Those who go underwater: Indignation,sentiment,and ethical immanence in northern Uganda

Paska and Laber

By 2012, Paska was a household name in Gulu. An Acholi girl from a district neighbouring Gulu, she had been a pupil at Holy Cross some 10 years before, during some of the most violent episodes of the war when the school and its students were targets of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). An unusually bright and beautiful altar girl from a rare wealthy family, Paska had been ostracised soon after boarding at the school. Midway through the year, her classmates began to share rumours about her. Paska and her family were so wealthy, according to the tales, because when Paska’s then-poor mother was pregnant with her, she visited an ajwaka (spirit diviner, medium, or ‘witch doctor’) to ask for help getting rich. Her mother was taken underwater, the rumour went, where she sacrificed Paska’s soul to the Devil or a water spirit (jok kulu). In return, Paska was bound to recruit souls to worship Satan and make journeys underwater to labour in the workshops of underwater demons, whence high quality and handsome goods originate—how else did people acquire luxuries during the impoverishment caused by war?

In 2002 a classmate of Paska, called Melissa, became possessed during a midweek prayer service. The spirits made damning claims: Paska was at the school to recruit girls for devil worship, and she had a list of candidates to target. Over the following days and weeks the spirits returned to Melissa and also entered other girls, who made similar accusations. Because Paska was well-liked by many of the Sisters, some said that there were also nuns who were helping her to recruit people on ‘the list’. Though constantly pressed as to the truth of the spirits’ claims, Paska kept silent and withdrawn. A girl named Laber watched as Paska was shunned in the classroom, at meal times, and during all activities. Though they had never interacted before, Laber was troubled by what she witnessed. When I asked her to tell me about how she became Paska’s friend, Laber said:

I tried to feel the pain she was in. I said to myself, if we are Christians and we really believe in Christ and God in heaven, we are not meant to fear the Devil. Demons know where they can enter; they aren’t like airborne diseases. If I’m sitting next to Paska and there are demons, they can’t enter my heart. My mother taught me that Jesus was tempted by the Devil, but he didn’t run. He showed his faith. Supposing I was Paska, how would I feel? It was at that point that I befriended her. I would bring her food and sit with her. I started losing my own friends. I would respond, ‘It’s okay, I can’t force you to be my friend. My thinking is different’. They would give me scriptures. But I would still sit with her.

‘No’, she said. ‘I have not worshipped any devils’. When pressed, Paska volunteered that she remembered a dream in which she saw people in black robes holding a bowl filled with human blood; they forced it to her lips, but she resisted. Soon after that night, teachers called charismatic preachers from Kampala to pray over the school and over Paska and Laber, and, soon after, the school administration ordered the two girls to mass at Holy Rosary church in Gulu Town. In neither case did spirits disturb or emerge in the two girls. The catechists insisted: ‘It never takes more than thirty minutes for a demon to show. It is Melissa who is disturbed’. The fracas culminated in the Head Teacher, Sister Frances, dramatically ordering Paska’s expulsion at a year-end assembly in which the entire school was gathered. Though the girls immediately began advancing on Paska in order to give her a beating, Laber skirted her away and hurriedly packed Paska’s belongings. Paska eventually travelled to Kampala, where she became a successful singer and model. Rumours continue to circulate about her in Gulu, where her name elicits scorn within and without Holy Cross. As for Laber, she is spurned by association: known as the friend of a lajok (a witch).

What is to be done?

The events at Holy Cross then and now were said, by some of the striking girls in 2012, to be the work of Paska and these lute pii. Holy Cross, they were adamant, had been infiltrated by devil worshippers, a harvest of souls was ongoing in the classrooms and dormitories, and the most senior levels of the school’s administration were guilty of negligence at best. Some teachers were accused of having made their own unsavoury deals with the malevolent underwater powers. Fantastical tales circulated. A particularly large kituba tree ⁵ behind the dorms was suspected of being a gathering place where possessed girls went at night to worship the Devil and bow to the apparition of a woman in a black dress and red headscarf. Sister Dorothy, a stern Alur woman feared by many of the girls, was thought to have buried something sinister under the tree, and students suspected she sat in the back of chapel working on tweno lega, the action of ‘tying prayers’, whereby a person maliciously diverts the ‘direction’ of others’ devotions, invocations, and supplications. The students grew to fear any big trees in the compound, and avoided walking near the statues that dotted the grounds (of subjects as varied as the Virgin Mary and African mammals). Those who were possessed were unable to stand the brightness of the statue of Christ, and onlookers were repulsed by what appeared to be blood in their classmates’ eyes or in the school’s food. But complaining was difficult: The pupils feared disciplinary action and dismissal by the school administration, and though some teachers were sympathetic, plenty thought the girls were ‘dramatising’ or malingering. ⁶

