Child to Soldier: Stories from Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army Page 4
More often than not, as the stories in this book make amply clear, life is harsh for CI soldiers. By comparison, my life at Pamin-Yai seemed closer to what Okot p’Bitek described as Lak taa miyo kinyero iwi lobo (the whiteness of teeth makes people laugh on earth). This could be interpreted to mean enjoying a life unencumbered or uncomplicated by conflicts and dangers or unnecessary worries. There were dangers, to be sure, such as snakes and wild animals, but these were dangers that did not threaten our way of life and routines. In the village of Pamin-Yai, I was welcome in any home. I could walk at night without worrying about my safety. Indeed, many strangers passing through often came to our home for food and a place to sleep before continuing their journey at first light.
When I was growing up, I did what many children did then. I made the daily walk to Pamin-Yai Primary School, located seven kilometres away, following the circuitous route around Pamin-Yai Rock. A shortcut through the bush and across the Ayago River became impassable in the rainy season as the river flooded, forcing us to go the long way. Our trip back home at the end of the school day was leisurely; often we stopped along the way to pick delicious wild fruits such as oceyo, olam, kano, obwolo, and oywelo. Occasionally we raided a wild bee’s nest for sweet honey. Somewhat less afraid of bee stings than my sisters, I often volunteered to plunge my hands into the crack of the tree trunk where the heavy honeycombs were stacked, pulled out the sweet stuff, and threw some down to my sisters, who waited anxiously on the ground. The bees always got nasty, and we fled for dear life.
As an abductee, however, Miya Aparo was not concerned with being stung by bees but with survival itself, and more often than not there was no previous experience or script from which to work. Confronted with the problem of survival, the CI soldier often had to rethink what previously seemed possible or even impossible. That was the case for Miya on the march to Sudan:
We stayed a while; we stayed for four months before starting the journey to Sudan. Thirst was the biggest problem. When we started the journey, all the water had dried off. With so much dust, many people died of thirst, hunger, there was no cooking. If you had water with you it was because you had filled your container in Atyak. That water had to last you at least two days, a ten-litre container. When it was finished, that was it.
We trudged on, some people were crying for the urine of others. You cried for urine, asking to drink urine to survive, to help you. You drank urine. This went on until we reached Sudan, then a vehicle was sent to fetch us from Pajok, taking us to Palotaka.
You drank urine. In Acholi culture, indeed in many African and world cultures, such an action would be considered a social taboo, with stringent consequences for the person undertaking it. But, in the sweltering heat of the desert wilderness, where water was scarce, one would drink any liquid, even urine, to survive. Urine became hope. Ultimately, personal agency for CI soldiers like Miya, I argue, was not about inventing a new culture in order to survive, but reinterpreting existing cultural meanings to foster new relationships within the violent world they were thrown in. You drank urine because that was the only liquid available under the relentless desert sun, over which you had no control.
In a similar vein, when confronted with harsh treatment at the hands of Raska Lukwiya, a relative who was an LRM/A commander, Miya Aparo was forced to rethink her prior Acholi cultural experience of what it means to be related to someone. In Acholi culture, a relative is someone you can rely upon in difficult times, someone you can trust and expect to help you out of trouble. This is understandable because, as P. Oruni (1994) points out, identity and relations between individuals are defined by wat (constitution). He notes, ‘Every aspect of Acholi life, the rights, obligations and privileges of the individual, social service-administration, civics, politics, defence and security, is defined and exercised in accordance with provisions of Wat Constitution’ (18). Under the Acholi wat constitution, the onyu (newly born child) is as much a part of the family as the old grandmother who can walk only with the help of a stick.
For Miya Aparo, though, the encounter with Raska Lukwiya made her think that ‘a relative is the last person to help you.’ She would discover, throughout her personal struggle to survive during the period spent with the LRM/A, that she needed to constantly re-evaluate her understanding of Acholi cultural norms in order to respond to new experiences in the bush. She, like the other informants, told me that survival was about making sense of the situation of war, and establishing control over their lives even as they were drawn deeper into an unpredictable and violent environment.
Paradoxically, as detailed in the Conclusion, as war survivors who used their cultural conditionings to overcome many odds, fight battles, and come out alive, returning CI soldiers face a culture that views them with a mixture of awe, fear, and superstitious beliefs. Their identities as returnees assume a new dimension in the eyes of the community, which sees them as superhuman aliens rather than as children who survived war. This is not to deny that children who serve as soldiers in wars are victimized; on the contrary, as R. Brett and I. Specht (2004) put it, ‘war comes to them’ (123). But, in taking up the question of culture as a source of identity crisis for returning CI soldiers, I acknowledge the dilemma that these children face when they return home. It was a dilemma I could hear in the voice of Miya Aparo and in the voices of the other CI soldiers as they told me their autobiographical stories of survival.
In the next chapter, I look at some of the conceptual and practical challenges of conducting an ethnographic study of this nature in a fragile environment of war. Central to the discussion is a consideration of both the possibilities and limitations inherent in my position as a native returnee trying to make some sense of the horrendous experiences of CI soldiers, and to reconcile these with my own nostalgic memories of a peaceful, happy childhood. Then, in chapter 2, I attempt to situate the LRM/A war within the historical context of the Acholi myth of defence of the homestead and ethnic politics in post-colonial Uganda. I explore how these two factors, one generated at the local level and the other at the national, are relevant to how Acholi children are transformed into soldiers by the LRM/A.
In chapter 3, I consider the notion of liminal repurposing of culture as a method of transforming and controlling CI soldiers. As I use the term here, ‘liminality’ describes the intensely emotional, psychological, and physical experiences through which abducted Acholi children are transformed into child combatants within the repurposed culture of violence and combat. In chapter 3 I argue that there is ample evidence to suggest that LRM/A’s skilful exploitation and subversion of Acholi culture, and not Stockholm Syndrome, enables the rebel movement to transform, train, and control the army of children in war. This notion is further explored in chapter 4 and chapter 5, where I analyze the particular cases of Jola Amayo and Ringo Otigo respectively. In the Conclusion, I contemplate the dilemma of the returning CI soldier, who was made to give up childhood to become a combatant and whose resourcefulness (and luck perhaps) allowed him or her to survive, but whose resilient qualities are now ignored – or even rejected – by the community. Through these thematic and systematic approaches, chapter by chapter, I hope to peel back, in a small way, the fog surrounding the question that is at the heart of this book: What happens when children are forced to become soldiers?
Chapter One
Conceptual and Practical Challenges
In his book Being There, Daniel Bradburd (1998) extols the importance of the ethnographer being in the field of study, getting close to the subject, as he did with the Iranian Komachi pastoralists. As an Acholi returning to my own childhood backyard to inquire into a subject in which I had personal interest, I could say ‘I was born and grew up there.’ However, my status as a native of Gulu who has lived abroad for nearly three decades also gave me the identity of a ‘halfie,’ to use the term coined by L. Abu-Lughod (1986, 1993, 39), that is, one who retains some claim to insider’s connection but with an outsider’s education and perspective. I still chuckle at an i
ncident in Amuru centre, thirty kilometres west of Gulu, when a little Acholi girl said to another excitedly while pointing towards me, ‘Nen munu ca’ (Look, there is a white man). To her, I may have the skin and the language of the Acholi native, but I also have the mannerisms of the foreigner, of munu (white man). ‘Who are you calling a white man?’ I shot back in perfect Acholi, using the idiom spoken in the villages. In any event, I was keenly aware of the tension between being too close to and keeping one’s distance from the focus of one’s study.
Confronted with such a dilemma, B. Sandywell (1996) describes the natural reaction to ‘castigate this obsessive reflexivity as enervating narcissism, abandon self reflection altogether and either return to the fold of grounded theory, or simply follow the accelerating velocities of change in aesthetics, intellectual, moral and cultural spheres, wherever these may lead’ (2). Without going to either of the extremes suggested by Sandywell, I take the view that grounded theory – that is, the formulation of theory from systematically gathered and analyzed data (Glaser & Strauss, 1980; Strauss & Corbin, 1997) – is not only not possible in an ethnographic field work conducted against the uncertain backdrop of war but perhaps not desirable given the speculative nature of the findings. As conceived, my research relied on the information provided by the CI soldiers, and for the reasons discussed below, namely the unreliability of memory and the difficulties involved in cross-checking this information for accuracy, it was necessary to provide room for speculative and tentative insights into what happens when children are transformed into soldiers.
