(PDF) Refusing aid: Interdependency and

15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License Received: 13 April 2020 Accepted: 12 June 2022 DOI: 10.1111/amet.13116 RESEARCH ARTICLE Refusing aid Interdependency and development in northern Uganda Sarah O’Sullivan1,2 1 Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto Abstract 2 Department of Human Geography, University of “Aid dependency” has long been a concern among development organizations, because Toronto Scarborough it supposedly discourages the entrepreneurial spirit and thus hinders economic devel- opment. But what happens when beneficiaries refuse aid? In this article, I offer an Correspondence ethnographic account of aid refusal in postconflict northern Uganda. There, members Email:

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Funding information Wenner-Gren Foundation, Grant/Award Number: 9469; Ontario Graduate Scholarship; Senior Doctoral Fellowship in African Studies, New College, University of Toronto; Centre for Ethnography, University of Toronto Scarborough It was early 2017 in Gulu Town, in the Acholi subregion of northern Uganda. Residents had gathered for the weekly meet- ing of their village savings and loan association (VSLA), an autonomous group whose members save together and take indi- vidual small loans with interest from those savings. Called bolicup in leb Acoli (the Acholi language), a VSLA normally maintains a one-year cycle, after which the accumulated sav- ings and interest profits are distributed back to members. Mego Flo, the VSLA treasurer, was addressing the group.1 “Let them come and train us, but we don’t want them!” she exclaimed. “We will not use the bank!” Her fellow members erupted in applause. She was speaking about the man in a suit seated across from her, who, defeated, got up and left. This man, Oryema, had been sent to the VSLA meeting by the NGO that oversaw the group, to persuade the hard-nosed members to open a bank account.2 This was Oryema’s first and last exchange with this VSLA. He had wiped the sweat pooling above his brow and pleaded with them, but they argued about bank fees. He tried another This is an open access article under the terms of the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial © 2023 The Author. American Ethnologist published by American Ethnologist. 2023;1–12. 2 1996, 10 years into the war, the government began forcibly relocating civilians into displacement camps to quell civilian- rebel alliances with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the largest and most notorious rebel group that posed the greatest risk to Museveni’s legitimacy (Gersony, 1997). Over the next 10 years, camp populations exploded. By 2005, there were almost 2 million northern inhabitants—mostly Acholi—living in 251 camps across Uganda’s northern districts (USAID, 2006). No official peace agreement was signed, but in 2006 the LRA left Uganda, and processes of resettlement soon followed. Once the region’s bustling epicenter of humanitarian aid, Gulu quickly became home to foreign-funded state-led programs and hun- dreds of foreign and national development NGOs implementing postconflict recovery projects. Unlike humanitarian aid in the camps that prioritized direct material assistance, aid in areas like Gulu after the war con- sisted of entrepreneurially oriented interventions that aimed to build skills and promote income-generating activities. Accord- ingly, the role of local and international NGOs on the ground changed, pivoting away from providing relief aid and toward education and capacity building. But for most of the popula- tion, reframing the situation from one of humanitarian crisis to development and recovery did not spur significant mate- rial, economic, or social changes in security, food access, or infrastructure improvements (Sande Lie, 2017). Thus, despite a saturated landscape of development aid, collective experiences of displacement and persistent precarity have led to increasingly tenuous relationships between aid providers and recipients, leading many beneficiaries to reject the terms of aid. In 2011, Health for Gulu provided a plot of land for farming, fully paid school fees for members’ children, and access to medical care at the NGO’s clinic. Gradually, however, the donor’s priorities changed to promoting projects encouraging self-sufficiency and responsibility. By the time I came to know Can Pe Yot in 2017, aid had been reduced to a handful of partially paid school fees and semifrequent visits from Maureen, Health for Gulu’s field officer, who had monitored the group’s finances since 2011. Can Pe Yot had grown tired of this highly uneven relation- ship, marred by incessant surveillance, receding budgets, and quick project turnover, in return for what they considered very little. They were especially frustrated over having to use their own money to purchase expensive VSLA materials, such as a lockbox, ledgers, and booklets, which Maureen claimed were necessary for group “ownership.” Oryema’s visit and insistence that the group open a bank account when they were doing just fine without one signaled a tipping point. In international development literature, humanitarian pro- grams are critiqued for supposedly perpetuating poverty by fostering a “dependency syndrome” in the wake of crisis. According to critics, their programs extinguish incentives to work and heighten beneficiaries’ expectations of material aid (Collier, 1999; Efe, 2018; Harrell-Bond, 1986; Little, 2008; Meth, 2004). As I will elaborate later, some aid providers in postconflict Acholi recognized aid-related refusals, in which beneficiaries rejected entrepreneurially oriented aid or refused to cooperate with NGOs attempting to implement development projects, as vestiges from years of relying on humanitarian aid in the camps. In northern Uganda, the term “camp mindset” is REFUSING AID through, are both urban VSLAs located in the same Gulu municipal division. The VSLAs include men and women mem- bers, most of whom make their incomes by selling food and essential items in markets and along roadsides. Importantly, both VSLAs were generally regarded as financially “strong” because their members related to one another with a robust sense of solidarity, leading to financial success; some members had made considerable purchases, such as motorcycles or land. Despite these similarities, there were key differences. Men were largely absent from Can Pe Yot’s meetings, sending their wives or children instead. And while Can Pe Yot’s executive commit- tee was composed entirely of women, both men and women ran Kacel Wa Cung. Finally, an NGO formed Can Pe Yot, but Kacel Wa Cung was an autonomously created group with no formal ties to development programs. How can aid-related refusals speak to broader concerns regarding the monetization of relations within the finan- cialization of development? In what follows, I show that understanding aid-related refusals demands considering Acholi collective experiences of war, displacement, and the transition from humanitarian relief aid to postconflict development. My objective is to offer an alternative to the development narrative of postconflict populations as pathologically dependent. To do this, I elaborate on the Acholi concept of ripe as a key marker of VSLA organization and social life by providing ethnographic accounts of ripe making and breaking between VSLA mem- bers. Understanding VSLA refusals through an ethics of ripe points to how the terms of aid employed by the develop- ment apparatus in Africa reinforce deeply hierarchical, colonial relations. SITUATING AID-RELATED REFUSALS Expanding on earlier theories of reciprocity and exchange, anthropologists have recently returned to the concept of refusal, reimagining it as a generative response to the hegemonic power of settler colonialism and occupation (Bhungalia, 2020; McGranahan, 2016a, 2016b, 2018; Weiss, 2016). Refusal was first theorized this way by Simpson (2014, 2016, 2017), who positioned Kahnawà:ke Mohawk maintenance of sovereignty as an ongoing “refusal to consent” to Canadian and US set- tler colonialism. Similarly, McGranahan’s (2016a, 2018) work shows us that Tibetan refugees refusing the “gift” of citizenship in South Asia is a moral and political position against Chinese occupation. These scholars show that refusals disavow the colo- nial project and speak against its power. In rejecting subjugation and colonial authority, Weiss (2016, p. 352) suggests, refusals are active and an “affirmative investment in another possibil- ity”; they generate future political possibilities and different subjectivities (Simpson, 2014). Or as McGranahan (2016a, p. 338) puts it, they are a “politics of hope” that “things will be different.” It is in this imagining of a different possibility that I draw on refusal theory. As the most prolific anthropological work on refusal theory has come from a critique of sovereign power and citizenship, refusal has mainly been theorized as an act of nonrecognition of imperialism. Theorizing Can Pe Yot’s rejection of the bank- ing project within this genealogy of refusal underscores the 4 their accompanying claims of creating positive material, eco- nomic, and social change. This position appears as frustrated remarks—“These people work and have money while we suffer!”