Geographies of unease: Witchcraft and boundary construction in an African borderland

3. The Uganda-South Sudan-DRC borderlands: historical and economic geography

The borderlands of Uganda and South Sudan neighbouring the DRC (Fig. 1) provide a particularly valuable case-study for exploring the ambiguous meanings of borders for their inhabitants and traversers. These international borders would seem to epitomise the arbitrariness of colonial boundaries, cutting through social, economic and cultural communities and therefore resisted or disregarded by their inhabitants (Adefuye, 1985). Yet over the past century, these boundaries have nevertheless come to delineate economic regimes and conflict frontiers as well as state territories (Leopold, 2005, 2009). As such, they have contradictory meanings: crossing borders can bring profits or provide refuge, yet it also entails dangers and losses. Below we explore how these tensions and ambiguities manifest in changing concerns about witchcraft. But first we provide some context for these concerns in terms of the historical geography and political economy of this borderland region, in which the movement of people and goods has been crucial for survival and success, yet also a source of unease and insecurity.During the nineteenth century, this region was depredated by the overlapping frontiers of ivory and slave trading emanating northwards from the East African coast via the Great Lakes region, and southwards from Egypt and Khartoum (Leopold, 2005; Titeca et al., 2020). The Turco-Egyptian government of Sudan in the 1870s and 1880s did little to inhibit slave raiding and violent requisitioning by commercial and imperial forces, leaving enduring memories of brutality, enslavement and displacement. The region was subsequently partitioned by the European colonial powers into the Belgian Congo, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and British Uganda Protectorate. The Sudan-Uganda boundary to the west of the Nile was poorly defined in 1914 and some stretches remain contested up to now. The colonial governments dealt with such imprecision and a spreading sleeping-sickness epidemic by forcibly relocating settlements to create an uninhabited border-zone and banning all cross-border movement. Colonial administrations sought to categorize people into ‘tribes’ and confine them within territorial chiefdoms, establishing an enduring administrative geography (Leonardi, 2020).At the same time, however, the colonial economy was generating new demand for migrant labour from the region to work in the plantations and farms of southern Uganda, or in the colonial military and police forces (Leonardi, 2007; Leopold, 2005; Middleton, 1963;). From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century then, this region experienced external forces as overwhelmingly extractive of labour and resources. Yet the colonial administrations also coercively asserted that the movement of people conveyed disease – a concern revived in more recent years by fears of HIV and Ebola spreading across borders (Allen, 2007; Storer & Pearson, 2019). The sense of ambivalence and unease that accompanies the opportunities offered by long-distance movement of goods and labour thus has a long history in this region.The postcolonial period has seen both continuity and change in these patterns. The continued marginalization of Southern Sudan, northern Uganda and northeast Congo contributed to multiple armed rebellions and waves of cross-border displacement. In one sense these refugee movements have reinforced cross-border ties and reciprocal obligations and blurred national identities among borderland inhabitants. But on the other hand, regimes of citizenship categorization and tensions between refugees and hosts have also hardened national identities and stereotypes (Merkx, 2000). Experiences of displacement and exile are often associated with the disruption of cultures and moral orders, as one of our Ugandan respondents emphasized:

People came [back] from Sudan [in the 1980s] with different ideologies, especially those who were in the camp, the different thinking. As we went to Sudan we lost, we lost that social network. What they did was to adopt an individual way of existing, everybody for himself … As we came [back], that bushman-like behaviour of people [continued], very rude … guns were rampant, there were guns everywhere.²

