Acholi: From Entrustment to Land Sale, from Camp to Village

The twenty-year LRA wars created a historical rupture in land use and tenure systems in the Acholi and Langi regions of northern Uganda. ^{Footnote 7} During the conflict the population was forced into camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), which prevented them from staying in their homes and farming their gardens, creating a radical break in the usual way of life (Finnström Reference Finnström2008). When peace was restored in 2008, IDPs had to leave the camps and faced the monumental task of reestablishing their homes, renegotiating access to land, and marking out boundaries with neighbors.

In these regions the customary system of land use and inheritance is—to borrow Shipton’s term from Luoland in Kenya (2007)—one of entrustment; a family’s land is entrusted to the living by their ancestors, with the understanding that it must be passed on to future generations. With entrustment, there is no formal “ownership” of land as such. Instead, the right to the land is reaffirmed by a lineage’s continued occupation and use of it. The lineage has its roots where the ancestors are buried, and the ancestral land binds relatives together, even if they do not all live there anymore. In Luoland the burial of the placenta used to mark the lineage, but today the placenta appears to have been replaced by graves as earthly anchorages of belonging (Shipton Reference Shipton2009). The family land is thus not just something to be lived on and farmed, but a tangible part of a family’s history and identity that is “co-possessed” by the living, the dead, and the generations to come. In this respect, the Acholi system for land tenure, as we shall see, is somewhat different from that of the Ik, for whom plots of land, although considered clan territory, can be allocated to in-laws, both male and female, as well as others outside the clan as long as they work on it.

In the Acholi entrustment system land is passed on in the patrilineage, usually from father to sons, and settlement is virilocal. Between 85 and 95 percent of land tenure in Acholi is customary (Ravnborg et al. 2013), but this form is being increasingly questioned by younger generations, along with the wealthier and educated (see Whyte and Acio, this issue). As national and international donor programs are promoting land titles and sales, the traditional system of entrusted land is up for discussion. In rural areas, most land is still passed on through the entrustment system, but land titling and sales are growing. Many still hold the ideal of the ancestral land in which one is to be buried, yet in practice many people, especially in urban areas, are buried in their more temporary locales or in newly purchased plots that do not possess any connection to the family lineage. In other words, among today’s Acholi land is owned, entrusted, rented, lived on, passed on, or bought in many different ways.

Ikland: From Semi-nomadic Practices to Military-Controlled Mobility

All land tenure in Ik county is considered customary, except for forest reserves and national parks. Customary land includes agricultural land as well as beehive and hunting areas, and access to these follows flexible organizational principles with virtually no restrictions. Agricultural land is entrusted within the clan and passed through both male and female lines, supervised by clan elders. There is a general emphasis on collective “ownership” and high flexibility, reminiscent of small-scale hunter–gatherer societies. Rights to agricultural land are reaffirmed by its continued occupation and use; if land is not used it may be given to or taken by another family. The Ik consider themselves patrilineal and subscribe to an ideal of virilocal residence, according to which a married couple resides within the husband’s parents’ compound. However, in practice about a third of Ik men settle within their wives’ compounds, at least temporarily, either due to insecurity in their own family area or because they can have easier access to land through their wives’ families. By far the most valuable aspect of bridewealth is bride service in the form of agricultural labor for the husband’s in-laws, which is another reason for the tendency toward matrilocality.

The Ik communities of the mountains in Karamoja were more nomadic in the past than they are today. Ik farmers used to cultivate gardens lower in the valleys, and before World War II hunters went to the forested mountain slopes near Kidepo National Park, many of which are now protected as game reserves and animal corridors. John Mark, a fifty-nine-year-old elder, remembers living in six different villages before he was ten years old, which indicates that villages were moved every one to two years. Ik elders mentioned several reasons for the high mobility at this time. The first was insecurity: Turkana and Dodoth herders passed through the Ik territory on their cattle raids and the Ik communities tried to escape looting and violent encounters by constantly moving their villages to other locations. A second reason was soil fertility: families cultivated gardens for a maximum of three years and then left them fallow. A third reason was death and illness: if many people had died in one location, it was considered contaminated by spirits and inappropriate as living space. Finally, internal conflict could make a village split up.

However, since around 2007 these patterns of hypermobility have been changing. In 2001 the government initiated disarmament programs and the military (the Uganda People’s Defence Forces, or UPDF) established detachments of soldiers in the Ik territory. One of the UPDF strategies for providing security in the area was a requirement for villages to be moved close to the barracks, which are placed high on hilltops for better surveillance. Most villages, therefore, have been placed near army detachments and follow the movements of the military. The average time spent in a village before moving or splitting it is now closer to eight years.

Acholi: Graves as Indices of Belonging

According to Acholi custom, as we have seen, the family is supposed to live together, the living alongside the dead, and graves ideally constitute a link between a lineage and the land through time. Furthermore, graves stand as tangible markers of belonging in space, solidifying a family’s presence and continuity through generations. But graves also signify belonging on a different level; the person interred retains a space, both physically and socially, within the structure of the family. The placement of a grave is significant. Graves are traditionally distributed carefully around the compound, with their exact placement determined by a person’s gender and age and sometimes by the manner of death or other defining characteristics. ^{Footnote 9}

Graves are thus powerful indices of belonging. They can tell the story of a person’s position in the social structure of the family, and they can signify a family’s belonging on a piece of land and in the larger context of a community. When the LRA wars ended and people moved out of the IDP camps, many were faced with a dilemma, as the relatives they had lost had been buried in the camps, on other people’s land. Some were able to rebury their relatives in the home they were returning to, but though this was the proper thing to do, many did not have the funds for transporting the bodies, goats for the ritual slaughter, or the food needed to conduct a proper reburial. The family’s land is where the ancestors rest, and as such, the violation of this practice is twofold, as the dead have not only been buried away from home, but on other clans’ land. Cultural ideals, however, can be difficult to live by and can be bent, and in many cases outside influences cause a family to rebury their loved ones.

In August 2013 approximately one hundred people were reburied from Limu Village, a neighborhood bordering Gulu Town. They were exhumed to make way for a new road, which was to cut through an area containing many graves. Building on top of an Acholi grave would disturb the spirit of the deceased, and when disturbed, the spirit might seek vengeance (Meinert & Whyte 2012). The local government created a system of compensation to meet some of the costs for the many reburials. The government owns the land in Limu, and the people living there are renting, so they would only be compensated for the loss of buildings, trees, and graves, but not for the land itself. The compensation for a grave differed depending on what material the grave was made of; a simple mound of soil was worth 80 shillings (about U.S.$30), whereas a cement grave was worth 200 shillings (about U.S.$73). A cement grave is more expensive to construct—partly because of the higher price of cement, although perhaps for other reasons as well (which we will discuss below).

Although the lower compensation was not enough to pay for a proper reburial, surprisingly few people complained about the compensation or the road. Most of the dissatisfaction was overshadowed by the advantages of a main road leading through the village, and the economic benefits that were expected to follow. What the Limu case brings to the fore is that though many people still speak of the idealized notion of the ancestral land where the family lives and the ancestors are buried, and though many believe that the dead will take revenge if they are not honored (Meinert & Whyte 2012), during and after the war there were high levels of flexibility and adaptation to alternative placements of graves and ideas about belonging to land. Many families have had to consider the resting place of their relatives not so much in terms of creating a stronger bond to the ancestral land, but in terms of practicalities and resources.

Ikland: From Graves in the Landscape to Graves in Villages

When talking to people in Ikland about reburials in Acholi, we found that most were astonished to learn that some of their countrymen farther west were moving their dead after the LRA war. The idea of digging up a grave, being in physical contact with human remains, and transporting them to another place seemed revolting. Yet burial practices, and the location of graves in particular, have changed significantly over the past ten years and are a subject of continuous discussion.

Interviews with twelve elders in Timu Parish showed that almost all had buried their parents in or close to a village, whereas their grandparents had been buried in the valleys farther away. As John Mark recalled,

In the 1960s, several factors contributed to the changes in burial location. First, after the 1966–1968 drought and famine in the region, people started moving higher up in the mountains and settling closer to Timu Forest. Thus they were farther away from the good burial locations in the valleys. Second, food relief was distributed from Kasile in Kotido district, and as people went there to get their rations, they became inspired by other burial practices. Third, the missionaries who also arrived in Timu around 1968 promoted the idea of burying the dead inside villages. According to John Mark,

In the 1980s and early 1990s another serious famine and cholera epidemic in the region made large groups migrate for food relief to Kakuma refugee camp, which had been established in Kenya, mainly for Sudanese refugees. Many Ik people died there and were buried in the cemetery in the camp. In recent years, after the establishment of UPDF detachments in Timu Parish, the military—with soldiers from various parts of Uganda, where burials are commonly in homesteads—has encouraged people to build their villages closer to the barracks for safety and to bury their dead inside the villages. As mentioned earlier, this strategy is officially employed to create security against raids from neighboring groups, but it also works to control mobility and create stability. Attempts by governments to settle nomadic and semi-nomadic groups are well known from other parts of Africa. A lieutenant from the UPDF explained,

Several interesting misunderstandings are implicit in the above statement. According to the military, since the Ik do not have cattle, the only reason for their semi-nomadic mobility patterns was security against attacks from neighboring groups. Yet the mobility patterns have always been closely related to food security and sustainable land use. Ik farmers do not use fertilizers or pesticides; they use lash-and-burn methods to keep crop diseases and insects at tolerable levels, fertilize with ashes, and leave gardens fallow for long periods of time. This necessitates village mobility in a relatively large territory. Another reason for their mobility is the general belief that if the village is full of graves, it is a sign, according to many residents, that “too many people have died” there and that people should move on. Whereas burials and reburials in Acholi and other parts of East Africa are designed to place the dead in close proximity to living relatives, until recently burial sites in Ikland have been chosen with the goal of placing the dead at a distance from the living in the wider landscape. “People here say that when you are dead, you are dead,” said one of the elders in Timu. “But they also say that even when the dead are dead, they are hiding somewhere . . . and are still watching,” so that having the dead in the village would seem “too close a watch.” ^{Footnote 10} The families in Tultul village who had a visible grave in their compound said that the presence of the grave made them sad and worried. One young woman who had recently buried her daughter near her home said she regretted the decision because “I don’t like to be reminded of the death of my daughter every day when I see her grave here in my compound.” She said she preferred the burial site of her mother, “in the village where we used to live on the mountain” (interview, Tultul, Jan. 25, 2014).

In the period from June to August 2014, Turkana from Kenya killed twenty-four people in the bush in Kaabong district, including six Ik men. One of them was buried inside his home village, because, according to neighbors of the family, his family was Christian and “saved” and among those who felt strongly that all dead should be buried inside the village. The five other bodies were left in the bush. Three of the deceased were attended to by their relatives and covered with leaves, while two bodies were left unattended. The bodies left in the bush created intense debate. John Mark, who saw himself as a guardian of Ik customs, commented on this neglect with regret: “The practice of leaving bodies in the bush is not indigenous Ik culture. I suspect that this is something inherited from the Karimojong. Those bodies should be buried, really” (interview, Lokinene, Aug. 13, 2014). Another elderly man names Charik had a different opinion, however: “We never bury a person who has been killed by a gun. . . . People believe that if you bury a person killed by a bullet, other family members will also be killed by bullets. So we leave the body outside and cover [it] with leaves and some put stones and thorns [on it]” (interview, Lopokok, Aug. 11, 2014).

Discussions increased further when the UPDF caught four young Turkana men and two young Ik men who were trading spaghetti and cooking oil for marijuana in the bush. They were all punished by caning and the Turkana were then officially “taken back to Kenya”—although the local residents knew that they had been shot by the soldiers and their bodies left in the bush “as a warning” to other Turkana. The situation was complicated because the Ik feared that the Turkana would come back and take revenge against the Ik, especially if the UPDF left the area. They also did not dare report the executions to the authorities out of fear that the UPDF would turn against them (Gade et al. Reference Gade, Willerslev and Meinert2015).

The unburied bodies in the landscape became silent but effective symbols of protest and territorial claims. The Turkana bodies left in the landscape were signs of the conflicts between ethnic groups in the Karamoja–Turkana region and of the border disputes between Uganda and Kenya. The Ik bodies left in the landscape were simultaneously cries of protest and subjects of internal cultural disagreement. One man remarked, “This way of leaving bodies in the open is not the Ik way.” Another man responded, “This is precisely why we are leaving the bodies there—to show that we disagree—we do not accept these killings” (Tultul, Aug. 14, 2014).

Governing with Graves

The anthropologist Katherine Verdery has written about the ways in which the dead, in effect, have ongoing political lives. She points out that a dead body, through its treatment and placement, can be used by the living to send a desired message, and that it can be especially useful for “localizing a claim” (italics in original). Dead bodies, in this way, are ascribed a multitude of meanings and intentions; they are imbued, as Verdery says, with “ambiguity, multivocality, or polysemy” (1999:28). At the same time, as Finn Stepputat has pointed out, “governing the dead” is often a highly important issue for states.

In Acholi the graves of the dead, especially those that have been interred and reburied, function as significant markers of belonging, both in terms of local social structures and cosmologies, and also in the physical landscape and judicial territories. In the case of the Ik, the materiality and “thereness” of bodies and graves are clear and tangible expressions of belonging, as well as of exclusion and protest. It can be questioned how far back Acholi homes, which are considered ancestral land, have actually been occupied by a certain lineage. The opportunity to select the place of burial is therefore an opportunity, both literally and figuratively, to cement one’s authority over place. Though the government may be trying to interfere with how the Ik choose to bury their dead, most of the contact with dead bodies, and the decisions regarding their treatment and placement, still lies with the immediate family. Thus decisions about where to bury, or re-bury, the dead can be seen as acts of micro-governance in support of the autochthony argument that origin and ancestry confer authority and rights over a particular location. The dead, in effect, are employed to work for the cause of the living, to help them in their ongoing effort of establishing the right to belong.

This micro-governance is particularly salient in the Timu Mountains, where differing stories of “who were where when” have been created for various purposes and the politics of establishing Ik origin are complicated by several factors. Colin Turnbull’s version in his controversial book The Mountain People (1972)—that the Ik were expelled from the plains that were made into the Kidepo National Park and had to retreat to the mountains, where they suffered a prolonged famine—is questionable, not to say inaccurate (Heine Reference Heine1985). Many Ik confirm that their ancestors used to live closer to the valleys, but claim that they both hunted and lived in the areas that were later turned into the park (Willerslev & Meinert Reference Willerslev and Meinert2017). At the same time, the Ik “origin story” in the mountains is potentially problematic as authorities are currently working to officially re-demarcate the Timu Forest Reserve, with its high biodiversity. While it is likely that the migration history of the area is one of interethnic sharing of the territory, this story would not work very well for establishing authority over a territory for a single ethnic group. And in general, claiming authority and sovereignty through stories of ancestry can be tricky in any case due to lack of concrete evidence.

Acholi: Breaking the Cement Graves

Traditional graves in Acholi are mostly mounds of soil, perhaps covered with rocks as markers and protection against erosion and animals. Soil graves are still the most common, but among the people who can afford them, cement graves are very popular. ^{Footnote 12} A cemented grave radiates permanence in a way that a plain mound of soil never could, and its material social “life” is thus prolonged. The names and dates scratched into the surface of the wet cement harden in place, proving who was buried there and when. As such, cement graves “speak for themselves,” and in their very concreteness constitute powerful evidence that a lineage has resided on the land over time.

Often when people in a land dispute are asked to present evidence of ownership, they offer, in the absence of an actual land title, the evidence of marking stones outlining the land, trees planted by parents or grandparents, houses, or the graves of their ancestors. However, as we learned from the following land dispute, even with cemented graves, the durability of concrete can be questioned.

The story of this conflict was narrated in 2014 by Alii, the acting sub-county chief of the village of Awach, and concerns a quarrel between his uncle, Stephen, and a young man named Oyo who had been rejected by his clan and taken in by Stephen, who treated him as an adopted son. ^{Footnote 13} They lived together amicably for years until Oyo, one day, accused Stephen of trying to encroach on land that he farmed and that therefore belonged to him. Stephen called on the clan elders to adjudicate the matter and the elders suggested that Stephen give Oyo some land, a settlement that Stephen accepted. Nevertheless, when they attempted to divide the land Oyo was not happy with the size of the plot he was assigned. He proceeded to appeal the claim through various levels of the local government, from Local Council 1 (LCI) to LCII and LCIII, all of which sided with Stephen. ^{Footnote 14}

