Ghostly Vengeance: Spiritual Pollution, Time, and Other Uncertainties in Acholi

by

Letha Elaine Victor

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology University of Toronto

© Copyright by Letha Elaine Victor 2018 Ghostly Vengeance: Spiritual Pollution, Time, and Other Uncertainties in Acholi

Letha Elaine Victor

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Anthropology University of Toronto

2018

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnography that describes problems of spiritual upset in northern

Uganda, where the repercussions of recent war (1986—2008) intermingle with older legacies of colonial and post-colonial violence. Based on 14 months of fieldwork in the Gulu and

Amuru Districts of the Acholi sub-region, it describes spiritual effects and affects in ordinary life, encompassed by what many Acholi people understand in the concept of “dirty things,” or ajwani. The pollution of ajwani manifests in phenomena such as cen (sometimes interpreted as ghostly vengeance), malevolent spirit possession, misfortune, premature death, and other uncanny problems with unclear or uncertain causes. The ethnography shows that while ajwani can be broadly understood as the manifestations of spiritual pollution caused by transgressions of a moral order, this order—or orders—is the site of myriad epistemic and ethical collisions. The thesis thus considers how transgression is variously understood in

Acholi, and how ghostly vengeance and other dirty things act as contextual, contingent, and subjunctive phenomena through time. The work features interlocutors of varied religious

!ii orientations and social positions, and shows how they consider spirit forces to be subjunctive

—be they living or dead, human or extra-human. It further suggests that the contingency of ghostly vengeance and other dirty things points to the ways in which the distress such phenomena cause, and the timely responses they demand, provoke and reflect immanent and imminent ethical challenges in Acholi. In so doing, the thesis contributes ethnographic exposition to the anthropological literatures on violence, ritual, social repair, and authority in post-war Acholi; haunting, religiosity and Christianity(ies); contemporary witchcraft and conspiracy; and ordinary ethics.

!iii Acknowledgments

The following ethnography is the product of many years’ worth of instruction, generosity, mentorship, conversation, collaboration, friendship, and love. Without the support of the following people and groups, this project would not have come to fruition—and for that I am truly grateful.

Foremost, I am deeply thankful to all the people in Atiak, Gulu, and all the places in between for welcoming me into their communities and homes, and who tolerated my fumbles and mistakes with encouragement and good humour. Though you will not find your real names used throughout this work, I trust that you will find your invaluable thoughts and contributions faithfully reflected within the content.

I thank the residents of Atiak sub-county, in particular the women’s and men’s massacre survivor groups, the rwodi, atekere, ludito, and megi, local councillors, leaders, and clergy who all made space for me within their busy schedules and routines. To the alumni, students, and teachers at the schools I have called Palapir and Holy Cross, thank you for your patient responses to my repeated questions, and for the time you took with me to discuss difficult and sensitive issues. Mr. Nyero and Laber, I am especially grateful to you for holding me in your confidence and for extending the hand of friendship.

To Daniel, who spent countless hours giving me lessons in leb Acholi, made me laugh, and entertained my endless requests for translations both petty and profound, an apwoyo matek. To Anena, Anywar, Lanyero, and their families and friends, you have consistently filled my belly with beans and my head with your thoughtful insights. I offer

!iv you my deep thanks, lurema. As for Okidi, you are wise beyond your years and my most trusted lapwony. I simply could not have done this work without you, and I hope our friendship and conversation continues for years to come.

Since we first met in Gulu, Martha Lagace has been my steady friend and exceedingly generous interlocutor, while my Co, Sophie Seebach, has been equally giving of her warmth, expertise, and selfless intellectual advice. I’m grateful to Nancy Rydberg for serving as a model for my scholarly aspirations, and feel especially blessed that she and

Kevin Gibbons always met me with cheer and encouragement, even when I was feeling less than cheerful or encouraged. Okello Benard assisted me greatly with transcription work despite his own academic deadlines. Thank you as well to Holly Porter and the JSRP team, as well as Henni Alava, Asunta Nyirach, and Mette Kusk: you are all fantastic thinkers and great friends.

Jessika Tremblay began this journey with me in a Uhaul truck barrelling out of

Montreal, and has been an unfailingly loyal friend and insightful colleague for nearly a decade (and hopefully many more to come). Seth Palmer, whom I first met in our tiny shared office at 19 Russell Street, also quickly became a fast friend. Seth, you have been a constant source of much-needed hilarity, inspiration, and joy in my life, and a kind and thoughtful collaborator to boot. Thank you as well to Tori Sheldon and Sandy Oh, whose mutual enthusiasm for life has been an important counter to my in-born pessimism. Arie Molema and Kate Rice have always known when to tell me I need a break, and, from the position of post-doctoral life, have provided important perspective when I’ve needed it. You two are the best. To Hannah Mayne and Ori Werdiger, thank you for your friendship and always-gentle

!v suggestions on my work. Hannah, you have saved me from more meltdowns than I can count.

Further heroes in the labour of keeping me on an even keel are living saints Joey

Youssef, Sarah Williams, and Chris Ball, who are not intimidated by tears. Thanks for always having confidence in me and coming to my aid. I also owe thanks to William Hébert, Sarah

O’Sullivan, Celeste Pang, Gloria Perez Rivera, Anna-Louise Crago and Katrina Peddle, for many happy, conspiratorial, and collegial conversations.

To Ric Duncombe, Kate von Achen, Isaac Kasamani, and Catherine Kemigisha, thanks for the good times in Kampala and for being pals from abroad through thick and thin.

Carla Suarez, Jill Van Gyn, Vivian Wong, and Jesse Jenkinson have also provided open ears and shoulders to lean on, for which I’m forever grateful. Thanks to Gretchen Bakke for good advice on writing and on life, and to Mélanie Chaplier, Amber Silva, and Anne-Elise Keen for sharing in the ups and downs of the academic path. Anna Chablinskaia, Kate Burtis and

Ross Bullen, Natalie Kaiser and Steve Richter, and Amy Waschenfelder and Lev Bubis have all made Toronto home for me, pampering and indulging throughout some of my most difficult days. Gina and Jordan Frank have been devoted and life-long friends from afar, and even paid for my counselling when texting jokes back and forth wasn’t cutting it.

Meanwhile, Jill Gregory-Ames has been my close confidante no matter where she is in the world, as well as my most trusted editor, and I can’t wait to go on holiday with her some day without a computer. Thanks, friends.

A host of lovely people saw to it that I had homes away from home at different points throughout the research and writing process. Mary Hanlon and Marco Morelli graciously

!vi offered me a bedroom and happy distractions in Edinburgh, Laura Beach invited me to a peaceful retreat in Xàvea, Rhoderica Chan and Mike Wall repeatedly spoiled and put me up in London, and on multiple occasions Hanna Kienzler and Cees Van Dijk gave me a refuge at their home in Crystal Palace (also in London). Kelly Vassie, Adam Barnard, and the whole

Vassie family took amazing care of me in both Spain and the UK. Koreen Reece took me writing-and-rambling in Scotland, and taught me more about kinship than I ever thought I wanted to know. Koreen, you are an unusually brilliant scholar and a sheer delight.

Koreen and I also shared close quarters as fellows of the Centre for Ethnography at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, and I am especially graceful for the mentorship that

Donna Young has offered me since 2011. Michael Lambek and Todd Sanders, my co- supervisors, have been steadfast in their support of my writing and ideas, and have generously opened many intellectual and professional doors for me. I feel extremely fortunate to have had you as such attentive supervisors. Girish Daswani, Katie Kilroy-Marac, and Jack Sidnell have also provided encouragement and helpful commentary on different portions of this thesis, as has Amira Mittermaier, in her capacity as the most recent leader of the Department of Anthropology’s thesis writing group. I am especially grateful to my fellow participants in the 2015-16 and 2017-18 groups for the generosity of their time and feedback.

I also want to thank the Department’s Graduate Administrator, Natalia Krencil, for always working her bureaucratic magic on my behalf. At the Jackman Humanities Institute, I was fortunate enough to hold a fellowship under the sage direction of Alison Keith and Kim

Yates, and had the privilege of participating in stimulating, generative, and supportive discussions with all the JHI fellows in 2017-18. I am most thankful for the opportunity.

!vii My research and writing was generously supported by grants and fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (grant 8874), the Richard F.

Salisbury Award from the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship

(OGS), the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Centre for Ethnography at the

University of Toronto, Scarborough, the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of

Toronto, Visa, and the Bailout-Bank of Mom and Dad.

To the Victor family: my mom (Cathy), my brother (Dan), and my sister (Rachel), everything I have accomplished I owe to you. I love you.

Finally, for my friend Beccy Vassie (1985-2015), who was my home and my refuge in Uganda, and for my dad, Ian (1952-2014), who taught me everything I know about writing and about people, and who knew just what to say whenever I thought about giving up. I hope

I’ve made you both proud, I love you, and I dedicate this to you both.

!viii Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

1. Births, Deaths, and the Shadows of Possibility ...... 4

2. Intervention: considering pollution and ethics in Acholi ...... 9

3. Outline of Chapters ...... 12

Chapter 1: Before and After Lukwena ...... 15

1. Entries: overview of Acholi ...... 20

The edges of empire ...... 23

Violence in the postcolony: the militarization of politics ...... 28

Internal strangers, displacement, and the lukwena ...... 31

2. The Objects and Subjects of Study ...... 38

Learning how to see, listen, and ask ...... 40

Chapter 2: Pneumapolitics ...... 49

1. Min Anena’s Bones ...... 49

An old problem with new urgency ...... 55

2. Kit Me Kwaro: death and the ways of the ancestors ...... 61

Belonging and exclusion: family bones and family shadows ...... 62

Ancestors’ power: the living dead ...... 68

The hills are never the same: authority and the ritual field (kwer) ...... 72

Ludito 73

Ajwaki 75

People’s shadows cannot be easily trusted: the potential of cen ...... 79

Culu kwor 80

!ix Contextualizing cen: life course, death course ...... 83

3. Gwok: subjunctive spirits at Ayugi ...... 94

Human acts ...... 97

Spirit acts ...... 101

The will to be acknowledged ...... 104

Chapter 3: The “Thing” at Palapir ...... 111

1. Healing and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion ...... 113

2. Navigating Passion and Action ...... 120

Palapir Primary ...... 127

3. House of Prayer and House of Reading: dini comes to Atiak ...... 133

Jok and God ...... 136

4. “Me, can you afford me?” The inscrutability of ajwani ...... 140

Witches and whites ...... 142

5. Belief and Practice: acting on “thing”ness ...... 149

Language ...... 150

Ritual 153

6. Conclusion ...... 156

Chapter 4: Those Who Go Underwater ...... 159

1. Ordinary Crisis at Holy Cross ...... 163

Paska and Laber ...... 165

What is to be done? ...... 168

Resentment, ressentiment, and the advent of evil ...... 172

Seeds of rancour ...... 175

2. Is the Pope Catholic? Navigating Underdeterminism ...... 179

!x Wealth, women, and water ...... 181

New ways of becoming ...... 184

3. Who Do You Think You Are? Judgment, self-knowledge, and the outsider ...... 192

Encounters with a mythical figure ...... 197

4. Conclusion ...... 204

Chapter 5: The Toll of the Road ...... 206

1. The Entangled Time of the “Post-War” ...... 209

Time and movement ...... 212

2. Lanyero ...... 215

The daughter of a rwot and a soldier ...... 216

Studies and prayers ...... 218

Marriage and rebellion ...... 220

Coping with shadows ...... 224

Roadworks and women’s empowerment ...... 227

3. Tolls and Subjectivities ...... 230

Acholi of the present, macon (old), and manyen (new) ...... 233

To grow the world: Christians and liberal economic subjects ...... 237

4. “Peter got sensitized”: trauma subjects and the colonization of affect ...... 240

Survivors ...... 241

The trauma advantage ...... 244

Coda: As Light as White Ants ...... 247

Works Cited ...... 258

Glossary of Acronyms and Acholi Terms ...... 278

!xi Introduction

Ngat man boko kot mupwode (each person tells of the rain that drenched him)

—Acholi Proverb (p’Bitek 1985: 133)

We are let in through the gate. The hospital is quiet, the night cool. The moon is so very bright, casting everything in its glow, and there’s one kiosk still open, with men and motorbike taxis hanging around it. Anywar and I go through the complex and there are some people sitting still in the dark of the courtyard and at the entrance, draped over their bundles and bags and packages. Women stumble along through their labour pains. There are few men besides Anywar and some of the nurses.

A door opens to the nursery for premature babies, and I peer down and see everyone is on the floor. One woman stands bare-breasted, cleaning something. Everyone looks exhausted. I know it’s late, but no one seems happy or excited. There is a single newspaper article posted on the wall above a table, and all I can make out is its headline: “Who is behind the rampant baby thefts in hospitals?” There are three hand-drawn posters that cover the interior windows of the premature neonatal nursery room. They’re to promote breastfeeding: “Cak pa mine maber.” [Breastmilk is good.]

There are many staff members wearing glaringly-white gumboots and long white

PVC aprons, and they pluck their way through blood and afterbirth on the floor, and past flowcharts on how to deal with difficult births. Sometimes Dr. Sister Acan passes by, with a lab coat over her habit. There is a crucifix over every door, and an abundance of fluorescent

!1 lighting and plastic sheeting and buckets stained with bodily fluids. Outside of the labour suite, women are lying on the floor in the hallway, a few sitting on benches, all trying to sleep. Their baskets and basins and bags full of supplies and thermoses and blankets litter the floors. Through the long hallway, we can just see row after row of single iron beds. We can hear lots of screaming and low moans.

Susan comes out of the labour suite around 10:30pm and tells Anywar and I that there was a woman who came in from Amuru around the same time that she brought Anena in. It’s so sad, she says, but the woman and her baby have both died, and their bodies are lying on the table next to where Anena is propped up. We speak for a little while, and then Susan leads me to the labour suite and we leave Anywar on the bench, tucked into his raincoat with the hood up, huddled over the radio on his phone, his eyes closed. We walk into the hall and I see the blood before I see the woman’s corpse and smell the strong smell. Formaldehyde?

I’m not sure. It’s making me feel sick. I see a body with a blanket on it, through the cracks in the curtain. Is it just someone lying there? I look away.

Anena’s faced is scrunched in pain, but she makes almost no sound. I hold her hand, impotent, and ask her if I can get her anything, but there’s nothing I can do. I help her lie down and the Dr. Sister says cheerfully, “Don’t lie like that!” I’m annoyed that no one is paying any heed to Anena, but what do I know of giving birth? I stand behind her and let her squeeze my hand and arm, and my eyes wander left. The blanket covers the face—that is no sleeping woman. All that I can see is the crown of her shorn head, still and dull, masked by the grey and red woollen blanket. There is no movement. I shouldn’t, it’s not right, it’s not

!2 my business, but I can’t stop looking. I want to see her face. Where is her baby? Where is her family? Why is no one crying?

I can see them sewing her mouth shut, or doing something with scissors at her mouth.

I can see part of her face. There are splashing sounds and the floor is wet. Now the woman is in a shroud, packed neatly and tightly. Is that her sister? Her friend? She is also wearing gloves and boots, her face impassive, as she helps to prepare the body. Are they cleaning it?

Draining it? How do such things work?

It’s quiet. Why is it so quiet? Anena is vomiting, but it just lands on her shawl. I ask

Sister for a bucket. She utters the phrase I’ve grown used to: “It’s not there.” Of course, I think, if you want to barf, you have to bring your own bucket. Susan brings a basin, but the mess is already there. She has also brought the black plastic sheet for Anena to lie on, and the cotton wool for the blood, and everything for the baby. The glare of the light is harsh. Anena asks me to go find out about a private room. I ask the Sister and she says, “You ask one of the other ladies,” but another lady never appears. I come back to the table and Anena asks me to go out and buy toilet paper.

I rush out with purpose and plead and finally convince the gate guard to let me out onto the road, and I buy some water and toilet paper and run back as fast as I can. But I have missed the big event: I come back and my eyes miss the grey and pink lump on Anena’s belly. They are both so still, and Susan has to point out to me that Anena has given birth. I see that the corpse is still in the room. As they’re cleaning Anena, plucking out the placenta and the afterbirth, men come in their gumboots with a wheelbarrow stretcher for the dead body. Susan hands me the baby, and I cradle her for a long time, until my arms grow tired.

!3 1. Births, Deaths, and the Shadows of Possibility

Anena gave birth to her sixth daughter at St. Mary’s in Lacor, a large Roman Catholic hospital located just outside of Gulu, Uganda. Around the time she went into labour, I was visiting in town with her sister, Susan, who appeared to be decidedly less excited than I was about the impending birth. Along with my friend Daniel, we had been busy discussing a different family matter: in two days, the men of the family would be exhuming the bones of

Anena’s mother, grandfather, and six other relatives from a plot in town, and then transporting them back to their home villages in nearby Atiak sub-county. They had all died during the war between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda, and at the time it was impossible to bury them properly on their ancestral lands. Their bones were finally to be transported home so that their human spirits, called tipu (shades or shadows), could be appeased.

But birth was also on everyone’s minds. In the weeks since I had been back in Gulu to begin my fieldwork, over several shared meals with Anena and her husband Anywar, we had mused and joked about the possibility that she might “finally” have a boy. When Anena and I first met five years before, she was the single mother of four girls (soon to be five), whom she had brought back to Uganda when she escaped from the LRA in Sudan. Abducted as a girl on her way home from fetching water in Atiak, she had been forced to soldier for over a decade and bear four children for a mid-ranking commander, who was later killed in battle. Anena lived in a displaced persons’ camp for four years after her escape, and had another daughter with a government soldier who disowned the baby. Now living in Gulu

!4 Town, she had found some measure of security in a marriage with Anywar, and their first child together was on the way.

Anena’s sister Susan, herself a single mother, shared the common and constant worry of how to best raise children under strained socioeconomic circumstances. So when I broached the subject of Anena’s new baby, she seemed to grow bored by my enthusiasm—it would be another mouth to feed, she reminded me, another set of school fees to find, another burden. And yet, I would come to learn, it is also dangerous to boast of a child or be overly effusive about the joy of newborn life. Here, in the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda, misfortune tends to fall most heavily on the children: the embodiment of future hopes for families, their faces and names the reminders of ancestors past. Cultivating well-being and preventing misfortune—sicknesses, accidents, madness, premature death, and more—is a matter of spiritual welfare as well as material conditions. Someone who obtrusively cherishes a child might attract the unwanted attentions of a malevolent spirit or arouse some other mysterious ajwani (dirty thing). More common than the unintended consequences of unrestrained love, however, is misfortune wrought by the dead and the things they become.

It was to those possibilities that my mind wandered later that night in the birthing suite. Only a few hours after Daniel and I had said goodbye to Susan, Anywar phoned me to tell me that the baby was coming. He came to pick me up on his motorbike, and we were both too excited to be bothered by the deep clouds of orange road dust that got in our mouths and eyes as we sped along the road to Lacor. Our moods were only tempered when we entered into the hospital and were reminded of how dangerous giving birth can be. Not for the first or last time, I was also reminded of how little I understood about the scenes of

!5 Acholi life, as common and mundane as a hospital wing on a Wednesday night. Births and deaths are ordinary, but they are also more than punctuated events: the birthing suite is but a beginning, and so is the morgue.

Anena was of course unable to accompany her mother’s remains back to Atiak, unearthed as they were a mere thirty hours after she gave birth. Plenty more of her relatives were able to participate. But what would be the state of burial for the dead woman whose body lay on the table next to Anena’s in the labour ward? We did not know much about the young lady from Amuru who died that day, along with her baby: simply that she had arrived too late for effective intervention, that this was her first child, and that her husband had adored her. The hospital staff told Susan that they were withholding the news of her death from her husband, because they feared he would be overwhelmed by grief and get into an accident on his way. Two deaths in one day, for a single family, were already too much. But whereas Anena’s newborn would serve to legitimate her place in Anywar’s family, the dead woman had not successfully “produced”—she would surely be mourned, but her burial would likely be a modest affair, and her tipu would not become an ancestor. Having never had a chance to live life, the baby’s tipu was likely equally undifferentiated in death.

Though their deaths were not “good,” neither were they egregious. They did not echo the violent deaths of so many Acholi killed during the war. These were deaths that many speculate transformed human tipu into cen: defined, by some, as ghostly vengeance.

Likely, the baby was buried in Amuru with sadness but little ceremony. It is possible that when relatives assembled for the mother’s burial, elders made a concoction of water and ground up leaves from the oput tree, licked it, and burned yaa (shea) leaves until everyone

!6 gathered heard the sound of their popping. If they did so, they would have then led the baby’s father to a nearby stream and washed him in the water, to cleanse him of the pollution of death. The baby’s tipu would have no real cause for vengeance, should such a simple commemoration have taken place, but time would tell. It is also just as possible that the baby’s family refused to participate in such rituals, which in vernacular Ugandan English are termed “cultural” (as distinct from Christian or Islamic). It is thus also not unimaginable that the baby’s tipu might become troublesome to the living, but the outcome is uncertain.

There is also something to be said about how my own reactions to those births and deaths were and are unavoidably refracted through the prism of position and experience. At the time, I had never seen anyone in active labour, either in Canada or Uganda, nor had I ever seen a body that was newly deceased. St. Mary’s Lacor is a very good private hospital, one I would later regret not going to when I required medical care myself. Though I was taken aback by the scene around me, Anena and Anywar—and likely most of the people in that labour ward—were mostly untroubled by what they saw. To me, the ward looked and smelled and sounded bleak. To Anena, the special advantage of being able to access private medical care (afforded by her position of employment at an NGO) was not taken for granted.

And though everyone acknowledged that the deaths of the woman and her baby were sad,

Anena simply had to get on with the business of giving birth and caring for her newborn.

I wrote the above account the next day, taking advantage of the privilege of time and resources that enabled me to sit in my room in Gulu and do nothing but indulge in rumination. But while I had been thrown off kilter, this unsettling moment also allowed for an entry point into considering the deeper assumptions made by people like me—foreign,

!7 curious, well-meaning—about contemporary life in Acholi. The assumption that everyone in

Acholi is in a constant state of hurt and sorrow is unfounded, but nor is suffering to be ignored to advance a project of resilience.

Anena and Anywar had both been forced to soldier during the war. They had both witnessed, and had active hands in, deaths much more gruesome and violent than what transpired in the hospital. Nearly a year later, with a healthy and happy baby girl on her lap,

Anena casually reminded me that extended meditations on the lives and deaths (and after- deaths) of others are not always welcome. On that night in the hospital, she said, she had purposefully sent me away to buy toilet paper when none was needed. It was unclear to me whether she had done it to protect me from upset (something she had done before), whether I had annoyed her by hovering at her side and making a fuss, or whether she had wanted privacy (possibly all three). She told others that I had a “strong heart” (was brave) and often repeated that assessment when I asked questions about violence and its aftermath. But it also meant that I was sometimes foolhardy, something I only realized after the one time Anena ever raised her voice at me. It was Christmastime, and we were in her village in Atiak, taking the children for a walk to our favourite swimming hole. The dry season was in full force, and bush fires were coming ever nearer. I got too close and was roundly admonished. I was, quite literally, playing with fire.

This was not to say that Anena and Anywar and I never spoke of things that require one to have a “strong heart.” Listening to the radio together over the light of a paraffin lantern, or scrolling through our phones and reading the news, like everyone else in Uganda we read a steady stream of media reports about ghosts and demons attacking schools, about

!8 shadowy conspiracies to commit ritual murder, and about children kidnapped and sacrificed for the purposes of witchcraft. Anywar wanted my academic opinion on what all this meant, and what should be done about it.

In the search for answers or some sort of certainty, of figuring out who is in charge of all of this (maybe the doctor, maybe the clergy, maybe the elder, maybe the soldier, maybe someone else), everyone who was in that hospital has sought some sort of interpretive foothold. The newspaper headline posted in the nursery (“Who is behind the rampant baby thefts in hospitals?”) is a sign that speaks to the shared anxiety characterizing how people make sense of and respond to dangerous possibilities and spectral threats. A common moral vocabulary—be it reflected in the crucifixes above doors, the rumours of kidnapping conspiracies, the materials of modern public health promotion, or the weapons of every gate guard—is a reference point for a shared conversation. The private intimacies of deaths and births belie the public conundrum of what happens next.

2. Intervention: considering pollution and ethics in Acholi

This is a dissertation that concerns the problem of spiritual upset in contemporary Acholi, northern Uganda, where the repercussions of war between LRA and Ugandan government forces intermingle with older legacies of colonial and post-colonial violence. I describe spiritual effects and affects in ordinary life, encompassed by what many Acholi people understand in the concept of “dirty things,” or ajwani. The pollution of ajwani manifests in phenomena such as haunting, malevolent spirit possession, misfortune, premature death, and other uncanny problems with unclear causes.

!9 To be attacked by cen, for instance, renders a person dangerously contagious, and so a person or family haunted by it, or just suspected of being haunted by it, may be ostracized from social and public life. Cen can lie quiet for years and even generations after a death. As such, the very reproduction of families and clans requires that cen be addressed communally.

But how to come to a collective agreement on how things like cen should be interpreted—as ghostly vengeance, as Satan, as psychological trauma, and more—is a point of serious contention. While ajwani can be broadly understood as instances of spiritual pollution caused by transgressions of a moral order, this very moral order—or orders—is the site of myriad epistemic and ethical collisions.

Throughout this thesis, I provide ethnographic insights on just what “spiritual pollution” means—what it is, how it comes to be, and what people do about it. Mary

Douglas, in her deeply influential work Purity and Danger, advanced that society-specific categories of dirt are equated with the dangerous potential of liminality (2002 [1966]). She posited that the total structure of human thought divides the material and immaterial world into classifications of purity/impurity or dirty/clean, and this is why “taboo confronts the ambiguous and shunts it into the category of the sacred” (2002 [1966]: xi). But as Adeline

Masquelier eloquently contends, the notion of transgression itself is not fixed or definitively agreed upon by members of any group or culture (2011). Practical ethnographic engagements in lives-as-lived instead demonstrates that “morality cannot be firmly located within categorical boundaries and must instead be understood as contextual and contingent” (Masquelier 2011: 159). I take heed of this point and thus consider how

!10 transgression is variously understood in Acholi, and how cen and other dirty things act as contextual, contingent, and subjunctive phenomena.

Spirits, be they living or dead, human or extra-human, are subjunctive. They are not clearly defined and composed. They have unclear intentions, desires, and convictions, and their purposes are often unknown even to themselves. Something might happen, a latent force could haunt, a dead shadow might speak through the mouth of a living child. A revenant has the potential to burst forth from the past and demand the transformation of time, place, and being. The contingency of ghostly vengeance and other dirty things thus points to the ways in which the distress such phenomena cause, and the timely responses they demand, provoke and reflect ongoing ethical challenges in Acholi.

The uncertainty of what is happening now, what happened in the past, and what might or could or should happen in the future is nonetheless met by the acts, however provisional, of living humans. It is for this reason that throughout this thesis I also elucidate not just what spiritual pollution is, what it looks or sounds or feels like, but also what goes on around it. The ultimate aim of this project is not to catalogue a “local” cosmology or to systematize (and perhaps make exotic) the world of Acholi ontologies (which do not exist in an epistemic vacuum). In this thesis I describe lived experiences that exceed the limits of language or knowledge: I describe human life and death and after-death. I follow Michael

Jackson and approach the “border situations" of existential uncertainty as an oscillation between “life as lived” and those (insufficient) concepts that make life intelligible (Jackson and Piette 2015: 7).

!11 I find this approach echoed in not dissimilar terms in the recent body of literature on ethical immanence, most specifically in the work of Michael Lambek. Lambek advances the ethical not as an object of classification, but as pertaining to how people “live that gap” between what they say and what they do, how they address contingencies and challenges, and how ordinary life forces the exercise of judgment, often in the face of irony and passion

(2015b). In this way, underdeterminism is the existential condition (Lambek 2015b: 2).

This thesis thus considers the underdetermined nature of spiritual pollution and how people respond to, cope with, act upon, manipulate, and interpret its diverse manifestations.

As an old Acholi proverb says, ngat boko kot mupwode: “each person tells of the rain that drenched him.” The vagaries of lived experience must always be taken into account, and this dissertation works to that end. Put in other words, this work elucidates, in the light (or darkness) of “dirty things,” how people in Acholi understand their own challenges, how they confront them through time, and how they change their minds.

3. Outline of Chapters

Chapter 1, Before and After Lukwena, introduces the ethnographic context by way of the purportedly haunted site of a massacre in Atiak, perpetrated in 1995 by the Lord’s Resistance

Army (LRA, locally known as Lukwena). It provides a general overview of the field site and of the history of the Acholi sub-region as a site of colonial and post-colonial political violence, as well as the war between the Government of Uganda and the LRA. It further explores the significance of the social and ethical difficulties I faced in researching cen, a phenomenon sometimes defined by my interlocutors as “ghostly vengeance.” The chapter

!12 argues that affective aporia and obfuscation over the topic is not an obstruction to the object of study, but is the object of study itself.

In chapter 2, Pneumapolitics, I explore the circumstances by which tipu dano (the shadows or souls of human beings) are understood by the living to become ancestors, ghosts, or neither. The chapter explores the concepts of good and bad death as they relate to Acholi sociality, geography, kinship formations, and ritual protocols. It argues that the central analytic of cen production is not violence per se, but the breaking of moral boundaries and the production of spiritual pollution. I describe how incorporeal human spirits are met, interpreted, and responded to by the living, but that my interlocutors understand spirit acts as uncertain and subjunctive. The concept of “pneumapolitics,” referring to breath as well as spirit, suggests that both the living and the dead (and perhaps beings outside of that dichotomy) are actors in struggles for social belonging and acknowledgment.

Chapter 3, The “Thing” at Palapir, complicates the kit me kwaro (“ways of the ancestors”) introduced in the previous chapter. It concerns the everyday hermeneutics of spiritual pollution or ajwani (“dirty things”) reflected in the case of a cluster of spectral apparitions and malevolent spirit possessions at Palapir Primary School in Atiak. I discuss the responses (and silences) of teachers, school authorities, clergy, neighbours, elders, and other onlookers and the search for solutions. The chapter makes the argument that contemporary cases of ajwani (dirty things) are not straightforwardly understood by residents as cen or tipu dano. Rather, I make the case that that the multivalent competition for ritual authority and epistemological supremacy renders the interpretation of and action against spiritual pollution inevitably tied to the politics of “belief.” As such, the chapter

!13 provides an overview of the historical place of dini (religion) in Acholi and its epistemic and political conflict with “traditional” cosmology and gerontocratic authority.

In chapter 4, Those Who Go Underwater, is about chronic crisis at a secondary school for girls in Gulu town, where many pupils claim to have experienced a type of spirit possession known as calypso. A clash of epistemic frames is illuminated by this problem, with one of the most dominant explanations being that calypso is caused either by the shadowy Illuminati society, and/or by conspirators who possess ill-acquired wealth and success. The latter, called lute ceto pii (those who go underwater), are said to have infiltrated the school and the region more generally. The chapter frames the problem of witchcraft, evil, and occult accusations from within an anthropology of immanent and imminent ethics, whereby girls must deliberate and act on uncanny phenomena, despite their uncertain origins.

Chapter 5, The Toll of the Road, is a person-centred study of the multiple temporalities entangled in contemporary Acholi, and of the numerous configurations of subjectivity enabled by this entanglement. This chapter features the life story of a woman called Lanyero, a lifelong traveller and one-time road worker whose movements and encounters with beings corporeal and non-corporeal have prompted her to creatively resist and incorporate the temporal modes and outlooks of several subject positions. It describes these subject formations as tied to spatial references (such as roads and settlements) and human (and spirit) movement in Acholi at different temporal junctures—including the colonial era, the lukwena and government war, and the present era of psychosocial intervention and “development.”

!14 Chapter 1: Before and After Lukwena

We couldn’t see our feet, nor much of the sky above us, so thick and tall was the grass through which we were trudging. I stumbled repeatedly, each time wondering if it was just a rock or a tree branch or something more ominous hindering my passage. I had imagined that eventually we would come upon a clearing in the denseness, the river in front of us and the sesame fields long behind us, and I would finally be able to see what I had come for. But no wide space ever opened up, and instead my guides suddenly stopped and announced that we had made it. There were trees to my left and right, but I was turned upside down and confused, and had lost my sense of direction. I tried to sketch a map of where we were in my notebook, and asked for help with orientation. The grasses had cut me like blades, and Okidi turned around to see me, sweating and out of place, my hands shaking and streaked with my own blood. No one said anything, but they all saw it when we passed my notebook around. Mostly, there was silence. We stood there for about ten minutes, quietly turned around, and left.

—Field notes, 1 September 2014, Atiak, Uganda

Our visit to that nondescript spot in the wilderness was preceded by fourteen months of social negotiations in which I worked to make sense of the lives—and deaths—of the residents of Acholi, northern Uganda. I was curious (and that curiosity was and is not without dilemma) to see for myself that bushy spot where 19 years before, soldiers from the

Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA, also known as lukwena) had brought around 400 hundred people (always an approximate number, never a fixity to be marked), whom they had rounded up from the nearest displaced persons camp in Atiak centre, about ten kilometres away, by way of thicket, field, and stream. It was nearing the end of the dry season that

April, so the grass was not very high, but it still provided adequate cover for the civilians when they were ordered by the rebels to hide themselves from the sights of the government’s helicopter gunships overhead. Whether by way of the advanced military hardware

!15 brandished by the foreign-funded Ugandan state military, or by the weapons with provenances less legally legitimate (but just as lethal) wielded by lukwena rebels, the threat of grievous harm and death came from the ground and the sky.

They had been walking west since dawn, away from their ot lum (grass thatch) homes and trading kiosks, now on fire or already ashes, had forded the Ayugi River and its bends three times, and came to rest in a narrow delta—this verdant space surrounded by trees and water and abandoned sesame fields. The head commander, a man named Otti Vincent who had grown from the same community as the people now facing his guns, instructed his soldiers to separate the pregnant and nursing women, along with children under the age of

14, from the rest of the group. This group was ordered to lie face down in the grass and wait.

Otti cleared his throat and said, “You people, you have been telling that our guns have rusted.

Today we will show you that our guns have not rusted.” He gave the signal, and his subordinates opened fire on the standing men and women. Once the smoke had cleared and three hundred people were dead or dying, he commanded the living group to clap and congratulate the LRA on their “work.” A selection of older children, mostly boys from the nearby vocational school, were prodded with boots and bayonets to stand and join the rebels to carry the loot of food, clothes, and medicine that they had taken from the camp before they burned it to the ground. They were marched south towards the Kilak Hills, where six of the boys were summarily pierced with bayonets after having served their purpose. Back at the riverbank, the survivors were left to pick their way back to the mostly-obliterated camp and anyone left at the army detachment, and a few savvy women guided the children safely through the fields peppered with landmines. The corpses were left in the grass and the mud.

!16 And so I stood at that same riverbank with my friend, interlocutor, and research assistant, named Okidi,1 and a small group of young men who live and farm on the adjacent land. In a moment of serendipity, at the eleventh hour of my fieldwork, these men had agreed to take us to the site. It was difficult to reach, both geographically and socially, and I had resigned myself to never getting there. It was clear from my conversations with residents and survivors that the past was meant to be left behind, that surely everyone had better things to do with their time than traipse through the mud, and that I should devote my anthropological efforts to documenting more illustrious subjects, like the lineage of the local chiefdom, celebrated dances, or other more “cultural” objects and practices. More urgently in my own mind, I asked myself what business I had in asking anyone to help me get to the place, and to what end.

Months earlier, a survivor of the massacre had admitted to me that his friend had recently heard the sounds of ghostly music and dancing coming from the riverbank. These sounds were, said the man, the spirits of the students killed on that day, performing the royal

Acholi Bwola dance. It was these rumours that intrigued me. I was interested in what happened after the massacre, and to learn more about the vengeful spirits of those murdered in the war who still haunt the living, and what is to be made of those who dispute such characterization. What is not in dispute is that only some of the bodies were ever taken home

1 The name Okidi, like the other names that follow in this dissertation, is a pseudonym I have picked in order to protect his identity. I break from this practice only in cases where I refer to public figures, such as elected politicians and widely-known military commanders like Vincent Otti and Joseph Kony. [Note that in Acholi naming practice there is no set name order, meaning it is acceptable to refer to either of the aforementioned as simply “Vincent” or “Joseph,” “Otti Vincent” or the reverse, etc. Rarely (but with increasing frequency) will a kin group adopt a family surname.]

!17 from the bank of the Ayugi. I was curious to know what impact that had on the Acholi community—both living and dead.

This dissertation is partially about the spirits (or the rumours thereof) in that grassy copse, and the traces left by their cadavers in its mud, and why it was so hard to get there, and how easy it was to get lost on the way. It is also a thesis about violence, but it is not precisely about the gunning down or the mutilation of bodies. Rather, it is about the violence of absence—and its effect and affect—of the everyday consequences of spiritual pollution in a place of unfinished history that is entangled, sometimes paradoxically, with what feels like jarringly rapid social change. It is a phenomenography (Jackson and Piette 2015) about the messiness of time, of haunting and commemoration, the ethics of interpretation and cosmological uncertainty, and of subjectivity and experience in Acholi.

When I went to northern Uganda, I wanted to think about why some dead people are ghosts and why some dead people are ancestors, and how people understand, speak of, and interact with the tipu dano (human shadows of the dead) and a host of other non-human spirits that are neither. I wanted to know why some bodies are buried at home and others are left for the sustenance of wild pigs, as some were at that spot on the Ayugi River. While by way of introduction I offer below more details about the sometimes violent past of this sub- region and its place in Uganda’s history, the truth is that too strong an ethnographic focus on past events would amount to not much more than a series of largely unverifiable anecdotes.

That is not insignificant. The past is in a large sense unknowable, refracted through present circumstances and needs, mobilized or occluded by the living. Rather than approach this ethnography primarily by way of punctuated events (such as “the” Atiak massacre), my aim

!18 is to offer an account of some of the ways that ordinary people maintain and repair relationships, and how their lives are inflected with and how they respond to the dark aporias of violence and social exclusion from communities of both the living and the dead. In the same vein, while this dissertation is in one sense about the aftermath of the war between the

Government of Uganda and what is now called the Lord’s Resistance Army, it is not in keeping with the genre of traditional justice literature that, taken as whole, tends to foreshorten the longue durée that haunts the present.

The opening account above has a double meaning: while the everyday circumstances in which it was written are described below, it also serves to point to the ethnographic journey as a whole when the very object of study itself is constituted by forces and histories murky and unseen. It is not enough to remark that the history of places in Acholi like Atiak are infuriatingly anecdotal or difficult for an ethnographer to make sense of. Instead, the why of the difficulty is telling. What do the complicated relationships between the living and the dead have to say about unfinished history and the lived experience of violence—physical, structural, and spiritual? I offer below, as a frame for these reflections, an introductory description of the barriers that were placed in my way when I tried to travel those mere ten kilometres from the centre of Atiak to its wild places, and how I struggled to make sense of the lies, obfuscation, indifference, and fear that seemed to colour all my attempts to “get the facts straight.” Once I reached that overgrown grave, I had to reconcile myself to the idea that it means something when no dramatic clearing opens up by the end of “fieldwork,” and one is left with nothing but silence, tall grass, and bloody hands.

!19 In the sections that follow, I present a wide overview of the place and people called

Acholi and situate my ethnographic project within that locus. Section 1 provides an admittedly truncated and selective picture of Acholi, and here I focus especially on the range of colonial and post-colonial violence that is not eradicable by present circumstances. This is not to say that “history” began with foreign contact: rather, it is to acknowledge the concentrated impact of global movements over the last 150 years. In section 2, I come back to 2014, to that deceptively calm and bucolic river-bend in Atiak, and I give more immediate context to my research, the lives of my interlocutors, and the interpretive frames through which I write.

1. Entries: overview of Acholi

The Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda (after the nomenclature of empire, often still called “Acholiland”) was by 2014 the home of 1.47 million ethnic Acholi, over three- quarters of whom reside in rural areas (UBOS 2016a: 71).2 It is within patrilocal village groupings that people are most commonly occupied by subsistence farming, and though wealth is largely measured in heads of cattle and other livestock, the practice of cattle-rearing has been much reduced due to war and conflict-related raiding. Operating within the restrictions of long dry and wet seasons (with shorter dry and wet periods in between them), residents use their garden plots to grow staple crops of millet, maize, sorghum, beans, simsim

2 The Acholi account for roughly 4% of the Uganda population as a whole, but are the eighth largest tribe out of the country’s over 70 recognized indigenous ethnic groups (UBOS 2016a). A smaller community of Acholi reside immediately across the northern border in Magwi County (Eastern Equatoria State), South Sudan.

!20 (sesame), groundnuts (peanuts), cassava, peas, and potatoes, and people harvest wild fruits such as mango, shea nut, and avocado. Though farmers were encouraged to grow cotton as a cash crop during the colonial era and through the time of independence in the 1960s, the only current (and highly controversial) cash crop is sugarcane.

Situated within 28 thousand square kilometres of grasslands, Acholi is also peppered with occasional rocky outcrops that serve as important political and ritual boundary markers.

To the north lie the Agoro Hills and South Sudan, to the east Karamoja, and to the west the

Madi, Lugbara, Kakwa, and Alur tribes of West Nile. Immediately south and east are Lango,

Teso, and Kumam. Further afield, the natural border made by the Victoria Nile (including the cataract of Karuma Falls) separates Acholi and its northern neighbours from the more populous central and southern Bantu-speaking tribes. Though English is the lingua franca throughout Uganda (and, as such, is the language of bureaucracy and education), here the native language is a dialect of Luo (a Western Nilotic language), variously referred to as Luo,

Acholi Luo (sometimes spelled Lwo) or simply “Acholi.”3 It is largely an oral language, the

3 In northern Uganda, the common identity and name “Acholi” has only been in use by the people themselves since the formation of Acholi District in 1937 (Amone and Muura 2014: 252; Doom and Vlassenroot 1999: 10). Even though the area has been inhabited since at least the first millennium BCE and a successive series of Luo migrations (from Bahr al-Ghazal, spreading out across East Africa) left an indelible mark on the region, there was no common social and political order prior to the mid-19th century (Atkinson 1994; Crazzolara 1950). “Acholi” was until then a polycephalous conglomeration of loose individual geographical zones and chiefdoms. Long-term developments over the course of hundreds of years (particularly the 17th and 18th centuries) gradually produced a tenuous shared identity, but the concept of the people as a unit emerged most definitively by way of interaction with outsiders: in the 1850s with Arabic- speaking ivory and slave traders (kutoria) from Sudan and Turko-Egyptian administrators (jadiya) from 1872-1888 (Atkinson 1994: 267-268), then the British Protectorate. Because the kutoria traders were familiar with the Shilluk of south Sudan and they recognized linguistic similarities in this “new” place, they erroneously called the people the “Shuuli” or “Shooli.” Lending further credence to the claim that the name was an outside imposition, “Shuuli” is in fact unpronounceable in Acholi, and eventually the present term emerged (Crazzolara 1938: vii- viii). It is not immediately apparent how this name history coincides with the use of the term “Acholi” in southern Sudan, which appears in the earliest ethnographic works of the area (Grove 1919; Seligman 1925; Seligman and Seligman 1932).

!21 first grammar only produced in the twentieth century. Despite recent renewed attempts by the

Government of Uganda to promote the uptake of Swahili country-wide (and thus to promote an integrated East African identity and common market), it is not widely spoken in Acholi, where Swahili is still negatively associated with the armed forces—in particular, as an aural reminder of the harassment and violence meted by Idi Amin’s soldiers. As such (and owing to the educational system), English remains the most commonly spoken second language in the area.

Even with the cosmopolitan outlook and increasingly urban focus of Acholi people, a person’s social belonging is still very much reckoned through patrilineal descent and patrilocality. Someone who has spent her entire life in town (or in an IDP camp) will refer to her father’s ancestral village as her place of origin. Yet migration is also a historical and present reality—be it to seek out fertile soils, to take advantage of educational and business opportunities, to flee conflict, or, for women, to be married. A person is only free to marry outside his or her clan, as all the age-mates in one’s clan are considered siblings. In the same vein, uncles and aunts share important roles as caregivers and providers: biological parents are not the only persons called “mother” and “father.” Notwithstanding the prohibitions of

Christianity, polygyny is common, and men in particular consider having a large number of offspring to be an unwavering source of prestige.4

4 Though grooms’ families are expected to pay brideprice, the current standards of wealth transfer are prohibitive for many young men and many couples cohabit for years before inter-family negotiations are concluded. According to anthropologist Martha Lagace, bride price has likely fluctuated in Acholi for centuries (responding to ebbs and flows in the local economy) and as it involves a degree of secrecy and subterfuge, “we might assume that the institution is designed to evade close scrutiny” (2017, pers. comm.).

!22 Though a small proportion of Acholi are practicing Muslims, most claim Catholicism as their dini (religion). Christian missions (Roman Catholic, Anglican, and more recently,

Pentecostal and charismatic) have over the last century significantly altered many aspects of indigenous life (most obviously in education), but elements of social and cosmological continuity are more profound than a quick statistical picture might paint.5 For most Acholi, it is paramount that deceased ancestors are revered and cared for ritually, while the management of non-human spirit forces remains an important preoccupation. These activities lie under the jurisdiction of elders, mediums, and so-called “cultural” leaders, which I discuss (along with the advent of religion) throughout the thesis.

The edges of empire

The armed conflict that has episodically plagued northern Uganda must be understood in the context of violent empire and its wake. Arabic-speaking traders from the Sudan travelled to northern Uganda in the 1850s in order to acquire both ivory and slaves, a time that Atkinson describes as introducing unprecedented and long-lasting wealth differentials in Acholi society: rwodi (chiefs), porters, raid organizers, and interpreters, acquired copper, brass, beads, their own captives, firearms, and cattle (1994: 269, see also Behrend 1999: 16–17).

5 For example, according to the latest national census of Uganda (enumerated in 2014 during the latter portion of my fieldwork): 39% of Ugandans identify as Catholic; 32% as Anglican (Church of Uganda); 13.6% as Muslim; 11% as Born Again, Pentecostal, or Evangelical; and the remaining 4.4% adhere to no religion or as one of eleven other recognized religious categories (UBOS 2016a: 73). Less than one percent of respondents claim to practice “traditional religion,” but as I will make clear throughout this dissertation, this term is a misnomer that distorts the commonality of simultaneous ritual practices (for example, a person might be Catholic and also a “local” spirit medium) and also erroneously shunts a broad range of lived experience into the realm of “religion” (borrowing from Arabic, in Acholi the word is dini). Though the Uganda Bureau of Statistics does not provide disaggregated statistics on religious affiliation by region, Acholi is most certainly a majority-Catholic area.

!23 The Arabs established trading posts, notably at Atiak, and forced residents to pay taxes or be plundered (Behrend 1999: 16).

In the 1860s, the first European explorers (James Augustus Grant and John Hanning

Speke, Florence and Samuel Baker) made contact with Acholi and marked these occasions in their respective travelogues. Like other British expeditions of the time in East Africa, these journeys were ultimately motivated by the Empire’s desire to establish a corridor between

Khartoum and the purported source of the Nile, thus assuring the extraction of riches necessary for the continued industrialization of the metropole (Finnström 2008: 58-57).

Samuel Baker, newly knighted as a “Sir,” returned to Acholi with Nubian troops in 1872, ostensibly as part of Turko-Egyptian efforts to end the Arab slave trade.

Baker, appointed as Governor of Equatoria Province, established military posts in

Pabbo and Patiko (Amone and Muura 2014: 246, Atkinson 1994: 268), partial remains of which can still be seen today at Ajulu in Patiko. Though he is remembered by Acholi today6 as a hero for his abolitionist efforts, his own recollections were less humanitarian: “War is inseparable from annexation, and the law of force, resorted to in self-defence, was absolutely indispensable to prove the superiority of the power that was eventually to govern. The end justified the means” (Baker 1874, quoted in Finnström 2008: 59). Though Baker himself was well-liked, his troops grossly abused the local people and were met with understandable hostility, a situation that continued under the successive tenures of General James Gordon and Emin Pasha, which ended with Gordon’s murder in the Mahdi rebellion of 1888

(Behrend 1999: 16). Though the official governorship withdrew, many Nubian soldiers

6 For example, the most prominent school for boys in Gulu is named Sir Samuel Baker Secondary School.

!24 remained to maraud and “did much to develop clan antagonisms where none before existed” (Bere 1947: 6; see also Anywar 1948, passim).

As part of the scramble for Africa, in 1894 the British declared a formal protectorate over what is now Uganda. However, the North was marginal to the interests of the Empire.

Buganda, from where the present country takes its name, was instead the locus of sustained colonial efforts. These efforts operated on the premise that among the regional tribes the

Baganda were the most “advanced” upon the scale of sociopolitical evolution, and like the

Banyankole, Banyero, and Tooro, the Bagandan polity consisted of a centralized government ruled by a single kabaka (king). In Acholi, power was much more diffuse, and though certain clans (for example, the Payira and Padibe) were more influential than others, no paramount rwot (chief, pl. rwodi) ever ruled the loose conglomeration of Acholi chiefdoms. The British used this fact to their advantage over the next 60 years by manipulating rivalries, rewarding and punishing “good” and “bad” behaviour (Behrend 1999: 17-18; Bere 1955; Girling 1960:

193).

The Protectorate did not extend north until 1898, when a Major by the name of

Macdonald travelled up from Kampala to round up remaining Nubian mutineers and to sign treaties with select rwodi, establishing military posts in friendly chiefdoms (Bere 1947: 7).

The next year, Major Delmé-Radcliffe7 was tasked with disarming and neutralizing the less acquiescent Acholi chiefdoms (Amone and Muura 2014: 248). The influential Rwot Awich of the Payira clan proved to be particularly resistant, and he was twice arrested and

7 Known in Acholi by the name Langalanga, Delmé-Radcliffe established a Boma (collectorate) at Nimule (today in South Sudan, and less than 40km from Atiak centre). This centre which was shifted south to Mt. Keyo in 1906 and then in 1910 to newly established administrative headquarters that came to be called “Gulu” (Amone and Muura 2014: 248).

!25 imprisoned in a foreign land: Kampala (Anywar 1948; Pellegrini 1949). Other rwodi denounced their rivals to the colonial administration in order to gain influence (Behrend

1999: 17).

The most dramatic instance of armed Acholi resistance against the Protectorate culminated in the Lamogi rebellion of 1911-1912, when the Provincial Commissioner of the

Northern Province ordered his officials to begin enforcing the Firearms Ordinance. The

Ordinance required all Acholi to register their firearms, lest they be confiscated, but the policy was poorly communicated to the Northern Patrol. Officers, to the anger of several clans, undertook a geographically unequal mass disarmament of the southern Acholi, while the central and northern portions of the region kept their rifles: both registered and unregistered. Further enflaming the anger and distrust of the populace was the Protectorate’s labour policies, which required men to build roads and bridges without compensation, and for the residents of each village to construct rest camps for the British officers (Adimola

1954).

In late 1911, the Lamogi clan and its neighbours defied both the firearm registration and labour policies, fortified themselves within cave networks in the Guruguru hills, and prepared for war. After an unsuccessful attempt at negotiation (including the ultimately disastrous act of bringing representatives from the rival Patiko clan along with him), the

Assistant District Commissioner at Gulu, Mr. Sullivan, wrote to his superior and asked for armed reinforcements, stating, “I consider that a final lesson should be given to these people”

(quoted in Adimola 1954: 172). Sullivan returned to Lamogi in January 1912 and, when he was unable to arrest him, set fire to the village of Rwot Onung, the Lamogi chief. Less than

!26 two weeks later he returned with a fighting force gathered from neighbouring districts of the

Protectorate, and within a month of sporadic sniping and siege, Sullivan’s force had killed ninety-one Lamogi fighters and taken over a thousand prisoner. Rwot Onung surrendered and was deposed, exiled and imprisoned with his key fighters (Adimola 1954). The bitter conclusion of the Lamogi rebellion marked a turning point in history that is still referenced today by Acholi.

The next year, the Acholi were finally “pacified” when the administration publicly burned their rifles—all but those belonging to the British-appointed “Divisional Chiefs”— while the Acholi installed their own parallel administration (Behrend 1999: 17; Bere 1955;

Girling 1960: 193). Over the next 40 years, the colonizer continued to systematically dismantle the polycephalous domains of Acholi, replacing wealth and status distribution with a centralized administration and an extractive economy based on cotton production and wage labour (Girling 1960: 177). In fact, cotton cultivation was unsuccessful. Despite legal measures enacted in 1949 that technically compelled all adult males to farm at least two acres of cotton fields, the Acholi were unwilling to comply and valued other activities more highly (ibid.: 176).8 Administrative and Anglican missionary reports characterized the populace as lazy and war-like, continuing the narrative first started in explorer travelogues of

Acholi (Girling 1960: 176; Finnström 2008: 60-61).

Though the Acholi, like many East African societies, periodically formed war parties to raid neighbours and acquire captives, wives, and cattle, in wider Uganda the ongoing

8 Cotton is a labour-intensive crop, but due to Acholi climatic conditions it could only be harvested twice a year. The returns were poor, and Acholi were thus at a distinct economic disadvantage to southerners who were able to grow coffee, tea, and more. Men had little choice but to travel further afield to earn wages as cheap labourers or as soldiers (Amone and Muura 2014: 251).

!27 image of the Acholi as “war-like” is rooted in the classificatory politics of colonial racism.9

While the Bantu were recruited for civil service positions, the North was regarded by the

Protectorate as a productive zone from which soldiers and policemen might be recruited en masse (Behrend 1999: 19; Finnström 2008: 60-61). Postlethwaite, the first District

Commissioner, actively recruited Acholi “warriors” for the King’s African Rifles (in Acholi, called Keya), noting that they took “to soldiering like ducks to water” (quoted in Finnström

2008: 60). Acholi soldiers formed the largest ethnic group of Uganda’s personnel contribution to the KAR, which went on to fight in WWI and WWII (Amone and Muura

2014: 254). By the time Uganda achieved independence in 1962, the Ugandan military was dominated by Acholi soldiers and other northerners.

Violence in the postcolony: the militarization of politics

The situation of ethnic and regional division of labour did not improve with independence, and the asymmetric relationship between economic and military dominance presaged the bloodshed that was to come (Doom and Vlassenroot 1999). As colonial states began to achieve autonomy after the Second World War, the dominance of Baganda in Ugandan politics had to be addressed if the transition to sovereignty were to remain peaceful. Milton

Obote, the founder of the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) and a northerner from Lango,

9 This situation was not helped by some of the authoritative remarks made by E.T.N. Grove in the first systematic ethnographic account of the Acholi (of present-day South Sudan), published in 1919. He wrote: “War was the constant occupation of the Acholi before the Government took over their country and usually took the form of night raids on other villages,” which he goes on to describe (1919: 163). As Sverker Finnström notes, the rigid and moral rules of engagement in an inter-clan war (lweny kaka) are left behind in modern state-level warfare (lweny pa gamente) (2008: 210). Ruddy Doom and Koen Vlassenroot have additionally noted that before the colonial state, acts of organized violence were not random or individually decided, and an elaborate system of containment, conflict management, and resolution governed war in Acholi (1999: 11).

!28 successfully negotiated the transfer of power from the British; Obote was democratically elected prime minister and Buganda’s Kabaka Mutesa II was named ceremonial president and head of state. Though the Baganda remained economically and politically powerful, up to two-thirds of Obote’s army came from the North (especially Acholi) (Behrend 1999: 19).

Obote and Mutesa’s alliance was short-lived. Tensions between Buganda and the rest of the country boiled over when Obote abolished the federal system that had, until then, allowed the continued existence of the Ankole, Tooro, Bunyoro, and Buganda kingdoms

(Doom and Vlassenroot 1999: 8). Used to being favoured under in the colonial regime, the

Baganda attempted to secede and ordered the central government to leave its territory

(Behrend 1999: 19;Doom and Vlassenroot 1999: 8). In 1966, Obote sent his troops—led by soldier Idi Amin—to surround and destroy the Kabaka’s palace in retaliation. The Kabaka fled, Obote promoted Amin to Commander, and he declared Uganda a republic (with himself as President). Amin began strategically promoting his tribe-mates from West Nile and firing

(sometimes murdering) dissident Acholi troops who threatened the ethnic balance of the military (ibid.: 9; Finnström 2008: 66).

In 1971 Amin overthrew the Obote regime with force. That year and the next, he ordered thousands of Acholi soldiers into their barracks in Kampala and had them murdered; a scene that would repeat itself in Gulu after the National Resistance Army takeover in 1986

(see below) (Behrend 1999: 17). Amin’s infamous and violent rule targeted politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders, and soldiers for torture and assassination, and Acholi people were specifically targeted in this state violence (Finnström 2008: 225). With the assistance of the Tanzanian army, in 1979 Obote’s Uganda National Liberation Front/Army (UNLF/A),

!29 led by the Acholi General called Tito Okello, invaded the country and re-took the government by force. Amin fled into exile in Libya, the Obote II regime was established in

1980,10 and Acholi once again dominated the military (Dolan 2009: 37). Unsatisfied with the re-establishment of the status quo, a year later a Banyankole man called Yoweri Kaguta

Museveni formed the revolutionary National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M).

Museveni took up arms and instigated a civil conflict that would later be called the

“Bush War.” In January 1983, Obote’s UNLA attacked the citizens of the Luwero triangle11 in reprisal for their support of Museveni’s NRA. The UNLA killed over 30,000 people, and since that time the Acholi have collectively been held responsible for the slaughter (Doom and Vlassenroot 1999: 9). Luwero has remained a source of resentment between Acholi and the rest of the country, and several Acholi argue that Acholi soldiers were caught in the middle of someone else’s war. Omara-Otunnu concludes that front-line reinforcements were

Acholi because they were regarded as expendable, while the journalist Caroline Lamwaka remarked that because Acholi elders did not bless the war parties, nor were any top commanders Acholi, it is Obote’s government that should shoulder the blame (Finnström

2008: 83). The question of ritual authority is a significant one, and the “skulls of Luwero” came to haunt the Acholi both literally and figuratively—points to which I return below.

Even though the UNLA’s General Tito Okello briefly assumed power in 1985, by

1986 the NRA had captured Kampala and installed Museveni as President—a role that he occupies to this day. Acholi soldiers fled north, fearing reprisals, and for the first time since

10 There was an additionally complicated power struggle in the year Obote’s second presidency, with Yusuf Lule first installed as President, only to be quickly replaced by Godfrey Binaisa. 11 The Luwero (or Luweero) Triangle is so called because it is a region situated between three lakes in the central region of Uganda.

!30 independence, they were fully alienated from the mechanisms of state power (Doom and

Vlassenroot 1999: 13). They were not the only ones unsatisfied with Museveni’s victory. In fact, within two years of the end of the Bush War, 27 different rebel groups had proliferated outside of central Uganda (Finnström 2008: 69). As for the Acholi soldiers who had been in the UNLA, some regrouped in southern Sudan and formed a cluster of rebel groups which eventually formed the Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA),12 its stated purpose to recapture state power (Dolan 2009: 43). The NRA was hard on their heels, and Museveni’s troops soon began to mete out extrajudicial killings, to physically abuse, detain, and torture

Acholi civilians and suspected rebels, to loot cattle herds and destroy homes, and to sow further seeds of mistrust between North and South (Finnström 2008: 71; see also Amnesty

International 1992).

Internal strangers, displacement, and the lukwena

Heike Behrend (1999) writes that the UNLA soldiers who fled North to Acholi created a crisis of “internal strangers” (a term coined by Werbner 1989) that upset both the social and spiritual balance of the Acholi moral world. These soldiers returned polluted with the angry spirits of the dead (cen) they had killed in Luwero, in turn contaminating the cosmos and proliferating misfortune, witchcraft, and illness in the society at large. Soldiers were blamed for bringing the cen that provoked the scourge of AIDS, the NRA’s reprisals in the North, and the general suffering wrought by renewed conflict. In pre-colonial warfare, a soldier

12 This group, one of the main precursors to the lukwena groups that followed, is also known by Acholi as cilil (meaning, “you go and tell”).

!31 might prevent attracting cen by bringing back the head of his victim, but more importantly by being placed in a state of liminal seclusion for several days until the deceased’s tipu

(shadow or spirit) could be sent away by ritual means (Behrend 1999: 28; cf. Grove 1919:

164). During WWII, soldiers in the King’s African Rifles brought back personal items belonging to their victims (such as buttons or clothing), but the ritual sacrifice and ultimate effect was the same (Behrend 1999: 28). No such ritual actions were taken by soldiers returning from Luwero in 1986; they were either unable or unwilling to submit to the authority of the ludito (elders) or to show proper woro (respect and comportment). People began to argue that an Acholi prophet needed to emerge in order to end the violence and suffering (Behrend 1999: 30).

With the assistance of her charismatic father, the still-active Severino Lukoya, in

August of 1986 a young Acholi woman called Alice Auma, made it publicly known that she was possessed by a Christian spirit called Lakwena. The word lakwena (pl. lukwena) means

“messenger” in Acholi, and it appeared to some that a prophet had indeed emerged. Lakwena claimed to be a deceased military general from Italy, and he commanded Alice to assemble an army to restore order and purity to Acholi and Ugandan society as a whole. This was called the Holy Spirit Movement (HSM), with a military wing called the Holy Spirit Mobile

Forces (HSMF). According to Behrend, the HSM “created order within disorder” by taking control of mediumship (ensuring that the power to heal eclipsed the power to kill, thus prohibiting witchcraft), dictating rules of engagement for the looting of food and medicine, issuing edicts against murder and rape, and unifying disparate social elements by re- employing ex-combatants (1999, passim).

!32 The HSM promised to defeat evil by ridding Acholi of cen, defeating the NRM

Government, creating paradise on Earth, and ushering in the second coming of Jesus Christ.

In the search for Acoli Manyen (New Acholi), warfare took on eschatological dimensions.

Alice convinced the UPDA rebels in Sudan to put troops under Lakwena’s command, and they were joined by other volunteer conscripts in the greater North, seeking a saviour. The

HSMF was governed by strict moral and technical dictates and its unusually disciplined force resulted in surprise victories in battles with the NRA, Lakwena’s troops throwing rocks blessed with holy water as grenades and singing hymns as they marched towards Kampala

(Behrend 1999: 59).

Nonetheless, the HSMF was defeated outside the southeastern city of Jinja in

November of 1987 and the alliance with the UPDA collapsed. Popular support for Lakwena’s message did not exist outside of the North, and once again Acholi soldiers fled home to join disparate rebel groups and turn to petty banditry. Lakwena abandoned Alice and she escaped to Kenya, where she eventually died in exile (Dolan 2009: 33). Once again, social chaos returned to Acholi, where the NRM government hurried its attempts to “pacify” the North and monopolize the use of armed force. In the aftermath of Alice’s defeat, a former UPDA foot soldier called Joseph Kony claimed he was now possessed by Lakwena (as well as a whole host of other spirits) and went on to form what is now globally known as the Lord’s

!33 Resistance Army13 (Allen 1991; Behrend 1999; Doom and Vlassenroot 1999; Lomo and

Hovil 2004).

This continuation of the lukwena, as they were known, resulted in over 20 years of protracted conflict with the state army (now called the UPDF).14 By basing its operations primarily from Sudan (now South Sudan), the LRA received intelligence, logistical support, supplies and arms from Khartoum for over a decade as Kampala funded the rebel SPLM/A and engaged Sudan in a proxy war (Schomerus 2007). While in the early stages of the rebellion there was some popular support for Kony’s forces, their tactics grew increasingly brutal as the civilian population rejected the violence. It remains controversial whether

Acholi ludito (elders) ever ritually blessed the war parties with laa (spittle, a generalized blessing), twigs of the oboke olwedo tree (also a generalized blessing), or lapii (the sticks used to make fire, a specific sanctification for war). The lapii blessing is a serious invocation

(lam) that cannot be retracted, but what is much more certain is that in Gulu another type of lam—a curse—was enacted by a prominent elder and his wife,15 and this action enraged the

LRA’s senior command (Dolan 2009: 87; Finnström 2008: 211-214).

13 Though Kony’s force is called the LRA, to my interlocutors who lived through the twenty years of conflict that proceeded the Bush War, this group was more commonly known as simply lakwena or lukwena (the messengers). Like the concept of Acholi identity, the “LRA” name stuck by way of its uptake and interpretation by outsiders, something which did not happen until the later stages of the conflict, when international relief agencies finally recognized the massive humanitarian crisis unfolding in northern Uganda. Throughout this dissertation I use the term LRA and lukwena interchangeably because that variation better reflects the vagaries of violence experienced and perpetrated by my interlocutors: similar to the phenomena of cen, it is not always clear who the messenger is, nor what they are trying to communicate.

14 The National Resistance Army (NRA) was renamed the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) under the terms of the 1995 Constitution of the Republic of Uganda. 15 This curse was a type of abomination (kiir): the man showed his penis and the woman showed her breasts, both in anger, as if to say, “This is where you came from, and I curse you.”

!34 In the 1990s the lukwena thus began seriously attacking Acholi people themselves. It disseminated warnings, edicts, and prohibitions about certain behaviours (both religious and practical) that restricted movement and threatened those who might be regarded as supporting the government. Unable to muster enough volunteer support, they began looting villages and abducting youth to serve in the ranks. Although the Government of Uganda and the LRA engaged in peace talks in 1994, the negotiations ultimately failed and the war continued unabated. The UPDF was granted official permission to enter southern Sudan in

2002 and it launched a brutal campaign against the LRA’s bases. However, the insurgency only worsened the humanitarian crisis in Acholi, and it was during this time that international agencies began providing aid to civilians (Dolan 2009).

Indeed, the lukwena were only one half of the problem, in the minds of civilians.

Even though many residents had moved closer to the military detaches and trading centres starting in the late 1980s, they had always returned home to farm their lands. This changed dramatically in 1996, when the UPDF forcibly relocated the populace into insecure and underserved IDP camps. The Government referred to the gazetted camps by the euphemism of “protected villages,” and late-comers were violently displaced or killed as suspected rebel sympathizers (Dolan 2009). By 2005, nearly 90 percent of the Acholi population resided in camps (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre 2008).

The camps had the effect of concentrating civilians into easy military targets for the rebel forces and they took away all means of dignity and self-sufficiency. They were overcrowded and underserved, rife with disease, and because residents were dependent on food and medical aid (while being even more vulnerable to rebel attack, raids, and

!35 abduction), some analysts suggested that the camp strategy opened up the Government of

Uganda, UN and other aid agencies to accusations of “humanitarian impunity,” possibly even crimes against humanity (Branch 2004, 2007, 2008). They made key methods of Acholi cultural transmission—the rearing of children in multi-generational homesteads, with elders telling stories around night time fires)—logistically impossible. As a result, elders and youth alike now complain that the children and youth who grew up in the camps “do not know how to be Acholi” (Baines 2005: 22). This dissatisfaction with identity and practice is acutely experienced, and the norms of gerontocracy challenged, in communities throughout Acholi where violent acts were frequently committed in intimate circumstances: between child and parent, neighbour and neighbour, relative and relative.

In October of 2005, the International Criminal Court unsealed its first ever arrest warrants–for five LRA commanders, charged with a litany of war crimes and crimes against humanity (Human Rights Watch 2005b). After having lobbied the Government of Uganda for several years to enact a general amnesty for LRA combatants (successfully realized in the

2000 Amnesty Act), Acholi leaders decried the Court’s involvement as short-sighted and harmful to ongoing peace efforts (Allen 2006; Allen and Schomerus 2006; ARLPI et al.

2002; Hovil and Quinn 2005). While to date only one of the charged men has been apprehended (Dominic Ongwen, in December 2014), the ICC’s intervention instigated a series of heated, polarized, and ongoing debates on the merits of retributive versus redistributive or reconciliatory justice, “local tradition” versus autocratic legalism, and practical peace versus idealized humanitarian justice (Allen 2006, 2007; Baines 2007;

!36 Anyeko et al. 2012; Branch 2004, 2007, 2008; Clarke 2009; Dolan 2009; Finnström 2010a,

2010b; Hovil and Quinn 2005; Hovil and Lomo 2005; Pham et al. 2007b).

Regardless of the merits of the ICC’s intervention, international attention helped to compel the Government of Uganda to meet the LRA’s high command at the bargaining table in Juba, after a ceasefire was declared in late 2006. By the time the LRA was definitively expelled from Uganda’s borders that year, its ranks of forced-soldiers had abducted approximately 66,000 youth and children to serve as soldiers, porters, spies, domestic servants, and sexual labourers (Annan et al. 2006; Annan et al. 2008; Annan et al. 2009;

Carlson and Mazurana 2009; Coulter et al. 2008; Human Rights Watch 1997, 2003a, 2003b;

McKay and Mazurana 2004; Pham et al. 2007a). While many abductees never returned home or remain missing, many more came back to face serious social stigma, where they were simultaneously labelled “victims” and “perpetrators,” a moral impasse that has continued to complicate local and global debates about the possibilities for justice (Baines 2007, 2009).

Kony never signed the Final Peace Agreement, failing to show up at the designated place and time in 2008. He retreated into the bush, but he did not bring back his fighters to northern Uganda. The current situation in Acholi might be termed negative peace (Galtung

1964): the North is not so much in a state of conciliation as lacking in war. Kony and his much-reduced force remain at large (likely in the border region between South Sudan and the

Central African Republic). Yoweri Museveni continues to hold the reigns of power after a

30-year tenure that has been repeatedly described as a “hybrid regime” of neopatrimonial and clientelist politics, upheld by a benevolent dictatorship (Goodfellow and Lindemann

!37 2013; Lindemann 2011; Rubongoya 2007; Tripp 2010). Since independence in 1962, there has yet to be a peaceful transfer of executive power in Kampala.

2. The Objects and Subjects of Study

Persistent amnesia, dumbfoundedness, the inability to reflect when faced by the seemingly unstatable—i.e. a vague perception that something in this cannot be coped with—was my ordinary lot during the adventure.

—Jeanne Favret-Saada (1980: 22)

I said goodbye to my guides that afternoon at Ayugi, my notebook brimming with stories and my brain exhausted. But for every story I heard about cen at that particular massacre site, I heard of three more cases where no one was quite able, or willing, to articulate what had happened to create the cen in the first place. For many people I talked to, they told me that there was no cen at that site, just bad memories. Maybe there cannot be cen because there are memories of what happened there. You cannot find cen, cen finds you. Of course, there is a double violence in not knowing who has been killed or what has happened to the missing.

The absence that says, “around this many people died,” or “about so many were killed,” or

“a handful were murdered,” the approximates and the maybes and every atrocity without a plaque and a name and a number is that “ungrievability” that Judith Butler (2009) wrote about, one that puts the dead outside of a political frame and turns them into spectres. So while the residents of Atiak could not recount their history to me, an outsider, they did lead me to linger in its silences and uncertainties.

!38 Jeanne Favret-Saada’s work considers “how the text is its own forward” (1980: 26) in her struggle to identify and codify “truth” in ethnography. To state that “the text is its own forward” in this case is to acknowledge the messiness of lived experience, the complexity of inter-subjectivities, and the moments of secrecy, deception, upset, disappointment, failure, and frustration in researching the spirits of violence are not beside the ethnographic object, a veil over the object, to be suffered or explained away in elucidating the object, but are the object of this ethnography itself.

While Husserl and Merleau-Ponty advanced phenomenology as the study of “things themselves,” I follow the lines of contemporary existential anthropology which explores “the tension and dialectic between immediate and mediated experience, reducing reality neither to some purely sensible mode of being nor to the theoretical language with which we render existence comprehensible” (Jackson and Piette 2015: 11). When I have observed or asked my interlocutors to explain or describe the “uncanny” or the “spiritual” or the realm of the unknown, I have not taken for granted that the relationship between individual experience and cosmology is isomorphic or in any way stable.

Methodologically speaking, this requires one to tread carefully: in bracketing the distinction between “the real” and the illusory (the former the province of experts), instead I have taken heed of Jackson and Piette’s suggestion that both are “appearances that arise from different circumstances, serve different interests, and have different effects” (2015: 9). This has meant not privileging one form of interpretation over another (those of a clan elder versus a psychologist, those of a priest over a teenage girl). This is not a repudiation of expertise or a naive celebration of the “grassroots,” but rather an attempt to show how life in

!39 Acholi is irreducible to narrowly defined categories of existence. In contrast to Berger’s

(1967) methodological atheism, I thus proceeded in my fieldwork in mind of Favret-Saada’s assertion (1980) that there is no room for uninvolved observers in an ethnography of the hidden.

Learning how to see, listen, and ask

When I first came to northern Uganda in 2008 under the auspices of the research and advocacy program called the Justice and Reconciliation Project,16 I assisted in the documentation of massacres and in researching the challenges faced by communities attempting to reintegrate youth returned from LRA captivity. I was additionally tasked with helping my Acholi colleagues launch a life-history project which focused specifically experiences of ex-LRA girls and women, with whom I continued my research for the fieldwork portion of my MA (McGill University).

During the period of my MA fieldwork in 2009, I was struck by the mode of telling and the content of stories about spirit beings and human ghosts—in and outside “the bush.”

Yet my interlocutors often told me, when asked, that I should be speaking to old ludito

(elderly men) if I really wanted to know more about such things. In one instance a group of women stated simply that ritual is the business of the royal (Payira) clan, and common women such as themselves should not be expected to know anything about the world of spirits and tum (sacrifice, lit. cutting). This self-censorship was and is not just about

16 Now an independent NGO, JRP began in 2005 as a joint research initiative between Gulu District NGO Forum and the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. It was during the start of the Juba Peace Talks in 2006 that I was first hired (in an unrelated administrative capacity) at the Liu Institute, and within a year I went on to work for JRP (first in Vancouver, then in Gulu).

!40 gerontocracy or esoterism, but also the dangerous volatility of spirit beings (who might be accidentally invoked by such talk), the will to forget and become new persons, and the competing practices of multiple Christian sects in Acholi. And so I would need to find new ways of finding out, or new ways of accepting why I could not.

One of the women whom I first met in 2008, Anena (see Introduction), was indispensable (and exceedingly generous) in helping me navigate the challenges of communication. Even though her formal education was brutally interrupted by her abduction at the age of 12 (her English skills roughly equivalent to my rudimentary Acholi), Anena and

I immediately clicked. We frequently visited one another at our respective homes in Gulu, and I grew to know her children, some of her many brothers and sisters, and eventually her new husband (a fellow formerly abducted soldier, called Anywar) and his family. It is with

Anena and her family that I learned (imperfectly, and through trial and much error) how to conduct myself. These individuals make appearances throughout the following chapters.

With the assistance of people like Anena and her family, I carried out the vast majority of my PhD research in two adjacent Acholi districts17 called Amuru and Gulu. The latter contains Gulu Town Municipality, by far the largest urban centre in the sub-region, founded as an administrative post in 1910. Even though the vast majority of Acholi inhabitants have traditionally resided in impermanent, rural, patrilocal village groupings,

Gulu Town’s population swelled dramatically in the 1990s and early 2000s as people were

17 At the time of my fieldwork there were seven districts in the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda (Agago, Amuru, Gulu, Nwoya, Kitgum, Lamwo, and Pader). In addition to the Resident District Commissioners appointed directly by the President of Uganda, each district is governed by a system of locally elected Local Councillors, or LCs. These levels of governance range from the most basic village level (LCI) through the parish, sub-county, county, and finally district (LCV) level, and are based on the revolutionary councils set up in the late 1980s by the National Resistance Movement.

!41 displaced from their farms by armed conflict and subsequent government-enforced evacuation, elucidated above. By 2014, the population of Gulu Municipality reached an unprecedented 150,000 people out of a district total of 436,000 (UBOS 2016b: 114). It was there that I based myself for 14 months from 2013—2014.

It was in Gulu that I met Okidi, the younger brother of a friend and an extraordinarily bright interlocutor. Though Okidi’s ancestral village is in Amuru District, he grew up during the LRA/UPDF war in town, where he remains today. Even though other friends and assistants accompanied me on research expeditions, big and small, helping to steer me through both the language and behavioural norms, it is Okidi who was and remains my most influential lapwony: teacher. I come back to Okidi and his family—a group always travelling for something, always moving towards a new opportunity—throughout the following chapters.

Like many Acholi themselves, I too had “one foot in the village and one in town,” and this movement (necessary for the topics of my research and the daily lives of Acholi) is reflected in the thesis. As such I was often in Anena’s ancestral village in Atiak, the home of her father, Ochora.18 Until recently a part of Gulu District, the much less densely populated

Amuru District is home to a little less than 187,000 people, of which roughly 34,000 live in the rural sub-county of Atiak (UBOS 2016b: 69). Though there is no town in Atiak, the trading centre of the sub-county is the locus of much daily activity, especially as it is a mere

17 kilometres from the border with South Sudan. It was from the trading centre that together

Anena’s family and I watched the beginnings of exodus from that country as it re-erupted

18 For reasons of security I do not name the village or parish here, and simply call it Gang pa Ochora (Ochora’s homestead).

!42 into civil war at Christmas-time in 2013, reminding everyone of the fragility of Acholi’s own peace. For Anena and her children, the eldest four born of a forced marriage with a now- deceased junior LRA commander, this precariousness plays itself out in daily life, where the relative anonymity of town life provides some measure of comfort.

During the last decades in northern Uganda, like in other volatile places a person’s familial connections and political or military allegiances, or more accurately, perceived allegiances, could very easily get them killed. In order to maintain discipline, discourage defections, and destroy social relations between abductees and their home communities, the

LRA routinely targeted the relatives and clan-mates of escaped abductees for reprisals19 and forced individuals to kill or mutilate their family members or neighbours at the time of their abduction (Annan et al. 2006; Annan et al. 2008; Human Rights Watch 1997; Pham et al.

2007a). At the same time, soldiers with the UPDF (and its predecessor, the National

Resistance Army (NRA)) harassed, killed, and abused relatives and residents of the home communities of prominent LRA members (Dolan 2009; Finnström 2008; Human Rights

Watch 2005a).

At the camp that sprang up around the trading centre in Atiak, this issue is painfully apparent in the aftermath of several massacres. Vincent Otti, a native of Atiak and at the time the deputy commander of the LRA, reportedly murdered 37 of his own relatives in 1990

19 See, for example, the case of the Mucwini massacre, during which 56 people were murdered in reprisal for a member of their community having escaped the LRA with a gun (Ogora and Baines 2008). This reprisal scenario was common enough for Acholi children and youth learned that, in the event of their abduction, they should immediately adopt a “bush name” (a pseudonym) and lie about their geographic origins. For example, Dominic Ongwen, one of the three still-living LRA commanders wanted by the ICC (and the youngest person ever charged for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity) adopted his name when he was abducted at the age of 10. His arrest warrant does not list his birth name (Baines 2009).

!43 (Ogora and Baines 2007: 8), though virtually no public record of this incident is available.

According to Amnesty International (UK section), on 16 March 1991 five civilians were killed by NRA troops when they attempted to leave a government rally (1992: n.p.); however, a representative of the (partisan) Uganda People’s Congress claimed the death toll to be over 100 persons, with government propaganda accounting for the discrepancy in numbers (Executive Intelligence Review 1997: 53). Still another report accuses the NRA of killing nine civilians during a rally at the Atiak market on 18 December 1993 (Mulindwa

2012: n.p.).

The significance of these allegations lies in their very ambiguity: no systematic research has been published to confirm or deny their veracity, instead a trend of erasure, secrecy, and willful silence characterizes the public record of political violence in Uganda.20

Inasmuch as narratives of violence in Atiak are concerned, they share themes of personal blood feuds between armed forces and a deep suspicion toward the military elite. Public and

Government attention21 has instead been focused on what has come to be known as the Atiak massacre of 1995.

Despite the fact that I was openly acquainted with the members of two groups of survivors of the 1995 massacre, I knew there was more going on than the commemoration of that incident. I heard many variations of an incident in the early 1990s in which government

20 In reference to the LRA, this secrecy is exacerbated by the open-ended ICC cases against the two still-living commanders for which it issued warrants in 2005. In in order not to compromise the integrity of Ongwen’s trial or a (hypothetical) future trial of Kony at the Hague, the specific findings of forensic investigations in northern Uganda are redacted from all public documents. 21 For example, President Yoweri Museveni traveled to Atiak in April 2012 to officiate the most recent public commemoration of the 1995 massacre. The memorial erected in Atiak and the annual ceremonies hosted there are a point of increasing debate about memory politics (for example, see Amoru and Lawino 2010; Hopwood 2011; Ssalongo 2012).

!44 soldiers approached vendors and buyers on the monthly market day and demanded that the relatives of a certain rebel commander identify themselves. When no relatives were forthcoming, the soldiers opened fire. Anena told me some years ago about that event, which she experienced as a young girl shopping at the market that day with her father, Ochora.

When I gently asked him about it in 2013, Ochora cut me off and told me it never happened.

He lowered his eyes and reached for his gin, and I let the matter drop.

But I still heard whispers about this incident and that one, about this government soldier or that rebel soldier, and about who was buried where. With each rock I unturned, thinking I was getting closer to getting a basic sense of the timeline of that place, I uncovered some other horror with murky details. I knew, intellectually, that the fact that I could not get a handle on things was sort of the point—war is never simple, and neither is its recounting.

But it nagged at me that I could not even pin down or corroborate things I had read in the paper - as though what had been printed was somehow a transcendental truth. I knew that there had been more than one massacre in Atiak in the time between 1986 and 2006, but people tend to only acknowledge the Atiak Massacre. Each time I thought I learned something outside of that event, someone would inevitably tell me that I had been lied to. I asked Anena why it was that people led me on wild goose chases and avoided my questions, however indirectly, gently, and appropriately I asked them, and she shrugged and said, “Well, they probably think you’re a government spy.”

Unfortunately, my other way of trying to understand things—through the realm of spirits—was no less uncomfortable. I was specifically interested in understanding people’s encounters with spirits in Acholi—how they speak about them, how they manage them, and

!45 what responses people around them have to such interactions. Though later chapters more fully describe the various spirit beings that exist in Acholi cosmology, here two spirits that have everything to do with good and bad human death should be highlighted. First, there is kwaro - the ancestors, or the living dead. Kwaro also refers to living elders, especially those people near death, who are said to have one foot in the world of the ancestors and one in the here and now. They are also the living dead. Now, not everyone becomes a kwaro—one must have died at an advanced age and have produced many sons and daughters to propagate the clan. A good death is full of peace and filial devotion, the remains are interred at home, and adequate funeral rites are performed to celebrate the life of the deceased and ensure his or her comfort in death. But the authorities are quiet on what happens to the tipu—human souls or shadows—who fail to meet these social requirements before their bodily deaths.

There is also bad death. When a person dies violently, unjustly, or without having been shown proper care during illness, his or her spirit may become vengeful and attack the living. If a person dies in the wilderness (a place which is ill-defined by my interlocutors and

I suspect might actually mean ‘any place outside of the deceased’s paternal ancestral home’) his body must be brought home to be laid to rest in the family compound. If he is not, the spirit will likely become cen, a vengeful spirit, and disturb any being it encounters until it is shown due diligence by the living: commemoration, burial, and care. A person may provoke the attentions of cen by perpetrating or witnessing the bad death of another person, by desecrating a corpse, or, as was common for people I met, by stepping on or over exposed human remains and failing to take proper ritual care of them. The intentions of the living person are less significant than his or her actions, and as such an individual forced to kill

!46 another, a person who willingly participates in a murder, and a stranger who stumbles upon the bones of the dead all occupy the same moral category from the perspective of the vengeful spirit. As for cen itself, it is certainly not kwaro, an ancestor, and people categorize it in ambiguous ways—it is not quite human to some, and it is simply Satanic to others, but it is always a dirty and bad thing.

Cen can bring sickness, debilitating daytime visions and nightmares, gross misfortune, madness, and even death, and is a known social contagion. Someone with cen might behave anti-socially and become an immoral and destructive person. Cen can lay dormant for years and even generations after the death in question, and is likely to turn its malicious attentions to the children and grandchildren of the person who first encountered and “contracted” the spirit. Thus those suspected of suffering from cen, as well as their kin, may be ostracized, and the propagation of the clan begs for a communal solution to the problem.

It stands to reason that the less the dead are recognized, the noisier they become. The more monstrous, and less human. After the largest Atiak massacre, some families were able to recover the remains of their dead family members, but plenty were not. I asked many of my interlocutors about that—local elders, chiefs, religious leaders, ritual authorities, and the survivors themselves. What happened after so many bodies were left? Did anyone do anything to help the spirits get home? Could they? Whose responsibility was it? Could they take me there so I could see it for myself? In truth, though I admitted to being curious about going to the physical site, I was more interested in what people had to say about why people should or should not go there. Again, I was led on a wild chase. I told people I would not be

!47 bothered if they did not want to go venture to the site, and that I did not want anyone to go if they thought they or their children might be attacked by cen. People told me they understood this, but that they simply needed to organize the journey, and yet no help every materialized in guiding me there. It was difficult for me to tell if they were afraid, or annoyed with me, or disinterested, or all of the above.

A week before I left Acholi, Okidi volunteered to go on his own to find out if he could meet the people who owned the land on which the massacre had occurred. I thought it was a fool’s errand - plenty of people had promised to introduce us to these mysterious people, but avoided us when we tried to follow up on it. But I smiled and nodded and gave him my blessing, put some money in his pocket and sent him on his way, expecting a new defeat. Okidi called me that night, breathless and exuberant: he had asked a motorcycle driver at random if he knew how to get to the land, and by coincidence (maybe) the driver happened to be a man who was intimately acquainted with the land and those who lived on it. He agreed to take us to meet the family in question and arrange for our guides. I told them

I would be satisfied just talking to them; I didn’t want to be responsible for someone contracting cen, but they were insistent. We went and we talked and talked, and as far as I know none of use contracted cen, but it could take years for it to manifest. So we wait and wonder what we can do to prevent it.

!48 Chapter 2: Pneumapolitics

ants keep busy they have figured out that life is for living & death is for dying there is no space for those of us who are not dead & have yet to be resurrected

—Juliane Okot Bitek, 100 Days (2016: 27)

1. Min Anena’s Bones

It had been a very long day, and the young men were especially exhausted. The coffin containing Min22 Anena’s bones, still wrapped in decayed bits of the green polkadot dress in which she was originally buried, was placed carefully in the newly-dug grave. A crowd of relatives and villagers, drunk on kongo (potent homemade alcohol), had gathered around the plot and were jockeying for space in order to see which of the coffins would be taken out next from the back of the truck. A disagreement erupted between the men at the front, who had been digging up burial plots since dawn, and they began gesturing back and forth between the truck and the open graves.

Though it was many hours past sundown, the moon was bright and full, and I was easily able to find my friend Daniel in the crowd. “What’s going on?” I asked.

22 “Min” is an Acholi teknonym, meaning “mother of.”

!49 “They’re tired and so they’re fighting about which bones go where. One of them has said that those ones aren’t their close relatives so they should just leave them for now and finish for today.”

We were in Gang pa Ochora, Anena’s paternal village in Atiak, but we had started the day on a crowded plot of land near the 4th Division UPDF detach in Gulu. It was there that the bones of eight of Anena’s relatives—and one stranger—had been buried one coffin after the other during the time of war and displacement. Theirs were common deaths: Anena’s maternal grandfather, of old age; an uncle, shot in his ear by lukwena after having dared to ride a bicycle;23 Anena’s mother, of “slim” (AIDS-related illness); two brothers in fighting forces, one poisoned24 and another shot in battle; a young auntie, of a mysterious sickness; infant twins, their cause of death forgotten; and a stranger from Kitgum, the son of a soldier, of “some disease.”

By the practices of cik Acholi (Acholi norms or custom), when they died, each of the deceased’s bodies should have been immediately placed in the ground at their homesteads

(gang) in Atiak (and for the stranger, at his place in Kitgum). This was an impossible task, however, as the gangi of Acholi were largely inaccessible for the better part the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. The insecurity of people’s ancestral lands against attacks and raids by the lukwena was met with an equally untenable government response: to forcibly relocate residents into internally displaced person’s camp (called “protected villages” by the

23 At one point, the LRA issued an order to civilians that none of them should ever ride bicycles. Those caught by passing rebels were often murdered. I discuss restrictions of movement in more detail in chapter 5. 24 To be poisoned generally means to have been the victim of witchcraft. This means that the method of “poisoning” could be any number of illnesses or accidents which lead to death.

!50 Government of Uganda). Others fled to the slightly better-protected centres of Gulu and

Kitgum.

Among the many problems of this mass and long-lasting displacement was the common problem of bones placed in the wrong soil. Unable to visit the shrines (abila or kac) of their home villages, the dead were impotent in their duty to care for their living descendants. Other people died in the wilderness and, like a contentious proportion of the victims of the April 1995 massacre at Ayugi, their bodies have never been recovered for burial. Even so, some human remains have been intentionally placed in the bush in order to incite cen, or ghostly vengeance. However, cen and other spirits can also be provoked unintentionally by, amongst other acts, the improper management of human remains. Above all, spirits are capricious and cannot be understood by the actions of the living alone.

Since the camps began to be de-gazetted in the years following Juba Peace Talks

(2006–2008), residents have found themselves with the task of relocating themselves to the homes that they have not seen for years (or, for many youth, ever), and they are also faced with the challenge of exhuming and re-burying the human remains that have been interred in strange places.25 This work requires ritual care and close supervision by elders who are familiar with appropriate protocols, and in the five years immediately following the war, mass dwogo [or dwoko] cogo paco (“restoring the bones back home/to the village”) rituals were assisted by foreign NGOs who were able to provide the livestock necessary for

25 I acknowledge that the work of burials and belonging are integral to the complex land tenure system and the process of return after the war. Much has been written about this and my intention is not to reproduce this insightful work, but rather to complement it. See Whyte et al. 2012 on continued land displacement and patrilineal fundamentalism; Jahn and Wilhelm-Solomon 2015 and Jahn 2016 on the territorial and cosmological configurations of re-burials and post-war “development;” Hopwood 2015 on women’s customary land claims; Meinert and Kjær 2016 on the national politics of land in Uganda; and Rosenoff-Gauvin 2016 on ngom kwaro (ancestral land).

!51 sacrifice, means of transportation, coffins, alcohol, and sundries. At present, this work continues haphazardly (and with little foreign assistance or fanfare),26 for the bones placed in less accessible graves. Some bodies have remained displaced due to geography or financial circumstance, while others have simply been lost.

The stranger who owns the land in which the bones of Anena’s family members were first interred requested repeatedly that they be removed. Though his small patch of soil does not come close to approaching the scale of the lands that were occupied by the camps, like the owners of the latter he too wished to finally make the ground productive. The productivity of the soil and of living bodies are intimately intertwined, tied to the intercession of ancestral spirits into the lives of the living, and as such, the careful removal of bones was to the mutual interest of the stranger and Anena’s family. As a non-relative, once the remains had been removed from his land and the graves slowly refilled by way of natural erosion, his responsibility to acknowledge the dead was concluded.

Yet Anena’s family members and their former landlord are not the only actors in this story—the living and the human are not the only agentive forces at play. To dig up a grave

(golo lyel) is only part of the story. The process of removing nine sets of bones from

“foreign” soil is imbued with potential that is complemented by, but exceeds, the ritual actions of living kin. Human shadows are subjunctive, operating in their own time and with their own sovereign power: they might be this at one moment, and they might be that at

26 As explained in chapter 1, in 2008 the Lord’s Resistance Army failed to sign the Final Peace Agreement (negotiated at Juba) with the Government of Uganda, but the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement still remains in place in the North. As such, by 2012 most international crisis organizations had ceased (or were in the end stages of) operations and programming for northern Uganda.

!52 another. They might be about to do this on the living, and they might be about to do that.

Irrespective of how different families and individuals cope with and respond to this uncertainty, and notwithstanding the diversity of philosophical and religious opinions by which people approach death and after-death, respect for the dead remains a paramount concern.

It is for this reason that Anena’s maternal grandmother, a woman in her 80s, sat on a papyrus mat for the whole day at the edge of those graves in Gulu. She directed the young grandsons, sons, brothers, and uncles of the family in their digging, ensuring that the remains were disinterred in the proper order, from eldest to youngest. The soil covering the remains of Anena’s maternal grandfather was disturbed first, and once they had dug far enough to uncover the bones, they covered the hole with a mat. They did this in order to protect their grandfather’s bones from the harsh burn of the sun, while they stopped for a break to slake their thirst with alcohol. Immediately following, they continued to dig out the other graves and covered each in turn. Once the graves had each been unearthed and protected with a mat, an elderly uncle further guided the proceedings by taking charge of the sacrifice (tumu) of a sheep.

A few men sacrificed the sheep quietly and efficiently, next to some bushes and outside of an obvious line of view to the rest of the gathered relatives and neighbours. The uncle took the flesh of the dead animal and gave it to the younger women to cook. While they prepared the meat, the young men quickly disinterred the bones and placed them in the awaiting coffins. We then shared the mutton soup while the uncle scattered the wer

!53 (intestinal remains) of the sheep, as well as kongo (alcohol), into the now-empty and unprotected graves.

Soon after, the sky opened up and it began to rain in torrents. While some of us took brief shelter in a neighbour’s ot lum (grass thatch home), the young men who had been digging did not have time to waste, and we had to be on our way in the truck. Before they could rest for the day (or even enter their own homes), they needed to complete the dwogo cogo paco so that they did not arouse cen, ghostly vengeance. Only after we had travelled the

70 km to the two villages in Atiak where the bones were to be reinterred, and only after the men had placed the coffins in the village soil, could they be afforded a final measure of protection against cen. Under the care of another elderly man, away from the crowd he officiated a ritual known as okano latoo (to hide the deceased) to shield them from spectral harm.

For Anena’s living family, the demands of recognition and commemoration are ongoing, and they are a topic of heavy consideration. The wearied dispute between clan grandsons over which bones mattered the most offers small windows into the simultaneously intimate and public problem of acknowledgement and belonging in Acholi. The material conditions of human remains and the politics of burials and reburials are crucial to this problem, but they also point to forces that are immaterial. Here, I contend that the politics of human value in Acholi are located not only in the ways in which people live and die, but in how or if incorporeal shadows (tipu) are met, interpreted, and responded to by the living.

Where others have located sovereign power in the management of populations to live and let die, or die and let live, in this chapter I shift the analytic locus of power from the individual,

!54 social, and bodies politic, to the minutiae of spirits produced at their interstices. Thus, the chapter operates within a central and unresolved tension in anthropological discussions about how spirits figure in contemporary lived experience with death—as independent and agentive beings (existing a priori to human articulation), or as figures bestowed with power and ontological status by the acts of the living. This tension is one that is mirrored in the conversations between Anena’s relatives and other people like them.

An old problem with new urgency

In this chapter I introduce the circumstances by which tipu dano (the shadows or souls of people) might become kwaro (ancestors or the “living dead”), cen (vengeance ghosts), or neither.27 In what follows I explore instances of death and burial; excavation and reburial; commemoration and disregard; hauntings, blessings, curses, and their possibilities: all phenomena that I witnessed during the period of my fieldwork, and each implicated with what I refer to in this chapter as “pneumapolitics.” The word “pneuma” points to breath (the stuff of life) as well as to vital force, soul, or spirit. Pneumapolitics therefore encompasses struggles that are at once mundane and existential, that concern both the living and the dead

(and perhaps more). Put in other words, pneumapolitics concerns the aforementioned tension

27 The reader must be prepared to bracket these concepts for reasons that will become more apparent in chapter 3, where I further interrogate how cosmological terms are interpreted and disputed by contemporary Acholi people and discuss the parameters of “belief” and Christianity. I expand upon the concept of ajwani (dirty things) and introduce jok (pl. jogi) spirit forces in the following chapter as well. I have committed these ideas from this chapter simply for heuristic purposes; this necessary organization does not correspond to the messy reality of Acholi cosmology.

!55 between the agentive acts of and passions upon living humans, dead humans, and other beings.

In section 2, I elaborate on kit me kwaro (the ways of the ancestors) to describe

“good” and “bad” death in Acholi as it is related to social worth and the regeneration of life.

As the parameters of kinship are integral to “good” death and practices of burial, this section first elucidates the family configurations of my interlocutors. This section introduces key concepts related to death and human spirits, as well as types of ritual (kwer) in indigenous

Acholi work.28 Though I make reference to older texts that document “beliefs”29 and tic

Acholi (Acholi ritual work), my primary concern remains with contemporary experiences as they are lived by my interlocutors, and so my interpretation and descriptions are especially refracted by way of conversations and shared experiences with Okidi (see ch. 1) and others.30

In section 3, I return to the case of bodies left at the 1995 massacre at Ayugi, and to the rumour of ghost students heard dancing the Bwola dance at the riverbank. This section further interrogates the modes of belonging and exclusion inherent in the ritual management of the dead: kin and stranger, through the concerns and interpretations offered by the residents and neighbours of the land on which those remains lie. Following the work of

Katherine Verdery (1999), Meinert and Whyte have recently offered a sophisticated reading

28 I explore the troubled nexus of dini (religion) with ker (authority, rule, chieftainship) in chapter 3.

29 Belief is a concept I explore in full depth in chapter 3. In sum, “belief” is an insufficient entry point into understanding either ontology or epistemology in Acholi as it is inseparable from the concept of Christian witness. 30 To reiterate the phenomenological approach I outlined in the introduction, text (broadly conceived) and practice are, of course, mutually constitutive, but I aim in the focus on individuals and specific families to present these phenomena as exceeding any one particular expertise or orthodoxy. Nevertheless, some term definitions and outlines of “tradition” provide heuristic grounding for further chapters.

!56 of how the materiality of dead bodies in northern Uganda can be used as a “technology of time” to both make the past present and to work towards hopeful futurities (2016). My aim here is to complement this work by further considering the immateriality of the dead. I contend in this section that an ongoing preoccupation with authentic “Acholi-ness” in the present contributes to the production of angry spirits not fully incorporated into kin networks, but not necessarily recognizable as individual ghosts, either. In Acholi, the word gwok captures the uncertainty of such phenomena. Gwok as a noun can mean taboo, abomination, or bad omen, but it is also used as an adverb to mean “may be or perhaps” or as a command to “take care” or “be alert” (Adong and Lakareber 2009: 36; Okidi 2000: 23). In conversation, Okidi once referred to gwok as a “mysterious spirit,” but he went on to say that it is a word uttered when “something bad happens and you don’t understand the meaning, but something needs to be done.” As such, each story contained herein demonstrates the suspended or subjunctive aspect of the dead as they relate to the living. It is the fear of ghostly vengeance or some other “dirty thing” or gwok and their unresolved possibilities that disquiet Acholi residents.

The distinction between ancestors and ghosts, of course, is not new in anthropological thought, nor is the differentiation made obviously (Hertz 1960 [1907]; van

Gennep 1960 [1909]; Gluckman 1937; Fortes 1959, 1987; Goody 1962; Mbiti 1970; Bloch and Parry 1982). More specifically, the subject has deep roots in the ethnology of Nilotic

East Africa (e.g. Driberg 1923; Evans-Pritchard 1974 [1956]; Southall 2004 [1956];

Lienhardt 1961; Middleton 1999 [1960]; Burton 1978). Death, ritual, and the regeneration of life (Bloch and Parry 1982) are subjects integral to scholarly understandings of African

!57 kinship, political authority, ritual practice, and cosmology (Gluckman 1937; Fortes 1959;

Kopytoff 1971; Brain 1973), and to the human condition more generally. Despite this intellectual lineage, the semiotic interpretation and ritual management of dead bodies, ancestors, ghosts, and other spirits has found renewed urgency in late 20th and early 21st century contexts of rapid socioeconomic change and political violence (Werbner 1991; De

Boeck 1998; Hutchinson 1998; Robben 2000; Mueggler 2001; Sharp 2001; Kwon 2006,

2008, 2013).

