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The majority of Uganda’s Acholi people are now displaced, abducted as child soldiers, living in IDP camps or similar resettlement communities, night commuting or trying to eke out a living in northern district towns. As a result, the strong, land-based, family oriented traditional nature of Acholi culture is deteriorating at a fast pace. For centuries, Acholi society was cemented by a strong family and village based economy of cattle ownership, agricultural production, the leadership of elders and the inheritance of land, farms and cattle to children. As in many traditional African societies, the burial of elders on ancestral lands, traditional story telling, the evening family meals, dance and ritual sustained Acholi economic and social structures and norms, with a great amount of respect afforded to parents and elders. Today, there is a growing generational divide. The elders, especially men, are no longer able to provide for their families, or turn over their land and cattle to children, creating a feeling of uselessness and resulting in chronic depression. Women are degraded and debased in front of their children, and no longer have the means to serve as functional caregivers. Children and youth are abducted and have killed family members, creating shame, guilt, suspicion and anger between children and families. Many children are now on their own, not being educated and no longer are nourished by family traditions or supervised by elders and older siblings. Hence, many children are involved in anti-social behavior that shocks elders and prevents children from developing into responsible young adults. The living conditions in the IDP camps, especially the cramped quarters, violate every aspect of Acholi culture. In short, the Acholi community is falling apart.

So what are the origins of an eighteen year war in which more people have died and been displaced than in Darfur yet goes on and on, invisible from the rest of the world and detached from the rest of Ugandan society?

To understand the origins of the war and the search for solutions requires an understanding of the role of colonialism on African culture, the specific colonial and post-colonial political history of Uganda and the particulars of the Lord’s Resistance Army that started this war in the first place.

As is well documented but too little studied at the popular and school levels, African kingdoms and societies were the pinnacle of global civilizations for thousands of years, having the most advanced discoveries and applications of math, health care and the sciences, well developed trade and economic systems, efficient transport, irrigation and agricultural systems, valued artisan skills, resilient systems of governance and effective mediation practices that developed human potential and sustained human society. West Africa, in particular, was a place of advanced city states, with international trade and respected institutions of higher learning. In addition, Africa was the home to less centrally structured societies, governed by clans, chiefs, councils and elders such as pastoralists, agriculturalists, hunter and gatherers and forest societies. African kingdoms from West Africa sent expeditions by sea to explore and trade with indigenous societies of South and Central America a thousand years before Europeans set out on the high seas; indeed, African civilizations flowered for ten thousand years before Europe set its sights on what it termed “the dark continent.”

The broad changes in Africa started around 300 BC with the military invasions and conquest of the Egyptian Empire by Greece, and thereafter, the Roman Empire invasions of North Africa. This was followed by centuries of war between Christian and Muslim empires and conquests by one over the other in Europe, North Africa and parts of Asia, formalizing and defining the relationships between Christianity and Islam with their counterpart nation states. The Western European Christian empires eventually broke in two, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France owing their allegiances to the Roman popes while England, Germany, Holland and Belgium forming their own religious sects known generally as the Protestants. England, the most powerful of the four, formed its own state-based church, the Church of England, which became known as the Anglicans. Organized religious movements led by foreigners and in partnership with foreign companies and armed forces did not come to Africa to solve problems, improve lives or save souls. They came as part of foreign government designs to militarily defeat or, capitalizing on the weaknesses within certain kingdoms or clans, control the politics of sovereign African kingdoms and societies. In so doing, they undermined African leadership and culture, brought the fear of a Supreme Being capable of casting “sinners” into eternal hell, and simultaneously, wound up owning a lot of African land. None of this was possible, of course, without the gun. In the case of Uganda, the Anglicans from England, the Catholics from France and Islamic groups from Egypt would impact on kingdoms and other societies in central and East Africa, utilizing military power, bribes, and divide and rule tactics against very different neighboring societies, forcing them to live under the rule of one nation which would become British colonial Uganda.

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