Farming the tarmac: rootedness and longing for the world in post-war Northern Uganda

This is a socio-cultural ethnography in five chapters about motorcycles and lifecycles in post-civil war northern Uganda. People of the Acholi sub-region endured civil war between 1986 and 2006. Many of them anticipate another violent, politically motivated upheaval in Uganda. Drawing on 23 months of field research between 2014 and early 2017, the author focused on ethnic Acholi motorcycle-taxi drivers known as bodabodas to explore how men raised during wartime make a life as internal migrants on their own, contested territory. The bodabodas’ experience as men attempting to fulfill moral responsibilities that preceded them and will also outlast them allowed the author to interrogate movement philosophically and ethnographically and with deeply historical dimensions. Results show the bodabodas’ and their passengers’ multiple uses and ideas of movement and memory as they navigate opportunities and constraints linking rural and urban aspirations and livelihoods in this setting. Specifically, results reveal how, for both men and women, cultural understanding of and claiming a rightful place in a region recovering from war is paradoxically forged not through settlement or rootedness but through continuous transportation as provided by the motorcycle taxis. Moving around is what keeps aspirations of place and destination (literally and figuratively: a home, an education, an office job) in play as both vital and meaningful. It keeps afloat stories of both responsibility fulfillment and personal freedom. The study thus contributes to the anthropology of youth, of internal migration, and of rural and urban transformation in East-Central Africa. The author’s method involved more than 1,000 trips as a passenger. The author interviewed 126 individuals (105 males, 21 females), gathered oral life histories, conducted mapping exercises, and drew on archival materials in the Uganda National Archives and Gulu District Archives. With native speakers of the Acholi language, the author translated poems, songs, proverbs, and folktales of relevance to migration, livelihoods, and cultural understandings of “home and away” in this tumultuous region. A key source for historical change comparisons were the 1950s-era ethnographic fieldnotes of anthropologist Paula Hirsch Foster at Boston University’s African Studies Library.2021-02-05T00:00:00