Knowing at least some of this, the public officials listened sympathetically to the concerns of the striking students and participated in the impromptu prayers on their office steps. They walked the strikers back to the school and called an assembly, where they suggested that the students be dismissed for a short period to visit their families, and that a physician examine the students and hear their complaints. After this short cooling-off period, the town’s most popular radio station (which operates in both English and Acholi) broadcast the sensational news that students of Holy Cross were suffering from hysteria: what the girls lacked were boyfriends to fulfil their sexual urges. The students at the secondary school for boys nearest Holy Cross were delighted by this news, and took it upon themselves later that week to scale the walls of the girls’ school in order to ‘help’ the afflicted. In another instance, one of the teachers took heed of the explanation and, when a student began again exhibiting symptoms, she recruited a handyman to embrace the girl and calm her body. In her state, the girl was much stronger than the workman and threw him off. Whilst that teacher was disciplined (and even brought to the police barracks to answer for her actions), these were nonetheless humiliating experiences for the girls, who felt invalidated by the claims that their distress was caused by anything less serious than spiritual forces.

These are not the only explanations for the goings-on at Holy Cross which continue to circulate in Gulu. ⁷ Though many consider the problem to have been unnecessarily escalated by adolescent behaviour and religious politics, few accuse the girls of faking calypso or spirit possession, the general consensus being that such phenomena cannot be convincingly faked. Most explanations of the ‘true’ origins of the behaviour (whether organic, psychological) emerged from a space of uncertainty. Some are convinced by radio and newspaper reports that framed the story in either scientifically authoritative terms of female hysteria (a diagnosis vehemently refuted by the physician who actually observed the girls) or as demonic possession. But everyday conversations between people leave more room for doubt in these didactic interpretations, reminiscent as they are of the nascent study of psychology in 19th century Europe.

At present, differences in interpretation are broadly (though not rigidly) divided on denominational and generational lines, with youth (the presently affected girls amongst them) more likely to point to Satan and lute pii as the cause, whilst their elders (Old Girls of Holy Cross amongst them) vocalise other possibilities in tune with a cosmology more inflected with ontological ambiguity than charismatic Christianity. For example, many people (both Catholic and non-Catholic) in Acholi muse that Catholic missions are teeming with tipu dano—shadows or souls of people—because Catholics, strangely, do not bury their dead at home. Unable to take their place amongst the clan ancestors, the tipu of people buried in mission cemeteries, like the one located adjacent to Holy Cross, tend to wander and cause trouble. When a tipu is particularly angry—at the circumstances of his or her death or burial, for example—it may become cen, a vengeful ghost, or tipu marac, a bad or unclean shadow. ⁸ Then there are the forces with non-human origins, a whole compendium of jok (singular) or jogi (plural), spirits once tied exclusively to geographic places in Acholi (clan shrines, divination shrines, bodies of water, hills, rocks, trees) but joined, over the course of the last century, by free jogi with a wider geographical scope (Behrend, 1999).

Although these diverse explications point to a tension between different ontological frames, it would be a misleading caricature to posit that these actions and interpretations with respect to the happenings at Holy Cross, can be easily mapped onto collective anxieties over post-war social change. This is not to say that such anxieties are not a prominent feature of daily life in Acholi. However, the threat of imminent loss—be it of religious, cultural, linguistic, existential, relational or moral integrity—drives the urgency of judgment and action in more mundane and messy ways. How one should act in the face of what might appear to be catastrophic cosmological rupture (for example, in collapsing a complicated compendium of ubiquitous spirits into the category of metaphysical evil, or rejecting all else for medical authority) is not unique to this particular moment. Let me be clear that I do not discount the (ongoing) affects and effects of what amounted to a nearly apocalyptic suffering wrought by the 1986–2006 war in northern Uganda, which I touch on below. ⁹ Nonetheless, the continuity of less-dramatically expressed moral urgency, in the face of social change that is never fully complete, is a legible constancy in mythical and historical moments in Acholi. ¹⁰

Seeds of rancour

Holy Cross was founded in the late 1930s as the first school in northern Uganda dedicated solely to the education of girls. It attracted students from across the North, but its initial success was short-lived. The Italian Comboni sisters who lived and taught on the grounds of the school were harassed by the British Protectorate during the Second World War, which at one point used the school as a barracks for its soldiers. Though by the 1950s Holy Cross was once again a respected primary and secondary school for girls, staffed then by a mix of local and foreign instructors, girls who boarded at the school periodically complained of being disturbed by unseen forces at night. One former pupil from those early days recalled that girls in her dormitory used to wake up during the night complaining of feeling strangled. She mused that the problem of malevolent spirits was the cen of Italians killed in the area during WWII, or perhaps of the tipu of missionaries buried within or near the school compound. The problem of mission ghosts was an ongoing problem in many colonial schools of multiple denominations within in the country as a whole.

During the regime of Idi Amin (1971–1979), the school’s fortunes suffered once again when its expatriate teachers fled the country, and the insecurity that followed his defeat and preceded the Bush War (the civil war of 1981–1986) discouraged students and teachers from continuing at the school. Unfortunately, the northern security situation did not improve with Yoweri Museveni’s 1986 victory, and several rebel groups (composed both of defeated troops tied to the Obote and Okello regimes and newly militarised men) became active in the area. Museveni’s National Resistance Movement/Army pursued these men and their communities, and it is purportedly during this time of National Resistance Army incursions that the problem of underwater people surfaced in Acholi.

The rebel groups waxed and waned throughout the next few years, but two in particular had a lasting impact on the fortunes of Holy Cross and the Acholi subregion: the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (HSMF) and its most prominent follower, the LRA. Lakwena, ¹¹ the leader of the HSMF, had the goal to purify Acholi of witchcraft and of the cen (ghostly vengeance), brought home by Acholi soldiers retreating from atrocities they had committed in Luweero (central Uganda), which had polluted the Acholi cosmos. Though the HSMF was largely composed of voluntary troops and did not abduct children as ‘recruits’ on the same scale as its successor group, it did attack the school and abduct several of the students to forcefully draft them into the movement. The LRA ¹² shared the goal to usher in Acholi Manyen (New Acholi), a morally purified society that left behind the purported evil of Acholi Macon (Old Acholi). To satisfy this goal, they became notorious for abducting youth to fill their ranks. ¹³ Despite the school’s relative prestige, its students were not primarily affluent. Those who could afford to send their children to schools outside of the North did so. Despite this rampant insecurity, many of the girls from around northern Uganda, not just Acholi, coveted spots at Holy Cross during this time, which still had a prestigious reputation for quality instruction. Some, like Paska, came from families who could pay for schooling outright, whilst others were sponsored by distant relatives, charities or well-wishers from further afield. Those girls who had their school fees at Holy Cross sponsored by well-wishers did not dare complain of their fear, lest they show disrespect.

During the late 1980s throughout the 1990s, pupils at Holy Cross habitually slept in their dormitory bunks with their shoes on, always prepared for abduction. The violence came in fits and starts over the years, and the security of the school sometimes changed dramatically from term to term. One alumna, who was a student at the school in the mid to late 1990s, reflected on what it was like to be a student at that time. She described a strict but rewarding routine of study, play and prayer. She also recalled chronic tension and fear, when evening preparatory session could no longer happen because the girls were preventatively locked in their dorms immediately after supper (or sometimes in lieu of it). The school’s walls were patrolled by soldiers who regularly exchanged gunfire—and words—with approaching rebels, all within earshot of the restless girls. Spies frequented the area and when caught, the girls were called to assembly to witness the ensuing interrogations.

