Introduction^{Footnote 1}

This article concerns the Ugandan origins of British anthropologist Aidan Southall’s 1970 essay, “The Illusion of Tribe.” In that seminal essay, Southall (1921–2009) offered sustained, trenchant criticism of African anthropology’s propagation of the notion of tribe. He contended that the term held derogatory connotations and perpetuated the notion of “clearcut, isolated, enclosed” groups, which was “a complete travesty of the facts.” Instead, anthropology needed to “hammer home” the idea of “interlocking, overlapping, multiple collective identities.”^{Footnote 2} In the essay, Southall also sketched out the historical processes that had produced certain “supertribes” or new “tribal aggregations.” He observed that in the literature particular ethnic categories had become institutions – established ethnographic frames – despite standing at odds, at least initially, with the ways indigenous societies represented themselves:

The current article explores the ways one particular ethnic category became institutionalized in the scholarship. But it illuminates a rather different – far less detached – sort of relationship between ethnographer and ethnographic field to that which Southall describes. In a similar vein to the contributions by both Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Alison Bennett in this issue, this paper explores the affective, human dimensions of Southall’s own engagement with the Alur ethnic category which began with his doctoral fieldwork in Uganda’s West Nile District in the late 1940s. It argues that it was this relationship that, paradoxically, fuelled the arguments Southall advanced twenty years later in “The Illusion of Tribe,” despite being barely mentioned in that essay.

Southall’s doctoral monograph Alur Society has been hitherto seen as a precursor to “The Illusion of Tribe” in the sense that it demonstrated his unusually early interest in the relationship between history and ethnicity.^{Footnote 4} Though his monograph was littered with references to the Alur “tribe,” for Southall this was a “new tribe” which had emerged out of heterogeneous elements through the process of “segmentary state” formation. Over the course of centuries, the ritual supremacy of Alur princes, striking out on their own away from the core highland polity Okoro, had led to the “Alur-ization” of the neighbouring Lendu and Okebo ethnic groups to the west and south west on the blurry, moving frontier of “Alurland,” Southall argued.^{Footnote 5}

But the more specific question of ethnic nomenclature that Southall foregrounded in “The Illusion of Tribe” also had its roots in his doctoral fieldwork. These research interests developed out of his relationship with the Alur, and their relationship to their eastern, riverine fringe. His doctoral monograph was itself an ethnic monograph, titled Alur Society, but this act of naming also entailed an act of un-naming. Southall’s doctoral project had been originally titled “An Anthropological Study of the Alur and Jonam.”^{Footnote 6} In his doctoral monograph, Southall had still written about the Jonam – a term meaning “people of the big river/lake” in many of eastern Africa’s Nilotic languages – but he had not used that ethnonym. Instead, Southall subsumed the river people within the Alur category, as “lowland Alur” or, in some of his later work, “riverain Alur.” The current paper analyzes the contested Jonam ethnic movement that Southall’s work obscured, the reasons for this act of concealment, and the ways these experiences shaped the ideas advanced in “The Illusion of Tribe.” It draws primarily on newspapers, published and unpublished work, and official and unofficial archives in Uganda and the UK, including Southall’s recently deposited papers at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London.

This paper engages with a growing literature concerning the history of ethnographic practice in Africa. It draws on concepts Peter Pels developed to distinguish between three phases of the production of ethnographies: the “préterrain” (literally “fore-field”) which refers to “the power relationships in which an ethnographer (…) gets caught upon arrival in the field;” the “ethnographic occasion,” which denotes the encounter between ethnographer and his subjects in the “field;” and the “ethnographic tradition,” which entails the writing up of field notes into ethnographic texts.

“One of the most persistent influences” of the préterrain of indirect rule, Pels argues, has been “the tendency of academic researchers to adopt the tribal classifications and territorial boundaries of the colonial administration.”^{Footnote 7} But the power relationships that constitute the anthropological préterrain “are not limited to those introduced by European colonizers,” he contends, “they include indigenous ones, and the interaction between the former and the latter.”^{Footnote 8} Focusing in part on these sorts of interactions – particularly Southall’s relationship with an Alur intellectual called Peter Claver Ringe – the current article draws inspiration from Lyn Schumaker’s exploration of the ways in which Africans appropriated anthropology to their own ends in the context of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in colonial Northern Rhodesia.^{Footnote 9}

