Search Results

The household is a standard social category used in demographic census and survey work around the world where it is taken to represent both the family and the basic economic unit of society. From an anthropological perspective, however, there can be a great difference between ‘the household’ as defined by demographers and the concrete networks of kinship relations that extend beyond the household and connect certain households to one another. It is shown that the women in urban Kampala, who would be demographically enumerated as residing in female‐headed households, in fact typically form, as ‘Senga aunts’, an integral part of a dual family household paired with a rurally located brother's household. Application of the conventional demographic category of household can only result in a complete misreading of family structure and economic relationships in this part of Africa. Routine demographic practices such as household surveys are of questionable value without more careful attention to the local contexts in which active agents create their culturally diverse household forms.

To understand how AIDS has shaped life in Uganda requires historical perspective on gender, sexuality, and intimate relationships in this region. That is the aim of this chapter; it charts the historical building blocks that have come to define masculinity in contemporary Uganda. It examines how work, authority in the home, and sexuality have all been intertwined in different ways across the twentieth century in Uganda, and how the relationships between these domains of social life were shaped by notions of masculinity.

This chapter explores urban refugee economies through the case of the Ugandan capital, Kampala. It first describes the lives and settlement patterns of communities across the city, then explains the governance framework regulating refugees’ economic lives in Kampala, where, despite some harassment by municipal authorities, refugees have the greatest economic freedoms out of all the sites selected. It shows how even urban refugees are in a distinctive institutional position, since they lie between formal and informal sectors and national and transnational opportunity structures. Different communities respond to these opportunities and constraints in distinctive ways. Alongside quantitative data, examples of the Congolese bitenge trade, Rwandan dairy industry, and Oromo FOREX businesses illustrate how refugees engage in arbitrage based on their transnational connections. Nationality also influences opportunity structures, thus Somali communities enjoy exceptional access to remittances, whereas Rwandans face constant regulatory scrutiny due to close ties between the Ugandan and Rwandan governments.

One can treat the early arrival of Indians in Uganda as a major source of technical labour supply in the construction of the East African Railway. However, during the process of colonization, a second wave of Indians also found its way into Uganda. These were mostly troops, clerks, and artisans who were taken on contractual terms. Some of them remained after seeing the trade and commercial opportunities that existed in the country. Hindu temples are common in major towns of Uganda, recognized because of the different architecture, high-flying flags atop, and the idols that decorate some of the buildings. At the time of their expulsion, their temples were taken over by the locals and turned into community halls, schools, religious centres, or even storage facilities. The socio-historical analysis in this chapter provides the context for a study of the development, programs, and impact of the BAPS Swaminarayan temple in Kampala, Uganda, which was built in 1960.

Chapter 8 employs the theories identified in Chapter 7 to consider whether it is possible to argue that armed groups are bound by the major human rights treaties. The chapter conducts detailed analysis of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. It also examines the main human rights treaties which it argues hold most textual potential to bind armed groups, namely the Convention against Torture, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, and the African Union Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa.