Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the evolving identities in Katine sub-county in Soroti District in eastern Uganda. The paper describes a place that is one step down from the district centre and demonstrates the continued ambivalence and unevenness of the construction of the state in rural Uganda.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the evolving identities in Katine sub-county in Soroti District in eastern Uganda. The paper describes a place that is one step down from the district centre and demonstrates the continued ambivalence and unevenness of the construction of the state in rural Uganda. As Uganda's older district capitals take on a more confident urban style, sub-counties and new district capitals become new sites of provincialism. There are two recent developments I would like to explore. First the politics of a large development project in the sub-county, where the budget of the NGO dwarfed the spending of the sub-county offices. NGO workers affected a cosmopolitan identity and adopted a position of condescension and detachment, fitting comfortably into what Bayart has described as the logic of extraversion in the state in Africa. Second struggles over 'idlers' across the sub-county. These young men, often with an education and a desire for an urban future, challenge rural identities in the area. In exploring these two aspects of identity a rural Ugandan sub-county I emphasise diverging images from and within a peripheral place.