But while Schumaker’s work focused on the Africanization of anthropology, the current paper examines the relationship between this phenomenon, on one hand, and the Africanization of an anthropologist, on the other. As such, the paper brings the insights of Pels and Schumaker into dialogue with Wim van Binsbergen’s ideas regarding an oft-neglected aspect of the intensive participant-observation method. In a personal and candid account, Van Binsbergen discusses “the genuine existential dimension of doing fieldwork” – that “intimate communion” by which the Nkoya of Zambia, for a time became ‘‘my people,” ‘‘my tribe’’ (original emphasis). The “Nkoya ethnic pathos swept me off my feet,” he writes. Their “eagerness to tell their tale, to have themselves put on the ethnographic and historical map” “positively attracted me” with a “very strong force.” “Their Nkoya-ness very soon became their main, even only, characteristic in my eyes,” Van Binsbergen explains, “and I became more or less Nkoya-ized in the process.”^{Footnote 10}

Before Southall – Ethnographic Traditions on the Upper Albert Nile c.1864 to c.1949

The area that Southall was to claim as his ethnographic domain had been claimed by others before him. A succession of different ethnographic traditions had been initiated and abandoned between the 1860s and 1940s. The first written reports pertain to the eastern fringes of this area: on the banks of the Albert Nile as it flows out of Lake Albert. No name resembling “Alur” features in the first half of the 1860s and in the early 1870s in the accounts of British explorer Samuel Baker who heard about these lands but never visited them. He did, however, record the terms used to refer to their inhabitants by peoples of neighbouring areas to the east and south. Baker’s map is somewhat jumbled but clearly evinces his awareness of people his informants knew as “Koshi” (Koc) in the north of this riverine zone. Baker was also informed of several other notable places along the river between Koc and the lake. On Baker’s early 1870s’ map he marked “Foquatch” (Pakwac), “Foobongo” (Pabungu), “Farrakatta” (Paroketto), and “Faimoor” (Panyimur).^{Footnote 11}

Other Europeans elaborated on this ethnographic tradition for a time in the mid-1870s. It is during this period that a label resembling “Alur” first appears in the historical record, though not in reference to the people of the river. In the service of the Turco-Egyptian government in 1872, Baker declared the whole Albert Nile part of the vast, ill-defined southernmost section of Equatoria province. Three years later the riverine area witnessed its first European visitor, British officer William Chippindall, who had been sent overland down the east bank of the Nile, tasked with clarifying the geography of the north end of Lake Albert with a view to setting up forts by which to consolidate Turco-Egyptian territorial claims. In March 1875, Chippindall reached a northern riverine locality which he believed was the territory of the “Koshi tribe” and was met to by their “chief,” a man known as “Wadelai” (more correctly “Wodlei,” meaning “son of Lei”). Chippindall recorded receiving information that “in the hills to the west of the Koshi” was “where the Lour tribe live.” These findings appeared in an account titled, “Observations on a journey to the Koshi tribe,” which the Royal Geographical Society published under a different title later that year.^{Footnote 12} Riverine use of the term “Lour” (or similar) to refer exclusively to the people of the highlands was also encountered by one of Chippindall’s colleagues, the Italian Romolo Gessi, a year later. During the two stops he made along the upper Albert Nile, he met Wodlei and another chief located much closer to the lake. Both men used the same term, rendered “Luris” by Gessi, to refer to the people of the hills, with whom they were often at war.^{Footnote 13}

Within a few years, however, Europeans came to categorize both the highlanders and riverine people as “Alur.” This phenomenon was largely down to the ethnological endeavours of a more renowned European in the service of the Turco-Egyptian government. Silesia-born Mehmed Emin (better known as Emin Pasha) first arrived among the riverine communities in the late 1870s. Emin visited Koc, which he considered to be just one of the small polities straddling the Albert Nile, the names of which Baker had marked on his map earlier in the decade. But Emin claimed that all these units were simply “subdivisions of the large country of Lur or Alur.” Emin’s ethnic taxonomy, which appeared in a series of published ethnographic reports, seems to have been based less on self-ascription by Africans than on the similarities and differences he perceived in terms of their languages, customs, dress, physique and skin pigmentation.^{Footnote 14} Chippindall’s paper and Gessi’s travelogue were soon eclipsed by Emin’s more widely disseminated works.

Emin’s ethnic categorizations became further embedded after the Albert Nile came to mark the division between two colonial territories in the late 1890s. However, the Alur label was not readily accepted by all those upon whom it was foisted by the British Protectorate of Uganda (on the east bank) and the Belgian king Leopold II’s Congo Free State (on the west bank) during this period of nominal colonial administration. For example, the appellation was either rejected or endured reluctantly by the people of Koc and their ruler, who had been controversially selected by the British as paramount chief of the riverine area by this time known as Wadelai District on the east bank. In 1901 a rather resigned Ali (son of Wodlei) informed an administrator that although the “Caoch” (Koc) “are now called (…) Lurus,” the “real Lurus are a very big tribe and are inhabitants of a very extensive country south-west [i.e. across the river and inland].”^{Footnote 15} The people around Wadelai “are miscalled Aluru,” wrote one contributor to a missionary magazine a year later; “in reality [they] are known to each other as the Wa-caotch.”^{Footnote 16} These sentiments were still being expressed along the river almost a decade later, according to a revealing account by the British administrator Chauncy Stigand, who visited the northern riverine area on the west bank on its transfer from the Congo Free State to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in June 1910:

