Saints and sinners: Five big Northern Uganda trends

I just completed a 3,800 kilometres whistlestop tour of several parts of Uganda in five days and got near or at all its borders, except the one with Tanzania.

On the night of December 31, having driven from Rukungiri, we made Gulu to watch it usher in the New Year in the wildest scenes I have ever seen. On a subdued January 1, 2023, morning, I went to St. Philip’s Cathedral cemetery to pay respects to Okot p’Bitek, one of Africa’s greatest poets and author of the unputdownable and world-famous “Song of Lawino”.

I was joined by a junior priest who had just come out of a church service. Telling him of the scenes I witnessed the previous evening, the conversation drifted to just how much Gulu, and the north, had come since the terrible days of the long Northern Uganda War.

Therefore, Northern Uganda’s climb out of hell, unsurprisingly, tops the list of the trends I gleaned on the northern leg of my tour, five of which we report on here. Next week we will focus on the southwest and west.

1. “The Rising of Post-Conflict Northern Uganda”:  From the wider Acholiland, Lango, and West Nile, the pace of change is almost breathtaking. Make no mistake, this region is still traumatised, and the societies will take many years to overcome the social destruction of war, but the area is happening. It enjoys the advantages that the countries that industrialised in the 18th and 19th centuries (compare first-industraliser UK and Germany) had. The northern Uganda recovery came when mobile phones, the internet, and affordable Chinese goods were on the scene. Additionally, the long war had, on the positive side, created a clean slate for them to start on. South Sudan’s independence, and the seeming boom in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo, for which they serve as food baskets and commercial clearing houses, were a bonus. The future of Uganda is in the north. Someone swears that Lira will be the Ugandan industrial city of the next decade.

2. “Emergence of Northern Ugandan Cosmopolitanism and Urban Sinfulness”: One striking feature of cities like Gulu, Lira, and Arua, is how much you see the face of the rest of Uganda in them. There are pubs and restaurants where the language spoken is Luganda. All sorts of Ugandans are in these towns running hotels and other businesses. The commercial sex market, a sign of how secular and socially liberated a city or town is, is considerable. The prostitutes mainly serve the long-distance travellers, and the thousands of Congolese and South Sudanese who descend on these towns on the weekends. The high-end sex workers are mainly from Buganda and Western Uganda. The image of a socially-conservative northern Uganda is in peril.

3. “The Nanyukisation and Gilgilification of Acholi”:  One of the most striking things in the north is what’s happening in Acholi, especially the districts of Amuru and Nwoya, is how much outsiders, Europeans, Asians, and the Ugandan moneyed class are moving in to invest in expensive agriculture and food processing. They are bringing to the areas the kind of set-up one finds in Nanyuki, in Kenya’s central region and Gilgil in its Rift Valley. It has its problems, with local agitation against alleged land grabs and the inequalities these structures bring. None of that, however, takes away from this very dynamic development.

4. “Invisible Asians No More”: On the 50th anniversary of the expulsion of the Asian community from Uganda by military ruler Idi Amin in 1972, I was asked by an Asian-focused journal to do a piece on the anniversary. I wrote about the “Invisible Asians”, who have come to Uganda in the last 30 years, and started small businesses in Kampala, but mostly Eastern and the wider Northern Uganda. You see them, dust on their faces, in hardware shops in Mbale and Lira. Their numbers are growing. They are slowly but surely changing the commercial life of many towns in these regions as the early 20th century Asians did in East Africa. In Lira, but particularly Arua, they are now increasingly visible, standing on storefronts, walking in the streets at night, and riding boda bodas around town.

5. “The Eritreans Have Did It”: Eritreans (and Ethiopians) have taken over Kampala suburbs like Kansanga, turning them into mini-Asmaras and Addis Ababas. They have become big players in real estate. They were particularly dominant in South Sudan but were scattered by the war that returned there in 2013. Many moved to northern Uganda with the resources they could gather up. There are a slew of hotels, pubs, and restaurants that have been opened by the Eritreans there, and they are huge attractions, spreading a sound and aesthetic that is pan-African. Another Eritrean East African re-invention is probably happening in northern Uganda.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3