Book Review: The Ugandan Churches and the Political Centre, edited by Paddy Musana, Angus Crichton and Caroline Howell

The everyday and spectacle of subdued citizenship in northern Uganda

Drawing on ethnographic research in the Acholi town of Kitgum in northern Uganda, this chapter illustrates how citizenship practices are embedded in particular relationships between the state and its citizens. Two key arenas for learning are identified: the everyday, which in this region is tinged by memories of past violence and fears of its recurrence, and moments of spectacular state performance such as the burial of a prominent politician. The chapter shows how practices of citizenship are learned through embodied experiences: by taking part in public debate, by voting or by greeting a flag, but also by running away from a soldier or by staying quiet due to fear. The chapter’s overall a…

Contextualizing citizenship in Uganda

According to the pragmatist framework of this book, practices in which citizenship is constructed are embedded in certain environments and, accordingly, current citizenship habits have been formulated in the course of a continuity of experiences and in interaction with existing circumstances (Holma & Kontinen, this volume). In this chapter, we provide a short overview of Uganda in so far as it is relevant for understanding the experiences and practices of citizenship: both vocal political engagement and the everyday processes of addressing matters of local importance. In contemporary Uganda, citizenship is manifest, on the one hand, in the upfront contestation and mobilization of visible op…

Introduction to the special issue: Beyond self-fashioning and freedom—bending, breaking, and adhering to rules in religious contexts

Rules are a crucial part of much religious thought and practice. Their importance or insignificance, their strictness or laxness, and their rigidity or flexibility in the face of change are constant themes of debate, both within and outside religious communities. Yet they have arguably not been given the attention they deserve within recent anthropology. Since the rise of practice theory, rules have more often been considered something to look past in the search for agency. Where the new anthropology of ethics has addressed religious orthopraxy, it has largely been through the lens of the cultivation of virtuous  self, or the ways in which moral rules may become especially salient in extrao…

Tiny Citizenship, Twisted Politics, and Christian Love in a Ugandan Church Choir

In 1977, the Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Janani Luwum, was killed under orders from President Idi Amin following his public criticism of Amin’s reign of terror. This article offers an ethnographic case study of a choir named in Luwum’s honour to extend existing research on the interrelations of Christianity, citizenship, and politics in contemporary Uganda. To do so, I draw a number of conceptual tools – tiny citizenship, authentic citizenship, twisted politics, and love – from work by and referencing Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, and Gary Alan Fine. First, analyzing the choir’s participation in the national commemoration of Janani Luwum Day at Uganda’s State House in 2021, I argue …

Kirkon ihanteiden ja todellisuuden välillä on kuilu

Purity rules in Pentecostal Uganda. Towards an analysis of relational rulework

Rules concerning romantic relationships and sex—what we term ‘purity rules’—are central to Pentecostalism in Uganda. In  public church arenas, the born-again variant of the rules laid down during Uganda’s ‘ABC’ response to HIV/AIDS — ‘abstain till marriage and be faithful once you marry’—are presented as clear and non-negotiable. Yet in church members’ lives, and in their conversations with each other or in small church groups, space is often created for interpretation and deliberation about the officially strict rules. In this article, we use ethnographic material from fieldwork in urban Pentecostal churches in Uganda to describe how rules work on people, and people work on rules. We descr…

Learning Marriage Ideals and Gendered Citizenship in “God-Fearing” Uganda

AbstractThis chapter contributes to understanding the space between religion, gender and citizenship through a focus on teaching and learning about marriage in Ugandan churches. While pastors focused marriage teaching on the primacy of a church wedding, sexual purity and harmony through hierarchy, church-going women saw cohesion, spirituality and physical survival as cornerstones of an ideal relationship. By juxtaposing how women saw themselves as having learned these ideals, and how pastors saw themselves as teaching theirs, we illustrate that teaching and learning about gender, relationships and citizenship—and the character-moulding concomitant within these processes—occurs more in every…

The Lord’s Resistance Army and the arms that brought the Lord : amplifying polyphonic silences in northern Uganda

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,…

Unravelling Church Land : Transformations in the Relations between Church, State and Community in Uganda

Christian churches control substantial areas of land in Africa. While intensifying struggles over their holdings are partly due to the increased pressure on land in general, they also reflect transformations in the relations through which churches’ claims to land are legitimized, the increased association of churches with business, and churches’ unique positioning as both institutions and communities. This article presents the trajectory of relations between church, state and community in Uganda from the missionary acquisition of land in the colonial era to the unravelling of church landholding under Museveni. Drawing on long‐term ethnographic fieldwork, the authors argue that claims to chu…

Poliitikot seisovat muurahaiskeon päällä : valtionrakennusperformansseja Ugandassa

At the Intersection of Instrumentalism, Understanding, and Critique : Reflections on Development Research on Citizenship in Uganda

This special issue showcases four analyses of lived citizenship in Uganda – a country previously known as a donor darling but, recently, better known for its steady slide towards authoritarian rule (Ssentongo 2021, Tapscott 2021, Wilkins et. al. 2021, Wiegratz et. al. 2018). Individually, the articles draw on and contribute to diverse strands of debate within the field of citizenship studies. As a collection, however, they serve to illustrate a space characterized by three different knowledge interests in development-related research on African societies. A central contention is that the very notion of ‘development-related research’ requires definition; as a field, it is constituted and its…

Christianity in Africa : Roman Catholicism