This enduring sense of difference between the people of the river and those of the highlands was to a certain extent reflected and intensified by the system of administration and nomenclature introduced in 1914 when the west bank of the river again changed hands. The Uganda Protectorate gained this territory from the Sudan in the midst of rampant sleeping sickness across the river, where a restricted zone had been declared, and opted to force the survivors living on the east bank to relocate west of the river in the newly named West Nile District. The official tasked with establishing administration in West Nile was District Commissioner Arthur E. Weatherhead. He divided the southern section of the district into three “Alur” counties: Okoro in the highlands, Padyere in the midlands, and Jonam along the river. Okoro was named after the core highland polity; Padyere (which contained mainly Okoro “chieflets”) meant literally “the place of the middle;” and Jonam meant “people of the river.”^{Footnote 18}

It appears that the term Jonam had not previously been committed to paper. But it may have previously been omitted by Europeans due to its ostensibly limited, topographical connotations. It was clearly imbued with some deeper, socio-political meaning, however. Though it seems no traces of Weatherhead’s own justification for this nomenclatural system survive, he is reported to have later spoken of taking the “greatest care” over the matter.^{Footnote 19} The deep-rootedness of the Jonam designation is suggested by its local resonance within just a decade of its adoption as a county name. A Catholic missionary in the mid-1920s stated that the highlanders and river people “call each other by distinct names, Jokoro and Jonam, and those of Okoro have absolutely no wish to belong to Jonam and vice versa.”^{Footnote 20} The antiquity of categorizations signifying groups’ positions in and relation to the environment and other peoples is evidenced by the presence of this system of social thought in all of the dispersed Nilotic-speaking populations of eastern Africa – from what is today South Sudan through to Uganda and to western Kenya.^{Footnote 21} The people of Okoro were themselves also known as jo-malo (the people of the hills) or jo-got (the people of the mountains), and referred to the people of midlands as jo-piny (the people of below).^{Footnote 22}

The physical environment had engendered a socio-cultural boundary between highlanders and riverine peoples. Between the neighboring riverine polities, which were within easy reach of each other by canoe, linguistic and cultural affinities had been forged through generations of contact. The river had served an important function as both a political frontier and a conduit across which these communities shifted back and forth to escape famine, disease, conflict, and incursions by outsiders. The river also enabled connections with Bunyoro, which most of the riverine polities claimed to have originated from or migrated through, and to whom they all acknowledged ritual suzerainty. Ecological and economic differentiation may have combined to provide the roots of ethnic distinctions. While most groups combined agricultural, pastoral, and hunting activities, the balance between these modes of subsistence was markedly different between the highlands and the riverbanks. And it was only the latter that provided direct access to fishery resources.

While officials and missionaries in the 1920s were still somewhat convinced of the overarching validity of the term Alur, the ethnographic tradition had also begun to shift to incorporate the lowland/highland distinction rather than reverting back towards the early 1870s’ categories tied to small polities. “The Jokoro, or mountain men, are hard-working,” the Catholic missionary noted, “the Jonam, or men of the river [Nile], are lazy, and much love fishing.”^{Footnote 23} Whereas the language of the highlanders was “much affected by the Lendu and neighbouring tribes,” asserted one administrator, “the Jonam” were “originally one with the Jopaluo” (“a Nilotic-Bantu people who live near the [Victoria] Nile, principally on the stretch between Lakes Albert and Kioga”). He considered only the highlanders to be “Alur proper.” ^{Footnote 24}

In the 1940s, local ideas of Jonam as a discrete entity were further sharpened, and gained currency among certain Europeans. For the people of Jonam County, and the officials who ruled them, invocations of the Jonam category became inextricably tied to several unifying concerns – threats originating beyond the boundaries of the county. One was a collective territorial claim to the east bank of the Nile which was voiced with increasing frequency amid both growing fears that this area had become Acholi territory in perpetuity, and devastating famines on the west bank.^{Footnote 25} Perhaps even more than had been the case in the past, invocations of the Jonam category became linked to control of fisheries at the north-western shore of Lake Albert and along the Albert Nile. Over the course of the war, the Albertine fishing industry had boomed in response to demand from the gold mines of the Belgian Congo. The Jonam category also signified lowlanders’ determination to maintain their independence from the highland Alur ruling dynasty.^{Footnote 26} Catholic missionary Joseph Crazzolara noted at the turn of the 1950s that both the Alur and Jonam “themselves maintain vehemently that the two names cover two well distinct tribal groups: the one is never the other.”^{Footnote 27} Certain Alur ethnic patriots did not share this view, however. The Alur Okoro dynasty and its supporters harbored designs over the lowlands which was the only one of the three counties remaining beyond their political control after the amalgamation of Padyere into Okoro in 1938.

These Alur-izing pretensions were embodied most clearly by an African teacher called Peter Claver Ringe. Like other local intellectuals in northern Uganda in the 1940s – who have been largely overlooked in the historiography (see Otim, this issue) – Ringe was engaged in ethno-historical writing. In the introduction to a basic Alur grammar and vocabulary book he produced at the behest of the District Commissioner in 1948, Ringe included a brief, tendentious account. It subsumed the riverine people under the Alur category, casting them as subjects of the “Alur dynasty” of Okoro, and descendants of one eponymous “Alulu.” “The Alur people live (…) [from] the western side of the River Nile, extending westward as far as the Nile-Congo watershed,” Ringe claimed. “All recognised as the only real chief (…) Jalusiga.”^{Footnote 28} But his Alur-izing project did not manifest itself just on paper. While working in the highlands at the Nyapea Catholic mission’s prestigious St. Aloysius College, Ringe gained a reputation for discouraging lowland students’ assertions of difference. Students claimed, for example, that Ringe change the letter “o” that featured in many of the prefixes (e.g. in the name O-kello) of the Acholi Lwoo orthography dominant in the lowlands to the “u” preferred in the highlands (e.g. U-kello).^{Footnote 29}

Assertions of Jonam ethnic difference also spoke of social and political relations between the people of the river. Jonam identity was invoked in moral claims regarding redistribution of resources amid class formation in the 1940s. It was also central to conflicts over legitimate authority which grew increasingly bloody from the middle of the decade.^{Footnote 30} For the Koc ruling dynasty and its supporters, the term Jonam also conjured a distinct tribal community over which they claimed the hereditary right to rule. For lowlanders who opposed this subordination, the same ethnic designation evoked a history of small independent polities. Jonam ethnicity was also a means by which people forged communities Kampala, Arua, and Gulu. Via Jonam diasporic networks new arrivals in these urban centres could access employment opportunities and other resources. Tellingly, by the early 1950s, Jonam had the highest rate of membership in the Uganda Police of any ethnic group in relation to their size.^{Footnote 31} From around the Second World War, these urban-rural ethnic networks were also responsible for the dissemination of a form of dance, njige, that became strongly associated with Jonam category.^{Footnote 32}

Official recognition of these assertions of difference emerged in the 1940s. On the basis of recommendations by district officials, the Jonam category was included in the schedule of tribal names for the 1948 census, which counted their population at about 15,942 – about a quarter of the size of the Alur population.^{Footnote 33} This distinction was accepted by Southall in notes he made on the “Jonaam & Aluur” over the course of a two-week trip in the highland Okoro County in mid–1947, during a vacation away from Makerere College where he had taken up a three-year lecturing post in Social Studies in 1945.^{Footnote 34} Advised by anthropologist Raymond Firth to undertake a PhD, Southall enrolled at the London School of Economics in 1948. With the support of the incoming director of the new East African Institute for Social Research (EAISR), Audrey Richards, he secured funding from Colonial Social Research Council. This funding enabled him to start his “Anthropological Study of the Alur and Jonam” as a Colonial Research Fellow in Uganda in August 1949.^{Footnote 35}

In Southall’s fieldnotes from stays in Jonam County in December 1949 and June 1950, he made liberal use of the designation “Jonam” – or “Junam,” as he more frequently rendered it. Based on indigenous categorizations of those who “speak Junam,” Southall also compiled comparative lists comparing the “Alur” and “Junam” (or “Dhu-Junam”) languages. He also referred to the existence of njige, which he described in his notes as “the authentic” and “traditional” “Junam dance.” While visiting what had been the precolonial lowland polity of Koc, Southall noted that his informants “won’t admit any other name but Koc and Junam.” Furthermore, the residents of Jonam County referred to the highlanders and their territory as “Alur,” he observed. “Alur [are] also called ‘jumalo’” – “people of the highlands,” Southall added.^{Footnote 36} He did record one statement seemingly to the contrary: a riverine clan head called Pola apparently told him that they had “been always called Junam (…) but it was correct to call them Alur too for they were all one.” But even this appears like a rather equivocal appeal to unity.^{Footnote 37} While transcriptions in Southall’s notebooks reveal that he had read Emin’s account, they also demonstrate that he had seen the contrary evidence offered by Baker and Stigand, if not that of Gessi or Chippindall. The passage from Stigand’s book that conceded the existence of early twentieth-century riverine resistance to the Alur label was both transcribed and underlined in Southall’s notebook.