Cross-border networks nevertheless facilitated the involvement of many borderlanders in the increasingly lucrative – if risky – informal or illegal magendo economy from the 1970s onwards (Meagher, 1990). In the early 1980s, returning Sudanese refugees were able to use ‘friendships’ built in Uganda or Zaire to conduct illicit cross-border trade (Merkx, 2000, p. 4). Arua Town in northwest Uganda, together with smaller border towns and markets, became centres of this trade. Leading Ugandan businesspeople known as the ‘Arua Boys’ or the ‘tycoons’, traded in fuel and manufactured goods from as far as Dubai and Hong Kong, exchanging profits for gold and dollars provided by Congolese and Sudanese traders (Titeca, 2009). Cross-border trade was by its very nature secret and exclusionary. Smuggling involved moving at night or through ‘the bush’, activities more commonly associated with occult practices. Traders flourished while those living in spaces through which the goods flowed struggled, including at the hands of rebel groups like the West Nile Bank Front (Leopold, 2005). The bus companies, hotels and grand homes built by the tycoons were a visible symbol of emergent inequality (Meagher, 1990). The deployment of the Ugandan army to DRC from 1998 also saw more Ugandan state and military actors employed in the trade (Titeca, 2012, p. 36). While the Arua boys remained well-placed to expand into trades like ivory and to develop links with new partners like Chinese buyers, increasingly it has been Kampala-based businesspeople with high-level links to Uganda’s political and military elites who have profited from the most lucrative and expansive commercial networks (Titeca, 2018). Similarly in South Sudan, the most profitable cross-border commerce requires connections to the governing and military elites (Walraet, 2013).The inequalities of the trading economy also contributed to resentments along national lines. After the end of the Sudanese civil war in 2005, cross-border trade boomed and many Ugandans found employment and business opportunities in Southern Sudan. The trade remained heavily controlled by Ugandans, producing resentment and increasing hostility towards them in Southern Sudan (Titeca, 2009, p. 14). Ugandans complained of unregulated taxation, harassment by military and security forces, and attacks on Ugandan traders (Ariko, 2007; Bwogi, 2007; Daily Monitor, 2007; Kiwawulo, 2008). Similar tensions and perceived inequalities have characterized trade across the DRC-Uganda border, where Ugandan traders feel more vulnerable than their Congolese counterparts (Schomerus and Titeca, 2012).The dangers of cross-border movement only intensified with the outbreak of civil war in the recently independent South Sudan in 2013. Over a million refugees subsequently crossed into Uganda, while military clashes near the border and cross-border incursions made the conflict seem uncomfortably close for the Ugandan borderland inhabitants. The security threat posed by ‘porous borders’ had become a ubiquitous refrain by the time of our research in West Nile in 2017 (Fisher & Leonardi, 2020):

The number one security problem is the porous border. Moyo is a district bordering South Sudan … Lawlessness is more in South Sudan than in Uganda. The flow of small arms and criminality is uncontrolled in South Sudan, and that means they come into Moyo also and engage some of our people in criminality also. Then there is war in South Sudan and human trafficking: taking our youth to join rebel forces, either by force or by convincing them that they are unemployed here.³

While the South Sudanese conflict and refugee influx provided the most common focus for these security concerns, some Ugandans also pointed to the wider issues of cross-border trade and criminality:

West Nile is a very porous region. People are not sure of their security because of improved technology and skills. People can steal cars in Kampala and find it easy to pass through Arua to Congo or Sudan. That makes people here worried. Also people can kill and then take off over the borders, or commit robbery and then do the same.⁴

The insecurity and economic and political marginalization of the regions on both sides of the Uganda-South Sudan border remained a source of grievance directed at the respective central governments by local politicians – and most starkly by rebel groups in South Sudan’s Central Equatoria. But competition for limited resources has also become channelled into more localized struggles over land and internal boundaries. Concerns about increasing populations – now massively exacerbated by the refugee influx – and anticipation of commercial farming and resource extraction have generated increasing insecurity over land rights, which remain primarily customary rather than individually registered (Leonardi & Santschi, 2016). At the same time, political strategies of decentralization along ethnic lines in both countries have heightened the association between local territorial control and administrative and political resources, positions and power (Justin and de Vries, 2019; Nsamba, 2013). The result has been proliferating demands for new ethnically-defined local government units and increasing conflicts over their boundaries (Leonardi, 2020).State decentralization strategies have effectively pitted ethnic groups against one another in the struggle for access to state resources and control over land and natural resources, so that the apparent better fortunes of one ethnic group or district are seen to come at the expense of their neighbours. Meanwhile the real profits in this borderland region have been made by transcending these local geographies, particularly by engaging in cross-border and long-distance trade, or developing connections to state and military elites. The political geography of these borderlands is thus increasingly fragmented and ethnicized, in ways that serve to undermine any regional solidarity or resistance to the wider inequalities of national and international political economies. Instead, grievances over the unequal distribution of resources and the insecurities of the regional economy tend to be directed at more local targets – migrants, refugees or the mysteriously wealthy. This is particularly apparent when we explore the discourses and actions relating to witchcraft, which are deeply revealing of the simultaneous opportunities, exclusions and inequalities of the borderland economies.

