Since the National Resistance Army/Movement took over power in 1986, a number of conference papers have been written and published on Uganda. In most of these papers, there were attempts to assess the performance of the Ugandan economy and society in the decades of political and economic turmoil as well as to look for possibilities of recovery and development.2 Part of those assessments focused on the food question in light of the fact that no country can hope to develop without an adequate food supply for its population.
This paper specifically examines one of the views on the food situation in Uganda, the view that Uganda has been and continues to be self-sufficient (read self-supporting) in her food requirements. Our basic argument is that this view is a misconception of the Ugandan reality. It is based on a thin empirical base, and the analysis was done within a conceptual and theoretical framework that is clearly inadequate. We proceed to show that a correct grasp of the food question in Uganda requires a different conceptual and methodological approach. By suggesting such an approach we hope to stimulate fresh thinking on the food question in Uganda and to raise the level of the debate.
The articulated version of the presumption of a "food self-sufficient Uganda" is most strenuously advanced in the works of Jamal Vali. These include "Structural Adjustment and Food Security"(1985); "Uganda Economic Crisis: Dimensions and Cure" (1987) and "Coping under Crisis in Uganda"(1988). Jamal Vali's basic argument is that the economic and political crisis that characterised life in Uganda in the 1970s and 1980s did not lead to a decline in food production. He argues that "by and large most of the families remained as self-sufficient in food as before and might have even intensified their food cultivation, devoting some of the labour freed from export crops to food crops". He goes on to say that "the collapse was confined to the monetary sector; the subsistence sector remained immune from economic and political upheavals, which of course, explains its basic strength in most African countries". Vali tells us that his conclusions are based on the following: (a) national statistics; (2) his perception of the situation; (3) the conclusions arrived at by the various missions that came to Uganda; and (4) other pieces of evidence (Vali, 1987). In the following pages we raise empirical, conceptual and theoretical issues.
The first issue has to do with the empirical evidence to support the view of an "immune" subsistence sector and a "self-sufficient" Uganda. Vali dismisses FAO statistical figures and proceeds to employ national statistics. He argues that "while it would be wrong to attach too much weight on to the data in view of Uganda's statistical base in recent years, we set greater store by these statistics than by the FAO figures for several reasons" (Vali, 1988, p.682). One of them is that FAO lacks an "independent basis for arriving at production figures ... and it generally uses whatever national figures reported to it." The problem is that Vali himself did not undertake an independent investigation to disprove the FAO figures. This is not to say that the FAO figures are correct. Rather it is to make the point that one is left unconvinced of a method that dismisses one set of figures without convincingly showing that the alternate figures are a sound basis for deriving valid conclusions. The fact is both FAO and Vali employed national statistics which are well-known for being inaccurate. Ben Kiryegera noted correctly that official statistics are inadequate, inaccurate and so outdated as to be of any utility. "How, for instance, can we formulate a national Food Security Plan when we do not know how much we produce and consume of the different food items?" (1988, p.5).3
Besides national statistics, Vali's conclusions are based on his perception of the food situation in Uganda and other pieces of evidence he does mention. In another article, Vali repeats the conclusions and says that his conclusions are in "keeping with informed opinion and what one would intuitively expect to have happened in the face of a breakdown of the monetary sector" (Vali, 1988, p.685). As methods of scientific inquiry, perceptions, opinions, and intuitions have definite and serious limitations. For instance, on what criterion is his perception based? What are these other "pieces of evidence" he is talking about? Even if we were to agree with his perceptions, it is a serious claim, for instance, to state that Kampala city (the capital of Uganda) became self-sufficient (self-supporting) in the decades of political and economic turmoil. The existence of small plots of plants does not imply that these small gardens could provide the necessary food requirements for Kampala residents. This is clearly evident from a recent investigation into the so-called "urban agriculture" (Maxwell and Zziwa, 1990, p.43). According to the findings of that research, only 20 per cent of the food supply in Kampala originated from a 5-mile radius of the city. The other 80 per cent came from beyond the city.
Others have raised doubts about Vali's conclusions. Ngau (1987) questions Vali's conclusions that food production did not decline and that the "subsistence" sector remained immune to political and economic upheavals. Says Ngau, "this is misleading because there was no real increase in food production". According to Ngau "real productivity per hectare for both food crops and export crops declined by 8.4 per cent between 1965 and 1982 in Uganda. Cereal imports and food aid in Uganda increased threefold since 1974" (p. 195-6). Figures from the Ministry of Planning, an official source, show that in 1982 alone Uganda imported food worth U.shs. 3,013,768,370 of which rice alone accounted for U.shs. 118,241,938 (quoted in Nsibambi, 1988). To this we add Karamoja region that has been and continues to be prone to famine and food shortages. The 1980 famine, for instance, is estimated to have killed over 30,000 people (see Beverley Gatrell, 1988; Mamdani, 1981; Okudi, 1991). There are abundant reports that show the frequency and scale of massive food shipments for Karamoja victims (Mamdani, 1981; Mukyusa, 1980)4. In yet another area, Masindi district, 45,000 persons were reported to have suffered from acute food crisis in 1984 (Minutes of Masindi District Relief and Resettlement Committee in Nyangabyaki Bazaara, 1987). In 1989, over one million people in West Nile faced acute hunger and starvation (Yunusu, 1989). The government had to provide 100 million Ugandan shillings for famine relief. For the same cause, three non-governmental organisations gave 280,000 US dollars; US$230,000 was obtained from FAO; the Lutheran World Federation provided US$25,000; and the Kuwait-based Islamic Relief Agency promised US$25,000.
One may stretch the arguments to pre-1972 levels; what was the food situation like? Was it a golden age? Vali gives an impression that the food situation in Uganda has always been satisfactory in all places except Ankole and Karamoja. Consider, for instance, the picture portrayed below for the year 1966.
Table 1
Monthly Expenditure on Food Relief for Four Districts
District |
No. of People |
Monthly No. of Bags |
Cost per Month(pounds) |
Karamoja |
14,667 |
1,100 |
3,300 |
Bukedi |
12,031 |
844 |
2,001 |
Bugisu/Sebei |
9,030 |
452 |
925 |
Acholi |
3,437 |
200 |
400 |
Total |
39,165 |
2,596 |
6,626 |
Source: Report on the Famine Situation as at 30th June 1966.
File S/AGR/511. National Archives, Entebbe.
The point is the pre-1972 period was not a golden age. Secondly, it is not only Karamoja and Ankole that are more vulnerable to famine and food shortages. If anything, most parts of the country are vulnerable, the extent varying from one ecological zone to another. Thus some areas are more vulnerable to famine or food shortages than others, and even within the same ecological zone some social groups are more prone to hunger and starvation than others. It is not enough, therefore, to say that the subsistence sector is driven by the logic of "self-sufficiency". There is need for an empirically based investigation of what actually happens on the ground. Without such investigation, the approach adopted by Vali can only lead to a false sense of security.
Vali's other source of error seems to originate in the assumptions behind the concepts he employs. These are "subsistence", "self-sufficiency" and "food security". These concepts have always been a trap for uncritical researchers. The in-built assumptions tend to close off any further inquiry into the subject. Once it was widely believed that pre-colonial African societies were "subsistence" oriented and "self-sufficient". In response, some historians dug up the records of explorers and travellers and researched in the oral records to prove that, before the coming of colonialism, there was extensive production of food stuffs purposely for the market (Cohen, 1983; Tosh, 1978; Uzoigwe, 1978; Pottier, 1986). Only that in their pre-occupation with hitting back at colonial ideological distortions, some of these historians ended up romanticizing the pre-colonial past as if the mere existence of marketing in food stuffs signified absence of famines and food shortages.
I have already shown that there are pitfalls arising out of these descriptive categories. This comes out in my work which in part was a critique of the colonial policy of "District Food Self-sufficiency" (Nyangabyaki Bazaara, 1988, ch.4). This policy was the colonial state's response to recurring food crises, an attempt to guarantee peasant food supplies as a necessary pre-condition for the expansion of commodity production for export. The policy amounted to the compulsory growing of famine reserves by each peasant household. Referring to this policy, Erhlich wrote that "if British administration had done nothing else it would deserve credit for having first reduced and then removed the age-long dread of famine" (Erhlich, 1976). Deborah Bryceson, writing from a different theoretical perspective, argued that the policy of famine reserves in Tanganyika stablised peasant food supply (Bryceson, 1978). We should not miss two points here.
