by Opiyo Oloya
Her quickness of mind may have again saved Jola’s life that night when the rebels chose to raid a shopkeeper’s home. The owner of the shop had refused to open the door, and the rebels were afraid of using their machine-guns to shoot the door open lest the noise attract unwanted attention from the NRM/A. The men then began cutting the window open using the machete they took from Jola’s home. At some point, noting that they needed a better implement for the task of getting into the shop, one of the rebels asked Jola to fetch an axe. While the order was likely a genuine one, had Jola agreed to it, she could have come across as more knowledgeable of the area than she had let on. How else would she know where the shopkeeper kept his axe? In a most audacious exchange with the rebels, Jola Amayo knew what to say: ‘I said, “Look, we came here together, I wouldn’t know where the axe is kept.” As soon as I said that, one of the men whacked me in the back with the machete. I cried out, “You are beating me for nothing. I really don’t know this area, yet you are asking me for an axe.”’
This is an important development in the abduction of Jola Amayo. The man, upset by Jola’s sharp retort, could have easily used the sharp edge of the machete to split her head in half. But he did not. It could be argued that the men had no wish to kill her at that particular time because they needed her to lead them through the village. However, the second and more plausible explanation is that Jola Amayo, far from being a captive victim waiting for her fate, whatever that might be, was actively inventing, humanizing, and establishing herself as dano adana, a human person, in the minds of her abductors. One has to remember that this is a twelve-year-old child caught in the middle of a very violent war, where killing is routine and death is a matter of course. Intuitively, rather than remain a terrified faceless girl snatched from her bed in the middle of the night, Jola, through her dialogue with the men, made herself into a real person. Her actions are strikingly different from those of Victor Turner’s liminal initiate, who is dependent, confused, and lacking a sense of self. It is this self-confidence and independence that the LRM/A seeks first to destroy in the process of transforming child abductees into soldiers, thereby training them to respond to violence as a way of life. But rather than remain passive victims of LRM/A’s dehumanizing violence, abductees work to retain some control over the situation. Jola Amayo, in control of her emotions, has insinuated herself into the minds of her abductors. Though it was early in her abduction, she was engaged in a dialectic process of self-production in which she employed her understanding of relationships in Acholi culture in a new situation where violence is an ever-present reality. Through her quiet, self-confident manner, she created space for herself in the midst of two LRM/A soldiers. Her very survival depended not on playing dumb, or doing something stupid like trying to escape, but on being quick-witted and playing along. As she travelled farther and farther from her family and village, and became one of a growing number of LRM/A child abductees, Jola Amayo, more than ever, would need to depend on her inner resourcefulness if she was to have any chance of survival.
Separation: Goodbye Home, Hello LRM/A
In the course of the night of her abduction, Jola Amayo was initiated into the violence that characterized the dozen years she would spend with the LRM/A. When one of the many burglaries in which she was forced to participate went awry, she survived a shootout between the NRM/A and the two rebels. Although she had an opportunity to attempt an escape, she chose to stay calm, reasoning that she could easily be killed by bullets from the opposing armies. She also witnessed up close the execution of a village catechist whom she knew well. The man had refused to open the door, but when he finally did, he was immediately shot dead. His widow, who had just given birth, was abducted along with the baby and released only miles away from home. The killing would haunt Jola years after she returned to her village, with some accusing her of orchestrating it. At daybreak, as the rebels passed her compound, Jola asked to be freed, but the men refused. She had walked all night, and most of the morning, without resting, but the rebels pressed on, taking her to their jungle hideout. When they finally stopped to rest near a stream in late afternoon the following day, Jola Amayo was battered, bruised, and bloodied, but not bowed. Survival, she knew, depended on remaining alert and strong, not in playing victim. She was still as sharp-witted as in the beginning:
The man left guarding me lay sleeping. I thought he was sleeping, but he was not; his eyes were open. When I got up, the river ran across this way; he was lying higher up the bank, and went to drink some water; he craned his neck to see if I was entering the river to escape. I drank water and returned back to resume sitting. He said, ‘Had some foolish notion taken over your senses to attempt running away, I would have killed you.’
I said, ‘I am not going to escape, my feet are sore, I cannot walk.’
I am not going to escape, my feet are sore, I cannot walk.
Jola Amayo, tantalizingly, is not ruling out the possibility of attempting to escape later. However, she is mature enough to know that her chances for escape range from very slim to none. She assesses her situation and determines that, in her current state of pain, she cannot possibly get far in an attempted escape. She states the obvious to the rebel guarding her. I am not going to escape, my feet are sore, I cannot walk. By stating openly her desire to remain where she is, Jola attempts to construct and establish an important element of survival – trust. Knowing that her very life depends on the rebels trusting her and dealing with her on the level of trustworthiness, she has to be completely transparent, open, readable, and, most important, believable. Anything that suggests the possibility of deception, cunning, or opposition, the very antithesis of being trustworthy, would jeopardize her chances of survival. So Jola states an obvious fact which she knows her captors can determine for themselves, namely, that she cannot escape because her feet are sore; she cannot walk. In doing so, Jola is demonstrating her realization that the long road to freedom requires that she continue to play along and do as the rebels command her to do.
The Vicious Beating and the Good Samaritan
As a newcomer among the LRM/A, Jola Amayo was neither immediately welcome nor accepted into the ranks of the rebel movement. In fact, after having mostly won the rapport of the two men who abducted her, she now had to start the process all over again with the larger group. She was treated with suspicion by the other abductees who preceded her into the bush. When she was ordered to clean up, she was accompanied to the riverside by a group of girls. At the river, as she bathed, a girl named Langwen hatched a conspiracy to murder her by throwing her in the river and claiming she escaped. Before the girls could carry out their plan, a sympathetic girl reported the matter to the camp, and the conspirators were summoned and punished. Jola Amayo now had to contend not only with whatever the LRM/A had in store for her but also with the hostility of some of her fellow abductees. When Langwen reported that Jola was planning to escape, she was ordered to stay in the rain all day, which left her thoroughly drenched not just in body but in spirit. After that incident, Jola attempted to keep to herself to avoid trouble, but that action brought suspicion and near-fatal consequences:
Barely two days had gone by; the same girl reported that I wanted to escape. I was called and they began interrogating me. I said, ‘I never said anything, I am new here, I don’t know what this is all about.’
They said, ‘You think you are stubborn; you will see what will happen if you do not tell the truth.’
I said, ‘What I have told you is the honest truth, so help me God. It is now two weeks going on a month, you will never hear me speak about such things. Furthermore, I don’t hang much around the girls, I keep mostly to myself.’
They said, ‘That’s it, you keep to yourself because you are planning to escape.’ He said, ‘Go cut some fresh sticks.’ A bundle of sticks was cut. They got a real thick rope, and tied it around here [her waist], as well as tied my hands and pulled them behind me like this.
The beating began; I was beaten until all th
e sticks were shred to pieces. Once that was over, they cut over four hundred fresh sticks – they beat me until those too were gone. As the beating continued, I lost consciousness, no longer feeling any pain, no longer crying.
The incident of the beating was a milestone in Jola’s journey into becoming a CI soldier. When the beating began, it was ostensibly to teach Jola a lesson. However, when prolonged to the point that she lost consciousness, it became likely that she was going to be killed. At the critical moment she survived as much by good luck as by the fact that she had endeared herself to some of the rebels, who took up her cause when, sprawled on the ground, bleeding and voiceless, she was no longer in a position to speak for herself. In our interview, remembering what seemed at the time to be an out-of-body experience, she described the haggling over her life between those supporting her and those against her:
One of the men came and said, ‘Fellows, you will kill this girl for nothing. A person such as this, who cries in the name of God, such a person likely has never spoken a word of lie. Why are you hurting her? She is still a very young girl; such a plan [to escape] could not cross her mind. If she said anything it is likely because the older girls started such a conversation. Let the girl live.’
