Browsing by Author "Obika, Julaina A."

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    The ‘Intimate Governance’ of Land in Northern Uganda
    (Nordic Journal of African Studies, 2022) Obika, Julaina A.
    After the war in northern Uganda, conflicts over land became pervasive. Families, clans, and neighbours often relate through tensions and contradictions over customary land and how it is governed. This article discusses the changing gendered dynamics of the governance of customary land amidst land conflicts in a post-war society. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Pader District in the Acholi sub-region, carried out between 2014 and 2016, the paper highlights strategies used by different categories of women involved in land conflicts to perform, communicate, and activate their belonging and attachment to land. Relating the notion of property to how women (re-)position themselves in land conflicts and (re-)construct those positions and their identities on and through land demonstrates how these conflicts in post-war northern Ugandan offer women a way of grounding themselves on customary land. The article therefore advances the notion of ‘intimate governance’ to understand, in particular, women’s increasing role in land governance, suggesting that it is becoming (en-)gendered through land conflicts.
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    Returning to the world of ancestors’: death and dying among the Acholi of Northern Uganda, 1900s–1980s
    (Routledge, 2022) Obika, Julaina A.
    The encounters between Acholi and Europeans, beginning in 1904 with the settlement of the Church Missionary Society in Acholiland, had a profound impact on the people. Scholars have long examined the impact of these encounters on various aspects of life. But a study of their impact on mortuary practices in the region has largely been neglected. Recently, scholars have shined a spotlight on death and dying as a result of the armed conflict that engulfed Acholiland from the late 1980s. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, interviews, and works of Acholi intellectuals, this article complements this new trend, by focusing on death and mortuary practices between the 1900s and the 1980s. Specifically, it recreates these practices and demonstrates change and continuity; and it concludes with a history of the cemetery in Acholiland.