Inside West Nile

Mark Leopold is Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London

• 'Why are we cursed?' an introduction - '"Arua" means "prison"': violence & ethnography at the end of the twentieth century - Amin, West Nile & the postcolony, (1995-1962) - Drawing a margin: West Nile under colonial rule, (1961-1925) - 'Rather a difficult tribe to tame': the invention of an uprising & the creation of a colonial district, (1924-1914) - Imperial encounters: the Lado Enclave & the birth of the Nubi, (1913-c.1850) - Lifting the curse: writing history & making peace - Violence, history & representation: an afterword - Bibliography

Nestled in an obscure corner of Uganda on the Sudan and Congo borders, the sector was once fought over by the Belgians, French, Germans and British. 'Gordon of Khartoum', Henry Morgan Stanley, President Theodore Roosevelt, Idi Amin, and others join a host of lesser-known but equally fascinating figures in this temporal journey that starts in the district's troubled present and moves backward. Along the way the reader first encounters a recent locally produced history, then the idiosyncratic anthropological accounts of the indigenous peoples from the mid-20th century, earlier colonial reports, and 19th-century precontact period reports of rogue European ivory hunters and Arab slavers. The journey ends in the singularly irenic past of indigenous origin myths. This compelling portrait of time and space shows how each era's interlopers misrepresented the local human condition with the importation of the theme of violence as a constant feature of the landscape. This is a brilliant example of anthropological scholarship. -