Though no final peace agreement between the LRA and the Government of Uganda was ultimately signed, the 2006 cessation of hostilities agreement has been upheld until now. Today, teachers and students at the school make it known that the school is an enduring and cosmopolitan institution, despite its tribulations. Like all secondary schools in Uganda, English is the language of instruction and the lingua franca of students and teachers, who are of varied linguistic and tribal origins. Though the school is Roman Catholic, pupils who belong to the Anglican Church of Uganda and various charismatic revival movements (both Catholic and Protestant) are granted time in the school’s chapel to hold worship and prayer services. ¹⁴ For many Acholi girls, their arrival at Holy Cross marks their sharpest exposure to the world outside their home villages or, during the last 10 years of the war, their first time out of the camps: full of both novelty and danger. During my fieldwork (2013–2014), ¹⁵ many friends, acquaintances and strangers, upon discovering my interest in issues of cen and other spirits, urged me towards Holy Cross. It was, they said, a hotbed of cen or ‘something’.

The girls at Holy Cross, who come from inside and outside Acholi, also demonstrate necessary discernment in light of myriad unknowns: Are the spirits who have possessed the girls evil, and aligned with Satan? Are they wartime ghosts? Or are they amoral beings, indigenous to the Acholi landscape? Are there spirits within these girls at all? Is Sister Dorothy untrustworthy because she is an Alur with rituals from ‘out’? What was Paska’s intention in admitting to have dreamed of being offered human blood? Did she know or understand herself?

Wealth, women and water

When women fight at wells or other sources of water, ¹⁶ they are likely to provoke the wrath of jok kulu (water-dwelling spirits) onto themselves and their children. But the dangers of jok kulu at village streams and wells seem almost provincial in comparison to the threats that emanate from bodies of water further away from the moral centre of kith and kin: Karuma Falls, the cataract of the Nile that separates northern Uganda from the rest of the country; Lake Victoria, that intimidatingly large lake that has swallowed many a ship; the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, with their unfathomable depths. Water is like the bush: dangerous not only because of its physical properties, but as a space and substance outside of the moral order of sociality. ¹⁷

By 2006, around the time when the LRA was expelled from Uganda’s borders and a ceasefire was implemented in the North, the residents of Gulu Town were still coping with an insidious fear less obvious than armed conflict. Those who go underwater were thought to be unusually active on the streets, abducting children and harvesting their blood and souls. Nearly everyone had a story about the underwater people, and unlike jok, cen, tipu and the like, the issue was discussed primarily in terms of moral condemnation. Largely cut off from the economic centre of Kampala and with most of the population still dependent on food aid, residents in both town and camp were suspicious of prosperity. Local business people, including one of Paska’s elder sisters, were accused of acquiring their wares from workshops underwater. Some girls from Holy Cross advised that it is prudent to use second-hand goods; finer things are likely to have been produced underwater and mark the bearer as a target for lute pii recruitment. Anybody with unusual levels of success and wealth are suspect, and at Holy Cross such people could be picked out in the dining hall, where ‘their juice never gets finished’, meaning their most treasured treat was never depleted.

‘Those’ underwater people are related to, or are themselves, part of a mysterious cabal; President Museveni, the Pope and most priests are themselves Illuminati or those of underwater. Beyoncé, I was told, is the Queen of the Water, and she counts most celebrity singers amongst her ranks. How else could they produce music so quickly and so beautifully? ¹⁸ These convictions are buttressed by extraordinary tales and confessions by those who have admitted to have travelled underwater: perhaps intentionally, perhaps unintentionally. That so many devout Catholics should question the Pope’s trustworthiness, but still continue to worship, is indicative of the ethical discernment performed on a daily basis.

The conditions of underdetermination in Gulu are heightened by teenage jealousy and the most recent war between the Government of Uganda and the LRA, but not only this. The idioms through which people think about the ethical are mediated by centuries of British imperialism, Italian missions, mediascapes of Nigerian and American films and music, medicine, political violence, institutionalised education, Catholic and Anglican communions, Islam, new waves of independent charismatic and Pentecostal churches, and the list goes on. Though the figure of the person who goes underwater or the fabulously wealthy Illuminati is recent in Acholi, it is reminiscent of longstanding concerns over the nature of moral regulation. In Acholi, as elsewhere, it behoves senior members of families and clans to redistribute their wealth. Those who fail in this central obligation of kinship, particularly those who do not regularly return to their villages from new lives in town, are morally suspect. At present, the figure of the self-made man or the independent woman is an anomaly, and one that has prompted talk of witchcraft, underwater dealings and violence. ¹⁹

The expression cwiny pe tek (‘the heart is not strong’) is commonly uttered in reference to the preponderance of women and girls who are affected by disembodied spirits. For the ‘Ocols’ or modernists of Uganda, this gendered turn of phrase is medicalised. The radio station that announced the problem to be ‘hysteria’ tapped into a modernist narrative in Uganda that takes just as many interpretive and creative twists as ‘traditional’ cosmology. The explanatory model of science is especially taken up in conversation about the inalienable truths of differences between tribes of Ugandans, between Africans and Europeans, between men and women, ²⁰ village and city, North and South. So though the physician who attended the girls at Holy Cross treated them with compassion and respect, and though she was annoyed by how her words were taken up in the media, her conclusion was thus: ‘To me, what the radio said was absolutely right: it wasn’t evil spirits’. The doctor suspected that the girls were suffering from somatic conversion disorder. Early adolescence is a very stressful time, she explained to the students. One cannot contain all the stresses of family, school and social lives; it manifests itself in bodily affliction.

Becoming: practical judgement and the ethical project through time

In their studies of possessed female Malay factory workers and Malagasy school girls, respectively, Aihwa Ong (1988) and Lesley Sharp (1990) argue that possession is produced by the uncomfortable and disruptive traversing of moral boundaries in an increasingly confusing world. In a similar vein, much anthropological work concerns the proliferation of occult conspiracies, particularly in Africa, contextualised by the social pressures wrought by multipally conceived modernities (West and Sanders, 2003) and late-stage capitalism (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999, 2001; Taussig, 2010). Conerly Casey notes that, in the case of similar problems amongst secondary school girls in Kano, Nigeria, ‘The worlds of spirits and witches are changing as rapidly as the world of humans…’ (Casey, 1997: 103). At the heart of these ethnographies is concern with the constant flux of life, the fluidity of social norms and shared understandings of the world, and what these changes do to people like the girls at Holy Cross. How to best live with and understand one another and (the ‘Other’) in an overwhelmingly connected (but fundamentally disjointed) time disrupts time itself, and as such ordinary life and ethics take on eschatological dimensions.

There are compelling similarities in the uncanny events and conundrums described in this literature, across widely differing geographic, religious and sociocultural milieux. My goal is not to provide a novel explanation of such phenomena or to offer a dramatically different take on theories of possession (broadly construed). Rather, I wish to dwell on how action in the face of particular circumstances—be they attributed to spirit possession, haunting or something else—is inherently tied to the immanent and imminent dimensions of ethical projects. Put in other words, how do people, in their ordinary struggles to become and remain full, responsible human persons (in Acholi, dano adana), interpret, cope with and act within the underdetermined?

In concluding that spirit possession is definitively idiomatic or metaphorical, or a tool of subconscious critique, something of the uncertainty of those lived experiences, as well as the ethical (the judgments and intents of both people and spirits) is lost. The acts of immanent spirits in Acholi, not to mention the acts of immanent and transcendent God and Satan, disrupt collective knowledge of the recent past and the future, and they beg acknowledgement. At the same time, the girls themselves interpreted the doctor’s and the radio announcer’s words to mean that they were faking their affliction, not that they were being acknowledged as victims of the ravishes of modernity or late capitalism. Their insistence that they be recognised not as hysterical schoolgirls but as victims of a deeply dangerous and malevolent conspiracy pushed back against attempts to medicalise or pathologise their behaviour. But it also reinserted the underdetermined and the affective into the public conversation dominated by experts: doctors, lawyers, radio announcers, missionaries, university graduates come home from Kampala, nongovernmental organisation workers, blog writers, social scientists—Ocol’s modern voice, ushering in reason.

