Traumatic Psychosocial Community Deformation of Ugandan Society

Traumatic Psychosocial Community Deformation of Ugandan Society.

Kampala based writer, playwright, and social critic, Kalundi Serumanga describes Uganda’s political and justice system as “Murder-as-Order.” In a powerful social commentary published in early 2021, Mr. Serumanga depicts a dystopian political social-security structure that is based on the employment of terrorizing violence under a thin veneer of rule-of-law based democracy. The National Resistance Movement Party led by President Yoweri Museveni, has been in power for nearly three decades with a principal focus on internal security. The NRM operates at nearly every level of government administration, to include the national elections commission and all the security services. While Ugandan law establishes and protects political action and guarantees free and fair elections, the reality is much the opposite. Violence, coercion, and open bribery have ensured Museveni’s position of power and a compliant legislative parliament.

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While Uganda holds regular elections, their credibility has deteriorated over time, and the country has been ruled by the same party and president since 1986. The ruling party, the National Resistance Movement (NRM), retains power through the manipulation of state resources, intimidation by security forces, and politicized prosecutions of opposition leaders. Uganda’s civil society and media sectors remain vibrant, despite suffering sporadic legal and extra-legal harassment and state violence.

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During the 2016 election, the NRM dominated parliament passed a law to eliminate presidential term limits from the constitution, despite overwhelming public opposition. Afterwards, each member of parliament was given 5-million Ugandan Shillings by Museveni as a gift for allowing him to continue in power. The evolution of political and social violence in Uganda occurred against a backdrop of postcolonial ‘tribe-as-ideology’ collection of civil wars, cults, and insurgencies that have battered Ugandan society for the past 50-years.

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Throughout the Kampala and Entebbe regions, a rising tide of murders of Ugandan women have been attributed to politics, policing, devil worship, land disputes, and other contradictory reasons. Many of the women’s bodies showed signs of rape, genital mutilation,torture, and strangulation, leading the United Nations HCHR to identify Uganda as having discriminatory laws that lead to greater violence against women. Kampala based writer, playwright, and social critic, Kalundi Serumanga describes Uganda’s political and justice system as “Murder-as Order.” In a powerful social commentary published in early 2021, Mr. Serumanga depicts a dystopian political social-security structure that is based on the employment of terrorizing violence under a thin veneer of rule-of law based democracy. The violence that has become a standard part of Ugandan social, political, and cultural life is neither new, nor does it arise from only one segment of society. Instead, it has become like an epidemic of sorts, with public officials championing and advocating for violent responses to protests and other violent responses in an endemic cycle of violence.

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The scale and intensity of suffering in postcolonial Uganda is almost unmatched on a continent that has borne indescribable horror from within and without. The postcolonial Ugandan state was carved out of several tribal kingdoms that had been in conflict even before the Arab and English intervention began in the 1800s. Islamic, Protestant, and Catholic missionaries added to the pre-existing divisions by adding a metaphysical component to what had previously been only ethnic-tribal conflicts over land and resources. Uganda’s first independence government was characterized by conflict between hereditary tribal authority and the newly arrived form of European democracy based on the Westphalian State concept adopted by the United Nations. This experiment in liberal democracy was quickly overthrown by an army colonel named Idi Amin, who seized and held power for most of the 1970s, in a manner that rivalled Cambodia’s Pol Pot Regime. Upwards of 500,000 men, women, and children were killed in Amin’s quest for power and control.

After Idi Amin’s demise in 1979, his supporters took to the bush and began a 6-year civil war called the Luwero War, that ultimately saw Yoweri Museveni, and his National Resistance Movement come to power in 1986 in yet another violent coup. A year later, in 1987, Joseph Kony, a nephew of Acholi medicine woman Alice Auma, the founder-spiritual leader of the Christian-Animist Holy Spirit Army and Movement, appeared as first a spirit medium, and then as the psychopathic guerrilla leader of the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army. Kony’s LRA created an army out of as many as 60,000 abducted children where were psychologically broken to create monstrously malformed psychological identities/personalities that could be directed to kill on command. His army and areas of control grew to most of the Acholi tribal areas in northern Uganda and spilled over into Sudan and threatened Ugandan President Museveni’s control over the northern half of his country. Museveni’s initial response was a scorched earth approach

of collective punishment and then forced resettlement on the Acholi population who were the principal victims of the LRA. Even as the Uganda-Sudan insurgency of the LRA became mostly subdued with assistance from USAFRICOM, a new insurgency, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) insurgency began carrying out attacks in Uganda beginning in the mid 1990s, with a goal to replace Museveni and his government with an Islamic fundamentalist state. Both the LRA and ADF continue to plague the populations of Uganda.

For the citizens of Southern Uganda and the metropolitan areas of greater Kampala, a half-century of war and violence has inculcated a willingness to tolerate an authoritarian government if it can provide security and prosperity. Bareee and Ashaa observed that “…voters in previous polls showed a rare inclination to defy repression and vote for the opposition, especially in urban areas.” Ugandan voter desire for security tied into the already existing psychological trauma of the last 50-year of violence, making cooperation with an authoritarian governance preferable to continuation of chaotic terror. Throughout the Kampala and Entebbe regions, a rising tide of murders of Ugandan women have been attributed to politics, policing, devil worship, land disputes, and other contradictory reasons. Many of the women’s bodies showed signs of rape, genital mutilation, torture, and strangulation, leading the United Nations HCHR to identify Uganda as having discriminatory laws that lead to greater violence against women. Although women bear a disproportionate amount of the violent attention, many of the shootings initially targeted politically active Muslim leaders. After March 2016, however, the attacks escalated to include senior government officials, social-activists, and residents involved in ethnic conflict. Even Museveni’s close circle of supporters in parliament are not immune from the violence. NRM lawmaker Ibrahim Abiriga and his bodyguard were gunned down by unknown assailants in Kawanda, north of Kampala. Abirgia had successfully campaigned to remove the presidential age limit of 75.