Presentation short abstract

Contemporary land conflicts in northern Uganda are largely interpreted as a legacy of the Lord’s Resistance Army war. Here, I argue that they are rooted in colonial policies that, a century ago, used sleeping sickness control as a pretext to sever communities from the landscape that sustained them.

Presentation long abstract

In 2006, after two decades of war, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) withdrew from northern Uganda, allowing 1.1 million Acholis to begin recovering from years of forced displacement and internment. The ensuing resettlement process was marred by violent land conflicts – particularly in western Acholiland, where peasant communities continue to clash with powerful investors over land the Ugandan government characterizes as “idle” (Mabikke 2011).

Standard analyses claim these clashes arise from wartime displacement and demographic shifts colliding with circumstances of the global land grab to ignite competition over previously empty lands. Blinkered by a focus on the LRA war and its effects, such studies take the historic emptiness of western Acholiland for granted. Conversely, this paper adopts a longue durée lens within a political ecology framework to argue that this emptiness was “produced” (Edelman and León 2013).

In 1912, British administrators forcibly relocated the entire population of western Acholiland – ostensibly for sleeping-sickness control. Colonial correspondence indicates, however, that the disease posed little threat in Acholiland. Through ethnographic and archival evidence, I demonstrate that administrators in fact used sleeping-sickness measures to uproot Acholi communities, deliberately severing socio-ecological relationships to subdue a population officials feared would evade colonial economic and political control so long as it remained “assisted by hills.”

I close by examining how the stakes of contemporary land conflicts change when we acknowledge western Acholi peasants are not merely competing with investors for “empty” land, but rather struggling to reclaim land their ancestors lost through deeper histories of dispossession.