Finding Peace in Africa
By Frank Bures
See a map of Current Wars in Africa
I was sitting on the plane to Uganda with a Belgian carpet salesman next to me. He leaned over and asked where I was going. I told him Kampala.
“Ah,” he said, “Africa!” He shook his head like he’d never heard anything so sad. “You see the way they kill each other?”
“Um, yeah,” I said, not sure what else to say.
“They blame us! And, okay, we did some not-so-good things. But it’s been a long time, and they’re still killing each other!”
“Why do you think that is?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Do you have a better explanation than it’s a little…” He chose his words carefully. “…a little in their system?”
I sat back in my seat. Actually, I didn’t have a better explanation. At least not the simple one everyone seems to grasp for when Africa comes up. Something about that word and that place unleashes the inner anthropologist in every Westerner. It becomes a Rorschach test in which we see the worst of humanity: Death. Misery. Despair.
Yet while Africa has its problems, there are also huge swaths of the continent not at war, where cows are being tended, kids are going to school, songs are being sung and things are just normal. But we seldom hear about those places.
There are many reasons for this, including media coverage, old stereotypes and plain lack of contact. But there’s also the fact that in 2006, half of the world’s high-intensity conflicts were in Africa. And according to a 2007 Oxfam report, the continent lost about $18 billion a year to these conflicts since 1990. And for what? The questions linger long after the wars are finished. Why did 5.4 million people die in the Congo? Why 800,000 in the Rwandan genocide? Why did 50,000 people die and another 10,000 have their hands, arms, legs, noses or ears cut off during the recent horrors of Sierra Leone?
I’m not sure an explanation can be summed up during a conversation with a stranger on an overseas flight. Yet there are factors. There are trends. There are grievances. There are motives. It is a confusing mix, but I was going to Uganda to try to sort through some of these questions as best I could and, if not find answers, at least find the questions.
Finding Peace in Africa
When I woke up, it was a bright day in Kampala, and the hills were full of green and sunshine. Late the night before, I had checked in to a cheap travelers hotel on the outskirts of town. I chose to come to Uganda because this small, landlocked country, constantly tiptoeing on the edge of unrest, typifies the suffering brought on by recent wars. After I’d caught a little sleep, I locked my room, walked to the road and hailed a motorcycle taxi. The driver raced through the cool morning air, winding around cars and buses and bicycles, before dropping me at the town center in front of a bookstore.
The shop was well-stocked, and I found several good titles on conflict in the region. One, War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa by Richard Reid, warned that war is “staggeringly complex” and cautioned against generalizing. Reid lambasted “rabid European stereotypes” about primitive, unthinking violence in Africa.
Precolonial African wars, according to Reid, were anything but mindless and irrational. They were motivated by economics, militaristic cultures and notions of identity. “Access to raw materials and to the benefits associated with trade, and the reconfiguration of class and social hierarchy [drove] much nineteenth century violence, and they continue to the present day in only slightly modified forms,” he wrote.
In other words, the forces that drove Africa’s early wars are the same forces that still drive wars around the world. Conflict on the African continent took a new turn in the late 1800s with the Scramble for Africa, the race by European powers to cut the continent into pieces like a giant cake.
I checked out of the store and found a little café where I sat down to have some sweet, milky tea, take some notes and look at another book, African Guerrillas, about the wars in Africa since 1990. It divides African rebellions into four kinds: liberation insurgencies (for independence from a foreign power), separatist insurgencies (to break away and form a new state), reform insurgencies (demanding radical government reform) and the worst, warlord insurgencies (driven by power-seekers).
Uganda has seen at least two of these kinds of wars in recent years: In 1986, the reform insurgency of Yoweri Museveni was launched to overthrow the regime of Milton Obote, and not long after that the warlord insurgency of the rebel leader Joseph Kony began to fight the government in the North. Uganda has also been embroiled in fighting in the Congo, where the world’s growing appetite for the minerals under African soil set off what looks almost like a new Scramble for Africa.
In the café, I heard some shouting and looked around. On the television, a man was running down some back stairs in his underwear, while upstairs an enraged husband screamed, “Jezebel!” It was a typical Nigerian film, and would probably be the most conflict I would actually see in Uganda.
