Gorilla Warfare
Gorilla Warfare
Life in and Beyond the Bush
This chapter investigates how humanity was constructed against animality through the space of the “bush” (lum). Whereas Acholi civilians and others had come to see the lum as a wild, dangerous, and evil space of animals, the rebels occupied the lum and gave it a different meaning. In what became a contestation over an “anthropomoral geography,” the LRA collapsed an analytic separating animality and humanity, unsettling a spatio-moral definition of humanity against animality. They saw their rebellion as gorilla rather than guerrilla warfare. Instead of reinforcing a colonial-era notion of the lum, the LRA found the lum to be a site of life, sacredness, and development. In doing so, they dissolved some of the spatio-moral infrastructure of “humanity” itself.
Keywords: humans, animals, bush, evil, ontology, morality, wild, Lord’s Resistance Army, rebellion, guerrilla warfare
California Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
