Museveni's Military Might

In February, a delegation of senior government officials from Mali visited Kampala, leading to speculation that Uganda may soon commit peacekeeping troops to that country. In December, the UN Security Council voted to create a new international peacekeeping force for the country, the African-led International Support Mission for Somalia (AFISMA), and it is now widely anticipated that Uganda may be looking to play a significant role within that. If Kampala does commit, it will give the Ugandan Army (UPDF) a military footprint in West Africa, in addition to its already extensive presence across large parts of the central and eastern continent.

In May last year, the UPDF and the US Army Africa (USARAF) co-hosted the second biennial African Land Forces Summit (ALFS) in Kampala. The stated aim of the meeting – which brought together army top-brass from 36 African nations – was to foster relationships between national armies, with a view to engendering future military co-operation (for example, in relation to regional security threats). However, for many commentators, the stated purpose of the conference was overshadowed by the symbolism of the event, which appeared to confirm Uganda’s rise as one of the pre-eminent military powers in Africa – something which has been very greatly assisted, in recent years, by US backing – at the same time as signalling future threats to the country (as characterized, in particular, by Sudan’s refusal to attend the summit). As such, it also raised important questions about the UPDF’s future role in Uganda’s own domestic political landscape, and about Kampala’s increasing use of its army as a primary tool of foreign policy, especially in the region.

In recent years, both the size of the UPDF, and the complexity of its organizational structure, have grown significantly. Following a mass recruitment of 9,000 new soldiers in late 2009, in August 2011, the army passed out a further 3,300 new troops, bringing the total number of regular forces to over 55,000. In addition, in March 2012, senior officers recalled 1,700 former soldiers, suggesting that, although the UPDF does not officially have a reserve force, it has greater numbers of men at its disposal than even this total would suggest (some estimated put the UPDF's unofficial reserves at around 10,000). Over the same period, President Museveni (who is also commander-in-chief of the UPDF), has undertaken a series of mass promotions among the UPDF officer class. For example, in January 2011, he promoted 208 middle-ranking officers. This was followed, in late September that year, by the promotion of 9 senior colonels to the rank of brigadier – the group included Museveni’s son, Kainerugaba Muhoozi, and also one woman, Proscovia Nalweyiso – and in April 2012, by the advancement of a further 204 middle ranking officers (most of whom moved from the rank of captain, to that of major).

Moreover, all of this also took place against a backdrop of increased military spending in the country. In a series of reports published from late 2011 onwards, a leading arms-control NGO, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), found that between the periods 2002-2006 and 2007-2011, Uganda’s arms imports increased by 300%. During 2006-11, Kampala imported 38,000 small arms and light weapons (nearly 20% of the total across Africa), whilst in 2011, Uganda’s total defence expenditure exceeded US$1 billion – by far the highest in the region. Certainly, these figures were inflated by Museveni’s 2010 decision to purchase 6 Su-30MK combat aircraft from Russia (which, although they are relatively old technology in global terms, will nevertheless eventually give Uganda one of the most advanced airforces in East and North-east Africa). However, recent reports have suggested that the UPDF’s spending is unlikely to stop there. In particular, rumours persist that the army has already bought, or else is about to buy, a range of new armour (although UPDF commanders have refused to comment on subject, arguing that the details of arms procurement are classified).

This rapid expansion of the UPDF since 2009 primarily reflects the growing role that the army now plays in Uganda’s domestic political landscape. With Museveni increasingly isolated within parliament – following a sustained challenge by a group of younger rebel MPs from within his own ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) – both he and the executive have become ever more reliant on the army as a means for quashing dissent. For example, in early September 2009, the president deployed the UPDF throughout Kampala in order to put down Baganda ethno-nationalist riots. In April 2011, the special forces group (SFG, which are headed by Kainerugaba Muhoozi) were similarly used to bring a series of opposition-led riots under control. And throughout early 2012, the UPDF were again active in relation to opposition leader Kizza Besigye’s ‘Walk to Work’ (W2W) campaigns. Elsewhere, Museveni has also become increasingly dependant upon the military as a means for strengthening state control over Uganda’s troubled Karamoja region (in the North-east of the country, and in which the UPDF’s 3rd and 5th divisions are currently based).

However, it is in relation to Uganda’s nascent oil sector that the president has become most reliant upon the army. From the time that significant oil deposits were discovered in the Lake Albert basin (from 2006 onwards), Museveni and his inner-circle have attempted to control the nascent oil fields by effectively militarizing the entire region in which they are located. Thus, following a series of cross-border skirmishes between the UPDF and the Congolese Army (FARDC), in 2009, Kampala announced construction of a new army base in Kyangwali Sub-county, Hoima District – which when complete, will be one of the biggest military installations in the country. In early 2010, Museveni then handed over security for all of the oil fields to his son’s SFG, whose duties include policing the ‘special permits’ which are now required for anyone – including elected officials – to access local populations. Moreover, the UPDF’s role in the oil sector is likely to expand once production begins in earnest, in a few years' time.

