Kaabong

The valley around Kaabong has been herding country for centuries, held by the Dodoth, one of the Karamojong-speaking peoples who moved into the dry north-east from the north. Their year turned on moving cattle between wet-season homesteads and dry-season grazing, and on relations — trading, intermarrying, raiding — with the Jie to the south, the Turkana across the Kenyan border and the Toposa in what is now South Sudan.

Colonial administration reached Karamoja late and lightly. The sub-region was governed at a distance and with very little investment, so schools, clinics and roads arrived decades after they did elsewhere in Uganda. Kaabong grew as a small administrative and mission post, with a trading row of shops serving the surrounding homesteads.

Independence changed little at first. The spread of automatic rifles from the 1970s onwards made traditional cattle raiding far deadlier, and successive governments answered with disarmament campaigns conducted by the army, which were followed by periods of relative calm and by renewed raiding. Kaabong became the headquarters of its own district in the 2000s, when Karamoja's large districts were subdivided, bringing offices, staff and aid organisations to the town. Kidepo Valley, north-west of the town, had been gazetted as a national park in 1962, and the slow growth of tourism there has given Kaabong a second role as a stop on the road.

Kaabong is the centre of the Dodoth, who speak Ngakarimojong and share the cattle-centred culture of the wider Karamojong group. Wealth, marriage and standing are counted in animals, and the homestead — a cluster of huts and granaries inside a thorn or brushwood fence, known as a manyatta — is the basic social unit. Elders hold authority, decisions are made in gatherings of men under a tree, and age-sets order a man's life stages.

Dress and ornament are distinctive: bright wrapped cloth, stacked bead collars worn by women, and stools that double as headrests carried by men. Dance and song mark marriages, initiations and the return of herds, and traditional beliefs about rain and cattle persist alongside Catholic and Protestant missions, which have been present in the district for generations and run many of its schools.

On the Morungole range north-west of the town live the Ik, a small group with their own language who farm and hunt in the hills; they are among Uganda's least numerous peoples and a subject of long-standing outside interest. Across the district, relations between herding communities, government disarmament programmes and the spread of settled farming and mining are constant themes in local life. Visitors are uncommon enough to be noticed, and a greeting in Ngakarimojong is received warmly.

Kaabong is a small town of some thirteen thousand people, serving a district whose population lives mostly in scattered rural homesteads. The built-up area is a handful of streets: shops, a market, the district offices, a hospital, schools and church compounds, with guesthouses and the vehicles of aid agencies and government programmes among them.

The economy is livestock and subsistence farming. Cattle, goats and sheep are the store of wealth, and families plant sorghum, millet, maize and beans on gardens that depend entirely on rains that often fail. Karamoja is among the poorest parts of Uganda and suffers chronic food insecurity in the months before harvest, when markets, relief programmes and remittances carry households through. Minerals are dug by hand in parts of Karamoja, and charcoal burning and brewing bring in cash.

The day begins early, with animals driven out to graze and the market filling soon after, and slows in the heat of the afternoon. Water is fetched from boreholes and pumps, power comes from solar panels and generators more than from the grid, and telephone coverage is patchy outside the town. Long distances to services, the effects of drought, and the security of roads and grazing areas are the issues people talk about most.

Karamoja eats what the dry country and the herds provide. The staple is a stiff bread or porridge of sorghum or millet flour, cooked to the consistency of thick dough and eaten with the hands, dipped in a sauce of greens, beans or groundnut paste. Maize has become common through markets and relief supplies, and boiled or roasted maize and cassava fill out the day.

Milk is central to herding households, taken fresh or soured, and goat is the meat most often eaten, grilled over charcoal or stewed with onion and tomato. Meat is not everyday food for most families; it belongs to market days, ceremonies and the killing of an animal for a guest. Wild greens gathered in the bush, groundnuts, cowpeas and pumpkins broaden the plate in the wet season.

In the town itself the cooking is the standard Ugandan one: rice, posho, beans, greens, stewed meat and chapati, with the rolex — a chapati rolled around a fried egg — sold at roadside stalls, and sweet milky tea drunk through the day. Local brewing matters socially: beers made from fermented sorghum or millet are shared at gatherings, and distilled spirits are sold cheaply in the trading centres, where drinking is a recognised social problem.