MULTIPLICATION: DISPLACEMENT AS FORCED URBANISATION

Displacement in Acholiland started unevenly. After 1986 people fled as insecurity affected their area; some sought safety elsewhere and then returned home for a while. As Atkinson (Reference Atkinson2010: 284ff) writes, the fighting always had periods of intensity followed by lulls. But in 1996, as the war with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) grew fiercer, the Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF) began a strategy of forcibly constraining the population in IDP camps, which they called ‘protected villages’ (ARLPI 2001; Atkinson Reference Atkinson2010: 297). Although the alleged reason for internment was defence of the civilians, the army did not in fact safeguard camp inhabitants from the depredations of the LRA. The camps allowed the military to control the population and prevent their collaboration with the rebels, while at the same time providing a convenient situation for managing humanitarian intervention (Branch Reference Branch2011: 94).

The number of camps and of people displaced varied over time and according to the organisation doing the counting (see ARLPI 2001: 30–3). But there is no doubt that they increased continually through the period of war (Dolan Reference Dolan2009: 107–8). By the year 2001, 90% of people in Acholiland were crowded into IDP settlements. There were reckoned to be about 50 camps in the three Acholi districts at that time (ARLPI 2001: 39). UNHCR reports that 1·84 million people were confined in 251 camps across 11 districts of northern Uganda (UNHCR 2012). Camp populations ranged in size from under 5,000 to 65,000 people, living in round mud brick huts, so congested that their thatched roofs almost touched. In many cases, the army forced residents of an area to move into the camps at very short notice, sometimes as little as 24 to 48 hours, giving no opportunity for proper planning. Within a brief time, the rural area of a whole sub-county was depopulated and a modest trading centre of a few thousand people multiplied by a factor of ten or more to become a semi-urban concentration.

Not everyone fleeing or expelled from rural areas moved to camps. Some (those with more resources) migrated to cities in the south of the country (Mallett Reference Mallett2010; Refstie et al. Reference Refstie, Dolan and Okello2010) and very many moved to the security of Gulu municipality, the largest urban centre in northern Uganda. Although never designated as a ‘protected settlement’ (and therefore not a channel for distribution of humanitarian aid), it was de facto the biggest IDP camp in the region with a surplus population of 90,000. Branch (Reference Branch2013) describes the influx of displaced people to Gulu town, but makes clear that people circulated between the ‘slum’ neighbourhoods of the town and the rural camps. Those who fled to town had to be able to earn money or stay with relatives; if they failed they returned to the designated camps where they could access humanitarian aid.

The camps were mostly established in places where there was an army barracks, an administrative headquarters, a health facility, a school or a mission. Often people had already begun to seek refuge near these institutions even before the locations were officially designated as camps and the military forced them to move there. The area demarcated for settlement comprised government, institutional and family or clan land. Whether families or institutions, landowners within the camp area had to allow displaced people to settle on their land. The camps had sharp boundaries and no one was allowed beyond them from early evening until morning. Except during lulls in the fighting, the army restricted daytime movements to a perimeter area of three to six kilometres around the camp, where people could plant crops and collect firewood. Displaced people were not permitted to go back to their own homes during the day, unless they were within the perimeter.

As a ‘gazetted’ camp, Awach was one of the later ones. It had been a sub-county headquarters with a Health Centre IV, a Catholic mission, a mosque, a Protestant church, two primary schools, a secondary school, and some shops and small businesses. About 2000 people lived in the trading centre, mostly on family land. Situated 45 kilometres northeast of Gulu town, it was not on a main road, had no bus or taxi service to Gulu, and no electricity. The LRA was particularly active in the surrounding area, and people began to flee to the trading centre spontaneously in the early 1990s, hoping for protection from the soldiers (the ‘detach’) posted there. By 1995, the new Catholic priest arriving in Awach found many displaced people squatting on church land, while others had taken refuge at the health centre or moved in with relatives who had land near the trading centre. He told us that with his catechists he registered 9000 for food rations from the World Food Programme. But it was not until 2001 that Awach IDP camp was officially established and soldiers of the 47th Battalion forced everyone to leave their rural homes and settle within its perimeter, bringing the population of the camp to around 20,000 people (about 16,000–18,000 according to other sources; ARLPI 2001: 32).

Within the boundaries of the camp were the sub-county headquarters, the government health centre, a primary school and an Anglican church, all of which had land where displaced people settled. Those who had already squatted on the Catholic mission land had to move because it was not within the delineated boundaries. Much of the gazetted area was family land, often called ‘clan land’. Owners did not have individual title, but held it under customary tenure. Sons inherited land through their fathers, so clansmen were neighbours; other members of a patrilineage or clan had residual rights, and people spoke of clans owning land in the trading centre.

Some of those seeking refuge in the early phase of the insurgency built shelters on the land of relatives in Awach. But when the army forced everyone to leave their rural homes at short notice, displaced people poured into the camp and built wherever they could find space. The authorities directed landowners to allow the refugees to put up huts on their land; landowners could not refuse, nor could they charge rent. Some evacuees asked the landowners' permission to settle, others just moved in. The landowners seem to have responded generously to the emergency. A businessman, who had six families staying on his land in the trading centre, remembered that you could come back from your garden to find someone you did not know building a house on your land. But he, like all the landowners to whom we spoke, was sympathetic to his fellow Acholi; there was war and they were in danger of abduction and killing.

Camp residents had to use land within the designated periphery to grow crops to supplement the insufficient rations from World Food Programme. In Awach the permitted area was first set at six kilometres around the camp, but later reduced to three kilometres (Nibbe Reference Nibbe2010: 167). This restriction increased the value of land in the camp periphery by creating an artificial land shortage. Landowners rented out fields for cultivation within the perimeter (ARLPI 2001: 17), which provided some income and might be seen as a first step toward the commodification of land through encampment.

The strict control on movement outside of the camp perimeter meant that settlers were seldom able to go home to bury their dead on their ‘ancestral land’ (ngom kwaro) as is increasingly important throughout Acholiland and other parts of East Africa.Footnote ² Yet there were very many deaths. The numbers who perished by direct LRA and UPDF violence were but a fraction of those who died of sickness and malnutrition in the overcrowded camps (Finnström Reference Finnström2008: 133). The death rates of infants and children in the IDP camps were much higher than those for the Northern region in general (UBOS 2007: 111).

No camp burial ground was demarcated, perhaps because there was no tradition of common cemeteries for unrelated people. (Indeed, the District Physical Planner explained to us that even in urban areas, there is no regulation requiring interment in cemeteries and people are allowed to bury their dead on their own urban land.) Although a very few camp dwellers buried their relatives in the consecrated ground of the Protestant and Catholic churches in the camps, most dug graves in the limited space around their huts. As years went by, the dead as well as the living multiplied in the camp. Foetuses and small children were buried up against the wall of the house. The jok children with physical anomalies and spiritual powers were buried in clay pots near their mother's house, and the graves of adults were placed nearby.

Those who had relatives with land in the camp were buried on ‘family land’. For example, two brothers from Pawel had bought land in Pabbo when they fled there in 1996. Very many members of their extended family lived on those two pieces of adjacent land until 2007 and they buried 28 people there – four adults and 24 children and youth. But the majority of displaced people stayed on the land of unrelated persons or institutions. Their dead were also ‘internally displaced’ in that they were buried in ‘the wrong soil’, as an informant in Pabbo put it (Jahn Reference Jahn2013). They were interred on other people's land instead of in their ancestral homes where they should mark the connection between families and land, a connection with added significance in view of the inflamed sensitivities about land connected to encampment and return (Meinert & Whyte Reference Meinert, Whyte, Pedersen and Willerslev2013).

Immobilisation and dependence on aid made encampment a kind of ‘social torture’ (Dolan Reference Dolan2009). As other scholars have shown, the displaced were living under bad conditions (Finnström Reference Finnström2008), they suffered high rates of depression (Roberts et al. Reference Roberts, Ocaka, Browne, Oyok and Sondorp2008) and their human rights were trammelled (Branch Reference Branch2011). Yet, as Branch has emphasised in his study of Gulu, encampment also exposed people to kwo town, town life. He mentions as central features: the monetary economy, NGO interventions, government development projects, and the promotion of women's and children's rights (Branch Reference Branch2013: 3157). Urban qualities of the rural camps also included monetarisation, though to a lesser extent than Branch describes for Gulu town. Unable to produce most of their own food, more rural people engaged in petty trade, including trade in World Food Programme rations. Rural camp life was characterised by humanitarian aid, increasing dependence on donor-provided services and exposure to rights discourses. Children were close to the primary school; in Awach more children attended school than was the case before encampment (Kaducu et al. Reference Kaducu, Ovuga, Meinert, Whyte, Okumu and Sodemann2013). For those needing chronic treatment, such as people living with HIV, accessibility was generally easier (Wilhelm-Solomon Reference Wilhelm-Solomon2011; Folmann Reference Folmann2012). NGOs financed nursery schools (‘Early Childhood Development Centres’), a facility not found in rural areas and much valued by parents. In Awach there were five, in sturdy large buildings. Donors provided water sources, reducing the long treks with heavy jerry-cans that are a part of rural life. Grinding mills were close by, a community hall was put up, and a playing field was even constructed for the much beloved football. Although at times, and in some camps, such amenities were grossly insufficient (Dolan Reference Dolan2009: 107–58), their significance became apparent when people hesitated to return home to rural areas without water and schools, far from health facilities. It was not just the availability of services that made camp life seem more urban. Older people seem to recognise the insidious attractions of urban life when they blame the young for wanting to stay in the camps, close to video halls, and far from the demands of hoe agriculture (Meinert & Schneidermann Reference Meinert, Schneidermann, Dalsgaard, Frederiksen, Højlund and Meinert2014).

SUBTRACTION: GO BACK TO WHERE THE WAR FOUND YOU

In the first instance, the transformation of the IDP camps back to trading centres was a matter of subtraction. The displaced people had to be re-placed in their rural homes; thousands of their huts had to be demolished; the military presence could be diminished; and the multitude of graves had to be removed and put where they belonged. These were steps on the way to normalisation and prerequisites for the development that people hoped for once the war ended.

