Acholi Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and the Making of Colonial Northern Uganda, 18501960 (New African Histories)

Acholi Intellectuals draws on the writings of homespun historians, interviews with elderly men and women who remember the last days of colonial rule, and government and missionary archives to illuminate the intellectual and political history of the colonial transition in northern Uganda. The book focuses on Acholiland, a place that has been chronically understudied in comparison to Uganda’s rich, fertile, and well-documented south. Southerners there―following the depictions of colonial officials and missionaries―have often regarded northerners as uncultured people lacking ideas. Acholi Intellectuals challenges this prejudice, bringing into view a whole category of men (and a few women) who mediated between indigenous and colonial knowledge systems and inaugurated a new kind of politics. Patrick William Otim studies a category of people―known as healers, messengers, war leaders, poet-musicians, and diplomats―who possessed prestige and power in an older Acholi political logic and who, in the dawning days of colonial government, came to occupy positions of power in the British administration. Otim argues that these Acholi intellectuals were not simply creatures of British colonial self-interest; neither was their power invented by the coercive logic of indirect rule. He asserts instead that people who held moral and social power in the older system were able to transform that strength, under colonial administration, into a new form of political legitimacy. Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: The Forgotten Acholi Intellectuals 1 V: Acholiland, 1850–1911: An Overview 2 V: Power and Authority: The Making of Acholi Intellectuals 3 V: The Roles of Court Officials: Acholi Intellectuals and the Functioning of Their Chiefdoms 4 V: The Introduction of Christianity: Acholi Intellectuals and the Spread of the New Religion 5 V: The Demise of the Old Order: Acholi Intellectuals and the Spread of Colonial Rule 6 V: The Intellectual Lives of the Transitional Acholi, 1920s–1960 Epilogue: The Destruction of Acholi Intellectuals Glossary of Selected Local Terms Source Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index