—and in refusals of “the gift” of entrepreneurially oriented aid and its accompanying reeducation. Important here is situating Can Pe Yot’s rejection of the banking project as refusal, not resistance. While theo- ries of resistance understand related actions as responses to forms of domination (Abu-Lughod, 1990; Seymour, 2006; Sivaramakrishnan, 2005), refusals reject an a priori hierar- chy. They unsettle the social landscape of aid by calling in development workers to relate to others interdependently, stak- ing a claim for sociality—even solidarity—between equals (McGranahan, 2016b, 2018; Sobo, 2016). Aid-related refusals are disruptive and generative; they are actions embedded in a politics of imagined possibilities through ripe—Acholi under- standings of interdependency and unity—leading “to new ideals of equality, new forms of hierarchy or, often, a complicated mix of both” (Graeber, 2013, p. 4). In their refusal to accept the terms of aid provided by Health for Gulu, Can Pe Yot’s members offer a reorganization of the political field through the social. THE FINANCIALIZATION OF DEVELOPMENT FOR POSTCONFLICT RECOVERY Health for Gulu’s insistence that Can Pe Yot open a bank account reflects broader development trends toward the democ- ratization of capital since the post–Washington consensus, according to which financial markets are reimagined as avenues to liberate people from poverty through social enterprises such as microfinance. Microfinance, theorized by Roy (2010) as “poverty capital” that repackages and sells the poor as finan- cially viable, shot to popularity in the late 1990s after the global success story of Grameen Bank, which won its founder the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Initially hailed as a poverty- eliminating, “inclusive” form of capitalism, microfinance is based on the understanding that small loans allow poor bor- rowers to establish and invest in income-generating activities that facilitate their upward mobility. But microfinance was not initially made for everyone, and the very poorest populations who posed too great a credit risk were often excluded. In response, the international humanitarian organization CARE created the first VSLAs among women’s groups in Niger in the early 1990s. CARE designed VSLAs specifically for the very poor to safely save and borrow money. Today, upwards of 10 million people are engaging in VSLA groups, with 850,000 in Uganda alone (CARE, 2017). Since the 1990s, the VSLA model has expanded beyond CARE to other organizations and to autonomous groups, which have adopted the VSLA model without the aid of a supervising organization. Originally intended for otherwise financially excluded pop- ulations, VSLAs are becoming a touchstone of financial inclusion, economic growth, and market expansion across Uganda. In 2017 the Bank of Uganda’s first National Finan- cial Inclusion Strategy emphasized the importance of linking REFUSING AID organization’s beneficiaries, for Ocen, was a direct consequence of displacement: Just being confined in the camps […] People became lazy. People became used to waiting to be given. And remember that some people were born during that time. So instead of learning that “for us we have to work for what we need,” like it was in the past, in the camp you are forced not to do it because of the insecurity. So the children growing up and even the adults during that time knew “OK, we have to be given free things. It is the respon- sibility of the government or whoever to give us food.” It [the camp mindset] became part of many of our people in the camps. Even now that people are back home, some people are still lazy. They want to wait for food to come. Since they do not dig, they have to steal from other peoples’ gardens because they did not cultivate theirs. […] [As an organization] if you come now and say, “Ah ah, I am not giving [things] to you [for] free. I have this mobile phone to give you but I want you to work for it,” some will even abuse you. Like Oryema, Ocen dealt with frustrated beneficiaries who refused his organization’s terms of aid. And like Ocen, Maureen interpreted these refusals as evidence of aid dependency. But rejecting the banking project was neither the first nor the last instance of Can Pe Yot’s aid-related refusals. Maureen the weekly meetings semiregularly; there, she passed attendance sheet to collect members’ signatures. The first time I met Maureen, she pulled out from her backpack a pen and an attendance sheet, and gave the items to a woman sitting mat across from her. The woman took the sheet, a single piece of paper with the name of a US donor prominently displayed at the top and an empty table underneath, and immediately passed it to the person to her right, who similarly passed it on without signing. I observed this process keenly, and when the atten- dance sheet made its way to the woman beside me, I quietly asked if she was going to sign. The woman shook her head and handed it off to me instead. Confused, but an enthusiastic rule follower, I took it and signed my name. Despite counting nearly 20 members, I saw only five signatures, including my own, the chairperson’s, and the secretary’s. Later that year, while I was visiting Maureen at her home, I asked her to clarify why Can Pe Yot’s members refused to sign their names whenever she circulated the attendance sheet. She launched into a frustrated diatribe: “These attendance sheets are entered into the computer. For them, they think that after writing, we just come and keep these sheets at home. But we take it to the office! We have our data officers.” I asked, “But why do people have to sign?” Maureen clarified that Health for Gulu needed the signatures for their records, but that they also used the attendance sheet to select beneficiaries of their school fees project. But the previous year’s selection process had not gone well. “Others [unselected members] were very bitter that I failed to pick their children for the sponsorship program,” Mau- reen said. Try as she might to explain that, owing to the donor’s 6 contrast, VSLAs provide safe saving opportunities and low- risk borrowing; importantly, they are social platforms on which to build relationships, trust, and commitments. This distinction became clearer to me after I heard members of Can Pe Yot retell the story of an MFI’s particularly severe means of collateral seizure. The neighborhood where Can Pe Yot’s members lived was a lively, densely populated area within walking distance to the center of town. As in most of Gulu, land came at a premium cost, obliging residents to rent rooms and often borrow from MFIs to start or maintain small business ventures. Word trav- eled quickly in these neighborhoods, and I could always count on the members of Can Pe Yot to update me with the latest gossip, like the dramatic public incidents of MFI and bank col- lection. One particularly notable story led several Can Pe Yot members to dismiss anyone with an MFI or bank loan as fool- ish and shortsighted. A neighbor had borrowed money from a popular international MFI that he could not repay. The MFI employees were scheduled to come to this man’s home to col- lect the outstanding balance, so, not knowing what else to do, he padlocked his door and left. This man lived beside a member of Can Pe Yot who