WHO DO YOU LOVE THE MOST?
David Ocitti
WE BECAME INVOLVED in the mission because of people like David Ocitti. Many years later, when David told me his story, I would be humbled and inspired all over again by the courage and resilience of the countless people impacted by the LRA, whose leadership made it possible for all of us to take action—and whose experiences made it imperative.
David was born in northern Uganda in 1986, the same year that hostilities intensified between northern and southern Uganda. Life wasn’t secure or peaceful. But growing up with his large extended family—his parents and siblings, grandmother, uncles and aunties, and many young cousins—and playing within the circle of mud-walled, thatch-roofed homes that made up their family homestead, David felt protected. He knew the elders would keep them safe. He thought the war outside couldn’t break through.
His earliest memories were of safety and love. He would watch his mother prepare meals and tend to his younger sister and stepbrothers, caring for them the way she had cared for him: breastfeeding him till he was two, tying him on her back till he was three, singing to him in Acholi, their native tongue: Little baby, don’t cry again, Mommy loves you, she’s going to cook for you, she’s going to get you what you need. Love was her food, practical, nurturing. Love was her face, long like his, her high cheekbones, her eyes as peaceful and watchful as a cat’s.
And love was his grandmother, the wrinkles that spread across her face like ripples over still water. Kara konyo, she called him. Helpful one.
And love was his father. David’s biological father had died when he was only three. His stepfather, full of jokes and laughter, always smiling, was the man he considered his father. While David’s mother’s sense of humor was quiet, reserved for the people she knew best, his father was outwardly jovial. The only time he scolded any of the children was for eating alone. “Everything you have is to be shared,” he would say. He was full of lessons. He would make David eat peppers so spicy his entire mouth would feel like it was exploding. “Hold your ground,” his father would say. “In less than a minute it will cool off.” And no matter how badly it burned, how intense the discomfort, the heat would always ease and fade. “It’s the same with difficulty,” his father said. “Nothing is permanent. Your body will react appropriately when you give it time to understand.”
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David’s hometown, Pabbo, was a small village and trading center north of Gulu, the most populous city in northern Uganda. Only three roads passed by his homestead. One led to the village well, a pool formed and filled by a channel dug beside a rushing creek. The second road led to the garden, where each family farmed a plot of crops for subsistence and trade. And the third led to the trading center. Whenever he saw someone passing his family’s homestead, David instantly knew where the person was going or where he had been.
Life followed predictable rhythms. The whole family woke at sunrise, earlier during the hot dry seasons. David would wash his face, then take a hoe and follow his parents to the family farm. Late morning, when the sun was high and the heat growing fierce, they would return home to sweep and clean the packed earth of the homestead, clearing the ground of leaves, insects, debris blown in by the wind. Everyone helped sweep. It was the best way to prevent infestations. And it was a cultural value. “Don’t judge a man’s success by his clothes,” his grandmother would say. “A fancy suit means nothing. Go home and see the state of his homestead. A large, clean homestead—that signals a real man.”
After the homestead was clean, the children would bathe in the river while their mother cooked lunch—cassava and beans, sorghum bread. His mother had the biggest pot, he thought—always full, brimming with enough to feed anyone who was hungry. After the meal, the whole family rested through the hottest part of the day. The children were free to nap, or climb one of the two dozen mango trees on their homestead, or play soccer in the empty space at the center of the circle of homes. The children made their own balls from plastic bags and pieces of cloth bound together with twine or thin branches, competing to see who could make the longest-lasting ball.
When the day was beginning to cool off, they would all return to the garden to move the weeds and branches they’d cleared away that morning. As the sun went down, they would walk back to their homestead, the boys gathering firewood on the way. Again they swept the homestead, and while the girls helped the women prepare the evening meal, the boys would finish gathering wood and build the wang-oo, the bonfire where the whole family sat together each night. They would set down a mat and eat dinner by the fire. The elders would sip waragi, potent distilled cassava, and the stories would begin. They would talk late into the night, the stars bright overhead, the air chilled, the fire warm.
