Child to Soldier: Stories from Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army
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The rejection of returning former child combatants can be rendered meaningful only when understood as one of the outcomes of a war that caused total devastation to traditional institutions of community and family. In essence, by rejecting returning child combatants because of fear that they harbour the dreaded cen, which could also be interpreted in terms of individual trauma, Acholi society exposes its own cultural trauma and its resulting impotence in dealing with social issues arising from the war. It is this uncertain terrain of cultural trauma with shifting meanings of victims and perpetrators that CI soldiers encounter upon returning home.
Acholi Cultural Trauma
Acholi society, I would argue, is experiencing severe cultural trauma today. This trauma denotes both the shared sense of collective suffering that has been experienced over the last two decades in Acholi society, and the profound impact that the war has had on the way the Acholi think of themselves as a distinct cultural entity. To qualify as cultural trauma, according to N.J. Smelser (2004), the event must be remembered, the memory must be ‘culturally relevant, that is, represented as obliterating, damaging, or rendering problematic something sacred’ (36), and, finally, the memory must be associated with a ‘strong negative affect, usually disgust, shame or guilt.’ J.C. Alexander (2004) argues that cultural trauma comes about when the victimized group not only becomes aware of the impact of the trauma on them, but is also alerted to the dangers that it poses to their ‘collective identity’ as a group or as a people. He writes: ‘For traumas to emerge at the level of the collectivity, social crises must become cultural crises. Events are one thing, representations of these events quite another. Trauma is not the result of a group experiencing pain. It is the result of this acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its identity’ (10).
The cultural trauma in this case affects the collective by inflicting damage on the basic tissue of social life, destroying the bond between people and creating a deepening awareness of their shared suffering. Acholi society itself is wounded, not in the organic sense of physical trauma, but in terms of broken social connectedness; the familial bonds that formed the basis of the smallest social units, radiating outwards to connect members of communities into tight cohesive groupings, have waned, setting children against parents, and siblings against each other.
The social condition arising from cultural devastation over the last two decades is best illustrated by the old Acholi proverb, Pe iput te okono (Do not uproot the pumpkin).3 The warning not to uproot the pumpkin plant is both literal and symbolic. It is literal because the pumpkin survives on its own even when the old homestead is abandoned for a new one; and, so long as it is not uprooted, it can be harvested again and again to sustain life, especially in times of famine. Because it requires minimal intervention and upkeep, often surviving wildfires and drought on its own, the pumpkin is considered an essential part of an Acholi homestead, readily available when needed. In almost all Acholi homesteads, including my own in Pamin-Yai, the large round vegetable was often planted in the wii oduu (garbage dump), where it flourished in the rich composted soil and, year after year, produced nutritious crops that were harvested as needed and prepared as part of a larger meal or by itself for breakfast. The pumpkin leaves, pot okono, make a tasty soup.
Looked at in the context of the two decades of violence in Acholi, to extend the metaphor one step further, the old homestead is left barren, strewn with old broken pots, overgrown weeds, and shrivelled pumpkin roots. That is to say, the situation is so critical that the old Acholi adage, Pe iput te okono, no longer applies because, metaphorically speaking, the war has uprooted the pumpkin, leaving it in danger of wilting altogether.
Within a generation, the very fabric of family that articulated social roles by gender and by age has largely disappeared; men are no longer able to provide for their families, women abandon their children, and children ignore their elders. The institution of marriage is now seen not as a lifetime union of a man and a woman, but as a vehicle for survival in the moment. A 2001 report by the U.K.-based Agency for Co-operation and Research in Development (ACORD, 2001) warned of ‘cultural demoralization’ in displaced-persons camps in Acholi where ‘prostitution, divorce, and early sexual relationships among young children have become another way of earning income to survive’ (17). Suicide, a serious taboo in Acholi culture, has become commonplace (Dolan, 2009, 165–6). The despair among the Acholi, in other words, is so catastrophic and complete that death, a much feared concept in Acholiland, is a welcome alternative.4
Because of the long, culturally destructive war, living has become a speculative ritual where problems are either ignored altogether or attributed with a sense of resignation to the supernatural world of spirits. For example, an often repeated refrain I heard while visiting the displaced-persons camps in 2005, 2006, and 2007 was that perhaps the Acholi were suffering so much because the jok (gods or spirits) were angry and wanted to punish the entire ethnicity collectively. As Ocitti (1973) explains, in traditional Acholi culture, these deities were dominant figures to whom ‘sacrifices and prayers were offered whenever the whole chiefdom was faced with threats such as war, drought, epidemic, famine, plague or when people were asking for fertility in women’ (13).
In fact, though the idea of a vengeful god might sound far-fetched to an Acholi living in North America or Europe, the notion of collective punishment was well entrenched in some of the camps. In July 2006, for instance, I had a dramatic encounter with this world while visiting the Anaka camp, located about thirty-five kilometres west of Gulu town. I arrived in the camp in a pick-up truck around midday and parked in front of the small building that served as the police station. The overhead sun was intolerably hot. I was met by David Okot, a camp leader. After we greeted each other, he began telling me about the mysterious fires that burn homes everyday without any apparent reason. Arson was often ruled out because many of the homes tended to burn during the day when people were around to watch for suspicious activities. Moreover, recently, fully expecting the fires, homeowners had begun removing all belongings from their homes in the morning.
Coincidentally, almost on cue, as Okot told the story, a fire started about two hundred metres from where we stood in the shade of a big mango tree. ‘There is a fire just starting right now, and it will burn the house to the ground,’ he said excitedly, pointing to white smoke billowing from a grass-thatched house. We piled into the truck and raced to the scene. The fire had begun at the top of the roof, and was fast spreading downwards. A quick inspection indicated that the house was empty, and there was no fireplace where the flame could have accidentally ignited. The gathering crowd confirmed that the house was used only as a sleeping place and not as a kitchen. In the next twenty minutes, we raced around trying to save the next building, which housed a milling machine. Water was brought and poured on the building even as the doomed house burned to the ground. I took many dramatic pictures, including one of a schoolgirl in her uniform who was now rendered homeless.
In the aftermath of the fire, concerned camp residents crowded around me to tell me their stories of encounters with spontaneous fires. One man recounted how his own trousers once caught fire all on their own, burning the pocket. Another told how a sleeping baby caught fire and barely survived. Then there was the munnu (white man), whose camera spontaneously combusted. These incidents, according to the assembled crowd, were compelling evidence of something supernatural haunting the community. Okot later told me that, according to rumour, an evil spirit from across the Nile River was responsible and could be appeased only by the sacrifice of a beautiful young girl’s blood. Uganda government officials whom I later spoke to, meanwhile, merely laughed at the idea of fire starting by itself or chalked it up to carelessness or even arson. But, when I did further research into the phenomenon of spontaneous fires, I discovered that it was entirely plausible that the grass-thatched homes in the camps were indeed spontaneously combusting, but the devil had nothing to do with it.
The problem was the hot grass itself.5
The response of Anaka camp residents to the fires was another reminder of how the devastating war ominously weakened the self-healing capacity of Acholi culture, a capacity that studies of cultures in other jurisdictions (Espino, 1991; Eyber, 2001; Garbarino, 1995; Garbarino & Kostelny, 1996a; Garbarino & Kostelny, 1996b; Garbarino, Kostelny, & Dubrow, 1991; 1997) suggest is crucial for maintaining social order and sustaining resilience in children facing catastrophic events. The incapacity to respond to social crises such as those arising from the return of child combatants, I would argue, is a manifestation of the larger failure of traditional institutions that collapsed as a result of the war.
Today, the traumatized Acholi culture not only lacks the capacity to support returning child combatants saddled with their own individual traumas but is afflicted with what Martin-Baro (1996) terms ‘seriously damaged roots of social co-existence’ (114) and, consequently, rejects former child combatants, consigning them, as it were, to their own individual suffering. The rejection of returning child combatants that I explore below should, therefore, be seen not as a reflection of the attitudes of individual families but rather as a symptom of a society caught in the throes of cultural trauma. The collective, in other words, is aware of its own pain insofar as it affects its identity as a people, and yet individually, as families, the community is unable to deal with this pain because it lacks the cultural resources to do so, thereby perpetuating the vicious cycle of trauma in which both the collective and the individuals within it cannot find resolution.
Cultural and Personal Resurgence
As used in this book, the expression pe iput te okono is also hopeful in that it teaches the importance of remembering one’s roots, one’s old friends and family, kin and community, of maintaining a connection with the past, especially when times are hard and the future is bleak. It is a reminder of the need to return to those roots, to reconnect with ancestors in order to foster a supportive environment that continually nourishes the culture and the individuals that are integral to it. It is an acknowledgment of the role of tradition in shaping how a people sees itself and acts, of what culture regards as important and what is discarded as spent by-product.
Though devastated by the war, many elements of Acholi culture survive today within the collective memory of the elders who were old enough when the war started to know how to use different cultural elements for individual and collective healing. Like the tender green shoot of the okono plant that defies the parched earth and is protected from total decay, this knowledge can be reclaimed. All is not lost, so to speak.
According to sociologist Emile Durkheim, and further elaborated by M. Halbwachs (1992), collective memory plays a major role in how a people recount and mythologize their past. As used in this book, collective memory is conceived of as the memories of a shared past ‘that are retained by members of a group, large or small, that experienced it’ (Schuman & Scott, 1989, 361–2) and transmitted through time and space in publicly sanctioned commemorations and group-specific discourses. The sharing of memories among the Acholi people presents a huge opportunity in helping returning CI soldiers reintegrate into the community. In this sense, metaphorically speaking, the Acholi must return to the old homestead to rummage in the ruins for salvable cultural resources that can be employed to help returning CI soldiers as well as rebuild society.
I am not suggesting a form of collective amnesia that denies that significant suffering ever took place in Acholi. Many communities, in any case, still bear the scars of years of atrocities; graves abound in the villages; victims whose lips, limbs, and ears were chopped off still struggle to survive openly; evidence of the LRM/A’s and NRM/A’s violent handiwork is amply and readily available in the form of burnt-down homes, schools, and churches. The failed Uganda government policy of mass uprooting and relocation of Acholi into overcrowded internal camps exacted an unimaginable human toll.6 Indeed, as an Acholi proverb puts it, pii pe mol dok cen (water does not flow backward). Not only is a denial of widespread suffering impossible in the face of the evidence of destruction, but ultimately it is self-defeating.
At the same time, as Jola Amayo put it unflinchingly, Gwok ka dong ongok pe dok nago ngoke (When a dog vomits, it will not lick back its vomit). What has happened cannot be undone. In other words, Acholi society, has, in its returning CI soldiers, the opportunity to look beyond its despair – with its corollaries of anger, pessimism, and social discord – to find a new kind of radical hope by choosing to remember those cultural resources that bring healing and repair to individuals and society as a whole. C.L. Oryem (2008), an Acholi academic, frames the issue this way: ‘We are either victims or perpetrators and members of a community enmeshed in the cycle of violence, so as stakeholders we all must do our part and meet the needs of each category. What do victims need? How about the perpetrators and the community?’ (5).
The issue that Acholi like Oryem are wrestling with in the wake of a war that devastated and traumatized Acholi culture is how to reconcile the two parts of the survivor-perpetrator dichotomy (Mamdani, 2002) under which many returning CI soldiers fall. I maintain that looking for transformative resources in their cultural past, those cultural resources with the capability of freeing individuals from their divergent status as survivors and perpetrators, and uniting them as co-existing members of a harmonious society, is the best way for Acholi society to deal with collective and individual trauma. There are many of these cultural resources, some particular to certain Acholi communities, and others universal to the Acholi people. For the purpose of this book, I examine four such Acholi cultural resources, namely, tumo kiir (cleansing the curse), culo kwor (restorative restitution for loss of life), mato oput (the drinking of bitter roots), and yweyo kom (cleansing the body), that could be used to reconcile former CI soldiers to their communities, enabling them to embark on the process of healing.
Tumo Kiir (Cleansing the Curse) and Culo Kwor (Restorative Restitution for Loss of Life)
Traditionally, Acholi culture was predicated on shared communal responsibilities such as pur awak (communal tilling of land) and kayo kac aota (communal harvest) and laro lok (communal resolution of conflict). A conflict emanating out of everyday living was quickly settled by elders, wek pe obal kin dano (so that it does not ruin the relationship between people). Ocitti (1973, 17), for instance, notes that the offence of kiir, disturbing the spirits by acts such as throwing food at another in anger, a mother lifting her breasts to curse her child, or committing arson, was considered serious enough that ‘a cleansing ceremony [would] be performed immediately.’ The communal ritual of tumo kiir, cleasing the curse of kiir, required that a goat be slaughtered and the contents of its innards smeared over the hearts of those present. The elders portioned out the meat of the goat which was communally cooked and shared by all. The contrite perpetrator of kiir was now safe from spirits who had hitherto been angered but were now mollified.
In the more serious case of murder or manslaughter, something that became commonplace during the war, culo kwor, restorative restitution for loss of life, was based on the cultural understanding that the loss of life affected not only the immediate family of the deceased but the entire community in which the dead person lived. The concept of culo kwor extended to the perpetrator’s clan, which was deemed morally and socially responsible for the crime committed by their son or daughter. A child, after all, is brought up by the village and so his or her behaviour reflects his or her upbringing by that community. The arrangement for culo kwor is an Acholi cultural mechanism for bringing the two clans, that of the perpetrator and that of the victim, towards a harmonious co-existence (Dolan, 2009, 172; Girling, 1960, 66–7; Finnstrom, 2008, 219–20). It is restorative at its essence in that, without devaluing the humanity of the perpetrator, it allows compensation to satisfy the community of the victim. Acholi traditional justice, in this sense, was not vengeful but oriented towards maintaining social connectedness between society’s members, who
make mistakes but should, after making restitution, be accepted back by the community at large. Perpetrators reclaim their status as dano adaana once the appropriate compensation is made. It is within such traditional Acholi practices that returning CI soldiers can find redemption and the cultural resources to rebuild their lives in a peaceful manner, in essence, returning to the land of the living. This is not to be interpreted as a cure, for what ails them is not an illness that needs to be cured; rather, what they need most is recognition that they retain their human personhood despite many years in the bush.
Mato Oput (Drinking Bitter Roots)
One of the cultural resources that would enable returning CI soldiers to be reconciled with their communities so that they are finally looked at again as dano adana is the ritual of mato oput. Traditionally, mato oput was used to engender reconciliation between clans, even families. It usually followed a period of feuding which had simmered between two parties or a precipitous action which resulted in manslaughter. To ensure that the matter was settled amicably, six elements were adhered to. First, everyone, victim and perpetrator included, came forward freely for the meeting of the court. Second, the meeting was held in the open where everyone could hear what was being discussed. Third, the perpetrator, if known, willingly told the truth and acknowledged the alleged wrongdoing in public. Fourth, ludito kaka (clan elders) discussed the problem and came up with a solution agreeable to both parties. Fifth, the perpetrator had to pay restorative restitution or compensation to the victim’s family. Sixth, once the punishment was accepted, and restitution made, the two sides of the disputes drank a liquid made from bitter oput roots. Drinking the bitter roots signalled the burying of the conflict since everyone had symbolically swallowed the bitterness. Life could proceed as before without any more finger pointing, isolation, or repercussions.