by Opiyo Oloya
Some people took my mother aside and calmed her down, telling her, ‘Look, it is your daughter telling you to calm down, she should be the one crying, not the adult. Cry silently.’ My mother went and sat alone, she calmed down, and then came to speak to me. We had a lot of catching up to do. I told her simply, ‘I am alive, not dead.’
In the end, the child who was abducted years earlier was not the person who stood in front of her mother that day. The realization must have dawned on the sad mother that the little child she all along ached to touch and welcome back home was no more. In place of that child was now a grown woman with two children of her own, and many battle scars. So, as only a mother could, she cried for the loss she felt deep inside her. She also cried because Acholi culture demanded that one cries at the death of a child – the child who was once hers was no longer. She had died in the bush.
Jola Amayo is aware of the double existence she must continue to inhabit. In the bush she had lived the double life of a soldier and a child yearning to return home; now she has to live the life of returnee who is physically back in the community but whose very presence is denied by the community. That is because she is caught in a cultural grey zone where she is neither the person she used to be nor the person the community thinks she should be. Her stigmatized identity, that of a child who has fought in a war, is the one in plain view.
In the past, returning Acholi warriors were welcomed back into the community with ceremonies meant to cleanse them of evil spirits. The cleansing ritual would be accompanied with much ceremony and pride. If victorious, a warrior would almost certainly earn the moi, a title of praise reserved for the most courageous deeds. Whatever name he chose would end with moi; Lutanya-moi, Lwanya-moi, Luker-moi, Tweny-moi, Guru-moi, and so on.
But Jola is not seen as a warrior even though she fought many battles and showed extraordinary courage in the face of withering fire. Her return home is not a moment for celebration. Instead, there is shame attached to her return; she is a killer whose participation in war is akin to the role played by the village witches who danced at night and placed curses on innocent people. She is held both in contempt and fear for what she has done and what she is capable of doing. The fact that she is considered the ‘walking-dead’ only compounds the communal rejection of her presence. She can stay in the community only because nobody has the courage to ask her to leave. Her children can play with other children but must not touch them. She knows this: ‘Even when my child was beaten, I held my tongue, merely watching what was going on. The antidote to that was to make sure your children did not go play near aggressive children. As soon as you spoke up because your child was beaten, you were derided as the mother of Lakwena responsible for massacring people. Where was your head at? You should be lynched by a crowd.’
The existential crisis that Jola Amayo now faces in her home village is exacerbated by her steadfastly held notion of being dano adana, a human person who survived years of abuse in LRM/A captivity. She is still a human being but not the person the community wants her to be. On her return, she was forced to accept her identity as a former CI soldier, and resolved to ‘keep quiet’ for fear of making matters worse. But today, Jola Amayo has chosen to speak up to teach others about who she is and, in so doing, to begin to negotiate her way back into the community: ‘To those who knew I returned from the bush, [I say,] “Don’t be afraid, let’s stay on good terms, because I know what pain is and you know what pain is. So don’t be afraid of me. If I have something you need, ask me, and I will not refuse to give it to you, and if you have something I need, I will also ask you, and I know you will not deny me.”’
Jola Amayo is now beginning to show that she is still what she was all along, dano adana, a human person, one whose personhood has survived years in LRM/A bush camps.
Chapter Five
The Ringo Otigo Stories
I met Ringo Otigo for the first time on 17 July 2008 at GUSCO head office in Gulu. He was already waiting when I drove inside the gates of the GUSCO headquarters at about eight that morning. When he saw me, he quietly stood up from his perch on an embankment under the tree. He did so slowly, and walked towards me just as slowly, never giving the impression that he was in a rush to do something else, or that he could be rushed into something he did not want to do. He wore oily blue-jean coveralls, and dusted his right hand on his pants before offering it to me in a firm handshake. Ringo was a muscular man with a big chest, yet he was soft-spoken with an exceedingly polite demeanour. He was working as a bicycle mechanic at an open-air shop located at the north entrance of Gulu market in Gulu town. The location of the shop at a busy intersection ensured that he was a very visible man doing a visible job, and was constantly interrupted by passersby and acquaintances who wished him well. His job required that he welcome all walk-in customers who needed their bicycles repaired, chat with them as he did his work, and haggle a bit over how much the work was worth.
GUSCO had contacted him the day before, and he had come for the day. I apologized for the short notice and the fact that his day’s work was ruined. He responded in English, ‘It’s okay.’ At the time of our meeting, Ringo was twenty-six years old, living with a partner with whom he has three children. It had been six years and five days since the day he walked out of the bush as a child combatant with the LRM/A.
There was a formality in the way in which Ringo sat, hands neatly folded on his lap, back straight up on the chair, and head erect. When asked a question, he paused to consider it, and then proceeded to answer carefully. He employed Acholi proverbs often to illustrate a point, and executed precise use of the Acholi language in the same way elders do at gatherings of kacooke, meetings at which speakers are expected to use lok mucwiny (mature spoken words) to make their points. The ability to employ lok mucwiny in a conversation is considered an Acholi art form which one develops by listening to village elders and then uses skilfully to argue both sides of the issue. Persons with such skills are well regarded within the community when there are issues to be discussed. The person who possesses the skills for lok mucwiny is often called upon to tweyo ter lok (tie up the discussion) by summarizing and concluding it. It is foolhardy for a participant at such a communal meeting to reopen the discussion after the matter has been properly ‘tied up.’ The biggest public insult is for a speaker to be dismissively silenced for loko lok me tino (talking like an adolescent), instead of lok mucwiny.
When I asked him whether the publication of his story was a concern, Ringo answered that he would be most concerned if it was not published because, as he put it in Luo, dong bene nongo loka oto nono (my whole story would have died for nothing).
The Cultural Context of Ringo Otigo’s Early Lifein an Acholi Village
Ringo Otigo was born on 7 December 1981 in Labwoc village, Koro district, just outside Gulu town. His birthday came just three days before the first anniversary of the disputed national elections that returned Milton Obote to power. In fact, by the time Ringo was born, the insurgency that was founded by Yoweri Museveni to rid Uganda of Obote was almost ten months old. It would take a few more years before it could succeed in its objective of toppling the government, putting Museveni in power and thereby plunging northern Uganda into a new cycle of violence that would involve many Acholi children as child combatants. At the time of his birth, however, there was nothing in the life of his village that would suggest the turn of events five years later.
Ringo’s father, a medical doctor at Gulu hospital, died before his birth. The boy’s upbringing, however, emphasized family loyalty, a strong relationship with extended kin and the larger community in the village, thrift and hard work, respect for elders and people in positions of authority, and the value of being responsible and dependable, all of which were qualities exploited by the LRM/A in the transformation of many village children into child combatants. Ringo remembered that he grew up well liked by everyone because he did what was expected of him: ‘Growing up, as young children, the way we lived with others, we lived i
n a large extended family, with many people living together. I was told that my grandfather and my father loved having people around them. Moreover, my father’s job required him to be around people. He was a doctor at the main [Gulu] hospital. He had a good relationship with people.’
Having good relationships with others, or as Ringo puts it, ‘good neighbourliness,’ meant that a child was trustworthy, and Ringo seemed to work especially hard to cultivate and maintain such relationships. However, Ringo reserved a special affection for his old grandmother, whom he referred to as ‘Big Mother.’ In time, Ringo’s grandmother became the most influential person in his life. He explained how the symbiotic relationship grew only stronger over the years: ‘My grandmother was particularly fond of me, often remarking that she could never find another grandson like me. She said so because I was giving her a lot of help. She also had granddaughters, the children of her own son, but they tended to stay away from her, saying she was too old and useless … I would dig potatoes from the field and bring it in the house. All she did was peel the potato and boil it in the fireplace.’
In return for his help, Ringo’s grandmother lavished attention on her grandson, showering him with the affection that he could never have received in his large household with so many children, something he acknowledged:
Grandmother had a special earthenware pot in which she would leave honey and simsim butter for me, which I enjoyed eating. She said she could not give the food to anyone else because nobody was giving her the kind of help I was providing her. The earthenware pot was an heirloom handed down by her mother who instructed her to allow only the most trusted grandchild to use it. She would pour simsim butter and add honey on top, which I then ate. Whenever hungry, I reached out to the hanging net in the ceiling in which the pot was placed, took it down and ate some of the sweet mixture.
Ringo’s experience of bonding with many relatives is by no means unique to Acholi culture. In other African cultures, a child is expected to know his relatives, visit them often, and live with them (see, for example, Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart). The rationale is that a child who is acquainted with relatives can never be alone even when his immediate family members are away, dead, or otherwise unable to support him or her. The expression often used to describe the close ties of extended family is wat aye yiki (your relatives are the ones who will bury you). The extended family, in other words, will always support you, even in death. For Ringo, this was a normal part of developing his budding sense of identity, an identity rooted in and nurtured by the larger cultural web of extended relations.
But the strong family bond was tested often by the lack of money. To make ends meet, Ringo Otigo and his six brothers and five sisters worked the cotton field and the harvested cotton was sold to the ginnery to make some money. Ringo and his twin brother also worked long hours cutting and splitting firewood to be sold at the market for cash. Even that, however, was not enough money to pay for the basic necessities for school. Often, Ringo was suspended from school because he did not have money to pay the fees. His mother intervened from time to time, asking the school’s headmaster to reconsider and take him back in. ‘Sometimes, my mother would come and say, “I am poor, allow my child to attend school, debt has never killed anyone,”’ he said.
Growing up poor in the village forced Ringo to mature quickly. Although he found time to engage in boyhood activities, like fashioning catapults from forked tree branches, going bird hunting, and swimming in the river, he also had to take on the adult responsibilities of tilling the land and picking cotton.
According to Ringo, he learned early on that adults could behave very badly. He specifically remembered two incidents. The first occurred when a boy accidentally threw a spear which pierced the face of another boy. The issue created tension in the extended family that became a running feud. And, perhaps as a continuation of the first incident, a second incident occurred that involved cattle eating the crops of another family. People in the village took sides in the dispute, some supporting the cattle owner and others the owner of the field. The fracas that ensued turned into an open fight that had to be broken up by the police. For Ringo, it became difficult to trust adults. He often declined to follow adults on hunting expeditions in the bush for fear that old enmities might surface and lead to the ‘spilling of blood.’
Despite what he saw as life’s many contradictions and challenges, he was shown early on how to cope and grow up to lead an honourable and useful life. Ringo recalled that most of his childhood education came from different elders in his community who taught him the meaning of life through Acholi traditional sayings. For instance, as a fatherless boy, Ringo was constantly reminded of the Acholi saying, latin pa lacan winyo pwony ki ii bad deero (the poor man’s child takes lessons from the side of the granary). He explained what it meant to him:
It meant that when adults were conversing, the smart child sat nearby, listening carefully to what was being said, never betraying his presence, but absorbing all the life’s lessons. The elders also had a saying for the recalcitrant child. In the Acoli tongue, the way I recall it, the saying went, ‘The recalcitrant child never gets a share of the wild cat’s head,’ meaning that when a child refuses to do an errand, but another does it, the one who was compliant gets a reward. But you, the recalcitrant child, get nothing, hence ‘The recalcitrant child never gets a share of the wild cat’s head.’
The ability to relate to his extended family went beyond the home into Ringo’s school life, something he was proud to speak about. Though he spent only a short time in school before he was abducted by the LRM/A, Ringo seemed to have made a lifetime of friendships with some of the staff and students at the various schools he attended.
An Education in a Village School
Ringo Otigo started his primary education in the village in which he was born, Koro, but spent the last two years of school with his grandmother in Lakwat Omer. His school experiences were mostly positive because, as he put it, ‘I was well liked by everyone.’ He was always among the first to arrive in school in the morning, even ahead of the bell, a disused car-wheel rim banged with an iron bar. In class, his generosity extended to helping colleagues read, write, and study for tests. But it was his athletic ability that won him popularity beyond the classroom: ‘The whole school looked to me when it came to sports, mainly two sports in track and field events, running and throwing shot put, all of which I excelled in with no problems.’
School was mostly an extension of the home, and Ringo, like his peers, was expected to relate to and respect teachers as he would his own parents. Two teachers stood out in Ringo’s mind; one taught him mathematics while the other taught social studies. He remembered both as very kind, helpful, and always willing to spend time to explain new concepts to the students. Ironically, the day he returned from the bush, Ringo surrendered to his former social-studies teacher, Simon Odong, who at the time was working as a social worker with GUSCO. Both teachers remained a part of his life when he returned home as a former child combatant: ‘Odong worked as a staff member at GUSCO. Otto Leba is presently teaching in Abili. Whenever I go there, I spend time with him, and he likes to tell people, “This young man was my student, a student I truly loved, a good listener, punctual, and always respectful in the class.” We have a good time together and to this moment he trusts me, such that whenever I get there – my mother resides in Koro Abili – and find them, and I have some money, I give them some [to buy beer], to relax.’
In school Ringo learned to resolve any conflicts that arose. He was especially afraid of a class bully called Abibu, whose vicious exploits left many children without lunch or with bumps on their heads. Abibu was a most dislikeable character: ‘He was very nasty, yet he was so stupid and knew nothing. He hated whatever good things were happening in class. In class he was constantly disruptive and noisy. When you did something well, he would beat you up. He also intimidated others to try to take away whatever food he liked. His main preoccupation was making little ch
ildren cry when they left the school ground.’
Ringo quickly sized up Abibu and concluded that the boy was angry because he was hungry. By offering food to him, Ringo solved the puzzle that had left many children in sheer terror: ‘When we had food, and it was lunchtime, I would give him some of it, and he would then leave us alone to go and eat. For instance, when I brought mangoes, I would give him two. He would then go to harass other children; meanwhile, we went to eat somewhere else. That was how we managed to get around him because we did not give him opportunity to give us trouble.’
Being able to read people would become a very valuable life-saving skill when Ringo was abducted by the LRM/A. As he soon discovered while living with the rebels, a misreading of a situation, an intention, or the smallest cue could cost one one’s life. In fact, whatever he did not learn in school, Ringo would learn the hard way during his life as a child combatant in both Uganda and Sudan.
Abduction in the Evening
Ringo Otigo says that he was abducted by the LRM/A just three days after his fifteenth birthday, on 10 December 1996. He spent the next six years with the insurgency, and coincidentally escaped from the bush on his birthday, 7 December 2002.1 The abduction happened on a Tuesday evening at Lakwat Omer where he was living with his grandmother. He had been to the hospital in Gulu town early that day to have the doctor check on chest pain he had been experiencing. The doctor had prescribed medication which he had in a pocket of his shorts alongside the hospital medical form. He had returned home and gone straight to the stream to fetch water. On his way back from the stream, he met two armed LRM/A soldiers. The soldiers brandished their weapons at him, but Ringo acted calmly while answering their probing questions: