Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

The Priest's Soldiers: HIV Therapies, Health Identities, and Forced Encampment in Northern Uganda

In this article, I analyze how antiretroviral therapy and associated HIV support programs engendered HIV-based health identities in displacement camps in conflict-affected northern Uganda. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork I conducted between 2006 and 2009, I argue that these health identities were intimately tied to the congested physical and social conditions of the displacement camp. I argue, too, that the interactions between therapeutic practices and biosociality, along with the social observation and labeling of people with HIV/AIDS, produced new health identities. Furthermore, the labels applied to people with HIV—and adopted by them—reflected a local repertoire of meanings associating HIV/AIDS with militarism, Christian missions, camp life, and humanitarianism: thus people living with HIV/AIDS were labeled ‘the priests soldiers.’

Vital instability: ontological insecurity and African urbanisms

This special issue aims to trace the manifold insecurities and responses to these, enfolding ontological concerns, in geographically diverse African urban spaces. The papers in this volume reveal the multiple forms of insecurity characterizing African urbanisms: violence; joblessness; indeterminate legal regimes; infrastructural fragility; continual persecution by state and private actors; epidemic disease and metaphysical disorders, among others. However, while these insecurities are violent and corrosive, they are also generative. Responses to insecurities have multiple forms: evolving and diverse systems of healing, religion and ritual; the production of new technological and media-scapes; and emergent forms of civic resistance, mobility and conviviality. Our concern with African urbanisms is not limited to the geographic continent but also includes and extends to diasporic spaces. Furthermore, our aim is not to essentialize African urbanisms or ontologies, but rather to situate them in their colonial and post-colonial contexts and within historical and contemporary lines of migration. A focus on Africa has been widely by-passed in the so-called and recent ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences. This special issue aims, in part, to address this neglect. However, more than just an application of trends in North American and European thought to the African continent, we wish to show in this introduction, and the special issue more widely, that concerns around ontology have been immanent to African anti-colonial and post-colonial intellectual traditions. Without this, there is a danger of re-enforcing Africanist scholarship itself as a Westernized way of reading African beliefs and lived realities rather than one that gives accounts of people’s realities for what they are and mean according to the people engaged in local contexts. Nonetheless, we will argue here that elements of the new ‘ontological turn’ have relevance to African scholarship because they draw attention to reflexive modes of being, knowing and thinking. Critical to our approach here is an analysis of African conceptions of being and personhood as they evolve in relation to urbanization, new materialities and transnational migrations. The special edition encompasses a range of case studies both on the African continent and in diasporic communities in Europe, including: the generativity of new communications technologies in Nairobi; the insecurities of motorcycle taxis in Kampala; the precarious lives of communities living in the shadows of an oil refinery in Durban; the outbreaks of fire and infrastructural fragility in inner-city Johannesburg; and the emergence of new religious forms in South Africa and Spain; along with exploring migration both within and beyond Africa. Guiding these explorations is a concern with the instability and generativity of African urbanisms; unstable and evolving relations of being and personhood; along with the corporeality and the materiality of the urban form.

The ruinous vitalism of the urban form: ontological orientations in inner-city Johannesburg

This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork, conducted between 2011 and 2016, in unlawfully appropriated buildings, or the ‘dark buildings’, of inner-city Johannesburg in which thousands of the city’s marginalized black populations live, including many cross-border migrants. It argues that responses to traumatic and debilitating events, including fires and building collapse, invoke an unstable ontological multiplicity oriented around the fragility of the urban form. ‘Ruinous vitalism’ refers to this instability and malleability of urban infrastructures, the scars and traces these leave and the capacities for social relations and regeneration they provoke. Ontologies here are not thought of in terms of sets of pre-existent beliefs or essences, but rather modes of orientation. Ontological orientations involve attempts to interpret, stabilize and reconfigure relations of existence through embodied and material practice; they also encompass wider social and metaphysical relations through which meaningful personhood can endure. In particular, the boundaries between insiders and outsiders are formed around the unstable materialities of the city. Furthermore, these orientations are not ahistorical, but emerge in relation to the historical and contemporary conditions and inequalities of the post-apartheid city; they traverse the attempts by municipal agents and private developers to contain and control urban space.

Tormented by Umnyama: An Urban Cosmology of Migration and Misfortune in Inner-City Johannesburg

Umnyama in isiZulu and isiNdebele is a polysemous term—it literally means “darkness” but also refers to misfortune or contagion. In this chapter, it is argued that the concept of umnyama—and the semantically related isinyama and ubunyama—is central to understanding both the social, economic and spiritual insecurities of migrant life in inner-city Johannesburg. Umnyama is not only a conceptual trope but also a subjective experience arising from social and economic hardship, exposure to diseased spaces, distance from ancestral homes and exposure to spiritual and occult threats including witchcraft. The chapter explores these themes through studying migrant life-worlds in the city: the forms of misfortune and insecurity that many face. The chapter then traces how these are dealt with across diverse healing strategies involving traditional healers, Zionist rituals and prophetic churches. Through these case studies it is argued that the concept of umnyama allows us to deconstruct the division between the material and metaphysical experiences of the urban migrant. Ethnographic analysis of umnyama also allows us to document the connection between the daily life conditions of many migrants in the city and religious ritual, showing that ritual and healing practices are closely embedded in daily insecurities.

Conclusion: Towards New Routes

This volume has charted diverse lines of mobility and migration and the ways religion has shaped these, and Johannesburg, in multiple ways. It has explored the sojourns of the living and the dead, the movement of people, ideas and objects, across borders and within city blocks. It has explored the ways in which spirits are experienced as incarnated not only in sacred spaces but also in the banality and tumult of everyday life.

Routes and Rites to the City: Introduction

This book is an exploration of the ways religion and diverse forms of mobility have shaped post-apartheid Johannesburg. By mobility, we refer to not only transnational and intra-national migration but also movements of commodities, ideas and forms, the traffic of objects, sounds and colours within the city. By taking this approach, we aim to re-theorize religion and urban super-diversity (Vertovec 2007, 2015): here super-diversity is viewed not simply in terms of the plurality of religious, ethnic, national and racial groups, but conceived in terms of the multiple movements and enclosures through which religion produces and permeates urban space. The relationship between religion, mobility and urbanization involves both temporal and spatial diversity and the shifting borders of spatial production, belonging and exclusion. This is a constant process of territorialization and de-territorialization of physical, aesthetic and symbolic forms of the city. We argue here that while religion allows for a sense of belonging and capacitates movement, freedom and aspiration in the city, it is also complicit in establishing new forms of enclosure, moral order and spatial and gendered control.

Valleys of Salt in the House of God: Religious Re-territorialisation and Urban Space

The diversity of the religious spaces and practices forms the major content of this chapter, which traces how the religious ordering of space and time extends across other modalities of city life: the moral, the economic, the somatic, the governmental. We aim to show how religion shapes the city’s spatio-temporal fabric through multiple processes of demarcation, territorialisation and movement in a constant play between formal structures and mobility. We argue here that religious groupings in the city aim to establish sites of belonging and moral order through the administration of spaces, objects and bodies, both in tension and in harmony with co-existing orders and territories. Religious groups, formally and informally organised, thus form territories within the built form of the city, but they are also perpetually in motion, perpetually territorialising. The chapter describes various processes of religious territorialisation: the conversion of spaces, rituals and sermons, and the trading and exchange of sacred and spiritual objects and services. Rather than an in-depth ethnography of a single institution, our approach was to travel between different religious organisations and spaces. Our chapter encompasses several areas of inner-city Johannesburg, reflecting a superdiversity of different religious groups within them.

Angels and Ancestors: Prophetic Diversity and Mobility in the City

On almost every block of inner-city Johannesburg there is a poster advertising the wondrous capacities of a “Prophe t, ” one who is said to come from a distant region of Zimbabwe or further afield. The phenomenon of prophets selling their services has spread rapidly in the post-apartheid era; it has come alongside a resurgence of new evangelical and Pentecostal prophetic movements in the city, while adherents to older Zionist and Apostolic traditions persist in gathering on the mountainsides and beneath the bridges of the city. Some evangelical prophets hire soccer stadiums to prophesy during Easter, while others conduct ceremonies on the peripheries and mining wastelands of the city. How can we understand the resurgence of prophecy, and what can it tell us about the post-apartheid urban condition? In this chapter, we make a twofold argument. First, we propose that in its contemporary use, the “prophet ” is a divinely authorised reader and mediator of disjunctive spatial, temporal and moral orders. Second, we argue that prophets are compelled to provide empirical evidence that a provisional freedom and mobility in the city can be achieved—indeed that it can be made visible as an accomplished, if evanescent, fact. At the same time, however, by incarnating the word of God or channelling the Holy Spirit, they can also foreclose certain possibilities for their followers, while imposing forms of social, moral and gendered control.

Disease as Dwelling: Sustaining Life with HIV in Post-displacement Northern Uganda

ABSTRACT In this article, I draw on an ethnographic study focused on the experiences of internally displaced people living with HIV/AIDS in northern Uganda between 2006 and 2013; in particular, I explore the ways in which they have navigated the effects of conflict, displacement, and post-conflict return movements. Here, I argue that disease, more than simply a vulnerability or a social identity, became a way of dwelling with displacement and in the post-displacement landscape. I argue here that a dwelling perspective, derived and adapted from the work of Tim Ingold, provides a lens into understanding the intertwined embodied, social and environmental concerns of people living with HIV in the post-conflict situation. Sustaining life with HIV requires securing food and medication, ensuring networks of care, but also orientation in a changing material and social landscape; without these the disease could be terminal even with access to treatment. This is a particular concern for HIV-positive women who are often denied access to land. In making these arguments I seek to move beyond a dominant public health perspective on HIV and post-conflict return – focused on ‘vulnerability’ and health services - and show that disease becomes integral to social and territorial relations. The perspective of disease as dwelling also aims to advance anthropological perspectives on HIV by focusing on the ways in which sustaining life with HIV/AIDS involves an embodied encounter with a wider landscape, itself formed through natural and political forces.

‘Bones in the wrong soil’: reburial, belonging, and disinterred cosmologies in post-conflict northern Uganda

In the aftermath of the war in northern Uganda between the Lords Resistance Army and the Ugandan government, most of the internally displaced have returned to pre-displacement areas of residence. As efforts to remake homes and reorder lives take centre stage, reburials from sites of displacement to former homesteads have become a widespread practice. Based on an ethnographic study in the formerly largest internal displacement camp in Acholiland, northern Uganda, we argue that the importance of reburial is twofold: first, it stems from a cosmological idiom in which, while in constant flux, belonging is spiritually embedded and territorially circumscribed; and second, the practice of reburial becomes implicated in post-conflict agendas of development and ‘reconstruction’ with pronounced material and cosmological consequences. Yet, contemporary debates in refugee studies have failed to grasp the importance of cosmological concerns and the ways these are bound up with questions of territoriality in post-displacement societies. It is therefore theoretically important to shift the contours of debate around post-conflict return and reconstruction from a focus on the critique of fluidity of social identities – or alternately emphasizing livelihoods and material ‘reconstruction’ – to an interrogation of the myriad ways in which place is made meaningful through ritual action invoking the material and the non-material alike, while at the same time being attentive to how the politics and materiality of post-conflict developmentalism continually shape, intersect with, and disrupt cosmological practice.