by Opiyo Oloya
Despite Kony’s apparent eagerness to embrace peace, the government of Uganda suddenly developed cold feet towards the whole notion. There are likely many reasons for the about-face. What is certain is that on 6 February 1994, while speaking to the Acholi population in Gulu, President Museveni torpedoed the peace effort by calling the LRM/A ‘bandits’ and demanding that the rebels surrender within seven days (O’Kadameri, 2002). The peace talks essentially collapsed then, and war involving children would go on for another decade.
From her vantage point as an LRM/A foot soldier, Jola Amayo had not been an idle watcher of the peace talks. The LRM/A created a special force in late 1993 to act as security for the second negotiating session; its members would even be responsible for conducting body searches of government delegates. Among those chosen for this force was Jola Amayo, who at that point was just beginning military training but did not have combat experience: ‘The peace talks began in 1993. When the peace talks began, we were selected for training close to a river. Through that time I was being trained on the use of the gun.’
By then, Jola Amayo was firmly embedded within the LRM/A, was trusted as one of their own, and did not attempt to set herself apart. The risky nature of the peace talks and the possibility that government forces could attack the LRM/A led Kony, in creating the special security force, to select those in whom he had confidence, people he could completely rely on not to betray him by defecting, showing fear, or failing on the job. Earlier, in the first few months of her bush life with the LRM/A, Jola had looked at the LRM/A in terms of ‘me’ versus ‘them,’ but three years on, at fifteen years of age, that separation was no longer apparent. She was now a combatant – still a child, to be sure, but one further removed from the life that she had experienced in her village. If in her past life as a child Jola had expressed fear of the LRM/A, now she had become the very kind of person whom she used to fear. The difference between then and now was that Jola possibly saw many things that were awry, amiss, wrong, or out of place in the LRM/A, but she accepted them as part of her new identity. If she had misgivings, she did not let on because she was focused on the task of being an LRM/A soldier, and survival.
As Joseph Kony had anticipated, the peace talks did not go well. The government of Uganda, from his point of view, was more interested in scoring political points than in reaching a final peace agreement, and would not commit to a formalized agreement of understanding (Dolan, 2009, 87–8). For Jola Amayo, these were very tense times, further complicated when her team was captured by NRM/A forces: ‘Atuku came to us, we were placed in an ambush – we stayed four days in ambush. On the fifth day, we left for Lacek-Ocot. At Lacek-Ocot, we were captured. We were captured by government forces. Kony ordered the attack on Lacek-Ocot, saying that since we were captured there, everything should be destroyed even tiny ants; nothing should be left alive.’ The LRM/A captives were later released without a fight on the intervention of Betty Bigombe.
The incident at Lacek-Ocot was a very important development in Jola’s transition into the life of a child combatant. For the first time, she saw herself as non-LRM/A people saw her, an event that was truly transformative. Until then, her new identity as a child combatant had grown on her almost imperceptibly; it was not something she had consciously thought about. The incident at Lacek-Ocot changed that by providing her with double consciousness, that state of being aware of herself as a captive of the LRM/A yet equally aware that others now viewed her as part of the organization. The layered self-awareness that constitutes double consciousness was best described by W.E.B DuBois (1999) when he wrote about growing up black in America. DuBois recalled the moment when, as if watching himself from another level of consciousness, it dawned on him that he was now the other:
It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards – ten cents a package – and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. (3–4)
DuBois’s experience of being black in America in a time of racial segregation, of seeing his blackness in the eyes of others, as if shut off by a ‘vast veil,’ is ultimately liberating in that it freed him from the shadow of knowing, of suspecting without fully glimpsing the object of his tension and dilemma, and brought him face to face, as it were, with what he needed to know, that is, that he was different. On a similar level, a captive of an identity shift that she could not fully acknowledge or confront until the gaze of her community freed her at Lacek-Ocot, Jola Amayo became aware of who she had become. She may have been an unwilling captive of the LRM/A at the beginning, forcibly abducted from her own bed several years past, but now, in the eyes of the larger community, she wore the new label of rebel. She presumably could have screamed out loud that she was not what she appeared to be, an LRM/A rebel, but such indignant protestations would ultimately have been futile, leading to nothing but despair – the experience of other black boys of Dubois’s youth in a segregated America, whose ‘youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry’ (4). No, a return to the world in which she was just Jola Amayo and not ‘Jola Amayo the LRM/A rebel’ was not possible, because others had confirmed her new identity as a rebel combatant. The split consciousness and the dilemma it entailed further cemented her bond with the LRM/A rather than freeing her from the group. Conversely, it could also be argued that the knowledge that she was now regarded by the civilian community as a member of the LRM/A freed her from worrying about what she had become and how she should act. Instead, she was able to focus her mind on the small things that matter for survival, such as not eating too much when on standby. Jola Amayo, in other words, was ready for combat, to fight for the LRM/A and, if need be, to die for it as well.