was home when the debt collectors arrived. She said that when their truck pulled up and they realized the man had fled, they broke the lock, entered his house, and took his belongings. The man returned in the evening to find his home emptied almost completely of anything with resale value. This sort of brutal response to defaulters frightened many VSLA members away from microcredit loans, providing impor- tant insights into how the groups’ respective aims authorize and sustain vastly different forms of sociality. In MFIs, the solidar- ity between members functions to legitimize creditworthiness (Schuster, 2014, 2015). MFI members and their extended kin are bound to each other in a “social unit of debt” (Schus- ter, 2014, p. 564) through oscillating financial obligations of debt and credit. VSLA members can use their social positions within and beyond the group to negotiate terms of payment and accommodate timelines for borrowing and saving, but VSLA members are not similarly imbricated within group debt lia- bilities because VSLA members are not liable to an external creditor and most did not encourage extensive borrowing or indebtedness. Most VSLAs I followed allowed new members to borrow only what they had already saved, guaranteeing that if the member could not repay their loan, the group could retrieve the outstanding balance from their savings at the end of the financial year. While VSLA members did have to prove themselves trustworthy and often dramatized their virtuous- ness to access large loans, the spectacle conjured by a VSLA member was not solely for financial gain or access to an expand- ing global market. While the legitimacy of MFI collectives is theorized as based on creditworthiness, legitimacy of VSLAs among Acholi is about ripe. UNITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE Can Pe Yot’s slogan, printed on its ledgers and sung at meet- ings and events, was “Ripe pi dano weng,” which might loosely translate as “Unity for everyone.” The statement served to REFUSING AID conflict and displacement and accepts that ethical becoming in Acholi (and everywhere else, for that matter) is indeterminant, emanating from a “consistent problematization of ontology, politics, violence, gender, and class” (Victor, 2019, p. 396) that extends through time. How I saw VSLA members relating to one another echoes Victor’s argument. When I suggest that VSLAs enacted ripe, I do not mean that VSLA members acted according to a desire to repair a romanticized prewar or “traditional” Acholi moral system or the social relations that such a system fostered.7 To suggest as much risks reproducing underde- velopment discourses—whereby the problem and solution to persistent poverty and disenfranchisement lies within Acholi social systems—which I have thus far critiqued. To some VSLA members, the type of ripe enacted between members, who were often not wat, was a different but no less important sort of ripe. VSLA members’ ripe, and the accompanying processes of who was accepted into VSLA groups and who was excluded, reflected, in part, how they made sense of the social changes brought on by humanitarian and development interventions, rapid urbanization, and growing financialization approaches to aid, in and around Gulu today. Ripe between nonkin has gained significance in contemporary Acholi, especially in urban areas like Gulu, and for some people, like the members of Can Pe Yot, VSLAs have become a crucial means to support and encourage these relationships and values of interdependency. In present- day urban Acholi, to be able to ripe ki dano, or “unite with people,” is an important virtue that takes on salience given the growing pressures to financialize VSLAs and monetize relationships fostered within them. ENACTING RIPE WITHIN VSLAs Money once borrowed must be repaid, no matter if from an MFI or VSLA. In VSLAs, however, one’s success at borrowing is determined less by one’s ability to repay or promptness in doing so than by one’s commitment to VSLA ethics. As already noted, VSLA ethics comprise circulating interdependent social and monetary obligations through ripe. Failing to oblige and bal- ance expectations of ripe with business ventures violates rules, and members who do so become transgressors accused of corruption and misdeeds. During my fieldwork, two events occurred within the VSLA Kacel Wa Cung when members could not repay their loans in the previously agreed-on time- frame. The events provide a rich comparison between member behavior that is deemed socially acceptable and unacceptable. These examples speak to my larger argument about practices of ripe that refuse the monetization of relationships in Acholi. Mego Adaa had been with Kacel Wa Cung since 2014. As the end of the 2016 financial year drew near, however, she strug- gled to pay back her outstanding loan. A dedicated member who rarely missed a meeting and supported her fellow members when difficulties befell them, she asked them to help her pay off the 225,000 shillings (US$60) still owed. They discussed the situation at length and, with only minor resistance, decided that each member would take 6,000 shillings (US$1.50) out of their personal savings to cover the cost of the loan if Mego Adaa 8 mother eventually got old and died as parents do, but much to his dismay, no one came to bury her, and he grieved alone. The lesson is not lost to listeners. Committing oneself to others is a virtue that comes with specific social obligations that cannot be replaced with monetary transactions. Like the chairperson’s fears that inappropriately chastising Mego Adaa would threaten group ripe, failing to follow VSLA ethics when borrowing money brought conflict and mistrust. A heated dispute involving a new member’s failure to pay her loan consumed my first few Kacel Wa Cung meetings in mid-2017. A new member, a young woman who was vouched for by a longtime member, had taken out a loan to start a small business near the beginning of the financial year in January. After receiv- ing the loan, the young woman disappeared from meetings, not returning until months later. She had come that day to ask if she could leave the group’s kalulu (Kiswahili: circle), a rotating savings and credit association within Kacel Wa Cung, in which members used their payout to purchase baati (corrugated iron sheets used for roofs). Her rationale for leaving the kalulu was that she could use the money she had saved thus far to repay the VSLA loan. Kneeling on a mat with her head hung low in front of the chairperson and other VSLA executives, including one of my longtime key informants, Mego Aber, the young woman explained that she had serious problems at home. The leader of the kalulu denied her request. She, along with other members, were angry that the woman had been absent from the meetings for months without any update. The leader threatened her that if she refused to pay back her loan, Kacel Wa Cung’s members would be forced to act like an MFI, “ambushing her and taking her things, which is not good.” The young woman grew irri- tated and lashed out, accusing her fellow members of stealing her money. But such ill-founded allegations only made them angrier. An older woman seated beside her condemned her for deception. Others nodded and cheered. Tears rolled down the young woman’s cheeks, and Mego Aber’s voice pierced through the noise: “Do not cry and think you are different from every- one else!” Taking this as a cue, group members began throwing insults: “Since she is late paying back her loan, she should pay with extra interest!” “She did not pay the 6,000 shillings we collect from everyone to buy food for our celebrations.” Eventually Kacel Wa Cung’s members agreed to give 75,000 shillings (US$20) of the young woman’s kalulu money back for fear of appearing to have passed too harsh a judgment over a member in relative financial distress, thereby acting too much like an MFI. But the kalulu’s leader insisted that have to wait until the end of the cycle to receive the equaled over 200,000 shillings (over US$50). Accepting this arrangement, the young woman left. I never saw her again. When she was out of sight, Mego Aber explained her uncharac- teristic outburst: “That girl is stubborn. She took a long time to come to us after she picked her loan, and yet she did not come to inform the group about her problems!” The next week, the member who had vouched for the young woman received harsh REFUSING AID officer (CDO). Can Pe Yot submitted an impressively detailed poultry project design for a 2 million-shilling (US$530) nonre- payable livelihood project grant. In early August, they received word that their project had been among those selected. Shortly thereafter and almost a year after they drove Oryema away, Can Pe Yot opened a bank account. The terms of service, however, differed dramatically from Health for Gulu’s original proposition. This time it was just a precondition for accessing the grant money and did not imply that they had to actually use it. Before the division chose the grantees, I spoke with the CDO about the selection process. I imagined the competition was high, since his division had over 250 registered groups but only a handful of available grants. He explained that interested par- ties had to pick the application form from his office and submit a feasible project proposal showing promise of “wealth cre- ation.” Once the division had made their preliminary selection, they would ask several community leaders to weigh in on the groups’ strengths, commitment, and overall ability to carry out the proposed projects. The CDO said his office usually selected agricultural projects because these were most likely to generate income. To my surprise, I later learned that Can Pe Yot had no intention of carrying out its poultry project. Raising chickens together and ensuring the project’s profitability was too diffi- cult to do well, members said, because the complicated logistics required to successfully manage caring for animals like chick- ens almost always brought conflict between group members and threatened ripe. To keep the chickens away from dogs and other disease-carrying animals and to discourage theft, the group would need to build a co-op on someone’s land. The mem- bers whose land they would use would have the most work to do, and not all members would contribute equally for feed and immunizations. Raising chickens was both a risky finan- cial investment and potentially hazardous to group synergy. Can Pe Yot knew that animal-based investment opportunities won grants, and its members based their winning proposal on their loan officer’s already well-established personal poultry business. If a division office employee came to evaluate their progress, they could simply direct the employee to the loan officer’s chickens and claim them as their own. After a few weeks of waiting, word came that they would receive their 2 million shillings shortly. The meeting buzzed with excitement, and members started brainstorming ideas on uses for the money. The chairperson seemed worried about their dishonesty and warned the group about the consequences faced by another VSLA whose members strayed from their sub- mitted project. Members of this VSLA, rather than implement the catering business outlined in their proposal, distributed the money among themselves instead. When they found out that the CDO would be visiting to see the state of the project, they scrambled to buy catering supplies and lost the money anyway. Mego Flo brushed off the chairperson’s warning. She insisted that Can Pe Yot’s situation was different because, unlike the other group that had no catering business, a poultry project did exist; it just did not belong to the group. She drew on the lan- guage of ripe, cautioning that to succeed, “members must be one voice and agree not to tell on the group.” The chairper- 10 development” (Pailey, 2019) by demonstrating how inter- dependent social relations reject pathological notions of aid dependency. There is, moreover, evidence that entrepreneurial development projects, which encourage market-driven “community-based” approaches to poverty, are ineffective at producing structural transformation and large-scale devel- opment (Nega & Schneider, 2014). Nonetheless, support for such projects continues to grow. Proponents emphasize such projects’ “grassroots” approach to development in Africa for how they align with collectivist cultural values found in many African contexts, such as the Xhosa/Zulu ubuntu philosophy (Calvo et al., 2017).8 But this way of doing development reduces the purpose of and values embedded in relations of interdependency to a goal of wealth creation. It co-opts African philosophy to support and legitimize capitalism as the de facto global economic system. African values of interdependence are appropriated as a marketable asset, another extractable resource for an expanding, lucrative market for the already powerful. The financialization of development disregards and delegitimizes what feminist geographers J. K. Gibson-Graham (2008) call “diverse economies”—the ubiquitous noncapitalist transactions and social practices that contribute to well-being. So, what can we make of aid-related refusals? Instead of evi- dence of a problem, of beneficiaries’ aid dependency, validate diverse economies and offer a window of hope into reimagining development. Refusals are transformational, insist- ing on an otherwise development: a worldly reorganization of human value and wealth through interdependency. AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S Research for this article was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foun- dation and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Writing was supported by the New College Senior Doctoral Fellowship in African Studies and the Centre for Ethnography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. I am grateful to the five anonymous reviewers, the AE editors, friends, and colleagues for their valuable feedback and guidance on drafts of this arti- cle. Finally, I am forever indebted to everyone in Uganda who welcomed me into their lives. ORCID Sarah O’Sullivan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4484-7951 ENDNOTES 1I use pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of all VSLAs, Research for this project was carried out in both would not have been possible without the research, expertise of Joyce Abalo, Okello Benard, and Susan all given me permission to share their names here. translations are my own, I owe a lifetime of gratitude for sharing her wisdom about the nuances of translating correcting my translation errors in early drafts. 2 In 2019, Gulu Town, the largest municipality in northern gained city status and became Gulu City. Because I this article before the redrawing of municipality municipality divisions and use the name Gulu Town or Gulu. 3 Several efforts to develop a universal Acholi orthography Lakareber, 2011; Malandra, 1955; Odonga, 2005) have ognized ways of writing leb Acoli. The perhaps most spells ripe as ribbe (Odonga, 2005). I choose, however, REFUSING AID Branch, Adam, and Adrian Yen. 2018. “Neoliberal Discipline Northern Uganda.” In Uganda: The Dynamics of Neoliberal Transforma- tion, edited by Jörg Wiegratz, Giuliano Martiniello, London: Zed Books. Calvo, Sara, Andres Morales, and Yanni Zikidis. 2017. idarity Economy in Post-conflict Sub-Saharan Africa: and Approaches to Development.” In Social and Solidarity World’s Economy with a Social Face, 278–307. New York: Routledge. CARE. 2017. “Care Global VSLA Reach 2017.” December 2017. https://insights.careinternational.org.uk/media/k2/attachments/CARE- VSLA-Global-Outreach-Report-2017.pdf. 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Hopwood, Julian. 2022. “An Inherited Animus to Communal Land: The Mech- anisms of Coloniality in Land Reform Agendas in Acholiland, Northern Uganda.” Critical African Studies 14 (1): 38–54. 21681392.2021.1931383. 12 Ott, Jessica. 2022. “Umoja: A Swahili Feminist Ethic Zanzibar.” Feminist Anthropology 3 (2): 389–403. fea2.12080. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónke..́ 1997. The Invention of Women: of Western Gender Discourse. Minneapolis: University Pailey, Robtel Neajai. 2019. “De-centring the ‘White Development and Change 51 (3): 729–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech .12550. p’Bitek, Okot. 1966. Song of Lawino: A Lament. Nairobi: p’Bitek, Okot. 1971. Religion of the Central Luo. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau. p’Bitek, Okot, Frank K. Girling, and Tim Allen. 2019. Acholi of Uganda. Zurich: Lit Verlag. Peters, Rebecca Warne. 2019. “Refusing the Development NGO? Departure, Dismissal, and Misrecognition in Angolan Development Interventions.” Anthropological Quarterly 92 (1): 203–29. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq .2019.0007. Pierre, Jemima. 2020. “The Racial Vernaculars of Development: West Africa.” American Anthropologist 122 (1): .1111/aman.13352. Porter, Holly E. 2017. After Rape: Violence, Justice, Uganda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quinn, Joanna. 2007. “Social Reconstruction in Uganda: The Role of Cus- tomary Mechanisms in Transitional Justice.” Human 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-007-0020-8. Roy, Ananya. 2010. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. New York: Routledge. Sande Lie, Jon Harald. 2017. “From Humanitarian Action to Development Aid in Northern Uganda and the Formation of a Humanitarian Nexus.” Development in Practice 27 (2): 196–207. 09614524.2017.1275528. Schuster, Caroline E. 2014. “The Social Unit of Debt: thiness in Paraguayan Microfinance.” American Ethnologist https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12095. Schuster, Caroline E. 2015. Social Collateral: Women and Microfinance in Paraguay’s Smuggling Economy. Berkeley: University Seymour, Susan. 2006. “Resistance.” Anthropological of savings and loan associations negotiate debts and investments through Acholi ethics of ripe, or “making life experiences together.” In doing so, they demonstrate that their refusals are not disavowals of development. Rather, they are refusals of development hier- archies and of the financialization of development, both of which risk obstructing Acholi ethics of interdependence. By analyzing ripe and the ways that association members negotiate the ethics of receiving aid, this article offers a counterpoint to dominant, pathol- ogizing discourses of African dependency, corruption, and development—discourses predicated on Western, neoliberal valuations of work and community. In short, this arti- cle calls into question the assumption that economic growth is always the sine qua non of development. KEYWORDS aid dependency, development, financialization, interdependency, microfinance, postconflict, refusal, Uganda angle, warning that keeping money within their homes posed a great risk for theft. But Mego Flo, who took great care in hiding the group’s money in secret places, decided that this man had spoken plenty. As he disappeared behind the outer wall of the compound where the VSLA held its meetings, Mego Flo turned to others around her and said, “They think because we are pro- gressing well, they need to embarrass us. These people work and have money while we suffer!” Acholi VSLA structures are diverse. On top of personal sav- ings, some VSLAs require weekly fixed contributions to social funds called Ber Bedo (Welfare) and Peko (Problems), which provide small grants to members in need. Others also run rotat- ing savings and credit associations simultaneously with their regular VSLA activities. Mego Flo’s VSLA, named Can Pe Yot (Poverty Isn’t Easy), was formed by the NGO Health for Gulu in 2011 as part of a larger push by development organi- zations to begin peace building and community-based recovery programs after a 20-year-long civil war between President Yow- eri Museveni’s military and various northern rebel groups. In Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the and no modifications or adaptations are made. Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/amet 1 15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST often used by foreign and Ugandan development workers as a moniker for evidence of aid dependency. Refusing Health for Gulu’s banking project, which would permit members greater access to credit, thereby opening room for larger investments, branded Can Pe Yot’s members as having a camp mindset: they cared little about accessing formal financial services to grow their businesses. In other words, an allegation of camp mindset behavior indexes laziness and shortsightedness or a prioritization of immediate material aid over long-term invest- ment. Elders and Acholi religious and cultural leaders also used the term to describe the postconflict present. But the term had different connotations for different actors. For NGOs and government employees, the term indicated dependency as an adverse consequence of living in the camps, while for cultural leaders and elders, it expressed a symptom of deep cultural and moral loss among those who lived through the war, par- ticularly the loss of ethical values that undergird practices of interdependency and the relationships that such practices foster. Such slippage between multiple meanings of “camp mindset” troubles assumptions concerning postconflict dependency syn- drome and points to very different ethical modes of evaluating consequences of war and identifying appropriate solutions. The NGO employees and the beneficiaries with whom I spoke had different diagnoses of the postconflict era, which led to different goals. Many NGO projects in northern Uganda aimed to address persistent dependency via the social capital gained through group-based projects targeting self-sufficiency, while members of VSLAs like Can Pe Yot were concerned with an ethics of ripe (unity), thought to be lost after the forced displacement that uprooted millions of people from their ancestral lands and fun- damentally changed the way Acholi related to one another.3 In this article, I offer an alternative interpretation of Can Pe Yot’s aid-related refusal, challenging conventional development dis- course surrounding “dependency.” Mego Flo and Can Pe Yot’s refusal should be understood as a protective measure against, rather than evidence of, a camp mindset. Aid-related refusals reflect not the flourishing of pathologically dependent subjects, but an articulation of partially competing and coalescing ethi- cal configurations, forming through the imbrication of postwar conditions and capitalist expansion. After 10 years of engagement in northern Uganda, I draw data from a larger project exploring notions of a “moral” HIV-positive personhood emerging from the entanglements of HIV interventions and postconflict development. In this larger project, conducted in both English and leb Acoli, I followed seven VSLAs around Gulu over 18 months from 2017 to 2019. I fulfilled corresponding VSLA responsibilities like attending weekly meetings, contributing to social funds, visiting sick members, and attending members’ weddings and funerals.4 When I was not involved in VSLA work, I visited members at home, worked with local HIV NGOs, interviewed government employees and Ugandan workers from local and international NGOs in Gulu, and visited archives. In this article, I use ethnographic accounts of relationship- making (and breaking) between VSLA members and affiliated NGOs from two VSLAs. Can Pe Yot, whose members’ aid-related refusal opened this article, and Kacel Wa Cung (Together We Stand), whose members we will meet halfway 15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 3 colonial and racial logics of development’s ideological frame- works through which people conceptualize the production of and solutions to social and material inequality. I add to a recent 21st-century body of decolonial scholarship that directly contests such discourses of Western superiority in develop- ment, against which Africans’ moral worth is measured and always found to be inferior (Abraham, 2015; Kothari, 2006; Mkandawire, 2015; Pailey, 2019; Wilson, 2012). Exposing how this colonial durability ends up replicating global inequalities has been the concern of development anthropology for some time. But the project of decolonization, Tamale (2020) writes, cannot be won solely through academic problematization or “deconstruction” alone. Instead, she suggests “reconstruction,” whereby the agenda for decolonization must focus on “restoring the dignity of African people” by “reconstructing the relation- ship between African people and the colonizers” (Tamale, 2020, p. 21). For Tamale and other African feminist and postcolonial theorists (Ngũgı̃, 1986; Nzegwu, 2006; Oyěwùmí, 1997), this means centering African knowledge and values of interdepen- dence, solidarity, and communitarianism against the