Surreal Realities: Anecdotes From a Week in the Greater North of Uganda

Kitgum, and to a lesser extent Gulu, have been my homes for the last week, as I was attending an international institute on transitional justice in Africa. It was a beautifully humbling week, as I realized how generally ignorant I am on issues I had previously considered myself fairly well-versed in. I suppose that’s what happens when you spend a week debating with scholars, professors, lawyers, politicians, UN workers and various other intellectuals. At one point in the conference, Norbet Mao – Presidential candidate and key figure in the peace talks between the LRA and government of Uganda – noted that he doubted there was, at that time, a space anywhere in the region containing a higher density of “cerebral matter”. I can only assume he was excluding me from that statement, but it was wonderful to be involved in discussing transitional justice through a Ugandan context with various activists and academics from Kenya, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Morocco, and elsewhere.

The week also provided some of the more surreal moments of my time in Uganda that are more entertaining than financial matrixes in international transitional justice funding mechanisms –one of my favorite panels, however  - so I’m sure those moments will be more entertaining to write and read about.

•   I stayed up for the entire first night in Gulu with friends, mainly because I still have no sense of mature decision making. Consequently I felt like I was on another planet the next morning, and opening remarks and lectures were more or less a blur that I was tasked with taking notes on. Later on in the day we made the trip up to Kitgum on the second worst road I’ve encountered in Uganda; I had been on it before, but you can never really mentally prepare for a few hours of misery in motion. I sat next to a good friend and colleague and David Pulkol, a former travel partner and the former head of Uganda’s external security. My friend and I stared at him in sense of privileged shock as he described his thought processes behind committing troops to various East African war theatres during the years; it seemed almost cathartic for him to describe. At one point, when discussing the proxy wars Uganda and Sudan waged against each other and his decision to go on the offensive, he said, “Where I come from in Karamoja, if you disrespect us, we are prepared to respond, and if we have to die, the vultures will pick at our bodies on your doorstep, not ours.”
• By a stroke of dumb luck I was able to stay at the Kitgum Royal Hotel for free with two other friends. Kitgum - or as co-workers who live there jokingly referred to it as “Shitgum” – is a rather forgotten center of the LRA insurgency. While the epicenter of the conflict was in Gulu, thus the large amount of NGOs and subsequent infrastructure, Kitgum was the site of some of the most prolonged and brutal fighting, but it was never deemed as ‘sexy’ by the NGO community and can feel rather bleak. The hotel, however, was easily one of the nicest I’ve ever stayed at in Uganda. Every night I came home my bed had been made, everything had been folded, new sheets were provided daily, the generator kept the power on all night, and I had a hot shower in a town that rarely has running water. All of this in a place where, less than a decade ago, leaving your door at night would have been risking your life.
• At one point during the conference, the former head justice of Uganda was asked a question by the former head of external security (Pulkol), and Norbert Mao threw in his opinion as well. It was the American equivalent of the former head of the CIA asking a question to a former Supreme Court Justice, while Ron Paul (no offense to Norbert, he’s much more practical and probably more intelligent and likeable than Paul) added his two cents. It was one of those moments in my life where I questioned how the hell I got so lucky for being one of 40 people to have such an experience.
• On Thursday night a group of us went to a bar called, I swear to god, Facebook. As all young, fresh-faced expatriates tend to do, we had our share to drink. At Facebook. After leaving Facebook at 3AM, my buddy and I got in the bed of the pick-up truck giving us a ride to the hotel, and the group of girls sat inside. While we were racing down dirt roads, my friend started yelling and slamming on the roof of the truck, while the driver slammed the breaks as the motionless body of a man in the middle of the road was picked up in the headlights. Our driver was adamant we keep going, leading to a fairly heated and drunk debate as to the moral dilemma we faced: Leave the man to his fate; check on him and hope his friends weren’t waiting in the bushes next to the road to attack us, a common tactic; check on him and hope he wasn’t dead, as we would be charged by the police, another common occurance; tell the police and hope they weren’t too drunk to give us a hard time; or wake up and deal with a man drunk enough to pass out in the middle of the road. My friend and I decided to take the matter up with the nearby police, who seemed sober but definitely didn’t care about the man waiting to be turned into mince meat by a less observant car. While we did this somebody in our party got the man up and over to the side of the road, where he passed out. We later asked our fellow attendees from Kenya, South Africa, Burundi, and Zimbabwe what they would have done. All of them said ‘keep going’ and told us how foolish we were for trying to help.
• On the last night of the conference we went to the Acholi Pub, where drinks were provided for free. At one point I was sitting next to Mao, sharing swigs off the bottle of wine he had hidden under the table so nobody else could have it. He didn’t want to be bothered with my political inquests, so we made small talk  and joked around about Manchester United’s recent Champions League game against Real Madrid and how Nani needed his own transitional justice for the ridiculous red card he was shown. If Mao is ever President, however unlikely, I will tell that story to at every possible moment I can. 

