Palmer Hurst, 2L
Intern at Land and Equity Movement, Uganda
The law grows in the shade of the mango tree
This blog post is slightly over due, but here I am in
north-central Uganda. My town is called Lira, and is the center of the Lango
Region. Lira is a small city in the center of a low-laying, marshy area; the
last stop before the highlands rise to Gulu and the greater Acholi region. The
native language is a dialect of Nuer, a language who’s speakers span the
majority of northern Uganda, South Sudan, eastern Kenya, and parts of the
Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic.
I am interning at Land & Equity Movement Uganda, a
Ugandan organization dedicated to protecting individual and community land
rights through legal recognition and representation. Its important work that
the staff embrace with their whole hearts and minds. We laugh, pray, rejoice,
encourage, and console one another. The job is not done until all Ugandans have
secure access to their lands.
In East Africa, it’s not an official meeting unless it is
conducted in the shade of a mango tree. Symbolism aside, the practical result
of this custom (other then at least one mango tree in every village) is the
burning attachment to consensus. In other words, democratic law.
Ugandans want law. After so many years of lawlessness during
the reigns of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, after the long brutal war with the
Lord’s Resistance Army, and with so much in flux in daily life, the people of
northern and central Uganda want a legal system that creates stability and
safety. As one clan elder put it to me recently: “We just want to know we will
be secure to live our lives.” To these people, particularly northerners that
have suffered so much for so long, the law represents stability.
They aren’t wrong in this assumption. They envy the freedom
and persistent peace of the United States and Europe. If only, many exclaim, we
can have that too. Then all will be well.
So then, what law to have? Here is where, as Chenue Achebe[1]
wrote, things fall apart. In a country with 36 million people, made up of five
major tribes, more languages then you can count, rampant illiteracy, and an
economy struggling to take off, it is hard to see what could unite the people
of Uganda. Proposed law is opposed on tribal lines, or ignored all together.
Elections (including that of the president) are questionable at best, and
government is seen as ineffective, uncaring, or corrupt. It is hard to see how
to create law in a place where government workers and officials are only in
their offices 35% of workdays.
It might seem that Uganda, as with most of Africa, is doomed
to an existence of poverty, violence, and pain. But there are bright spots.
First, the majority of communities recognize the importance and positive role
the rule of law can have in their lives. The hearts and minds of the average
person are compatible with the rule of law, but experiences with the law and
the people who make and enforce it have left them soured. Second, groups like
LEMU show us (in Uganda and in the West) that Africa can in fact govern itself
and resolve disputes without resorting to tribal or ethnic warfare.
It may sound as if I’m some bleeding heart romantic, gazing
through rose-colored glasses and seeing only the positive and potential of this
tragic place. I assure you I possess no such naiveté. To be sure, there are
problems here that every society encounters. Uganda has its share of thieves,
predators, hucksters, and corrupt politicians. But for as many reasons there
are to give up on Uganda, and Africa as a whole, there are more reasons to not
give up. There is life here, fighting to exist and straining to succeed.
[1] Chenue Achebe
was a Nigerian writer, most famous for Things
Fall Apart, a novel describing the colonization of Nigeria from the African
perspective.
Great post, Palmer!
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