Community of strangers

The Mierencs struggled to maintain workable expressions of community through the era of landlordism and the lacerating divisions of the Civil War and its aftermath. My first enquiry into the hard work that people put into forming community came long before I arrived in Mieres. In 1965 I went to Bugerere in Uganda, a fertile region on the shores of Lake Victoria, where the recent eradication of river blindness had just made the land habitable. Migrants from across the Southern Nile region, Uganda and neighbouring countries had poured in to start farms. Bugerere was a melting-pot of languages, religions, kinship systems and political customs. I wanted to find out how these people, strangers to each other in a strange land, managed to work out ways to live and work together, to negotiate their differences reasonably peacefully, and to forge a sense of community. Community of Strangers, published in 1978 and reissued in 1986, describes these processes and the people who anchored them.