Re-placement of people, like displacement, happened in steps and unevenly. After the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement was signed in 2006, satellite or transit camps were established all over Acholiland. The idea was to decongest the IDP camps by moving people to smaller sites closer to their villages, where they could begin to cultivate their own land again. Some moved directly to their rural homes, but many remained in the main camps or in the satellite camps, waiting to see if the peace would hold. Some people said they were ‘still studying the peace’ (Meinert Reference Meinert, Lisberg, Pedersen and Dalsgaardin press). They hesitated to go back for many reasons: dysfunctional water sources, schools and health centres; the difficulties of clearing the bush and constructing houses; and the fear of land mines, unexploded ordnance and vengeful spirits (cen). As we have discussed elsewhere (Whyte et al. Reference Whyte, Babiiha, Mukyala and Meinert2013a), some people were excluded from rural homes on the grounds of missing links through marriage or patriliny.

Over the three years from 2006 to 2009, the displaced people of Acholiland were encouraged to return to their homes, or as some authorities put it, ‘to where the war found you’. This phrase was a more accurate recognition of the reality that many people were not on their patrilineal ‘ancestral land’ when the war intensified. In any case, women were expected to return not to their own but to their husbands' ancestral land, a move complicated by the fact that many partnerships were not formalised during the years of displacement. Distribution of rations by the World Food Programme was gradually phased out, at different paces in different areas, as agricultural land was again brought into production. One by one, the IDP camps were formally decommissioned at events sometimes marked by the ceremonial demolition of a hut. The camp at Awach closed officially in August 2008 and WFP supplies to the people of Awach sub-county ended completely in July 2010.

The process of re-placement was full of tensions. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and its NGO partners, which had helped to manage the camps, were bound by the principle of Durable Solutions for IDPs (Brookings Institution 2007). They held that displaced people had the right to return to their places of origin in safety and without duress, to move to another place, or to remain at the site to which they had been displaced. That is to say, displaced people did not necessarily have to be re-placed. Arguing against deadlines for eviction and undue pressure, UNHCR and its partners continually urged patience and protection for displaced people, as we learned from interviews.

While the Government of Uganda had subscribed to the principle of Durable Solutions, in practice the authorities wanted the displaced people to return to their rural homes as quickly as possible (Refugee Law Project 2012). In places, local authorities used heavy-handed methods to move people out of the camps. As one of Jahn's informants in Pabbo stated: ‘Evictions were conducted by local government … there was nothing like giving people a choice whether they want to stay or not. Just as people were ordered to come to the camp, they were also ordered to leave’ (Jahn Reference Jahn2013: 47). The degree of force varied, and the moderating influence of UNHCR was felt in places like Pabbo once it opened an office there (Jahn Reference Jahn2013: 46).

The landowners, both institutions and families, were keen on removing the settlers in order to resume full use of their land. In Awach the Protestant church gave notice that it planned to plough and develop its land for agriculture. The Health Centre wanted everyone to leave so it could fence its area as is proper for health facilities. Families mostly planned to cultivate their land in and around the former camp and wanted to avoid any future claims by those who had used it during the conflict. With the establishment of security, landowners began to assert their rights over the property that had been shared by force of circumstance. Just as land conflicts were erupting in the villages where people were returning, so they also appeared in the former camps (Snowden Reference Snowden2009).

During encampment only the land used for cultivation within the perimeter around the camp could be hired out. But once the camp was officially closed, landowners were allowed to charge rent to those who remained in the houses on their land. The authorities, perhaps in an effort to encourage them to leave, announced that displaced people would have to negotiate conditions with the landowners. The effect was that a market for rental of houses emerged in the aftermath of encampment. Some settlers stayed in the huts they had built and began to pay rent; others looked for places to hire in other parts of the former camp.

A few who had nowhere to go were allowed to stay for free by kind-hearted, or related, landowners. Although the elected LCIII chairman of Awach expressed sympathy for those who were unable to access land in the rural areas, the administrative chief believed they were just making excuses to remain: ‘These people did not come from trees. They all have relatives they can go to.’ The remainers were deemed unable to contribute to development, and some thought they would be squeezed out as land was developed and rents increased.

Not only did local authorities encourage all displaced people to return and claim their ‘ancestral land’; they were particularly concerned about getting rid of certain kinds of people whom they considered a bad influence. Many Acholi people mentioned the breakdown of moral order in the camps, and the need to rid the former camp sites of bad lots. In Pabbo, one man spoke of ‘those who refuse going back home, the thieves, robbers and wrongdoers … The government should help us, to force those people back home’ (Mergelsberg Reference Mergelsberg2012: 77). The sub-county chief for Awach recounted efforts to get rid of the ‘social nuisance’ of ‘redundant’ people who became thieves and prostitutes. As a Parish Chief in the former camp of Opit said, there were people who cultivated ‘the seeds from the camp’ – prostitution and drunkenness. ‘We talk to the landowners where they are staying about trying to make them leave, but they are paying rent so the landowners do not send them away.’

At Pabbo camp, which had a very large army detachment, soldiers brought wives back from their operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. These women remained in the camp when their partners deserted them and returned to their Ugandan wives. According to the Local Council Chairman, they survived by selling sex: ‘they were destroying our cultural values and norms by their lifestyle’. He told us that the local authorities arranged transport to take them home to the DRC, appealing to NGOs since such expenses were not in the government budget. The story of these harshly treated women was more complicated according to Mergelsberg (Reference Mergelsberg2012: 73–4, 79). He argues that donors did not want to get involved in the moral cleansing campaigns of local authorities, but that the interests and efforts of the two parties coincided. NGOs were concerned with preventing HIV while local authorities were preoccupied with cultural values and moral danger.

