In 2008 I conducted field work in Uganda’s Karamoja and Sudan’s Toposaland regions. This work was part of a larger project – funded by the lovely people of Canada – to investigate the nexus of pastoralist conflict and livelihoods in the greater Karamoja Cluster. Within my part, I created a photo-documentary element to give the project some color, but more importantly, to develop a method to bring the pen-to-paper research back to the communities that were at the centre of the research.
My work focused on seers and their role in peacemaking, war, migration, healing and medicine, and their substantial influence on customary authorities’ decision making. With my camera, I set out to capture the ‘everyday’ of these men and women and learn how, and to what ends, their communicative capability with the divine impacts the lives of the people who seek their guidance and blessing.
But my photographs weren’t limited to only seers. I was also keen to capture a range of people living their lives, to illustrate how different groups in the region experience common challenges, pains, loves and customs. Six months after completing the field work, I returned to Uganda to put on a three-week travelling photography exhibit, visiting 12 locations in four districts. With rolled-up canvas prints, a lot of string and wire, my colleagues Darlington and Samson loaded up and we hit the road from Kampala northeast to Nakapiripirit, onward to Moroto and Kotido, and ended in wonderous Kaabong near the tri-border area with Kenya and what was still Sudan.
The idea was quite simple: arrive to trading centers on their scheduled market days, set up the photographs however we could, and let people wander among the pictures, run their hands across printed faces and landscapes, and provide them with a safe place to speak openly about what they saw in the photos. My colleagues, conversant in Ngakarimojong, guided small groups of people from photo to photo, providing a general narrative to describe each photograph and discussing the findings of the larger project – the impacts of armed violence and cattle raiding on peace, health, education, customs, and inter-group relations.
For nearly everyone, it was the first time to see a photography exhibit and one that featured themselves, and so we were eager to give people space to mix together, speak freely about the issues raised by the work, and share ideas among themselves. In addition to the relative novelty of the exhibit itself, people were keen to see photographs of other groups including their traditional adversaries – to touch their faces and imagine how their lives may be similar or different from their own. For instance, a photograph of Toposa women, dressed to the nines and dancing in an open field in a day-long celebration of the return of their youth herders after the dry-season migration, evoked discussion among one Jie community in Kotido of the benefits of peace and the importance of preserving and practicing traditions, festivities, and, as one elderly women put it while reflecting on an earlier time before the gun, life.
The exhibits were up from dawn to mid-afternoon, allowing market vendors, school children, policemen, teachers, male and female youth, elders, and people who travelled from distant manyattas visiting the market to come and go as they liked, share insights, ask questions, and engage each other about issues of security, and social and economic challenges both at home and in the wider region. It was common for people, after learning from one of my colleagues about the research and its findings, to then act as guides themselves and walk people through the photographs to tell their own story and what they saw in the photographs.
After the exhibits, I returned home to produce a hard-bound book that included the findings of the work, the photographs exhibited, and pictures of the exhibits themselves. Then I returned to Karamoja and Toposaland to distribute the books – with English and Ngakarimojong text – to as many communities as we could. Pictured here is one of those books with four Ik women on Mt. Moroto.
© Khristopher Carlson Photography