“Back in the day,” his grandmother would begin, telling a favorite story, “the men used to hunt without flashlights. They had to know how to find their way home in the dark. The smart hunter knew how to search the night sky for latwok, the brightest star. But the foolish hunter forgot about what was right above him, and stayed lost in the dark night.”
David had been taught that latwok was the first star to come out at night. When they were walking back home before sunset, he and the other children would see who could spot it first.
“Don’t be a foolish hunter,” his grandmother continued. “If you’re smart, you know its position in the sky. If you follow the star, it will always guide you back.”
It was easy to identify latwok at sunset. But now, the sky was full of bright stars. Each time David thought he had found the brightest one, a different star would flicker and shine, appearing even brighter. “How can you be sure you are following the right one?” he asked.
“Latwok is distinct among the many stars,” she replied. “If you think you’ve found the brightest one, keep an eye on it. If it’s really latwok, it will keep changing color, showing you many shades as you focus on it.”
When David grew sleepy, one of his parents would lift him up or take his hand and lead him into the small, dark house. They’d lay him down on a mat, cover him with a light blanket. Sometimes his uncle would kneel beside him and play the lukeme, the thumb piano he had built just for David. He would sleep to the throb of the lukeme, to the murmur of his family all around. In the dry season, they would often carry the mats and blankets outside and the children would fall asleep while the elders talked, the whole family resting all night together by the glowing embers.
The seasons came, unbroken. In May, the mangoes ripened. Children climbed high into the trees to shake down the fruit, their faces stained orange from eating so much, the sweet juice gushing down their chins and necks and chests and then drying, turning their shirts as stiff and hard as wood. Trouble Month, they called it. All through the village, children went around with casts on their arms or legs from climbing too high in search of fruit. David, too, fell once or twice. Fear seized his stomach on the way down, then the rush of laughter when he found he wasn’t hurt after all.
In October, Independence Day came and went without much fanfare. Everyone in the village was saving every penny, every bit of food, for the weeklong Christmas celebration, the culmination of family and community life, a constant feast that ran from Christmas Eve till New Year’s Day.
So the annual rituals came and went, but all around them, there was the ever-present war. It was a new manifestation of an old conflict, a hundred-year-old struggle that began in 1894 when British colonizers came to the Nile and invented a nation. Ignoring the tribal sovereignty of the many kingdoms and chiefdoms in the region, the British had hemmed more than a dozen culturally and linguistically distinct groups into a single protectorate.
Then they began systematically dividing the same groups they had artificially and arbitrarily unified. The Baganda people in the south—for whom Uganda was named, and whose king was made the de facto leader—were elevated into social and polit
ical elites. But the Acholi in the north were marginalized and stigmatized, their labor and military conscription used to further the south’s dominance.
The cycles of revenge and mistrust between north and south continued after Uganda achieved independence in 1962. Disputed elections, military coups, and bloody dictatorships dominated Uganda’s early years of statehood. David’s life began in a country that had been mired for decades in political turmoil and violence, where leaders often seized—and kept—power by force.
The threat of violence was so normalized that David had no way to understand how destructive the war was. He just knew that sometimes he’d hear gunshots and see everyone around him start to shake. When he saw others running, he had to run, too. Sometimes they hid all day in the bush in broad daylight, the screen of leaves safer than the thick mud walls of home. He grew used to the fear, so steady and constant it felt normal to go about daily life with a mental tremble. Yet he didn’t really understand what it was he was afraid of.
“What’s that sound?” he asked his grandmother once as they huddled together in the bush, a hot wind rustling the leaves. Around them, the quick flit of bird wings. Farther away, a groaning sound.
“It’s our neighbors, kara konyo,” his grandmother said. “They are crying.”
“Why are they crying?”
“Because the LRA have come and are killing people. When they kill it is painful.”
