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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 9, No. 11

Publication Date: November 25, 2022

DOI:10.14738/assrj.911.13488. Obika, J. A. (2022). Intimate Enemies and Intimate Allies: Land Conflicts and Microreconciliation After War in Northern Uganda.

Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 9(11). 482-496.

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Intimate Enemies and Intimate Allies: Land Conflicts and

Microreconciliation After War in Northern Uganda

Julaina A. Obika

Senior Lecturer

Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies, Gulu University, Uganda

ABSTRACT

Land conflicts after war in northern Uganda have been given scholarly attention,

often taking different directions. This article focuses on microreconciliation at the

local level to unpack how people who returned to their ancestral lands are faced

with the challenges of re-establishing intimacy after years of encampment during

the war. Juxtaposing the notions of intimate enemies and intimate allies, I illustrate

how intimacy and reconciliation may be difficult to achieve between families, clans

and neighbours. Witchcraft accusations is not a new phenomenon but I show how

accusations are used in new ways as strategies to outlaw and excommunicate others

from customary land. Dividing land, another strategy to create closeness or distance

between kith and kin is often seen as a solution to land conflicts even though it goes

against the clan rules that used to govern Acholi society before the war.

Key words: Land conflicts, intimate enemies, intimate allies, microreconciliation, Acholi,

northern Uganda

INTRODUCTION

In her work, on post-war Peru, coined the concept ‘intimate enemies’ to illustrate how victims

were able to live again with those “who had learned to kill their brothers” during the civil war.

She analyses the processes Kimberly Theidon [1] through which enmity was constructed, with

some people stripping others of ‘what makes them human’, creating sharp divides between ‘us’

(the villagers/victims) and ‘them’ (the Senderistas/ rebels), the goal being to create distance.

For Theidon, forms of violence suffered and practiced influence the reconstruction process

when the fighting subsides. After the war in Peru in the early 2000s, communities had ex- soldiers (or rebels), widows, orphans, victims and perpetrators, living together side by side, in

what she calls a ‘charged landscape of moral complexities’. In living with ‘intimate enemies’,

Theidon explored how people attempted to reconstruct moral orders after prolonged violence.

Her thesis on microreconciliation is not unlike the on-going social struggles after war in

northern Uganda.

For more than two decades, northern Uganda, particularly the Acholi sub-region, was engulfed

in civil war – a war between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government of Uganda.

A myriad of literature on the war that took place between 1986-2006, exists [2,3,4], even

though it is generally acknowledged that the war’s history can be traced from the colonial

period through to the post-independence era in Uganda, which witnessed violence on

unprecedented levels. Approximately 1.8 million people in northern Uganda were forced out of

their homes and ancestral lands and became internally displaced, most rendered helpless to

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Obika, J. A. (2022). Intimate Enemies and Intimate Allies: Land Conflicts and Microreconciliation After War in Northern Uganda. Advances in Social

Sciences Research Journal, 9(11). 482-496.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.911.13488

live in squalid conditions in camps, in what Dolan has called “social torture”. Although it is

estimated that over 10,000 people were abducted into captivity, it is still unclear as to how

many adults and children were forcefully taken to serve in the ranks of the LRA. Many of them

were forced to loot, rape, kill, abduct and commit many crimes against the population in

northern Uganda.

After failing to broker a peace deal, a Cessation of Hostilities Agreement was finally signed in

2006 between the government and the LRA. Those who had been interned for several years

were told that the war was over, and that they should ‘go back to where the war found you’. By

2009, the camps that had been set up all over the Acholi sub-region were gradually

decommissioned, as people returned home to rebuild their lives. The gradual process of return,

however, meant that some people returned home much sooner (or later) than others, while

many remained internally displaced [5]. The guns had gone silent, and many researchers began

to view northern Uganda as a post-conflict society. It is now more than a decade since the camps

were decommissioned and people returned home, but some researchers have begun to

question the “post” in the post-conflict [6], that others constantly allude to. The everyday lived

experiences of losing loved ones, property and subsistence are still very much present rather

than past. New conflicts, particularly over land, emerged soon after the war was over, as people

began to retrace their land boundaries, ownership and inheritance and to re-establish their

attachment and belonging on their ngom kwaro, ancestral land.

During and immediately after the war, northern Uganda was a hub of critical ‘reconciliation

work’, often done in post-conflict settings. Civil society, including NGOs, religious leaders’

groups and elders’ forums pushed an agenda to open spaces where communities could live

together with those who had committed atrocities against them during the war. In 2000, the

government of Uganda had also passed the Amnesty Act and issued amnesty to LRA rebels who

wished to defect and return home. Many former LRA soldiers responded to this amnesty call.

