For twenty years now, the West has held up Uganda as one of the few bright spots on a continent still mired in corruption, still struggling to achieve liberal democracy, still unwilling to tackle HIV/AIDS head on. Yoweri Museveni, so the story goes, has made the hard decisions that would usher in economic, social, and political development, and for that he is fêted in Western capitals and is showered with millions in aid. Of course, the true picture is not that rosy: one need only look at Uganda's involvement in Congo to realize that something is amiss in the pearl of Africa. Museveni's Uganda also attracts a good deal of academic attention among scholars of ‘the state’. Writers pose questions of how particular schemes work, or how government decentralization has sparked innovation by civil society. In the end, asserts Ben Jones in this fascinating work, ‘the state becomes the central object of study’, while ‘changes at the local level are understood to be no more than a reaction to the government's decentralization efforts’ (pp. 4–5). Instead, Jones examines Oledai subparish in the Iteso region of eastern Uganda, where the state and NGOs appear more or less irrelevant to daily life, and the achievements for which Museveni is hailed are nowhere to be seen. Instead, the people of Oledai have invested meaning and power in local institutions over which they exert authority, and in which the state plays no role.
Jones first briefly traces the history of Oledai and Teso generally since the late precolonial period. The colonial state intervened forcefully in the region, coercing peasants into cotton growing. In the early postcolonial years, however, Teso remained somewhat on the margins of national politics, and the impact of the Amin years was limited mostly to the economy. ‘For Teso,’ Jones argues, ‘the post-colonial disaster started in 1986’ (p. 48). The accession to power of Museveni worried many in Teso, which was over-represented in the army and police of the government that he had just overthrown. Cattle raids also began to increase in number and severity, a situation the central government did nothing to remedy. For the next seven or so years, Teso was wracked by warfare. Young men loosened the authority of their seniors, rural-dwellers were herded into internment camps, corpses were mutilated or dumped into mass graves.
As the insurgency ended, so too did much of the state's regular involvement in Oledai. Development programs, the growth of local bureaucracy, the intervention of NGOs: all these were absent in Oledai. The sub-chief rarely made an appearance in the area. Taxes went uncollected. Church and state both focused their attention upwards and outwards. As James Ferguson has recently pointed out, state, NGO, and multinational interventions in Africa usually appear as ‘islands’, with a very few areas receiving significant infusions of aid or investment, with the rest left isolated, ignored, forgotten. Oledai was not one of the islands.
Residents turned to the village court, to religion, and to burial societies to create a sense of personal security and civility disrupted by the insurgency and unattended to by the state. These institution all served as answers to pressing needs to define and enforce ‘proper behaviour’ (p. 23). Village courts, nominally an arm of the government, draw their legitimacy from three sources: they long pre-dated Museveni; they continue to evolve with local needs; and their decisions reflect local norms. Jones traces the rise of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity, and concludes that all draw on one another for new methods of worship and of institution-building. Unlike other studies that argue that African Pentecostals seek isolation from the wider world, Jones argues that they remain very much part of Oledai society. Among the main religious developments is a greater attention to rules regulating personal behavior and church membership; the murders and thieving of the insurgency seem to demand this. Burial societies are the newest institutions in Oledai, having emerged over the last decade or so. Nearly every household in Oledai belongs to one of three burial societies, to which they contribute money and which in turn cover members' funeral expenses and assist survivors. While burials had in the past been quiet affairs, the often intentional disregard of proper funereal procedures during the insurgency propelled residents to seek new ways of protecting the deceased and of developing a civility disrupted in those years.
In all, this is a fascinating and convincing book. My main complaint is that it is rather too short: 165 pages of text, the heart of it being pages 63–155. I would like to have heard more about how the courts operate, for example. Similarly, there is only limited discussion of HIV/AIDS and sexual morality. Jones notes that informants talked little about AIDS in relation to the rise in burial societies, but is there not more to say on the subject?
