The State as Raider Among the Karamojong: ‘Where There are no Guns, They use the Threat of Guns’

Abstract

AbstractThe article brings together archival material, past ethnography, and memory on the one hand, and up-to-date eye-witness and newspaper reports on the other, to set current traumatic events in the very long view. The presentism of contemporary developmental and research approaches has precluded such perspectives. Thus the current disarmament programme being forced on the Karamojong of north-east Uganda by the Uganda People's Defence Force is no more unprecedented than the armed conflicts it is intended to resolve. The advent of colonial administration and memories of it are examined to illuminate the constraints of the present exercise. Events are not occurring solely in a local context, still less just on the national scene, but in the global context directed by world power. Thus the significance of cattle-raiding, the nature of which has not been drastically changed by firearms, has been exaggerated as part of a threat to world peace that must be tackled by international action. This has provided the rationale for repeating the brutality of the small wars of imperialism on a larger scale and with less prospect of an ensuing peace. The article proposes a rediscovery of African agency in Karamojong religious ceremonies that are not controlled by world orders.