Hey Meat Eaters, is Eating Horse Repulsive to You? A Confused Vegetarian Would Like to Know Why

Guns, God and meat: Not quite the story of how and why we came to be, but an interesting breakdown of the way we live our lives nonetheless. I lump these three items together for no particular reason other than the fact that I have made conscious and thought out decisions to exclude all three from my life. I refuse the responsibility and implications of owning a lethal firearm and would find no comfort with that extra weight around my waist; I find no logic behind the existence of a higher power, and religious institutions and practices play no role in my everyday existence simply because I don’t need or want them to; I don’t need to eat animals to survive, and I haven’t felt a void in my life in the seven years I’ve been vegetarian to indicate any personal happiness is lost in my decision of exclusion.

The beauty behind personal morality and ethics is just that: They're personal, not universal. You want to carry around a weapon? Do it responsibly and within the means of the law. Want to practice a religion? As long as it doesn’t have a bearing on my life or the lives of others who don’t agree with you. Feel the need to indulge in some foi gras or veal, or maybe a chicken sandwich? Hopefully you’ve thought about the implications of your actions, but eat away my carnivore friend.

Of course we don’t live in a perfect world and these guidelines are not always followed. Mass shootings happen. Gay marriages, in many parts of the world, do not. Slaughterhouses exist as an often invisible link between a breathing animal and the packaged meat you purchase at a store, simply because it’s easier not to think about it.

Even if you choose not to question how that meat got on your table, it’s not a secret that you’re eating a dead animal, and that the animal on your plate most likely didn’t die as a result of natural consequences. So, you’ve made a decision to eat it, even if weighing that decision was made at a subconscious level. There was a choice involved, and choices involve, at the least, weighing one option against the other.

Hopefully we can agree that ethics and morality are individual, and that eating meat involves a choice between consciously consuming a dead animal for enjoyment or avoiding that consumption (eating meat as means for survival or health, therefore, presents no choice and is excluded from the conversation) on any number of grounds. So then, as a vegetarian, I’m confused to the indignation surrounding the recent controversy in Europe that revealed some beef products were actually made from horsemeat.

Now, let me clarify. I’m not confused as to why people are angry that they were misled. If it turned out that the tofu I regularly purchase was actually tempeh, I’d probably be mad simply because I had been duped; although after I got over that my anger would be manifest in the sound of my shoulders shrugging. Eat a tempeh reuben sandwich and tell me how upset you are after you’ve finished.

 And if your religious practices do not allow the eating of horse meat, I can certainly understand why you would be in an uproar. But if religious exemptions of horse meat are not your everyday reality, after the shock of finding out what you thought you were eating was actually something else, would you really be upset?

Writing in the Atlantic, Corby Kummer breaks down the anger and repulsion to horse meat in the following way:

“This is news because of cultural taboos and the big ick factor of eating animals to which we ascribe -- that is, willfully project -- personality and character. It's a sharper, more painful, but similar reaction to anyone who encounters a restaurant or, worse, butcher selling dog meat in China.”

What makes horse meat wrong but meat from a cow, or pig, or chicken, or fish acceptable? Why is a butcher selling dog meat in China abhorrent, while a nice filet mignon that costs more than the daily keep of a minimum wage employee is no problem?

Personality and character, really?

Cats sleep an average of 15 hours a day, leaving them nine waking hours a day to establish their renowned personality as reclusive, despondent animals. On the other hand, cows are social animals amongst themselves and sleep for less than four hours a day. Dogs and pigs have comparable intelligence levels. Shouldn’t you feel comfortable getting a cat burger at McDonald’s instead of a meat patty? Instead of bacon links for breakfast, why not eat strips of salted German Shepherd?

I understand the relationship animals and horses have together: Horses are more likely to provide a sense of companionship than other farm animals, and there is an air of regality around equestrians and horse racing. But, really, what difference does it make? Pigs can be domesticated quite easily, and I imagine you would have a closer relationship with a pig than a ferret, or hedgehog, or snake, or gerbil, or any other animal taboo to eat. Not to mention the work has already been done for you. Is somebody shooting a cow in the head so you can enjoy a burger any less bothersome than shooting a horse in the head?

