The Karamojong or Karimojong, are an ethnic group of agro-pastoral herders living mainly in the north-east of Uganda. Their language is also known as Karamojong or Karimojong, and is part of the Nilo-Saharan language group.

History[link]

The Karamojong live in the southern part of Karamoja region in the north-east of Uganda, occupying an area equivalent to one tenth of the country. According to anthropologists, the Karamojong are part of a group that migrated from present-day Ethiopia around 1600 A.D. and split into two branches, with one branch moving to present day Kenya to form the Kalenjin group and Maasai cluster. The other branch, called Ateker, migrated westwards. Ateker further split into several groups, including Turkana in present day Kenya, Iteso, Dodoth, Jie, Karamojong, and Kumam in present day Uganda, also Jiye and Toposa in southern Sudan all of them together now known as the "Teso Cluster" or "Karamojong Cluster".

It is said that the Karamojong were originally known as the Jie. The name Karamojong derived from phrase "ekar ngimojong", meaning "the old men can walk no farther". According to tradition, the peoples now known as the Karamojong Cluster or Teso Cluster are said to have migrated from Abyssinia between the 1600 and 1700 AD as a single group. When they reached the area around the modern Kenyan-Ethiopian border, they are said to have fragmented into several groups including those that became Turkana, Toposa, and the Dodoth. The group that became known as the Toposa continued to present day southern Sudan; the Dodoth, settled in Apule in the northern part of present day Karamoja. The Turkana settled in Kenya where they are now and today's Jie of Uganda are thought to have split from them, moving up the escarpment into today's Kotido District. The main body continued southwards, reportedly consisting of seven groups or clans who settled in today's southern Karamoja, eventually merging to become the three clans now existing: the Matheniko in the east around Moroto mountain, the Pian in the south and the Bokora in the west. However, a significant sized group went west and formed the Iteso, the Kumam, and the Langi. It was this group who were said to have used the phrase "the old men can walk no farther".

Language[link]

Related to Turkana: in the Karamojong language, the people and the language have the convenient prefixes ŋi- and ŋa- respectively. Lack of a prefix indicates the land where they live. All the above mentioned branches from Ateker speak languages that are mutually intelligible. (The Lango in Uganda are also ethnically and genetically close to the ŋiKarimojong, evidenced by similar names among other things, though they adopted a dialect of the Luo language).

Culture[link]

The main livelihood activity of the Karamojong is herding livestock, which has social and cultural importance. Crop cultivation is a secondary activity, undertaken only in areas where it is practicable.

Due to the arid climate of the region, the Karamojong have always practiced a sort of pastoral transhumance, where for 3-4 months in a year, they move their livestock to the neighboring districts in search of water and pasture for their animals.

The availability of food and water is always a concern and has an impact on the Karamojong's interaction with other ethnic groups.

Social organization[link]

The dominant feature of Karamojong society is their age system, which is strictly based on generation. As successive generations have an increasing overlap in age, this leads logically to a breakdown of the system, which appears to have occurred after rules were relaxed in the nineteenth century among their close neighbours, the Jie. However, the Karamojong system is flexible enough to contain a build-up of tension between generations over a cycle of 50 years or so. When this can no longer be resolved peacefully, the breakdown in order leads to a switch in power from the ruling generation to their successors and a new status quo. The next changeover is expected around 2013. [Dyson-Hudson, Neville (1966), Karimojong Politics, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Spencer, Paul (1998), The Pastoral Continuum: The Marginalization of Tradition in East Africa, Clarendon Press, Oxford (pp. 99-119).]

As both a rite of passage into manhood, as well as a requirement for engagement, a young Karamojong man is required to wrestle the woman he desires to marry. If he is successful in winning the wrestling match against the woman, he is now considered to be a man and is permitted to marry the woman. This ensures that the man will be strong enough to care for and protect his wife. After a successful match, the dowry negotiations are allowed to commence. In an instance where the young man is unable to defeat the woman in the wrestling match, he will not be considered by his people to be a man and will often leave to marry a woman from a different people-group where a test of strength is not required. If a non-Karamojong man desires to marry a Karamojong woman, he is also required to go through this ceremony.