Yet even if Uganda’s current military expansion is driven primarily by domestic concerns, it would not have been possible were it not for Kampala’s commitment to ongoing military operations in Somalia. From the time the current African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) began, in January 2007 – with backing from the UN Security Council – Uganda has provided the lion’s share of troops for the mission, as well as much of its command-and-control structures. Indeed, following al-Shabaab’s bombings in Kampala in July 2010, Uganda has recently increased its overall commitment to the mission, to 8,000 troops.

The key point though is that prior to the UPDF becoming involved in Somalia, Uganda’s overall military expenditure was effectively capped by the donor community. Throughout the late 1990s, and early 2000s, the World Bank and Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID), in particular, put sustained pressure on Museveni and his executive to limit defence spending as a percentage of their overall budget – even in the context of (then) expanding military operations against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the north of the country. However, following the creation of the AMISOM mission, any such spending limits have effectively been lifted, with the US, the UK and the EU all contributing to the costs of the intervention. The US, in particular, has already spent US $550 million on military training and equipment for the Somalia force, and much of this has gone directly to Uganda. For example, since 2007, American military contractors have operated a training camp for Somalia-bound UPDF troops at Kakola (about 50 miles northeast of Kampala), which in May 2012 passed out 3,500 men. In addition, since 2007, Uganda has received other forms of military support from the US besides (i.e. over and above that which they have received specifically for AMISOM). Most notably, in October 2011, President Obama deployed 100 US Army Special Forces (Green Berets) to assist in the UPDF in their hunt for LRA leader Joseph Kony.

Moreover, all of this has also given Museveni renewed confidence in using the army as a primary means for achieving various of Uganda’s other foreign policy objectives across the region. For example, it has resulted in the Ugandan president reinvigorating the UPDF’s operations in North-eastern Congo and the Southern Central African Republic (CAR) to capture Kony and his men. These operations had been ‘running out of steam’ a little, especially in light of more pressing domestic concerns. However, in the context of Uganda’s renewed military strength – and again, with additional US support – in March last year the UPDF announced that it would form the majority of a new brigade-strong AU force against the LRA. Moreover, following its creation, the new structure almost immediately proved a success, when in May, a UPDF patrol captured a senior LRA commander, Caesar Acellam, near to the DRC-CAR border.

Recent months have also seen a ratcheting-up of the Ugandan government’s rhetoric regarding the current conflict between South Sudan and Sudan. Having supported the Southern People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) from the mid-1980s onwards, Uganda remains a staunch ally of (the now independent) South Sudan, and could thus be expected to be draw into the conflict on Juba’s side. Moreover, this possibility became increasingly real last year, when the Sudanese Ambassador to Uganda Amb Hussein Awadi claimed that Kampala had been providing covert support to rebel groups in Darfur. Reflecting Uganda's new military strength, Kampala's response to these claims has been notably robust. Thus, following the Sudanese Ambassador’s comments, Security Minister Wilson Mukasa refuted the allegations, but also said that Uganda was well capable of repelling a Sudanese attack, and thus had nothing to fear from such an eventuality. Kampala has also been similarly blasé about the possibility of future armed conflict with Egypt over ongoing disputes over ownership and control of water in the River Nile. Indeed, at the time he announced the purchase of the Su-30MK aircraft to his cabinet, Museveni claimed that the new jets would ensure victory over Egypt in the event of any such war.

President Museveni is likely to become increasingly reliant on the UPDF as a tool for quelling domestic opposition in the months and years ahead. He is also likely to deepen their engagement in various theatres of conflict throughout the region, and across the continent. Kenya remains Uganda’s primary ally, and relations between Kigali and Kampala are at an all time high. Therefore armed conflict with either of those states is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future. However, the UPDF’s engagement in North-eastern Congo is likely to continue, and to expand, for many months to come, whilst the potential for renewed conflict with Sudan grows all the time.

Review- Ghosts of Kanungu (African Affairs)

The latest edition of African Affairs (Vol. 111, No. 445: 673-675) carries a review of my book Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, secrecy and exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa (James Currey, 2009). The review is written by Professor Richard Fardon from SOAS, University of London:

Richard Vokes has written a compelling account of the tragic events that hindsight suggests were to culminate in 2000 with the deaths of some hundreds of members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandmants of God (MRTC) in the south-west of Uganda.

Ethnographic monographs on Africa, whatever their other virtues, can rarely be described as riveting from first to last, but this one is. Its achievement is to explain the concatenation of events around the demise of the MRTC without foreclosing every doubt about the exact nature of those events. We shall never know with certainty what happened in March 2000, but Vokes has worked tirelessly to derive a plausible narrative by placing the documented events in the context of the various forces – of the past and the present, the relatively local and global –working upon them.