As for a health argument, studies have shown that horse meat has some advantages to traditional meat and no health risks were posed in the mislabeled food. And let’s be blunt about this, if you’re eating frozen “beef” lasagna or meatballs, you’ve lost the plot, at least momentarily, on being consciously healthy.

None of my arguments are new or original, of course. Peter Singer laid the groundwork decades ago while Jonathan Safran Foer provides a more contemporary voice. Countless examples lie between them. Either way I don’t really care, I’m just confused and rather curious. If you’re offended or disgusted with eating a horse, but have no problem with a hamburger, that’s great. I’m just curious as to why.

And if you have eaten horse before, that’s great too. Maybe you shot one in the head with your own gun, and then said a prayer before you ate it. It’s not for me, but maybe my tofu hoagie isn’t for you. And that's OK. 

Celebrating 27 Years of Torture

I spent the last week working and traveling in northern Uganda, staying in Gulu for the majority of my time there. Over the last two years I’ve spent somewhere around a collective of two weeks in the center of what was once considered by Jan England and the United Nations as the world’s most pressing, dire, and ultimately forgotten conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda (GOU) – consisting of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and its military wing, the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF). Two weeks is nowhere near enough time to consider my hand to be on the pulse of the everyday realities of life in Gulu; while I work in post-conflict recovery and conflict legacies, I can’t pretend to grasp what it is to live through what I write or read about on a daily basis. 

Because of that lack of understanding, I have always viewed Gulu through the lens of the literature on the conflict that I either read about or contribute to. The Acholi Inn has meaning not because I used their shower, but because it was mentioned in Green’s The Wizard of the Nile; Pece Stadium has an importance not because I watched a soccer game there, but because the atrocities carried out within its grounds were discussed in Living With Bad Surroundings. Conversations with local politicians and stakeholders, or even boda drivers who mention the conflict while taking me to the bar, provide words that seem trapped in typeset. When you associate your surroundings with the catalog of material you read back in the comforts of home instead of the reality in front of your eyes, history is perpetually abstract and stagnated, bound to the pages of a book.

I worked at our Gulu office on Tuesday, and at the end of the work day I was told that we had the next day off for a national holiday. Wednesday was NRM Day, a celebration of the party’s 27 years in power. The co-worker who told me about our day off, an Acholi who lived through the LRA conflict, described it as “being forced to celebrate 27 years of torture.” On my way to lunch yesterday afternoon I passed by a large parade ground, filled with hundreds of UPDF soldiers marching in formation in front of a smattering of observers.

As we passed the rifles and bayonets flashing in the sun, the words I had been reading for years were finally released from the page.

I can only imagine that, for northern Ugandans, NRM Day is comparable to Native Americans in the United States taking a day off work for Columbus Day. This was not a celebration of liberation, but rather a forced recognition that history reflects the narrative of victors, not the reality of the marginalized. One imagines that had the LRA managed a successful insurgency and taken Kampala, an LRA Day would have replaced NRM Day; instead of taking off work in recognition of forced displacement and decades of government-sponsored rape, pillage, and murder, the people of northern Uganda would be forced to accept child abduction, torture and brutality as the means to whatever end was deemed as the conclusion.  

There is no good side because in reality they are good, but because the play requires them in order to reach a resolution. And just like a play, this was a farce, a perception of events consumed by an audience with no say in the story being told.  

I didn’t know what to do after my colleague made his remark. All I could do was drift my eyes away from his, shake my head and smile for fear of not knowing how else to react. My books and my job are his life. Those soldiers in formation, the Acholi Inn and Pece Stadium are my landmarks shaped through literature, read in coffee houses and apartment complexes 8,000 miles away from Gulu.  For him and every other Ugandan I have interacted with north of the bellowing Nile, those bayonets were nothing more than acknowledgement of subjugation. 

I had nothing but silence to offer my colleague, and I have no sage words to close with. I still think, perpetually and ultimately, that mankind is virtuous, wise and considerate of each other. But yesterday was confirmation that this is a thought not ground in fact, that our daily experiences can be nothing more than smokescreens created by somebody powerful enough to convince us that what is a myth is in fact tangible and real. Guns, uniforms, and marches will always be more immediate than words on a page, even if their motions are ground in nothing more than the spoils of the victor.