A Moonless, Starless Sky

The moonless, starless sky was bright the evening Eunice met Bosco in the forests of southern Sudan. The year was 1996, and Eunice had been kidnapped two weeks earlier from a school in a town called Aboke, in northern Uganda, by men who called themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army. Founded by a young man named Joseph Kony in 1987, the LRA was raiding villages in Uganda’s north and abducting children while routing the Ugandan army. Eunice was a thoughtful girl of fifteen with inquisitive eyes and closely cropped hair, and she had been visiting her older sister at a girls’ boarding school when rebels surrounded the building. The men, who were really boys if you looked at them closely, tied the girls together with rope and forced them to trek through the forests of northern Uganda, on the way to Sudan, for over a week while they cooked, did laundry, and fetched water for them. Eunice was frightened and exhausted. She was still wearing the blue cotton skirt, her best one, and the matching blouse that she had thought would impress her sister’s friends. Eunice wanted to attend their school one day, too, be among these accomplished girls, and she had hoped to show them that she could fit in, be smart and interesting, dress like they did.

The girls eventually crossed into Sudan and stopped in an area of tall grass and thick, looming trees. More men emerged, including Kony. Rebels began plucking girls from the group, choosing the prettiest ones first. Eunice watched with a swelling sense of dread. There was nowhere to run. They were everywhere. A boy named Bosco, who looked like he was no older than seventeen, appeared in front of her. He was wearing rain boots, a green military uniform that slouched on his thin frame, and a matching cap over bushy hair. Another rebel, who seemed like he was one of the men in charge, nudged Bosco closer toward Eunice and told him, “This will be your wife.”

Eunice was still; she felt paralyzed. She had nearly just died when the Ugandan military emerged out of nowhere and fired gunshots at the rebels as they led the girls through the bush, and death, she thought, would make more sense than what was happening to her right now.

“You’re blessed that you’ve come to me. We thought that you girls might refuse us. You’ll be okay,” Bosco said to her.

Bosco was nineteen. Three years earlier, the LRA had also kidnapped him and trained him to be a soldier. Bosco had felt himself become hardened to the killings and kidnappings he was ordered to carry out. But when he first saw Eunice, he fantasized of a new family that would replace the siblings and mother he had lost. He imagined that he had finally found someone to trust. She was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.

Eunice was repulsed. I have no interest in this man, she thought. How will I get to know him when I absolutely do not want to be with him? Bosco led her to a tent constructed of tree branches with a tarp laid on top, a fragile bush hut, where they would begin the rest of their lives.

Uganda was a sheet of green unfurled over slopes and through forests that stretched to its borders with South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and sometimes it extended over those boundaries, too. The range of greens within a single field looked like a child poured buckets of every hue of green paint into the plants, the trees, the bushes. There was also red dirt, and redder mud, but it was the green that stood out. The cities were always under construction, choked with pollution, traffic, and new malls and apartment complexes. In the northern countryside, above the Nile River, the green still meant fertile land and roots, that what once belonged to your ancestors was now yours to bring to fruition. It could mean both struggle and fortune. The green never felt completely familiar; there was a reason people left so much of it intact in the great expanses between their houses and the houses of their neighbors, and why, no matter how much intruders tried to tear it down, it sprang back up again. To the people of northern Uganda, the green did two more things: It sheltered those who needed a home and camouflaged those who sought to destroy the very idea of it.

Called the “Pearl of Africa” by former British prime minister Winston Churchill, Uganda won its independence from Britain in 1962 after seventy-two years as its colony. A landlocked teardrop in East Africa, the country has a population of almost 40 million people and multiple ethnic identities that the British exploited as they divided and ruled. The British army recruited mostly from the Acholi ethnic group in northern Uganda, while many of the Baganda in the south worked in business or civil service. After independence, these groups competed for jobs, land, and power. The new nation quickly became beset by a series of violent coups and armed rebellions.

Milton Obote, Uganda’s first postindependence prime minister, was from the Lango region in the north and drew support from the Lango and Acholi groups. He formed an alliance with the Baganda in the south, but soon dissolved the constitution and declared himself president, beginning a dictatorship that terrorized opponents and stole from the national coffers. A general named Idi Amin from the northwestern Kakwa group overthrew Obote to begin his own brutal regime that disappeared and killed thousands of people, and purged Lango and Acholi soldiers from the military.

When forces within Uganda and from neighboring Tanzania forced Amin into exile, Obote reemerged to win the 1980 election. His return was not smooth. Guerilla leader Yoweri Museveni accused him of rigging the race, and Museveni’s rebel National Resistance Army, made up largely of southerners, waged war against Obote. The people of Uganda were tired. They had endured bloodshed and a never-ending turnover of despotic leaders, and were desperate for stability. But more coup plans, as always, were brewing.

General Tito Okello, an Acholi, overthrew Obote. Okello signed a peace deal with Museveni’s rebels at the end of 1985, but Museveni seized power a month later anyway. He was still in power in 2017. Once Museveni assumed office, soldiers and government officials loyal to Obote and Okello fled back north. They were afraid of retaliation at the hands of the new government, which was angry about massacres Obote’s army had committed in central Uganda of residents who supported Museveni. Acholis watched as Museveni’s army then committed murder and rape and seized land and cattle, in their own communities, under the guise of establishing control in the north.

The general air of paranoia and discontent in the north gave way to the Holy Spirit Movement, led by Alice Auma Lakwena, who offered her followers protection from Museveni’s soldiers, and promised Acholis a spiritual cleansing and redemption from all the violence that had both been done to them and been done by their bitter, haunted soldiers. Such salvation required them to, among other things, rub shea butter on themselves to evade bullets. Lakwena claimed that snakes, bees, and rivers would devour their enemies. Before the army defeated Lakwena and her legions of footmen, thousands of supporters and innocent civilians had died during battle.

Joseph Kony was her cousin. A former altar boy who dropped out of school, he was regarded by his community as a healer, able to lift curses and cure illnesses. He started the LRA in his twenties, when he said the Holy Spirit had visited him and told him to overthrow the government. He claimed the army was going to murder everyone in Acholiland. He vowed to recover the land and cattle stolen from the Acholis. The late 1980s was a time when resistance efforts against the government had genuine popular support among northerners. Kony recruited a contingent of Acholi ex-soldiers who called themselves the Black Battalion. But Acholis soon realized how sadistic the LRA was: Kony declared that the country should be ruled by the Ten Commandments; that it was now his duty to perform a cleansing on Acholiland and root out all evil in the world; and that he was possessed by spirits and powers, a claim that led many of his terrified followers to consider him a Godlike being.

When many Acholis refused to support his delusions, Kony turned on his own people. In the early 1990s, the LRA began attacking the very population it was claiming to protect. By the decade’s end, the group was composed almost entirely of members who had been kidnapped against their will, usually children. The longer children spent in the group, the more brutal they often became and the farther up the ranks they rose. Brainwashed and desensitized to violence, they eventually became commanders.

President Museveni was equally culpable for the trauma and poverty that plagued the region. A period of relative stability and prosperity arrived after he took office, but the wealth didn’t spread north of the Nile River. Some suspected that Museveni’s government was even enriching itself off the war, by inflating its military budget as it took money from foreign donors and prolonged the fighting. The government’s counterinsurgency sent many Acholis, mostly subsistence farmers, into displacement camps in order to empty rural villages of recruits and support for the LRA. People were forced to leave their green land. In the camps, many became infected with diseases because of cramped conditions and poor sanitation. People fell hungry, fell into despair, fell victim to violence, and were still, incredibly, abducted under the noses of the soldiers tasked to guard them. The army was also burning the homes of northerners and slashing their crops, executing LRA suspects, beating people and accusing them of collaborating with the rebels. “They are your children,” the soldiers told them.

For over a quarter of a century, the LRA carried out an unprecedented reign of terror, first in northern Uganda, and then in neighboring South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic. The killing, mutilating, abducting, and looting had become completely divorced from Kony’s stated revolutionary political goal—restoring Acholi dominance. In a warped reading of the Bible, Kony instructed rebels to cut off the lips, ears, and noses of their victims, to amputate their arms and legs if they rode bicycles on the Sabbath, and any other kind of medieval punishment imaginable. The LRA forcibly recruited some 30,000 children from northern Uganda into its ranks and displaced 2 million people in the region. A 2006 cease-fire between the rebels and the Ugandan government was intended to finally end the LRA’s operations in the north.

The town of Gulu was the epicenter of the LRA’s uprising. Its chairman, or local leader, the bright and energetic Martin Mapenduzi, met Kony twice during peace talks in South Sudan. Once was in the dense jungle of the Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Kony spoke for two hours straight. Some northern members of Mapenduzi’s government-appointed negotiation team were almost persuaded by Kony’s accusations against Museveni of corruption, bias in employment and military recruitment, and economic neglect. Kony struck Mapenduzi as unpredictable and paranoid, though clever. His team told the warlord that people were ready to forgive him. But LRA leaders bristled when Mapenduzi explained that there would have to be some accountability for their crimes, and that International Criminal Court indictments against Kony and his deputies still stood. Various clergy appealed to Kony, to no avail. So as Kony negotiated a peace agreement, he was secretly moving fighters to the Central African Republic. In the spring of 2008, at the final signing ceremony of the peace agreement, he simply never showed up.

After taking advantage of the Central African Republic’s heavily forested and weakly governed areas already rife with bandits, Kony was believed to be hiding in Sudan. His foot soldiers were still kidnapping and killing through the region. In 2011, the United States tried to capture or kill Kony by sending one hundred special forces to Uganda, South Sudan, the Congo, and the Central African Republic to help the African Union force, made up primarily of Ugandan troops, hunt the rebels. But the Ugandans complained of insufficient equipment, lack of intelligence on the rebels’ whereabouts, and meager food rations. The nonprofit Invisible Children released a viral video on the warlord in 2012; Kony still proved elusive. In 2014, the United States sent more military aircraft and special forces to help. A few key LRA leaders had surrendered or been captured or killed. But the LRA’s independence from technology was one of their greatest assets, allowing them to avoid their hunters by using messengers and handwritten letters to communicate, and eschewing phones and two-way radios. U.S. officials acknowledged the rebels were unlike any other enemy they had faced. And in early 2017, the Americans and the Ugandans announced they would be withdrawing their missions from the Central African Republic.