I drained my tea, then headed out into the street to catch another motorcycle taxi back across town. On the way, I took in Kampala’s skyscrapers and working traffic lights. Its shops were full of goods. Just 20 years ago, much of the city was still in ruins from the civil war that brought Museveni to power. But now construction was booming, and the economy was growing at 8.9 percent a year.
I thought back to the carpet seller. This was not the place he imagined. Kampala is a peaceful, vibrant city. It is the Africa that doesn’t beg to be anthropologized, that won’t make you wonder what has become of humanity. Even though several wars still rage in this region, there are more and more places like Kampala, where life is hard, but where normalcy has begun to seem almost normal.
Finding Peace in Africa
Not far down the hill from where I was staying was the Refugee Law Project, where a constant trickle of Uganda’s 230,000 or so refugees show up looking for help. The refugee problem is not unique to Uganda.  According to the most recent numbers, some 2.3 million refugees are spread across Africa, along with another 12.7 million internally displaced people (refugees who didn’t cross a border).
I wanted to talk to people who’d seen war with their own eyes, who knew it from their own lives. On the porch in front of the building were some empty benches, so I sat down to wait for my appointment. Soon the seats started filling up. One young guy who sat down next to me had been a video editor in Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Another man came from one of the refugee camps in the West of Uganda, where he and his wife looked after their own six children and seven orphans. He told me in Swahili that he was from Bunia.
“Isn’t the war over in Bunia?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “It is quiet there now. But after the things I have seen with my eyes, I can never go back.”
More people filed in, and a woman named Lillian from Goma in the Congo sat down next to me with her son perched on her hip.
“What is your son’s name?” I asked.
“Bryan,” she said.
“How old is he?”
“He is 5 months. But he is sick.”
“Do you have others?”
“I have three children. One is 3. The other is 5. But I don’t know where they are. We are wakimbizi,” she said, using a Swahili word that means “the running people.”
“The Lendu are killing everybody.”
“Really?” I said. “I thought the fighting was finished.”
“Every time it finishes, it starts again.”
“Why?”
She looked out at the road and said, “You can’t know.”
Finding Peace in Africa
It is hard to know why the Lendu were killing the Hema, or the Hema were killing the Lendu, or the Hutu were killing the Tutsi, or the Luo were killing the Kikuyu. From afar, one can understand why the carpet seller might wonder if conflict was simply in their system. But up close, the question resists such a simplistic and condescending answer.
Once, when I was living in Tanzania in the 1990s, I was sitting in a garden restaurant when a small boy came up to me. He sat down at my table and asked if I wanted to go on a safari. I said I didn’t and he didn’t really seem to care. So I asked where he was from, and he said he was from Burundi. He was a Tutsi, and his family had been killed by Hutus.
“A Hutu isn’t a person,” he told me. “You can talk to them, and they look right at you, and they look like a person. But if you turn around, they will kill you. They are not human.”
For me, this raised perhaps the most important question at the heart of many of Africa’s problems. It is the question of The Other, of not only how we draw the line between us and them, but what we can do to people across that line. The questions “Who are we?” and “Who are they?” lie at the heart of many conflicts across Africa and the world. The questions go to the heart of the concept of the nation-state.
Finding Peace in Africa
A nation is a group you are born into or feel you belong to. A state is a government based more or less around that nation. Together, these institutions can build an almost impenetrable solidarity. Most governments in the West are of this kind, where being a citizen creates a strong sense of belonging. Today Europe is the picture of stability, prosperity and six-week paid vacations, and it’s easy to forget how much blood was spilled to create those nation-states. Remember World War II? Remember the Hundred Years’ War? Remember Napoleon?
“Africa hasn’t evolved into nation-states,” says John Stremlau, vice president for peace programs at the Atlanta based Carter Center for human rights. “All these governments in Africa are states, not nations.  But look at the bloodletting it took in Europe to get an ethnically cleansed France or Germany before you could build the European Union. That was a 300-year project. Africa is only 60 years into independence. You wouldn’t want Africa to go through anything like Europe went through.”
