Uganda - Gulu and the North

Kampala, Entebbe, the Uganda of repute, is a place of enveloping warmth, lush-green, coffee-rich, a jacaranda breeze. The far north of Uganda is nothing like this. The country north of the Victoria Nile and Lake Kyoga is drier than the savanna in the far south-wide open land, often trackless, which even before the days of Idi Amin, travelers were warned to enter with no less than two four-wheel-drive vehicles. Today, you're warned to shun it altogether, unless you can rent a light plane to get in and out of secure redoubts like the army base on the Kidepo River frontier with the Sudan, a region whose land, people and animals are so close to the Pleistocene, and so palpably distant from the rest of the world, that you find yourself hypnotized.

This is Nilote country. Amin came from the Nilotic tribes that populate this harsh country; likewise, Obote. Meantime, Museveni's crusade came from the green south and west, the heartland of the old Bantu kingdoms.

The Acholi, the tribe that spawned Joseph Kony has suffered terribly. It is estimated that 300,000 Acholi have died in the last ten years.

The far north has always been a rough place, a place where men can still be seen with chest scars toting their kills (left breast for women, right for men), and cattle rustling has long been both a routine way of life and a routine way of death. Today, it's especially dangerous. Remnants of Amin's army are about, along with the Lord's Resistance, as well as outright shiftas. In this territory, the term shifta, meaning bandit, is likely to be used honestly, and not as a euphemism for guerrillas.

http://www.state.gov/www/issues/relief/gulu.html

Uganda a No-Go

Want to get out for a night on the town? U.S. government employees must have permission from the chief of mission to visit the following districts: Kotido, Moroto, Apac, Lira, Gulu, Kitgum, Kisoro, Rukungiri, Kasese, Moyo, Arua, Nebbe, Adjumani, Bundibugiyo, and Kabarole.