Child to Soldier: Stories from Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army Read online

  To authenticate and legitimize the author’s claims to objectivity, traditional autobiography often seeks multiple sources of information, documents, archival records, and other media information. In such works as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (2007) and Winston Churchill’s Memories and Adventures (1989), where the author’s self-portraiture is the sum of critical events and personalities within a specific discipline (in politics, literature, education, philosophy, science, and so forth) at a specific historical moment that have influenced him (and that he in turn has influenced), the author relies on both memory and independent sources of information (Thompson, Skowronski, Larsen, & Betz, 1996). But this is not possible for former CI soldiers in war situations where independent records are not generally kept and personal information about the particular child may be non-existent. Some of the former CI soldiers told me that they could not remember dates of specific events such as birthdays, how long they were in the bush, and the names of people and places that were salient in their stories. For example, when recalling how he finally escaped from the LRM/A after eleven years in the bush, Can Kwo Obato mentioned that he was with five other rebel CI soldiers when he reached the decision to leave the bush. As the ranking officer at the time, he recalled sending home ‘four of the young rebel soldiers, saying, “Guys, you go ahead, I will come and find you there.”’ But a little later, in recalling the same event, he said, ‘So the three children went. I followed them later the next day … I left my deputy in the bush, we left three of them. Four of us came back home.’ Not only do the numbers not add up, just how many of the CI soldiers left the bush on the first day is not clear since the number changes from four to three.

  Moreover, when CI soldiers tell their own stories (e.g. Beah, 2007; Keitesi, 2004), the venue, time, and manner of telling are often prompted and mediated by others, such as in co-authored child-soldiers’ autobiographies (McDonnell & Akallo, 2007; Eggers, 2006), court testimonies provided by CI soldiers (Arts & Popovski, 2006; Dawes & Cairns, 1998; Kuper, 1997), or interviews of CI soldiers by researchers and writers (de Berry, 2004; Goodwin-Gill & Cohn, 1994; Honwana, 2006; Machel, 2001; Wessells, 2006). The CI soldier’s audience, in other words, is the counsellor, the news reporter, the court, the researcher, or the co-author. As a result, the ‘voice’ in the autobiographical voice of the CI soldier is often dissimilar, for example, from the voice in the valedictory autobiography Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) in which Friedrich Nietzsche (1992) sees autobiography as a self-revelatory reckoning of the individual with his or her past, an acknowledgment of one’s existence which is potentially redemptive. Nietzsche, without overstating its self-healing qualities, was suggesting that the autobiography retains for its author what P.R. Brown (1969) in Augustine of Hippo, a critical look at St Augustine’s Confessions, describes as the ‘self-portrait of a convalescent’ (177). In this phrase, Brown underscores expressive introspection as both restorative to the individual’s conflicted inner self and revelatory of the new persona formed through that healing process. Jacques Derrida (1988) adds that the personal narrative ‘is not autobiographical for the reason one commonly understands, that is, because the signatory tells the story of his life or the return of his past life as life and not death. Rather, it is because he tells himself this life and he is the narration’s first, if not only, addressee and destination – within the text’ (13).

  For Derrida, Nietzschean autobiography is introspective in that it aims, foremost, at illuminating the author’s own mind for his or her sake. To this self-initiated process of telling about oneself, the audience is secondary insofar as the autobiographical voice is concerned.

  As I listened to their stories of life in the bush with the LRM/A, it became apparent to me that some of the former CI soldiers were unable to speak, read, and write in what F. Lionnet (1989) terms ‘classical modes of expression’ (2), namely English and French, and lack the resources to record their experiences of war (Machel, 1996). In short order, I became the ear that hears and the hand that records what the CI soldier experienced. This arrangement was further complicated when the informants told their stories in the Luo language, and left it to me to translate into English. Being a native Luo speaker rendered the task of translation both a blessing and a liability. I consider myself a fluent native Luo speaker; it is my mother tongue, my first language, and I like to think that I speak it with authentic idiomatic nuances. Still, my interpretive lenses have broadened because my life straddles two cultures now, Acholi culture and Western culture, and the way I understand the Luo language is mediated by these two world views. Or to paraphrase Acholi poet Okot p’Bitek, reading the books of white people has ‘captured my head.’ I had to take as much special care as a non-Acholi would (e.g., Finnstrom, 2008, 2003) to be non-judgmental about the experiences of CI soldiers. For instance, when Jola Amayo, one of the informants, spoke about the period following her father’s death, she mentioned that her family was reduced to eating ‘spinach, sour leaves and okra.’ To my Westernized ear, it sounded as if she was saying that her family became poor and could not afford the kinds of food that were available when her father was alive. However, in the Acholi culture, poverty is not defined by lack of money or resources alone. You are poor when you do not have anyone around you, especially extended family, and you lack the strength and energy to take care of yourself – hence the Acholi saying lacan bedo kene (the poor person lives alone). In fact, Jola Amayo hastened to say, wabedo, warii (we lived, life continued) as the family pulled together to till the land. This does not suggest poverty because the family is still viable, able to work, and depend on each other and extended kin for support.