Even though the LRA was no longer in Uganda, its ghosts hovered in the uneasy peace. Families across Uganda had not only members who had been killed, raped, and disfigured by rebels, but also those who were forced into the LRA and had now returned. Until May 2012, LRA combatants who either surrendered or escaped were granted amnesty by the Ugandan government. Over 13,000 fighters received amnesty, and many were given the option to join the army. They now slept next to soldiers, their former enemies, in Ugandan military garrisons as they hunted for their old comrades. Other ex-fighters, and sex slaves and porters, settled near people they may have once harmed, and their former communities didn’t know what to do with them. Nearly all were kidnapped as children, but their actions after the abductions were usually appalling. Children were forced to kill their parents and then, sometimes, eat a meal with their hands still soaked in blood. Communities were struggling in the aftermath.

Now a scraggly group of a few hundred members, the LRA was rapidly losing fighters. High-ranking rebels who had long wanted to escape were sending home their “bush wives” and children, armed with letters instructing the men’s families to take the women and children in and take care of them. When, and if, the men escaped themselves, the young mothers were agreeing to marry them with a surprising frequency, confounding families who were left gasping for breath, trying to steady their vision, when their daughters were first taken.

Eunice grew up in a village seven miles outside Gulu, a town with roads extending like arteries into the countryside. The paths out of Gulu weaved past uniformed children walking to school, men and women riding bicycles as they lugged farm tools and jerry cans of water, and sun-drenched bursts of color, from the lime-toned bushes and banana trees to the rust-colored earth. Mango and orange trees surrounded the spread-out homes of Eunice’s family and her neighbors. It was in this serene landscape where Eunice jumped rope with her sisters and eagerly learned to cook from her mother. She liked to perform the dances traditional to Acholiland, and went on adventures with her best friend in the nearby creeks and bushes. Eunice was quiet in class but liked school, and she felt hurt when she had to stop attending in the fifth grade. Her father had stopped supporting her mother, and he no longer paid Eunice’s school fees. He had other women who took up his time and his money, and Eunice watched helplessly as her mother struggled to brew and sell a local, potent alcohol to make an income. She soon joined the business, helping brew alcohol and sewing tablecloths. But despite feeling abandoned, she loved her father. When he died from heart disease when Eunice was twelve, the blow felt worse than anything she had ever experienced.

One day soon after her father’s death, her relatives heard that the LRA was attacking nearby villages. Many of the children and adults in her extended family decided to sleep in the bushes for a few nights, hiding amid the foliage. Villagers considered it safer to sleep in the forest to avoid the rebels if they showed up on a surprise raid. Eunice heard gunshots that second night. When she returned home early in the morning, she found her brother, sister-in-law, and cousin dead. Everything else was ash. The rebels had burned down their houses and belongings. It was now daylight, and the rebels had done what they came to do, so Eunice knew they were no longer around. But she felt their presence and couldn’t stop shivering. The horrific experience seemed to bring the family together. Despite the complications of her father having had so many partners, the women and their children got along well, and Eunice was close with both her full and half sisters.

By the time Eunice turned fifteen, in 1996, life had settled into a surreal kind of normal despite the chaos the LRA was wreaking around her community. The rebels had taken and killed relatives of hers. She slept in the bushes if the LRA was operating close to home, or traveled to Gulu to spend the night in a shelter like thousands of other “night commuters,” children who poured into the town from the vulnerable countryside to sleep. But she refused to restrict her life by the persistent threat of the rebels. She was planning on making her third trip to visit her older sister Doreen at St. Mary’s College, a boarding school in Apac, just south of Gulu.

It was a great source of pride for the family to have Doreen in the school. “I was so excited to see her,” Eunice recalled. She expected to eventually go back to school herself. She packed a bag of bread, cooking oil, and sweet treats to bring her sister, and boarded a matatu, or minibus, for the journey. The first night after she arrived, in October, was filled with gossip and laughter with Doreen and her sister’s friends, poised young women who made Eunice feel both full of admiration and at ease. The second night, there had been food, soda, and dancing as the girls celebrated Uganda’s Independence Day. Then, in the black early hours of the morning, the rebels came and took her, her sister, and all of her new friends from their beds. Eunice had been sleeping when strange men wielding flashlights woke her up. They were shouting at the girls to get up and open the door of their dorm. There was the sound of breaking glass from the windows. Girls tried to hide under their bunk beds as the rebels forced themselves into the room. They were mostly teenage boys with guns, wild and unkempt, banging on their beds’ headboards and dragging girls out from under the beds and into the cold night. The girls were screaming. Some fought back and the rebels hit them, a few others managed to run away. Ribbons still adorned their bedposts.