Alur-izing Ethnography, 1950-c.1956

But Southall suppressed the Jonam tribal category in what appears to have been his first doctoral research paper. Delivered in December 1950 at the first annual conference of the EAISR at Makerere College, the paper was titled “The Alur.” It referred to the people of the river as “lowland Alur.”^{Footnote 38} A year or so later there was later some equivocation regarding these designations in a draft thesis chapter Southall composed. “Tribe is here defined in terms of the common awareness of being a named group inhabiting a continuous territory, possessing a common language, common basic cultural forms, and a common ethnocentric political philosophy,” Southall explained. “None of these distinctions is absolute,” he conceded, however. “All refer only to the politically dominant group upon which the social structure is focussed” – i.e. “the true Alur” who lived in “the highlands” (emphasis added). “On some of the fringes of tribal territory,” Southall acknowledged, “there is increasing hesitancy as to whether the dominant groups call themselves Alur or not, or else they consider themselves Alur secondarily and something else primarily.” “For convenience,” however, he resolved to use the terms “lowland Alur” and “highland Alur.”^{Footnote 39}

But even these brief caveats and admissions were not present in the thesis he submitted in 1952 or the doctoral monograph that followed. While averring their “ethnic heterogeneity,” Southall maintained in his thesis that “the Alur may be accepted as a tribe in the sense of [anthropologist Meyer] Fortes’ socio-geographical region or in virtue of an ideological unity and a likeness accepted as dogma.” ^{Footnote 40} In the first of only three rather perfunctory references to the Jonam category, Southall cited the aforementioned Pola’s statement expressing unity; in the second he dismissed the categories jomalo and jomalo as simply “ecological” divisions of “Alurland;” and in the third – somewhat contradicting the second – he conceded that “within the general body of the Alur” the term Jonam reflected a “particular sense of common identity.”^{Footnote 41} In the population data Southall mined from the census 1948 for an appendix to the monograph Alur Society, he even replaced the term “Jonam” with “lowland Alur.”^{Footnote 42}

Why by late 1950 had Southall started to resist the officially-sanctioned view of the ethnic landscape? Perhaps Southall privileged the account of Emin over that of Stigand or Baker because of the former’s scholarly reputation. Maybe he was anxious to defer to the definitions employed by the professional and amateur ethnographers who had come before him, including his erstwhile Cambridge lecturer Jack Driberg, and a host of other early colonial officials and missionaries.^{Footnote 43} It is also possible that Southall had taken to heart a statement made by the doyen of “Nilotic Studies” who was to act as his external examiner. In E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s presidential address to the Royal Anthropological Institute earlier in 1950, he had claimed the term “Alur” “generally included the Jonam.”^{Footnote 44} After all, this more expansive definition of the Alur had been, until relatively recently, “sanctioned by [three quarters of] a century of use,” to modify Evans-Pritchard’s own justification for adopting the term “the Nuer” in one of his monographs.^{Footnote 45}

But to understand this act of concealment, it is necessary to assess other aspects of the préterrain and also the ethnographic occasion. Southall’s decision to collapse the distinction between the Jonam and Alur categories spoke of the powerful impact of the “proselytising culture” of the Alur heartlands.^{Footnote 46} He devoted what he termed the intensive part of his fieldwork among the Alur highlanders. For most of the twenty or so months Southall spent in West Nile and the north-east Congo he was located at the Alur core and the highland areas over which their influence strongly extended; he spent only a few weeks in the lowlands across two or three visits. While Southall argued that “the traditional process of domination and assimilation” by Alur of non-Alur, “can no longer occur,” recruitment had continued by other means.

Certain relationships formed early in Southall’s fieldwork proved crucial in his own recruitment. Perhaps most notable was his bond with the bane of the Jonam ethnic separatists, Peter Ringe, whom he had first encountered during his short visit to the highlands in 1947. Southall was much taken by this man, who had in the 1930s become the first person from his area to study at Makerere College in Kampala. By 1949, Ringe had been appointed as both an African member of the protectorate’s Legislative Council and honorary secretary of the Alur Language Committee formed by the West Nile District administration at the end of the Second World War. His various commitments seem to have left him little time for significantly increasing his ethno-historical output before his death in 1957. In Southall’s eyes, he was “an exceptional man, born out of his time.”^{Footnote 47} But in many ways Ringe was very much of his time: he was a typical ethnic entrepreneur. He wanted to put the Alur on the map; but he also wanted to remove the Jonam category from it.