By reflecting on this scholarly urge to not only weigh in on the value of particular explanatory models and to unwittingly (re)produce them, I propose a shift in temporal framing. In looking to ethical imminence, to what spirits and humans might bring about in the future, rather than solely what they are or whence they have come, one has a more meaningful grasp on what is at stake for the ‘possessed and dispossessed’. Durkheim’s suggestion that reality can only be understood by trained scientists, and not described or explained by those living in it (Laidlaw, 2013: 30), is replicated in the poststructuralist hermeneutics of suspicion. This is an ethnographic problem. As Michel de Certeau remarked on the possessions at Loudun in 16th century France, ‘history is never sure’, but ‘deviltries are at once symptoms and transitional solutions’ (de Certeau, 2000: 2). The uncertainty of the future, and the rejection of present limits, are indispensable elements of epistemological crises, not riddles to be solved. This is not to say that people do not perceive reality as relatively transparent, or that no explanation is ever obvious and no debunking of the strange ever occurs. But in resisting the impulse to explain with unwavering authority, an anthropologist approaches an interpretive judgment more in keeping with the vagaries of lived experience. To better describe and acknowledge the acts of practical judgment that are demanded of our interlocutors—in ordinary and chronic situations of hesitation, uncertainty, fear and anger—provides a different kind of insight on ethical projects.

Consider the different possible explanatory frameworks—hysteria, psychogenic illness, conversion disorder, lute pii, cen, tipu dano, devils etc.—as types. They belong to langue, not parole; everyday judgments are taken from the symbolic repertoire characterised in the figures of both Lawino and Ocol, not either/or. Jack Sidnell, in his lucid demonstration of how ordinary ethics are woven into everyday speech interactions, notes, following J. L. Austin and others, that ‘interaction is itself a moral and ethical domain. When persons interact, they necessarily and unavoidably assess whether they are being heard, ignored, and so on’ (Sidnell, 2010: 124). Language as action (Lambek, 2010) is central to understanding what is at stake in the ordinary as well as extraordinary times of contemporary post-war northern Uganda. Whilst I do not consider microlevel linguistics here, the centrality of language rings true. For Paska, she judged many moments of her precarious situation at Holy Cross to warrant the most prudent response: silence. When she did act by speaking, it was not to deny the reality of devils, but simply to assert that she had no recollection of ever having been in league with them, only of an ominous dream. Her interpretation left open the possibilities of what might come next. Meanwhile, Laber did the work of negotiating her own conceptions of the world with what she saw unfolding in front of her: ‘I tried to feel the pain she was in’, she said of Paska, and pondered Christian exegesis and the incommensurability of demons and airborne diseases. Ultimately, she weighed the risks to her own social capital and her own soul and made the choice to befriend Paska. It was an act not to be taken lightly: She was rejected not only by classmates and teachers, but by family members and neighbours once she too left the school. In practicing reflective judgment, they found new ways of relating to each other and to themselves that went beyond the extant symbolic resources.

For their classmates and successors at Holy Cross, as well as the ecumenical interveners, the problem of calypso exemplifies the immanence of history and the imminent possible crises of the future erupting into the present. Cen, the vengeful ghost of a human poorly treated at death or burial, is also folded into new and different instantiations. The phrase cen me te pii, or underwater cen, is also used to describe the ‘something’ at Holy Cross and in Gulu that has caused so much moral concern. Whilst such a turn might repurpose the problem of unacknowledged death and dying, it is alternatively understood to be synonymous with Catan (Satan) or in league with him. A person who considers all jok (plural: jogi), cen, kwaro (ancestors), tipu dano (human shadows), cen me te pii to be inherently evil, existential threats without the possibility of meaning, propitiation or domestication, is cultivating a moral stance in line with Pentecostalism’s ‘break with the past’. But as many ethnographers have shown, such a break is never clean, the community of Christian brothers and sisters is in constant flux, and an exclusively eschatological orientation is not easily realised. ²¹

But of course, change does occur, and authority is challenged. When a girl asserts to her peers, teachers, even the District Chairman, that she is being made to suffer by lute pii, she is also conveying her own character: She is a righteous follower of Jesus Christ, whose blood is attractive to the fallen, and she suspects the end times are near. This performance leaves less room for the reproduction of a moral community predicated on the supreme value of elderly, sexually productive men and opens cracks for the cultivation of all sorts of subjectivities. When a radio announcer publicises that girls have been taken over by ‘hysteria’, or when a physician insists that people should speak of somatic conversion disorder, they are making a claim for modernity, science and the values of reason and progress. They, too, make available new types of persons that the students might emulate and become. They mark themselves in opposition to the ‘backwardness, superstition and ignorance’ of village ‘spirit talk’, but often preclude Christian prayer (a perfectly modern practice) from their condemnations. Still others stake their claims as moral Acholi, obedient to the needs of both their living and dead clan kin, and struggle to balance the spiritual pollution caused by the horrors of war. And yet, these stances might be said to be ethical ideals, not immutable categories, and as such they are messy; ideas flowing into words and out of them, and the moving target of meaning always open to interpretation for speakers and listeners. It is the individuals who are unwavering in the certainty of their convictions who are curiously both admired and suspect. They are islands in the unruly river of symbolic material.

Who do you think you are? Hesitation and ressentiment

Clouds of admiration and suspicion are also the companions of many an anthropologist, mired in that fog in the process of research and the ongoing (and sometimes unexpected) relationships that persist beyond the ‘event’ of initial fieldwork. Often tolerated by our interlocutors as childlike in our first forays, we are nonetheless called upon to strive towards full personhood—in the Acholi context, to become dano adana. The hesitant deliberations by which we respond to this call also constitute the stuff of ethical relations, and they are ensconced within ethical projects greater than our own individual goals. These attempts at practical judgement succeed, and they also fail, but they are always contingent.

It has not been possible to divorce my own attempts at scholarly comprehension from the immanent and imminent ethics of contemporary Acholi. Just as I have worked to interpret character, motivation and context from action, so have my efforts and my mere presence (and subsequent absence) had effects.

Drawing from Adam Smith and Jean Améry, Didier Fassin has written that the moral indignation of ‘resentment’ can be understood in contrast to the moral sentiment of ‘ressentiment’ (Fassin, 2013). For Fassin, ‘resentment’ characterises a reaction to pain inflicted by others, expressed in such a way that the perpetrator must acknowledge (or make amends for) his or her actions. To feel resentment, the wrong-doer and the wronged must be on relatively equal footing. In contrast, ressentiment cannot produce mutual understanding between perpetrator and victim (if such a distinction can indeed be made) because it is a moral sentiment experienced by the dominated, the weak, the marginalised and the powerless. Fassin writes,

The source of ressentiment is the ‘thirst for revenge’ that erupts as the result of a reaction of frustration provoked by a combination of envy for what one does not have and of impotence to obtain it, but it is neither mere anger nor pure emotion: It supposes the work of time and of consciousness. (Fassin, 2013: 252)

Resentment and ressentiment are complementary; part of a temporal process of which we, as anthropologists, are a part. Lambek, in his commentary on Fassin’s (2013) piece, remarks that in considering our informants’ remarks, ‘The trick is how to simultaneously acknowledge and critique their positions’ (Fassin, 2013: 262). Anthropologists are social actors, however much they might erase themselves from scholarly narratives, and their judgments and actions have consequences that feed into the lived experiences of their interlocutors. By the final period of my doctoral fieldwork, I had for many months wondered what had become of Paska. I worked on my own ethical practice, making constant judgements over the credibility of my interlocutors, of their motivations, of my motivations, and always wondering how to respond to the questions that were posed back in my direction: ‘What do you think? Are the Illuminati real? Is Paska the Queen of the Ocean?’ I deflected such questions as much as I could, but I am not certain my judgment was always good. How might I answer without unduly provoking ressentiment or violence against Paska? In the ‘troubled waters’ where ethics and politics meet (Fassin, 2015), the question of public sentiment also poses a challenge for the ethical life of the ethnographer.

