Learning the language of grief
By Gina Bramucci Posted Apr 1 2002
Thousands of Ugandans have been displaced from their homes and now live in camps maintained by the military. Restricted to small areas of land, villagers are unable to plant their crops and are dependent on food aid from the outside. Overcrowding in the camps has provided fertile ground for the spread of diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS.
More than anything I remember their eyes. More than hands held or voices heard, I remember all of the deep, black irises framed in white. They stared into me, silencing my words with their longing. But no matter what I was or what I represented in that world, no matter how many nights I lay awake wishing I could be more, I never found an answer to that hunger. I had stumbled into a story that was screaming to be told. Kitgum District in northern Uganda had been torn by 16 years of rebel conflict with little attention from the outside. In March 2001, I arrived in a world where travel meant risking rebel ambush, and children often fell asleep to the sound of gunfire.
During my initial weeks in Uganda I gathered copious notes. Each evening, when I returned from a day visiting remote villages, I poured words onto paper. I believed that if I continued to write, I might understand the details of a war that is largely unknown outside of eastern Africa. But then there were the days when the words would not come. I was unversed in the language of grief.
In early May, during a routine visit to families outside Kitgum, I stopped at the home of a young mother in the final stages of AIDS. She was too weak to care for her child, who had malaria and was dangerously anemic. He seemed to be
racing his mother to the grave.
For the first time since I had come to Uganda, I felt that my connection to an outside aid organization might give me the power to help. I radioed for a vehicle and we drove to the hospital. I felt numb, and the same thought kept repeating in my head: I’m holding a dying baby. How am I supposed to respond to this? The next afternoon, the baby died; a few days later, his mother died too. I walked through the hospital ward hoping to see his face until the doctor noticed me. “He passed. I’m sorry.” That was all there was to say. This happened every day. I just wanted this one to live.
I went to Kitgum to work on a small book for a Milan-based nonprofit group. I was there to record people’s stories, but what I most wanted was the one thing that would elude me as a writer. In initiating programs and development projects, aid workers could see the impact of their work. They had something tangible to offer. All I carried was the promise of words. It was an empty offering in a place where need could often be seen and touched.
Months after returning from Uganda, I spoke with correspondents who had lived in East Africa for several years. I wanted to know how this conflict had escaped notice for so many years. I wanted the explanations that I had been unable to provide.
James McKinley of The New York Times and Karl Vick of The Washington Post opened my eyes to the realities of covering a region that, at any one time, might have 20 conflicts brewing. The story of northern Uganda was important, but it didn’t carry the same geopolitical interest as, for example, war in the Congo. For practical reasons, reporters learn to determine shades of injustice. Northern Uganda was a sideshow in a turbulent region. In Acholiland, an area that encompasses Uganda’s Gulu and Kitgum districts, there is no easy rationale behind years of violence. To trace the roots of the war is to work through a tangle of economic, social and cultural pieces of the country’s past, with no consensus on where to begin the story of a troubled north.
Most histories of the current war (either oral or documented by nonprofit groups) begin at some point in the succession of military regimes and bloody coups that followed Uganda’s independence from Britain. When President Yoweri Museveni took power in 1986, tensions began to build between the southern-based government and the northern Acholi people. A disillusioned populace in the north, many of them ex-soldiers from previous regimes, proved fertile ground for a series of “spiritual” resistance movements.
For the past 16 years, under the leadership of Joseph Kony, a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has fought a small insurgency in the north. In the eyes of his followers, Kony was a deliverer that would purify and restore strength to the Acholi people. The LRA outlined specific goals, including the “moral regeneration” of Uganda and the establishment of a utopian society based on the Ten Commandments. In order to fuel this ill-defined war and fortify their troops, the LRA made it a practice to move from one village to the next, abducting children, looting homes and burning what they left behind.
Nongovernmental organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UNICEF, estimate that 10,000 children have been kidnapped by the LRA. An unknown number have died, many have been fortunate enough to escape, and 5,555 names are still listed as missing.
At a meeting with 60 parents, all missing one or more of their children due to rebel abduction, a father asked me what “my people” think of the troubles of the Acholi. My face grew hot and I felt a swell of shame as I explained that most people where I came from knew nothing of this war. The man persisted, asking if I would return with a message for the United Nations to send peacekeeping troops. I heard myself give a hollow answer. “In my place, I’m not so powerful,” I said.
I don’t know who was more disappointed and frustrated that day — me with my inability to effect some immediate change, or the man listening to one more excuse from an outsider. I often found myself reaching for answers, but my words were never enough.
I wanted to understand many things while in Uganda: the complex web of tribal rivalry, colonialism and 20th century dictators; Joseph Kony and his militant spirituality; and the children and families who had somehow become the victims of it all.
Logically I learned to fit pieces together, to draw myself a map of crimes past and present and to link current conflict to a historical legacy. But logic meant nothing when I sat on the ground in a mud hut and listened to the guilty whispers of a boy who had killed weaker children to save his own life. Beyond history, in the villages and homes I visited across the north, Uganda was painfully incomprehensible.
On a visit to Padibe, one of the internal displacement camps where thousands of people now live under a pretense of government protection, I sat under a mango tree with a 10-year-old orphan. He hunched over a piece of paper and sketched a scene with the stub of a pencil. I watched as he outlined a road, trees and two figures. The first man he drew had bare feet and tattered clothes and walked with his hands tied behind his back and a rope around his neck. The second, dressed in camouflage and heavy combat boots, held the end of the rope in one hand and a machete in the other. In the corner of the page, the boy added the figure of a body stretched on the ground with blood dripping from its mouth and neck. He printed neatly next to the body: K-I-L-L-E-D. Near the rebel soldier he printed K-O-N-Y.
This boy, David, held his eyes firmly on the ground as he told me a story in muffled tones. He had lived for two years under the rule of Kony in the LRA stronghold in southern Sudan. When he escaped, using the confusion of a battle to slip away from his commander, David returned home to find his parents buried. What he shared of his life with the LRA was disjointed, more like a detached list of facts than a personal story.
In Padibe, the scars run deep. On the day I visited, I was accompanied by a Ugandan visitor from the South who asked the children to recount their lives with the LRA. One by one, children burdened by guilt and nightmares stood to register their crimes.
“When the rebels abduct you, they make you beat babies’ heads against trees until they die,” said a 13-year-old boy. His eyes darted up, as if expecting us to run away from the horror. “And the old women drawing water. You have to kill them too.”
Stories like these took on an uncomfortable familiarity in Uganda. I felt constantly torn between a need to shout of the injustice and an awareness that my audience was already numb to the account of a suffering African continent.
When I returned to the United States, I held Uganda inside, not sure how to reconcile the two worlds. Words that had been inexhaustible in the journals I kept in Kitgum seemed impossible to translate for the Western world. The stories were more to me than distant accounts of suffering on the evening news. They had taken on dimensions and faces and souls.