4.1. Cross-border movement and contamination

There seems to be a long history to concerns about the potential for hidden threats to be carried by the movement of people in this region: some oral histories and colonial reports associate the origins of particular forms of occult poisoning with women from neighbouring or distant groups captured in warfare (Reference removed for review). In precolonial settings, women were often the most mobile, moving to their husband’s territory on marriage, and might therefore be suspected of bringing forms of witchcraft from outside the community (Allen, 1993, pp. 367-70). But from the 1920s onwards, new opportunities for migrant labour made young men more mobile and are cited by South Sudanese as the source of new forms of poisoning acquired for the first time by men:

What happened was that many people were going there to work in sugar or cotton, they got their money, came back and settled, got married. It is during this migration, and interaction with poisoning in Uganda, especially among men, that some men also acquired this practice and brought it back.⁵

One Yei chief’s father warned him in 1937 that Masindi in Uganda was the principal source of poison.⁶ In northwest Uganda meanwhile, Congo was more commonly depicted as the source of new forms of witchcraft. In the 1950s, the anthropologist John Middleton reported the introduction of new ‘elojua’ poison into Lugbara areas, said to be bought by local migrant labourers from Congolese migrants in southern Uganda. One of Middleton’s chief informants, an elder, instructed that ‘young men should not go to Congo and get evil things’ (Middleton, 1963, pp. 183, 246-8).Colonial medical campaigns against sleeping sickness and meningitis sought to spread the message that invisible threats could be carried by people across borders. There is some evidence that these diseases were associated with witchcraft: serious outbreaks of cerebro-spinal meningitis in Kajokeji in the 1930s were accompanied by major witch-hunts (Leonardi, 2007), while recent interviews with Ugandan elders suggest that sleeping sickness was attributed to occult poisoning (Kovacic et al., 2016). Whether or not they reinforced the perceived occult threats of cross-border movement, these medical campaigns certainly contributed to the hardening of boundaries. Cross-border movement increasingly had to take place under the cover of dark, which contravened the normal dislike of ‘night-walking’ associated with occult activities.⁷From the 1960s, international boundaries became lines between conflict and refuge, although these lines were also transgressed and blurred by rebel groups operating in and across the borderlands. Some of these groups have themselves appropriated and reworked older forms of magical protection and therapy, which had historically been an important source of power but in the 1980s–90s became intertwined with the violent threat posed by groups like Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army or the Congolese Mai Mai (van Bockhaven, 2020; Titeca, 2010).The movements of refugees also became associated with increasing and new forms of witchcraft and poisoning. In 1980s Southern Sudan, Ugandan refugees from West Nile were subject to considerable hardships and the ‘forced urbanization’ of the refugee camps, where Harrell-Bond (1986) recorded acts of ‘mob justice’ to manage people suspected of poisoning. Some Ugandans now claim that new and more potent forms of poison or witchcraft were obtained by people when they were in Sudan, leading to collective action and killing of suspects after their return (Allen and Reid, 2015).⁸Other West Nilers fled over the Congo border, where they lived among Congolese citizens rather than in refugee camps. Survival often depended on living among strangers and assimilating in order to trade, which posed particular moral dilemmas. An elder emphasized the occult dimensions of this sense of change:

When people went to exile, people went and learnt new cultures …. They came back and started to drink, started practicing mazi, those things weren’t there before. That is why you see things like evil spirits here now; people brought them from exile [in] 1982, ‘83.⁹

The returns of West Nilers in the 1980s were accompanied by a major influx of Southern Sudanese refugees fleeing war. The latter’s lengthy exile in Uganda is also associated with the acquisition of new forms of witchcraft, which accompanied their return after 2005:

Abiba is a form of witchcraft, which was brought by Sudanese returnees from Uganda … Abiba is new and people learned about it in exile in Uganda. They bought this kind of poison from markets in the Lugbara areas of Maracha in the Terego land. Some poisons were also bought from Ma’di on the eastern bank of the Nile. The Kuku bought abiba from Ugandans during the wartime, and are using it to kill each other.¹⁰

A South Sudanese refugee in Moyo District similarly claimed in 2017 that abiba was a ‘recent’ phenomenon, originating with the Alur of Nebbi District in Uganda, that he had only heard about in West Nile in the 1990s and which was brought into South Sudan’s Kajokeji later by returning refugees: ‘So really this abiba is foreign’.¹¹ In 2007, people in Yei in South Sudan were also attributing an increase of occult poisoning to the return of refugees: ‘poisoning has increased because people have brought back these things from Uganda’.¹² Blaming ‘witchdoctors’ (or diviners) for inciting mob killings of suspected witches, a South Sudanese police commissioner also emphasized the ‘foreign’ origins of the witchdoctors: ‘They come from Uganda, where there are many criminals … They are here illegally.’¹³Concerns and discourse about occult threats have played a part in the formation of national and ethnic identities over time, reflecting the interaction of occult and political geographies in the construction of state territory. Attempts by state actors like this police commissioner to construct and govern boundaries have recurrently involved the pathologization and criminalization of unregulated cross-border movement, while rebel operations in the borderlands have enhanced the sense of frontier threats. But occult discourses also go beyond the statist language of border security to reveal the significance of cross-border movement in structuring economic inequalities and exploitations.

4.2. Capturing labour

Economic inequality and exploitation have also been apparent in the long history of labour extraction in this region, from enslavement and colonial labour demands to more recent recruitment or abductions by rebel or state security forces. In the early 1950s, a Southern Sudanese politician was reportedly ‘concerned to find that the ancient superstition of Kulia Batu is still fairly widely believed’ in Yei District:

The belief is that at dusk, saloon cars come across the frontier from the Belgian Congo or Uganda and carry off any unwary Sudanese to an uncertain fate. It is even alleged that the Yei merchants are the agents of the Kulia Batu. The words ‘Kulia Batu’ mean in effect ‘cannibals’.¹⁴

These cannibals were said to be ‘European, Arab or even Indian’, suggesting a link both to colonial labour recruitment and to the history of slave raiding in the region (cf. Shaw, 2002). Stories of colonial bloodsucking and cannibalism across east and central Africa offer ‘a glimpse of the world as seen by people who saw boundaries and bodies located and penetrated’ and constitute epistemologies for describing ‘the extractions and invasions with which they lived’ (White, 2000, p. 5). In Uganda’s West Nile, kulia batu also became associated with Congolese commerce and were said to cut off people’s heads and put them in the foundations of storage buildings (suggesting a link with accumulation). Respondents here reveal that fears persisted into the later twentieth century and recalled being told not to sleep outside when they were young, for fear of being taken by the kulia batu: ‘These people were not seen, they operated at night, even it was hard to know what colour they were. They took anyone, women, men, as long as you were human.’¹⁵This particular threat appears to have been superseded since the 1980s by ideas of zombie labour, which have also been prominent as far afield as South Africa, where ‘zombies are thought to have multiplied as wage work has become scarce among the young and unskilled’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999, p. 290). In the South Sudan-Uganda borderlands, occult forces known as abiba or maji/mazi are said to be used by wealthy businesspeople to turn corpses or sleeping people into labourers, often in far distant fields:

People think that you have died, but you have not died. [They] will bring back the whole body and put your spirit back in you – you will come back to life and you will work for him, doing any kind of work for them, not necessarily evil, you might become a slave, doing digging, so [you are] still there for them, visible to them but not to your people.¹⁶

A suspected case occurred near Yei in South Sudan in 2005, when a recent grave collapsed and the deceased was said to have been taken by abiba; according to a relative, ‘people are blaming the driver who drove the deceased to Uganda, saying that the driver is a workaholic and has taken him away to work for him’.¹⁷ There are obvious parallels with the kulia batu cannibals in their ‘saloon cars’ in the late colonial period: abiba is even more explicitly related here to the cross-border extraction of labour and the profits of trade and transport.

