Living with Bad Surroundings and the mango trees of northern Uganda - Sverker Finnstrom

Sverker Finnstrom is the author of Living with Bad Surroundings, a landmark work on how Acholi people have interpreted and shaped the narratives and events that comprise the past two decades of war and peace in northern Uganda. Below Sverker reflects on his work, recently awarded the coveted Margaret Mead Award, and how Acholi experiences are relevant to each of our own stories.  

It is the greatest of honors to be presented with the Margaret Mead Award for Living with Bad Surroundings, my anthropological monograph on northern Uganda. The award is offered jointly by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. I regard it as a prize acknowledging the stories of my friends living in a region of the world ravaged by war.

More than anything else, here I see the anthropologist as a storyteller, only that the stories of my book are not really mine. The stories are Ugandan stories. They are important stories. I want them to be read. To take the time to read a book, and to allow the stories to nestle in your thoughts, disconnecting you from your hectic life to instead connect you to the more acute realities of war-torn Africa is more important than ever these days. In a sense, in doing the research for my book, and doing so in the midst of ongoing war, I trespassed on the great Ugandan hospitality. As one of the reviewers of my book noted, my ambition was simply to portray my Ugandan friends as the tenacious survivors they are, “remarkably resourceful in making use of past traditions as well as new means to manage their lives.” Yet I also regard my book as a contribution to a much wider debate on anthropology and the often violent developments in African postcolonies. Here another reviewer was upset, arguing that I downplay the violence of the Lord’s Resistance Army, at the verge of being a rebel apologist. To put such a harsh conclusion in perspective, Ugandan authorities have dismissed, more than once, the reports of Human Rights Watch as being “the work of those bent on mobilising for the LRA.”

Needless to say, for me the Margaret Mead Award proves the opposite. I think the latter reviewer read my book very selectively, missing an important point: if we are to understand the very real brutal violence of the Lord’s Resistance Army, and thus be able to do something about it, we need to look at the wider picture. So behind the stories I tell are many years of work, as well as scholarly loyalty, you could say, to the lived realities of northern Uganda. My ambition with my book was to revisit Ugandan political history, including its colonial past, in addition to scrutinizing the often destructive international interventions of today, to be able to better understand the conflict in Uganda and how globalization is always locally emplaced. I tell a story of a global war, with battles that however are always locally fought.

Stories of today, collected from ordinary people living in the shadows of war, guided me in this re-reading of Ugandan political history. Here I would like to take the opportunity to revisit the introduction to my book. I write there that it can sometimes be quite unreal to conduct anthropological fieldwork in a setting where memories and experiences of war are vividly and continuously reactivated in everyday life. For me, when I first came to northern Uganda in 1997, as an external observer, stories and narratives of lived experiences could appear fictitious against the background of the nice breeze under the shade of a mango tree, where I sometimes sat, listening to my new-found friends. A helicopter gunship bombing a rebel hideout in a forest some kilometers away added to the strange experience. Of course, it became crucial for me to recognize that my job as an anthropologist is not to absorb the stories of my informants as mine, or to impose uncritically my stories upon them. It is about their familiarity with the world, not mine. Perhaps the contrasting feeling of the friendly breeze under the mango tree assisted me in acknowledging this important feature of the anthropological encounter as I have chosen to practice it.

The mango trees… They are so big, so lush, standing so firm in the storms of war. So many stories are told under their caring shade. I dedicated my book to one of my Ugandan friends, the late journalist Caroline Lamwaka. She once sent me one of her unpublished poems, written in a style similar to the great Ugandan poet, novelist and anthropologist Okot p’Bitek. Caroline very much wanted me to include her poem into my book, and I did. I would like to repeat it in part here:

Yes, indeed it is better
To return to the ruins of the old homestead
Than never to return at all
Soon all the people will return,
And the neighbourhood will be filled with laughter and joy
The laughter of children, running and playing
The giggles and laughter of the girls and women
As they joke and cut grass
Huts will be rebuilt, and compounds cleared
And the mango trees will blossom with fruits.

As I note in the conclusion to my book, I like to think that as long as the mango trees in Africa grow and blossom – although in northern Uganda the army sometimes has cut them down in the effort to deny the rebels food – Caroline’s hope lives on. It must. Thus I end my book by quoting the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “Underneath the clamor a silence is growing, an expectation,” he once wrote. “Why could it not be a hope?”

Why not? In facilitating this hope, I suggested by presenting my book in memoriam of Caroline, we need to understand better how people in war-torn settings like Uganda act upon their immediate and wider surroundings, as they try to understand not only the violent practices of the warring parties but also the international involvement. It was my great wish that this would make my book an important read not only about Uganda, nor only about the Lord’s Resistance Army, but more, also beyond Uganda, even beyond Africa. It was my hope that the stories of my book would say something about the human condition more generally, that every culture is potentially all cultures. For me, the Margaret Mead Award is the finest acknowledgment of this wider ambition of mine. As the conflict that I write about has dangerously evolved and expanded in time and space, over ever widening stretches of Africa and with a most violent logic of its own, so increases the relevance of my book and those of my colleagues, which just as mine are build on in-depth and long-term fieldwork engagements. There are a few important books out there now that take us beyond the many stereotypical journalist accounts. It is my hope that these books can find a wider readership, and that they inspire people to reflect critically upon what is going on in Africa today, and our role in it. I therefore also like to hear from readers of Living with Bad Surroundings, because I see feedback as part of the dialogue that really defines anthropology for me. And dialogue is the only real hope in our contemporary global times of militant and military thinking. By cultivating the dialogue, we can work for good and peaceful surroundings, in Uganda and beyond. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” as the legendary quote attributed to Margaret Mead has it. “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Sverker Finnström, December 2009
Stockholm University and Uppsala University