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RONALD R. ATKINSON The Roots of Ethnicity: the origins of the Acholi of Uganda before 1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, 320 pp., $3295, ISBN 0 8122 3248 8.
The Acholi of northern Uganda are a Luo-speaking group with a distinct ethnic identity. Following the end of British rule, they became one of the most important Ugandan 'tribes', and Acholis have played a part in the political upheavals which have plagued their country's recent history. An Acholi military officer briefly became Uganda's president in 1985, and since Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement came to power in 1986 their home area has been almost continuously insecure. Fighting was particularly intense during the late 1980s, when various guerrilla forces, including the famous Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena, waged campaigns against government forces.
This attractively presented and clearly written book begins with a brief outline of what happened to the Acholi from the turn of the century up to the horrors of Amin's rule in the 1970s, but the bulk of it deals with developments long before those events. It focuses on the establishment of numerous small chiefdoms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The author links this development with the formation of Acholi ethnicity. For Atkinson, it is impossible to understand ethnicity in modern Africa without studying the more distant past. He recognises the importance of Frederik Barth's ideas, and he notes that much insightful historical research on Africa has built directly on Barth's work. Nevertheless, he maintains that the extant literature on ethnicity is limited in scope in that it has a primarily twentieth-century focus. In his view `the social order and political culture that came essentially to define an emergent Acholi had become widely and firmly entrenched even before 1800. And because this order-based on lineages with an overlay of chiefly rule-is prevalent across East, Central and Southern Africa, the investigation of its early evolution in Acholi will have relevance beyond the particular case in point' (p. 17).
Most of Atkinson's material is drawn from the oral traditions collected under the auspices of the History of Uganda Project, based at Makerere University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, the book may be viewed as a late flowering from that school,...