They were sons, fathers and brothers, many of whom had been abducted and forced into

committing crimes against their will. But they had left people behind – families that they wished

to be re-united with, reconciled with. For a time, there was a rush to promote and perform the

mato oput ritual, a homegrown Acholi ritual that reconciled a murderer with his victim’s family

[7]. There were also different kinds of local rituals performed around homesteads and fields, to

cleanse the land of cen, evil spirits, and to ‘release’ the spirits of the dead – those unjustly killed

as well as those who had been buried in the ‘wrong soil’ [8,9], i.e. outside their ngom kwaro. But

there is also another group of people – the people who returned to their land after many years

of the war, and got involved, in different ways, in conflicts over land. These are the people to

whom this article now focuses attention.

The war had changed the social landscape, changed how people related to one another, more

so, on and through the land. Until recently, the concept of reconciliation was often deployed in

a top-down direction [10], leaving little space to speak about the sentiments of retribution or

vengeance that often characterizes the local level and have implications for everyday social

relations. There is often a gap between reconciliation on the national level (as we have seen in

South Africa and Rwanda) and the micro-politics of reconciliation practiced in communities. In

other words, I ask: how do Acholi people manage to live again, not only with those who had

learned to kill them but those with whom they struggle over land in the everyday, after war?

How do we as researchers catch sight of the micro-politics of reconciliation at the local level?

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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal (ASSRJ) Vol. 9, Issue 11, November-2022

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These are the questions I pondered in order to understand how people, especially family and

clans, re-establish intimacy on customary land after being estranged in the camps and during

the war.

Land in Acholi culture is said to be owned by three generations: the past (ancestors), the

present (those living on it) and the future (the unborn) [11]. Over 90 per cent of land is held

under customary tenure [12] under entrustment of clan systems. Acholi being a patrilineal

society, land is mostly managed by men and passed on from fathers to their sons. In another

article, I discuss how this idea is problematic because in everyday practice, women do have

authority over land, albeit in different ways to men [13]. The seven tiers of Acholi customary

land include homesteads, fields, grazing lands, hunting grounds, water points, forests, and

rocks. Land is therefore not just a thing, to be worked, lived on, bought and sold or even divided

up, but rather, it is a space for intimate relationships between kith and kin to be practiced.

Extended families hold land in perpetuity for settlement and farming purposes, while other

sections of clan land are commonly used. Customary land is a space for community and for

social harmony – ber bedo (14, 15, 16].

This study was located within the recent history of armed conflict in northern Uganda,

encampment and the return and resettlement process. With a focus on the Acholi sub-region of

northern Uganda, it explores how the changing landscape of social relationships takes

expression in tensions over land. Inspired by Theidon’s notion of ‘intimate enemies’ I suggest

that there is some inadequacy in trying to understand land relations by looking at enemies

without understanding the allies – the other side of the same coin. I therefore employ the

concept of “intimate allies”, juxtaposed against Theidon’s “intimate enemies”, as fluid

constructions of the other, to understand how microreconciliation is practiced through land

conflicts. I do not in any way suggest that social relations after war should be reduced to

binaries to understand processes of reconciliation, rather, I make the point that looking at two

sides of the same coin helps us catch sight variations in affect, along a continuum, these

relationships often oscillating back and forth.

I discuss two entry points into understanding microreconciliation in the post-encampment

Acholi society: 1) witchcraft accusations and 2) ‘dividing’ or apportioning land among

conflicting claimants of land. I found that these are just some of the strategies employed by kith

and kin as ways of establishing closeness and distance, both socially and geographically on

shared land. Witchcraft and witchcraft accusations are not new notions. Kinship relations and

witchcraft in Africa have been studied for decades [17, 18, 19] but what I demonstrate in this

article, is how these are used in new ways to explain land relations on contested land after war.

Suggestions of dividing land go against Acholi cultural norms of land governance which

promotes communal life through generational entrustment. I activate the notions of ‘closeness’

and ‘distance’ to show the dynamic meanings and practice of intimacy within charged

landscapes and how this helps us to understand microreconciliation in northern Uganda.

FOLLOWING CASES: A COMMENT ON FIELDWORK

This paper is a result of an ethnographic study carried out from 2014-2018. I was pursuing my

Ph.D. research, from which I tried to understand how women navigated access to customary

land that had been pervaded by conflicts between families, clans, and close neighbours. My

study began in Gulu District where I was employed, and later took me to other districts of the