Alur ethnic patriots such as Ringe exercised a strong influence over Southall and the assumptions he brought to bear on his ethnography. On Southall’s return to West Nile in 1949, Ringe was one of the men with whom Southall spent time in “relaxation and helpful discussion” at Nyapea. The anthropologist later described him as “an absolute Godsend for me,” as he “knew everybody and everything.”^{Footnote 48} But “as with all social relationships, informants and fieldworkers use (and sometimes exploit) each other,” to quote one of Southall’s later colleagues.^{Footnote 49} Ringe often weighed in on matters concerning history, according to Southall’s field diaries, and generally helped the young anthropologist to “start off on the right foot.” It is highly likely that he had a role in both selecting Palei in Nyapea sub-county as Southall’s main field site, and identifying a student who could act as his interpreter and assistant for the duration of the fieldwork.^{Footnote 50} One of Southall’s supervisors at the LSE, Raymond Firth, later emphasized the importance of “the informal, often covert, constraints” which, paradoxically, “often tend to be largely a function of the positive assistance that the anthropologist receives.”^{Footnote 51} This paradox manifested itself strongly during Southall’s doctoral fieldwork.

Alur ethnic entrepreneurs succeeded in enlisting the anthropologist’s unconscious support both for their crackdown on non-Alur orthography, and in the wider political project this reflected. In Southall’s monograph he literally put Jalusiga, the Alur hereditary chief of Okoro, front and centre: the frontispiece to Alur Society was a photograph Southall had taken of this potentate. As well as opting for Ringe’s definition of Alurland as a ethno-territorial frame for his doctoral research, in sections of Southall’s monograph written up after his thesis submission he took it upon himself to advocate for other Alur Okoro causes vis-à-vis the colonial state. In his monograph, Southall bemoaned the “remoteness and backwardness” of Alurland, the “major social evils” begot by labor migration to Buganda, and the lack of “official recognition” for the Alur. The latter issue could be remedied, he believed, through the creation of a “small district corresponding closely to the tribal area.” An Alur district would have the advantage of “linking tribal esprit de corps to local development.”^{Footnote 52} Such advocacy and promotion constituted something of a departure from the “hear-no-evil, see-no-evil” approach Audrey Richards encouraged in EAISR scholarship.^{Footnote 53}

Southall had started to function as an anthropological advocate for the Alur and an agent of ethnographic Alur-ization because he had himself been subjected to this process. His stay in West Nile, which began when he was still in his twenties, was his first extended piece of fieldwork. It had a transformative impact on him. The content and tone of the acknowledgements and preface to his monograph strongly evoke Van Binsbergen’s account of his own “Nkoya-ization.” Southall wrote with great warmth and humor about his fieldwork in “Alur homesteads,” learning the “Alur language” and drinking, dancing, and digging among “Alur friends.” He wrote proudly that he had become known as “JaPalei” (man of Palei) “across most of Uganda Alurland.” “There is a very strong case for having stayed in that first place for the whole time,” Southall later recalled, “in many ways, I wish I had.”^{Footnote 54} He maintained that he was treated as an “Alur of high rank” and that, by the end of his fieldwork, his “status as an eccentric European” was only “residual.”^{Footnote 55}

Casting “The Illusion:” A Contested Ethnographic Tradition since c.1956

That Southall had come to share certain Alur assumptions regarding their riverine eastern fringes became all the more obvious over subsequent decades. From the mid-to-late 1950s, he found himself confronted by a Jonam ethnic consciousness that was being sharpened further by democratic reforms and competition over the increasing resources of the developmental late-colonial state and the market. With talk of independence in the air, little-known groups with little-known political grievances feared that there was only a narrow window of time in which they might receive redress before they were condemned to domination by larger ethnic groups. Many Jonam memoranda were sent through official channels. Advocates of the ousted Koc dynasty petitioned in pursuit of this lineage’s constitutional recognition alongside the rulers of large kingdoms like Buganda. Self-declared spokesmen for the wider Jonam community wrote to advance their ethnically-framed territorial claim for the so-called “lost bank,” seeking for this case to be viewed in the same light as the cause célèbre of mid-twentieth century Uganda – the “Lost Counties” dispute between Buganda and Bunyoro.^{Footnote 56} Starting with the publication of 1959 letter announcing the existence of the Jonam Association in Kampala, the Jonam literati also targeted the English-language daily Uganda Argus with their missives, adverts, and photographs to both render their community visible and voice their grievances to the largest Uganda-wide audience possible.^{Footnote 57}

Debates over the validity of the ethnonym “Jonam” developed in various public arenas, as peoples threatened by its significations articulated dissent. Self-identifying Acholi sought to undercut the Jonam claim to the east bank of the Nile as it threatened the integrity of Acholi District. “In the early centuries, there was no tribe known as Jonam,” one Acholi writer maintained, “it was in about 1910 (…) those [Alur] living along the Nile started to call themselves Jonam.”^{Footnote 58} Unsurprisingly, the Jonam category also faced derision from Kampala-based Alur ethnic patriots (who had themselves began to advertise meetings of the “Alur Association”).^{Footnote 59} One writer demanded to know whether the “Alur who are claiming themselves to be Junam (…) still believe that they are sons of water?”^{Footnote 60} The ethnonym became subject to similar mockery from members of the ascendant Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) in a March 1963 session of the National Assembly. Concerned by the prospect of both alienating UPC supporters in Acholiland and encouraging other similar claims around the country, these men rejected the demands for a West Nile-Acholi boundary commission voiced by a Jonam member called Martin Abe Okello – the outspoken Democratic Party representative for West Nile and Madi Central Constituency.^{Footnote 61}