The “bipolarity” of death (Kwon 2008), wherein “good” deaths produce ancestors

(and the reproduction of the social order) and “bad” deaths produce ghosts, has a long history in social anthropology. Durkheim theorized that the commemoration of ancestors functions to create social solidarity, while a soul that fails to separate from the body creates a

“vagabond being” that lies outside of sociality, and creates pollution (Kwon 2013: 192). Yet, as Heonik Kwon has argued in a masterful exploration of Robert Hertz’s social and political theory of the soul, Durkheim’s conception of ancestors “constitutes a broken and profoundly wounded category” (2013: 199) in light of modern warfare and geopolitics. The ancestors and ghosts of northern Uganda are equally ensnared in this categorical brokenness. The ethnographic evidence I present here complements Kwon’s discussions of “ritual ambidexterity.” However, while Kwon’s focus has largely been at the confluence of large- scale state commemoration (virtuous and heroic war dead) with intimate kin-based ritual

(which incorporates the non-virtuous dead), here there is no category of heroic death and kin-based ritual is equally fraught.

!58 In 2003 Achille Mbembe revisited Foucault’s (1976, 1978) claim that classical sovereign’s right to kill subjects (to “take life or let live") was complemented by the 19th- century emergence of biopower. Biopower refers to how the modern nation state uses technologies of social and political power to control populations and subjugate bodies, or the right to “make live and let die” (Foucault 2003 [1976]: 241). Mbembe advanced Foucault’s assertion that the sovereign “right to kill” was not subsumed by the politics of “life itself," but rather that the power of death has also been transformed. Necropolitics, in Mbembe’s terminology, is more than the classical sovereign right to kill, but also includes the sovereign31 right to impose social death, the right to enslave others, to reduce people to bare life, and to enact other forms of political violence through “necropower” (2003). More recently, Erik Davis has coined the term “deathpower” to illuminate the social power

Cambodian Buddhists wield to manipulate the dead (both in terms of memory or ontological status) (2016). He asserts that death “is simultaneously a value, and the conquest of that value,” (ibid.: 3) and that Foucault’s later work on the “care of the self” offers an additional angle with which to view this control-over and care for the dead (6).

Who is accorded the status of an ancestor, and who is abandoned to the forgotten realm of hungry ghosts, is a question of ethics and of power in multiple registers: at the level of the family, of gender, of clan, of tribe, of nation. The process of death of course illuminates life, as so many of the aforementioned scholars have shown, and as such I argue that the dynamic between kwaro and cen (and perhaps even more significantly, the dead who do not easily occupy either category) constitutes pneumapolitics. I suggest here that

31 Mbembe does not take the bounded modern state to be the sole realm of “power,” and I follow this broader definition in my argumentation.

!59 disembodied spirits also have power; not only because the living bestow status upon them through ritual, but because they can and do act independent of human-prescribed order.

Pneumapolitics are inherent in the subject of the tipu (shadows) who live on the borderlands of commemoration and kinship, not fully (re)membered. They are subjunctive spirits, signifying potential effects on the living, and ongoing deliberations on proper acts of acknowledgement, recognition, and commemoration (including disavowal and passivity) are affected by these possibilities. These deliberations concern the social formations of the past, present, and future, of social belonging and exclusion. The struggles between “traditional”

Acholi authorities and disaffected “internal strangers,” which Behrend (1999) and Finnström

(2008) have each demonstrated contributed directly to the rage of war and grievous death, is re-inscribed in the politics of dead humans and subjunctive spirits. This “subjunctivity" concerns not just ritual action and the social reproduction of kinship formations, but reflects and is reflected in politics at multiple scales of interpretation: family, clan, tribe, country, and globe. Whose spirits are worthy of commemoration, of ritual care, and of recognition is a question related to but not fully encompassed by the politics of acknowledgement and the

“grievability” of the Other advanced by Butler (2009). I return to this idea in section 3.

!60 2. Kit Me Kwaro: death and the ways of the ancestors

Romo pe koko latin pa dyel (“A sheep does not lament the death of a goat’s kid”)

—Acholi proverb (p’Bitek 1985: 14)

Okidi and I were introduced through several mutual friends in January 2014. Knowing that I had been searching for a research assistant, my friends had presented me to this 24-year-old

—a gently-spoken polymath in search of waged work. His brother-in-law had affectionately described him to me as a bookish nerd of diverse interests, similar to myself. We had a first meeting over dishes of beans and malakwang (a traditional Acholi food), where we discussed all manner of things, including my research program. We got along well, and I hired him on the spot. But only a week later, our plans were slowed and our meetings punctuated by deaths in Okidi’s family. It was neither the first time nor the last that death re-oriented my research plans.

The morning after our first day together, Okidi failed to show up to my house at the time we had agreed upon, and I called him to ask when I might expect his arrival. Okidi replied that he was busy washing up because he had only just gotten home: his cousin-sister had died the night before. Acayo was a mere 22 years old, and three months before she had been hit by a tractor trailer that was barreling through town on its way to South Sudan. She had only now succumbed to her injuries at the hospital, and Okidi had been up most of the night helping to make the arrangements for her body to be picked up at the mortuary in

Lacor and taken to their village in Amuru District for burial.

!61 Despite the condolences I offered, Okidi insisted on coming to my house—perhaps a choice indicative of the desire for scarce waged work, just as much as the quotidian tragedy of premature death. Although saddened by Acayo’s passing, Okidi’s attentions were now on his ailing grandmother (daa), an accomplished lami yat (herbalist healer) who had long recognized and nurtured the special qualities of an herbalist in Okidi. His mama madit (lit. big mother, another term for grandmother) had buried her own son, Okidi’s father, and taken a prominent place in her grandson’s life. Determined to get on with the day, however, Okidi took me to the garden behind his mother’s second-hand clothing shop (see ch. 5), located on a main road in the marshy valley that bisects Gulu Town. Soon after we arrived, his phone rang and he answered. With tears in his eyes, he apologized and said he had to leave: his mama madit was dead.

Belonging and exclusion: family bones and family shadows

Though Okidi was born in 1990 in Gulu Town and raised there, like most of his peers he considered his home to be his ngom kwaro (the place of his ancestors), in Amuru District where the bones of his deceased family members lie, and where his mama madit’s bones would soon rest as well. His grandmother and cousin-sister’s deaths were by no means his first encounters with familial demise, and so despite his youth, he was already well-versed in grave matters. Over many conversations, Okidi and I discussed the particularities of his family history and the different styles of ritual care with which the ludito and megi32 of his

32 Ladit (pl. ludito) is the common term of respect for an elderly man, and mego (pl. megi, lit. mothers) for a woman.

!62 family have responded to death. The intensity with which people concern themselves with the dead is in proportion to the magnitude of their shared kinship relations, hence the dispute at Gang pa Ochora over whose bones should be interred first.33 Okidi’s family is no different in this respect, and in what follows I introduce some practical matters concerning a family’s bones and shadows.

The world lyel—often translated into English as “grave”—in fact refers to the material remains of a body rather than the burial plot. Whether or not the dead body retains the constituent essence of the person him or herself is a more complex question. According to Okidi, many Acholi people have forgotten the ways of their ancestors (kit me kwaro) and the conceptual distinction of lyel and tipu (tipu, shadow or soul). The conflation of bones with shadow risks the possibility that, in the process of burial, the presence of the tipu will go unheeded. It is the bones of the dead, not their tipu, that rest in the soil, he asserted. Okidi instructed me with the following anecdote:

Some people went to bury an old man. A ladit [elderly man] asked a middle-aged person, “What have we come to do today?” The younger man replied, “We have come to bury Paul.” “You have failed,” the old man said. “His spirit is still here.”

Rather than announcing: waceto ka iko lyel pa Paul (“we are going to bury the dead body/ remains of Paul”) or waceto ka iko cogo pa Paul (“we are going to bury the bones of Paul”), now the more common utterance takes the form: waceto ka iko Paul (“we are going to bury

Paul”).

33 As I will demonstrate in section 3, taken to its most logical extreme, this complex of social and familial belonging/exclusion is met by the acts of spirit forces themselves.

!63 For Okidi, this linguistic slip is problematic, but does not invalidate the material/spirit distinction that persists in ordinary understanding. Regardless of the reason for this new phrasing (perhaps due to the influence of the English language), Okidi and others imparted to me that it would be impolitic to read it as a radical ontological shift. Daniel, my friend and

Acholi language tutor (who accompanied me during the restoration of of Min Anena’s bones to Gang pa Ochora), also took this stance. When I asked people about the importance of ancestral land in the course of their own lives and eventual deaths, Daniel encouraged me to ask, “Where would you like your bones to be placed?” (Imiro ni kidwok cogo ni paco kweno?) instead of, “Where would you like to be buried?”

Tipu (or tipo) dano refers literally to people’s shadows (sometimes interpreted by

English-speakers as “soul” or “spirit"), and these human spirits are sources of strength and potential power. Not to be conflated with the concept of mind, a person’s tipu may depart her body while she still lives, leaving the body tired and listless, and prone to illness.34 At the moment of death (“When someone is freshly dead,” Okidi once said), the deceased’s tipu first runs away. In order to prevent the tipu from getting lost,35 more traditionally-minded

(living) family members ideally lay the corpse inside the house for a single night. When possible, the sisters of the dead person sleep with the body, or, in the case of a young person,

34 Such a condition might be diagnosed by a visit to an ajwaka (see below), who may divine that their client is a victim of witchcraft. If this is the case, someone intending the person harm has employed a less scrupulous ajwaka to capture their rival’s tipu and enclose it in a lidded pot. If mako tipu is indeed diagnosed, this other ajwaka, employed by the suffering person, may deploy powerful countermeasures to summon the tipu back to the body. In one case I witnessed (see Victor and Porter 2017), it was in the process of chasing malevolent spirits from her body that a woman’s tipu accidentally departed as well, fleeing to the wilderness with the offending powers. As a result, the acts of exorcism left her doubly exhausted and in need of further ritual assistance. 35 Depending on the circumstances of death, tipu dano can be confused and wander into the bodies of animals (dogs, cows, goats, and all sorts of domestic and wild animals) and get into trees, rocks, and wells. For example, if someone gets knocked down by a cow, the spirit might possess the cow.

!64 the person’s mother(s) and aunts. This affords the spirit time to return to the home before the material remains are buried. Yet kin do not always have a body to care for or to bury, nor access to land on which it should be buried, and so a family must make do. For example, people may bury a yago (sausage fruit) in the place of a family member’s body.

Who, then, is a mother or a sister, a father or a brother? What makes a “cousin-sister,” as in Acayo’s relation to Okidi? Okidi referred to Acayo as his “cousin-sister” in English, but in the Acholi language (and in his lived experience), she was simply his sister—lamer. By definition, Acayo was the child of either Okidi’s mother’s sister (to him, also one of his mothers) or his father’s brother (to him, also one of his fathers), otherwise known as parallel cousins. Acholi kinship is classificatory, meaning that the broad strokes of relationship terminology equate individuals who may be genealogically distinct. In other words, the categories of “mother,” “father,” “sister,” “brother,” and so forth, encompass individuals within and outside genetic closeness, and one person will normally have several mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, both fully and partially biologically related, as well as children and siblings with whom one might have no close genetic relation.36 To add further complexity, polygyny is the traditional norm for Acholi families (the ability to support

36 In sum: Ego’s biological mother’s sisters are equally his mothers. Ego’s biological father’s brothers are equally his fathers. Ego’s mothers’ brothers are ego’s uncles, and ego’s fathers’ sisters are his aunts. Inasmuch as men prefer polygynous marriage (fathering children by different co-wives), ego may have brothers and sisters whose mothers are not his own (in English, ego may refer to his father’s co-wives as “step mothers,” while in Acholi they are simply “father’s wives”). While ego’s fathers’ children are his own brothers and sisters (in English, rendered as “cousin-siblings,” but not differentiated in Acholi), the children of ego’s biological mother’s sisters and the children of aunts and uncles are not siblings. These individuals do not have a classificatory name (beyond being called the children of ego’s aunt and uncle or non-biological mother) and are less closely related. In the generation that follows, the children of ego’s same-sex siblings are thus equally his own sons and daughters. While at first blush this seems incredibly complicated, in the tradition of patrilocal homesteads the system is quite logical.

!65 numerous wives and children being a mark of both virility and wealth).37 Okidi, for example, has 17 brothers and sisters, birthed by different women. Though he refers to these women as

“step-mothers” in English, in the Acholi language they are merely wives to his father, and their children his siblings.

All of this is to say that though Acholi relations are seemingly infinite and perhaps fluid, the fact of patrifocality supersedes all other factors. Relatedness is concentrated on patrilineage, with children “belonging” to their fathers and fathers’ families. In practice, though children belong to individual patrilocalities, the ideal that children reside in their paco ngom kwaro (ancestral home) may just be that: an ideal. Given the complications of mass displacement, the premature deaths of husbands in war, access to schooling and social services, issues of conjugal violence and discord, poverty, and a paucity of opportunity in rural villages, children often live in their mother’s home villages or in town.38 Nonetheless, who is a relative (wat) is ultimately determined by patrilineage. A child with living mothers and no father is still an orphan, and socially suspect. A new wife, relocated to her husband’s village, will live as a stranger amongst his family until she earns their respect by birthing and raising healthy children. Until such offspring may be produced, the sentiment behind the phrase mon pe wat (women are strangers/not relatives) colours her interactions with her husband’s family. It is the bones of relatives who are buried in the paco ngom kwaro, and their tipu who reside nearby. The exclusion of strangers from obsequies is summed up in the

37 Though Christians are meant to be monogamous, and the normative ideal of the Euro-American nuclear family is increasingly a marker of sophistication and modernity, the preference for polygyny is still dominant in Acholi. 38 For an example of this movement, see Lanyero’s story in ch. 5.

!66 Acholi proverb romo pe koko latin pa dyel (“a sheep does not lament the death of a goat’s kid”).

The year before his father’s death in 1996, one of Okidi’s sisters (aged two) died. The year after his father’s death, Okidi’s brother (aged four) died of a fever. His step-mother (a co-wife to his mother) died around the same time. As it was wartime and their ngom kwaro in Amuru was inaccessible, each of these four family members had their remains buried in

Kabedopong, an area of Gulu quite close to the buried remains of Anena’s family members.

Like Anena’s family, the eventual golo lyel (digging up a grave) and dwogo cogo paco was a collective effort. Though the bodies of these different family members were treated with some ritual distinction because of their relative ages and genders, “as long as they all have the same roots,” Okidi explained, the same sacrificial animal could be used to appease their tipu and protect the labourers from angering them.39 The elderly men in the family simultaneously slaughtered a female sheep of “just the right size” for Okidi’s sister and step- mother, and a male goat with horns for his father and brother. Once the remains had been excavated, a ladit did canyo wer (throwing of the animals’ intestinal remains), along with some alcohol, into the empty graves. Like all tic Acholi, his sprinkles followed the gendered

39 For example, because Odoki’s little sister had been born face-down and was thus considered abnormal and related to jogi spirits, her body was buried in a clay pot. Twins are also considered different and connected to supra-human jogi, and thus the remains of Anena’s twin relatives were also interred in clay pots in the first instance of burial. When these pots were disinterred for the dwogo cogo paco to Atiak, Anena’s elders chose not to pursue any further rituals for the twins because they stated that having done it once would have to be enough: they did not have the money for the requisite sacrifice.

!67 formula of three for a man and four for a woman.40 “Even if they are buried far apart,” Okidi said, this collective act of ritual can be performed for many sets of bones: as long as they are relatives. But Okidi’s grandmother, a stalwart Catholic, refused to participate in these sacrificial rituals: even though she still wanted the remains to be brought home with respect and filial care. And unlike the case of the dwogo cogo paco that brought back multiple sets of remains to Gang pa Ochora, no stranger’s bones complicated the procedure. I return to the problem of strangers in part 3.

Ancestors’ power: the living dead

It is often said that children have no souls, and certainly those of women are not as powerful as those of men. This reflects their lack of authority when alive. The soul has responsibility, especially in kinship matters, and neither women nor children are fully responsible human beings.

—John Middleton, Lugbara Religion (1999 [1960]: 30)

The bones of Okidi’s father, like the bones of Anena’s father, were given the most attention in these two separate family dwogo cogo paco processes: as kwaro, their remains were the first to be dug up and the first to be re-interred in their respective villages. The word kwaro contains two inter-related meanings that are best summed up in English by the term “the

40 In Acholi ritual observances, the number three is associated with males and the number four with females. For example, a woman who has just given birth will remain secluded in her home for three days after the birth of a boy, and four days after a girl. If a ritual calls for the consumption of food or drink, males will take three bites or sips, and females four. After a body has been buried for iko lyel (first funeral rites), the mourners will wait three days if the deceased is male and four if female before they proceed with the second funeral rites (puyu lyel, smearing of the grave). Lienhardt recorded the same number association in Dinka rituals (1961: 139).

!68 living dead.” While kwaro means “grandfather,” it additionally means “ancestor.” As such a person speaking in English may refer to her living elders as her ancestors, meaning that the term kwaro does not only refer to distant and long-dead primogenitors, but to the people of the here and now. As Kopytoff detailed more generally of African societies (1971), the concept of kwaro indicates that living elders and recently dead ancestors exist in close proximity, part of a community on either side of a veil that can only be permeated by death and ritual skill. Kwaro are thus the living dead, the embodied and disembodied links on a chain of kinship.

Just as a woman’s social worth and incorporation into her husband’s family is dependent on her ability to produce children, so too is the existential success of a man measured by his virility. This is certainly not unique to the Acholi context. Meyer Fortes, for one, wrote that the jural status of parenthood is what is transmuted into ancestorhood throughout West Africa, rather than the moral qualities of a life lived (1987: 76). Closer by, among the Lugbara in the northwest of Uganda and across the border in DR Congo,

Middleton observed that the most powerful ghosts are those who were “big men” in life and are accorded shrines in death (1999: 34, 45).41 “If a [dead] person had grandchildren, they will treat the dead differently—they will really dance and beat drums and sing songs, special songs for the dead,” said Otim, a schoolteacher I met in Gulu. “No grandchildren: no dance.

You’re still young,” he continued.

41 Middleton’s employment of the word “ghost” is not equivalent to how “ghost” (cen or tipu dano) is used by English speakers in Acholi. Rather, a Lugbara ghost is a powerful ancestor who can become vengeful if his needs are neglected: “all ghosts are ancestors but not all ancestors are ghosts” (1999: 34). While ancestors in Acholi certainly have the power to become angry and dangerous, expressing displeasure on the living by doling out misfortune, the negative association of ghostly vengeance (cen) is quite separate from the realm of ancestors. (Though on this last point, a Born Again Christian may disagree. See ch. 3).

!69 In keeping with this, the sterility or impotence of one’s spouse is adequate grounds for divorce, and is also cause to seek the intercession of dead ancestors.42 It is grandmothers and grandfathers, not just old women and men, who become the most influential ancestors after death, and theirs will be the most elaborate funeral rites. A person’s productive importance is thus measured through the generations—where a family has come from and where it is going. Okidi’s father, who died suddenly in his 40s (see ch. 5), was not an aged grandparent. Nonetheless, before his death he had produced 18 biological children (from several wives), and men like him are still venerated among the kwaro.

The ritual prominence granted to the funerals of grandparents should not be taken to mean, however, that the young and the childless go unmourned, and in fact their deaths elicit more grief than the deaths of elders. Opiyo Oloya emphasizes the ethic of shared humanity contained in the oft spoken phrase dano adana (human being), which is invoked in the context of personal maturation, but also to implore others to recognize a shared humanity.43

In keeping with this notion of shared humanity, Oloya notes that the secondary funeral rites for grandparents in Acholi are anticipated with much excitement and joy because of what they have achieved in life. In contrast, when a young person dies, the bitterness and pain of death is not met with rituals that correspond to the enormity of grief (2013: 18). In this way,

42 In one instance, I met a man who said, “I was not alive,” to mean he had once been impotent. His elders took him to their clan’s ancestral shrine (kac) and invoked the assistance of the kwaro. From then on he became sexually active and started having children. Nevertheless, in the same clan, there is a tipu of a man who died without having had a wife and children. The clan elders think that this tipu wants the clan descendants to suffer as he did, and so causes their sterility. They try to appease this tipu with food so as to lessen his harshness. 43 In the context of women abducted by the LRA, Baines and Stewart observe that many who have returned home are marginalized, considered as non-persons by the state and their home communities. Consequently, they use oral storytelling as a method to repair their status as dano adana in the eyes of others (2011: 15).

!70 it is important to distinguish between the social and spiritual import of funeral rites and the affective impact of human death and intimate loss. However, following Finnström (2008: 25) and Apoko (1967: 49), Lara Rosenoff Gauvin remarks that a real dano adana is made by way of socialization, through the process of intergenerational transmission of values (2013: 46).

In other words, the death of the young is so painful precisely because they have not yet fully become human beings.

For example, there was no large gathering after the death of Acayo (despite her tragic and untimely passing), but some months before I was summoned to a village in Paicho to participate in the first funeral rites (iko lyel, to bury a body) for the paternal grandmother of

Anywar (Anena’s husband), a lady whom I had never met. I arrived the next morning and, though she had only died the morning before, her remains had already been interred.

Anywar’s grandmother’s age-mates, other female relatives, and neighbours, entered the compound with loud wailing, ululating, and crying that we could hear long before they were close by. After that moment, however, the proceedings maintained a festive mood. We danced, we ate, we drank, we played drums, we accepted and rejected sexual advances, we listened to music and stayed up late into the night. I went to bed long before most of the elderly people retired, but was kept up by the loudspeaker that pumped dancehall and reggae loud enough to wake the dead. Above all, we gathered friends family celebrated the life and legacy of Anywar’s grandmother.

!71 The hills are never the same: authority and the ritual field (kwer)

Anywar’s grandmother, like Okidi’s mama madit, was a Christian—and this fact was reflected at the iko lyel, with time set aside for prayers and hymns. Anywar, who had converted to Islam during the war, has repeatedly encouraged his parents and siblings to also embrace Islam, and they have practiced haphazardly through the years. His father has been the most obstinate, which Anywar reasons is due to his love of drink and pork (predilections

I also witnessed). But despite the not-uncommon pluralism of religious practice in their family, none of them would think of disputing the necessity of the first funeral rite (iko lyel) when the corpse is buried at home and close relatives and acquaintances of the deceased make their way to the homestead, nor the second rite (puyu lyel or puyu opuyo, “the smearing of the grave”) when the grave is covered and smeared with black soil (opuyo) and cement

(three or four days after burial).44 “Now, catechists are invited for prayer because the world is developing,” the aforementioned teacher, Otim, said matter-of-factly. This did not change the fact that bodies and tipu should be treated respectfully, nor that relatives should gather together to contribute resources needed for the feasting and visiting.

This is not to say that the ritual management of cogo and tipu is never charged, simply that some sort of ritual action (kwer or kwero) is universal.45 While that fact alone is

44 There is one cemetery in Gulu Town, which is reserved for Muslims. I have not yet ascertained how different people interpret this important ritual outlier, and none of my interlocutors have ever mentioned it (Anywar included, who is devout in his practice). What I did hear repeatedly from several of my friends and acquaintances, however, was their uneasiness with the handfuls of graves that are adjacent to some of the more prominent churches in the area. 45 As Girling notes (1960: 73-74), the English translation of the word kwero (verb) or kwer (noun) here is imprecise or partial. Though kwero dano can be though of as a ritual form or way, kwer also refers to disobedience, prohibition and disavowal, avoidance and taboo, as well as the marking of events in celebration. This feature of moral latency or even liminality might relate to the ambiguity and uncertainty with which people approach tic Acholi.

!72 obvious enough to be unremarkable, what is especially significant here is the way in which ritual specialists who deal with bodies and shadows are already emblematic of belonging and exclusion among the living. Put in another way, who has the authority to dictate ritual action is heavily determined (but not fully foreclosed) by gender and gerontocratic politics. At the same time, individual and families routinely deal with the unexpected, and there is room for difference and ritual manoeuvre.

Ludito

Okidi once stated a proverb to me that his elders had always repeated to him: wang kac pat pat, or cere pat pat. The first translates to “the place of the shrine is never the same,” the second, “the hills are never the same.” What they both mean, in Okidi’s interpretation, is that every clan in Acholi has its own ways of doing things, and while there are commonalities, styles differ and are subject to modification. Indeed, even the translation of kac to mean

“shrine” is one that is not universally accepted. In some interpretations, the kac refers to the physical structure of the shrine (where ancestors and jogi46 come to eat), which may be a tree or a human-made structure, while the abila refers to the power of ancestor spirits themselves.

Most literature considers the abila shrine to be a human-made structure (for example,

Malandra 1939; Menzies 1954).47 When I asked some ludito (elderly men) to clarify this for me, they disagreed with each other (some thought the words kac and abila are

46 I discuss non-human jogi (sing. jok) spirits more fully in ch. 3. 47 Malandra, though he acknowledged the casual fluidity with which people interchange the two terms, pointed out that, at least in the early twentieth-century, kac more precisely referred to the small tree under which the abila is built (1939: 32).

!73 interchangeable or a matter of clan preference). Nonetheless, it is the ludito, not the youth, who have the esoteric knowledge and authority to justify having opinions on the matter.

Seebach (2016) points out that in the “intimate governance” of death in Acholi, much of the power to govern social relations comes from the dead themselves, from which living kwaro derive their authority. That their authority is sanctioned by long lines of male progenitors is certainly a preoccupation of the rwodi and ludito who sanctioned my research in Atiak. While I explained my research topic in both formal and informal meetings with those men (who continually referred me to each other), I was often thanked for coming to record or otherwise promote their genealogical history. The fascination with centuries-old histories and the origins of male ancestors, the desire for prideful identity over time and space, did not surprise me—given the violent ahistorical brush with which contemporary

Acholi life has been painted in Uganda and abroad. But the genealogical urge is also one still tied with grapplings for more localized power, which has shifted considerably over the last

150 years (see, for example, Atkinson 1994).

And yet the dead—and other spirits—are not only invoked by living kwaro and ludito, nor do spirits only interact with elderly men of authority. The figure of the ajwaka (pl. ajwaki or ajwagi)—variously defined in common English speech as spirit host, medium, traditional healer, local healer/doctor, or witchdoctor—disrupts what otherwise might appear to be a monopoly, held by elderly men, over the ritual field.48

48 The clergy of Islam and Christianity, not to mention biomedical physicians, further complicates the issue of ritual authority. I address this more fully in ch. 3. Nevertheless, it should be noted that in everyday usage, “ritual” in Acholi refers specifically to tic Acholi (Acholi work) and not to dini (religion) proper.

!74 Ajwaki

Heretofore, the first and second funeral rites (iko lyel and puyu lyel) mentioned above are directed by clan ludito. The third funeral rite, guro lyel (to gather and repair the grave) is held at least six months after death, but more often takes places years and even decades after death (or never, if the deceased was a child). Today, a family might take out an advertisement on the radio to announce their intention to hold the event, and friends and relatives from near and far are expected to gather at the grave for several days in order to feast, dance, tidy the grave, and provide goods and monetary contributions.49 Aside from the larger scale of the event (in comparison to the first two rites), what also traditionally differentiates guro lyel is the expert presence of an ajwaka, who is invited to call the tipu home so that the living can ask the deceased (who speaks through the ajwaka): “How did you die? What must be done about it?”

The unknown, the unsure, and the uncanny are the (contested) domain of the ajwaka.

The power, or predilection, to be possessed by spirits is one largely (though not exclusively) an occupation held by women. I was repeatedly told that girls and women are more susceptible to possession because they are more fearful and do not have “strong hearts” (and are thus more permeable mediums through which spirits might communicate).50 Women and girls are also the people who, by virtue of gendered labour roles, are responsible for fetching water at streams and wells and collecting firewood in the bush: both dangerous areas where

49 For example, Anena called me once I was already back in Canada to request that I attend the third funeral rite, in Atiak, for her mother. Though she suspected I would be unable to travel the distance (I was indeed unable), her request demonstrated the way in which sociality is re-constituted through the commensality of funeral events. 50 See ch. 4.

!75 spirits dwell, outside of human moral control. The danger of spirits is also one of potentiality, however, and though an ajwaka may have initially become ill due to a spirit attack or possession, it is in the process of ritual training (by another ajwaka, sometimes a relative) that she may learn to domesticate and harness useful spirits and expel malevolent ones. The role of the ajwaka is to channel these spirits (both human and extra-human) to diagnose and treat illnesses, identify sources of misfortune and death, and use offensive and defensive magic against a client’s enemies. In short, an ajwaka has the power to invoke spirits to heal and the power to harness them to kill (Behrend 1999).

The English term “witchdoctor,” frequently used by Acholi people in speaking of ajwaki, helps to situate the ambivalent social role such ritual specialists currently occupy.

Though I met several ajwaki who are practicing Roman Catholics (and who are hosts to other Catholics among their compendia of spirits) and who include icons of Jesus and the

Virgin Mary amongst their gagi (ritual paraphernalia), in more frequency my interlocutors publicly disavowed mediumship as witchcraft; a fundamentally anti-Christian, evil, and

Satanic practice. The most extreme pole of this Christian approach regards all tic Acholi as

Satanic (for example, some returning LRA abductees refused to participate in mass nyono tong gweno cleaning rituals51 administered by elders or the Paramount Chief, Rwot David

Onen Acana II). For others, the primary danger lies in ritual processes that involve the invocation of spirits (through sacrifice and accompanying verbal invocation, or when the

51 Nyono tong gweno means “stepping on the egg.” Individuals who have returned home after a long absence (due to school, labour migration, war, etc.) are welcomed home by this process of being cleansed of the essence of the outside world. Participants do this by stepping on a chicken’s egg placed on a branch of the opobo tree (a type of tree used in most tic Acholi rituals), while an elder sprinkles water on them as they enter the home. See also Baines 2007; Anyeko et al. 2012; Victor and Porter 2017.

!76 ajwaka whistles and uses an ajaa [gourd rattle] to summon them). The rituals performed by ajwaki, compared to those performed by clan elders, are the most unambiguously dangerous.

This danger is both social and spiritual. Early 20th-century missionaries, ethnologists, and colonial officers described ajwaki as holding the roles of “village priest” (Malandra

1939: 28), “medicine women” or herbalists (Girling 1960: 161), and “the universal resort in case of trouble and the chief authority on medicine” (Grove 1919: 175-176). Most (though not all) ajwaki are women, and the ritual power of women compared to that of men is worth noting here. Nearly a century ago, among the Acholi of southern Sudan, C.G. Seligman posited that kac were shrines for male ancestors only, while structure called joktuel were used as shrines for female progenitors (1925: 32-33). Though his observations of the shrines were partial, Seligman’s inquiry into the etymology of joktuel points to the striking association of femininity with the undomesticated and wild.52 Jogi (sing. jok) are extra- human spirit forces associated with certain geographical fixtures, shrines, and paternal family lineages, but they are not ancestors. Tuel (also spelled twol) refers to “snake,” that dangerous creature of the overgrown and amoral bushland.

The power to heal and to kill speaks to this very same danger and potentiality.

Consulted in cases of sickness, disaster, and misfortune, the ajwaka was responsible for channeling both ancestral kwaro spirits and clan jogi to determine the problem and solution.

Ajwaki were additionally responsible for administering trials by ordeal, and were additionally contracted to kill or poison enemies. As the cosmological landscape shifted significantly in

52 Grove took note of a spirit called Jok Tim (outsider or bush spirit), which was “generally regarded as a snake” (1919: 165).

!77 the colonial era, however, so did the social role of the ajwaki and their grip on authority in matters of possession, medicine, and ritual expertise.

Tim Allen, in a social contextualization of Alice Auma’s Holy Spirit Movement, writes that by the 1950s spirit possession was no longer primarily restricted to mediums and shrine keepers (won abila) throughout northern Uganda (specifically among the Alur,

Lugbara, and Madi peoples, as well as Acholi). Free jogi, a new class of spirits not connected to clan lineages, shrines, or geographic locales, began falling on people outside the orthodoxy of traditional ritual authority, and on women especially (Allen 1991: 383; see also

Behrend 1999, passim; p’Bitek 1971: 106-119; Southall 1969, passim). These spirits came from foreign lands, spoke foreign languages, and had foreign predilections. As these aforementioned scholars each note, northern Ugandans explicitly pointed to the arrival of these free and foreign jogi as a consequence of colonialism, empire, and the accompanying impacts of social and military labour migration.

For example, Allen notes that between the time of John Middleton’s fieldwork (in the

1950s) in Lugbara and that conducted in the same location by Virginia Lee Barnes-Dean (in the 1970s), conceptions of affliction and healing had changed radically. Where once female mediums were generally only consulted in cases of sorcery, within twenty years of social, political, economic, and cosmological upheaval, sorcery was rampant and mediums had the ritual upper hand (1991: 384). Much prior to Middleton’s fieldwork, the Protectorate’s 1912

Witchcraft Ordinance set out prohibitions across Uganda against both “witch-doctors” and

“witch-finders,” and defined narrow bureaucratic prohibitions for their prosecution, thus additionally taking away the authority of clan elders to find and punish suspected lajok

!78 (witches).53 Across northern Uganda, the possession of female spirit mediums by free jogi, as well as the terror of sorcery, “were both associated with the decline in the authority of ritual elders, bewildering social change, and the manifest incapacity of the ancestors to alleviate epidemics of previously unknown diseases” (Allen 1991: 385). By the 1980s, when Acholi soldiers were returning home en masse from civil war battlefields in Central Uganda, this epidemic was spurred by a mass infiltration of cen: ghostly vengeance.

People’s shadows cannot be easily trusted: the potential of cen

In chapter 1, I explained how Acholi soldiers returning from the 1986 civil war prompted a social crisis where they were regarded as internal strangers who upset the social, moral, and cosmological balance of Acholi (Behrend 1999). These soldiers were accused of being infected with the ghostly vengeance of the people they killed in the Luwero Triangle, and this cen caused sickness, death, and misfortune back home. That violent war-time deaths should produce such wrath is not so surprising, but the problem of cen is not quite so straightforward.

The bones of Anena’s family members who died during the war were treated in the re-burial process with respect and care, lest their tipu become angry and begin to haunt the living family members. The discrete events of their respective deaths (some violent, some less so), though of important consideration, are factors that do not fully encompass the

53 The Ordinance was modified significantly in the late colonial era and removed references to “witchdoctors,” and to focus much more on witchcraft than on accusations thereof. It was re-adopted almost verbatim by the newly independent government in 1965 (Abrahams 1985: 40-41). I further discuss the figure of the witch (lajok or latar) in ch. 4.

!79 potential characteristics of their shadows over time. Okidi remarked to me of his own family, for example, that had his brothers willfully refused to help with the dwogo cogo paco (other than for the reason of poverty), everyone else in the family would say: “You watch them.

Bad things will happen. Their dad’s spirit will begin to torment them. It might not happen directly to them, but to their kids and grandkids.” Terrible accidents and sudden premature death, Okidi said, are a surefire sign of cen. While he and his brothers did indeed participate in the repatriation of the bones, the family was not untouched by the wrath of ghostly vengeance.

Culu kwor

Around the early 1950s, a brother of Okidi’s grandfather had recently been married to his first wife at their home village in Amuru. Together they had a healthy 8-month-old baby boy, their pride and hope for the future. Unusually, this man only had one hut,54 and he was fond of sleeping inside in the evenings when normally everyone else would be out socializing around the wang-oo (fireplace). One evening, his wife was brewing kongo alcohol outside while he slept with the baby inside. Because she did not have an ot tedo (cooking hut), she carried the clay pot of hot brewing residue into their house. The pot was too hot and she dropped the contents, spilling them all over the baby and the husband. Their infant son died instantly from the burns. The husband was injured, but survived.

54 Normally, a husband gives his wives are their own separate houses and separate cooking huts.

!80 In cases of homicide or wrongful death where the member of one clan kills someone from another, a compensation fee of culu kwor (or culu kwo, lit. “paying life”) is normally paid. This is a process of compensation between distinct lineages or clans, rather than individuals, and it precedes and makes possible a period of shuttle diplomacy, public truth- telling, and eventual reconciliation ritual called mato oput (drinking the bitter root) (Anyeko et al. 2012; Baines 2005; Finnström 2008: 219-220; Girling 1960: 66-67; Porter 2013: 184).

Traditionally a young woman, or at least the cattle required for the bridewealth needed to acquire one, would be given to the aggrieved clan so that a new wife could produce new life.55 Within the reach of the British Protectorate, in the 20th century this practice was amended so that cows, rather than human beings, were given in compensation (Boccassino

1956: 256). Finnström (2008: 220) and Porter (2013: 184) both point out that culu kwor is also often translated to mean “revenge” by means of retaliatory killing rather than economic or marital compensation. Despite the challenges this overall system has faced in the contemporary era, “The underlying meaning of compensation,” Porter writes, “still rests on the thicker notion of marriage and the production of children as a way of maintaining or restoring social harmony” (ibid.).

Further conundrums arise, however, in cases of inter-clan and inter-familial killing, or when the scale of deaths is large and individual perpetrators are not easily identifiable (such as in war). For instance, because clans are exogamous, if a victim and perpetrator belong to the same clan, it would be incestuous to give a woman as culu kwor. In the case of Okidi’s great-uncle and his wife, they were unsure of how to proceed. If a male family member had

55 This is similar to the settling of Nuer blood-feuds that Evans-Pritchard detailed in Sudan (1990 [1940]: 152-155).

!81 killed the child, he would have paid compensation to the mother’s family, who is of course of another clan. And so the family called a trusted ajwaka, who summoned the spirit of the baby. The spirit directed his parents to give the culu kwor resources to the father’s step- mother (the baby’s grandfather’s wife). “But,” Okidi said, “people fear and doubt even if the spirit has instructed something, and they took it lightly.” Other family members advised the parents to keep the culu kwor. “This was your own kid!” they admonished. And so they did not take the baby’s request seriously.

Many years passed in the family, and the couple’s next son grew older and got married. But this son produced and buried 11 children with the same wife. Okidi’s grandfather immediately suspected that the cen of his brother’s long-dead baby was to blame. They called another ajwaka to summon the child’s spirit, and he spoke clearly through the host’s body: “Those compensation materials were misused by my parents.” This time, the family took the baby’s demands seriously, and they performed the sacrificial rituals that he demanded. It was because of this, Okidi maintains, that their next child thrived and has had many healthy children of his own. He is famous in their ancestral village, where despite being under the age of 40, he has fathered 26 children with four wives.

That Okidi’s great-uncle and his wife distrusted and feared the voice of their infant child, speaking through an ajwaka, speaks to the immediate alienation caused by death. Tipu, even the tipu of one’s closest family-members, are strangers. Renato Boccassino, a prominent missionary of the Italian Verona Fathers, opined that cen can bring death to a family even when they are its own relatives, because the dead no longer belong to a family

(1956: 254). For Okidi, the aphorism tipu dano pe wat means that spirits cannot be easily

!82 trusted. “The way that bodies relate is different from the way bodies relate to spirits,” he opined, and a spirit is more “advanced” outside of its body (it is more powerful, knowledgeable, and imbued with potentiality). It also means that tipu dano are prone to trickery and must be communicated with by way of accomplished spirit diviners. “If I heard the voice of my grandmother or father calling me, I should just ignore [it],” Okidi said. “It could be another spirit putting on their voice.” Tipu dano are also known to be “rude” or

“harsh” (tipu dano gee), but in this way a person’s spirit also emphasizes the personal qualities they embodied in life. A harsh person will become even more harsh after death. In addition, a tipu is always mature, even if the body was not. If a baby dies, for example, its tipu will be able to speak as adult, fully developed in its linguistic faculties. This does not mean, however, that the tipu of an infant wields the same authority as that of a grandfather, a kwaro.

Contextualizing cen: life course, death course

In other societies throughout sub-Saharan Africa, anthropologists have detailed the ways in which who becomes an ancestor and who becomes a ghost owes much to circumstance as well as social structure and the death event. For example, among the Thonga, the Tallensi, the Dahomeans, and the Ashanti of West Africa, Fortes elucidated that death and mortuary rites do not of themselves confer ancestorhood. Specific obsequial rites that bring home the dead are required in order to re-establish his place in the lineage, and the dead must then manifest his power in the lives of his descendants before he can truly be called an ancestor

!83 (1987: 72). This power may take the form of troublesome misfortune as well as blessings— but not all agents of these powers are then accorded ancestorhood.

Elsewhere in northern Uganda, Middleton described the relationship that the Lugbara have with the dead as one of potential. Though the categorization of ancestors and ghosts in

Lugbara is quite different than in Acholi, they also remain quiet as long as they are well treated. “The latent relationship becomes precise and meaningful at sacrifice, when it acquires a social content by becoming part of a set of ties that compose an actual network of relations of authority between living men,” he wrote (1999: 27). Perhaps this was once true, or perhaps it still is in Lugbara. But for my contemporary interlocutors in Acholi, anyway, the relationships between the living and the dead are not necessarily made precise by way of normative sacrifice—the factor of potentiality extends into the future and encompasses power beyond the agency of living humans.

One potential transformation of a latent tipu is that it becomes cen. For reasons described below, a person might be suspected of being haunted by cen if they, their children or grandchildren experience terrible misfortunes, sickness, and premature death. Likewise, cen may manifest itself on an individual by causing them to suffer from frightening visions, nightmares, hallucinations, and gaps in memory—such as wandering off into the forest or down a dangerous road in a state of dissociation, only to be found days later. Crucially, frequent attacks of cen may cause someone to act anti-socially and fail to interact in normative ways with family members, friends, and neighbours. “Sitting alone” and withdrawing from expected social roles also points to the relational problem of cen: not

!84 merely an individual affliction, it both causes and is caused by a polluted socio-spiritual sphere. I will return to this point shortly.

Though the immediacy of recent and contemporary political violence in Acholi has pushed ghostly vengeance into the path of the post-war psychological and interventionist gaze, cen is not a new concept, nor one relegated solely to war or Acholi life. Writing on the subject of the Luo of Kenya, Evans-Pritchard recorded that jacien (pl. jociendi) is a troublesome ghost that principally causes sickness and misfortune (1950: 86), and he recorded variations of the word cen or lacen belonging to Nilotic languages throughout central and east Africa.56 Prior to Evans-Pritchard’s anthropological assessments, British colonial officer Captain E.T.N. Grove remarked in his notes about Sudanese Acholi: “A ghost (as apart form the soul of a dead man) who comes and haunts you is called Cen…The

Cen is always malignant” (1919: 177),57 while in nearby Lango, Driberg made similar observations (1923: 229).58 Later, the Italian missionary and ethnolinguist J.P. Crazzolara translated cen as “a departed spirit, vengefully disposed” (1938: 199), while Father

Boccassino described lacen (a term used interchangeably with ‘cen’) as the spirit of a dead

56 According to Evans-Pritchard, these cognates are found in the languages of the Nuer and Shilluk (cien), Dinka (acien), Anuak (acieni), Dhuluo (jacien), Luo of Bahr al-Ghazal (tchien), Lango (chyen), and Acholi (lacen) (1950: 86). He adds an addendum to his work on the Luo of Kenya: jociendi is a word sometimes used for “ghosts in general” (not just malevolent ones) and “that some ghosts appear to be thought to become nature spirits dwelling in water and in the air, and others to occupy the gourds used by diviners and to answer questions the diviners put to them” (ibid.: 87). In Acholi, the use of the words cen and jok to refer to diverse spirit forces, and the classification of tipu dano (the shadows of people) may be used as well. See ch. 3 for the practical implications of this fluidity.

57 More dubiously, Grove notes also state that “the distinction between Cen and Tipu is exactly the same as the English distinction between ghost and soul or spirit.” (1919: 177). 58 Driberg, a colonial officer who lived among the Lango, claimed that the word chyen was used “without prejudice” to refer to the tipu of dead persons, a word for the apparition of a tipu after death (in the form of a ghost). He further argued that after funeral ceremonies, all chyen are merged into jok force (1923: 230-231). For a rigorous refutal of Driberg’s assessments, see p’Bitek 1971.

!85 person who returns to take revenge on those who killed him (1956). Offering indigenous perspectives, Okot p’Bitek went on to offer a subtle take on the ambiguous origins of

“vengeance ghosts” (1971: 104), while Odoki simply referred to cen as a “troublesome spirit” (1997: 40). Renewed interest in the concept has flourished in the context of discussions about the wars of the 1980s to the 2000s, with contributions by Behrend (1999, passim), Baines (2005: 12-23; 2007: 92-93; 2010: 420-423), Finnström (2008: 159-160),

Okumu (2010), O’Byrne (2015: 32-33), Victor and Porter (2017, passim), and the list goes on. In sum, a diverse number of observations identify cen as a persistent phenomenon (or, perhaps, phenomena) through time in Acholi and beyond.

In searching for the causes of cen, one might ask not only what causes a living person to be haunted by cen (in other words, what makes someone vulnerable to haunting), but also: what causes a human shadow, of someone already dead, to be transformed into monstrous cen? These questions are of course intertwined, but from a perspective that only privileges

(living) human acts, the latter is in danger of being subsumed in to the (nonetheless crucial) former. Thus while attention should be paid to the events and characteristics of people’s lives and deaths inasmuch as they can lead to later haunting, I argue that consideration must also be given to the “death course” of tipu over time. How might people affected by cen have their lives ameliorated and transformed? But also: is the transformation of a human spirit into cen irreparable? Does cen chased away by ritual ever return to haunt again?

Much of the aforementioned scholarship emphasizes how violent deaths, particularly those perpetrated in war, may lead to cen. It is not necessarily the violence itself, however, that can provoke the creation of ghostly vengeance, but the polluting attributes of extreme

!86 anger and the breaking of taboos (kiir, or abomination) and cause dirty things (ajwani) in general.59 Some acts of violence—such as in war that has been blessed by the spittle and spears of elders (see ch. 1)—are socially legitimate, and this point is evidenced in the existence of honorific war names (nying moi) bestowed upon the bravest soldiers. This is similar to the praise names (nying mwoc) shared within clans and often given to individuals.60 As others have noted, in pre-colonial and colonial times, a warrior would bring back either the heads of the people he killed or at least some sort of material memento of the dead. These materials were used to assist in the ritual purification of the warrior through sacrificial appeasement of the victim’s tipu (Girling 1960: 102-104; Behrend 1999: 28-29).

Were these ceremonies omitted, it would “make the slayer’s head go round” and would

“dance in his head,” driving him so mad as to be a danger both to himself and others” (Driberg 1923: 229).

Failure to appease the deceased spirit could mean that it would turn into cen and prolong the moral impurity of the warrior. Okidi’s uncle, the family patriarch who had earned the nying moi “Lugwa moi” for his acts of battle bravery, was tormented by such spirits. That particular name identifies him as someone “associated with atrocities, someone who has killed people collectively and indiscriminately on a mission,” Okidi said. Lugwa moi was part of the UNLF force, commanded by Tito Okello from Tanzania, which ousted Idi Amin

59 Elsewhere, I have detailed examples of different moral transgressions that are considered abominations, and these included (but are not limited to): throwing food or money in anger, eating ash in anger, committing arson, cursing one’s children by pointing one’s genitals or breasts (for women) at them, having sex in the bush, committing murder, mishandling human remains, and more (Victor 2007; Victor and Porter 2017: 5-6). 60 For example, when Anywar and I attended his grandmother’s puyu lyel funeral rites, we shouted and sang “Paicho! Paicho!” all afternoon and evening, Paicho being both the clan name and nying mwoc.

!87 in 1979 (see ch. 1). His good friend was a strong commander, and while he was part of the force about to overtake the barracks near Jinja, he received a report that he had been shot while searching for reinforcements. He grew so angered by the news that he began to unleash his rage at the people there. “We [children] didn’t know that bullets and bombs can go through metal roofs,” Okidi explained, “and so the kids went inside. He just blew them all up.”

When Lugwa moi returned home to Acholi, the spirits of the dead began to torment him. “If he heard a radio, he would smash it because he felt like his head was bursting,”

Okidi remembered. Elders needed to confirm that he had committed those atrocities by administering a trial. They gave him a bow and a single arrow and released a cock in his line of sight. “If you did those things, and you shoot that one arrow, you will strike the cock down straight away. If you miss, you didn’t do them, and it’s other spirits that are tormenting you. This is proof of 'lugwa moi,’” he explained. Immediately after killing the chicken,

Okidi’s uncle collapsed on the ground, shook and sweated and “became wild.” They laid him down under a tree and performed a yobo kom61 ritual while he slept. He woke up “a different person, totally refreshed” and the elders forbid him from moving around the area where they had performed the kwer (ritual). This was likely due to the fact that the spirits were expelled within that particular area and might return to him. As many years have passed since, he has now been moving freely in the area.

61 Yobo means to repair or “to set aright or in order” (Crazzolara 1938: 423), while kom means the human body. A yobo kom is a ritual where known spirits are expelled from a body. Compare with moyo kom (moyo meaning to air or expose), which is used when the identity of the spirits is in question. Both of these are referred to in English as “cleansing of the body.”

!88 And what of the dead spirits who were expelled? Okidi was unsure of this, especially as the spirits came from Jinja—a town far away from Acholi. Notably, no compensation of culu kwor was observed for the dead foreigners, and it is unclear what sort of death course they might follow if their spirits remain in the foreign land of Acholi. For an Acholi person who is killed away from home, the only place where obsequies can take place, his or her spirit may be called back to the village. “It is thought a great misfortune for a man to die a natural death and not be buried in his house,” Grove noted. “A man who is killed in the bush however hunting of [sic] fighting is thought lucky, even though he is not buried at all and his body is eaten by vultures. A special ceremony is then performed under the direction of the

«Ajwaka» to call the spirit back to the village (1919: 159-160). Ritual care, therefore, is the responsibility of the families of both the killer and the killed. I return to this point in section

3 of this chapter.