After the failed peace talks in 1994, the rebel movement was drawn closer to the government of Sudan, even as the NRM/A (which became Uganda People’s Defence Forces in 1995) pursued it more ruthlessly. Jola Amayo was among 250 combatants sent to Sudan for intensive six-month military training, lasting from December 1994 to June 1995, when she was deployed for combat operations inside Uganda. Freshly supplied by Sudan with guns and ammunition, the unit quickly engaged the UPDF. Over the next several weeks and months, Jola Amayo would see much combat, a typical clash occurring at Agoro, inside Uganda: ‘In Agoro, the army followed and caught up with us at eight in the morning. We began fighting, shooting at each other from eight in the morning until six in the evening. You could not walk, you could not carry any load. With so many wounded and dead, there were now way too many loads to carry. One of the boys who lived with us died in that battle. Another boy who was the commander of the convoy was also shot, breaking his thigh. Their loads now became our responsibilities.’
By this time, Jola Amayo was a fully experienced combatant, and it showed in her description of the battle:
We were told to shoot until our ammunition was gone. We shot them and they scattered. Six lines, we shot them, they scattered. Another six lines entered the fray. That was a tough lot, we fought toe to toe with them – they were strong and would not run. On our side, the cry went up that if it was a fight to the death, so be it because there were way too
many wounded to carry with us. Added to that all the loads previously carried by the wounded and the dead were now heaped together in three huge lots.
Jola Amayo was wounded in the thigh during one of the running battles with the UPDF. She could not walk, so she had to be carried by her colleagues. In one close exchange of fire with the UPDF, she was dumped by those carrying her. She crawled on all fours through the night until she located her team the following morning. Her bravery in battle brought her recognition from the leader of the LRM/A. Jola recalled that moment: ‘Our unit finally connected with Kony’s unit. Among those wounded, I was the only girl with injuries. Kony said, “You are a good role model to the other girls” – Kony is related to my father’s side of the family. He asked me, saying, “Young girl, how are you?” “Are you wounded?” I replied, “I am wounded.”’ Jola was the first LRM/A girl soldier to be given a rank, something she remembered with some pride years later: ‘I was the first among the girls to wear a rank, that is, among the women in Kony’s household, and all the women in the bush, I was the first to be given a rank, and was appointed a second lieutenant.’
Jola discovered that not only was she not afraid to fight, she was also good at inspiring others to remain courageous in battle. Her role had changed completely; the child abductee clinging to life in LRM/A camps had become a confident, battle-tested child combatant whose growing importance made her the target of jealousy among her colleagues. She commanded both respect and fear. More important, she knew how to take care of herself, as she recalled:
As the jealousy grew there was a plot to shoot me mainly because I was seen as elevating the status of the leader [Kony] and he lavishly praised me. I should be shot and killed. On the way back to Sudan, we came under fire. An officer wanted to shoot me then, but alerted, I stepped away from the line of fire. Instead, he shot a young soldier who was part of the leader’s escort. When we arrived, the shooter was jailed for six months, in which time he was not allowed to touch a gun, and required to walk bare-chested.
Jola Amayo not only stayed with the LRM/A, she had become one of its more important members.
Motherhood Intervenes: Baby on the Back, Machine-Gun in Hand
As she matured into a young woman, Jola Amayo found love. Unlike other young girls who were simply handed over to senior LRM/A officers as wives, Jola was wooed by a young man who became her first bush husband. This was important to Jola, who, in the midst of her own uncertain future as a child combatant, still retained the original, desired identity she had developed in her home village. She valued being able to say ‘yes’ to a suitor’s advances. It confirmed a part of her Acholi upbringing, which said you don’t throw yourself at a man, you allow him to approach you first. She may not have had the same setting for the wooing as she would have had at home, but she still went through the process, that satisfaction of being a girl pursued by a boy:
When I left Uganda [to return to Sudan] the word went out that I was now having my menstrual period. Senior officers became interested in me as a woman. One officer was especially fierce in fending off other officers. He used to beat me badly, saying that I was unruly and wild.
I began living with an officer, a boy from Alero. He wooed me instead of forcing me into the relationship. We began staying together, living together. We had a baby boy and named him Otim.
The birth of her son in 1996 meant that Jola Amayo could not actively participate in combat. In what seemed like the blink of an eye, Jola moved from being a child herself to being the mother of a child. Her son was deliberately called Otim, a Luo name that means a child born in the wilderness, in the diaspora, among aliens. She could have named him anything she wanted – Sam, Pedro, Andrew, James, or any number of other possibilities. But she still clung to Acholi customs, ultimately refusing to relinquish the very culture that had betrayed and abandoned her at the crucial moment of her childhood development.