First, that the policy was implemented at all is testimony enough that it is not always true that "subsistence" farmers are "self-sufficient" as Vali argues. And to say this is to ignore the inter-household food exchange networks which this approach does not recognise. Secondly, the uncritical swallowing of the phrase "food self-sufficiency" led the two scholars to imagine that this phrase meant that self-sufficiency or stabilization was ever attained. In my work, already referred to, I showed that the policy of "District Food Self-sufficiency" did not solve the problem of famine and food shortages. On the contrary, famine and food shortages continued to afflict Bunyoro-Kitara although the frequency and intensity varied from one ecological zone to another and was dependent on the nature of the class pattern in a given locality.
It is obviously incorrect to equate food self-sufficiency with food security and in turn with subsistence production. Food self-sufficiency, as Dhliwayo (1988) defined it, is a situation whereby a country relies on "100% of the staple food needs of a nation from its own domestic production, and regardless of economic and climatic variations"(p. 15). Food self-sufficiency can fall short of Food Security which, as defined by the World Bank in Poverty and Hunger (1986), is "access by all people at all times to enough food for an active and healthy life" (quoted in Dhliwayo, 1988). Following this, several questions can, therefore, be posed with respect to Vali's assertions of "subsistence production and food self-sufficiency". Taking the household as a unit of analysis as he does, what type of food crops did households remain sufficient in? Does Vali imply that the subsistence sector remained static with no changes in the organisation of production activities, in the type of crops grown and in access to productive resources? At the minimum, can we say that there was no resource depletion so as to alter the material basis of their self-sufficiency? If changes occurred, as they should, which households benefitted, which ones lost? These questions have deeper implications but the problems arise from the limitations inherent in the theoretical framework he employed.
Vali's theoretical perspective is one that looks at African agriculture in terms of "dualism" -- the existence of the "traditional/subsistence" sector side by side with the "modern" cash crop/industrial sector. The former was held to be exclusively for the production of food crops on a "subsistence" basis while the latter is for export/cash crops. In the 1960s, it was the modern sector that was the object of investigation and analysis. The results, "rural studies" as they were called, were aimed at overcoming the technical and physical bottlenecks to expanded production of export crops. The "traditional/subsistence" sector, a sector within which the bulk of the food was produced, was not given the attention it deserved. It was simply assumed that in this sector households engaged in the production of food stuffs for their consumption and since they did not have to resort to the market for food needs, they were presumed to be self-sufficient! In turn, these assumptions precluded any meaningful investigation into the nature and dynamics of the so-called "traditional/subsistence" sector. This sector was, so to speak, a black box about whose inside we knew nothing.
In short, the sum total of the so-called subsistence sector is defined in terms of what it is not, i.e., not the modern cash sector. It is no wonder that Cowen calls it simply an ideology. Cowen argued that
A model of subsistence agriculture was put forward by administrators as that pattern of production that was supposed to exist in the past and serve as the vision for the future production. During the colonial period, state personnel were fearful of the frightful consequences that commercialised production was expected to impose upon the poorer people of the countryside. In counterpoising food production for household use against commercialisation, many officers of the colonial administration created an ideology of subsistence production ... The ideological label subsistence producer remains to this day(Cowen, 1983, p.200).5
To underline his "immune subsistence" argument, Vali claims that in the "lost decades" there was no increase in the marketing of foodstuffs because there was no increase in urban population and that the existing population responded to inflationary pressures and low incomes by growing their own foodstuffs. The validity of this is indeed questionable. In terms of statistics it may be true that there was no significant increase in the population before and after that Asian expulsion of 1972. But what is missing is the acknowledgement that the cultural composition of the urban areas changed overnight. Towns became populated by Africans with totally different diet needs. Whereas the Asians ate rice as their staple food which was imported, the Africans who replaced them ate local foodstuffs -- maize meal, matooke (bananas), groundnut, etc. This change definitely acted as a stimulus to increased food marketing to a scale unknown before. Besides, Vali's dependence on official statistics led to another error of failing to detect a parallel market (Magendo) whose operation eludes official statistics gatherers. A lot of illegal trade in foodstuffs was carried out between the countryside and urban places, on the one hand, and between the rural areas and the neighboring countries of Sudan, Rwanda and Kenya, on the other. There was substantial smuggling of maize, groundnut,beans and other foodstuffs, the magnitude of which is yet to be established.