A murdered person’s tipu has the highest potential of becoming cen. But what of cen that did not arise from murder, accidental homicide, or battle deaths? John Roscoe, an ethnologist and Anglican missionary (of the Church Missionary Society), opined of the

“Nilotic Kavirondo” (Dhuluo) that ghosts may be dead strangers who were killed by the haunted (or sick) person in the course of war, but adds ghosts could also be grandparents angered that their descendants have neglected their filial duties (1915: 280, 286, 289).

Likewise, Evans-Pritchard wrote: “It is the disgruntled and resentful who cause trouble…It seems that normally it is only kinsmen who haunt a man, but any man who kills another, whether he be related to him or not, is in danger of ghostly vengeance" (1950: 86-87). Often, this resentment is due to unmet social obligations towards living and dead kin. Like Roscoe,

!89 Evans-Pritchard added that of the Luo in Kenya, a dead person may haunt his or her kin for a number of other reasons: if the relatives did not avenge or seek compensation for his death, if a man commits suicide following a dispute, if a woman commits suicide after being forced into an unhappy marriage, if a woman dies after being falsely accused of and punished for witchcraft, if a man dies having unresolved feelings of shame or resentment, if a woman dies having an unresolved argument with her husband or co-wives, or if a deceased person has been forgotten by his or her kin (1950: 86). In Acholi, Boccassino emphasized the chief role of anger that might cause a tipu to manifest amongst the living as cen: the “soul” of a son who’s father denied him bridewealth, a slave killed for trivial reasons, a person who died because they were denied sustenance, and so forth (1956: 255).62 Duties to and expectations of one’s kin thus play a central role in the transformation of tipu into both cen and kwaro.

Among the Tallensi in northern Ghana, Fortes advanced the principle that all ancestors intervene in the same ways in the lives of the living: they are equally the source of misfortune and good fortune. They persecute rather than punish, having no interest in the moral standards of living humans. In this way, parallel with the Acholi experience, homicide must be ritually redressed whether it was intentional or accidental. “This is done not because it is wicked to kill a man,” Fortes wrote, “but because it is sinful to pollute the Earth with human blood or to commit such an outrage against the supreme law of kinship amity” (1987:

62 In an especially limber demonstration of Christian theological gymnastics, Boccassino claimed that cen comes at the behest of a supreme deity: Lubanga (God) is angered that his child has been killed and the wrongdoer has not paid compensation, and so he grants permission for the dead man’s soul to bring disease and kill the living (1956: 254).

!90 78).63 Even though cen is an affliction that may centre its wrath on one individual, it is an intimate problem that involves entire families because of its tendency to cause sexual disfunction and kill children and grandchildren—and thus social reproduction. In the 1950s

Boccassino made note of a case in which a young man killed his father’s sister, a poor widow, because he was enraged that she had demanded charitable access to their precious village resources. Her cen returned to the village a year after the murder and killed the eldest daughters of her killer (her nephew). These daughters were those most close to marriageable age and the cen therefore denied bridewealth for their father and brothers (1956). Cen is also contagious, and thus families suspected of suffering from cen may be socially ostracized until it has been chased.

Cen’s manifestation may thus be delayed both subjectively and temporally, years and even decades after the death in question, complicating explanations of the phenomenon it causes under the rubric of individual psychological trauma. Okidi, for one, who has countless age mates who were abducted by lakwena and who himself grew up haunted by its constant possibility, is adamant that cen and trauma are not synonymous. Violence left scars on the bodies and the minds of LRA soldiers and victims, and thoughts about the violence they underwent or saw or committed themselves continue to linger in many of their hearts and

63 In a literary example from Ghana, a significant plot point in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) revolves around the consequences of an accidental death caused by the novel’s main character, Okonkwo. When Okonkwo unintentionally kills a young clan-mate, in order to appease the earth goddess he and his wives and children are exiled from the clan for a period of seven years. The crowd of men from the clan who subsequently destroy Okonkwo’s compound and its contents do so not to avenge the act of violence, but to prevent the wrath of the goddess. “They had no hatred in their hearts against Okonkwo,” Achebe writes, “…They were merely cleansing the land which Okonkwo had polluted with the blood of the clansman…And if the clan did not exact punishment for an offence against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled the others (2010 [1958]: 87-88).

!91 minds. This creates fertile ground for cen to act (particularly due to the people they killed or the bodies they mishandled) and for other ajwani to emerge, but cen is more than the idiom of internal psychological distress.

Whereas an ajwaka may learn to socialize and domesticate certain clan spirits (elders and jogi), nearly all of my interlocutors agreed that cen is always malevolent and must be expelled from a family in order to prevent sickness, madness, and death.64 There are differing opinions on how to best exorcize cen, which often now involve Christian prayer (see ch. 3).

When the origin of the cen is uncertain, an ajwaka may be consulted to speak with the spirit and thus communicate its grievances and demanded solutions, which often involve a kwer

(ritual) of tum (sacrifice). Commonly, the haunting spirit will demand the blood and meat from a goat, sheep, and/or chicken, and will only agree to be expelled from the family once this offering has been made. An elder or ajwaka will perform tumu (cutting/sacrifice), scatter the wer (intestinal remains) of the goat or sheep into the bushes, and offer an invocation

(lam) that the cen should from that moment on cease to trouble the haunted people or person.

One ladit told me that, when he was a boy, the act of ryemo cen (chasing cen) did not necessarily have to involve animal sacrifice (tum), but instead it worked by subterfuge.

People in a village or hamlet would whisper to each other to prepare for a particular day and time when everyone should ready to chase away cen—they did not speak so loudly or publicly in case the cen overheard their plans and causes more problems. At the appointed

64 The prefix of cen or jogi, however, is still used to refer to particular spirits which are not inherently malevolent. Spirits would come in dreams to instruct Okidi’s grandmother, as a lami yat (herbal healer), on how to proceed with certain cases. “These spirits come in times of necessity,” Okidi explained to me, offering examples of a seemingly infinite number of influential spirits. For example, cen lukwor (spirit of thievery), cen dwar (spirit of hunting), cen nek (spirit of killing), cen lweny (spirit of fighting) are all spirits that might influence the actions of humans for good or ill.

!92 time, one person would start the process by banging a drum or a pot very loudly to frighten and chase cen then away.65 This would start a wave of noise-making from East to West, towards the setting sun on the horizon, to chase it far enough away that it got lost in the setting sun. Simultaneously, the residents of each compound would bring out their mattress or sleeping mats from inside and beat them so that cen could not hide under beds and disrupt the wave of expulsion. The next day and onwards, people would say they felt in better health and experienced less misfortune.

In legendary Acholi songs, tipu dano were praised for having attended to and brought blessings to the homestead, defending it from sicknesses like measles and allowing the propagation of the clan with good harvests and strong children. Those tipu who have been known by the gang (homestead) or kaka (clan) for more than two generations are known as tipu pa kwaro: ancestral shadows. But if young shadows and ancestral shadows are not attended to, they may become dangers. This is the reason, Okidi pressed, why guro lyel—the last funeral rite—is so important.

For others, especially Christians, rites like guro lyel and restoring bones back to the village are solely about respect for the deceased, and not the potentiality of their tipu. Laber, a Catholic woman I introduce more fully in chapter 4, once reflected on this in reference to the process of dwogo cogo paco she had organized for her mother’s remains. Cen will not result from any mishandling of the bones, she said, it would simply be “rude.” Her mother

65 This was one of the reasons my neighbour offered as to why he was fond of playing ear-splitting music at night. For eight months I lived in a house in Gulu Town that some of my neighbours claimed had been used by Idi Amin’s soldiers to torture and execute Acholi soldiers (Amin’s local “palace” was a mere 100 metres from the compound). When the rain brought up a grenade from the soil in front of the main gate, it prompted people to share stories about how the previous tenants of the house had all died mysterious deaths (in fact, they were alive and well), and that no Acholi person would dare live there. Céline Dion at 75 decibels was thus a preventative measure.

!93 was a good person, she stressed. “Those who follow the ways of God go to heaven. Those who sin go to hell.” She added an important caveat: “But, I think hell is on Earth.”

3. Gwok: subjunctive spirits at Ayugi

Bedo akera oroma I am tired of being dependent Ceng ma wanga orwenyo When my face is lost Lapar para ki lwiyo The mourner will mourn me with whistles

—from the Bwola song (recorded by p’Bitek 1985: 15-16)

The dance Bwola can only be held on the following six occasions: — (a) To honour the building of an Abila, which is a small hut in which offerings are made to the god Jok. (b) When in the middle of the year the people have finished their customary cultivation for the Rwot and a bull has been killed. (c) On the occasion of chair-taking by a new chief. (d) During the harvest moon at the end of the year. (e) At the funeral of the Rwot or a member of his clan, or when an important person has died whom the Rwot wishes to honour by taking his dance and drums to his house. This is the only occasion when Bwola can [sic] held away from the Rwot’s village. (f) On other very special occasions as arranged by the Rwot; beer is always made and drunk in large quantities.

—R.M. Bere (1934a: 64-65)

Rennie Bere, a British naturalist, mountaineer, and conservationist, dutifully collected descriptions of many Acholi dances and hunting rituals for the inaugural issues of the

!94 Protectorate-era Uganda Journal.66 The Uganda Journal’s stated aim was to “to collect and publish information which may add to our knowledge of Uganda and to record that which in the course of time might be lost.” Bere’s mission of intellectual and material salvage was necessitated by the very conditions of violent erasure that colonialism produced; radical transformations that he would have helped to oversee in his role as the District

Commissioner (and later Provincial Commissioner) for the Northern Province of Uganda. In the case of dances, part of the cultural catalogue of an imagined pre-encounter Acholi society, Bere’s descriptions omitted—either by design or disinterest—a recognition of the sovereign power at their symbolic centre.

Myel Bwola, or the Bwola dance, is the royal dance of the Acholi. Today, it is often referred to colloquially as simply the traditional dance of all Acholi, and this seeming democratization is telling. Whereas once the dance was exclusively performed for royalty

(the Rwot), today it is a staple at dance competitions, cultural revival events, weddings, occasions with special visitors in attendance, and other gatherings. Previously, an outer ring of older men (adorned with leopard skins, beads, and voluptuous headdresses of ostrich feathers) danced in circles around an inner ring of women, who themselves moved to the beat of the centre drum. Today, the dance is often performed by boys and girls much younger, and who are unlikely to have access to the traditional costumes. The historian

Ronald Atkinson writes that prior to the British Protectorate, the royal drum of the Acholi

(bul ker) was needed to perform the Bwola because possession of the drum symbolized the

66 The Uganda Journal, produced by the Uganda Society (originally the Uganda Literary and Scientific Society), was active in stops and starts from 1934 to 2002. It published ethnographic descriptions, biological notes, correspondence, photographs, folk tales, genealogical analyses, and all manner of things.

!95 possession of sovereign authority. “Supernatural” misfortune was bound to strike anyone who played or handled the drum without authorization. But, “the British took the drum, [an elder said], ‘to abolish all ker [rule, authority], to show that I have already defeated you’” (Atkinson 1994: 96). The British intentionally silenced the drums of many prominent clans.

The exclusive power to perform and witness the Bwola was irrevocably dispersed as the sovereignty it once represented was extinguished by foreign rule. But the once-beating heart of the bul ker, the contested authorities of the ludito and the ajwaki, the selective and lethal powers of the Ugandan state and its rebel foes—these are not the only forces of sovereign power that demanded or demand recognition. Shortly before Easter 2014, which coincided with the 19th anniversary of the LRA massacre in Atiak, a survivor of the massacre imparted information to me that had been, in turn, passed on to him by a friend: that a hunter or hunters on the land adjacent to the Ayugi River site had heard the ghostly sounds of deceased young men performing myel Bwola, the royal dance of the Acholi. He told me this in the presence of a group of his fellow survivors, but it did not prompt much discussion. Perhaps they were horrified by this revelation, as I never heard any of the other survivors speak of this auditory spectre again.

The scores of teenage boys murdered by lakwena at Ayugi were not old enough to become kwaro. They had no children of their own, many of them were not even Acholi, and most of their bodies had remained unclaimed at the riverside—no guro lyel or puyu lyel has incorporated their tipu into the realm of ancestors. Despite some ritual care that others in the community have showed to the bones, these tipu could, or will, or might, or maybe have

!96 already—transformed into ghostly vengeance, or perhaps they were enjoying themselves in a way traditionally reserved only for a rwot. A ghostly dance, or its sounds, is a gwok—an omen that demands explanation and action, and one that signifies something that might be or could happen. The idea that mere ghosts, unincorporated and even foreign tipu, might perform the Bwola—that symbol of Acholi cultural potency if not royal power—suggests the potential that tipu might flout the authority of the living by continually making their presences known in ways unexpected and unanticipated by human ritual.

Human acts

In the village immediately adjacent Gang pa Ochora lives an old ladit, named Opobo, who is profoundly familiar with ritual crises wrought by unspeakable violence and bad death.

During the period of my fieldwork I grew acquainted with Opobo’s nephew, a man named

Komakec. Komakec narrowly survived the 1995 Atiak massacre when, after having forcibly portered looted goods for the rebels, they repeatedly stabbed him and left him for dead.

Komakec’s uncle invited us to his home to discuss many things, including the fate of the bones of many of Komakec’s classmates. The rebels were particularly intent on killing the young men they had gathered up in the camp that morning, and they murdered scores of teenage boys (Komakec’s classmates) and their teachers from the Atiak technical school, known colloquially as “Techo.” While the boys made up the largest proportion of the dead, their elders were also killed without mercy. “On that day, even the sub-county chief was killed,” the ladit said. “There was no one to stand up in that mess.” But the scale of the

!97 atrocity still necessitated a response from the living, despite the ongoing chaos of physical displacement and insecurity.

As a man who was already considered elderly at that time, it was up to Opobo and other relatives to organize burials for the dead. The student body of Techo, like many secondary schools in Uganda, was comprised of a large proportion of non-natives to the

Atiak area, including northerners from other tribes. It was a not inconsiderable risk to travel to the massacre site to retrieve bodies, given that the LRA was still moving around in the area, and so the bodies of relatives were prioritized and the “foreigners” bodies’ were respectfully, but shallowly, buried in a mass grave where they had fallen. Like the argument at Gang pa Ochora over which bodies should be prioritized in burial, the foreign student victims were disfavoured by their youth and social distance to local families: they were not ancestors in the making.

Though he participated (along with the rwodi and the ateke from Atiak and Pabbo67) in tum to appease the spirits of the dead at Ayugi, Opobo observed that such acts are not sufficient if the living are ignorant of them: if one forgets or is unsure if they or others have performed a ritual, it is “useless.” Opobo’s assertion shows that ritual care is an ongoing process rather than an event, and it also exemplifies the way in which ritual serves a public function. But beyond such instrumentalization, the idea that ritual must be remembered is also indicative of the phenomenological approach that many Acholi share towards the realm of spirits, in that one’s acts towards and convictions about spirit forces are thought to directly

67 An ateke or atekere is a type of clan ritual specialist that is particularly prominent in the areas of Atiak and neighbouring Pabbo sub-county. The Ayugi River forms part of the border between Atiak and Pabbo and though the massacre occurred closer to Atiak centre and IDP camp, it technically occurred on Pabbo land and thus fell under the jurisdiction of Pabbo officials.

!98 impact upon how and why they manifest (if at all). This is not an equation of determination, however. Amongst Acholi Christians, for example, rebuking Satan can also provoke him.

While one might be attacked by cen from finding or stepping over human bones, cen is not the product of profound fear: it is enabled by it. Fearing cen might equally instigate its attention, but it might not.

For Opobo—who is aware of which rituals were performed at Ayugi—the massacre site is unpleasant and affected by fear, but it is not haunted by cen. That place at Ayugi is generally feared, he said, and filled with wind and a strange frosty dew. “You sense something is wrong,” the ladit elaborated, but the unease comes from ajiji: to his mind, this is an extreme fear that makes someone quake, makes him feel as though he is not himself, that he is “out of his senses.” But this, Opobo was insistent, is unrelated to spirits. While by his telling the stories of the land at Ayugi being haunted are inaccurate, Opobo and his family members conceded that cen has manifested itself elsewhere, including in their own family.

Opobo worries for his granddaughter, who was only a toddler at the time of the massacre, and who sits around the family homestead with a vacant stare on her face. She and her mother, Opobo’s daughter, were part of the group of children and women-with-children who were separated out and forced to witness the murder of the other men and women. “She was normal when she was born,” her grandmother said. She has been affected since the massacre and never learned to speak or otherwise communicate, and her grandparents are convinced she is suffering from cen. Opobo suspects that the act of witnessing psychologically harmed her or perhaps damaged her brain, and this provided the opportunity for cen to haunt her. The responsibility to treat the problem lies with the paternal side, but the

!99 girl’s father is incapacitated by his own mental problems. And so her mother and her and maternal grandparents—Opobo and his wife—have searched for solutions.

Regrettably, Opobo’s daughter died several months before we first met. When she was still alive, she took her own troubled daughter to the Health Centre in Atiak Centre, which proved ineffective. “They just gave some drugs,” the grandmother recalled, but did not know what they were. They tried to take her to an ajwaka, but her problems remained.

They took her to another ajwaka in Pabbo (adjacent to Atiak), where she stayed for four days. The girl was weak, her legs became paralyzed, and she contracted measles. Her grandmother begged the ajwaka’s spirits to let her take the girl to a hospital, as she did not trust in their power. Her family feared she would die, and so they dug a deep hole into the ground and buried the girl vertically, so that only her head was a above the soil. This, they said, made her legs stronger, and she recovered from measles and can now walk. Meanwhile, the ajwaka specified that the girl has both tipu from her paternal side as well as cen. Though the ajwaka did not mention the massacre as the source of the cen, Opobo and his wife are convinced that is where it originated. While the spirits demanded a goat and four chickens be sacrificed under the direction of the ajwaka, it is ultimately the responsibility of the girl’s father and his clan to provide the materials for tum. As they remain incapable or unwilling to so do, Opobo’s granddaughter remains vulnerable to the impacts of cen.

!100 Spirit acts

When Opobo and his family treated his granddaughter’s paralyzed legs by burying her vertically in a column of soil, their acts were strikingly reminiscent of a common tactic of spiritual hostility. When someone is murdered and the perpetrator is unknown to the victim’s kin, the iko lyel (first burial rite) does not follow the standard pattern. Rather, the body may be placed in a forested area or buried vertically in a temporary grave. The face may be positioned in the direction of the physical location of the suspected killer, and by this placement the deceased’s family seeks to sic cen on the perpetrator. During the war, it was not uncommon for bodies to be thrown in the bush or otherwise manipulated in order to torment and/or identify murderers (the evidence of their guilt being their own deaths, sicknesses, or misfortunes). The invocation of a curse is but one way people attempt to harness powers greater than their own.

Outside of human intentionality, the acts of kwaro, tipu dano, cen, jogi, and other spirits are nonetheless not wholly predictable. No one knows for certain how many bodies were left unmarked in the bush at Ayugi, but Opobo estimates that they buried the corpses of thirty foreign boys whom they were unable to identify by sight—their faces are lost, as the

Bwola song says, but the mourners do not mourn them with whistles. Interred about two feet into the soil, some of the remains were dug up by wild pigs that partially ate and then scattered the bones. And so despite Opobo’s claim that no cen haunts Ayugi, for the people who frequent the land on and adjacent to the massacre site, the rumour of spectral sounds of dead students dancing by the riverbank holds more weight.

!101 The won ngom, father or “owner” of that soil, is a paternal uncle of a man called

Bongomin Michael. Bongomin lives with his wives and fifteen children on a plot of land not far from his uncle’s land, and he and his brother-in-law, along with another friend, sat down with Okidi and I to discuss the inconstant spirits they fear will affect their children. When he was in his late teenage years, Bongomin recalls, he witnessed that horrific day when the lakwena and their captives moved across the land towards his uncle’s place. He ran away with his wife and others, and in so doing saved their lives. Charles, who is now Bongomin’s brother-in-law, was a nine-year-old present at the massacre, and his youth spared him from death (he was separated along with the same group of women and children as Opobo’s daughter and granddaughter). He watched his elder sister, a sixteen-year-old, kicked down and murdered. The rebels turned to look at him and said, “We’ll come back and kill you later.” Though he sometimes dreams of the people who died, Charles is untroubled by wandering tipu.

But the danger did not pass with the retreat of the rebels. Charles and Bongomin each remember the haste with which bodies were removed under the supervision of the government army. “The soldiers were caning people to hurry up, so sometimes they put four people to a grave,” said Charles, “and we see very many human bones up to today when we go hunt there in the dry season. Others are still buried deep.” He has not witnessed “any big cik Acholi” (Acholi customs) on the land, and complains that when people have come to unearth their loved ones, they bring a sheep to sacrifice for “their person only.” Bongomin concurred: “For us, we the ordinary people, we don’t know much. Ateke, ludito, they should

!102 be the first to begin to do these things. But the biggest problem is poverty. Even if they gather the resources together with their families, that’s not enough.”

A cousin-brother of Bongomin, named Tony (another “ordinary person” without ritual expertise), personifies the potential problems their children may face. About a dozen years after the massacre, Tony went out into the bushes to cut firewood. But when he came home, ajwani (dirty things) began to torment him. “This cousin-brother of mine says that when ajwani come, they talk to him.” Tony began to see people hanging from the trees from which he cut firewood, and these people said things like, “Why did you cut me?” He told

Bongomin that there are many bodies there who are alive, but people are unable to see them.

Tony’s father is a Born Again Christian and was uncomfortable with the idea of using cik

Acholi to address the problem, and instead opted for other Christians to come pray on him at home. “When he’s very deep into the Born Again faith, he is okay. But if he backslides he begins to drink alcohol and it starts again,” Bongomin qualified. For now, Tony has moved away from the area. Ambivalent towards this individualized solution, Bongomin and Charles remain unsatisfied.

At home, tipu and bones still crop up occasionally. Others, out hunting or gathering fruit and firewood, have heard disembodied voices call their names. Out of fear, people have abandoned working the land at the massacre site, but soon their children will be grown and will begin searching for land of their own. “We know what happened, but our children don’t,” said Bongomin’s friend, “and we don’t want them to one day dig [farm] there and have a problem.” Bongomin’s wife, for one, did not heed that danger, and took their infant daughter on her back as she ventured out to forage for bananas. When they reached the river,

!103 the baby let out a sharp cry. She cried all night and did not stop, and in the morning her mother took her to the health centre. The staff did not find anything of note. But the baby got weaker and weaker, and so they took her to an ajwaka. The ajwaka said the child was disturbed by tipu dano, but did not provide any further information, and prescribed an herbal remedy. It failed, and “she has been like a mad person since,” her mother said. “We don’t know what to do.”

For everyone at Bongomin’s home, the possibility of ajwani is always present. They repeated that some of the students who were murdered came from very far away, and their ancestral lands are difficult to trace. Nonetheless, “I feel the bones should be taken from there and buried in a decent place,” Charles opined. He added that the spirits would know they were being considered and cared for if the memorial was relocated from Atiak’s trading centre to the actual site of the massacre. “It would mean a lot.”

Bongomin agreed: “For me, I don’t fear. But I also want the spirits to know that I’m contributing to letting people know about them.”

The will to be acknowledged

The poetry of Juliane Okot Bitek, used in the epigraph to this chapter, gracefully illuminates the crisis of liminality experienced by “survivors” of genocide in Rwanda. Her work is also deeply influenced by the war in northern Uganda, from where she originates. In reflecting on the idea of “space” (there is no space for those of us/ who are not dead/ & have yet to be resurrected), I consider here how the social positions occupied by the dead are not fully

!104 determined by the structural inclusions and exclusions maintained by the living. So while contestations for sovereign power and the terms of belonging play out among those who still have breath in their lungs, the winds of spirit forces—perhaps kwaro, perhaps tipu dano, perhaps cen, perhaps jogi, perhaps something else—have the subjunctive potential to manifest their own power. For Bongomin and his aforementioned friend, the theatre of this pneumapolitics is on their own land and in their own families.

Their desire for the massacre memorial to be moved from Atiak centre to the actual site of the killings is more than aesthetic. This is a material problem—that the elders and ritual specialists are too poor to do their work, that land polluted by bones has not been fenced off, that politicians “eat the money” allocated to to alleviate poverty, and that their children will likely look for any land to dig rather than going to school. “For us, government keeps promising us that they’ll do something for us, but they say, ‘It takes time.’ But these things are on our lands. My brother here has 15 children and they’re soon going to be old enough to have their own,” Bongomin’s friend lamented. The power of these

“things” (ajwani) rests in their latent potential as much as their more dramatic manifestations.

The uncertainty signified by the word ajwani (dirty things) also points to the potential that human tipu might rest in ambivalent structural positions that make it difficult for the living to adequately recognize and respond to them. Meyer Fortes, in his exploration of religious life in several West African societies, noted of the Ashanti that ancestor worship is an aspect of citizenship—it is a law that regulates social relations and conduct surrounding kinship and descent, not morality or “spiritual patri-filial relationship” (1987: 73).

!105 Considering kwaro to be ideal citizens, then, it is not surprising why so many oral and written accounts of Acholi history, taken from both native and foreign perspectives, focus primarily on the genealogical formations of individual kaka (clan) chiefs, or rwodi (for example, Anywar 1948; Crazzolara 1950).68 By virtue of kinship proximity, the idea of

“Acholi-ness” (an identity that many of the students killed at Ayugi could not claim) is also one that acts to signal the social worth of both the living and the dead.

In a 2015 memoir by Amony Evelyn, which details her abduction from Atiak and the decade she spent as a child solider and the forced wife of LRA leader Joseph Kony, twin factors of social proximity and social value persist throughout the narrative. In her recollection of surviving the Auction Day massacre in Atiak, perpetrated by government soldiers around 1992, the crime was especially egregious (even strange) because some of the government soldiers were Acholi. She recalls that one soldier “talked as though he was not from Atiak, yet it was where he was born.” She continues, stating that the commander, whom she identifies as a man from neighbouring Kitgum, was so harsh that he “acted as though he wasn’t an Acholi” (2015: 9). Violence inflicted on one’s own kin seemed unimaginable and incomprehensible.69 Holly Porter has also written extensively on how people in Acholi

68 A preoccupation with the origins of individual clans and migratory patters from the great Luo migrations of the 17th century (from Bahr el Gazal in what is now Sudan) preoccupy many people’s personal explorations of the Acholi as an ethnicity. The subject of Rwot Awich, once the chief of the royal Payira clan, for example, has elicited sustained scholarly and popular interest since colonial times. The interest leaves no doubt as to the primacy of the won piny or won ngom (father of the environment/area or land/soil) in Acholi polity. 69 Later in the memoir, Amony reflects on the sense of betrayal that she and her fellow abductees felt when a transnational coalition launched a campaign to rescue another group of girls who had been abducted (from Aboke). “All of us were abducted, but no one followed us up to Sudan to try to find us. Why were the Aboke girls followed? Were they the only ones who were useful? Who had blood in their veins? We talked a lot about this afterward, about why no one looked for us. We concluded that it was because they had an education. What about the rest of us?” (2015: 45).

!106 evaluate appropriate responses to crime and wrongdoing (engaging in vengeance or reconciliation), and argues that the social position of the perpetrator is an important determining factor in judgement. The future of social harmony is at stake for kith and kin,

Porter shows, but there is no relationship to restore with a stranger (2016).

The same logic can be applied to the spirits of Acholi. A kwaro—a grandparent, a fellow citizen, an Acholi—demands food and drink, and a good person will provide that sustenance for the best of his or her ability. The decision to appease, incorporate, or banish a displeased tipu is complicated by the uncertainty of social position, and by the fact that, as

Okidi put it: spirits are not family. Robert Hertz, a student of Durkheim who conducted fieldwork in Polynesia, noted that in multiple societies, the emotions, conceptions, and practices surrounding death are social facts that point to a denial of individual annihilation and the function of reified “society” in reproducing itself (Bloch and Parry 1982: 6). For

Bloch and Parry, the reverse is true: it is ritual that shapes social order, and in their 1982 edited volume they concern themselves with the productivity of death rituals, particularly surrounding sexuality and fecundity, in reproducing and shaping the moral collective. Here, I am interested in how subjunctive spirits in Acholi—who do not always respond to ritual— disrupt and complicate the idea of a moral collective. Spirits who might be neither cen nor kwaro prompt a range and multitude of responses among the living.

Victor Turner, famously theorizing social dramas and ritual, remarked that social dramas are “humankind’s thorny problem…our native way of manifesting ourselves to ourselves and declaring where power and meaning lie and how they are distributed” (1980:

158). He considered how the ritual “abyss,” the anti-structure of van Gennep’s liminal phase,

!107 was one of potentiality and indeterminacy, a “subjunctive mood, since it is that which is not yet settled, concluded, and known. It is all that may be, might be, could be, perhaps even should be” (157). Culture, in this line of thinking, is transformed from an indicative “mood” to a subjunctive one, and back again. The ritual phase is thus one of (re)generation and of potentiality for “humankind”.

But spirits, themselves subjunctive potential, might disrupt the temporality of this process. In some moments, it appears as though the “liminal phase”—that subjunctive mood

—extends far beyond the supposed structural renewal and transformation. While a ladit like

Opobo may posit that a ritual phase has concluded, or the Government may declare the end of war, “these things” still dwell in the landscape. Recently, Lotte Meinert and Susan

Reynolds Whyte, following the latter’s earlier (2002) work, note of subjunctivity in northern

Uganda that it “starts with the existential condition of uncertainty in relation to problems; it assumes fallibility and reserves judgment while giving priority to experience and trying out or responding” (2017: 274). “Rather than regarding cen as a cosmology,” they go on, “we consider it as a subjunctive way to ask about and attempt to give form to experiences of haunting and contamination” (282). This is an important starting point, and one that speaks of the ethical deliberations of befuddled humans.

Elsewhere, Kwon, inspired by Robert Hertz, has described the recent commemorative context of Vietnam as one wherein people’s everyday ritual acts (of “ambidextrous” care for the ghosts in the street and the ancestors at home) have begun to “decompose” the exclusionary logic of the Cold War (2008). In that context, kin-based ritual has re-emerged after years of state suppression, wherein the distinction between heroic and tragic death

!108 favoured the politically productive commemoration of war heroes. In Uganda, the revenants of war do not lend themselves to talk of heroism, but to the mundanity of purported social worth and family life. There are no war heroes, and no real end to the war, just its absence.

The memorial in Atiak centre reflects less state imperatives than the liberal intervention of the foreign NGO that funded it. This also points to the ways in which exclusion of tipu from legible ritual categories reflects the marginal political position of provincial life.

Mbembe’s influential treatise on Necropolitics (2003) argues that Foucault’s notion of biopower is an insufficient lens through which to understand politics in times and places of

“war machines” and states of exception. Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1990 [1978]) traces, among other things, the transformation of sovereign power (the power to kill or let live) into the revolutionary advent of biopower in Western Europe. The “entry of life into history” meant that power was no longer the sole domain of death, but rather life itself: sovereign power expressed in the biological management of populations, a transformation of the body politic into a disciplined and self-surveilling mass (1990: 143). But this power over life is paradoxical; the genocidal logic that “massacres have become vital” to protect certain types of life is the apex of biopower. In this way the right to kill is inscribed in modern statehood and technologies of race (ibid.: 137).

While Foucault’s project examined the analytics of sexuality as a realm of the biopolitical (in contrast to the symbolics of blood characteristic of the old order), for

Mbembe the sovereign right to kill—politics as the work of death—has not been eclipsed by biopower. In the case of massacres, Mbembe writes, “lifeless bodies are quickly reduced to the status of simple skeletons…in the register of undifferentiated generality.” But, “what is

!109 striking is the tension between the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness on one hand, and on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something,” (2003: 35).

Similarly, Kwon notes on the My Lai massacre that: “A grievous death in this context not only destroys an innocent life but is also a crisis in the social foundation of commemoration, and the idea of justice points to the right to be commemorated and accounted for” (2013:

198). For Kwon, modern political realties have determined that ethics, rather than structure, characterize the quality of the relationship between the living and the dead.

This is undoubtedly accurate. The ethical acts of the living towards the dead are attempts to repair the wounds of grievous death. Incorporeal spirits, however, are not easily shunted into the frames of ancestors and ghosts, which both place demands upon the living.

Butler suggests that violence is done to those who are “unreal”—violence takes place on the condition of that unreality. The foreign students killed at Ayugi were rendered unreal by their very strangeness. “The derealization of the “Other” means that it is neither alive nor dead, but interminably spectral,” she writes (2003: 22). In considering the violent erasures of public grief or its absence, she further posits that that the struggle for recognition is one that by its very effort changes the actors. “To ask for recognition…is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the further always in relation to the Other” (2003: 31).

These spirits, and their potential, cry out not just against social and physical death, but annihilation. The solicitation of becoming is thus not solely located in the realm of living humans. In Acholi, these solicitations continue to leave their traces.

!110 Chapter 3: The “Thing” at Palapir

Daniel, normally gregarious, was clearly uncomfortable. His malaise was not quite due to the stifling heat of midday, nor to the rattling movements of the crowded taxi we had just exited, but instead seemed, outwardly, to reflect an internal jarring of his sensibilities. We had just arrived in Atiak’s trading centre, a dusty and mundane stretch of road about a kilometre long.

The murram70 was flanked to the east and west by the sorts of buildings found in many

Ugandan trading hubs: a modest health centre, a police post, the offices of the local government authority, and a multitude of kiosks housing small enterprises. At the north end sat the Roman Catholic mission and the Rwot’s palace, to the south the holdings of the

Anglicans and the Pentecostals, and, off the main thoroughfare, a mosque. But our eyes were trained on the road itself, to the source of Daniel’s changed mood.

Paying no heed to the danger of transport trucks and passenger vehicles barrelling through on their way to the border, a young woman and an adolescent boy were taking a public dirt bath in the road. The woman had removed her shirt and bared her breasts to onlookers, shouting something we could not make out, while she poured the orange gravel over her head and down her body. The boy rolled on the ground, giggling as though drunk.

Shopkeepers and men lounging on the kiosk verandas looked along with what appeared to be a mixture of embarrassment and exasperation, but I was still surprised by how few of them

70 Murram is a clay-like material used to surface roads in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa.

!111 greeted me.71 I asked Daniel, in English, if he knew what was going on, as though his

Acholi-ness might afford some insight into their behaviour, to act as a broker to my social blindness. At least I had resisted the foolish impulse to wonder aloud if either the woman or boy had run mad from cen. “Wiiye obale, we say. Their heads are spoiled,” he opined.

“Those people are mentally unsound.” The rest of the onlookers looked just as bewildered, and I did not press further as we carried on to find our accommodations.

Three months later, I sat across a desk from an old ladit, Rafael, who rented a room at those same accommodations that I came to know well. Multiple people had urged me to speak with him, as he was responsible for the spiritual direction of children at the Catholic- affiliated Palapir Primary School. But I sank as his answers to my questions remained obstinately clipped and formal. There were dirty things (ajwani) at the school, that much I now knew—the kind of thing that might cause children to run mad, or to cause embarrassment and shame. What did he think was happening? What should be done to heal those (or that which was) afflicted? Did it have something to do with cen or tipu dano? “For me, as a Christian, I don’t believe in that,” he responded in English. I had been dismissed.

71 The practice of greetings is of paramount importance here, where the norms of sociality and woro (moral comportment, respect) demand even the greatest of enemies to shake hands and exchange pleasantries. This is reflected linguistically in Acholi, where no equivalent word to the English “hi” or “hello” exists. Rather, individuals are expected to take the time to ask of another’s family, home people, health, etc. Not surprisingly, differences in social rank determine the repertoire of bodily movements, the content of conversation, and the speed or length of the exchange. It is rude or even offensive to not greet someone.

!112 1. Healing and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Just two weeks before the day when Daniel72 taught me about the nebulous problem of

“spoiled heads,” I had returned to Acholi to begin my fieldwork. I asked him to accompany me to Atiak’s trading centre on a short overnight trip, to help me initiate research with members of one of the local massacre survivor groups. It was only after we returned to Gulu

Town following this first brief visit, however, that an astute friend revealed another unsettling piece of information about Atiak to me. Mere days before Daniel and I had been there, she had heard on the radio that one of Atiak’s primary schools had purportedly been attacked by cen—or perhaps it was demons, or maybe some bad jok,73 or some disturbed tipu dano, but definitely some “thing” (as they called it in English). A number of children in the

P3 class at Palapir Primary, the reporter said, became possessed and collapsed on the floor of their classroom. Lest the children get spoiled heads, or befall some other terrible fate, something had to be done.

Problems like those at Palapir are known in Acholi as ajwani and in English as “dirty things.” They are diffuse phenomena, encompassing problems as wide as severe misfortune, unwanted or malevolent spirit possession, haunting, strange occurrences, sexual and reproductive dysfunction, and illness. In the preceding chapter I posited that ajwani are understood by my interlocutors as spiritual pollution (or the problems resultant from it) caused by transgressions to a culturally shared moral order. But, as the above vignette

72 I introduced Daniel in chapter 2. Born and raised in Gulu District, in 2012 Daniel was assigned by a language instruction agency to work as my Acholi Luo tutor. A year later, he assisted me in the initial stages of my doctoral research. 73 A (possibly) wide-ranging class of non-human spirits. See discussion below.

!113 suggests, the parameters of that “moral order” are evasive and contested, and in fact are comprised of a multiplicity of epistemic suppositions. Whereas in chapter 2 I described the management of the dead as one intrinsically tied to kinship, the contemporary conditions of death have also rendered tipu and their possibilities into a public problem—ajwani push against the limits of family ritual jurisdiction. A multiplicity of epistemologies converge and mingle in Atiak, and no one person or group has a monopoly on interpretations and responses to ajwani. As Geertz wrote, “culture is public because meaning is” (1976: 12).

If a person is “mentally unsound,” for example, one might hope a psychotherapeutic expert will intervene to address the individual, afflicted mind. If a person has been possessed by a rogue spirit, however, one might hope for the intervention of a different type of ritual specialist. These positions are not mutually exclusive; cen, for example, can make one vulnerable to mental illness, and vice versa. But they do frame the sources of illness, and ultimately the solutions to it, in radically different ways. The utterance “I don’t believe in that,” is deeply consequential.

But the meaning behind the statements, “I believe” or “I don’t believe” are not immediately transparent. The utterance of the ladit Rafael did not necessarily imply a denial of the factual existence of dirty things like cen, nor did it lay bare some inner psychological state of ontological truth or identification. Commonly, my interlocutors profess (in English) to not believe in cen. And yet there is no contradiction inherent in simultaneously fearing its wrath, nor in taking ritual action against it. In the absence of a direct correlate to “belief” in

Acholi Luo, speakers rely separately on the words “geno” (trust, hope, faith), “tye" (to be), and “yee” (obedience, agreement) (Victor and Porter 2017: 6). In the vernacular usage of the

!114 term “to believe,” Acholi English-speakers lean strongly towards its equation with geno and yee and, in so doing, signal hope, obedience, and trust (or their opposites) in something or someone.

This is not unique to Acholi. Robbins (2007) remarks that belief-as-trust is more recognizable across cultures than other usages of the term “belief”—for instance, as a proposition about the factual existence of an entity, or in the sense of the internalization and acceptance of dogmas and orthodoxies. As has been demonstrated repeatedly in the last half century of scholarship in the anthropology of religion, “belief” is so fraught with conceptual variation as to be analytically useless (Needham 1972; Geertz 1973; Pouillon 1982; Ruel

1997 [1982]; Asad 1993). Needham, for one, argued that the term should be abandoned entirely, while others (Pouillon, Asad, Ruel) have situated its etymological history firmly within a history of Euro-Christian epistemologies.

Jean Pouillon wrote, “The “I believe” (je crois) which precedes so many statements of the most diverse kinds, is the mark of distancing and not of an adhesion” (1982: 3). In a similar vein, Malcolm Ruel traced had traced the linguistic genealogy of “belief” in English, and found it to be (as Lienhardt suggested) already deeply imbedded within Christian and post-Christian ontological premises (1982). This rings true in Acholi, a place still very much epistemologically adrift, where a Christian like Rafael might say, cen tye, ento pe ageno: cen is there, but I do not put my trust in it. Rather than focus attention on orthodoxy, some of the teachers at Palapir have instead concerned themselves with finding the correct—or at least most effective—ritual practice. How might they lessen students’ suffering, no matter what the “thing” is called?

!115 More recently, Lindquist and Coleman have suggested that, given the tenacity of the word in both scholarship and common speech, “belief” is “good to think against” (2008: 15).

Thinking “against belief” is a productive avenue to take with regards to contemporary

Acholi, where belief-as-trust, just as much as doubt, or as knowledge and ignorance of unseen forces, is in constant flux. In Atiak, “belief” is a metric of healing and its impossibilities, of practices calculated to transform the body (and spirit) multiple, of politics entangled with multiple esoteric authorities,74 of colonial histories and colonial presents.

But what is meant by “meaning”? I do not want to imply here that “meaning” is a given, that the Truth of ajwani is primed to be either uncovered or debunked by hermeneutical practice. In his scrutiny of interpretive traditions, Ricoeur discerned that

Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx each approached hermeneutics as a practice of demystifying meaning: they were the critical “masters of suspicion” (1970: 32). A hermeneutic of suspicion considers texts, in this case the culture of Atiak, as a repository of deception to be unmasked. Obvious or supposedly common-sense meanings in the text are eschewed, while contradictions, silences, and inconsistencies are emphasized by the reader-interpreter. For

Ricoeur, however, the hermeneutic circle is in fact a spiral: one in which meaning becomes separated from the subjectivity of original authors, events, or acts (Lambek 1981: 8). In his first monograph on trance in Mayotte, Lambek followed this approach: “Meaning must be drawn by each individual confronted with the experience or knowledge of possession and will change over time…It is not a code whose meanings can be read off once we discover the key, but a context or ground from which meaning can be generated. The meaning is open, “in

74 For example: priests, pastors, physicians, ajwagi, atekere, and the forces by which they have each been respectively ordained.

!116 suspense” (Ricoeur 1971: 544)” (ibid.: 82). The ongoing suspension of meaning is equally met by Atiak’s readers.

Here, I want to consider a hermeneutic of suspicion as it operates within a prized norm of discursive concealment. In other words, how do people in Atiak themselves interpret and act upon ajwani when indirect communication is the convention, meaning is consistently deferred and shifting, and speaking of “the thing” is in turns shameful or dangerous?

Mariane C. Ferme’s ethnography of Sierra Leone, The Underneath of Things takes a similar starting point, where a “hermeneutic of suspicion” refers not to the methodologies of the

“School of Suspicion,” but to Mende people “valuing a whole range of cultural skills aimed at producing and interpreting deferred meanings” (2001: 7). But despite these uncertainties— of the “thing,” of each other, of strangers and interlopers human and non-human—ritual action still matters, in spite of the lack of fixity in meaning, and in spite of ritual’s possible failures.

In order to begin to understand “the thing”75 at Palapir, the affliction it does and might cause, and the possible paths to healing “it” that residents of Atiak might take, one must therefore be versed in the epistemic history and linguistic polysemy of Acholi as much as its affective dimensions. I acknowledge the tension that arises between melding a hermeneutic approach to a phenomenological one, but I maintain that it is a productive strain. The goal of this chapter, then, is to engage in a phenomenology of place as well as a phenomenology of hermeneutic practice, one in which I am also caught up as part of the interpretive spiral, equally an unstable text to be read by my interlocutors. As it is throughout

75 As I discuss below, my interlocutors used the words “the thing” when speaking in English about the phenomenon at Palapir. This is consistent with their translation of ajwani to “dirty things.”

!117 this dissertation, rather than seek definitive causal explanations (and thus solutions) to often uncanny lived experiences, my goal is also to elucidate the phenomenological and affective forces at play and to describe how people in Atiak interpret and respond to them. Indeed, the danger and embarrassment of ajwani render it largely inaccessible, practically speaking, outside of lived experience. As such, I suggest that the shame of ajwani is itself a kind of contagion: one that lowers the shopkeepers eyes, discomfits even the most willing assistant, self-edits the confident teacher, and humiliates the nosy anthropologist.

By shame, I am referring to more than the emotion of embarrassment. Shame, in this context, is entwined with acts of concealment, an affect resultant from not just individual self-identified inadequacies, but from a sense of collective “badness.” This affect is part and parcel of a living, racialized history of unmet or inadequately fulfilled expectations (both externally and internally produced/imposed): that Acholi would eliminate witchcraft and sorcery, that Acholi would modernize through Christ and capitalism, or (equally) that Acholi would preserve an immutable “culture,” that Acholi would partake in Ugandan institutions of power and prosperity, that Acholi would “develop.” But, I argue, the affect of shame also provokes the ethical opportunity for action. In Atiak, the shame of having a sick child with no clear diagnosis, combined with a shared parent-teacher imaginary of what sufficient biomedical care might look like “over there” (anywhere wealthy or imagined to so be), does not preclude the demand that someone do something.

In chapter 2, I introduced the idea that in Acholi, spirits are subjunctive—that far from being ontologically inscribed within timeless categories, it is the unresolved possibilities of these powers that demand ethical responses from living humans. Put in other

!118 words, who is an ancestor (kwaro), who is a vengeful ghost (cen), and who is neither depend on a host of factors related to (but exceeding) the idiosyncratic circumstances of kinship, estrangement, lives lived, and deaths suffered. Importantly, spirits are subject to change, and are not fixed in their characteristics. I used the term “pneumapolitics” to describe the struggles of forces found in both life (breath) and death (vital force), and thus I argued that in

Acholi, spirits also have agency. Pneumapolitics implies that, in this situation of mass death caused by war and political violence, biopolitics and necropolitics are insufficient on their own to describe the powers at play. Spirits matter, even to those who do not believe in them.

For heuristic purposes, however, in the previous chapter I asked readers to bracket a host of cosmological terms and focus on kit me kwaro, the ways of the ancestors, as they pertain to death and the management of after-death involved in pneumapolitics. In this chapter, I complicate the history and present understanding of those terms and ritual processes in Atiak, especially as they relate to the introduction and uptake of religion (dini) in general, to Christianity in particular, and to the shame that inflects the historical conflation of witchcraft with tic Acholi (ritual work). Below, I discuss the possible language choices by which the “thing” is described, in light of long-standing anthropological discussions about the nature of “forces” or “spirits” in East Africa, both in Acholi and amongst neighbouring peoples. Although it is tempting to assume the collapse of indigenous cosmological categories into one or two concepts (e.g. “demon” or “Satan”) is demonstrative of some

Acholi people’s wholesale conversions to (charismatic) Christianity, I propose that speaking of “things” in singular terms is also indicative of the endurance of polysemic features in the

!119 Acholi language, which must be interpreted contextually. What might be a demon in one moment at Palapir could be cen the next.

2. Navigating Passion and Action

Like many anthropologists, I have found myself living within the methodological predicaments that arise from what Geertz described as “deep hanging out” (1998). While on the one hand academic structures obligate the fieldworker to have a plan—a set of research instruments, relatively well-defined research questions, assurances of feasibility and so forth

—the vagaries of actual circumstance require one to constantly re-hash one’s strategies.

Given the sensitivity and elusive nature of the subject matter that I had identified as the locus of my research, compounded by what I already knew of the indirectness of speech habitual in

Acholi, as well as a complicated history between research “subjects” and researchers in northern Uganda, I had resolved to leave myself somewhat adrift. Stated differently, I had to navigate between passion (in the sense of being acted upon, and allowing things to happen) and action (having “a plan”) (Lambek 2010: 54).

On the day that Daniel and I first travelled together to Atiak’s trading centre, we met in the morning at the Gulu bus park, some 70 kilometres south.76 By chance, as we waited for our taxi in Gulu, we met the secretary of one of the Atiak massacre survivors’ groups.77 A friend and colleague in Gulu had put us in touch by phone some days before, but this first

76 As I detailed in chapters 1 and 2, I had more established relationships with people in Gulu, and thus Atiak was in some senses a risky research proposition. While Anena assisted me with connecting to her family in Gang pa Ochora (in an Atiak parish about 5 km from the trading centre), I had no personal connections in the trading centre or with members of the survivor groups. 77 I elucidate on these groups in chapter 5.

!120 face-to-face encounter was accidental and fortuitous. Maggie, a busy woman in her early 30s with a baby in tow, welcomed us to Atiak and helped us secure two of the scarce rooms available for rent in the trading centre. The President of Uganda was scheduled to make a rare appearance in the area the next day (on the grounds of Palapir Primary) in order to inaugurate a major roadworks project,78 and so Atiak’s few guesthouses were fully occupied.

Suspecting that his visit would attract many residents of Atiak (normally dispersed over a vast rural landscape), I had taken the event as an opportunity to introduce myself to members of Maggie’s group, who were scheduled to gather to see the President at the school.

After leaving behind the scene of spoiled heads, Daniel and I went to our respective rooms to freshen up, and then emerged in search of a midday meal. Accustomed to the busy commerce and friendly chatter of Gulu Town, the reserve of the shopkeepers and their clients surprised us both. “Dek tye?”79 we asked, over and over, until finally we found a spot that was serving rice and beans. We ate in silence. The lady who served us was drinking sachets of waragi80 in between her cooking tasks, and we interrupted her to ask where the massacre memorial was. Morosely, she pointed directly across the road from where we sat, next to the communications tower and the sub-county office. A small pillar sat on a two-stepped dais, covered with a roof of light blue sheet metal and ringed by a chainlink fence and a locked gate. Despite the fencing, the steps were littered with goat feces. The writing on the brass plaque at its centre was so faded that it was hard to make out, even when stood directly in

78 See chapter 5

79 “Is there food?” Like in many places, in Acholi an offer of food is an offer of hospitality, even if money or goods are exchanged in the process. The centre that day was swollen with visitors come for the President’s visit, thus also stretching available food resources. 80 Waragi is Ugandan gin.