As she had been ‘chased’, rumours of her whereabouts seemed to me to be never more than that. Nonetheless, I discovered that I was acquainted with several people who knew her sister, Fiona, and they told me that Fiona was likely to agree to a meeting. Fiona discussed the experiences of her sister and family with a generous frankness. Though I wanted to speak with Paska, I did not want to harm her by reopening old wounds, and so I was hesitant to pursue anything further. However, I was willing to travel to Kampala, where Paska now lived, in order to mitigate any discomfort. Fiona thought this reasonable, and so she called both Paska and Laber in my presence in order to vouch for my character and ask that they permit me to speak with them in person. Fiona described, as I had to her, the purpose of my research and the consent process of participation. She got off the phone, satisfied, and told me that both were expecting my calls.

We parted on good terms and within a week I found myself in the modest sitting room belonging to Laber’s sister. Laber spoke at length about her life and her continuing friendship with Paska, noting that she was likely to tell Paska all about my visit. Though I had tried Paska’s number several times and sent her some introductory text messages, she had yet to respond. Some days after visiting Laber, I was getting ready to meet a friend for dinner when my phone rang and displayed Paska’s number. I answered the phone, hoping for pleasantries, but was met with anger. ‘Why are you making a documentary about me? I will sue you!’ she said, in a raised voice. I tried to interject: No, I am not a filmmaker, I am a researcher from Canada!

‘You journalists just make trouble!’ she continued. ‘You are promoting ignorant stories and superstition!’

‘Please let me try to explain who I am. It’s okay if you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t have to. But I want you to know that I am a student of anthropology, not a journalist or a filmmaker, and what I do is try to understand culture—’

‘Culture?!’ she interrupted. ‘Those people don’t know anything about culture! What does this have to do with traditional dress and dances? The nuns and students at Holy Cross are nothing but nasty bullies! I’m a model and a singer and I don’t need their culture’.

These ordinary acts are political. The last decade of scholarship on northern Uganda has been understandably preoccupied with the subject of forgiveness and justice during and after war, especially in the context of debates over the moral and legal value of local and international transitional justice mechanisms (Allen, 2006; Baines, 2005). Notwithstanding the public prominence of the war crimes and crime against humanity trials of LRA commanders Dominic Ongwen and Thomas Kwoyelo, ²² of more immediate and consistent concern to Acholi has been how to live together after decades of intimate violence, where the categories of victim and perpetrator were indelibly blurred. Lotte Meinert (2014), following Arendt, has noted in Acholi that the questions of who and what is forgiven, and why, are deeply tied to the maintenance of intimate relationships, the creative and subjunctive management of moral boundaries and exploration of intentionality, and the pragmatics of hopeful new beginnings (cf. Porter 2016). The act of forgiveness is socially restorative, implying that a social relationship must have existed to begin with—one can forgive an intimate other with whom one has a future, one must acknowledge the intimate other that is still a part of one’s moral domain. ²³ Yet forgiveness is a process that is deeply contingent and fragile, Meinert reminds us, and the open-ended question of intentionality is especially potent given the violence perpetrated by children and youth during the LRA insurgencies.

The consideration of intimacy and distance, kin and Other, echoes Durkheim’s equivalence of the moral and the social ([1912] 2008). Other ethnographers have done much to advance theories of what might be called an Acholi moral system or moral community and have provided empirical evidence of the social import given to relationality, respect and social harmony (Finnström, 2008; Oloya, 2013; Porter, 2016; Rosenoff Gauvin, 2016; Rydberg, 2016). In the context of post-displacement return to rural Acholi village life in Padibe, Rosenoff Gauvin shows that intergenerational practices that engender connections to ngom kwaro (ancestral land) have supported processes of social repair and kin-based relatedness. Elders are especially preoccupied with what they perceive to be a decline, amongst young people, in the practice of woro, which means respect for others (particularly one’s elders) as well as idealised and gendered comportment (Rosenoff Gauvin, 2016: 196).

A focus on the rules and obligations that promote Acholi social harmony, however, might inspire the sort of criticism Bernard Williams’ levelled against philosophical interest in a ‘morality system’: a supposedly consistent, universal set of generalised principles of human behaviour (Keane, 2015: 18). The crisis of people who go underwater highlights not a breakdown of (a) morality system(s), but the living of ordinary ethics: an active and ongoing working-through of norms as well as judgment of (and despite) the underdetermined recesses of experience.