The book opens with the scenario as it appeared to a newcomer – as Vokes then was – and closes by revisiting the same scenes in the light of eight years of investigation. A fire in a building at the headquarters of the MRTC in Kanungu immolates many of its surviving members. As well as the remains of a last meal, a wall calendar is found that laconically records for 16 March 2000 ‘world’s end’, and for 17 March ‘bye’. Vokes, who had arrived earlier that month intending research in south-west Uganda, caught the news item on CNN in Kampala. From the outset, media, police, politicians, and so forth began to apply different glosses to what had taken place. Initially in Kanungu, then in the following days at other MRTC properties, investigators discovered mass graves, some of them simply bodies tipped into pit latrines. What mixture of murder or cult suicide might explain this? The answer involves our retracing the history of this ‘African-Initiated Church’ (AIC) to learn about its antecedents, expansion, teaching, and demise.

Historical reinterpretation is needed for one set of antecedents to become apparent. The Nyabingi cult appears in records of the colonial period primarily as a movement of resistance. Vokes argues that this was only one guise adopted by a network of relations, exchanges, and initiatory knowledge that sought to redress misfortunes, particularly infertility in narrow and broad senses. The MRTC took part of its template from Nyabingi, one reason for the MRTC being unusually secretive for an AIC. Between Nyabingi and the MRTC stood a historical mediator in the shape of Roman Catholicism. The White Fathers were distinctive and successful, at least vis-à-vis the Church Missionary Society, for reasons that included both their practical attempts to improve the lives of their parishioners, and their advocacy of the protective role of the Virgin Mary, particularly in women’s affairs. Nyabingi, as one informant put it, became a Catholic, and in the process also became anthropomorphized. With the retirement of the last overseas missionaries, the Church passed into local hands, and Africanizing initiatives were encouraged after Vatican II.

The central figure of the drama, Ceredonia Mwerinde, was visited by the Virgin Mary at a site particularly associated with Nyabingi in its guise of anti-colonial struggle. Over time these visions began to specify a whole style of life and of worship. Adherents set up their own sites of worship and residence, the MRTC being eventually expelled from the Catholic Church, taking some clerics with it. Growth of MRTC as an AIC correlated with the worst onset of AIDS, and its adherents were largely drawn from those most marginalized, particularly young AIDS widows in polygamous households, possibly descendants of migrants, as well as other women at risk economically. What property they retained was made over to the MRTC in expectation of security. Meanwhile, under the influence of international Marian contacts, the leadership of the MRTC turned increasingly to preoccupation with the doctrines of the final days. Illness, particularly malaria, broke out in the cramped collective dwellings; drought led to hunger approaching starvation; and, as they died, increasingly the group cut themselves off. The end was mostly likely suicide by poison, the dead engulfed by a fire set by the last to die.

What is so compelling about Vokes’s account is the sense of forces and events conspiring together towards tragedy. Along the way, Richard Vokes generalizes theoretically and methodologically for his anthropological readers likely to be interested in such things, but these passages are neither extended nor obtrusive (whether or not they are necessary) and readers of this journal will not find they obscure the narrative thrust. This is amongst the outstanding Africanist ethnographies of recent years: a splendid combination of ethnographic investigation with the evaluation of texts and images, and a significant addition to the literature on African-initiated Churches.

For more on the book, visit the Kanungu project website, which is available here.

Publication- Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives

I have just published my latest edited collection, called 'Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives' (James Currey, 2012). Full details of the publication can be viewed at the publisher's website here, and the book can also be purchased at Amazon.co.uk here (or Amazon.com here).

The collection includes a series of empirically rich historical and ethnographic case studies, which examine the variety of ways in which photographs are produced, circulated, and engaged with across a range of social contexts. The volume includes examples drawn from across the continent, and from each of Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa. In this way, it elucidates the distinctive characteristics of all African photographic practices and cultures, vis-à-vis those of other types of 'vernacular photography' worldwide. In addition, the studies included here also develop a reflexive turn, by examining the history of academic engagement with these African photographic cultures, and by reflecting on the distinctive qualities of the ethnographic method as a means for studying such phenomena.

The volume critically engages current debates in African photography and visual anthropology. First, it extends our understanding of the variety of ways in which both colonial and post-colonial states in Africa have used photography as a means for establishing, and projecting, their authority. Second, it moves discussion of African photography away from an exclusive focus on the role of the 'the studio' and looks at the circulations through which the studios' products - the photographs themselves - later pass as artefacts of material culture. Last, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between photography and ethnographic research methods, as these have been employed in Africa.

In addition, the book pay particular attention to the fast changing nature of African photographic cultures, especially since the arrival of widespread digital imaging technologies. For example, to take my own field site of South-western Uganda, it is interesting to note that although digital technologies have only become available in significant numbers since around 2009, they have already begun to generate keen discussion, across a wide variety of social contexts. Thus, even in settings in which people are not yet entirely familiar with digital imaging technologies, people are already beginning to debate, for example, what impact pre-natal scan images will have upon concepts of personhood (in a context in which practically any reference to an unborn child is regarded as strictly taboo), what effect digital portraits will have upon exchange relations (in a context in which photographic image-objects play a significant part in many types of exchange relationships), and what impact the advent of Facebook, and other social networking sites, will have upon relations between people ‘back home’ and those now living in the Diaspora.

I recently conducted an interview about the new collection with the editor of African Griot. The interview provides further information about the volume, and some background on the genesis of the project. The full text of the interview can be viewed here.