The displaced family: moral imaginations and social control in Pabbo, northern Uganda

Abstract

Looking at the internally displaced people (IDP) camp in Pabbo, northern Uganda, the article focuses on aspects of displacement less frequently discussed. People in Pabbo were not only victimised by violence from the side of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels on one side and the Ugandan government on the other. They also felt threatened by the experience of a moral crisis in the IDP camp. At the centre of this crisis was the family, the place where people were supposed to care for each other and control each other's behaviour. The setting of the IDP camp was experienced as making this ideal model of mutuality and accountability impossible. The ways in which threats of witchcraft, HIV/AIDS and antisocial behaviour were discussed reflected this crisis of the family. In an effort to restore what was expressed as collectively acceptable moral values, people in Pabbo resorted to measures which to outsiders may appear violent. This led to the somewhat contradictory situation in which aid agencies, working in the region, informed people's understanding of the moral crisis (mostly through HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns) but found it impossible to reconcile their human rights-based approach with the local measures of social control aimed at restoring moral values. The people of Pabbo, this case study suggests, were far from being passive victims of powerful outside actors. Rather, they had clear ideas of the threats they experienced and found ways of acting against them. They exercised agency, but mostly within their own terms of reference.

Keywords:

• displacement
• IDP camps
• witchcraft
• HIV/AIDS
• family cohesion
• social control
• Uganda
• northern Uganda
• Acholi

One day in July 2005, about 50 thieves were arrested in Pabbo internally displaced people (IDP) camp, northern Uganda. Armed men in military uniform forced them to take off their shirts and tied them together in a long line. They had to sing “we are thieves, we do bad” and clap their hands. As the group moved around the camp, followed by children and onlookers, more and more men were arrested. They finally went to the market place, where the culprits were lined up and shown to the public. They were given hoes and told that they were now going to dig their own grave. The group moved outside the camp and stopped near a site owned by Sobetra, a construction company working on the roads around Pabbo. Plastic bags were put over the heads of the detainees and they were lined up in front of the armed men like in a firing squad. The guards noisily cocked their rifles to make the men believe they were now going to be shot. Some of them urinated into their trousers out of fear. The group was brought back to the camp and released the same day.

While many people obviously agreed with what was going on, there was no angry mob beating the culprits. People followed the event with some sense of curiosity and amusement, but they did not directly get involved in what happened. The event seemed well organised and planned – including the calculated punishment of staging a fake firing squad. The armed men carrying out these actions were neither soldiers nor policemen, but they were well known to the inhabitants of the camp. People called them “mony pa Ojera” (Ojera's Soldiers). Ojera is the name of a powerful local politician in Pabbo. The armed men acted under his command, and when I asked him about them, he explained to me that they were his vigilante force, ensuring security in the camp. During the two months or so I had stayed in the camp this was the first time I had become aware of their existence.

The arrest puzzled me, not only because it made me aware of a group of political actors I had not noticed before. More importantly, the events I had seen did not fit the framework with which I was trying to understand life in the IDP camp. I was looking at the suffering people experienced in displacement caused by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) on the one hand and by the Ugandan government on the other. In the arrest I witnessed, people were reacting collectively and in an organised manner against something they obviously considered a great threat. But this did not directly involve the LRA or the government forces. Obviously there was something important I was missing.

Popular accounts in the media and in non-governmental organisation (NGO) reports frequently present the war in northern Uganda as an apolitical and irrational conflict.1 They emphasise the LRA's double standard between their teaching and actions; and they maintain that the rebels fight without any real cause beyond their will to survive. The LRA, it is argued, causes tremendous suffering by making their fighters terrorise and kill their own people. The epitome of this view is the story of child soldiers, who were forced by the LRA leaders to kill their own family. It is no surprise that such gruesome stories have been overemphasised in media reports. They fit well to underline the view that the conflict in northern Uganda is meaningless and serves no real political purpose.

In the past decade many scholars have vehemently opposed this perspective. They argue on the one hand that the LRA does have a political agenda, even if its articulation is fragmented and somewhat contradictory.2 On the other hand, they point to the structural violence within the IDP camps, which have been established by the government and maintained with the help of international organisations.3 They accuse the government of using the IDP camps to control the population rather than protect it from the LRA rebels. From this perspective, it is one-sided to focus coverage on rebel cruelties and ignore the extreme suffering resulting from displacement which affects far more people than are victimised by direct violence. As important as this counter-narrative is, it has created its own myths and blind points.

Focusing on the antagonism between the Acholi population and the Ugandan government, scholars seem to have preferred more intellectual and politically conscious narratives of displacement, neglecting the perspectives of people, which were less eager to put the blame on outsiders. Conflicts within the Acholi communities received much less attention from authors trying to replace the “Acholi killing their own people” narrative with one that blames the Ugandan government and international community. Thus, the criticisms on the conditions of displacement often focused on its more dramatic and straightforward aspects, such as crude mortality rates or statistics on abductions. It neglected ways of suffering that were more difficult to understand, and sometimes implied that those suffering life in the camps were passive victims. Actually, they exercised agency all the time, from finding ways of appeasing both the Ugandan army and the LRA to adapting the administration system imposed on camp life in their own interests.