  But even as I tried very hard to be accurate in translating the stories from Luo into English, I could only ‘capture’ what the former CI soldiers were saying rather than translating word for word, sentence for sentence, paragraph by paragraph, everything that was said. That is not because I am a bad translator, but because the construction of spoken Luo does not translate neatly into the English language. What I write in English does not do justice to the depth of meaning and experiences as expressed in Luo.

  Spoken Luo, moreover, can be treacherously ambiguous at the best of times even to a native speaker like me because it conveys many shades of meaning. Consider this single Luo sentence uttered by an informant: ‘Dano omyero odong adonga.’ Without context, and in direct translation from Luo to English, there are almost a half-dozen interpretations. It could mean, ‘People ought to stay behind.’ It could also mean, ‘People should beat up Adonga.’ A third translation could be, ‘Human beings ought to grow up.’ Even, ‘Let people stay, Adonga!’ My translation was: ‘A person needs to grow up.’ She uses the word dano, which, depending on the context, can be translated into the singular ‘person’ or the plural ‘people.’ I chose the former because the context of the sentence was about children recruited as CI soldiers being forced to skip childhood. The informant was reflecting on her life, and lamenting the fact that she did not go through the various natural stages of childhood.

  Indeed, through interview questions, the CI soldier is prompted to tell what happened (Seidman, 2006), and in some instances to speak the unspeakable. At moments such as this, the autobiographical voice of the CI soldier holds the possibility of opening the archival record for reconstructing the events before, during, and after the war, and assessing their transformative impact on how the child related to others within the cultural space carved out by war, or what D.E. Jonte-Pace (2001) calls ‘shadowy and fragmentary narrative,’ in which case the audience is left with ‘guessing at what lies underneath’ (140), or even the disappointment of stark silence from a soul that has experienced too much and is unable to talk about it. As one former CI soldier told me in Gulu, ‘this is really just a brief overview of what happened because there is a lot to tell. In some cases, there is so much that cannot be told. This is just a synopsis because the suffering we went through is unspeakable. If I were to tell you everything, it would take two days
, and even then there would still be more left to tell.’

  Notwithstanding the aforementioned limitations, the autobiographies of CI soldiers can be rich with meaning and information about their lives in war. At the very least, even when the CI soldier chooses silence, we can surmise the pain, suffering, and extreme experience that rendered the child speechless, and perhaps use our imagination to reconstruct what happened. Through fiction (e.g., Iweala, 2005), or actual events disguised as fiction (e.g., Eggers, 2006), or non-fiction (e.g., Beah, 2007), the CI soldier’s narrative retains the promise of an insider’s rich perspective into the underlying tension and motivation that guide the children towards making certain choices in the process of becoming CI soldiers. As M. McQuillan (2000) points out, autobiography as narrative performs the story as well as plots how the story is told. According to McQuillan, the plotting is the dynamic process that drives the audience’s interaction with the narrative form.

  Wrestling with the Curse of Autochthony in Post-Colonial Uganda

  Being an Acholi who closely sympathized with the ordeal that the Acholi people generally and especially former CI soldiers went through, I am also keenly aware of the pitfalls of identifying too closely with the subject and thereby losing all sense of balance and objectivity. In doing field research, D. Druckman (2005) warns the ethnographer ‘to reflect on and be explicit about how their own biases, life experiences, status and power, and character shape their findings and analysis’ (236). In order to avoid writing a book that could be read as an apologia for the LRM/A’s gross crimes against humanity, or conversely as a cover-up for what some believe is genocide in Acholi perpetrated by the government of Uganda (Otunnu, 2006, 44), I needed to confront and wrestle with the ethnocentric mindset that Arjun Appadurai (2006) calls ‘autochthony.’ The term describes ‘primary claim to peoplehood, territory and citizenship for persons who can show that they are from their respective places, unlike others who are migrants or foreigners’ (89). This often leads to explosive ethnic-based violence with many casualties (Appadurai, 1998).

  But, while Appadurai’s explanation of autochthony does not quite describe post-colonial Uganda when compared, for example, to the former Yugoslavia where full-fledged conflicts unfolded purely along ethnic fault lines between Serbs, Croats, Albanians, and others (Cornell and Hartmann, 1998; Vuckovic, 1997), there are strong tell-tale signs of colonial policies intensifying these conflicts. In post-colonial Uganda, after all, violence tended to play along ethnic lines at the state level as a function of political power (Hansen, 1977; Ibingira, 1973). But inter-ethnic conflict was not always a given for the numerous ethnicities that peopled what became Uganda. As the descendants of the early Luo of Tekidi,1 for example, the Acholi experienced many clan battles, especially during the reign of Kuturia (Equatoria Province), which extended the power of the Khedive of Egypt from central Sudan through northern Uganda. The ‘Kuturia’2 reign set many Acholi clan states against others. War was rampant and those clan-states that had the best weapons and support of the Arab administrators and traders gained the upper hand over opponents. But, even in times of conflict, the clan-states adhered to the philosophy of defence of the homestead against the enemy established by earlier generations of Luo. J.M. Onyango-ku-Odongo (1976) writes: ‘It should be noted, however, that in a fight between the Luo of Payira and the Luo of Puranga, or between any two Luo groups, houses were not destroyed. The warring factions would take great care never to harm women and children. No looting or taking of captives was allowed, though all these actions were permissible in wars against other ethnic groups’ (161–2).

