Gorilla Warfare

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.

How Violence Became Inhuman

This chapter explores how violence and humanity bifurcated into opposites in the course of the LRA war. It examines how LRA violence was seen to violate a modern moral sensibility by disrupting modern expectations of the relationship between violence and technology, reason, time, and development. As a result, LRA violence was not only condemned as brutal, but seen to oppose both modernity and humanity. It offers alternative ways of understanding the ethics of violence, drawing on narratives of colonial violence, mob justice, “traditional” violence, and LRA violence like mutilation. It excavates ways of seeing and understanding violence outside the shadow of modern moral sensibility that splits violence and humanity.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the lives of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in Uganda, suggesting that these lives are too complex to be understood through the simple moral lens of humanity. It uses “against humanity” as a heuristic to think about the problems posed by the uses of humanity (including the “crime against humanity”)—a social construct that must be critically interrogated rather than taken as natural. Being “against humanity” means thinking about the richness of human life that exists outside limited notions of the good—life beyond humanity. Also included is important historical context for the LRA war, including its leader, Joseph Kony, as well as ways in which LRA rebels have been expelled from humanity.

Rebels and Charity Cases

Chapter 6 engages recent debates in anthropologies of humanitarianism and human rights that argue that categories like “victim” and “charity case” deny actors their political agency and reduce them to bare life. By examining how LRA rebels remained political militants even as they accepted charity and humanitarian aid, this chapter shows how these debates ignore how rebels speak in the trenches of these discourses. Their experiences expose “humanity” as a concept historically constructed in the opposition of the “ethical” and the “political.” In Acholiland, “ethics” and “politics” had different meanings and could coexist. Rebels accordingly exposed humanity as a premature fixer of political and ethical meaning, precluding dynamism and multiplicity of meaning in a global society in uncertain flux.

Beyond Reason

This chapter argues that the LRA transcended the question of rationality by binding together both science and magic in their rebellion. Moving past debates that either condemn LRA beliefs and actions as irrational (and therefore inhuman) or attempt to explain them as rational (and therefore human), this chapter takes LRA beliefs and actions in their singularity in ways that expose the limits of “rationality” and “humanity.” Releasing “rationality” and “humanity” helps better conceptualize how the LRA held at once military and spiritual tactics; magical-prophetic and modern-scientific time; Christian and traditional Acholi religious practices; and spiritual and political reasons for fighting. By holding together logic and faith in this way, they transcended the category of “rationality,” undergirding many concepts of “humanity.”

Conclusion

The concluding chapter recaps how and why the concept of humanity does violence to the common good. It then offers new, radical ways of healing social suffering, beyond humanity and humanitarianism. After detailing a personal trajectory, it addresses the question of how to better reach the moralities of the marginalized and oppressed through a philosophy of anti-humanism. Specifically, it discusses the practical possibility of a radical anti-humanist medicine as a way of healing our sick societies. When freed from the dualist, tortured, and overdetermined form of relationship designated by humanity, we might begin to formulate new ways of thinking and doing anthropology, medicine, activism, and intervention in ways that bring us closer to a truer form of mutual recognition and emancipation.

Rebel Kinship beyond Humanity

This chapter explores how new relations involving rebels were forged through rather than outside of or in the face of violence. These relations, which included marriages, brotherhoods and sisterhoods, clans, and other forms of love and mutual belonging, challenged “humanity” as a form of kinship and as a sentimental community. Militant kinships drew boundaries between insiders and outsiders in a way that humanity cannot except by expelling other humans from humanity. Moreover, these kinships thrived with real meaning in the fertile ground of violence, even as they were condemned from the outside as forced, enslaved, or otherwise inhuman(e). Humanity morally denied the meaning of these kinships and simultaneously drew boundaries of mutual belonging that excluded the LRA.

Interlude

The interlude attends to the concept of “reintegration,” or demobilization, whereby LRA rebels leaving the frontlines were to be reformed to live in peace among civilians. It highlights the ways in which civilians and NGO workers conceptualized rebels as animals needing to be humanized and the ways in which rebels, in turn, resisted this disciplinary process. It shows that rebels did not want or need to have their heads “repaired.” Rather, it was civilians for whom “reintegration” was ritually healing, allowing them to heal their own sicknesses by projecting them onto rebels. Whereas reintegration offered to cleanse rebels through the pure concept of “humanity,” the interlude acts as a dirtying process of dis-integration, rejecting the healing offered by “humanity.”