Girl soldiers with Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda fighting for survival: experiences of young women abducted by LRA

For this study the narratives of 16 young women who had served as child soldiers with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda were collected. They had spent between 2 months and 16 years in captivity before managing to escape. All of them spent time at the Gulu Support the Children Organization Rehabilitation centre, from which 12 had moved back into their communities. The narratives start with their capture, the time with the LRA, the escape and the returning and reintegrating. Even though the narratives included appalling stories about the time in captivity, the participants expressed hope for the future and focused on giving their children a good start in life. We used Antonovsky’s theories about ‘sense of coherence’ coupled with resilience theory to discern the factors that helped these young women cope. The participants all managed to leave captivity. We have no comparative information about those who are still in captivity.     

On exposure,vulnerability and violence: Spatial distribution of risk factors for climate change and violent conflict across Kenya and Uganda

Recent studies discuss the link between climate change and violent conflict, especially for East Africa. While there is extensive literature on the question whether climate change increases the risk of violent conflict onset, not much is known about where a climate-conflict link is most likely to be found. We address this question by analyzing the spatial distribution of the factors commonly associated with a high exposure and vulnerability to climate change, and a high risk of violent conflict onset in Kenya and Uganda. Drawing on recent literature and quantitative data for the period 1998–2008, we develop various specifications of a composite risk index (CRI) with a spatial resolution of half a degree for Kenya and Uganda in the year 2008. A quantitative comparison with conflict data for the year 2008 provides support for the composite risk index. Finally, the composite risk index is contrasted with the findings of three qualitative case studies, which provide mixed support for the index and help to identify its strengths and weaknesses as well as conceptual needs for further quantitative studies on climate change and violent conflict.     

Negotiating spatial identities: mobile perspectives on street life in uganda

Previous geographical research with street children has principally focused on their micro-geographies in the city. This paper draws on nomadic and episodic processes of homeless mobility, to explore street children's geographies from a wider social, spatial and temporal perspective. By examining street life in Kampala, Uganda as a continued negotiation of public/private and street/non-street locations, the fluid nature of street children's identity is illustrated. Over time, movement between spaces, such as divergent city niches, institutions, homes and other towns, is often subject to power relations operating in street/non-street spaces with each requiring conformity to a different set of values and behaviours. The paper demonstrates how this results in children's street identity changing as they move through the street life path.     

Towards an Archaeology of Recent Conflict in Western Great Lakes Africa

Abstract

This paper proposes an archaeology of recent conflict in western Great Lakes Africa as a means to give volume to subaltern voices marginalized within and since the conflicts, to produce alternative historical narratives and thus create a more nuanced understanding of war and its aftermath in this region. In addition, by drawing upon emerging theoretical and methodological frameworks in contemporary archaeology, this paper proposes that a politically and socially engaged participatory approach to the material remains of the past may also contribute toward cathartic post-conflict local resident healing and academic understandings regarding the contemporary construction of post-conflict identities. In so doing, the paper presents a survey of prominent conflict remains and discusses their suitability for archaeological approaches, focusing upon one site, Pabbo, an Internally Displaced Person camp in Northern Uganda.     

Post-conflict heritage: symbolic healing and cultural renewal

Heritage is invoked for post-conflict development by international organisations, governments, and sub-national groups to provide emotional and cultural, including economic, healing for individuals and societies. However, academic critiques of healing-heritage typically cite the failure of heritage to heal, either because it cannot, or because it is managed incorrectly. Thus, an anomalous situation exists between expectations and critiques, which this study describes and explores through international policies and national and sub-national post-conflict healing-heritage initiatives from Rwanda and Uganda. Drawing on concepts of heritage as a cultural process, cultural trauma, and symbolic healing, this study proposes that heritage is neither an essentially positive nor negative post-conflict development strategy to select or avoid respectively. Instead, heritage is better understood as a common element of post-conflict renewal, which becomes intensified as the past is aggressively negotiated to provide healing related to conflict traumas. By moving beyond the ‘does heritage heal or hurt?’ distraction the meaning and function of heritage in post-conflict contexts as a common element of post-conflict healing complexes is elucidated. The implication for those who wish to manage post-conflict development through heritage is that they are just the latest in a long history of symbolic healers, from whom they have a lot to learn.     

The cultural and chronological context of Kibiro, Uganda

During fieldwork in 1994, 53 surface collections were made in the archaeologically unknown area of Uganda between Kibiro on Lake Albert and the north bank of the Victoria Nile below the Murchison Falls. Analysis of the collected material revealed a general similarity in the pottery roulettes in use in this area during the past millennium, in spite of some local differences in pot forms and decoration. This suggests the existence of a widespread cultural homogeneity that would have formed part of the background to the growth of the state of Bunyoro. Also found, however, were sherds of Urewe and Chobi ware, as well as of an associated pottery that it is proposed to call “Fajao ware.” These are presumed to belong to the first millennium AD and to suggest the settlement by foodproducers of the lower Victoria Nile, and to a lesser extent the NE margins of Lake Albert, before the appearance there of rouletted pottery. In addition, sites along both the river and the lake produced numerous stone artifacts that indicate the presence of hunter gatherers in the area during the later Pleistocene and early Holocene.

