2018 Volume 83 Issue 2 Pages 274-284
This paper argues the effectiveness of a strategy by President Museveni's campaign for reelection to conduct a series of government re-burials of or commemorative ceremonies for great men with West Nilotic origin who had been murdered by then-President Idi Amin. The attempt is to describe the attitude of the Western Nilotic peoples in Uganda towards a series of events, and to confirm how individuals with voting rights are inseparably connected to the identity and sentiments of their ethnic group. The re-burials clearly show that modern presidential elections in Uganda have an emotional aspect as well as a civic one. The series of events, and the strategic effectiveness displayed, force us to rethink the universality of the idea of the concept of "citizenship." That concept—as with all concepts of Western origin believed to be universal—has been interpreted and appropriated reasonably within an autochthonous cosmogony, and might be seen to be interwoven with autochthonous concepts in Africa and other areas after being imported from the West.
Because of the series of events, the people of Western Nilotic origin, or at least those who can assert to have some connection, supported President Museveni as he honored the great dead men of their ethnicity. This time, the reburial was an epoch-making strategy to address the issue, and even successfully managed to integrate people based on their ethnicity, even though the late Oboth-Ofumbi was not especially beloved by all his neighbors. Another issue was the role of religious and spiritual dimensions in peopleʼs voting behavior. The government's honoring of the dead positively affected people in neighboring communities. It can be said that the dead thus demonstrated agency to the living, having intervened in the actions of the living. In a sense, they—ontologically, the dead—shared a social space with the living in terms of personhood, which, for people of Western Nilotic origin, inevitably includes those who have already died. A consideration of the state of the dead can thus greatly influence their voting behavior.
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