UGANDA: Rebuilding Home and Hearth

PALEMY, Uganda, Oct 23 (IPS) - Dusk gathers in the thickets of Palemy village, in the Gulu district of northern Uganda. Men, women, and children follow foot paths through the dark to the residence of Mzee Otto Yuvani.

Residents have only recently returned to Palemy, about 12 kilometres from the town of Gulu, after years spent sheltering in internally displaced people's camps. The from the Lord's Resistance Army rebel insurgency has been defeated, if not destroyed - Joseph Kony and what remains of his army have fled to the jungles of neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

In Palemy, it is like the coming of the rains after a long dry season of fear. Villagers are busy building new huts and opening up fields.

And, as the sun sets each evening, children and elders meet around the fire place in Yuvani's compound to hear stories, make riddles; to sing and talk. It is a deliberate community initiative to revive an important aspect of their culture that was damaged by the war.

Her wrinkled face is dark beneath a white snow-cap of hair. Sixty-seven-year-old Frieda Okello tells story after story. She opens the evening with the story of a man who had five wives but mistreated one of them.

  As fate would have it, one day the man fell ill and his family sought the services of a medicine man to save his life. She reminds her audience that the medicine men of those days were knowledgeable herbalists, not quacks like today.

  The story goes that this traditional healer advised that for the man to be healed, medicine would have to be extracted from a bamboo tree in the middle of the ocean.  

All five wives of the sick man were to swim the waters and whichever one managed to extract the medicine and swim back to save the man would become the darling of the saved man. 

One after another, his four favoured wives tried to swim the waters, but heavy storms rose a on the ocean and they almost drowned. In the end it's the fifth wife, the woman the man had treated badly, who managed to get the medicine and the man was saved.

Betty Apio, 13, says what she learns from the story is that men should not abuse women. "A woman that you mistreat may be the one to save you, just like in the story."

David Okot draws a very different lesson. "Marrying many wives is not good it only disorganises the family because you cannot love them equally," the thoughtful 14-year-old says.

Elder Otto Yuvani is behind the revival of this long-standing Acholi ritual in Palemy. Wango'o, the practice of gathering around the fire in the evening to tell stories, was one of many casualties of the 20-year insurgency by the LRA. People were not at liberty to practice wango’o during the conflict.  

Seated on a cow skin, Santina Akot recalls that the last time she sat round the bonfire was before the insurgency, 20 or more years ago.

"In the camp you could not sit around the fireplace because, well, there were no fires in the first place. And soldiers would order you to go and sleep as early as 6:00 pm," Yuvani recalls. "It was also dangerous, because (fire) would alert the rebels as well."

"Wango'o is a way of life for us because we the Acholis, the way we build our home... you have the house for children, then the main house, and then the kitchen. And the best way to interact with members of the home is an open place. We cannot change this, even if time keeps on changing," says Yuvani.  

Acholi Paramount chief Achana II says wango'o is an important aspect of Acholi culture. He tells IPS that children who have taken part in the ritual tend to be more disciplined and intelligent compared to others.  

"We have a generation of children who never saw the wango'o, that is why we have thefts and all forms of bad manners."

Yuvani heads the Koro Cultural Trust, a group that with financial support from the Norwegian Refugee Council is spearheading the local effort to return to the bonfire. He says the ritual is more important now than ever before, if a new generation of Acholis that grew up in the camps are to learn their culture.

A reminder that rebuilding communities shattered by war is not just a question of putting up new houses and planting crops; it is also about repairing the battered fabric of shared stories that hold make a collection of people a community.

(END/2009)

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