"The Rain Fell on Its Own" the Alur Theory of Development and Its Western Counterparts

Abstract

When I went to live and learn among the Alur for the very first time in 1947, the great linguist Archie Tucker described them to me mysteriously as “very wild and woolly.” What anthropologist could resist? Indeed, although part of the colonial state, no one in Southern Uganda really knew who they were. The refined BaGanda referred to them in lilting labials as Balulu, uncouth northerners, who came to do the unskilled work, and grow cotton on the Ganda landowners' estates. The Alur reciprocated by not really considering themselves in Uganda, despite the legal facts. When they crossed the Nile to go “down country” they spoke of going across to Uganda. In the then Belgian Congo, where many Alur also lived, they were very differently regarded. The Belgian District Commissioner of Mahagi wrote of them as “civilizers of the hordes” (Quix, 1940). In the vast ethnic wilderness of eastern Zaire, the white administrators saw the Alur as a ray of hope, an intelligent and progressive people with the capacity to rule over others and bring them to order —the fundamental requirement of development then (as now) when “Toe the line!” was the requirement of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Agency for Development (AID), Overseas Development Agency (ODA), and so on, however deceptively camouflaged. For some centuries the Nilotic Lwo immigrants had been establishing themselves and incorporating more and more people from the surrounding ethnic groups into their evolving system, thus creating a new entity: Alur society. When I tried to find out how and why it was that the Alur were able to exercise this domination and why the other peoples submitted to it—since it did not seem to be a simple matter of military conquest—the symbolic answer always was “we brought them rain.”