In Southall’s published papers from the start of the 1960s, the people of the river had remained the “lowland Alur” or simply “Alur.”^{Footnote 62} But it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to continue skirting the Jonam question in his scholarship. Southall was almost certainly aware of the broadcasting of this very public controversy, having taken the decision to remain in Uganda after his doctoral research. He had spent the first few years of his postdoctoral career at EAISR as a research fellow before being appointed as both director of the institute and Makerere’s first Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology in 1957. Southall was also no doubt cognizant that one of the urban diasporic manifestations of Jonam ethnic separatism had caught the attention of another British anthropologist, David Parkin, who was conducting doctoral fieldwork in east Kampala from 1962 to 1964 while attached to EAISR as a research associate. Though Parkin’s research came to focus primarily on the city’s Kenyan Luo community, his research also brought him into contact with other diasporic communities including separate Jonam and Alur “tribal associations.”^{Footnote 63}

Though deeply sympathetic to the territorial claim to which the Jonam category was inextricably attached, Southall demonstrated his partisanship in these ethnonymic politics in a paper he presented in January 1963. Based on incomplete evidentiary foundations, Southall’s paper on the subject of elections in “Alurland” lent support to the popular interrogation of the Jonam designation by invoking the writings of past proponents of the Alur ethnographic tradition:

In a 1968 conference paper, he offered a distilled reiteration of this contention, claiming that the Jonam “appear to have regarded themselves as Alur until the present century.”^{Footnote 65} In these papers and those that immediately followed them at the turn of the 1970s, Southall appeared determined to validate and perpetuate the application of the Alur ethnic category to the people of Jonam County.^{Footnote 66} This conviction was perhaps not surprising. Besides his vested professional interest in the Alur category, there was also the matter of his personal commitment. By the time he had left Uganda for Syracuse University in the United States in 1964 Southall was “a paid-up member of the Alur tribal association in Kampala,” as he himself admitted elsewhere, rather unnecessarily.^{Footnote 67}

Southall’s 1960s’ contentions as regards to Jonam ethnicity clearly foreshadowed and motivated some of the arguments he famously put forward in 1970 in “The Illusion of Tribe.” But their silences revealed his personal and intellectual anxieties concerning the Jonam question. They exhibited his reluctance to either more thoroughly investigate the historical roots and valences of the Jonam category or subject the Alur category to historical scrutiny – an undertaking one of the older generation of anthropologists of Uganda, May Edel, had briefly gestured towards in a 1965 essay on colonial-era “super-tribalization.”^{Footnote 68} Southall’s essays of 1963 and 1968 also demonstrated his reticence concerning the collective self-appellations that he had himself encountered on the ground at the time of his doctoral fieldwork.

Southall’s disquiet became perhaps more conspicuous in “The Illusion of Tribe” and certain other influential essays he published in the 1970s. As other scholars have argued, Southall’s writing at this time in some ways presaged the critical self-examination central to the ethnographic enterprise’s postmodern “crisis.”^{Footnote 69} Somewhat ironically, however, his own work on the Alur did not really feature in these essays. In pursuit of ethnic illusions to deconstruct, Southall felt more comfortable roaming widely.^{Footnote 70} Quite controversially, from 1976 Southall halted for several years to disrupt the ethnographic traditions of writing the Nuer, Dinka, and Atuot of Sudan.^{Footnote 71} In the same year, in a far less well-known essay, he returned to the subject of ethnicity in Uganda. But Southall revisited his early ethnographic terrain only fleetingly in the article. Momentarily, he appeared more uncertain of his previous claims regarding the past (and continuing) Alur-ness of Jonam County. While noting that explorer Baker “found no identifiable peoples called the Acholi” he also admitted that “nor does Baker mention Alur or Jonam, but only chiefdoms.” Southall also appeared reconciled, if for only a moment, to referring to “the Jonam” as “immediate Nilotic neighbours” to “the Alur.”^{Footnote 72} Perhaps these statements reflected a degree of unease he felt as to his own dogged attachment to the Alur category, and the part he had played in authenticating it to the detriment of that of Jonam.