Physically, the camps consisted of thousands of round, thatched huts, which were being deserted one by one. There was general agreement that huts not in immediate use should be destroyed because they were a danger to cleanliness and social order. Children used them for toilets, lovers for trysts, and thieves for hiding places. Moreover, the thousands of huts simply took up space. They also stood as evidence of an unpopular military policy that government may well have wanted to put behind it. By September 2010, when we began systematic interviewing of Awach residents, many huts had been reduced to circles of crumbling mud brick, covered by the yellow flowers of loofah vines, which seemed to be the first vegetation to take advantage of the ruins.

The UNHCR and its partners, which oversaw the management of the camps, established a procedure for demolishing huts once they had been vacated. The former occupants were allowed to remove building materials such as poles, doors and window shutters, thus acknowledging their ownership of the huts they had built. The rights of the landowners were also recognised in that they could ask to keep any structure on their land once the occupants had taken what they wanted. They retained and rented out huts in good condition, both to those who remained and to others who wished to live in Awach. When the secondary school, which had moved to Gulu town during the war, re-opened in Awach, students from too far away to commute rented former IDP huts from landowners. This was the case in Opit as well, where there was also a secondary school. Traders who needed to be near the market and people waiting for land wrangles to be settled in their rural homes made rental agreements too.

Like all IDP camps, Awach had a barracks with a ‘detach’ of soldiers to protect the residents, a task they accomplished with only varying success. The barracks had been established on clan land even before the IDP camp was formally gazetted. It was closed in 2011 and 100 soldiers were also subtracted from Awach, together with their wives and children. Their square mud brick houses went the way of the round ones that had sheltered the internally displaced people they were supposed to have guarded. In line with the increasing commodification and judicialisation of land, members of the clans who claimed to own the land tried to obtain compensation for the years the army had occupied it. The army demanded that the claimants produce certificates of customary ownership, which in turn required that they agree among themselves about who had rights to which pieces of land. By early 2014 some of the ensuing disputes had still not been settled. As was the case with the subtraction of displaced people, the presence and then removal of the barracks had changed the value of the land that lay within the planned Town Board.

The subtraction of graves from the former IDP camps is happening at a slower pace. The majority of displaced people who left graves in the camp said they intended to remove them when they had the necessary resources for exhumation and reburial. They wanted to reunite the living and the dead on family land (Meinert & Whyte Reference Meinert, Whyte, Pedersen and Willerslev2013). Some people were under the impression that the government had decreed the removal of graves from the former camps. But that was not the main reason for exhuming the bones. As one woman said: ‘Even without government pressure, we always move with our dead bodies.’ People said that they felt something was left undone if the graves remained behind. Moreover, many had not completed all the funeral rites for those buried in the camps and wanted to bring them home in order to do so.

The landowners who had waited so long to take their land into use again found that once the displaced people finally left, their land was littered with graves. They did not want to disturb the dead with their hoes and they hesitated to put up new buildings on top of the graves. The space and soil around graves was considered ‘contaminated’ or endowed with spirit in a way that had to be respected. One man in Pabbo showed Susan Whyte the burials on his land in the former camp. Two graves had been removed but ten still remained. He explained that he wanted to plan for his children who were schooling. ‘I want to build but there is something wrong if I build on graves. The house can crack. If you sleep in a house built on graves, shades (tipu) will disturb you. You may dream seriously, dream of tipu, have bad dreams. Or you may get sick.’ He had asked the grave owners to exhume the bodies, and when they failed to do so, he informed the traditional chief (rwot moo) who sent his agents to make the request. Sometimes the insistence of the former hosts did seem to work to set the process in motion (Jahn Reference Jahn2013: 54–8).

Both displaced people and landowners saw incompatibility between the presence of graves and the development they hoped for in the new urban centres. A parish chief in Pabbo put it pointedly: ‘Development and graves don't match together. People don't want to stay with graves in town. They don't want to do business in a building or on a plot where there is a grave. It's going to be very common as the Town Council develops that landowners insist on removing graves.’

If the dead were buried on land belonging to a clansman, it was considered less urgent to remove them. But even in such cases the argument of development carried weight. As one man from Pabbo said, ‘The landowner is of our clan and the graves could remain, but the only problem is that the land is affected by development. He was told he must develop his plots or sell them.’ The two brothers who had bought land in Pabbo camp could have left the 28 graves of family members. But the family was determined to remove all the graves at once, even though they had not yet decided how to use their Town Board land. One of the brothers explained: ‘I want to set the land free for development. We will see what to do with the land once the bodies are removed. If rich people buy the land, they do not want graves. Or maybe an investor will come.’ A year after witnessing the removal of these graves in January 2013, Susan Whyte revisited the family in Pabbo and at their rural home ten kilometres to the north. No new building had occurred on the Town Board land and the abila shrine remained for lack of resources to move it to the rural home. But the family members were immensely satisfied that they had brought their dead home and freed their land in the ‘Centre’ for development such as building rental units. The incompatibility between graves and development was dramatically played out in connection with the implementation of accepted plans.

DIVISION: PLOTTING AND PLANNING DEVELOPMENT

In November 2009 the sub-county authorities received District approval of their application to up-grade Awach trading centre to the status of Town Board. In Gulu District some other former IDP camp locations were also being considered. Opit was identified at the same time as Awach, and other former camps such as Unyama, Palenga and Paicho were being mentioned as possible candidates. Becoming a Town Board meant recognition as an urban centre (although most did not look very ‘urban’), assistance in town planning, administrative autonomy from the sub-county, and a direct budget vote from central government. Final approval must be given by the Ministry of Finance, as well as the Ministry of Local Government. By early 2014 this had still not happened, but many Awachis seemed to consider that they were well on their way to urban status. Part of the process had already started in that plans had been drawn and plots had been marked. Development was going to include division of land into transactable plots, and cutting of streets through the maze of houses and graves still remaining in the former camp.

When we visited the sub-county offices in October 2010, the walls were hung with colourful and detailed drawings of the future Awach Town Board. They showed neat streets lined with plots, and new buildings in several stories, a far cry from the reality outside the door with its modest mud-walled shops and hundreds of deserted IDP huts. The plans had been drawn by a team from the Faculty of Technology, Makerere University, financed by the Northern Uganda Transition Initiative (USAID) as support to the District plan. The basic thrust of the plan was to bring development by surveying plots that could be sold and developed for commerce and residence. Unlike the 2003 proposal by Divinity Union for Security and Production Units (Finnström Reference Finnström2008: 177–9), these drawings did not portend land grabbing. Plotting was to start on sub-county land. Two new streets were to be laid out and the land along them divided into plots. These were to be sold as freehold at one million shillings each to buyers who could afford to develop them. Awach was fortunate in that the sub-county had land that could be used for the new streets and divided into plots. The lack of local government land in some places meant trying to find other land to kick-start development in the small urban centres. As a local leader put it pithily, ‘Development cannot stand on air, it stands on the land.’

The next step was to encourage landowners adjoining the streets, and others in the Town Board, to survey plots on their own land. The message was given to them that they should develop their land by putting up good structures, preferably ‘storied’ buildings. If they could not afford to do so, they should sell or lease to others who could. One landowner showed us how he had divided some of his land along a road into plots. He had given one to a brother and had resources to develop others. But the directive was worrying for other landowners to whom we spoke; they feared they might lose their land because they could not afford to develop it. The chairman of the sub-county council, the LCIII, did not think lack of capital should present a problem. He explained to us that a person with land in the Town Board could survey ten plots and sell eight in order to develop the remaining two. (The landowners need not have worried according to the District Lands Officer in Gulu; no one can be forced to sell land, except in special circumstances of compulsory state acquisition.)

Virtually everyone we spoke to was positive about the plan for a Town Board and hopeful that it would bring a change for the better. Even people who were going to be inconvenienced by having to move did not question the vision of development. Talking to local leaders and residents about the plans and plots, it was evident that a kind of narrative was taking shape about the possible future of Awach. Perhaps we could say that, beyond dividing up land, they were plotting in another way, as they imagined a story of investment, business opportunities and electrification. If a plot is a pattern that gives direction to a story, whereby one thing leads to another, then the plot was urban development. The technical drawings, the marking of segments, the cutting of streets were all part of the narrative. As individuals in rehabilitation emplot their lives by acting in accordance with an envisioned storyline of recovery (Mattingly Reference Mattingly1998), so the leaders and residents of Awach were speaking and acting to realise a plot of development.

There was a geometrical aesthetics to the story as well, which moved from round or curved to rectangular and straight. Plots were supposed to be surveyed in straight lines measured metrically, whereas ‘clan land’ was seldom so geometrical. All houses in the camp were circular, whereas soldiers lived in rectangular ones. Shops are always rectangular, and the plans on the wall of the sub-county office showed straight lines for streets and buildings. Thatched houses are round, while those with roofs of mabati [corrugated iron sheets] are rectangular. As Reverend Abia, a spokesman for development put it: ‘Even a poor man can make a semi-permanent house of mud bricks and buy mabati so structures are not grass thatch like a village. Urbanisation cannot be there if people are living in thatch houses.’

The streets were duly surveyed, parallel with one another, near the new market. People who had settled on that land, claimed by the sub-county, were warned that the grader cutting the new streets would destroy houses and graves in the roadway. They were to receive some facilitation to help move the graves, but no compensation for the houses that were on sub-county land. (Those should have been removed when the camp closed.) The local authorities claimed that notice had been given in good time when the grader arrived in May 2010, but some residents we spoke to contradicted this. The problem was not so much the houses – they could be vacated – but the bones that had to be exhumed and reburied elsewhere, a procedure requiring the sacrifice of a goat and sometimes a sheep. Many could not exhume their dead quickly enough and marked the burial place with a stick so the grader could pass around it. In all 86 graves (another informant put the number at 45) were moved to make way for the new streets with their promise of plots and development. Most have yet to receive any facilitation because the funds were insufficient.

Three years after the new streets were graded, the plot had thickened and development was proceeding slowly. The 25 plots surveyed on sub-county land had nearly all been spoken for, and most of the potential buyers had finally completed payment. A legal challenge, brought by the son of the man who had originally donated land to the sub-county, claimed part of the land on which the plots were located. The buyers knew their plot numbers, but had yet to be shown their actual plots; they were blaming the claimant for hindering development. The LCIII chairman acknowledged that those forced to move graves along the new streets still had received no compensation for expenses incurred; there were plans to pay them from the money realised by the sale of the plots. By February 2013 we saw that the streets so dramatically cut by the grader were overgrown with grass and the road to the market had become a mere footpath.

Still the plan for Awach Town Board was part of a narrative plot that was unfolding, albeit with some unexpected twists and turns. In Opit, people were more confused. Three different plans had been brought, shown to residents, and then taken away again. No one we spoke to was sure where they were or which would be adopted. The planners told people they could not build within 15–20 metres of a feeder road, but people were uncertain about the location of new roads and hesitated to build. The lack of a plan seemed to be inhibiting a clear development plot.

This was not the case in Pabbo. As the Local Council Chairman had told Mergelsberg: ‘We are no longer in the camp by the way, we are in town. Pabbo town. We used to call it Pabbo Camp. You should know from a trading centre it was changed to be a town board. And soon it will be a town council’ (Mergelsberg Reference Mergelsberg2012: 76). A fine drawing of the new plan was posted at the entrance to the sub-county headquarters. It involved cutting streets through the dense labyrinth of lanes and huts left behind from the huge IDP camp; this had not yet started but development seemed certain in Pabbo. It lay on the main road to Nimule and South Sudan, a road that was finally being improved. Huge trucks passed constantly on their way north and as we shall see, a major addition had already been completed.

ADDITION: INVESTMENT, IMMIGRANTS AND DONORS

After subtraction of people, houses, barracks and graves, and in accordance with the plans and plots imagined and demarcated, addition was needed. Local leaders looked for additions from two sources: individuals who would invest in plots, buildings and businesses; and donors who would support larger infrastructure projects.

The individual private investors in Awach were of two kinds. There were people from Awach sub-county with jobs in towns and cities. Men working in Gulu and Kampala, and a woman living in Arua, had bought plots. Only a couple of new buildings could be seen in early 2014, both put up by Awachis working elsewhere, and being rented as business premises. The capital to put up the ‘storied’ buildings envisioned in the Town Board plan was hardly found among those actually living in Awach.

The more common private investors established small businesses: hairdressing salons, provision stores, pharmacies, grinding mills, butchers, tailors, drinking places, eating establishments (hotelis), bicycle repairs, video halls and a ‘petrol station’ that sold fuel by the soda bottle. A boda boda park offered transport by motorcycle to Gulu and surrounding trading centres, although there was still no bus or taxi service from Awach, nor any lodge where travellers might spend a night. There was a brisk trade in food crops and charcoal from the surrounding countryside. Many of these small businesses started during the time of the camp; an example is Francis the tailor, who had stayed in the camp from 2002 to 2006, returned to his home in a nearby parish, and continued his tailoring business in Awach riding his bicycle to the trading centre every day. Thus the new urban centre does offer the opportunity to build upon initiatives and investments made by displaced people (and landowners) when Awach was still an IDP camp. Also, people who spent the war in other camps are starting small businesses in Awach. Simon, the proprietor of a hair salon, came to Awach in 2006 from Gulu town where he had been staying. Betty, who runs a bar, came from Kitgum in 2008. For all of these entrepreneurs, the remaining IDP huts provide inexpensive local accommodation. The LCIII chairman pointed out that there were new grass thatched roofs to be seen among the remaining huts. Landowners who have seen the possibilities in renting are improving the remaining IDP huts on their land, or even building new ones.

Besides those who have moved to the coming Town Board, there are many commuters from the surrounding villages who come for the day or the evening. These are mostly people who had resided in the camps and appreciate the amenities of the small urban centre. Some come for entertainment. Laxi, the owner of a video hall, said the exodus of displaced people did not affect his business much. People who had gone back to their villages returned to town to enjoy videos; with security, it was easy to move back and forth, even in the evenings. When there were popular football matches, he could attract 200 customers. We heard a good deal of righteous criticism of youth who slept in the villages but came to Awach to hang out, play cards, drink and chat with their friends. Their critics thought they were continuing the bad habits they had picked up during life in the camp. But they are certainly among the additions to the Town Board, in that they left and came back, if only as commuters. Modest as these various additions might seem, they are the main thrust of development in small urban centres and provide desired and necessary services to the surrounding countryside.

It is striking that many people want to maintain a place in the small urban centres as well as in the rural countryside. The notion of re-placement on ancestral land, and even the principle of Durable Solutions that allows people to choose a place to reside miss the reality of attachments to several places simultaneously. The brothers who removed the 28 graves from their family land in Pabbo were clear on this point. Asked what he would do now that he had ‘freed’ his land in the centre, Okumu said: ‘I will build houses there so my children can all stay in town for schooling. For myself I will be in Pawel, as this is where I do my farming. The land in Pabbo will be primarily developed for my children.’ Such practical considerations are reported from other newer studies of forced migration. As both Bjarnesen (Reference Bjarnesen2013) and Lubkemann (Reference Lubkemann2008) show in their monographs, understanding wartime mobility requires recognition of the ways that life projects are pursued under social conditions changed by war. The sedentarist assumption that people must be rooted in one place hinders the exploration of pragmatic movements and multiple attachments. The investments of diasporic Awachis and local small businessmen, as well as the regular visits by rural people to former camps and Gulu town bear witness to multiple ‘emplacements’. The urban centres are becoming places of opportunity and service provision also for those who maintain (other) homes elsewhere.

The contributions of international donors began in the time of the camp. As others have documented (Dolan Reference Dolan2009; Branch Reference Branch2011), humanitarian aid allowed the government to maintain people in camps. In Awach, donors put in water points for the 20,000 displaced people: one with a solar-powered pump and one with a generator to run the pump. Salvation Army built five nursery schools and an NGO called Concerned Parents established a football pitch and playground. World Vision built a grinding mill to be run by Mothers' Union of the Anglican Church. The Northern Uganda Social Action Fund (World Bank) constructed a vocational school. Another donor provided a community hall. By and large, these investments have not been sustained as the IDP camp has moved on towards becoming a Town Board. All of the nursery schools were built on family land, and the good solid buildings have reverted to the landowners, as was agreed. None are being used as nursery schools. The football pitch, playground and grinding mill were on land claimed by the Church of Uganda; none are being used for their intended purposes, although the church has hopes of re-establishing them if funds can be found. The land on which the vocational school was built became the object of litigation in a case that went up to the Magistrate's Court and was sent back for local mediation. The school was functioning as of January 2014, even though the case between the church and the family claiming the land was not yet settled. Of public infrastructure, the water systems remain, although both the generator and the solar panel have been stolen.

The ownership and maintenance of donor investments in the camps is a problem in other parts of northern Uganda. Two brothers currently living in Gulu, who had worked abroad, told of their efforts to help develop a former IDP camp near to their ancestral land. They thought it would be good to have houses near their family home, but on a road and with amenities like water and electricity. Landowners in the former camp were suspicious and no one could agree about cooperating to re-establish the water system and pump that had been put in by donors during encampment. In Opit, the system of pumping water up to big tanks, established by AMREF for the IDP camp, is not working now because the generator has disappeared. Most of the boreholes put in by another donor are spoiled. The iron sheets from the Early Childhood Education buildings were requested to roof a private school, of which a local politician is owner and director. Physical infrastructure was established in the camps, but there was not adequate social infrastructure to maintain it for common use. As the IDP camps became small urban centres, the infrastructure was privatised by consent or theft, or fell into disrepair. Whether any of it will be salvaged for public use, as had been envisaged, remains an open question.

The former camps struggling to become Town Boards or Town Councils are trying to attract donor funding for new infrastructure projects. A Town Board should have a proper water supply system; the first plans are being laid in both Awach and Opit to realise this (support is expected from Italian Cooperation for Awach). In both locations, new market buildings have been constructed under the Commercial Agricultural Infrastructural Improvement Project. USAID funded the market in Awach on sub-county land, but in Opit land had to be purchased. Since it is not a sub-county headquarters, Opit trading centre has no local government land. In Awach there is a community access road constructed by ACTED (Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development). At the Health Centre, new wards were built with funding from the donor-supported PRDP (Peace Recovery and Development Plan). There is even a ‘Community Knowledge Centre’, a computer facility with internet access in a large container placed near the sub-county headquarters by a Kenyan NGO, Arid Land Information Network. Most important, electricity is coming; the masts for the lines were in place in January 2014 and a few cynics commented that they would surely be connected in time for mobilising voter support in the 2016 election.

At Pabbo, site of the oldest and largest IDP camp in the country, the Japanese Development Agency (JICA) made a substantial addition. Pabbo had achieved Town Board status in 2008, although implementation was delayed until 2012. When representatives of JICA considered the sub-county development plan, they chose to support the construction of a new administrative headquarters and community hall on sub-county land. During the time of the camp, displaced people had built houses and buried their dead on this land, and they had to make way for the large new building. The huts had already been demolished at the order of the authorities in late 2008, but many graves remained. When JICA was ready to commence work in 2009, parish and sub-county officials asked for a delay in order to deal with the graves. They called meetings with the traditional chief (rwot) and the families concerned to make lists of graves and present JICA with an overview of the ritual requirements for exhumation. In what must have been an impressive exercise of organisation and logistics, 144 graves were exhumed in the space of four days. JICA agreed to provide sheep and goats. One sheep was killed on each day and wee, the chyme from the intestines, was sprinkled in the open graves. The goats were sent to the home areas where they were required in connection with the reburials. Although some grave owners were disappointed that JICA did not also provide transport for the remains, they accepted family responsibility according to Acholi custom. And as the JICA Focal Point officer explained, ‘The grave owners were willing, for that is development.’

Despite these donor contributions, local leaders were in accord that international interest in northern Uganda was on the wane. During encampment and in the immediate resettlement period, NGOs, multilateral and bilateral donors provided humanitarian support and immediate development aid. ‘Now most NGOs are on exit strategy’, as one parish chief put it. Bilateral international funding was put on hold in 2012 when the PRDP for northern Uganda was hit by a major corruption scandal at national level. Given the insufficiency of government resources, and the disposition choices being made, Awach and other hopeful small urban centres have cause for concern if the donors pull out.

THE ARITHMETIC OF DEVELOPMENT AFTER DISPLACEMENT

Arithmetic may seem an odd analogy for a study using qualitative methods, but it serves the heuristic purpose of focusing on processes and calculations. In concluding we consider who was doing the calculations and how the various processes influenced one another in the emerging story of development. This underlines the importance of differentiating actors' perspectives and being aware of many forces at play in the trajectories from IDP camp to Town Board.

The impression often given is that the multiplication of people in IDP camps was the calculation of people seeking security from attack by Joseph Kony and the LRA. In fact, at a certain point it was the Ugandan army that forced concentration entailing ‘multiplication’ (Finnström Reference Finnström, Allen and Vlassenroot2010; Nibbe Reference Nibbe2010). This was adopted as a military strategy in order to clear the countryside and better pursue the enemy. Although it was also intended to protect the population, that was not done effectively. Camps were regularly attacked by the LRA, who committed atrocities against the residents, as did the soldiers themselves. The multiplication of graves in the camps was partly due to casualties of war, but probably more to the high fertility, morbidity and mortality of camp life. Illness and malnutrition flourished in the congested, immobilised population. The sustained multiplication of people and graves in the camps for up to twenty years was only possible because of the influx of humanitarian aid (Dolan Reference Dolan2009). Donors provided food, infrastructure, amenities and a discourse of rights and development that was denied by the reality of the war (Branch Reference Branch2011; Muyinda & Whyte Reference Muyinda, Whyte, Ingstad and Eide2011). Thus multiplication was due to considerations beyond those of the LRA and the frightened local population.

Subtraction was the calculation that camp residents had waited for. Most were reckoning and longing to establish or re-establish their own homes. When the time came and food rations stopped, some hesitated due to the perceived fragility of the peace and had to be strongly encouraged by local leaders. Camp closure did not just happen by itself because of the residents' own initiative. It was a policy implemented by UNHCR and its partners who had helped to manage the camps. There were guidelines for the destruction of huts overseen by Camp Phase-Out Committees. Subtraction policy did not officially extend to graves, but families wanted to take the dead home and landowners urged it. Subtraction was a kind of figuring and action done by residents, policymakers and their humanitarian supporters.

Division was projected in technical plans for cutting roads and surveying plots. It was a calculation required, and a geometrical aesthetics facilitated by, government authorities in order to become a Town Board. But it was also connected to the narrative plot of development, in which drawings, plot markers, and road graders were evocative of the direction people hoped the story would take. Even when plan implementation rushed the removal of the dead precipitately, there was support for the efforts towards urbanisation. So division was a move not only by planners and local politicians, but also by residents insofar as it involved emplotment in the imaginative sense of envisioning a story of progress.

Addition is necessary for urban growth. Awach does not yet look like a small town at all, and lacks basic amenities associated with town life. Small entrepreneurs and people who see no possibility in the countryside are vitalising it through the investment of their efforts and petty capital. A few donors have made much larger infrastructural additions, but by and large, incremental change is proceeding slowly. The question of who will add to the former IDP camps is still open.

Division with its plans and plots, and the press for addition and growth, characterise development of small urban centres all over the country. What makes the situation different in northern Uganda is the multiplication and subtraction that preceded these processes. Most trading centres grow by gradual accretion, sometimes by the establishment of government and other institutions, and usually because they have a strategic location and a rural catchment area with resources. In northern Uganda, such gradual growth was interrupted by forced urbanisation. Not only that, the unwilling ‘urbanites’ had lost all of their assets in the move to the camps. Cattle and smaller livestock that might have been converted to cash had been raided and confiscated (Gelsdorf et al. Reference Gelsdorf, Maxwell and Mazurana2012). People had lost access to the land on which they could produce commodity crops, or hunt, or turn wood into charcoal. Subtraction had occurred even before multiplication, so to speak. Moreover, much as the camps were semi-urban environments, moving to a camp was not like migrating to a town where one might find work to support a family, or to a local trading centre to set up a business. It was the opposite: moving to conditions of dependency where one could only hope to find niches for some minimal economic activity in the form of petty trade. And all forms of trade were constrained by the war and the restrictions on free movement of goods and people. Therefore, the narrative of urban development has a very special poignancy in the former IDP camps and in the broader context of the glaring underdevelopment of northern Uganda.

The donors have played a part in the calculations that is unique to this special trajectory toward urbanisation. First, they made investments in the camps, as well as maintaining them. But because the physical infrastructure they contributed had no social arrangements for maintenance and continuing common use, most has fallen into disrepair or been privatised one way or another. In the absence of a local revenue base and the seeming inability of national government to provide needed infrastructure, the donors are still needed. Humanitarian and development aid is important all over the country, and NGOs are everywhere; but nowhere have donors and NGOs played a more prominent role than in northern Uganda. Yet now there is a prospect of diminished donor contributions.

While this worries local leaders, the residents of the former IDP camps are more concerned to get on with their own divisions and additions. The commodification and individualisation of land that followed camp closure are the ‘urban’ counterparts of the rush to claim land in rural areas (Whyte et al. Reference Whyte, Babiiha, Mukyala and Meinert2013b). The new thatched roofs appearing among the remaining IDP huts are a very particular form of urban development. Students enrolled in the re-established secondary school hope for the construction of a proper hostel. Meanwhile, a kind of historical consciousness, as well as playful irony, is evident in the words they have chalked on the mud walls of the IDP huts they are renting: ‘Welcome to Ghetto Palace’ and ‘Paradise Guest House’.