Conflicts[link]

The Karamojong have been involved in various conflicts centered on the practice of cattle raids.

The Karamojong are in constant conflict with their neighbors in Uganda, Sudan and Kenya due to frequent cattle raids. This could be partly due to a traditional belief that the Karamojong own all the cattle by a divine right, but also because cattle are also an important element in the negotiations for a bride and young men use the raids as a rite of passage and way of increasing their herds to gain status. In recent years the nature and the outcome of the raids have become increasingly violent with the acquisition of AK47s by the Karamojong.

The Ugandan government have attempted to broker deals for weapons amnesties, but the number of cattle the Karamojong have wanted per gun has proved too steep for any meaningful agreement to be made.

External links[link]

• UGPulse.com articles on the Karamojong
• everyculture.com - Karamojong
• [1]

It has been suggested that Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) Proposed since December 2010.

Peaceful coexistence was a theory developed and applied by the Soviet Union at various points during the Cold War in the context of its ostensibly Marxist–Leninist foreign policy and was adopted by Soviet-influenced "Communist states" that they could peacefully coexist with the capitalist bloc (i.e., non-communist states). This was in contrast to the antagonistic contradiction principle that Communism and capitalism could never coexist in peace. The Soviet Union applied it to relations between the western world and in particular, the United States and NATO countries and the nations of the Warsaw Pact.

Debates over differing interpretations of peaceful coexistence were one aspect of the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the People's Republic of China under the leadership of its founder, Mao Zedong, argued that a belligerent attitude should be maintained towards capitalist countries, and so initially rejected the peaceful coexistence theory as essentially Marxist revisionism. However, their decision in 1972 to establish a trade relationship with the United States also saw China cautiously adopting a version of the theory to relations between itself and non-socialist countries in the developing world. From that point through to the early 1980s and Socialism with Chinese characteristics, China increasingly extended its own peaceful coexistence concept to include all nations. Enver Hoxha also denounced this and turned against China as a result of China growing closer ties to the West such as 1972 Nixon visit to China and today Hoxhaist parties continue to denounce the concept of peaceful coexistence.

Peaceful coexistence, in extending itself to all countries and social movements tied to the USSR's interpretation of communism, quickly became modus operandi for many individual communist parties as well, encouraging quite a few, especially those in the developed world, to give up their long-term goal of amassing support for an armed, insurrectionist communist revolution and exchange it for more full participation in electoral politics.

Soviet policy[link]

Khrushchev solidified the concept in Soviet foreign policy in 1956 at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The policy arose as a temptation to reduce hostility between the two superpowers, particularly in light of the possibility of nuclear war. The Soviet theory of peaceful coexistence asserted that the United States and USSR, and their respective political ideologies, could co-exist together rather than fighting one another, and Khrushchev tried to demonstrate his commitment to peaceful coexistence by attending international peace conferences, such as the Geneva Summit, and by traveling internationally, such as his trip to America's Camp David in 1959. The World Peace Council founded in 1949 and largely funded by the Soviet Union attempted to organize a peace movement in favor of the concept internationally.

Peaceful coexistence was meant to assuage Western, capitalist concerns that the socialist Soviet Union was driven by the concept of world revolution advocated by its founders, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Lenin and the Bolsheviks advocated world revolution through workers' "internal revolutions" within their own nations, but they had never advocated its spread by intra-national warfare, such as invasion by Red Army troops from a neighboring socialist nation into a capitalist one. Indeed, short of such "internal revolutions" by workers themselves, Lenin had talked about "peaceful cohabitation" with capitalist countries. Khrushchev used this aspect of Lenin's politics to argue that while socialism would eventually triumph over capitalism, this would be done not by force but by example. Implicitly, this proclamation meant the end of the USSR's advocacy of the spread of communist revolution through insurrectionist violence, which some communists around the world saw as a betrayal of the principles of revolutionary communism itself.

In addition to being a reaction to the realisation that a nuclear war between the two superpowers would ensure the destruction of not only the socialist system but the entirety of humanity, it also reflected the USSR's strategic military disposition - the move away from large, and possibly politically offensive, military ventures towards a force centered on proxy wars and a strategic nuclear missile force. Although disquiet over this shift helped bring Khrushchev down, his successors did not return to the antagonistic contradiction theories of an inevitable conflict between the imperialist and socialist systems. Initially, this was China's main gripe with the theory, and the reason the latter from then on classified the Soviet Union as a "betrayer of the Revolution."

Cuban policy[link]

As Marxists we have maintained that peaceful coexistence among nations does not encompass coexistence between the exploiters and the exploited, between the oppressors and the oppressed.

—Che Guevara, December 11, 1964 speech to the United Nations^[1]

One of the most outspoken critics of peaceful coexistence during the early 1960s was Argentine Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara. As a leader in the Cuban government during the October Missile Crisis, Guevara believed that a repeat invasion by the United States (after the Bay of Pigs) would be justifiable grounds for a nuclear war. In Guevara's view, the capitalist block was composed of "hyenas and jackals" that "fed on unarmed peoples".^[1]

Chinese policy[link]

Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China proposed the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in 1953 during negotiations with India over Tibet and these were written into the Agreement Between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of India on Trade and Intercourse Between the Tibet Region of China and India signed in 1954 by Zhou and Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru. The principles were reiterated by Zhou at the Bandung Conference of Asian and African countries where they were incorporated into the conference declarations. One major consequence of this policy was that the PRC would not support Communist insurgencies in Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia, and would distance itself from overseas Chinese in those nations.

However, Maoist doctrine continued to emphasise the survivability of any conflict between the imperialist and socialist world systems - the Chinese continued to advocated a stronger form of the campist theory of global politics than that approved in the USSR.

With Mao's death the Chinese softened their line, though would never endorse the views of their rivals. During the late 1970s and 1980s, the concept of peaceful coexistence was expanded as a framework for all sovereign nations. In 1982 the Five Principles were written into the Constitution of the People's Republic of China which claims to be bound by them in its international relations.

The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence as promoted by China are:

• mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity
• mutual non-aggression
• non-interference in each other's internal affairs
• equality and mutual benefit
• peaceful co-existence

There are three notable consequences of the Chinese concept of peaceful coexistence. First of all, in contrast with the Soviet concepts of the mid-1970s, the Chinese concepts include the encouragement of global free trade. Second, the Chinese concept of peaceful coexistence places a large emphasis on national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and thus moves by the United States to promote democracy and human rights are seen in this framework as hostile. Finally, as the PRC does not consider Taiwan to be sovereign, the concept of peaceful coexistence does not extend to Taiwan, and efforts by other nations, particularly the United States, to involve itself in PRC-Taiwan relations are seen as hostile actions in this framework.

Use in modern diplomacy[link]

More recently, the phrase has gained currency beyond its usage in communist phraseology and has been adopted by the broader diplomatic world. For instance, in his 2004 Christmas address, Pope John Paul II called for "peaceful coexistence" in the Middle East.^[2]

See also[link]

• Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Ankerl, Guy. Global communication without universal civilization. INU societal research. Vol.1: Coexisting contemporary civilizations : Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western. Geneva: INU Press. ISBN 2-88155-004-5. 
• Erickson, Richard J. (January–February 1973). "Development of the Strategy of Peaceful Coexisting During the Khrushchev Era". Air University Review. http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1973/jan-feb/erickson.html#erickson. 
• Kulski, Wladyslaw W. (1959). Peaceful Coexistence: An Analysis of Soviet Foreign Policy. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. http://www.questia.com/read/95046034.