Furthermore, in reflexivity, as pointed out by M. Hammersley and P. Atkinson (2007), researchers accept that they are shaped by their socio-historical locations, and that their work may in turn influence the climate in which political and practical decisions are made. They write: ‘What this represents is a rejection of the idea that social research is, or can be, carried out in some autonomous realm that is insulated from the wider society and from the biography of the researcher, in such a way that its findings can be unaffected by social processes and personal characteristics’ (15).
As a researcher, therefore, I acknowledge both the opportunities and the shortcomings inherent in my status as an Acholi doing research on Acholi CI soldiers. For one, notwithstanding the issues discussed in the previous chapter, I saw my Acholi background as a good thing because I did not have to face some of the challenges associated with language and cultural nuances that often confront field researchers. My Luo language skills were advantageous in communicating with a group of people who speak mostly Luo, and in understanding the cultural and contextual nuances of the Luo language when it came to translating the CI soldiers’ testimony into English. As the Acholi proverb goes, labul tongweno ngeyo ka pene (the one who roasts the egg knows where the umbilical cord is located).
Perhaps more important, the initial rapport of kinship based on shared culture, of speaking to a fellow Acholi in our mother tongue, allowed the former CI soldiers to relax, speak naturally, and go deeply into details, thereby opening a window for me into the world that they experienced in combat. E. Husserl (1970) suggests that, to better understand life experiences, it is crucial to shed light into the ‘life-world,’ the world as it is immediately experienced. M. Merleau-Ponty (1962) further describes this life-world not as another layer of experiences that needs to be uncovered, but as what is experienced itself. He argues, ‘We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive’ (xviii).
Viewed through the lenses of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, my situation as an Acholi allowed me to avoid the pitfalls of becoming wholly preoccupied with trying to decide whether what I was seeing, experiencing, or hearing was really the ‘real deal.’ This was critical, to paraphrase M. van Manen (1990), in uncovering and describing the structure and internal logic of the lived experience of CI soldiers’ survival of war. Understanding the Acholi language rendered the experience all the more vivid. Specifically, it gave me a fuller appreciation of how abductees’ sense of humanity was transformed or sustained in the midst of what former CI soldiers described as can matek, which I translate to mean ‘intense suffering’ and which is the opposite of kwo mayot (easy life). In Acholi, mayot can be translated as ‘lightness,’ ‘easiness,’ or ‘goodness’ of a situation. Used in association with kwo, which is translated as ‘life,’ ‘living,’ and ‘existence,’ it describes an ‘easy time,’ a ‘good life,’ a ‘relaxed life.’ The informants often spoke about kwo odoko yot (life became easy) and onongo wabedo maber (we lived well or we lived a good life), concepts associated with what S. Finnstrom (2008) calls piny maber, which he defines as ‘good surroundings’ (4).
Meanwhile, matek, defined as ‘strong,’ ‘intense,’ or ‘tough,’ modifies and emphasizes the noun can (pronounced ch-an), which can be translated to mean poverty, suffering, pain, even death. For example, ‘can matek otime’ (an intense suffering has occurred) usually prefaces bad news about a critical incident where a person or persons are seriously injured or killed. Can matek has the same import as kabedo mading (tight space) and is usually associated with piny marac, defined by Finnstrom as ‘bad surroundings’ (4). What Miya Aparo experienced in her journey into becoming a soldier could be described as can matek (intense suffering).
However, culturally, and as used by the former CI soldiers, the terms can matek and kwo mayot do not describe absolute conditions, but rather, at the very minimum, a fluidity of life experiences that range from extreme suffering to relatively less suffering, and occasional joy. In this sense, the informants did not see their life experiences as cumulative suffering over time such that the suffering of yesterday combined with the suffering of today to make one big suffering. Instead, they used these terms to suggest that their life experiences while living with the LRM/A included intense feeling of pain at specific moments in time, interspersed with moments of, relatively speaking, easy living and even the occasional joy.
For example, the period immediately following their abduction was reported by all the informants as a time of intense suffering. Later, after establishing new relations in the bush, the informants experienced suffering when a bush colleague or a bush husband or wife was killed in combat. At such moments, the informants experienced can matek; they were in mourning, depressed about the loss of rebel colleagues who had become like family members, and, possibly, weighed down with feelings of isolation from the rest of the LRM/A community, feelings that were particularly acute whenever death was the result of an execution ordered by rebel commanders. At the same time, amidst the violence and harsh surroundings, the informants reported happy times too, for example, when food was plentiful, when there was a prolonged period of peace, and when communal celebrations like Christmas were held. The informants reported that such times were almost akin to being ‘back home,’ an earlier time in their lives when they were surrounded by loving and extended families.
In any event, while being an Acholi afforded me an insider’s vantage point from which to contemplate and understand how the LRM/A abductees survived the extremes of living conditions, evolving with time under violent circumstances while maintaining hope, I had to keep reminding myself that they retained distinct voices in their autobiographical recalling of what happened during war.
Autobiography and Voice
In choosing to organize in autobiographical form the information collected, I recognized, first, that Acholi oral literature, as in many African oral traditions, radiates from the teller – the person who is at the centre of the story and who, in telling the story, not only recreates what happened but assumes the various voices in a dialogic manner. Second, although the stories about war are filled with gut-wrenching, unimaginable, and terror-driven violence, their telling is now a part of the living Acholi oral literature because, as Isadore Okpewho points out in African Oral Literature (1992), ‘an oral performance really exists where there is an audience that compels the respect of the performer and puts
the performance on record (whether of memory or tape)’ ( 57). For the children who fought in Uganda’s most destructive war, the telling of war stories is a way to confirm, not only for the listeners but also for themselves, that the war indeed happened, that they were a part of it, and, most important, that they survived it. The telling of the stories validates who they are even as the stories themselves take on social and pedagogical meanings that serve to underscore not only the terror of war but its lingering consequences.
As storytellers of what the war did to them, and what they did during the war, these former CI soldiers cease to be merely passive voices floating in the void of destruction. Using their stories, they cover salient moments of their violent lives, the moments they feel are worth salvaging, worth remembering, and worth repeating. If words could be captured in bags, this is the bagful of experiences a CI soldier would hand over – here, take this bag; it is the story of my life at war in the bush.
Evidently, the emotional complexities that are in play as they tell their stories come from the depth of the CI soldiers’ first-hand experience of war, where moments of silence are as eloquent as vivid descriptions. In their collective stories reside the possibility of retrieving the salient details that inform what it is like to be a child amidst cultural devastation before the onset of war, what happens during the course of the war, and how children reorient their thinking in the process of surviving war.
Naturally, there are limitations to relying on the child’s own memory to collect autobiographical information. C.D. West (2004), for instance, discovered in the narratives of girl soldiers in Mozambique that memory of an event ostensibly shifts from person to person, depending on the narrator. A similar observation is made by C.P. Thompson, J.J. Skowronski, S.F. Larsen, and A.L. Betz (1996) in their study Autobiographical Memory, in which they write: ‘Over time, it becomes more and more necessary to reconstruct the details of an event’ (8). Likewise, in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, Allessandro Portelli (1991) illustrates the fluidity of memory in what is remembered and forgotten in recalling a single event. To Portelli, the death of a twenty-one-year-old Italian steelworker from Terni, killed in a clash with police in 1949, is important because ‘it became the ground upon which collective memory and imagination built a cluster of tales, symbols, legends and imaginary reconstructions’ (1). Different people in Terni later came to remember the single event differently, in some cases adding details that were unverifiable. V.R. Yow (2005) explains that a gap occurs between what is remembered and what actually happened because memory picks only salient points in an expansive landscape of experiences. ‘The recording of a memory from the beginning preserves a partial record because we cannot take in every detail in a scene and therefore takes in only what seems significant for us’ (38).