DE LA ADMINISTRACIÓN DE LA COMPAÑÍA COLECTIVA

How we represent and account for others’ experiences is intimately related to who we are, …and the connections need to be spelt out …38

Self-reflexivity was a crosscutting tool throughout this study (Fine 1989; Stacey 1988; Daniels 1983; Chodorow 1989; Altorki and El-Solh 1988). As an indigenous researcher, I acknowledged the value of both inter-subjectivity and detachment, which enabled me to explore available options to reconstruct myself as an ‘outsider from within’ (Collins 1986: 29). This covered the selection of language group, geographical area, and interactions with interviewees, all of which were reflected in the interpretation and analysis stages of the study. These factors directly and indirectly interacted with my ethnicity, gender and also my having spent all my life growing up and working among the Langi. As an insider, I understood the local values, knowledge and taboos and was fairly aware of the informal power dynamics inherent in the population (Coglan, 2003; Hermann, 1989; Tedlock, 2000). Being aware of them helped in shaping questions, interpreting and analysing answers.

38 _{See Haraway in Bolak, 1997, p. 96.}

Interpretation of the responses and observations in this thesis therefore drew heavily on my familiarity and practical experience with the local ethnographic environment: first as a native, and second as an employee of two grassroots human rights organisations that were directly concerned with addressing rights and needs of those affected by the LRA war in northern Uganda from 2000 and 2004 respectively.

As a native, I grew up during the upheavals associated with the political, social and economic changes that defined rural Lango, where most of my respondents lived. Before the war, I spent most of my school breaks in my parents’ sub county of Otwal, alternating my stay between my maternal grandmother’s village of Acokara, in whose house I had been born, and my paternal grandparents’ village of Amuku Gungu. I followed other girls to the woods for firewood; to the springs for water; to the two weekly markets of Acokara Sub Station and Otwal Railway Station to sell grains for my grandparents and then used the money to buy meat, fish, salt and soap for them. I blended well with local peers, many of whom were my cousins and I took part in their games and cultural activities. With them, I enjoyed harvesting white ants from my maternal grandmother’s many anthills during the rainy season and also learnt well how to find and dig out the odir, cricket, from their holes in the ground at the setting of the sun. At the time of the fieldwork, these were still delicacies of the Langi between the months of March and June when we peak the first rains (and for the odir, July & August when the sesame starts to flower and the millet harvests are held). They taught me how to ride the rather tall Raleigh bicycle and tell the sounds of the forests and villages. As the LRA war was setting in 1987, I could already comfortably join my village cousins in singing along with the distant drums that we knew were from the village native doctor, ‘singing the body’ of a patient. I also took part in the awak, rotating farm labour on village farms alongside my maternal grandmother and her labour group. Female heads of households in rural Lango like my grandmother often met their farm labour needs by taking part in such loose neighbourhood associations, a relic of rotational farm labour groups from pre-colonial and colonial Lango (Driberg, 1923; Curley, 1973). At the fall of President Obote’s Second government in 1985, my family took refuge in these villages until 1986 when the LRA and cattle rustlers from Karamoja started their activities, rendering both villages unsafe.

As a woman socialised in Lango, I had been a participant in many of the local concepts that I had set out out to study, in particular the marriage, kwor (blood payment) and luk (fine for pre-marital sex and children born outside marriage) concepts. In the 2000s, when two of my brothers and three of my cousins made their suitors pregnant before marriage, the suitors’ families demanded for luk payment. These boys did not have enough resources to either fund their luk or subsequent marriages – for those who wished to. During each of these luk processes, the Rwot (chief) of my father’s clan section in Otwal had issued out an order for all clan members to contribute towards the collection of the luk requirements. As a woman, I was required – just like my siblings who had gainful employment to contribute towards the gathering of these marriage goods. My contribution to each of these luk costs ranged from a hen to goat. In August 2013, in addition to a goat, I also contributed to hiring a bus to transport my brother and his entourage to marry his bride in Mbale – eastern Uganda. I had also made regular contributions towards payment of kwor for my patriclan. I had therefore lived with and experienced some of the important concepts I had set out to study.

In the 1990s and 2000s my maternal and paternal lineages had also lost a number of members to the LRA as they abducted and killed civilians in Otwal, Ngai sub counties of Oyam district. While several of these have never returned and were presumed dead, a number of girls survived the forced marriages in the LRA and returned with children. Such deep roots and links in the study population rendered me an ‘insider’ (Adler & Adler, 1994). During the course of my fieldwork therefore, I often felt as though I was studying my own lineage. But I was aware that this could, to some extent, influence my role as a researcher. Whereas I appreciated the greater exposure and understanding of the local culture - which my insider status had accorded me - I knew I had to distance myself from this level of familiarity ‘in order not to loose objectivity.’ (Unluer, 2012:1). DeLyser (2001) and Hewitt-Taylor, (2002) also stated that prior knowledge such as that held by ‘insider’ researchers can be considered a bias. The use of an institutional archive (Rachele Centre) to identify my respondents rather helped in mitigating any emotions that studying a relative could have evoked. I also attempted to explore the experiences of luk, marriage and culo kwor by research participants who were not

related to me in any way so I could re-familiarise myself with what I thought I already knew as well as learn new areas that I did not know.

My work with Concerned Parents Association (CPA) and FAPAD further placed me in the centre of this contradiction. From 2000, I pioneered the coordination of the Concerned Parents Association, a network of thousands of parents in northern Uganda whose children had been abducted by the LRA. Three years later, after a more intense engagement with ex-combatant mothers and their children in the Gulu Support the Children’s Organisation (GUSCO) and World Vision reception centres in Gulu for a master’s dissertation, I embarked on directing Facilitation for Peace and Development (FAPAD), a rural Lango grassroots organisation. Through FAPAD’s social protection activities, I interacted closely with beneficiaries who included former LRA recruits and their social networks, enabling me to explore and understand the social experiences of post-conflict communities. All of these served as a platform for identifying and interpreting the lived experiences of the mothers and their children in this study.

But as an indigenous researcher, I was conscious that such familiarity could render one neglectful of details of the prevailing local cultures – a feeling that one ‘already knows’.

To counter this, I not only applied open-ended inquiry techniques, allowing my subjects to steer the discussions and recording with the help of a voice recorder, camera, and paper and pen all that I was told and had observed. In this way, even what I thought I already knew was still documented for onward use. In most cases, this decision turned out as important to the study because it documented several aspects of what I had initially understood only from my singular lineage position but had attributed to all Langi. Being ‘ignorant’ and documenting all that transpired helped the study to avoid essentialising experiences and perceptions of individuals and groups. In addition, my supervisors continuously adviced me on possible biases about my research data by evaluating my reports based on the strength of field-based evidence and the themes I was advancing in my analysis. Furthermore, the multiple sources of data and methods of data collection, which included multi-layered interviews, focus group discussions and observation, helped in checking inconsistencies that might arise from any form of bias.

I was also constantly aware of the gender ramifications of my study since I also interviewed mothers of CBOW on intimate and sometimes traumatic biographies. As survivors of sexual and gender based violence, these women were more comfortable to open up to me as a fellow woman. This was even more the case when they realised I once worked for FAPAD, an organisation that was known for addressing issues of women’s rights. I was aware that any link to my former role in FAPAD could introduce multiple role obligations for me (Adler and Adler, 1997: 28-29). As a former staff of FAPAD, individuals in the community occasionally referred their cases to me for redress. For example, people reported cases of sexual abuse of children, domestic violence and lack of access to safe water sources in the vicinity to me in the hope that I could use my old position in civil society to help them. As an anthropological researcher, I knew I had to occasionally when expected, respond as a way of balancing the ‘moral exchange’ (Adler and Adler, 1997: 29). And so from the start I had mapped out (also as part of the ethical requirements of the study) a list of service providers in the sub region, to whom I directed my informants for further advice and support. This also re-enforced the ethical dimension of my study as not merely extractive (of information), but also empowering for the subjects of my research. Thus, I found myself assuming what Adler et al., referred to as ‘bifurcate roles’; most times being a researcher and sometimes being an activist and linking individuals to resource points.

Interviewing children also made me conscious of how age can influence power dynamics during research. Children are among vulnerable populations that have often been ‘studied down’ (Rosaldo, 1989; Hertz and Imber, 1993). Even when I followed the ethical rule that required parental consent before engaging a child in an interview, I knew that by doing that, I was reconstructing the boundaries between child and childhood and adult and adulthood. All the children that participated in this study did so only upon the acceptance of their guardians. Once the guardian consented, only then did I proceed to explain the study to the child and obtain his or her consent – which complemented his or her parent’s consent. Through seeking parental consent for children’s participation, I reproduced inter-generational boundaries, which, for children and adults, are expressions of difference in power and authority. A child’s consent is not

considered sufficient for a researcher to interview him/her because children are perceived as in need of care and protection. While I always obtained guardian consent, I also sought (and obtained) consent from the children, and held interviews with individual children alone in an open space on the compound.

But the choice of the Langi was influenced, not just by my interest in studying my native language group, although that in itself is linguistically advantageous as I have been able to communicate directly without the use of transcribers or translators39, but mostly because of the dynamics of the LRA war. Because Joseph Kony, the initiator and warlord of LRA, was an Acholi who took his war across ethnic borders, incorporating Lango girls into his system, I became interested in finding out what a group’s experience who was confronted with children born from relations with an aggressor considered ethnically different could be.

Children of ex-combatant mothers in Acholi lacked one of the attributes (ethnic difference) that I was interested in. The Langi, whose involvement in the LRA conflict has been less studied, had been targeted by the LRA right from its conception in 1987. Communities in border sub counties like Minakulu, Ngai, Otwal, Iceme, Aromo and Okwang had to contend with the LRA just like in the hotspots of Acholi. In chapter two, an in-depth historical account of Uganda’s geopolitics as a build up to the LRA war, and the eventual war itself is explored, along with the social aftermath of the war.