“ACORD Chiefs were wrongly installed…”: Political Contestations within a “Cultural” Institution in Northern Uganda

Abstract

This paper uses popular pressure to reform the Acholi cultural institution (Ker Kwaro Acholi-KKA), as an entry point to understanding the nature and life character of a political institution cloaked in a cultural garb. Tracing its emergence, growth and subsequent fragmentation into two parallel factions with multiple social constituencies, this paper argues that KKA was fundamentally an institution imagined by and propped up by state power using its financial, legal, violent and political machinery to mobilize underlying cultural sentiments within Acholi society clamoring to reinvent chiefly power. I argue that the state utilized two significant contexts to influence cultural agents in Acholiland. First, the state used the end of the LRA war as a context to construct a developmentalist NGO logic that used Acholi cultural brokers as the gatekeepers and custodians of economic and social change. Second, the state also utilized the wave of resurgent chiefly and kingdom restoration elsewhere in Uganda as a benchmarking precedence for Acholi society to copy the experience of others to entrench itself in society on the backdrop of society-state animosity in post-LRA northern Uganda. By propping up new cultural brokers to become political actors under the purview of state supervision, financial and violent protection, this paper shows that the state re-politicized cultural institutions and rolled back the nationalist project of the First Republic, which had, with minimal success, attempted to depoliticize customary authorities under the nationalistic pretentions of the first postcolonial regimes. The despotic turn of many actors in KKA was attributed to the benevolent legal and violent machinery of the state. By deploying the chiefly component of the customary authority as a point of political governance, the NRM regime continued in the bifurcated legacy of British colonial governance, in which the state attempts to successfully construct social subjection using its machinery of politics. The paper also explores the claims to hereditary or non-hereditary leadership dynamics within KKA while emphasizing that the character of leaders and the claims they made in their daily performance of roles and functions reflect the nature of their source of legitimacy. Actors propped up by state power have acted with minimal accountability to society due to the lack of social legitimacy, which has allowed resistance from within the very KKA structures and from the society below. Focusing on the resistance against KKA's controversial activities, legitimacy concerns, corruption, despotic and undemocratic practices, the paper emphasizes the precarious circumstances under which the contestation between political brinkmanship and cultural pretentions manifest and the consequences for state and society relations. Importantly, the mismatch between cultural rhetoric and practice accounts for what I consider as re-politicization of the cultural.