In an unfinished church in Biso, a town in western Uganda, in January last year, dozens of villagers gathered on rough wooden benches, anxiously awaiting updates from their lawyer. Women huddled together in a corner on the right, a few cattle-keeping men sat apart with their herding sticks, and children crammed outside the door.
Everyone shared the same grievance. Two years earlier, on 10 February 2023, hundreds of people in Kapaapi and Runga, two neighbouring villages, had awoken to the sound of gunshots, the screams of their neighbours and the smell of their thatched roofs burning.
The villagers believed the attacks had been orchestrated by a network of private developers and political and military elites, who had conspired to violently seize ancestral land from over 500 families in Hoima District. Their motivation? A cut of the oil rush brought by the impending East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), Uganda’s first new oil pipeline since commercially viable oil deposits were confirmed in the region in 2006.
