The Lord’s Resistance Army and the arms that brought the Lord

2019

This article develops the notion of polyphonic silence as a means for thinking through the ethical and political ramifications of ethnographically encountering and writing about silenced violent pasts. To do so, it analyses and contrasts the silence surrounding two periods of extreme violence in northern Uganda: 1) the northern Ugandan war (1986–2006), which is contemporarily often shrouded by silence, and 2) the early decades of colonial and missionary expansion, which the Catholic church silences in its commemoration of the death of two Acholi catechists in 1918. Employing the notion of polyphony, the article describes how neither of these silences is a mere absence of narration. Instead,…

Introduction

2019