Cultivating Refuge: A Long History of Dealing with Disaster in North-Central Uganda, 1720-2006

Edwards, Mitchell

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-4tw4-0w46

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Cultivating Refuge: A Long History of Dealing with Disaster in North-Central Uganda, 1720-2006

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Historians have long argued that humanitarianism—what Thomas Haskell once described as “alleviating the suffering of distant strangers”—first emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as part of a complex set of perceptual changes involving capitalist growth, Enlightenment ideas, and Christian values. Given these claims, it is no coincidence that humanitarianism has often been characterized in the historical literature as a Western export, a trapping of modernity that only made its way to Africa, Asia, and other parts of the Global South through European-led abolitionist campaigns and imperial conquest. While a chorus of scholarly work has recently called into question this Eurocentric understanding of humanitarianism’s single origins and global diffusion, few studies have been able to provide alternative historical narratives that de-center actors, strategies, and moral frameworks emanating from the Global North. A conspicuous blind spot in the literature has thus emerged—one that gives the false impression that nothing akin to humanitarianism existed in non-European contexts prior to the moment of colonial encounter. Often found in the Global South, such contexts tend to feature as mere backdrops in these histories of humanitarian exchange, their own unique heritages of “alleviating the suffering of distant strangers” simplified, flattened, and sometimes erased altogether under the weight of concepts, categories, and strategies brought from afar. Speaking directly to this blind spot in the history of humanitarianism, this dissertation recovers a heritage of emergency relief in the Acaa River region of north-central Uganda. Located in the heart of today’s Acholi sub-region, this fertile stretch of savannah grassland has been subjected to a litany of foreign interventions over the past one hundred and fifty years, many having been made under the banner of aid and relief. Whether evidenced in Samuel Baker’s purported mission to end the slave trade in 1872, or the British colonial campaigns to control disease and mitigate hunger in the early twentieth century, it is impossible to deny the impact of these memorable encounters on local practices, politics, and imaginations. The same could be said of more recent crises and the humanitarian responses they provoked. From 1986 to 2006, a brutal civil war engulfed the region and caused widespread displacement. Forced into congested Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps for the better part of a decade, the region’s communities had no choice but to rely on rations supplied by the world’s biggest aid agencies. Though heralded as a temporary solution by the Ugandan government, camp confinement wrought indelible destruction for those caught in its crosshairs. Deprived of their land and labor, the people of Acholiland essentially became refugees in their own country, systematically cut off from their own distinct heritage of ensuring sustenance and overcoming crises. Based on two years of fieldwork in the region, this dissertation aims to recover some of what this disaster took away. It does so by identifying regional strategies for dealing with disaster in the precolonial past, then tracing their transformation across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As much as this wide aperture allows for historical transformations to come into focus, so does it also capture important continuities in how people in one particular part of the world have mitigated disasters of varying scale and scope. As will be demonstrated throughout, one of these continuities involves “refuge work,” what I define as “the giving and receiving of aid between strangers.” Just as refuge work lay at the foundation of the region’s precolonial chiefdoms, so did it produce identities of belonging and difference that extend into the present. Despite dramatic disruptions, a familiar type of regional refuge work still persists today, fueled forward by the physical struggles and intellectual labor of generations. In foregrounding this heritage’s deep roots and tracing its durability across time, this dissertation contributes to a growing literature that provincializes humanitarianism, thus pointing to alternative genealogies of aiding strangers around the world.

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