That Saturday, we woke up to footprints of rebels in our compound.
*
We had thought it was safe. News of home raids, kidnappings, killings, and mutilations had been missing from the radio for weeks. The grapevine had no rumors about the movement of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army rebels in nearby villages.
Kony’s bloody war against Yoweri Museveni’s government had already been raging for a decade in northern Uganda and would stretch to South Sudan, DR Congo, and Central African Republic. Kony swore he wanted to save northern Uganda from alienation and underdevelopment that dated back to colonial times and worsened under the Museveni regime.
We believed him. Why wouldn’t we? Kony grew up in church. He was an altar boy. We knew about his singing voice and his swift football feet. We passed by his village of Odek on our way to visit Grandma in Opit, a neighboring village. We believed him when he called himself our Jesus, our savior. After all, the Acholi word kony literally means help. We believed Kony until he dropped the Bible and pointed the gun. He had turned against us, his people.
Years of running had taught us that when the rebels raided the outskirts of town where families like mine lived, they wouldn’t search the bushes. They went straight to houses to ransack, to loot, loot, and loot some more.
From the late 1990s, whenever the sun sank on the horizon, my family packed bedding and headed for the swamp, two miles away. It was that swamp – Wang Oyaru – where families from Layibi Cubu went to fetch drinking water, and turned it into a haven at night. That wetland was safer than home. Its thick green papyrus and tall eucalyptus provided ample shield for our escape.
Every evening, a few people who had relatives in northern cities sent their children to the safety of lights and concrete. Some families sent their children to the taxi park or shop verandahs. Years of running had taught us that the rebels didn’t fancy the cities. They were more guarded by government soldiers, and the lights, all that electricity, was bad for stealthy attacks. Like our swamp, those open air, crowded verandahs and parks were safer than home too.
But home still called our names, louder in times when the guns fell silent. When the radio played music more than bad news. And so, that night, tempted by the warmth of our grass-thatched huts, we borrowed a leaf from many in the neighborhood and spent the night at home.
*
The next morning, we woke up to footprints of rebels in our compound. Our knees turned shea-butter-soft with fear, the fear that comes after real danger is no more. The fear of what could have been had the universe not somehow saved us, had it not stopped the rebels from kicking in our doors, harvesting us like millet grains.
My parents imagined their children – all eight of us – herded off into the night to become fighters, killers, wives. They saw their own graves, dug with their own hands – a seven foot abyss into which they would be shoved, probably alive, a generation wiped out in a single night.
But our fears were nothing compared to what the sun would announce.
*
In the homes around us the rebels had abducted boys and girls; they had raided granaries and kitchens. They had left blood in their wake. In the distant IDP camps the rebels had set huts on fire, and behind them, the wounded, the frightened and the government soldiers deployed to protect had fled for their lives or surrendered to destiny.
We had tempted fate by sleeping at home and somehow survived, but those boys and girls, taken from two homesteads away from ours, have never returned, never been heard of again.
For years I have agonized over that narrow escape. I have called myself a child and a survivor of war. But now I think about those who were taken into captivity, those who were forced to renounce and kill their relatives; those who, like Dominic Ongwen, were charged by the International Criminal Court for crimes they committed as abducted soldiers of Joseph Kony.
I think about those twenty years of surviving, and I realize I had it better. I had it softer – even though I still wake some nights sweaty with nightmares about those nights in the swamp, those horrible years when the state, the rest of Uganda, and the world stuffed their ears to what was happening to the north. I think of the privilege of despair, and the guilt of surviving. ▪