When We Return

When We Return Art Exile and the Remaking of Home in Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and The Democratic Republic of the Congo

Project Overview In mid-2019 the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) reported that the world’s forcibly displaced population had hit a ‘record high’ of 70.8 million: equivalent to 25 people being forced to flee every minute in 2018. As conflict-related violence and persecution increase, and threat environments become more diffuse and complex, people are uprooted as they try to negotiate profoundly difficult conflict circumstances. They also face comparably difficult situations when they return to their original homes, if that ever becomes possible. To make matters more complex, individuals often occupy ambiguous victim- perpetrator statuses, moving between combatant and civilian roles, either through coercion or through choice.

Central Africa has witnessed prolonged and repetitive forms of displacement for many, many years. In 2018, the UNHCR

reported that the number of refugees on the continent as a whole had almost tripled over ten years, from 2.3 million in 2008 to over 6.3 million today. At the time of the project, Uganda was the third-largest refugeehosting country in the world, after Turkey and Pakistan, with an estimated 1.19 million refugees in December 2018. To date, international organisations have prioritised ‘going home’ as the most durable solution to this crisis. Processes of ‘return and reintegration’ represent a huge practical and policy challenge for world governments and are therefore a critical international policy issue.

‘lifecycle’ of conflicts in some of the world’s most difficult places.

Drawing on anthropology, comic journalism, history, heritage studies and political science, we have focused on the everyday experiences of those attempting to build or rebuild communities in central Africa, contributing to a better understanding of how conflict-affected societies constitute or reconstitute themselves.

By analysing how refugees, internally-displaced persons and former combatants in Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and The Democratic Republic of The Congo negotiate and experience ‘return’, we have aimed to help fill a large gap in current knowledge on the

Artwork on previous page by cartoonist Thembo Muhindo Kashauri 4

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Artists in Residence

Willy Karekezi is a self-taught Rwandan visual artist. Karekezi is interested in the everyday lives of people around him and wants to portray the dynamics of human realities. He uses painting, live making and sculpture to express himself. Karekezi works in Kigali.

Curatorial Statement This undertaking invited artists to reflect on research related to forced migration and displacement. In the trend of my curatorial practice, I hoped to trigger dialogue and deep thinking around how arts and social justice intersect. Having artists from within the region of research was an important opportunity to both illustrate research findings and abstract complex realities in such a way that it offered both literal and figurative interpretations. While the cartoons serve to mirror the research, the conceptual artworks form a space to push beyond the narrative forms of academic papers and policy briefs.

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Over the three years of the research project we have been able to activate conversations in Kampala and London to see how different audiences react to the research in an aesthetic space. I saw my role in this as a classical curator, caring for knowledge, artworks and artistic processes, while innovating to make research more accessible and understood across audiences ranging from war-affected persons in Uganda to policy professionals in London.

- Kara Blackmore, Project Curator

Bathsheba Okwenje is an interdisciplinary, researcher-artist working at the intersection of information practices and aesthetics. Her work explores the hidden histories of people, their interior lives and the interactions between them. Okwenje is also part of a collective called Radha May that has recently undertaken to investigate issues of aesthetic censorship.

She is based in Uganda.

Kusa Kusa Maski Gael was born in Kalemie, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The experience of conflict and fleeing to Kinshasa as a child has inspired his work in the study of his society. Through collage, Maski asserts that the world is a confrontation of several simultaneous realities that allows us to identify questions and observations around memory, conflict and social oppression.

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Lost Identity (2018) Acrylic on Canvas | 50x70 cm

Willy Karekezi Through painting on bodies and canvas, Karekezi tries to capture many stories. We glimpse into his studio and see two artworks in progress. One is a congregation of questions around how and why we return, or not. The other harks on traditional patterns and sees the reflection of one’s self in the past and future.

He has a prolific energy that manifests in many forms and tries to see the everyday experiences of displacement. The objects resting in the studio are from Internally Displaced Persons camps. They were rationed by aid organisations and have endured the movement from camps to home, to market. He is trying to imagine a table, cracked and disarticulated at the time of return.

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State of Agony (2018) Acrylic on Canvas & Refugee Testimonial Sound 150 x 115

Image of Memory (2018) Acrylic on Canvas | 50 x 70 cm

Installation View KLA ART 18 | Uganda Museum August 2018

Bathsheba Okwenje Gang Kikome is the Acholi phrase for ancestral home.

The Acholi people (and other people of Northern Uganda) endured 20+ years of conflict. This resulted in millions of people displaced from their ancestral homes and living in settlement camps for years and years, in many cases for over a generation.

The objects in the work are items that had been used by the inhabitants of the settlement camps but were left behind once the camps were disbanded. They are artifacts of war and displacement. They are deserving of preservation and reflection because they tell a story about Uganda’s recent history that is often not told.

120 x 80 cm Photographic Print on PVC Ongoing Series Installation View from the Artist Residency Show September 2018 | 32Âş East | Ugandan Arts Trust

Images from the series Gang Kikome and Other Things We Left Behind

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Kanyo Multi-part installation

This installation is a series of artworks that come together. Can Agura, Cuna and Transitional Justice are all aspects of a lived reality that Okwenje is trying to understand through her artistic process. To return is not simple, to legislate is imperfect, and finding home is often a compromise. The women featured in this work are all attempting to remake their lives after being wives in the bush. The sound is a reflection of displacement. The documents are a union between what can and can’t be said. At presentations and exhibitions the audience is invited to interact with the artwork and listen to the testimonials.

Kusa Kusa Maski Gael This collage takes on the ideas of departure and return.

The woman featured is a South Sudanese silhouette.

She is pasted with portraits from Pabbo and Internally Displaced Persons Camp in northern Uganda. The faces show a trans-generational scar that covers her skin. The water mimics a memory of the artist, during his own departure from Kalime in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The fabrics are floating, discarded from the haste of leaving. She is also suffocating from the flight, yet holding dreams and aspirations. In the returning figure are letters sent between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda.

Maski doesn’t just want to show the suffering. He offers hope and a beacon of light for the women of displacement to follow. Perhaps the children’s faces will be an emotional guide to keep moving?

Three Women on the Lake | 245 x 170 cm | Collage on Canvas Installation View | August 2018 | KLA ART 18 | Uganda Museum

Detail of Three Women on the Lake showing detail of portraits of former Internally Displaced Persons in Northern Uganda

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Gloria Kiconco In one of her essays, Gloria Kiconco paused to reflect on what it means to return.

Do refugees go home or come home?

What does it mean to tell someone “come home”?

What does it mean to tell them “go home”?

What does it mean to return every day?

Back and forth across the border of Uganda and DRC? At home by day, a refugee by night.

For the Acholi children born in IDP camps, what does it mean to return home?

When home is a place kilometres away.

When home is a place to which they have never been.

What do they imagine when others speak of going home?

What does it mean, in South Sudan, to return home? When home is constantly changing hands.

If you are an integral part of the vision, the nostalgia of home as you remember it, can you ever “come” home if you change?

Gloria Kiconco is a poet, essayist, and zine-maker based in Kampala, Uganda. She regularly writes about arts and culture in East Africa and performs spoken word poetry around Kampala. During the Politics of Return she documented and creatively responded to the visual processes of the Artists in Residence.

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During the artist residency each artist was asked to read through research, meet with researchers and develop a project inspired by some of the findings. The artworks that emerged from the residency was in some way deeply inspired by these specific academic papers. The conceptual nature of the residency meant that the artists went beyond mirroring the research to use their mediums of painting, collage, and installation to make new knowledge registers as a hybrid engagement.

Willy Karekezi and Kusa Kusa Maski Gael at Pabbo IDP Memorial Site

Transitional Justice My research on transitional justice (TJ) explores a key challenge in contemporary international efforts to promote TJ in nontransitioning, conflict-affected states: the ‘implementation gap,’ in which 28

policies are designed and funded but neither enacted nor implemented. My findings are based on long-term qualitative fieldwork in Uganda since 2012. The previous UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, identified the ‘implementation gap’ as a problem of ‘scandalous proportions’, not just in Uganda, but across the globe. In my research I argue that rather than a temporary bump in the road the ‘implementation gap’ is a dynamic, enduring political space generated, constituted and sustained by the interaction of technocratic donor approaches towards TJ, and the power imperative of domestic elites in nontransitioning places. This has consequences. I argue that donors for their part should be thinking much more systematically about how ‘implementation gaps’

impact the relationship between victims and the state. A key donor justification for supporting state-centric TJ reforms is that they will generate ‘civic trust’. In Uganda though, the nature of the TJ ‘implementation gap’ has undermined this broad objective.

On the ground in the north there is very little evidence to suggest that the donor-sponsored national process has addressed the needs of victims or ‘empowered’ them and much more evidence to support the argument of one lawyer, working with victims, that ‘everyone has let them down’.

-Anna Macdonald

Moral Spaces and Sexual Transgression: Understanding Rape in War and Post Conflict When it comes to rape in war, evocative language describing rape as a ‘weapon of war’ has become commonplace.

Although politically important, overemphasis on strategic aspects of wartime sexual

violence can be misleading.

Alternative explanations tend to understand rape either as exceptional — a departure from ‘normal’ sexual relationships — or as part of a continuum of gendered violence. This research shows how, even in war, norms are not suspended; nor do they simply continue. War changes the moral landscape. Drawing on ethnographic research over 10 years in northern Uganda, this research argues for a resexualization of understandings of rape. It posits that sexual mores are central to explaining sexual violence, and that sexual norms— and hence transgressions—vary depending on the moral spaces in which they occur. In Acholi, moral spaces have temporal dimensions (‘olden times’, the ‘time of fighting’ and ‘these days’) and associated spatial dimensions (home, camp, bush, village, town). The dynamics of each help to explain the occurrence of some forms of sexual violence and the rarity of others. By reflecting on sexual norms and transgressions in these moral spaces, the research sheds light on the relationship between ‘event’ and ‘ordinary’, rape and war.

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Stigma The literature on Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) returnees in Acholiland, northern Uganda tells us that those who returned from the rebel group are likely to experience stigma and social exclusion. While the term is deployed frequently, ‘stigma’ is not a well-developed concept and most of the evidence we have comes from accounts of returnees themselves. Our research has focused instead on the ‘stigmatisers.’ Adopting the ideas of medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman and colleagues, we theorise stigmatisation as part of the ‘moral experience’ of regulating post-war social repair.

Through interview-based and ethnographic methods, we find that stigmatisation of former LRA returnees is most helpfully

understood as something that ‘happens in human relationships’.

As such, it takes many forms and serves multiple functions, calling into question whether this catch-all term actually obscures more than it illuminates. While noting that stigmatisation is usually practised as a form of ‘social control’, we argue that its function can be ‘re-integrative’ rather than purely exclusionary.

Through our study we seek to advance conceptual and empirical understanding of the manifestations and functions of stigmatisation in spaces of return, challenging the logic underpinning those interventions that seek to reduce it.

-Anna Macdonald and Raphael Kerali

Moving toward ‘home’: love and relationships through war and displacement This research examines how experiences of displacement and return reshape constructions of ‘home’ in relation to love and intimate relationships. It does this through the main concept of movement. It examines movement amidst a spatial moral geography. Reflecting on ethnographic research over ten years in northern Uganda where a two-decade-long war (19862006) occurred, it shows how the spatial dynamics of camps entailed profound disruptions to ‘normal’ gendered orderings of life. Yet in the post-war period, perhaps surprisingly, there are evident continuities alongside transformations.

The processual nature of affinal relationships is well established in Africanist anthropology. This research suggests that spatial considerations are equally as important and proposes

the concept of movement as an integral dimension of understanding relationships in post-war northern Uganda and beyond. The research examines movements in relationships between public and private spaces against the backdrop of wider societal movements from the moral spaces of camp to home.

-Holly Porter

Bathsheba Okwenje at Pabbo IDP Memorial Site

Between Home and Camp The video installation focusses on different moral spaces in the daily lives of the Acholi people of northern Uganda and how they have shifted in the past decades marked by war, displacement and return, after the LRA rebels disappeared from northern Uganda.

The Acholi home is a place of order and protection that has to be defended against the surroundings of wild nature and disorderly relations. During the period of the war, people in Northern Uganda were forced to leave their homes and had to move into IDP camps. The home, as it was known before the war, disappeared for the great majority of Acholi people.

The bush, that has always been associated with powerful spirits and wild animals, became also the place of the rebels. They, too, were seen as powerful and unpredictable. When people had to leave their villages, nature could creep back into what was previously the protected home.

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Moving to the IDP camps confronted people with new life styles and outside influences, and this was almost entirely experienced in terms of its negative aspects: loss of control and autonomy, poverty and suffering due to disruption in the traditional ways of doing things, fear of witchcraft and being a victim of a hostile government.

When the camps began to be dismantled and people had to return to their former homes, these categories shifted again.

Many people had gotten used to the way of life in the camps after years of staying there. They were no longer used to the hard peasant existence in remote villages. They had to claim back their home from the wilderness.

Others saw that the former camps and now busy trading centres were the origin of immoral life and felt that the only way to go back to the Acholi cultural values was by returning home.

Film still from Between Home and Camp, a multiscreen video installation

Ben Mergelsberg has learned photography in Buenos Aires and studied the Human Sciences degree at Oxford University. Since 2004 he has visited Uganda repeatedly and published a number of papers focussing on Acholi life during and after displacement.

He explored Acholi moral geographies within the environment of the camp, the home and the wilderness surrounding people’s settlements, a theme that is also explored in his video installation.

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Stills from the multi-screen video installation. Mostly coming from Pabbo, one of the largest internally displaced persons camps in Uganda during the war.

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Independence falls like a bull buffalo And the hunters Rush to it with drawn knives, Sharp shining knives For carving the carcass.

And if your chest Is small, bony and weak They push you off, And if your knife is blunt You get the dung on your elbow, You come home empty-handed And the dogs bark at you!

– Okot p’Bitek, extract from The Song of Lawino, discussed in Lawino’s People

Lawino’s People The republication of Okot p’Bitek’s seminal yet largely forgotten anthropological works comes at a time when the Acholi people of Uganda, in the aftermath of a twenty-year war, are looking back to discover their precolonial and colonial cultural history. Tim Allen frames the historical and political context of this work, including p’Bitek’s fraught relationship with Western scholarship.

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Enduring Exile Lived Realities of South Sudanese Women in Uganda Enduring Exile makes visible groups of South Sudanese citizens who, by choosing to avoid residing in humanitarian settlements, may otherwise by invisible. It also focuses on church spaces central to constructing normalcy during exile, and offering teachings key to generating hope that return may one day be possible.

Research by Liz Storer | Original Photographs by Katie G. Nelson

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Two Friends

Betty

Wilma “When the country is not yours, you’re not happy in it.”

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Gbadolite The exhibition and essay investigate the inscriptions left by combatants during the First and Second Congo Wars at Gbadolite Airport in north-western Congo. These inscriptions speak to the experiences of soldiers and militiamen during these conflicts, not only providing insight into their lives but also visually representing the wars themselves. Gbadolite, President Mobutu’s remote ancestral town, was once known as his Versailles, where he constructed luxury lodgings and entertained visitors. But between 1995 and 1999, at the same airport where Mobutu once landed his supersonic Concorde jet, young men arrived as members of state armies and rebel groups in successive waves of military occupation.

They left charcoal inscriptions on the airport’s walls: names, religious texts, drawings, military boasts, and even quotations from postcolonial philosophy. These visual traces of the past attest to successive (and sometimes opposing) combatants’ preoccupations, desires, and need to memorialise their presence as they entered combat zones from which they often had little hope of returning home.

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Photographed between 2015 and 2017, the 20 images in this exhibition illustrated the conflicts that have passed through and transformed the country. These etchings, proverbs, and personal testimonies reveal the individuality of the combatants; together, the layers of graffiti show the human elements—and human toll—of war.

Displacement and Return in Central African Republic One of the defining features of the crisis in the Central African Republic (CAR) since 2013 has been massive displacement.

Currently, about a quarter of the country’s population is displaced.

People who have been forcibly displaced, whether internally or abroad, and people who stayed behind this time (but frequently have their own memories of displacement) provide particular kinds of information about war and its not particularly peaceful aftermath. In this research, based on interviews with a broad range of people affected by displacement, we show that Central African views about the prospects for peace are deeply affected by how displacement has shaped tensions over the political senses of distribution (who has a right to what, and on what basis).

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Who should pay for war, in senses both material and otherwise, and who should be compensated?

However, distribution and belonging are not the issues prioritized in the aftermath of war, when elite deals, punitive justice and technocratic recovery plans crowd out treatment of the material justice and belonging questions that dominate neighbourhoods. The political dimensions of material justice in the aftermath of war require more thorough treatment, as listening to people who have experienced displacement makes abundantly clear.

Didier Kassaï Didier Kassaï was born in Sibut.

He studied to become a comic artist, first in (Bangui, Libreville, Yaoundé and Kinshasa), and later in Brussels. In 1999, the work of Kassaï appeared at the Gabonese festival Journées Africaines de la Bande Dessinée. One year after that, he contributed to the collection album ‘A l’Ombre du Baobab’, which was published on the occasion of a group exhibition at the festival of Angoulême (France). He also participated in Africa Comics 2003 in Italy and in Shege in Cameroon. In

2006, he won the “Prix africa e mediterraneo” in Bologne with Azinda et le mariage force.

He also won the Pan-African competition ”Vues d’Afrique” with “Bangui coquette” at the Angoulême festival. In 2009, he won the “Prix du meilleur projet,” for the Best Comicbook project with Pousse-pousse at the Algiers festival.

- Louisa Lombard, Enrica Picco

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He Cannot Marry Her

Thomas Dai

This research considers the role of the legal governance of marriage in conserving and changing social divisions during a period of war, exile and fluid elite politics.

Marriage is particularly potent in its influence on identities as it allows state-level politics into the most intimate relationships as well as governing the legitimacy and legality of reproduction. War and exile can remake identities.

In times of war politico-military elites may try to instrumentalise identities to build constituencies that remain loyal despite turbulent elite alliances. At the same time, identities are often internalized, constituted through habits that remake visions of divisions and are independent of such instrumentalisation. This research looks at examples of how chiefs’ courts through marriage laws

Thomas Dai is a cartoonist and muralist from South Sudan.

He is an active member of Ana Taban ‘We are Tired,’ a collective of artists and activists trying to transform their country. His antiwar artwork has been regularly featured in the Juba Monitor.

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and norms mediate and contest ideas of identity in times of war, including the identity of the dead. The research is based on qualitative interviews and observations of Nuer chiefs’ courts in South Sudanese refugees in Sudan in 2017 and 2018.

- Naomi Pendle

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Uganda’s Forgotten Children Accountability and Social Torture: What happened to the children who returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army?

This research was carried out between 2004-6 and from 2012-18 working with some of the children who returned from the Lord’s Resistance Army. A large number were never seen by their families again, but more than 20,000 returned through aid financed reception centres, such as GUSCO. Girls recruited were given to LRA commanders as wives, and a high proportion returned with babies born in the bush - who are now in their teens or young adults. While the conflict was ongoing endeavours were made to reunite the returned children with their relatives, who were mostly living in insecure displacement

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camps in very difficult conditions.

Once left in the camps, relatively few were subsequently visited, even after the fighting ended in 2006. Thousands of vulnerable children were largely left to their own devices. The findings from that work is being compared to findings on reintegration in the region. A key point made is that implementing best practice guidelines for relocating displaced children with their immediate relatives in northern Uganda had negative consequences. The majority of those children who passed through a reception centre are now settled on ancestral land, where they are commonly abused because of their LRA past.Those who returned as babies, whose fathers were LRA commanders, such as Dominic Ongwen, Vincent Otto, or Joseph

Charity Atukunda Kony, often face open abuse. With few exceptions, it is only those who spent a long period with the LRA, and who attained a rank, who have managed to avoid such experiences. They generally live in urban and peri-urban locations, and are the most likely to have received some continued support from NGOs. In contrast, the vast majority of the returned children we have spent time with and interviewed have been ignored.

- Melissa Parker, Tim Allen, Dorothy Atim, Jacky Atingo

Charity Atukunda is a visual artist, passionate about drawing and digital illustration. She spent her formative years seeking out her place as an artist, drawing on visual fine arts, graphic novels and animations for inspiration.

Charity’s work is always marked by a conscious use of pattern, symbolism and mythical allusions.

Her work often explores and questions the ideas, beliefs and systems that govern our lives.

She currently lives in Kampala, Uganda.

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Between Two Spaces This research discusses the social mobility of combatants and introduces the notion of circular return to explain their permanent state of movement between civilian and combatant life. This phenomenon is widely observed in eastern DRC, where Congolese youth have been going in and out of armed groups for several decades now. While the notion of circular return has its origins in migration and refugee studies, we argue that is also serves as a useful lens to understand the navigation capacity between different social spaces of combatants and to describe and understand processes of incessant armed mobilization and demobilization. In conceptualizing these processes as forms of circular return, we want to move beyond the remobilization

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Victor Ndula discourse, which is too often connected to an assumed failure of DDR processes and tends to ignore combatants’ agency and larger processes of socialization and social rupture as part of armed mobilization.

- Koen Vlassenroot, Emery Mudinga and Josaphat Musamb

Victor Ndula is an editorial cartoonist, illustrator and comic artist who lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya, where he lends his voice to social commentary through his cartoons. A member of the global organization Cartoon Movement, and Cartooning for Peace, he has attended and exhibited his work at Cartoon festivals in Switzerland, France and Germany, and his work has also been exhibited in Peru, Doha Qatar, Amsterdam and at the London School of Economics.

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The Story of Two Rapes After Rape provides evidence of a more complicated and nuanced explanation of rape and its aftermath, suggesting a reimaging of the meanings of post-atrocity justice, whilst acknowledging the role of sex, power, and politics in all sexual experiences between coercion and consent. With its wide investigation of social life in northern Uganda, this study offers vital analysis for those interested in sexual and gender violence, post-conflict reconstruction, and human rights.

Victor Ndula Victor Ndula is an editorial cartoonist, illustrator and comic artist who lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya, where he lends his voice to social commentary through his cartoons. A member of the global organization Cartoon Movement, and Cartooning for Peace, he has attended and exhibited his work at Cartoon festivals in Switzerland, France and Germany, and his work has also been exhibited in Peru, Doha Qatar, Amsterdam and at the London School of Economics.

-Holly Porter

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Land Conflicts in Northern Uganda For many of the people who inhabit northern Uganda, access to land that they can cultivate is essental to survival - in Acholiland there are few, sometimes no economic alternatives for most of the rural population. How people access land, what their customary land claims are and how these can be defended are complex issues very specific to local traditions and circumstances; often tied into larger social structures and subject to extended family politics. Yet rather than seeking to understand how these complexities impact land ownership and usage, international development actors pursue an agenda of individuating, privatising and titling land, that in practice benefits the powerful, the elite and foreign investors. The result is contributing to a growing population of landless people.

-Julian Hopwood

Tom Humberstone Tom Humberstone is an awardwinning comic artist and illustrator based in London. In addition to publishing his own comics, he edits and publishes the critically acclaimed UK comics anthology Solipsistic Pop. His comics have appeared in Nelson (Blank Slate), Solipsistic Pop (Solipsistic Pop Books), Paper Science (We Are Words + Pictures), The Independent, and Cartoon Movement.

