Ugandan Borders: Theatre of Life and Death

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the resilience of informal cross-border trade among the Bakiga people, living in the Kabale region. It argues that the state and its borders do not only frame economic realities, but are an intrinsic, at times inconvenient and at times profitable, part of cosmology of life on the border. Ugandan border-dwellers and traders are mostly not resisting the state, but living with and using the “system” as best as they can. The state is not always a foreign hegemon, but a frame of life.

Acknowledgements

Research for and the writing of this essay were made financially possible by the Chevening Secretariat, Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust and Centre of African Studies (University of Cambridge). The fieldwork for this research was undertaken between June and July 2015 for my MPhil dissertation. Data were collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The names of residence during fieldwork and my interlocutors have been changed to protect their identities. My field research relied on the generosity, patience and trust of many, but I am especially indebted to Afrinspire, Zadok, Franco, Guster, Joyce, Moses, Chow, and the International Trade Centre. I am indebted to Anastasia Piliavsky for her careful readings of the drafts of this essay. Special thanks are due to Angela Strachan, who encouraged me to pursue this research. It is my hope that the residents of Kabale would find something of interest in my take on their dynamic borderland.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A similar view is adopted by linguists, such as Joseph Greenberg, who demonstrated that east African communities are best identified through the common denominator of language. By defining the rules that established the correlation between over 800 African languages and innumerable dialects, one can trace historical relationships among Africans by the commonality of the structure of their languages, even if they are mutually unintelligible (Greenberg 1970). According to Greenberg, the Niger-Congo (Bantu), largest among the four linguistic families identified in Africa, originated from the Cameroon–Nigerian frontier and expanded to fill the southern half of the African continent, including Uganda. The Bantu came to be understood not simply as a language, but also as a unit of economic and cultural traditions that percolated or supplanted indigenous peoples (Collins and Burns 2014).

2 While such incidents may not necessarily be reported in mainstream Ugandan media due to, one suspects, the industry tightly controlled by the state, some incidents are documented in the form of personal narratives. One such example is Bob Nakileza's description of the plight of smugglers in the coffee magendo at Mount Elgon (Uganda):

Just a few kilometres at the border, we lost our coffee in confusion after a stampede. There was no alternative. We went ahead to Suam town to get some support from village mates or any other sympathisers. In the night, we camped in a nearby pine forest  …  we were woken up by barking dogs, as if to warn us of the imminent danger. Many ran for their lives naked or half-naked. That neighbour (the Late Magwali) was deep asleep in a sisal gun bag. The Kenyan police grabbed him and many others, and all were taken for three months of hard labour at an unknown destination, which later was established to be a prison farm. I was quick enough when I woke up to run through the dark pine forest, dodging trees and tree stumps. It was indeed a narrow escape (Nakileza 2007, 134).

3 Anderson and O’Dowd defined arbitrage economies as “economic activities for which the border is the raison d’etre   …  The co-existence of different regulatory regimes on either side of the border generates a form of opportunity structure which invites smuggling, unofficial exchange rates and illegal immigration” (italics in the original)

4 Ubuntu can best be summarized as follows:

A person is a person through other people, strikes an affirmation of one's humanity through recognition of an “other” in his or her uniqueness and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the “other” becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The “I am” is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance (Eze 2010, 190–191).

5 As an aside, a substantial body of literature on Amazonian kinship creation also conceptualizes the notion of precedence of post-natal filiation and affinity through commensality over shared biological substance (Taylor 1996; Vilaça 2005; Viveiros de Castro 2009).

6 The internal rotational policies were not, however, without its problems. On August 31 2014, Ethics Minister, Rev Fr Simon Lokodo, alleged that most corrupt officials in government are usually rotated in “juicy” ministries with the help of “god fathers.” The corrupt bureaucrats are also privileged to determine which ministry or government agency they want to work in. (http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/Govt-rotates-corrupt-officials--says-Lokodo/-/688334/2435368/-/ufflrj/-/index.html)

7 Some of the difficulties encountered by would-be Ghanaian revolutionaries in their efforts to stamp out smuggling in 1982 are addressed in Gupta (1995).

8 For a striking contrast, see Piliavsky's (2013) ethnography of professional thieves in Rajasthan, where the boundaries of police jurisdictions have profoundly shaped kin and marriage relations

9 Relying on habitus, Nugent argues that officials' habits have emerged out of countless daily interactions that make only certain kinds of people suspect, hence susceptible to ignorance of people with whom they are familiar (Nugent 2011, 367–368).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Centre of African Studies (University of Cambridge), the Chevening Secretariat, the Cambridge Commonwealth, and the European and International Trust.