Silencing the past in Ugandan schools. The role of education in reconciliation processes. (2nd January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Datzberger, Simone; Donovan, Outi
• Is Part Of: Peacebuilding. Volume 8:Number 1(2020)
• Page Start: 118
• Page End: 134
• Publication Date: 2020-01-02
• Subjects: Reconciliation -- education -- silencing -- social truth -- Uganda; Peace-building -- Periodicals; Peace -- Periodicals; Mediation -- Periodicals; Conflict management -- Periodicals; Nation-building -- Periodicals; 327.172
• DOI: 10.1080/21647259.2018.1517963
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2164-7259

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article assesses how reconciliation in post-conflict Uganda is currently approached in the country's education sector. It highlights that education is in the main equated with economic development thereby side-lining the legacies of past conflicts and social injustices. In the view of Uganda's highly politicised reconciliation process, this may not come as a surprise. Interviewees pointed to a general fear, that addressing past conflicts in official curricula could revive tensions. However, fieldwork further revealed that a sheer absence of reconciliation through the education sector could be dangerous in two ways. First, silencing past conflicts in schools may have a depoliticising effect on a population as a whole. It deprives a society of constructing a social, cultural and national identity that is based on multiple understandings of a conflict. Second, the absence of a social truth based on different narratives of the conflict can in the long-term trigger new forms of structural violence if not conflict or violent unrest.