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Résumé  Au cours de recherches sur le terrain en 1994, on a recueilli en surface 53 pièces dans la région de l’Ouganda archéologiquement inconnue située entre Kibiro sur le lac Albert et al rive nord du Nil Victoria en aval des Murchison Falls. L’analyse des matériaux recueillis a révélé une similarité générale parmi les roulettes à poterie utilisées dans cette région au cours du dernier millénaire, malgré quelques différences locales dans la forme des pots et la décoration. Cela laisse supposer l’existence d’une homogénéité culturelle étendue qui aurait été en partie à l’origine de la croissance de l’état de Bunyoro. En outre, des tessons d’objets Urewe et Chobi ont également été trouvés, ainsi qu’une poterie associée qu ’il a été proposé d’appeler “objet Fajao.” On présume que ces objets appartiennent au premier millénaire après J.- C. et qu ’ils laissent supposer le peuplement de la vallée inférieure du Nil Victoria par des producteurs de nourriture et, dans de moindres proportions, des rives NE du lac Albert, avant l’apparition dans cette région de la poterie décorée à la roulette. De plus, de nombreux objets en pierre ont été découverts sur des sites le long du fleuve et au bord du lac, indiquant la présence dans la région de chasseurscueilleurs à la fin du pléistocène et au début de l’holocène.

     

Tourism global production networks and uneven social upgrading in Kenya and Uganda

This paper addresses how the growth of tourism global production networks (GPNs) based in Kenya and Uganda created uneven social upgrading outcomes for workers and communities. A tourism GPN and social upgrading framework follows a global political economy approach to analyzing tourism development and labor in diverse tourism geographies. Two tourism GPNs are investigated: Mombasa, Kenya, and Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda. Four main findings emerge: (1) governance relationships between tour operator and accommodation firms directly impacted social upgrading outcomes for hotel workers and indirectly for excursion workers; (2) excursion workers and community members had precarious connections to tourism GPNs; (3) public governance and collective power were key components to social upgrading while supporting its unevenness; and (4) societal embeddedness constructions around gender and regional space influenced worker and community social upgrading potential. Social upgrading is shaped by a confluence of firm, institution, geography, and labor conditions that differentially materializes in specific tourism GPN arrangements.     

Neurasthenia at Mengo Hospital,Uganda: A Case Study in Psychiatry and a Diagnosis, 1906–50

This article uses a case-study approach to examine the complex and contradictory nature of diagnoses like neurasthenia in colonial Africa. Drawing on the case notes of European and African patients diagnosed with neurasthenia at the Church Missionary Society's Mengo Hospital, Uganda, it argues that in practice, and outside the colonial asylum in particular, ideas about race and mental illness were more nuanced than histories of psychiatry and empire might imply. At Mengo, the tales of pain and suffering recorded by the doctors remind us that there is more to the history of neurasthenia than colonial anxieties and socio-political control. This was a diagnosis that was negotiated in hospital examination rooms as much as in medical journals. Significantly, it was also a diagnosis that was not always reserved exclusively for white colonisers—at Mengo Hospital from the early 1900s neurasthenia was diagnosed in African patients too. It became part of a wider discussion about detribalisation, in which a person's social environment was as important as race.     

Demography,diversity and nativism in contemporary Africa: evidence from Uganda

ABSTRACT. The relationship between population growth, ethnic diversity and conflict in the developing world is little understood but highly relevant to a large number of countries. In order to understand this relationship, I focus on a case study of local conflict in the district of Kibaale in western Uganda. Uganda's unusually high population growth rate and high level of ethnic diversity are often seen to have led to communal violence in Kibaale. Yet I claim that while this conflict was indeed sparked by population growth and resultant internal migration, it has nothing to do with ethnic diversity per se. Rather, the conflict in Kibaale has much more to do with nativism and the salience of claims to indigeneity at the local level. Kibaale may thus prove something of a warning sign for other parts of Uganda and other developing countries with similar high population growth and little success in nation‐building.     

Land as fictitious commodity: the continuing evolution of women's land rights in Uganda

In sub-Saharan Africa, colonial influences have altered traditional practices as a way to manage that which Polanyi labeled as ‘fictitious commodities’ of land, labor, and money. Land has now become a highly marketable commodity and an intrinsic part of the global economy. Over the past century, Uganda's land rights have evolved from communal rights to that of male-dominated, individual ownership practices that have excluded women. Despite constitutional provisions, which confer title of both a deceased husband's property rights and equal rights to property within a marriage to a wife, postcolonial patriarchal tradition prevails. This article examines historical changes in land rights in Uganda and discusses the impact of shifts in land rights from communal ownership to individual tenure, altering power structures and attempting to create marketable land title. The Ugandan women's movement's opposition to policies and implementation of laws that exclude women has been unable to facilitate the required changes in unbiased access to land rights, despite apparent victories in revisions to the letter of the law. Situated within contemporary interpretations of tradition and pressures of market demand, this article shows that women's access to landownership and use are restricted by misinterpretation of traditional law and a lack of enforcement of contemporary legal rights. To illustrate the impact of a lack of access to land, this article examines an empirical case study of widowed subsistence farmers in southern Uganda. Women in Uganda continue to lose ground, quite literally, decreasing the possibility of gender equity in terms of land.