The violent commodification of life in Uganda

The investor left / with our land yesterday, / still, we scratch our destiny / from hands of a curtailing fate.” – Harriet Anena, “Scratching Destiny”

One day in 1954, or perhaps the following year, junior workers at the Uganda Game and Fisheries Department covertly dropped Nile perch off a pier in Entebbe, changing Lake Victoria forever. Its waters had hitherto been flecked with colourful enkejje, varieties of haplochromine cichlids, which nurture their young in their mouths. “The Haplochromis is generally regarded as ‘trash fish’ of very little value,” wrote Alec Anderson, the British fisheries officer who masterminded the introduction of Nile perch. “It seems clear that the obvious way to utilise Haplochromis is to introduce a predator which will convert them into something worthwhile.”

Within a few years, Tanzanian fishermen were hooking Nile perch on the distant shore. By the 1980s, the lake had reached a tipping point, its balance upset by algal blooms, falling oxygen levels and the voracious appetite of the new intruder. More than half of the haplochromine species vanished. Dutch biologists wrote that their disappearance “may well represent the largest extinction event among vertebrates during this century”. Meanwhile, the economic value of the fishery rose fivefold because the meatier Nile perch could be sold to international buyers. An ecological disaster was a commercial triumph.

Fisherfolk referred to Nile perch as “lake gold”, even though little of the catch made it to their tables. European and Asian traders opened fish processing factories on the shoreline, where fillets were packed in Styrofoam and ice then flown to distant corners of the world. By the mid-nineties, fish had become Uganda’s second-biggest export; the factory owners today claim that the sector supports more than a million people all told.

But the commercialisation of the lake also required new tactics to police it, because the lucrative Nile perch was itself threatened by overfishing. After half-hearted experiments with community management,, the government settled on military patrols. Soldiers arrested and beat the barias who man the boats. The poor could not bribe their way out of trouble, nor afford the larger boats that were now mandated by law. “When the government programme comes, they come with those who are educated, elite, rich,” I was once told by a veteran fisherman, “and the government sends its soldiers to hunt for the poor man.” At the landing stages along the shoreline,Fish people whisper of the things they have lost: their houses demolished, their boats set on fire, their friends drowned while trying to escape.

The parable of the lake is the story of all Uganda: of its land, trees, minerals, cattle, crops, labour, politics. After adjusting for inflation, the economy has grown more than eightfold in size since Yoweri Museveni seized power in 1986. But this is not experienced as widespread prosperity. The same process of commodification which has brought profit to some is felt by others as a source of uncertainty and threat, often entwined with violence. Uganda’s predicament cannot be understood in narrowly political terms – democracy, militarism, rights – without also addressing these social ructions. This is how the market, like the Nile perch, preys on things it considers “of very little value” and “converts them into something worthwhile”.

Big Fish, Lucrative Ponds

The dry plains of Karamoja, in Uganda’s north-east, are as distant from the squally waters of Lake Victoria as it is possible to be. Seen from Kampala, it is a permanent periphery, its backwardness evidenced by deadly cycles of cattle raiding. “We shall not wait for Karamoja to develop,” said Milton Obote, the country’s first prime minister after independence. This may seem an unlikely place to look for a commercial transformation.

But to view cattle raids as a primordial relic is mistaken. In 1979, soldiers abandoned the Moroto armoury after the fall of Idi Amin. For days Karamojong emptied its stores, loading guns onto donkeys like bundles of firewood. It was a catalytic moment, like a fish being tossed into a lake. The proliferation of small arms allowed the longstanding practice of raiding to expand in lethality and scope.

Young men had once raided to restock herds, accumulate bridewealth, or show their daring. Those motives were now supplemented by monetary gain. Economies of scale allowed gangs to turn raiding into a business, selling cows into trading networks which fed the demand for meat in distant cities or swelled the herds of wealthy elites. During the most recent upsurge of violence, which began in 2019, everyone from the president downwards decried the “commercialisation” of raiding. Herders followed the footprints of stolen herds until the trail went dead at tarmac roads, where cows had been loaded onto lorries and driven away. Somehow, the vehicles made it through official checkpoints. Local leaders wondered, pointedly, why they found cartridges of army-issue bullets after raids. 

Karamoja is being emptied of cattle, just as Lake Victoria is being emptied of fish. A survey in 2017 by the Karamoja Resilience Support Unit, a research group, found that 57% of households did not have enough animals to live primarily off their livestock. Instead, they survive by other labours: brewing beer, digging for wages, felling trees for charcoal, quarrying for limestone, sifting the earth for gold, or escaping along the same roads as the vanished cattle.