Finally, Oyo took the matter to the magistrate’s court, but at that point he had little hope that he would win. One night, therefore, he and some associates went to the disputed territory and destroyed six cement graves. Horrified by the destruction, the local residents managed to identify Oyo as the mastermind and detain him. Oyo claimed that he had destroyed the graves because, in his opinion, they were located on his land and did not belong there. Stephen’s family conducted some rituals to calm the spirits so they would not go after Oyo, and it was decided that Oyo had to pay for the reconstruction of the graves. In the magistrate’s court, Stephen brought pictures of the destroyed graves, and it was decided that Oyo was to receive no part of the family’s land. In the end, Oyo was ostracized from the community, and eventually he bought a small piece of land for himself, away from both his own and his adopted clan.

This story of insiders and outsiders, and of disputing generations, shows how cemented graves are seen as significant markers of ownership over land. Stephen and Oyo represent two generations. Stephen grew up before the war and before Ugandan independence in 1962. Though the time after independence was not entirely peaceful for northern Uganda, the period remains in local memory as a relatively tranquil period in comparison to the turbulent decades of war, which began in the 1980s. ^{Footnote 15} Oyo, by contrast, grew up in a time of disturbance and uncertainty, when people were moved about and put into camps, where some suffered silently and others acted with brazen self-interest, and when the rules of social interaction were in flux. In some ways, then, Oyo and Stephen stand not only for two different generations, but also for two different systems of land distribution and dispute settlement. Stephen relied on traditional ways, in which land is passed on in the family and marked by graves and disputes are settled by the elders. Oyo’s claim to Stephen’s land was based on his farming of it, and he took his case to government institutions and courts. His claim also, in a sense, demonstrated a new way of social maneuvering. In this case, however, his “social imagination” (see Lubkemann Reference Lubkemann2008) and creativity fell short, and he then resorted to the drastic measure of smashing the graves.

This was not only a devastating physical act, but a powerful symbolic one. In erecting the cement graves, Stephen had not only created monuments for the dead, but also anchors of belonging for the future of his lineage (see Geissler & Prince 2010; Shipton Reference Shipton2009). After the war ended and the internment camps closed, some families, similarly, were quick to mark graves, and if possible cement them, as a way to reassert their land rights. More than even a traditional earthen mound, cement monuments send out a signal of permanence and stability. They are large, square, and so tangibly solid that they seem to radiate a determination to remain forever and to stand as ancestral reminders for the generations to come. When asked why cementing graves is important, a woman named Nyeko explained,

Of course, in reality, they are not durable in the way that Nyeko hopes for; a cement grave can be broken down surprisingly quickly, as Oyo proved. What is interesting, then, is not only the actual physical properties of the substance, but also what lies behind the idea of cementing: the motivations, plans, and intentions that drive the desire for cement graves, and thus the properties that are ascribed to, rather than inherent in, the substance.

What is significant in the use of cement, in other words, is the signaling effect. Cement stands for permanence and possession, for a timeless and indisputable right to belong. This quality is also what makes cement graves so valuable in the tumultuous postwar era, as in the case of the Limu reburials described above. After years when boundaries were in flux, and when people were allowed to manage their land, cement comes to stand as the ultimate symbol of stability and of the possibility of actively creating belonging and the claim to land. Thus the symbolic value of cement, and people’s ability to manipulate it, can help them reclaim some of the control they lost during the war. By destroying the graves, Oyo attempted to destroy the most tangible and sacred proofs of Stephen’s ownership, the concrete symbol of his right to the land.

The Cement Pillars: Timu Forest Reserve

In Ikland, almost no families have cement graves. Cement graves may be admired, but few can afford to create them, and cement as a building material, in general, is rare and considered quite exotic. But the symbolic effect of cement may thus be even stronger, which is why the event described below—the marking of a forest reserve in the area with this material—evoked deeply felt anger.