In this article I will look at people's struggle to maintain social accountability and cohesion in the midst of displacement. The family as the most intimate space of social relations will be the focus of my analysis. Attacks from outside forces such as rebels or government agents, as terrifying as they might be, can actually strengthen the cohesion of the family, while seemingly trivial aspects of IDP life are much more destructive. The changing living arrangements had a profound impact on people's sense of order and authority within the family. The experience of “mixing of people” within the camp and a loss of control led to the perception of a moral crisis in the IDP camp. This was the frame of reference within which people discussed many aspects of life in displacement.4

Pabbo during displacement

Pabbo is a subcounty of Amuru district in northern Uganda, located some 20 miles on the road leading from Gulu town to Juba in Southern Sudan. It lies in the middle of an area of civil war that has been going on for over 20 years between the Ugandan government and various rebel forces, most notably the LRA rebels. Most inhabitants of Pabbo have lived in displacement since the early 1990s. In 1996, the main camp was established around Pabbo's trading centre and the government army forced the population to relocate there. Those who stayed in the village were assumed to be rebel collaborators and could be killed. In some places bombs were dropped to destroy the settlements and make it impossible for people to return. The camp frequently became one of the largest IDP camps in northern Uganda and, for many years, it was completely overcrowded. In 2005, the population peaked at more than 60,000 inhabitants.5 Huts were built so close together that if somewhere a fire started it burnt down whole sections of the IDP camp, moving from one grass-thatched roof to the next. The sanitary situation was alarming. Access to clean water and safe disposal of waste was hardly possible. Squeezed in between the huts were cooking spaces, latrines and shelters for bathing. Some latrines were too shallow, leading to overflow during the rainy season. Others were dug too deep, congesting the drinking water. Infectious diseases were common. In mid-2000 there was an outbreak of the ebola virus in the area. There were also outbreaks of cholera. Another major problem was that people were not able to cultivate food. They could not access their gardens except for some small places near the camp and along roads. If they went further away from the camp they risked running into the LRA, who might abduct, mutilate or kill them. Alternatively they might meet the Ugandan army and be accused of being an LRA collaborator. As a result, people were compelled to remain in the camp and depended on the food deliveries of the UN's World Food Program. Supposedly protected by the government army, they felt threatened by soldiers of both sides as well as the disastrous living conditions.

I first visited Pabbo in 2005. Through my research work I came to know Awil Joseph, a teacher and his wife Min Atat, a nurse. They later became my host family to which I would return regularly. The security situation at the time was still very bad and no one was ready to hope that war and displacement would end any time soon. Pabbo continued to be vulnerable to LRA attacks due its close proximity to the Southern Sudan border, from where small groups could launch incursions. When I returned to Pabbo three years later much had changed. The threat of LRA attacks from across the border had subsided and peace talks were being held in Juba. People were starting to believe in the possibility of peace. Meanwhile, local government and aid agencies were pushing for IDP camps to be closed and for the population to return to their former family homesteads. I again returned in 2010. At this stage, although peace talks had failed, the LRA had been pushed many miles away to the Southern Sudan border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. There was a confidence in Pabbo that the fighting was really over. Many families had returned to their former homes, or at least sent some family members there to start building homes and opening fields. But some did not want to leave Pabbo. For many it had been their home for most or all of their lives. With improved security, the IDP camp was turning into a permanent semi-urban space with nightclubs, video halls, pool tables, and a busy market place. The road passing through Pabbo connects Uganda with Southern Sudan. Trucks from Kampala or Gulu passed to deliver all sorts of goods to Juba and other places in Southern Sudan. Previously one of the remotest areas in Uganda, Pabbo suddenly found itself in the middle of a border region of growing importance. In sum, within a few years, the people of Pabbo had experienced dramatic changes in their lives. It is in this context that I now proceed to discuss aspects of their social agency. First it is necessary to make a few comments on what the ideal, and idealised, family unit was supposed to look like. It was in relation to this model that social developments were persistently discussed by just about everyone I spoke to.

The memory of village life

Almost everyone old enough to remember life before displacement spoke in glowing terms about how things used to be. In an Acholi village, they explained, when people talk about a certain home, they refer to it using the name of the male head. The home provides social identity and accountability: those living in a certain home are under the authority of its head and he in turn is responsible for them.6 The home is a space that has to be respected by outsiders. When people approach the home of a stranger, they would ask for permission to enter the compound by shouting “wadono?” (“can we enter?”) or by making themselves noticed in another way.

The ideal homestead was described to me as being embedded in wider social spaces. The compound is surrounded by the family's fields and neighbouring homesteads. Those living nearby are part of the extended family: they might be brothers, parents or uncles of the male head. The further one moves away, the more difficult it becomes for people to describe their exact relation. But even people of the same village might express a feeling for a common identity since they belong to the same clan.

