There is an additional way in which to view displacement and emplacement tendencies in the war-time register. The strange and unfamiliar landscape becomes a moment of rest but not the end or final stage of flight.
GULU CITY-THURSDAY JULY 23,2026
By Okumu Livingstone (Ugandan correspondent)
Prof. Daniel Komakech carried out analytical finding in the post war conflict Northern Uganda, here below is his verbatim, second edition
While war generates large-scale dislocation (Elliott 2014:128), it also enhances immobility in the sense of ruins and ghost towns, while mobility is conceptualised in terms of speed, flight and displacements (McElroy et al 2012) described.
However, as Vigh (2018) shows, one may be displaced but this displacement is not in the physical sense of up-rootedness or leaving one’s home or house or location. But rather, how the surrounding and landscape becomes unfamiliar or strange and so, one is therefore, disconnected.
Similarly, one may be emplaced, but this emplacement is not to be interpreted in the physical form of being rooted, but rather, one may be displaced physically, in order to get emplaced. In this state, one’s agency of sensibility and tactically (tactics) has a utility or teleological end of taking or catapulting one into the state of being visible, recognised and living a livable life.
This is the idea of social becoming within which we can begin to see the embeddedness of flight, displacement and navigation. In light of this, we begin to notice how the two-decade experience of the civil war in northern Uganda, and subsequent physical displacements in the internally displaced 2.
peoples’ camps (IDPs) can be elaborated in view of displacement and emplacement. In this IDP as a new site, this new ‘home’ became unfamiliar and strange, from which flight was desired and preferred. In both cases, there was an embedded desire of flight from this unfamiliar and strange locality to the cityscape from which to re-imagine new capacities of being visible and socially recognised (Dolan 2009).
There is an additional way in which to view displacement and emplacement tendencies in the war-time register. The strange and unfamiliar landscape becomes a moment of rest but not the end or final stage of flight. In this case, both the physical small and crowded IDPs into which 1.6 million (Southwick 2005:106) or 1.8 million (Branch 2013:3152) Acholi were in, made flight an everyday yearning. Suitcases in the houses were arranged for a short notice flight as much as hesitations to buy more durable items even when cheap or affordable they were, indicated tendencies of departure.
They were a manifestation of the materiality of movements but also, continued uncertainties (Baines 2010) for further movements (Motasim 2008:13). This very locality which was momentarily a place (and not home), was a time of moment, a time of rest and a time of wait, comparable to a bus park, office or hotel lounge, where one’s sitting point is transient and only occupied for a time, waiting dislocation or movement.
That which is called ‘place’, takes on another nodal meaning, a transient meaning of mobility itself. It is a non-place (as opposed to no place), a lowly state of landscape, with a next move propensity. A breakpoint, a breakpoint to break-step and momentarily converge in this place – as it were in the IDPs.
Therefore, the place and the occupied huts or ‘house’ were mobile (mobile units) moving, as the occupant moved, becoming a moving object. In effect, it was not the physical place or homes moving but rather, people as infrastructure of movement, carrying along with them, place and home. A movement from that which is unfamiliar and frightening while at the same time, flight from being invisibilised to a terrain of visibility or recognition.
This terrain, this landscape, is the city and in this case, Gulu city. The choice of why Gulu city for which flight was made, will be explained in the subsequent sections.
Consequently, the flight from the IDPs and other spaces of wait, to Gulu city, required an intensified deployment of circulation, to afford legibility and navigation of the cityscape.
The legibility was to assist in re-presenting, holding up or having a grip on the city potentials or its actual. The agency of sensibility and tactics of navigation, was to make, re-make or innovatively alter the register of Gulu city to favor them. It is in Gulu city that the overlapping or layered histories of the conflict or its effects became more intense. The incessant navigation and maneuver as we shall see, are moments of show of displacement and emplacement, while the subsidiary effort is to re-establish a certain social, economic as well as cultural order of visibility.
This convergence, this presence in the registry of Gulu city was not only the crowding but also the alterations of the speed of Gulu cityscape. This has since made city life unfold in a spectacular way, with many things; street with moving people, animals like goats, dogs and cows who are themselves in a fast-moving mode, speeding vehicles, communications, information and gossips across vectors of navigations of all kinds. However, there is little trade and slow commerce.
This slow commerce means, there is a narrow path into the city while at the same time, necessitating sharper lenses of viewing the cityscape for hidden or erstwhile unnoticed opportunities.
For that matter, engaging the city into another gear of speed mode necessitated further acceleration to try and catch the city or catch up with the city. While those whose ways of things were slow or yet to unfold, were in a state of brakes, a ‘brake and go’, and a ‘go and brake’, slowing the city, the more dynamic young people transformed the speed and the city ways of things. It is this complex character that Gulu has gained over time as a city with two speeds, that made Branch (2013) to proclaim it as; a city with layered cityscape.
In situations such as fleeing the IDPs and the villages, Gulu city had to be held with a firm grip and not to be lost since there was presumably no other cityscape in Acholi sub-region to try out life. This made Gulu city a dire as well as a privileged site for making ends meet. It was and is dire because it is the alternative moment of displacement and emplacement, and no other.
Its dense registry intensified its transformation in all directions and circuits. It is here that post-war uncertainties have mobilised young people to negotiate survival. In the next section, I draw on this, to situate and elaborate the survival sensibilities and tactics.
