from the Refugee Council and Refugee Welfare Committees, teachers, and staff of implementing partners. The main criterion for selection is academic performance, with special consideration for youth with special needs (single parents, UAMs, the disabled). Fifty percent of all scholarships are to be awarded to female applicants. When I was talking to two Sudanese young men and asked them whether girls from their country are involved in prostitution in Uganda in order to survive, they said: “We haven’t heard of it”. However, they added rather matter of fact that girls in the settlements, “especially the medium performers” have sex with officials from different offices in order to be listed for UNHCR scholarships. They suggested this was a quite common phenomenon. The Refugee Rights project received information of the same kind, but it proved very difficult to substantiate the allegations given the fact that girls fear to make their experiences public (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). Lastly, access to Ugandan educational institutions is dependent on one’s proficiency in the English language. For refugees from francophone countries (Congo, Rwanda, Burundi) this meant that chances of pursuing their education in exile were extremely thin.26
Refugees who managed to overcome all the monetary and bureaucratic hurdles and started going to school or university, were often still plagued by the fact that their living circumstances were not conducive to studying. One Congolese young man who had just managed to pay his tuition fees, stopped going to school after one term because the headaches that came with spending the day at school on an empty stomach, made him incapable of concentrating. Refugee children and youth who have experienced trauma may generally have trouble concentrating and keeping up with work (Landau 2005). Several refugees without living parents, who were taken in by relatives, had what they referred to as “problems at home” that affected their studies. Clinton was one of them. He was the first person I had an appointment with the morning after my arrival in Kampala in late December 2004. It had been nearly two years since my last visit to Uganda. It was pouring with rain and we sat with a soda at a roofed Kabalagala terrace. Clinton was on his way travelling north to Moyo to see his relatives (self-settled Sudanese refugees) for the Christmas holidays, but had wanted to wait for my arrival. He had grown - I barely reached to his shoulders now - and was dressed in a flashy sports outfit so spotlessly clean it almost hurt my eyes. He was going on eighteen and I could discover few traces of his former shyness. Clinton does not know much about his early years, or his parents’ histories. He was a toddler when his family fled to Uganda, and lost his parents soon after that. His relatives took it upon themselves to educate him. Earlier he had written to me explaining the few things he was told about his family background:
I lost my mother in Moyo district. My mother died of a heart attack, which developed right from Sudan during the process of the war. She was a learnt person, she worked as a nurse. When her disease intensified she resigned from work. Because of the war we moved into northern Uganda under the guidance of my father. He established his family there and had now enough attention to my
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mother’s sickness. Unfortunately due to inability to take her to a better hospital, she passed away. My family has a broken history. My mother was at first married to another man whom she later divorced. She moved with her baby boy and later got married to my father. We are supposed to be six from the same father but we lost four. I am the third born and my blood sister Jackie is my follower. When my mother passed away my grandmother and my aunt brought us (me and Jackie) to Mukono [a trading centre along the Kampala – Jinja road]. I recall in 1995 I was put in Primary One. My uncle later brought me to Kampala and let me join Primary Three at Shimoni Primary School, which you know has a high standard. About my father I cannot have a clear explanation, but what I know is that when we came to Mukono he moved back to Sudan because before we came to Uganda he was a soldier. When my mother died and we were brought to Mukono he decided to retreat because his aim of coming with us to Uganda was to see that we were safe from the war and attend to my mother’s problem. And since she was unable to survive and we were brought to Mukono he decided to go back. It’s now 10 years and I don’t know whether he is alive or dead.
Clinton can be considered lucky in that his relatives were concerned about his schooling and had money to pay for it, but even so things were not easy. The uncle, who took him from Mukono to school in Kampala, lost his job. Clinton reflected:
At one point my uncle with whom I stayed became a serious alcoholic. When I stayed with him I was in P5 and he would come back home at night and paralyse everything. If you have been doing something you find yourself stopping because of the unnecessary noise he makes. And he could ask me foolish questions and it was a must to answer and if I refused he would start quarrelling. And if I slept before he had told me to do so that would be another case. I had a lot of hardship in paying school fees. I looked for my mother’s death certificate to help me in the search of a sponsor.
That is when (in mid 2000) Clinton came to the Refugee Law Project, where he told one of the legal officers about his uncle who sometimes stayed away for days, leaving him without food. He was thirteen years old and I remember him sitting there in his school t-shirt and shorts and with his socks pulled up to his knees. He handed us his mother’s death certificate as well as his school reports. The legal officer went with him to visit his uncle, who admitted it had become impossible to support his cousin any longer. We managed to get Clinton funding and he is now in a boarding school and like Jean he is an O-level Candidate. He is a bright student, always among the top three of his year. For Ugandan standards the comments on his report cards are full of praise: apart from the standard “should work harder”, they also read “good performance” and the house master of his dormitory wrote: “Cooperative member of the house, I appointed him Captain”.
6.2 Life at school
January 2005. It had been nearly five years since I had last seen Jean, but I recognised him immediately. He was much taller, no longer a boy crying for his father but a man of nineteen dressed in brown trousers and matching shirt. His slightly lanky movements though seemed to belong to someone who had only just got used to his new proportions. The expression on his face when he told me of his latest achievement at school also betrayed a mix of childlike pride and adult earnestness. He had been elected Prefect Sports & Games. He explained the procedure: the pre-selection involved an evaluation of the applicants’ personal files of behaviour by the school management, then those who passed were interviewed by a committee consisting of the headmaster and several teachers,
Students 211 followed by three days of election campaigns. All contestants put up posters on the school premises. The closing day of the campaign was the toughest, he said: he and the other candidates had to answer a series of questions with all pupils (S1 to S6) as their audience. On Friday morning the elections took place: “It was by ballot, you see, it’s democracy they use”. School alumni who had gone on to university were called in to count the votes. Jean received the top number of votes – “more than the Head Boy!” There were fourteen positions to be allocated (Head Boy, Head Girl, and Prefects for Sports & Games, Sanitation, Welfare, Library, and Religion – each of them with an assistant) and the applicants each had to contest for a particular one of these. Jean gave me a meaningful look when he said: “A boy from Senior Five became my assistant”. “All students cheered for me”, he said, and the headmaster had complimented him with the words: “You are a foreigner but you have competed with Ugandans”. Some friends had advised him not to apply, “they said because I am not known”. He had thought over their advice, but then realised that “later, people will ask you, ‘have you ever been a leader?’, and you have to show them your certificate to prove it”. I asked him why his fellow students voted for him. He knew the answer:
As a foreigner they like you if you talk to them well. And you should not place yourself above them… as a leader you have to put yourself on the same level and cooperate with them. That’s what people like, we learn that in political education and it is true. You know, I like ideas, I always ask people who are older than me. I tell them, “I don’t want anything from you, I only want your advice”. God gave me that talent of meeting the right people and knowing how to talk to them. Who knows, without that I could already be dead.
Wani, the former SPLA bodyguard, also successfully contested for a student leadership position. During a brief visit to Uganda in 2003, I went to see him at his school. I asked the guard at the school gate where I was to find the students of Senior Five. He asked me who I was looking for. When I mentioned Wani’s name he said: “But then you need Senior Six”. I probably looked unconvinced, but he smiled and said: “He is in Senior Six, Madam, we all know him here. You don’t know that he’s the Head Boy?” He sent a pupil to go and look for Wani. We sat in the little school kiosk and had a chapatti and a soda. I recall Wani mentioned his locker had been opened and his calculator and a few other things stolen, but he did not make a big deal of it, reassured me it would be solved. Two years later in 2005, when Wani had just started university, we came to talk of his secondary school experiences as Head Boy. He said:
I was liked because I was not arrogant and because I didn’t cheat on my fellow students. One day I contained a strike and everybody was very happy. At 7.30 in the morning the bell rings for morning preps, but that day porridge was late and the students hadn’t had their breakfast. They all converged around the kitchen and started pushing the cooks. I had to address them and said: “Are we going to spoil our education because of porridge?” You know, here in Uganda students go on strike just because of food… I told them to go to class as usual and that during break-time I would open the dormitories and give them five minutes extra to eat their porridge. They were very happy. And the teachers were also happy because the students had been really sharp, but I managed to contain them. You know, with leadership you have to have principles, otherwise you will be taken for granted and the students will say: “Ah, that’s how he talks, but what does he do?” The ones who didn’t like me were the prefects, they took me harsh. They all the time asked me: “How are we going to benefit?” But I told them we are all students, we were not elected to benefit.
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I asked Wani about his plans for his years in university - would he go for a place in the student council? “Not yet”, he said, “I’m only a fresher and I don’t want it to affect my studies, maybe next year, or in my third”. A few months later when I spoke to him on the phone he told me he had been appointed spokesperson of the Sudanese Student Association. “I was asked”, he said.
Clearly not all students had such positive experiences. Samuel (see Chapter Soldiers) also wanted to compete for Head Boy in his secondary school and had already started his campaign when he was called to the headmaster’s office and told to withdraw: “He told me that election is for Ugandans only”. Marcus Duku was told the same in his school, “the leader of the students has to be a Ugandan”, but he was allowed to contest for the position of class representative. Wani recalled that things had not always been favourable for him either: he and other Sudanese pupils had been the object of discrimination in primary and the first years of secondary school.
They nicknamed us omukidi, which means ‘people who move naked’. You know, that is what I call stereotyping of the poverty of refugees. Here in Buganda they assume that people from the North and people from Sudan are very harsh and hostile. They think like that because of all the wars in our areas. But during my A- levels they couldn’t call me those names because of my authority as Head Boy.
Mikael felt very much discriminated against in university, by the students more than by the lecturers. He said: “I’ve never felt different as I feel it here, I’ve never before thought about whether I am African or not”. What he experienced was black-to-black racism caused by his being Ethiopian and ‘brown’ in an environment of predominantly ‘black’ Ugandans. He wrote to me:
Their definition of being an African is very narrow and is entirely based on colonialism and worst of all it is based on colour. For them being African is being black and being colonised. Colour issues are an everyday experience here at university. There was a half-cast living at my hostel but now he has moved away after a very bitter argument based on colour. This is true and you can check it out and you know I rarely lie to you. It’s like this: either you are black and a fellow or else you are not a fellow brother. I don’t want to associate myself with such kind of perception, I think it’s dangerous. In your writings I came across a quotation by an African writer who said ‘what have we done for these whites to hate us so?’, but should we not also ask why the Ethiopians hate the Eritreans, why the Ugandans discriminate ‘brown’ people like me, and who is to blame for what is happening by the LRA in Uganda? The Europeans? ‘These sweet Africans they don’t die but they are always killed’, I don’t agree with such kind of argument. Why export all the blame? And what about the Red Terror in Ethiopia, why was the OAU not there in Addis Ababa with all the knowledge they had when Ethiopian students were killed and lying in the streets?27
Often Mikael was about to give up university and leave. It was not only the discrimination and racism that frustrated him, but also the mismanagement and corruption going on at school administration level. It was an issue already during his A-levels. From my notes:
Mikael came from school with the decision that he can no longer stay on as a boarder. His complaints: no privacy, no place to read, students fighting every day for posho, stealing from the dormitories, and to make things worse: teachers have no authority. He managed to convince the Deputy to make an exception and let him stay on as a day scholar. Mikael: “I only want my peace of mind to study. I don’t want to be disturbed by anyone”. Together we write a letter to the Deputy
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concerning the issue. He is convinced that in Ethiopia such “chaos and indiscipline” would never be tolerated.
When in another mood he would reflect and say: “I lack emotional attachment, that’s why I’m always angry. Like last time, I know you were disappointed when you saw me and I immediately started complaining about school. I don’t think it’s the school… I just needed to relieve myself. You know I’m so suspicious. I look for small things and then I magnify them, but I’m learning that often people say and do things unintentionally. I hope I will change, that when I come out of school I will not be the same person”. He said he was fed up with his anger and his “inferiority syndrome”:
People who suffer from that can benefit because they are usually very strong. But it’s not a good kind of strength. Did you know this about Napoleon? He came from a poor family but got a scholarship to study with rich kids and that’s how he developed his inferiority syndrome. People who are angry and jealous are very strong, but they don’t know what they are doing, they can easily kill you. I don’t want to be like them.
One more thing that may explain why Mikael felt ‘the odd one out’, and was probably approached as such, was the fact that he was ten years older than most of his fellow students. This is an issue for many refugees, and ex-combatants, who have missed years of schooling and whose struggle to keep up with younger children is experienced as humiliating (Twum-Danso 2003). Samuel, who was six years older than his classmates, purposefully lowered his age on his school registration form and was slightly put off by having to wear shorts.28
6.3 Diploma in hand
Today Kampala is very hot, but the sun plays hide and seek. How are you? Now I am deep into the month of April, soon it will be gone and I will have May, May will bring me my certificate, how I long to get my certificate…
Email from Mikael, 2002
What do diplomas and degrees bring? Bourdieu’s (1972) observation that the value of the diploma, outside the specifically academic markets, depends on the economic and social values of the person who possesses it, is true for all young graduates, but especially for foreigners lacking social networks. Though throughout Africa education is seen as the key to jobs and a successful life, in reality the connection between being educated and obtaining a job is far from self-evident. Cruise O’Brien writes: “Today’s students compare themselves with preceding generations, those who could count on getting government jobs because of their degrees” (1996: 65). The situation today, however, is that: “mass education creates problems for the future, as the partially educated young people have new expectations in terms of jobs, of income, of lifestyle”. An increasing proportion of the “partially educated” lives in towns, and: “Very few of them can hope to find employment in the ‘modern’ sector: the public sector … has been under structural adjustment … with very tight constraints on new hiring, and the industrial sector has been shedding labour since the mid-1980s” (1996: 59). Nevertheless, and this is what young people hold on to, with diploma chances to find work will always still be better than without. Besides, young people’s (and their parents’) preoccupation with obtaining formal education is hardly a surprise given the example set by governments and international donor agencies. These attribute “a virtually sacred role” (Brenner, in Cruise O’Brien 1996: 66) to education in the
214 Narratives process of ‘development’ – even if there are few reliable macro-economic data that substantiate the assumed positive relationship between education and economic development.
The role of students in society
The young men of this study worried about whether they would find work in Uganda after completing their education, but they generally were confident about their future contributions to the development of their home countries. When I asked them about society’s views on the role that university graduates play, their answers included: “they are considered decision makers and future leaders”; “they are seen as people who have knowledge for development”; “they politically mobilise the public”; “they play administrative roles”; “they are seen to act as an example to the society”.29 And they also said: “they are seen as people who have neglected traditional culture”. I asked Wani if he ever experienced difficulties in relating to people who are not educated, and how he viewed them. He came up with a rather outspoken list:
I look at them as people who need help; they are hygienically poor; they are narrow-minded; they are demanding; they regard the educated to be exploitative.
When Wani and I had this conversation in January 2005, he had not been back to the refugee settlement in northern Uganda or to Sudan ever since he was taken out of the SPLA by his uncle eight years earlier. The reason he had not gone there, he said, was “no money for transport”, and he added: “People there may judge that I am not responsible because I don’t come to visit. They think that because you are in town you must have money, but they don’t know the realities of town. And also, education is expensive in terms of time, but the villagers don’t understand that. They think you are neglecting them, they assume you are forgetting your culture”. Another reason why they probably feel he is “not responsible”, Wani added, is because he is not married.
Traditionally you are considered a responsible man if you are married. And traditionally if you are not married you cannot be a leader, you are not respected. They say: “Charity begins at home’’. If they see me in the village, they may say I’m wasting my time. But for those who went to school marriage is not as it used to be. Anyway, I’m already a man. I’ve first married education, then later I will marry for a family. As they say, “you cannot serve two masters at one time”. And also I think I have already shown that I can be responsible… being Head Boy, I had the responsibilities over all the students of the school.
Wani would like to get married, but only after finishing his education. More urgent is his determination to go back to Sudan. He wants to contribute to the development of his country, and to share and use the knowledge and skills he has gained through his education. He does not want to wait until finishing his degree, and aspires to go on one of the trips organised by the Sudan Student Association at his university. Due to the peace negotiations travelling to Sudan has become easier. To cross into Sudan a student has to pay $30 to the Ugandan immigration, and “on the Sudan side they let students cross for free”. Wani explained: “The students go during holidays to teach and sensitize the people there. We don’t need to be selfish, it’s good if we share our knowledge. For example to tell people to send their children and daughters to school”. But these trips will not be easy:
In the village there is that spirit of sharing. So people all eat from the same plate, even sick people eat with them. If you refuse to do so because you have learned
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that it is hygienically unhealthy, they will say that you are feeling big or proud. That’s where differences come.
Wani, I learned after knowing him for many years, came from a family of chiefs. The uncle who bailed him out of the SPLA, so it was explained to Wani, had come to Uganda many years before for three reasons: to flee the first civil war, to search for education, and to escape his future chiefly duties. Wani remembered from his time as a young child in his grandparents’ village, that people looked at him in a particular way and that they “treated me with respect”. When I asked him whether he aspired to follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, he said he was “not interested”, and “there are enough young ones there who can do it”. He wants to be a leader (qualities of which he believes are “in his blood”) but “no, not in that traditional way”.
Sudanese nationals who went into exile to neighbouring Uganda and Kenya are generally speaking far better educated than their compatriots who remained in southern Sudan during the two decades of war. Lomeling Sunday and Marcus Duku, two Sudanese medical students who spoke to me in early 2005 about their possible return home, predicted: “People who fought are the ones who will get jobs once there is peace. They will say: ‘You who ran away, now you want a job here?!’ Jobs will be given based on whether you stayed and fought, not on the basis of the papers you have. But maybe with the international NGOs coming in, those who have been educated outside will have a chance to get jobs”. And they added: “The NGOs that operate in southern Sudan pay good money, they pay in dollars”. Lomeling and Marcus were concerned about whether they would find a job, but had few doubts about the contribution they as university graduates would be able to make to the country they left many years before. I asked them how they saw their role, and they came up with the following list: “Health education on water and sanitation, peace counselling, initiate projects and income generating activities using the local resources, sensitisation of the community on HIV/Aids, be a spokesperson to advocate for the disabled, impaired and voiceless”. The jargon in itself is quite interesting, but it only partially answers the question of how they envisage their role, which really is a hard question. When I discussed it with Sudanese young men in 1998-2001, they would all say that eventually they would go back to Sudan and help rebuild their country. During my visit in January 2005, the peace deal between the SPLA and the Khartoum government was signed. This gave an entirely new perspective, and some young men suddenly seemed more hesitant about a future return home. They were sceptical about whether the peace would last, and some expressed frustration with how it was achieved:
If you want long-lasting peace you have to involve the youth. They should have mobilised the youth before their peace talks, asked them their agendas. But the leaders are selfish and there is a lot of nepotism. Hierarchy is the only thing considered when deciding who is to go and talk, which is discriminative. They should have consulted university students, they are the leaders of tomorrow and yet their ideas are not taken. Now they feel undermined.
And also, like Lomeling and Marcus, some expressed worries about how they would be received by their compatriots who had not fled. The new situation made the question about their commitment to society a very real one. Years earlier, many had expressed to me their aspirations of becoming “an important person” in the development process of their beloved home country. Some wanted to become doctors or engineers, others thought in terms of becoming involved in politics, to be “good leaders” who would “bring democracy” and show the alternatives to war. They also spoke of their desire to help give their country a more prominent place on the world map. Their flight and exile in different
216 Narratives countries, and their residence in a capital city, had given them a new outlook on the world, and connections to other places that they had come to value. Cruise O’Brien, discussing the role of college and university students in African politics, writes that even if at times they are “leading defenders of liberty, Mbembe style, heroes of democracy, ‘vanguards’”, generally their role is ambivalent:
“An oppositional stance is commonly adopted on campus. But none of these presentational considerations should deflect attention from the fact that the fundamental preoccupation of these students is with securing state employment … [and] membership in the ruling elite, privilege” (Cruise O’Brien 1996: 67, 65).
I noticed many Sudanese struggled with the felt moral obligation of contributing to their country on the one hand, and their concerns with their own social mobility and desire to do well for themselves on the other hand. Most made a pragmatic assessment and attempted to combine their own goals with a contribution to society. I asked Clinton, who came from Sudan as a toddler, what role he saw himself playing in society as an educated person. He was eighteen and wrote: “To be sincere to you, my contributions to my society are minor but I think far better than doing nothing…” Clinton used to stay with his grandmother and aunt in Mukono during school holidays, but since his grandmother passed away and his aunt died of Aids, he has been travelling to Moyo to spend time with distant relatives who live there as self-settled refugees. After many years of living in a city environment, the realities of poor, rural Uganda made him pause.
Being a person with a lot of interest in sciences, I put some of the things I learn into practice and I advise my people about sanitation and human health. On several occasions when I go to the village I find a bushy environment. At times I advise them on the dangers of bushes near to a home. Drinking unboiled tap/borehole water, ignoring washing hands after easing oneself, ignoring children’s disposals, having less attention for the family in favour of alcohol, smoking, these are some of the common things found among societies, but through some educated few in society these can come to a minimal stand.
Jean did not talk of “health and sanitation” but about law. The second time Thierry and I interviewed Jean in 1999 (when he had just arrived in Kampala and was still hoping to find his Aunt Alice), I had asked him whether he remembered hearing about the war in his country for the first time. He said he knew people were talking about the war, but that he could only “pick a few things of what they were saying”. No, his father did not talk to him about it, instead, he said, “according to my culture I’m not allowed to sit with my parents or adults when they are talking”. He said he had heard names – “Kabila, Rwandans, Ugandans, Lumumba” - but did not know details of what was happening. He knew the president of his country was called Kabila and understood that “people are fighting him”. I asked him whether in his primary school he was taught the (political) history of his country. He answered that the teachers “started telling us a few things about Mobutu and so on only after Kabila came”. I realised he probably thought I was giving him some sort of test, when with a sudden eagerness he volunteered his knowledge that “Kabila’s money” is used in Dungu. This conversation seems a far cry from the way Jean talked and presented himself nearly six years later, in 2005. There was no doubt in his mind: he wanted to be a lawyer. He had told me earlier that the “teachers like me, especially in the arts subjects”, and that “sciences are giving me trouble”.
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I want to do arts, because I want to study law. And I want to be a lawyer because I’ve been in difficulty and I’ve seen many things. In my country there is no law, they only use the law of corruption.
“Will you practise here in Uganda or at home?” I asked him. “I can’t know”, he said, “I don’t know if there will be peace in Congo. And now I feel Kampala is my home”. I also asked him whether his education made it difficult to relate to people who have not been to school. “No”, he said, “I take people the way they take me. That’s also why they like me in school, that’s why they elected me”.
Responsibility towards family and relatives
Jean not only has a vision now of what he wants to achieve and contribute to society at large, he also thinks of ways to support his father and siblings. His first journey from Arua to Yambio in Sudan (where his father had taken refuge from insecurity in north-eastern Congo) during the Christmas holidays of 2000, was inspired by his longing to see his father. He was fourteen at the time and had been on his own in Uganda for eighteen months. His father was surprised and very happy to see his son, but advised him to go back to Uganda because only there would he have a chance of going to school. Ever since then, Jean has done his utmost to go and visit his family in Sudan during school holidays. It is a journey of at least 800 kilometres one-way, on very bad roads and into insecure areas. When Jean and I met in January 2005, he had just returned from one such long journey. First he had travelled from Kampala to his home village in Dungu in north-eastern Congo to get his primary school leaving certificate, which as an O-level candidate he needed to register for his exams. He admitted the area was not safe, but, he said:
There is a commander in Arua and his wife, they knew me from when I was young. I don’t think something can happen to me... as long as you pay the soldiers. Only when you have serious money you are in trouble. But what you do is you put on two shirts, two trousers, and you just hide and divide your money, and a small money you put in the pocket of your shirt. That you give to the soldiers… even before they ask! That’s how we do it. I don’t know if there will ever be peace in my country. I learned that all this war is because of money, because of gold. My area will never develop… there are no good houses because people fear to show they have money. If you build a good house soldiers will come for your money. There it’s only money that talks.
It seemed quite a miracle to me, but his village school still had Jean’s certificate on file, and with one mission completed, he travelled on to his father in Yambio. He even managed to send me some emails from there, using a UN facility. He told me a bit more about his father:
You know my father is not educated, he stopped in Primary Two. But he is a trader and many people knew him in Dungu. And now also many people know him in Yambio [Sudan]. They take him as one of them, he tells me he feels protected… only that his friends can’t help him financially. You know my father had more wives. Before me he had four children with another woman, they are big now and married. And after me I think there are ten children, or even more. So he had more after my mother died, from my mother we were only five. His woman now just had another baby.
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Jean said he is now the most educated member of his entire extended family, and added: “That means they now depend on me”. He was looking for means to support one or two of his younger brothers and sisters to go to school, so that with time he would not be the only educated person in his family: “If all of them have to depend on me that can’t work”. He suggested he wanted to bring to Uganda one younger sister (“that one is very bright”) and also a younger brother, a son of his father’s latest wife: “So that they don’t feel I’m segregating, I want to balance things”.
Concern with the education of younger siblings was something I came across often. With parents passed away, disappeared, or as in Jean’s case financially unable to educate their children, the young men took their role as older brothers very seriously. Wani’s aunt and uncle, who took care of their young “warrior” nephew after bailing him out of the SPLA, both passed away. Since then, Wani and his seven cousins have stayed together as a family. The eldest among them is a young woman in her early twenties who graduated from Makerere University. She has a job and is the one who brings in some money. Apart from his cousins, Wani has one other close relative: the son of his late sister, a boy of ten. This sister, like Wani, survived the attack on Torit (Sudan) which killed their parents and baby brother in 1989. Wani’s sister, however, was killed in cross-fire six years later after just having given birth to a baby boy. This boy, Sebit, recently joined Wani and his cousins in Kampala. It sounds like Sebit takes after his young uncle in terms of both ambitions and intelligence: he will skip a year in primary school, just like Wani did when he had just come out of the SPLA. When Wani and I met again in January 2005, he told me about this boy and his determination to look after him. It is a challenging task given the constant financial insecurity of him and his cousins. The very first thing Wani told me when we met was that one boy from their household, his cousin of fourteen, had passed away a month earlier. He had broken his arm and it had got infected. They could not take him to hospital because “there was no money”. Several Sudanese acquaintances provided the fee required for burying the boy in a public cemetery of Kampala City Council.
In December 2004, Clinton told me about his younger sister Jackie, who had run away from their relatives in Moyo (northern Uganda) and come to Kampala, because of the pressure put on her to get married. Clinton and Jackie are orphans: their mother died many years ago, their father disappeared. Clinton said: “You know, the people there, when they see you are having even small breasts, they think you are ready to marry”. Jackie had been out of school for a year after completing Senior Two. She came to stay in Kampala with the same people that Clinton stays with during school holidays, relatives of some sort, but the exact relationship Clinton was unable to explain. He felt he and his sister were depending too much on this family, while being unable to contribute. His wish would be for his sister to go to a boarding school, because otherwise “she will not have time to read [do her school work] because they will want her to do all the things in the house, like washing, cooking…” Being given the bulk of household tasks was not exclusively a problem for girls. Lomeling, now a medical student, when in secondary school used to live with a family that made him earn his food by washing their clothes, cleaning the toilet and doing all sorts of other chores. Moreover, he said: “The house is not conducive for studies because I sleep in the sitting room. This means I can only study after everyone has gone to sleep, which is probably after midnight. I have no influence over what takes place in the house because I am not listened to”. However, he and many other young men stressed that the situation for girls was much more difficult and commented on what they considered their society’s conservative outlook on girl’s education:
The little money parents have is saved for boys to get married. For girls, when they have completed primary school, or sometimes Senior Three or Four, that’s
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considered as if they have finished their education. They are now considered ready to marry.
Furthermore, they explained, “educated girls are expensive”. Parents will demand a brideprice from their prospective son-in-law that makes up for the expenses they have had for their daughter’s education. Marcus, also a medical student, said: “Some educated girls now argue with their parents that they don’t need to be paid for, because they don’t want to be left unmarried. Parents who don’t agree with these new ways may even refuse to visit their daughter”. He said he himself would prefer an educated girl as his wife, because: “It will help in our understanding. A girl who is not educated will want to go back to tradition, for example, she will want to go to the witchdoctor if she is not producing”. But even if he would be lucky to meet a girl whose family does not ask for a brideprice, he said, his situation would still make it difficult to get married: how will he provide for his wife’s upkeep and that of their children? “That’s why many Sudanese youth now contract HIV”, he added, “they don’t have stable relationships, they sleep to satisfy their desire”. Lomeling and Marcus suggested they would not be surprised if many of their age mates will remain unmarried. A daunting prospect, because, as they said: “If you are not married and you don’t have children you are considered a boy, even if your hair is grey!”
Mikael was much less optimistic than most others about his role in society as an educated person and, as we saw, rather sceptical about the role of university graduates in general. He said:
Yes university students will have a role in their society. Many of my fellow students are doing courses focusing on leadership and education. I think they will play a role in those areas, that’s also how they speak about themselves. Depending on their personality they will play the good or evil role. We can’t tell. In my relationships with people I don’t think education is very important. It depends on the personality of the person. It’s difficult and undesirable to deal with a crooked man or woman whether they have education or not. But to me it appears that a dishonest man or woman with education is more dangerous than the uneducated one. I think it’s undeniable that educated people are more artificial and uncertain and have more vanity than the illiterate innocent and sincere one.
It is not that Mikael did not know what he aspires: he wanted to write and impart his experiences, thoughts and truths to the world. But this he could do, he imagined, from his own study, he need not participate at the centre of civil society. As for his personal life, he had no younger siblings in Uganda to be responsible for. His family was in Ethiopia and he had not seen them for over fifteen years. But he wanted to get married and have a baby, and had clear views about his role as a father. Recently, his sister’s teenage son started to write to him from Addis Ababa, and they set up an ongoing conversation. The boy has never seen his uncle. Mikael was delighted about this unexpected novel contact, and wrote to me:
I like him and his way of thinking, I believe we are much alike. I think my sister is very lucky to have such a boy. I am always very happy to read his messages on my email. The boy is now the greatest source of joy to me.
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7. CONCLUSION
It is very very, very important to me to be an educated person. Only if you are an educated person you may help your people later, the people who gave birth to you, in the days to come, the years to come.
Isaac, field notes, June 1998
The young refugees of this study are highly preoccupied with getting into school or continuing their studies. This observation is shared by other forced migration studies (Horst 2006b, Sommers 2001a, Willems 2003), which unanimously testify to the link between the great value attributed to schooling and young people’s perceptions of livelihood strategies and their aspirations for social mobility. For refugees in urban areas, it is rightly observed, education may play a critical role in social integration and in helping those coming from rural areas to acquire the necessary skills to become economically competitive (Landau 2005). But what I noted most of all was the role that education played in young people’s self-perception. Many expressed that ‘being a young person = wanting to learn’. One Sudanese young man wrote: “The fact that I hunger for knowledge, the desire I have to discover new things and ideas qualifies me to be a young man”. Receiving the desired education was a stepping stone to personal autonomy, respect and prestige. In the words of one protagonist of this chapter: “If I am a student, I am someone”. I would like to end with a striking illustration of the significance attributed to students’ enrolment in school juxtaposed to that of youth joining the army. Whilst the SPLA drilled their recruits to chant the ‘graduation oath’ cited in Chapter Four ‘This gun is my father, my mother, my food, my wife, it is my everything!’, Marcus’ mother, on her deathbed, impressed on her son: ‘Remember, my child, school will be your mother and father, your wife, your relatives and friends’.
CHAPTER SIX
ARTISTS
Me voici Un enfant abandonné Personne ne connaît mon nom Je suis ballotté par le vent Comme une vague furieuse Sur une plage moelle Qui suis-je? Qui suis-je? Qui suis-je?
Kampala, Africa Refugee Day 2000
That a chapter on artists has a place in this book could be justified with the mere argument that all young refugees in Kampala were artists of sorts: on a daily basis, all of them engaged in ingenious acts of creative survival in the city. The reason though why this chapter was written is because among these survivors were young men who engaged in artistic activities in the conventional sense of the word: painting, drawing, theatre, dance, music, film and creative writing. They called themselves artists and put this across as their defining identity. In August 2000, Petna Ndaliko Katondolo and I together set up the art centre Yolé!Africa, which offered a place to work to these young exiled artists. Under Petna’s inspired direction, the centre has become a meeting place for artists of different nationalities and the birth ground of many creative projects and initiatives. This chapter explores questions that were also central to the chapters on Soldiers and Students: in the aftermath of war and the reality of exile, how do young people view themselves? Given their personal histories and those of their region, how do they approach the question that lingers on in their minds: Who am I, where am I going? The previous two chapters showed the importance of narrative expression. People wanted to talk – about what they had gone through, their current worries, about their memories of home and their future ambitions. In this chapter, the narratives - both verbal and visual - of young refugees who danced, sang and painted, who wrote poems and made films, take centre stage. To sketch the academic context of discussion, this chapter starts by introducing some contentions that surround the field of African art. Secondly, the protagonists of this chapter will be introduced: Samy Kambale Tawite and Petna Ndaliko Katondolo from Congo and Yosief Endrias Habties from Eritrea. Section three discusses the storylines found in the young artists’ work: what do they paint, sing and dance about and why? In 222 Narratives section four I consider the vicissitudes of their lives in Kampala: the role of artistic expression in the way they survive, in their relationships to others, and in the way they think about themselves. The final section of this chapter deals with the relationship between loss, pain and creativity.
1. CONTENTIONS OF AFRICAN ART
I did not start off in Kampala wanting to study artists. I entered the field of African art as a result of my interest in the lives of a couple of exceptionally creative young men whom I was fortunate to meet. This drew me into a new field of study. ‘African art’ – the term itself contested for its untenable generality - is a terrain of cultural production and expression that has been interpreted and appropriated by colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial canons, each with their own political agendas. My first explorations introduced me to the fierce criticisms addressed to the West (more specifically: art critics, curators, anthropologists) concerning its attitude towards African art and artists. Olu Oguibe speaks of “the limitations of appreciation and expectation, or what we may call the confines of perception, within which African artists are either constructed or called upon to construct themselves” (1999: 19).1 Oguibe describes an interview encounter by a “white boy” critic (McEvilley) and a “native” New York artist (Ouattara). The critic’s questions, Oguibe suggests, are typical of such encounters: they centre on the artist’s history (‘Where were you born? Would you tell me a little about your family?’), rather than on the artist’s preferred topic: his work. Oguibe writes:
“McEvilley’s seemingly innocent question to Ouattara again comes to mind: ‘Where were you born?’ One recognises an uncanny ring to this question, the resonance of mechanisms of surveillance and regulation employed by the West today to keep Africans outside its geographical borders. We notice a confluence of the political and the cultural. The one-sided contest for authenticity that the West insinuates, its overbearing desire to claim originality as a preserve and to dismiss others as inauthentic and mimetic, in several respects parallels its current paranoia over territory, the anxiety that it is about to be overrun by outsiders. Hence the intensification of border regulations and the redefinition of origins and identities, the recurrence of the question: ‘Where were you born?’” (1999: 27-8).
Even if one questions the broad strokes with which Oguibe writes off ‘the western attitude’ to African art in its entirety, I follow his sensitivity about the “questions of origin”. An oscillation between attraction and distancing is exemplary of the long history of double- edged attitudes to ‘all things African’. Oguibe argues that African artists are viewed as “object[s] of exoticist fascination”, who at the same time are forced behind “the confines of manufactured identities aimed to place a distance between their practice and the purloined identity of contemporary Caucasian art” (1999: 27). For a moment I found myself skating on thin ice: I too asked the protagonists of this chapter to tell me about their personal histories. However, I did so in order to be able to go beyond the “manufactured identities” and I chose my methodology accordingly: no one-time, staged interviews, but a series of meetings and conversations over a period of several years. These years saw a friendship growing between some of the young artists and myself and I quote them literally at length not to force them beyond necessity into my (white girl) master narrative. Nevertheless, the assertion by Oguibe and others (Blier 2000, Diawara 1999, Enwezor 1999) that African art as a field of cultural production is embedded in the history of power and politics that has shaped the contact between Africa and Europe, is
Artists 223 uncontested. It was only from the 1950s that African art began to be exhibited in art museums in Europe and America. Until then, critics had limited their gaze to the ‘higher’ art of the West, and it was only anthropologists who had shown interest in African objects. The latter studied these objects as part of a particular society’s material culture, but not as art an sich. They emphasised authenticity and context, and were silent on the societies’ long and rich histories of art as well as on the identities of individual artists (Blier 2000, Gramly 1989). African art needed to be explained, justified and placed in an anthropological, cultural or religious tradition. The Europeans – “some … charismatic or merely driven, others paternalistic or romantic” (Kasfir 1999: 65) – who began to promote African art in the 1950s, had distinct ideas about what this art was and should be about. The training of young artists in the colonies was influenced by the politics of the time and by a way of thinking along racial lines of difference. The question was whether African artists would benefit from academic instruction or should rather be given minimal technical advice and be left to do their thing. Many teachers and sponsors of the 1950s and 1960s chose for the latter, based on the assumption that
“Africans have innate (and by implication, unique) artistic abilities which need only to be uncovered in practice” (Kasfir 1999: 97).
It was believed that this ‘innate creativity’ ran the risk of being spoiled by academic instruction (Mudimbe 1999, Oloidi 1998).2 The idea that ‘blacks’, unlike ‘whites’, were ‘natural’ rather than ‘created’ artists, echoed the opinions of the European artists (Picasso, Matisse, Derain) whose introduction to African sculpture in Paris in 1905 had led to new forms of expression in European art. They assumed that African art came from intuitive, ‘primal’ impulses, and did not realise its intellectual or intentional aspects. Nor did they appreciate, Blier writes, “the degree to which African artists were grappling with the art historical traditions of their culture as well as with new, imported ideas and art forms” (2000: 22). Noteworthy is that these European artists considered themselves not solely inspired by objects from Africa. The Dutch Cobra group (1948-1951), which aimed at “‘primitive’ freedom and spontaneity”, drew its inspiration from “prehistoric art, primitive art, folk art, children’s drawings, and the creative expressions of the mentally disabled” (Kerkhoven 2004: 14). Primitivism as a movement left its mark on 20th century modern art - Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1906-7), in which African masks determine the visual language, is considered its historical milestone.
1.1 Identity and authenticity
Despite the doubts about the relevance of academic training, in the late colonial era some of the most promising students of the art schools and centres in various African countries went to the Slade School of Fine Art in London or the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. According to Kasfir, they acquired larger-than-life reputations as archetypes of ‘the modern African artist’ in the minds of the European public as well as back home. She summarises:
“They were expected to epitomise the educated colonial élite, but also to represent an essential Africanity” (1999: 146).
How to be African and still be a modern artist, was “the burning question of the 1960s” among artists across much of the continent (Kasfir 1999: 152). Leopold Senghor, using the concept of a ‘pan-African aesthetic’, was among the most vocal of those attempting to create “national identities and public cultures which would reflect a distinctively African art, literature, theatre and music” (Kasfir 1999: 166). The identity question was not only an
224 Narratives issue for the artists, but also for their audiences outside Africa, and this continues to be the case up to today. Even though museums and galleries for contemporary art have begun to present work by African artists, no longer labelling this as ‘primitive’ or ‘non-Western’ but as ‘global art’ (Woets 2004),3 it is still the case that:
“Western collectors, cultural institutions and audiences are decidedly more at ease with artists who lay claim to their African identity than with those who do not. For one thing, this identity is made to seem natural in the discourse of many African diaspora artists and critics and in the popular interpretation of multiculturalism. For another, it appears to provide some kind of necessary formula for decoding work that is assumed by critics and publics to be otherwise resistant to interpretation” (Kasfir 1999: 208-209).
Thus, claiming an African identity comes with expectations about the form and content of the work. African artists are expected to bring in their origin and address certain themes: they have to show a social message that is related to ‘the African situation’, and to work with ‘African’ themes like slavery, colonialism and poverty – even if moulded in a postmodern way, for example by using multimedia (Oguibe 2004, Woets 2004). If they do not work with ‘African’ symbols, narratives, signs or materials, they risk being accused of imitating the West (Blier 2000, Hassan 1999, Mudimbe 1999). Some would say that this attitude to African art is superseded. Catherine Lampert, director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London where the Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa exhibition (1995) was hosted, states:
“the romantic authenticity automatically associated with the ‘untrained’ artist has become an exhausted assumption, except in the media and among some collectors” (quoted in Kasfir 1999: 136).
But others argue that the concept of ‘authenticity’ continues to surface, and that African art is still often depicted as innocent and unschooled, an attitude that John Picton calls “neo- primitivist exoticism” (Picton 1999). Contemporary forms and expressions of African art are still often misunderstood as “‘detribalised’ aberrations from tradition” (Kasfir 1999: 20), supposedly contaminated by exposure to western styles. It is evident that there is an ongoing debate on the role and meaning of African art in the global, postmodern world, in which many critical voices can be heard (Hassan & Oguibe 2001, Oguibe & Enwezor 1999). They suggest that the development of a new critical language started with the Les Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Centre Pompidou (1989). Ever since, curators and powerful private collectors who have a big say in what may or may not enter the domain of art with a capital A, have to justify their choices. As regards their organisation of exhibitions, anthologies and reference books, they have been criticised for either lumping together artists of all sorts (trained & untrained, continent & diaspora, well known & unknown), or instead categorising along obsolete lines as traditional versus contemporary, or urban versus rural. Some argue that the recent interest in ‘popular art’ (Barber 1997, Fabian 1996, Jewsiewicki 2003), has caused a paradoxical situation in which artists who are successful in the local art scene are unknown abroad, while artists who are looked upon as craftsmen in Africa (the Ghanaian carpenters of conspicuously shaped coffins,4 or the signage artists painting the commercial signs for barbershops), are celebrated artists in Europe and America.5 What this discussion boils down to is the definition of art as opposed to craft.6 It requires a re-examination of the foremost beliefs of western art criticism, that is, firstly, that an artwork ought to be a singular, one-of-a-kind creation, and secondly, that an artwork is not a commodity. The work of artists and artist-entrepreneurs in African cities
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(woodcarvers, sculptors, sign and street painters, and photographers, who largely work in the informal sector) challenges both dichotomies. As for the first, Kasfir argues:
“Far from regarding emulation as a mark of weakness, it was – especially in the formerly structured apprenticeship – until very recently a sign of competence. And far from there being negative connotations to copying the work of a master, it was, and still is, a form of respect and therefore worthy ... Western notions of originality sit uneasily in such a situation because they require the rejection of African cultural models of how teaching and learning take place” (1999: 129).
On the other hand, many contemporary African artists do consider originality as the sine qua non for an object to transcend craft status. Secondly, as for commercial value, one could argue that in the West “[t]he commodity status of the artwork is clothed in, and even denied by, a rhetoric which says that art is created as an act of self-realization for the artist” (Kasfir 1999: 130). For most artists in Africa, it is simply unrealistic to deny the importance of their work for making a living. They need to devote much of their time and energy to selling their work. When doing so, they are faced with the fact that their art is predominantly produced for foreign patrons and buyers. The flow abroad of ‘cultural capital’ is part of the economic dependency of postcolonial states and their citizens (van Beurden 2001). That some supposed patrons still seem unaware of this, was illustrated by UNHCR’s attitude to a Yolé!Africa exhibition it was willing to sponsor in Kampala in 2000. UNHCR simply said: “If we pay for the paints and canvas, then after the exhibition the work will be ours”. We as Yolé!Africa staff made it clear we thought this ridiculous, yet the ‘take it or leave it’ response was unequivocal: “that’s our policy”. So we looked elsewhere for funding of the art materials. Woets (2004) argues that more research is needed on how artists in Africa experience and respond to the western hegemony in accessing and working in global art circuits. Even though my study was not aimed at this question, it touches upon many of the issues addressed in recent critical debates. Most of the young artists I worked with had not read the literature quoted in this chapter, but they had plain personal opinions about their role as artists from Africa, their ambitions and identities vis-à-vis a wider world. For instance, the dance performances by Yolé!Africa, which were among the first of their style to be staged in Uganda’s National Theatre, presented a conscious move away from the traditional performances with bare-chested men beating drums, which tourists in the capital’s posh hotels continue to be treated to. Petna, who choreographed these performances, used ‘traditional’ emblems, yet as part of a new idiom, because: “On fait la danse traditionnelle, mais par le truchement de la danse contemporaine”. Asked to comment on his performance Traces, he said:
Traces of who I am, of who we are, are visible in our dance. Traces of our histories, traces of our travels. You can’t deny the things that are part of you. Traces help you for your own individual identity. Traces also betray you.7
2. PROTAGONISTS
2.1 Samy Kambale Tawite
Samy was 17 years old and had just finished his third year in secondary school when the deuxième guerre de libération was declared on 2 August 1998 by the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD). Mid September 1998, Mai Mai and Interahamwe took Goma town.
226 Narratives
After the RCD retook it, its commander announced on the radio that the inhabitants of the quartiers of Mabanga and Majengo were hiding the Mai Mai and Interahamwe in their houses. House-searches started, and the RCD began recruiting young men from these neighbourhoods to their fighting forces. Samy managed to escape recruitment, crossed two international borders and ended up in Kampala where I met him ten months later. From my research notes (14 July 1999):
My first appointment with Samy. I have known him by face and by name because he is referred to as ‘the artist’ in BHB’s office. Yesterday Barbara showed me the booklet of (gender-sensitive!) cartoons Samy drew about life in an African village. Quite stunning. He is only just eighteen. We sit on the stone wall of the veranda behind the Social Research building that he uses as a quiet place to draw. … Samy shows me some of the drawings he always carries with him. One shows a man with his hands tied and a very big heart. Samy: “He wants everybody to have love in their hearts because then they would no longer kill”. Many of his drawings have water in them: “Water is the life”. He tells me he used to make wall paintings on buildings in Goma. And that when his father found out that he was the one he was surprised, not knowing he had a son with such a talent. Samy is the second-born of four boys. He says his father didn’t want more children because he was afraid to have more boys: “When the war comes, a father fears it will take his sons”.8 His father is a cook by profession. Samy: “I fear being a soldier. I don’t want to be a soldier. If I was killed, who would see my art?”
The evening of my first appointment with Samy, my parents were to arrive at Entebbe Airport. I recall Samy saying they must be very good parents, who travel so far to come and see their daughter. He said he wished there was a way of letting his parents know that he was still alive. Samy and I spent a lot of time together that summer. We came from different worlds and there was eight years of age between us, yet we became each other’s first friends in the new place that Kampala was to both of us. But Samy never revealed much about his first ten months in Kampala. All he said was: “I’m happy my mother doesn’t know about my life these days. If she knew she would cry”. I remember from those early days that his eyes were full of questions. A curious and inquisitive look that suited him as a young man of his age, but a look that I also interpreted as of someone who had lost his bearings. At the time I was reading the novel Secret Places by Janice Elliott, sent to me from Europe by a friend, and came across a line that summed it up poignantly:
“To be young in the middle of a war is to be a child who hears her parents. They are quarrelling in another room. She may know that one is right, the other hurt. But she is still bewildered. There will be the same pain” (Elliott 1981: 136).
Samy was the first person I met among the refugees in Kampala with an outspoken interest in art. Painting was his one great passion. I invited him to come and work at our house in Kibuli. Together we removed the pieces of canvas from underneath all the stuff left behind by previous tenants. Samy spent many a day sitting in the shade of the tall tree, flanked by our two dogs, Jonker and Kiwafu, absorbed in his work for hours on end. One afternoon in August when I came back from a meeting in town, he showed me the large oil painting in yellows and browns that he had just put the finishing touches to and which he called The Life. That evening I captured our conversation in my diary:
“Can you see”, Samy asks me, “my painting changed, the circle is no longer full, there are gaps now. That is how the life is now”. We look. I can see three gaps, one big one and two smaller ones. “There is somebody who tries to close the gaps”, he says. “She tries to close the gaps but it is very, very difficult”. I ask, “Is it
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impossible?” He answers, “I don’t know, but it is very difficult. The big gap can never be closed.” “But you know”, he says, “the gaps are not only bad. They allow us to travel. We can travel wherever we wish to go. The person who put the gaps was very intelligent, he knew we need to travel”.
He starts to tell me a story. A story about war, about soldiers who knock on doors. About a family with food on the table. They are frightened. But the soldiers leave when the mother tells them she won’t open the door. She is the hero. The next day there are more soldiers, they are everywhere. People make big fires in front of their houses and beat their drums and anything they can find. It’s them or us, one of the two will die. The noise scares the soldiers, they don’t come near. But somewhere else the guns are shot. The group of the commander shoots the soldiers of the country. It is terrible. It is like music. The next morning people come out of their houses. They go and find their friends. There is blood and many lost their lives. Their bodies are scattered in the street like mangos.
“That is the story”, he says, “one of many stories. I’m tired now”. I too feel tired. “I took you inside one of the gaps”, he says, “but you can’t stay there forever, you will die together with my thoughts”.
Samy’s life had changed dramatically. He spoke of how in Goma he used to attend school, play basketball with his friends, make drawings while listening to his mother’s stories about her youth. He had known insecurity and poverty, but had had the safety of a loving family. Gradually I got a feel for the extent to which he missed the presence of his parents and friends, his former ‘normal life’. The first day we met he had said: “These days I’m no longer young, I now live like the old people”, and added, “if I am hungry, I can’t cry, I have to keep quiet because I know I’m now living my life myself”. On some days this seemed to make him feel insecure, on others he was proud of himself and the way he was coping. But all along it puzzled him, this new reality and how he had suddenly become solely responsible for his own life. He said: “This is not my decision. We suffer from something of which we don’t know where it is coming from”.
Because Samy had never seen an art exhibition, I suggested we would visit Tulifanya Gallery. We went there one morning in the first week of August 1999, but were disappointed to find that the gallery as well as the little annex restaurant had closed for a one-month summer break. We sat on the pavement. Samy said: “I feel I have lost something important, but I never know what it is”. He talked about the years when he was still young. Samy spent his early childhood in Rwindi, where his father worked as a cook in a hotel near Virunga National Park, and came to live in Goma once he started primary school in 1987.
When I was small, my mother used to bake bread and my brother and I went to town after school to sell it at the markets and in the hotels. The money was for school fees. My mother used all her force for us. My father was often not with us, he was working in different places as a cook, he worked in Bunia and even in Kampala. We didn’t often get his news … But those days I was very, very happy. I was also very quiet. At school the headmaster sometimes called me in front of all the pupils to show them what a good student looks like. Some big boys didn’t like me for that, they were jealous. Inside, I felt I was different. When my thoughts were still small, I didn’t realise I was different, or why. But when my thoughts grew, I knew. I never talked much. In class I only talked when the teacher or the other children asked me to tell stories about the history and the culture of my family and my people. They loved my stories and I loved telling them.
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He related to me his father’s family history, and then talked about his hometown Goma.
I lived in the northern part of town. North is the volcano, south is the lake, east is Rwanda and west are the Mai Mai soldiers. The volcano is part of our traditional history. When there is trouble in Goma, the volcano wants to erupt. The King then offers a cow and a beautiful girl to the volcano and it will change its direction and erupt into the forest instead of into town. People are often afraid that the volcano will erupt. The last time people were afraid was when the Hutus [refugees from Rwanda, 1994] had come to town. I was painting in town and somebody came on the bicycle to tell me the news. I was afraid, because my parents were in another part of town and what if they would decide to run? I would have to run alone, I was afraid of that. That day I didn’t know that one day in the future I was going to run alone … When the refugees were in Goma, they were dying everywhere. We were wearing protection for our mouth and nose because the whole town smelled very badly. My mother got affected. She couldn’t see, she couldn’t hear or speak. My three brothers and I looked after her. My elder brother baked the small breads and I went to town and to the hotels to sell them. The doctor first refused to admit her in the hospital, but later she was admitted through somebody we knew. After three days she opened her eyes. She was the first person in town who was cured from the disease.9
It started to pour down heavily and Samy and I moved from the pavement to sit under the covered part of the restaurant’s terrace. I felt as if we were hiding from the big outside world as much as from the rain. Samy seemed to move effortlessly between the here-and- now and an imaginary world of his own. He noticed my concern about him getting wet and cold in his flimsy t-shirt and said: “Don’t mind about me. I’m the King of Rain, I will ask it to stop. Every time we are together it rains, and it is a very good sign. The rain makes the flowers grow”. I told him about my life at home, my friends, about the long summer evenings of playing hide-and-seek when growing up in my village in the south of Holland. I realise that my storytelling, not essentially different from the recollections that Samy had been treating me to, was also triggered by a certain need to share something about the place I had arrived from, and to bring it into the present. I told him about my friend Han and showed him her photo. He may have sensed I missed her and a few days later suggested painting her portrait.
Samy was one of hundreds of young men from the towns of Kivu who started arriving in Kampala in late 1998. The war they were fleeing (the RCD rebellion against president Kabila) was the second rebellion in two years that had sparked off in the area (see Chapter One). In 1996, Laurent-Désiré Kabila himself had begun his march to Kinshasa - to topple Mobutu – also from Kivu. Citizens from Bukavu, Uvira and Goma had fled their towns. Samy was fifteen at the time, and had fled together with his parents and brothers. They did not cross an international border, but moved deep into the forests and walked for two weeks to reach Butembo town, 300 kilometres from Goma as the crow flies. Samy often spoke to me about this first experience he had had with war and flight. The episode had made an indelible impression on him. It is difficult to capture on paper his engaging and reflective way of speaking, or his skill for detail, but I will recount a few passages, noted down as he spoke one afternoon, forty-five minutes non-stop.
It was my first time to hear war. It came from the direction of the airport. It was five o’clock in the morning, they always start at the early hours. We had already left our house, our part of town, because of the situation. I was staying with my aunty. That day I went to my school to get an ID, because we had heard that soldiers would take us, boys and men, if we could not identify ourselves. There was a long
Artists 229 queue at school, all my friends were there asking for IDs. The administrator told us he couldn’t sign, because the headmaster was not around. But we begged him, we came with any little money we could find. From there I went to town to see Eloka, the famous painter who taught me how to use a brush and colours. I passed by our house. My mother was still there, she was preparing beans to sell, you know, she has always liked doing business. I asked her: “Will it be safe for you to go to the market?” She said she would be fine, that the war was still far. Then I went to my grandmother’s place. They didn’t have water in the house, so I was sent to go and fetch water. My little niece followed me with her little jerry can. That is when it started. Tátátátá… I ran! The small girl, I even forgot her… but when I looked around I saw her running behind me. I saw my aunt running like a lion, like an antelope, I saw my father. Everybody was running, running while bending for the bullets, running, running... even my old grandma! We all reached the house. My grandmother’s sister was crying. We asked her why. Then we remembered: her husband was an invalid. She had left him, he was too heavy for her to carry. She had locked the door behind him. We kept quiet because there was nothing we could say.
Everybody was so scared. People started packing, taking things outside. And you know, when you are scared, you need the toilet all the time. So we saw people going for short call, one after the other, and another one again. What surprised me was that people in the house were asking about our cousins and uncles and aunts, but nobody asked about my mother. My father was talking, talking, he couldn’t stop. Then they started saying: “Maybe we go… maybe she’s already dead… maybe she went with others”. It was then that I saw someone coming, at a very far distance, and I said: “Maybe that’s her!” They said it wasn’t her. But I knew, I was the last one who had seen her that morning, I knew the colour of the kitenge she was wearing. She came from fár. It was her.
There were some people in the neighbourhood who had vehicles and everybody wanted to get on and people were quarrelling. You try to get on, they push you off. Big families wanted to stay together but they can’t all fit. People argued. Someone proposed we all walk and we use the vehicles to carry our properties. Then the shooting came near and we rán! Nobody thought about the vehicles anymore. We rán! There were red lines in the sky like fireworks, it was everywhere.
I saw things I never saw before. The Rwandan soldiers, they put all of us together, they hold up their hand grenades in the air. They demanded for our money. They say: “Give me your trousers!” And if you refuse, they shoot your legs. They take your trousers and leave you in your shorts. And there in the forest there were little black insects, people call them lusungu, they bite worse than bees. We were bitten all over our bodies, on our arms, everywhere. They say if the lusungu bite you on your head you die, but luckily they didn’t bite our heads. You know, we feared so much, we couldn’t feel our hunger. All mothers had put on two bitenge before leaving their homes. Now they made ropes of the bitenge to tie their children to their waste. But they didn’t look over their shoulders, they didn’t want to see how their children were crying. We were so many people walking. At times people at the back of the group started calling, ‘You in front, stop! Someone here has been killed!’ But in front, instead of stopping, you run even faster!
We had to cross a big river. Children were carried on shoulders, on mattresses carried on top of people’s heads. People screamed. We reached the other shore. There were soldiers again. They said: “This is your end”. They demanded one thousand US dollars. People who still had some money put it together in one big sack. Everything they wanted they took it. They told us to sit down. Then they started cutting banana leaves and putting them on the ground. We knew it was our
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end. Because that is how in the village they slaughter a goat. The banana leaves are there so that the blood does not touch the ground. You don’t know who is who, you are just scared. You look at these people, they are human beings, but what they do... I don’t know why, but after putting their banana leaves, one of the commanders told his soldiers to let us go.
We reached a village. My father knew that area, it was near to where he had grown up, where he had gone to his Catholic school. He started pointing out to us: “This was my school, this is where we used to pass...”. There was another river, with a tree trunk across it that was like its bridge. There were soldiers again, they demanded: “Give your money, then cross!” It was a big tree, but it was dancing. It was only my mother who knew how to cross it, because that was how she used to cross rivers in her village when she was a child. People said: “If you are scared you will make others fall!” I don’t know if I closed or opened my eyes, I only know that I crossed.
[Several days later] We were in Pelsa. That area is known for growing the best tea. I remember we drank it, and it tasted different than any other tea I had drunk before. It was softer. I think we felt a little bit safe. From four in the morning until five in the afternoon we had been... I don’t know what to say… between life and death? People started bathing. There were a few houses. I slept in a little kitchen with my brothers and some of my uncles. We were eight boys condensed in there. They locked the door from outside. And I thought, because we were in this kitchen, the store room, I thought: “One of these rebels may come for food from this store and we will be his food”. In the night we heard people coming. We were so scared. We kept quiet. We even stopped breathing all of us. They went to the next room. They demanded: “Where are your boys, your men?” Some of us were already sleeping, and they were snoring. I wanted to cover their mouths with my hands but I knew they might wake up and make noise. I was closing my eyes. I was so scared. It was a very bad night. In the morning my mother told me they had come to the house where she was sleeping. The rebels wanted my father. They said they wanted to see the colour of his intestines. He was already taken outside. My mother pleaded with them, she said… I can’t talk about that.
In the morning we left that village. Katsiro was our last hope. Everybody knows about Katsiro, it was like coming to paradise from hell. But first we met more soldiers. They took the last thing I carried, my blanket. One soldier came to me and put a gun to my head. He said he knew me, that I was a Mobutu soldier. My father pleaded with him: “Look how young he is, how can he be a soldier?” But he didn’t listen. Then someone came and said: “Here, take this money and let that poor boy go”. I don’t even know who that person was. You know, I’m talking about me, but these things happened to many people. The soldiers gave us sugarcane to eat, told us to all sit down. We sat in a very big circle. They climbed in the trees surrounding us with their guns ready. We didn’t fear. By that time we couldn’t fear anymore. We were going to die, it was obvious. We told each other not to fear, that because we were dying in a group it is no problem. Their commander came. He told his soldiers: “Take all, but leave them”. They took our last properties. They were holding a long rope that we were obliged to cross before being free. I know I’ve told you that before. They had wooden sticks with nails at the end and all the boys and men had to pass by them. They beat you, pooof! on your chest, then you go. Can I tell you something interesting? We were all fighting to be the first to be beaten and to cross that rope! I was beaten, I crossed. My uncle Gilles asked to be beaten for my father and my two young brothers. They did. That’s how we crossed into Mai Mai territory. There was a group of people from Goma that came one day after us. We heard they were all massacred. If you knew you had a relative among them you don’t cry, you just keep quiet.
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We reached Butembo. My uncle Gilles had a short wave radio, they were playing Congolese music and he started dancing. Then I thought: “Hey, that means we’re now safe”.
As Samy was relating these experiences to me, I realised that the same November 1996 I had been busy with an assignment for my degree in International Technological Development Studies at Eindhoven University of Technology. We were to design a school building for a village in what was then still called Zaire. We studied the climatic features of the area, the availability of building materials, and discussed alternatives to glass windowpanes and iron roofing. One day a fellow student, who had read the papers that morning, came to class with news about the killings taking place in the Zairian forest. As far as we could make out it was in the exact area where we were busy building our imaginary school. Over the weeks we kept hearing the name Kabila, and had difficulty not to confuse Hutu and Tutsi, just like two years earlier. I do not know if the memory comes from television footage (I doubt there was any like that) or from what I imagined at the time, but the picture in my mind is of vast stretches of green, as if seen from an aeroplane, and then, zoomed in, black bodies lying at the feet of tropical giants. While I was listening to Samy these anonymous bodies were suddenly given a face. Samy finished his account with some impressions of the months he and his family had spent “in the village” before returned to Goma in early 1997. He and his three brothers went back to school. Eighteen months later, at the start of the second war, Samy fled Goma again, this time without his parents, to Kampala.
2.2 Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Petna was introduced to me by Samy as his friend and grand frère, who used to work for television in Goma and wanted to make a documentary about refugees in Kampala. I recall our first meeting in early February 2000. Samy, Petna, Michel-Pierrot and I were sitting outside on the wobbly chairs of a local restaurant along Wilson Road and discussed Petna’s ideas for the documentary. We had to make an effort to understand each other: neither my French nor their English was fluent, and we were enveloped in the noise of cars, minibuses and boda bodas jeering by. Petna points at the mad jumble of people and traffic and exclaims how much he desires to film. That he tends to view the world around him as if through the lens of his camera, and that he sees movies wherever he looks. We discuss practicalities and agree that in a week’s time, when they have written down their ideas for the documentary, we shall talk again. As it happened the film did not get completed until several years later, when it was screened at the 2nd Amakula Film Festival in Kampala in September 2005 - its title: Wakimbizi (Refugees). However, Petna and I started working together a couple of months after that first meeting. He accompanied me to appointments and interviews, and introduced me to Congolese friends and refugees in Kampala. I had not realised how much I had been lacking this: being able to share the weight of my daily visits and talk about people’s predicaments, and knowing that I was not alone in being shocked by the situation individual refugees found themselves in and at the same time being touched by their resilience. Petna became the person who helped me reflect on my research – both content and process – and I valued his advice about my relationships with the refugees and the extent of my responsibilities towards them. Petna himself had fled eastern Congo in 1999, at the age of twenty-five. His critical voice and his work as an artist and filmer in his hometown Goma had got him into trouble with the RCD. Given the close ties between the RCD and the Ugandan government, Petna’s security in Kampala was not guaranteed. In all
232 Narratives ways life in Kampala was at first very different from life in Goma, where Petna used to lead a cultural centre for youth called Propulsion, as well as a youth environmentalist group called Maideni, and where he had been well-known across town for years. In 1995, he had directed his first play, Victime de la Guerre, staged in memory of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide. Petna himself had played the lead role and the play won the prize for the best local production in a festival organised by the National Federation of Theatre (FENATH). Petna had been used to a comfortable life and to earning his living with his video camera. His sudden flight to Kampala meant he had to start from scratch in a city where he was not less anonymous than any other Congolese refugee. He looked upon this as a period that taught him humility. Soon his social skills and charisma, as well as his self-confidence, gained him the position he had had before. Petna and I started talking about setting up a centre for young refugees in Kampala. My research had revealed that the young refugees in the city desperately lacked a place where they were welcome, rather than being yelled at or treated with humiliating indifference. During our journeys through town, we fantasized about a place where young people would not just hang out, but be encouraged to develop their skills and talents. We agreed that artistic expression should be the leading denominator of such a centre - a personal preference, which was moreover related to the hope that a show of people’s creativity would help counteract the prevalent images of refugees that we were so fed up with. We also believed in the therapeutic value of creative expression for people with trauma. We decided to see if our idea would take off, and I asked my parents to fund the initial costs. On 8 August 2000, after several hot afternoons of walking the hilly back roads of different Kampala neighbourhoods, taken in tow by a local broker, we found what seemed the perfect place: a three-room house with a small, quiet backyard, in the midst of lively Kabalagala. We rented this place, furnished it and started our first activities under the name of Yolé!Africa.10 Soon many Congolese as well as several Sudanese and Ethiopian individuals with an interest in painting, sculpture, music and dance found their way to the new centre. Others came because at Yolé!Africa they found people to talk to, joke with and ask for advice – and were at times invited to join for lunch. On 14 December 2000, UNHCR celebrated its 50th anniversary with festivities in Geneva and in each of the countries where the organisation is represented. In Uganda, the main festivities took place in Kampala’s National Theatre. There were speeches by various dignitaries, including the UNHCR Country Representative, the Minister of Disaster Preparedness and Refugees, and the 2nd Deputy Prime Minister. But the evening also marked Yolé!Africa’s first public appearance, with the performance of a two-hour show called Homeless, a collage of poems, drama and dance. The show, directed by Petna, brought onto the theatre’s stage young men and women from Congo, Sudan, Somalia and Senegal, who addressed the audience in French, English, Nuer and Kiswahili. The UNHCR celebrations were covered in the newspapers, and a full-page laudatory article about Yolé!Africa appeared in The Monitor, one of Uganda’s dailies. Nearly six years later, with Petna still as Yolé!Africa’s director, the centre has moved to a larger place, and it has become well-known within Kampala’s art scene. Its artists have staged seven contemporary dance performances in Uganda’s National Theatre, and exhibited (and sold) their paintings in Kampala’s galleries as well as in Europe. For years, Yolé!Africa’s Friday afternoon Baraza discussion meetings have been attended by young men and women from Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Rwanda and Burundi, and at times by friends and visitors from Europe or the US. Yolé!Image, the centre’s film department, has produced music videos which are broadcast in Uganda, Congo and Rwanda, and co-founded the Cineclub (weekly video evenings held at the Alliance Française) and the Uganda International Film Foundation (UIFF). Petna’s films have been screened at international film festivals in Asia, Europe and Africa, and his film
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Lamokowang (Calabash) has received several prizes. Inspired by all this, youth in Goma – who kept in touch with their ‘brothers and sisters’ who crossed the border - also organised themselves. In 2005, Yolé!Africa Goma, Kampala’s sister organisation, received NGO status.
2.3 Yosief Endrias Habties
Yosief, the young man who escaped from National Service in Eritrea (see Chapter Soldiers), is one young artist for whom Yolé!Africa provides a working base. Yosief was about to turn twenty-three when he arrived in Kampala in June 2001. He came to Uganda after having spent fifteen months as a refugee in Khartoum (Sudan) and Nairobi (Kenya). He joined Yolé!Africa in late 2001, by which time I had left for the Netherlands. Yosief and I met when I visited Kampala in March 2003, but only talked at length about his experiences and his artistic vocation when I spent time in Kampala again in December 2004 and January 2005. Yosief is modest and endearingly unassuming in his behaviour, yet purposeful when he presents himself and his work. He has a skill for weaving details of his personal history into the presentation of his art. In 2002, he wrote a profile of himself for www.baobabconnections.org, which starts as follows:
To be exiled or to be displaced is not a pleasant experience. I was forced to leave my beloved family and country because of a regime that slaughtered my very soul. From childhood, I had only one opportunity to see my father. He was a freedom fighter. He committed most of his life to my country’s independence. Dad wedded mum at the tender age of sixteen. Soon after, he joined the forces to fight for Eritrea’s independence just like many of his compatriots did. Fortunately he was placed under the Reconnaissance Brigade, which was charged with the duty of coming to the city, and that way my mum and he were able to see each other at times. Together they decided that mum would leave for Italy to find work and a semblance of peace. While working as a nanny for an Italian family in Palermo, mum realised she was pregnant, carrying a baby in her womb who would later become Yosief the ‘Rebel Painter’. She returned to Africa and on 20th July 1978 around midnight I was born in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Around September, when I was a two months old baby, my mother and I shifted to Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea, where she joined her mother with whom she had entrusted my elder brother. Since my childhood I never had any experience of a father; it was my mother and my grandmother who were everything to me. Finally, in 1991, Eritrea was free, but I was not fortunate enough to see daddy again. All we were told was that he is now a martyr. At the reception of the news about the death of dad, mum was filled with uncontrollable grief. Nevertheless, she later on contained it and came face-to-face with the fact that he was forever gone and that she now had a family to raise single-handedly. My father gave his life so that we could live in peace, but to date no peace has been realised, only war, war, and more war from the new regime.
The absence of his father, the love of his grandmother, and his budding artistic aspirations are the headlines in Yosief’s recollections of the past. Before going to Uganda in late 2004, I sent Yosief a couple of questions that I hoped to discuss with him, and within a few weeks received an eleven-page life history, titled ‘Born to be a Rebel Painter’. This document served as a basis for our further discussions in Kampala.
When Yosief was five years old his mother, who then worked as a storekeeper, moved house within Asmara to be nearer to her job and left Yosief to stay with his widowed grandmother. Yosief’s elder brother Abraham stayed with their mother.
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Life with my grandmother was so funny and pleasant, she was so close to me. Ever since my infant stage there is no doubt I liked her more than anybody in the family. She used to tell stories about the past, history, culture and many other things about her life experience, not only to me even to other children in the neighbourhood. She would be preparing her coffee while telling stories surrounded by kids. Grandmother was a hardworking old lady. Although she was around seventy she did most things in the house by herself. But sometimes she sent me to fetch water or asked me to clean the house, while she prepares her coffee. She would reward me with sweets, which she used to keep in her treasure box, where she also kept her money and jewellery. I had no sister and there was no any other person in our house, I was the only one to help her. I really loved to be with my grandmother, but there was one thing that disturbed my mind and soul, and that was the whereabouts of my father. I knew my mother whom I could visit whenever I wanted to, but what about my father, where is he? That was my question. One morning I decided to confront my grandmother, who was busy cooking breakfast and drinking coffee. Of course I had asked her questions about my father before but she had tricked me with other stories. But this time I made up my mind that I should get my answers. I remember I was 8 years old and in class two of primary school. My classmates told many stories about their fathers, so that influenced me that I should know and tell something about my father too. I decided that morning was a right moment for the answer to my questions. “Grandmother, where is my father?” I started, “why doesn’t he stay with us … and why did my mother come from Italy… is it that my father lives there?” She looked straight into my eyes and when I finished the questions her mood had changed. Her charming old face now showed tension. For a few seconds she was quiet and looked down. I assumed she was thinking on how to start, because I was a bit grown up and serious with my questions. Suddenly, she breathed heavily like someone offloading a heavy load. “My grandson”, she began, “your father is in the bush fighting in the war for the liberation of our land from Ethiopian colonisation. He left more than ten years ago to join other fighters in the bush. He was here before your mother left to Italy, since then he hasn’t come back. You know my grandson, this land is ours, Eritrea belongs to us, we are the Eritreans. Ethiopia is colonising us, therefore we have to liberate our land and the colonisers should leave. The situation was so bad, young Eritreans were hunted and your father decided to join his brothers and sisters in the jungle. I think you can now understand where your father is”. She stopped from there. Well, I did not understand the whole issue of ‘Liberation’ and a country Eritrea, until after some time when I was mature enough to realise all these.
Yosief went to a neighbourhood primary school and writes that it was at the age of ten that his artistic talent “began to reveal itself”.
My friends in school and in the neighbourhood used to call me ‘street artist’ because I was always drawing with chalk on the blackboard in the classroom or on the road that passed in front of our house. I also used flowers to colour my drawings, and I caught butterflies, of which I admired the colours and their beauty. I praise the Almighty, the Creator, who created me to be creative, and also my grandmother who taught me about my culture, so I could discover myself. Whenever I went to church with my grandmother, I spent some time staring at the artwork on the walls of the churches while others were busy praying. The artwork in the church really impressed me, even though many symbols and characters were faded because most of them are as old as many years, even before the birth of Jesus Christ (the Eritrean Catholic Church tradition is different from that of Roman Catholic, I discovered after living outside Eritrea). Sometimes during classes, instead of being attentive to the teacher, I was busy sketching the symbols
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and characters I found in the church. This behaviour did not please my teachers; they chased me from school and asked me to bring my parents. I came with my grandmother, who got angry and complained to the teacher that I do the same even at home. Back home my grandmother suggested that I should not waste my time on such useless behaviour and instead concentrate on studying. And to make sure that I changed, she hid my papers, colours and everything that seemed to her to be part of that ‘useless behaviour’. But that could not work, it was like fuelling the fire, instead I became more and more interested. It was not easy for her because there was something deep in me, which was driving me towards art.
Yosief received his secondary education also in Asmara, and graduated from technical college with a diploma in Architectural Drafting. Then he had to join the National Service. His training at Sawa Military Camp, at the army’s navy base on Dahlak Island, and his two weeks of frontline fighting were narrated in Chapter Four. Yosief summarised this period with the lines:
For almost two years, I reluctantly participated in and witnessed all sort of human right violation. And since I believe that I was born an artist and have faith in humanity, my consciousness totally rejected that phenomenon. The most painful thing is that I hated myself for being a soldier rather than doing what I value most, my artwork and painting.
Among the photos he showed me in Kampala, several of which I described in Chapter Four, there was one that he introduced as “this is my exhibition in the Navy camp”. Yosief is standing among a handful of young men dressed in uniforms, who look at eight paintings put in a circle on the sandy floor inside a dusky army tent. Yosief commented: “Those days I painted figuratively, now I don’t like that anymore. I was just painting for comfort. And all those paintings have been taken by the Fighters. They tell you, ‘I want that one with the boats!’ - and you give it”. In his written life story, Yosief devoted one full page to his escape from Eritrea, and in January 2005, he spoke to me at length about this episode. After Yosief had escaped from the Navy (see Chapter Soldiers), he came back to Asmara. When his grandmother passed away, he went to live with his mother. About his grandmother’s last weeks he said: “Life had changed. I used to walk with her to the market, but now I was sitting next to her bed. She was sleeping all day, and I sat with her drawing her lovely face”. Yosief got a job at a construction site. He used to leave the house wearing his military jacket, changed only when he reached his work. He explained: “Because you never know, neighbours can betray you, [as far as] they knew I was still in the army”. He had not told his mother that he had deserted, “because she would worry about me being taken to jail”, and instead claimed he had been transferred to a (military) office job in Asmara. Yosief forged several IDs for himself - a student ID; a letter from National Service stating he was on leave; an ID for Ethiopians staying in Eritrea11 - and used them as he saw fit. People who were caught with a false ID were carried off to jail, Yosief explained, but he did not worry too much: “I trusted my IDs, I made them very well”. And he added that “many of the Military Police on the streets of Asmara are villagers from the lowlands, who are put on duty in Asmara because they are harsh and never excuse you, but they are not smart in distinguishing false documents from real ones”. Nevertheless, life as an AWOL (absent without leave) in Asmara was tricky, especially because the border war with Ethiopia which had broken out in May 1998 was ongoing and new soldiers were needed at the front all the time.12 Yosief said he felt increasingly insecure because “police started to hunt many young people in the city” and “it was a very hard time for those of us who were playing the game of hide and seek with the military police who were looking for us in every corner of the city”.13 Like many other
236 Narratives young men unwilling to fight, he decided to try and leave his country. The first time he fled, in early 2000, he made the journey together with a friend. He told neither his mother nor his girlfriend of his plan to leave. They made it to the town of Kassala across the Sudanese border, but, he said, he missed his girlfriend and decided to go back for her. The truck on which they travelled was stopped at roadblocks. Yosief showed the police his forged student ID as well as the folder of paintings he carried. He told them he had gone to Sudan because he had heard about an art college in Kassala, and that he had come back to Eritrea because he had failed to enrol. One time, a police officer found his forged IDs, which were hidden under a sack of onions, and slapped him, but he let Yosief and his friend continue their journey to Asmara. When I asked why, Yosief said: “They know once you are in Asmara it will be very difficult to come to the border again. It is a very difficult journey, everywhere there are road blocks, and everywhere military police”.
Reaching Asmara I discussed with my girlfriend, Meskerem. My girlfriend was also tired of the war, since her four brothers were engaged in the battlefields and she would always worry for their lives. Leave alone that, she had the fear of being sent to battle herself, since there is no distinction, in Eritrea all able men and women are obliged to protect and defend the country. Therefore, we agreed that nothing should stop us and we have to leave. She was very young, fifteen or sixteen. I told her it was going to be a very difficult journey. They can shoot you from the Eritrean side when you try to cross the border. We didn’t tell my mother, but recently I have told her the whole story. We had to travel at night and sleep during the day, and after three days we reached the border town Tesseney. This town was regarded a military operation zone, because of the existing tension between Eritrea and the Sudan14 and because it is an escape route for many young Eritreans who reject the war and military service, and it is also used by smugglers. So there are big numbers of Eritrean troops stationed there. My girlfriend had to look for human smugglers while I was hiding in a hotel. Eventually we managed to get the smugglers and made a deal with the hotel owner. We had to buy Muslim attires to disguise ourselves as Sudanese. By midnight we left the town through the bushes guided by our smugglers. It was a very risky attempt and my girlfriend began to worry. Many women who attempt to cross always return back. But Meskerem and I were determined to cross and she all the time prayed for our safety. Her persistence really encouraged me. It was our first time to use camels as a means of transport. The smugglers use camels because they move slowly without making noise, one cannot even hear their footsteps, and they quietly travel a long distance without being bothered about water or food. It was risky but also amazing, the nature of this animal taught me to be patient. We were shooting deep inside the darkness on the back of the camel. Meskerem had covered her head like a Muslim and I was saying to myself: “I have to be patient and strong to make sure she is safe, and there is no way back”. At a certain point we had to disembark the camels and cross the border on foot. Surely God is so wonderful, we crossed the border while soldiers on both sides of the border were there guarding their posts. But these smugglers knew their routes. For six hours we walked through the bushes up to the Sudan territory.
From the border town Gulsa inside Sudan, they continued to Kassala, where they were taken in by an Eritrean born in Sudan, who hosted them for several weeks.15 Yosief spoke warmly of this young man: “Sometimes we tried to give him money for shopping but he refused and told us that money can never buy brotherhood and that we should feel ourselves at home”. Eventually Yosief’s girlfriend sold her jewellery to pay for their transport to Khartoum, where many Eritrean refugees live and work, and where, Yosief said, “it is easy to mix”. He commented on the hospitable Muslim culture of the country’s capital, but also on shari‘a, which he evaluated as “putting people in a tin, then closing the
Artists 237 lid”. He talked of his work as a waiter in a Sudanese restaurant, of Eritrean women working as house servants, and of the increasing insecurity: “We feared being hunted because there was a big presence of both Eritreans and Sudanese working and spying for the Eritrean government. There were incidents where young Eritreans just disappeared and no one would know of their whereabouts”. They left Khartoum. Meskerem, on account of her pregnancy, went back to Eritrea, and Yosief travelled to Nairobi, where he found a teaching job in an architectural college. He taught during the day, painted at night, missed his girlfriend, and did not warm to Nairobi: “I had to share my salary with the Kenyan police. They harassed me almost every day when I left the college on my way home. Whenever I met them I had to fill their pockets”. In early June 2001, Yosief crossed the border between Kenya and Uganda and arrived in Kampala on the 10th of that month. Twenty months later, Meskerem and their son joined him. A year after that, he paid for his mother to also leave Asmara and come to live with them in Kampala. On one of the bookshelves in Yolé!Africa’s modest library stands a beautiful painting: four camels with a baby one in front move in line, graciously walk off the paper, their journey lit by the moon. It is these animals, Yosief said, who will always be his most trusted companions: they secured his flight out of Eritrea.
DahlakDahlak IslandsIslands KhartoumKhartoum DahlakDahlak IslandsIslands KhartoumKhartoum KassalaKassala AsmaraAsmara TesseneyTesseney Eritrea
Sudan
Ethiopia
Uganda Kenya Somalia
D.R.Congo
KampalaKampala
NairobiNairobi
Tanzania 0 300 600 kilometers
3. STORYLINES
The notion of restlessness, of the artist-in-exile has been very attractive to the western mind. The list of European and American painters and writers who have left home for some other country in this century and the one before is impressive indeed. Let me mention an arbitrary half-dozen that come first to my mind – Picasso leaving Spain for Paris; Rimbaud leaving France for Abyssinia; Rilke changing homes twenty times in two years; even James Baldwin returning to America from France in a casket and W.E.B. De Bois finding a resting place in Ghana. Diverse as their individual situations or predicaments were, these children of the West roamed the world with the confidence of the authority of their
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homeland behind them … The experience of a traveller from the world’s poorest places is very different …
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile, 2000, p. 91-92
The artist-in-exile as a romantic figure. As for the lives of the young artists in Kampala: there was little romance about these. The image of the artist as the eccentric gifted individual who distances himself or herself from society by choice, the wanderer who lives in his or her own creative world, may indeed be largely a western image. Though Samy, in my perception, did have a poetic world of his own that he retreated into at times, his actual pressing reality was one of insecurity and, definitely in the beginning, an unsettling loneliness. The young artists in Kampala had not sought the unfamiliar environment of this city to boost their creative inspiration. They came because they were no longer safe at home. Nevertheless, their situation of exile, and their previous experiences of war, shaped the content of their work as well as their ambitions. The issues they engaged with extended beyond their individual experiences. Chinua Achebe writes about the upcoming African literature in the 1950s/1960s:
“Everywhere new ways to write about Africa have appeared, reinvesting the continent and its people with humanity, free at last of those stock situations and stock characters, ‘never completely human’, that had dominated European writing about Africa for hundreds of years” (2000: 49).
I believe the young artists I got to know would all subscribe to Achebe’s statement that “Africa needs stories told by Africans”, and moreover, that these stories must convey the Africa of the 21st century and its palette of different and conflicting realities. The work produced at Yolé!Africa – the paintings, performances, music and videos – showed a wide range of styles, techniques and subjects. Generally speaking though, a great deal of it reflected their personal experiences of war, flight and exile. Three storylines were woven into most of the art made by the young refugees working at Yolé!Africa, i.e. dispossession and violence, memory and nostalgia, transformation and hybridity.
3.1 Dispossession / violence
The prototype dispossession portrayed in art and literature from Africa concerns the foreign intrusions of the continent (the slave trade and European colonialism), but the abuse of power in the postcolonial era is also a popular artists’ theme. Examples are many: from Wa Thiongo’s A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1994 [1985]) to Fela Kuti’s provocative lyrics, from Gebre Kristos Desta’s painting Golgotha (1963) and Nuruddin Farah’s trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1980-1983) to Moke’s painting Motorcade with Mitterand and Mobutu (1989). The work of the young refugee artists in Kampala was also in many ways a commentary on their personal and their societies’ histories of dispossession and violence. As part of Yolé!Africa’s performance Homeless on UNHCR’s anniversary day in December 2000, Cheikh Gaeye, a Senegalese member of Yolé!Africa, recited one of his poems called My Country.
My country was reborn At a round table in Berlin In 1884 Its umbilical cord torn apart By men who were not men Predators clad in coats
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Wielding long carving knives
Long before Adam and Eve And your cursed apple My country had a name A beautiful name And you gave it yours A splinter in my memory Of gold And ivory And diamonds And jangling chains and transatlantic wounds Across the raging seas
My country Was once beautiful You dug up its veins For nuggets to parade In salons of condescension
My country has people Beautiful like yours Bowed But not bowing Famished yet eating The fruits of resilience
My country Has all you yearned for The Giza pyramids And Tasseli Caves Rwenzori Mountains And Elgon Serengeti and Nikolokoba Agadir and Walvis Bay Okapis and flocks of geese Sea, sand, sun and sex And AIDS galore
But my country has people Beautiful people With radiant smiles Like a sunset And beggars And evil men Clad in silk or fatigue
People who wield pangas And machetes And slaughter a dream in a wink People who dream of Picking our gold from your streets As they sweep them
People of all hues
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Copper-brown Blue-black Ochre Tawny Chocolate-brown
My country has nomads And refugees Displaced and dislocated people And wars that never stop Thanks to your generous supplies
My country is above all A grammatical error As the poet said: Past imperfect Present tense Future uncertain
My country is A rich addition To the vocabulary Of human intercourse
Cheikh was a performer - the intensity of his words contrasted with the sympathetic and optimistic speech by the Senior Protection Officer that preceded his act – and there was spontaneous and excited applause for his improvised lines:
My country / is a capital letter K / Kinshasa, Kampala, Kigali / Kagame, Kaguta, Kabila / K.. K.. AK47 Kalashnikov.. K / Kabarole, Kasese, Kony.. K.. / K.. Khartoum.. K / My country is an AK47 dangling over the womb of the Congo / Deep deep down in the middle of the Congo...
The controversial Kisangani clashes between the armies of Paul Kagame (Rwanda) and Yoweri Kaguta Museveni that took place on the territory of their former common ally Désiré Kabila, which left many soldiers and civilians dead, were fresh in everybody’s mind. Cheikh’s and other artists’ fierce criticism of past crimes (their countries disowned by invading European armies) does not veil their outrage about the current wrongs on the part of Africa’s leaders and elite. Contemporary greed and corruption, war and human rights violations form a definite theme in their creative narratives. Cheikh’s poem moreover struck home because all young actors on stage that evening, and many in the audience too, had recently lost their countries to war. When the curtains were drawn and with the applause from the audience still ongoing, the atmosphere backstage turned jubilant. We, Yolé!Africa, had succeeded in what we had envisaged: speak instead of being spoken to, show the force of creativity. Drinks were served and photos taken in an atmosphere of hugs and laughter. When I look at the photos of that evening this exuberance is evident, but behind the crowd talking and toasting fragments are visible of the paintings exhibited in the theatre’s reception hall. One in particular catches my eye: the oil painting by a Sudanese young man that portrays men in suits with grotesque faces conversing while skulls are burning under a perfectly blue sky. I remember its ghastliness had made some of us uncomfortably giggly. After the show, we never saw this Sudanese artist again, and his painting was left in Yolé!Africa’s storeroom. Homeless was Yolé!Africa’s baptism of fire. A great many works have been produced at the art centre since, many of which refer explicitly to war, violence and dispossession.
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For instance Petna’s painting Kadogo, les Enfants de la Guerre (2001), a tribute to the many children in the Great Lakes Region who have ended up carrying guns, and his Birth of an Orphan (2001). The latter renders the epitome of dispossession: a child born into absenteeism of those who gave life to it. The artist Daniel Kambere Tsongo, addressed as Maître by the younger generation at Yolé!Africa, received his education at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa and has exhibited and sold his oil paintings in Africa and Europe. In 1999, he fled his home area in eastern Congo. Daniel’s Exode II (2001) is colder in colour than most of his work: blues instead of his usual shades of yellow and orange. With his feet dipped in black paint the artist has walked across the canvas; a movement of his hands (white and ochre) has been printed onto it too. The sketchy references to people that are found on many of his canvases, are here reduced to dots. The painting has a forceful energy to it: my impression is of a blaze that has left everything at odd angles. Was this painting born out of the same experiences as Where Are They?, the anonymous poem that I found among my fieldwork papers? Its first verse reads:
The graveyard answered me With a pregnant silence For their limbs Broken one after the other Were not worth burying here
Yosief’s references to wartime violence are few and more disguised, yet several of his paintings, like Responsibility (2005), have the image of buffalo horns, which according to Yosief are the symbol for authority and power. He explained:
The meaning of power is responsibility, but in Africa power is that what enables men to get anything they want. If someone is much disturbing and wants to fight all the time, in Eritrea we call him keran, which translates as ‘the one with the horn’.16 In the Horn of Africa there is fighting everywhere. What I want to tell those leaders is: “You have the horn, you have the power, but use it peacefully, not in a violent way”.
In a different genre the same subject of protest against violence and abuse of power is captured in Petna’s short documentary/music video Twaomba Amani (We Ask for Peace, 2005).17 In November 2004, Yolé!Africa Goma (Congo), led by 22-year-old Sekombi Katondolo, organised a group of musicians of different ages and musical styles to work together on a song against the continuing political violence in their region. Petna produced a music video of it, which radiates the musicians’ determination to speak their minds about politicians who loot the country’s riches, children left orphaned by war and Aids, the destruction of flora and fauna, and the sexual abuse of women and girls. Petna stressed the musicians could only have come out with this as a group, no individual artist would have dared make statements like “Congo Kinshasa, the peace we ask of you is not a gift, it is our fundamental right! Aren’t you ashamed to do evil?” The music video is preceded by a short documentary about sexual abuse. It starts with footage from a demonstration by women in the streets of Beni, whose expressions of anger at the rape of their daughters, sisters and mothers leave one without words. Twaomba Amani ends with a visit by the Goma musicians to a camp for demobilised child soldiers. The boys look indifferent at first, but eventually one or two get up to dance - and finally they ask the musicians when they will be back to sing with them. The statement by Sekombi Katondolo with which the film opens, voices the vision of all Yolé!Africa artists: “Peace will not come from foreigners, but from us, sons and daughters of Africa”.
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3.2 Memory / nostalgia
When an old man dies, it is as if a library burns.
Amadou Hampâté Bâ 18
A second storyline on which the artists draw quite extensively – perhaps in response to the theme of dispossession and violence – is that of history, far and near, through memories of ‘the good old days’. Yosief writes:
I believe part of my work is to record the day-to-day life of people and in the long run to become an archive for the future generation’s heritage. My art works as a mirror of old days reflecting our modern time. Abyssinians are the only people in Africa who have maintained their own alphabetical and numerical order up to the present time. And we, the artists of Abyssinian origin have maintained our own artistic symbols, inherited from the walls of the churches, rocks, forts and caves left to us by our forefathers. My role as a painter is to bring these images of old paintings to the modern time.
Woets (2004) points out that a statement like this should not be taken at face value. She argues that most collectors and critics of African art lack eye for the dependence of artists on the art market, and that their use of ‘traditional’ symbols and materials is a reflection of this dependence as much as it is an expression of artistic motives or identities. I agree with her, but still, Yosief’s use of what he calls ‘traditional symbols’ hardly comes across as obligatory. It rather fits his general approach to life, for instance how he and Meskerem (who he has since married) want to raise their young son, insisting that he speaks Tigrinya instead of only picking up English and Luganda (and bits of French and Kiswahili when he joins his father at Yolé!Africa). Yosief insists that he uses the architectural imagery, the round faces and eyes inspired by Byzantine art, and the Ge’ez19 symbols
because I don’t want it to be forgotten, I don’t want to show negligence. If you forget about yourself, your history, if you don’t talk, nobody will know. I like the past because the past is your roots. Roots are very important. If you feed the roots, the tree will grow. Without remembering the past you can’t grow. I think I’m a traditional artist. Remember I used only black and brown shoe polish in my early paintings? That was because of its resemblance in colour and texture to animal skin. In Eritrea, artists and monks used to paint on the dried and stretched skin of lambs, but here in Kampala I found it hard to get the real skin. Those brown colours of my early paintings are the more traditional colours. Now I’ve brought my paintings to the modern world. But in every painting I make today, you will still see traces of tradition.
Evoking images of the past is also very much a theme in Daniel Kambere Tsongo’s work. His vibrant oil paintings – variations on the theme of his Souvenir de Kivu (2001) – convey a nostalgic memory of the era when, as he puts it, “flora, fauna and human beings still coexisted in harmony”. These paintings refer to the distant past, the times before the slave trade and King Leopold’s reign over the Congo, as well as to a mere decade ago, the years before the devastating wars raged in his home area Beni. Kasfir argues that “the depiction of an idealised Africa undisturbed by change and epitomised in scenes of rural domestic life [that] has had a wide currency with [contemporary] urban painters … is not entirely market-driven” (1999: 29-30). She refers to scholars like Fabian and Jules-Rosette, who stress that these “idyllic rural narrative paintings” can lay claim to several possible readings: memories of an actual past, a cultural ideal of harmony, an escape fantasy, or a symbolic
Artists 243 rejection of anything western. The fact that people like Yosief and Daniel are passionate about expressing their communities’ recollections of the past is undoubtedly linked to their personal histories of flight and loss. The recollection of a better past, an Africa unadulterated, is tied up with their longing for the life before the recent uprooting. Perhaps it also echoes this sentence from Milan Kundera’s Ignorance:
“It is important to understand the mathematical paradox in nostalgia: that it is most powerful in early youth, when the volume of the life gone by is quite small” (2002: 77).
I recall one afternoon in October 1999. I had invited Samy and his friend Raphal to lunch in town, and met them at the post office on Kampala Road. I was tired from walking through town all morning, and proposed to go for the first place we would see. We sat outside at the big wooden tables of the Canaan Restaurant, with its clientele mostly from the city’s business centre, and sipped our sodas while we awaited our orders. Both Samy and Raphal were unusually quiet. I tried to lift the atmosphere, but did not quite manage. Samy – who was scribbling absentmindedly in the sketchbook he always carried - said the restaurant reminded him of the few months he had spent in Kampala with his father, who had come from Goma to work as the chef cook in a hotel which, according to Samy, used to be at the very spot where we were having our chips and sausages. It was about six years ago, and Samy had been twelve or thirteen then. He sighed he wished he could retrace life as it was then: peaceful, without constant worries. He told Raphal and me that the previous night he had dreamt that he was fleeing Goma, together with his cousin-sister. He said: “We were wading through red rivers of blood”. Several of his other relatives had also been with them, but not his mother. He said the worst thing about the dream was that she had not been there. I asked them to what extent their dreams had changed. They answered that all their dreams had come to involve war, and war only, whereas in Goma they used to dream about their lives and their relatives. Samy was quiet for a moment then qualified that at times he still dreamt “something nice”. Raphal said he never did. Samy asked Raphal whether he had brought his photo-album with him to Kampala. “I did”, he said, “but I have put it far away. Every time when I look at the photos my nights are terrible”. Samy nodded, yet suggested he should do his best and try to look at those tangible reminders of home every now and then. Three weeks before, a year after he had fled, Samy had received his first letter from home with a photo of his father, which he treasured. Now that I recall this afternoon, I also remember the two sisters from Rwanda whom I met at the JRS office during my first months in Kampala in 1998. Immaculate and Florence were their names and we must have been about the same age. I visited them once in their room along Gaba Road and the one thing I still picture clearly is Florence and me going through her flap-over album with dozens of photos, mostly posed, of friends and family. She filled me in on who everybody was. Immaculate kept a distance. It took a little while before I realised that the persons on the photos adorned with little pencil crosses, the great majority, had all been killed. To have photos, tokens of the life that once was, though in part a painful possession, seemed important to many refugees. As for the artists, I believe their work gave them something photo albums could not: it allowed them to create their image of the past as they (wanted to) remember it – through painting, dancing, writing and song they could create, what Salman Rushdie has called, “imaginary homelands” (Rushdie 1992). In his oil painting Souvenir (2000) Samy reflects his young years before war and flight: the warm embrace in which he remembers his family and hometown held him until the day he fled. When recently I reminded him of the orange glow and dreamlike quality of this painting, he wrote: “Ellen, you remember the things I was always talking about those days. I was missing home and so I decided to make a painting to express the feeling I had in me”.
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Most refugees, when I explicitly asked them, said they were thinking primarily about the future: that was what they needed to focus their attention and energy on. However, perhaps in quiet, private moments, their thoughts were just as much with the past and with all that had come to belong to a bygone era. The young artists in Kampala, I believe, experienced the tension between what the Nigerian intellectual and curator Okwui Enwezor calls the ‘seeing eye’ and the ‘remembering mind’, a tension which he considers inherent to the artistic experience of diaspora artists.
3.3 Transformation / hybridity
The artists of the present generation are the children of two traditions, two worlds, both of which they challenge, merging mechanics and masks, machines and the memories of gods.
V. Y. Mudimbe, Reprendre: Eneunciations and Stratgies in Contemporary African Arts, 1999, p. 39
The third storyline in the work of the young artists focuses not on the past but on the present and the future. It is a recurrent theme especially in Petna’s work. He explains: “People keep repeating, keep lamenting, ‘this is how we used to be before...’, and I say, ‘so what?!’ We cannot go back. We must start from the facts. Those borders are now part of our history. It is very, very important to know what happened, but we must not make our minds prisoner of it. It is now time to start from the facts and be responsible. All of us”. To him, the interesting and compelling questions concern what has been coined ‘hybridity’. The individual lives of the young artists – and indeed all young exiles in Uganda – poignantly illustrate that Africa, like any other place in the world, is a place of change. In his work – his paintings, films and choreographies - Petna takes himself as an example: “Because I am part of it, consciously and unconsciously I’m part of all this change”. The central question posed in his work is ‘Who am I?’ In Homeless (2000) this question was approached from the perspective of ‘the refugee’: using dance, drama and poetry the performance depicted people’s life stories from war to flight and into exile. The last scene expressed the refugees’ ongoing struggle of trying to cope with their new lives in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment. There was no closure to the story, it was left open-ended: ‘Who am I?’ remained unanswered. In 2001, Petna wrote Kekele, a text that has inspired several performances he subsequently choreographed.20 The central question of Kekele again is ‘Who am I?’ Kekele, literally, is the liana growing in the Central African forests, the bendable wood out of which round stools are made, which can be bought at every roadside. In this piece, the protagonist is called Kekele, as a metaphor for both, as Petna put it, “transformation” and “being flexible”. Kekele, the liana, has been used and misused for many different purposes throughout history. Its most common use today is the stool; in colonial times, in the hands of the Belgians, it served as the infamous chicotte (whip). Petna’s text starts:21
Who am I? Kekele is my name. This thick liana. Why am I Kekele? Is it not because of my origins, my essence?
I was called upon to block the roads for lumberjacks and poachers of all sorts, who attack the brothers of my race; to protect the insects, the birds and the trees against the suicidal assaults of the different mercenaries of the forest, who want to get rid
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of the essential races. The forest, which was my fortress, is now being plundered at a large scale with a greenhouse effect.
Kekele, the man who can do all, who is at the service of both the illiterate and the intellectual, both adults and children. I am one of the masterpieces of certain musical instruments. Many people appreciate me and fit me into their bedposts. I lend myself to beautiful cupboards. In architecture, I serve not only as the framework but also as the ceiling. Children are my favourites. As a toy, I contribute to their entertainment. In the villages, I sometimes serve as toothbrush, and at war I serve as the bow of combat. As for the man in power, it is a big honour for me that his symbols of power, his royal throne, are also made of Kekele. As for my love, my well-loved mama Africa, I offer her the stool.
Kekele, an instrument of correction, ever-present in the homes of correction. Rightly or wrongly, I am called upon as a chicotte. I am the favourite of oppressors, who have made me a symbol of ferocity, of violence in short. I punish the unruly animal and people of different classes. I exercise a total violence on those who are marginal. Panic installs itself in people’s hearts every time I am brandished. Yet I am also in charge of the noble mission of the assembler, the unifier: I can serve as the bridge between villages separated by the course of the water.
Kekele, Petna explained to me during his first visit to Europe - the record-book hot summer of 2003 – is an autobiography of sorts: “In Kekele, I talk about the continent Africa, about all the young people of my generation, about myself”. Kekele is about the journeys people make, voluntarily or forced, in the current world of change and movement. He elaborated:
Why am I Kekele? Is it because of my culture that I’m Kekele, is it because of where I’m living? Let’s say I move from A to B. Will I still be Kekele? I will, but not the same Kekele as before. I’ve seen a lot, and these new impressions influence who I am and who I will be. When I travel back to A, people there will look at me differently. Or maybe they look at me in the same way but I myself feel I am different. Because I have seen. When people go back to where they came from, the first thing they do is to tell stories of what they have seen, of what they have gone through. And that automatically will bring change. If people used to like you, maybe some of them will not like you anymore because of your stories. If people were not interested in you, maybe now they will be interested because of the stories you tell.
Petna was speaking about himself. The experiences that brought his question ‘Who am I?’ to the fore were many: the movies he watched as a young boy, in which blacks always played “the negative role”, his being in exile, and perhaps more than anything the experience of war. We were still sitting on my balcony in Amsterdam, watching people walking their dogs as well as the huge freighters, which with admirable skill were being manoeuvred through the canal in front of my house. Petna said: “Then came the famous story of the war, when I ran with those twenty-one children and ...”. I once again realised that he had never elaborated on that experience, and that I had never felt free to ask. I knew the facts: it was 1996; Kabila’s ‘first liberation’ had just taken off in North Kivu; a large part of Goma’s population fled into the forests, where Hutu refugees from Rwanda were also hiding, among them Interahamwe soldiers, and where Mai Mai militia presence was rife. Petna, twenty-two years old at the time, fled his town with a group of children, including his younger sister, and spent fifteen days in the forest. He said: “That’s true, I never told you much… well, it was a bit sad”.
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They [Interahamwe] were stopping us and yes, thanks to God, none of my group was killed. I’m the one who got... well, and also the other brother from Rwanda, you know, the one who wrote to me recently, they beat him quite… well almost up to death. Because they couldn’t believe a Hutu had passed all those barriers of the Mai Mai. They said: “The Mai Mai can sniff, they can smell if you are Hutu and they will kill you”. So they said if you managed to pass you are a Tutsi. They beat him badly and my sister came and lay on top of him and she said: “If you want to kill him, kill me first, he’s our brother”. That was Isabel. Then they released him. So, those people being beaten in my own country, in my own land, it affected me. I mean, I’m in my land and you are foreigners, how come you can come and beat me in my own land?! And the other history is when we were coming back, when Kabila had taken the whole area, the whole Kivu. On our way back to Goma, we had all of those roadblocks, soldiers, they were Rwandan of course, they were Tutsis, asking us funny questions. Saying: “uko adui?” which means, “are you an enemy?” Imagine! You, you are from Rwanda, you’ve come, you’re just helping our Congolese brothers to fight your war, I mean, that was their war, I don’t consider myself part of it. They’re asking us if we are not enemies, and I mean, you, you are from outside, how can I be an enemy in my country? Between you and me, who can be an enemy? So all of those things, they affected me. That’s why in Kekele you see there is war.
Kekele, the liana, when still in the forest, was like a soft rope. But people have changed it, it has turned hard. In the forest its work was to protect the animals, because where there are many kekeles, it is difficult for the hunter to find his way through. “But look what we’ve done to Kekele”, Petna said, “we’ve made it into a chair to sit on. Power-hungry people make chairs out of the lives of other people, they sit on them, they enjoy sitting on them. From a defender, Kekele is made into an oppressor”. The story of Kekele, Petna said, will go on as long as there are people who force others “to be what they don’t want to be”. For Petna, and many with him, it were “the politicians”, and the wars they spawned, which forced him into exile where waited “the beginning of a new life, a life I had never imagined I would have to go through”. Still, the message of Kekele is not solely negative or pessimistic. It is equally about “transformation, but, and this is very important, transformation without knowing the end”. Because, in his words:
Kekele can also unite people, it can serve as a bridge, one can make a bed out of it, for resting and peace, or chairs for people to come together and discuss. So, I take Kekele as a philosophy of being flexible, of being many things at the same time. It is up to us to choose.
Hybridity – even if not previously coined as such – is not a new theme in African art. It has been presented in terms of a clash of cultures, of old and new forms and ways of living. A review of Idanre and other poems (Soyinka 1967), an early collection by the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, reads: “Taken as a whole, the collection may be viewed as a valiant effort to reconcile the mysterious legacy of the old with the harsh and often bloody imperatives of the new”. The encounter between old and new has long been interpreted by African artists in terms of ‘corruption’ of the traditional and indigenous ways, and as such was closely intertwined with the theme of dispossession. Today the many ‘cultural incongruities’ are evaluated in terms of ‘realities of diversity’, and are no longer envisaged as by definition involving an irreconcilable clash. Jean-Hubert Martin, director of the 2004/2005 exhibition Africa Remix, quoted in a press release:
“Africa Remix focuses on the presence of the present … The attribute ‘Remix’ is intended to mean a reshuffling of cards, to show that our present situation is hybrid in character and therefore a reflection of globalisation”. 22
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Petna considers it important to appreciate the fact that the current North/South, black/white, African/Afro-American encounters are here to stay, and that these open up significant spaces for (cultural/individual) self-reflection. Questions to ask do not only concern “our African roots”, and the violation of these, but also what pan-Africanism has to offer in the 21st century, or even, as Petna put it, “who is the white person in me?” The historian Jewsiewicki writes: “In the colonial culture which is still ours, the only quest for identity that is open to the mulatto is the ancestry of his non-Western parent” (2000: 223). One need not be a mulatto by birth, Petna would argue, to want to discover the traces and question the constituents that come together in one person. Issues of race and colour are at the centre of the issue of hybridity. In Kekele he writes:
What type of life will I find in heaven after this sad fate on earth, where the curse seems to stick to my skin, this curse that I detest as a constant daily companion. The elders and old people of my clan, of whom I am the prototype, from whom I have descended, treat me as a sorcerer because I’ve had the misfortune to marry a white one, a stranger. Because of the flesh of my flesh, the rib of my ribs, and my resort to internet demonstrating the sorcery of the white man, I have been spewed out by my own people. I am no longer a free and respectable man. But at the same time, a parent of my loved one qualified me as primitive when she saw me playing the Tam Tam.
While globalisation promises new opportunities and cross-fertilisation, it clearly also spawns conflict. As is shown in Kekele, it is not only conflict with ‘the other world’, but also, and painfully so, with ‘one’s own’:
Because my contemporaries have trouble understanding my thoughts. My words irritate the people who live according to the rules of the jungle. That’s why they have forced me into refuge. Kekele, a paradoxical being. Am I always similar to the people of my race?
The realities of not only physically but also culturally and emotionally moving away from one’s background and community, put challenging questions to the young men in Kampala. Petna mentioned (an experience shared by Lopithi Igom and others) that during visits to his parents’ plantation some fifty kilometres outside Goma, he was a lousy competitor in the games and work of the village boys. His self-made traps would always be empty, “not even a squirrel” he would catch in them. “They were laughing at me. They said: ‘You, you are from town!’” At the same time, at home in Goma, his association with expats from the French and Belgian communities also proved controversial. His friends would say: “Ah that one is always with mzungus”. Petna recalled: “They started to talk to me as if I belonged to the society of those whites”. As for ‘those whites’, Petna said:
Some of them really acted as if they can keep on colonising Africa. Their language… some of the people I met, let’s say there is a party, we are talking, then the way they talk... to me it was like, ‘wow, people, where are we?!’ I could hear that their thoughts are still there. For example they would tell me: “Where can we get beautiful girls to go out with?” So they think that I will be their man to go and look for women and bring them… I mean! I came there because G. invited me as the artistic director of my cultural troupe Maideni. He wanted me to meet people and get contacts. Then they now think they can send me as if I’m a boy from the street, because I’m an African… as if I will go to get girls for them… Those things were a challenge, a big challenge in my heart.23
Samy Kambale Tawite
Entre le marteau et l’enclume, 2000 Confusion, 2001
Souvenir, 2001
Daniel Kambere Tsongo
Tour de Congo en bicyclette à la paix, 2004 Souvenir de Kivu, 2001
Exode II, 2001
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Birth of an orphan, 2001 Kadogo, les enfants de la guerre, 2001
Asibakiye nyuma, 2004
Yosief Endrias Habties
Common vision, 2004 Mother, 2003
Responsibility, 2005
Stranger in no man’s land, 2004
Yosief Endrias Habties
Forced to leave, 2006 Woman in exile, 2006
Undestined journey, 2006
Fear, 2004
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The dance performance Silale that Petna staged at the National Theatre together with Karine Barthe in January 2004, questioned the controversies of colour. Silale means ‘insomnia’ and underlying it are the challenges of change and transformation. As he put it: “The new nights in the city are not like the nights we used to know. There is noise and there is quietness, all in one confusing mix”. And Kekele continues:
From the illiterates to the highest intellectuals, from the hut of a peasant to the skyscraper, from the layman to the religious one. From the street boy called phaseur to the politician, I find myself in the daily life of different social classes. The remarkable progress of medicine doesn’t stop me from consulting the fetishist and marabous of all sorts. Shall I one day have the boldness to compare myself with those who are involved in the revolution of modernity, the architects of the internet and globalisation? Shall I equally have a considerable place on the soil of my ancestors, despite the eternal conflict between my contemporaries and me?
Onyewuenyi writes: “One function of the arts is to make explicit the images by which a society recognises its own values, and thus to offer a means by which the members of a community may express and evaluate new elements in their lives” (1998: 397). For the young artists their work is a conversation, an ongoing reflection on the challenges that come with the changing connections between different realities, cultures and people, a reflection on the all-encompassing changes in their personal lives. One particular area in which rethinking and renegotiation take place, and to which I will return in Chapter Seven, is the issue of self, captured in the lines with which Petna ended his Kekele:
From the traditional Tam Tam Ngoma to modern electrical instruments, from the era of the sorcerer Lungo to the aeroplane, I remain Kekele.
After long routes mountains and plains cover forests and savannahs. I will always be Kekele.
I no longer want to complain. I want to reflect. Among the noise, the music and the tears, is silence.
4. ARTISTS IN EXILE
How do the different issues and storylines they bring up in their art relate to the young artists’ daily lives? This section will look at their lives in Kampala and the role that issues of dispossession and violence, or the memories of a life left behind play in these. It also narrates how the notion of hybridity relates to the ways in which they experience and shape their artist identities. I start with a description of what daily life as a refugee artist looked like for Samy. At first glance, or initially, there seemed little difference between the lives of aspiring artists like him and Yosief, and other refugees.
4.1 Daily life in Kampala
Wednesday 24 November 1999 I visit Samy at his new place (two rooms) in Mengo-Kisenyi that he shares with M- P and E. He is sitting on the floor against the wall with a plate of rice and bananas in front of him. Can hardly open his eyes, feels very hot and is obviously very sick. We talk a little. I give Michel-Pierrot money to buy passion fruit to make juice for Samy. The situation is very graphic, etched onto my mind. It’s so not like being sick
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in our house … Michel-Pierrot walks me back to the road. He says Samy has moments of losing his memory, asking him the same things twice.
Thursday 25 November 1999 I visit Samy again. He’s in bed. The two beds I got from Alfred Dube fit into the room, and that’s it. They share them with the three of them. No mosquito nets. Samy has my sleeping bag, I don’t see any other bedcovers. Their clothes are hanging from nails, covering one wall. Their belongings are in bags aside the beds. There’s one tiny window, which Samy prefers to keep closed because the light hurts his eyes. He looks better than yesterday. Talks and opens his eyes. He’s still very hot, sweat is running down his face, his shirt is soaked. He says his friends take very good care of him, waking up at night every few hours to wipe his face. I inquire about all his symptoms, ask about his room in Goma. It was bigger than this one, he says, and he had it to himself, he had the walls covered with pictures from magazines. He tells me of the first painting he made: a portrait of his father that had earned a special place on the wall in his parents’ house. He says he has a photo of his father, sent to him recently. He starts looking for it. I’m curious. He has put a plastic bag with clothes under his mattress, to create some kind of pillow, and there are two self-made envelops in there, with photos and letters … He eventually finds his father’s photo. I wonder if he’s a bit embarrassed trying to find them under his mattress. For the first time it feels I’m intruding in his private life very directly. We are used to seeing each other either at my place or in town. I look at his father, can’t see Samy in it, but it touches me. This is the first time I see something tangible from his home, his life in Goma. It gives a new, more real, dimension to all he’s told me. It makes it more painful too. His father looks young and healthy. He’s from 1955, Samy says, and his mother from 1962. He has an older brother of 21 and two younger brothers of 15 and 12 years old. He starts narrating about the war. I get his account of their flight during Kabila’s first war in pieces, he keeps adding to it. Some of the things he tells me now, he told me before. About his brother crying because of the pain they see their father is in (his rheumatic knees); about the house without the roof; about the border between Interahamwe and Mai Mai territory and how they had to pass it being beaten with sticks with nails on it, how his father went back, volunteering to be beaten again, to look for his eldest son who had stayed behind. How one Hutu put a gun at Samy’s chest threatening that “your soldiers were very bad to us in Goma, now we’ll also show you how bad they were”. He keeps saying how all young boys and even girls had guns, also in Goma, as everybody willing to fight got a gun from Mobutu. I ask whether these are the things he dreams about when he says he has nightmares, but he says: “No, that I have already forgotten, it is past”. Yesterday he said his dreams are black, very black, and there are faces but he can’t see who they are ... I wanted to take a picture of the situation: the dark room with half painted walls, Samy covered in his sleeping bag, his serious face, the one sunbeam coming through the window bars (myself on the other bed?). Something was strangely beautiful about it, or rather very powerful. I didn’t dare ask.
After weeks of hassle and uncertainty, during which he had spent the night at different people’s houses, a church and school building, Samy had found this place in Mengo- Kisenyi in October 1999. It was one year after he had arrived in Kampala. He spent his days trying to get his refugee papers in order, and was occupied with “finding money” for food and rent. They were very stressful months. I remember Samy told me there was a time during his early days in Kampala when he went without a meal for four full days. He reflected: “I didn’t mind. I knew the world had changed”, and he gave it a positive twist: “I’m happy because it gives me the experience. We are not the first to have this experience. It is all over the world. And there is something positive about being here in exile. I meet new people, I get new opportunities”. It was not quite clear to me what ‘new opportunities’
Artists 255 he had in mind. To me his days seemed an endless struggle. I looked up this conversation in my notes and read what I jotted down about our meeting of the previous day (2 September 1999). It indicates how brittle his optimistic thoughts were.
Meet Samy at UNHCR/FIDA: “I didn’t sleep last night. When I got home my heart was beating fast, I was hot and had a headache. I’m thinking too much”. He can’t tell me what he was thinking about. He still feels bad. Says he wants to die. He is cold. The receptionist at InterAid today shouted at him, called him a liar. He says that if I know how one can stop thinking, could I please teach him?
But he was right and new opportunities did come. In late 1999, he met the director of Amnesty International’s Regional Office for Africa, who invited him to participate in the Mwana art competition, organised to promote children’s rights and lobby African governments to ratify the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1990). At the competition’s launching ceremony in the Sheraton Hotel in November 1999 two of Samy’s paintings were auctioned. One was bought by the guest of honour, eight-year-old Oyo Nyimba, the King of Toro. Samy started spending his days at the Amnesty office doing admin jobs and teaching himself to use the computer. During break time and after work he enjoyed the quietness of the Ntinda office and worked on his drawings. After several months he was given a formal internship, and Samy worked with Amnesty International on and off for approximately two years. It gave him a bit of money to spend as well as contacts within the NGO community. In Kampala’s refugee situation what matters is how you distinguish yourself with your skills, or your personality. “You know”, Samy put it to me one day: “life is a fight. If you don’t fight you don’t get peace or whatever it is you want. If you just sit still like that the life will kill you”.
On 29 June 2000, I visited Samy in his new room in Ntinda. He had moved there to be closer to the Amnesty International office and to save on time and the expenses of transport. It was the day of the Referendum, which was to determine whether or not Uganda should adopt a multiparty system.1 Out of fear for ‘incidents’, a UN security order stipulated that all UN staff in the country stay inside from 12 p.m. onward. Many refugees had told me in the weeks leading up to the Referendum that they would stay inside that day. They feared patrols and checking of IDs by the Ugandan police. But Samy did not fear, because “I have all the refugee documents now, and the Amnesty ID too”. From my research diary:
Yesterday my taxi driver predicted the town will be empty today, with people on their way to and queuing at the polling stations. But he also said Ugandans have lost interest. In Kibuli, when I leave home, and in Ntinda, when I reach Samy’s, there is little show of awareness that politically this day is different from others. Or perhaps awareness is there but people are indeed ‘not interested’. It strikes me as a poverty issue. The butcher with his meat sucking the polluted air and the women selling fried cassava have no time to get excited about a referendum determining the political future of their country. And everybody knows the whole thing is flawed anyway. ‘Vote Movement’ posters have been abundantly disseminated over the past few weeks, opposition ones are scarce. The Monitor reports that many, referring particularly to illiterate people in the neglected areas up-country, do not understand the meaning of voting for a political system rather than for a tangible person.
I immediately spot Samy among the busy crowd of people getting in and getting out of the taxis, the hawkers selling watches and sweets, and the young men whistling and shouting to attract passengers for their journey back into town. Samy
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comes up to me and we shake hands. People around reveal a sense of surprise, briefly, when they see that this young man is the person I came here for. I sense some suspicion too - they are trained to see that Samy is no Ugandan. What does the mzungu lady do with this foreigner? Samy quickly leads me off the main road, and to the back side of the small shops. It’s slippery where we walk due to the heavy rains of the last few days. I watch my steps. Half a minute and I find myself in a small, closed backyard: several doors with padlocks, outside stairs to second floors, and a little alley leading back to where we came from. The colour of the brick buildings thrown together on these few square meters is a yellow-brownish one, the ground distinctly red. Samy fiddles with the lock and welcomes me into his private dominion.
My first impression is one of cosiness and a warm and welcoming atmosphere. It is the light in the corner, a bulb decorated with paper. My second thought: “So this is it, these six or seven square metres are what you can call your home”. The room is not as entirely empty as many I have seen. Those with only a bare mattress on the cement floor and one or two plastic bags with miscellaneous belongings in the corner send chills down my spine. Samy has obviously made an effort, as an aspiring artist would, to decorate his room. He has put his own drawings on show, a poster on the wall, and his father’s photo on an improvised bedside table. He’s put plastic floorcloth to cover the cold cement and has painted the walls, waiting to have money for the second layer. The light in the corner is his favourite piece of art in the room: three branches of a small tree polished black and a bulb fixed on top. To dim the light, he has enveloped the bulb in cartoon paper. Where the branches part he burns a small candle, and the tiny pink flamingo which I once gave him, has been fixed next to it. It makes this room look so much more homely. In one corner are his two spare pairs of shoes, on the floor in the other corner his household utensils - plastic plates and cup, toothbrush, half a loaf of bread, blue band, an ironer, a bucket and a jerry can. Nearly half of the room is taken up by the mattress on the floor, the dark green sleeping bag its cover. In the other corner a stack of drawings, sketchbooks, notebooks and magazines. And his photo album. And his cassette player. I remember that was the first thing he bought when he earned some money with his Christmas card drawings (through Barbara). Music detracts from loneliness. Lastly, there is a fully stuffed backpack and his clothes are hanging from nails on the wall. We both sit down on his mattress. Samy has left the door half open, his room has no windows. Some light does come through the tiny holes in the iron sheeting that is his roof.
When he first saw the room, Samy says, he couldn’t believe he would be able to live there. But now that he has given it his own touch, he likes it. Sometimes, he says, he’s lonely sleeping alone, especially when he doesn’t visit anyone in the evening. And particularly when there is no power. On weekends he often stays over at Petna’s place. For most of his friends Ntinda is too far to visit him: 500 USh by taxi from town. I don’t know if he knows his neighbours. Their shared toilet is far, he says. There used to be a shortcut, but the landlord has locked the passageway because the shopkeepers on the main road were illegally using it. He doesn’t want to take me there because it’s too far and a busy place, he doesn’t want people staring at us. He himself uses the toilet at the AI office. He bathes inside his room with the water that he gets for 50 USh per jerry can. He pays 25,000 USh a month for this room, including electricity. With his meagre belongings I believe he now counts as one of the well-to-do young refugees in town. At least among those who came recently. He’s an example that things can improve. But also of the fact that life is volatile. I haven’t forgotten what he looked like when he had his malaria attack. And the many times he didn’t eat, which was rule more than exception only three months ago. He says he would like to have a mobile. Now that he lives at
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quite a distance from his friends, he wants to be able to communicate. He also wants it in case his parents want to reach him from Goma. It will be his life-line.
I recall the massive billboards along Kampala’s roads advertising for Celtel, the first mobile company in Uganda: “Join. Our World. Go. Everywhere”. Samy managed to save money and bought a mobile phone. When his contract with Amnesty expired, he put his self- taught computer skills to use by designing websites for two other NGOs, and by helping people out with their computer problems. He managed to sell a few of his paintings too. His social network expanded, he made friends, both Congolese and Ugandan, and learnt to speak Luganda - if not as fluent as his elder brother Antoine, who joined him in Kampala in late 2000. That daily life remained a continuing struggle, was clear to me from our email contact over the years.
Dear Ellen, how are you? I’m fine but if I had to write to you all the problems I am facing here it can take us a full book of a thousand pages. Most important I would like to tell you that my mother is very sick and my father has asked me to help. Now I’m learning that a man has to carry the weight of his problems in the hiding corner of his own heart.
I cannot find my response to this particular email, but imagine I advised him to try not to blame himself for his inability to help his parents at this point in time. A few days later he wrote:
Thank you for the advice, but you know I am a tree in my family and my parents are the roots which need to be watered to help that tree to produce good fruits. Consider if it was you in my situation, how you might feel… When I heard my mother was sick I felt bad because I was already feeling I wanted to see them, but of course it is a bit difficult. Then I started dreaming that I no longer had them in me. Since then whatever slight bad thing happens to them, I feel like running faster up to them to help. You know it is still in me, that feeling I told you of visiting them, even if for one day only.
The difference of our situation was painfully evident. I had gone home to the Netherlands for a couple of weeks, because I was close to being overworked and needed some distance from ‘the field’. In my ‘sent messages’ box I find this email:
Dear Samy, I’m writing to you from my parents’ house, it’s a Sunday late afternoon and almost getting dark. It’s cold outside and warm inside, we have a fire in the living room. My mother is cooking, my sister is looking at my photos, my father is… I don’t know, but he’s around. Where are you? Are you with your brother? It’s a bit strange being here, skipping thousands of kilometres, but of course normal too, as I know every inch of this house and village. Yet I feel quite scattered across different places and people. I wish I could show you how beautiful autumn is in this part of the world.
And one line from his response:
I feel the cold wind from your place is crossing through my mind. But don’t worry Ellen, I believe that this wound will one day pass.
Since I completed my fieldwork and left Kampala in early 2001, there have been two occasions on which Samy and I spent time together again, in 2003 and 2004/5. I arrived in Kampala in late December 2004, and saw Samy two days later at Yolé!Africa’s Christmas Eve party. Once again I noticed his touch for style. I did not ask but assumed he had
258 Narratives bought his French Connection shirt and his white linen trousers at the place where Lisa used to take me shopping: Owino Market, where containers of second-hand clothes from Europe arrive every week (and where, if you have an eye for it, you can find great things). Later that evening I learned that Samy’s handsome features and grace had recently earned him a photo session at a fashion show. We had a lovely evening, everyone was there: Petna and his younger brother Emma, Yosief and Meskerem with their son Finhas and a group of Eritrean friends, Samy’s neighbours, Yolé!Africa’s Ugandan and French friends. Samy’s brother Antoine and I had spent the afternoon preparing food: rice, chicken, peas and cabbage, fried plantain, Irish potatoes, tomato salad and roasted groundnuts. With half of the chicken legs still in the marinade, the power went and Antoine sent someone to buy paraffin for the stove. Food was delayed and we ate in darkness. When the power came back, Emma was our DJ, and we listened and danced to Awilo Longomba, Bob Marley and Lokua Kanza until the early hours.
Samy and I met again several times in the weeks thereafter. Our topics of conversation were not very different from years before: our thoughts and dreams about life, and his worries. He was late paying his rent and his landlord was threatening him with eviction; the people he had been doing computer jobs for delayed paying him; he had a tough time finding new jobs. It must be said that these worries about livelihood are shared by most Kampala residents, whether native or foreign. Samy also worried about his parents and younger brothers in Goma; he racked his brains over where the future would take him; he expressed that he wanted to go abroad, but if that would not happen, wondered whether to stay in Kampala or return to Goma – which after all was home. Samy has visited Goma two or three times since he arrived in Uganda in 1998. The first time was in July 2000. From my field notes:
Friday 14 July 2000 I realise it’s exactly one year ago that we met, and decide to pay Samy a surprise visit. He’s not at the AI office. I call him and we meet in town. He tells me he’s going to Goma this weekend! It’s been nearly two years, he wants to see his parents, friends and the town. He will travel via Rwanda, because the Uganda- Congo border is not safe. He says he has to go, whatever will happen. He gives me his uncle’s mobile number in Goma. We go to Kibuli, b/c I want to give him one of the disposable cameras Brigitte brought for me. So that he can bring some images back with him. He leaves to get organised for his journey. I write him a card with the Irish blessing: ‘May the road rise up to meet you…’
I remember the one line with which he later described his mother’s response to his unexpected reappearance: “She was so happy, it was… like a volcano eruption!” In January 2005, he told me about his most recent trip home, which was several months ago then. Samy has no passport and cannot use his Refugee Identity Card to enter the country he fled from, as that will jeopardise his refugee status in Uganda. He explained to me the tricks of the trade: go to immigration/police in Kampala, state you are a refugee wanting to go home, but that you lost your documents; use a false name for the travel paper they give you; use this to cross into Rwanda. At the Rwanda-Congo border you can “talk in your own language”: tell them you have decided to come home but have no papers, and if not very unlucky the immigration officers will say: “you go, go home then”. On your way back you use a different border crossing and a Congolese transit paper (that someone else gets on your behalf, again with a different false name), stating that you are allowed to go to Uganda for two weeks for medical treatment. “It’s the only way but it’s not secure, you’re in serious trouble if they discover you”, Samy said, “sometimes we say we’re used to this
Artists 259 insecurity, but it’s not true. It will always remain a very bad thing. I’m tired of it”. And he added:
Yes things have changed or improved but we always want more, a next step. To me the most important thing now is to no longer be dependent. I want to go abroad so that I can contribute to my family’s situation, to save money and come back to Africa and be able to live a life without these worries of where to find food. If it was just me I could live in my room, do my paintings and live modestly. But I want to contribute. Not because I’m supposed to according to the rules or other people’s expectations, but because I want to. You know it hurts to see my parents in the situation they are in. I think you remember what I wrote to you when I reached Goma?
I do remember. Samy sent a one-line email which read: “When I reached home and saw the kind of life my family is in tears came off my heart. But this is life.” His father was without work; his mother’s business (selling cups of sugar on the streets) kept them going; only one of his younger brothers was in school. Samy commented: “Those who have money are the politicians. They come and make things difficult for us in town and then they retreat to the villages where there is food. These days in Goma it is very difficult to borrow money from relatives or friends. Those who have a little extra save it and keep it because no one knows what the future will bring”. Samy and I had this conversation in January 2005, when North Kivu was again in the news. He spoke to his parents, who told him that everybody stayed inside after 6 p.m., and that young men were arrested randomly and interrogated. Samy: “But we’re not hiding anything, we have no information. You know the bad thing is, we don’t know why all this fighting and war”. We were quiet for a little while, then I asked him whether he had managed to pay his landlord. Samy had told me that the place he rents perhaps exceeds his budget, but he wants to hold on to it – because the area is secure, because he likes his neighbours, and because it has the space to accommodate his parents and brothers if they happen to have to leave Goma. He said: “I have the experience of being thrown out and living in a classroom, I don’t want my young brothers to go through that”. The idea that he may have to accommodate his parents and younger brothers is not unfounded. In early 2002, when the eruption of the Nyiragongo had destroyed much of Goma town, Samy’s family came to Kampala. Nothing had been left of the family house and they stayed with Samy and his brother Antoine for several months. Up to today, the situation in North Kivu has remained politically volatile and none would be surprised if people were to be pushed out again.
The worries Samy expressed not only concerned his parental family but also having his own. Already in 1999, he was eighteen then, he spoke of how as a young man he would have been expected to have his own house had he lived “in the village”. Samy and his friend Raphal often told me about their expectations of marriage and having a family. I recall one afternoon when we sat outside one of the little shops on the pavement of what is now the traffic-lit Wandegeya roundabout, yet back then one of the most chaotic crossings in town. Taxis and boda bodas were parked around us. We shared a roll of vanilla biscuits and drank yoghurt from pink plastic sachets – more nutritional, they had decided, than a soda. They were not sure what supper would bring. From my field notes:
Raphal and I discuss the possibilities of him getting a scholarship through the Hugh Pilkington Trust. Think it will be hard though because of his French. Will go and enquire … We talk about women and girlfriends. Raphal keeps advising Samy not to engage in any relationship with a Ugandan woman: he is convinced they all have AIDS. He jokes that he will take Samy straight to Luzira Prison if he finds out about any such engagement. Raphal says he himself isn’t interested in finding a
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girlfriend here in K’la as he cannot forget F. I ask him how serious their relationship was and he says it felt very serious to him but that “I didn’t tell her well enough”. Now he fears he will lose her to another man. I ask him why he doesn’t try to get a letter to her in Goma and he says he wrote one yesterday but is afraid to send it. Finds it hard to say why. “I can wait for her for a long time, but I’m afraid she can’t. There are many customers for pretty girls”.
It was the first time that in my presence Raphal spoke of F., the girlfriend he had left behind in Goma. He said:
The question of who will be your wife is a hard question, you have to be cautious. It’s for the rest of your life, so you can’t joke with that. If you choose from interest money will get finished, if she has studied she still may not find a job, if you choose because of her family, the future may change their good life. The first thing is love.
Samy said:
I will never marry because of conditions or because my family thinks she comes from a good family. I will marry her because I love her. My problem is that my family thinks I’m strange. According to the tradition I’m obliged to marry from my own tribe. But I know I will marry a stranger. My life is already not normal. I’m out and I will stay out.
Raphal was resettled by UNHCR to Texas (USA) and married there a few years ago. He asked Samy to do the honours for the parallel wedding ceremony that took place in Kampala at the house of the parents of the Congolese bride. In January 2005, without Raphal this time, Samy and I share our thoughts about getting married and having children. We both recognise that we are in a different phase of life than five years ago. We joke and agree that for me, at thirty-two, the issue of children is much more urgent than for him. We have taken a ride with a fisherman from Port Bell to Gaba, where we will have our lunch of fried tilapia. We admire the green islands in this expanse of Lake Victoria. Samy says that if he has a choice, he will not take an office job. His ideal would be to have his own studio to spend the day painting with his children near to him. He has brought a few photos to show me. One is of himself as a 13-year-old, standing in his parents’ garden, with a little paper windmill tied to his head. He looks into the camera shyly yet proud of his creation. Later during our lunch he says: “The way the world is going now, you have to stick yourself to one of the hands of a clock, so as to move with them, so as to not be left behind”.
4.2 Merits of the artist identity
Samy’s life in many ways continued to be a struggle, but the practical rewards he got out of his artistic talent (work experience, skills, money) at times eased things a little. The social networks of young artists like him were expanded as they made contact with galleries and with private collectors (well-to-do Ugandans but mostly expatriates) through their affiliation with Yolé!Africa. Being known in these circles provided them with a semblance of security. Suddenly it was not unthinkable that someone might stand up for them or that their possible disappearance (abduction was feared by the Congolese refugees in 1999/2000) would not go unnoticed. They had the same security issues as other clandestine urban refugees, yet they felt more secure, and at times their contacts indeed proved significant. The UNHCR Representative in Uganda, a Gambian national, turned out to be an art-lover. He kept in touch with Petna and Daniel Kambere Tsongo all through his
Artists 261 placement in Uganda and funded Yolé!Africa’s dance performance Stand Still (2002) at the National Theatre. He was able to put forward – in his tennis outfit – the necessary authority vis-à-vis the Ugandan police after Petna had called him one evening from a police cell, having been arrested for not carrying an ID. Being artists helped the young men not only in terms of livelihood or security, but in less tangible ways too. The fact that his work at Amnesty International gave Samy a program when waking up other than “going to look for food” was a significant change in life as he had known it in Kampala. “Refugees”, he said, “are roaming and begging everywhere to everybody everywhere”, and he was pleased to be able to take some (psychological) distance from this imagined community. To claim “I am an artist” was a way of distinguishing oneself and of counteracting the indiscriminate use of the label ‘refugee’.2 Until they had proved themselves to be something else as well, that was what they were: refugees. I remember the first meeting Petna and I had at UNHCR to discuss Yolé!Africa’s contribution to its 50th anniversary celebrations. We were invited into the shipshape Conference Room – opened by Uganda’s 3rd Deputy Prime Minister in the presence of regional UNHCR officials and the Kampala diplomatic corps eighteen months earlier – and I was asked to introduce myself. Then the chairperson glanced in Petna’s direction and asked: “And who’s he?” When Petna did not respond immediately, deliberating whether to answer in English or French, the Public Relations officer cut in and said: “O, he’s one of the refugees”. A brief uncomfortable moment followed, unnoticed it seemed by the person who probably thought she had come to our help. Then Petna answered in French that he was an artist from Congo and the director of Yolé!Africa. The chairperson blinked, nodded, and asked him to speak English. Our collaboration with UNHCR in the following months proved challenging (we barely avoided a last-minute fall- out about the invitations: individual refugees were not supposed to be, for logistical and security reasons, on the evening’s official list of invitees!) but was an interesting learning experience. On 14 December 2000, after the well-received performance, one UNHCR official came up to a group of actors and dancers with the dubious compliment: “If we had known you were capable of this, we wouldn’t have insisted on sending you to the refugee settlements!”
Young artists’ role in society
Being able to call oneself an artist is a significant asset in a situation where other meaning- giving identities are (temporarily) not available: out of school, one no longer is a student; away from one’s family and community not a responsible son; without income no longer a potential future husband. The artist identity, which can be carried across borders, provides direction and purpose and a sense of self-worth. This self-worth for a large part derived from the contribution the young men felt they could make to society. Yosief wrote to me:
If we, people of this generation, will not play a big role for change, it will remain the same, even worse, for the next generation. The work of an artist is to pass on a message. It is my role to express my feelings and observations of the events taking place in my own community and around the world. I regard myself as a fighter, fighting for peace in my own yard and outside. My gun is my brush and the colours are my bullets and the paper or canvas is my battleground. My preoccupation is to create solutions by peace and love and not confusion. I believe great power is great responsibility. Through my art I tell people and the leaders of the world that they should use power to govern in a peaceful way, with comfort, and a sense of humour, rather than misusing the power for personal ego, greed and irresponsibility towards each other.
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Okot p’Bitek, the late Ugandan philosopher/artist, writes in his Artist, the Ruler (1986):
“I believe that a thought system of a people is created by the most powerful, sensitive, and imaginative minds that a society has produced: these are the few men and women, the supreme artists, the imaginative creators of their time, who form the consciousness of their time. They respond deeply and intuitively to what is happening, what has happened and what will happen … [T]he artist creates the central ideas around which other leaders, law makers, chiefs, judges, heads of clans, family heads, construct and sustain social institutions … The artist uses his voice, he sings his laws to the accompaniment of the nganga, the harp; he twists his body to the rhythm of the drums, to proclaim his rules. He carves his moral standards on wood and stone, and paints his colourful ‘dos and donts’ on walls and canvas” (1986: 39-40).
Okot p’Bitek captures the ‘mission’ that Yosief and the other young artists in Kampala had carved out for themselves. As individuals and as a group (united as the ‘Yolé!Africa family’) they felt they had a pedagogical role in society. It was no easy mission though. They struggled with the limited space in which they as foreigners manoeuvred and insecurity curtailed their freedom to express themselves. The practical impediments were serious too: no stable place to work from, no money for canvas, sketchbooks and paints, or musical instruments and costumes. Now that Yolé!Africa is well established, the situation has somewhat changed, but needs and funds remain continuously at odds. Still, unlike students who have no way of being what they want to be without paying a considerable amount of school fees, aspiring artists have more leeway. Even if far from ideal, you can be an artist with minimal funds: almost everybody can afford a pencil and some sheets of paper, and if worse comes to worse, songs and poems can be stored in one’s mind. Zedin Kroo is Yolé!Africa’s music band. ‘Zedin’ means ‘united’ and ‘kroo’ is their translation of ‘crew’. In 2005, Emma Katya, the then 20-year-old lead singer, explained:
We are a group of people working together for a specific task. We spread a message of hope and peace to young people in Africa, to build their self-esteem and confidence. In the Third World, of which Africa is part, misinformation is one of the major causes for conflict, poverty and disease. People have no access to information and youth are the first victims of that situation. Today, many young people have joined armies and are fighting other people’s wars. Others end up on the streets and are involved in theft, drugs or sex trade. They end up with immature pregnancies and AIDS. Through our music, we speak to them and transmit our message. It will go straight to them, deep inside their hearts.
By taking on this pedagogical role, the young artists placed themselves within a wider tradition. Artists who set out to ‘educate society’ by commenting on the social and political situation or by discussing issues of morality, are valued across Africa. One example is Chéri Samba, the Congolese painter whose international fame grew rapidly after his inclusion in the Les Magiciens de la Terre (1989) exhibition in Paris. His recent outsized acrylics are not essentially different from his early flour-sack paintings for a Kinshasa audience:
“his themes have continued to deal with the problems of urban life in Africa, from prostitution and AIDS to potholed streets … and the dangers for Africans of European social behaviour” (Kasfir 1999: 27).
The idea behind much so-called ‘popular art’ is that “in native formal style, [it comments] vividly on historical events, social issues, and the cultural struggles of working-class and rural peoples” (Mudimbe 1999: 37). This popular art includes the texts and visuals painted
Artists 263 on walls and vehicles and which often carry moral slogans. For instance, messages on lorries and buses - ‘One Man, One Wife’, ‘Think First’ and ‘Zero Grazing’ - relate to the dangers of AIDS and reflect the fact that one of the pandemic’s main paths of propagation has been the truck route that passes through Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania (Kasfir 1999: 37). However, it is precisely this engaged, dubbed ‘functional’, attribute of art and performance in Africa that causes many western critics to regard African art as “something less than the other ‘pure’ art, a sort of poorer cousin as it were” (Wilkinson 1998: 384). Not only ‘popular art’ but also for instance the Nkondi statues (also called ‘nail fetishes’, some over three centuries old) from Congo serve as an example (Meyer 2001). These statues are community owned and protect villagers by identifying and hunting down wrongdoers such as thieves, adulterers, and people who are believed to cause sickness or death by occult means. Art in Africa is intricately tied in with societal practices, religion and the philosophical interpretation of the world (Blier 2000, Kimmerle 1995). However, the oft- made corollary that in Africa art has never presented an autonomous sub-field of life and living, that art as such did not exist in Africa, has been refuted. It is evident that in Africa
“a centuries-old tradition of making objects with aesthetic appeal developed gradually into making objects for aesthetic appeal, all the while following the same logical pattern as Western art even if the concept of art as it was used in the so- called developed countries was unknown” (Wilkinson 1998: 387).3
In Europe too, l’art pour l’art is a relatively recent innovation.4 For many centuries art was almost entirely in the service of religion. Blier (2000) stresses that in late Medieval Germany and in Renaissance Italy, the concepts of ‘art’ and ‘skill’ were intricately connected. The Latin root for ‘art’, ars, has it source in the word artus, which means to join or fit together. The Italian word arte and the German Kunst were linked to the idea of practical activity, trade and know-how. Furthermore, art has clearly served pedagogical purposes also in the West. For instance, Walter Gropius, from the beginning days of the Bauhaus School, selected as instructors artists who shared his view that art education could help transform the moral and ethical climate of society. The Socialist Realism art counts as a very different but not less valid example. I believe it is no coincidence that in tandem with the socio- political upheavals of the past few years (9-11, the war on terrorism and its effect on Europe’s so-called multicultural societies), the question of whether or not art should express social and/or political engagement has again become a subject of discussion, witness discussions on television and in newspaper fora.5 The western perception that art did not exist in Africa, meant that ‘Africans’ were not thought of as having a tradition of sustained aesthetic judgment comparable to ‘ours’ (Oloidi 1998). Clearly, however, the fact that a piece of art has a ritual function does not imply that its aesthetic quality cannot at the same time be central to it. Vogel writes: “Most African languages have a single word that means good, useful, well made, beautiful, suitable” (1989: 15). Blocker writes about West Africa:
“Masks and figures worn atop the head, paraded or carried in ritual dances, will often only work if they have been fashioned to look the part. The portion of a Yoruba Gelede mask, for example, is designed to entertain and thus pacify evil witches, but if the masks are not visually entertaining, they can hardly be expected to do the job” (1998: 421).
Aesthetics and functionality go together not only in religious performances, but also in art used to express political standpoints. The young artists in Kampala attribute a large part of their inspiration to the edifying and sensitising potential of their work, but aesthetic quality is considered at least equally essential. They judged their own and each other’s art using
264 Narratives criteria of skill, visual appeal, and originality. One of the weekly concerts organised by the Uganda Hip-hop Foundation, which I attended to watch Emma, Zeden Kroo’s lead singer, perform, can serve as an example. I had come to know Emma as a quiet, observing kind of person, and thus was amazed how as soon as he stepped onto the stage, his body language changed and he threw his lyrics about war and corrupt politicians at the audience. Later that evening, I saw from the corner of my eye how Emma tried but could not quite disguise his opinion about some of the less gifted rappers. He saw I noticed and we laughed. One of these young performers came to our table and asked Emma would he teach him the proper rhythms and moves. Although he has been training several others, Emma declined. His standpoint was clear: if you simply do not have a whisper of talent, whatever the ingenuity of your lyrics or message, there is no point in persisting. It is for this same reason that the Yolé!Africa artists are ambiguous about the portmanteau concept of ‘artivism’. The ‘artivism’ movement (a product of the anti-globalisation and anti-war movement) appeals to them, but they are sceptical: “Many of them are bad artists… and that is worse than not having a message”.
4.3 Contentious artist identities
Publicly claiming the ‘artist identity’ – and thus setting oneself apart from other refugees – can also be a risky act. First of all, the admiration that the young artists receive from their compatriots, and at times from Ugandans too, is often shot through with scepticism. Many do not consider being an artist a serious profession. The dire circumstances of exile reinforce the prevalent opinion that it is far more sensible for young people to devote their energy to getting into school or university. Apart from the practical truth this attitude may carry, it also reveals that the role of artists today is not as undisputed as p’Bitek suggests it was in the past, when they were “fully acknowledged, admired and feared for their sharp tongues” (1986: 39). Petna and I discussed this subject and he explained that in his society several perceptions of ‘the artist’ are currently in conflict. Traditionally, the gift of artistic creativity was seen as something passed on from father to son, a prerequisite belonging to members of a lineage whose founding father had been appointed by God.6 Artists made the objects that people adored and worshipped, and they played significant roles in society: as griottes they were the memory-keepers; as pleureurs they played a central role at funerals, when people gathered, as Petna put it, “to fill la vide”; as troubadours they had the purpose of praising the leaders. Through contact with Europe, new perspectives on art and the aesthetic value of individual artworks emerged and caused controversy. According to Petna, for many the troubling question is: “Are these people faking?” In other words, are those who call themselves artists working merely for favours, fame and fortune? If so, their work is considered an insult to traditional ways and values. Mobutu’s protégé artists, who went to great lengths praising the president in their work, though they could be seen as a contemporary version of the earlier troubadours, are artists now spoken of with such disdain. Interestingly, because of the national stereotypes that surfaced in their contacts with the Ugandans, this was an issue not only for the artists, but for many Congolese refugees. Several of them mentioned that when they started arriving in Uganda, people on the streets used to call after them: “Hey, you, ndombolo!” The ndombolo was one of the popular dances in Congo at the time. Insulted, they wondered: “Is all these Ugandans know about us that we are good at music? They really think all Congolese are musicians eh!?” The connotation attached to the label of ‘musician’ is of someone who is ‘not serious’ or even ‘mentally not stable’. However much famous Congolese artists like Papa Wemba are revered, they are at the same time seen as arrogant, spend-thrift and slightly off the rails. Secondly, there was the issue of jealousy. Distinguishing oneself means running the risk of becoming the object of suspicion and envy. The young artists were seen to associate
Artists 265 with mzungus and every now and then a Pajero or Toyota Hilux, some with the Corps Diplomatique number plate, was parked outside Yolé!Africa. This triggered the assumption that for the young artists all doors were generously opened. It was a contentious issue given all refugees’ desperation to get access to the UNHCR and InterAid offices and foreign embassies. Furthermore, their paintings being priced in dollars or euros, people imagined that the young artists availed themselves of a ready flow of cash, when in fact their financial situation was anything but steady. This attitude is not restricted to Uganda. Kasfir writes:
“… success and failure are often linked in ordinary people’s minds not only with diligence and hard work, but also with some form of superhuman intervention on the artist’s behalf. Many studies assert that success in contemporary African terms is usually thought of as a ‘zero-sum game’. Every win must be offset by someone else’s loss, which can trigger jealousy and witchcraft accusations” (1999: 122).
This outlook is what affected Yosief. When he first arrived in Kampala in 2001, Yosief lived in Kisenyi, the city’s most infamous slum area, which is home to many foreigners. To earn a living for himself he set up a small restaurant. In January 2005, we went to Kisenyi to see the place where Yosief used to live and work. He had not been back for two years. We walked around for a few hours, Yosief met old friends, and we saw the tiny house that used to be his business. Not only I, but also Yosief was exhausted by the time we left. He said: “When I lived there I didn’t think it was bad, you know, I was inside. You compare yourself with people who are there, and you know you don’t have another option. But now I find it difficult to stay even for one afternoon”. He explained more about those early days in Kampala:
I made my restaurant in Kisenyi because there you need no documents or license, and because it is the cheapest place. I rented that little house and inside I made a partition: one part was for eating, one part for chewing mirra.7 The cooking I did outside. It was a fulltime job. People come for breakfast, lunch, and others come in the evening to play cards. Because they are chewing mirra, they don’t feel sleepy. I had to wait till they finished, sometimes it was very late, like three in the morning. I opened the restaurant to solve my problems, but it changed to solving the problems of others. Many people came asking me for credit. And it was very difficult for me to say no when someone asks for credit because he is hungry. But the bad thing about giving credit is you lose your money but also you lose your customers. Because customers who have a lot of debt, they are afraid, and then they get lost [disappear].
In 2001, one customer who saw Yosief sketching in the margins of newspapers, introduced him to Yolé!Africa. It took Yosief one visit to decide: he invited the Yolé!Africa crew to lunch, then locked the door of his restaurant and from that moment onwards he has spent every day at the centre. He recounted:
I remember that first day I spent at Yolé. I felt so relaxed because the whole day I watched people painting. Then at six they started to leave to go to their own places, and I felt this fear inside. So I asked myself: “What is this fear?” And I realised it was because I had to go back to my place, to Kisenyi. And then I thought: “If that place makes me feel bad, why don’t I stop?” And I knew my business was collapsing anyway. So I stopped. I rented a very cheap room without a toilet and without power. I only used it for sleeping. In the morning I open my door, wash my face, then go to Yolé. I paint the whole day, then in the evening I watch them do their contemporary dance, and we talk. At one o’clock I go home to sleep. Every day I worked on my paintings, there were no Sundays. Somebody told me there is a place where you can eat for 500 Ugandan shilling. So every day I
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went there for my rice and beans. Fish and rice was 1000, so I couldn’t eat that, because then the next day I would not eat. I started missing eating enjera. I went to one of the Eritrean restaurants to ask for credit. It was difficult for me to ask for credit, but I really wanted to eat enjera, because it’s my food. The answer was difficult for me, he said he can’t give me credit. It made me feel bad, I thought: “Why did I ask?” Then I tried to talk with myself, I said: “It’s ok, things will change, one day I will eat it”. And of course, after selling my first painting, I went back to this restaurant and ate enjera.
At Yolé!Africa, Yosief easily picked up new skills and developed his own style. In 2003, his paintings began to do well. The Ijayo Foundation started selling his work in the Netherlands, and soon Yosief was able to bring over his girlfriend, and later his mother, from Eritrea to Kampala. He is quite exceptional in being able to live of his art, which has moreover introduced him to new and different social circles. It is no wonder that he draws on this identity when presenting himself: he is first and foremost an artist. However, a disturbing incident happened to Yosief at the time of his very first exhibition at Tulifanya Gallery in late 2001. One evening he was invited to drinks by a couple of Eritrean acquaintances, only to wake up in the street hours later with a crippling pain in his left arm and shoulder. He spent two weeks in Nsambya hospital, where the doctors managed to fix his shoulder. However, he will never be able to fully use his left arm again. He paid for the hospital bills with the earnings from his first sales. When I walked through Kabalagala with Yosief and Petna in March 2003 we bumped, as they regularly do, into one of the men responsible. Disbelief and indignation at this person’s aloof – even if slightly nervous - way of greeting us must have been written all over my face. Yosief responded that he believes the best strategy is to show he is not intimidated. At the time he did not report to the police because he feared it would set off a spiral of revenge. Yosief’s elder brother who lives in Canada sent an email to Petna which read: “Please tell Yosief to care about his fast recovery and forget what has happened. He should put everything behind his back and should move on with his life”. When I pressed the issue, Yosief admitted he can only guess as to what motivated this hideous act: a combination of envy, frustration and desperation. Then he joked: “Ellen, don’t worry, they broke my left arm, they weren’t thinking, I can still paint!” And he added that it is only his body that was assaulted, which will not crush his spirit, just like the bullets that wounded him in Eritrea did not have the power to do so. He said:
Jealousy is there, it’s everywhere, especially when people don’t have a way. Sometimes I fear to be with people, especially with my own people. When they see you change, they think: “Why him, why not me?” They can even kill you, because they no longer want to see you. But they do these bad things without thinking, and especially when they are drunk. There is positive jealousy and negative or evil jealousy. Positive jealousy is when people see you as an example that they want to follow. Evil jealousy comes when people have no confidence inside themselves. Jealousy doesn’t discourage me, it shows me I’m special, it makes me work hard. But of course it also tells me to be aware and take care of myself.
The responsibilities and dilemmas that come with distinguishing oneself are delicate and require a constant navigating between cultural rules and personal choices. The young exiled artists in Kampala use their artist identities to manoeuvre in a social setting that obliges them to constantly reposition themselves. To claim the identity of ‘artist’ is a purposeful, strategic act. However, ‘artist’ remains an ambiguous label as well as a self-identification that cannot simply be employed towards a better life. In this respect it is different from being a student, which bestows an identity that is unanimously respected. Nevertheless,
Artists 267 their work is of great value to the young artists, not the least a psychological asset – why and how is the subject of the last section of this chapter.
5. LOSS, VIOLENCE AND CREATIVITY
Out of despair one creates. What else can one do?
Elie Wiesel, in Jane Katz, Artists in Exile, 1983, p. 96
Chapter Three discussed the relationship between suffering and knowing: does extreme pain give access to a different domain or quality of knowledge, can the knowledge of ‘sufferers’ be privileged? Equally intricate is the question whether the experience of pain nourishes creativity. Or more crudely stated: does suffering breed artists? One reason to answer this question in the negative is that for the young people in Kampala it had not been the experience of war and flight that made them turn to artistic expression. They saw themselves as artists long before these life-changing events. Samy said it was his early fascination with and love for the beauty of nature that had inspired him:
As a young boy I used to love dreaming of beautiful appearances. My parents thought that I would become a famous agriculturalist because of the things that always kept me busy. Nature was my favourite planet. And I was always thinking of becoming a bird one day so that I could fly wherever I liked. Then, as I was growing up, the feeling of planting flowers at home started to disappear, because I realised the pleasure of drawing flowers instead.
During my first return visit to Kampala in March 2003, I posed the question of the relationship between violence and creativity at Yolé!Africa’s Baraza. Most of those present kept quiet or looked away: they were too polite to dismiss my hypothesis. Then one person responded: “It’s true that violence makes some people creative, but don’t forget it makes others choose for the opposite. They become totally destructive”. People laughed uncomfortably, but also relieved: that was much closer to the truth. What they had in mind, I think, is what Nordstrom calls “the insidious nature of violence to reproduce itself” (1997: 210). Of course, wartime violence is primarily destructive. Dealing with the experience of it can - sometimes and in some people - spawn creative forces. If not violence, then what about the connection between creativity and suffering a major loss? This was a central question at the 2003 Nexus conference The Anatomy of Loss. Leon Wieseltier phrased his scepticism: “Suffering is the most common experience in the world… art is not!” And Pierre Audi adjoined: “The opposite may be just as likely. Let’s think of Orpheus, the inspired artist. He falls in love with Eurydice, he loses her and what happens to his art? It dies!” The (romantic) idea of a causal relationship between suffering and creativity must thus also be abandoned. However, this does not rule out every connection. For the young artists in Kampala there clearly were links between what they had gone through, their motivation to make art, and the kind/content of art they made. The very titles of their work reveal that they dance, sing and paint about war, flight and loss: Portrait d’un Guerrier, Exode II, Tour de Congo en Bicyclette à la Paix, Birth of an Orphan, Homeless, Woman in Exile, Fear, N’taka Amani, Jamais les Armes, Undestined Journey and Stranger in No Man’s Land. Furthermore, even if I am not quite sure how it works, I believe that the extremity and novelty of certain painful experiences causes some people to tap into previously unknown sources of their creativity.8 The last part of this chapter distinguishes
268 Narratives three ways of thinking about the connection between loss and creativity: expression, comfort, and truth.
5.1 Expression
Homo fabula: we are story-telling beings.
Ben Okri, Birds of Heaven, 1996, p. 24
The desire to express and narrate is a shared human desire. Anthropologists have repeatedly stressed the dependence of people on stories that convey meaning and significance – something particularly relevant in the insecure circumstances of exile. The fact that the atmosphere of Kampala appeared palpably filled with stories and narratives, was something I interpreted as a product of war and exile. And it was clear that this served many different purposes: to not forget; to off-load; to evoke sympathy; to create order in the mess; to break through loneliness; to have something to hang on to (storytelling is all that is left); to keep recurrent fears under control; to get access to precious resources; to release anger; to convince oneself or other people of one’s innocence; to be seen and heard; to point at the guilty; to create more comforting truths. Clearly art is not the only avenue of expression that can serve these purposes, but for some people it is vital. They want to get onto paper or canvas, or dance or sing about, the images and experiences that preoccupy their thoughts. This is not always easy. Samy wanted to draw what happened that day in September 1998 when so many young men had been taken from their houses by RCD soldiers. He managed a few pencil drawings, however, whenever he got to “the difficult parts”, he felt something was “tearing his head apart”, and he stopped. Later in 1999 he made an oil painting that combined a quite literal and a symbolic depiction of what he had seen. He called it Entre le Marteau et l’Enclume: a naked woman, her child tied to her back, carries the globe on her head and walks from black clouds and rain to blazing skies and burning mountains, bones and a skull at her feet. In later work, Samy tackled the questions that the war, and his flight and exile, had raised: Who am I and where am I going? He voiced what many had indicated:
I’m living here in Kampala in anxiety because I don’t know the end of my destiny. I don’t know where the world is taking me. The war changed our lives and we don’t know where we are going to see a future for ourselves. I keep thinking about my future, because my life and myself have stopped to grow up.
He referred to the uncertainties of what was to come, and his worries about losing out if nothing changed. This was a chief concern to many: time is passing, the clock is ticking, but I see no progress in my personal life. I recall an afternoon in September 1999 when Samy and I visited the Bahá’í temple on the fringes of Kampala. We boarded a taxi from Wandegeya, and were dropped at the bottom of the murram road that meanders up to the meticulously kept hilltop park in which the temple is so beautifully placed. Walking up in the hot afternoon sun, Samy said:
Sometimes I think I’m deceiving myself. I think I’m happy but in fact I’m not. I feel I have lost something and I can’t find it, and I don’t know what it is. It’s not my family. When I was young I would cry if I would go one day without my family, now I appreciate the world. I want to find somebody to help me find the thing I’ve lost, but it’s very difficult to find the person who can do that. My mother is the one who used to know.
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Later during those months he made an oil painting that he called Confusion. Recently I asked Samy what he sees when he looks at this painting now. He wrote:
I was 17 years old when I came to Uganda and had to embrace the way those of 30 years live their life. It was like a single click in my brain. Everything became different just because back in Congo I was living in my parents’ house under their supervision, yet here in Kampala I had to make my own decisions, to live on the street or to search for assistance. I was told by someone that I have to wake up, not think that I was going to eat, so that eating to me became a surprise. A life when you have forgotten the colour of school benches. Having a life without hope, without education, without proper meals, without the care of your parents, life with neither A nor Z. As I was making that painting, I was figuring out how a person can live searching for black string and a needle in darkness in order to sow his torn life.
He spoke of circumstances and feelings of the past, from which he had managed to take some distance. In January 2005, Samy revisited the disturbing experiences of his first flight out of Goma in 1996, together with his parents, brothers and uncle.9 When he had finished he was quiet for a moment, then said: “Now I’m no longer affected by telling you this. I just see it now as a sad past, as history”. Yosief is the only one who never directly painted about war or violence. When I asked him why, he answered in an email:
I don’t paint about war and violence simply because I believe in solutions and not in problems. When I paint about peace it is because peace is the solution to violence. I paint about love because it is the solution to hate; and so forth. I would never paint about war and violence because it doesn’t represent my opinions.
During a later conversation in Kampala, he qualified:
Painting reflects what is inside. War is inside me, but what I paint is the solution to the war: peace. There is war in my paintings, but it is hidden under many layers.
I also asked Yosief how he views his earlier paintings, he said:
I feel that the time I was painting it and now is really different, and so I see the painting differently. When time changes our situation also changes. When I look at that painting I realise that it reflects back my situation of those days, but now I am different.
It is thus no surprise if over the years their work changed - the colours, subjects and titles. Kasfir writes about the Ethiopian artist-emigrés in the USA that “their diasporic experience has not been the only formative influence for these artists” (1999: 198), and indeed young men like Samy and Yosief are more than merely war-escapees or exiles. As yet, however, the theme of war and wartime violence has not yet disappeared. I think of Petna’s recent painting Asibakiye Nyuma (2005). Petna’s sister works for an organisation in Congo that counsels victims of rape, and this painting was inspired by her work. Petna initially wanted to make a documentary about her work. His sister sent him some footage, but he realised he could not look at it, let alone use it - it was too awful. Because he could not let it rest either, he painted. The title of his painting refers to the fact that women are only safe as long as they move together in small groups. Those who are alone get snatched away and raped. The painting says: asibakiye nyuma, which translates as ‘don’t leave her behind’.
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Another example is the short story Samy sent to me in September 2004. It was titled Fear is the King, and his introduction read: “This is an amazing tale of a young boy aged thirteen, who was forcefully enrolled in the army at a very tender age together with many others”. It starts:
After several days of training they were taken to the battlefield.
Booom!!! Boom! Heavy detonation of machine guns, exchange of fire arms everywhere like fireworks of New Year’s celebrations; this was a music of terror that could not be celebrated but only scares, brings grief and tears to people’s faces.
Suddenly, he managed to escape. He took a different direction, which no one had ever taken. He began to run fast and faster… throwing away all the military ammunition remaining with only shorts on his body. No shoes, no nothing…
He ran a very long distance when he came to a point where no one could rescue or hear him since it was far in the bush. Fear wore him. The only image he had in his mind was death and he was in the world of loneliness. Like a young boy, he began to cry and scream thinking someone would come to his rescue. It was all in vain.
I wonder why he was screaming in this empty bush since there was no one around and more so, no one would risk one’s life to come and rescue this young boy.
Where war takes place in the world, people search to grab the past where peace was left. In war, we always trace a list of those who might die, including yourself as number one. While some people are thinking about building skyscrapers, others think about the rectangular hole in which they will be thrown. That is, if you get a chance to get it and be buried in peace!!
When it rains, we put on a sweater or jacket and at times carry an umbrella to protect us from getting wet. During sunny days, we need something light and simple. But during war, there is no rain, no sunshine, neither day nor night. FEAR IS THE KING. People don’t know what to do because they don’t know where they are. Is it covering our hearts with a sweater? Is it carrying an umbrella to protect our soul not to get wet? Are my eyes feeling hot? Are my feet sweating? War is evil!!!
But let us run back to the story of the young boy who was looking for food and something to quench his thirst.
The boy in Samy’s story does not survive. He walks into a pineapple field and is killed by a landmine.
Tip toe, tip toe, he went. He made sure that not even the smallest grass touched his heels. With all his appetite, he reached his hand to have one of these delicious fruits and … goshhhhhh!! ... Boom.
The focus of this chapter has been on performance and painting, but some – like Samy in this case - used writing as their avenue for expression. Ahmed, who was in his mid twenties when I met him in 1998, had fled Somalia six years earlier. He was the sole survivor of his family of seven. Ahmed had only enjoyed primary education, yet when over the years his English improved, he began to read whatever he could lay his hands on. With phrases and sentences taken from newspapers, lyrics, dictionaries and legal documents he started to
Artists 271 compose poems. He wrote almost obsessively, paid small fees to have his verses typed, and sent them to me (and others) by email. Almost without exception they dealt with the pain and injustices of exile and his faltering hopes for a better world.
Please don’t ask me why don’t you go back? Do you think I like staying? Suffering from discrimination and malaria And the stabbing pain that returns to my empty belly and mind If I could help myself I would rebuild my homeland
Please don’t ask why don’t you go back? Do you think I like staying? Without my mother, father, sister and brother Feeling homesick for the folktales of childhood, never old Never dead, stamped in my mind
Please don’t ask me why don’t you go back? I have normal feelings Don’t look down at me because of my loneliness and statelessness I will if I can, I wouldn’t stay a moment When the new dawn of peace comes
One could ask the question why it is so important to find words. Antjie Krog’s answer to that is: “Because the moment you find the words, you get a grip on the memory, it can no longer haunt you at random, you can order it to a halt, step by step, or try to ask for respite” (2004: 13).10 Finding the right words is an empowering experience. Oguibe writes in his article Art, Identity, Boundaries: “language, that which we speak or write, and one may add, paint or sculpt, all that we produce as a body of text, as a composite of signifiers, enters the service of power upon coming into being. Though this power may aspire to Barthes’ definition as the desire to dominate, libido domini, its most fundamental nature, nevertheless, is as a condition for the articulation and definition of the self …” (1999: 19). Having a means to articulate and define the ‘self’ is an enormous asset that the young artists acquire, something that is of particular relevance to all refugees. To write or paint or sculpt, Oguibe concludes:
“is to present ourselves, and establish our authority over not only our creativity, but most importantly, over our selves. It is enunciation that subjectivises us, the ability to reiterate our power over our selves. It is this ability and freedom to enunciate, too, that takes us beyond the dominance of others, takes us, as it were, beyond the bounds of power” (1999: 20).
5.2 Comfort
Art wants to pass into life, to lift it; art wants to enchant, to transform, to make life more bearable or meaningful in its own small and mysterious way.
Ben Okri, Birds of Heaven, 1996, p. 5-6
In Kampala my fascination with art grew. Even before Petna and I started Yolé!Africa, one of my favourite pastimes had become visiting the art galleries in and around town. With hindsight I realise I felt a need to open myself to things that expressed beauty, in order to counterbalance the harsh and controversial images that were accumulating inside me. As
272 Narratives my adoptive grandfather put it to me years later: “Art is a refuge – perhaps not from reality, but from one’s painful experiences”. Throughout history, art has served as a source of comfort and consolation. Antjie Krog, at the Nexus conference, said: “If art helps someone it is to live better, not to survive loss. It makes you alive, brings you in the moment”. Gabriel Josipovici offered that art (writing, music) helps him to “feel life more”, and gave examples from literature in which this notion is brought up as well.11 In Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), Bernard responds to Percival’s death with a visit to the National Gallery:
“Here are pictures. Here are cold madonnas among the pillars. Let them lay to rest the incessant activity of the mind’s eye … so that I may find something unvisual beneath … Mercifully these pictures make no reference; they do not nudge; they do not point. Thus they expand my consciousness of him and bring him back to me differently”.12
Wole Soyinka is one person who testifies that memories of art – the concerts he played in his mind while in solitary confinement in a Nigerian prison – helped him through the most difficult days of his life. Looking at, listening to or remembering works of art can be comforting in a similar way that one’s own acts of creation give solace. One line I scribbled down at the Nexus conference was: “The first act after loss, as part of mourning, is describing and naming what happened, to tell the story. This is the first step on the way to closure. One basic principle of human psychology is to create order in chaos, one way of doing this is by making pleasant things”. But is it necessarily the “pleasant” attribute of art (i.e. its beauty) that is comforting? The Dutch journalist and filmmaker Wim Kayzer in 1997 interviewed internationally renowned scientists, writers, philosophers, musicians and artists about this subject. It was broadcast as the television series Van de Schoonheid en de Troost (Of beauty and Consolation). I quote from Martha Nussbaum’s contribution:
“I think by consolation I would mean coming to terms with some powerful loss. Trying to assimilate it, trying to move on through it and from it. And for me, works of art have a very deep role in consolation. But it’s not because they are beautiful, it’s often because they depict grief and helplessness in an extremely agonizing way … I mean, the Kindertotenlieder of Mahler, now to me that is music that is immensely powerful, and in the time when I was grieving for the death of my mother, I listened to it again and again. I listened until I couldn’t stand it anymore. What I would say is that music is consoling because it brings you to terms with the finality of loss in such an eloquent way. Now I wouldn’t have said of the Kindertotenlieder that’s a beautiful work. I think most listeners wouldn’t use that word. It’s a harrowing work. But it’s precisely for that reason it’s consoling … When Mahler was conducting his own work, he described this experience saying “a burning pain crystallizes”. And I think that’s the experience that I often have with music. That there is a kind of pain in the personality somewhere, buried too deep for words. And music doesn’t just reproduce it, but in some way does crystallize it. It gives it a form, but a form that’s not the form of daily conversation, and it’s precisely for that reason that it has the power that it does”.13
Could it be that attributing a consolatory role to art is an elitist or perhaps western notion? I do not think so. Petna had mentioned the artists who as professional pleureurs comfort the bereaved at funerals, and when we discussed the role art plays in his personal life, he said: “If I didn’t have my art I would be already dead, that’s clear, I don’t even have to think twice”. Art is “un atout”, he said, a trump card that helps in coping. And about Yolé!Africa’s contemporary dance performances, he said: “Dance is the most direct way of expressing myself, more direct than painting. It gives me the opportunity to deal with myself. It is a
Artists 273 very powerful therapy”. Art clearly served to comfort and support the other artists in Kampala as well. I saw it in the way they responded to the work of others, yet most strongly in the way they were engrossed in their own. Yosief wrote:
I am in exile, living in a situation where there is nobody to take care of me, but I am something to my art and my art is something to me. Life experience is a big teacher for me and I still believe in change, one day I will be in the right place, the one I deserve. I know from where I come but I do not know where I will go. Time goes on and things will change, but I pray to God that I may stay with my full colours until my destiny.
When I asked Yosief what had inspired him when he painted his Mother, he said:
I give a special place in my heart to the one who made me become the way I am now. Time really changes. Those days I was situated in the worst days of my life. I was in need of someone special next to me, and that is my mother.
Art brought Yosief, and others too, closer to their lost world, the familiar, reassuring world of home. Art provided a retreat, lifting them out of the present, even if only for a brief moment. In May and June 2003, Petna led several workshops for a group of refugees at InterAid. He was to compose a performance with them for World Refugee Day. He remembers it as an exceptionally powerful experience. Petna did not know the group, but made them move and dance, using exercises that explored the experience of trust. After initial scepticism and uneasiness, these young refugees from Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, who knew each other by face only (they spent days waiting at the same offices) started to use their voices and bodies to make contact with each other. “Dance”, Petna reflected, “is so powerful. You touch the other person, you share each other’s sweat, you hear and feel the other person breathing. I’m sure that for some moments these boys forgot who they were”. He bumps into one or two of them every now and then in town, they greet him saying: “Hey, brother, we’re still doing your movements, even if we have no place, we just do them in the streets!” Lastly, art is not only comforting because it can bring one closer to the past, or remove one from the present, but also because it is about creating something new. Art creates space for the imagination, which essentially means the possibility of a different world. Carolyn Nordstrom, in A Different Kind of War Story (1997), elaborates on the significance of the imagination for ordinary people in war-ravaged Mozambique. She writes:
“When people look out over a land that should resonate with meaning and life but that now stares blankly back with incomprehensible images of barren fields, broken communities, tortured bodies, and shattered realities, they are left with the choice of accepting a deadened world or creating a liveable one. It is the imagination – creativity – that bridges the abyss, if not to reconstruct the past, to make the present liveable” (1997: 190).
People’s ability to imagine – “the landscapes of the mind are … vibrant, rich, and nuanced and … endlessly creative” (Nordstrom 1997: 192) – plays a crucial role in survival.14 The artists in Kampala had an advantage over other refugees in that they disposed of a way of immediately translating their imaginations and visions into something tangible. Imagining something and then bringing it into the world for others to see, watch and hear, helped them to counteract experiences of loss and the witnessing of death and destruction. It must be noted that the issue of sharing is crucial here. I believe that true comfort and solace are only experienced when expression converges with sharing. The young refugees in Kampala
274 Narratives wanted to get things off their chest, but the real relief only came when what they had to say was listened to and understood by others. In Chapter Three it was argued that people’s true experiences can barely be conveyed in academic language. Nordstrom & Robben suggest that these limitations run the entire expressive gamut:
“One can count the dead and measure the destruction of property, but victims can never convey their pain and suffering to us, other than through the distortion of word, image, and sound” (1995: 12).
Still, despite all limitations to conveyance, art clearly offers openings for understanding. Richard Bell even argues: “To understand others maybe always, ideally, includes attending to the iconic traditions of these person’s communities: visual art, literature, music, ritual drama etc” (2002: 5). It is true that the symbolic meaning of art often transcends the concerns of a particular regional or ethnic group:
“Although we no longer worship Dionysus, we can still enjoy the plays of Sophocles and Euridipes, which were once a part of that worship. We continue to appreciate the tragedy because our aesthetic attitude has detached it from its religious context and thereby transformed it into a potent, cross-cultural symbol that it was not for the original audience. In precisely the same way, potent symbols in Soyinka’s plays of Obatala and Ogun – Yoruba gods of creation and war – transcend the ethnic borders of Yorubaland and become available on an aesthetic level to all Nigerians, whether Ibo, Tiv, Ishan or Hausa, as well as to non-Nigerians around the world” (Blocker 1998: 419).
The young artists in Kampala find great comfort in the fact that their work enables them to share their experiences, dreams and visions, and that it opens up ways for engaging in dialogue – within and across Africa’s borders.
5.3 Truth
I have taught my self not to speak of the years which followed, although I have forgotten little of them. The years were written in the language of the body, and it is not the language I can speak with words.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2001, By the Sea, p. 230
Writing is a way of being in touch with something more genuine and true... to feel life more… Art gives a sense of authenticity and joy.
Gabriel Josipovici
In January 2001, many of those who had partaken in the Homeless performance for UNHCR’s 50th anniversary came together at Yolé!Africa to watch the video coverage of the event. We sat packed together on the few armchairs and benches and watched intently. The third scene: a tall white sheet in the right corner of the stage, lit from behind, on which the shadows of people move in line - men, women, short, tall, cripple, carrying luggage, carrying children, empty-handed. They are stopped by a man holding pen and paper. He asks them a question, notes something down. One by one the shadows disappear from sight. I looked around the room and saw that Ahmed, who had acted as ‘the man with the list’, strained himself not to cry. I heard him mumble: “That is us… that is how we are”. Ahmed was someone with a strong urge to tell his story: the awful things that had happened to him and his family in Somalia, and his current desperate life in exile. Was he
Artists 275 struck by the poignancy of this silent, two-dimensional scene? Did he feel this somehow was a more truthful rendering of his experiences than all his attempts at telling his story using ordinary language? The late Ugandan philosopher/poet Okot p’Bitek writes:
“Ordinary language, with all its rules of grammar and logic is too shallow to contain, too weak to convey, too slow to effectively tell, the message. Art is the most direct vehicle; a special language spoken by a clan called artists” (1986: 41).15
The inadequacy of ordinary language is of course and age-old concept, and the young artists in Kampala unanimously agreed that only through their art could they convey their innermost feelings. From my field notes:
13-17 September 1999 Samy is very worried about the fact that he’s been thrown out of the house. He no longer has a place to stay. He stayed with M. for three nights and yesterday with B. He says he wants a doctor to check his blood because he feels weak and often has headaches. Today he stays the night at our house and relates the story of how, during his family’s flight into the bush in 1996, in pouring rain they went to hide in a house that had no roof. Samy: “My problem these days is that I speak too much, I just speak to speak. It’s because I’m not painting… but painting is the first language in which I can express myself correctly. I’m not in my world. I’m in the world of obligations. These days life dictates me, but the life should be my slave”.
Not only persons who called themselves artists felt that daily speech did not offer a suitable vocabulary. The Ethiopian young man Mikael Woldeselassie (see Chapter Students) telling me about his subjects at school, said:
I’m happy I chose fine art, I like it. I’m improving my drawing. I’m not interested in graphics, I want to draw real life people, cartoons and colours. I need it to express myself. Some things you can’t express in words. Like the situation at InterAid. But I can draw the police guard with his kalashnikov.
This is not merely about expression for the sake of it. Petna said: “Art is powerful because it is a testimony… the raw material of the truth”. He continued:
Using words puts you back into the situation; the only way of expressing myself without hurting myself is through painting, or dance. When you talk about your experiences, the issue is always if people believe you or not. While you are speaking, struggling for the right words with which to express yourself, you are constantly watching the other person’s attitude – is he listening? is he interested? – and most importantly: does he believe me? It takes a lot of your energy, while at the same time you are trying to express something that is heavy. When I’m painting, it is just my painting and me. I cannot lie to my painting and the painting doesn’t doubt what I’m trying to say. It is a very different kind of conversation.
Then he compared the work of academics and artists, and said:
An academic tells you what he or she thinks and you can agree or disagree. You can play with it, discuss and give his words a new shape that will stay. As for art, you can play around with it but eventually it will always go back to its initial shape. In academia we speak of thèse and anti-thèse. But I don’t think there is such a thing as anti-tableaux.
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The young artists partly make their art with a purpose of telling their truths about what they have seen and gone through. Two factors make for the significance of ‘telling the truth’. Firstly, by offering a way to express, investigate and convey truth, creative expression sets off a process of healing or transformation. Secondly, ‘telling the truth’ has a moral component: people feel the urgency to pass on what they have seen, and inherent to their truths is a moral judgment. Both factors come across unmistakably in Primo Levi’s accounts of the holocaust. In the introduction to If this is a Man (1987 [1958]), he writes:
“The need to tell our story to ‘the rest’, to make ‘the rest’ participate in it, had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs” (Levi 1987: 15).
One particularly moving episode in The Truce (Levi 1987 [1963]), is when shortly after his liberation from Auschwitz, Primo Levi climbs down from a train and a curious crowd surrounds him, the first man they see in ‘zebra’ clothes. Among this group of workers and peasants, Primo Levi spots a man “with a felt hat, glasses and a leather briefcase in his hand”. He reflects:
“after the long year of slavery and silence, to recognize in him the messenger, the spokesman of the civilized world, the first that I had met. I had a torrent of urgent things to tell the civilized world: my things, but everyone’s, things of blood, things which (it seemed to me) ought to shake every conscience to its very foundations” (Levi 1987: 226-227).
However, the words he utters fall flat, and though he feels it is the “sacred duty” of his audience to listen, the crowd disperses, and after a few minutes also the man with the felt hat leaves him, “urbanely excusing himself” (1987: 227). Primo Levi recalls:
“I felt my sense of freedom, my sense of being a man among men, of being alive, like a warm tide ebb from me … I had dreamed, we had always dreamed, of something like this, in the nights at Auschwitz: of speaking and not being listened to, of finding liberty and remaining alone” (Levi 1987: 227).
Without wanting to draw untenable parallels, this is what happens all the time to the young refugees in Kampala: their words are doubted, or they are simply not listened to – a source of their greatest frustration and humiliation. This confirms the importance of sharing referred to above: one’s truth is only a truth when it is shared, when it is acknowledged by others.
6. CONCLUSION
Their artistic skills not only earn the young artists positive feedback and at times money to spend, but also a connection to places and people outside of Central Africa. Their work is exhibited and promoted in Europe. Yosief’s painting Common Vision was selected by the World Youth Peace Summit for their 2004 Christmas and New Year’s cards. Petna has built up an international network through his films and video productions. In 2004, his Lamokowang, about Acholi dance and at the same time a commentary on the genre of calabash films, was screened at the Open Forum festival in New Delhi and at the 24th Festival International du Film d’Amiens. In 2005, it won the Special Mention Award at the
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Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF). Petna’s work as director of Yolé!Africa has met with great enthusiasm in his hometown Goma. He has been invited to speak on television and radio during recent return visits. The reason that such value is attributed to his success, people explained to me, is twofold. Firstly, he is seen as playing an exemplary role for Goma’s youth, and secondly, he helps to “put Goma on the map” in a light other than through news about refugees (1994), war (1996-present), and the disastrous Nyiragongo volcano eruption (2002). This wish for Goma to be ‘put on the map’ parallels the request from so many of the young refugees in Kampala to “go and tell your people what you have seen is happening to us!” Artists have an avenue for doing so themselves - without a conduit - and in their own language. Their art moves across Uganda’s borders and many of their paintings adorn walls in the West. At the same time, Yolé!Africa is starting to build up its own collection and aspires to set up a national gallery of contemporary art in Kampala. Like many of the soldiers and students, the artists of this study had at times been plagued by feelings of inadequacy, failing in their duties and responsibilities towards their parents, families and societies. Yes, “Art serves as a means and an index of social prestige” (Ojo 1982: 205), but perhaps more important for the young men was the opportunity art came to provide to do something meaningful as ambassadors for their home towns and communities.
Part III
Reflections
Yosief Endrias Habties, Truth about Life, 2005
CHAPTER SEVEN
REFLECTIONS ON IDENTITY AND SELF IN THE AFTERMATH OF WAR
The foregoing chapters have shown that young refugees are not passive victims of the political and socio-economic crises that plague their countries. Their situation is dire, but they are not entirely without resources as some of the literature quoted in the Introduction to Part II suggested. The individuals I got to know in Kampala had fled war. They had crossed one or more international borders because they hoped and believed there was a future for them elsewhere. Not everybody acts likewise: the majority of people in war- affected areas do not cross borders. For some a positive conscious decision, for most a matter of unavailable means and opportunities, determined by age, gender, physical health or financial resources.1 Among the people who manage to cross an international border, there are individuals who are so traumatised, or incapacitated by the hardships of exile, that building new lives remains a relentless struggle for them. Many others though act in fairly successful ways upon their precarious situation. The lives of young men like Samy, Yosief, Samuel, Petna, Wani, Jean, Lopithi, Clinton and Mikael carry elements of both realities. My research in Kampala amounted to a study of the lives and experiences of a small number of individuals. It was my idiosyncratic personal interest in the idiosyncrasies of people’s individual lives that triggered this approach, yet it converged with the specific context of the research subject and locale. The transience inherent to research among refugees in an urban environment posed a challenge to conventional research methods. It was impossible to conceptualise the divergent and highly mobile refugee population in Kampala in terms of a group or collectivity, and I strongly felt that if I wanted to gain an in-depth understanding of young men’s lives in exile, I had to go beyond the group level and work with individuals. This impression was reinforced by what I learned was the central question posed by so many of the young men in Kampala: “Who am I?” – a question that touched on issues of responsibility, ambition, manhood, and dignity. Building on the narratives of Part II, this chapter discusses how my focus on individuals, and the findings this yielded, led me to critically reflect on anthropology’s focus on groups/collectivities as well as on the discipline’s use of the concept of identity. Having come to question this concept for studying the experiences and perceptions of individuals in the aftermath of war, I propose a shift from the concept of ‘identity’ to the notion of ‘sense of self’. To be able to argue this proposal, I first consider the use of the concept of identity in anthropology and African philosophy generally (section 1). Then I evaluate its 282 Reflections use in anthropological studies of wartime violence (section 2) and exile (section 3) – the two contextual parameters of my research. Sections four and five will explicate the shift to self and individual.
1. IDENTITY IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY
Over the past few decades, identity as a research subject has carved out a considerable space for itself on the anthropological agenda. It has become impossible to keep track of the host of studies dealing in one way or another with the subject of identity. A similar trend concerns sociology and social psychology (Cerulo 1997, Howard 2000). Speaking about identity is not just an academics’ peculiar hobby: identity is a buzzword of contemporary society. This is undoubtedly related to the processes of globalisation and localisation, which have triggered self-reflection and self-assertion on the part of individuals, ethnic and religious groups and nations (Geschiere & Meyer 1998), but it also has older roots. A preoccupation with identity accompanied what Giddens (1991) termed “the juggernaut of modernity”: the changing and confusing conditions of the modern world instigate a continuous reflection on who we are and want to be. Giddens’ analysis echoes that of the French philosopher Simone Weil, who in her posthumously published L’Enracinement (1949) - translated as The Need for Roots (Weil 2002 [1952]) - typified our modern world as having witnessed, through the cult of materialism, a devastating loss of spirit and consequently of human values. The notion of ‘a world out of balance’, and the consequences this has for people’s lives and self-perceptions continues to capture the imagination of contemporary scholars. The themes of the recent Nexus conferences (international get-togethers of eminent philosophers, artists, and writers) suggest that not only ‘confusion’ is at stake, but that the more sombre issue of ‘evil’ also poses challenges to the conception of ‘who we are’ (Nexus 2002). The question of evil was the very topic in 2002, and at the 2003 conference The Anatomy of Loss the British philosopher Roger Scruton reintroduced it. One characteristic of contemporary western society, bereft of a shared (Christian) faith or any form of belief in the transcendental, he argued, is its changed perception of the human being. The human body no longer awakens in us a sense of awe, but has come to be seen as a mere object belonging to the animal kingdom. With all the violence of today, exemplified in the obscene violent fantasies in movies and on television, the human body has been degraded to “a squirming, agonising worm”. Many of those present disagreed with the pessimistic tidings of the conservative scholar from Oxford, yet all shared the common understanding that the onset of modernity was accompanied by a concern with the individual and his or her relationship to society that has proved long- lasting. Because this is not the place to paddle in waters so rich in scholarship and argument, I offer only a brief glimpse at the history of this concern. In western philosophy since the Enlightenment, the question of identity posed ‘what makes us cognizable to ourselves and to others?’, and ‘what makes that I am myself and not someone else, a person who can be distinguished from other persons?’ Descartes’ dualism brought forth both mentalistic and material explanations. The former attested that our identity through time is a function of our thoughts, beliefs and feelings, the latter that our bodies are our basic units of identity. Both professed the modern belief in the existence of an essential, core, integrated self, which in the early 20th century informed psychoanalytic theory. Freud considered the experience of a core identity essential to a person’s mental heath and well-being. Interesting in the context of this study is the claim that a major challenge to this ‘healthy’ identity is posed by adolescence, a crucial phase in the human biography characterised by a conflict between identity and identity-confusion (Erikson
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1968). Adolescents and youth, in their experimentation with acts of ‘authoring’ coherent selves (Durham 2000) resist and reshape the identities that society ascribes to them. Post- structuralist and deconstructionist thinkers broke with this tradition of humanist discourse by criticising the notion of a unified, rational subject. Scholars like Lacan and Derrida pose that the unity of identity is an illusion: there is no singular essence at the core of each individual which makes them what they are; the self is a composite of fragmentary, contradictory and ever shifting subject positions. In the field of anthropology, the issue of identity never so much concerned the individual, but focused on groups. The study of ethnic identity or ethnicity was spawned by Frederik Barth’s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969). Only with the postcolonial and feminist writers did identity become a political subject. Identity is essentially about processes of inclusion and exclusion: it is used as a mode for bargaining rights for one’s own group and for legitimising the refusal of the same rights to others. Ethnicity, race, gender, age, class, region and religion all serve as the basis for self-defined group identities. Because identity is subjective and socially and historically constructed (Anderson 1983, Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983), and thus always prone to being contested, “boundary maintenance” (Barth 1969) is crucial. In brief: “Identity stands and falls by the security of its borders, and the borders are ineffective unless guarded” (Bauman 1992: 678). The defining features that anthropologists attribute to the concept of identity, are: 1) Identity is relational: it is constructed and negotiated in relation to other and to wider social and cultural contexts, 2) Identity is multi-dimensional: people foreground different dimensions and aspects of their individual and collective identifications as a way of constructing who they are; constitutive factors of identity like race, gender and class are mutually informing, and 3) Identity is dynamic, flexible and mutable: the construction of identity entails a continuous process of self-definition by people interacting with a changing world. It is a dynamic process involving choice and human agency, or: “Identity is not to do with being but with becoming” (Sarup 1994: 98). The following two sections expand on how anthropologists have approached the study of identity in the context of war (section 2) and in the context of exile (section 3). Both these contexts are unmistakably defined by practices of inclusion, exclusion and boundary-maintenance. First, conceptualisations of identity in African philosophy will be briefly discussed.
1.1 Identity in African philosophy
It has dawned on me as something very strange that anthropologists can claim to be ‘Africanists’ without having read at least some works by African philosophers (Lammers 2005a).2 It was argued in Chapter Three that dialogue should be aimed at by anthropologists during fieldwork, yet the pertinence of (interdisciplinary) dialogue also holds within the walls of academia (van Binsbergen 2003). The exchange with African philosophy included in this chapter – by looking into its writings on self, identity and community – is an attempt at such dialogue. During this research I wondered: by choosing to study identity, have I revealed myself not only as a child of my time and my disciplinary upbringing, but also as a child of my time in a specific cultural location? Though violent conflicts over identity are evident across Africa, the relevant question to pose seemed whether scholars and citizens on the African continent share the western fascination with the notion of identity. ‘Identity’ came to be part of the writings of African intellectuals in the context of colonisation and the struggle for independence. The concept was central to the négritude movement, launched in Paris in the 1930s by a group of students from Africa and the Caribbean - with Léopold Senghor, later president of Senegal (1960-1980), as its leading
284 Reflections spokesman - as well as to its anglophone counterpart, that is, Nkrumah’s cult of ‘the African personality’. Even if the term used was not identity but ‘African consciousness’, ‘Negro-African aesthetics’ or ‘authenticity’, the crux of these political/intellectual movements was to articulate a new notion of what it meant to be African – an urgent want considering the detrimental impact of the, as Franz Fanon called it, “psychic costs of colonisation” (Fanon 2001 [1961]). African identity came to be articulated in opposition to what was seen as the coloniser’s identity, and it sought to revalorise the derogatory characteristics that the West had so generously ascribed to the continent and its people.3 The succinct definition of the oppositional identity formulated in those early years, and which later came to be rigorously criticised, is Senghor’s famous phrase l’émotion est nègre, la raison est hellène. Race and ‘African identity’ became inextricably intertwined, that is, ‘being black’ came to be seen as the primary basis for a shared ‘Africanness’.4 The belief in a distinct African identity was translated into a political revolutionary rhetoric and after independence served as the ideological basis for political theories of African socialism. Highlighted were notions of community, solidarity, generosity and reciprocity. Some consider it sadly ironic that the early African (and African-American) intellectuals did not step outside of, but in a way romanticised, the inherited racialised idiom. Appiah writes that the centrality of the concept of race in early theories of African identity inevitably led “not only to a belief in the existence of a peculiar African form of thinking but also to a belief in special African contents of thought” (1992: 24). The Beninois philosopher Hountondji has labelled this ‘unanimism’: “the illusion that all men and women in such societies speak with one voice and share the same opinion about all fundamental issues” (1996: xviii). Achille Mbembe says about this illusion: “... what is called Africa is first and foremost a geographical accident. It is this accident that we subsequently invest with a multitude of significations, diverse imaginary contents, or even fantasies, which, by force of repetition, end up becoming authoritive narratives”.5 A unanimist perspective, which for several decades dominated African philosophy, has thus been seriously criticise by scholars who argue against the promotion of generalised conceptions of African identity, and instead aim at exploring “the possibilities and pitfalls of an African identity in the late twentieth century” (Appiah 1992: x) through a focus on diversity and plurality (see also Werbner 1996). This involves the philosophical question of what are the qualities, histories and experiences that are shared by and that unite ‘Africans’ despite their many cultural, linguistic and individual differences. But it also involves more political questions: How can Africans bring across the reality of their differences to a world which still tends to view the continent as one homogenous whole? And secondly, how do African nations and their citizens deal with their internal diversities in a constructive way, rather than, as happens so often today, allowing these to be the cause of (violent) conflicts? The lives of the young men of this study painfully bear out the consequences of ‘Africa’s’ struggle with its diversities and divisions in terms of race, wealth, religion, generation, gender, education, and rural-urban realities. Chapter Six discussed Petna’s piece Kekele, which, he explained, stands for “a philosophy of being flexible” and which makes a case for embracing change and diversity. The (male) Kekele of his prose and choreography tries to find answers to the question “Who am I?” One issue at stake is who Kekele is as an African – as an African in relation to ‘his brothers’, in relation to Europe, and in relation to the parents of his mzungu wife. The piece shows that race and colour are intrinsically part of definitions of identity: not only black versus white, but also alleged racial distinctions “among ourselves, our African brothers and sisters”. The centrality of these issues is hardly surprising given that questions of race and ethnicity are causally implicated in the wars that Petna and all other young people in Kampala had fled from. Kapuscinski writes:
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“Herein lies the attractiveness of ethnic agitation: its ease and accessibility. The Other is visible, everyone can recognise and remember his image. One doesn’t have to read books, think, discuss: it is enough just to look” (2001: 86).
While this is seductively phrased by the historian/travel writer, and carries a sad practical truth, it overlooks the crucial fact that being able to recognise or categorise someone as ‘other’ need not per se lead to a willed act of harming, let alone killing, that ‘other’. Racialism – whether scientifically true or false - does not in itself necessarily dictate racial violence (Appiah 1992: 13). At the same time, while the labelling of wars in Africa as mere ‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’ is markedly superficial, the notion of ethnic identity is needed to analyse these violent conflicts. Not just their present causes and conditions but also the long and deep histories of (racial) violence in which they are embedded. To the young men in Kampala these were not in the first place academic questions. They had witnessed the consequences of ethnic and racial discourse materialised in the violence between Nuer and Dinka, Hutu and Tutsi, Tigrinya, Oromo and Amhara (Abbink 1996, Deng 1995, Jok & Hutchinson 1999, Malkki 1995a). Besides, issues of race and ethnicity played a part also after they had crossed into Uganda, where distrust between and within the refugee communities was the source of discourses and practices of discrimination. The following is from my notes of a conversation with a Sudanese young man who explained to me the situation in Kyangwali refugee settlement, which houses both Sudanese and Rwandan refugees.
They [Rwandans] have their own part and we have our own part. But the same [food] ratio we share it together. Our culture and their culture is not the same. All of them they have these witchdoctors. We don’t know what will happen to us, so let them be isolated. We fear their witch doctors. Nothing happened so far, but the fear is there. These are the dangerous people. Also they don’t wash their clothes, the same clothes they use for cultivating, to sleep, to do everything. The situation they are in is a very desperate situation so they are not clean like the Sudanese. Maybe we will have cholera. We reported this issue to the camp commander.
Instances of discrimination were also part of the refugees’ relationships with the host population. Even though few refugees complained about Ugandans being xenophobic, they were confronted with national and racial stereotypes that got mixed in with the identities ascribed to them. One example mentioned earlier was that Congolese refugees in Uganda were called after on the streets with the term ndombolo, the name of one of the popular Congolese dances at the time. While this was something they usually jokingly dismissed – or put to use to prove their own prejudices: “See, these Ugandans are yuma, the only thing they know about Congo is that we are good at making music!” – what truly upset them was being called ‘cowards’ or ‘traitors’ for fleeing their country instead of defending it (alongside the Ugandan army!). As for refugees from Sudan, Fred O., a Ugandan police officer, outlined his view on the treatment of refugees in Uganda as follows:
There is a common feeling among the nationals that these refugees are strangers so they can be mistreated or cheated. After all they are not related to the nationals. There are reports reaching my desk that some landlords charge more money for house rent for the refugees than the nationals. Sometimes their property is stolen in their absence and their children beaten for no reason. Those in our local schools are being denied scholastic materials and teachers despise or punish them unnecessarily. They are said to be enjoying education freely when they will not work in Uganda to build our country … I have noticed the nationals mistreat the Sudanese refugees saying they are dirty (because of their dark skin), that they are
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rude (they have a strong Nubian accent), and that they do not have respect because their women do not kneel when greeting.
In Chapter Five several Sudanese students mentioned the discrimination they experienced in school. Samuel and Marcus Duku were excluded from competing for the position of Head Boy because of their Sudanese nationality, and Wani remembered how he and others from Sudan, being considered “harsh and hostile” people, were nicknamed omukidi (‘people who move naked’) by their fellow pupils. The attack on the Twin Towers in the US also had its repercussions for certain refugees in Kampala. After September 2001, Mikael and Yosief, like many other Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees, were routinely stopped by police and interrogated because of their supposedly ‘Arab’ appearance. In other words, refugees in Kampala were confronted with, and partook in, cases of ethnic and racial discrimination. They were also confronted with discrimination born out of the perception that refugees are ‘strangers’ who challenge the bounded concept of the nation state (Malkki 1995b), and who are suspect by virtue of their different looks and customs. Racial categorisation indeed is “pervasive and fundamental” and “draws basic demarcations between migratory experiences” (Benmayor & Skotnes 1994: 8). Several young refugees in Kampala responded to these experiences by articulating their wish to be called ‘African’, rather than Congolese, Banyamulenge, Hutu, Sudanese, Dinka, Eritrean, Amhara or Somali. This became common practice at Yolé!Africa, where the statement was used to create an inclusive atmosphere and to question the rationale for referring to individuals using nationality or ethnic affiliation. The experiences of war and exile, at least for some people, had inspired a consciously positive use of the word African. They were all brothers and sisters, they said, and would no longer have their leaders dupe them into thinking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. But what exactly the generic ‘being African’ meant was a question of debate. Some would argue it was about a shared history or about cultural values of sociability such as generosity and respect. To others, echoing the early 20th century pan-Africanists, colour was the defining attribute. Both views were obviously reinforced by their perception of Africa’s place in the world. One example that some referred to at the time because it directly concerned them, was the article ‘Chicken for Kosovo refugees, no water for Africans’ published in The Monitor. It quoted the opinion that African refugees did not need the same treatment as the war victims in Yugoslavia as they were used to lower standards anyway (Miller 1999). Leave aside the provision of adequate food and shelter, the young people in Kampala knew how greatly they too would have benefited from having access to Internet for contacting relatives abroad – no different from the Balkan refugees.6 As a white European I was implicated in the discussions about African identity. Certain individuals warned my friends about me: was there not very little reason to trust me, did my colour of skin not tell enough? Even if the friends concerned responded with disapproval, this does not negate the fact that in the relationships between the young men and me our different colours could not be dismissed. There always seemed awareness that we as individuals were carriers of the charged history of interaction between Africa and Europe. Interestingly though, my identity got slightly reformulated in the course of time, which confirms the non-fixed and situational quality of (racial) identities. Our daily shared experiences and especially our shared struggle to get Yolé!Africa off the ground and promote its vision, gave me a tinge of Africanness, the young men suggested, and contributed to the boundaries being redrawn. Nevertheless, they joked, it was clear from my busy schedule and impatience with slow internet connections, my shyness in performance and my slow progress in becoming African streetwise, that I was still, and always would be, a mzungu. The definition of African identity was a tricky issue for the young refugees in Kampala – it will remain a subject of reflection and contention on the part of Africa’s
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 287 intellectuals, artists and politicians for a long time to come (Appiah 1992, Geschiere 2005, Mbembe 2001, Mudimbe 1994, Werbner 2002).
2. WAR AND IDENTITY
It was a Monday, late August 2000, lunchtime. I was leaving the Refugee Law Project office in Old Kampala. As always lots of people were hanging around waiting to speak to one of the legal officers. As I was trying to make my way out, one after the other people would come up to me, demand my attention, ask me to “come outside I need to ask you something”. Some of them I knew quite well, others only by face. I was exhausted. When finally I did walk out two men approached me. I made a gesture that I really did not want to see or hear anyone. They insisted. I had a vague recollection of one of them; I knew he was Congolese. He told me that his friend needed to show me something. They walked along with me, stopped as soon as we had moved away from the office some fifty meters. Children came running out of the gate of Old Kampala Primary School, laughing, with their little rucksacks in green-and-white uniforms. The two men stood near to me, enclosed me in a small circle of three. The one whose face I didn’t know took an envelope out of the pocket of his jacket. He showed me the photos that were in there. Dead and mutilated bodies; wounded children inside a half-dark room; close-ups of deep cuts in arms, legs, heads; festering wounds. “This is what the Rwandans do to us”, he whispered. They looked at me expectantly. I had no clue of what to say. I felt sick. I think I mumbled something like, “this is horrific”, and asked them who took the photos. “I did”, said the one I hadn’t seen before. For over two years I had been listening to stories of war and the horrendous injustices people had endured, and I wonder why this one incident put me so off-balance. Perhaps because it was so much in my face, or because I was so tired? Perhaps because these two men whom I didn’t know forced me into an atmosphere of intimacy by showing me photos of the most gruesome kind, which for all I knew could have been taken the week before. The eyes that were now looking at me had rested on those bodies maybe just a week ago. I felt unsafe. Why did they show me these photos? They didn’t know me. I was just a white face in an office. I was no more than one anonymous representative of a group of humanitarian, human rights workers and researchers. They seemed uncomfortable themselves too. Secretive, whispering, alert. I suddenly sensed what I had known all along: that boundaries between victim, witness and perpetrator are anything but clear-cut. I didn’t know these guys. What had they been doing there taking these pictures? What did I know about what factions they belonged to? Might they cause harm to any of my friends? But at the same time: if I was so disturbed just looking at these photos, how must they feel having seen the real thing? I felt helpless. Because there was a question in their showing me: look at this, this is what we are faced with, what can you do for us? They wanted an audience. Despite the constant reminders through people’s recollections, I sometimes managed to forget where my discussion partners had come from. Our shared reality was that of sitting outside a small bar or restaurant, relatively undisturbed, drinking a Coke or Stoney, talking. Curious glances from passers-by, but no immediate threats, no atmosphere of acute danger. But here was the visible proof of what people had seen. It was one of those moments during my years in Kampala when the message was brought home to me unedited: people have fled from extreme violence. And I wondered: How do you live after you have seen that? How do you incorporate this into normal daily life - or does it become normal life? What questions will your children ask and what answers can you possibly give?
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What does the world look like when you know that violence is an ever-present possibility, what do you make of your future?
2.1 Anthropology and violence
Before addressing the relationship between wartime violence and identity, I will say a few words about how anthropologists have approached the study of wartime violence generally. The anthropological literature on contemporary war is growing and Elisabeth Colson, quoted in the Introduction to this book, probably rightly predicts that:
“If anthropology continues to be based in ethnography… ethnographic accounts will reflect the violence and suffering, the precariousness of life, and the evils humans do to one another, in a way foreign to earlier ethnographic traditions” (2003: 3).7
It was not my initial plan to write about wartime violence. My study was going to be one of refugees and their present lives. However, it soon was obvious that I could not forego the situations the young men had lived through and which had shaped them. Writing about wartime violence, I realised, was going to be anything but easy. As discussed in Chapter Three, the subject confronts academics (and the ordinary person too) with epistemological and representational dilemmas: what can we know, who are the ‘knowers’, what is truth, and how do we share our understanding? Even if one listens carefully, it remains a challenge to fully comprehend a person’s confusion, anger or trauma, and to convey this in writing. Take this episode from a testimony written by Elias Laku from Sudan:
After his retirement, my father became the village sub-chief of L. He was an outspoken critic of both the revolts [SPLA] and the government soldiers. He condemned the human rights violations they committed. In mid April 1990, a tragedy loomed the family. On that painful day, there was an attack on L., the village where we lived. The combined forces of the Mujahadin [lit. holy warriors] and the Sudan Armed Forces attacked the villages, terrorised the local people, killing several of them including my father whom they slashed to death with a machete and whose mutilated body they hung on a tree. Luckily my mother and two of my brothers and sisters were not at home on that day.
I can follow the facts, perhaps even picture the scene. But to me it remains difficult to grasp what exactly violence does to people, and what a person like Elias, seventeen when he witnessed the killing of his father, does with it. And even though I got to know some individuals rather closely, and learned of their backgrounds, their family upbringing, their daily occupations and future aspirations, I struggled trying to understand and represent their most intimate encounters with violence – whether as perpetrator, witness or victim. I still guess at how to interpret the matter-of-fact way in which Wani related his experiences of the SPLA training camp, where as a twelve-year-old he had to punish age mates and bury those who had succumbed to the brutalities of the training regime. I recall a conversation Lopithi and I had during which he described what ‘annihilation’ meant in his experience with the SPLA. I have this conversation on tape and find that Lopithi’s account sounds more staccato or disjointed than his usual flow of words. The unfinished sentences of my questions reveal to me my eagerness and reluctance to hear, a similar uneasy combination that I detect in his telling.
I just take… I… I… I crush his head with my boots, then I pull his leg, then the backbone goes apart, then we throw that one, that one is dead.
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Is that the normal way of … That’s not very normal, that’s not normal in the army. That is annihilation. So when was… It was a genocide against the local population carried out by the SPLA. The people did not realise, and they do not realise… and I’m afraid… you are the first person I’m telling you this, you see… I can take a child of… a two months old baby, just take the child by the leg then do like this and hit it on a tree. This one is dead. A child of how many months… crawling like this, coming to you… maybe thinking that you are a friend and so on, a child smiling at you… to kick a child with the boots here and this is dead. Pounding in this, pounding in what… Do they pound the… the Yes, yes, yes… And they started destroying the village… and it took the local population by surprise…
Even if someone manages to speak about experiences like this, what am I to make of it in my analysis? Even if this particular experience was shared and witnessed by many, is it not ultimately an individual experience with which I can do little more but present it the way it was told to me? That violence is a difficult and sensitive subject was evident from the responses I got to an early draft of this chapter. The first set of responses concerned my definition of violence. One colleague wrote: “I would be very careful about diluting what you mean by violence. There has been a tendency – especially within anthro lit – to call violence anything that denudes, damages or denies (ha!). This, I think, is a mistake. What you seem to be talking about is real physical violence”. One of my supervisors suggested: “It might well be that you mean the humiliation of discrimination which is a violation of human dignity. You must distinguish between violence and a sense of being violated. The latter I think is familiar to all of us, the first perhaps not”. The second cluster of responses questioned what they considered my rather naïve representation of violence, and the statements I had made about the incomprehensibility of it all. One person got quite agitated: “Violence an sich is not incomprehensible, nor the fact that it exists, how it is politically manipulated etc. Perhaps specific, excessive forms of violence are difficult to understand. You describe violence as too exclusively negative, yet it can also be born out of something gentle, for instance protecting your children. It can be chastening, a cleansing expression of anger or desperation”. Again I recall Lopithi, who pinpointed this very connection between violence and love in his response to my question about his child (see Chapter Four). Were his son ever to follow in his footsteps and join the Sudanese liberation war, he said: “I will shoot him and bury him, there will be no questions, he is my blood”. Acts of violence can be strictly personally motivated deeds. But perhaps most acts of violence – I was told to stress this more clearly - are no individual, random deeds, but instead are part of realities and discourses that people are brought up in. Chapter Four on Soldiers showed that wartime violence is often part of a symbolic repertoire of action, and that in situations of protracted war (as in Sudan) violence can become an institutionalised part of society. My colleagues were probably right that my initial writing was too emotive. Yet it must be noted that for some of my readers in Uganda my choice of words instead seemed rather too weak or generic. After reading my early essay on violence, Mikael wrote to me:
Dear Ellen, I’ve realised something. In your essay you have repeatedly used the word violence, but I strongly disagree with [the notion] that what happened is violence. Because people experience violence every day, yet they often survive. Yet some people seem to be affected as I am, then I asked myself, why the difference? What I would like to say is what happened is not only violence, but maybe violence is the general form of it, but what happened to me and perhaps to the southern
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Sudanese man you mention, is not violence but TERROR. It is terror that unsettles people for life or recreates another person within a person. Think about it Ellen, terror is what you experienced when you talked to people who have it in their veins that run throughout their bodies and distort their paradigms, and engulf them, and stay as a heavy burden in their heart and mind. You are always in my thoughts and prayers, Mikael.
Operational and experiential approaches to violence
Blok (2000) argues that in the West, the civilisation process (Elias 2000 [1969]) caused violence to be pushed further and further into realms of taboo – and largely removed it from inquiry in social science. This may partly explain my difficulties in tackling the subject as well as my colleagues’ sensitive responses. How did anthropologists who wrote about contemporary violence tackle the problems of definition, interpretation and conveyance that come with this intricate subject? First the obvious: it is not easy to gain in-depth ethnographic knowledge about contemporary war situations. These ‘complex emergencies’ involve a combination of macro-economic collapse, multiple threats to human security, civil and military conflict, high levels of civilian mortality and mass population movement (Karunakara 2004), circumstances in which long-term fieldwork is often impossible (Nordstrom & Robben 1995b). Anthropologists studying war therefore often endorse an operational approach (Schröder & Schmidt 2001), focusing on political causes, structural conditions and the development of patterns of violence between different (state and civil society) actors in specific regions (Abbink 1995c, 1996, Kloos 1996, 2001). These studies, which can be conducted even at times when fieldwork is unfeasible, aim at comparing acts and patterns of violence across space and time, and at developing analytical frameworks to enable such comparisons. This has not been the approach of this study (which, evidently, is a study of the aftermath of war rather than war itself). I did not try to get to explanations, but presented people’s individual accounts from a so-called experiential perspective. I addressed the how of people’s daily lives, rather than searching for answers to the what and why questions that surround the social phenomenon of violence (Schrijvers 2002). I was interested in the meaning people gave to events in order to shed light on questions like: in situations of uncertainty and anguish, how do young people make sense of what happens around them, to themselves, their friends and communities? How do they respond and how are their experiences incorporated into their view of the world? There are other ethnographies with a more or less similar approach (Daniel 1996, Feldman 1991, Macek 2000, Nordstrom 1997, Scheper-Hughes 1992, van de Port 1998). Experiential studies of violence have received criticism. Schröder & Schmidt write:
“The experimental perspective tends to neglect cultural generality in favour of pure fragmented subjectivity ... the extreme proponents of this post-modernist view subscribe to a randomising view of violent events that negate the possibility and usefulness of anthropological comparison” (2001: 18).
I do not agree that anthropologists can compare only on the basis of culture. We do not need to aggregate our findings to the level of ‘cultural generality’ to be able to say something valuable. My work has shown that one can remain close to the vicissitudes of individuals’ daily lives and as such contribute to a deeper understanding of what happens to people in and after war generally. I see this focus on individuals as a sine qua non for illuminating an understanding of the realities and meanings of wartime violence. The actual experience and interpretation of the acts and events of war will always remain contested among and between its victims, perpetrators and witnesses, and cannot be reduced to any cultural or socio-political template. Furthermore, it seems particularly difficult to speak of
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 291
‘culture’ when working with people who are ‘in transit’. Culture – in terms of a shared body of beliefs and practices – is precisely that which is under pressure during war and also in exile. Taken for granted behaviour is challenged, new problems ask for new answers by all different members of communities, rules are transgressed, compromises negotiated. This reality is captured by means of an experiential approach, because it endorses
“mutations of social theory from structure-centered models to action-, agency-, and performance-centered models of social and political constitution in which society is a project and not a reified predeterminant” (Feldman 1995: 240).
I stress that, while I employed an agency-centred experiential approach to the study of wartime violence, I do not cast doubt on the significance of analysis of the larger explanatory picture. There is an urgent need for the study of global power-relations and historical patterns of violence which through complex trajectories incite local wars, which cause individuals to opt for martyrdom, and which catch families in webs of trauma. A future challenge for social scientists is to look for ways of bringing these macro and micro, operational and experiential approaches together.
2.2 Violence and identity
Violence is formative; it shapes people’s perceptions of who they are and what they are fighting for across space and time – a continual dynamic that forges as well as affects identities.
Nordstrom & Robben, Fieldwork under Fire, 1995, p. 4
War had impacted on the lives of the young men in Kampala: not only had they been forced to leave behind destroyed villages and unsafe towns, but the events of war had also put to the test their perceptions of themselves and their societies. In anthropology, the relationship between violence and identity is usually analysed from the vantage point of the group/community level. This is a valid approach considering that it is group identities - often reified as strictly bounded, exclusive and unchangeable entities - which people use to make their claims to territory, resources, power and privileges, and that it is other people’s group identities which they target. Summerfield writes:
“Another key dimension [of war/violence] is the crushing of the social and cultural institutions which connect a particular people to their history, identity and lived values” (1998: 15).
As much as violence is a means to a practical end – the annexation of territory, the achievement of independence, the elimination of a personal enemy – it is also a medium of communication. This way of conceptualising violence was introduced by Riches (1986), who argued that because violent acts are highly visible and concrete they can serve as an efficient means of staging an ideological message before a public audience. Wars are fought over definitions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and violence is a powerful communicative vehicle to get a message across about ‘who we are’ (Blok 2000, Bowman 2001, Schröder & Schmidt 2001). This communicative function of violence is central to the current War on Terrorism; it has been central to many (civil) wars in Africa. Particularly disturbing examples recounted to me by Rwandan, Congolese and Sudanese refugees were of soldiers cutting off lips and ears, or cutting open pregnant women’s wombs, in order to deliver the messages “do not dare to speak of what you have seen and heard”, and “we will not kill only you, but also
292 Reflections your future”. Other studies cite similar examples (Gourevitch 1998, Malkki 1995a, Prunier 1995, Richards 1996).8 Based on his research in Sierra Leone, Paul Richards suggest:
“War itself is a type of text – a violent attempt to ‘tell a story’ or to ‘cut in on the conversation’ of others from whose company the belligerents feel excluded” (1996: xxiv).9
Richards is among the scholars who identify certain violent acts as part of “meaningful”, “rational”, or “constructive” repertoires of action, which make cultural or sociological sense as they are intentionally employed to (re)create social reality (Blok 2000, Bowman 2001, Feldman 1991, Richards 1996). For a long time, Lopithi considered the war he participated in a necessary and thus constructive activity: he was fighting the ‘Arab’ enemy to liberate ‘his people’ from political and economic oppression. He probably drew strength from the notion that he participated in a longer tradition - locally: Lokoya young men had always had to show their readiness and ability to defend their villages; and regionally: this SPLA war was a continuation of the first Anyanya that his elders in southern Sudan had fought. It is easier to consider violent acts as ‘constructive’ or ‘meaningful’ action when addressing the more abstract political level of patterns of and motivations for war. It becomes harder when zooming in on the individual level. Can one envisage a young soldier’s killing of a baby as a meaningful act, or the beating to death of a prisoner-of-war, or starving a child recruit? History and present show that even these severe acts can be labelled meaningful and legitimate, which illustrates that the interpretation of and the legitimacy ascribed to acts of violence depend wholly on the perspective, ideology and position of the person involved (Riches 1986). This, in turn, links up with the concept of identity. Richards’ metaphor, war as “a violent attempt to ‘tell a story’” makes sense: the story, usually, is about identity and belonging. Identities, including cultural and ethnic identities, are fluid and situational. They can thus be strategically constructed and manipulated, which is what happens in most of today’s wars. Historically constructed ethnic identities, which essentially are “a relationship rather than a thing”, can acquire material existence and appear natural (Comaroff 1996). Threats to such supposedly natural identities serve as a rationale for violence and war. Bowman writes that “identity may be far more inchoate than is the sense of threat to its persistence”, and that consequently individuals and communities often act on the basis of “fantasies of the violence the others would carry out on ‘us’ if we did not first destroy them through pre-emptive violence” (2001: 41-42). The rhetoric of identity in its most extreme form denies ‘others’ the status of human beings. Tutsis could be killed without compunction, so Rwandans were told, because they were cockroaches [inyenzi] not humans. Just over a century earlier, Morton Stanley and his men had treated as a game the shooting of ‘blacks’ from the Lady Alice and dugout canoes which took their expedition through East and Central Africa (Hochschild 1998). While (perceived) threats to identity can spawn violence, identity can also “arise out of violence” (Bowman 2001). Liisa Malkki’s study on Burundi Hutu refugees in Tanzania shows this. The accounts of the 1972 genocide that the Burundis in exile ceaselessly kept narrating, essentialised categories of identity – Hutu and Tutsi – and created an all- encompassing world of beliefs and fears. Mattijs van de Port (1998) examines the reconstruction of collective identity that people in wartime Yugoslavia were involved in. He shows how the Balkan war challenged people to reconsider the “world of stories” they had identified themselves with and how it forced them to construct new notions of their own historical position as a people. The challenge of peace time is for individuals and communities to de-essentialise the constructed identities that legitimatised violence (Junne & Verkoren 2005: 7). This is a long-term process. In Kampala, it was difficult to find a Sudanese Equatorian who did not
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 293 drop in a line about the aggressive (arrogant, rude) character of “those cattle-keepers” (the Nuer and Dinka) and the wish that they would be “taught a lesson”. These statements were made also by young men who considered themselves ‘modern’ and emancipated through their education and who claimed to reject the divisive practices of their political leaders. Despite the fact that the artists at Yolé!Africa aspired to rid themselves of discourses based on nationality, religion or ethnicity, these evidently had become rather engrained. For instance, when Congolese spoke about the Banyamulenge, there was always uneasiness, and occasionally a derogatory joke.
Reconstruction and creativity: responses to violence
In an attempt to do justice to the individual agency of people dealing with war or its aftermath, several experiential studies conceptualised these people’s relationships to violence in terms of reconstruction, captured in the notion of ‘creativity’. The destructive impact of war on people’s life-worlds requires a creative renegotiation of those worlds and in that sense, it is argued, violence is “world-making” (Bowman 2001: 32). Carolyn Nordstrom writes about her frontline research in Mozambique:
“Not all Mozambicans have such developed powers of creative imagining. Not unusually, the creative members of culture – healers, visionaries, performers – have developed these skills to a fine art. Their talents lie not only with their abilities to imagine but also with their abilities to convey these images to others so that they, too, may share in the reconstruction of their symbolic and social universes. I have visited a number of communities that had been recently decimated by the war. One of the most powerful experiences I had at these times was sitting with people amid the fragments of what was once their home and community and listening, watching, the imagining – the creation of identity, home and resistance afresh. I choose the word watching as well as listening purposefully: as the Mozambicans talk about what has happened and what will happen, and as they discuss this in the context of human nature and the meaning of life, I found I could not only understand but “see” the world they were creating. Apparently so did the others present. New identities of suffering and resistance were forged, home was reinvented, the world was relandscaped with significance, people survived” (1995: 148).
As much as I admire Nordstrom’s work, this paragraph makes me pause. It sounds too neat. There must have been people in that audience who had no clue of the new symbolic universes that were being created around them. I am sure some were too caught up in pain and anger to even contemplate the option of reconstruction. I imagine that, in the end, not all of them ‘survived’. The relationship violence-creativity was coined to open up new ways of studying the phenomenon of violence. Violence was not to be regarded as something external happening to people, but as a phenomenon that individuals (willingly and unwillingly) engage with on a societal, psychological, bodily and spiritual level (Rapport 2000). The conceptualisation of violence as a creative force is part of a shift towards an agency-centred perspective in social science, which aims at doing justice to people’s individuality, for instance by refuting the reductionist portrayal of victims of violence and poverty as suffering individuals hardly in charge of their own lives. I support this shift. At the same time, speaking of people’s creative strategies in the face or the aftermath of war runs the risk of sounding rather rationally optimistic, and reveals an inkling of western teleology. Before people were represented as victims – war victims and refugees turned into passive recipients of aid - now they are portrayed as creative survivors. Without wanting to deny
294 Reflections they are, this is too simple and rather too dichotomous. My observations tell me that violence and its effects on people are inconclusive and contingent. People do not always know what they are doing. They do not all respond in the same way. They are not all consciously aiming at reconstruction. I recall what Leon Wieseltier said at the Nexus conference The Anatomy of Loss (2003): “Why do we have this tendency to make losses into gains? Many losses are simply losses, full stop. There’s not always something transcendental about them”. And Antjie Krog added: “Certain wounds one wants to keep open… sometimes the therapeutic notion of closure is obscene. Some losses are too terrible, one wants no finality to it… Moreover, you can be so scarred, the hurt so deep, that you learn nothing”. In brief, destruction is not always followed by personal growth and creative reconstruction; not everyone succeeds in creating new selves and new worlds. My question thus is: does the conceptualisation of violence as a creative force truly reflect something about the ontology of violence, or is the fact that some anthropologists are keen to use it rather a reflection of something that they need? Are they inclined to hear in people’s narratives the promises of reconstruction and creation because they need to hear those in order to stay sane? In order to trust that things will come full circle - because destruction without reconstruction is too meaningless to be comprehended? I too was bewildered by the creativity and perseverance with which young people in Kampala were able to continue after all they had gone through. In fact, when friends back home asked me whether it was not too “heavy” or emotionally draining to work with war victims, I used to answer that it was not. My explanation: all the inspiring examples of survival and strength I was privileged to witness. But when I returned to the Netherlands and was able to take some distance, I realised that this answer partly reflected a need on my part to focus on the positive side of the encounter. It had been part of my own survival strategy: I would not have lasted long in an environment entirely bereft of positive meaning. Hence I believe anthropologists must be cautious with statements about the creative force of violence. I support a research focus that highlights the creative strategies people employ in the face of war. It is important as recognition of people’s strength and dignity. However, just as we should not make assumptions about people’s helplessness and suffering, neither should we take their abilities to be creative as a natural given.
3. EXILE AND IDENTITY
I am a refugee, an asylum-seeker. These are not simple words, even if habit of hearing them makes them seem so. I arrived at Gatwick Airport in the late afternoon of 23 November last year. It is a familiar minor climax in our stories, leaving what we know and arriving in strange places, carrying little bits of jumbled luggage and suppressing secret and garbled ambitions.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea, 2001, p. 4
After crossing the borders of their home countries, the young men of this study found themselves in an unfamiliar environment. After years of wearing an army uniform and participating in a bush war, Lopithi found himself in Kampala, with none to give orders to and dependent on the whims of charity. Jean exchanged his village in north-eastern Congo, of which he drew a map with only five landmarks – the Catholic Church, my father’s house, River Dungu, the marché, and road to the refugee camps – for a capital city with mad traffic, over a million inhabitants and no shambas to grow one’s food. Tesfaye Abebe was a young soldier in Ethiopia. He was a courageous fighter, he said, because he wanted to revenge the death of his parents. He fled, became a refugee, and was branded ‘mad’ by
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 295
NGO staff. He found his breakfast and dinner in the City Council garbage containers. How can one conceptualise such individual experiences; do they display a shared or common substance? Several anthropologists have argued that the concept of liminality can be used to capture what is at stake for individuals in exile.
3.1 Liminality?
Liminality is a state where an individual moving from one fixed, known status or circumstance into a new one “becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification; he passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state” (Turner 1974: 232).
“... transitional beings are particularly polluting...” (Turner 1967: 97).
In the 1960s, Victor Turner coined his concept of liminality to describe the rites of passage of the Ndembu in Zambia, making use of Mary Douglas’ concept of pollution (Douglas 1966, Turner 1967, 1974). Twenty-five years later both concepts were picked up by anthropologists working in the field of forced migration studies. Liisa Malkki offered to current thinking about forced migration the insight that, from the perspective of “the national order of things” refugees are considered liminal beings: dangerous, subversive and polluting (Malkki 1992). She builds on Foucault’s argument in Madness and Civilisation (1961) and Discipline and Punish (1977), which spell out how societies define and set apart those who do not fit (Foucault 1991 [1977], 1995 [1961]). It is true that the concepts of liminality and pollution together aptly uncover what determines the perception and treatment of refugees: a fear of ‘the stranger’, the one who is unlike us, and the consequent call for policies of containment. Turner describes the liminal personae undergoing rites of passage as “at once no longer classified and not yet classified” (1967: 96). The deep-seated uneasiness about today’s non-classifiable newcomers ironically has set off an urge to apply a host of different labels and statuses to them, leaving ‘the refugee’ in bureaucratic terms more meticulously defined than any other person within the boundaries of a given state. Following Stepputat (1992) several authors have used the concept of liminality in a way complementary to that of Malkki by shifting the vantage point from nation states to the perspective of the people who cross borders. Refugees, they argue, find themselves in a limbo that resembles what Turner described as the liminal phase in rites of passage. They are “betwixt and between”, neither here nor there, neither this nor that, and bereft of the structures that used to define their lives. This limbo gives rise to feelings of insecurity and confusion, but also promises new opportunities:
“Undoing, dissolution, decomposition are accompanied by growth, transformation, and the reformulation of old elements in new patterns” (Turner 1967: 99).
Refugees have crossed a border – literally and symbolically – into a new life. But since ‘a new life’ is hardly served on a plate at the border crossing, a period of suspension follows, an emptiness, in which nothing is as it used to be while the contours of a future are not yet marked. The insecurities and opportunities of liminality are the backdrop against which refugees struggle to define new identities, a process that is both disruptive and potentially liberating (Camino 1994, Essed, Frerks & Schrijvers 2004, Ghorashi 1997, 2004, Hollands 1998, Matsuoka & Sorenson 2001, Stepputat 1992, Turner 2004). Depending on age, gender and personality, individuals seize new opportunities and decide what parts of their (cultural, personal) past they wish to do away with and what to treasure. It has been noted
296 Reflections that many refugee women transgress previous gender restrictions in taking up new spaces and responsibilities, and that men on the other hand are often hit hard by the loss of formal power networks, which affects their self-perception and self-worth (Kibreab 1995, Lammers 1999, McSpadden & Moussa 1993, Rajasingham-Senanayake 2004, Schrijvers 1997, Sinha-Kerkhoff 2004). All this underscores the insight that identity is something always ‘in the making’. In my view, however, there are several weak points in comparing the situation of exile to the liminal phase of rites of passage. In rites of passage in Turner’s use of the word the liminal phase is unmistakably circumscribed. There is a set period of time marked out for it during which there are clearly spelled-out rules and absolute authority to concede to. But what marks the beginning and what the end of refugees’ liminality? Is it the border crossing as such that throws people into suspension? What was this ‘known fixed position’ that people allegedly came from? Sometimes war enters a village or town suddenly and unexpectedly, but more often people flee, as a last resort, after months or years of insecurity during which all ‘knowns’ have only been gradually dismantled. In answer to my question “Can you describe in what ways the experiences of the past years, your flight and being a refugee, have had an effect on your person?”, Mikael wrote:
I don’t have an outlook on my life as ‘a refugee’ and ‘not a refugee’. I fail to see my life as defined by only two colour differences, as the chessboard colours are, as discriminative as they differ. Or the moment of crossing the border between Ethiopia and Sudan as a point where something ends and another starts. For me being a refugee is an issue I have failed to define. Whenever I think about it my mind rushes back to my prison time. It doesn’t stop at the border of Ethiopia but it goes back to some years prior to becoming a refugee. For me feelings of that time are almost similar to feelings of being a refugee. But to be honest I should say that the difficulties I face as a refugee are far smaller than the challenges I passed through in my homeland.
He described how during those years at home he had felt “shut off from life”. His words resemble the ways in which the political activist women in Ghorashi’s (1997) study memorise the homelessness they felt while still in Iran as their most alienating experience. If ever they crossed the threshold into a life in suspension it happened back then. Thus, the difference could be hardly more acute: neophytes enter the liminal phase of their initiation rites coming from a period of normality; refugees enter from chaos. Their experiences of liminality in terms of ‘dissolution’ and ‘transformation’ are as much defined by the suspension and novelty of exile as by the events that happened before and of which they carry vivid memories. Therefore, without taking into account the experiences of insecurity, violence and threatened livelihood prior to flight, a study of lives lived in exile will not explain much (Daniel & Knudsen 1995, Eastmond 1996, Krulfeld & Camino 1994). If the beginning of liminality is not distinctly marked, even less so is the end. The neophytes in an initiation rite will come out transformed into ‘men’ or ‘women’ after a given period of time. They are declared new persons by those who lead the ritual as well as by society as a whole.10 In exile, however, people follow their own trajectories, with little or no guidance, and have no given point in the future that they can anticipate as the moment when things will have changed. So what counts as the end of the alleged liminal phase for refugees? Politicians propose ‘integration’ into the local society as the desired and inevitable end to liminality. Integration is a buzzword in western refugee and asylum policies and ‘local integration’ is one of the three durable solutions propagated by UNHCR. However, one cannot a priori assume that there is an end to the feelings that come with liminality. There were only very few refugees who said they had come to feel at home or at peace in Kampala. Yosief and Clinton were two of them. Yosief’s success in exhibiting and selling
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 297 his art enabled him to cater for his wife and mother, to send his young son to a good school, and to distinguish himself from other Eritrean refugees who were stuck in the slums of Kisenyi, where Yosief too started his life in exile. Clinton, who had come from Sudan as a toddler, attended school with only few interruptions, which gave him a degree of confidence in the future that many lacked. When I asked him whether he felt at home in Uganda, he said: “I’m a Sudanese, but also a Ugandan, according to the length of my stay here. And of course I speak fluent Luganda”, and joked: “Some may think I’m a Buganda, because some Buganda also have a big nose and are brown like me”. For the majority of the young refugees, however, their feelings of security, confidence and belonging were fragile. This explains why they spoke of being in Kampala as temporary: a period between past and future that was to pass. And even if they focused their energy on finding their feet in Kampala, and at times adjusted their expectations or ambitions, few wished to see their lives in Kampala as there-to-stay. It was going back home or going on. For most, there was no clarity as to when either of the two was to happen. This painful fact was constantly confirmed by certain unexpected events, such as the eruption of the Nyiragongo that destroyed large parts of Goma in January 2002. This shattered the Congolese refugees’ dreams of one day returning to their beloved hometown - dreams that had helped them to deal with what they considered their temporary sojourn in Kampala. For others the unexpected new agonies were hearing of the death of a relative back home, or the falling apart of a long-treasured dream to be resettled outside East Africa. As Benmayor and Skotnes put it: (forced) migration
“is a long-term, if not life-long process of negotiating identity, difference, and the right to fully exist and flourish in the new context” (1994: 8).
It is with this in mind that I turn once more to Malkki’s observations. The impression she gives about the ‘town refugees’ in Kigoma is of a group of people trying their utmost to assimilate into local Tanzanian town life, but who at the same time feel forever outsiders: weary, alert, suspicious, never at ease. Yet Malkki suggests that, while history was omni- present among the camp refugees, the town refugees’ relation to their past was one of simple denial:
“the past was that which had been left behind in Burundi. For most informants, this past had simply passed” (1995: 194).
I however think that even if it was not present in the same way as in the camps, as a “predominating, structuring force in their everyday lives”, in a subtler manner history must have been present in the town refugees’ daily lives, at the very least as part of people’s personal memories. The town refugees’ constant juggling with, and hiding of, their identities points at this: by so adamantly not wanting to be rooted in the past, in Burundi, the past was inescapably there for all of them. Refugees in Kampala also focused their efforts on making a living here and now, but I cannot derive from that observation alone the conclusion that the past had simply passed. Instead, people constantly worried about what had happened to those left behind, and many felt guilty about not fulfilling their obligations towards their parents, siblings or communities at large. The young men were habitually making mental notes on what was the same and what was different between ‘home and here’, and between ‘here and elsewhere’. They sang songs from home, wanted to eat their traditional food, and searched the internet for up-to-date news about their countries. Even if few spoke openly about this, the past visited them in their sleep: Lopithi’s nightmares woke his roommate, Samy waded “through rivers of blood” without a trace of his mother.
298 Reflections
In the concluding chapter of her study Liisa Malkki compares the ways in which the camp refugees and the town refugees gave meaning to liminality in the context of ‘national order’. She writes:
“In the camp, liminality was understood to be like a rite of passage: a temporary state preparing the way for membership in a recognized and honored category (“true nationhood”). In town, liminality was not so orderly; it was the “noise” in the system, the cosmopolitan disorder that awaited no necessary resolution into national order” (1995: 253-254).
“The noise in the system” is well coined. It hints at the fact that liminality cannot be neatly defined; that it lacks a pre-set resolution that can be worked towards; that it may not even have an end. Is that the reason why Malkki’s discussion of the urban refugees in Kigoma town comes across less convincing than her discussion of the camp refugees in Mishamo?11 The “noise in the system” proved more difficult to describe than the situation in the camps, where rehearsed mythico-histories provided day-to-day meaning. To capture the complex situation in town would have required more insight into the Burundians’ individual lives. Part II of this book depicted this complexity by showing the fragmentary realities of the young men in Kampala, their different ways of tackling the problems of survival in the city, and the fact that some individuals were more successful than others in rediscovering and reformulating parts of their identities that helped them to rebuild their lives.
3.2 Labelling and refugee identity
The sated days sometimes led Cosmos into a philosophical and dreamy reverie. “If you ask Tristeza or Alfredo or any of the others what they want most in life, what do you think they will say?” Nelio thought for a moment. “Various things,” he said. “I’m not so sure about that,” said Cosmos. “Isn’t there something that is greater than everything else? Greater than mothers and full stomachs and distant villages and clothes and cars and money?” They lay there in silence while Nelio considered. “An ID card,” he said at last. A document with a photo that says that you are who you are and nobody else.” “I knew you would think of it,” said Cosmos. “That’s what we dream about. ID cards. But not so that we’ll know who we are. We already know that. But so that we’ll have a document proving that we have the right to be who we are.”
Henning Mankell, Chronicler of the Winds, 2006 [1995], p. 119
This quote is from a novel set in Mozambique about Nelio, a boy who has escaped the killings in his village and ends up living in Maputo with a gang of street kids. The precocious Nelio is still a child, younger than the protagonists of this study, yet reading the questions that keep him awake at night is like hearing the young men in Kampala. The ID- card, no more than a little plasticised piece of paper (in case of the UNHCR protection letters, an A4 piece of photocopying paper folded into four in people’s back pockets) illustrates that identity is political. Without a document to identify themselves to police or immigration officers, refugees are extremely vulnerable. The refugee label is ascribed to people for good reasons when it concerns their legal protection, but it has many a downside as well, as is discussed in the article Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity (Zetter 1991). The author stresses that the label ‘refugee’ is not merely definitional - determining people’s entitlements, rights and obligations - but that it conveys
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 299 explicit value judgments. Labelling is a political act, which toys with the fact that identity is coupled with issues of power and control as well as with feelings of dignity and belonging. The young men in Kampala unanimously disliked or even despised the refugee label. During one of our early conversations in July 2000, Petna said:
Here in Kampala, when refugees manage to get a good life, they stop saying they are refugees. They don’t want to be seen as refugees anymore. They feel ashamed to say they are refugees. It is because of their experience with the Rwandan refugees in Goma. To be called a refugee was an insult, because the refugees in Goma were holding up their hands, they were beggars. It’s not good to be a beggar, you are no longer free. There are Congolese businessmen here in Kampala, who laugh when you tell them you are a refugee. They ask how you can come to this poor country to beg, they say you are dishonouring the name of Congo. One Congolese was going on and on about this to me, he didn’t know that I am a refugee myself.
Samy referred to the same when he said: “I don’t like that word, refugee. It is an insult. In Goma, when you called somebody a refugee, he could stay angry with you forever”. Historically, ‘refugee’ has also been a positive ascription. Refugees fleeing Eastern Europe after the Second World War were seen in the US and Canada as a unique potential for economic growth, and as welcome proof of the failures of communism (Harrell-Bond 1985). During the Cold War, refugees from Africa were welcomed in Europe and the US as courageous political activists (Hollands 2006). The negative connotations (‘profiteer’, ‘economic migrant’, or even ‘terrorist’) are currently far more prevalent in both political and public discourse, and essentially convey the message that refugees cannot be trusted. In Kampala, it was especially people’s interaction with the UNHCR and NGO staff that put to the test their self-perceptions vis-à-vis the labels ascribed to them, and consequently their sense of dignity. Most outspoken about this was Mikael. I recall us walking along Kampala Road in June 2000. Excitedly he told me:
The JRS asked me to talk to a class of students who are being trained to counsel trauma patients. I was to tell them about being a refugee. You know what I did? I drew an image on the blackboard: a stadium. I drew twenty-two players, those are the NGO’s, and the ball is the refugee, and the referee is UNHCR. And do you know who are the spectators? The government! And the ball doesn’t know where it is going. It is kicked vigorously in all possible directions. That’s how it is, don’t you think!?
Mikael’s metaphor captures what has been profusely argued but hardly acted upon: the fact that relief agencies disregard the perceptions, skills and resources of their beneficiaries in the planning and implementation of their work (Harrell-Bond 1986, Harrell-Bond, Voutira & Leopold 1992, Horst 2006b, Kaiser 2004, Kelly 2004, Schrijvers 2004). The refugee label imposes on people an institutional dependency: to be a refugee is to accept the passive role of recipient. ‘Refugee’ is equated with ‘victim’: a helpless dupe of external circumstances. Malkki puts it aptly: the refugee conceived as “bare humanity”, embodied in the image of a child (1995: 11). If people want to be included in the assistance programs designed for them and gain access to protection, they must conform to this label. If they voice their disagreement with the “categorical description of [their] assumed needs” (Zetter 1991: 44), conflict often ensues (Byrne 2000, Oliver-Smith 1991, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005, Waldron 1987). UN and NGO workers are surprised or annoyed to find that their beneficiaries have an opinion. Assertiveness is a nuisance: it interferes with the routines of providing assistance, considered stressful enough as it is.
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The mere fact that conflicts between refugees and their ‘helpers’ occur, shows that people are not defencelessly at the mercy of the labels bestowed on them. Instead, some refugees strategically employ these labels in order to gain access to specific resources. Horst (2006) shows how Somali refugees in Kenya changed their identities according to the institutional demands of UNHCR’s resettlement program. When ‘vulnerable women’ became an eligible category, certain married couples decided that the woman would present herself as a widow. If she was selected to go abroad, her husband would stay behind and later try to join his wife through family reunion procedures in the resettlement country. Others, learning that certain resettlement countries used clan membership to determine whether a Somali individual had a profound fear of persecution, changed their clan identities. Research in India showed that female migrants from East Pakistan, acting against the unequal gender relations and treatment in the camps, claimed their very status as refugees to make collective demands as women (Sinha-Kerkhoff 2004). That they managed to do so even in the restrictive environment of the camps shows that even if the comparison between refugee camps and Goffman’s ‘total institution’ may not be totally unwarranted (Harrell-Bond 2000), this does not mean there is no room at all for negotiation and creative resistance. However, even if people manage to use their refugee identity effectively, the label still forces them to manoeuvre within a limited and limiting frame of reference as to who they are. In the long run this is a highly stressful and alienating exercise. Most refugees, especially initially, need assistance, and many will quickly fine-tune their behaviour to what they learn is expected of them, for instance in terms of clothing, the accounts they give and their body language.12 They become skilled performers or role players (Goffman 1959), which illustrates their ingenuity and coping skills. However, the stress and strain of conforming to social expectations and stereotypes while privately experiencing their contradiction is ultimately humiliating.
Labelling and self-definition
Tied up with the practice of labelling are issues of trust and distrust, which are central to the lives of refugees (Daniel & Knudsen 1995). One day when I double-checked with Mikael whether he was fine with preparing written answers to my questions, he said:
Yes, I enjoy it, it’s good practice before going back to school. And the other reason why it is good is because it is free. Usually, every time you have to answer questions somebody is going to judge you by them, or decide about your fate. And they always assume that you are lying.
The damaging impact that the institutional climate of disbelief has on people cannot be underestimated. At the same time, refugees have their own opinions and prejudices about the group to which they technically belong, and many young men distinguished between “real” and “fake” refugees among themselves. In February 2000, Mikael gave me an essay to read, which he had titled Exercising My Freedom of Thought on Multiple Personality. It was a few days after unknown assailants had attacked him late at night. His wounds had been treated in Mulago hospital, and his lip and forehead stitched. When handing me the paper on which he wrote his essay he apologised for it being tattered with bloodstains. The essay expresses the resentment Mikael felt towards refugees who presented themselves as persecuted human rights activists but who, in his eyes, turned into wavering and opportunistic individuals once confronted with the arbitrariness and injustices of the ‘refugee regime’.
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 301
What kind of miracle does change a man of justice, morality and principle when in his country of origin, into one who bows to parasites in the humanitarian sector, who work for the sake of fortune and fame, after he becomes a refugee? What kind of instant evolutionary process, or traumatic experience, or culture shock, changes a man who openly or secretly refused to tolerate a narrow-minded regime, into a sloppy, slimy liar?
Set aside those who were in the Rwandan crisis or the Jews in Adolph Hitler’s Europe, because they are persecuted for who they are. Forget about those who are caught up in crossfire during fighting among rival forces, and who are forced to flee for safety. I also don’t want you to think about those who left their country because of drought and famine. I want to concentrate on the so-called refugees of conscience or ideology.
Who is a refugee? A refugee is a person who refuses to submit himself to the government in his country of origin. Why can’t they submit to the government? Because they can’t tolerate the injustice in their community and in the administration of their government. In my opinion one of the reliable measures of the credibility of an individual case refugee is his inability to stand injustices.
But where does a refugee acquire the ability to stand injustice towards him in his host country? In talking with refugees, I am frequently appalled by the lack of strong belief they have in anything. Many have become chameleon-like in their ability to change their opinions depending on the dominant person in the group they are with. I have seen communists change into imperialists when with an imperialist group, then assume the protection and coloration of communism when they are with people of the left.
If a refugee bends to opportunities (i.e. refugee status, resettlement, job opportunities and higher education), I can only see there is a serious conflict between what he claims to be and what he actually is. If he can stand intimidation during his asylum interview, yet he claims to be unable to stand oppression of any kind, doesn’t his claim become vague and his complaints indefinable?
My question is, aren’t individual case refugees undiscovered multiple personality neurotics, who at times put their lives in danger for the sake of justice while at another time they are vicious opportunity hunters? What is at stake, or a priority, to a real refugee is not opportunity or success, but hunger for a taste of justice, hunger for a word of truth. In fact I feel helpless to admit that our world is a mocking ground for the opportunity seeker in every sector of life.
Carolyn Nordstrom writes: “Worlds are destroyed in war … Not just worlds of home, family, community, and economy but worlds of definition, both personal and cultural” (1995: 147). Is that what is at stake for Mikael? When we talked about his essay, he explained he wanted to understand what it is that happens to people, why they change, why many refugees behave in such a shameful way. “I need to understand,” he said, “because here I’m one of the refugees, and so I must compare myself, whether I also fit into that category”. He distrusts others, and is no longer sure whether he can trust himself – whether he is still the same person that he always thought himself to be. This was perhaps the most difficult or painful thing to deal with for other young men too: that in some ways the labels and identities ascribed to them by others did ring true. Samy said:
The title of refugee gives me a headache and medicine will not help. I’m thinking all the time. Even now, when I’m talking to you I’m thinking… People believe that a refugee is not able to help himself, that he needs to be assisted. And it’s true,
302 Reflections
because even though you try to be independent, sometimes you still suffer, you need help from somewhere… The life as refugee is very bad indeed because you depend on other sources, not from yourself. And even if you try your best to hide it, you still have that title.
At times when he was in particular dire straits, Samy would appeal to friends abroad for assistance. But the act of asking implied the confirmation of his ‘typical’ refugee dependence. He said: “It takes me three days to write the word ‘money’. I don’t want to write it. Then at last I think, ‘Ok, it’s not a crime to ask for help, I’m hungry, let me ask’”. As Marcel Mauss put it: “The gift not yet repaid debases the man who accepted it” (Mauss 1970 [1950]). Young men like Samy sought to qualify their situation by putting it in the perspective of time: it/I was not always like this in the past and it/I will not always be the same in the future. Isaac, the Sudanese theology student, refused to have his situation and himself be defined by the reductionism of a one-shot exposure. He said:
I’m not ashamed of being a refugee, because when you’re displaced from your homeland that’s not a problem you can become ashamed of. I did not do crimes. I will not be ashamed because I know things will turn right later. Because in any country they may have instabilities, but if God gives peace to that land then that title of refugee will disappear. Now this title of refugee is compulsory to us Sudanese. But anybody in this world may pass through that. Even Jesus was a refugee.
My research confirms what is self-evident: refugees conceive their identity as quite different from those bestowing the label (Essed, Frerks & Schrijvers 2004, Harrell-Bond 1986, Hitchcox 1990, Horst 2006b, Malkki 1995a).13 Thus, to avoid being distrusted, stigmatised or branded a liar or idler, if given half the chance people hide their refugee identity. They call themselves students, and use their student IDs to identify themselves. They use their Yolé!Africa IDs and call themselves artists. Some decide to pay the poll tax, which in the eyes of the police makes them into law-abiding Ugandan citizens. People resist being controlled by labels that detonate with their self-perception. The identities of uprooted people are anything but one-dimensional and show complexities due to the ever-changing circumstances they find themselves in. The refugee label disregards this diversity and has no regard for refugees’ purely individual characteristics and qualities, talents and personalities. The enforcement on individuals of a generalised and stereotyped identity negates one of the most fundamental human needs: the need for self-definition.
4. FROM IDENTITY TO INDIVIDUAL AND SELF
The question ‘Who am I now?’ was a pertinent one for all the young men I got to know in Kampala. Each in their own way, they reflected on the changes that had taken place in their lives and were busy renegotiating their position vis-à-vis others, the past, and their new environment. Dealing with change is an inherent part of life for young people finding their place in society, yet for young refugees this challenge is magnified by experiences of flight and exile. The issues of identity with which the refugees in Kampala tussled were manifold. They tried to reconcile the labels ascribed to them (refugee, idler, liar, profiteer, traitor) with how they saw themselves. They had to choose between taking on identities that were useful and strategic – ‘performing’ in Goffman’s sense of the word - and remaining true to their actual perceptions of self. And they experienced a tension between their desired and their (as yet) unattainable identities. They aspired to be university students, responsible
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 303 fathers, cosmopolitan citizens or famous artists, but in reality most were busy eking out a living on a day-to-day basis, left with little time to work towards these future visions of themselves. Implicated in their identity struggles was the contradiction that young people generally are faced with: wanting to belong to a group on the one hand and wanting to emphasise one’s singularity on the other, or the choice between being ‘a part of’ and ‘apart from’ (McSpadden 1999). Identity, Moore writes, is about “processes of identification and differentiation. These processes are engaged … with the desire to belong, to be part of some community, however provisional … and it is in this desire that much of the passion for difference resides” (1994: 2). All their questions about identity and belonging converged in the fundamental ‘Who am I?’, a question to which some people, especially during their early days in Kampala, lacked the most rudimentary answer. I came across the notes on a meeting with Petna, in July 2000, when we discussed the documentary he wanted to make.
Petna wants to call his film La Lumière sur L’Ombre. Explains: The shadow is the refugee, it is the shadow of your real self. The light is like the sun, your hopes and aspirations. When at home, you are yourself, with a face and an identity. When in exile, you are your shadow, without a face, without identity. But the light gives life to the shadow. The light is always there, it was your reason to run, you were hoping for something better. If the light would not be there, there would be no reason to keep on living. For refugees without hope, even their shadows die. The question underlying the film is, does my shadow have a face, an identity?
My original research question was: ‘Do the insecurities of war and exile affect young people’s identities, and if so, how?’ However, I always retained a certain ambivalence towards the term ‘identity’. In the course of the research, it became obvious that the overriding concern of most young men was to be seen and recognised by others as an individual person, a human being – a quality that is more fundamental than and precedes the question of identity. My consequent doubts about the value of the social science concept of identity for capturing what is at stake in refugees’ changing lives, can be summed up as follows: with the use of the term ‘identity’, are scholars busy describing and explaining the ‘shadow’ that Petna speaks of, rather than the ‘face’?
4.1 The individual/self in anthropology14
This study is a study of individuals. This choice was initially prompted by the situation I encountered in Kampala. Firstly, as noted, the protagonists of my research had arrived in the city on their own and did not automatically form part of any social group or network. They depended first and foremost on themselves and only secondarily could they lay claim to transient, ever-shifting alliances with acquaintances, neighbours, compatriots and friends. While for most of them this was a painful situation, they had little choice but to seize its challenges. A Sudanese young man like Samuel, who was forcibly recruited, who escaped the front lines but had no means of knowing whether his mother and siblings were still alive, nor any guarantee that he would ever return home, could only concentrate on his individual troubles, ambitions and opportunities. Young men like Samuel were on their own and presented themselves to me as individuals, rather than as members of a social group. Secondly, not only was it evident that the young men had many different ways of interpreting and responding to the events that had befallen them, I also observed that the human desire to be seen to respond, think and act differently strongly prevailed among the refugees. I saw this as an antidote to what most humanitarian and political practices and discourses do: confirm their essential sameness. In addition to their security concerns, part
304 Reflections of the reason why people used to ask me to talk to them privately - away from the group, around the corner, under the next tree - was a wish for the recognition of their individuality and the specificity of their situation. What they responded to was the indifference and the routine treatment they received at government, UNHCR and NGO offices. The experience of ‘not being seen’ was humiliating and they sought their contact with me as one opportunity to become visible (Myerhoff 1994 [1979]). To take this aspiration seriously was another motivation to embrace a focus on individual persons. That this is not only an ethical but also a political choice was discussed in Chapter Three: a study of individual persons who seek refuge in African towns and cities (or in Europe or North America for that matter) can help to counteract the stereotypical images that exist of refugees.
Anthropology knows very little study of the individual person. In fact, questions about the individual continue to be ignored because the individual is seen to derive from society’s structures and institutions (Cohen 1994). Even if anthropologists have moved away from a Durkheimian view of culture as an organic whole to a notion of culture that stresses conflict and indeterminacy, meaning is still thought to reside primarily in collective, social practices. There has been very little critical study of individuals who, as the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye (1997) puts it, can “wriggle out of” their cultural and societal context. I have always seen this as a shortcoming: if anthropologists no longer believe in culture as an integrating template, but as made up of social interaction among and between individuals, then how can they study culture/society without studying individuals? Besides, in their day-to-day living, individuals experience contradictions between their sociality and their individuality, which (and this is unmistakably so for the young men of this study) “frequently causes ... anguish, stress and perplexity” (Cohen 1994: 12). We cannot understand how people deal with this contradiction, nor generally convey their experiences, if we do not look at how they as individuals author these, creatively and proactively. I thus ally with the few anthropologists who have argued for amending the discipline’s overriding emphasis on ‘cultural meaning’, and for unmasking the individual nature of thought and experience (Abu-Lughod 1993, Cohen 1994, James, Hockey & Dawson 1997, Moore 1994, Rapport 2001). In his chapter in Anthropological Theory Today (Moore 1999b), Boyer states:
“We do not need to posit anything special about ‘cultural’ representations that would make them functionally different from other types of mental representation. Any individual mind entertains a large number of mental representations. Most of these are idiosyncratic” (Boyer 1999: 224, emphasis added).
In the history of anthropology there have been some attempts at paying more attention to individuals, and at questioning the unduly strict disciplinary boundaries between anthropology and psychology. In the 1960s, in response to structuralism, social scientists started to revaluate the place of the individual within societal structures of power. Clifford Geertz’ ‘interpretivism’, which gained ground in the late 1960s, was an early promise of more consideration for the individual. It reinterpreted culture as the means by which individuals engage with society, and boosted the discipline’s interest in processes of symbolisation and in the private and public facets of the individual. However, in the end, upholding the principle of ‘every man to his trade’, Geertz and his school stuck to the study of culture and turned away from the individual or self (Cohen 1994: 69-70). Only with the post-Geertzian turn to reflexivity (late 1970s and 1980s) did the self really become a subject of inquiry. Anthropologists reflected on the fraught relationship between the self (the anthropologist) and the other (the anthropologised) and ‘discovered’ that the anthropologised were self conscious, feeling and thinking humans just like ‘us’ (Cohen 1994: 3, 70, 135-138). This ‘discovery’ converged with growing anthropological
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 305 interest in cognate phenomena like thought, emotion and cognition (Carrithers, Collins & Lukes 1985, Lutz & White 1986, Schweder & LeVine 1984). Theories were formulated concerning thinking social actors and the strategies they employ in day-to-day living (Archer 1988, Giddens 1979, 1991, Long 1990, Long & Long 1992, Moore 1988, 1994). Long summarised:
“The essence of an actor-oriented approach is that its concepts are grounded in the everyday life experiences and understandings of men and women, be they poor peasants, entrepreneurs, government bureaucrats or researchers” (1992: 5).
Agency became a central concept: individuals do not merely comply with, or at best respond to, the imposed structures and discourses of society; they are capable of resistance. Various definitions of agency demonstrate the relevance of the concept to this study; such as Honwana’s definition of ‘tactical agency’ introduced in the chapter on Soldiers, and Long’s definition that “[t]he notion of agency attributes to the individual actor the capacity to process social experiences and to devise ways of coping with life, even under the most extreme forms of coercion” (quoted in Peters 2004: 7). Feminist anthropologists, who had been at the forefront of the reflexive turn, further contributed by formulating theories about the self as a gendered being. Moore argues in favour of developing a theory of the “differentiated subject” as “the site of multiple and potentially contradictory subjectivities” (1994: 55). She evaluates feminist use of the ideas formulated by Lacan about the importance of language and systems of meaning and signification for the constitution of self and subjectivity (Moore 1994: 42-48). While the Lacanian notion that people are all ‘subject to’ and ‘constituted in’ discourse is relevant to the study of refugees’ self-perceptions, the idea that individuals are determined by such discourses must be cautiously embraced. In Lacanian terms the ‘I’ is a “shifter” with very little real authority over its life and very little continuity in its experience of self. Though all individuals unite within themselves different and often contradictory qualities, I ally with Cohen that it is a position of “eminent common sense” (1994: 23) that the self has a unique essence formed by the individual’s genetic history, intellectual and emotional development and personal experience.15 Over a decade ago, Henrietta Moore noted “anthropology’s ... failure to develop a theory of the subject” (1994: 4) and in the same year Anthony Cohen’s persuasive Self Consciousness. An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (1994) was published. Unfortunately, their call has largely been left unheeded. Very few anthropologists so far have given individuals a prominent place in their ethnographies.16 Cohen concludes:
“the ethnographic literature ... is full of accounts of socially scripted personhood from which the authorial self is entirely absent” (1994: 79).
The “authorial self” is prominently present in all the narratives of part II of this book. Writing about these self conscious individuals caused me to revaluate the anthropological concept of identity. The question ‘Who am I?’ that the soldiers, students and artists posed was an existential question: it was not necessarily a question about identity, but rather about individuality or (the recognition and integrity of) self. Identity as a social science concept may suggest that it deals with the individual, but it hardly gets close to him or her. It is true that all people belong to certain societal groups or structures (family, political organisation, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender) and that this group membership, however tenuous or temporary, influences individuals’ self perceptions as well as their actions. As noted, people’s decision to resort to violence is often motivated by (perceived) threats to identity. Group affiliations and identities also serve benign practical ends. This study shows that for some refugees the simple statement “I am a student” or “I am an artist” was an
306 Reflections empowering act. However, while individuals employ collective forms to assert their identities, these should not be mistaken for “uniformities of identity” (Cohen 1994: 178). While identity is (in part) socially constructed, it is individually lived. Wani, Lopithi, Samuel and Jacob G. all referred to themselves as ex-SPLA soldiers, but they had experienced and now interpreted this attachment differently. Jean, Clinton and Mikael always emphasised the fact that they were students, but gave different value to this identification and had their own private aspirations. Lastly, identity is often interpreted or applied in terms of strategic role play. A study of identity as the roles that people take on to position themselves and deal with the contradictions of social life can be illuminating, but in the end is prone to be reductionist: it focuses on “what a person does socially to the exclusion of who the person is” (Cohen 1994: 7). Thus, rather than focusing on the vogue concept of identity, I propose that anthropologists move closer to studying the more intimate qualities of “who the person is”, or feels to be, which can be referred to as sense of self, selfhood, or individuality. Studying a person’s sense of self can only be conducted from the subject’s perspective: from within instead of from without. The concept of self is more holistic than that of identity: it transcends roles, identities and generalisations, it rejects every reduction, and can never be used as a label. This is of particular significance for the study of refugees (and any other marginalised group): a focus on people’s sense of self contributes to bringing in humanity and human dignity, to making whole again.
4.2 The individual/self in African thinking
When thinking of the young refugees in Kampala, plenty words to describe them and their struggles come to my mind: self-assertion, self-discovery, self-command, self-confidence, self-criticism, self-sacrifice, self-searching, self-fulfilment, self-destruction, self-centred, self- pity, self-supporting, self-made. Though I doubt that Kiswahili, Kakwa, Nande or Tigrinya have as many ‘self’-words as the English language does, these young men evidently entertained a notion of ‘self’ that many have falsely argued is an exclusively western thing (- witness this statement by an anthropologist in 1970: “Most Indians do not reveal themselves because it does not occur to them that they have unique selves to reveal” (Cohen 1994: 1)). The first African scholars writing on the subject did much to support the strict distinction between western and African notions of self. Best known is John Mbiti’s thesis that ‘I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am’ (Mbiti 1969), which was elaborated upon by other philosophers like Ifeanyi Menkiti and Joseph Nyasani. The central tenet of this view – referred to as communalism or communitarianism - is that an individual derives his or her moral worth from connection to and membership in a larger group. In its extreme form it states that Africans do not think of themselves as discrete individuals:
“It is the community which defines the person as person, not some isolated static quality of rationality, will, or memory” (Menkiti, quoted in Gyekye 1997: 37).
In recent years this view has been substantially criticised. Firstly, the exclusively sociocentric concept of self, and especially its application in political doctrines,17 was criticised for not being a ‘neutral’ metaphysical principle of social existence, but rather an impassioned critique of the existing social order in the West (labelled exploitative and predatory) and its forceful introduction into Africa. Kaphagawani writes:
“The concepts of the self adopted by these scholars are chosen strictly with this goal in mind: they are concerned not with what concept best captures the manifold
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 307
experiences of the self but with what concept best allows them to ... promote difference” (2000: 74).
Secondly, it was argued that the ‘I am, because we are’ perspective is too narrow, only doing justice to one side of the equation. The criticism is not meant to deny that communities play a vital role in the development of people’s sense of self, but calls to attention the issue of where to draw the boundaries between self and community, and how flexible those boundaries are. It questions what a sociocentric explanation of personhood implies for individual autonomy and responsibility. Kwame Gyekye was the first to articulate this criticism and has “reintroduced the individual into African thinking” (Kimmerle 1995: 90, my translation; also see Bell 2002: 60-64).18 In his Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (1997), the Ghanaian philosopher argues in favour of a ‘moderate communitarianism’, which essentially says that personhood can only partly, and never fully, be defined by one’s membership of a cultural community. This model, he writes, “acknowledges the intrinsic worth and dignity of the individual human person and recognises individuality, individual responsibility and effort”, while “integrating individual desires and social ideals and demands” (Gyekye 1997: 40, 41). Gyekye centralises the concept of ‘autonomy’, by which he means “not … self- completeness but the having of a will, a rational will of one’s own, that enables one to determine at least some of one’s own goals and to pursue them, and to control one’s destiny” (1997: 54). This implies that individuals, though “enmeshed in the web of communal relationships, may find that aspects of those cultural givens are inelegant, undignified, or unenlightened, and would thoughtfully want to question and reevaluate them”. He concludes:
“The possibility of reevaluation means, surely, that the individual is not absorbed by the communal or cultural apparatus but can to some extent wriggle out of it, distance herself from it, and thus be in a position to take a critical look at it” (1997: 54).19
In short, the critics of ‘radical communitarianism’ stress that the importance of community does not preclude recognition of the values of individuality, and that an individual, also in African societies, can exist meaningfully within the boundaries of a given community without being squashed by it (Gyekye 1997, Hountondji 1996 [1983], 2002, Kaphagawani 2000, Wiredu 1996). The recent critical discourse in African philosophy “valorize[s] the individual as the agent of change through social and cultural criticism” (Karp & Masolo 2000: 8). It confirms what this study shows: that individuals can step outside of the binds of community, and that this detachment – however unasked for or painful – encourages reflection on previously held cultural values. It is not only African philosophers who assert the existence of African notions of the individual and the self. Research carried out by anthropologists and some psychologists across the African continent shows that it is “an indefensible contention” (Cohen 1994: 14) that the individual is a peculiarly western concern (Hollan 1992, Jackson & Karp 1990, Jacobson-Widding 1990, 1991, James 1988, Lienhardt 1985, Riesman 1986, Schweder 1991, Whittaker 1992). It also shows that, very generally speaking, there are differences in how self and personhood are culturally conceptualised (Teffo & Roux 1998: 144-47).20 In the West, Descartes’ view of the person as consisting of matter and mind has left indelible impact; in most African conceptions, the material and spiritual aspects of a person know no categorical difference. In the West an epistemological or psychological definition of personhood is dominant: we define ourselves through our capacity to know and reason; the properties intelligence and will distinguish ‘human’ from ‘animal’. In Africa the starting point is interpersonal relations, which explains why illness and stress in many African
308 Reflections societies are considered directly related to either strained relationships with spiritual agents or community members, or due to feelings of guilt arising from a breach of communal morals/norms (Sogolo 1998). This does not mean that intelligence is not a defining quality of African personhood. The Bantu of eastern and southern Africa see a person as being endowed with intelligence, but also with a ‘heart’, which “integrates all that the interior man is; it harmonises the operations and acquisitions of intelligence, by adding to them the acts which other cultures attribute to the will” (Kagamé, quoted in Kaphagawani 1998: 174). In most Bantu cultures, ‘the heart’ is the personality of a human being: “it is that by which an individual man is himself and not another” (1998: 174). Of the many theses about ‘African personality’ this one struck me as an immediate reminder of what Samy said to me one day in September 1999. He and I had just wondered about the fact that, coming from such far apart places, we happened to share such an immediate understanding. His explanation was:
I think God first created us without hearts, minds and faces. Then one day he created many different hearts of different colours - blue, red, green - and he asked us to come and select a heart. We couldn’t see but everybody selected a heart. So maybe you chose blue and I also chose blue.
It is evident from the narratives in this book that the young men saw themselves as individuals – with a core that made them different from others, and which at the same time enabled them to share with others. At times they specifically referred to notions of self and individual. On his birthday in May 2005, I called and spoke to Samy. He had waited for this occasion to tell me his latest news: he had been accepted for resettlement to Canada. He said:
Things have been hard, you know that there were many times when I felt unlucky, but when I received this news, I felt a person once again. It was a message of peace to my mind in war.
Six years earlier, Samy had nodded by way of assent when his friend Raphal used these words to explain how exile made them feel: “You lose your identity, your personality. It is a problem in the heart of everyone. It’s not a problem against another person, it’s a problem inside your own body”. I also think of Lopithi’s evaluation of how his participation in the Sudanese war negatively affected “things to do with my development, my own development” (see Chapter Four). At the age of nineteen he had thought himself, a resolute young man, in a position to contribute to the liberation of his people and had joined the SPLA. Having been forced, after ten years, to leave the war prematurely, he stressed how his ambitions for his country had been at the cost of his personal aspirations and happiness: he had spent so little time with his family that his young son barely knew him; he had joined the SPLA to fight for his rights to education, but it was unlikely he would ever pick up on his interrupted studies; he felt inept in dealing with the new reality of civilian life. Little more clearly could he have expressed his sense of self, and the importance he attributed to it, than when one day he said:
Now if something happens to me, I think you can be the one to write my biography.
During my return visit to Kampala in January 2005, I discussed the issue of anonymity with the protagonists of this study. I had to put in quite some effort to convince them to let me use fictitious names, but eventually they suggested how to call them in this book. Then, when I asked what to do with names of villages, refugee camps where they had stayed, or routes they had travelled, the majority responded: “Ellen, don’t change other facts, my
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 309 story will lose its meaning”. I can only interpret this as an illustration of their highly evaluated sense of self and the importance they attributed to the individuality of their experiences.
5. REGAINING A SENSE OF SELF
Always ... they sought evidence that they were still the same people now that they had once been, however transformed. The sense of constancy and recognizability, the integrity of the person over time was their essential quest.
Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days, 1994 [1979], p. 37
Chapter Six on Artists mentions Samy saying to me one rainy morning at Tulifanya Gallery that he felt he had lost something important, but did not know what it was. He referred to it again in late September 1999: “Sometimes I don’t like the world, and myself. I don’t know what happened in my heart, I feel I’m in the air”. War and exile have had an effect on who he feels he is – his integrity of person is at stake, something before and beyond a question of identity. I recall another moment that can be interpreted likewise. Since Samy did not have an ID document, I prepared an improvised one stating: “This is to notify that the bearer of this paper, Mr. Samy Kambale Tawite, is a friend to the family of Ms. Ellen Lammers, and that he is currently working under her supervision at Kisugu, Kibuli- Kabalagala Road, plot 2025”. Better than nothing, we reasoned, in case of police controls. We attached a passport picture of Samy. When the strip of black-and-white photos had dropped out of the photo booth, Samy looked at it and immediately and rather brusquely put it away, saying he did not recognise himself. Earlier that day he had confided to me that he thought he had changed, that he was no longer the same person he was in Goma. He said he could not quite put into words what this change entailed, but it bothered him, even though he trusted that “one day I will change again, to how I was before”. When he put the passport photos away he said he would look at them again the next morning and see if that unfamiliar person might have got his smile back. I also think of an afternoon with Petna, shortly before we started Yolé!Africa in August 2000. From my research notes:
Petna arrives at around three. He is wearing glasses. He used to wear glasses in Goma, and these last months has had difficulty reading and writing as his eyes were hurting. He says he’s very happy, and looks it. Says everything is going well. Says he’s so pleased with his new glasses, not only because it solved his eye problem but also because “now I’m me again”. He wants to show me something and starts connecting the video camera. I prepare some food. Yesterday night he filmed the refugees who are sleeping outside at InterAid and Old Kampala police, it’s made a big impression on him. Says: “Your research is very, very difficult, you have to have a very strong heart to do it”. And: “As a refugee for me it’s very difficult to do this research, what I saw yesterday… these people are really suffering… but it’s not impossible”. I believe I understand his mood exactly - high-spirited because he’s touched on something that’s ‘real’, fundamental, despite it being so appalling and painful. We watch what he filmed.
It is the footage mentioned in Chapter Two: the young men at InterAid who take turns talking to the camera about their plight - sleeping on the cement floor outside without food, washing the plates of the prisoners in exchange for their leftovers. Petna said they were “hot”, angry. He then let me watch a copy of the videotape that he had sent home to
310 Reflections his family in Goma the day before. Petna is sitting on the bed in the room he shares with his sister, who has followed him into exile, looks into the camera and addresses each of his siblings, says their names and talks to them. I cannot follow his mixture of French and Kiswahili, but gather he is advising them on something. Then his sister takes her turn before the camera. Petna laughed and when I asked him what was funny, he said his sister was lying. “She’s telling our mum that all is fine with us here. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. My mother knows what we tell her is not the truth, that we are saying it just to comfort her”. Later, as he was leaving, Petna said:
You know, one of the questions you asked me to answer on paper, “what do you worry about most?”, you know what I worry about most now? To be a refugee. Now I fear being a refugee, because now I’m starting to feel normal again, I’m feeling as if I’m Petna as I was before. But when I see those young men sleeping at InterAid, I know they are the real refugees, and I fear being one of them.
Caused by the ruptures of war and exile, the young men in Kampala experienced uncertainties about themselves as unique individuals. Two things helped some way in redressing these feelings. The first was being able to provide for one’s own needs instead of being dependent. All who managed to keep away from the humanitarian offices (because they gained their own source of income, or because they finally decided there was nothing to be had from UNHCR and InterAid and gave up trying) mentioned this as a positive change in their lives: it returned to them a sense of self-worth. Secondly, what helped was being able to identify themselves with something other than ‘refugee’. To be able to say “I am a student” or “We are artists” is no small thing when other identifications – through family, village, occupation, etc. – have become inaccessible or meaningless. In order to gain access to the social networks of acquaintances and friends, the young refugees employed different ways to send out a certain impression. For instance, both women and men put effort into “looking smart”: they would rather go without food than that they economised on their appearance. Looking respectable (or fashionable for the young Congolese), they explained to me, was important to their self-worth but it also enlarged their chances of being invited to someone’s house for a meal. In Chapter Five on Students we saw that the student uniform plays a similar role: it shows the person wearing it is “serious”. I came across several examples of school-going refugees suddenly having easier access to assistance because they had proved ‘being serious’. Mikael wrote to me:
I’ve experienced something quite amazing. Now that I have my university ID, the people at UNHCR are suddenly polite to me. Yesterday the receptionist even offered me a chair while I was waiting for the protection officer. I think this is wrong, but I realised that’s how this world works: nobody is willing to invest in a lost case.
In strategic terms, a person’s ascribed identity is often more relevant to daily survival than his or her private concept of self, partly because these identities are easier to communicate than more elusive or idiosyncratic qualities. Still, the way one is perceived by others is not soul-saving. The identities of artist, student and soldier may help to define oneself vis-à-vis others, to attain visibility and sometimes access to resources, but it is not these identities alone which constitute selfhood. Despite his academic success, Mikael wrote:
I worry whether I will ever come out from this trap of being a refugee and specially the helpless emotional feeling that possessed deep inside my soul. Will I ever be the same person as I was before I became a refugee is my deepest worry.
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 311
Ultimately, the issue is regaining one’s humanity. Schrijvers writes about the internally displaced Tamils and Muslims in Sri Lanka:
“The longer the refugees were forced to live dependent lives, packed together in the camps like animals, the greater was their urge to (re)create structures and symbols which expressed their identity as human beings” (Schrijvers 1997: 73).
Retrieving a positive sense of self is a precondition for regaining one’s dignity and humanity. For the refugees of this study, crucial to this process were: overcoming the impact of violence (5.1) and recreating an image of oneself as a moral person (5.2).
5.1 Violence and self
Several studies pose that violence has transforming qualities and is essentially an assault on the self. Referring to Giddens, Nordstrom writes that as a result of wartime violence “ontological security in its most basic sense is undermined” (1997: 182). It reminds me of the words with which Samy recalled the day in September 1998 when RCD soldiers started recruiting young men from his Goma neighbourhood. He said:
That day everything changed, the colours in the road changed, I was not in the world. It was the same as when you sleep and you are dreaming. Because I had never seen this in my life.
Mikael wrote to me:
My repeated exposure to the cruel side of mankind has given me an understanding of man as a very cruel being. I have considerably lost interest and confidence in mankind. I have seen man’s ability to inflict pain on other men, and his disregard to the suffering of others because of his own greed. When I was younger I used to believe people mean what they say and I was serious about life and mankind. I never thought the world was such a fake world.
Terror and cruelty changed Mikael’s image of ‘mankind’ and by extension challenged his self-image. Regularly, he referred to the fact that he had lost his willingness, or ability, to communicate – which reminds one of Elaine Scarry’s phrase that “pain defies language”. In February 2000, Mikael wrote:
I have never talked with any of the neighbours, neither greeted them. I don’t give them any opportunity to come near to me. I know some of them come and use my sitting place in front of my room, but as soon as I come they depart. Now it seems there is unspoken promise and agreement that I don’t want to be talked to or disturbed. I deliberately created that silent atmosphere between me and them. But it is not only with them, it is also with most of the refugees from my own country or any other country. I don’t find it interesting talking to them.
At school and university, Mikael also kept his distance from fellow students. He realised that his chosen silence had its roots in his past. During one of our meetings in March 2000 he said:
I think I have made a big mistake. I never talked about what happened [in Ethiopia]. I think that is why I am as I am now. I think the prison is what changed me and I don’t know if I will ever be able to change that. When I was released I never talked. I lived with my sisters in the same compound, but for several years I
312 Reflections
never talked to them. And I never talked to the EPRP people again. I didn’t greet them. They thought I had gone crazy. My mother was worried and every morning she made me drink a full glass of holy water. She would come to wake me up and take me into the garden to drink this water. It hurt me because I didn’t believe in it. In fact what happened, when I was released I was very unapproachable. Everybody in the area knew me and always looked at me. But I just kept quiet.
Extreme violence can silence. I detected this in myself – I who was exposed to narratives of violence, to photos and paintings, but never to the real thing. I heard it in my voice, sometimes, when I tried to speak of what I had been told. Knowing the facts, I was at the same time unsure if what I was saying was true – true in the sense of possible; possible in the sense of ‘of this world’. I remember Samy’s muddled expression when halfway through his account about his family’s flight into the Congolese forests, and the killings they witnessed, he paused for a second then said: “You look at these people, they are human beings, but what they do... You keep asking yourself: who are these people, are they people?” It is an obvious fact that violence has always been part of human interaction, and yet the relationship between extreme violence and humanity remains hard to grasp.21
My observations in Kampala confirmed that wartime violence can affect people’s sense of self in a fundamental way. However, because I also witnessed people’s remarkable resilience to resist attacks made on their integrity, I have reservations to make this a general statement.22 Firstly, several authors have argued that war and violence constitute an assault on the self because the self is (at least in part) bodily experienced. Medical anthropologists have called embodiment the “existential ground of self” (Csordas 1994), and feminists have stressed the notion of the body as “one’s primary location in the world, one’s primary situation in reality” (Braidotti 1991: 219). War and trauma, as social experiences, are inscribed on the body (Csordas 1994, Daniel 1996, Das et al 2000, Feldman 1991, Nordstrom 1997, Winkler 1994).23 This is in part a tangible or visible inscription. Many young men complained of feeling sick and losing weight, of stomach pains, headaches, or “a problem with my blood”. While these ailments were certainly caused by their poor living conditions, some were also the psychosomatic remnants of war and trauma (Kleinman 1980, 1987, Summerfield 1998). The young men urgently wanted their complaints to be seen to, and their very restricted access to health care greatly worried them. Yet, if they could trust their bodies to be healthy, confirmed by expert medical tests, this worked as a step in overcoming trauma. Unasked for, the young men showed me their scars, the places where bullets had entered their body, the x-rays of bullets still lodged in their bodies. They did so to substantiate their accounts, but perhaps also because these visible traces could replace the words they struggled to find to speak of their experiences. The bodily inscriptions of war provided an alternative idiom, which served as a means to assert themselves and to present themselves as the persons they had now become, a first step towards acceptance and growth. Secondly, the immediate and long-term effects of wartime violence on individuals are personal and contingent on the resources people have to deal with their experiences. The process cannot be captured in general statements like: “Children personally touched by violence develop perspectives on the world which cripple their healthy maturation as citizens” (Trudell 2002: 12). The way in which children and youth respond to violence depends on individual factors such as age, gender, personality, family history and cultural background. It is also linked to the nature of the event, the length of exposure and the position the individual took up (Machel 1996: 168-169). Youths are often remarkably resilient to violence and exposure to atrocities because they are by nature future-oriented. It is therefore that local trauma counselling often focuses on concrete present and future
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 313 problems, rather than on the past (Peters, Richards & Vlassenroot 2003: 22-23). The war that Lopithi, Wani, Samuel, Jacob and countless young people with them had lived through had disrupted their life plans, especially in terms of education and establishing a family. The passionate wish of these young men was to recover exactly that. Few were interested in talking about the violence and insecurity that they had suffered and that had plagued their home country for decades. They came to Kampala with a clear purpose: education, jobs or resettlement. When they managed to achieve these goals, that helped them a great deal in overcoming their trauma. For others, artistic expression served as a means to contend with their wartime experiences. Chapter Six quoted Petna who said that dance gave him “the opportunity to deal with myself” and that it served as “a direct and very powerful therapy”. Artistic expression and imagination had comforting qualities and enabled the young artists to provide testimonies of their experiences - “the raw material of the truth” - which was an empowering experience. The act of testifying is “a traditional means of building and reaffirming identity in many cultures throughout the world” (Benmayor & Skotnes 1994: 15). Oguibe states that writing, painting, sculpting and dancing are all modes of expression (“enunciation”) which serve to
“establish our authority over not only our creativity, but most importantly, over our selves … It is this ability and freedom to enunciate, too, that takes us beyond the dominance of others, takes us, as it were, beyond the bounds of power” (Oguibe 1999: 20).
Petna put it categorically: “If I didn’t have my art, I would be already dead”. I also think of Ahmed, whose entire family was killed, who fled Somalia and felt desperately insecure in Kampala, and whose tireless writing of poems somehow helped him to assert and believe in himself. Yosief wrote that thanks to Yolé!Africa he had achieved his dream, “the dream of becoming an artist with a NAME” – yet he added that his experiences as a soldier in Eritrea had played their part in making him “strong and determined”. Other ex-soldiers also mentioned the positive aspects of their previous occupation. Wani said that it was during his military training, he was a child at the time, that he discovered his talent for leadership. He suggested that his wartime experiences had advanced rather than “crippled” his “healthy maturation”.
In Chapter Three the question was raised to what extent one can fully understand another person’s pain, fear or grief when one has not shared the experiences that caused these emotions. Based on his work in Northern Ireland, Feldman suggests that a person can no longer be known after having gone through extreme violence. He writes:
“How can they [perpetrators and victims of violence] be understood and depicted if they dwell on the other side of the border of conventional or known bodily sensory and moral experience?” (1995: 245).
It is true that some people, suffering from severe post-traumatic stress, are perhaps no longer themselves. However, is claiming that war victims can no longer be known, not tantamount to robbing them of their humanity? Being human is being cognizable to others and being able to have meaningful relationships. I can understand that a person listening to another person’s harrowing accounts of wartime violence, if these are far removed from his or her own experiences, may feel this person cannot be known. But this, I believe, says something about the limits of our imagination and empathy rather than about an allegedly transformed humanity of the person who has gone through these experiences. The young men of this study stated their pain, resentment and ambitions through narratives, music,
314 Reflections theatre and painting. If they had lost their humanity, I contend, they would no longer have had this desire to share and express. Besides, listening to people’s experiences, however incredible and brutal, I observed that all that makes a person human was still there: emotions like anger, grief and frustration, instances of solidarity, and the capacity for forgiveness. In fact, extreme violence does, in certain people, enlarge their humanness (Levi 1987 [1958]). Some of the young men of this study and I developed long-term personal relationships. Not only were these young men ‘knowable’ to me, and I to them, they were knowable to themselves. The closing lines of Petna’s piece Kekele, quoted at length in Chapter Six, are:
From the traditional Tam Tam Ngoma to modern electrical instruments, from the era of the sorcerer Lungo to the aeroplane, I remain Kekele.
After long routes mountains and plains cover forests and savannahs. I will always be Kekele.
Even Mikael, despite the uncertainties about himself and others that he routinely expressed, had moments when with his typical firmness he stated:
I’m confused about everything, but there’s one thing I know: I am Mikael!
Petna, Samy, Mikael and others expressed their fear of having changed, but they could all call upon memories which substantiated the continuity, even if fragile, of their sense of self.24 The relationship between wartime violence and the transformation of self thus needs qualification: in what circumstances, to what extent, for whom? The young men’s question ‘Who am I?’ – so apparent in the big, wide open eyes in Yosief’s early drawings – was triggered by the violence and cruelty they had witnessed, caused and experienced, but was also due to the fact that they were young and on their own in an unknown place and without clues about the future. I would like to defend that it is not just violence that affects a person’s sense of self, but rather violence as part of a general environment of insecurity and the concomitant confusion about changes of society and its moral codes.
5.2 War, exile and the moral person
For the refugees of this study, crucial to the process of regaining their dignity and humanity, was not only overcoming the impact of violence, but also recreating an image of themselves as moral persons. African philosophy suggests that individuals owe their sense of self and moral worth to the communities to which they belong. The young men of this study had fled their communities and were in Kampala on their own. Community remained a directive factor in their daily lives - even in, or especially in, its absence. While the young men focused on their individual pains and possibilities, they hardly ever lost sight of the larger picture of which they knew themselves part. Even if exile did not provide them with a community, they treasured the knowledge that there once was a community to which they belonged – and that this might again be so in the future. This knowledge implied a moral concern with that community, however distant or intangible at the time. In fact, the young men’s actual and imagined relationships to these communities were crucial to their process of regaining a sense of self.
The loneliness and indignity of exile, and the young refugees’ meagre prospects for a betterment of their situation in the near future, made some of them not only pose the question “Who am I?”, but also the more distressing “Am I a person?” This ties in with
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 315
Gyekye’s discussion about the moral conception of personhood. “An individual can be a human being without being a person”, the Ghanaian philosopher writes, that is, “there are certain basic norms and ideals to which the behaviour of an individual, if he is a person, ought to conform” (1997: 49-50). These basic norms and ideals include:
“kindness, generosity, compassion, benevolence, and respect and concern for others; in short, any action or behaviour conducive to the promotion of the well- being of others” (1997: 50).
And while Gyekye stresses that “achieving economic success or status is one thing; achieving personhood is quite another” (1997: 52), in the perception of the young refugees those two were not so easily taken apart. Their worries about not studying, not having a job, or not being in a position to support a wife and children, which may “from the position of the wider community” indeed be seen as lacking social or economic success, in their own eyes represented a more general failing. In situations of severe stress, only exceptional personalities retain the mental space to see other people’s needs and translate the values of compassion and benevolence into concrete action. Yet, the majority for whom this is unfeasible may all the same be burdened by strong feelings of incompetence. It is true that, by necessity, the young men’s concerns and choices became more individually oriented. However, this change tore at some deep-felt social principles. Assefa, a well-educated Ethiopian young man candidly said: “As refugees we develop bad habits. I started smoking in prison. And I’m losing my good culture. I’m losing the habit of sharing. I’m afraid that when I return to my country I can’t live with them like before”. Marcus, a medical student from Sudan, observed about refugees in Kampala:
War has changed their mind. For example, people are not received like before. After you have stayed with someone for one night, this person will ask, ‘Where are you going tomorrow?’ People have become individualistic because of the war.
Relevant in this respect is Kwame Gyekye’s remark that:
“[I]f a human being lives an isolated life, a life detached from the community, he would be described not as a person but as an individual. A life detached from the community would be associated with an egoistic life. An individual detached from the community would not be considered a responsible moral agent” (1997: 50).
Even though generally speaking people have the faculty to distinguish between different reasons why certain individuals (come to) live outside a community, this does not mean that for the person involved, for his or her perception of self, these reasons serve as a valid excuse. Awareness of the fact that personhood is defined in terms of moral achievement is extremely relevant to understanding the situation of refugees in Kampala: their age and gender imply specific moral responsibilities. For the young men to regain a positive sense of self, it is crucial to be able to play a meaningful role within their families and their communities at large.
Family, gender and masculinity
The narratives of Part II show that the young men in Kampala worried about foregoing their responsibilities towards the families which they had left behind. Feelings of guilt and self-recrimination about having escaped to relative safety while families and friends remained in desperate situations are mentioned in other studies as well (Matsuoka & Sorenson 2001, McSpadden 1999). These feelings are gendered. Though gender ideologies
316 Reflections differ between and among communities in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Congo and Sudan, the shared conception is that a man, if he is a moral person, takes responsibility for himself and for his family. This involves economic responsibility as well as providing physical protection. War and exile limit the possibility to act according to such cultural norms. The young men in Kampala barely had the means to take care of themselves, let alone to support their families back home. This meant that they had few channels for asserting their manhood, which evidently put great pressure on their feelings of self-worth. In his biographical article ‘Rebel artist in exile’ (September 2002) Yosief stated: “As I’m writing this, I feel greatly inadequate and powerless that I cannot help my mum from the skills I acquired from school”. This I often heard: “My parents struggled for my school fees, but what am I doing for them now?” For Samuel, the ex-soldier who had been abducted from his school in Juba, this was the reason why, when after eight years of no news he heard that his mother was still alive, and was immensely grateful for this, he did not immediately contact her. He said he was “a grown man” and could not return home empty-handed: “I only want to go home if I can help my mother”. Some young men eventually, or sporadically, managed to assist their families, which boosted their self-esteem. When Yosief’s artwork started selling, he bought a plane ticket for his widowed mother to come from Asmara and live with him in Kampala. Samy, who during a risky visit to his home town Goma emailed that “When I saw the kind of life my family is in tears came off my heart”, took his younger brother back with him to Kampala, relieving his parents of another mouth to feed. The boy was not schooling in Goma, and by being in Kampala he would at least learn some English. With the high value given to education, it is no surprise that those who had managed to get into school or university in Uganda, worried about the lack of educational opportunities for their siblings at home. When he was a boy of thirteen, Wani was bailed out of the SPLA by an uncle concerned about his nephew’s education. Eight years later Wani, who had just obtained a university scholarship, struggled to get his one close surviving relative, the son of his late sister, into primary school. Jean, who as a child had escaped the war in north-eastern Congo and had managed to get into school, later wanted to bring a younger sister and brother to Uganda, because, as he said, they were “wasting their time without learning”. Jean also had the future in mind: coming from a large rural, uneducated family, he foresaw responsibilities that he, despite his education, would be unable to live up to: “If all of them have to depend on me that can’t work”.
Most of the young men of this study thus tried their utmost to live up to the social standards on which they had been brought up. At the same time, their distance from home and the new realities they encountered in the city caused them to reassess certain cultural values and practices. This reassessment foremost concerned gender issues. Other studies also observe that gender is often the perspective through which people experience and attempt to understand the challenges of exile (Essed, Frerks & Schrijvers 2004 2004, Schrijvers 1997, 1999a, Turner 2004). To the young men in Kampala, the subject of girlfriends and marriage was particularly pertinent. Samy said:
In my village when you are eighteen years old you are supposed to be a man and do everything by yourself. You have to get a wife and build your house with your own hands. You get a goat and when it produces you have to bring the small ones to the parents of your wife. It is also the time to look for friends. You need friends to help build your house and to protect you.
Samy had just turned eighteen when we had this conversation in 1999, and he needed not add how far removed he was from “getting a wife” or “building a house”, and even friends were an issue. Together with Raphal, one friend he trusted, we talked about love and the
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 317 customs of marriage on which they had come to reflect quite critically. In our conversation included in Chapter Six, Samy and Raphal expressed their agreement that “love” should be the basis for marriage, rather than the family background or the material position of the prospective bride. Samy added: “That’s another difference between us and you: we buy our wives. Before we can marry we have to look for money to pay. But we can’t say ‘buy your wife’ in front of our parents. They don’t want to see it like that”. A few weeks later in September 1999, Samy treated Raphal and me to the story of how his parents had met, rounding off with a one-line summary: “My father stole my mother and he closed his eyes for the fact that she was still so young”. Raphal agreed that it should not be like that: apart from love, mutual agreement was to be “the most important”. Raphal had been working for a women’s human rights organisation at the time when he fled eastern Congo. He was critical of men’s behaviour, and suggested that the war in his home country had given some women a reason to flee their homes, when what they were actually escaping was domestic violence. Samy’s cartoons about “life in the village”, drawn during his early, solitary days in Kampala, included explicit and striking drawings of women’s mistreatment at the hands of their men. Samy and Raphal were not the only ones who critically reflected on the relationships between men and women. Lomeling and Marcus, Sudanese medical students, expressed criticism about the unequal division of labour. They said: “In the refugee camps ninety-five percent of all the work is done by women. They cook, do the baby care, fetch water and firewood, and get the family rations on distribution days”. In their future marriages, they said, they would seek to “balance” the work. I asked how other men would respond to such novel behaviour and Marcus responded: “They will abuse you and say you are belittling yourself, but you have to try not to take offence. Our generation will change this”. Many also stressed their rejection of the ‘traditional’ ideal of marrying “within your own tribe”. One Congolese young man said:
People keep telling me, “You have to go back to where you are from and get a lady from there”. I don’t believe in that. There are nice ladies everywhere. I had a girlfriend here when I just arrived. She is the one who helped me to learn English.
Samy simply stated that “I will marry a stranger”, and it was his elder brother who, having joined him in Uganda in 2000, married a Ugandan young woman five years later. Samy’s parents did not object and even made a great effort to come from Goma to attend the wedding ceremony. Others too admitted that the displacement of the past decades had caused a relaxation of the codes on suitable marriage partners. Jacob, who had not been in touch with his family ever since as a child he marched to Ethiopia with the SPLA, thirteen years ago as we spoke, was quite certain that “If I went back with my wife from another tribe or nationality, there will not be a problem, they will accept her”. Jacob later had a child with a Ugandan woman, which he was hesitant to tell me. He went back to Sudan after the 2005 peace deal, and I hope his relatives responded as he had predicted.
To some extent, the ideas Samy, Raphal, Marcus, Jacob and others expressed on marriage and gender relationships may have been influenced by their perceptions of my views on such issues. Besides, certain young men in Kampala had little choice but to adjust their ideas in order not to feel inadequate. After all, some young men had their girlfriends looking after them instead of the other way around, which, if they did not interpret this in terms of new gender norms, would be humiliating. Other studies of forced migrants and diaspora communities also observe how values and self-perceptions are reconsidered in exile when they prove inconsistent with present experience, and therefore have become inadequate modes of expression and organisation of behaviour (Camino 1994, McSpadden
318 Reflections
1999). Besides, since no cultural norms and practices, and thus also no gender discourse, is static or hegemonic, people can identify with, or even devise, alternative discourses and appropriate certain cultural forms in individual ways (Moore 1994). One young Congolese musician at Yolé!Africa relied on a wide definition of ‘a man has to be productive’ to explain that even if he barely managed to feed himself, let alone others, he certainly was not an idler. He warmly recalled his late mother’s words and said:
I’m a positive person, I take life the way it comes. My mum encouraged me to be active and to work. She always told me, “A real man is a person who has a spirit of creativity”. She used to say, “Il faut toujours creer”.
And with his music, he said, that is what he did. Another interpretation, on which the young men drew extensively, was to frame masculinity as power of the intellect rather than just physical or productive power. Wani, who as a child recruit wanted to revenge the death of his parents, came to reconsider the principles of manhood that the SPLA military training, and his upbringing in Sudan, had given him. It was not that he dismissed the importance of physical strength needed to protect oneself and one’s family, but he ascribed new value to the power of the well-chosen word and the qualities of democratic leadership. He was twenty-two, unmarried and in university, and said:
Traditionally you are considered a responsible man if you are married. And traditionally if you are not married you cannot be a leader … If they see me in the village, they may say I’m wasting my time. But for those who went to school marriage is not as it used to be. Anyway, I’m already a man. I’ve first married education, then later I will marry for a family.
Marcus, also a Sudanese student in his twenties, said: “You are seen as an adult according to marriage. In our culture only if you are married you are allowed to sit with the elders. However, this may not be the same in the future. We hope that soon education will be considered too”.
Manly contributions to society
Their experiences of war and exile caused the young men in Kampala not only to reflect on gender relations and their roles within their families, but also on their manly responsibilities towards their communities at large. The narratives of Part II reveal their aspirations to contribute to their home, and sometimes host, countries. Each in their own way, the young men emphasised their ambitions of contributing to economic development, good leadership, justice and the rule of law, the end to foreign oppression, or understanding and the tolerance of ethnic and religious diversity. Wartime violence as many had experienced it (Mikael’s memory of the Red Terror campaign in Ethiopia, Samy’s experiences in the Congolese forest, Jacob’s reference to the killings between Nuer and Dinka in southern Sudan), had meant a profound attack on the values of community with which they had been brought up. Excessive violence had shaken their trust in a moral community, especially because a great deal of this violence was experienced as coming from ‘within’. Sudanese young men admitted, sometimes reluctantly, to having fled from “our own brothers”. It was the SPLA soldiers and other militias, “blacks like us”, that had attacked their villages, forced them to spend their nights in the bush until eventually they had managed to cross into Uganda. It was the fear for recruitment into “our own army” that made them leave their parents behind. These young men had hardly ever seen an ‘Arab’ soldier, the official outside aggressor. In other places,
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 319 the violence of war even entered family relationships. The Red Terror campaign in Ethiopia for a large part depended on family members willing to betray one another (Abbink 1995b, Matsuoka & Sorenson 2001). During Eritrea’s war of independence with Ethiopia, the bond among the EPLF fighters was so powerful that during the civil war between the ELF and the EPLF, siblings killed each other if they belonged to either of the two organisations. They were socialised into the norms of each front and they felt more attached to their organisations than to their families. There were no links with families until the late 1980s and both fronts functioned as families: every fighter was like a brother and a sister (Gaim Kibreab, personal communication). The young men’s experiences of these ingredients of wartime violence begged a variation of questions on the theme “Am I – is he, are they – (a) person(s)?” These were questions for witnesses and victims, but certainly also for the perpetrators of wartime violence, i.e. the ex-soldiers of this study. Its complexity was addressed in Chapter Four. On the one hand participating in certain acts of violence meant transgressing community norms and values; on the other hand the use of violence was justified as fighting for the values of that community and defending it against foreign intrusion or domination. As noted, Sudanese young men saw the SPLA war as a continuation of the struggle against domination and humiliation that their elders had started by means of the first Anyanya. To be able to say “I fight a war my ancestors started”, served as an assertion of their manhood. Despite the dilemmas and internal conflicts that participation in war brought, the overall feeling remained that not to protect one’s community is not to be a man. Reflecting on his own childhood aspirations to be a soldier, Wani recalled:
In the villages where there is war, the young men are told: “What is wrong, are you all women, can’t you do something?” If you don’t want to join, you are called a woman, it doesn’t feel that good to be called a woman.
And Mikael, who said he had never touched a gun in his life, hinted: “In Ethiopia being a man means being able to kill two birds with one bullet”. Supporting a war, even if not physically, can also be an asset to one’s (manly) status and self-worth. Many Sudanese refugees in Uganda carry SPLA membership cards. Lomeling and Marcus explained that people buy these cards “to move freely” (the Ugandan government recognises the SPLA card as official ID), “to contribute to the Movement, as a sign of support”, and, they added with some scepticism, “to get a reputation in the community of being liberators even though they are here in Uganda”. Lomeling had had very bad experiences with the SPLA and lived in fear of being tracked down by a certain commander, to the extent of this affecting his health and his studies, but he nevertheless stated that he respected the SPLA soldiers very much “because they are fighting on our behalf”. He recalled with some pride: “At times the SPLA came to the refugee camps here in Uganda. They ask you to contribute what you can give, willingly, whatever you have, food, money, or clothes. One time I left my shoes for them”. Many exiles support the wars in their home countries from a much further distance (Hepner 2005, Matsuoka & Sorenson 2001). Ghosts and Shadows (2001) deals with such “long-distance nationalists”. The authors write:
“Across Canada, Eritreans in particular committed themselves to assisting the nationalist movement … These commitments devoured time that others devoted to work, study, and family, and some activists suffered health problems through overwork and stress … For some Eritreans this commitment overshadowed any efforts to adapt to Canadian society … Among the Eritrean diaspora, support for nationalism and the revolutionary ideals of the tegadelti, the EPLF soldiers, exerted
320 Reflections
a strong influence and provided moral guidance” (Matsuoka & Sorenson 2001: 98-99, emphasis added).
For the students and artists of this study the moral questions about contributing to their communities were less complex than for the soldiers. Rather than committing themselves to supporting a war, even if its cause was considered just, they found self-worth in choosing to be and present themselves as artists and students. This implied a moral statement linked to the young men’s reformulated ideas about what their societies needed, about creativity, justice and development. As a result of the deep suspicion they had come to harbour against national (and international) government initiatives,25 they did not want to involve themselves with active politics. Yet, like so many youth across the continent today, they tried out different avenues to comment on the political situation in their countries and to express what they considered the qualities of a ‘moral community’.26 They saw themselves as the agents of change that some literature has suggested them to be (Argenti 2002, Sommers 2001c). The artists at Yolé!Africa made political statements through their work and activities (such as the video production Twaomba Amani discussed in Chapter Six), and tried to back these up through the centre’s inclusive atmosphere. Some were involved in discourses on a new pan-Africanism – one with a cosmopolitan slant - and aspired to connect with youth across the continent to share and bolster their vision. The students, who took their cues from discourses on emancipation, justice and human rights, confirmed Ranger’s observation that “the modernizing project, whether for good or for ill, still has much life in it in postcolonial Africa” (1996: 273). Their aspirations to be lawyers, agriculturalists, doctors and politicians were linked up with their serious intentions to make a constructive contribution to their societies. Essentially, what many young men expressed was: ‘We are the new generation’, who, duped by the current political leaders yet also empowered by our experiences of war and exile aim at ‘doing things differently’.
6. BEYOND THIS STUDY
By way of concluding this book, I would like to suggest some questions for further research. The narratives of this study have revealed the “processual nature of personhood, the constant and gradual remaking of persons” (Kaphagawani 1998: 173) that is central to African conceptions of the individual. They have also given some clues about the fact that communities, like the individuals who build them, are dynamic and susceptible to change. These two claims are the outcome of a study which was located in Kampala, the city where the young men mingled with people from different countries and backgrounds, learned to speak new languages, and were provided with a window on the world that was new to many of them. In the course of their exile, they all developed new contacts that extended beyond Uganda, and for some beyond East Africa and the continent. Artists did so through their work; students through school, befriending classmates from other African countries; and many, as a result of UNHCR’s resettlement program, kept in touch with relatives, friends or compatriots who had left for the USA, Europe or Australia. It was part of their survival strategies to develop and invest in these networks. These contacts reinforced their feeling that they had never wanted to see Uganda’s capital as their final destination. They pictured themselves as ‘in transit’, imagining that they would either return home or move on. It has been noted that forced migration to cities in Africa regularly marks the beginning of a longer journey, to other urban centres regionally, or to cities elsewhere in the world. Many of the young men of this study did eventually move on, as witnessed by the emails, phone calls and letters I received from Dar es Salaam,
Identity and Self in the Aftermath of War 321
Sydney, Cape Town, Brussels, New Haven, Winnipeg and many other places. Clifford (1994) uses the term “travelling cultures”, and writes that for refugees the question is not so much ‘where are you from?’ but ‘where are you between?’ My question would be how young refugees understand such transnational life experiences and how they integrate these into their individual lives. Following from this, it would be interesting to research the new notions of community which are negotiated as a result of these transnational experiences. As noted, the upheaval that took place in the young men’s lives already led them to critically reflect on certain community values and rules, including gender discourses and ideas about inclusion and exclusion based on kinship and ethnicity. One may expect this process to continue in the light of the young refugees’ increasing transnational alliances. Finally, this centre pass for further research links up not only with the currently growing body of research on forced migration and transnationalism (Al-Ali & Koser 2002, Cheran 2006, Collyer 2006, Horst 2006a, Kusow & Bjork 2006) but it also takes its departure from the recent insight that young Africans in general must be studied as “actors in the theatre of globalisation” (Diouf 2003: 5) 27 who are fighting, some against all odds, to make their desired transnational connections a reality.
EPILOGUE
Repeated, the words took on such power that, deep inside her, Irena saw them written out with capital initials: Great Return. She dropped her resistance: she was captivated by images suddenly welling up from books read long ago, from films, from her own memory, and maybe from her ancestral memory: the lost son home again with his aged mother; the man returning to his beloved from whom cruel destiny had torn him away; the family homestead we all carry within us; the rediscovered trail still marked by the forgotten footprints of childhood; Odysseus sighting his island after years of wandering; the return, the return, the great magic of the return.
Milan Kundera, Ignorance, 2002, p. 4-5
The young men in Kampala spoke of their longing for home and return. This was often triggered by our conversations about their living conditions in Kampala, which for all of them had meant change. Change in terms of the size and comforts of their house, the experience of sharing rooms with people they barely knew, the wary looks from neighbours who spoke a different language, the novelties but also high costs of city life, the threat of eviction by impatient landlords, the loneliness of a single room and no parents. These differences in living circumstances between Kampala and home in Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea represented the over-all changes in the young men’s lives. In Chapter Two I quoted from Mikael’s description of the room where he lived when we first met in early 2000 – a stark contrast with how he remembered his family house in a middle class neighbourhood in Addis Ababa. He not only explained about the differences in material comforts, but his description also revealed clues as to what ‘home’ meant to him.
Throughout my refugee life in Uganda I have never lived in a room with an electric light. But I’m always successful and get a candle to use at night. Even though my roommates also have city backgrounds, I don’t remember them bothering about this serious problem of not having a light at night. But for me one of the most painful experiences of my refugee life is not having light at night before I sleep. Back home I had my own private room ever since I was twelve years old. I had a wide wire spring bed, a shelf and studying desk and a box that could be locked for my secret and personal treasures. My room was a bit separated from my other sisters’ and brothers’ rooms. In front of my room I had flowers in pots and also a small lawn for my favourite flowers. With my father and mother our family consisted of fourteen people while I was with them. I was often occupied with my personal activities in my room and nobody came to my room without my permission. In general I lived with my family in an understanding of maximum respect for individual privacy. 324 War, Refuge and Self
Twelve years later these details of home still carried explicit value to him. My conversations with Samy over the years also revealed meanings of home. On the first day we met, mid July 1999, he said:
These days, the time that I’m happy is small and the time that I’m not happy is big. It is because I’m thinking all the time. I don’t want to think anymore. When I was still in Congo I was always happy because I had so many people to talk to. My mother always told me about her history, about life in her village when she was a little girl. She makes tablecloths with patterns of flowers and I always used to draw flowers for her. And every day after school my friends came to look for me at home.
Home for Samy was also making his first wall painting in town. Home for Petna was being recognised in the streets of Goma as the founder of the youth groups Maideni and Propulsion, and as ‘the man with the camera’. But home was also, on his own, enjoying the view from the surrounding hills over his beloved hometown, the volcano and forests in the distance, and coming home to his mother’s wise words. Home for Lopithi Igom were his age mates in his father’s village, “a little deeper into the jungle ... surrounded by hills, rivers and streams”. Home was also Juba town, where he got involved in the student protests. Home was his elder sister who loved and spoiled him, the Benjamin. Home for Samuel Alim was going along with his father on his jobs as a photographer, and being given a bicycle to trade salt and sugar during school holidays. It was also his mother’s popular home-brew bar. And it was being “the first of my tribe” to complete Senior Three. For Yosief home was his grandmother, her story-telling to the children in their Asmara neighbourhood, his chalk drawings on the pavement in front of their house. John Wani’s parents were killed when he was five. Home then became his grandparents’ village, where during harvest he helped other children shelling groundnuts, at the same time aware that, being from a family of chiefs, he was “treated with respect”. What generally struck me was the strong affection with which the young men spoke of the mothers they had left behind and how they made a point of telling me that they had always been their mother’s favourite child. I do not suggest that such feelings were not real or deeply felt. They certainly were. At the same time, the young men’s reminiscences of home were also idealised constructions. Their urge to put their thoughts and feelings about home into words almost seemed to imply the hope that the world of words could become a world of reality. Marita Eastmond concludes from her interviews with Eritrean refugees in Canada:
“In existential terms, in their stories, a sense of continuity with the (better) past seems to be recreated by the narrator by holding on to valued aspects, as something that might be re-conquered and restored, at home, in the future” (1996: 246).
Renée Hirschon, writing about a community of Asia Minor Greeks fifty years after their expulsion from modern-day Turkey, speaks of memory as a “rescuing bridge”: accounts of life in the homeland provide a frame of reference against which all subsequent experiences can be interpreted and which provides a template for identity (Hirschon 1998: 17). However, this rescuing bridge can be a fragile structure. While the young men’s accounts of their homes at home spoke of the soothing closeness of parents and of mundane daily happenings that reflected an inherent sense of belonging, for many their homes also represented the exact opposite. They were often the very places from where the terror had started. Kadogo, the boy from Burundi sleeping outside at InterAid, lived with the memory
Epilogue 325 of his family house as the very place where he had found his parents murdered after returning from an errand in the neighbouring village. The same happened to Ahmed in Somalia, who lost his entire family when their house was burnt down, to Emmanuel in Congo, to Florence and Immaculate in Rwanda, to Wani who lost his parents and infant brother when their house was shelled by the SPLA. Samuel, Elias, Jacob G., Peter L. and countless young men in Sudan were recruited from their homes or their schools. Raphal, Maria, Petna, Rose, Lopithi, Lomeling, Assefa, Mikael, Evelyn and Michel-Pierrot all had memories of soldiers coming to their house to search for them or wanted relatives, or to live out their random bouts of looting. Evidently, for most young men and women, memories of home were complex and conflicting.
It is true that exile communities find solace in the notion of return, “a return that promises the restoration of order and identity” (Matsuoka & Sorenson 2001: 90). However, I observed that for certain young men in Kampala, their meanings of home changed, gradually, following a complex process of forgetting, clinging on to, looking towards the future, mourning, and revaluating. They knew that the future was ‘here and now’ and thus they tried to find their feet in Kampala. Some were more successful than others. Several young men continued to live very isolated lives, but most of them managed to create some new community to which they could, even if partially or provisionally, belong. They found a niche for themselves in the city, learned to speak Luganda, made friends, and pointed at advantages over their lives at home in terms of education, job opportunities or a new window to the world that came with living in a capital city. For all of them this process required a great deal of resilience, luck, creativity, and often a leap of faith. I agree with Kibreab (1999: 406) that the questions raised in (postmodern) literature – are there ‘natural places’ to which people belong and from which they derive their identity, and does displacement from such natural places constitute deprivation of identity resulting in a loss of some part of one’s very humanity? - are crucial questions to ask. They are empirical questions. Home is not always and to everyone sacrosanct. At the same time, home does not become an empty notion once a person realises that certain qualities of home can be fulfilled elsewhere. The ways in which individuals experience displacement as well as perceive their possible return home, are inextricably linked with the cause of their displacement as well as with the treatment they receive and the opportunities that exist in the new country (Kibreab 1999: 405-406). And for a large part, I would add, this depends on the person’s previous life experiences and the idiosyncrasies of his or her personality.
Nordstrom, observing war-torn Mozambique, asks: “What happens to people when what they believe makes them human – home, hearth, family, and tradition – has been wrenched from their grasp?” (1997: 184) Based on what I learned from the young men in Kampala, my answer would be: what makes them human is the fact that they can engage in new relationships, build new homes, formulate new ambitions, and invest in new perceptions of themselves. This is a central claim in Margalit’s The Decent Society (1996): the essential characteristic that makes us human is our ability to change and start anew. A study on refugees is essentially a study on social changes (Kibreab 2004b). My long-term contact (1998-2006) with the young refugees in Kampala has given me the opportunity to understand and convey some of the personal and social changes that took place in their lives. Long-term research not only has ethnographic implications, but also theoretical ones: “the model of society as a relatively closed system is necessarily replaced by an open system, open to the future” (Kloos 1988: 113, emphasis added). Throughout this research project I had moments of serious discomfort about revealing these individuals’ intimate experiences of indignity, struggle and hope. My doubts were reinforced when someone would say to me, as Samy did several times, “I’m no longer interested in talking
326 War, Refuge and Self about the past, it’s the past after all, I managed to start a new life”. This book graphically reveals the dire straits in which the young men found themselves and the feelings of desperation this gave rise to. The protagonists of this book will read back their experiences as they recounted them to me years ago, or rather, as I rendered them. Few people appreciate being reminded of their rough patches, and the young men may feel embarrassed by some of the things they said. When discussing this problem with some of them, they concluded: “It is ok, we don’t need to be ashamed, yes it was me, then, but now I’m different”.
I wish to end this book with an open view to the future. Writing some lines on the current whereabouts of the young men who have so generously shared parts of their lives and thoughts with me, I am aware that this ending is arbitrary. If I were to finish this book in a few months from now, they might be in different places again, having different priorities, and new experiences to share.
Samuel Alim In January 2005, the Comprehensive Peace Deal was signed in Sudan, and exiled southern Sudanese are currently returning home. When shortly after I asked Samuel about his plans, he said he did not trust the peace, and was not sure about his personal safety. In Kampala, he had had the protection of being a student in a highly respected government school, but he had remained fearful of being tracked down by his former SPLA commander. That is why, after four years as a refugee in Uganda, in 2003 he fled once again, to Nairobi, where the process of finding his feet started all over again. He made friends at his new college, but retained the wish to leave Africa and communicated with fellow Sudanese in Australia who had been luckier with their resettlement applications. As I am writing this epilogue, Samuel is on his way to Juba. He briefly spoke to his mother, who convinced him he would be safe there. It has been nine years since he was taken from school as an eighteen-year-old to fight. He emailed: “I’m very eager to meet my family members. I think I may have new brothers or sisters. I really don’t know what the situation will be, but I think I will stay there for two months or one. I will try my best to call you from Juba so you can finally talk with my mum”.
Mikael Woldeselassie Before going back to school in 2000, Mikael spent many of his days reading in a local library in Kampala. He loved its quietness and the fact that he could read undisturbed for hours on end. “Inside there I feel King!” he said. Throughout his refugee life he had been reading whatever he could lay his hands on – and he told me about what he had learned from The Diary of Anne Frank, Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, books on Freud and Sophie’s World. Mikael had left Ethiopia as a high school graduate. Fifteen years later, he entered university in Uganda. For Mikael the purpose of education is to come to understand the world and himself; much less than others is he concerned with the job opportunities it might yield. In May 2002, he wrote:
It is important to tell you that my main motive in education is to come up with a book, concerning why, what and who is responsible for my destroyed youth. Discovering the reasons will help me as a reconciliation point with my past. Fifteen years of refugee life is not an easy thing I think.
Mikael often said there was nothing he hated more than the label of refugee, yet once or twice he mentioned that he was proud of being a refugee, because it meant that he was “beyond countries or nationalities”, which gave him “the freedom not to belong to any group”. Ever since he was young, Mikael has felt an outsider. He barely seeks company and
Epilogue 327 concentrates on his books. But it is not as if he has no desire to be connected to others. He will economise on anything, but not on the money he has to pay for his internet access, which is his way of keeping in touch with a wider world. Once I received an email from him with the subject line ‘THANK GOD FOR YAHOO.COM!!!’
Samy Kambale Tawite Time changes experience. In September 1999, a year after his flight from Goma, Samy started to speak of the painful event in terms of ‘travel’. He said he believed it was his destiny to travel, and that it was good this way.
Not when I first came here, but now that I’ve become used to my new life. My parents can’t tell me to come back home, I’m too old for being told. Destiny is inevitable. I want to go back when I can help my family and my country. But for that I first need to travel and learn many things.
Samy now lives in Canada. I recall our conversation when he told me he had been accepted for resettlement. He said: “The woman asked me if I wanted to live in the French or the English part of Canada, but I didn’t know which one was better so I told her to choose for me. I told her I hope I will study”. He said:
I feel that I will be open again in my heart. I’m not an artist who wants to paint about blood and war. That was never my idea. I wanted to paint the thoughts in me but these things happened and confused me. Now feel that I’m someone again, that I am seen as someone.
My worries about his move to this cold country proved largely unwarranted. In March 2006, Samy emailed: “Hey Ellen, it’s been a long time since I heard from you. I’ve decided to break the silence today by telling you that I’m fine and that winter is now like a boring friend to me”. His experience of being a refugee in Kampala, he said, had helped him a great deal to adjust to a completely new life once again. He gets up early to catch the bus to work, comes home late to his studio flat which, he laughs as he tells me, is called a ‘bachelor’. Samy paints in the evening when he gets home. He sent me a photo of his latest work: a young woman sitting on a chair, eyes closed, chin in the air. She is occupied in thoughts, but looks self-confident. It strikes me how little resemblance there is with War and Confusion, his Kampala paintings.
Yosief Endrias Habties In January 2005, rounding off a long conversation about his past, Yosief said:
Eritreans hardly ever talk about the problems and bad things happening in their country. It’s because they are proud of being Eritreans, they don’t want to expose the bad side. But they are also scared, because things have turned very sour. You know, Eritreans are courageous in bearing difficult situations, and they are patient. But once they feel they have had enough, they will act. And then the government will not be able to stop them. But I believe we need to talk now.
Yosief conscientiously commented on the transcripts of our conversations and was eager to see my thesis come to an end. Though he speaks to ‘the world’ through his paintings – Common Vision, Forced to Leave, Truth about Life - I got the impression he saw this book as a respectable second best. It is little surprise that Yosief has no qualms about appearing in print: he jokes about the Ugandans and mocks their being so money-oriented, but he has made himself at home in their country. In August 2006, he won the Golden Mirror award for best Ugandan artist of the year. Yosief is totally devoted to his vocation. He works on
328 War, Refuge and Self his paintings preferably at night, when all is quiet and the moon is out. It reminds him of the nights on Dahlak island when he was still a (reluctant) recruit with the Eritrean army. The girlfriend he had left behind in Asmara is now his wife. The two of them are inseparable and all their friends know that she sleeps outside in the compound to keep him company while he is painting. During the day, after school, their young son Finhas sits next to Yosief and draws.
Lopithi Igom1 The last time Lopithi and I met was in January 2005, in a Kampala hospital. Lopithi used to be twice my size, but his legs now were the size of my wrists and a fuzzy layer of down grew on his bald head. His voice was unaltered, but he spoke in a milder tone it seemed, yet eloquent and engaging as before. We discussed the Sudanese peace deal signed in Naivasha two weeks earlier. He was excited yet also sceptical. He shared the fear of many that the Equatorians and Dinkas would soon start fighting each other and asked: “We may have peace with our enemies, but do we have peace among ourselves?” Lopithi kept an eye on everything that happened around us in the ward - the same vigilance, a soldier’s trait, that I remembered from years before. I asked whether he was still plagued by the nightmares that had affected him so badly that first year in Kampala. He said: “They still come occasionally, especially when I’m stressed. Nightmares find a weak mind”. He went through the drawer packed with tablets and took out an envelop with doctor’s reports for me to read. He looked up and said: “I’m no longer with the military, no longer with politics, but I will stand with my people. You know, Ellen, I haven’t given up hope. If I’m still here in say November, I will go back to Sudan and help my community”. Then he was quiet for some time. Earlier that week he had asked me if I had brought my recorder. He had been speaking to it, about the war, about his life, in a quiet corner he had discovered in the overcrowded hospital. He handed me two tapes and made me promise to keep them well. “So many children in Sudan don’t know anything about their parents. Sometimes I wish I could send my sons back into the womb of their mother, but I can’t. I want them to at least remember my voice”. Lopithi passed away in July 2005.
John Wani Mid august 2006, Wani emailed me. I had sent him the draft of my thesis, which he had been reading through after finishing his exams. He asked if it was not too late to add something to his story. I had written that his grandparents had sent him along, only ten years old, with others fleeing to Uganda, because they feared their boy would be recruited into the SPLA. Wani now wrote:
When I was still staying with my grands in the village, my uncle who was in Jinja [Uganda] sent a letter for me. But the funny thing was that the letter took almost a year without being read to me, because nobody knew how to read and write English in our small village. It was not until a priest who I remember by the names of Ali Lasu came to baptise the children and after the service the letter was given to him to read for me and my grands. The message in there was… my uncle wanted somebody to bring me to him in Uganda because he wanted me to go to school. So I think it was not only because of the forced recruitment but also because of that letter that I came to Uganda.
Wani did not make it to Jinja then, but lived in a refugee camp for a while, after which he walked back to Sudan. He underwent military training and as a twelve-year-old was a bodyguard to an SPLA commander. The same uncle managed to bail him out.
Epilogue 329
Wani is in his second year of university. Last Christmas his best friend invited him home to Kenya for the holidays. Wani enjoyed the trip and said: “It is good to learn about different cultures, it will help you to fit in anywhere”. His latest ambition is to go home to Sudan next year for the research he has to do to obtain his BA. Wani has great trust in modern education, but the history of his country keeps him from being naively optimistic. He says: “Students are the leaders of tomorrow, but the question is, what kind of leaders?”
Petna Ndaliko Katondolo During his early days in Kampala, Petna would recall his father’s words to hearten himself: ‘Be like the cassava tree, you can grow wherever your seeds happen to fall’. Six years later, Petna has more than lived up to this saying. Under his direction, Yolé!Africa has become a well-known centre of artistic inspiration, and Petna’s films are screened at international film festivals across the world. In July 2006, he toured his home country to make a film about Congo’s first democratic elections in forty years. He travels in Africa and Europe – bracing himself against frustrating visa procedures – and is a global citizen. Yet ‘home’ retains its unique quality. In January 2002, Petna wrote to me from Kampala:
The volcano erupted in my hometown Goma and the house of my parents is destroyed. All my childhood I spent in that area. My parents’ house was like a cradle for me, and the town was like my house. Now everything is burnt up by the volcano. It is my most painful experience.
Eight months later, Petna and I spoke on the phone. He was in Goma for the sad reason that his father had passed away. “The town has completely changed”, he said. And he explained that what was once the lively town centre was now covered in black lava rock. He had had to ask someone to show him the way to his sister’s house through a new neighbourhood that sprang up after people had come back to Goma. “The views are still the same”, Petna said, “and they are beautiful, but it is not my town anymore”. At the same time he spoke of how it touched him that hundreds of people had come to pay their condolences. According to tradition, many stayed for three nights to support his mother and her children in these difficult days. The feeling this gave him, he said, Kampala would never give him. Recently, he reflected: “It’s true that I can’t complain. I have my work that I love and I have my friends here in Uganda. Life is treating me well. But still, it’s the circumstances that brought me here. I think I will find peace the day that I choose where to live”.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ACTV African Centre for Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims AFDL L'Alliance des Forces démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo CPA Comprehensive Peace Agreement (Sudan) CARA Control of Alien Refugees Act (Uganda, 1960) CRC Convention on the Rights of the Child CTD Convention Travel Document DED Deutscher Entwickelungsdienst DoR Directorate of Refugees (Uganda) DRC Democratic Republic of Congo ELF Eritrean Liberation Front EPLF Eritrean People’s Liberation Front EPRDF Ethiopian People’s Democratic Revolutionary Front EPRP Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party ESO External Security Organisation (Uganda) EXCOM Executive Committee (of UNHCR) FAR Forces Armées Rwandaises FHRI Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (Uganda) FIDA International Federation of Women Lawyers GoS Government of Sudan GosS Government of southern Sudan GoU Government of Uganda HPCT Hugh Pilkington Charitable Trust HURINET Uganda Human Rights Network HURIPEC Human Rights & Peace Centre (Makerere University) IAU InterAid Uganda ICC International Criminal Court (The Hague) ICCPR International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ICESCR International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross IDP Internally Displaced Person IOM International Organisation for Migration JRS Jesuit Refugee Service JVA Joint Voluntary Agency (US resettlement agency) KSh Kenya shillings LC Local Council (Uganda) LRA Lord’s Resistance Army LWF Lutheran World Federation MISR Makerere Institute of Social Research MLC Mouvement de Libération du Congo MONUC United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo NRA/M National Resistance Army/Movement (Uganda) 332 War, Refuge and Self
OAU Organisation of African Unity OLS Operation Lifeline Sudan (UN) OPM Office of the Prime Minister (Uganda) PFDJ People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (Eritrea) RCD Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie REC Refugee Eligibility Committee (Uganda) RLP Refugee Law Project (Uganda) RPA/F Rwanda Patriotic Army/Front RSD Refugee Status Determination RUF Revolutionary United Front (Sierra Leone) SHRA Sudan Human Rights Association SOAS School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London SPLA/M Sudan Peoples Liberation Army/Movement SRS Self Reliance Strategy SRRA Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association SSIA/M South Sudan Independence Army/Movement (formerly SPLA-United) TCRS Tanganyika Christian Refugee Service TLF Tigrayan Liberation Front TPLF Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front TPO Transcultural Psycho-Social Organisation UAM unaccompanied minor UBOS Uganda Bureau of Statistics UDHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights UHRC Uganda Human Rights Commission UNCST Uganda National Council for Science and Technology UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UPDF Uganda People’s Defence Forces UPE Universal Primary Education UPPAP Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Project URP Urban Refugee Project (Uganda) USh Uganda shilling WFP World Food Programme
LIST OF FOREIGN WORDS
agdamia hierarchy / ranking in the army (Sudan) Anyanya name of first civil war in Sudan, 1955-1972 baraza veranda, meeting place belila dish of boiled sorghum, maize or beans (Sudan) boda boda motorbike taxi or bicycle taxi durra sorghum enjera sourdough pancake (Ethiopia) fesila platoon (SPLA, Sudan) gaar six parallel lines carved on the foreheads of Nuer men Interahamwe Hutu militias jama squad (SPLA, Sudan) jesh amer the Red Army (Sudan) jesh asabi adult forces (Sudan) kadogo ‘little one’, today used for child soldier (Congo) kisra flat bread, from sorghum or millet (Sudan) kahtiba brigade (SPLA, Sudan) kitenge piece of traditional clothing kwete locally brewed beer from millet or maize (Sudan) lubya cowpeas matatu private minibus used for public transport matooke cooked bananas, staple food in western Uganda mirra also called khat or qat, a natural stimulant, to chew monyomiji name of the ruling middle-aged grade, meaning ‘fathers’ or ‘owners’ (monye) of the village (amiji) (Sudan) mujahadin holy warriors mzungu white person (pl. 'wazungu') (Swahili) okra ladies’ fingers olojingat those who are not yet initiated, lower in rank than monyomiji (Sudan) panga knife, machete posho staple starch food made from maize flour and water shamba plot where people grow food shari’a Islamic law simsim sesame sungu sungu refugee watchmen and women in the camps talimat to follow standing order in the army (Sudan) tukul round hut made of mud and thatched with straw waragi Ugandan gin Warsai conscripts, young soldiers (Eritrea) Yekaalo liberation war fighters (Eritrea)
DUTCH SUMMARY
Dit boek is gebaseerd op antroplogisch onderzoek verricht in Kampala, de hoofdstad van Oeganda, in de periode maart 1998 – januari 2001. Oeganda huisvest meer dan twee honderdduizend mensen die gevlucht zijn voor oorlog en de sociaal-economische gevolgen van langdurig gewelddadige conflicten. Zij zijn afkomstig uit Soedan, de Democratische Republiek Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopië, Eritrea en Somalië. De Oegandese wetgeving, gesteund door UNHCR, verplicht vluchtelingen te verblijven in rurale vluchtelingenkampen. Een toenemend aantal mensen weigert echter zich hun recht op vrijheid van beweging (zoals beschreven in artikel 26 van het VN Vluchtelingenverdrag van 1951) te laten ontnemen. Zij trekken naar de stad op zoek naar werk, onderwijs, veiligheid, en een meer menswaardig bestaan. In Kampala zijn echter nagenoeg geen humanitaire voorzieningen voor urbane vluchtelingen, en zij die in de stad terecht komen moeten dus een harde strijd leveren voor hun levensonderhoud. Hun clandestien verblijf in de stad, vaak zonder identiteitspapieren, maakt hun marginale situatie nog schrijnender. Recentelijk is er binnen vluchtelingenstudies een groeiende belangstelling voor de problematiek van stedelijke vluchtelingen. Dit boek, dat zich richt op de ervaringen jonge mannen uit Soedan, Congo, Ethiopië en Eritrea die als vluchtelingen in Kampala proberen te overleven, is een van de pioniersstudies op dit terrein. Mijn oorspronkelijke onderzoeksvraag luidde: ‘Wordt de identiteit van jonge mensen aangetast door de onveiligheid van oorlog en ballingschap, en zo ja, op welke manier?’ In een vroeg stadium van mijn onderzoek bleek dat de jonge vluchtelingen zeer werden beziggehouden door de vraag ‘Wie ben ik?’ Daarom heb ik mijn algemene vraag opnieuw geformuleerd en mij in dit werk vooral gericht op deze existentiële vraag van hen. Deel één van dit boek - ‘Context’ - bestaat uit drie hoofdstukken. Het eerste geeft een achtergrondschets van de politieke geschiedenis en de gewelddadige conflicten in het Grote Meren Gebied en de Hoorn van Afrika, en beschrijft de huidige internationale reactie op het fenomeen van urbane vluchtelingen. Hoofdstuk twee is een kritische beschrijving van het dagelijkse leven van vluchtelingen in Kampala vanuit het oogpunt van de (inter)nationale vluchtelingen- en mensenrechten wetgeving. Hoofdstuk drie zet vraagtekens bij de mogelijkheden van conventioneel antropologisch onderzoek onder een onveilige en zeer mobiele populatie in een stedelijke omgeving. De epistemologische dilemmas verbonden met onderzoek naar politiek beladen onderwerpen als oorlog en migratie worden belicht met speciale aandacht voor vragen betreffende de mogelijkheid om andermans ervaringen van geweld en verlies te begrijpen, betreffende objectiviteit en waarheid, en representatie in antropologische literatuur. Deel twee - ‘Vertellingen’ - presenteert de etnografische kern van het onderzoek, met als doel licht te werpen op de ervaringen in het verleden en in het heden van jonge 336 War, Refuge and Self vlchtelingen in Kampala, en op hun dilemma’s en ambities. Het laat zien hoe hun bezig zijn met de vraag ‘Wie ben ik?’ – opgeroepen door hun herinneringen aan de oorlog en hun afgescheiden zijn van ouders en familie, raakt aan kwesties als verantwoordelijkheid, ambitie, mannelijkheid en menselijke waardigheid. Deel twee is verdeeld in drie hoofdstukken: ‘Soldaten’, ‘Studenten’ en ‘Kunstenaars’, die elk gebaseerd zijn op de verhalen van drie of vier hoofdpersonen. Soldaat, student en kunstenaar waren niet de enige identiteiten van deze individuen, maar – zeker aanvankelijk – hun dominante, en deze bepaalden de manier waarop ze zich naar mij toe presenteerden. Deze jonge mannen weten zich geplaatst voor dezelfde beslissingen en uitdagingen als hun leeftijdgenoten elders. Ze zijn in gedachten bezig met een toekomstig huwelijk en het vaderschap, ze streven naar kennis en een opleiding, ze willen onafhankelijk kunnen zijn en creatief en hebben een visie voor de maatschappij. Maar de omstandigheden van oorlog en ballingschap hebben hun ambities ingeperkt en hun pad naar de volwassenheid verstoord. Dit hoofdstuk brengt aan het licht hoe verschillend ieder van hen omgaat met deze zorgwekkende realiteit. De namen die ik in dit boek gebruik zijn fictief en gedeeltelijk door hen zelf gesuggereerd. Alleen de kunstenaars hebben hun eigen naam, reeds verbonden aan hun werk, gehouden. Al te lang is de Afrikaanse kunst in Europa anoniem getoond. Deel drie - ‘Reflecties’ - behelst een theoretische reflectie op de etnografische hoofdstukken van deel twee. Mijn speciale gerichtheid op individuen en de onderzoeksresultaten die dat opleverde, hebben er toe geleid dat ik kritisch ben gaan reflecteren op de exclusieve aandacht in de antropologie voor groepen en collectiviteiten en ook op het door antropologen gehanteerde begrip identiteit. Ik stel dat voor het bestuderen van de ervaringen van individuen en hun zelfperceptie tijdens de nasleep van een oorlog, het begrip identiteit aangevuld dient te worden met dat van zelfbeeld/gevoel, oftewel ‘sense of self’. In dit hoofdstuk wordt aangetoond hoe een positief zelfbeeld een voorwaarde was voor de jonge mannen om hun waardigheid en menselijkheid te hervinden. Cruciaal in dit proces was het verwerken van het effect van geweld - ondergaan of aangericht - en het opnieuw zichzelf leren zien als moreel persoon. De theorie binnen de Afrikaanse filosofie over een mens als moreel wezen biedt een bruikbaar perspectief bij het leren verstaan van dit proces.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Ellen Lammers (1972) is a graduate of the Free University of Amsterdam (Cultural Anthropology, cum laude) and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (Medical Anthropology, distinction). She first went to Uganda in 1998 to do research for her Masters degree. She returned to live in the country’s capital city Kampala for two more years (1999-2001) for her PhD research, funded by the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO), and with the University of Amsterdam (InDRA, later AMIDSt) as her institutional base. The project was also part of CERES Research School for Resource Studies for Development.
Among her earlier publications are Refugees, gender and human security. A theoretical introduction and annotated bibliography (Utrecht: International Books, 1999) and the edited volume Making waves: inspiring critical and feminist research. A tribute to Joke Schrijvers (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2002). She has published in magazines and academic journals like Refuge, Social Identities, Refugee Survey Quarterly and Forced Migration Review and contributed short articles to newspapers including the New York Times Magazine.
In Uganda, she co-founded the art centre Yolé!Africa (see chapter six of this book) and in the Netherlands the Ijayo Foundation.
Ellen Lammers lives in Amsterdam.
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NOTES
Introduction
1 Significantly, most of the conflict related mortality in the second half of the century was among non- combatants: civilian deaths went up from 14% in World War I to 90% in the approximately fifty armed conflicts that were waged in the 1990s (Garfield & Neugut 1997). 2 Of the ten major refugee populations worldwide, refugees from Afghanistan form the largest group. Of the remaining nine, seven represent African countries: Burundi, Sudan, Angola, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Eritrea. Nearly one-third of all African refugees seek asylum in countries that are also experiencing conflict (FMR 2003). As for internally displaced people, estimates are of a total of 20 to 25 million worldwide, with major concentrations in, again, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo 3 In August 1999 and July-August 2000 I visited refugee settlements in Adjumani and Arua Districts, and in January 2000 I spent two weeks in Kibondo District in western Tanzania. 4 www.yoleafrica.org and www.stichting-ijayo.nl. 5 Analyses of (forced) migration and the responses to it cannot do without the concept of race. “From the European expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, hierarchical conceptualizations of race and colour have evolved to sanction and promote European colonialist and neocolonialist practices – and the migratory movements that resulted. A kind of internally complex, ever-changing grand master narrative of colour was established and continues to function to this day” (Benmayor & Skotnes 1994: 7).
PART I – CONTEXT
Chapter One – Refugees in Uganda: The Political, Legal & Humanitarian Context
1 For Congo/Zaire, see: (Clark 2002, De Boeck 1996, Dunn 2003, Hochschild 1998, Lemarchand 2001, Nzongola-Ntalaya 2002, Reed 1998, Scherrer 2002, Umutesi 2000, Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers 2004). For Sudan, see: (de Waal 1988, 1997, Deng 1995, FMR 2005, Holt & Daly 2000, Hutchinson 1996, Johnson 1998, 2004, Nyaba 1997). For Ethiopia, see: (Abbink 1995a, c, 1997, Donham 1999, Doornbos et al 1992, James et al 2002, Negash 1997, Nzongola-Ntalaya 1991, Pausewang & Tronvoll 2002, Zewde 1991). For Eritrea, see: (Abbink 2003b, Connell 1997, Davidson, Cliffe & Habte Selassie 1980, Dorman 2005, Hedru 2003, Iyob 1995, Kibreab forthcoming, Negash 1997, Ogbazghi 1991, Pateman 1990, Pool 2001, Wilson 1991, Wrong 2005). For all countries also see reports by Amnesty International (www.amnesty.org), Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) and the International Crisis Group (www.crisisgroup.org). 2 Ethnographies exist of several of the peoples of southern Sudan, e.g. the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 1990 [1951], Hutchinson 1996), Azande (Evans-Pritchard 1971), Uduk (James 1988), Dinka (Lienhardt 1961), Lokoya (Lako 1995), Mandari (Buxton 1973), Murle (Lewis 1972), Bongo (Kronenberg, Kronenberg & Schweinfurth 1981), Lotuho (Grüb 1992), Nilotic communities on the East Bank of the Nile (Simonse 1992) 3 For a discussion of the establishment of the SPLA, its political program and the first years of the war, see Johnson 2004, chapter five. 4 See Johnson (2004: xv-xvi) for criticism of the archaic term ‘animism’, and of the simplistic reduction of the war to a contention of world religions. It is true, he writes, that “the current drive to Islamize the South has produced more Christian converts in the last decade than the entire colonial missionary enterprise did during the first half of the twentieth century” but: “Despite this, the indigenous religions of southern Sudan continue to inform ideas about ethical behaviour, the moral community and political action”. 364 War, Refuge and Self
5 See Johnson (2004: xiv) for critical commentary on the use of the concept of ethnicity in the case of Sudan (linked the misuse of terms like ‘clan’ and ‘tribe’), and the central explanatory value given to it in popular writing. 6 The under-age soldiers in the SPLA constituted the so-called Red Army. The majority of the young Sudanese men I met in Kampala had been SPLA soldiers. They had (sometimes temporarily) left the rebel army, and many consequently faced serious security issues in Uganda. The narratives in Chapter Four illustrate this insecurity, and expand on the issue of forced recruitment of children and youth into the SPLA. The same chapter also explains why many Sudanese children and youth chose the frontline life of soldiering. 7 A chief criticism of the CPA is that it ignores the ongoing violence in the western region of Darfur and in the East. The term ‘comprehensive’ is widely considered a misnaming. For background information on the Darfur crisis, see: (de Waal 2005, Flint & De Waal 2005, Prunier 2005). 8 Horn of Africa Day, organised by the Africa Studies Centre and the Development Policy Review Network (DPRN), Leiden, The Netherlands, 14 December 2005. 9 The DRC is home to over two hundred and fifty different ethnic groups (the largest among them the Kongo, Luba and Mongo). About 700 local languages are spoken. French is the official state language and Lingala, Kiswahili, Kikongo and Tshiluba are used as intermediary languages (Vansina 1966). About 80% of the population are Christians, predominantly Roman Catholics. The syncretic sect Kimbanguism, which was considered a threat to the colonial regime and banned by the Belgians, has about 3 million members, primarily among the Bakongo. 10 Source: http://hdr.undp.org/docs/statistics/indices/index_tables.pdf; accessed November 2005. 11 Hochschild in his widely read King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) claims the number is around ten million. Other sources, however, argue that this figure cannot be substantiated (Beirlant 2005). 12 See: (Berkeley 2001, N'Gbanda Nzambo 1998, Wrong 2000) and Thierry’s Michel’s documentary Mobutu, King of Zaire (1999). 13 Mobutu died of cancer in Morocco the same year. 14 Rwanda claims the highest population density in the continent, with Burundi and North Kivu (DRC) close behind (Lemarchand 2001). 15 Rwandan Hutu’s had en masse crossed into Tanzania and Burundi in April/May 1994. Mid July, when the RPA captured Gisenyi near the border with Zaire, this caused the exodus of refugees into North Kivu. UNHCR estimated that by the end of 1994 there were 850,000 refugees in Goma alone, a town of 15,000 people. 16 The death toll was massive – estimated at as high as 10% of the refugee population. Low writes: “the death rate was distressingly simple to estimate. Because the earth was volcanic rock, it was impossible to dig graves to bury the dead. Bodies were left by the road and, and when NGOs became more organized, they were collected by trucks which took them to mass graves for burial” (Low n.d.). 17 Mobutu had long been a mentor to Juvenal Habyarimani, Rwanda’s Hutu president who was killed in the plane crash on 6 April 1994, which sparked the Rwandan genocide. 18 In May 1999, a group of human rights activists targeted by the RCD for revealing its human rights abuses to Roberto Garretón, special rapporteur of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for the DRC, fled to Uganda. Several of them are included in this study. By late 2000, most had been resettled to the US. See Eastern Congo Ravaged: Killing Civilians and Silencing Protest (HRW 2000). 19 Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers (2005: 6-7) explain that the Mai Mai militias originally had a very limited impact on the local power-game. Their formation had started as a rural reaction of youngsters against Mobutu’s political system, which they held responsible for the lack of social and economic opportunities. In 1996, many Mai Mai militias briefly joined the Kabila-led war against Mobutu, but they turned against Kabila when the ‘Tutsi influence’ in Kabila’s movement became too visible. Since the outbreak of the second war in 1998, Mai Mai leaders started recruiting the better educated and disenchanted urban youth (who were attracted to the alleged objective of fighting the ‘Rwandan occupation’). 20 See (HRW 2001a, ICG 2000, Lemarchand 2001, Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers 2005). 21 Pottier (2000) argues that the dominant narrative on the crisis in eastern Congo (i.e. Kagame’s government perspective which exclusively focuses on extremist Hutu refugees in eastern Congo posing a threat to Rwanda) is at odds with a historically situated academic and local reading of economy and politics in eastern Congo. He condemns the fact that the international community has largely embraced the Rwandan narrative on ‘the problem’ – and that it has done so “at great cost, both intellectually and in terms of human lives lost” (Pottier 2000: 2). 22 For information on the conflict in Ituri (including ethnic violence between the Lendu and Hema concerning long-standing tensions over land, and triggered by the presence of Uganda’s UPDF soldiers) see: (Lemarchand 2001, Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers 2005) and www.hrw.org and www.ai.org. 23 Source: http://www0.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=12990&Cr=democratic&Cr1=congo#; accessed November 2005.
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24 Eastern Congo became the first case taken up by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague since its establishment in 2002. In June 2004, the chief prosecutor announced the investigation into the crimes (listed in the Rome Statute) committed in the DRC. However, by 2005, no progress had been made on developing mechanisms to deliver justice for the crimes committed before 2002 when the jurisdiction of the ICC begins. At the time, several Congolese women’s groups were seeking ways to enable the prosecution of war-related sexual violence. 25 The intractability of the Congolese conflict can only be fully understood when taking into account the social transformations that occur in situations of enduring conflict (Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers 2005). The conflict in Congo has caused shifts in the organisational and authority structures of local communities, with new patterns of social-economic interaction between elites, non-state armed groups and local populations that generate new orders of “power, profit and protection”. Conflict dynamics, even if initially set in motion ‘from above’ are sustained at the local level, where people in their struggle to survive try to adapt to new circumstances, seek new opportunities and forge new alliances. In eastern Congo, commercial entrepreneurs have aligned with and mobilised local militias – often a situation of mutual benefit that they are quite happy to prolong. The authors are critical of peace-building initiatives that view armed conflicts as an object of intervention (and thus focus on institution building at a national level) rather than as a complex outcome of foremost local conflict dynamics. In Congo, a situation has been created in which “the ‘rational’ pursuit of individual livelihood ends up reproducing the collectively ‘irrational’ phenomenon of war” (Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers 2004). Other studies which stress the importance of taking into account local strategies of survival, resilience and peacemaking in the face of warfare and collapsing national structures: (De Boeck 1996, Hilhorst & van Leeuwen 2005, Richards 1996). 26 For further information about Uganda, see: (Ahluwalia & Zegeye 2002, Hansen & Twaddle 1991, Hansen & Twaddle 1988, 1998, Kasozi 1994, Langseth et al 1995, Mamdani 1983, 1995, Mazrui 1975, Mugaju & Oloka-Onyango 2000, Mutibwa 1992, Oloka-Onyango 2000, 2004, Omara-Otunnu 1995, Rupesinghe 1989). See also: www.hrw.org; www.crisisgroup.org; and www.amnesty.org. 27 Uganda lies at the northern edge of the vast area of sub-Saharan Africa occupied by Bantu speakers. In Uganda, broadly speaking at the river Nile (Uganda’s most important physical feature and a source of competition between the imperial powers in Central Africa) the Bantu meet the Sudanic, Nilotic and Kushitic speaking societies of northern Africa and the Horn. 28 Zaire and Sudan received the bulk of Ugandan refugees, while smaller numbers fled to Kenya and a considerable number of high-profile individuals reached Europe and the US. With over 400,000, Ugandan refugees were the world’s fourth largest refugee population by the end of Obote’s regime in 1985 (Gingyera- Pinycwa 1998b, Pirouet 1988). 29 Idi Amin died on 16 August 2003 in a hospital in Saudi Arabia, where he was living in exile. 30 Obote: a Political Biography (Ingham 1994) contends this reading of history and argues that Obote’s political achievements have been underestimated. 31 One spear point of the NRM government was the empowerment and increased participation of women in politics. For a discussion on the successes and failures of the policies addressed to achieve this, see: (Mugyenyi 1998, Muhumuza 2004, Tamale 1993, 1999, Tripp 2000). 32 Source: http://web.worldbank.org; accessed November 2005. 33 In August 1972, Amin declared his ‘Economic War’, giving Asians living in Uganda 90 days to leave the country. Of the around 75,000 that lived in Uganda (the majority British subjects; 23,000 holding Ugandan citizenship), nearly all had left three months later. Their land and property were confiscated. The Asians had a pivotal role in Uganda’s economy, established under colonialism, and their expulsion had very adverse economic effects. See: (Kasozi 1994, Mamdani 1973). 34 Beginning in 1997 and led by the US, the international community embraced the leaders of Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Eritrea as the “new leaders” of Africa, advocates of strong governments willing to bring “African solutions to African problems”. See (Oloka-Onyango 2004) for a critique of what is now “a largely discredited idea” (2004: 29). 35 In 2000, Uganda qualified for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) debt relief initiative by the IMF and World Bank, and the Paris Club debt relief. See Oloka-Onyango (2000: 37-39) for a sobering commentary on the real benefits of debt relief for Uganda’s citizens. 36 Source: http://hdr.undp.org/docs/statistics/indices/index_tables.pdf; accessed November 2005. The HDI, published annually by the UN, ranks nations according to their citizens’ quality of life rather than strictly by a nation’s traditional economic figures. The criteria for calculating rankings include life expectancy, educational attainment, and adjusted real income. The 2005 index is based on 2003 figures. Uganda performs only slightly better than the countries whose refugees it hosts. These are all, except for Sudan, classified as the 20 “least liveable” countries in the world. 37 There are many publications on HIV/AIDS in Uganda, e.g. (Deininger, Crommelynck & Kempaka 2005, Lyons 1998, Obbo 1998, Putzel 2004).
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38 The Uganda Human Rights Commission (UHRC) was established as an independent body under the 1995 Constitution. Independent civil society human rights organisations have a joint platform, HURINET, the Uganda Human Rights Network, with over 20 active members. 39 For an analysis of the LRA war, see: (Doom & Vlassenroot 1999, Lomo & Hovil 2004, Lucima 2002, Van Acker 2004). Also see various reports at www.hrw.org. Sudan-Uganda political relationships are implicated in the LRA war: Uganda supported the SPLA rebels in southern Sudan while the LRA has been supported by the Sudanese government in Khartoum. The continued LRA presence in southern Sudan poses threats to the current peace and reconciliation efforts in southern Sudan. 40 For a critical commentary on the role of the ICC in bringing justice and peace to northern Uganda, and its tenuous relationship with the Amnesty Act 2000, see: (Hovil & Lomo 2005, Hovil & Quinn 2005, RLP 2004). See (Oomen 2005) for similar concerns about “donor-driven justice” in Rwanda. For local perceptions of justice in northern Uganda, see (Marchand 2005). 41 This section draws on an unpublished paper, Refugees in Uganda and Kenya, by Mauro De Lorenzo, 2002. For detailed information about refugee flows into Uganda during the 1950s to 1970s, see Louise Holborn’s two- volume work on the history of UNHCR (Holborn 1975). 42 During the Second World War, Uganda’s British administration arranged for about 7,000 Polish refugees to be accommodated in camps in Masindi and Mukono districts to prevent them from mixing and intermarrying with “the natives” (Lwanga-Lunyiigo 1998). 43 UNHCR acts under sovereign law. However, some argue that the government’s ability (and duty) to direct policy has been compromised by UNHCR, which appears to have complete control over the provision of material aid and ‘development’ projects in the refugee settlements, and which is involved in refugee status determination (see below) (De Lorenzo 2002, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). 44 Organisations working with refugees in Uganda often use ‘OPM’ as shorthand to refer to the Directorate of Refugees of the Ministry of Disaster Preparedness and Refugees. 45 According to UNHCR statistics, ‘new’ Congolese refugees in Uganda in the years 1999-2001 numbered between 7,600 and 10,300. These figures include only those registered in refugee settlements. 46 Note that this figure includes almost exclusively refugees who have been in Uganda for less than fifteen years. The early refugees from Sudan (mid 1950s-1970s) and Rwanda (1960s) are not accounted for; some ‘old caseload’ Congolese refugees are. 47 A host country’s political relations with the refugee generating country may not only influence the way in which refugees are received and treated, but also the validity of the statistics provided. In the 1970s, for example, the numbers of Ugandan refugees in Kenya were underestimated not to embarrass the government of Uganda. See: (Crisp 1999b, Harrell-Bond, Voutira & Leopold 1992 1992). 48 In 1976, only 1.2% of African refugees were estimated to be urban (Chambers 1979). 49 For further discussions of migration as a livelihood strategy for the poor, see: (de Haan 1999, Dietz 2004, Ellis & Freeman 2004, Khasiani 1991, Massey et al 2005, Parnwell 1993) and: http://www.livelihoods.org/hot_topics/migration.html; accessed January 2006. 50 There are many documented instances of epidemics in camps leading to increased mortality, as well as other public health problems, see: (Karunakara 2004, Toole & Waldman 1997). 51 Studies analysing insecurity in refugee camps in the Great Lakes Region: (Crisp 1999a, Horst 2006b, Hovil 2001, Hovil & Moorehead 2002, Hovil & Werker 2001, Mulumba 1998, Verdirame 1999, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). 52 In July and August 2002, attacks by the LRA on settlements in Kitgum and Adjumani districts led to the displacement of 30,000 refugees, who had to be relocated to settlements elsewhere in the country, mostly to Kyangwali settlement in the western Hoima District (UNHCR 2002b, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). 53 See Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005, pp. 186-191 for a discussion of the dispute settlement and justice arrangements in the refugee settlements in Uganda. 54 See http://www.unhcr.ch/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/home?page=PROTECT&id=3b8366bc4; accessed January 2006. 55 Also see Horst (2006), chapter 5, Al-Sharmani (2003), and Verdirame & Harrell-Bond (2005), pp. 283-287. 56 Literature on transnational linkages between refugees in Africa and their compatriots in the West, and the importance of remittances, is emerging. See: (Akuei 2005, Al-Ali & Koser 2002, Al-Sharmani 2003, 2006, Cheran 2006, Horst 2004, Kusow & Bjork 2006, Lindley 2006, Matsuoka & Sorenson 2001, Shandy 2006, van Hear 2002). 57 See Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005, pp. 99-104 for a critical commentary on the ‘irregular movers’ issue, which is linked to the ‘first country of asylum’ rule that was included in the 1990 Dublin Convention, but which has no place in general international refugee law. 58 In 2005, the RLP conducted a study on self-settled refugees in Koboko town in northern Uganda. It showed that nearly all refugees were willing to go home as soon as conditions in Sudan would permit them to do so, contrary to arguments by both UNHCR and the GoU that integrating refugees with locals makes it difficult for them to consider returning home (Okello, Gottschalk & Ridderbos 2005).
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59 See: http://www.refugees.org/article.aspx?id=1109&rid=1179; accessed January 2006. 60 It has been argued that the objectives of the SRS were compromised by the lack of concern for issues such as freedom of movement, which affect self-sufficiency. The lack of participation and consultation of local government in the process has also been a source of contention (Hovil 2002, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). 61 The situation for Somali refugees is different: none are granted convention refugee status by the GoU. Somali asylum seekers whose claims UNHCR finds credible are given Mandate Status by UNHCR. The GoU takes no official responsibility for them (Huff & Kalyango 2002: 11). 62 See: (Alexander 1999, Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005) and www.rsdwatch.org. 63 SPLA deserters were at times denied protection by UNHCR on doubtful grounds (Verdirame & Harrell- Bond 2005: 177-179). 64 Landau (2005: 6-8) outlines the factors complicating RSD in urban areas for UNHCR and governments: 1) The fact that urban refugees have often travelled long distances, at times passing through multiple countries, makes it difficult to determine the political or security situation at the time of departure, or even to establish with certainty the nationality of the asylum seeker, 2) Cities attract people who have been the victims of traffickers but who not necessarily come from war-torn areas, and thus have little ground for claiming asylum, 3) Forced migrants often live in immigrant neighbourhoods among co-nationals who may not be ‘forced’. Distinguishing between the two is both a conceptual and an empirical challenge. 65 The majority of whom where Somalis: 150 out of the 251 family heads in 1998. In 2001, a revision of the urban caseload took place and in April 2002 its number was down to 173. 66 In addition to data from my fieldwork, I draw on an MA thesis (Kalyango 1999), and two RLP working papers (Bernstein 2005, Huff & Kalyango 2002). 67 This project, directed by Barbara Harrell-Bond, was part of an EU-funded project titled Health and Welfare of Refugees, initiated at the Institute of Tropical Medicine (Antwerp, Belgium) and including teams of researchers from the Institute of Public Health, Makerere University, Uganda, the Centre for Refugee Studies, Moi University, Kenya, and the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University, UK. The Refugee Rights project had its institutional base at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR). Its findings are published in Rights in Exile. Janus-faced Humanitarianism (Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005). 68 Ntinda is the name of the area where the Salvation Army hostel was located, in which UNHCR accommodated ‘security cases’. 69 The issue of security is dealt with in Chapter Two, section 2.5. It is also a central theme in the narratives presented in Chapters Four to Six. 70 See (HRW 2002) for recommendations to address resettlement delays and inefficiencies. 71 See www.refugeelawproject.org. 72 According to 2002 statistics, 18 percent of all persons of concern to UNHCR worldwide live in urban areas. This figure, however, does not include the great numbers of refugees in urban areas who do not declare themselves to UNHCR or the host government (Jacobsen 2004). For instance, for its Uganda statistics, UNHCR will only include the 500 individuals on its urban caseload, whereas estimates of the total number of refugees in Kampala vary between 5,000 and 50,000 (see Chapter Two). 73 It must be noted that this indifference or suspicion are not necessarily personality traits of individual staff members, but caused by lack of training, heavy workloads, lack of supervision, and the worries of local staff for themselves and their families.
Chapter two – Young Men in Kampala: Daily Life in Exile
1 Government censuses also routinely omit urban migrants and refugees who, because of their ambiguous legal status, choose not to reveal their presence (Jacobsen & Landau 2003). In Uganda’s 2002 Population and Housing Census, there is no mention of different nationalities, let alone of refugees. 2 Kampala also hosted several refugees from Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Turkey and Iraq. 3 Again this must be related to developments in rural-urban migration trends. While young adult men were long considered the main partakers in this process, a rapid growth of female migration to the city became apparent in many African countries from the late 1980s onward (Drakakis-Smith 2000, Gilbert & Gugler 1992, Jolly & Reeves 2005). 4 UNHCR is aware of this, and in its 2003 paper mentions the difficulties of comprehensive and accurate data collection (see Chapter Three). 5 The ethnic composition of Kampala according to (Republic of Uganda 2000): Baganda 60%, Banyankole (5%), other ethnic groups (33%), foreigners (2%; of which the largest group are Rwandans (21%), followed by Tanzanians; the Indian population is steadily increasing). 6 Only in the Amin years (1971-1979) the population influx into the city was greatly affected and its growth rate more than halved as compared to the foregoing decade.
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7 For Uganda’s Local Government system and the structure of Local Councils, see the Local Government Act (1997) and www.molg.go.ug. 8 In 1992 the GoU began monitoring living standards and poverty in the country through an Integrated Household Survey (IHS), which was followed up by four annual monitoring surveys (MS1-4), of which the last covers the fiscal year 1997/98, and the 1999/2000 Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS) (see www.ubos.org). The surveys use a food-based poverty line, see (Appleton 2001, Appleton et al 1999). 9 For detailed information on Uganda’s and Kampala’s economy, see: (Republic of Uganda 2000, UBOS 2003a) and online sources on www.ubos.org, www.uppap.or.ug, www.undp.or.ug and www.worldbank.org. 10 Amis (2001) contrasts the quantitative data from the household surveys with the Uganda Participatory Poverty Assessment Process (UPPAP) carried out for Kampala District in 2000 (Republic of Uganda 2000). In its executive summary, and in contrast with the survey findings mentioned above, the UPPAP notes that “communities in Kampala felt that poverty was increasing”. Amis (2001) notes the importance of infrastructure and environmental factors for people’s perceptions of poverty – flooding, sanitation, access to roads, and disease – as well as issues of insecurity and government services. 11 In the 1990s, the city experienced a rapid growth in the housing sector, attributed to the increase in demand for houses for rent created by rural-urban migration. Officially planned new houses and housing blocks are built of permanent materials, yet slums remain a common feature in Kampala. 12 UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, General Comment 4, 1991. See: http://www.unhcr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(symbol)/CESCR+General+comment+4.En?OpenDocument; accessed 20 December 2005. 13 Family reunion procedures were so cumbersome and bureaucratic that it could take months for new arrivals to join their relatives if they followed the official route (Harrell-Bond et al 2000). 14 This issue will be further discussed in Chapter Three. 15 Clearly this is particularly disruptive for children and adolescents whose bodies are still developing. Across the globe malnutrition accounts for the high percentage of stunted people found in refugee populations. 16 To what extent refugees, or other non-nationals, are purposely blocked from the Ugandan labour market as a result of discriminatory practices requires a more thorough investigation. 17 See (Nencel 2001) on the methodological difficulties of researching sex-workers. See (Davis 2000, Kielmann 1997, White 1990) on prostitution in East African cities. 18 These developments are all the more interesting in view of the fact that the Eritrean women had to operate in an environment where gender relationships and constructs were defined by Islamic law (Kibreab 1995, McSpadden & Moussa 1993). 19 By 2003, UNHCR and the GoU agreed on the need to abandon the old protection letters and some refugees were provided with ID cards. To obtain a Refugee Identity Card, I was told, one needs to provide copies of one’s ration card from the camp, a letter from the camp commander, a letter from the LC Chairman of one’s area in Kampala, and a statement that one is able to provide for one’s own upkeep in Kampala and will not expect any assistance from UNHCR. 20 Rogge refers to Karadawi’s findings in Khartoum that, “in their desire to establish at least some degree of legitimacy, many refugees fall prey to a growing body of unscrupulous purveyors of forged documents, permits and passports” (1986: 10). I did not establish if this was also the case in Kampala. 21 Around 40% of all detainees in Luzira prison are held on charges of being ‘idle and disorderly’ (personal communication with officer-in-charge of Murchison Bay, the men’s wing of Luzira prison; December 1999, with Doreen Lwanga, chair of the HURIPEC Prisons Project). 22 Keynote ‘Trust and its Limits’ by Achille Mbembe, at the PhD & Post-doc seminar ‘Terms of Trust. The dynamics of old and new moralities in Africa’, Leiden, 18-20 September 2002. 23 The urban dweller in Africa’s cities is merely one example of how, according to Mbembe, all postcolonial ‘subjects’ in Africa have to continuously bargain and improvise in the “plurality of ‘spheres’ and arenas”, that make up the daily reality of the postcolony (Mbembe 1992: 5).
Chapter three – Researching & Writing about War and Exile
1 See Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005, pp. 123-126 for a critical assessment of the vulnerability approach to refugee women in humanitarian assistance: “the ‘women-first’ approach, which pervaded the provision of humanitarian assistance [in the 1990s] ... was usually flaunted by humanitarian organisations as evidence of their ‘gender-sensitivity’. Being assigned to the bureaucratic category of ‘vulnerable’ individuals, might have created some entitlement for women on the surface, but is was also a disempowering and, in some ways, debasing practice” (2005: 124). 2 In terms of refugee protection, the situation of children and youth is largely undefined. The 1951 UN Convention does not distinguish between adults and children/youth. Particular reference is made to children only in terms of religious education (art. 4) and work (art. 17, 2c) while in very general terms, the Convention urges governments to provide extra protection to (unaccompanied) refugee minors. In response to this lack
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of specified legislation, UNHCR formulated policy guidelines for refugee children and adolescents (UNHCR 1994, 1997a), which, however, do not have legal value. The treatment of refugee children must thus be evaluated using the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which all countries in the world, except for the US and Somalia, have ratified. The CRC is unique in that it encompasses all the rights stipulated in the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) and includes rights that have never before been included in international treaties, like the right to identity (art. 8), foster care (art. 20), adoption (art. 21) and special treatment of juvenile delinquents (art. 37 & 40). Research in Uganda revealed countless cases in which the treatment of refugee children did comply neither with the CRC nor with the 1996 Uganda Child Statute. 3 See for example: (Halcon et al 2004, Kinzie et al 1989, Lustig et al 2004, Mighir et al 1995, Rothe et al 2002, Rousseau & Drapeau 2003, Szapocznik, Cohen & Hernandez 1985, Weine et al 1995). See (Lammers 1996) for a discussion of the drawbacks of applying western psychology/psychiatry to the situation of refugees from the South, namely reification, individualisation, and medicalisation. Studies focusing on young refugees and outside of the mental health perspective are few: (Bek-Pedersen & Montgomery 2006, Camino 1994, Chatty, Crivello & Hundt 2005, Farwell 2001, Sommers 2001a, Turner 2004). 4 Based on the addition of the categories of adolescents (10-19) and youth (15-25), the WHO and FAO definitions of ‘young people’ include all persons between 10 and 25 years old. The UN General Assembly when adopting the World Programme of Action for Youth in 1995 defined youth as people between the ages of 15 and 25. 5 Of the nineteen chapters in Engendering Forced Migration (Indra 1999) only one is specifically about men: (McSpadden 1999). Other exceptions are: (Berger forthcoming, McSpadden 1987, 1991, McSpadden & Moussa 1996, Omidian 1993, Sommers 2001a, Turner 2004). 6 This number excludes refugees I interviewed in the refugee camps and settlements in Adjumani and Arua (northern Uganda) and Kibondo (Tanzania), as well as the young (under age 12) children of families and single mothers who are included. 7 Two studies tried to work around this problem by developing sampling techniques suitable to the situation: Kibreab in Khartoum (1996) and the Johannesburg Project (Jacobsen & Landau 2003). Note that these are large-scale and mostly quantitative studies with different objectives from a qualitative study like mine. 8 For novels that deal with this relationship, see for instance: The Grass is Singing (Lessing 1950), My Son’s Story (Gordimer 1990), The Pickup (Gordimer 2001), Disgrace (Coetzee 2000), Admiring Silence (Gurnah 1996), The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver 1998), Season of Migration to the North (Salih 2003 [1969]), Conrad’s Rivier (Schipper 1994), Abyssinian Chronicles (Isegawa 1998). 9 There is a second reason for the rule of ‘no assistance’. Jacobsen & Landau write: “While reactivity problems occur in all field research, when informants are like refugees – marginalized, poor and powerless – the methodological problems fade into ethical ones” (2003: 102). The argument is that it is un-ethical to give in a context defined by power differences, because this exacerbates these differences and may lure people into participating in a project that they may otherwise have stayed away from. However, this argument glosses over preoccupations and sensibilities about power and guilt, which will be discussed later in this chapter. 10 The issue of giving/receiving not only relates to feelings of dignity, but also to sheer survival: having nothing to give – whether money, food, skills, knowledge – means being in an extremely precarious situation. Without wanting to draw untenable parallels, Primo Levi’s insight is relevant here: “One of the most important things I had learned in Auschwitz was that one must avoid being a nobody. All roads are closed to a person who appears useless, all are open to a person who has a function, even the most fatuous” (Levi 1987 [1963]: 235). 11 The Journal of Refugee Studies tables of content reveal only two articles with this reflection: (Chimni 1998, Zetter 1989). 12 Compare the past debate in women’s studies: does one need to be a woman to study and understand the lives of women? (Grant 1993, Harding 1986) 13 Night of Philosophy, Felix Meritis, Amsterdam, 5 April 2003. 14 For an impressive example, see A Human Being Died That Night (Gobodo-Madikizela 2003). 15 Among the landmark publications were: Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (Asad 1973), Current Anthropology, 1968 (‘Responsibility Symposium’), The Politics of Anthropology (Huizer & Mannheim 1979), Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes 1972), Orientalism (Said 1979). 16 At her public lecture Culture and Citizenship: a Feminist Perspective, Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), Amsterdam, 9 June 2004. 17 Several authors make a point of stressing that, though they usually receive the credits, the postmodern scholars were not the first to put the critique of objectivity and ethnographic authority onto the anthropological agenda (Bell, Caplan & Karim 1993, Caplan 2003, Mascia-Lees, Sharpe & Cohen 1989). 18 Haraway adds that how to see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic and that “the standpoints of the subjugated are not ‘innocent’ positions” (1991: 191).
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19 The Quest of Life, part III, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands, November 2003. Wieseltier wrote Kaddish in the year following the death of his father, a holocaust survivor. 20 Though I am critical of the practices of ordering and generalising, I do not contend that a random compilation of ‘raw’ observations and narratives will do. I ally with Van de Port that ordering in academic texts something as chaotic as war is alienating, that it leaves out the core of what it is about, but also with his qualification that, “my criticism of the academic passion for tidying up is aimed more at types and degrees of ordering than at structuring as a valid procedure” (1998: 25). 21 For instance: (Cesara 1982, Siskind 1973, Smith Bowen 1954, van Binsbergen 1988). 22 Ethnographies which include the researcher in varying degrees of presence: (Abu-Lughod 1993, Behar 1993, Briggs 1970, Ghorashi 2003, Myerhoff 1994 [1979], Nencel 2001, Nordstrom 1997, Scheper-Hughes 1992, Shostak 2000, van de Port 1998, Willemse 2001) 23 According to Bell, Peter Winch set off this debate with his Understanding a Primitive Society, 1964. In this essay, discussing Evans-Pritchard’s description of the Zande poison oracle, Winch raised the spectre that however well one might describe the practices of the Zande in their particular surroundings, one may still go away without understanding them (Bell 2002: 2).
PART II– NARRATIVES
Introduction – Young People in Transit
1 An average of nearly 45% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population are children under fifteen Compared to 18,5% in high income countries. 2 In Kinshasa, adult suspicion of children and youth relates to the unprecedented scene of Kabila’s march into Kinshasa with bands of young soldiers armed with assault rifles (Argenti 2002: 144). 3 Translation: ‘We didn’t climb on our elders’ shoulders to watch their toes.’ Used by Petna in interview AF. 4 Young people were often at the forefront of pre-colonial movements for religious and political renewal, and the independence generation of African political activists defined themselves as ‘youth’ in opposition to their elders who “were supposedly content either to be loyal colonial servants or placid rural chiefs and smallholders” (de Waal 2002: 15). The struggle for independence cannot be understood as only a revolt against colonial rule, but also as one of educated and ambitious young men against their fathers. This is beautifully and painfully captured in the novel Weep not, Child (Wa Thiong'o 1964). 5 Youth have been a subject of inquiry in sociology since the 1950s and in cultural studies since the 1970s. See: (Bucholtz 2002, Valentine, Skelton & Chambers 1998, Wulff 1995) for discussions on the study of youth culture by the ‘Birmingham School’. 6 See Caputo (1995: 23-26) for an elaboration on the influence of development psychology on the study of childhood and youth across many disciplines. De Boeck & Honwana write: The concept of children and youth as “dependent, immature and incapable of assuming responsibility, properly confined to the protection of home and school” developed among the middle classes in Europe and America “and has been universalized in such a way that youngsters who do not follow this path are considered either to be at risk or to pose a risk to society” (2005: 3). 7 Virtually absent in this study is the fourth area of growing research, i.e. religion, which is indeed embraced by increasing numbers of African youth as “an alternative circuit of meaning and dignity after the failure of political engagement”. Abbink writes: “Recourse to religion combines the quest for meaning in an insecure world with the creation of a sense of belonging to a wider community, and presents an alternative way of ‘knowing’ in the absence of access to proper public education and scientific knowledge” (2005: 20). For work on African youth’s participation in religious movements, see: (Christiansen 2006, De Boeck 2005, Meyer 1998, Sharp 2000, Tayob 1995, van Dijk 1999).
Chapter four – Soldiers
1 Clearly, some of these young men would have benefited from being able to talk about what they witnessed or about the sexual abuses they had themselves committed. That there are no such professional services available for refugees in Kampala is a great lack (see Chapter Two). 2 There are no ex-fighters from Congo among the protagonists of this chapter, because no Congolese young men I came to know personally had been soldiers before their flight to Uganda. Young men in eastern Congo have been recruited into armies and militias throughout the 1990s. See: (Bazenguisa-Banga 2002, Clark 2004, HRW 2001a, Lemarchand 2001, Van Acker & Vlassenroot 2000, Vlassenroot & Raeymaekers 2005, Vlassenroot & van Acker 2001). 3 De Waal argues: “While it is not possible to make a legal or human rights case against adult (over age 18) soldiers, it is both necessary and possible to address the structural conditions that make it so easy to militarise Africa’s youth” (2002: 22). See Chapter Three for the definition of ‘young people’ used in this book.
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4 Think of the squires in Europe in the Middle Ages, the children’s crusade, Napoleon’s army, British underage soldiers in the Gulf War and recruits to the American army today who are legally minors (Brett & McCallin 1996, Furley 1995, Honwana 2002). Only the US and Somalia have not ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which opposes military service below the age of 18. 5 The OAU African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (1999) was the first regional treaty to establish 18 as the minimum age for recruitment and participation in warfare. The Optional Protocol (2002) to the CRC on the involvement of children in armed conflict raises the minimum age for recruitment from 15 to 18 years and prohibits the use in conflict of children below the age of 18 by all armed groups. 6 Samuel said that his father (a Jurchol) had two or three years of primary education, and that his mother (an Anyuak) never enjoyed any formal schooling. 7 For a discussion of the establishment of the SPLA, its political program and the first years of the war, see Johnson 2004, chapter five. 8 Johnson argues that only “by the end of 1991 the SPLA in Equatoria was tolerated” (2004: 87). 9 Several studies cite generational conflict as an underlying and enduring factor in the continuation of the war in Sudan (Jok 2005, Kurimoto 1994, Simonse & Kurimoto 1998, Willis 2002). As was discussed in the Introduction to Part II, this situation is by no means unique to Sudan. Conflict between generations and/or age groups is a structural social and political phenomenon in many African countries, and often among the causes of war (Abbink 2005, De Boeck & Honwana 2005). 10 Juba University was transferred to Khartoum in 1989, and English as language of instruction replaced by Arabic (Simon Simonse, personal communication). 11 See section 3.1 about the SPLA military training camps. 12 Johnson (2004: 132) argues that systematic recruitment into the SPLA started in 1986. 13 It was not exclusively young recruits who were escorted to Ethiopia by the SPLA. Scott-Villiers et al report that in mid 1988 “an extraordinary number of destitute southerners trekked across the south of Sudan, guided on their way by the SPLA towards these Ethiopian camps. No stopping was allowed” (1993: 203). These people were fleeing the 1987 famine in Upper Nile, Jonglei, Bahr el Gazal, caused by drought, insecurity and the breakdown of trade. 14 See Johnson (2004: 87-90) for a discussion of SPLA involvement in internal warfare in Ethiopia, and the consequent fighting that broke out (including the attack on Gambela refugee camp) immediately after the fall of Mengistu. 15 In both Nasir and Pochalla, where the relief efforts for the returnees were concentrated, 20,000 to 30,000 so-called ‘unaccompanied minors’ arrived (Scott-Villiers, Scott-Villiers & Dodge 1993). The question of just who these ‘unaccompanied minors’ (dubbed ‘The Lost Boys’) were, whether all of them had indeed been trained by the SPLA in Ethiopia, and how they were kept and used by the SPLA to attract relief, are contested issues. For a discussion of the ill-coordinated and inadequate UN relief efforts for the approximately 250,000 returnees, see (Johnson 1996, Scott-Villiers, Scott-Villiers & Dodge 1993). For a graphic account of the situation in Nasir, see chapter 19 in (Scroggins 2004). 16 Unni Karunakara, director of the Demography of Forced Migration Project, John Hopkins University. 17 See Harrell-Bond & Verdirame 2005, pp. 175-179. 18 The West Nile Bank Front, a Ugandan rebel group supported by the Government of Sudan (GOS), was led by Juma Oris, once Idi Amin’s Foreign Minister. It was defeated in 1997 by the SPLA at Morobo and Yei: 800 were killed, 1000 handed over to the Ugandan government (Johnson 2004: 209). 19 The Kuku of Kajokeji are Bari speakers. Gore is a Bari birth order name. Gore could be a place named after a chief (Simon Simonse, personal communication). 20 The first of these interviews Joke Schrijvers and I conducted together. 21 M. Locheherk, personal communication. 22 Afewerki joined the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), engaged in military opposition to Ethiopian supremacy since 1961, in 1966. In the 1970s he became involved in the seven-year long civil war on the side of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), mainly Christian intellectuals with a Marxist bias, who had broken away from the ELF. It was the EPLF that emerged from this war as the principal party, able after ten more years of fighting to shake off foreign domination in 1991. In the First Organizational Congress (1977) of the EPLF, Afewerki was elected as the deputy chairman of the EPLF. In the Second Organizational Congress held in 1987, he was elected as the Secretary-General. By 1991, Afewerki was the most powerful man within the EPLF, and he became the first Eritrean president in 1993. The EPLF was renamed the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) in the Third Congress in 1994, and has since been the only party allowed to operate in Eritrea. 23 Some argue that women’s participation in the liberation war is “much exaggerated” and that “the guerrilla war machine used female power without necessarily altering traditional views of their role in society” (Hedru 2003: 439). See also (Alayli 1995, Bernal 2000). 24 These are the figures that Yosief uses. Eritrea’s current population is 4,4 million and Ethiopia’s is 68,6 million (IGAD website)
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25 The liberation war fighters, commonly referred to as the tegadelti, are called the Yekaalo, and the new recruits are called the Warsai. 26 By mid-2001 reports of sexual abuse of female conscripts by army officers began to circulate, first informally and then in the private press (Hedru 2003). Dorman writes that although allegations of sexual abuse are widely believed, little evidence and few first-hand accounts have emerged. She also mentions that “young men say that they will not consider marrying women who have attended Sawa Military Camp because of the ‘damage’ done to them there” (Dorman 2005: 200). 27 New recruits in various rebel armies are moreover forbidden to use their birth names, traditional names or nicknames (Honwana 2002, Twum-Danso 2003). 28 Gaim Kibreab, personal communication: This kind of relationship was unheard of during the 30 years war of independence. During the war of independence, when the EPLF was Maoist-oriented, those who originated from urban areas were not trusted. They were regarded as petty bourgeoisie who would readily betray the revolution in pursuit of self-interest. Thus, the educated left no stones unturned to hide their identity. The model fighter was the ‘peasant’ who was referred to as the tcheguar danga (hairy legs) who executed orders with robotic precision with no questions asked. To win the trust of the majority of the fighters and the leaders, those who came from the urban areas to ‘commit class suicide’ proved through actual practice that they were part of the proletariat and the peasantry. 29 Jehovah Witnesses were harshly persecuted for refusing to participate in the 1993 independence referendum. In 1994, the state revoked their citizenship rights because of their refusal to participate in the national service (Dorman 2005, Hedru 2003). 30 Yosief told me what he remembered and I had no means of verifying this information. An independent commentator to this chapter suggested that his description of the destruction wrought by the Eritrean army across the Sudanese border is hard to believe, because the army was known for its strict discipline and because if the Eritrean army was there to help the SPLA, this behaviour would undermine the credibility of the Sudanese opposition. 31 This is another example of me having to rely on what my discussion partner told me, without being able to cross-check the information. An independent commentator on this chapter suggested it was unlikely that Lopithi was arrested merely on the basis of his disapproval of the conflict in Chukudum, and that other issues probably played a part. For more information on the Chukudum conflict, see: (Johnson 2004, SHRA 1999, Simonse 2000). 32 In 2005 Lopithi told me he had heard Kamal was in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, and commented: “He managed to come out, because he was also disturbed”. 33 It proved difficult to verify the extent to which deserters, if caught, were indeed executed. 34 This Ugandan doctor was one of the majority of Ugandans who sympathise with the cause of the SPLA war, and he obviously thought that Lopithi - as an intelligent and well-educated person – had the capacity to make a useful contribution to it. 35 SRRA is the Sudan Relief and Rehabilitation Association, closely linked to the SPLA/M. 36 See (Harrell-Bond et al 2000). 37 See www.hrw.org, www.amnesty.org, www.jrs.net, www.reliefweb.net and (Nkula 2004) for reported human rights abuses in Kamwala Remind Prison in Zambia. 38 The alleged ‘Dinka domination’ within the SPLA has been a subject of controversy (see Johnson 2004, pp. 51-53.) 39 Lopithi informed me about the sexual abuse of boys and girls in the training camps only in 2005. Wani denied sexual abuse of boys happened during military training: “Homosexuality is a taboo in southern Sudan, people hate it. They assume it is an Arab thing”. 40 SPLA leaders like Riek Machar persuaded both villagers and recruits that the violent deaths generated by the civil war, were devoid of the pollution risks associated with acts of intra-ethnic homicide due to local feuding, and had no spiritual consequences. See Hutchinson 1996, chapter 3, and 1998 for a discussion of how this notion implies a suspension of the strong moral obligations binding Nuer communities of kin, leaving many with “strong degrees of moral uncertainty – if not profound anxiety” (1998: 70). 41 Simonse & Kurimoto argue that contemporary ‘total’ warfare is not devoid of ritual or sacrificial meaning (1998: 11). Previously, anthropologists denied that age systems in East Africa have a military function at all (Simonse & Kurimoto 1998). 42 Jok refers to Hutchinson, who argues that a growing sense of ‘entitlement’ to the domestic and sexual services of women also pervades this ‘hyper-masculinized world view’. 43 Ethnic tensions and hostilities were also played out in transit camps and settlements in northern Uganda and resulted in UNHCR adopting a policy of separating hostile groups (Moro 2004, SCDP 1998). 44 See Chapter One: After the Nasir split, John Garang’s faction was renamed ‘SPLA-Mainstream’, while Riek Machar’s faction was named SSIA (earlier SPLA-Nasir). 45 Men’s struggle with their self-respect and manhood as a result of not being able to take care of their families is noted more generally in forced migration literature (Kibreab 1995, McSpadden 1999, McSpadden
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& Moussa 1993, Schrijvers 1997). One study in Tanzania notes the way refugee men feel undermined in their manhood because UNHCR has taken over their role as providers for their wives and families (Turner 2004). 46 Lopithi lists the topics of lectures received in Senior Officers training: “Karl Marx, F. Engels, Machiavelli, last days of Plato, Napoléon Bonaparte, the KGB, Hitler’s demise, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, the CIA/FBI, the British SAS”. 47 Jok (2005) argues that the important status and “overwhelming centrality” accorded to children is said to have changed as a result of this war. 48 Hutchinson cites a different ‘graduation song’: ‘Even your mother, give her a bullet!/ Even your father, give him a bullet!/ Your gun is your food; your gun is your wife’ (1996: 355). 49 I knew a son of the same family, who confirmed his father was concerned that Samuel may be ‘dangerous’ and that his behaviour was not always understood. We discussed the issue with Samuel, and I was interested to hear the son’s advice to him: ‘Why were you disobedient? Yes you have your rights but you are in Africa with all of its horrible institutions. You should have been humble, get your education and then leave, if you had wanted to. You can’t go blaming my father, who is older than you and takes care of you, however many wrongs he may have – and he does.’ 50 I asked Wani whether he considered his late father’s brother (who took him in after he was released as bodyguard) as his father. He said: “Yes, and some time ago I even took his name, because of the care he took of me, out of respect for him. And on my refugee paper I wrote the name of his wife where they asked for that of my mother”.
Chapter five – Students
1 Also see STARBASE on www.unsudanig.org. See Scroggins (2002, chapter 12) about the primary schools started under the aegis of Operation Lifeline Sudan, funded by UNICEF, in the early 1990s. 2 The RLP working paper (Dryden-Peterson 2003), which has been very useful to this chapter, addresses in considerable detail the issue of educational access for refugees in Kampala. Its continuation involves following 80 pupils in four different schools in Kampala and two refugee settlements for three years. Several research reports pay attention to the educational opportunities of refugee children and youth in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (Masabo & Mageni 2006) and in Cairo, Egypt (Afifi 2003, Al-Sharmani 2003, Dingemans 2002). 3 Chapter Three discussed the methodological consequences of this kind of involvement. 4 Information for this section is taken from reports (UNESCO 2003, UNHCR 2002a, 2003a) and internet sites, including: EFA Global Monitoring Reports at www.unesco.org; www.education.go.ug; www.unsudanig.org. 5 See Verdirame & Harrell-Bond 2005, chapter 5. 6 UNESCO has a Regional Programme for Education for Emergencies and Reconstruction (PEER) in the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes Region. There is also an Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE). UNESCO advises governments on including emergency and crisis issues in their national EFA plans. 7 On average, developing countries spend 4,1% of their national income on education (2000) as compared to .... in Europe and ..... in the USA. 8 See: http://stats.uis.unesco.org/TableViewer/tableView.aspx?ReportId=235; accessed August 2006. 9 There are critical voices to be heard: “The UPE program, introduced by Museveni before the 1996 presidential elections, was widely regarded as a ploy to win votes. Because of the speed with which it was introduced, it has serious flaws, yet ironically there is little public debate over it, a program that donors consider a model for Africa” (Tripp 2004: 10). 10 The 2005 RLP report mentions that in Kyaka II settlement, which houses approximately 4300 children aged 5 to 17, there were only three primary schools and one secondary school (Bernstein 2005: 33). 11 See Verdirame & Harrell-Bond (2005: 260) on the policy of ‘education for repatriation’ adhered to in many refugee-hosting countries, but not in Uganda. 12 HPCT, now renamed the Windle Trust (www.windle.org.uk), is a British NGO which also receives funding from DFID. 13 This policy is especially hard to understand considering that HPCT cannot fill all of its scholarship quotas in the settlements due to a lack of qualified applicants (Bernstein 2005: 32). 14 There is criticism of the on-going state withdrawal of from the funding of the tertiary sector. The government’s argument that resources should be directed primarily to the basic sectors of education (UPE) is spurred by World Bank policies. The Dean of Makerere’s Faculty of Law writes: “No country has developed only on the basis of promoting basic education. The approach must not only attempt to ensure that as many as possible are able to attain minimal literacy and numeracy, but that specialized educational levels are also attained. Otherwise, not only will it be impossible to resist (or simply respond) to the imperatives of globalization, but the peoples of Uganda will be condemned to a marginal existence on the fringes of
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important cultural, technological and economic developments” (Oloka-Onyango 2000: 42-43). For the changes in university education across Africa, due to economic crisis, withdrawal of state support, and imposed SAPs, see: (Cruise O'Brien 1996, Federici, Caffentzis & Alidou 2000, Lebeau & Ogunsanya 2000, Mbembe 1985, Nyamnjoh & Jua 2002). 15 In 2004 the HPCT sponsored 91 undergraduates (of which 11 non-Sudanese) and 8 postgraduates (of which 1 non-Sudanese) in university, and a further 270 students in vocational training courses. 16 For the primary and secondary level tuition fees are the same for nationals and foreigners; most Ugandan universities charge higher fees (to be paid in US$) for foreigners, including refugees. In August 1998, the University Council of Makerere University announced that henceforth refugee students would pay the same fees as Ugandan students. 17 Ethiopia is often known as the only African country not to have been colonised. Save for the Italian occupation (1936-1941) Ethiopia, under the charismatic and prolonged leadership of Haile Selassie I, was able to withstand foreign domination in the 20th century. However, internal unrest mounted during the 1960s and 70s, especially among the student population. In 1974, following a harsh famine and the damaging effects of the worldwide oil crisis, Selassie’s government was toppled and replaced by a communist administration known as ‘the Derg’. This regime, headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam from 1977 until 1991, was backed by communist powers such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and East Germany. Ethiopia in this period was subjected to continuing turmoil: the raging war with Eritrea, Somalia’s attack in 1977, further droughts and subsequent famines, and various attempted coups. There were attacks by the anti-Mengistu Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP) dubbed ‘White Terror’ by Mengistu, who promptly retaliated with ‘Red Terror’. During this two-year campaign, a minimum of 10,000 were killed in Addis Ababa alone in 1977, and probably a comparable number in the provinces in 1977 and 1978. A large number were detained and subjected to appalling prison conditions and torture. To assist in exterminating the Derg’s political opponents and ‘enemies of the revolution’ Mengistu employed the secret police and issued arms to local government officials. In 1991, the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the newly formed coalition of resisting factions (EPRP and TPLF), overthrew the Derg regime and Mengistu in its stride. It is the present government led by Meles Zenawi that has ruled Ethiopia since then, meanwhile establishing good relations with the United States and its allies. The Ethiopia-Eritrea border war, as well as the violent response to demonstrators disputing the 2005 election results, have raised serious criticism of Zenawi and his government both inside and outside Ethiopia. 18 The Sudanese refugees often mentioned that when their compatriots fled the first civil war (1955-1972), many of them received their education in Uganda. They make it appear as if in those days all Sudanese freely joined schools and universities in Uganda. They are, sometimes bitterly, disappointed to find a different reality. 19 War destroys educational infrastructure and thus affects long-term, socio-economic development (Machel 1996). As Galperin puts it: “one of the mechanisms whereby Africa’s wars have lasting economic consequences for the continent, is through denying an education to children” (2002: 110). 20 There has been controversy about schools run by the SPLA in southern Sudan: were they schools or military training camps? Examples are Natinga, where 2000 displaced boys were in school ‘protected’ by the SPLA (Haumann 2004) and Palataka, thirty miles southeast of Kapoeta, where at one time several thousand teenage boys lived in abandoned mission buildings. This ‘school’ was sponsored by FACE, the Friends of African Children Educational Foundation, founded by John Garang (Scroggins 2002: 144-146). 21 Isaac had a four-year-old daughter, whose mother used to live with him in Uganda. Her parents, however, had called her back to southern Sudan because Isaac had not completed paying the brideprice. 22 The authors further criticise the fact that in refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda these programs contained very little “hard law” and that there were instances where these programs were introduced while at the same time secondary education (unlike peace education the object of a specific right) was phased out. 23 During the first civil war (1955-1972), the northern government had killed bull-boys and other educated southerners. They argued that the missionaries had poisoned the minds of the south’s educated young men against Islam and the north (Scroggins 2002: 175). 24 Wani said: “Now that we’ve been to school we think differently. I now know we are equal. For example in university I see that girls can sometimes contribute even more than boys. In academic work their reasoning capacity is sometimes more than that of boys. In the village if a woman enters a discussion, she is told, ‘You are reasoning like who?!’ I now see that these are fake thoughts. However, in Sudan people still have this in mind, especially the older people. Girls are not sent to school, people see it as spoiling their money for nothing: you have daughters only to receive brideprice. But as a result of the war and many Sudanese having fled to Uganda, many girls are now educated”. 25 It was a dominant theme in Yosief’s account (see Chapter Soldiers), who portrayed this difference as the determining factor in the relationships between ‘the Fighters’ and young army recruits, and between village people and townspeople.
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26 The same problem is noted for refugees in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (Masabo & Mageni 2006, Willems 2003). 27 Mikael wrote his (well received) BA thesis on the role of ethnicity in conflicts in Africa, with special reference to Nigeria. 28 For the ex-soldiers of this study, like Samuel and Jacob, the anonymity of Kampala made that they did not need to reveal their former occupation to school management or fellow students. Therefore the issue reported in other post-conflict situations, that teachers and parents object to having former (child) soldiers enrol, fearing that they will have a disruptive effect on other children (Machel 1996) was no obstacle to them. 29 Cruise O’Brien writes about students in West Africa that they “can be seen to occupy a politically significant space in which they play a role of inherent ambiguity. On the one hand they are popularly seen as candidates for elite status, as idle and unproductive: they may even be held in a sort of contempt. On the other hand, these same students emerge in times of political crisis as leaders of the crowd: they are then held in a sort of temporary respect” (1996: 64-69).
Chapter six – Artists
1 African artists, he puts it, are denied “the right to language and self-articulation” and “turned into a silent colony, a vassal enclave of pleasure and power … for the all-knowing critic or collector” (Oguibe 1999: 19, 23). 2 Examples are the ateliers of Pierre Romain-Desfossés in Elisabethville (now Lumumbashi, Congo), Frank McEwen in Salisbury (now Harare, Zimbabwe), Kenneth Murray in Nigeria, and Margaret Trowell in Kampala, Uganda. Influenced by the Jungian notion of the collective unconscious, the ‘tribal artist’ was seen as “someone living in a familiar relationship to a mythic past, only superficially touched by the colonial experience” (Kasfir 1999: 51). Kasfir writes about the South African ‘township art’: “While abstraction became the dominant international style in the 1950s, many south African promoters believed this was an unauthentic direction for black artists, who ought to be depicting the life that surrounded them instead of aspiring to membership in an art world whose centres were far away and putatively ‘white’ … However, it needs to be seen as one fragment of a larger picture in which all South African art in the 1950s existed on the far periphery of a late-colonial Europe where even white South African artists were largely pre-occupied with conventional genres such as landscape, still-life and the figure” (1999: 96-7). 3 Museums for African art in the US and Europe no longer exclusively display ‘traditional objects’; African artist exhibit at important art festivals such as the Venice Biennale (49th edition, see Authentic/Ex-centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art (Hassan & Oguibe 2001)) and the Documenta in Kassel (in 2003 for the first time with an African curator: Okwui Ekwenzor). Several major exhibitions of work by contemporary African artists have been organised since the first Les Magiciens de la Terre, Paris, 1989: Africa Explores (1991) in New York; Africa, the Art of a Continent (1995) in London; The Short Century (2002) in Berlin, Chicago and New York; Africa Remix (2004/5) in Dusseldorf, London, Paris and Tokyo. Enwezor & Oguibe write: “Not only are there greater numbers of artist working today, there have emerged curators, art historians, scholars, and university departments dedicated to the study of contemporary African art, as well as new spaces, especially within the continent, which are now charting the emergence of what undeniably is a golden age” (1999: 10). 4 Carpenter Kane Kwei started producing these decorated coffins (in the form of Mercedes, beer bottles or mobile phones) for the local elite in the 1960s. He was ‘discovered’ by a Californian gallery holder after which the coffins were put on display in many exhibitions and bought by several museums (Woets 2004). 5 It is noted that though this ‘popular art’ has been promoted in the West as “quintessential contemporary African expression”, its collectors are not willing to pay for this art prices in any way comparable to what is paid for contemporary western art (Oguibe 1999: 24). 6 The 1989 exhibition Art/Artifact at the Center for African Art in New York had as its theme the ways westerners have regarded and classified African art and material culture during the 20th century. 7 Traces, by Petna and Gerry Turvey, 8 January 2003, National Theatre, with dancers from Y!A, Footsteps and Katwe Youth Development Centre; Alama/Traces, as curtain raiser to Abila by Compagnie Gàara, choreographer Opio Okach, 7 May 2003, National Theatre. 8 In January 2005, Samy read an earlier draft of this chapter. At this sentence he stopped and said: “It was me who thought that, I didn’t ask my father”. 9 In January 2005, Samy read an earlier draft of this chapter and commented: “I’m not sure she really was the first, but she was one of the rare cases. I believe the disease was dysentery”. 10 See: www.yoleafrica.org. Yolé!Africa has received funding from the Ijayo Foundation (www.stichting- ijayo.nl). 11 All Ethiopians living in Eritrea carry this ID and are exempted from National Service 12 The border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which ensued in 1998 over the border town Badme, led to 19,000 Eritrean casualties. In December 2000, the Algiers Agreement appointed an independent UN- associated boundary commission, which officially ended the war. In April 2002, this commission stipulated a
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decree awarding Badme to Eritrea. However, fears over new conflict have not been resolved by this decree, not least because of Ethiopia’s continuing military presence in Badme (Abbink 1998, 2003a, b) 13 See Dorman (2005) on the annual gffa (in Tigrinya) or ‘round-up’ of draft-dodgers. 14 The rebels, aiming at overthrowing the regime in Eritrea, among them the JIHAD Movement, use this part of the border to raid the Eritrean government troops. 15 Gulsa received thousands of Eritrean refugees after the outbreak of the Ethiopia-Eritrea border war in 1998. 16 The word keran can be used to anyone who instead to resorting to reason resorts to a fight, including those in power. 17 Screened at: Africa in the Picture, 7-11 September 2005, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; 2nd Amakula International Film Festival, 15-25 September, Kampala, Uganda; 1ière Salaam Kivu International Film Festival (SKIFF), 21-23 October, Goma, DRC. 18 Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1900-1991; born in Mali) was a diplomat, historian and writer who spent much of his life translating and transcribing African oral traditions. 19 Ge’ez is the liturgical script of the Ethiopian Church. 20 Kekele, as curtain raiser to Valérie Berger and Sello Pesa’s Everyday, 23 January 2002, National Theatre; Kekele, out from the deep, 28-30 March 2002, La fête de la danse, National Theatre. 21 Petna wrote Kekele in French, and had it translated into English. 22 ‘Africa Remix – Contemporary art of a continent’ was a joint venture between Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf, the Hayward Gallery, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Chief curator was Simon Njami. 23 See: The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body (Butchart 1998) and Empire and Sexuality (Hyam 1990). 1 The Referendum posed the question: ‘Which political system do you wish to adopt, Movement or Multiparty?’ Voter turnout was 50,1%, of which 90,7% voted for the Movement (i.e. non-party system) and 9,3% for multiparty system. For a commentary on the referendum, see (Ahluwalia & Zegeye 2002). Five years later, in the July 2005 constitutional referendum, the Ugandans voted to restore a multi-party political system. 2 Chapter Seven further discusses the issue of labelling. 3 The Dutch daily De Volkskrant, gave its article about the Africa, the Art of a Continent exhibition at the London Royal Academy (1995) a telling heading: ‘Duizend talen maar geen woord voor kunst’ (One thousand languages but no word for art). 4 L’art pour l’art was coined in the early 19th century by the French philosopher Victor Cousin: art needs no justification; it need serve no political, didactic, or other end. 5 Many remain opposed to the idea of politically engaged art. I was struck by how Jeanne-Claude responded to journalists’ questions at the opening of her and Christo’s temporary installation The Gates in New York’s Central Park in February 2005. The cameras followed the more than 7000 saffron coloured fabric panels along the park’s walkways that quite stunningly fluttered amidst the leafless branches. She emphatically stated: “It is not a symbol, it is not a message, it is only a work of art”. 6 Ojo writes about the Igbo of Nigeria that “some Igbo carvers are also priests, diviners and herbalists. They belong to a special class of people who understand the language of spirits and come into contact with them” (Ojo 1982: 203). Oloidi sums up a whole list of celebrative words for artist, which include olowoamò (a sculptor whose hands have been specially blessed to make beautiful clay figures or objects) and asogidèdá (a creator, a good or superhuman sculptor who turns a mere wood into a human being) (Oloidi 1998: 48-49). 7 Mirra (also called khat or qat) is a natural stimulant from the Catha Edulis plant that grows in East Africa and Southern Arabia. 8 Loss is a principle theme of western literature and art, which suggests a relation between pain/suffering/loss on the one hand and creativity on the other hand. Three random examples are: Vondel’s Kinderlijck (1632) [Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679), poet and playwright, is considered one of the greatest Dutch writers ever. He lost his wife and three of his five children. The poem Kinderlijck is about the death of his son Constantijntje], Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Kollwitz’ Trauernde Elternpaar (The Mourning Parents, 1932) [Sculpture at the German WWI military cemetery in Praetbos, Belgium, described in Pogingen tot Ontleding van Verlies (Krog 2004)]. Chinua Achebe (2000) argues that most of the new African literature of the 1960s and 70s was about re-appropriating and revaluing ‘Africa’, and thus essentially about recovering a loss. 9 For this account see section 2 of this chapter. 10 Original in Dutch: “Omdat je op het moment dat je de woorden hebt gevonden, greep krijgt op het geheugen, het kan je niet langer naar willekeur achtervolgen, je kunt er stap voor stap een halt aan toeroepen of proberen om wat respijt te vragen”. 11 Two recent novels that explore the notion of the consolatory function of literature are Bernard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (The Reader) (1995) and Gilles Rozier’s Un Amour sans Résistance (Love without Resistance) (2003).
Notes 377
12 Quoted in Gordon (2000) Breaking Habits, Building Communities: Virginia Woolf and the Neuroscientific Body, Modernism/Modernity, 7 (1): 25-41. 13 Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, premiere in Vienna 1905, from poems by Friedrich Ruckert, published posthumely in 1872. 14 While the imagination can have constructive and healing qualities, it can just as well be dangerous. I saw young refugees who as it were lifted themselves out of reality and lost every sense of connection to the here- and-now. The line between the empowering imagination and incapacitating escapism appears to be thin. 15 The late Leopold Senghor, poet and former president of Senegal (1960 to 1980), described poetry as “the place where the essence exists”. Others are sceptical. Antjie Krog, poet herself, said at the conference The Anatomy of Loss: “No art and literature… and in South Africa we have two Nobel Prize winners… [Nadine Gordimer (1991) and J.M. Coetzee (2003)] prepared us for what came out at the TRC, for the truths of experience”.
Part III - Reflections
Chapter seven – Reflections on Identity & Self in the Aftermath of War
1 Fuglerud (2004) argues for more scholarly attention for the motivations of those who do not flee: considerations to stay in spite of conflict are relevant for understanding the way people conceptualise space and their own communities within it (see also Allen & Turton 1996). 2 A distinction must be made between studies of African systems of thought, or ‘folk philosophy’ (on which there is an expansive body of anthropological literature, see Riesman 1986), and African philosophy. Philosophy is a second-order evaluation of first-order ways of thinking about nature, culture and experience. In the historiography of African philosophy this distinction – i.e. the question of what African intellectual activity should be called ‘philosophy’ - has been the source of much debate. Interested readers may consult: Appiah 1992, chapter 5; Bell 2002, chapter 2 & 3; Coetzee & Roux 1998, chapter 3; Hountondji 1983; Kimmerle 1995, chapter 2; Masolo 1994. 3 Relevant to note is that ‘the West’ employed (and in many ways continues to employ) the same mechanism of the oppositional identity. In his The Invention of Africa (Mudimbe 1988), the author argues that the West needed an antipole with which it could express its own identity as a rational subject. The African became not merely the ‘Other’ representing all that the westerner was not, but the key to western identity itself. The Congo has always been a pre-eminent example of such construction. De Boeck writes: “In various gradations, ‘Zaire’ appears in … works of fiction as a powerful negative image of the Western Self, in which the west projects all its fears and fantasies” (1996: 91). See also Imagining the Congo (Dunn 2003). 4 This discourse developed within the context of the increasingly racialised thought and practice of 19th century Europe and America. See the first two chapters of Appiah’s In my Father’s House (1992) for an analysis of the writings of the early 20th century African-American intellectuals who initiated the Pan-African discourse (from which the négritude movement drew much of its inspiration). Also see Bell 2000, pp. 50-58. 5 Achille Mbembe in an interview with Christian Hoeller: www.stanford.edu/~mayadodd/mbembe.html 6 In 1999, western governments gave more than 25 times more money per person in humanitarian assistance to the former Yugoslavia than to the DRC (Murison 2002). 7 I managed to fill about one bookshelf with the edited volumes, theoretical books and ethnographies that have contemporary wars and violence as their principle subject of study: (Abbink et al 1996, Aijmer & Abbink 2000, Boyden & de Berry 2004, Brandt 2002, Daniel 1996, Feldman 1991, Hutchinson 1996, Kooiman et al 2002, Loizos 1981, Malkki 1995a, Nordstrom 1997, Nordstrom & Robben 1995a, Richards 1996, Riches 1986, Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois 2003, Schmidt & Schröder 2001, Stewart & Strathern 2002, van de Port 1998). Many of these authors note that anthropologists have marginalised or neglected the study of warfare. Brandt (2002) refutes this claim with a detailed reconstruction of the position that war has occupied in 20th century anthropology’s published discourse. 8 Feldman writes about similar Renamo tactics: “These symbolic mutilations are acts against the organs of social witnessing, attacks on the individual body that affect the corporate body and its capacity to construct memory” (1995: 247). 9 See Richards (1996, Introduction) for a theoretical elaboration upon ‘war as discourse’ and ‘war as performance’. 10 Cohen criticises anthropological studies of initiation which understate the difficulties and ambiguities that accompany passing from one status to another. He writes: “Transformations of status … require a process of adjustment, of rethinking, which goes beyond the didactics of procedures … They require a reformulation of self which is more fundamental than admission to items of lore, or being loaded with new rights and obligations” (1992: 127-128).
378 War, Refuge and Self
11 With due respect for Malkki’s thought-provoking study, my reservation remains that the impression is given of too much homogeneity in the camp in terms of an undisputed adherence to the mythico-histories. Moreover I find the total opposition between camp and town at least surprising. 12 Note that several studies show that outside help is often less crucial for the survival of refugees than their own ingenious coping strategies (Harrell-Bond 1986, Horst 2006b, Kibreab 1993, Zetter 1996). 13 Not only do labels fail to reflect how people see themselves, they also do not take into account cultural and historical patterns of movement and the arbitrariness of national frontiers (Allen & Morsink 1994, Allen & Turton 1996, Bakewell 2004, Fuglerud 2004, Malkki 1995b, Ranger 1994). 14 While I was writing this chapter, I came across Anthony Cohen’s Self consciousness. An Alternative Anthropology of Identity (1994), which greatly helped to explicate my thoughts on the subject of the individual and the self. 15 It is interesting to note in context of this study that the Chicago School of urban sociology saw urban life as being incompatible with the maintenance of a coherent self. Selfhood was fractured by the city into functional performances and contingent personae. 16 Studies that include a focus on individual lives: (Abu-Lughod 1993, Briggs 1970, Caplan 1997, Fernandez 1982, Harris 2004, Myerhoff 1994 [1979], Nencel 2001, Rapport 1993, Shostak 1981, 2000, Werbner 1991, Willemse 2001) 17 For politicians and intellectuals like Leopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere and Kwame Nkrumah it served as the ideological groundwork for their different versions of so-called African socialism: it was used to show how humanism and socialism were an inherent part of Africa’s pre-colonial heritage (Bell 2002: 40). 18 The Beninois philosopher Paulin Hountondji also had a pioneering role in this debate (Hountondji 1996 [1983]). 19 The African philosophers referred to in this chapter are all men. Except for Gyekye, they all use the generic ‘man’ when referring to persons in general. 20 It must be stressed that there are not only different models and discourses on the person/self between cultures, but also within them, and that there is no linear relationship between these discourses and people’s everyday experiences of self (Moore 1994, chapter 2; and see below in section 5.2) 21 Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of Auschwitz, If This is a Man (1987 [1958]) and Pumla Gobodo- Madikizela’s book about her interviews with Eugene de Kock, one of the masterminds behind South Africa’s apartheid killings, A Human Being Died That Night (2003) both capture this tension poignantly. 22 See also Cohen 1994: 99-106. 23 Moore rightly notes that the assumption that physical embodiment constitutes identity is “part of a western discourse, rather than a natural fact of human existence” (1994: 36). Ethnographic studies show that there are cultures which do not see the body as the source and locus of identity, and which envisage persons as divisible and unbounded (Moore 1994, chapter 2). I did not establish the cultural discourses on the relationship between body and self that the young men of this study were brought up with. Nevertheless, my strong impression is that they experienced their physical bodies as an integral part of themselves as individuals. 24 This crucial role of reminiscence is central to Locke’s memory theory, in which identity and unity of a person are guaranteed by virtue of remembering things done in the past. 25 “Ordinary Africans routinely suspect that any initiative from a government department or international agency may have a hidden agenda, or may be a passing fad that will soon be superseded” (Argenti 2002: 131). 26 See the Introduction to Part II for a discussion of how young people across the continent today use education, religion and performance in their attempts to break away from traditional culture and authority structures and the marginalisation this implies. 27 See also: (Comaroff & Comaroff 2005, De Boeck & Honwana 2005).
Epilogue
1 This paragraph is adapted from my New York Times Magazine article My everything. When I was young, living in Sudan, I had so many dreams (Lammers 2005b).