ABSTRACT
In Uganda, since the end of the 1970s, leaders at the village level have produced identity papers in view of ensuring that interpersonal knowledge overcomes the borders of physical social networks. The production of these papers is based on the moral assessment of one's character, not biometrics, in a world of increasing movement and anonymity. But importantly, the chapter demonstrates that this ideal of the village as a moral homeland is (also) a product of the central state. It has been produced both from below and from above, by successive and antagonistic postcolonial regimes. In the villages studied, autochthony was not central to local leaders’ concerns. What was important to them was moral anchorage: ‘strangers’ were more feared than ‘foreigners.’ These categories can of course overlap, however, and the kind of citizenship that these papers help produce is compatible with ethnic nationalisms. Based on historical and ethnographic research carried out in rural and urban areas of Toro and Buganda, the chapter allows a better historicization of the models of citizenship promoted by the Movement regime. It also describes the popular conceptions of what it is to ‘know someone’ within which biometrics were introduced, and the debates these new methodologies of knowledge have triggered within local polities.