The intimate and controlled space of the home was contrasted with lum, the bush. As one moves away from one's home, the area gets less and less familiar and the people living there are less and less closely related to one's own family. Eventually one would reach lum. This is the place where there are no homes and no gardens. Instead, there are trees, shrubs and grass. The bush is the place of alien beings and uncultivated nature. It is the home of wild animals and jogi, powerful spirits.7 It is also, however, a place of plenty: string, bamboo and grass needed for the roofs of huts are collected here. Hunters kill bush animals and bring them back for eating. There are powerful herbs and roots too, some used in rituals for remedies, others with more dangerous qualities, associated with witchcraft and poisoning.8

Thus, the opposition between home and bush is not only geographically defined – home and bush also stand for opposite moral spaces. The home is the place of order and control, the place of people. The bush is the home of the wild and dangerous, the place of non-human beings. To maintain this distinction is an ongoing task. The effort to constantly re-establish a place of order and accountability within a home is what I want to call the making of the moral family. The most tangible signs of this effort might be small talk and greeting patterns among people. People commonly ask each other questions, to which the answer is already known. Someone resting under a mango tree is asked “Ibedo mot?” (“Are you resting?”); a woman with an empty jerrycan is greeted with the words “Itye kagamo pi?” (“Are you taking water?”) and someone passing a group of men building a hut might comment: “Wutye kayubo ot?” (“Are you building a hut?”). By asking, a person makes clear he has seen and understood what is going on. He also affirms what he is seeing. Knowing what other people do and where they are makes them understandable and accountable. Along those lines one might also understand the fact that “apwoyo”, the most common greeting in Acholiland, translates as “thank you”. You can thank someone for specific things: “apwoyo nena” (“thank you for seeing me”), “apwoyo tedo” (“thank you for cooking”) or “apwoyo camo” (“thank you for eating”). But you can also thank someone for doing things you don't benefit from yourself; and you can say apwoyo to someone simply to greet him. In this way, to say apwoyo is an expression of gratitude of the moment of meeting someone; an appreciation of the person as well as of what he or she is doing.

These descriptions contrast with the reality of the IDP camp. In the camp, no one asked for permission when they entered the homes of strangers. Most people did not know what people in their immediate surrounding were up to and most neighbours hardly knew each other. This is not to suggest that in the camp there was no sense for order based on family relations or the responsibility of a family's head for his dependants. But the physical set-up, into which the family structures were usually embedded, was not present in the camp. It was impossible to tell where the space of one homestead ended and where another one began. Huts were squeezed together so that there was hardly enough space for cooking. Often, different families shared the same latrine and bathing shelters. In the confined family spaces of the camp, it was impossible for people to observe and monitor each other throughout their daily activities. It was often mentioned to me that parents could no longer control their children, because they could easily escape from their parents and hide in the crowded camp. It was impossible to note who left and who arrived at the homestead, since one was constantly surrounded by people in the camp. More threatening still than the proximity to people was the fact that those people were mostly strangers. This was often described as the “mixing” of people in the camp: while in the village, most neighbouring homesteads were those of close relatives, this was rarely the case in the IDP camp. Discussions often turned to the topic of witchcraft, which according to my informants demonstrated the dangers associated with the lack of order in the IDP camp.

In a group discussion, a young man told me:

When life becomes difficult, there are a lot of quarrels between neighbours since they live so close together. They may end up trying to poison, do witchcraft. So that is the reason that there is witchcraft. Formerly in the village, even if you killed a cat or dog of a neighbour, that person will be punished, before the community, but now here it is just different.9

Witchcraft requires physical proximity of the aggressor to the potential victim. In the context of the camp, there was no protection against witches. As two other men explained to me:

Formerly, we knew the boundaries of where to play. But now we are in the camp. You don't know the immediate person who is next to you. They may be from another parish, another village, and they may come with witchcraft. So we just fear.10

During those days [in the village], people used to live close to relatives, they were not so mixed. So you find out in a community, most of them are relatives. Witchcraft was not practised, because everybody was a relative. But now people are mixed and those things are occurring.11

Virtually all informants I talked to confirmed that witchcraft incidences had increased when people had to move into the IDP camp. The lack of distance, to them, meant a lack of protection against evil influences.

On several occasions, there were fires in Pabbo, which burnt down whole sections of the camp. At one level it was obvious how these disasters occurred, because the thatched roofs were so close together. But, invariably, there would be discussions of how the fires had broken out that evoked the ways in which the moral order was not as it should be. And, more often than not, there was talk of witchcraft. Thus, the congestion of the camp was held responsible for the fires in more than one way.

Accusations of witchcraft of course occurred in the past too. Girling, p'Bitek and others wrote about them among the Acholi, and Abrahams and others amongst neighbouring groups.12 But accounts from the past highlight the dangers associated with concentrations of strangers. Reading the works of Okot p'Bitek, in particular, it can quickly be recognised what threats the close proximity of camp life might pose.13 Fear of those threats remained acute at the time of my research, even after so many years of displacement.

Invisible threats

It is a somewhat curious fact that, amongst all the epidemic diseases people experienced in Pabbo, HIV/AIDS was most readily mentioned to describe the horror of camp life. Why, one might ask, did people not talk as much about ebola or cholera? Both are deadly diseases, which are far more contagious than HIV/AIDS. Both are immediately visible in terms of the symptoms of those affected as well as in terms of the response from health professionals who set up special wards to isolate the patients. Both first appeared in northern Uganda when people were living in IDP camps and both are clearly linked to the disastrous living conditions of displacement. In the case of HIV/AIDS on the other hand, such a causal connection is not easily made and there is a controversial academic debate about the effects of displacement on HIV infection rates with some scholars arguing that war and displacement might well not have increased HIV-prevalence.14 HIV/AIDS is also much less visible than the other diseases. But it is one of the peculiarities of the HIV epidemic that it is rarely seen but much talked about. I will suggest that it is precisely the elusive nature of the disease that makes it such a potent metaphor to talk about the hardship of camp life and the threat it poses to the cohesion of the moral family. Crucially, HIV/AIDS has similarities and links with notions of witchcraft.