hegemony of white Western economic liberalism that undergirds the con- temporary oppressive status quo. In joining other critiques of white liberal rationality (Dubal, 2018; Mahmood, 2005), I sit- uate refusals as challenging the liberal assumptions of agency and humanity through which the development project in Africa was imagined. By drawing on refusal theory, I offer a theoretical pathway that lies beyond problematizing the presupposed hierarchies in aid provision thought to be necessary for successful “devel- opment” by attempting to meet the so-called beneficiaries of aid on their own terms. Recognizing development as a com- plex social practice (Olivier de Sardan, 2005), I draw on Beck’s (2016, 2017) recent work on microcredit in Guatemala, which theorizes development projects as “emergent interac- tions” among multiple parties with conflicting and interlocking dispositions, interests, and meanings (2017, p. 4). Beck (2016) argues that both critical scholarship and development practi- tioners overemphasize the outcomes of development projects at the expense of understanding the social relations between actors that constitute and are constituted by what we call “devel- opment.” Understanding development as a “set of ongoing, contingent relationships” (Beck, 2017, p. 25) draws attention to what people are doing and what they are responding to, eschew- ing the idea of development as a one-sided static intervention that is done by the Global North to the Global South. Can Pe Yot’s insistence on doing development differ- ently through ripe shows, ethnographically, development as a practice of relations within a set of local obligations and negotiations. In the context of postconflict development, we can imagine Can Pe Yot’s refusals as a “refusal to consent” to narratives of an enduring Acholi underdevelopment and aid dependency that fuel development interventions. Inspired by others who explore relations of interdependence and rela- tional personhood in African contexts (Chekero & Morreira, 2020; Ferguson, 2013; Nyamnjoh, 2017; Ott, 2022), this inter- pretation depathologizes dependency and legitimizes VSLA members’ rejection of aid. Refusals are an offensive posi- tion against development NGOs and state-run projects and 15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST formal financial services to VSLAs and other informal savings and lending groups, thereby expanding their credit capac- ity and making them function more like externally financed microfinance institutions. In VSLA workshops I attended, facil- itators hired by NGOs explicitly instructed project employees to emphasize the necessity of loans over saving when train- ing members of newly formed groups. One consultant, hired by a community-based NGO to educate its field officers on cor- rect VSLA procedures, explained that if a group saved without encouraging their members to borrow, then it could not call itself a VSLA. When a field officer who ran his own VSLA protested in favor of savings as a group’s most important asset, the consultant reasoned that savings do not “promote peoples’ ability” as borrowing does. Said another way, a VSLA mem- ber’s chance of “developing” became restricted if they limited their investments to only their savings. In northern Uganda, scholars and practitioners have imag- ined VSLAs and other group-based financing projects as a key means through which to foster peace and encourage eco- nomic recovery postconflict (Blattman et al., 2016; Malual & Mazur, 2017). Such framing reflects recent trends in neoliberal governance strategies for promoting “human centered devel- opment,” which focuses on improving peoples’ self-reliance and participatory decision-making for the goal of achiev- ing economic growth. At the World Bank, human and social development issues have been mainstreamed into economic assistance packages, which critics argue wrongly emphasize internal factors, such as a society’s social structures, customs, and institutions, as the primary causes of poverty and sup- posed underdevelopment (Bergeron, 2003, p. 400; Craig & Porter, 2006; Li, 2007). Shown in Branch’s (2011) critique of Western intervention in northern Uganda, the World Bank’s peace-through-development agenda, which interpreted violence as causing and caused by underdevelopment, legitimized the financialization of postconflict development interventions in Acholi. As Branch notes, the World Bank’s US$100 mil- lion Northern Uganda Social Action Fund was heralded as a form of “inclusive neoliberalism” (Golooba-Mutebi & Hickey, 2010) for the way it emphasized community participation and empowerment. Yet it blamed the conflict on the lack of social capital and cooperation among Acholi people (Atkinson, 2018; Branch, 2011; Branch & Yen, 2018). In other words, post- conflict development programs in Acholi, many of which are funded by the World Bank, are structured in a way that devalues the Acholi themselves, casting them as purveyors of violence and poverty. In the everyday practice of development work within implementing NGOs, VSLAs were not so much thought of as attending to a naturalized Acholi underdevelopment, but rather as mitigating aid dependency, empowering for- merly displaced people, and leading them toward economic development. Ocen, the Acholi director of a community- based NGO, spoke favorably about his organization’s recent move away from home-based care for vulnerable popu- lations toward VSLA-based projects. They were, he said, “moving from a kind of intervention that makes people to be dependent to a kind of intervention that makes people become more self-reliant.” Widespread dependency among his 15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 5 budgetary constraints, only a few members could be chosen, members still accused her and Health for Gulu of stealing from them. “If I tell them this and they start signing and then they don’t get anything, then they will really complain.” She con- tinued, “They think we benefit from their name. That is what they say. People append their signature, and they think they are getting money or something.” Can Pe Yot’s disobedience had grown gradually, as the material advantages associated with Health for Gulu’s VSLA project waned over time. As Maureen recalled, “When we first started in 2011, people could sign! If I came and forgot the form, they would even remind me to give it to them so I would have to return home to retrieve it. But when things [like material aid] were leaving, they [the signatures] began dropping, dropping, just like that.” Maureen reasoned that reducing material aid while encour- aging ownership was justified because it helped foster self- sufficiency and responsibility among members, giving way to higher economic productivity the same way that encouraging VSLA growth through banks might. In development practice, VSLAs become useful for rehabilitating societies recovering from conflict and civil war for the perceived benefit that increased social interaction brings for economic cooperation (Feigenberg et al., 2013; Hudon & Seibel, 2007). If VSLAs are considered useful techniques to mitigate the camp mind- set by bringing people together to increase their economic development, VSLAs’ refusals to respect NGO guidance on economic empowerment becomes evidence that the VSLA members remain trapped by their camp mindset. attended around an VSLAs AND MFIs IN POSTCONFLICT NORTHERN UGANDA on the VSLAs are popular across Uganda, where 37 percent of adults belong to VSLAs or similar informal savings groups (FSD Uganda, 2018). In Gulu alone, with its population of just over 150,000, I counted over 800 government-registered VSLA groups in 2018.5 Yet efforts to successfully integrate VSLAs into the formal financial sector have largely failed, a prob- lem that Financial Sector Deepening Uganda (FSD Uganda), Uganda’s leading financial inclusion think tank, blames on widespread financial illiteracy and the inappropriate tailoring of products to meet the financial needs of a population that incon- sistently relies on irregular incomes and small amounts of cash (FSD Uganda, 2018). But such logic assumes that struggles to successfully integrate VSLAs into the formal financial sec- tor, making them function more like microfinance institutions (MFIs), is inherently a problem, and it sidelines the possibil- ity that the failure to financialize VSLAs may, in fact, indicate a VSLA’s success. To members of both MFIs and VSLAs with whom I spoke in Gulu, the two organizational structures have purposes that are conceptually worlds apart. In northern Uganda, many MFI members and financially secure or salaried employees of large businesses and organizations also belong to VSLAs, withdrawing a percentage of each paycheck from their bank account and depositing it into their VSLA savings every week. MFIs and bank loans are used mainly by own- ers of enterprises who wish to expand their businesses. In 15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST deepen feelings of solidarity between VSLA members and stood as a reminder that no one succeeded on their own. While “unity” is the standard English translation for ripe, it falls short of representing the profound significance of ripe in everyday Acholi life. An Acholi Catholic priest with a PhD in anthro- pology better described ripe to me as “making life experiences together.” This translation positions ripe as a verb. Indeed, talk- ing of ripe in an abstract sense is difficult because it is always attached to specific actions. In other words, ripe is better shown than explained. Ripe, furthermore, is not just an important com- ponent of relationships; it allows and defines relationships, bringing them into existence. Historically, ripe refers to the interdependence between wat, all relatives and clans-people. Wat, as a “category of relations” (Oloya, 2015, p. 148), has specific relational obligations and responsibilities that set the foundation of social, political, and moral Acholi communities and personhood.6 But when people were forcibly displaced into overcrowded camps, where disease and violence were common, the foundation of Acholi relat- edness through wat was unsettled, causing a strong sense of moral uncertainty, or “social torture” (Dolan, 2009). Clans were separated in the camps, and it became logistically impossible to maintain practices essential to ripe, such as the transmis- sion of ancestral knowledge and cultural norms, as in wang oo, or storytelling around a communal fire. Confirming elders’ fears, children grew up without ripe, thus not knowing their wat or tekwaro (Acholi indigenous knowledge; Gauvin, 2013). As one elder lamented, children “are out of culture now. In fact, they don’t know what they are doing. They just don’t know” (Finnström, 2010, p. 144). Accompanying these difficulties were increasing kiir (abominations) arising from moral viola- tions of Acholi social codes (Victor & Porter, 2017, p. 594), like destroying property, murdering kin, or incest, that continue into the present day (Baines, 2010; JRP 2012; Porter, 2017). War and displacement eroded ripe, fundamentally altering Acholi community, personhood, and morality. Social repair, or the “myriad of ways in which persons live with, make sense of, and come to terms with violence” (Baines & Gauvin, 2014, p. 282), has been the subject of much ethno- graphic writing on postconflict Acholi society. Most of this work focuses on how the war caused social and cosmologi- cal rupture in Acholi, as well as the war’s aftermath and the postwar struggle to achieve “social harmony” (Porter, 2017), forgiveness, and rehabilitation through traditional justice mech- anisms (Baines, 2010; Gauvin, 2013; Ochen, 2014; Quinn, 2007). Ripe’s value, in this work, rests in restoring social rela- tionships, thereby reestablishing Acholi moral communities. Victor (2019), however, presents an alternative approach to con- temporary Acholi relations with their social worlds. Insofar as scholars understand present-day life and action in Acholi as always emanating from moral breakdown caused by war and displacement, we fail to see the “living of ordinary ethics: an active and ongoing working-through of norms as well as judgement of (and despite) the underdetermined recesses of experience” (Victor, 2019, p. 405). Attending to the ordinary ethics of living, such as intra-VSLA disputes or VSLA-NGO frustrations, uncouples present-day social life from the “event- aftermath” (Hunt, 2016, p. 4; see also Hopwood, 2022) of the 15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 7 vowed to repay them during the next financial year. Indeed, by August 2017 she fulfilled her promise, but not without minor difficulties along the way with some impatient members. On the day Mego Adaa returned the money, she addressed the group. “Thank you all for your patience,” she said. “I struggled to get something small [the amount owed back], and even though I have a lot of problems, I thought of the group first.” Seeing that Mego Adaa had, indeed, repaid every member in full, Kacel Wa Cung’s chairperson, a 40-year-old Acholi man who ran a clothing stall in a nearby market, chastised impatient members. “Some of you people acted so rude and continued to follow this woman up,” he said, “reminding her of the money she owed you even after we agreed to provide her more time. This is not an appropriate way to act.” These actions were inappropriate because Mego Adaa excelled at ripe, and the group collectively agreed that she could be trusted. The members’ poor behavior signaled to the chairperson that these members put their finan- cial concerns above those of the group, threatening the VSLA’s ripe. VSLA loans were not simple financial transactions, and membership in VSLAs weighed heavy with social obligations. Members were expected to pool their money for public func- tions, VSLA celebrations, and travel costs for funerals, hospital visits, weddings, and births. Kacel Wa Cung’s members con- tributed a fixed amount to social funds that were given out as grants or interest-free loans for costs associated with funer- als, health care, and emergencies. In late 2019, I returned to Kacel Wa Cung after a year to learn, sadly, that they had lost two of their long-term members—one to a road accident and the other to post-operative complications. It had been a par- ticularly financially productive year, and Kacel Wa Cung had planned a special outing to a nearby national park to celebrate. But after the loss of the second member, the group funneled the safari money into the deceased member’s funeral arrangements. Members decided it would be highly inappropriate to celebrate when the family was mourning, so they instead traveled to her ancestral land to see her laid to rest. Accounts of sharing in each other’s joys and sorrows were given as examples by my interlocutors when I asked them to elaborate on ripe. One man explained, VSLA If I have problems, and my neighbors come to me, that is a sign of ripe. […] We share the problems, we share the joys. We share whatever is affect- ing the community or the individual. It [ripe] is just being there. […] A family that is divided does not stand. A family with ripe, this is a family that stands. So, ripe is a key value that makes us stand in whatever level—family, community, workplace. Although VSLAs regularly raised money to support their members, money alone did not foster ripe, and a handful of members always volunteered to attend events or visit a sick member when needed. The moral of a popular story stood as a fair warning to those sufficiently naive to think otherwise: there once lived a rich man who never went to the weddings or funer- als of family, friends, and neighbors. Instead, he would send someone with an envelope stuffed with money. This rich man’s 15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST criticism for allowing such an untrustworthy person to join. I asked Mego Aber months later what became of the woman. She told me that she had been slowly paying her debt, giving small sums of money to the secretary outside meeting hours to avoid further shame. The woman’s failure to attend the meetings and lack of transparency about her personal problems demonstrated her lack of understanding that the ultimate goal of the group was the flourishing of ripe—social and moral obligations—between members. By treating the group instrumentally, as simply a means of saving and accessing loans much like MFIs, she failed to see the larger ethical purpose and animating ethos of the group and thus was ostracized and shamed. Comparing these two cases illuminates the politics, terms, obligations of debt, and forms of sociality created and sup- ported through Kacel Wa Cung. We can understand borrowing among Kacel Wa Cung’s membership as predicated on sustain- ing appropriate social relations in postconflict Acholi—that is, a version of Graeber’s (2014, p. 158) “human economy,” in which money is stripped of its social importance and is used, rather than to purchase things, to “create, maintain, or sever relations between people.” Not that members overlooked the financial benefits of belonging to VSLAs, whereby membership afforded them the ability to buy food and property, pay school fees, and pay off other debt. While the opportunities that money afforded were crucial, money was only appropriately circulated through practices that fostered and maintained ripe in VSLAs. The young woman fell victim to harsh criticism not because she couldn’t repay her loan but because she failed to fulfill the social obligations required by VSLA membership—and, by extension, the VSLA’s loans. Mego Adaa’s practice of ripe afforded her possibilities inaccessible to the young woman who borrowed money yet failed to participate in Kacel Wa Cung’s everyday dynamics. When speaking about the importance of ripe, members often described it in relation to development: it was, they said, mutu- ally necessary, like two sides of the same coin. VSLA members did not consider financial inclusion or material growth more important than fostering moral obligations with other people. Mego Aber, who attributed her relative material achievements to her skills at maintaining relationships, explained ripe’s sig- nificance to Acholi development this way: she raised her right hand with fingers outstretched and said, “We have five fingers for a reason. We cannot use a hoe with one finger, we cannot write with one finger. We need all fingers to make a hand. Only when everyone works together can we progress—can we gar- den, can we go to school, can we learn to write.” To “develop” in Acholi was to privilege relationships that offered mutual sup- port over personal gain. No one can do everything on their own; give to others and they will give to you when you are in need. she would rest, which REFUSING FOR A DIFFERENT DEVELOPMENT In 2018, six programs were offering financial support to government-registered VSLAs within Gulu’s four municipal divisions. VSLAs wishing to be considered needed to submit a project proposal to their division’s community development 15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 9 son eventually caved, and Can Pe Yot’s members distributed the grant money among themselves. To the best of my knowledge, the CDO never followed up. Can Pe Yot’s refusal to follow the conditions of the liveli- hood project would have been read as fraud—corruption—by the CDO if their deception was realized. Labeling it as such is part of what Pierre (2020) calls the “racial vernacular” of devel- opment, a term that draws attention to the “absent presence” (M’charek et al., 2014) of the racial thinking that structures the development apparatus deployed in Africa. Corruption, Pierre (2020) notes, is so often the focus of writing on African politics and development that it has become seen as a taken-for-granted, naturalized African cultural characteristic and rendered a major cause of persistent poverty in Africa (p. 90). Racial logics of African difference are so embedded in development dis- course that development organizations constantly misrecognize political dissent and creative attempts to mitigate inequities as corruption. Peters’s (2019) work in Angola, for example, highlights the plight of Angolan NGO staff who refuse their unequal terms of employment by using the NGO vehicles for their personal needs, just as international staff do; they are then fired for stealing organizational resources. By placing dis- courses of corruption alongside Mego Flo’s frustrated remark that opened this article (“We will not use the bank!”), we can begin to understand the VSLA’s actions as a rejection of post- conflict development hierarchies between aid providers and receivers. Applying refusal theory to understand the development appa- ratus in Africa unsettles assumptions of white superiority and the innate goodness of Western institutions that drive inter- ventions. For the VSLAs discussed in this article, refusals emanate from imagining a different sort of relationship with Health for Gulu and the division office, one distinct from the always-unequal giver-receiver dyad that defines development interventions in postconflict northern Uganda. They were, to again evoke Simpson (2016, p. 330), “manifestation[s] of deep awareness of the past, of, for example, theft in raw form.” Can Pe Yot’s members knew that Health for Gulu benefited enormously from their relationship, a relationship that mem- bers considered extraordinarily unequal and void of ripe. If Health for Gulu or the division office provided the VSLA with cash, land, or school fee grants, members would have the finan- cial freedom to invest in opportunities otherwise inaccessible to them. Refusals do not preserve aid dependency. They are efforts toward a possible praxis of ripe, in which development is inseparable from a form of care for others as equals. Instead, aid providers monitor, evaluate, and request obedience. It is worth considering the possibility that the “developed” subject who obeys NGO authority and accepts the terms of aid may be more an exemplar of the “camp mindset” than VSLAs like Can Pe Yot. Efforts to reclaim space for sociality outside institu- tional audit norms and the monetization of relations encouraged via financialization may offer up the most hope for an actu- ally sustainable future. For Acholi VSLAs, this future may be embedded in ripe. Through an ethnography of VSLAs and aid-related refusals in postconflict northern Uganda, this article offers an anthropological avenue to “decenter the white gaze of 15481425, 0, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.13116 by Cochrane Canada Provision, Wiley Online Library on [01/02/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST single p rather than the double bb because that is how I was taught by my leb Acoli instructor and it is how my VSLA interlocutors spelled it. 4 I contributed to social funds, as was requested by VSLA executives, but I did not request financial assistance or borrow money. 5 To arrive at this number, I counted the group names within ledgers at Gulu Municipality’s four division offices. Since these ledgers are not updated regu- larly and many groups in Gulu are unregistered, and consequently unrecorded, I suspect that the real number of VSLAs in Gulu is much higher than the modest estimate presented here. 6 Although the genealogy of ripe is beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that conceptions of relatedness have played a key role in the making and maintaining of pre- and postcolonial Acholi moral worlds (p’Bitek (1966, 1971; see also p’Bitek et al., 2019). 7 A certain body of work critiques contemporary efforts to engage in “tradi- tional” Acholi mechanisms for social repair. For an examination of Acholi political structure, see Komujuni and Büscher (2020); to understand poli- tics undergirding “traditional land tenure” see Hopwood (2022). Allen et al.’s (2020) recent study on the long-term effects of reintegration programs for chil- dren who returned from life with the LRA provides insight into the impact of humanitarian interventions on the moral regulation of Acholi social spaces. 8 The use of the philosophy of ubuntu, translated as “I am because you are,” to support South African politics and capitalist development is highly con- tested in literature. Critics like McDonald (2010) argue that the philosophy of ubuntu is fundamentally at odds with capitalism and that using it this way rein- forces neoliberal development and inequality. In contrast, proponents such as Edozie (2017) emphasize ubuntu’s power to align economic philosophy with the actual development needs of Africans. refusals REFERENCES Abraham, Christiana. 2015. “Race, Gender and ‘Difference’: Representations of ‘Third World Women’ in International Development.” Journal of Critical Race Inquiry 2 (2): 4–24. https://doi.org/10.24908/jcri.v2i2.4723. 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