4.3. Secret profits of cross-border trade

The migrant labour economy of the colonial period might have distanced the source of the labourers’ wages and commodities from their home communities, but the postcolonial economy of trade and smuggling has produced profits in even more secretive and hidden ways. It is not surprising then that the Arua ‘tycoons’ became a focus of occult rumours in Uganda’s West Nile from the 1990s. It was said that these men ‘went under the water to acquire mazi from Congo’.¹⁸ People were suspicious of shops which were mysteriously filled during the night, and said traders communed with snakes or white spirits. Mazi accusations were fuelled by the opacities of the cross-border trade, according to one of the few respondents to question their veracity:

Mazi, it is not true. These accusations are everywhere, but they come up because people don’t understand about smuggling … These rich people – the ones that have developed Arua – they are supplying all these people who sell small things here. You see them going round town in closed vehicles, distributing. But in the village, people don’t understand these things, so they accused them of mazi.¹⁹

The secrecy and subterfuge inherent in cross-border trade may have particularly fuelled occult explanations of its profits. But the inequalities and vagaries of the wider regional economy are also critiqued and perhaps combated through the association of sudden wealth with occult activities. Since the 2000s, accusations were also directed at rural kiosk-owners making smaller-scale profits from selling tobacco and other goods. Markets are described as sites for the procurement of poisonous substances and the services of ‘witchdoctors’, a term that has come to refer to the commercialised vendors of both protection against and forms of witchcraft. The growing commercialization of and competition over land is also sometimes cited as a motive for either accusations or use of witchcraft (Lindrio, 2019).The threat of being either targeted by or accused of witchcraft could be seen as a powerful levelling force, pressuring richer members of society to display generosity rather than ostentatious wealth – both the practice and the accusations of witchcraft are often explained in terms of envy and resentment of the wealthy. For more sceptical respondents, witchcraft concerns work not as a positive levelling force but as an obstacle to development, a ‘pull-down factor’ as a teacher from Kajokeji put it: ‘If I go to dig in the morning, very early in the morning, and I make a good farm … they will say, “Ah, so and so has extra powers. Therefore, he has to be killed”.’²⁰ An Ugandan district councillor shared this view:

A farmer can concentrate and can cultivate there in the bush, you hardly see him for six months. When he comes back, he has planted five acres of cassava, when he sells it he has 10 million [Ugandan Shillings], when he’s building, you think he has made this money out of devilish power. Somebody’s doing a business that you don’t understand and they have a lot of money … so these are some of the reasons that people can suspect village members and can decide to chase you from the village and even beat the village member to death.²¹

As in many other contexts, the use of occult powers has come to be seen not only as a recourse by the poor to express their resentment of more fortunate relatives and neighbours, but also as a means of becoming wealthy swiftly and ruthlessly (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999; Geschiere, 1997; Ndjio, 2008). This more novel use of witchcraft by the rich is associated with the expansion of markets and towns, allowing spatial as well as economic differentiation (Geschiere, 2013). The opacity and vagaries of business in the borderlands adds to the mysteries of profit-making. But strategies to combat witchcraft tend to reinforce boundaries rather than to redress inequalities.

4.4. Internal mapping and movement control

In one sense, these occult forces transcend state boundaries – indeed this is part of what makes them so troubling. Yet the ways that people talk about and try to combat witchcraft are deeply entangled with state political geographies in this borderland region. Not only are particular forms of witchcraft associated with cross-border movement, but also with specific districts and ethnic groups – and districts have increasingly become defined in ethnic terms. Stories circulate about which districts or ethnic groups are the most potent sources of witchcraft, such as the Alur of Nebbi District or Mount Wati in Terego County.²² It is striking that a state administrative unit can become seen as a boundary between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of moral communities such as Allen (1993) described in the 1980s. A district councillor in Moyo, for example, emphasized that abiba was a new form of witchcraft; when asked where it came from she emphasized its outside origins:

The normal tale is that they have gone out of the District (laughs). They go to buy from witches that they know; they go outside the District because these are things which we are not hearing of.²³

Such accounts work to reinforce the sense of identity and moral community that local authorities like councillors have worked to invest in their administrative jurisdictions. Ethnic difference and division has become the focus of political competition for positions and for the creation of new districts or sub-district units, so the emphasis on particular ethnic origins of migrant occult threats feeds into the dominant political idiom in both Uganda and South Sudan.The geographic imaginaries of witchcraft also generate particular strategies for attempting to contain and exclude it, often at an even more localized level than the district. Within the smallest administrative units in Uganda (Local Council 1, or LC1) or under chiefs, sub-chiefs and headmen in South Sudan, the threat of witchcraft is cited as a basis for regulating incomers. Newcomers (particularly strangers and those from different ethnicities) wishing to settle in a particular village or neighbourhood are said to require letters from their former LC or chief, vouching that they are not witches or poisoners. A LC1 chair in Moyo District emphasized that residents from non-Ma’di ethnicities were by definition ‘squatters’ in the neighbourhood, and the automatic suspicion of migrants:

If someone comes and wants to live here, I need to get reason why he shifted here. If I find you are a wizard, I cannot let you settle here; or if you like fighting … I have to research the background of a person before he settles here.²⁴

This reflects a long history whereby witchcraft accusations could force individuals and families to relocate, inviting suspicion of migrants, but also a more recently formalized practice of evicting suspected occult practitioners. In the past two decades or so, local authorities on both sides of the border have developed a practice of holding ‘elections’ in communities convinced of an immediate occult threat, in which villagers vote to identify suspects, who are then evicted under threat of violence (Allen and Reid, 2015; Storer, O’Byrne, & Reid, 2017). While such practices are not endorsed by higher level government and judicial authorities, they are perceived as a legal and fair mechanism by the lowest-level authorities of the local state, and recorded with a degree of bureaucratic officiousness.²⁵Both this hybridized ‘modern’ practice of elections and more violent methods of eviction or killing are said by some respondents to have helped ‘cleanse’ communities from the worst occult threats, demonstrating the efforts to make the most localized administrative units into moral communities. Since 2010, along the Uganda-Congo border, rural clan leaders have been involved in the writing of English by-laws, which are on occasion presented to village and sub-county authorities.²⁶ These by-laws underscore the territorial approach to combating witchcraft, with an emphasis on the need for suspects to be evicted across long distances – specifically ‘300’ miles or kilometres. Some clans have developed ‘security wings’, where young men are involved in inflicting harsh punishments, particularly on suspects from outside the clan. Similarly a South Sudanese clan headman in Kajokeji near the Uganda border was proud of having ‘chased’ poisoners away from the area, adding that none of them were from his clan.²⁷Collective action against suspected witches and poisoners can work then as a way of constructing small-scale territorial communities, from which the dangers and corruptions of migration and the borderland economy can be excluded or cleansed. Such claims work to the obvious advantage of the local authorities seeking to govern these territorial units. But they also feed into the broader reinforcement of state political geographies that divide to rule along ethnic lines, undermining broader regional or class-based political solidarities. Action against occult threats is thus an example of how borders and territory are constructed by the myriad small-scale attempts to define and govern the boundaries of political and moral communities (Salter in Johnson et al., 2011).These small-scale constructions of territory have come to overlap with how state boundaries have been imagined, understood and experienced by the inhabitants of these borderlands. Cross-border movement has been a fundamental part of their lives, enabling access to economic opportunities, refuge from conflicts and the maintenance of transborder relations and cultural communities in defiance of national regimes of citizenship. But the various occult themes discussed in this section also reveal otherwise hidden concerns about the risks, costs and unequal effects of these cross-border opportunities. Accounts of occult threats imported by returning refugees and migrants both reflect and contribute to the ways in which experiences of displacement across borders have shaped national identities and given moral meanings to international boundaries. Most importantly, stories of zombie labour exploitation and the sudden riches generated at the expense of one’s kin highlight the unequal effects of the transnational economies that traverse and exploit these borders, while life for the majority of borderlanders remains impoverished and precarious.