When the army sweeps through towns at dawn, rounding up young men in its search for illegal guns, it first releases those who speak good English, only later the boda-boda drivers, and last of all the men who transport jerrycans of homebrewed kwete on the back of bicycles. “They are now categorising people based on how they appear,” said one detainee, speaking to me two days after a round-up in 2022. The emerging class structure doubles as a hierarchy of suspicion.

Leaving the land 

The lake and the plains are each, in their own way, places on the margins. But the same process of commodification can also be found in the agricultural heart of the country, in the struggle for land. Since independence in 1962, the area of cropland in Uganda has slightly more than doubled, but the rural population has risen nearly sixfold. Two-thirds of farming households now own less than a hectare, an area the size of a large football pitch; around 40% of them own less than half of that. The growth of cities has also pushed up the price of land on their outskirts.

The strains are especially visible in the Buganda region, which contains the capital Kampala. Much of the land here falls under an unusual system of mailo tenure, where the rights of landowners and occupiers overlap. By law, anyone with kibanja rights in a parcel of land cannot be evicted so long as they pay a nominal ground rent, fixed at a few dollars a year. But landlords are trying to get around that restriction so that they can cash in on rising land prices. One strategy is to sell the title to new owners with political connections, who use their influence to evict kibanja-holders in disregard of the law. The implicit justification is that land should go to those who can make the most profitable use of it, which is assumed to mean commercial farms, industrial enterprises and residential developments. “If you have something prime you don’t want to sell, [land-grabbers] will use other means,” complained Matia Lwanga Bwanika, the chairman of Wakiso district, when I met him in 2023.

Similar pressures which are felt all over the country, even though land markets generally remain thin. In the Acholi region of the north, many farmers returned from displacement camps after the war with Joseph Kony’s rebels to find their fields earmarked for sugar plantations or game reserves. In Bunyoro, land wrangles exploded in anticipation of oil development. As the researcher Yusuf Serunkuma has noted, the payment of cash compensation in instances of land acquisition reshapes local economies, livelihoods, gender relations and much else besides. “Nowadays they have seen money has arrived, they have changed things,” sings the Alur artiste Professor Lengmbe in his song “Refinery”, explaining that men now want “a brown [wife]” because “the one at home is too black”.

Time Bomb

In each of the examples, there is an undertone of Malthusian pessimism: a sense that there are no longer enough fish, cattle or land to go around. But this is more than a crisis of population growth. The cash economy is pressing on daily life from all sides – a grip that is also felt in the expansion of casual wage labour, the illicit trades in timber and charcoal, the cutthroat practices of coffee marketing, the spiralling costs of political campaigns, the struggle to pay school fees, or the relentless hustle of city life. Chains of commerce stretch regionally, as in the cattle trade, or internationally, as in the export of fish, gold and domestic workers. Profit flows to whoever has the most political influence, legal muscle, market power or access to credit – or simply the least scruples.

The point here is not to pine for some pristine version of the past, which never existed, nor to romanticise small-scale subsistence, which is no way for a country to grow rich. Some Ugandans find opportunities as “entrepreneurs” or “consumers”; even capitalism’s harshest critics recognise its tremendous power to marshal resources, enable specialisation and expand production. But the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions”, as Marx called it, is especially turbulent in a society like contemporary Uganda, at the sharp end of the global order, which since the 1980s has been a testing ground for market-led reform.  

The Hungarian political economist Karl Polanyi, writing in the 1940s, described a “double movement” in the history of capitalism: first a drive to let the market loose from its social moorings, and then a counter-movement to contain it. In today’s Uganda, where unions, co-operatives and political parties have been undermined, an organised pushback is hard to discern. In his 2014 hit “Time Bomb”, the singer Bobi Wine lamented the high price of education and electricity, but as an opposition leader, he has shown little interest in economics. Whereas the factories and mines of industrial countries were historically a seedbed for solidarity, Uganda’s informal economy is fragmented and its workers atomised. They are too busy looking for “some ka money” within the existing system to invent a new one.

But that does not mean that Ugandans are at ease with the new dispensation. Discontent can be found everywhere, from protests against land grabs to the burning of sugarcane plantations to the laments of dissenting intellectuals. And it lives in the murmurs of everyday conversation. “It’s because of thieves,” a woman in Wakiso told me as stick-wielding thugs eyed her banana garden. “They are the ones mixing up the country.” The men had been sent by a surveyor who wanted to develop the land, to sell it, to profit from it – in short, to convert it into something worthwhile.

 Liam Taylor is a freelance journalist. He was based in Uganda from 2016 until 2022.

Featured photograph: Fisherman on Lake Victoria in January 2023 ( Wiki Commons)