The state in Africa is a strange thing. Many can fight wars but can’t deliver the mail. Some can run an airline but not a highway system. This is at least partly because the state was a foreign (and recent) development. In the 60 years since Africa was decolonized, the roots of national identities haven’t gone very deep. The state often only includes a small number of people brought into the system as taxpayers and stakeholders in the government. For others, the state remains a foreign thing.
Many people within Kenya view their own country as a separate, distant place encompassing only Nairobi and the surrounding region, where those wealthy enough to pay taxes live, Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina said. “In Kenya, which has one of the largest tax bases in Africa, if you move 100 kilometers from the capital, to the north from the south [but still inside the country’s borders], people will ask you: ‘Did you come from Kenya?’”
Tribes or ethnicities are often much stronger indicators of identity, and African leaders sometimes encourage and exploit tribal and ethnic ties over national ones.
“The African leadership uses ethnicity to stay in power,” said Aaron Mukwaya, a professor of political science at Makarere University. “Not because they want ethnicity, or they want tribalism, but because these are the methods they use to stay in power.”
This system of defining identity based on local heritages rather than a national one can fuel internal conflict.
“Whenever you amass too much power, you exclude others and that exclusion is sometimes expressed in terms of tribe or in terms of region,” Mukwaya said. “The problems in northern Uganda, in eastern Congo and in the south of Sudan are problems of permanent exclusion.”
Just how identity in Africa can be redefined to create modern nation-states remains a mystery. It is a giant experiment currently being carried out across the continent.
“I don’t think that anyone has figured out the formula for a nation yet,” Wainaina said. “Not enough time has passed to know what they are becoming. Experts can talk what they talk, but we just don’t know.”
Finding Peace in Africa
In northern Uganda, Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army have been waging war against the government of Yoweri Museveni for 20 years. Kony said he wanted to overthrow the government in Kampala and rule the country according to the Ten Commandments. The fighting has caused a huge amount of suffering, with nearly 2 million people displaced, 20,000 children abducted or killed, and the equivalent of $1.7 billion wasted. The International Criminal Court has indicted Kony and his lieutenants for war crimes.
An uneasy peace had settled on the city of Gulu, near the center of the conflict, since peace talks began in 2006. I wanted to see how the place was recovering and what the region’s prospects looked like. I also wondered if there wasn’t more behind the caricature of Kony as a simple madman.
At the humble headquarters of Human Rights Focus, an organization started in 1994 to help resolve the conflict, founder James Otto welcomed me into his office. He was a tall and jovial man whose grasp of the situation was wide and deep. He was also one of the first advocates of peace talks.
I sat down on a couch, filled a cup with tea and took a samosa from a dish on the table. I asked about the situation in Gulu.
“It’s been calm for about two years now,” Otto said. There haven’t been any attacks since peace talks started, and Gulu is now the third-fastest growing city in Uganda.
“Do you have any ideas about the root causes of the fighting?” I asked.
Otto thought for a minute. “Well, yes,” he said. “The government was very quick to say that this conflict was caused by soldiers seeking their past glory. But one thing we know is that the British divided this country between North and South. They developed the South. They gave them education and commerce. And for the North, it was a labor reservoir. That was the design, and that division remains.”
Otto said that early on, his organization held a meeting with community members to ask what the cause of the war was. What they said was “self-preservation.” Soon after the fighting that brought Museveni to power in 1986, the government issued a call for all soldiers to disarm and present themselves at the army barracks. But in the late 1970s Uganda’s most notorious dictator, Idi Amin, issued a similar call. And when the soldiers showed up, they were all killed.
“So they said, ‘No, we are not going to die like chickens.’ That’s what we mean by self-preservation. They did not have any political agenda. They just wanted to survive with their guns.”
Some of these soldiers formed an independent army. Others joined the mystical rebel leader Alice Lakwena. Others joined her cousin, Joseph Kony.
“Do you think one of the factors has been political exclusion?” I asked.
“To a certain extent, yes,” Otto said. “When it comes to resource allocation, the exclusion is there. It is very glaring. And there is an anxiety that has engulfed the greater North. With the voting in 2006, Uganda unfortunately became so divided that it became two political countries. Now we need a program that can weld the two countries. We need someone who is a nationalist by conviction.”
Finding Peace in Africa
Later that day, I caught a ride on a dirt road that led out of town, through one of the hundreds of camps in the area, where people came to live out of fear of attack from the rebels. There were hundreds of mud huts gathered close together, but many were empty. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 872,000 of the displaced people have gone back to their homes. Some of the camps have even started evolving into towns, with permanent buildings going up along the roads that run through them.
I headed back into town, where I walked through Gulu’s streets packed with cars and lined with makeshift stalls full of goods.  If peace held, these would likely become actual shops someday. Those shops that did exist were covered in bright new paint, put on by telecom companies in exchange for the free advertising.
I stopped in a local restaurant where I’d arranged to meet Richard Ocitti, a former child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army. When he was 12, the rebels killed his father, nearly killed his mother and kidnapped him. For two years, Ocitti lived in the bush, carried a gun and lived a life well beyond his years. “We did a lot of things,” Ocitti told me as we sipped our sodas. “Terrible things. Sometimes you will be forced to do things like killing, maiming, raping. Sometimes we also faced the battle, so you must do all the duties a soldier must do.”
Ocitti was the guard for Okot Odhiambo, one of those indicted by the International Criminal Court. “Some of my friends are still there,” he said. “Others have been killed.”
“Did you ever meet Kony?” I asked.
“Yes. When I was in Sudan, he used to address us.”
“What was he like?”
“He’s a young man. Very energetic. He looks friendly. Kony is very friendly.”
“Really?” I couldn’t picture that.
“Yes, he looks friendly. And even when he is addressing us, you have to see that he has two things in mind. He has a reason for the fighting, because the spirits tell him what to do. He talks to spirits, so one day he says one thing, the next day he can say another thing. So it’s hard to know what he will do.”
“Does he have another reason for fighting?”
“They always say that we are fighting to liberate our people,” Ocitti said. “Because the current government has totally marginalized us. And we just want the national cake to be shared equally. And we want to be in the cabinet. And we want to be an important people.”
“So sometimes when they say this, you can see the reason for fighting. And sometimes you can feel hope.”
Finding Peace in Africa
The streets were dark when I went out early the next morning. The people of Gulu were sleeping well during this tentative peace. It was early in the morning, and I had to catch an early bus back to Kampala. The stalls were empty. The cars and trucks that normally choked the streets were locked behind their gates. Here and there a dog picked through the trash. I could also hear music: a group from the capital called the Obsession Girls had been playing all night long.
At 2:30 in the morning I climbed on the bus, thinking it would leave at 3 a.m. But 3 came and went, as did 4 and 5. I drifted in and out of sleep, and my thoughts came back to the carpet seller and his question: Isn’t it a little in their system?
War may indeed be in their system, but it is only because the system is still being built. Its foundations are still settling. Its lines are still being drawn. Its cake is still being cut up even as it’s baked.
But even today, many of the recent conflicts have subsided and something like hope has taken root in places like Gulu, southern Sudan, Liberia, Angola and other places. The United Nations reported a 6 percent decrease in the number of refugees in Africa in 2007, and the continent as a whole posted five consecutive years of higher-than-expected economic growth.
Finally, hours late, our bus roared to life and we lurched out of town, past the shops that were opening, the goats that were grazing, the refugee camps that seemed mostly empty, and finally out onto the open road.
But the road from Gulu to Kampala is never an easy journey, and there were many hardships along the way: Our bus hit a pothole so big two people cracked their heads on the luggage rack above. A window shattered and blew all over the face of the schoolgirl sitting next to it. Our brakes went out and we had to wait for another bus to come along.
Finally, as we sped along there was a loud Crack! from the back of the bus as one of our back right tires blew out. I waited for the bus to stop, but the driver kept his foot on the accelerator. The tire rubbed on the underside of the bus: whoom! whoom! whoom! Looking around, no one seemed to be bothered. Then, after about half an hour, the tire fell off and all was quiet again as the bus kept rolling on. Together, we all kept our eyes ahead, not knowing what else might slow us down, but also knowing that no matter how long it took, someday we would get there.
Frank Bures is an award-winning journalist who writes frequently about Africa. He currently lives in Minneapolis. Find more of his work at www.frankbures.com.
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