Inside West Nile: Violence, History, & Representation On An African Frontier (World Anthropology)

West Nile is best known as the home of Uganda's notoriously violent dictator, Idi Amin. But the area's association with violence goes back well into the colonial era. This book examines the relationships between past and present and among violence, narrative, and memory in the former West Nile district. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in the district capital, Arua town, during the warfare of the late 1990s, the author adopts the unconventional approach of moving backwards from the present through successive layers of the past. He develops an anthropological critique of the forms of historical representation and their relationship with the human realities of war and violence in a border area too often portrayed as a "heart of darkness." The book contributes to debates in political anthropology on border areas, the local state, and the nature of the "post-colonial." It will be of interest to all those who study questions of violence, narrative, and memory.