But the brevity of these admissions, and the obscurity of the essays in which they occurred, rendered them little more than internal dialogue. At any rate, Southall seems to have overcome these reservations by the late 1980s and 1990s when he composed a series of passionate papers reflecting on his experience of “the Alur,” and their experience of Uganda’s dark postcolonial decades. Southall did, for the first time, acknowledge that his past certainties regarding the Alur had been misplaced. “At the time of my arrival,” he explained, “they were accustomed to being called Alur and accepted the name.” “But they did not usually refer to themselves as Alur,” Southall conceded, “the Alur identity (…) remained somewhat vague. It is difficult to say which polities recognized this identity before the European intrusion clearly crystallized it.” Southall even expressed regret concerning his own youthful ignorance of the risks inherent in “establishing and demarcating one’s own distinctive ethnographic estate, with presumptively monopolistic property rights.” He was not yet prepared to fully renounce the category that had framed several decades of his scholarship, however. “Unlike many current ethnic appellations, the name Alur is not without valid foundation,” Southall contended, yet again adducing the ethnographic output of Emin as evidence.^{Footnote 73}

Southall displayed a renewed blind-spot regarding the Jonam-Alur relationship in this period. On one hand, he averred his growing commitment to the idea that “man’s place in, reaction with, and appropriation of nature” constituted “a major influence in the formation, elaboration and transformation of (…) identities.”^{Footnote 74} But, on the other, he revealed that he was not quite ready to apply these insights to the people of the Albert Nile. Their sense of separate identity remained, in Southall’s eyes, a construct of “recent decades.” They had “differentiated themselves more and more from the rest of the Alur, claiming to be a separate ‘tribe’ and succeeding in getting themselves enumerated as such in the Uganda census,” he argued. Southall conferred on the Jonam the status of a “new sub-ethnic group” – the implication of a previous and continuing “Alur-ness” remained.^{Footnote 75}

Conclusion – An Ambiguous Ethnographic Legacy

When Southall had left the Britain for Uganda in 1949, the object of his study was not just the “Alur.” But it had become so as the young ethnographer ironically became subject to, and an agent of, the very process of “Alur-ization” his work famously explicated. Southall made no secret of his personal commitment to “the Alur.” In the early 1990s he declared that scholarly neutrality was “a highly ideological posture.”^{Footnote 76} His readiness to “advocate for improvement for the Alur” in this period – even in a meeting with Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni – was admiringly recalled by anthropologists Susan and Michael Whyte in their tribute to Southall.^{Footnote 77} Southall disavowed “tribe” as unit of analysis, and developed a strain of what he termed “virulent antitribalism;”^{Footnote 78} but over the course of a relationship that lasted about sixty years, he never renounced “the Alur.” Southall granted the “positive value” of “ethnic particularisms” “in the struggle against oppression,” but was somewhat unclear about which “particularisms” were legitimate, and what constituted “oppression.”^{Footnote 79} He was deeply disheartened by what he perceived, and represented, to be the fragmentation of his people; he failed to acknowledge the visceral and vested nature of this stance. Southall’s story reminds us that even intercessional ethnography enacts power relations, in this case within an ethnonymic politics.^{Footnote 80}

The case of the Alur and the Jonam sheds light on the curious, unpredictable ways in which a particular ethnographic tradition can gain or regain traction – how, in this case, an ethnic category can become an institution. “Subsequent writing tends to ignore the formative influence of the power relationships given in the préterrain and actualized in the initial ethnographic occasion, by either reproducing it in the same form (…) or by skipping it altogether,” Pels observes.^{Footnote 81} Similarly Barrie Sharpe emphasizes “the need to readmit precolonial and early colonial records to ethnography,” arguing that “a current tendency is to dismiss these sources on the basis of supposedly superior recent knowledge” even though, sometimes, these “more recent texts actually suppress important data.”^{Footnote 82}

The ethnographic tradition of writing the Alur that Southall re-established cast a large shadow on the préterrain of subsequent researchers who touched upon his ethnographic territory. In the early 1970s, one Makerere student from Jonam County used the introduction of his undergraduate agriculture thesis as an opportunity to bemoan the fact that “sociologists have always sought to classify Jonam with the Alur.”^{Footnote 83} But most other scholars were more deferential, often explicitly so.^{Footnote 84} In a piece accompanying the “tribal map” in the government’s official atlas in 1962, Makerere researcher John Goldthorpe asserted that, though now “conventionally regarded as a separate tribe,” the Jonam were – “from an anthropological point of view” – “those Alur who live by the Nile.”^{Footnote 85} Other scholars used footnotes to acknowledge that “whether the Jonam should be identified as a separate ‘tribe’ is a debatable point.” But they resolved to follow the “precedent” set in the ethnic taxonomy of “authorities” such as Southall.^{Footnote 86} Most researchers have failed to demonstrate any awareness of the controversy, consigning it to obscurity or total oblivion.