  When inter-ethnic wars took place, such as the Jie-Acholi war (Lamphear, 1976; Lamphear & Webster, 1971), the Acholi did not consider the other ethnic group as mortal enemies. Instead, there were many examples of inter-ethnic cooperation, as was the case when Luo ancestors helped form the ruling Babito clans which founded the Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom around the latter part of 1300s (Crazzolara, 1950). Several hundred years later, when the Omukama Kabalega, the king of Bunyoro-Kitara Kingdom during the colonial period, was defeated by a combined British and Buganda force in November 1894, he fled northward where he was sheltered for a while by the Acholi, whom he regarded as his kin. Interestingly, when he became dissatisfied with the growing influence of the British in Buganda, King Mwanga rebelled in July 1897 and, upon his defeat by the British army, escaped, was briefly detained by German forces, and escaped again, fleeing north to join his erstwhile enemy the Omukama Kabalega in Acholi and Lango. The pair were finally captured in 1899 and exiled to Seychelles Island. That the two kings could find refuge in Acholi was testimony to the good relations between the Acholi and the other larger ethnicities in Uganda.

  The roots of modern-day ethnic tension and conflicts involving the Acholi and other ethnicities in Uganda can be traced to the inauspicious arrival of Sir Samuel Baker, the first white man in Acholi. The colonial English adventurer could barely conceal his surprise at the pleasant welcome that he was accorded by the natives, but he nonetheless stated that, as part of the colonial enterprise, his mission was to ‘convert the greater portion of savages into disciplined soldiers’ (Baker, 1874, 302). By the early 1900s, in what would later become known as Uganda, neat geographical and political boundaries were drawn around ethnic groups that were growing suspicious of each other, penning them within tight spheres where the expression of identity was bound to lead to further suspicion, ethnic tension, and possibly violence. Early on in the establishment of the British hegemony over Uganda, for example, Buganda was armed and used to subdue other ethnic groups to the east and to the north (Twaddle, 1985, 1993; Karugire, 1980; Kiwanuka, 1971).

  The colonial policy of divide and rule had two fateful consequences in Acholiland. First, it introduced the notion that other ethnic groups were the enemies of Acholi people. An early example was the Lamogi Rebellion of 1911–12 (Adimola, 1954), when Buganda soldiers were used to suppress Acholi opposition to the new political arrangement under British colonial rule. A localized resistance that began when the British colonizers, aided by their Baganda collaborators, attempted to take away firearms that had proliferated throughout the Acholi countryside, the rebellion became an example of Acholi resistance in the face of a bigger foe. The move to disarm the Acholi was part of a larger colonial effort to make them more amenable to the establishment of British authority over the rest of Uganda, an effort that also included recruitment into the army, where they constituted the bulk of the troops, and forced participation in the growing of cash crops. Unhappy with the proposed action by a colonizing power, the people of Lamogi resisted the disarmament program, taking off to the Guruguru Hill where they held out for several weeks until they were finally disarmed.

  Although the British saw the squashing of the Lamogi Rebellion as an unqualified success, the narrative played out differently among the Acholi (Adimola, 1954). Instead of feeling defeated, the Acholi viewed the rebellion as a badge of honour, an emblem of courage in the face of the oppressor. It also came to symbolize what many Acholi people felt in their heart, namely, that no outsiders could humiliate them without a fight. Furthermore, in the Lamogi Rebellion, the Acholi’s ethnocultural identity as defenders of the homestead came of age in modern Uganda political history. The British, through their agents from Buganda, were the invaders who had to be repelled by whatever means possible, and, although the rebellion had foundered, there was a feeling that the Lamogi had not surrendered.

  Divide-and-rule policy also stoked inter-ethnic rivalry by nurturing the Acholi’s ethnocultural pride in their perception of themselves as courageous warriors. J.R.P. Postlethwaite (1947), the first colonial administrator in Acholi (1912–17), recalled in his memoir that the Acholi ‘took to soldiering like ducks to water’ (71). Over time, from the 1920s to the 1950s, the Acholi’s military bravery, courage, and fierceness became first mythologized and then institutionalized through a policy that saw massive recruitment of Acholi into the security services in colonial and post-colon
ial Uganda (Mazrui, 1975; Mazrui, 1977; Parsons, 2003).

  The large presence of Acholi in the security forces was perceived differently depending on one’s vantage point. From the perspective of the population in central and southern Uganda, it seemed that all the shortcomings of the military were attributable to the Acholi. Meanwhile, among the Acholi, their strong presence in the army gave them the impression of strength in numbers. In the post-colonial milieu, the Acholi and other ethnicities in Uganda were set on a collision course in which brute military force, rather than the age-old art of ethnic diplomacy and traditional methods emphasizing caution and prudence in decisions about whether to pursue war and peace, was seen as essential for ethnic survival.