In addition, it is far-fetched a claim that the urban population became self-reliant in producing their food. This is empirically questionable. For example, foodstuffs produced in the environs of Kampala are for both "subsistence" and marketing. Maxwell and Zziwa's data show that the 20 per cent food supply from the environs of Kampala is not exclusively grown for home consumption; a big fraction is grown purposely for sale whether based on peasant or capitalist forms of production. Thus, the assumptions about food production in Uganda need to be re-examined. The subsistence context of food production is dynamic, ever changing to be captured by the conventional assumptions about African agriculture.
In his writings, Vali cautions us from going overboard as there are "regions where food is in chronic short supply and famine is never away; and finally that even within the food surplus regions, unequal access to productive assets means that a significant proportion of farmers fail to meet their food needs" (Vali, 1987, p.125). This is the crucial point but Vali does not pursue it further than the lines quoted here. A country may be self-sufficient but certain fractions of its population may not be food secure! Mamdani's address to the Red Cross sponsored conference further illuminates this argument. He gave a story of a thin man and a fat man during the Sahelian famine of the 1970s. "Said the fat man to the thin man, `You should be ashamed of yourself. If someone visiting the country saw you before anyone else he would think there was famine here'. Replied the thin man, `If he saw you next he would know the reason for that famine.'" (Mamdani, 1985, emphasis mine).
The Ugandan population has increasingly differentiated with far-reaching implications regarding the character of food security. Recent researches in the Ugandan countryside reveal that the peasantry is differentiated into land labourers, poor, middle and rich peasantries and capitalists (Mamdani, 1984, 1985; Nyangabyaki Bazaara, 1991). These different peasant strata and classes have unequal access to productive assets. Social differentiation implies unequal access to productive resources, food availability and food security. To begin with, the 1975 Land Reform Decree passed by Idi Amin led to a resurgence of landlordism that the colonial state had tried to arrest with the 1928 Busulu and Envujjo law. (Mamdani, 1984; Nyangabyaki Bazaara, 1987, 1988, 1991). The decree created insecurity of tenure for most of the producers. Absentee bureaucrats converted the land of "subsistence" farmers into their private lands. This conversion created a landless category who became either lumpens, squatters, or tenants. At the same time, population increase among the so-called subsistence farmers led to land subdivision to the point that some of the youth can not access land through inheritance. They have to work, save and accumulate money to buy some land, a very difficult option for many youths. Furthermore, the economic crisis affected the poor so seriously that when confronted with social crisis such as school fees, bride price or sickness they sold off some pieces of their land, mainly to speculators.
Empirically based research that is beginning to appear shows clearly that some peasants do not have enough land to cultivate.6 In some areas like Kakindo, visited by the author, community bush necessary for shifting cultivation is no longer available. The peasantry, especially the poor and middle peasants are forced to till land year in, year out, without fallowing. This means that the land-hungry abandon some crops that require fertile soils for those that can do well in poor soils. During the 1989 famine in West Nile, Asedri noted that resource depletion in West Nile was one of the factors behind the famine. "Lack of virgin land to the farmers to cultivate millet takes a lion's share of the blame in explaining the sharp decline in millet production in West Nile as it can only do well in areas that have been fallow for at least three years". In its place has been cassava which has almost become a staple food for the people in West Nile. Yet cassava was originally a periphery crop. It was introduced by the colonial state in the 1930s as a compulsory famine reserve crop. Thus for the land-poor, productivity declined, changing their "subsistence", "self-sufficiency" and "food security" levels.
On the other hand, some peasants with inadequate land resorted to "borrowing" of land. This borrowing is not without costs: access to land is conditional to the payment of disguised rent in the form of cash, labour or agricultural produce. Rent affects agricultural productivity and innovation. The payment of rent is a transfer of resources from one stratum to another. The one losing resources is incapacitated in terms of savings necessary for the purchase of new or better implements. Furthermore, the stratum "borrowing" land is restricted in the types of crops he/she can grow. He or she can not grow permanent crops such as banana, coffee, etc., because perennial crops have a tendency of strengthening the claim of the borrower over the land, causing endless litigations. In brief, "borrowing" processes create paralysis in as far as productivity/production is concerned.