She now focused on being a mother and a wife, but she was widowed early on when her bush husband was captured and killed during an operation inside Uganda. Alone, she worked her field, producing foodstuff that was sold in Juba. She met another man, who became her second bush husband; she would have two children with him and they live together today. But motherhood did not change Jola’s stigmatized identity or status as a combatant since the LRM/A remained at war with UPDF. It meant that, instead of fending for herself alone, she now had to think about her children as well, as was the case, she said, in 1997 when the UPDF attacked the LRM/A base in Nisitu in southern Sudan. Jola Amayo was forced into combat with one-year-old Otim in tow: ‘A fierce exchange of bullets ensued. Everywhere you turned, moving to the road, away from the road, bullets were flying. I began fighting with my baby son Otim tied to my back. I opened fire on the army position. Otim was asleep on my back. We fought a hard battle until the end, but we could not move along the road. We had dispersed government troops.’ She adds: ‘There was a wounded government soldier lying nearby, I thought he was dead, but he was alive. Another government soldier lay dead nearby; I searched his rank and found he was a captain. I had earlier shot and killed him. I plucked his rank and held it in my hand.’3
The unforgettable picture that Jola paints in this segment of her narrative, of a combatant wielding a machine-gun in battle with a sleeping baby tied to her back, is both heroic and tragic, leaving us to cheer her courage in facing the blazing guns of her enemies but also lament the inescapable reality of her new identity as a child combatant carrying a child of her own into combat.
In her village, she would have either gone ahead with her education, or been married in the traditional Acholi nyom ceremony. As a bride she would have gone on to establish her home at her in-laws, beginning the journey of motherhood within the new community. Here, in the wilderness, she became a mother with a gun in her hand. She killed without hesitation, and, as in the story just told, she could inspect the body of someone she had killed to see if there was anything on it worth taking, something that would have shocked most Acholi to their core. From the dead person, she yanked out the pip signifying that the dead soldier was a UPDF captain. Moments later, she herself was shot, the bullet shattering her wrist. Without yelping with pain, she walked for several miles before handing over her machine-gun to someone else to carry. She took care of her own wounds, and then tended to her sleeping son.
Viewed through the lenses of Acholi culture, in which killing and dying are extraordinary events regardless of the context, this story is striking. Yet the contradictory images that Jola offers, as a child mothering a child, as a child fighting a war, and as a child widow, are the least of her worries. She is fighting to survive and care for the child tied to her back. This was not something she had been trained for, but it was something she was forced to accept as part of her new identity. Her transformation from child to child combatant was complete. Abhorring introspection, second-guessing, and brooding about events over which she had little influence, she instead adapted, constructing and nurturing an identity that she had control over, that of a combatant, who acted deliberately and with confidence because that was the culture of war. In that environment, a moment’s hesitation could be fatal. She did not question why she needed to kill the captain because, if she had not killed him (which she did), he would have killed her. The equation was fairly straightforward – kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.
Jola Amayo was a soldier now, self-assured with a gun in her hand, who would not necessarily kowtow to the demands of a man just because he was a man. She was a soldier whose values reflected warfare and combat, who was aware that those elements of her that long ago demanded that she look at the world from a certain cultural vantage point of obedience and meekness had been supplanted by a new self that spoke loudly of surviving the day so that tomorrow could take care of itself.
Return of the Living Dead: Home, Bitter Home
Jola Amayo’s homecoming on 12 June 2002 was reminiscent of the manner in which she left in the first place. It was sudden, unexpected,
and anti-climactic, a disorganized event that simply happened one night. She was part of the rebel movement one moment, fighting for her life and that of her children, if not for the cause for which she had been abducted more than a decade earlier. Then, the LRM/A, after using her for its purposes, spat her out, seeing her as a spent force, an unsuitable CI soldier on account of motherhood. As Jola herself put it, ‘I stopped fighting when Otim grew up.’ There was no letter of discharge that said so and so fought for such and such a cause and was now being honourably discharged. Instead, unless one was told her story, Jola was just another village mother, now with two children, one still nursing. Perhaps her scars could tell part of the story of what she had gone through all these years, what she had survived, and the battles she had fought.
But even at this crucial moment of liberation from her former abductors, she was not capable of crying. She was a soldier first. In fact, when her mother was moved to tears, wailing out aloud, Jola sharply rebuked her, an incident that she did not relish speaking about:
On arrival, my mother began wailing. I told her, saying, ‘If you have come here to make me sad, then you had better go back. I have just come out of extreme difficulty, and here you welcome me by wailing? Here in the bush, there is no crying, go back home.’