I remember hearing a radio spot promoting HIV/AIDS awareness on Radio Mega, a local broadcasting service in Gulu. The spot began with a man announcing: “This is the voice of a person who is HIV negative.” A friendly male voice was heard saying “hello”. The speaker continued: “and this is the voice of a person who is HIV positive”. It was followed by precisely the same voice saying “hello”. The same was repeated with two or three other voices, all of which sounded exactly the same whether the person was HIV-positive or -negative. The point that it is impossible to tell if someone is HIV positive or not is an important message of awareness campaigns in northern Uganda. Of course, there is a simple way of telling if someone is positive or not: HIV blood tests are quick, reliable and have become quite easily available in northern Uganda. But although in recent years the number of NGOs offering testing has increased, the main premise on which this is done is that the decision to test has to be entirely voluntary and the results are to be kept confidential. Thus, even when testing is offered during awareness campaigns, people do not find out who is positive. They are warned of the presence of HIV-positive people within their community, but have no way of knowing who it is.

Scholars looking at other parts of East Africa have noted that this strategy has profoundly influenced local ways of engaging with the disease. Allen, writing on the Azande of Southern Sudan, observes that the way HIV/AIDS is discussed in awareness campaigns echoes Zande ideas of witchcraft. HIV-positive people, just like witches, carry within themselves a deadly substance that can harm other people. Warning people of the deadly threat, without giving them any way of knowing who is infectious and who is not, is some kind of social torture, he argues.15 Heald, writing on the ways in which HIV/AIDS was discussed in rural Kenya, takes up this point. She argues that to people of Kuria district, not sexual morality as such, but knowledge who was and who was not HIV positive, was the key for people to avoid transmission. Most people she talked to were in favour of a strategy where testing was mandatory in some form and where results were made public.16

In the case of Pabbo too, the fact that HIV/AIDS was presented as an invisible threat made it appear even more dangerous and uncontrollable. In this sense, the disease reflected the experience of the camp as a place of hidden dangers. As HIV is transmitted through sexual intercourse, it was the most intimate relations that posed the most immediate threat. Here lay the great destructive potential of the disease for the family: the threat was not only invisible but it came from the people one was closest to. NGO campaigns offered no help to identify the threat and make it more controllable. Instead, they advised people that they should abstain from sexual relations until the right partner was found to whom they would then remain faithful.17 This idea is not unknown in Pabbo. Parents try to control their children (especially girls) to keep them from sexual partners until they are married. Marriage itself is a long process, involving negotiations between the families of the couple, the transfer of payments and the careful investigation of the other family's background.18 In the IDP camp both the control of children's sexual activities and the negotiation of a socially sanctioned relationship were experienced as failing dramatically. An old man told me:

Before, in the village, we had high moral values. It was a long process to get in contact with a girl. The girl would show you her home and you would try to find out about the family: are they wizards? Are they well behaved, respectful? These days the moral behaviour is bad. Here, you might even marry a relative! It is not easy to control your children. You might not even be able to keep all of them near your hut. (…) Parents try to control their children, but it is hard: you move in one direction and your child moves into the other direction.19

In the crowded camps, families felt that their authority was undermined. They were not capable of negotiating marriage deals for their children, because family members were dispersed around the camp and because they were usually too poor to pay the required fees. While marriages did happen during the time of displacement, the ceremony and the required wealth transfers were rarely done properly or left uncompleted.20 Thus, many relationships were only insufficiently legitimised and recognised by the relatives. On the other hand, parents felt they could not control their children who were not yet married. Children could spend time with neighbours whose behaviour the parents did not know. My informants described the camp environment as chaotic and polluted and concluded that it spoiled the children. Speaking in English, another man told me:

Here in the camp, people don't know who is who. They don't know their relatives. They don't know if someone is a good person. Transferable diseases can easily come in the camp, like HIV, Hepatitis E and Ebola. If it is dirty they can easily be transmitted. There are those girls with bad character. They want the clothes from Kampala [the capital of Uganda]. Men buy them and they have sex. In the village, you would feel ashamed in a home you are not a relative of. If a boy comes to see girls their parents can beat him. If he is not proper, they can refuse. They can arrest him and punish him for his misbehaviour. (…) This is bad behaviour we don't want. Things must be done in a proper way. Not running up and down with one person, then the next … because it becomes meaningless.21

HIV/AIDS, just like witchcraft, posed a threat impossible to control within the IDP camp. Awareness campaigns informed people about the danger but they also emphasised that it was impossible to know where it came from. They advised people to live according to strict moral rules, but precisely those rules were impossible for families to enforce in the crowded IDP camp. Thus, people were left in a situation of vulnerability, in which they were aware of the danger but had no effective means of protecting themselves. They were, however, not entirely helpless. In the next section, I will discuss ways in which people responded to the threats they experienced in displacement.

Fighting against thieves

The day after the arrest of the thieves, described at the beginning of this article, I had lunch with Joseph and some other men in one of the small restaurants in the centre of Pabbo. The discussion turned to what had happened the day before and people were laughing as we talked about the fake firing squad. Joseph did not see why I was disturbed by this incident. It was them who did wrong, not us, he said. Over the course of the conversation I understood that the word “thief” had another meaning for me than it did for them. Some of the arrested men seemed to be related to the burglary of a small store that had happened some time before. But most of them were not involved in an event of theft or any other violation of Ugandan law. They had, however, in the eyes of people in Pabbo, violated moral laws. While they were not written down, these laws were no less clearly felt. Some of the arrested, I was told, would sit around playing cards all day. Others would look for girls to have sex at night. All of them were considered a burden to their family and a bad influence on the community.

Three years after the incident I decided to move around the camp and talk to people about what had happened. On the outskirts of the camp, I met a group of women. They remembered the arrest well and said it was a good way to set an example against those who do wrong: “Before torturing them, when they arrested the thieves, they first enquired with their families: is it true? Is this one really bad?” they said.22 A man, remembering the arrest, said: “It was good, it made bad behaviour with bad consequences go away.”23 When I asked him what he meant by bad consequences, he mentioned the moral decay of the community and HIV/AIDS.

The category of a thief, as it was used in those conversations, has little to do with its legal meaning. Rather, it was used as a synonym for “idler” or “wrongdoer”. Suzette Heald, writing about the Gisu of Western Uganda, suggests that the category “thief”, just like “witch” is a judgement of character: to be a thief is a “dispositional base from which behaviour can be seen to spring”.24 This is certainly true for the Acholi as well. With the public punishment, people aimed to set an example and scare wrongdoers into behaving well. In this sense the arrests resemble the witch-hunts in north-western Uganda, described by Tim Allen.25 The violent actions served as a means to reassert moral norms and scare others into not using their evil powers. The local politician who had organised the arrest told me:

These idle ones were disorganising the community. We arrested them and paraded them before the community so that they would fear. I kept on following them, monitoring them. Many of them have now reformed. It was not the only time this was done. And I am about to do it again.26

The vigilante force, which had carried out the arrest, was not originally meant to combat thieves and wrongdoers in the camp. Its official purpose was to help the government army to fight the LRA rebels, relying on the insider knowledge of its members. It was created in the early 2000s by the local councillor (LC) 3 of Pabbo Sub-county. Local councillors are elected leaders on different levels of local government in the Ugandan political system. During the war, the LCs in the camps had little more than an administrative role, not least because there was no functioning police force with whom the LCs were expected to work. Much political power was concentrated in the military, which controlled the area.

Being a functionary of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM), the LC3 of Pabbo was in close contact with the military commanders. Training and arming a group of young men to support the military certainly helped him gain influence within the camp. Not only did he have his own security force, he also maintained close contact with the soldiers based in Pabbo. In fact, he had his own hut among the army barracks in the camp. When the LRA disappeared from northern Uganda and the army detachment was slowly dismantled, the LC's group remained. When I asked him, why the group still existed, he answered:

Security is not only about rebels. The vigilantes deal with anything that disturbs the peaceful settlement of the community. I even have those boys still now.27

In other words, the vigilante group was also used to enforce a certain vision of order within the camp. In one instant, a group of young men lived in the camp for some time because they were digging a telephone line from Kampala to Juba. According to the LC3 they were stealing from people and harassing women, so they were no longer allowed to stay out in the evenings. The vigilante group came with sticks into the bars and nightclubs in the centre and chased them away. Even I had been monitored by the vigilante group during my initial time in Pabbo, as the LC3 readily admitted. I also found out they were involved in controlling sexual behaviour of boys and girls in the camp. Some young men told me:

Sometimes the LC3 put some trained people to move at night and find out about people who are engaging in love affairs. If you are caught you are beaten. They went against all those immoralities.28

Students were given mobile phones and sent out to monitor the behaviour of their peers. If they found out about someone about to have sex they could use their phones to call the LC3's vigilante force. The “wrongdoers” were then arrested, beaten and taken to their families. The LC explained to me:

The time when we did that there were not any unwanted pregnancies or cases of defilement. I will continue with it in a more organised way. I applied for money at an NGO. I want to get the funding not only as scouts for moral guidance, but also to give them something to do. They will come closer to me. No one will wish to be my enemy. They will report those cases of sex.29

Moral imaginations and humanitarian interventions

Frequently, the LC3 described his measures as an effort to revive Acholi culture and its values, invoking imaginations of the high moral standards of life before the war and displacement. This vision also matched the discourse of reviving Acholi customs, which is popular amongst many NGOs working in the region.30 Needless to say, the LC3's vision of restoring Acholi culture was not particularly welcomed by the aid agencies. Most of them had no idea of what was happening and, when I told them about it, they refused to see any connection between their work and the things I had observed on the ground. Yet in the eyes of the LC3, the NGOs were part of his effort to restore moral order among the people. The following example demonstrates this ambivalent relationship well.

