An African hell of colonial imagination? The Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, another story

Abstract

I first encountered an Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) manifesto in 1997, a tattered one-page ten-point program. Some ten years later, with peace talks held in Juba (south Sudan) that started in 2006 but ended some two years later, my file with LRA written statements has grown big. This is basically also the timeframe that I cover in this chapter. Some LRA documents have been given to me by diaspora contacts in Sweden and the UK, a few I have downloaded from the Internet – then often copies of documents circulating on the ground – still most of them have actually been shown to me during fieldwork in Uganda, by people who put their trust in me despite a situation of severe state oppression. There is a clear continuity in claims put forward in the LRA documents that I have gathered throughout the years, and I will present something of a rarity in the academic literature on the war in northern Uganda. My narrative will also function as an implicit chronology.