LAUSR

In the early 2000s, the central north of Uganda was the site of one of Africa’s most protracted armed conflicts. Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) had been fighting the government of Yoweri Museveni since the late 1980s. Thousands of people had been forcibly recruited, many of them children, and hundreds of thousands were living in internal displacement camps in dreadful conditions. In November 2003, the situation was described by the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs as a “moral outrage.” The LRA was subsequently referred to the International Criminal Court, and the region drew increased aid agency and media focus— including Invisible Children’s sensational YouTube documentaries. Currently, Joseph Kony remains at large, but northern Uganda itself is no longer a war zone. In this context, there has been a remarkable outpouring of writings, most of it concerning the Acholi people, who have been most affected, and who have composed most of the LRA combatants. The literature includes anthropological studies, addressing just about every aspect of the war and its aftermath, thereby presenting both an opportunity and a dilemma for those researching more recently. On the one hand, there are texts to critique. On the other, the proliferation of publications raises doubts that new ones add to what is already known. Sam Dubal began his research in the area in 2012, several years after the end of the fighting, and his response to the existing literature is to cite bits of it, but mostly to use it selectively as a peg, or a straw target. It makes his well-written, engaging, and provocative book exasperating. A good example comes at the start. In a journalistic style, he describes meeting a woman who is preparing a meal and braiding her child’s hair. He expects her to be an agentless epitome of feminine victimhood, abused to the point of becoming like an animal in need of “rehumanization.” To his amazement, she identifies herself as a former LRA captain, who supports LRA tactics and the LRA way of life, and is positively disposed toward the man she was given to, even though she knows that if he ever returns from the LRA he will live with another of his LRA wives. Perhaps Dubal is being disingenuous here for literary effect, because it is unlikely he was really so surprised. Publications listed in his bibliography discuss the fact that women in the LRA could secure a rank, could be quite senior, and could have affection for their LRA husbands. A separate reception center location had to be established for such women and their children when they initially returned from the LRA, because they were asserting authority over other women who returned with them and who had very different experiences and perceptions about what had happened to them. Also, it is strange that in his discussion of the relations between former LRAwomen and men, Dubal does not engage with Erin Baines’s (2017) book, even though it deals with matters of complex victimhood in ways that overlap with his interpretations. Even more surprisingly, Holly Porter’s (2016) much-praised study of Acholi sexuality and violence is omitted from his references. In fact, none of Porter’s publications are mentioned, and Okot p’Bitek’s (1964) seminal article on Acholi love is absent too. To be fair, Dubal openly indicates that he is not intending to engage systematically with the work of other researchers, and presumably he recognizes there is nothing much that is new in his accounts of events or description of attitudes among those returning from the LRA. It is his analysis that he considers insightful. Bizarrely, an important aspect of this is only presented in the Acholi language. Dubal addresses the passage to former LRA rebels he has come to know. It reads as follows: