Cross-Border Pastoralism in a Losing Era: An Unbroken Practice in Peripherality?

The practices of Batuku pastoralists in the Semliki region at the Uganda-DRC border have been hampered by the militia activities in the eastern DRC, droughts, the state controls of the border. This has prompted a crisis that has led both privation and invention that oftentimes feed off and inform one another. People in this crisis utilise what is present to them for their survival. This ethnography reveals a shift from patrilineal and gerontocratic political tendencies to a more “resource ownership” driven societal perception. Drawing on my conversations and hangouts with women, youth and the elderly in the Batukuland, there is an upcoming “counter culture” that is bringing a shift from androcentrism (agnatic politics) and gerontocratic (eldership politics) tendencies. A new situation where young people and women are breaking into “independent” resource ownership is observable. Women, for instance, are in trading centres; trading in various Chinese merchandise; they are in markets selling food and beverages of all kinds; they are in jobs of teaching at pre- and primary school levels; while others have moved to towns to work in industries. Some women find themselves as the head of their families after their husbands run away, and their cows get completely depleted because of drought. These developments have had an unsettling effect on the once relatively stable social system of the Batuku pastoralists, a system that was anchored in labour allocation and status ascription that depended on age and sex. The decimation of cattle that once held this system together has exposed the Batuku pastoralist community to a state of precarity and peripherality.