Patrick W. Otim. Acholi Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power and the Making of Colonial Northern Uganda, 1850–1960. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2024. 302 pp. $34.95. Paper. ISBN: 9780821411469.

Intellectuals interrogates the importance of Acholi intellectuals' roles during the late precolonial to postcolonial eras in Uganda, and it problematizes how historians address power in Africa by focusing on a place with decentralized power and men who did not inherit power.Otim defines Acholi intellectuals as men and women who worked the land but did not depend on it for their livelihood.These were Acholi citizens from nonroyal lineages who received some sort of formal training through missionary schools during the precolonial period and occupied leadership roles within the colonial administration, but they also "commanded public appeal and shaped the people's discourse and actions" (20).The book highlights the work of men like Lacito Okech, an Acholi historian and cofounder of the Acholi Association, who learned how to navigate the colonial structure while retaining his influence among Acholi citizens.Otim engages colonial archives such as the Gulu District Archives and the Uganda National Archives, missionary archives such as the Christian Missionary Society (CMS) Archives at the University of Birmingham, and oral histories he recorded during his field research in Acholiland.Chapters One through Three pertain to the roles of Acholi intellectuals before the British colonization of Uganda significantly impacted the Acholi.In Chapter One, Otim details the changes in Acholiland from 1850-1911 as the British forced Arab traders out of the region.Otim further argues that the British-appointed chiefs, who were not sons of chiefs, did not achieve success through brute force alone.Their success was due to the court positions they held prior to their official positions with the colonial administration as they built positive reputations publicly prior to their work with the British.Chapter Two challenges ethnographers', such as F.K. Girling, assumption that Acholi commoners who attained positions within a chief's court did so because of their family's association with the royal lineage group.By examining missionary records, Otim highlights different trajectories of commoners to court positions which "reveals how the Acholi cultivated knowledge and skills as well as the status they gave to people who held such knowledge and skills" (4).Chapter Three delves into the roles of Acholi intellectuals such as priests, royal healers, war leaders, and royal messengers within the chief's court.Otim explains how the Acholi exercised power prior to colonial rule and how Acholi intellectuals maintained power during colonialism even as the power of chiefs were increasingly challenged and curbed by the British Administration.These