A full understanding of the extent and nature of these processes requires concrete research. In the meantime, analysis of the existing evidence does cast doubt on the claim that the "subsistence" sector in post-1972 Uganda remained the same as that in the pre-1972 period. The potentials of Uganda, which I believe influences Vali's perception, should not lead us into a false sense of security. The poor sections of Ugandan society are perennially with food shortages and are vulnerable to starvation in times of environmental stress, drought, floods, etc. They may be "food self-sufficient" but not "food secure". For instance, in Kitende village on the Kampala-Entebbe Road, Mamdani discovered that the main staple food consumed by the land labourers and poor peasants were no longer matooke and beans but cassava with a bitter sauce of Ntula. Middle peasants ate cassava with beans, sometimes potatoes with greens (dodo). These two classes, land labourers and poor peasants, were continuously in a situation of malnutrition. In Amuoma village, Apac District, Mamdani discovered that the poor peasantry were continuously deficient in food while the capitalists, who were not, took advantage of this deficit to hire peasant labour at very low wages. While the gardens of the capitalists or the rich peasants were being attended to, those of the poor peasantry were left to grow bush. My experiences in Bujenje and Kakindo villages in Masindi District reveal deepening inequalities, with the poor strata of the rural community eating very poor diets mainly composed of starch. The peasantry had even developed a language to express this changed circumstances. At the time of my research in 1987 and 1988, they talked of their increasing dependence on Wandabahoga, literally meaning "you used to bypass me". This word refers to a type of banana (used for brewing a local wine and gin) they had resorted to as opposed to the edible plantains they went for as they bypassed Wandabahoga. Furthermore, a 1989 UNICEF publication estimates that "under normal circumstances in Uganda, about 2% of children are acutely malnourished" (UNICEF, 1989, p.42). Food security differs in qualitative and qualitative terms among the different peasant strata usually lumped under what is dubbed as the "subsistence" system.
What is even more questionable is Vali's claim that the subsistence sector remained immune to political upheavals and civil wars. In one way this is to dismiss the role of the state and conflict. Here Vali clearly embraces the shortcomings one finds in the developmentalist perspective. As Maxwell pointed out, "as recently as 1984, conflict was all but ignored in most considerations of African agriculture" (Maxwell, 1986, p. 25). Viewed from this angle of a neutral state and absence of conflict, the subsistence sector remains immune to political upheavals. It is not possible then for one to see the fact that there are possibilities of the state creating "political" famines by forcing subsistence farmers to do what it wants. In the 1970s the use of extra-economic methods of extracting resources were commonplace and definitely had an impact on the subsistence levels of the peasants. The civil wars of the 1980s disrupted production and put the food security of the affected in jeopardy. For example, my research in Masindi district, located in western Uganda, shows that, in this district alone, 14,196 families were displaced by the war between Obote's soldiers and the National Resistance Army (NRA) of Yoweri Museveni in the 1981-1984 period (Masindi Relief and Resettlement Committee quoted in Nyangabyaki Bazaara, 1987). Because of the war and intermittent supply of agricultural inputs, the drought of 1984 deteriorated into famine and food shortages. As mentioned above, the Masindi Relief and Resettlement Committee recorded about 45,000 persons faced with starvation and relief food had to be mobilised to avert starvation. Similar situations can be cited for the war affected areas like Luwero, West Nile, the Northern and North-eastern regions of Uganda. UNICEF estimates that between 50,000 to 200,000 people were killed in the Luwero Triangle during the 1981-1986 war, and with the displacements, the population of the triangle declined from 700,000 to 150,000 people. This definitely cut a deep swathe in the labour supply for agricultural production, a critical factor in hoe agriculture.
Instead of concretely understanding the changes taking place in the "subsistence" sector and the changing relationships between the producers and the state, relationships which determine the vulnerability to famine, Vali chooses a psychological explanation. In the attempt to justify his argument that the decline of export crop production did not lead to a corresponding increase in food production, Vali argues that the "subsistence" farmers instead withdrew into "leisure". Despite the theoretical advances of the 1970s and the 1980s regarding African agriculture and the peasantry, Vali still assigns psychological explanations about peasant behaviour. Yet psychological claims have been criticised as ahistorical; they deny the so-called subsistence sector of its own dynamism. As the underdevelopment school noted, the "subsistence" sector was a product of the history in which the third world was incorporated into the world capitalist system. The psychological explanations of want for "leisure", "laziness" or the claims of natural calamities are therefore misleading.