On a number of occasions since 1948, when the Timu Forest Reserve was established, Ik families living in the area were asked to move out and stop using the resources in the forest. In 1958, when Kidepo National Park was established on the plains, Ik communities were expelled and had to stop using their former hunting grounds. Some of the elders recall, or have been told about, the time when the area of the Forest Reserve was first demarcated (group discussion, Timu, Jan. 30, 2014). According to their account, about fifty years ago a man called Hillary quarreled with a representative of the British colonial administration who had come to set the boundary. They gave him the nickname of “Lokok,” which means “Termite with red head—the one that guards the white ants.” This referred not only to his skin color, but also to his role in leading the work of gathering stones to demarcate the boundary. Hillary encouraged the hired workers to abandon the project, but they were receiving needed food as payment and told Hillary that they could always dismantle the heaps of stones after the white man left. Even fifty years later the name “Lokok” and the story of the dismantled land markers caused laughter (group discussion, Timu, Jan. 30, 2014).

With long intervals, officials would travel to the area or call Ik representatives to meetings to remind them of, and establish the rules of, the Reserve: People were not supposed to live, farm, hunt, burn grass, or cut down trees. Most were probably aware of the rules but did not follow them all. There were few actual villages in the forest, but families had their gardens in the area, which had fertile soil. During the dry season hunters would burn grass in certain areas of the forest as part of hunting techniques for compounding and chancing game. For many years the shadowy existence of the forest reserve seemed to work out for both stakeholders, as well as for the forest. Philip, a local security officer, recalled that in 1999–2000 two officials came to reestablish the boundaries. They mobilized people to collect stones again and they even planted trees. As Philip explained,

There was an implicit understanding of the mutual benefits of keeping a façade of a forest reserve with no human activities, but behind the façade families could continue to use the land and take care of the forest. The officials even marked some areas in the forest where families stayed and could continue to do so.

This relationship between Ik people and officials took a turn in 2012–2013 when representatives of Uganda’s National Forest Authority (NFA), in collaboration with the Kaabong District environmental officer and supported by USAID, put up a line of cement pillars across a section of Timu Parish in an effort to demarcate a “biodiversity program” in the Timu Forest Reserve. The markers were 1.5 meter–high cement cones (around 5 ft.), which could not easily be dismantled or moved by hand. The line created by the numerous cement pillars cut across the territory and the only road in the area in a very visible, unfamiliar, and permanent-looking way.

The officials were adamant, according to Philip, that there was to be “absolutely no human activities in the forest from now on and that this would be monitored closely.” (interview, Lokinene, Sept. 5, 2013). This provoked outrage among Ik people, who at this particular time were struggling to feed their families due to drought and two consecutive years of poor harvests. In these periods, the forest served as their reserve for hunting game, cultivating gardens that were less susceptible to drought, and collecting honey. Sangan Aldo, an Ik elder, explained the response of local residents to the erection of the pillars.

Obviously there was something about the cement pillars that made the demarcation of forest reserve disturbing in a new way. Cement is not a common building material in the Ik communities. All of their structures—houses, graves, fences, latrines—are made from natural and degradable materials, some of which can be moved and reused when a village moves to a new place. The only cement buildings in Timu Parish are a school, a small health center, a Pentecostal church, and two houses built by an American couple. Thus cement is generally associated with modernity, authorities, and strangers.

In this debacle Philip, the security officer, got in trouble with both the NFA and the community members because, on the one hand, he was the person who attended the meetings with “the forest people,” while on the other hand, he was not successful in persuading the community members to leave the area. They called for the officials to hold a meeting in the forest rather than in their offices in the district capital. This demand was turned down, and the Ik were then told to write a letter to the sub-county with their complaints, which would be taken to the district and from there to Parliament. But they did not want to do this either, since they did not trust what was going on. Philip was frustrated and said that

According to Sangan and Philip, by 2014 the situation had “cooled down—at least for some time,” although not because of any official resolution to the controversy. We were not able to get in touch with the District Environment Officer or with the National Forest Authority officer responsible for the area, but we learned from Uganda Wildlife Authority officials at Kidepo National Park that in August 2014 the district environment officer had been suspended from work because of mismanagement of funds (interviews, Kidepo, Feb. 2, 2015). The cement pillars that were supposed to demarcate the whole of Timu Forest Reserve had only been put up around the road, and the Ik community continued to use and take care of the forest as they had for decades. By 2014 the grass had grown tall and buried the cement pillars.