Acholi Intellectuals draws on the writings of homespun historians, interviews with elderly men and women who remember the last days of colonial rule, and government and missionary archives to illuminate the intellectual and political history of the colonial transition in northern Uganda. The book focuses on Acholiland, a place that has been chronically understudied in comparison to Uganda’s rich, fertile, and well-documented south. Southerners there—following the depictions of colonial officials and missionaries—have often regarded northerners as uncultured people lacking ideas. Acholi Intellectuals challenges this prejudice, bringing into view a whole category of men (and a few women) who mediated between indigenous and colonial knowledge systems and inaugurated a new kind of politics. Patrick William Otim studies a category of people—known as healers, messengers, war leaders, poet-musicians, and diplomats—who possessed prestige and power in an older Acholi political logic and who, in the dawning days of colonial government, came to occupy positions of power in the British administration. Otim argues that these Acholi intellectuals were not simply creatures of British colonial self-interest; neither was their power invented by the coercive logic of indirect rule. He asserts instead that people who held moral and social power in the older system were able to transform that strength, under colonial administration, into a new form of political legitimacy.

Patrick William Otim is an associate professor of history at Bates College and affiliated faculty at the Africana Program. He is a historian of East Africa with a particular interest in northern Uganda. His work has appeared in the Journal of Eastern African Studies, Critical African Studies, International Journal of African Historical Studies, Canadian Journal of African Studies, History in Africa, and Stichproben-Vienna Journal of African Studies, among other places.

Patrick William Otim has written a fascinating, innovative, and meticulously documented account of Acholi history. He shows that intellectuals who played major roles before conquest worked to create an Acholi-inflected version of colonial society. We were mistaken to imagine that the most important post-conquest transformations revolved around chiefs. Instead, people who were already influential in the realm of symbolism and knowledge reimagined and recreated their own society. —Steven Feierman, University of Pennsylvania