Quite interestingly, the "leisure" theory has become a pivot in predicting the likely consequences of the IMF/World Bank sponsored Structural Adjustment Programmes(SAPs) in Uganda. In 1981, SAPs were adopted to reactivate export-led agricultural production through devaluation and price incentives. Vali argues that a reactivation of the production of export crops will not undermine the production of food crops. Therefore, even under SAP, Uganda will remain food secure. Admittedly, there has been no comprehensive evaluation of the impact of SAP on agricultural production. But the little evidence available seem to suggest that export-led agricultural production is bound to undermine food production in general and particular foods in particular. For example, in 1989, the government campaigned for the growing of maize and even advanced non-secured loans to peasants. The aim was to export some of the maize through barter arrangements to ease the foreign exchange crisis. That year there was indeed a doubling of maize acreage, for instance, in Masindi District.7 Since then there has been an upward trend in the production of maize. Simultaneously there was a decline in other crops like groundnuts, simsim, millet, etc. Thus, under structural adjustment, not only are a few crops stimulated at the expense of others but also a few social groups, mainly the rich peasantry and capitalist farmers, have benefitted. At the same time the wage freezes and layoffs in the civil service and in government parastatals as a result of IMF dictates are reducing the expansion of the food market. Moreover, the increasing enclosure of land and marginalisation of the real producers by absentee landowners is further undermining agricultural production. The removal of petroleum subsidies have escalated the costs of transport of both agricultural commodities as well as inputs. Finally, the removal of subsidies on agricultural inputs are bound to affect negatively the productivity of the majority of the producers who have no means to purchase the non-subsidized inputs. What this implies is that food production is bound to stagnate if not decline and the food security of the households in poorer peasant stratums will be jeopardised (see Nyangabyaki Bazaara, 1991b).
It is clear from our analysis that our empirical knowledge of the food position in Uganda is limited. There is, therefore, a need for undertaking more empirical research. But much more important, there is a need to re-examine critically the concepts we use in food analysis. There is too much confusion around the concepts of "food security", "food self-sufficiency" and "subsistence". In turn, these conceptual problems seem to be rooted in the hegemony of the developmentalist paradigm in the analyses of African agriculture. In as far as "subsistence" system is taken to be a static system and the state a neutral instrument, there is no possibility of deriving correct conclusions that can form the basis for a viable food policy. We have demonstrated that the so-called "subsistence producers" are increasingly being differentiated implying unequal access to land, instruments of production and marketing. These inequalities have implications on the food security of each household. Thus "subsistence", taken not merely as a standard of living but a productive system, is very much undergoing a change for good or bad. This system is much affected by state policies whether the policies have to do with markets or force peasants to do what the state wants them to do. That change is rooted in the social, economic and political structures operating in the wider economy. Our analysis must, therefore, be historical, taking into account the development of the agrarian, social, economic and political structures that reproduce food security or insecurity and for which social group.
1. The original version of this paper was presented to the Conference on "Population Movements, Famine and Community Response" organised by The Centre for the Study of Administration of Relief (CSAR), New Delhi, January 9-13, 1992.
2. See Holger Bernt Hansen and Michael Twaddle (eds.) (1988) Uganda Now: Between Decay and Development. London, James Currey. The articles therein were presented to a conference sponsored by the Danish Research Council for Development Research, the Danish Social Science Research Council, the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies.
Kumar Rupesinghe: (eds.) (1989) Conflict Resolution in Uganda London, James Currey. The articles were presented to the "Internal Conflicts" conference organised by Makerere Institute of Social Research/International Alert.
Wiebe, Paul D. and Dodge, Cole P.: (1987) Beyond Crisis: Development Issues in Uganda. The articles once again are a result of a seminar organised in Uganda.
Mawazo editorial board organises regular workshops. For a reader interested see issues of Mawazo, a journal of the Faculties of Arts and Social Science, Makerere University.
The African Activist Association produced a special issue on Uganda in its journal Ufahamu, Vol. 50, No. 2, May 1986/87.
3. A serious attempt to collect relatively accurate figures began during the NRM regime with the rehabilitation of the Statistical Division of the Ministry of Planning.
4. The worst crisis in the history of the Karamojong was the 1980 famine. In an article which appeared in Weekly Topic of 1980 entitled "Uganda's Starving Thousands", the author described the situation as follows: "Pathetic children with matchstick legs crawled like spiders outside the Moroto Mission a week ago searching for grass seeds to eat. They are probably dead by now, along with another thousand or more Karamojong tribes people, starving in the worst tragedy".
In another article, "Karamoja Reality Still Appalling", Mukyusa Jengo described what he saw in Karamoja thus: "Karamoja is unrivalled as the worst human disaster story on record in this country. Even today, when the worst of the famine in that region is said to be over, with armies of relief workers and tons of aid food arriving each day to combat the famine, the reality everywhere in Karamoja is still appalling, the conditions remain sub-human and the problems poised by Karamoja are still daunting as ever.
"All that remains of Karamojong today is just a dark shadow of the brave, beautiful people -- reduced to walking skeletons with rusty hair, almost visible bones, blotted tummies and withered hips. What one sees in Karamoja is all scandalous and shameful...
"In Namalu, I had my first encounter with real famine. Namalu is a small trading/mission centre. Here death-like ghosts or death-like creatures, walking carefully,as if with one foot already in the grave, came to see the helicopter landing. I felt as if I was watching a bizarre, humourless attempt by someone to do a slow motion in hell. Matchsticks for arms and legs. Weathered, leathery skins. Bones and ribs visible, as if there was no covering flesh. It was enough to haunt a person for a life time. And I can only describe in a stumbling fashion....
"My estimate of the number dying each day at all three medical centres we visited in Namalu, Kotido and Kaabong, is at least fifteen. This does not include the fallen bodies in the bush along the hospital route, or those who die while still in their homes. Last week the official press put the death toll in Karamoja at one person dying each day. This is the week which I also visited Karamoja..."
(Excerpts from Mukyusa Jengo, 1980 p.5).
5. On self-sufficiency Cohen argued that "There are two senses of self-sufficiency in food production. The first and most obvious is that a self-sufficient household is attached, particularly when the requirements are set out in nutritional terms as some necessary standard consumption for productive work. Non-food requirements are also met, separately and outside exchange relations, when the household produces a surplus -- a level of output greater than its food requirements. This state is the misty ideal of a subsistence agriculture...."
6. I demonstrated this elsewhere in a seminar paper. See Nyangabyaki Bazaara: "Forms of Land Tenure and Agricultural Change in Masindi District, Uganda". Presented to a CBR seminar held on Thursday, May 28, 1992, at the Centre For Basic Research, Plot 86, Mawanda Road Kamwokya, 2.30 p.m.
7. File 8A: Annual Reports. Department of Agriculture, Masindi District. Masindi Town Headquarters.
1. A Situation Analysis United Nations Children's Fund, Kampala, Uganda, 1989.
2. Asedri, Vivian:(1989) "Cassava in West Nile Hit by Disease". The New Vision, Friday, April 28.
3. Berry, S. Sara:(1984) "The Food Crisis and Agrarian Change: A Review Essay". African Studies Review, Vol. 27, No. 2. June.
4. Beverley Gatrell:(1988) "Prelude to Disaster: The Case of Karamoja" in Douglas Johnson and David Anderson: (eds.) The Ecology of Survival: Case Studies from Northeast African History. London, Lester Crook Academic Publishing.
5. Bryceson, Deborah: "Peasant Food Production and Supply in Relation to the Historical Development of Commodity Production in Pre-colonial and Colonial Tanganyika" BRALIP SERVICE PAPER NO. 78/3. A paper presented for discussion at the History Departmental Seminar on Thursday, 16th November, 1978. University of Dar es Salaam.
6. Cohen, David William:(1983) "Food Production and Food Exchange in the Pre-colonial Lakes Plateau Region" in Robert I. Rotberg: (ed.) Imperialism, Colonialism and Hunger: East and Central Africa. Massachusetts, Lexington Books D.C. Heath and Company.
7. Cooper, Frederick: (1983) "Subsistence and Agrarian Conflict: The Coast of Kenya After Slavery" in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), ibid.
8. Cowen, P. Michael: (1983) "The Commercialisation of Food Production in Kenya After 1945" in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), ibid.
9. Curtin, P.D.:(1981) "Recent Trends in African Historiography and Their Contribution to History in General" in Ki-Zerbo, J.: (ed.) General History of Africa. Vol. I. London, Heinemann Educational Books.
10. Dhliwayo, K.J.M.: (1988) "The Concept of Food Security and Self-Sufficiency" in Kwesi Prah: (ed.) Food Security Issues in Southern Africa. The Institute of Southern African Studies, The National University of Lesotho, Southern African Studies Series, No. 4.
11. Erhlich, Cyril: (1976) "The Uganda Economy 1903-1945" Vincent Harlow and E.M. Chilver: (eds.) History of East Africa. London, Oxford University Press.
12. File 8A: Annual reports. Department of Agriculture, Masindi District.
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