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Exhibitions and Events Participant Busi Dalmini of Democracy Works viewing the cartoons

Sketching Violence

Adut Ayik during the Q&A of Understanding South Sudan: Questions of Knowledge and Representation

Enduring Exile May 2017 In dialogue with Beyond the Statistics, Uganda Museum, Kampala November 2017 In Dialogue with Understanding South Sudan: Questions of Knowledge and Representation, London School of Economics and Political Science 114

Performance celebrating Acholi heritage

Lawino’s People August, 2017 TAKS Centre, Gulu, Uganda This conference brought together creatives and scholars to reflect on the legacy of Okot p’Bitek’s legacy and the role of anthropology in understanding the past. Okot was a writer and former director of Uganda’s National Theatre. He is famously known for his work Song of Lawino (1966).

May 2018 Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre Mobilising histories of discrimination, persecution and genocide to make progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

Lawyer and artist Pamela Ryenell commenting on the citizen’s duties and creative responsibilities to displaced persons at the Grammar of Images symposium

Grammar of Images August 2018 KLA ART 18, Uganda Museum, Kampala Artists and NGO practitioners joined together to launch the show and dialogue around how to meaningfully represent displacement and return beyond the humanitarian gaze. It was part of the biennial festival KLA ART, including artworks by Bathsheba Okwenje, Willy Karekezi, Kusa Kusa Maski Gael, Sarah Waiswa and Kudzanai Chiurai and colonial archives from the Uganda Society.

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Africa Summit visitor in the Between Home and Camp installation

Abraham Diing presenting research alongside Naomi Pendle and Charles Ogeno

Dark Pasts -

Juba Dissemination

Optimistic Futures March 2019 The Africa Summit, London School of Economics and Political Science Original artworks and cartoons produced from the research collaborations made their UK debut at the annual LSE Africa Summit. They made an important arts and culture contribution unlike any previous year.

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Research presenters and collaborators for Cross-Cultural Understandings of Trauma at the LSE

Dorothy Atim presenting research findings on Uganda’s Forgotten Children alongside Jacky Atingo and James Ocitti

Cross Cultural

September 2019 EU Conference Hall in Juba, South Sudan

Understandings of

South Sudan-based policy makers from the UN, NGOs and donors, as well as academics, came together to hear and discuss research by Dr. Leben Moro and Dr. Naomi Pendle. Chirrilo Madut shared his personal story of return and Tomas Dai discussed his role as a cartoonist tasked with transfroming research into artwork.

September 2019 London School of Economics London, UK

Trauma

This workshop brought together historians, psychologists, geographers, and medical anthropologists to use the findings of the Politics of Return Project as a way to examine different forms of cultural trauma.

Presentations and discussions ranged from northern Uganda’s

Acholi conceptions of trauma to contemporary psychoanalysis on brainwashing. The scholars used the discussion forum to set a new agenda for future research collaborations.

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When We Return July 25-August 15, 2019 TAKS Centre Gulu Video Installation of Between Home and Camp

Kusa Kusa Maski Gael showcases and explains his artwork with the women included in the collage.

This exhibition brought together conceptual and commissioned artworks to help illustrate three years of academic research.

Some artists interpreted research papers while others imagined new artworks through the inspiration of research findings.

The title ‘When We Return’ is about more than just the people whose stories are featured, it is also about ‘we’ the researchers and ‘we’ the artists who keep coming back for deeper understandings.

The opening was accompanied by a two-day conference with a multinational group of artists, academics and social justice professionals who all joined in dialogue to think about the

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legacies of war in Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Through this regional combination, the exhibition aimed to make sense of the difficult realities of displacement and return. To host this show in Gulu was a unique possibility to share the artwork with people directly impacted by the issues the research addresses.

We invited people represented in the work to preview and sign off on the artistic interpretations of their lived realities. There was an overwhelmingly positive response and an open space to debate and dialogue about the research findings.

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Conference participants register for the Politics of Return two-day event.

Bathsheba Okwenje and Holly Porter discuss their research collaboration and resulting artwork on Acholi Love and Kanyo.

From left to right Willy Karekezi explaining his artwork and research process to the KLA ART Lab participants.

Audience Member viewing the cartoons Displacement and Return in Central African Republic and Between Two Spaces.

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Collaborators 32º East | Ugandan Arts Trust

Ugandan Arts Trust is an independent non-profit organisation, focused on the creation and exploration of contemporary art in Uganda.

Their multi-purpose resource centre is based in the capital city Kampala and includes studios, accommodation for artists in residence, a contemporary art library, computers & editing suites, meeting areas and outdoor workshop space. Their programme offers artists in residence and members one on one drop in sessions for critique and professional development, workshops for practical skills and a regular discussion series, Artachat, for social engagement.

They are also the producers of KLA ART, Kampala’s public contemporary art festival held every two years.

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AYINET

APRU

The African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET) is an independent national NGO in Uganda. AYINET has implemented several important projects on post conflict recovery, paying much attention to transitional justice and healing among the growing youth populations in Uganda.

AYINET’s director, Victor Ochen, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and currently serves as an ambassador to the UN on Sustainable Development Goal 16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.

Action Pour la Promotion Rurale (APRU) is an association NGO. APRU participates in the reconstitution of basic social services. It participates in the rehabilitation of social infrastructures including bridges, schools, and health and maternity clinics. It also contributes to struggles against AIDS through sensitisation and in the promotion and protection of women’s and children’s rights. Lastly, it conducts research on access to justice and security.

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is a worldleading centre for research and postgraduate education in public and global health, with more than 4,000 students and 1,000 staff working in over 100 countries. The School is one of the highest-rated research institutions in the UK, is among the world’s leading schools in public and global health, and was named University of the Year in the Times Higher Education Awards 2016. Our mission is to improve health and health equity in the UK and worldwide; working in partnership to achieve excellence in public and global health research, education and translation of knowledge into policy and practice.

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CEP

The Centre for Political Studies (CEP) is a research centre operating in the School of Social, Administrative and Political Sciences of the University of Kinshasa. CEP brings together some fifty researchers; maintains activities in five main areas: research, training, studies, surveys and appraisals, publication and documentation; and institutionally it privileges collective and interdisciplinary research.

SSRC

The Social Science Research Council is an independent, international, nonprofit organization founded in 1923.

Governed by a board of directors, it fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues.

Ghent University

Cartoon Movement

The Cartoon Movement is a global collaborative platform for editorial cartoons and comics journalism. They have worked with the LSE over the last five years to create illustrated comics around academic papers. For the Politics of Return we collaborated with artists in DRC, CAR, Uganda and South Sudan.

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Ghent University is one of the major universities in Belgium, founded in 1817. It hosts 11 faculties offering a wide range of courses as well as in-depth research within a wide range of scientific domains. They ‘Dare to Think’, priding themselves as a a pluralistic university open to all, regardless of ideological, political, cultural or social background.

CRG

The Conflict Research Group (CRG) is a multidisciplinary research unit at Ghent University (Faculty of Political and Social Sciences). We are primarily interested in the micro-level dynamics of civil conflicts and concentrate both on the impact of civil conflicts on local communities, and on the links between local and global dimensions of conflict.

CRG’s crosscutting analysis has led to the comparison of different geographical case studies, from Asia and sub-Sahara Africa to Latin America. Our research centres around three clusters: resources, governance and humanitarian aid.

Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Bukavu

Institut Supérieur Pédagogique de Bukavu is one of the leading teaching institutes of South Kivu and is based on Bukavu. It was created in 1961, and houses the Centre de Recherches Universitaires du Kivu, which promotes local research activities and invests in local research capacity.

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The artwork and catalogue was produced for the ‘Return, Responsibility and Reintegration in Central Africa: A multi-disciplinary exploration into endemic violence and social repair’ made possible by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant reference number AH/P005454/1. The project was hosted at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the original artwork can be viewed at the Centre.

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Catalogue design by Nupur Mathur

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