One person said, ‘No, let’s beat her some more.’ They took the machete and hit my back, nine times in my back. Another person said, ‘You will kill the girl for no reason, it has no benefit. Killing her will not make you famous because all you would have killed is an innocent little person.’
Those against killing Jola prevailed just in time, saving her from being beaten to death. When she regained consciousness, a sympathizer helped care for her, but her situation was dire. The group was ordered to abandon Jola at that campsite while the rest moved on to a new location. Yet, ignoring personal dangers, two rebels returned and carried Jola Amayo to the new site, helping to nurse her slowly back to health: ‘I was brought to the new camp position where they had moved; they boiled water and washed my body with warm water. They took some liquid drug with which I was injected, feeling absolutely no pain, my entire body was numb.’
It is possible that, without the intervention by the two Good Samaritans, Jola Amayo would have died from her wounds. However, by rescuing Jola, the two rebels were likely placing themselves at some personal risk. That they were willing to take a chance on the new girl, and carry her to safety, clean her up, and give her a new dress to put on suggests a degree of rapport between Jola and her rescuers. In the short time that Jola had lived with the LRM/A in the bush, about three weeks at the time of the beating, she quickly sized up her captors and through her personal initiative created a sympathetic personal narrative with some of them. She likely understood that she could not possibly get everyone to be on her side, and she did not try.
Jola’s beating also signalled the LRM/A’s shifting attitude towards her. Before the beating, she was just another child abducted from the village, an outsider just as likely to survive as she was to die by being thrown into the river by a bunch of conniving girls. Whether or not she would live was a 50–50 proposition. The beating put her through a severe test of her will to survive. In Acholi tradition, which the LRM/A rebels were very much aware of, she is said to have escaped death just barely – oloyo too cwii. It is a phrase used to describe an edible rat that is being pursued by hunters and that at the last possible moment, before being clubbed or speared to death, disappears down a hole in the ground, thereby escaping its pursuers. The general belief among the LRM/A would have been that death spared Jola likely because she had a clean heart. The theme of clean heartedness versus dark heartedness was very often repeated in LRM/A narratives and appeared to guide many of the group’s actions. It is also a common theme within Acholi oral tradition, as captured in p’Bitek’s (1966) Song of Lawino, where Lawino speaks about the smallpox that killed so many because they were dark hearted:
The fiends found
Many people with bad hearts
There was much quarrelling
And jealously among women
And so many people perished
I lost my father too (104)
Situated within the cultural context of oloyo too cwii, barely escaping death by a whisker, is the ever-present superstitious belief that fate favours those who narrowly cheat death. It is considered bad luck to tempt fate by trying to harm such a person a second time. Surviving the beatings likely increased Jola’s chances of being accepted and no longer considered an outsider.
More importantly for Jola, oloyo too cwii also comes with an implicit determination by the collective not to allow the situation to repeat itself. There could be other life-threatening punishments farther down the road, but, for now, Jola cannot be beaten for the same issue, that of attempting to escape. At this stage, Jola is not yet a full-fledged LRM/A member, a successful initiate into the fold of the rebel movement. But the fact that she had survived a vicious beating raised her status just a bit.
Settling among the Rebels, Learning the Ropes
Those like Jola Amayo, who had been in captivity for over two years, were usually considered completely won over and did not require round-the-clock supervision. She was assigned to work in the LRM/A sickbay. Having looked after her siblings at home, Jola was a natural fit at the sickbay, where she helped to care for the wounded and assisted the doctors:
When you were assigned a patient, it was your job to get up before dawn, around three in the morning to start the fire, boil water. As the sky reddened in the morning, you needed to have put out the fire; all that remained was hot charcoal. You should have also cooked food by then because there was fear that the smoke would give away the position of the rebels to the army.
You took care of the patients as well as the doctor, the sick, and that’s the way we stayed at the sickbay for two years. After spending time at the sickbay, we were ordered back into the convoy. We were returned to the convoy led by Kony. That was 1993.
For Jola, the three years spent away from home allowed her to establish her own surrogate family, one she cared about and shared good and bad moments with. She was not keenly thinking about escaping any more, but was simply doing the work assigned her. As a testament of her changing attitude, she was removed from the sickbay and asked to join a convoy led by Joseph Kony himself. This was a big increase in responsibility since it meant she was now considered part of an LRM/A operational team. She learned to walk long distances without food or water and take incoming fire from enemies, in this case, the NRM/A. For all practical purposes, Jola had become a full member of the LRM/A – perhaps not in the sense of identifying with all of the rebel movement’s philosophy, but in the sense that her life as the young girl who was abducted several years prior had changed to that of someone who was now a soldier. For instance, in a combat engagement with the NRM/A, her status as a captive was now less apparent, replaced as it were by her demeanour as a combatant. She was as likely to draw the enemy’s fire as to respond with fire herself.
In other words, even if Jola wanted to escape the captivity of the LRM/A at this point in her transformation, she would be at a loss as to where to start, how to negotiate the deadly terrain, escape villagers hostile to the LRM/A rebels since she would be identified as one, and survive a possible ambush by the NRM/A. Common sense would have suggested to her that the safest place at the moment was with the LRM/A itself. As a former CI soldier suggested, the irredeemability of the label of being olum, a LRM/A rebel, was perhaps the strongest deterrent for children contemplating escape from LRM/A captivity. As the informant put it:
On reaching Uganda we started a campaign of deception – you know there are ways of deceiving people and especially since there was no option for amnesty – telling other abductees that when you spend a certain period in the bush, on returning home, you would be immediately killed. There would be no reason to let you live. Naturally, you would start thinking, ‘Well, I am now one year in the bush, and have also fought battles, surely, returning home means certain death.�
� You begin thinking, ‘How should I live? How should I protect my life in order to start living a life?’ You begin to consider what to do when battles come. We stayed. Jola also stayed.
Training for the 1994 Peace Talks, and Prisoner of War
The 1993–4 peace talks between the government of Uganda and the LRM/A was the first serious effort to make peace between the warring parties. Implicitly, it was a tacit admission by the government of Yoweri Museveni that the LRM/A constituted a serious if not permanent threat to the security of northern Uganda. The peace talks themselves were initiated and led by the minister for pacification of northern Uganda, Betty Atuku Bigombe, and, according to my informants, were referred to by the LRM/A as the ‘Atuku Peace Talks.’ The first face-to-face talks between government representatives led by Bigombe and the LRM/A mid-level commanders took place on 25 November 1993 at Pagik village in the Aswa region in Gulu. Originally planned as a confidence-building exercise, the talks turned into negotiations aimed at the LRM/A’s demobilization, an outcome that, according to rebel commander Cirilo Jurukadri Odego, should not be seen as ‘surrendering’ but as a ‘return home’ (O’Kadameri, 2002). The rebel delegation further articulated its view that those the LRM/A was fighting, including the NRM/A and UPDA, had rejected the way of God.
In the second session of talks, beginning on 11 January 1994 at Pagik, the LRM/A delegation was led by Joseph Kony himself, aided by his commanders Omona and Odego, while the government of Uganda delegation was led by Betty Bigombe (Dolan, 2009; O’Kadameri, 2002). The government army commanders who participated in the first meeting refused to attend the second because the LRM/A insisted on being solely responsible for choosing and securing the venue. Joseph Kony seemed eager to conclude peace with the government of Uganda and directed his most venomous remarks at Acholi elders, whom he accused of forcing his members to take up arms in the bush and then abandoning them there (O’Kadameri, 2002). The LRM/A leader wanted to be given time to gather together his soldiers, who were then scattered in various places, so that he could return the children to their homes.