Government soldiers who had been deployed in Congo and were subsequently transferred to Pabbo brought with them Congolose women as their wives. They lived as a group in the camp. When more and more soldiers were transferred elsewhere, many Congolese women decided to leave as well. The LC3 talked about them in negative terms:

We have the soldiers coming into the camp and the sluts following them. These are women suffering from the bleaches they do to themselves and their strong perfumes. Eventually our camp became contaminated. Thank God, some NGOs helped us to take the Congolese back. Because they were the ones telling me that they had come here with the penis, and they were also only going back with the penis. That is their way of life. (…) Our moral values were tampered with by those from outside like the Congolese women. They wear petticoats and those things – in Acholiland it is not normal to show your private parts. It will take us 50 years to regain the shining values of our culture.31

The organisations that the LC said had “helped” him to take the Congolese women home were UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). They worked with a Catholic sister in Pabbo who arranged to talk to the women and prepare for their return.32 When I explained to the sister what the LC3 had told me, she commented:

It is funny the LC3 says I am helping him to bring back the Congolese, because we were told by UNHCR and IOM to keep a low profile. It was done without the knowledge of the military or the local leaders.33

Neither the sister nor the organisations were interested in seeing their work as part of an effort to clean the IDP camp of immoral elements.

On one side there is a local politician fighting to regain the “shining values of Acholi culture” with the help of aid agencies, on the other side there are international NGOs trying to do their work without getting involved in local politics. The latter's attempt to help the Congolese women leave the camp without the support or even the knowledge of local leaders strikes me as rather naïve. But, in fact, most NGOs whose work I experienced tried not to get involved in local politics. In doing so, they did not only ignore the realities of camp life, but they also misjudged their own roles. Being rich and powerful organisations associated with white foreigners, they were a source of power and legitimacy. Associating his own efforts with the work of NGOs, the LC3 made use of this.

Sometimes, NGOs did not only legitimise local activities, but actually funded them. Above I have quoted the LC3 saying that he is currently applying for money to extend his efforts to control students’ sexual behaviour. I contacted the Ugandan NGO he had mentioned to me to find out what their perspective on this story was.

The local field officer in Gulu town explained to me that they were supporting local “child protection committees” and that it was one of their tasks to monitor the girls under their care. In addition, he said that it was part of the programme to talk to the students about HIV risk behaviour and advise them “not to misbehave”. When I told him what these efforts looked like in Pabbo, he was, unlike most other NGO workers, not particularly surprised. In his eyes, local leaders were frequently misusing their power. However, being a partner of the government, there was nothing his organisation could do, he explained.34

But to interpret the events in Pabbo as the result of an individual misusing his powers ignores the widespread support the LC3 enjoyed for his measures among the camp inhabitants. Even those who accused him of using his vigilante force for his own interests agreed that something had to be done against the immoralities of camp life and they admitted that the LC3's measures had been effective.

In fact, it was the people themselves, and not the LC3 alone, who saw a connection between the work of NGOs and local efforts to restore moral behaviour. This was especially obvious in the case of HIV/AIDS. For example it was while talking about the problem of HIV/AIDS and possible solutions that I was told about the LC3's effort to control young people's sexuality (discussed above). Earlier I have argued that, to many people in Pabbo, HIV/AIDS was the result of the moral crisis in the IDP camp. Also among health professionals it was not unusual to make a connection between the occurrence of HIV/AIDS and the decline of cultural and moral values. An Acholi doctor working with HIV/AIDS patients in a large regional hospital put it like this:

With the social breakdown, the problem of HIV became bigger. There is always a good and a bad part of culture. The good part was that there was control of young women. This enforced A- and B-prevention.35 But now with the war, parents are lacking control.36

It is not surprising then, that the efforts to reduce immoral behaviour in the camp and restore parental control were seen as an effective means of fighting the epidemic. Unlike HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns, which pointed to the threat but refused to render it visible, the measures I observed in Pabbo were successful at exposing those who were seen as the cause of the crisis. “The problem” an NGO worker commented to me, “is that all our campaigns are done within a human rights based framework and we cannot accept to be connected to such violent actions”.37 From a local perspective, this position seems hypocritical: while NGOs claim to help the people and clearly point to the moral crisis and its dangerous effects, they did little to address this. Measures based on voluntarism were considered unsuited to deal with the moral problems in the IDP camp.

Returning home

Having talked about the moral crisis in the IDP camp, an old man ended by commenting:

When people return home, there will be much improvement. Boys and girls will stay separate and we will return to the former glory of family rules and regulations. It will be difficult in the village just to have sex. (…) These others, the vagabonds, they should arrest them and take them back to the village.38

As I have observed above, the memory of village life was frequently used to contrast the difficult conditions during displacement. Over the years, an idealised narrative of traditional life in the village had been established. NGOs, journalists and researchers played their part in this too by drawing a glorified image of the past to underline the inhuman conditions in the camp.

Around 2008 people could finally return home. Talking to those who had returned to their former homes, I heard a lot of positive things about living back in the village. A couple, which lived on the other side of the valley from Joseph's home told me:

We are happy to have gone home, life is good. The air is fresh and no one disturbs us. It is not like in the camp.39

A woman said:

Home is good, because it is home. Neighbours in the centre come from far; you don't know what they can do to you. Here, the neighbours are not giving many problems.40

And a group of old people said:

Here you feel at home. On the children you can impose a code of behaviour, not like in the camp where you can say anything, but your kids just copy the neighbours.41

But this was only part of the picture. The ambiguities of return are well demonstrated by the example of my host family. In 2007, Joseph had built a new hut and, for some time, the family was living in the original home during the holidays. They always returned to the camp, however, when school started again. Their home in the camp was next to the health centre, where Min Atat worked. For her, it was very convenient to check on the children in between her work. Also, Min Atat had a little drug store in the camp which she opened every evening. The children's school was next to the camp. If the children had to go there from their former home, it was a long walk or else the parents had to pay a boda, a motorcycle taxi. Compared to the camp's infrastructure, the former home seemed, although idyllically set apart from the congested camp, rather empty and abandoned. Both, Joseph and Min Atat enjoyed meeting their friends in the camp and chat with them. To cultivate their gardens, a lot of work was necessary. For the children it was a new experience to work on the field additionally to school hours. There were very mixed feelings within the family, about returning home, which Joseph only resolved when he decided for them to all move back home for good. “Sometimes” he commented to me “you have to be a dictator”. Only a few times have I seen him take such an authoritative stand.

Returning home was not at all easy for most families. Where a long time ago had stood huts, compounds and fields, was now bush – a place perceived to be alien and dangerous. To rebuild the homestead was hard work. Moving to the village was also a great change in lifestyle. People, who had lived for years surrounded by many people, suddenly found themselves in an isolated and unfamiliar setting. Adapting to this way of life was especially difficult for the younger generations who had grown up in the camp and knew little of rural life. A young man I met in the village told me:

Coming here was not so easy, because in the camp we were many. Now suddenly we were alone.42

Importantly, with the end of insecurity, also the IDP camp changed dramatically. People were allowed to move freely. With the establishment of the trade routes, the camp turned into a busy commercial centre. The LC3 told me in 2008:

We are no longer in the camp by the way, we are in town, Pabbo town. We used to call it Pabbo Camp. You should know from a trading centre it was changed to be a town board. And very soon it will be a town council.43

People no longer talked about the “camp” but went back to calling it the “centre” instead. The change in vocabulary also reflected a change in the attitude towards the place. Instead of looking at it as a place of disorder and suffering, people more and more came to see it as a place of money, development and enjoyment. At the same time many remained suspicious of the negative aspects of these developments. A woman I met in the village observed:

In the centre I can see buildings go up, vehicles moving but now I don't know if that is development. I don't know if it is good or bad.44

The example of trade explains such ambiguous feelings. With the opening of Juba Road, and an increased demand for food from Sudan, new opportunities also arose for farmers far from the centre. It became easy to sell food at a good price and people took advantage of this opportunity. Yet nearly everyone reminded me of the risks connected to this. Several times people had sold so much food to Sudan that it became rare in Pabbo itself. Due to the high demand, prices jumped up in the market. Trucks loaded with food passed through Pabbo and refused to stop and sell it, since they could make a lot more money in Sudan, where people were ready to pay higher prices. People, who had sold food to earn money, found they had to buy some back at an inflated cost. At times, there was no food available at all. This experience was well summarised by a woman who said:

Trade makes those happy who like money. It leaves us without food.45

Between the busy commercial centre and the isolated demanding farmers existence, people have to find their way to re-establish a new life which had little to do with the glorified memory of the past. One day I talked to a group of people about those who still lived in the camp. A man in the group told me:

There are those people who refuse going back home, the thieves, robbers and wrongdoers. Like my wife, she refused to come with me and now she is moving in the bars and is falling in love with other men. We even had a meeting and talked to her. She agreed to come home, but after cutting seven bundles of grass for roofing she got tired and went back to the camp. She is no longer used to life in the village. The government should help us, to force those people back home.46

The problem, the man explained, was that he had not yet paid all the bride price he was supposed to give. He continued:

There is some land I want to sell to marry her completely and then I will be able to force her home. You have to find someone among your people to buy my land!47

Life in the village was difficult and many people were no longer able or interested in living a farmer's life. The opportunity to rebuild life in the village and the rapid developments in the centre of Pabbo at the same time brought with it its own dilemmas challenging the cohesion of the family in new ways. In the man's quest to unite his family in the village, he was willing to call the police or other government agents to arrest his wife and bring her back home. To be able to finalise the marriage, he wanted to sell a part of his land and invited me, a European visitor, to find someone who might buy his land. The story shows that the effort to control and protect one's family is not tied to a particular “traditional” lifestyle. In the remaking of the moral family, traditional and modern practices become entangled.

Conclusion

The material presented here can be read as a contribution to the literature looking at the conditions of displacement in northern Uganda. The complaints discussed were no minor issues to people in Pabbo. The fear of witchcraft, for example, was among the first things people mentioned when I asked them about camp life. The same is true for HIV/AIDS, the problem of thieves and idlers, and the lack of control over one's own family. The perception of a moral crisis within the IDP camp provided a rationale to make sense of those aspects of life in the IDP camp and act upon them.

Discussions of displacement frequently make the point that people forced to live in IDP camps have lost their “culture”. However, what exactly has been lost and if people really want it back is not so easy to pin down. The memory of life in the village was not static. Over time, an idealised narrative of Acholi traditional life became established. The gap between this imagined past and the reality of life in the village appeared when people started to return. And, as it turned out, people did not necessarily want to go back to the past of village life. What life after displacement could look like and what re-establishing “Acholi culture” meant in practice turned out to be open for discussion.

Many NGOs have enthusiastically embraced a discourse on the need of restoring Acholi traditions, assuming somewhat naively that this corresponds with their ideas of positive values. This article suggests that this is not necessarily the case. People's concerns often referred to the need to control their families and the ways through which they attempted to regain this control could be quite violent. This led to the somewhat paradoxical situation where aid agencies, on the one hand, welcomed plans of restoring “Acholi traditions” but, on the other, opposed the measures people took in order to restore what they considered their cultural values.

The people in northern Uganda, this case study shows, were no passive victims of the LRA or the Ugandan government. They had a clear understanding of what they were threatened by and they showed the capacity to act – even if those actions might seem surprising to outsiders.

Notes

1. Such perspectives have been summarised in Finnström, “An African Hell of Colonial Imagination?,” 74–5.

2. Most notably: Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings, 99–130; Finnström, “An African Hell of Colonial Imagination?,” 74–89.

3. For example see Dolan, “Understanding War and its Continuation”; Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings; Allen, Trial Justice, 53–60.

4. The argument is based on participant observation, informal talks and interviews conducted during three main periods of fieldwork between 2005 and 2010. Unless indicated otherwise, quotes were translated from Acholi into English.

5. This information was given to me by the LC3 of Pabbo as well as various UN officials. See also Jaramogi, “Uganda: 10,000 Leave Pabbo Camp.”

6. See, for example, Girling, The Acholi of Uganda, 7.

7. It is interesting to note that the LRA rebels are usually referred to as “people from the bush”. In my work on former LRA soldiers I suggest that for them, life “in the bush” was experienced as a totally different world from life at home as a civilian. Mergelsberg, “Between Two Worlds,” 156–76.

8. One time, I found a type of mint in the bush and brought it home to try to make tea with it. Min Atat just shook her head and refused the children to try any of it. Joseph only drank the tea after some hesitation. The behaviour did not only relate to their fear the herb might be poisonous – Min Atat commented that I was now “like a wizard” bringing unknown herbs from the bush and cooking them.

9. Author's interview, April 25, 2005.

10. Author's interview, April 25, 2005.

11. Author's interview, April 25, 2005.

12. For example p'Bitek, Religion of the Central Luo; Girling, The Acholi of Uganda; Abrahams, “A Modern Witch-hunt among the Lango of Uganda.”

13. p'Bitek, Religion of the Central Luo.

14. See Allen, “AIDS and Evidence”; Lowicki-Zucca, Spiegel, and Ciantia, “AIDS, Conflict and the Media in Africa”; Ciantia, “HIV Seroprevalence in Northern Uganda.”

15. Allen, “Witchcraft, Sexuality and HIV/AIDS among the Azande of Sudan.”

16. Heald, “Is the Sharia of the Doctors Killing the People?”

17. Awareness campaigns were usually framed in the concept of ABC prevention. This refers to a joint effort to encourage abstinence, partner reduction and condom use. Figures about condom use are notoriously difficult to obtain, so nothing conclusive can be said about the rates of condom use. In any case, awareness campaigns as well as informal discussions among people usually focused on abstinence and partner reduction as the main ways of fighting HIV/AIDS.

18. p'Bitek, “Acholi Love.”

19. Author's interview, July 31, 2008.

20. Joseph, my host, for example lived with his wife and children like in a family, but only managed to complete the ceremony many years later, when the most difficult years of displacement had passed.

21. Author's interview, July 31, 2008.

22. Author's interview, August 27, 2008.

23. Author's interview, August 27, 2008

24. Heald, Manhood and Morality, 76.

25. Allen, “The Violence of Healing.”

26. Allen, “The Violence of Healing.”

27. Author's interview, August 8, 2008. All conversations with the LC3 took place in English and are reproduced verbatim.

28. Author's interview, August 2, 2008.

29. Author's interview, August 8, 2008.

30. This is very obvious in the debate about the intervention of the International Criminal Court and alternatives for justice and reconciliation in northern Uganda. See Allen, Trial Justice.

31. This is very obvious in the debate about the intervention of the International Criminal Court and alternatives for justice and reconciliation in northern Uganda. See Allen, Trial Justice

32. A few hundred Congolese women and their children used to live in Pabbo. Most of them were in stable relationships with one of the government soldiers stationed there. When the security situation relaxed and the soldiers were transferred away from Pabbo, the majority left towards Juba or Gulu. Some few who no longer had husbands in the military were brought back to Congo by UNHCR and IOM.

33. Author's interview, August 23, 2008.

34. Author's interview, August 15, 2008.

35. This refers to abstinence and partner reduction.

36. Author's interview, July 19, 2008.

37. Author's interview, August 7, 2008.

38. Author's interview, July 31, 2008.

39. Author's interview, January 16, 2010.

40. Author's interview, January 17, 2010.

41. Author's Interview, January 24, 2010.

42. Author's interview, January 15, 2010.

43. Author's interview, August 8, 2008.

44. Author's interview, January 17, 2010.

45. Authors interview, January 22, 2010.

46. Author's interview, January 24, 2010.

47. Author's interview, January 24, 2010.