The Yira Folk Across the Congo-Uganda Border

This book argues that in order to fully understand contemporary African borderlands, we need to incorporate precolonial spatial knowledge and practice. Investigating the history of the Yira people at the Congo-Uganda border, the book demonstrates that precolonial Yira polities set the context for continuing practices of violence of and resistance against colonial modernity astride Lwa-Nzururu (the Rwenzori Mountains).

The book outlines the emergence of the seven autonomous yet mutually dependent Yira clan-states, which were confederated as Buyira in the mid-eighteenth century. Centred inaugurally around trade in salt from the saline of Katwe, Buyira viewed state borders as connecting bridges rather than barriers, and so the fixed colonial spatial order imposed by British and Belgian colonisers prompted waves of violent resistance. Drawing on a range of archival, oral, and ethnographic evidence from across space and time, this book demonstrates the resilience of the precolonial Yira spatial imagination: the cosmogenic vision of ekihugho. Within this context, the colonial political modernity, with its border regimes of surveillance, visas, and taxes, represented an infrastructure of violence that had to be either resisted or eluded.

Providing a novel explanatory framework for the ongoing pathologizing violence which has pitted state forces against Yira folks ever since the colonial period, this book will be an important reference to researchers across the fields of African history, anthropology, and politics.