Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [34]
An increase in police, courts, taxes, wage labor, identification papers, conscription, jails, health care, water management, primary education, veterinary services, and livestock-improvement programs—in short the matrix of governance—quelled the traditional raiding, even as it sometimes gave rise to other, new forms of violence. The countryside was administratively contained and thus controlled. The Turkana and other pastoralists were partially absorbed into Kenyan society, and their traditional cultural modes were subsumed by capitalist economic relations and the state’s general regimentation of society.13
Yet in postcolonial Kenya, the pastoralists of the North remained peripheral—for better and for worse—largely neglected, though operating within the half-present social and judicial confines of a modern state complete with schools, laws, clinics, roads, game parks, and a cash economy. But the state’s administrative grip on these lands and populations would weaken considerably starting in the late 1970s, when a series of El Niño–Southern Oscillation–linked droughts began. With that, cattle raiding started to increase once again.
The Guns of Uganda
The British also controlled Uganda until the early 1960s. During the late 1970s it was from independent Uganda that the first flood of guns would enter the Turkana region and much of northern Kenya. What is now Uganda once comprised the former kingdom of Buganda plus a few other African principalities and feudal states, all of which had fallen under British suzerainty through a mix of coercion, cooperatation, and economic might.
By the mid-1950s, Uganda’s old native elite and educated middle classes were watching the progress of the Kenyan Mau Mau, and the brutal campaign against them, with keen interest. The Kenyan rebels served as a cautionary tale for both Africans and white authorities. When Ugandans began agitating for greater political participation and full independence, British authorities wisely made preparations for a scheduled decolonization that began in the late 1950s. Uganda remained a British protectorate until 1962 but thereafter was an independent state.
The first president was an old African aristocrat, Sir Edward Mutesa, who had once been a regional king; his prime minister was the left-leaning nationalist Milton Obete, who nationalized large parts of the economy but was also known for corruption. In 1971 the infamous military officer Idi Amin Dada seized power, and there began a slide toward chaos.14
Born in about 1925 in northern Uganda, as a boy Amin went to primary school and tended his family’s goats. In 1944, he enlisted in the Kings African Rifles, a British colonial regiment that served in East Africa and, during the world wars, elsewhere. Amin saw action in Burma and returned a corporal. He went on to become the local military heavyweight-boxing champion, participated in punitive expeditions against restive tribes in northern Uganda and, in 1953, fought the Mau Mau. Upon his return from Kenya in 1957, preparations for independence were under way in Uganda, and as a prominent noncommissioned officer, Amin was groomed for high rank in the Ugandan Army. By 1964, he was a top commander and ran secret missions into Congo/Zaire in support of the Simbas, a group of pro-Lumumba rebels fighting against the emerging kleptocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko. But mostly, Amin seems to have used his time in Congo to vacuum up ivory and gold.15
As soon as Amin had political control of Uganda, he began to threaten neighboring Tanzania.16 Domestically, Amin’s regime was marked by medieval savagery and modern weaponry. At first his repression had a political logic: violence was directed toward specific socioeconomic ends and served the dominant economic interests. But Amin was, ultimately, insane: a big, roly-poly, smiling, cherubic, khaki-clad sociopath in charge of what would become one of sub-Saharan Africa’s largest armies. The Ugandan state