!121 front of it.81 Nonetheless, Daniel asked me to take his picture in front of the memorial, to commemorate his visit.

Maggie is, as mentioned above, one of the younger survivors of that 1995 massacre at the Ayugi River. Though I proceeded with caution, I was nonetheless eager to sit down with her in private (far from the bustle of the Gulu bus park, a crowded taxi, or a shop veranda) and better explain my reason for coming beside our vague shared understanding of

“research." She sat with me only for a moment, saying that she would come back after she retrieved her phone from a nearby charging kiosk. I sat and waited in vain for her to return, and felt foolish. With imprudence, later that night I found her in the same spot, and confided that, amongst other things, I was interested in issues of cen and tipu dano. Though her face fell into a look of seriousness, she agreed to introduce me to the group after the President’s speech the next day.

In the morning, labourers parked brand new heavy machinery and a dozen bright red dump trucks (adorned with red ribbon and a welcome banner) in front of the school.

Meanwhile, swathes of military police preceded the President by several hours and quickly installed a ritualized security theatre. Having placed a lone metal detector in the middle of the school’s grounds, directly behind the displayed machinery, two officers also ensured that each of the 500-odd visitors sprinkled their hands with water from a single proffered basin— a measure, I was told, against Ebola. When the “chief guest” arrived, the younger children welcomed him with their raucously-recited school song and the elder children performed the raka raka (the Acholi courtship dance) in his honour.

81 Some of the massacre survivors and land owners shared their annoyance with me over the state of the memorial, as well as its location away from the actual massacre site. See chapter 2.

!122 In this festival atmosphere, Maggie introduced me to her fellow group members, and we danced together to the music pumping from the loudspeaker. Perhaps my earlier boldness, in broaching the oft-taboo subject of spirits, had been forgiven. With a happy promise to return later in the week to meet with the group in a quieter setting, Daniel and I hitched a ride back to town.

It was only when I was back in my room in Gulu that, two or three days later, a friend called to tell me what she had heard on the radio about the news from Atiak. “You mean about the President coming, or about the fight between the massacre survivors?”82 I asked, casually.

“No, I mean the demon attacks.” According to the broadcast, cen or demons had attacked students at Palapir Primary in the days before Museveni had visited. One of the classrooms had been temporarily shuttered, the reporter said. Surely, given my interest, I had been told of this?

I was stunned, overtaken with a peculiar mix of shame and frustration over my ignorance. Though I was a stranger to Atiak and could not expect anyone to trust me with such information (certainly not immediately), the fact of having missed the public reportage of these “demon attacks” rendered my unawareness simply embarrassing. In the many casual conversations I had held about my research in those days before, stood on or adjacent to the grounds of Palapir itself, why had no one told me about this?

82 In 2013, two separate survivors’ groups of the April 1995 Atiak massacre began arguing over the allocation of funds that the President of Uganda had given to one group, but not the other. The dispute was covered in the daily national newspapers. See chapter 5.

!123 I picked up the phone and called Daniel to tell him what I had just found out, and to see if he would be willing to go back with me as soon as possible to help me with interpretation. He mentioned, nonchalantly, that he had indeed heard about what was happening at Palapir while we were there. Here was someone well-acquainted with my interests, a friend with whom I shared some level of emotional intimacy, and yet he had remained silent. I tried to swallow my annoyance, wondering what I could have done or said differently, wondering about his eagerness to come back to Gulu, wondering more about the look on his face as we witnessed the parade of “spoiled heads.” Even though he was no stranger to social suffering—having grown up in the epicentre of a war—and plenty open to engage in intellectual conversations about health and cosmology, Daniel was decidedly rattled. Certainly, speaking openly about things like cen is inadvisable because words can provoke it. It is also equally likely that Daniel, in his (precarious) capacity as my research assistant, simply did not tell me the school had been attacked by spirits because I had not directly asked him to do so.83

For Daniel, the ladit Rafael, and anyone with Acholi Luo as his mother tongue, the logic of talking in parables, and of habituation in the ambiguities and silences of the language, is self-evident. This is certainly not a communicative feature unique to Luo, but it does contrast sharply with the directness of speech characteristic of the language ideology of

North American English—my own mother tongue. These differences and intersections of language ideology matter a great deal in that language intersects with human (and, I would

83 Owing to equal parts deference, speech convention, and fear of invoking the power of dirty things, this type of omission has been a common feature in interactions I have had with my interlocutors in Acholi.

!124 argue, extra-human) relationality, offering anthropologists “a robust model through which to examine how contemporary social life is shaped and experienced dialogically” (Bialecki and

Hoenes del Pinal 2011: 578). For example, Joel Robbins, in his illuminating work on

Urapmin Christianity in highland New Guinea, observes that the Urapmin’s mass conversion to Protestantism transformed their language (in which the transparent value of speech was normally suspect) into one privileging the expression of interior sincerity (2001, 2004).

But despite the remarkable “family resemblance” of linguistic ideology that anthropologists of Christianity have identified across a wide geographic and social field

(Engelke 2007; Keane 2007; Robbins 2001; Stromberg 1993, etc.), language is still heterogenous. Bialecki and Hoenes del Pinal remark that “language ideologies often struggle alongside one another, offering competing visions of the nature of language and tis relationships to human sociality…[there are] multiple, competing claims to a semiotic true north,” even in Christianity[ies] (2011: 583). This ideological friction is apparent in Atiak and in Acholi more generally, where the logos of Christ the Saviour (for the balokole, or

“Saved” charismatics) grinds against the subtle secrecy and ambiguity of ordinary Acholi speech acts. The tension is less pronounced for Acholi Catholics, such as Rafael, but this is of course complicated by the common use of English.

Indeed, though secular North Americans have naturalized interlocution marked by the logic of liberal Protestant interiority, whereby speech reveals truth, plenty of other languages operate within more opaque conversational forms. Of the Mende of Sierra Leone, for example, Ferme writes: “Here a person who communicates directly what she or he desires or thinks, or who draws unmediated inferences from sensory data and texts, is considered an

!125 idiot or no better than a child. Instead, ambivalence is prized” (2001: 6-7). In the tradition of

Erving Goffman, Judith Irvine’s study of “unmentionable” and toxic language demonstrates that the moral life of language resides not only its linguistic properties or moments of conversation, but in a whole host of other contextual factors (2011). Of especial relevance here are the issues of genre convention and impression management, which eclipse “truth-in- reporting.”

All of this is to say that direct questions are not necessarily a good way of going about acquiring “clear” information in Atiak, but neither are they dispensable. As to why the attack on Palapir’s children was not openly discussed in public during that initial incident, it was also likely that the teachers and leaders at the school wanted to save face in front of the

President and gathered dignitaries, to secret away the shameful “thing” that had affected students. Many of Atiak’s residents—modern, God-fearing, and rejecting belief (trust) in cen

—likely did not want to risk humiliation by speaking of “such things” in front of an outsider who looked “like a missionary” (as I was repeatedly told).

And so I waited, for my repeat presences to open up even the smallest window, and in the meantime continued to circuit between Atiak centre, Gang pa Ochora, and Gulu Town.

More of a burden than a useful farmhand, my attempts to engage with participant observation were mostly met with laughter or the admonishment that I was “useless.”

Researchers, I was repeatedly told, conducted surveys and interviews after fields had been weeded and meals had been cooked, and ferried about in SUVs. Still others were unconvinced by my repeated pronouncements that I was neither a proselyte nor an NGO worker with material resources to distribute. I filled my time by interviewing members of

!126 Maggie’s survivor group, by meeting with local chiefs, clan ritual specialists (atekere), and ajwagi, and by attempting (and failing) to offer the use of my documentation skills to local leaders. Without approaching the school itself, I asked around about the goings-on at Palapir.

I heard rumours that the school latrine was haunted, and several students had contracted cen when they saw the spectre of a hand emerge from the pit—a gwok, or bad omen.

Palapir Primary

Rafael, the esteemed ladit who rented a room mere metres from my own habitual rental,84 had been a teacher at Palapir Primary for decades, several people told me, and I should be interviewing him. So I set out to formally interview the teachers and staff at the school, despite the inkling that interviews were not the way to go about it—the act would provide me with a modicum of legitimacy. I was not prepared to interview the young students themselves, as I did not want to draw undue attention to afflicted students who might already be facing the stigma of their peers. By that time, Daniel had gone on to other ventures back in town, and I hired a temporary interpreter called Alanyo to accompany me.85 Each of the teachers is fluent in English, the language of instruction, and most requested the interview be

84 Near to these rented rooms, we both frequented a restaurant decorated with artworks that exhorted maxims like: “Call them your friend, but watch their steps.” Rafael regarded me with similar suspicion. 85 As mentioned in previous chapters, my need for an interpreter was due both to my less-than-perfect grasp of Acholi Luo and social legitimacy provided by having an Acholi research assistant. Regrettably, I was unable to find an interpreter and social broker who both lived nearby the trading centre and had the requisite skills. Alanyo lived in Gulu, like myself, and came on the recommendation of a friend who described her to me as a “traditional lady.” Her affinity for “tradition” meant she might be more sympathetic to my project (instead of assuming it might inadvertently promote or condone Satanic behaviour) and the linguistic nuances it required. However, she was unable to continue with the job after giving birth shortly after our formal visit to Palapir, and eventually I met and hired Okidi for the remainder of my fieldwork.

!127 conducted in that language—one that marked them as authorities, one that served as a distinction of education and class.

Over the course of several visits, the teachers and staff pieced together a story for me.

The students and teachers had been readying themselves for the President’s very special appearance, they said, and they were doing everything they could to make a good impression on him. But in the days before Museveni arrived, a visitor of another kind made its presence known in the classrooms of Palapir.

A Primary 3 student, a boy of about nine years old, had collapsed in his classroom, rolled around on the ground, shouted and cried incoherently, and acted “rude,” as one teacher described it. School staff tried to restrain him, but he was unusually strong at that moment and could not be held down. After several minutes of bodily contortion and screaming, he gained consciousness and was reported to have no recollection of his collapse or subsequent behaviour. The Deputy Head Teacher took the boy home and asked his family if they knew of any reason why he would do such a thing, but they could only say that the day before he had eaten a piece of pork, which was an unusual treat. The boy’s trance was a mystery to his parents and to the teacher.

Over the next days that “thing,” as the teachers called it, spread to one quarter of the boy’s one-hundred-or-so classmates. Each of the students, girls especially, would suddenly collapse, or run out of the classroom like a wild animal, shout and roll and yell and cry. The

Head Teacher was alarmed and concerned, and called in a physician from the local health centre to investigate. When the doctor stepped across the threshold of the classroom, two pupils fell immediately to the ground and writhed on the floor for between eight and fifteen

!128 minutes. “Perhaps they’ve had too much sun,” one teacher recalled thinking. The doctor ruled out malaria, prescribed sedatives, and sent the children home to rest. The problem persisted and the parish priest was called in tandem with the physician. During regularly scheduled mass, the students were prayed for, and a few of the present pupils became overcome with the “thing,” becoming violent and tearful in front of worshippers. Within two weeks, however, the students became calm and life continued on normally.

Ocan Geoffrey, the Head Teacher, recalled that after he had been transferred to the school from elsewhere in Amuru (earlier in 2013), it did not take long before he noticed strange behaviour amongst the students. He took it upon himself to research more of the history of the school, and he approached the LCIII,86 local elders and neighbours, as well as the Chairman of the School Management Committee, for information. When students in the

P3 class became affected by the “thing,” the Deputy Head Teacher contacted the most senior local authority, the Rwot Moo,87 along with the parents of the children. It was important, in the teacher’s estimation, to inform himself about the biographies of the children and the school alike.

The parents were adamant in their conversations with the Ocan Geoffrey that such things had never happened to their children, and that the problem lay with the school itself.

When he brought the pupils to the local health centre, the staff took care to collect their personal histories, but nothing of note was uncovered. The health officials advised the parents to administer sedatives to their children and keep them away from the school for a

86 See chapter 1 for an explanation of the Local Council system. 87 The Rwot Moo is the head chief over all the other clan rwodi (chiefs or lords) in Atiak.

!129 rest, and the doctor suggested the rest of the P3 pupils should write their term examination early so that they could be sent home for a holiday.

Amony, the twenty-nine-year-old P3 teacher responsible for 110 pupils on her own, remarked that these “things” seem to occur mostly to young people between the ages of twelve and eighteen. The physician who had examined the students, she said, explained to her that there is a certain kind of disorder, associated with the brain, that disturbs children of a particular age. This happens especially when teachers attempt to instruct pupils on something too hard or advanced for their brains to accommodate. When the first incident occurred in her classroom, she had just stepped away from teaching the students a lesson in

Christian Religious Education (CRE). The first boy fell down while she was getting a book from the library.

For Amony, the doctor’s explanation made sense. In fact, when she had been in Gulu

Town, she had heard the same thing had been happening to the students of Holy Cross

School for Girls.88 Surely, this was a disease that could be cured with medication, she mused.

But something did not quite add up for her. “People started telling what has been happening here in the past,” she said, “others were saying that people fought here for a long time and many people were killed at this place, and maybe that is why the children are disturbed.” Her colleagues also tried to search for an explanation that made sense to them, and they turned once more to the history of Atiak and the school itself.

This, however, was no simple task—practically or intellectually. Though each of the teachers and school officials acknowledged the existence of harmful spirits caused by

88 See chapter 4. Alanyo’s interpretation of the connection between these events was different. The similarity was not due to pedagogy, she said, but to creed: “Catholics have a lot of secrets.”

!130 wartime violence, the exact role of those ghosts in causing the crises at the school was less assured. In a discussion between Ocan Geoffrey (the Head Teacher), Lubangakene (the

Treasurer of the school’s Parent Teacher Association), another foreign researcher, and myself, the school staff brought up the issue of trauma. “Previously, it was that spirit. That could be because of beliefs or what,” began Ocan Geoffrey, before the Lubangakene interrupted him:

“I think that could be psychological thinking. You know people are traumatized. So they relate wrong things to the present situation. So that thing becomes very big and has a big impact on the population. People know we lost our people here, they have their spirits around here, and this is the same spirit that can cause problems. So if anything takes place, and because of that trauma, that one develops and the things keep on increasing.”

When I and the other researcher pressed him on the fact that the children in P3 were likely too young to remember the war and the events that took place at Atiak Camp, he clarified his point by emphasizing that trauma, like cen or other dirty things, harboured, in essence, an element of contagion. In almost all homes, he posited, at least one or two people were killed in the war. “Information is taken by the young child and they keep on adding on and on to the story and the children start to relate among themselves. ‘I was told by my mother that my grandfather was killed by the soldiers,’ and it keeps on spreading. It is like a myth so their minds are thinking about these things that took place.”

Yet the teachers were adamant that though the method of contagion that caused the dirty thing might be varied—direct experience, inherited story, or augmented interpretations

—it was firmly rooted in publicly unacknowledged history. To Lubangakene, this problem

!131 was both local and national. He pointed to the LCIII as being responsible for public records, and yet the lakwena made record-keeping a life-threatening job. When the rebels found people (like local councillors) who kept kept records of atrocities and attacks, they killed them. As people were afraid of losing their lives, the teacher said, people’s memories must rely on what little oral information they have access to. Nonetheless, even today, speaking of the past is a dangerous political act. Though Ocan Geoffrey and the Lubangakene were unable to point to any legislative detail that made it so, they were of the impression that the

1995 Constitution of Uganda forbids citizens to talk of the past. This, they reasoned, was because the current government authored the law. “Anything before 1995, you are not supposed to talk about, so it makes it very difficult now to follow some events. So we just leave it there. We shut our eyes and keep deaf ears and we continue, but the main issues at hand need to be discuss and are very serious. We need assistance from our stakeholders.”

Not unusually, the word “stakeholders” reflected the technocratic and self- legitimating language forms used by NGOs in Atiak and elsewhere. Lubangakene’s appeal to stakeholders was an acknowledgement of the need for assistance from multiple—and sometimes competing—authorities. Though no aforementioned prohibition on speech is included in the Constitution, for people who have witnessed the violence of the government army firsthand (like the teachers of Palapir) the everyday effect of political tension has rendered that legal fact moot. The stakeholders, however, are products of Atiak’s history and ongoing encounter with colonial forces. The “thing” raises the stakes of social reproduction for the holders of ritual authority.

!132 3. House of Prayer and House of Reading: dini comes to Atiak

Over and over, throughout Acholi, it was pressed upon me by my interlocutors that dirty things are not problems unique to Palapir. Catholic schools are often built on graves, an aberration of cik Acholi (custom).

Palapir has been a Roman Catholic school since its inception, and in fact the history of formal education and religion in Atiak are inseparable. According to the Spiritual Director

Rafael, who was one of the school’s first pupils, Palapir was founded in 1946. The school’s first headmaster was a son to the Rwot of Atiak, the area’s most powerful native authority.

He had collaborated with Roman Catholic missionaries to remove the families who resided on the Rwot’s land where the school, as well as the nearby mission and church, were to be built. But the land still contained the bones of the residents’ ancestors, now separated from their living kin.

This arrangement was typical of the Christian missionary efforts in the early 20th century of the British Protectorate. Though Arabic-speaking traders and slavers had introduced Islam into northern Uganda in the mid to late 19th century, its epistemological impact was nowhere near as monumental as the incursions of Anglican and Catholic missions.89 The new idea of “religion” (dini, from the Arabic) as a discrete category of life, however, had a lasting impact. Nonetheless, clan ritual—those practices that might today be regarded as “religious”—was not dini, and it was certainly not easily distinguishable from everyday life. These Acholi saw no obvious contradiction between visiting the ot kwan

89 Allen and Reid have noted that the success of Roman Catholicism in neighbouring Madi was entirely due to the deliberate policy of the Protectorate to make northern Uganda “a bulwark against the spread of Islam from the Anglo Egyptian Sudan” (2014: 108).

!133 (house of reading) and the hut of an ajwaka, no logical opposition between supplications made at the ot lega (house of prayer) and sacrifices made to clan jogi and ancestors at the abila shrine.

Keith Russell, a former Bishop in the (Anglican) Church of Uganda, describes the initial tolerance (and even enthusiasm) for Christianity as the result of Acholi desire not for spiritual salvation, but for educational and economic opportunities (1966). In 1903 Rwot

Awich, the head of the royal Payira clan, summoned Rev. Lloyd of the Christian Missionary

Society to teach him about Christianity, which had so far only been introduced further south in Buganda and Bunyoro. More specifically, Rwot Awich was eager to participate in the practice of reading and writing words.90 Rev. Lloyd and his followers established a mission station—with a school—in the Keyo Hills near present day Gulu Town, and especially invited the privileged sons of rwodi to come and learn. Though Lloyd invited each rwot to come to Keyo with two children apiece, Rwot Olya of Atiak declined to do so (Anywar

1948: 76).

Nevertheless, Rev. Lloyd visited Atiak and Rwot Olya in 1904. In a personal retrospective published by the Uganda Journal, Lloyd mirthfully recalled arranging a “big lantern show” for Rwot Olya and his retinue in Atiak Kal in 1904. He wrote:

In the midst of the great courtyard we erected the sheet and then, when all the people were quietly seated, the first picture was flashed on the sheet—that of an elephant. The wildest excitement immediately prevailed, many of the people jumping up and shouting, fearing the beast must be alive, while those nearest the sheet sprang up and fled. The chief himself crept stealthily forward, and peeped behind the sheet to see if

90 See chapter 1 for the account of Awich’s later rebellion and imprisonment by the British. Despite his rebellion, he agreed to be baptized as Ibaraimu Awich in 1948, three years before his deal (Anywar 1948: 78). Rwot Awich is the great grandfather to current Acholi Paramount Chief, Rwot David One Acana II.

!134 the animal had a body, and when he discovered that the animal’s body was only the thickness of the sheet, a great roar of laughter broke the stillness of night. (1948 [1904]: 90)

Though the account seems innocuous, not all was well, and Olya’s aversion to Christianity was likely due to its potential to challenge his own power. Rev. Lloyd eventually abandoned the Keyo Hill Mission in 1908. According to Reuben Anywar, he did so because of issues with weather and the increasing hostility of Acholi towards Europeans (1948: 77). This hostility, however, was due to much more than the political incursions of the British Empire.

Russell offers a compelling reason for this sudden pull-out: Lloyd had inadvertently encroached on clan ritual.

Thinking it would entertain the people gathered at the mission to hear their own songs on a phonograph and see their own likenesses projected by a cinematograph, Lloyd and his comrades demonstrated what the Acholi believed to be the shadows and voices of the dead. One of them recounted that event, saying:

“When the people heard the voice of the dead people singing and saw their shadows in the picture walking, talking and blowing whistles and horns, they were very afraid. They thought that the white man was capturing the shadows of people to take to their own country; which would mean that those people died. From that time people began to run away from the white men" (quoted in Russell 1966: 23).

As the gathered crowd knew, to capture the shadow of another person (an act called mako tipu) is a dangerous and hostile attack, and one best performed by a powerful ajwaka.

Indeed, another witness remarked, “This is better than our ajwagi…It is better than the shrines where we remember our ancestors” (ibid). Lloyd’s misstep provoked chaos. One rwot shot dead his own son, whom he had previously sent with pride to the ot kwan, while others

!135 destroyed books and forbid reading. The rwot was so incensed by the trespass of dini into clan ritual, Russell contends, that he killed his own son rather than allow that “poison” to continue infiltrating Acholi. The CMS missionaries left in haste and did not return for another five years (24).

Jok and God

In teaching privileged Acholi to read the Bible, the missionaries from Anglican and Catholic communions faced the challenge of translating incommensurate terms from English and

Italian into Acholi Luo. The process of establishing the Christian dini, especially amongst young minds at schools who might take their new “religion” back to their home villages, had a transformative effect on language. For Christians in Atiak, Lacwec (the Creator), otherwise known as Rubanga (God), has always been there—it is simply that those words (the Word) did not exist until the 20th century. But the introduction of Acholi words for a supreme God did not destroy the plurality of gods, forces, or powers—jogi— that first inhabited the pre- colonial Acholi cosmos. Rather, jogi were the prerequisites to His creation.

The category of spirit called jok (sing.) or jogi (pl.) refers to a compendium of forces once only associated with specific places, clans, and families, but now, since at least the beginning of the colonial period, also inclusive of “free” forces (Behrend 1999: 109). Free jogi come from outside of Acholi, are not tied to specific spaces in the local landscape, and largely demonstrate ethnically foreign characteristics. For example, certain jogi speak Arabic

(such as Jok Allah) and require their hosts to put on white robes, others speak European languages (such as Jok Munu, or white-person jok) and have their hosts smoke cigarettes and

!136 drink European beer (ibid.). One ajwaka in Atiak, a Roman Catholic, told me that she has an

English- and Yoruba-speaking jok from Nigeria. He is a former slave with the skin of a white person and the kanzu (robes) of a Muslim. The phenomenon of free jogi is not dissimilar to the spirit forces found in possession cults throughout Africa (for example Boddy 1989;

Lambek 2016; Masquelier 2011), which reflect complex engagements with history, temporality, colonialism, and the Other—but which I cannot do justice to here.

Even so, while some of my interlocutors consider jogi to be unrelated to human spirits and perhaps better understood as extra-human, still others (such as the aforementioned ajwaka) regard jogi to have been once-human and since transformed after death. I heard several people suggest that deceased human twins are the origin source of jok kulu (water spirits), and that their remains should be buried in pots and placed next to a stream or well.91

But early ethnographic and mission writings on the concept of jok92 (or Jok, and here the majuscule is significant) debated whether the concept should be interpreted as a supreme deity under which all creation (including minor deities) is subsumed (Jok) or as a compendium of amoral and impersonal beings or "small gods.”93 The European meaning of

“God,” as Lambek has argued, is provincial in its own way: and not the only meaning of the term that operates in the world (2008).

91 The remains of Anena’s twin relatives were buried in pots rather than coffins (ch. 2). However, the family did not place the pots next to water. See footnote 39 above.

92 Jwok or juok are other common spellings. Here I use “jok” to reflect the Acholi usage. 93 For example: Grove 1919; Driberg 1923; Boccassino 1939; Bere 1939; Malandra 1939; Wright 1949; Pellegrini 2006 [1949]; Ogot 1961, 1967, 1976; Evans-Pritchard 1974 [1956]; p’Bitek 1963, 1971; Lienhardt 1961, 1997; Mbiti 1970; Mogensen 2002.

!137 The missionary ethnologist Father Crazzolara remarked that when asked which jok had created them, his Acholi contemporaries were baffled: “Such enquiries implied suppositions and questions which most probably had never occurred to their simple minds: it puzzled them, as they are still puzzled at such questions. With hesitation they answered… that they did not know, which was more nearly approaching truth but less satisfactory” (Crazzolara 1940 in Lienhardt 1964: 43). When Boccassino wrote that the jok called Rubanga94 was the “Supreme Being” of the Acholi (1939), he was challenged by

Crazzolara (1940), the British Protectorate official A.C.A. Wright (1940), and most forcefully by the Acholi poet and writer p’Bitek (1963), who notably criticized the reliability of Boccassino’s research assistants, decided Catholic converts. Crazzolara’s hasty dismissal of Acholi intellect, particularly in “religious” matters, is an attitude that continues to colour the self-deprecating auto-evaluations of many Acholi Christians—including when interacting with an anthropologist they interpellate as a white person who “looks like a missionary.”

When speaking of God or jok, the desire to not appear simple or unsophisticated (to self or others) is rooted in the missionary fallacy of translation. Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) observed that the attempts of early missionary and ethnological writings on Nilotic “religion” to categorize jok (stilted by the multiple and seemingly contradictory or confused ways in which Nilotic peoples described the concept) were frustrated precisely because of the

94 Rubanga, which stands for “God” in the Catholic Bible and liturgy (Lubanga for the Protestants), is a name of Bantu origin, a point cited by both p’Bitek and Lienhardt to draw suspicion to the claim that the concept of Jok, God, predates sustained interactions between Acholi and Bantu populaces. Lienhardt notes that the Acholi are the only Nilotic group to have long had close contact with Bantu peoples (1964: 45), while p’Bitek argues that name Rubanga/Lubanga is nothing more than an arbitrary name selection made by Acholi natives, beleaguered by the incessant tone-deafness of missionary questions about their Creator. The jok rubanga, in the minuscule, is associated with spinal tuberculosis, and as such is a name accorded to hunchbacks (p’Bitek 1963: 24).

!138 ontological assumptions with which they approached the matter. In one camp was a philosophy grounded in Christian revelation, or an assuredness in a universal existence of its socio-evolutionary antecedents, in which all peoples conceive of godly power and creation in the singular (“primitive monotheism”)—Jok. Their detractors, the upholders of rationalism, searched the world for confirmation of a polytheist model—jogi. Both views, according to

Lienhardt, “take the superiority of theism for granted,” and have had undue influence on the anthropology of African religion by focusing intellectual efforts on what is essentially a

European philosophical and theological debate, not necessarily relevant to Nilotic cosmology

(1997: 41-42).

Lienhardt preferred, in the case of jok, to use the English words “divinities” or

“powers” rather than the word “spirits,” arguing convincingly that the former terms better presented the complexity of lived experiences. Perhaps this better reflects the jogi of the

Dinka or the Nuer at the time that Lienhardt was writing. In Atiak, however, the language of

Christianity and “traditional religion” exist in a dialectical relationship. Jok Rubanga, despite

Rwot Olya’s initial resistance, became a spirit who made his powers known in Atiak.

Christianity’s success, and its association with modernism and social respectability in Acholi, did not destroy clan ritual, but it did complicate the social field.

This is especially apparent in the case of death, as well as in the problem of dirty things. A prominent local politician named Peter once told me that, “Three quarters of people here still believe in spirits, even though they are Christian. Especially last funeral rites,” he continued. Peter recounted the experience of hearing his father’s voice speak through a tree when an ajwaka called his spirit during a funeral rite. As his father’s spirit greeted those who

!139 had gathered, he demanded to know where his sister-in-law was. In fact, she was a Born

Again Christian and refused to participate in the ritual, but the gathered family feared angering the tipu of Peter’s father, and so they told him that she was too sick to attend.

However, the sister-in-law paid her fair share of the goods needed for the ritual. “Because even though all those people become saved and say they don’t believe, they will contribute

(money, food) to these things, even if they don’t go personally,” Peter said. “The dead should be recognized. Only when that is done can memory end. The memory of the ancestor can die, but you still maintain the grave.” It would appear that memory has not yet ended in Atiak.

4. “Me, can you afford me?” The inscrutability of ajwani

More is at stake over the issues of jogi, God, and ajwani than a sense of familial or cultural belonging might imply. As others have documented (e.g. Middleton 1963a, 1963b; Abrahams

1985; Allen 1991; Behrend 1999), the disruption of economy, social structure, and cosmology wrought by colonial incursions has had serious consequences in northern

Uganda. While patrilineal kwaro (living and dead) had normally had a monopoly of authority over their families and clans, new strangers (free jogi) began to possess ajwaki with increasing frequency throughout the 20th century. At the same time, colonial and postcolonial state ordinances against “witchcraft” (so broadly defined as to be useless) stripped clan elders of the authority to try and punish individuals for witchcraft (Middleton

1963a, 1963b; Abrahams 1985).95

95 The 1957 Witchcraft Act remains in force. Though it is rarely (if ever) used to prosecute suspected witches, it puts the jurisdiction for their prosecution in the hands of the state.

!140 According to Allen, the increased possession of ajwaki (usually women) by free jogi, concurrent with unchecked sorcery, “were both associated with the decline in the authority of ritual elders, bewildering social change, and the manifest incapacity of the ancestors to alleviate epidemics of previously unknown diseases” (1991: 385). A near-vacuum of ritual power continued through the rebellions of Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement, which sought to destroy witchcraft and create a pure Christian society, and by the LRA, which destroyed shrines and killed many ajwaki (ibid.: 379). Whose responsibility and authority it is to determine and act upon dirty things—Christians, politicians, doctors, elders, ajwaki—is still a flashpoint for debate in Acholi, but it is also infused with frustrated urgency as children fall sick.

In lieu of immediate or definitive action from any of these “stakeholders” (an issue I return to in section 5) the school authorities at Palapir took it upon themselves to study the more recent history of Palapir—as best they could. Every child in the P3 class was old enough to have been born during the most recent war, and many were born in Atiak IDP camp itself. To the adults (both teachers and neighbours), however, their investigations of the

“thing” often took them to the beginning of 1986, when the classroom blocks were appropriated by the NRM/A.96

96 The NRM/A (National Resistance Movement/Army) is the political and military force that won the Ugandan Bush War and instituted its leader, General Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, into his position as President (1986 to present). See chapter 1 for a further history of the political violence in the area.

!141 Witches and whites

In the fallout of Idi Amin’s exile and the bush war that followed the Obote II regime, various paramilitary forces had scores to settle with the local populace (always seeming to support the wrong side), and rebels had to be brought to heel. The school was used as the NRA’s local barracks, and they purportedly used the facilities as a holding site for suspected rebels who had been arrested in their home villages. Many were executed under the massive mango tree at the centre of the school’s grounds, and were rumoured to have been placed in a mass grave on that site. But both rebel and government forces were thought to be responsible for atrocities in Atiak centre, and several LRA attacks of the camp (in the 1990s and 2000s) left the residents with no choice but to bury victims in the trading centre. While the army detach was eventually moved about a kilometre away, the school remained at the epicentre of what became Atiak IDP camp, which was occupied by civilians from over a wide geographical area—strangers and neighbours alike. According to some of my interlocutors, it was this element of strangeness that led to further violence.

In chapter 2, I described meeting an uncle to Komakec97 in the village adjacent to

Gang pa Ochora. Opobo had been one of the elders who had been instrumental in the removal of bodies from the banks of the Ayugi River in 1995, and Komakec had encouraged me to ask him more about local history. One afternoon, a dozen of Komakec’s family members (young and old, male and female) gathered to sit with us in Opobo’s compound. I told Opobo, and by default, everyone gathered, that I had recently heard that the bodies of people who had died in Atiak camp—either by violence or disease—had sometimes been

97 Komakec is a survivor of the 1995 massacre.

!142 intentionally left in the main thoroughfare through the trading centre so as to sic cen on lakwena rebels raiding and attacking the camp at night. Opobo was very quick to deny that this had ever happened, but his lack of reflection or pause suggested to me that I had hit a note of controversy he wished to leave behind.

And so our conversation moved on. “Uncle,” I eventually said, “what is happening at

Palapir Primary?” Opobo and one of his sons immediately noted that Palapir is located next to the market where, one day in the early 1990s, NRA soldiers are accused (by some residents in Atiak, these members of Komakec’s family among them) of having opened fire and killing 15 people.98 “It’s the spirits of those people killed who are attacking,” Opobo and his son said. The more we spoke, however, the less certain they appeared of which spirits were to blame. Another son opined that the people killed during that massacre were not the ones causing cen, because each of their bodies was picked up by their relatives and “buried decently.” Only one person’s body, someone from Madi, was unclaimed. However, tum

(sacrificial cutting) of a sheep was performed to ensure that the tipu was appeased. If the ajwani at Palapir were indeed tied to a singular, discrete event or era—the assumption of which contradicts the hesitant musings of most of my interlocutors—the circumstances of that particular massacre do not point to having caused a tenacious haunting.

98 I mention this incident in ch. 1. Several survivors of this massacre independently stated (to me) that no one is certain where the first shot originated (whether from a government gun or a rebel one). What is more clear is that the commotion began when NRA soldiers began abusing the gathered crowd and provoking angry responses. One of Komakec’s brothers, for instance, was present, and remembers that the soldiers were Bantu and speaking Swahili (the lingua franca of the army). “They were saying that Acholi are useless, that we don’t wear clothes, that we live in bad houses with grass thatch. They continued to insult us and said, ‘We do white collar jobs and wear ties and sit in offices and you Acholi people are just watch dogs.’” These remarks echoed the racist justifications behind colonial policies to recruit northerners for military and police services and southerners for the civil service.

!143 For Opobo, what was more significant than those particular murders themselves was the fact that a Madi person was among the dead: a stranger with no local kin. Members of neighbouring tribes were not unusual in Atiak at the time, but their strangeness became a shorthand for the fears (internal and external) inherent in wartime. In the 1990s, Opobo said, the added problem of life in the camp was that the area was full of witches. When I asked why, he explained that there were many people from outside of Atiak who flocked to the camp: people from Kitgum, Sudan, and especially Madi. Of the many different clans and ethnicities in the camp, Madi were especially numerous and “known for poisoning.”99

Although witches are present everywhere, he admitted, their concentration reached crisis- levels. “Birds of a feather,” he said, implying that the mass of people gathered together allowed witches to find strength in numbers.100 This was a matter of fact, and it contributed to the already momentous insecurity of daily life in Atiak camp at the time. It was this crisis that triggered significant violence within the camp.

A suspected cilil101 collaborator was living in the camp around 1989. He was tolerated by others in the camp community because he was especially known to beat or kill any lajok (witch) who poisoned someone and refused to remove the poison. “John” took it upon himself to cleanse the area of witches, meaning that he was the judge, jury, and executioner of several people living in the camp. He retired from this work at some point and

99 It should be noted that the Madi association with witchcraft is not one solely created by a contemporary Acholi distrust of their close neighbours. This reputation was known to the British Protectorate and they have “retained their notoriety in this respect,” including in their refugee settlements in Sudan in the 1980s (Allen and Reid 2014: 108).

100 See chapter 4 for a further discussion on witches. 101 Cilil rebels were active in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the LRA was forming. See chapter 1.

!144 lived as a civilian in the camp. But the son of a woman he had killed became an NRA soldier, and was stationed in the camp. One day, when food was being distributed in the camp and everyone was outside, this soldier came across John. “It was a coincidence that ACORD102 came to distribute items that day, but the soldiers took advantage of the gathering,” explained one of Komakec’s relatives.

Recalling everything John had done to his mother, he and his colleagues strung John up onto the goalpost at Palapir Primary, in front of everyone gathered for their food rations, and they executed him with their guns. They threw his body in the adjacent pit latrine. In

2012 or 2013, when the school built a new pit latrine, they found human bones in the ground.

It was at that point that children began to see ghostly figures in the latrines and a hand

(sometimes described as white, other times black), or sometimes a whole body, appear in the toilet.

It is worth noting that in another version of this story that I heard from one of

Palapir’s teachers, John was said to be an NRA soldier rather than a rebel, and the mother he had accused of witchcraft had ultimately escaped from his wrath, physically unharmed. The ambiguity of his social role—rebel or government soldier—mirrors the mistrusts and social uncertainties that contributed to the witch crisis in the first place. The violent scene was met with equal ambivalence: “People were divided in two. Half appreciated the death of the man because they were witches and he was killing them. The other half didn’t. But you don’t show that publicly, otherwise you’ll have a bigger problem. You just lament privately,”

102 Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development, an international NGO with head offices in Nairobi and London.

!145 Opobo said, his words reminiscent of the Palapir teacher’s warning on the illegality of public memory.

Multiple people—teachers, neighbours, the sub-county counsellor, and others each recounted to me a variation of the story that one of the children had “contracted” the “thing” when he (or she, depending on the speaker) went to the latrine and saw the hand of a muno, or white person, coming out of the darkness of the pit. Another student saw the entire body of a muno hanging from the rafters in the latrine, only to disappear when she brought her friends to look at it. Still another saw a ghostly group of men hunched together as if gathered around a nighttime fire, eating a meal. When foundations were being dug for a new classroom block in 2012, human remains were found opposite the P3 classroom. The bones were taken by nearby residents and buried elsewhere. One of the people who reportedly witnessed this exhumation was the first to encounter the hand rising out of the pit latrine. She narrated what she saw to her teachers, who went to examine the toilet, but found nothing of note. A month later, another girl saw the ghost of a man in the latrine, but it too disappeared.

When they were still living in the camp, Komakec’s aunt said, her own granddaughter saw a white hand on the ceiling of a latrine, and a second girl saw it as well. A third girl saw the entire spectral body of a white man standing, speechless, in the toilet.

Today, “cen attacks her if she goes back to school,” she said. “Once in a while it happens at home. But cen demands a lot—chicken, goats, and more. She doesn’t talk when she’s attacked, but Born Agains pray on her and the spirit says: ‘Me, can you afford me?’” The cen refuses to identify itself, but implies that its demands are unobtainable to a family impoverished by war. In the camp, the family was dependent upon food aid from

!146 international NGOs, and like many families, they also relied on NGOs programs to assist with the economic strain (for livestock to sacrifice, food and drink for participants, alcohol, and transport costs) posed by so many burials and ritual cleansing of bodies (moyo kum) and places (moyo piny). These programs have since ceased to exist.

It was not lost on me that a white hand or body in a pit latrine might somehow be connected to the legacy of strange and threatening whiteness in Atiak—Catholic and

Anglican missionaries, British administrators, humanitarian workers and NGO consultants, researchers, Pentecostal evangelists, each offering a take on what could be for Acholi. And so

I asked Komakec and his relatives: “Why is the hand white?” Opobo’s son, sitting to the side and otherwise quiet, spoke up. He was around seven years old at the time that John was killed at the school, and remembers the day well. He proposed that maybe the white vision, as he called it, is related to the fact that people saw white people from ACORD on that day, and this someone left an indelible mark on people’s memories. “It could be that white in a miracle103 form is reflecting the ACORD whites,” he said. Others weren’t so sure. “Cen can change to any colour,” Komakec pointed out. The connection to colonialism was not straightforward.

For the politician Peter, who always has his ear to the ground, he was convinced that the problem was connected to the ghostly hand in the latrine, but he suggested a different origin for the hand than John’s murder and ill-placed bones. Peter claimed that cen had

103 His use of the word “miracle” refers to the Acholi word tungu, which has a double meaning. In Acholi Luo interpretations of Christian scripture tungu refers solely to the positive sense of the word. Outside of scripture, tungu also refers to magic that has either morally neutral or morally negative connections. For example, Okidi witnessed a magician cause a girl at Gulu’s Kaunda (also called Caribbean) parade grounds to lay an egg. This was the sign of a bad miracle. This negativity also applies to the miracle of the spectres at Palapir.

!147 landed on a girl in P3 when she was returning home from having taken food to a mentally ill person. On her way back she walked through an area, thick with eucalyptus trees, where many people had been killed. She saw two cats with huge, glowing eyes, he said, but when she moved towards them they disappeared. In their place were two children, who also vanished before her eyes. Now, at Palapir, “You find the hand of a white man. If you’ve seen it, you’ve contracted cen. It’s landed on you, not others. That it was kids who first appeared to the girl means it was signifying ‘we are going to attack children.’ That girl was the one who brought cen to the P3 class.” Though Peter mentioned the mental illness of the person receiving care from the girl, he did not elaborate further on its significance (if any) to the issue.

The rumours that Palapir Primary were a hotbed for cen were compatible with cen’s modus operandi: to attack children and, in so doing, threaten the future reproduction of clan and social orders.104 According to Opobo, what had changed in Atiak was not the nature of the problem, but its magnitude. As an elderly person, he could remember similar problems happening at the school in the 1940s. Perhaps a “dark-hearted person” killed or was killed on the land, but he did not know. He pointed out that there is a problem of cen in all the nearby schools, not only Palapir. “Children are easily scared, more than adults. It’s easy for the cen,” he reasoned.

Meanwhile, the acting Rwot Moo disputed the claims of cen when I asked him for his input, and he aggressively insisted that if there had been any apparition of ghostly appendages or bodies in the school latrine, by the rights of his office he would have been the

104 See chapter 2.

!148 first to be informed. He said that “thing” had nothing to do with the violent deaths or war and insurgency, but that the first infected child and his friends kept playing under one particular big tree on the school grounds. This was where the ancestors go to rest, he said, and the tree had either been cut down by Chinese road workers who did not understand its significance, or it had been felled to make way for a new classroom block. After the first incident in 2013 had calmed down, he said it was because of the Catholic prayers that the ancestors had been put to rest. No indigenous rituals or “Acholi work” needed to be done because it was a minor problem—prayer would work just as well as something “stronger,” as he put it.

5. Belief and Practice: acting on “thing”ness

They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when he had stepped off the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me." For he had said to him, "Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!" Then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?" He replied, "My name is Legion; for we are many." He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; and the unclean spirits begged him, "Send us into the swine; let us enter them.” So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.

—The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Mk. 5.1-13.

!149 When I had asked Rafael, the long-time Spiritual Director of Palapir, what sort of “thing” he reckoned was disturbing the P3 class, he responded forcefully, in English: “People have been thinking that maybe because of dead people who were buried here, their spirits are the ones disturbing the children. For me, as a Christian, I don’t believe in that.” But Rafael was not necessarily denying the existence of ghosts. He did not believe in that. The acting Rwot

Moo’s contention that prayer is weaker than tic Acholi is not without controversy, but it points to the issue of who has the authority to act upon ajwani. This action is both linguistic

(in the sense of naming the problem) and ritual (in the sense of attempts to relieve it).

Language

In Acholi, as elsewhere, a growing number of charismatic Christians reject the distinction of the kwaro (ancestor) and cen (vengeance ghost) categories in their entirety, and of the other spirit beings I have mentioned, and instead collapse them all into the same word: Satan.

Whether one should offer a sacrifice to appease and commemorate the dead is a problem of ethics and acquiescence to a certain authority. Individual acts of care for the dead—or sacrifices to spirits—are sometimes imbued with challenge to competing ritual and spiritual powers.

But this collapse is not necessarily straightforward. In the epigraph to this section,

Jesus encounters spirits named “Legion.” A legion was a major unit in the Roman army that was composed of four to six thousand soldiers. Like the spirits who say, “We are Legion” to

Jesus, an Acholi speaker who claims that the “thing” is a demon, or cen, or a devil (there are

!150 no definite articles in Acholi) might be saying “this is a selection of things dominated by cen, or a bunch of beings that run with demons." These are often synecdoches—figures of speech that use a part to refer to the whole. For the great majority of Acholi people who are well versed in Bible stories, the scriptures that describe Jesus casting out unclean spirits are not foreign, “white” stories, but are intimately familiar and relevant.

Dirty things, to repeat, can point to a host of origins: cen, kwaro, jok or jogi, ajiji, ayweya, or the unambiguously evil work of devils and Satan of the Abrahamic traditions— the list goes on. Who has the authority to determine the cause of a “thing” like the ajwani at

Palapir, who has the responsibility to respond to it, and how such “things” are linguistically categorized offer a window into not only the politics of religion and religiosity in contemporary Acholi, but into how categories of lived experience—illness, healing, worship, rejection, shame, pride, etc.—are continually reconstituted.

The relationships between power and language—namely, how the linguistic distinctions people make between the "things" of Acholi—are important not for reasons of determining definitive causality or any sort of obsessive symbolic classification, but because the way people speak of “things” has to do with differing and often clashing ways of knowing and interacting with the world and its powers—seen and unseen. The Deputy Head

Teacher at Palapir used a common turn of phrase to describe the goings-on at the school: in

English, he spoke of “that thing” affecting the students. His choice of words spoke not only to the uncertainty of the ajwani’s origins (the word by which the “thing” could be reasonably attached), but to the characteristic aporia of “things” themselves (if indeed such things can be fairly spoken of as “selves”). In Acholi Luo conversations, any number of possible signifiers

!151 are frequently abandoned in favour of less precise terms and pronouns such as late (“that of”), lute (“those of”), eni (“he/she” but also “it”). Ugandan English spoken by native Acholi speakers is often similarly vague, and as such the factor of context is absolutely central to mutual intelligibility (see, for example, Ocaya 1979). As a consequence, meaning is hyper- mutable from speech to interpretation. This is easily observable in the case of “spirits.”

Acholi vocabulary is above all polysemic. A large number of disparate terms are homonyms—much more so than in leb muno (English).105 A listener can discern the concept that the speaker intended to convey by paying attention to the tone, pitch, and context that the word was used in. To a non-native speaker like myself, the challenges of unaided interpretation can sometimes prove insurmountable, even if one has a fair knowledge of vocabulary. But aside from the problem of non-native interpretation, Acholi words also point to the latent potential of speech acts. The word lam can be interpreted in two ways: to mean

“blessing” or “curse,” and this refers to how it is a forceful and powerful type of speech with serious consequences. Cen or lacen can mean vengeful ghost, or it can mean “last” or

“behind.” Gemo means “disease,” but it also means “rebellion.”

There are several important observations to be made from Rafael’s speech. First, that he clearly stated his Christian faith, and his lack of belief in the spirits of the dead, should not be automatically interpreted to mean that he denies the existence of those spirits. One might instead consider his words as a claim on the authority of the Christian God over unclean spirits, as Jesus gave permission to those inhabiting the Gerasene man to enter swine instead

—a story and idea to which Acholi Christians often refer. Second, his reluctance to speak

105 While leb muno means “the tongue of white people,” it refers specifically to English. This is despite the influential and significant presence of Italian speakers in the region.

!152 about the “things” adds further evidence to the idea many Acholi people fear to speak frankly about such matters, in case that their words are misinterpreted as belief, that they might provoke ajwani further, or that they might be the source of (or at least associated with) the trouble. Lastly, the “maybe” of “maybe dead people” indicates the uncertainty and unfinished quality with which “things” are named, before the determinations of ritual specialists have been made.

Ritual

Ocan Geoffrey, along with his colleagues and the members of the PTA, were moved by the urgency of the children’s suffering. As an educated person, he felt it important to search for a medical cause for the problem, but none could by identified by the local health officials. At the same time, in August 2013 the parish priest had prayed over the problem during the last mass before the end of term, and had not held a prayer service at the school itself. As the school fell under the priest’s ritual jurisdiction, Ocan Geoffrey had been reluctant to welcome the local charismatic Christians to lend their aid and conduct their own prayers. But when the “thing” resurfaced the next year, he permitted a pastor (who styled himself as

“Apostle” in the school’s visitors book) to come lay hands on the affected. He stayed throughout the day and prayed on the children until they “stopped being possessed,” and wrote in his visitors’ book commentary: “Visiting the school to cast out demons.”

Though he may have personally wanted the intervention of an ajwaka or an atekere, as the Head Teacher, his constraints were clear: “This is a Catholic-funded school. They have their own traditions which you can’t go against.” Nevertheless, he was worried, as three

!153 prayer services had not been enough. The elders should be allowed to do their rituals, he argued, and the prayers should be ecumenical. “This will build everybody’s capacity,” he reasoned. Lubangakene (the Treasurer of the PTA) agreed that prayers were stopgap solutions. Other neighbours that I spoke to were certain that though prayers were welcome, they were not proving strong enough, and tic Acholi was finally needed. But,“Our people here are very difficult,” he said. “If you try to trace a death, it is difficult because people won’t come out willingly. If someone didn’t die in a peaceful way, you don’t need to remind the family about the death of their beloved one because if you do that it will spark anger in that family. So if you tell those people that they should do something, it can cause another problem.” A common reluctance to trace the problem—be it from shame, pride, anger, or fear, or some other constraint—frustrated the schools’ efforts.106

The fact that no one was certain of the origins of the ajwani increased the difficulty in finding a solution. For functions like last funeral rites, which are equally expensive, it is the family of the deceased who will take up collections of money and goods. “You see, if I lost someone or if my people die, it will be up to me to take up a responsibility to hold their last funeral rite, for fear that the ancestor spirit may attack the family if no ritual is done,” Ocan

Geoffrey reasoned. But the children of Palapir “all belong to different people.” Struggling with their own familial issues, people were refusing the burden of responsibility for strangers’ children. When NGO programming on war-related issues was much more active in the area, people were able to access funds for rituals. “That is why there is a massacre

106 It was unclear to me, based on our conversations, whether or not Ocan Geoffrey and the other school officials thought that these “problems” included inadvertently shaming families who had not performed the full gamut of burial rites.

!154 monument,” Lubangakene said. “Now our sub-county is running away from their responsibility because they used to rely on those NGOs.107 Now they are neglecting their duties. Maybe you could go to your MP, but mostly in Uganda if you are not on the right- hand side of government it is hard for you to be heard. That is why our MP is voiceless.”108

Lubangakene was clear that it was the responsibility of the ludito, elders, and the atekere (clan ritual specialists) to perform their traditional functions, no matter how the ajwani might be traced. “They were demanding so many things so we could not afford it, because the money that we have here is not enough for the things they wanted.” Comparing old people to children, he remarked that their needs kept changing: “I need eggs, sweets, tea, bread, so many things at once.” As “big people,” the elders required money for transport, two sheep, two goats, two chickens, two saucepans, 50kg of maize flour, two crates of beer, waragi or arege (gin), 20 litres of Lujutu (another type of home-made gin), and a fee for the rwot. Each tic Acholi ritual might cost at least 700,000 shillings,109 an unattainable amount for the parents as well as the school. What might normally be a family responsibility, to respond to an unhappy ancestor, was now a problem of public ghosts.

Prayer is much cheaper than clan ritual. The exclusivity of denominational beliefs

(broadly construed), however, frustrated those for whom ajwani is regarded as a collective

107 Specifically, many of these rituals were funded by the Northern Uganda Transition Initiative (NUTI), a project of USAID (US Agency for International Development)’s Office of Transitional Initiatives. NUTI programming ran from May 2008 to May 2011. NUTI granted US$1.8 million worth of grants for “Truth and Reconciliation Processes,” with the majority of funding going to Ker Kwaro Acholi (described unproblematically by NUTI as “the traditional cultural leaders of the Acholi”) to conduct rituals (Casals & Associates 2011: 16). In Atiak, NUTI funded 7 cleansing ceremonies and another 5 that took place between the sub-county border shared by Pabbo and Atiak.

108 The Member of Parliament for Kilak South County, Olanya Gilbert, is a member not of the ruling NRM party, but of the opposition FDC (Forum for Democratic Change). 109 Approximately CAD$230.

!155 concern. Opobo was wearied by this. “The impact of prayer is not much,” he opined. “People say, ‘We can handle as prayer group,’ but don’t involve the community. They need to sit down with all and have a singular way forward, decide to have tum or what.” At the same time, as an old ladit, he worried that too much responsibility was put on him to address ritual problems, because so many of his age mates died prematurely in the war. Frequently ill and dealing with issues of affliction amongst his own grandchildren, he knew little of the details of Palapir because he was unable to extend the energy it required. He too, pointed to the responsibility of the rwot of Kal clan, but at the time he had not issued his report to the other elders.

6. Conclusion

Rwot Olya, the chief on whose land Palapir Primary now lies, died in 1923. It was a gruesome death: humiliated when one of his young wives (a daughter of the royal clan) complained loudly and openly about being sexually unsatisfied, he killed her with his spear and turned the weapon on himself. Though he was succeeded by his son, decades later this abominable act is still remembered in Atiak and elsewhere in Acholi. In the 1950s, the former Rwot of Patiko informed the anthropologist Paula Hirsch Foster: “You know Attiak110

Kal, they have a cen in their clan, you know Rwot Olia111 killed himself after killing his wife.

110 This is alternate spelling (also, Atyak), which I preserve here in accordance with the archived notes. 111 Also an alternate spelling.

!156 His brother’s son also committed suicide and so did his grandfather. There is a kwong [curse] on that clan.”112 And so there is yet another possibility, buried in Atiak’s soil.

When children are affected by cen, or any virulent dirty thing, their parents worry that they will not make it to adulthood. They will not live to propagate the clan, or they will die social deaths, perhaps becoming the type of people who wander with spoiled heads, half- dressed, onto the road. The social, moral, and spiritual order cannot be reproduced in such a situation. But all of this raises the question: whose social, moral, and spiritual order is paramount? In Atiak, this question remains unanswered, but posed repeatedly by those who try to find a way forward through dirty things.

Of the Jop’Adhola people (Luo relatives to the Acholi) in eastern Uganda, Hanne

Mogensen has advanced that the issue of juok (jok for Acholi) demonstrates “culture as a battleground between conflicting voices” (2002: 436). Mogensen writes that her interlocutors do not concern themselves with defining juok as an ontological category that fits into an overarching cosmology. Instead, juok has no static properties, but it is invoked, activated and made real in intersubjective experience (ibid.) Drawing upon the work of Reynolds Whyte, who argues that people know misfortune by acting upon it to alleviate suffering (1997),

Mogensen writes: “People are always aware that they do not understand all that is going on and that there is a need to enquire of those who know” (2002: 433). The evidence points to ajwani being a similar intersubjective locus. At yet: even the experts are not quite sure of what is going on.

112 I am grateful to Martha Lagace for having alerted me to this source. It comes from the Paula Hirsch Foster archive, Box 3, file folder A.d, ‘“Suicide,” 1954-8.

!157 It has been over 90 years after Rwot Olya’s death, a mere 50-odd years since Uganda gained its independence from the British Protectorate, and a hair’s breadth in time since a decades-long war in Atiak and northern Uganda at large. Atiak’s trading centre bears the marks of an unfinished history, one in which a century of European Catholic and Protestant missionization has collided with, danced around, transformed, and been transformed by the

“things” of local clan ritual. By the time I left Atiak, the problem of “thing” remained in suspense, and efforts to somehow reach a solution continued in a prosaic fashion.

!158 Chapter 4: Those Who Go Underwater

Ocol says he is a modern man, A progressive and civilised man, He says he has read extensively and widely And he can no longer live with a thing like me Who cannot distinguish between good and bad

—p’Bitek, Song of Lawino (2008 [1972]: 36)

The poetry of p’Bitek, literary star of Acholi and post-colonial critic of anthropology, is replete with themes of social change and moral conflict. His most famous work, the epic

Song of Lawino (written in Acholi Luo in 1966),113 gives voice to the frustrations of a traditionalist Acholi woman (Lawino) who has been spurned by her modern, Christian,

English-speaking husband (Ocol). At times lashing out at the woman who stole the attentions of her husband, at others lamenting the loss of an idealized existence before British colonialism and Christian missions in northern Uganda, Lawino’s song is above all an assertion of virtue and difference. Some years later, p’Bitek published Ocol’s response: in

English, and asserting a quite different judgment of being in the world. In contemporary

Acholi, those who style themselves as “Lawinos” or “Ocols” (and those who fit in neither tidy boundary) are no closer to agreement on what constitutes the shared ethical project of

“Acholiness” or how best to become, be, and stay together as dano adana: human persons.

113 The English translations used in the epigraphs of this chapter are p’Bitek’s own (2008 [1972]).

!159 As residents of a place of recent war and ongoing social upheaval, northern Ugandans are reflecting on the meanings of good and bad, of the nature of evil, and of acceptable sociality and unacceptable disrepair. But this is perhaps no different from what they always did, war or not, as all people do, Acholi or not.

Anthropologists, too, are lately concerned with articulating the boundaries and practices of the ethical. Scholars ask: is there a useful analytic distinction to be made between morality systems and ethics (Laidlaw 2013; Williams 1985; Zigon 2007)? Is the concept of virtue ethics one, or many (Mattingly 2012; Nussbaum 1999)? Is the ethical observable only in crisis and moral breakdown, or can it be identified in the ordinary (Das

2015; Lambek 2010, 2015a; Lempert 2013, 2015; Zigon 2007, 2009)? How can the discipline move beyond the “science of unfreedom” and find new questions to ask about moral systems, actions, judgements, and reflections as they are lived in the world (Keane

2015; Laidlaw 2013)? These are important conversations that have produced rich analyses of

“the ethical” in ethnography, both in new monographs and (in hindsight) old ones (Lambek

2015b).

I offer here an ethnographic intervention that speaks in particular to the question foregrounded by Meudec et al. (forthcoming) of how the ethical is at once immanent to culture, always a prerequisite to intersubjective and intrasubjective relation, but also extending through time, its shared questions and goals always imminent but never quite answered or realized. I take up Meudec at al.’s notion of ethical “project,” in which “human goals extend further than the present moment,” and acts (broadly conceived) are part of collective engagements with ordinary life. Being attuned to the idea of ethical projects,

!160 unfolding over time, could help anthropologists better articulate the ways in which our own interpretive acts are also subject to hesitation, revision, and uncertainty, precisely because we too are enmeshed within these aforementioned projects.

I also consider the caution provided by Todd Sanders’ (2008) against the “seductive analytics” of much current anthropology, which waylay doubt by rendering strange and hidden (or “occult”) phenomena as idiomatic commentary. While snapshot views of certain instances of crisis at the school—a moment of possession, the violent expulsion of a suspected wrongdoer, a dramatic eruption of disobedience—could be interpreted as social critiques or as breakdowns that render disrupted moral dispositions intelligible, in the longue durée of Acholi social history it appears that moral crisis is in fact ordinary (which is not to say inconsequential). As such I find it productive to consider the ethical as it pertains to what

Lambek prefers to term “underdeterminism” (2015b).

Underdeterminism, in a subtle departure from Laidlaw’s concern with freedom, takes as central to the human condition that acts “are not fully directed or determined,” by either individual agency or structure, “they require the exercise of some form of judgment” (Lambek 2015b: 2). In his marriage of the ethical as consisting of both practice

(in the Aristotelian sense) and performance (in the sense of Austin’s ordinary speech acts),

Lambek has advanced an approach to the ethical that confronts the contingencies characteristic of everyday human life. How to deliberate and discern the right course of action in the face of incommensurable values (or, indeed, lack of criteria) and irony (in the sense of not fully knowing one’s own or another’s intentions) is a challenge faced both in discrete and discontinuous instances and in the ongoing work of ethical being.

!161 These features of the ethical are elaborated below in the context of chronic violence that could otherwise be interpreted as moral breakdown. Below, I examine a series of events connected to purported witchcraft and malevolent spirit possessions at a girls’ school in Gulu

Town. The narrative is itself the result of multiple interpretive refractions. I did not witness the majority of events described herein; I did and continue to witness and participate in the interpretive acts that preceded and follow them. As such, I present it below as an amalgamation and triangulation of the ways in which these stories were offered to me by my interlocutors. It should not, therefore, be read as a definitive account of Holy Cross

Secondary School and its tribulations but rather as the product of interlocution, reflection, and characteristic indeterminacy. In this way, my offering here is an interpretive act already embedded in the aforementioned ethical project.

Here, I want to highlight the affective forces—chiefly resentment, fear, indignation, and ressentiment (Nietzsche 2006 [1887])—that heighten and are heightened by underdeterminism, wherein practical judgment must respond to consistent uncertainty, be it of intention, ontology, or value. An anthropologist examining these affects and underdetermined experiences cannot remain outside of their ethical purview (Favret-Saada

1980, 2012a) and further below I recount how I became the object of ethical scrutiny myself.

I explain in the second half of the chapter how I came to Holy Cross, became acquainted with its people and the events herein described, and created a sense of intelligibility out of experiences lost in or exceeded by acts of interpretation and translation: navigating underdetermination. This attention to uncertainty should not be read as an anti-interpretive stance to ethnography, where the reader might be unmoored by inconclusion. Rather, with

!162 this ethnographic case I further the contention that “hesitation enables an ethical relation” (Meudec et al.: forthcoming) in which ethnographers (and, by extension, their readers) are also participants.

1. Ordinary Crisis at Holy Cross

I do not deny I am a little jealous, It is no good lying, We all suffer from a little jealousy. It catches you unawares Like the ghosts that bring fevers; It surprises people Like earth tremors: But when you see the beautiful woman With whom I share my husband You feel a little pity for her!

— p’Bitek, Song of Lawino (2008 [1972]: 39)

Before dawn one morning in late 2012, an agitated crowd of schoolgirls forced their way out of the walled compound at Holy Cross in Gulu. Though the teachers had been sound asleep, they were undoubtedly woken by the ruckus of shouts for the bewildered night guard to relinquish his watch and open the heavy iron gates. He acquiesced and watched helplessly as eight hundred pupils spilled out onto the road, guided only by scraps of moonlight, a few contraband mobile phone torches, and the urging of the Head Girl. Convinced that a ring of devil worshippers had infiltrated the school and provoked a strange and unwanted form of spirit possession, the girls felt the increasing attacks had become unbearable. Aside from a

!163 series of unexplained events at the school, to the girls the most obvious proof of this nefarious invasion was the outbreak of “calypso,”114 a laboured and involuntary trembling of the limbs, reminiscent of a foreign dance or, the movements of a snake, or (in some descriptions) the bobbing of chickens. Between 40 and 50 pupils had been affected, and the problem was often accompanied by muteness or uncontrolled vocal outbursts. The worship services at the school’s chapel seemed to provoke dangerous spirits to enter the girls while they were deep in prayer, telling onlookers they had come for “nice things” and girls’ souls.

To many of the pupils, it was a sure sign that underwater people, called lute pii or lute ceto pii115 in Acholi, had infiltrated the school. Lute pii are often thought to be connected with

Satanic worship and the Illuminati, and are identifiable by their suspicious wealth, success, and power, thought to have been acquired during fantastical journeys under large bodies of water.

Holy Cross, at one time northern Uganda’s most prestigious Catholic secondary school for girls, was by the girls’ own estimation now just another target for these malevolent conspirators. The problem was acute, but not unique to the school—such was the common

114 In Greek mythology, Calypso was a sea nymph who seduced and detained the hero Odysseus on her island for seven years. The root καλύπτω (kalyptō), means “to cover,” “to deceive,”’ or “to conceal” (Liddell and Scott 1894: 738). Though it is tempting to seize upon some meaning in that provocative etymology, the connection was certainly not hinted at by my interlocutors, who are more influenced by popular culture from less distant millennia. As a genre of Trinidadian folk music with roots in West Africa, calypso music surely reached the radios of the “Old Girls”’ of Holy Cross when they were pupils in the early days of the school. Though the talk of water spirits is reminiscent of Mami Wata cults of Nigeria and West Africa in general (see for example Bastian 1997), girls did not mention it. This is not to belabour the point; the origins of a rhizomatic phenomenon cannot, by definition, be excavated. 115 “Those of under water” or “those who go under water,” respectively. This same category of people are also known as dano ma aa i te pii (“people who come from under water”), dano maceto i te pii (“people who go under water”), or sometimes cen me te pii (“cen from under water”). See chapters 2 and 3 for further discussion of cen.

!164 lot of girls’ schools, especially Catholic ones. Feeling that their concerns were being summarily dismissed by their teachers (or that the teachers themselves were underwater people), they took matters into their own hands and organized a strike. The most senior of the girls colluded to march en masse, by cover of night, some ten kilometres to the headquarters of Gulu District’s most senior public officials. Along the way, several of the girls reportedly became possessed: some speaking in ominous voices that uttered words and languages not their own (demanding blood and tributes in English, Acholi, Luganda, and

Swahili), others with limbs growing wobbly and unsupportive in shows of calypso, and more screaming and writhing. By the time they reached the office of the Resident District

Commissioner to await his early morning arrival, a crowd of townspeople had gathered to watch the fracas, and so had local journalists and clergy. The protestant clergy laid hands on all the affected, and prayers of deliverance were quickly and repeatedly uttered in the name of Jesus. When a pastor led the assembled in prayer, one of the girls was overcome by a spirit who identified itself by shouting, “I am Paska!” to the onlookers.

Paska and Laber

By 2012, Paska was a household name in Gulu. An Acholi girl from a district neighbouring

Gulu, she had been a pupil at Holy Cross some ten years before, during some of the most violent episodes of the war when the school and its students were targets of the LRA. An unusually bright and beautiful altar girl from a rare wealthy family, Paska had been ostracized soon after boarding at the school in her third year of secondary. Midway through the school year, her classmates began to share rumours about her. Paska and her family were

!165 so wealthy, according to the tales, because when Paska’s then-poor mother was pregnant with her, she visited an ajwaka to ask for help getting rich. Her mother was taken under water, the rumour went, where she sacrificed Paska’s soul to the Devil or a water spirit (jok kulu). In return, Paska was bound to recruit souls to worship Satan and make journeys underwater to labour in the workshops of underwater demons, from where high quality and handsome goods originate—how else did people acquire luxuries during the impoverishment caused by war?

In 2002 a classmate of Paska, called Melissa, became possessed during a mid-week prayer service. The spirits made damning claims: Paska was at the school to recruit girls for devil worship, and she had a list of candidates to target. Though the spirits left Melissa immediately after a Sister prayed over her body, over the following days and weeks they returned to Melissa and also entered other girls, who made similar accusations. Because

Paska was well-liked by many of the Sisters, some said that there were also nuns who were helping her to recruit people on “the list.” Though constantly pressed as to the truth of the spirits’ claims, Paska kept silent and withdrawn. A girl named Laber watched as Paska was shunned in the classroom, at meal times, and during all activities. She rubbished the claims made by her peers that they saw Paska after having turned into a fish, flopping on her cot in the dorms. Though she had never interacted with Paska before, Laber was troubled by what she witnessed. When I asked her to tell me about how she came to become Paska’s friend,

Laber said:

I sat one night and I tried to feel the pain she was in. I said to myself, if we are Christians and we really believe in Christ and God in heaven, we are not meant to fear the Devil. Demons know where they can enter; they aren’t like airborne

!166 diseases. If I’m sitting next to Paska and there are demons, they can’t enter my heart. My mother taught me that Jesus was tempted by the Devil, but he didn’t run. He showed his faith. Supposing I was Paska, how would I feel? It was at that point that I befriended her. I would bring her food and sit with her. I started losing my own friends. I would respond, “It’s okay, I can’t force you to be my friend. My thinking is different.” They would give me scriptures. But I would still sit with her.

Laber accompanied Paska in all things, and prayed with her each night in the chapel.

The possessions continued unabated, however, and the situation came to a head in the dorms one night. Melissa had once again been overtaken by a spirit during chapel, and she entered the dorms where Paska and Laber were already asleep. A Born Again student asked everyone to assemble to pray and sing together, and as a group they confronted the spirit in Melissa. It was angered that Paska, who had taken human blood and human flesh and promised

Melissa’s soul, was denying it. In a rage, all the gathered girls pulled Paska from her bed and demanded answers once and for all. “What tempted me to think it was true,” one of the more skeptical girls reflected, was that despite the fact that the weather was clear and there was no sign of rain, Paska looked up and opened her mouth to speak when there was a huge clap of thunder. The electricity went out, and with it the lights. Girls began screaming and running, while others hid under the beds. But Paska spoke from the darkness.

“No,” she said. “I have not worshipped any devils.” When pressed, Paska volunteered that she remembered a dream in which she saw people in black kanzus (robes), holding a bowl filled with human blood. In the dream, they kept forcing it to her lips, but she resisted.

Soon after that night, teachers called charismatic preachers up from Kampala to pray over the school and over Paska and Laber, and, soon after, the school administration ordered the two girls to mass at Holy Rosary church in town. In neither case did spirits disturb or emerge

!167 in the two girls. The catechists insisted: “It never takes more than thirty minutes for a demon to show. It is Melissa who is disturbed.” The fracas culminated in the Head Teacher, Sister

Frances, dramatically ordering Paska’s expulsion at a year-end assembly in which the entire school was gathered. Though the girls immediately began to overturn chair and tables, advancing on Paska in order to give her a beating, Laber skirted her away and hurriedly packed Paska’s belongings. Paska eventually travelled to Kampala, where she became a successful singer and model. At the time of writing, rumours continue to circulate about her.

What is to be done?

The events at Holy Cross then and now were said, by some of the striking girls in 2012, to be the work of Paska and these lute pii. Holy Cross, they were adamant, had been infiltrated by devil worshippers, a harvest of souls was ongoing in the classrooms and dormitories, and the most senior levels of the school’s administration were guilty of negligence at best. Other teachers were accused of having made their own unsavoury deals with the malevolent underwater powers. Fanciful tales circulated. A particularly large kituba116 tree behind the dorms was suspected of being a gathering place for possessed girls, where they went at night to worship the Devil and bow to the apparition of a woman in a black dress and red headscarf. Sister Dorothy, a stern Alur woman feared by many of the girls, was thought to have buried something sinister under the tree, and students suspected she sat in the back of chapel working on tweno lega, the action of “tying prayers,” whereby a person maliciously diverts the “direction” of others’ devotions, invocations, and supplications. The students

116 A kituba is a large tree often planted over graves.

!168 grew to fear any big trees in the compound, and avoided walking near the statues that dotted the grounds (of subjects as varied as the Virgin Mary and African mammals). Those who were possessed were unable to stand the brightness of the statue of Christ, and onlookers were repulsed by what appeared to be blood in their classmates’ eyes or in the school’s food.

But complaining was difficult: the pupils feared disciplinary action and dismissal by the school administration, and though some teachers were sympathetic, plenty thought the girls were “dramatizing” or malingering.117

Knowing at least some of this, the public officials listened sympathetically to the concerns of the striking students and participated in the impromptu prayers on their office steps. They walked the strikers back to the school and called an assembly, where they suggested that the students be dismissed for a short period to visit their families, and that the physician on the school’s Board of Directors come examine the students and hear their complaints. After this short cooling-off period, the town’s most popular radio station (which operates in both English and Acholi) broadcast the sensational news that students of Holy

Cross were suffering from hysteria: what the girls lacked was boyfriends to fulfill their sexual urges. The students at the secondary school for boys nearest Holy Cross were delighted by this news, and took it upon themselves later that week to scale the walls of the girls’ school in order to “help” the afflicted. In another instance, one of the girls’ teachers took heed of the pseudo-scientific explanation (a diagnosis that reinterpreted and rendered vernacular the words of the doctor) and, when one of her students began again exhibiting symptoms of the problem, she recruited a nearby handyman working on building repairs to

117 Nonetheless, the spirits did not concern themselves with S4 and S6 students, who were busy revising for their O-Level and A-Level examinations.

!169 come embrace the girl and calm her body. In her state, the girl was much stronger than the workman, and she threw him off and raged. While that teacher was disciplined for her behaviour (and was even brought to the police barracks to answer for her actions), these were nonetheless humiliating experiences for the girls, who felt invalidated by the claims that their distress was caused by anything less serious than spiritual forces.

These are not the only explanations for the goings-on at Holy Cross which continue to circulate in Gulu.118 Though many consider the problem to have been unnecessarily escalated by adolescent behaviour and religious politics, few accuse the girls of faking calypso or spirit possession, the general consensus being that such phenomena cannot be convincingly faked or maintained. In determining the “true” origins of the behaviour

(whether it be organic, psychological, or metaphysical), most explanations emerge from a space of uncertainty. Some are convinced by radio and newspaper reports that framed the story in either scientifically authoritative terms of female hysteria (a diagnosis vehemently refuted by the physician who actually observed the girls), or under the umbrella of demonic possession. But everyday conversations between people leave more room for doubt in these

118 Furthermore, this is not to say that more simple explanations were never explored, nor indeed that any one interpretation offered any neat conclusions. Mr. Nyero, a teacher at Holy Cross with whom I struck up a friendship, would have me over for tea in his quarters in the school compound. Over a year after the girls’ strike, he told me that rumours once more circulated about mysterious goings-on at the school. A man was seen prowling through the dormitory of one of the classes, but when he was chased out, the night guard did not observe a human escaping over the high compound wall, but a pussy cat. He suspected the man was actually an abiba, a type of shapeshifter known to come from Alur. (An abiba is a person who can take the form of either a cat or a kite with an illuminated tail, or simply a sphere of light). Around the same time, girls reported seeing unfamiliar looking classmates at night on the dormitory roofs, and it was feared that cen or tipu dano was once again haunting the school. When I next came to visit, Mr. Nyero told me, giggling into his tea, that a police dog had been acquired to trace the scent of the most recent nighttime intruder. The dog led the officers to a nearby house, owned by an upstanding man of the community. It was only after the man was arrested on suspicion of these break-ins that his teenage son came forward to exonerate him: what the dog smelled was not his father, but one of the Holy Cross uniforms he and his many school friends had been wearing on occasional cheeky raids of the girls’ school.

!170 didactic interpretations, reminiscent as they are of the nascent study of psychology in nineteenth century Europe.

At present, differences in interpretation are broadly (though not rigidly) divided on denominational and generational lines, with youth (the presently affected girls among them) more likely to point to Satan and lute pii as the cause, while their elders (Old Girls of Holy

Cross among them) vocalize other possibilities in tune with a cosmology more inflected with ontological ambiguity than charismatic Christianity. For example, many people (both

Catholic and non-Catholic) in Acholi muse that Catholic missions are teeming with tipu dano because Catholics, strangely, do not bury their dead at home. Unable to take their place among the clan ancestors, the tipu of people buried in mission cemeteries, like the one located adjacent to Holy Cross, tend to wander and cause trouble, or may even become cen.

Like their neighbours further north in Atiak, the people of Gulu also find credence in the possibility that calypso and other uncanny occurrences at Holy Cross are the work of jogi.

Even though these diverse explications point to a tension between different ontological frames, it would be a misleading caricature to posit that the actions (described in more depth below) and interpretations of the aforementioned people, with respect to the happenings at Holy Cross, can be easily mapped onto collective anxieties over post-war social change. This is not to say that such anxieties are not a prominent feature of daily life in

Acholi. However, the threat of imminent loss—be it of religious, cultural, linguistic, existential, relational, or moral integrity—drives the urgency of judgment and action in much more mundane and messy ways. The question of how one should act in the face of what might appear to be catastrophic cosmological rupture (for example, in collapsing a

!171 complicated compendium of ubiquitous spirits into the category of metaphysical evil, or rejecting all else for medical authority) is not unique to this particular moment. Let me be clear that I do not discount the (ongoing) affects and effects of what amounted to a nearly apocalyptic suffering wrought by the war. Nonetheless, the continuity of less-dramatically- expressed moral urgency, in the face of social change that does indeed happen but is never fully complete, is a legible constancy in mythical and historical moments in Acholi.

Resentment, ressentiment, and the advent of evil

The Acholi, as with all the other east African Luo tribes who trace their primordial origins to the Bahr el Ghazal region of what is now South Sudan, mark their historical separation from the neighbouring Alur in a tale replete with themes of kinship, Otherness, and envy. In 1934,

R. M. Bere, one of the first British administrators of the Acholi sub-region, recounted the story as told by the Rwot of one of the oldest Acholi clans (which he estimated to be between three and four centuries old at the time):

Lwo was the first man, he was without human parents. He sprang from the ground and it was taken that his father was Jok (God) and his mother the earth. Lwo’s son Jpiti, whose mother is unknown, had a daughter Kilak, who was never known to have a husband. At one time, however, she became lost in the bush for a while, no one knew where she had gone. She came back with a male child and it was said that the devil was his father. Labongo was the name given to this child; he was born with bells at his wrists and ankles and with feathers in his hair. There was something definitely satanic about him, for he danced all the time and all the time his bells jingled. (1934b: 65-66)

!172 Though there are several features of this particular account that need to be contextualized within British imperialism and Christian missionization, here the concept of evil must be foregrounded. Bere did not indicate the language in which the Rwot uttered the story, and three words should be considered suspect here: God, devil, and satanic. The use of these Christian terms (either by the Rwot, perhaps a translator, or the administrator) point to the way in which, by the turn of the twentieth century, Acholi cosmology had been radically transformed and was, as a result, made intelligible to European colonial authorities and missionaries. Whether jok or Jok is equatable to the Christian God is still widely contested.

That the radical difference of the wilderness was considered evil is additionally suspect; rather the bush might be considered an amoral contrast to social spaces.

Crazzolara, the aforementioned Italian Roman Catholic priest who lived in and around the Acholi region for three decades, recounted a sequel to this origin story which “has had far reaching consequences and has ever since been deeply impressed on the minds of the descendants of those implicated” (1937: 10). In Crazzolara’s telling, Labongo was referred to not as the son of the devil, but as the son of Olum.119 Labongo had a brother named Gipir with whom he quarrelled: Gipir had used Labongo’s most precious spear and lost it when he struck an elephant, which took it into the bush. Labongo ordered its retrieval at all costs. So

Gipir went deep into the wilderness to the den of elephants, where he met the spirit called

Lubanga,120 which appeared to him in the form of a large female elephant (Min lyec). “This

119 This name comes from the word lum (grass or bush), and so Olum means, roughly, “of the wilderness.” The taunt frequently levelled against ex-LRA combatants, “olum olum,” is particularly hurtful. 120 Recall (see ch. 3) that Lubanga is the word used for the Christian God amongst Protestants in Acholi.

!173 Lubanga could turn into elephant or man at will,” noted Crazzolara (ibid.). After Gipir had assured the spirit that his hunting was neither cruel or excessive, she relinquished Labongo’s spear and gave Gipir a gift of food and beads. Gipir returned home, delighted with his new beads, but a child of Labongo ate one of them. Enraged, Gipir killed Labongo’s child in order to extract his precious bead (in some versions, it is Labongo who kills his own child out of frustration). The brothers were forever divided after this event, and so Labongo stayed in their ancestral land (Acholi), while Gipir crossed the Nile into the West and became the father of the Alur tribe.

The resentment between Gipir and Labongo was intractable, but the shared origins of the Alur and the Acholi obligate mutual recognition. It is less certain whether the act of recognition is warranted if one’s foe is not human or not fully so, his or her intentions unclear or even evil. If, in Christian Acholi, the devil lives “out there” in the bush, or if

Lubanga’s wealth brings only jealously and violence, what was once amoral difference becomes evil.

Elsewhere, Nietzsche’s first essay in On the Genealogy of Morality (2006 [1887]) makes the argument that Euro-Christian morality emerged not from “the” spirit, but out of a spirit of displaced resentment, by the weak, against the powerful. His philological analysis is that goodness was classically defined simply as the acts performed by the masters (the militarily and politically dominant “over-men” or Übermenschen) in their search for pleasure and power. It was the hate and envy of Judea (especially in its priestly class) against the noble Roman Empire that prompted a new valuation of morality, a re-sentiment

(ressentiment) that defined master morality not only as bad, but as evil, and slaves as

!174 inherently good. For Nietzsche, this slave revolt is an “imaginary revenge,” a creative self- deception that falsely equates suffering with accomplishment and goodness (or, more accurately, not-evil). Slave morality takes weakness as a virtue, insulating the powerless from culpability in their own suffering and re-directing their frustration to a distorted image of the despised aristocracy. In making the masters slaves (Christian sinners), his polemic offers, the foundation for democratic egalitarianism was laid, and the spectre of evil was imagined into being.

The suffering of northern Uganda, the outpost of an empire and the theatre of post- colonial violence, is powerfully paralleled in the re-sentiment of the “master,” a recurring effigy at which rancour is unleashed: the wealthy outsider, the powerful politician, the beautiful schoolmate, the ruthless rebel soldier. I return to ressentiment below.

Seeds of rancour

Holy Cross was founded in the late 1930s as the first school in northern Uganda dedicated solely to the education of girls. It attracted students from across the North, but its initial success was short-lived. The Italian Comboni sisters who lived and taught on the grounds of the school were harassed by the British Protectorate during the Second World War, which at one point used the school as a barracks for its soldiers. Though by the 1950s Holy Cross was once again a respected primary and secondary school for girls, staffed then by a mix of local and foreign instructors, girls who boarded at the school periodically complained of being disturbed by unseen forces at night. One former pupil from those early days recalled that girls in her dormitory used to wake up during the night complaining of feeling strangled. In

!175 our conversations, she pondered and wondered if the problem of malevolent spirits was due to the cen of Italians killed in the area during WWII, or perhaps of the tipu of missionaries buried within or near the school compound. The problem of mission ghosts was an ongoing problem in many colonial schools not only in the North, but in the country as a whole, which hosted missions from the French Roman Catholic White Fathers, the Italian Verona Fathers, and the Anglican Church Missionary Society, among others.121

During the regime of Idi Amin (1971-1979), the school’s fortunes suffered once again when its expatriate teachers fled the country, and the insecurity that followed his defeat and preceded the Bush War (the civil war of 1981-1986) discouraged students and teachers from continuing at the school. Unfortunately, the northern security situation did not improve with

Yoweri Museveni’s 1986 victory over Kampala, and several rebel groups (composed both of defeated troops tied to the Obote and Okello regimes and newly militarized men) became active in the area. The NRA pursued these men and their communities, and it is purportedly during this time of the new government’s incursions that the problem of underwater people surfaced in Acholi.

The HSMF’s Lakwena (who possessed Alice Auma), had the goal to purify Acholi of witchcraft and of the cen, brought home by Acholi soldiers retreating from atrocities they had committed in Luweero during the Bush War. Though the HSMF was largely composed of voluntary troops and did not abduct children as “recruits” on the same scale as its successor group, it did attack the school and abduct several of the students to forcefully draft them into the movement. The LRA shared the HSMF’s goal to usher in Acholi Manyen (New

121 Though Islam preceded Christianity in Uganda (the CMS first came in 1877), it had a much more modest long-term impact on the populace and on the country’s educational structures.

!176 Acholi), a morally purified society that left behind the purported evil of Acholi Macon (Old

Acholi), and they began abducting youth in much greater numbers to fill their ranks.122

Those who could afford to send their children to schools outside of the North did so. Despite this rampant insecurity, many of the girls from around northern Uganda, not just Acholi, coveted spots at Holy Cross during this time, which still had a prestigious reputation for quality instruction. Those girls who had their school fees at Holy Cross sponsored by well- wishers did not dare complain of their fear, lest they show disrespect.123

During the late 1980s throughout the 1990s, pupils at Holy Cross habitually slept in their dormitory bunks with their shoes on, always prepared for abduction. The violence came in fits and starts over the years, and the security of the school sometimes changed dramatically from term to term. At times there was less reason to “feel free,” and piny rac

(bad surroundings) impacted their ability to learn and live happily at the school. One alumna, who was a student at the school in the mid to late 1990s, reflected on what it was like to be a student at that time. She described a strict but rewarding routine of study, play, and prayer.

She also recalled chronic tension and fear, when evening preparatory session could no longer happen because the girls were preventatively locked in their dorms immediately after supper

(or sometimes in lieu of it). The school’s walls were patrolled by soldiers who regularly exchanged gunfire—and words—with approaching rebels, all within earshot of the restless girls. Spies frequented the area and when caught; the girls were called to assembly to witness the ensuing interrogations.

122 See chapter 1 for this history. 123 See below for further information on woro, the Acholi norm of respect and comportment.

!177 Today, teachers and students at the school make it known that the school is an enduring and cosmopolitan institution, despite its tribulations. Like all secondary schools in

Uganda, English is the language of instruction and the lingua franca of students and teachers, who are of varied linguistic and tribal origins. Though the school is Roman

Catholic, pupils who belong to the Anglican Church of Uganda and various charismatic revival movements (both Catholic and Protestant) are granted time in the school’s chapel to hold worship and prayer services.124 For many Acholi girls, their arrival at Holy Cross marks their most marked exposure to the world outside of their home villages or, during the last ten years of the war, their first time out of the camps: full of both novelty and danger. During the period of my fieldwork,125 many friends, acquaintances, and strangers, upon discovering my interest in issues of cen and other spirits, urged me towards Holy Cross. It was, they said, a hotbed of cen or “something.”

The girls at Holy Cross, who come from inside and outside Acholi, also demonstrate necessary discernment in light of myriad unknowns: Are the spirits who have possessed the girls evil, and aligned with Satan? Are they wartime ghosts? Or are they amoral beings, indigenous to the Acholi landscape? Are there spirits within these girls at all? Is Sister

Dorothy untrustworthy because she is an Alur with rituals from “out”? What was Paska’s intention in admitting to have dreamed of being offered human blood? Did she know or understand herself?

124 While there is a minority of Muslim students as well, there are no specific religious observances held for these girls at the school. 125 With the help of friends who were either the relatives of present and former Holy Cross students, or were graduates themselves, I eventually came to make regular visits to the school and its surroundings and become acquainted with students and teachers. I discuss this in more detail below.

!178 2. Is the Pope Catholic? Navigating Underdeterminism

They play at the ballroom dance And I do not follow the steps of foreign songs On the gramophone records. And I cannot tune the radio Because I do not hear Swahili or Luganda.

— p’Bitek, Song of Lawino (2008 [1972]: 49)

The girls of Holy Cross have much to wonder about. Their 2012 outbreak of calypso re- invigorated a widespread interrogation of the uncanny that illuminated a public sentiment of resentment. To whom, or what, this resentment is directed is unclear. The acts of the girls and the townspeople did not reflect a simple critique of the powerful, but ethical judgment in a milieu of sustained uncertainty. Even though the misfortunes and illnesses caused by some spirits may be propitiated by acts of sacrifice and/or other ritual measures, the explanations for and solutions to the problems at Holy Cross are far from straightforward. To whom, or what, does one turn to when misfortune is pervasive? How does one determine the reason or source of unfortunate circumstances or events? How should one act in face of, or feel about, what might be called “ordinary crises”? Like Lawino, who does not “hear” (understand)

Swahili or Luganda, but can still recognize their (what sounds to her as) distorted sounds, the girls were challenged to make sense of and respond to confusing, infuriating, and frightening experiences. In this context, “moral” crises are so pervasive that there is no rational

!179 distinction to be made between ethics as extraordinary self-reflection and moral systems as sets of ordinary, unquestioned norms.

Jarrett Zigon, in his reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time, recounts breakdown as the moment when something that is “usually ready-to-hand becomes present-to-hand,” in this sense meaning that instances of moral crisis illuminate moral criteria themselves. While

Zigon roughly equates Heidegger’s concept of breakdown with Foucault’s notion of problematization, Laidlaw disputes their interchangeability. For Foucault, problematization refers not to discrete events (breakdown), but it is rather part of his genealogical method wherein historical eras are analyzed according to what they “problematized”: the ideas that people took as subjects of reflection, concern, and uncertainty (Laidlaw 2013: 119). For

Mattingly, the striving inherent in ordinary ethics includes the reality that people are often

“plagued by the threat of moral tragedy” (2014: 11). In considering this distinction, the practices and performances around and about the events at Holy Cross reflect do not reflect moral breakdown, but a consistent problematization of ontology, politics, violence, gender, and class. This runs in additional contrast to Lempert’s suggestion that immanence implies the “localizability” of ethics (2013: 379), or that it somehow neglects discursive entanglements. On the contrary, inter-subjectivity is part and parcel of everyday moral striving, discernment, and judgment. I explore these registers of problematization, of the threat of tragedy, below. They are the stuff of ordinary judgment and self-cultivation, and they occasion new and unexpected ways of becoming in northern Uganda. I suggest that in order to understand the ethical, anthropological evaluations of phenomena such as “those

!180 who go underwater” ought to dwell in underdeterminacy as much as they acknowledge more readily transparent explications.

Wealth, women, and water

When women fight at wells or other sources of water,126 they are likely to provoke the wrath of jok kulu (water-dwelling spirits) onto themselves and their children. But the dangers of jok kulu at village streams and wells seem almost provincial in comparison to the threats that emanate from bodies of water further and further away from the moral centre of kith and kin:

Karuma Falls, the cataract of the Nile that separates northern Uganda from the rest of the country; Lake Victoria, that intimidatingly large Bantu lake which has swallowed many a ship; the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, with their unfathomable depths. Water is like the bush: dangerous not only because of its physical properties, but as a space and substance outside of the moral order of sociality.127

By 2006, around the time when the LRA was expelled from Uganda’s borders and a ceasefire was implemented in the North, the residents of Gulu Town were still coping with an insidious fear less obvious than armed conflict. Those who go under water were thought to be unusually active on the streets, abducting children and harvesting their blood and their souls. Nearly everyone had a story about the underwater people, and unlike jok, cen, tipu and

126 This behaviour is known as one of many types of kiir, or abominations. See Victor 2007; Victor and Porter 2017. 127 See Porter 2016, for further discussion on the cosmological and social consequences of the LRA in the wilderness, including the taboo of sex in the bush. I acknowledge that the idea of water being an amoral substance or space outside of human sociality is not a cultural universal, and that in many contexts the opposite is true. Here, I simply refer to how water figures in the narratives of my Acholi interlocutors.

!181 the like, the issue was and is discussed primarily in terms of moral condemnation, or at least with more certainty than acknowledgements of the capriciousness of spirits. Largely cut off from the economic centre of Kampala and with most of the population still dependent on food aid, residents in both town and camp were suspicious of prosperity. Local business people, including one of Paska’s elder sisters, were (and still are) accused of acquiring their fine wares from workshops under water. Some girls from Holy Cross give the advice that it is prudent to use second-hand goods; finer things are likely to have been produced under water and will mark the bearer as a target for lute pii recruitment. Anybody with unusual levels of success and wealth are suspect, and at Holy Cross such people could be picked out in the dining hall, where “their juice never gets finished,” meaning their most treasured treat was never depleted.

“Those” underwater people are related to, or are themselves, part of a mysterious cabal; President Museveni, the Pope, and most priests are themselves Illuminati or those of underwater. Beyoncé, I was told, is the Queen of the Water, and she counts most celebrity singers among her ranks. How else could they produce music so quickly and so beautifully?

The devil, after all, plays the best tunes.128 These convictions are buttressed by extraordinary tales and confessions by those who have admitted to have travelled under water: perhaps intentionally, perhaps unintentionally. That so many devout Catholics should question the

128 Passengers of one prominent bus company in the North, which ferries travellers outside of the region, reported their coach stopping in the middle of the bridge that traverses the Nile at Karuma. An enormous snake blocked the way, and it guided the entire bus (passengers and all) under the river. The passengers were made to slave away in this underwater workshop of fine wares, and they emerged with foggy recollections. Mothers pierced the ears of their children throughout Gulu, as abductors for these devilish workshops are interested solely in unmarked, unblemished, and whole bodies. Others claimed to have drunk human blood from a throne under water, reached by cracking chicken eggs on the surface and riding a great crocodile into the depths.

!182 Pope’s trustworthiness, but still continue to worship and carry out rituals, is indicative of the ethical discernment performed on a daily basis.

The conditions of underdetermination in Gulu are heightened by teenage jealousy and the most recent war between the Government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, but not only this. The idioms through which people think about the ethical are mediated by centuries of British imperialism, Italian missions, mediascapes of Nigerian and American films and music, medicine, political violence, institutionalized education, Catholic and

Anglican communions, Islam, new waves of independent charismatic and pentecostal churches, and the list goes on. Most surely, spirits in Acholi are interpreted in increasingly complex ways, as new symbols are mapped onto more familiar ontologies. Though the figure of the person who goes underwater or the fabulously wealthy Illuminati is recent in Acholi, it is reminiscent of much more longstanding concerns over the nature of moral regulation. In

Acholi, as elsewhere, it behooves senior members of families and clans to redistribute their wealth. Those who fail in this central obligation of kinship, particularly those who do not regularly return to their villages from new lives in town, are morally suspect. At present, the figure of the self-made man or the independent woman is an anomaly, and one that has prompted talk of witchcraft, underwater dealings, and violence.129

The expression cwiny pe tek (“the heart is not strong”) is commonly uttered in reference to the preponderance of women and girls who are affected by disembodied spirits.

For the “Ocols” or modernists of Uganda, this gendered turn of phrase is medicalized. The radio station that announced the problem to be “hysteria” tapped into a modernist narrative in

129 See, for example, Seebach 2016 on the case of Gulu’s notorious “Mr. Red.”

!183 Uganda that takes just as many interpretive and creative twists as “traditional” cosmology.

The explanatory model of science is especially taken up in conversation about the inalienable truths of differences between tribes of Ugandans, between Africans and Europeans, between men and women,130 between village and city, between North and South. So though the physician who attended the girls at Holy Cross treated them with compassion and respect, and though she was annoyed by how her words were taken up in the media, her conclusion was thus: “To me, what the radio said was absolutely right: it wasn’t evil spirits.” The doctor suspected that the girls were suffering from somatic conversion disorder. Early adolescence is a very stressful time, she explained to the students. One cannot contain all the stresses of family, school, and social lives; it manifests itself in bodily affliction.

New ways of becoming

My husband rejects me Because he says That I am a mere pagan And I believe in the devil. He says I do not know The rules of health, And I mix up Matters of health and superstitions.

— p’Bitek, Song of Lawino (2008 [1972]: 101)

130 One schoolgirl stated by way of explanation: “You know, girls like nice things.” By virtue of their gender, they are more likely to be possessed (girls fear), to give in to temptation (they like nice things), and to go mad if they do not have the attentions of their boyfriends (hysteria).

!184 In their studies of possessed female Malay factory workers and Malagasy schoolgirls, respectively, Aihwa Ong (1988) and Lesley Sharp (1990) argue that possession is produced by the uncomfortable and disruptive traversing of moral boundaries in an increasingly confusing world. In Malaysia, Ong refers to female factory workers as representative of a nascent proletariat, where rapid urbanization and industrialization in the 1970s and 1980s corresponded to afflictive spirit possession becoming the problem of young, single women, nearly “overnight” (1988: 29). Previously, possession by hantu beings occurred almost exclusively in married women, but this new form of disruptive possession in the workplace enabled, following I.M. Lewis, “a traditional way of rebelling against authority without punishment…a rebellion against transgressions of indigenous boundaries governing proper human relations and moral justice” (ibid.: 33). Though Ong writes against the medicalization of possession and the managerial control of women’s bodies in factories (including the manipulation of local healers and the practice of displacing blame onto individual workers by way of ethnotherapeutic expertise), something of psychological assumption is smuggled back into her ultimate analysis. “Their participation as an industrial force is subconsciously perceived by themselves and their families as a threat to the ordering of Malay culture,” she writes, “The spirit idiom is therefore a language of protest against these changing social circumstances” (38).

Meanwhile, in northwest Madagascar, Sharp has described the possession of adolescent girls by dangerous Njarinintsy spirits (both individually and en masse at schools) as a provisional “means through which to express the chaos inherent in their daily lives” (1990: 339). Like the cosmopolitan student body at Holy Cross, the town of Ambanja

!185 hosts migrants from diverse cultural backgrounds that grapple with the transformations brought by French colonialism, plantation agriculture and socialist reform, the introduction of foreign capital, the undermined authority of local royalty, and the presence of the Catholic church. Sharp refers to the town as existing in a state of anomie, a concept introduced by

Durkheim to describe the circumstances of disrupted social order (ibid.: 341). Even though

Sharp departs from Durkheim’s focus on reified “society” (considering that, as a concept, it strains a necessary examination of human agency) her focus here is on how possession reflects the intricacies of agency, and not necessarily how the agents of possession (the forces or spirits) might be actors.131

In concluding that spirit possession is definitively idiomatic or metaphorical, or a tool of subconscious critique, something of the uncertainty of those lived experiences, as well as the ethical (the judgments and intents of both people and spirits) is lost. The acts of immanent spirits in Acholi, not to mention the immanent and transcendent acts of God and

Satan, disrupt collective knowledge of the recent past and the future, and they beg acknowledgement. At the same time, the girls themselves interpreted the doctor’s and the radio announcer’s words to mean that they were faking their affliction, not that they were being acknowledged as the victims of the ravishes of modernity or late capitalism. Their insistence that they be recognized not as hysterical schoolgirls but as the victims of a deeply dangerous and malevolent conspiracy pushed back against attempts to medicalize or pathologize their bodily comportment. But it also re-inserted the underdetermined and the affective into the public conversation dominated by experts: doctors, lawyers, radio

131 Later, in revisiting young female mediums in Ambanja, Sharp (1995) does much to rectify this omission, focusing on the social critiques offered by youthful tromba spirits against royal ancestors.

!186 announcers, missionaries, university graduates come home from Kampala, NGO workers, blog writers, social scientists—Ocol’s modern voice, ushering in reason.

Much anthropological work has also been done in recent years on that which concerns the proliferation of occult conspiracies, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, contextualized by the social pressures wrought by multiply-conceived modernities (for example, West and Sanders 2003) and, for Marxists, late-stage capitalism (for example,

Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, 2001; Ong 1988; Taussig 2010). How to best live with and understand one another and (the “Other”), how to make sense of the failed or failing promises of varied economic structures, religious dictums, and expectations of modernity

(Ferguson 1999) in an overwhelmingly connected (but fundamentally disjointed) time disrupts time itself, and as such ordinary life and ethics take on eschatological dimensions.

These are compelling ethnographic comparisons. The ubiquity of uncanny disturbances at schools throughout Uganda (and without), often reported through the print and online editions of daily newspapers132 lends itself to the “seductive analytics” (Sanders

2008) that serve to instrumentalize the “occult” as an idiom for critiquing neoliberal modernity. Sanders, in his examination of “bus-devil” stories common in Dar es Salaam,

132 In the first half of 2015, for example, English-language national newspaper The Daily Monitor (privately owned by the Kenyan-based Nation Media) published articles entitled “School Closed Over Demon Claims” (8 March), “School Closed Over Alleged Demon Attacks” (16 April), “School Shut Down Over Demon Scare” (6 June), and “School to Reopen after Closure over Demons” (27 July). Each article concerns a unique case from a unique region of Uganda, not just Acholi or the North. Though the physical and electronic archives of the two main national dailies (The Daily Monitor and government-owned New Vision) are subject to significant erasure, my most basic searches and physical collections produced 28 articles (covering 20 separate cases in 18 districts) on the topic of “school demons” for the years 2002 to 2015. This number does not include editorial pieces, of which there are many. More significantly, this tally does not consider the number of cases which go entirely unreported (for reasons of shame, fear, disinterest, journalistic priority, etc.). Recently (2014), sociologist Robert Bartholomew has compiled a worldwide survey of cases of “mass hysteria” in schools since 1566, which are common through time and geographic location.

!187 urges anthropologists to consider occult discourses not just as reflections of social ruptures

(in the Tanzanian example, between a socialist economic system and a neoliberal one), but also of continuity. This requires a shifting in temporal frame: the ends of time implied in an analytics of rupture (in using the lexicons of post-modern, late-modern, post-colonial, post- war, etc.) might serve as an “ill-fitting theoretical straightjacket” (2008: 124) whereas a consideration of the continuities of doubt and dissatisfaction in lived experience is also necessary. A space to recount contradiction, uncertainty, and ambivalence—an analytic of underdeterminacy—is opened up by this approach, as is time itself. Rather than thinking of those involved in the Holy Cross affair as placeable on a linear timeline replete with ruptures in knowledge and positionality (crudely speaking, with spots for the traditionalists, the

Catholics and Anglicans, the Charismatic Christians, the medical and psychosocial modernists), an analytic of underdeterminacy makes visible the spectres and uncertainties that point to non-linear possibilities. My goal here is not to provide a novel explanation of such phenomena or to offer a dramatically different take on theories of possession (broadly construed). Rather, I wish to dwell on how action in the face of particular circumstances—be they attributed to spirit possession or haunting or something else—is inherently tied to the immanent and imminent dimensions of ethical projects. Put in other words, how do people, in their ordinary struggles to become and remain full, responsible human persons (in Acholi, dano adana), interpret, cope with, and act upon the underdetermined?

In reflecting on this scholarly urge to not only weigh in on the value of particular explanatory models (the psychological, the functionalist, etc.) but to actually (re)produce them, I propose a shift in temporal framing. In looking to what spirits might bring about in

!188 the future, rather than solely what they are or from whence they have come, in the case of

Holy Cross one has a more meaningful grasp on what is at stake for the “possessed and dispossessed.” Durkheim’s suggestion that reality can only be understood by trained scientists, and not described or explained by those living in it (Laidlaw 2013: 20), is replicated in the poststructuralist hermeneutics of suspicion. This is an ethnographic problem. As Michel de Certeau remarked on the possessions at Loudun in 16th century

France, “history is never sure,” but “deviltries are at once symptoms and transitional solutions” (2000: 2). The uncertainty of the future, and the rejection of present limits, are indispensable elements of epistemological crises, not riddles to be solved. This is not to say that people do not perceive reality as relatively transparent, or that no explanation is ever obvious and no debunking of the strange every occurs. But in resisting the impulse to explain with unwavering authority, an anthropologist approaches an interpretive judgment more in keeping with the vagaries of lived experience.

Consider the different possible explanatory frameworks—hysteria, psychogenic illness, conversion disorder, lute pii, cen, tipu dano, devils, etc.—as possible types. They belong to langue, not parole; everyday judgments are taken from the symbolic repertoire characterized in the figures of both Lawino and Ocol, not either or. Jack Sidnell, in his lucid demonstration of how ordinary ethics are woven into everyday speech interactions, notes, following J. L. Austin and others, that "interaction is itself a moral and ethical domain. When persons interact, they necessarily and unavoidably assess whether they are being heard, ignored, and so on" (2010: 124). Language as action (Lambek 2010) is central to understanding what is at stake in the ordinary as well as extraordinary times of contemporary

!189 post-war northern Uganda. While I do not consider micro-level linguistics here, the centrality of language rings true. For Paska, she judged many moments of her precarious situation at

Holy Cross to warrant the most prudent response: silence. When she did act by speaking, it was not to deny the reality of devils, but simply to assert that she had no recollection of ever having been in league with them, only of an ominous dream. Her interpretation left open the possibilities of what might come next. Meanwhile, Laber did the work of negotiating her own conceptions of the world with what she saw unfolding in front of her: “I tried to feel the pain she was in,” she said of Paska, and pondered Christian exegesis and the incommensurability of demons and air-born diseases. Ultimately she weighed the risks to her own social capital and her own soul and made the choice to befriend Paska. It was an act not to be taken lightly: she was rejected not only by classmates and teachers, but by family members and neighbours once she too left the school. In practicing reflective judgment they found new ways of relating to each other and to themselves that went beyond the extant symbolic resources.

For their classmates and successors at Holy Cross, as well as the ecumenical interveners, the problem of calypso exemplifies the immanence of history and the imminent possible crises of the future erupting into the present. Cen, the vengeful ghost of a human poorly treated at death or burial, is also folded into new and different instantiations. The phrase cen me te pii, or underwater cen, is also used to describe the “something” at Holy

Cross and in Gulu that has caused so much moral concern. While such a turn might repurpose the problem of unacknowledged death and dying, it is alternatively understood to be synonymous with Catan (Satan) or in league with him. A person who considers all jok (pl.

!190 jogi), cen, kwaro (ancestors), tipu dano (human shadows), cen me te pii to be inherently evil, existential threats without the possibility of meaning, propitiation or domestication, is cultivating a moral stance in line with Pentecostalism’s “break with the past.” But as many ethnographers have recently shown, such a break is never clean, the community of Christian brothers and sisters is in constant flux, and an exclusively eschatological orientation is not easily realized.133

But of course, change does occur, and authority is challenged. When a girl asserts to her peers, teachers, even the District Chairman, that she is being made to suffer by lute pii, she is also conveying her own character: she is a righteous follower of Jesus Christ, whose blood is attractive to the fallen, and she suspects the end times are near. This performance leaves less room for the reproduction of a moral community predicated on the supreme value of elderly, sexually productive men, and opens cracks for the cultivation of all sorts of subjectivities. When a radio announcer publicizes that girls have been taken over by

“hysteria," or when a physician insists that people should speak of the problem of Holy

Cross in terms of somatic conversion disorder, they are making a claim for modernity, science, and the values of reason and progress. They, too, make available new types of persons that the students might emulate and become. They mark themselves in opposition to the backwardness, superstition, and ignorance of village "spirit talk,” but often preclude

Christian prayer (a perfectly modern practice) from their condemnations. Still others stake their claims as moral Acholi, obedient to the needs of both their living and dead clan kin, and they struggle to balance the spiritual pollution caused by the horrors of war. And yet, these

133 See for example Daswani 2015; van Dijk and Werbner 1998; Engelke 2010; Meyer 1998; Shaw 2007.

!191 stances might be said to be ethical ideals, not immutable categories, and as such they are messy; ideas flowing into words and out of them, and the moving target of meaning always open to interpretation for speakers and listeners. It is the individuals who are unwavering in the certainty of their convictions who are curiously both admired and suspect. They are islands in the unruly river of symbolic material.

3. Who Do You Think You Are? Judgment, self-knowledge, and the outsider

We will arrest All the village poets Musicians and tribal dancers, Put in detention Folk-story tellers And myth makers, The sustainers of village morality;

We’ll disband The nest of court historians Glorifiers of the past, We will ban The stupid village anthem of ‘Backwards ever Forwards never.’

*

To the gallows With all the Professors Of Anthropology

—p’Bitek, Song of Ocol, (2008 [1989]: 129)

!192 One evening in August of 2014 I was at a friend’s house not far from the compound of Holy

Cross. We had gathered with a small group of researchers and friends, both local and foreign, to share a meal and conversation. Looking out over the grasslands to the north of the house, someone remarked that a lion had recently been spotted nearby and that the Ugandan

Wildlife Authority was investigating. There was some debate as to the veracity of this story, and what quickly emerged from the conversation was the rumour that the lion was in fact a shapeshifter, someone who can turn into ngur (a beast of prey).134 Our hosts recounted that a friend of theirs, a British man, had left their home late one night and had a terrifying encounter with what he swore was a lion, just on the main road. Prossy, an Acholi woman who worked as a researcher and interpreter, said plainly: “It’s the fact that it’s a White who saw it that makes me believe. If it was a Black I would just think it’s superstition.”

Prossy’s racial calculus is demonstrative of a tendency amongst Ugandans to self- deprecation, stemming from a long history of colonial violence and continued “White” intervention, scholarly and other. The power (both perceived and real) of foreigners, commonly (though not exclusively) of European extraction, is a locus of expectation, desire, admiration, trust, suspicion, and resentment. To take the muno’s words as unquestionable gospel is a self-colonization that reverberates in all intersubjective acts. What this means is

134 As is the case with the abiba and its supposed Alur origins (see note 118, above), when people speak of those who are able to shift into ngur, they usually point to it being a phenomenon of a proximate Other, unknown traditionally in Acholi. Okidi, for example, asserted that certain tribes do not use spears to hunt, they simply turn into beasts. Such shifting is real (unlike fictional werewolves in movies), he said, and the ability is found amongst the Kakwa tribe of West Nile and amongst certain South Sudanese people adjacent to them. Such people are identifiable by the hair that grows under their nails and by their revulsion towards malakwang (a plant of the Hibiscus genus that is cooked as a staple food in Acholi homes). For Okidi, this is telling: if a visitor comes to your home, you must first serve malakwang, otherwise you have made it clear that you do not love them. A ngur is not welcome in the home.

!193 that interactions with the Other are always at least partially pre-determined by a hermeneutics of history and power. No stranger is a tabula rasa; the symbols of skin and language elicit familiar affects and expectations. It is because of how I was interpreted as a symbol, before or in spite of my own self-assertions, that I came to know the people at Holy

Cross. Though these interpretations came with built-in privileges that advanced my own scholarly interests, the same symbols left me open to ressentiment. Like Paska (and later, to her), I was a volatile person: underdetermined.

I was introduced to Holy Cross during my first stays in Gulu in 2008 and 2009, where I met many alumni simply by virtue of getting to know local research colleagues and making friends. My first entry into Acholi was through a research NGO staffed by well- educated and well-connected employees, and many of the women were Old Girls of Holy

Cross and one in particular who told me stories of boarding there during some of the most intense fighting in the war. Meanwhile, friends, colleagues, gate guards, house ladies, and other acquaintances all knew of my interest in matters of cen and jogi and so forth, and when

I returned for my doctoral fieldwork in 2013, several people urged me to investigate what had happened at Holy Cross the year before. Though suspected “demon attacks” on schools are not unusual in Uganda (see above), the consistency of worry over Holy Cross was remarkable, and a number of people independently told me the details of the girls’ strike that had happened in the ten months since my last visit to Gulu in 2012. I have provided a

!194 description of the strike and of the events of the decade before by triangulating the data that I collected from late 2013 to September 2014.135

This data was of course mediated by the unreliable nature of memory, by the motives of the speakers, by confirmation bias and prestige bias, and all the other factors inherent in social research. What is crucial here is that I have tried to strike a balance between that triangulation for the sake of intelligibility and a representation of the fundamental aporia around which my interlocutors have and must continue to live their lives. The uncertainty over what had and was happening at Holy Cross was expressed by the girls present during some of the most dramatic events described above, as well as those who had only heard second or third-hand accounts of the troubles. When two friends independently proposed that

I study the Illuminati, my response: “Who or what is the Illuminati?” elicited the suggestion that I educate myself not by conversing with others, but by gathering information on the

Internet - that unwieldy morass of symbols. Phrased differently, these interpretations are open ended but always mired in the politics of authority: the White researcher, the written word, the computer screen.

My friends and interlocutors’ interpretations of the subjects and objects of my research, of the parameters of ethnography and of sociocultural anthropology, and of my own

135 I collected 25 in-depth interviews with current and former pupils, current and former teachers, former students of the neighbouring boys’ school, clergy and medical personnel, neighbours of the school, the former RDC who was called by the girls to intervene, Laber, and Paska’s elder sister. I conducted the majority of the formal interviews in English, while some were conducted in Acholi with the assistance of a native Acholi-speaker. I supplement this material with 24 months of field note observations made in Uganda, many informal conversations had with my Ugandan interlocutors (including, but not limited to, those who agreed to formal interviews), and analysis of newspaper, radio, and online reports of Holy Cross (where available) and the problem of school possessions more generally. In order to protect the staff, students, and alumni of the school, I have not provided citations for those media sources which identify the school or its students by name.

!195 personhood and reasons for being in Acholi, were indicative of the same work that goes into articulating the experiences of Holy Cross. After having spoken to some current and former students during the Christmas and New Year break, I was given mixed advice about approaching the school to speak with the teachers. The administration was still reeling from the disobedience the girls had shown the year before, and did not permit students to speak of calypso or to “dramatize” in case they created another school-wide disturbance. For others, this attitude was simply further evidence of the senior staff’s conspiracy in demon worship.

Despite these cautions, girls told me that they knew of many teachers and students who would enthusiastically make my acquaintance, as long as our meetings did not happen in any obvious official capacity at the school. And so I became a shadowy figure myself.

At the end of the war, an American NGO with evangelical roots had chosen Holy

Cross as one of several northern schools to be recipient for infrastructural aid (new classroom blocks, new dormitories, books and supplies, etc.), but also for an exchange program between Ugandan and American teachers. NGO staff regularly visited the school and successive waves of American visitors came through. Consequently, as an obvious foreigner with white skin, I went unnoticed in the Holy Cross compound when I came to meet particular teachers, but as always, individuals read me as having expert knowledge and solutions to the school’s problems. Mr. Nyero, a teacher who lived with his family in a private house within Holy Cross’s walls, was enthusiastic about my project as he thought research might end the uncertainty and provide an official explanation for the school’s ills.

With everyone, I was transparent about my abilities, limitations, and goals as a researcher,

!196 but those utterances could only mitigate the powerful symbol of my white body. To reiterate, that symbol is full of potentiality, and it elicits varied affects.

Encounters with a mythical figure

Drawing from Adam Smith and Jean Améry, Didier Fassin has written that the moral indignation of “resentment” can be understood in contrast to the moral sentiment of

Nietzsche’s “ressentiment” (2013). What he means by this distinction is that “resentment” characterizes a reaction to pain inflicted by others, expressed in such a way as to force the inflicter to acknowledge (or make amends for) his or her actions. To feel resentment, however, the wrong-doer and the wronged must be on relatively equal footing. In contrast, ressentiment cannot produce mutual understanding between perpetrator and victim (if such a distinction can indeed be made) because it is a moral sentiment experienced by the dominated, the weak, the marginalized, and the powerless. “The source of ressentiment,”

Fassin writes, “is the ‘thirst for revenge’ that erupts as the result of a reaction of frustration provoked by a combination of envy for what one does not have and of impotence to obtain it, but it is neither mere anger nor pure emotion: it supposes the work of time and of consciousness” (2013: 252).

The work of time and consciousness is uncertain: who or what is one becoming, who is she, who am I? The difference between a witch (in Acholi, lajok or latar) and one who is bewitched is strikingly similar to the one who is resented and him who resents, or

Nietzsche’s masters and slaves. The uncertainty that one might be a witch and not even know it—that the radical other might actually be oneself, one’s family members, or closest

!197 confidants (Geschiere 2013; Bubandt 2014), requires a constant moral vigilance. Favret-

Saada (2012b) describes witchcraft in the French Bocage as a provoking “a fundamental suspicion about the frailty of the social contract, and simultaneously to provide a means of consolidating this latter through a perpetual activity of group and self-reconstruction— activities whose outcomes are in fact equally precarious” (2012b: 52). In the Bocage, where there is no emic distinction made between witchcraft and sorcery (in the way described by

Evans-Pritchard in Azande),136 the antagonistic traits of witches and the bewitched produce the conditions for witchcraft attacks. On the one hand, the bewitched is respectful to rules of reciprocity and the upholding of the social contract, but he can only passively suffer because he does not have the active (little-understood) Force of the witch. On the other, the witch is infinitely greedy for the possessions, health, and lives of others. He is invulnerable, has the power of unseen Force, and is an inveterate transgressor of the rules of reciprocity (Favret-

Saada 2012b: 49-51). Meanwhile, Nietzsche’s slave morality also hinges on a passivity and suffering that renders its subjects good in opposition to the masters. In the Bocage, “one cannot be simultaneously good and strong, good and active, good and prosperous, good and, in the long term, alive,” (Favret-Saada 2012b: 51).

In considering the sociopolitical situation of northern Uganda as it is reflected in the ordinary crises at Holy Cross, the indignant attitudes of Paska’s many accusers can be cast as

136 Scholars continue to debate the cross-cultural relevancy of differentiating witchcraft and sorcery (as advanced by Evans-Pritchard), and the appropriateness of the terms “witch” and “witchcraft” compared to “magic,” “sorcery,” “force,” “occult powers,” etc. In Azande, according to Evans- Pritchard, sorcery is acquired or learned techniques of object and word manipulation, whereas witchcraft is an often-unintentional embodied subjectivity with a psychic component (Bubandt 2014: 2-3, 247). In Acholi, a variety of terms are used to identify “such things” and the speaker’s language and social orientations are determining factors in term choice. In my presence (and likely suspect to the utterer’s self-censorship), the words “witch” and “witchdoctor” are most commonly used by English-speaking Acholi, but these terms expand considerably in Acholi.

!198 ressentiment on one register, and resentment in another. Concurrently, and though I did not hear her labelled as such, seeing her situation through the lens of oppositional characteristics and the frailty of the social contract puts Paska in the light of witchery. She was a schoolgirl from northern Uganda during a period of agonizing social and political violence—her circumstances in 2002 were only minimally more fortunate than some of her peers, in the grand scheme of history. In this way the detractors amongst her classmates were resentful, and pushed her to admit her moral follies and acknowledge her part in their suffering. But

Paska was also cast as a symbol far greater and more provocative than any individual schoolgirl, devil worshipper or not. As a mnemonic for the pain of the North, of the marginalization of silly schoolgirls, of precariousness, of the terror of wondering what will come next, Paska provokes ressentiment. So much so that in the course of my research, some alumnae of Holy Cross from the 1990s, before Paska’s time, were certain she had been the subject of discussion then as well.

Resentment and ressentiment are complementary; part of a historical process of which we, as anthropologists, are a part. Lambek, in his commentary on Fassin’s piece, remarks that in considering our informants’ remarks, “The trick is how to simultaneously acknowledge and critique” their positions” (Fassin 2013: 262). Anthropologists are social actors, however much they might erase themselves from scholarly narratives, and their judgments and actions have consequences that feed into the lived experiences of their interlocutors. During the final period of my doctoral fieldwork, I had for many months wondered what had become of Paska. I worked on my own ethical practice, making constant judgements over the credibility of my interlocutors, of their own motivations, of my own

!199 motivations, and always wondering how to respond to the questions that were posed back in my direction: “What do you think? Are the Illuminati real? Is Paska the Queen of the

Ocean?” I deflected such questions as much as I could, but I am not certain my judgment amounted to “the good.” How might I answer without unduly provoking ressentiment or violence against Paska? In the “troubled waters” where ethics and politics meet (Fassin

2015), the question of public sentiment also poses a challenge for the ethical life of the ethnographer.

As she had been “chased,” rumours of her whereabouts seemed to me to be never more than that. Nonetheless, I did discover that I was acquainted with several people who knew her sister, Fiona, and they told me that Fiona was fond of research and was likely to agree to a meeting. Fiona commiserated with me and discussed the experiences of her sister and family with a generous frankness. She suggested several people who might prove to be knowledgeable on the topic. Though I wanted to speak with Paska, I did not want to cause her undo harm by re-opening old wounds, and so I was hesitant to pursue anything further.

However, I was willing to travel to Kampala, where Paska now lived, in order to mitigate any discomfort. Fiona thought that this was reasonable, and so she proposed to speak to

Paska immediately. She called both Paska and Laber in my presence in order to vouch for my character and ask that they permit me to speak with them in person. Fiona described, as I had to her, the purpose of my research and the consent process of participation. She got off the phone, satisfied, and told me that both were expecting my calls.

We parted on good terms and within a week I found myself in the modest sitting room belonging to Laber’s sister. Laber spoke at length about her life and her continuing

!200 friendship with Paska, noting that she was likely to tell Paska all about my visit. Though I had tried Paska’s number several times and sent her some introductory text messages, she had yet to respond. Some days after visiting Laber, I was getting ready to meet a friend for dinner when my phone rang and displayed Paska’s number. With a racing heart and a trembling hand I answered. Hoping for pleasantries, I was met with anger. “Why are you making a documentary about me? I will sue you!” she said, in a raised voice. I tried to interject: no, I am not a filmmaker, I am a researcher from Canada.

“You journalists just make trouble!” she continued. “You are promoting ignorant stories and superstition!”

“Please let me try to explain who I am. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t have to. But I want you to know that I am a student of anthropology, not a journalist or a filmmaker, and what I do is try to understand culture— ”

“Culture?!” she interrupted. “Those people don’t know anything about culture! What does this have to do with traditional dress and dances? The nuns and students at Holy Cross are nothing but nasty bullies! I’m a model and a singer and I don’t need their culture.”

Her criticisms continued for some time. I was aware that her reaction was telling, and so I conceded internally that I could not do much to make myself understood. Perhaps she was right, and maybe it was unethical to pursue the matter any further. Eventually I was able to explain, in a stilted but perfunctory way, who I was (or, at least, who I thought I was) and what I was trying to do. Paska calmed and said, “Fine. I’m going on a holiday. If I have time when I get back, you can interview me.” Roundly chastised, I hung up the phone. It was the first, last, and only direct contact we had. Laber, with whom I maintain a friendship from

!201 afar, never mentioned the incident. Surely, I was owed nothing by Paska, and it was clear that

(with the exception of Laber) she returned the resentment and ressentiment directed towards her. Must (or can) one repair (or maintain) relationships where there are none of which to speak? The answer to that question lies in ethical deliberation, a weighing of the might-be of intentions, but it is also inflected with any possible range of affects: rage, resentment, shame, jealousy, admiration, vindication, hope, gratefulness, fear, apprehension, and the list goes on.

These ordinary acts are political. The last decade of scholarship on northern Uganda has been understandably preoccupied with the subject of forgiveness and justice during and after war, especially in the context of debates over the moral and legal value of local and international transitional justice mechanisms (for example Allen, 2006; Baines, 2005).

Notwithstanding the public prominence of the war crimes and crime against humanity trials of LRA commanders Dominic Ongwen and Thomas Kwoyelo,137 of more immediate and consistent concern to Acholi has been how to live together after decades of intimate violence, where the categories of victim and perpetrator were indelibly blurred. Meinert (2014), following Arendt, has noted in Acholi that the questions of who and what is forgiven and why are deeply tied to the maintenance of intimate relationships, the creative and subjunctive management of moral boundaries and exploration of intentionality,138 and the pragmatics of

137 Dominic Ongwen is a former senior LRA commander, charged by the International Criminal Court with 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, who surrendered himself to local forces in the border region between Sudan and the Central African Republic in late December 2014. His trial commenced in The Hague in December 2016. Thomas Kwoyelo is a less senior former LRA commander who was taken into custody after having been captured in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2009. Unlike a host of other LRA commanders who surrendered to or were captured by the Ugandan army (those charged by the ICC notwithstanding), Kwoyelo was not granted amnesty. His trial is the first domestic war crimes case in Uganda. 138 For an in-depth discussion of moral spaces in Acholi, see Porter 2016.

!202 hopeful new beginnings. The act of forgiveness is socially restorative, implying that a social relationship must have existed to begin with—one can forgive an intimate other with whom one has a future, one must acknowledge the intimate other that is still a part of one’s moral domain.139 Yet forgiveness is a process that is deeply contingent and fragile, Meinert reminds her audience, and the open-ended question of intentionality is especially potent given the violence perpetrated by children and youth during the LRA insurgencies.

The consideration of intimacy and distance, kin and Other, has echoes to Durkheim’s equivalence of the moral and the social (1912). Other ethnographers have done much to advance theories of what might be called an Acholi moral system or moral community, and as elsewhere these scholars have provided empirical evidence of the social import given to relationality, respect, and social harmony (Finnström 2008; Oloya 2013; Porter 2016;

Rosenoff Gauvin 2016; Rydberg 2016). In the context of post-displacement return to rural

Acholi village life in Padibe, Rosenoff Gauvin offers that inter-generational practices which engender connections to ngom kwaro (ancestral land) have served to re-elaborate processes of social repair and kin-based relatedness. Elders are especially preoccupied with what they perceive to be a decline, amongst young people, in the practice of woro, which means respect for others (particularly one’s elders) as well as idealized and gendered comportment (2016:

196).

A focus on the rules and obligations that promote Acholi social harmony, however, might inspire the sort of criticism Bernard Williams’ levelled against philosophical interest in

139 Likewise, Macdonald and Porter (2016), in their astute observations on the case of Thomas Kwoyelo, note that different people in northern Uganda have “individuated” or “de-individuated” Kwoyelo depending on their social proximity to his alleged crimes (706).

!203 a “morality system”: a supposedly consistent, universal, and set of highly generalized principles of human behaviour (Keane 2015: 18). The crisis of people who go underwater highlights not a breakdown of (a) morality system(s), but the living of ordinary ethics: an active working through of norms as well as judgment of (and despite) the underdetermined recesses of experience.

4. Conclusion

An elderly alumna of Holy Cross, in commenting upon my research interests, offered a wry opinion: “Victor,” she said, “the Devil is wiser than you.” The old woman was not attempting to discourage me from my project; far from it. What she was expressing was that there are forces apart from human experience that one can never fully understand. It is not that the events at Holy Cross have no meaning, it is that their meaning is indeterminate, provisional, and always subject to imminent change. Whether one is pagan or Christian, Catholic or

Pentecostal, a Lawino or an Ocol, one must “live that gap” between ideals that can never be completely or consistently met (Lambek 2015b: xi).

I have offered here ethnographic evidence to support the premise that the ethical is immanent in everyday action, reflection, deliberation, and judgment, and that this ordinary practice also entails working through chronic social crises. In northern Uganda, the daily work of hermeneutics draws upon a palimpsest of moral and ontological systems. Despite these entanglements, the work of discernment trudges along. New forms of subjectivity and judgement, in response to myriad phenomena, are sometimes burdened with an affective weight of indignation built-up throughout the longue durée of history. The effigy of the

!204 master, rather than the master himself, fuels moral ressentiment, and it is in this way that rancour against Paska stands in for myriad shared grievances and anxieties.

The stability or instability of daily life—against war, economic shocks, rumourscapes, political intrigue and violence—is mirrored, for some Ugandans, in an ill- defined underwater kingdom of devil worshippers that has conspired to enslave humanity with temptations of wealth, beauty, and worldly goods. Girls, who love shiny things, are particularly susceptible to the manipulations of these evil beings, and they will readily recruit their peers’ lives, sacrifices made in blood and labour, to secure access to the good life.

Those guilty of cooperating in this heinous crime, they say, are identifiable by their unusual good fortune: they are the few who are fantastically rich in a time of want, preternaturally beautiful in a place of ugly suffering, clever and talented despite a paucity of opportunity, and powerful in the face of collective impotence. To others, these girls are nothing but backwater hysterics.

For yet others, the events at Holy Cross provide opportunities to repair, create, or maintain ethical relationships between the beings of the seen and the unseen worlds, as well as to acknowledge, cope with, and manage the resentments and ressentiments of the past and present, and the potential of the future. How to adjudicate ethical action in the face of such fluid, dangerous, and consequential politics is the daily lot of schoolgirls and adults alike, and it is a task they meet—despite, and in light of, the underdetermination of experience.

!205 Chapter 5: The Toll of the Road

You people need to prioritize. Prepare to use this road by producing well so that the road does not carry rumours from one part of Uganda to another, it carries wealth. —President Yoweri K. Museveni, 21 August 2013, Atiak

Mummy, you have done very great work for us! This road is going to help us shoot so many trucks and make good money! We will be able to shoot at rich people in their cars! Instead of moving in the bush, for us, we will start running to town using these roads. —Lakwena to Lanyero the road builder, 1999, Lalogi

Ugandans easily recognize the President of Uganda by his wide-brimmed safari hat. Even in a sea of politicians’ suits, the Head of State is identifiable by his actual head. Though

Museveni has repeatedly stated that he merely wears the hat as protection from the sun (e.g.

Tumwine 2017), the intimation is that he is always outside, amongst the peasant farmers and rural traders, non-verbally communicating to the linguistically diverse electorate that he is of the people (Muth 2011). The sign of his hat is interpreted differently by many of my interlocutors, however, most specifically those current and former students of Holy Cross featured in the last chapter. He never takes it off, many of them say, because his dark and magical powers are concealed beneath it. As a member of the Illuminati, or someone who goes underwater, he is not the type of person whom one should aspire to be—despite the temptations of power and wealth.

This complicated hat, and the prosperity it evokes, was on display late one morning in Atiak, at the groundbreaking ceremony for one of the final stretches of road that would

!206 soon run from the port of Mombasa to the often-unstable (but always profitable) city of

Juba.140 The last 30 kilometre stretch of the highway, from Atiak’s trading centre to Niumle, on the other side of the border with South Sudan, was to be paid for by the people of Japan, laboured upon by Chinese workmen and engineers, and celebrated by a grateful Ugandan public. Daniel and I sat with the women members from one of the 1995 Atiak Massacre survivor organizations, perched on plastic chairs under one of two large white tents erected on the school grounds of Palapir Primary. Dozens of Atiak residents were ensconced in the rest of the chairs under the tent, while hundreds more, along with the school children, sat on the ground without shelter. Officials from JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency), representatives for the Japanese ambassador, Chinese road workers, MPs, Cabinet ministers, local governmental officials, the Rwot of Atiak, and other dignitaries sat in the second tent, perpendicular to our own. A small platform with speakers and a microphone was placed in the open space between the tents.

We waited for several hours until President Museveni arrived in his gleaming convoy of black SUVs. Bypassing the road, the entourage drove straight onto the grassy field and stopped at the length of red carpet that ran the remaining five metres to the makeshift podium. His hat bobbed up out of the back of one of the vehicles and the President walked the carpet and stood there, at attention, as the sound system played successive recordings of the East African, Ugandan, and Japanese anthems. A Catholic priest led those assembled in prayer, thanking God for allowing leadership, wisdom, and development to come to Uganda,

140 The roadworks project inaugurated at this particular stretch of highway was part of a larger East African artery being constructed between the port of Mombasa and inland to Juba. This section was funded by Japan International Cooperation Agency (Japan’s international development ministry) and its equipment and roster of workers were provided by a contracted Chinese firm.

!207 especially to this blighted area. Thereafter, the LCI141 for the area was invited to the microphone to welcome the chief guest. The LC caused a stir when he burst out in complaint: “So many of our leaders have been killed. It is hard for us to do anything because transport is a problem. We need bicycles. If the President had gone past Atiak he would have seen how bad the road is.” He was quickly ushered off the platform, and one of the MPs publicly reprimanded him for politicking.

Thereafter, a parade of high-level political dignitaries from Amuru District and

Parliament, as well as more judicious local leaders, took to the microphone to commend the

Government’s forward-thinking interventions. The leader of the Youth Development

Association thanked the President for his vision and gave him the gift of a spear, to raucous applause. A group of women then presented Museveni with a goat, and praised him for making Atiak the only place in northern Uganda what he had visited twice in one year.

Nevertheless, the Minister of Works and Transport took to the microphone and chastised the crowd: “We are fulfilling our election promises and advancing our governmental strategy of regional integration, infrastructure development, and education,” she said. “People should stop telling lies that say Government is neglecting the North. They must not be tolerated! It’s not true.” She then turned her attentions to the President himself.

People were impressed, she spoke, that the President had followed through on the pledge he had made earlier in the year to donate 50 million shillings (at the time, approx. Cdn$20,000) to survivors of the Atiak Massacre. As someone who herself grew up in what is now Amuru

141 As explained in chapter 1, an LCI, or Local Councillor 1, is an official elected at the village-level. LC1s occupy the lowest possible political rank of the council system in Uganda, LCVs (District- level) the highest.

!208 District, she commended that every government since her childhood had promised to repair the road, but Museveni was the one to do it. Because of this, there is a trade boom with South

Sudan. “But trucks pay no toll. We need to create tolls to maintain the road,” she suggested.

Museveni was the final person to take the microphone. Most of the proceedings had been in English, and the President (a Banyankole) elicited laughter by also showing off a few words and phrases in Acholi Luo. He wagged his finger at the gathered people, telling them not to cam cam (eat, eat) away the wealth that the Government was helping them acquire.

“You people need to prioritize,” he warned, switching back to English. “Prepare to use this road by producing well so that the road does not carry rumours from one part of Uganda to another, it carries wealth.” The President then began speaking Swahili—a language that is at least partially understood by most Acholi, but was likely not comprehensible to most of the

Japanese or Chinese guests in the audience. I was puzzled by the switch, and whispered to

Daniel that I did not understand what Museveni was now saying. Daniel summarized: “He’s saying that they shouldn’t listen to all the safety regulations and rules that foreigners have for development. Everyone’s jobs will get done faster without them."

1. The Entangled Time of the “Post-War”

Acholi people are intimately familiar with the dictum that they must be productive in order to secure a prosperous and morally-upright future. As I explained in chapter 2, sexual reproduction is the mark of adulthood, so much so that a 30-something man with no offspring of his own is regarded as a child. Wives, having relocated to the paternal homes of their husbands, are regarded as strangers, something other-than-family, until they birth their

!209 first child. Though contemporary living arrangements are more flexible, traditionally it is only after a woman has given birth that she may have a hut and kitchen of her own, to produce the hearty meals that nourish the homestead. Meanwhile, more conservative Acholi praise ancestors for their virility, having produced families and entire clans, and try to propitiate them so that they might bless the crops in the fields and ensure abundant harvests to come. The eternal reproduction of the kak, the clan, is paramount.

Despite the precarious role that young wives play in their husbands’ families, women are in many ways also regarded, as some of my interlocutors assert, as the keepers of

“Acholi-ness.” This gendered transmission of norms and subjective expectations is one that has persisted through time. Traditionally, women have travelled from their own home areas to take up residence in the clans of their husbands, and there they stay to maintain the homestead and raise children while husbands leave for long periods of time. Depending on the era, men have left to hunt, to find waged labour and business opportunities in other regions and countries, to fight in nearby conflicts and far-flung wars, to pursue higher education, and more. The ever-demanding search for bride price (which is often only accumulated after years of co-habitation), paid to the bride’s family by the groom’s, remains a constant concern for young men with few economic opportunities at home. Today, Acholi women are also on the move, pursuing commerce and education, travelling in search of promising futures.

The President of Uganda is emblematic of another accounting of labour and time.

World leaders praised him throughout the 1990s as a “new breed” of African leader, friendly to neoliberal economic development, privatization, and modernist social engineering. His

!210 charisma, however, has not succeeded in eliminating the rumours of the road; whispers that things are not as they seem, that people are tired of waiting, that an accounting of the past has to take place as much as the state coffers need to be accountable. For each red carpet event there is also the unruly disruption of the past in the present, but there are also spectators and participants who have considered how they might make do with what is in front of them, to the benefit of the near and distant future.

In this chapter I reflect on how different configurations of time and movement contribute to the formation of subjectivities in northern Uganda. It is not an attempt to present an exhaustive catalogue of possible subject types as they exist in contemporary

Acholi, but rather a meditation on how my interlocutors make themselves to be legible persons in ways that configure—and are configured by—understandings of spatial-temporal movement. I use the Gulu—Atiak—Nimule road (and travel on it) as a central analytical tool to describe how people live within frames of constraint and opportunity that exist in time and place. These constrains and opportunities are both material and symbolic, and I argue that certain subject positions are identifiable as having arisen from them. Broadly, these positions can be characterized as the liberal economic subject, the Christian subject, the revolutionary new Acholi subject (Acholi manyen), the contemporary Acholi subject, and the trauma subject. These are positions through which people transit in and out, dwell in enthusiasm and ambivalence, and straddle simultaneously.

In section 2 below, I recount stories from the life of Lanyero, Okidi’s mother, a woman whose life has always been intimately connected to travel and the navigation of social possibilities offered by violence, commerce, and religion, among other things. In

!211 section 3, I interpret Lanyero’s stories through the wider context of temporal and subjective orientations that frame and have framed life in Acholi. In section 4, I discuss the emergence of a subjectivity centred around trauma, widely construed, in particular as it relates to the lives of Atiak’s massacre survivors and their practices in relation to the intervention of humanitarian and legal regimes. Yet none of these subjectivities is certain or fixed; the road is the meeting place where all sorts of unexpected encounters occur.

The 100 km stretch of road between Gulu Town and Nimule (South Sudan), which runs through Atiak trading centre, is built and travelled figuratively and literally. It is the means by which goods are brought to and from market, the artery that intersects parishes and trading centres and town, the line of meeting places that connects people on journeys both mundane and extraordinary. This road also takes and sounds its tolls. By this I imply three intertwining meanings of the word “toll”: in the sense of a monetary payment (a tax, or the price of bringing an automobile onto the road), in the sense of wear and exhaustion, grief or ruination (a death toll, stress has taken its toll), and finally in the sense of a ringing bell (a harbinger of the near-future, of the about-to-happen, of the just-passed-event, a messenger of time). It is these entwined meanings that so accurately describe the entanglement of postcolonial time on the Gulu—Nimule road.

Time and movement

“First, every age, including the postcolony, is in reality a combination of several temporalities,” writes Mbembe (2001: 15). His critique of scholarly representations of Africa takes as a starting point the notion that, like every other human being, “the African subject

!212 does not exist apart from the acts that produce social reality, or apart from the process by which those practices are, so to speak, imbued with meaning” (Mbembe 2001: 6, his emphasis). The relationship between time and subjectivity in Africa, he posits, is not sufficiently encompassed by the analytical frame of “before” and “after” colonization.

Rather, time is “entangled;” people experience it not only as linear sequences of ages, but an interlocking of “presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones” (ibid.: 16).

Temporality and subjectivity are thus co-constitutive.

Masquelier, for one, argues that roads in postcolonial Niger are more than iconic makers of modernity; they are “hybrid spaces” that condense past histories and make material the “perils and possibilities of modern life” for rural Mawri (2002: 829). In considering how history is “condensed” and near and distant futures produced on the road, it bears making a similar observation about time in Acholi. Much contemporary narrative in and about Acholi is temporally oriented towards categories of pre-war, war, and post-war eras. From a wider lens on Uganda, this also takes the episodic form of pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial, and these temporal divisions suggest subjectivities that centre upon episodes or events of catastrophic violence.

As Veena Das has famously argued, subjectivity comes to exist and develops in tandem to the way language organizes lived experience (2007). In moving analytical focus beyond the event and into everyday social life in the aftermath of violence, Das emphasizes not just how the past influences subjects, but how futurity in the present allows people to dwell within plural subjectivities. This is an important point that works to ameliorate the

!213 state of affairs articulated by Nancy Munn almost three decades ago, when she remarked that anthropologists thinking about time had tended to do so by only looking at how the past is in the present (1992: 116). Below, I consider how different notions of the past and the future

(near and distant)—including but not limited to dates-as-events—are intimately bound up with notions of selfhood in the present.

I take particular inspiration from Girish Daswani’s ethnography of Pentecostal

Christians in Ghana and among the Ghanian diaspora in London, in which he elucidates how

Pentecostal transformation is ethically situated (2015). His consideration of the "intersections of religious change and continuity” shows that, for his interlocutors, those intersections are sites of ethical issues and uncertainties (2015: 6). It is for this reason that his work places emphasis on ethical practice over time (“the journey” rather than the destination) (ibid.: 22).

But by drawing attention to the spatial-temporal components of ethical practice, Looking

Back, Moving Forward does not take temporality to be singular. Of the transnational character of Pentecostal Christianity, Daswani remarks that “church members continue to live within and between multiple spatial-temporalities, between their status as economic migrants and as diasporic members of a heavenly kingdom” (2015: 199). These spatial- temporalities point to times and places in which people have a subjective stake: Ghana in the near and distant past, present, and future; Biblical times and places; the sacred time and place of the Kingdom of Heaven (of which Christians are citizens); the near-future and distant futures on heaven and on Earth (made possible by being Born Again in Christ), and more.

The urge to move through time and space, as Daswani shows, advances the notion that people are motivated to shape and act upon the world around them—they are not just

!214 passive recipients of socioeconomic and structural circumstances. In fact, also studying the moral geographies of transnational Pentecostalism (in São Paulo, Lagos, and London),

Coleman and Vásquez posit that the forms of urban and peri-urban Christianity they study are constituted through roads (2017: 30). Where people’s daily lives involve transit, the navigation of danger, and moments of uncertainty and intimacy played out on thoroughfares, roads “represent and constitute other aspects of practice, in including the cultivation of mobility and a kind of Pentecostal kinetics by takings spiritual and material advantage of opportunities provided by the anonymities and circulations of the mega-city’s thoroughfares”

(28). Though Gulu is by no means a mega-city, and most of the people described in this chapter do not identify as Pentecostal, the concept of roads-as-practice still rings true in

Acholi.

2. Lanyero

Bedo kacel mayo okolok lak iteri (If you sit in one spot too long, a centipede will crawl up your bottom)

—Acholi proverb (p’Bitek 1985: 26)

Nestled in the swampy valley that bisects Gulu Town, Lanyero’s shop offers passersby a bright collage of clothes from which one might self-fashion. The shop is wide-open to the air and sits right next to a main road, where pedestrians and boda boda motorbike taxis and cars and trucks all compete for adequate space. Before Lanyero and I had ever met, I had passed her shop countless times on my way to and from the market. But once I realized she was

Okidi’s mother, the uniqueness of her shop made sense to me, in that her son’s character

!215 seems to reflect a similar fondness for order. While the proprietors of most second-hand clothing kiosks in Gulu display their wares in haphazard piles through which their customers rifle, Lanyero is not content to sit still amongst bales of garments shipped from wealthier countries, daydreaming and looking out over the monitor lizards that pluck their way through the swamp. Rather, the value she places on discipline and self-sufficiency is visible in the careful coordination of colours and styles and pieces that have made her shop a rare success in an over-saturated market. Her work of spatial organization has been especially cultivated.

Though Lanyero lives in rooms across town, Okidi and several of his cousin-brothers stay in the modest quarters behind the shop. It was there that I often met up with Okidi, and where he introduced me to his busy mother, Lanyero. When I began researching and asking questions about Holy Cross and about people who go underwater, Okidi suggested I interview his mother, an Old Girl of the school. I did so in the sitting room behind the shop, and over the course of the next nine months Lanyero and I became better acquainted with one another. In what follows, I draw upon a mixture of recorded interview data (conducted in

English) and our informal conversations. I use this material to detail some of the eras, events, themes, and reflections through which Lanyero understands the trajectory of her own life, and how that life has been organized on and through the road.

The daughter of a rwot and a soldier

Lanyero was born into a prominent clan in 1966, in a village not far from the border with what is now South Sudan. She proudly remembers her father as “a member of the British

Empire.” This connection was due to his recruitment in the King’s African Rifles (Keya, in

!216 Acholi), the multi-battalion British colonial regiment that saw men from across East Africa soldier abroad. He fought in World War II, she recounts with pride, and retired from Keya soon thereafter.

Back home, he was well respected and bright, and eventually became the Rwot of the

Padibe clan. During the first regime of Milton Obote, whose first of two tenures as the

President of Uganda started when the nation achieved independence in 1962, Lanyero’s father was summoned by the Government to the southeast town of Jinja, where he was made an instructor in the School of Infantry. He brought along Lanyero and her mother, one of his junior wives.

By the time Idi Amin staged his successful coup of Uganda in 1971, the armed forces were ethnically dominated by the purportedly martially-gifted Acholi. They were seen as a threat to Amin’s authority. In Lanyero’s words, “They [Amin’s allies] said that staying with bright people is not good as they can easily take over the government, so Amin decided to kill most of the bright people: including my father.” Though a Lugbara colleague warned her father of the secret plans for his murder, he refused to flee Jinja, citing the dependence that his seven other wives and many children had on his salary.

It was too late, regardless. Later that night, men came to the house, tied him up with ropes, and threw him in the back of a Land Rover truck. Several others were rounded up that night, and they were all beaten and executed. Though Lanyero was only a little girl, she remembers a neighbour coming to tell her mother the news that Lanyero’s father had been killed, and warning them that they should go straight back to the village. The neighbour gave them money and they boarded a train to take them as far north as the tracks led. But her

!217 mother never recovered Lanyero’s father’s remains for a proper burial, and instead someone told her that his body had been cut into pieces and tossed into Lake Victoria. Her mother told her that other victims’ bodies were burnt.

As a fatherless girl in a patrilineal society, Lanyero was now considered to be an orphan. When Obote returned briefly to power following his invasion (with Tanzanian assistance) in 1979, he saw to it that a small amount of compensation was sent up north to the widows and orphans of Lanyero’s father. But the eight wives and children fought over who was more deserving of the money, and by the time Lanyero reached secondary school age, there were insufficient funds for everyone’s school fees. “They took advantage of what was given to the family,” Lanyero said of her mother’s co-wives. “I did not benefit from it

[the compensation] because, you know, in a polygamous family, some mothers can only be concerned for their own children. They would say things like, ‘In those days [in the past], your father mistreated me, so the money should go to my children.’” But life in Padibe was hard, and Lanyero saw no future for herself there.

Studies and prayers

In 1982, shortly after the beginning of the Ugandan Bush War that pitted Milton Obote (and later, Tito Okello) against the forces of Yoweri Museveni, 16-year-old Lanyero began to board at Holy Cross Secondary School for Girls in Gulu Town. Though her mother had not received any of the compensation money sent by Obote’s government, she was able to pay for Lanyero’s initial year of secondary.

!218 Lanyero enjoyed being at the school and excelled in her studies. She was equally at home in the Catholic environs: “I found I like religion because it can give you discipline in your ways of life, like when we were praying in the Cathedral,” she said. “It was a very good school. They taught the students to love each other, not to go for witchcraft, and that they should study hard. And that’s what I did.”

But not all of her peers felt the same way, and some of them were disturbed by spirits. Those girls could be heard shouting in the dorms at night about how they were seeing devils. Sometimes the teachers or the headmistress herself would come and explain that the girls were suffering from hysteria, which the teachers defined as “a problem of the imagination.” Lanyero was unaffected. “Myself, I didn’t experience it, because I was a very strong Catholic by that time, and most mornings and afternoons I prayed.” In her estimation, the only relief the suffering girls felt was when their peers prayed over them. Some of the students asserted that the spirits were tipu dano, coming back to speak with them. Perhaps, they speculated, they originated from the graveyard adjacent to the school.

Of those buried in cemeteries, an unusual and even treacherous thing to do, Lanyero said, with pity: “Those are some people who have no homes, or they are people who died in a road accident and no one knows where they come from. The church takes care of them; their bodies are not just thrown away.” Despite her faith, the other reason people are buried in a church cemetery seemed not so much sad or pitiful as odd: “Others are buried there because they have a faith in religion so strong that they request to be buried at church.”

Despite her confidence, Lanyero’s life could not continue as it was. Before she could complete her schooling, her mother ran out of funds to pay the fees. Lanyero decided it was

!219 time to find a boyfriend who might help her financially. By now, in the mid-1980’s, Acholi soldiers fleeing their defeat from the Bush War were regrouping and forming new paramilitary outfits in Acholi and South Sudan. She met Paul, a young cilil soldier,142 and quickly became pregnant. Though she wanted to have an abortion and continue with her schooling, Paul urged her to keep the baby and move in with him. It was a risky proposition.

Like every other soldier who was not part of Museveni’s NRA, for continuing to bear arms he faced severe retaliation, including, but not limited to, an extrajudicial execution.

Marriage and rebellion

Nonetheless, Paul and Lanyero were married, and she gave birth to a daughter. Though they spent much time in the bush as part of the UPDA, Lanyero did not tolerate the life well. They had another child, and the life on the move increasingly wore her down.

Eventually, she sat down with Paul and persuaded him to end his part in the rebellions. “Why don’t you go back home and talk to the Government?” she pleaded.

“People are tired of this life. Snakes are killing people and children are sleeping in the bush, while you go to Sudan and move around Gulu [District], never finding the Government,” she continued, frustrated.

Paul listened to Lanyero and agreed to send her back to town with the children, away from their rebel camp. While Paul remained in the bush, she and the children re-entered

142 See chapter 1. In the second Obote era, the Government’s Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) was commanded by General Tito Okello Lutwa, an Acholi from what is now Kitgum District. He staged a coup to overthrow Obote and was briefly President before he was defeated by Museveni’s NRA forces in the Bush War. Former UNLA soldiers, most Acholi, fled North and formed the rebel Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA), known colloquially as cilil.

!220 civilian life by approaching a priest on the road, who took them immediately to the Resident

District Commissioner (the Presidential representative in the District). The RDC accompanied Lanyero to the Division Commander at the nearby NRA barracks (the 4th

Division), and introduced her as “the wife of a rebel who has come out, and wants him to also come out and stop fighting.”

Lanyero, the RDC, and the Division Commander spoke for many hours, negotiating the terms of an amnesty for Paul. They sent Lanyero back to the bush with an escort. “He told me to go and tell those people to come back home to the Government,” she said of the

Division Commander. “Tell them that they are our brothers and we cannot fight them.” So she relayed the message that a peace agreement would be signed with the Museveni’s government if they surrendered their fight. Many, but not all, of Paul’s collaborators agreed to make peace, and they came out of the bush. Paul was promoted to the rank of Captain and joined the National Resistance Army, and the young family moved into a house in the barracks. He spent much of his time negotiating with those people still hiding in the bush, urging them to come home and stop killing their own people. Those cilil who did not come out went on to form the Lord’s Resistance Army.

It was 1987, and Paul soon became a division officer who was frequently away on battle missions. War did not go away, even though she herself had been present to witness the signing of a peace agreement between the Government and her husband’s old comrades. At their house the barracks, Lanyero found her situation intolerable. Her elder brother, who had served in the UNLA under Tito Okello, had also gone to Sudan with the remains of the former state army. While Okello went into exile in Kenya, the NRA carried out reprisals

!221 against real and suspected cilil. Government soldiers retaliated against Lanyero’s brother by attacking their family home in Padibe. “Tractors, bulldozers, graders, lorries, very many things were looted from the farm. But my other brothers were staying around there, and when the NRA found out they were the brothers of a cilil, they killed them.” NRA intelligence officers also had their sites on Paul’s brother, who had been abducted by Joseph

Kony. The officers falsely pegged him as a collaborator and beat him to death.

With the loss of brothers and considerable wealth came further burdens. So many of

Lanyero’s family members from the village were displaced by the fighting, and they came to stay with her in the 4th Division barracks. She was responsible for finding enough food and school fees for not only her younger sister, but the children of her deceased brothers. Not one to be idle, she decided to get into the business of selling second-hand clothes. Despite the considerable risks of civilian travel, she travelled with military convoys as much as she could, going to auctions and market days in the trading centres, which by then were the centres of crowded IDP camps. She went frequently to Atiak and the nearby border, and was able to stay with relatives of Paul’s mother in Atiak IDP camp.

In that same year, one day during the scorching heat of the dry season, Lanyero was present for Atiak’s monthly auction (market day). She had gone to buy food for her one meal of the day, and when she came back to the market area to begin displaying her fine bed sheets, she heard a commotion. “You know,” she said, “sometimes when soldiers are moving in a convoy they are very funny143 and make so much noise.” Though she initially thought she was hearing rowdy soldiers, she soon realized that abuse was being hurled towards the

143 In this sense in Ugandan English, “funny” means poorly-behaved.

!222 stationed soldiers. It was cilil, men who had refused to come out of the bush when her husband had. There were so many of them; in numbers much greater than the government soldiers, and they quickly chased the NRA troops away. The market was surrounded by rebels. The rebels “said that business people were the ones supporting the Government, and if we are not supporting the Government we should join them.” To the cilil, the scene of

Lanyero and the other businesspeople selling goods, protected by government soldiers, looked like collaboration. They further scolded the camp residents for having left their home villages to gather around government troops.

Lanyero recognized their commander, Otti Vincent, a local man whom she knew well from Paul’s days in the bush. He gave the order: “Nek aneka” (kill them). The rebels started firing bullets and throwing grenades at the gathered crowd. Lanyero had come from Gulu with over forty other businesspeople; all but three were killed. She remembers dropping to the ground and pretending to be dead, while someone else’s intestines fell on her head. “I thought I was dead,” Lanyero said. “Their blood was all over my dress.”

The rebels looted the marketplace and took away all the clothes and bedsheets, leaving only children’s clothing. Lanyero laid as if dead for two to three hours until help arrived, when an NRA helicopter gunship came and began bombing the attackers until they retreated. Many people, who up until then had been hiding in the bushes, ran towards the gunship, wanting to be rescued and brought away from Atiak. “You know, very many of them were hiding in the bush. The people in Atiak, they also wanted to be rescued because the rebels were hunting everybody.” But the helicopter was only able to take away those with injuries, and so Lanyero, who had been injured with shrapnel, was airlifted back to the

!223 barracks in Gulu. Those people whose relatives could still access their home villages brought the bodies home for burial. But Lanyero described their remains as “partial.” Others, whose bodies could not be identified, were buried in a mass grave.

Coping with shadows

Though her wounds became infected, as a resident of the 4th Division barracks in Gulu,

Lanyero was able to access adequate medical care to heal them. She restricted her movements as the war grew in intensity and as civilian travel became increasingly forbidden.

In 1990, she had Okidi, and by the mid 1990s she had birthed five children and was taking care of several more. Paul fathered many more children from different wives, and they were all dependent on his salary.

The most difficult period of Lanyero’s life, she asserts, came when Okidi was only six. Paul had been gaining weight and developed hypertension. He reacted badly to the medication he was prescribed, and he died suddenly. Lanyero and the children were chased from the barracks, having no claim to stay there anymore. She began renting a house in town and made a decision: “Life became very difficult and they stopped giving us food, so I said to myself that if I continue staying like this then my children will not study. So I started moving again in auctions.” Lanyero travelled frequently, aware of the danger. She survived yet another rebel attack by taking shelter in the army detach in Bibia, just north of

Atiak, by the border post with (what was then) Sudan. But her goods, along with many of the civilian houses, were set ablaze, and she had to start over. But she kept going, and relied on her younger sister, Monica, to look after the children when she was working. In return,

!224 Lanyero continued to pay for Monica’s school fees at Holy Cross. Okidi and Monica grew especially close.

One day, one of the Sisters of Holy Cross called Lanyero to go to the school. Monica was not feeling well, the Sister said, and Lanyero should take her home to recover: she was being attacked by a spirit. “I started counselling her,” Lanyero said, “because by that time I was a widow and I could not pay her school fees on time. Sometimes I paid fees by instalments, so I thought maybe it was the stress that was causing her this problem.” But

Monica was adamant. It was the spirit of some dead person who came to her and wanted to take her away.

Even though Lanyero advised her to pray, the prayers were not enough. Monica reported that even if she prayed, the spirits would come to her. She became weaker and weaker despite the prayers, and eventually had to withdraw entirely from school. She stayed at home with Lanyero for the next year, doting on Okidi in particular, until she died from a heart attack.

Soon after she died, Monica came to Lanyero in a dream. She said to Lanyero, “My sister, you used to like me so much, and now you’re suffering. I want you to come with me.”

In the dream, Lanyero followed her until they came across a massive sea. She got scared and started to go back the way they had come, but Monica kept tugging at her arm, urging her forward.” She woke up feeling weak, and was admitted to the hospital for several days.

Meanwhile, Okidi, relaxing in the sitting room one day, turned to see his aunt’s spectre sharing the sofa. Their relatives advised them both to chase her spirit away through prayer, and to remember that the spirits of the dead are unaware of their own power: they are not to

!225 be trusted. “When I told them the story, they said to me that someone dead is no longer your friend. Those spirits are not good; you should always be praying and you have to be near church all the time. That’s my experience,” Lanyero added.

Monica still comes to Lanyero in dreams, but she chases her away. “I just tell her: you go! I don’t want [to come with you]! I become wild to her.” For Lanyero, the real danger comes from the tipu dano of people one knows, because spirits change after death and “could change into a different thing.” These spirits want to take the living away with them into death. “For them, they [the tipu] don’t know that they are coming in bad faith. Like my sister, I don’t think she knew she was coming to kill me. Maybe she was worried about the way I am living.” Lanyero worries that if she spends too much time alone, her husband’s shadow will come for her as well. “For him, he might think that he is taking me away in good faith,” she said, “but somebody who is dead now will not take you in a good way. Of course, you will get sick and die also.”

Even though prayers did not save Monica’s life, Lanyero is not convinced by any other solution to the problem of intrusive tipu dano. “Some people have different characters,” she acknowledges, “and they will go to a witch doctor because they have the belief that a witch doctor will chase away those spirits. Or, some of them can talk with those spirits. But I don’t believe in them and I have never tried.”

For Lanyero, it is important to remember your ancestors, but through prayer—ghosts are not ancestors. This was something she learned from her grandmother, who taught her that it was important to celebrate “great great ancestors.” As a child in Padibe, Lanyero recalls

!226 that every November they would have celebration prayers to remember the ancestors, so that they were not forgotten.

Roadworks and women’s empowerment

By the late ‘90s, Lanyero was still struggling to take care of her own five children, as well as six more born to her late siblings and other relatives. An opportunity arose when a Danish

NGO recruited her as part of a women’s empowerment initiative. They sent Lanyero to a training school in Mbale (Eastern Uganda), where she earned a certificate as a technician in road and bridge construction and maintenance.

When she returned to Gulu, the District administrative officers forwarded her phone number to another international NGO, this one Swiss-based. The NGO was satisfied with her qualifications and hired her to supervise road work throughout the war zone. She opened many roads in Gulu, in Amuru, and further afield. “Only in bad places,” she said.

In 1999, Lanyero was supervising road alignment in an area east of Gulu. She was friendly with the people who would be out on the road looking for firewood, and she worked to recruit them as casual labourers. An elder approached her one day near a road that was being graded, and said, “My daughter, come, I want to talk with you. My daughter, where the road is going, you should divert it.” Lanyero told the ladit that the path of the road was dictated by the maps her supervisors had given her, and asked why she would alter the course. He pointed to huts in the distance, where the road would soon reach. “Those huts you are seeing there, they are for Otti Vincent.”

!227 LRA commander Otti Vincent had led the auction day massacre that Lanyero survived, as well as the 1995 massacre in Atiak. “You have been working with his relatives,” the man told Lanyero, “but you have paid them well and they talk good things with your name.” Even though the old man assured her that Otti would not attack her, Lanyero was worried. The casual labourers began asking her many questions and why she was building roads and who she was working for and why. She made sure the emphasize that she was working for an international non-governmental organization.

Nonetheless, the rebels were suspicious of Lanyero’s employers, and they began dictating her work. No trucks were allowed near the site, no phones, and no radios. And so she walked the 25km to work each morning, wearing mismatched sandals in order to avoid provoking the rebels into stealing her gumboots. She stayed resolute even when the rebels began to demand her salary. While she was able to get away with refusing that request, pointing to the burden of childcare she faced as a widow, they made one thing chillingly clear: If they heard that any information about this place was leaked to the government, they would cut off Lanyero’s mouth, arms, and legs.

That very day she attempted to resign, but her supervisors made things difficult.

“They said to me that I am a woman and these people will not kill me; they would have done so by now. They said if I left they will have to close the project.”

“I said to myself, if I leave this job now, how will I live here in town? I have no land in town and my children need to go to school.” And so Lanyero returned the next day, only to be brought into the presence of the deputy rebel commander himself. She saw smoke rising

!228 from the huts just ten metres from where she was working, and the rebels directed her towards it. “Otti Vincent was there, and in that place they had slaughtered very many goats.”

The man who had once been her husband’s colleague, had left her for dead in the

Atiak market, and who would one day be executed on Joseph Kony’s orders, stood in front of her. He interrogated her: “Why do you have such a strong heart?” he asked Lanyero. “For you, don’t you fear rebels?” She responded simply that she was “looking for life,” and that she wanted her children to eat, and that she was a widow. He asked her husband’s name, and when she replied, only then recognized Lanyero’s face. Otti shook her hand and said he remembered her hospitality from when she had cooked for him and his fellow rebels in the bush, “when we were still one.” He ordered his soldiers to not bother Lanyero’s work, and, seeing how thin she was, gave her fruit and roasted cassava.

When Lanyero finished the road, the Director of the NGO asked her to take on another contract. “Those people who were working in Amuru resigned and said that the rebels were going to kill them,” she explained. “For me, I said I will not die. I know my God is there for me because I am a widow, and I am suffering for my children. So for me, I am going to work. I am not accusing anybody or segregating anybody [as rebels or government].

I want to do the work and I want the road to be opened.”

But once more, lakwena rebels confronted her at her work. “What is the purpose of opening so many roads?” the gathered rebels pressed her. “Today you are here, tomorrow you are there, but why?” Lanyero pointed out that the rebels were cultivating land, but they were not in a position to eat all of their produce. She told them that people needed roads in order to transport their produce to market and to access the hospital in Gulu, particularly

!229 urgent as there was an outbreak of Ebola at the time. “I said to them, ‘Have you heard about this disease called Ebola? It can get you any time and you will need to be taken to Lacor

Hospital to be put in the isolation ward. So if there is no road, all of you will die.’”

It was their reply that set her body to trembling: “Mummy, you have done very great work for us. This road is going to help us shoot so many trucks and make good money! We will be able to shoot at rich people in their cars! Instead of moving in the bush, for us we will start running to town using these roads. No more walking in the bush!”

It was her children who eventually convinced her to quit roadwork supervision at the end of a contract in 2002, as rebel raids and ambushes on the roads were intensifying.

Lanyero’s children sat her down. “Mego,” they pleaded, “We still need you. These rebel people, they change their colours like chameleons. Today they are good, tomorrow they are bad, and they have started killing women. If you are gone, who will take care of us?”

With the money she had earned from the NGO, Lanyero was able to buy land in town. She no longer needed to worry about being chased from rental accommodations when her rent was overdue, or being harassed by a landlord to pay six months in advance. She constructed a house and the shop in which her second-hand clothing shop now operates, and proudly sent her children to school.

3. Tolls and Subjectivities

Lanyero was born just four years after Britain withdrew its colonial officials from Uganda.

The “civilizing” project that had justified so much economically-motivated violence

!230 throughout Africa took a heavy toll on Acholi as well, where people like Lanyero’s father had to navigate the dangerous roads of the Empire.

Despite the fact that Acholi was considered marginal to early colonial rule (for the

British, it did not hold the level of interest presented by the Buganda kingdom), the populace was incorporated into the colonial political economy after 1900 and direct foreign intervention became commonplace. This intervention included the solidification of the very concept of Acholi ethnicity and a deeply consequential manipulation of existing clan and rwodi authorities,144 observable in the orientation towards futurity that justified the

Protectorate’s policies on labour, space, and movement.

The first Resident District Commissioner of “Acholiland,” J.R.P. Postlethwaite, enacted a land policy designed to ease the collection of taxes for the Protectorate, to clear areas harbouring the tsetse fly (the vector of sleeping sickness), and to promote “the intellectual, moral, and economic progress of the people” (Girling 1960: 175). To that end, starting in 1913 large swathes of the populace were compulsorily evicted from their lands and settled on a concentrated line running along the road from Atura (south of the Victoria

Nile and the cataract at Karuma) to Nimule (in present-day South Sudan) (ibid). This facilitated communication and administrative control for the Protectorate and also contributed to a restructuring of native political authority with an imported “Buganda-style council of chiefs” (Atkinson 1994: 5) and the abandonment of the customary laws which governed the succession and appointment of rwodi (Girling 1960: 175).

144 See chapter 1. The concept of “Acholiness” pre-dated British colonial rule, but was firmly affixed by the Protectorate’s policies. The history of this pre-colonial polity is examined most prominently in Atkinson 1994.

!231 The road itself was built by a conscript labour system called luroni and paid for, by

Acholi people, through poll and labour taxes. Britain’s primary intention for the road, aside from administrative control of Acholi, was to enable to extraction of cotton for export.

British explorers and colonial officials justified the intimidation and violence they meted out on the Acholi as morally necessary; a corrective to the purported laziness of the

“natives” (Finnström 2008: 57-59). In the opinion of Postlethwaite, the RDC, “the natural road for progress by the Acholi” lay in the development of individual land tenure and agricultural production by individual families, in contrast to the favoured Acholi system of communal cultivation and homestead impermanence (Girling 1960: 175).

In the 1953 novel Lak Tar (White Teeth), p'Bitek tells the story of a man who, like

Lanyero’s father, must participate in the relatively recent monetary economy in order to accumulate bridewealth and marry. “I must get money because the world of today was a world of money,” he says (1989: 31). While many Acholi had been recruited for the Keya

(King’s African Rifles), after WWII (when the story takes place), earning sufficient income for bridewealth became a common problem for youth. The main character, Okeca Ladwong, must choose between only earning money once a year from growing cotton, earning a small wage from the Public Work’s Department by carrying murram for road repairs, or travelling south to “Bananaland” (Buganda) to find work in the city or on a plantation. “And I feared I would soon be drafted into luroni, the conscript labour system just introduced by the white man’s government,” he worries (1989: 30). At the same time, Okeca is observant of the changing landscape around him, of the potential futures facilitated by the new roads, and of the ever-expanding construction going up in the new town of Gulu.

!232 The modernist future promise of the road—despite the violence that enabled its construction—is reflected in the ambivalence with which many of my interlocutors imagine or look back at colonial rule. Lanyero’s proud statement that her father was both a rwot and a

“member of the British Empire” speaks to the complexity of such temporal interpretations.

The road is like the lakwena, messengers, who travelled it during the most recent war. It tolls like a bell announcing that something is about to happen, or could, or just did; if only people would move on its surfaces and find out for themselves. But it also demands tolls, of money and of life, be it in taxes extracted to a city far away, or in rebel ambushes sending a message. The road takes its toll on bodies and shadows, in potential not-yet or never realized.

Yet people keep moving on it, navigating available arteries and building new ones.

Acholi of the present, macon (old), and manyen (new)

When Lanyero pleaded with Paul to abandon rebellion with the cilil, she cited the fact that the bush is no place for children to sleep. In chapter 2, I explained how the wilderness (lum, grass or the “bush”) is a dangerous place outside of the human moral sphere, and that ex-

LRA are often mocked by the moniker olum olum (bush person). This stigma is especially levelled against children who were born in captivity, whom the lakwena had intended to form the backbone of an a radically configured Acholi manyen: a new Acholi society. This moral and political project, first conceived in the era of Alice (Lakwena) Auma’s Holy Spirit

Movement, worked in opposition to the contemporary Acholi society in the villages and towns.

!233 The lakwena regarded the old Acholi as morally corrupt and tainted by witchcraft and cen. Acholi manyen, however, was not just a prophetic or millennial movement that looked towards a future purity. It also required its subjects to look back to a mythologized Acholi macon, “cleansed of the corruption of westernising influences, though building on Christian messages about creating a new society” (Dolan 2009: 86). Had Okidi and his siblings grown up in the bush with Paul’s former colleagues, they would have undoubtedly been subject to this new vision of Acholi as a nation. Whereas Lanyero and Paul married willingly, recall that Lanyero wished to abort their first child and continue with her studies. I do not know if

Paul convinced her to have the baby as part of the Acholi manyen project, but it is certainly likely that he was motivated to reproduce and strengthen the prestige of his family.

Other men and women have not made such autonomous choices. Erin Baines writes that forced marriage and reproduction within the LRA has been an important part of its political project, and not merely a system designed for the sexual satisfaction of male commanders (2014; see also Aijazi and Baines 2017: 479). For senior LRA, the regulation of sexual abuse and forced marriage in the bush, as well as the organization of family units, demonstrates their strict moral principles and their authenticity as the “genuine” Acholi nation (Baines 2014: 406). Sometimes also called “Acholi A and Acholi B” (rather than

Acholi manyen and civilians), according to Baines’ informants, this system meant that LRA soldiers were not permitted to eat with, accept food from, have sex with, or sleep with civilians, lest they become morally tainted (ibid.: 410; see also Dolan 2009: 273-234). And while the rebels severely restricted the movements of “recruits” (abductees), the LRA also dictated the activities of civilians in the camps and towns.

!234 In chapter 2, I also wrote that a lakwena shot one of Anena’s uncles dead for riding a bicycle. Through different periods in the war, the LRA attempted to control the political narrative circulating about them by restricting and redirecting flows of people and information. When the LRA was active in Uganda, they would force people to gather in villages to listen to lectures, would drop letters on roads and paths containing political tracts, decrees, and behavioural edicts, and broadcast messages through radio channels (Dolan

2009: 83-84). They warned civilians not to ride bicycles or in other vehicles (these could be used to warn the Government of LRA activity), not to hunt (as people might find LRA hiding places), not to live near the road (which is where all the camps were located), not to follow

UPDF orders, and not to keep pigs or dig (farm) on Fridays or Sundays (ibid.). These latter two prohibitions were dictated by the mixture of Christian, Muslim, and indigenous spirit forces that possessed Kony.

That Lanyero and her fellow businesspeople had dared to travel to Atiak, with the protection of a government army convoy, meant that she was fair game for reprisal by the logic of the LRA. If one was not killed outright by lukwena for contravening their rules, one risked mutilation—such as when rebels threatened to cut off Lanyero’s lips should she speak of what she had seen on the road. People like Lanyero, who did not wish to “segregate,” were caught both spatially and morally between the Government (under the auspices of the

NRA and then the UPDF) and the LRA.

Though many people initially moved voluntarily from their villages to camps in the trading centres, by 1996 the UPDF was violently enforcing civilian encampment (see ch. 1).

Chris Dolan has referred to this policy as “social torture” of the Acholi (by the Ugandan

!235 state), who were debilitated, violated, and humiliated by the camps and the restriction of movement (2009). As I described in chapter 1, around the same time, as the LRA made nightly attacks and abduction raids in camps, swathes of adults and children alike began walking each evening to the towns of Gulu and Kitgum, seeking the relative safety of verandahs on which to sleep. Civilians caught outside the camp also faced screening exercises by the army called panda gari (Swahili for “climb in the truck”), during which people were often accused and punished for being rebels or collaborators (ibid.: 47).

Lanyero was able to avoid the hardships of camp life and night commuting because she already lived in Gulu Town. Her rejection of both Acholi macon (represented to her, for example, in dangerous interactions with tipu dano) and Acholi manyen are indicative of

Lanyero’s concern with the present and near future: of feeding her children, of paying for school fees, of making time for prayer. Though most of my interlocutors consider the “end” of the war to be nothing but a pause in a soon-to-be-renewed rebellion, they are also like

Lanyero, trying to “move forward” in their daily lives.

When I once asked Daniel to help me describe the concept of “anthropology” in

Acholi, he came up with the phrase, kwo pa dano macon ki ma konyoni. Literally, this means

“the study of people of old and of nowadays.” Yet the idea of “Acholi people of the present,”

Acholi ma konyoni, does not register as a possible identity for my interlocutors. It does not have the political weight of the traditional Acholi macon, venerated in stories, nor does it have the volatile potentiality of the rebel Acholi manyen. In other words, it is too mundane, too unobtrusive a concept on which to tether one’s self-understanding—but there are other orientations to time and subjectivity available.

!236 To grow the world: Christians and liberal economic subjects

Lanyero, though not by any means the type of person who “stays up all night shouting prayers” (as she once criticized the practice of Born Agains), is undoubtedly a Christian.

Like countless other people educated in Catholic institutions like Holy Cross, she draws a modicum of classed prestige from her association with European pedagogy and discipline.

As stated in earlier chapters, for Acholi adherents of Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism in particular, religion is indelibly bound with an orientation towards global, modern economic belonging.

Jane Guyer suggests that the evangelical Christian concept of prophetic time is very similar to that espoused by the monetarism of neoclassical economic theory. The concept of growth, she writes, brings the near-future into view and “evokes a strange new economic subject: one who can be rational, submissive, ingenious, and infinitely desirous all at the same time” (2007: 413). The planning and hoping for the imminent second-coming of Christ is mirrored in the struggles for specific material goals that, the economic theory goes, are sought by individuals in a liberal market. In Acholi, where all and sundry have demonstrated their entrepreneurial spirit by registering their own NGO, the concept of “development” is known as dongo lobo: “to grow the world.”

In the opening account of this chapter, I described how a low-level politician was publicly chastised for lamenting the fact that so many of Atiak’s leaders had been killed, and for asking that the issue of local people’s daily transport—bicycles rather than SUVs—be addressed. The man had failed to toe the line by considering the recent past, but he had also not dreamed big enough, so to speak. That he had not affected the expected attitude—

!237 celebratory, hopeful, and self-starting—meant that he had run afoul of the state’s preferred narrative. The developmentalism that characterizes the contemporary Ugandan and Acholi economy is one that, for Okidi, “comes from out.” It is not something that is “home-grown,” as Okidi puts it, but it is one that has been carried along the roads of Acholi and into intimate domestic spaces.

Lanyero has never been one to rely on others, be they her relatives or government bodies. Okidi is himself unusually independent, but he is critical of the way such independence has been fashioned. “Our ancestors felt like land could not be owned,” he said.

“They never stayed in one place. They would stay maybe for a generation, exhaust the land, and move.” It was the colonizers, he says, that introduced the idea of land ownership and the restriction of mobility (or, rather, its social ideal). “That idea has started to mature,” Okidi claims, and it did so starting with Museveni’s regime. He remembers being in primary school, where the teacher told him and his classmates that communal land ownership “is dangerous to development.” If you own land, Okidi says, you can sell it to investors.

Such an idea, in Okidi’s estimation, is “deadly,” and has impacted how his peers understand their place in the world. “Someone who has gone to school has so many skills, but if he doesn’t end up in an office, he won’t be satisfied. He hasn’t succeeded or developed,” he muses. “The spirit of self-initiative is preached so fully in schools. They tell us, ‘Students, create your own jobs!’ These people in government didn’t create their own jobs, they sit in their posts for 30 years and have capital.” Okidi’s frustration is not unusual for a young person in Acholi (and, one might easily argue, in most places in the world

!238 today). Nonetheless, my interlocutors—Okidi included—consider it necessary to continue to pursue the possible benefits development might offer, if only to move a bit forward.

Martha Lagace has recently argued that the central thrust of scholarship about Acholi is geared towards a sense of social and geographical rootedness—ethnographies and other research works tend to emphasize, if not the reality, then at least the ideal of patrilocal village groupings and the long occupation of ancestral lands. But in her examination of Gulu’s boda boda drivers, Lagace takes a different approach by considering how motorcycle drivers are

“internal migrants of their own contested territory,” where being on the move is what keeps their “aspiration of place and destination…vital and meaningful” (2018). “I might fail, but

I’ll try,” Lanyero said, when she agreed, through self-professed Christian charity, to take in her relatives’ children and assume the never-ending search for school fees. She was perhaps no more “empowered” as a woman by having built roads than had she declined to do so, but her belief in God, she attests, allowed her to see the projects through. That, in turn, has afforded her an unusual level of economic independence for a widow.

Although Lanyero told me that she has repeatedly tried and failed to lobby the

Government for compensation (through, and then by avenues external to, the notoriously corrupt Acholi War Debt Claimants Association), what is remarkable is what she has—and has not—asked to be compensated for. Though she is someone who survived an attempt on her life by the LRA, witnessed the murder of 37 of her colleagues at the same time, and was repeatedly threatened by the same force in other instances, she has not asked the Government to offer recompense for failing in its legal duty to protect civilians. Nor has she claimed

!239 funds for the murders of her brothers. Rather, she has sought the return of her family’s wealth, looted from the homestead in Padibe, so that they may start again.

4. “Peter got sensitized”: trauma subjects and the colonization of affect

Sunday was a day of some happiness and you could hear prisoners laughing. Every prisoner laughed in his own mother language. As the Acolis145 laugh differently from the whites, so do the brown-skinned. It is impossible for one to cry and laughing a foreign language because people are different and when they feel something, they feel it in their own language.

—p’Bitek, White Teeth (1989: 66)

On Easter morning, I sat in a pew in the Catholic church in Atiak centre, doing my best to follow along throughout the mass. Easter 2014 coincided with the 19th anniversary of the

Atiak Massacre, and an ecumenical prayer service was to be held that afternoon at Palapir

Primary. For now, each clergyman preached to his own congregants. The padi (priest) was telling us the story of the Apostle Simon Peter, whom the Gospels record as having denied

Jesus three times upon his arrest. As the padi moved back and forth between Acholi and

English, he uttered a phrase about Peter’s eventual redemption that the congregation was sure to comprehend: “Peter got sensitized about Jesus.”

Eight months earlier, I had met several of the congregation members, survivors of the

1995 massacre, when they gathered as a group at the roadworks inauguration detailed in the introduction to this chapter. A collection of almost exclusively women, they had celebrated the President’s visit by giving him the gift of a goat, purchased from the 50 million shilling

145 Alternative spelling for “Acholi.”

!240 donation Museveni had given them just a few weeks earlier. When the President took the microphone and joked, in Swahili, about the rules and safety regulations that foreigners place on infrastructure projects, he indirectly challenged the value of NGO “sensitization” campaigns so prevalent throughout Uganda and Africa in general. Yet in contradiction to his words, the act of his donation furthered the trend he mocked.

The affective demand of “sensitization”—that ignorant subjects be educated about correct speech, behaviour, comportment, and feeling—lies at the heart of humanitarian and development interventions in Acholi. Largely based on a biopolitical discourse that atomizes and de-politicizes human suffering, the consequence of “sensitization” is that it has tied access to material resources, and much needed services, to the disciplined performance of a globally-legible subjectivity. It is this type of subjectivity that many of the survivors of the

1995 Atiak massacre have found particularly important to cultivate.

Survivors

In chapter 3, I referenced a conversation I had in which a member of the PTA at Palapir

Primary, along with the Head Teacher, stated that the Ugandan Constitution forbids citizens from speaking about events that occurred before 1995. Lanyero, meanwhile, remarked:

“People fear to tell these stories because they might think that if you talk about these things the Government can arrest you. But for me, I will tell you the truth because I know what happened in my life.” The assumed prohibition on looking back, however, is tied to the

!241 possibility that those in power will react poorly if they are called to redress and take responsibility for past wrongs.146

Several days after the roadworks inauguration, I met with the women’s massacre survivors’ group again, labouring under the false assumption that they were the sole organization comprised of survivors of the 1995 massacre. I began with formalities, introducing myself and my research, and asked them questions about their association. Why were there almost no men? I asked, acknowledging the only man present, the group’s chairperson. “They were all killed in the massacre,” one of the women stated. Another burst out: “There is only sympathy for the elderly and pregnant ladies and children. But we are ladies now who have lots of responsibilities because our husbands are dead.”

I asked them why they formed a group. Their main purpose, they stated, was to form a boli cup, a Village Savings and Loan Association (VSLA). Stating the social problems rife during the war, in 2001 they formed the group to save money and to help one another farm and rotate crops. Because of the problems in the war, they decided to counsel one another and share their experiences, and to work to keep the massacre memorial maintained. “At first, we had not unity,” one stated, “but then an NGO helped us with t-shirts.”

Though the group vaguely mentioned having split voluntarily from another group of survivors, most of whom no longer live in Atiak, it was only later that I realized that there was a bitter division between the groups. The other group was comprised exclusively of men,

146 I observed, for example, a group of formerly abducted LRA women debate appropriate language use in a petition to Parliament. The petition asked Parliament to address the socioeconomic needs of the women and their children, to create a national reparations policy, and to do more to pursue prosecutions against LRA wrongdoers, among other things. Privately, though, the women discussed if the anger they felt towards the Government should be reflected in the document, or if it should reflect a strategic humility. A wounded person, pitiable and grateful of recognition, does not threaten power in the same way as an angered one: diplomacy won over.

!242 like Komakec (see ch. 2), who in 1995 had been pupils at the local technical school. The men’s group was also formed as a cooperative VLSA, and both groups have membership encompassing not just eye-witnesses or survivors of the attack, but also children and other dependent relatives of the murdered or since-deceased.

Even though tensions between the two groups existed before Museveni’s visit, they erupted in the immediate aftermath of his donation. After having gotten wind of the gift, the men’s group demanded a share of the funds. The women refused and immediately invested the money in livestock, which angered the men. Museveni made it clear that the funds were not a form of compensation, but were simply a gift. When I asked one of the women about the dispute, she was vociferous in her response: “We danced for the President. That money belongs to us.”

What was particularly curious about this incident was the way in which survivors went on to invoke and resist the idea of trauma in their respective self-evaluations. In the words of the women, the President was justified in giving his gift to them not because they were survivors of a massacre, or that they had suffered more than the men, but because they had performed well for the most powerful person in the land. The men felt that as traumatized victims, they deserved to share in the gift. I want to highlight the factor of performance here not to suggest a bald or cynical utility of victimhood, but to trace how particular subjectivities are produced in people’s efforts to become legible and deemed worthy of acknowledgement. More than that, it became clear over the months that I came to know different survivors that the line between the trauma of “official” massacre survivors, and the suffering war and poverty has brought to everyone, is blurred.

!243 The trauma advantage

In a 2014 speech to university graduates given by the former Chief Prosecutor of the

International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, I witnessed the “trauma subject” of

Acholi made even more visible. Before the guest of honour took the microphone, representatives from the sponsoring organization and educational authorities praised the graduates on having succeeded despite their traumatic and war-torn backgrounds. But in

Ocampo’s words, the trauma of the war was not a hindrance; it was an advantage.

“We have to invent our destiny,” he said. Citing himself as an example, he went on to describe the emancipatory power of truly heinous suffering. As a young lawyer living under

Videla’s dictatorship in Buenos Aires, Ocampo said, he had no inkling that he could ever become a prosecutor for the state of Argentina. But democracy returned, he said, and he had the opportunity to prosecute generals and to eventually become the first Chief Prosecutor of the ICC. He went on to praise a professor who was present in the audience, pointing to him as a shining example of success: “He’s a professor at Stanford University and also at the

University of California, Los Angeles… And he’s here today…And one of the reasons he’s here is because he’s Jewish. His family suffered. So his people suffered sixty years ago under the Nazi regime…You have to benefit from this place…that is your comparative advantage.”

But there was no decisive military victory in Acholi, no regime felled or dictator locked up, no moral high ground from which victims might perch. Rather than having achieved peace in northern Uganda, war simply became absent.

Referring to the ICC’s first investigations, one of the Atiak massacre survivors I know recalled one of the Chief Prosecutor’s visits to Acholi: “When Moreno Ocampo came

!244 [he] sat at the radio station and announced that they wanted to talk to members of the community. But they already doomed the conversation. Do I want to risk my life and my family by telling them what I want, while some government spy listens to the whole thing?”

Though the men’s survivors’ group has written letters to the President and to MPs, explicitly stating the circumstances of its members’ traumatic collective past, as a group they are careful to not directly request compensation. Rather, they ask for “fatherly advice,” assistance with housing, children’s school fees, carpentry and joinery materials, bricklaying, concrete, and welding tools.

“Sometimes I can dream that I was arrested and tied up and at time I see someone coming to kill me,” one of the men once told me, “And I can dream about some of my friends who are doing better financially because they went back to school. When you are in crisis, even if it’s a financial crisis, you can dream of these things.” For individual members of these massacre survivor groups to become trauma subjects, patients under the authoritative care of their father the President, they avoid censure by paradoxically omitting mention of the political etiologies of their trauma, or of the volatile ghosts it has produced.

For those men, the trauma they suffered during the massacre, as well as the destruction of their property, is a vehicle for state recognition, but not for individual care.

“We have trauma and need counselling,” one man told me, in English. “It looks like we have a normal life, but we don’t. When you are alone, you begin reflecting and you feel your life is useless.” Amongst his colleagues, the pain of the intrusive past intermingles with the pain of unrealized futures, and this is not always translatable using the concept of trauma—one

!245 that, Okidi often asserted, was an invention of NGOs in 2005. The war hurt not just people or their spirits, but the “might have been” of lives at peace.

!246 Coda: As Light as White Ants

It is early afternoon, and after much waiting in the bus park, our taxi is finally on its way out of Gulu Town. I share the front row of seats with the driver and our friend Nora, an

American student. Okidi is in the row behind us, sitting next to two men who are speaking

Luganda. Their presence is strange, even to fellow outsiders like Nora and me. What business could they have in Amuru District?

We take the scenic Patiko road, bypassing all the heavy trucks and roadworks that start at Lacor. I love the palm trees that line this road, and I try to focus my attention on them as Nora tells me why she slept poorly last night. She made the mistake of reading the local news online right before bed, she said. After it had rained and the white ants were swarming, some boys in her neighbourhood went out to harvest them. But they found the beheaded body of a 24-year-old woman. The theory is that the music is so loud in that part of Gulu that no one could hear her screaming.

We stop talking for a while.

When the Kilak Hills come into view through the windshield, I quietly mention to

Nora that the rebels used to frequent them. They hid in the hills and used them as bases, but they also used to go there to get soil and water with special powers. I lower my voice to a whisper in case anyone overhears me.

Soon, we reach our destination in Amuru and we all climb out. The Baganda people surprise us by getting out at the same stop, and Nora asks them in English why they are here.

!247 One of them replies that he has come to dig (farm) so that he can have food to eat. He and his companion leave and the three of us walk in the opposite direction towards the Mission.

***

A central tension in my research and writing practice about Acholi has been, and remains, how to go about describing the data of people’s lives in ways that do not fall into rigid analytic frames glossed as either endless suffering or inevitable redemption. I could have written a dissertation solely about the testimonies of war survivors, or a thesis about communal forgiveness and the work of soothing ghosts. But the conversations I have had with people in Acholi do not lend themselves perfectly well to either narrative. The work I have produced is thus always only a part of a whole, and is an attempt to articulate a shared vocabulary of experience. The conversations we have had were more than academic, and we have had to choose our words and silences carefully.

***

Nora introduces us to Padi (Father) Opwonya and some of the other catechists at the

Mission. We share a late lunch, and then Nora has to go for a research meeting held under one of the big mango trees. After chatting with one of the catechists, I too walk outside and find Okidi deep in conversation with a catechist called Denis. Padi Opwonya walks over and points to the ground at my feet, between two smaller mango trees. That is the mass grave, he says. He gestures to the small holes that it looks like animals have dug. An academic from

Australia, he says, came and said that the sunken soil is a sign of a mass grave. But it doesn’t matter. Denis and Padi Opwonya already know it's a mass grave.

!248 I ask them what happened. He’s from Gulu, Padi says, and only came here a few years ago. But his mother was from here, and so he knows the area. What he knows is that around 1988, one day the NRA rounded up people in Atiak and took them to this area by truck. They were trying to escape the insecurity caused by the rebels. Those people came here and slept all night together in the church. But when they came out the next day, the rebels caught up to them and killed them all.

“Who were the rebels?” I ask. “Were they cilil? LRA?”

“Cilil,” they say in unison.

“But some people believe it was actually the NRA that did the massacre,” Denis offers. There’s an opposition politician who was a big NRA commander here around that time, and he ordered a lot of killings.

“That is why he isn’t popular in this area,” Padi Opwonya adds. He points to the big mango tree under which Nora is conducting a meeting. That was where they tortured the people before they dumped their bodies here. It was a pit latrine at the time.

When the Papal Nuncio came from Kampala to say prayers and sprinkle holy water on the grave, the Government made life “difficult” for the local catechists. A Catholic NGO raised money to put up a memorial marker, but the Government officials won’t allow it.

The conversation lags. I point to the ridge of hills to the west and ask them to name the hills for me. That one is Olinga, that one is Kilak, that one is Labala, and there is Guru

Guru. We can see that there are still soldiers stationed at the foot of Olinga and Guru Guru, and we can just make out their huts. Padi Opwonya and Denis don’t know why they’re still there.

!249 I think of Okidi’s grandfather, who took to the caves in Guru Guru to fight the British in the Lamogi Rebellion. It doesn’t seem that long ago.

***

In different ways throughout this dissertation, I have suggested the notion that contemporary life in Acholi is not just contemporary; it is imbued with a publicly shared sense of unfinished or uncertain history. By “unfinished,” I mean the ways in which memories and representations of past events and eras are both contested and preliminary. I have explained the ways in which my interlocutors experience life: neither as passive participants in an untroubled continuity of traditions and ideas, nor as the agents of radical epistemic ruptures and revolutions. Rather, people interpret and act upon the “stuff” of their own lives in consideration of the possibilities of the past, present, and future.

***

Okidi and I are alone for the first time all day. I want to go see Anena’s friend, Prossy, but

Okidi takes the opportunity to first pull me aside as Padi Opwonya and Denis go back indoors.

“Did you know what was going on in that taxi?” he asks.

No, I say.

“I don’t think those people were who they said they were. And they definitely didn’t come here to dig.” Okidi, a cautious and sober man, is unequivocal. Those ones were government agents, he says. They had huge sums of money with them, and though Okidi

!250 only understands a little Luganda, he noticed that, over and over, they repeated the name of an NGO project where I used to volunteer.

*Boom!* What sounds like a bomb goes off to the North. We pause and look around.

It was probably just a blown-out tire.

We resume our conversation. The agents kept asking Okidi about me and Nora, about who we are, and how he knows us, and what we’re doing here. “I realized something wasn’t right,” he says. He told them we are just students, and then lied and said he has only known us for a month. But they kept at him, and found different ways to ask. “I didn’t tell them anything other than that. I said I don’t know what you’re studying.”

Okidi says that there are more and more government agents in Gulu these days. He used to fear them, but he is tired of watching what he says.

I think of Anena, and how people spy on her because she was in the LRA. I remember that she suggested people in Atiak might think I’m a spy. But I am hardly the first white person in Acholi to stick my nose in where it doesn’t belong. I won’t be the last. Later, at dinner, Padi Opwonya will laugh with me and teach me new phrases. One is cego wang bur: to poke at or reopen a wound.

These government agents probably mean nothing. Still, I will be careful.

***

This project has been anything but independently conceived and implemented. My reliance on the interpretive skills of those around me has not merely been a research tool; its very necessity is indicative of the suspicions of conspiracy and danger that produce and are

!251 produced by political violence. At the same time, I have shown that violence is not the only way of understanding speech and its absence in Acholi, and that the false assumption of a universal communicative transparency is one heavy with its own history.

***

Okidi and I walk to the houses just behind the Police Post, where Prossy lives. We met just two weeks ago in Kampala, where Prossy, Anena, and other women who were abducted by the LRA were petitioning Parliament to do more for them and their kids. “You’re just called mad if you speak up,” Prossy had worried out loud to the group.

We arrive and her local women’s group is outside, practicing a song and dance routine. In a few days there is an NRM rally, and men will play nanga and rigi rigi harps and drums to accompany the women. Now, Okidi and I watch as they practice on the harps and keep rhythm with a comb on a saucepan.

After the practice, we go inside to Prossy’s sitting room. She has decorated it with several posters. One says “Vote Museveni and the NRM,” and another has a photograph of

Barack Obama and his family, with the caption, “African American First Family.”

Okidi and I walk back to the Mission and spend the evening with Padi Opwonya,

Nora, and a few other Mission guests and residents. We can’t seem to keep out the beetles and white ants, and I chase multiple chickens from the kitchen. The flying ants seem to bother only me, and everyone teases me for jumping.

We relax and watch the news together on Padi Opwonya’s TV. There is a story about a fundraising event for female education that will be held at the Sheraton Hotel in Kampala

!252 on Friday. The chief guest will be Janet Museveni, a Cabinet Minister and Yoweri

Museveni’s wife. “That’s too bad, they’ve ruined it! If it wasn’t for the guest of honour, I’d go,” someone jokes.

***

Though this thesis has often delved into the extraordinary, it has also offered snapshots of the mundane ways that people go about their lives. A conception of ethics as both immanent and imminent has permeated my analysis of Acholi life, and I have explained how deliberations and actions might be interpreted in context. While the choices and actions of my interlocutors are not always ones which I readily understand, I have also advanced that acts are always contingent, and liable to revision. The person who was a rebel one day might be

President the next.

***

After breakfast, I sit with Otto John, a catechist who has lived at the Mission for a dozen years. He’s a frail 62-year-old, and he tells me about his life up to now. As an orphan, he was unable to study past P7, but he became a successful farmer. He raised enough money to marry, and he and his wife did so in a church. Life was so good, he says, they loved people and had children and life was so nice—it was as light as white ants.

“Later on, problems came,” he sighs. They saw a lot of killing in this area, and then his leg started swelling and his eyes started hurting, and his wife noticed and left him with the children. Now, he preaches the Gospel and earns money by digging in other peoples’s gardens.

!253 We walk outside to sit underneath the trees, and he begins talking about the grave again. He speaks so fast that I sit dumbfounded and ask Okidi to help me understand what he’s saying. “The Pope’s representative came and organized a prayer and prayed for this people who died and later on when they went back, the Government soldiers came and threatened me and asked me why the Pope’s representative came here,” he says, all in one breath. “I just told them there is life after death and so the Pope’s representative just came and organized prayers because those people who died, their souls must go to heaven and the

Government thought that I was betraying them and I wasn’t doing it, it was just for the people who died, just to make sure that their souls go to heaven.”

When I ask him about the tipu of those who died, he says that sometimes when you are sleeping at night, you might wake up and find someone strangling you, and you start screaming. He says that some people will go to a traditional doctor to find out about the spirit, but others just want to sprinkle holy water and say prayers.

There is a girl who lives near here, Otto John says. She disappeared from home and had been away for so long, but now she is back. But her parents don’t know where she was, and she needs to be prayed for. “You know,” he says, “some people go mad because of spiritual attacks.”

***

I entered into this work wanting to better understand ghostly vengeance and its relation to violence and memory. I have elucidated how the idea of dirty things, or spiritual pollution, is better understood in relation to moral violations, kinship, and the reproduction of kin

!254 relations. While violence is indeed intimately connected to cen, the vengeance of murdered individuals is not the only way in which my interlocutors understand spiritual attacks. How people understand, talk about, and respond to spiritual dis-ease is inevitably connected to issues of language, epistemology, and ritual authority.

***

The shout reverberates off the yellowing walls, its waves touching everything in its path: the simple desk, a plastic wash basin, a tangle of computer batteries and phone chargers, the dirty backpacks, a crucifix over the door. It is muffled only by the two mosquito nets, drawn curtains, and the heaviness of sleep.

In the bed by the window—that window so close to the mass grave—the mosquito net is pulled taut. A little girl rests her weight on the gauzy material, looking like she will leap any moment onto another slope of the thin fabric. She might fall on top of me as I lie frozen on the mattress.

My mind catches up to my ears and I finally register the “Hey!” as an exclamation my own mouth has produced. I am startled, but not frightened. The girl vanishes and I am disoriented, looking in the wrong direction to make sure I haven’t woken Nora.

I use the flashlight on my phone to get re-situated. The white ants are scuttling around on the floor, shedding their wings as they move under the door and towards the light.

I quickly turn it off, tuck the net back in, and try to go back to sleep.

It was probably just a dream, I tell myself.

***

!255 Spirit forces, I have argued, are their own sovereign powers. While living human beings work to variously understand, manipulate, reject, domesticate, and deny the phenomena called “spirits,” the lived experiences of my interlocutors point to such forces operating at the behests of their own desires and within their own temporalities. Above all, their powers are fickle and indeterminate, and the living wonder about their signs and next manifestations.

***

It’s finally morning. I don’t tell anyone about waking up at night, and I’m especially glad I didn’t wake Nora, who is frightened by the thought of ghosts.

I am glad to see Okidi’s face in the sitting room. He teaches me a phrase that people use to express a good friendship. Laremi ma opoko pye ngwen wuni kede: your friend who would share their only white ant with you.

Last night we barely saw Padi Opwonya or Denis. They are so busy, seeing sick people and organizing mass and burials, and one of the other priests in the area just died yesterday as well. And so we only get to say a short goodbye this morning at breakfast.

Okidi and I leave Nora at the Mission and make our way to the trading centre. Prossy has suggested we go see the camp memorial that some of the local politicians have constructed. I have my heavy bag, and I stumble through the timber plant adjacent to the memorial, and nearly trip over four lines of barbed wire that are laid low across the footpath.

Our guide stops and tells us we have arrived. But I am confused and don’t understand what I am looking at. He says the empty field is meant to represent the people who had died.

The guide points to a bathing shelter covered in a tarp, and a few other brick structures and

!256 huts and a row of latrines. “This is what the structures in the camp were like,” he says. I don’t say so, but they don’t look any different from most of the buildings around them.

So I say apwoyo, thank you, and we go home.

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!277 Glossary of Acronyms and Acholi Terms

*Note on pronunciation: In Acholi, “C” is pronounced like the “ch” in “chair.”

abila ancestral shrine, or may refer to the immaterial power within the shrine (see kac) ajiji a bad memory, intense fear ajwaka (sing.) or ajwaki (also ajwagi) (pl.) spirit medium or diviner, often translated as “witch doctor” ajwani lit. dirty things (spiritual pollution) ateke or atekere clan ritual expert ayweya type of spirit that lives in big trees Bwola or myel Bwola royal dance Catan or catani Satan, the Devil, demons cen or lacen ghostly vengeance cik Acholi Acholi norm or custom dini religion (esp. Islam and Christianity) dwoko cogo paco or dwogo cogo paco to restore or return bones home gang (sing.) or gangi (pl.) homestead (see also paco) golo lyel (also spelled golu lyel) to dig up a grave or human remains guro lyel (or gworo lyel) third (last) funeral rites (to gather and repair the grave) gwok bad omen or unexplained event, taboo or abomination; maybe or perhaps HSM/HMFF Holy Spirit Movement/Holy Spirit Mobile Forces Movement, 1986—1887 ICC International Criminal Court, 1 July 2002— present (Rome Statute adopted 1998) IDP internally displaced person iko lyel first funeral rites (to bury the dead)

!278 jok (sing) or jogi (pl.) non-human spirits tied to geographical features, shrines, and clan territories (e.g. jok kulu is a well spirit, jok nam is a lake or river spirit, jok got is a mountain spirit) as well as free spirits from abroad kac sacred tree at abila, OR may refer to ancestral shrine itself; may also contain ot jok structure (house for jok) ker authority or rule, chieftainship kiir abomination kit me kwaro the ways of the ancestors/elders kongo homemade alcohol kwaro ancestor/grandfather/elder (“the living dead”) kwer a polysemic word that can refer to ritual, prohibition/taboo, denial, and celebration laa or laa maber spittle, a blessing lajok or latar witch lam curse, invocation made with anger/ annoyance ladit (sing.) or ludito (pl.) elderly man, a term of respect lami yat herbalist, a type of healer lakwena (sing.) or lukwena (pl.) lit. messenger; with an uppercase L usually refers to Alice Auma (leader of the HSM), lowercase refers to the LRA LC Local Councillor (from levels I to V, i.e. village to district), elected LRA Lord’s Resistance Army, 1987—present Lubanga (see also Rubanga) God (for Protestant Christians) lute pii or lute ceto pii people of/who go underwater (devil worshippers, witches, Illuminati)

!279 lyel grave, or material remains of deceased person (see also iko lyel, golo lyel, guro lyel, and puyu lyel) mego (sing., or lamego) or megi (pl., or elderly woman, a term of respect lamegi) muno foreigner, often used to mean “white person” ngom kwaro ancestral land NRA National Resistance Army, 1981—1995. The NRA was not demobilized, instead it became the UPDF under the terms of the 1995 Constitution of Uganda NRM National Resistance Movement, the ruling political party in Uganda, 1986—present paco home village puyu lyel or puyu opuyo second funeral rites (smearing of the grave) RDC Resident District Commissioner, appointed district-level representative of the President of Uganda Rubanga (see also Lubanga) God (for Roman Catholic Christians) rwot (sing.) or rwodi (pl.) chief or lord Rwot Moo the chief of chiefs in a clan tic Acholi Acholi ritual work tipu or tipu dano (also spelled tipo) human spirit, sometimes translated as soul or ghost, lit. shadow or people’s shadows tum animal sacrifice, lit. cutting UPDF Uganda People’s Defence Force, 1995— present wat relative (pe wat = stranger) wer intestinal remains, esp. of goat or sheep used in tum, scattered for ritual purposes woro respect, esp. towards elders

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