The group that became the Lord’s Resistance Army formed around the time David was born, ostensibly aimed to protect the north. Its leader, Joseph Kony, was an ethnic Acholi like David, born in Odek, northern Uganda, in the early 1960s, also the first years of Ugandan independence. The son of subsistence farmers, Kony grew up amid chronic poverty and the political marginalization of his people—and then the ruthless violence of dictator Idi Amin’s regime.
Early in his life Kony’s aspirations seemed more spiritual than militaristic. He served as an altar boy in the Catholic Church where his father was a lay apostle, and when he was fifteen, he dropped out of school and apprenticed with a local witch doctor, learning to be a healer and spirit medium. He became a trusted spiritual adviser in his community, especially to rebel soldiers hiding out in the north, waiting for an opportunity to free Uganda from the disputed rulers and repressive regimes that followed Idi Amin’s reign.
When Kony was in his early twenties there was another coup—this time staged by a northern general, a fellow Acholi. When General Tito Okello ascended to power, long-standing grievances among Acholi in the north seemed vindicated. But just six months later, in January 1986, Yoweri Museveni, one of the commanders who had helped oust Idi Amin, led his National Resistance Army to topple Okello’s Acholi-dominated government, despite having signed a peace deal with Okello the month before. Museveni became the new president of Uganda, and his forces took control of northern Uganda in sometimes brutal fashion. Museveni’s decision to undermine the peace agreement, Okello’s swift fall from power, and the Acholi’s ensuing suffering, recatalyzed northern bitterness and rage.
A militaristic and spiritual group rose to oppose Museveni. Led by spirit medium Alice Auma “Lakwena,” the Holy Spirit Movement unified the various rebel fighters in the north. More than an army, the group used mystical practices to protect its members and to cleanse and purify them. Lakwena promised her soldiers freedom from political persecution—and freedom from guilt. Before battle the soldiers rubbed themselves with shea butter, sang hymns, doused the ground with holy water to protect themselves from enemies’ bullets, and flung rocks they believed would explode like bombs. In November 1987, the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces very nearly succeeded in toppling Museveni’s government. But in the end Museveni’s forces defeated them just sixty miles outside of Kampala, the capital.
Lakwena went into exile and Joseph Kony, who was already known and trusted by the rebel fighters, recruited her former soldiers to build the Lord’s Resistance Army, adopting many of Lakwena’s mystical practices along with her military ambitions. Kony used his charisma and status as a spiritual leader to galvanize an army of thousands of combatants intent on overthrowing Museveni and protecting the Acholi from the retributive violence they expected as punishment for Lakwena’s nearly successful coup. For the first eight years of David’s life, the war that raged around him was between north and south, between the LRA and Museveni’s army.
But by 1994, the civil war had all but fizzled out. Northerners, exhausted by decades of violence, were ready to embrace peace. The LRA had long since lost most of its local support, and Kony’s forces were dwindling. This is when Kony began abducting Acholi children—his own people—to fill the ranks of his flagging army. The LRA, which had been created to protect the north, began attacking its own.
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Life in Pabbo began to change. By the time David was ten, the children, even those as young as two or three years old, had to spend days at a time in the bush to avoid abduction by the LRA. They hid alone, without their elders near. Their parents would sneak into the bush to bring them food, warning them not to make a sound, not even a footprint, as they moved to their next hideout.
As life grew more dangerous, Pabbo became the biggest of more than two hundred displacement camps created in northern Uganda to house the nearly two million people driven from their homes by the ongoing war. As many as sixty-seven thousand people came to live in Pabbo, where circular mud huts were crowded together so closely that the grass-thatched roofs often touched. Narrow dirt paths—dusty or muddy depending on the season—wound between the thousands of huts. The camp was patrolled by Ugandan military troops and a curfew imposed—residents had to wait until nine or ten in the morning to leave the camp to farm, trade, or go to school, and they had to return no later than five in the evening. Surrounding the camp were green cornfields and farmland, fast rivers, mountains that rose in the distance, and all around, as far as the eye could see, an ocean of six-foot-high grass and brush, tall and thick enough that an entire army could tread through it undetected.
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Constant war had eroded the school system in northern Uganda, but David was determined to keep up his studies. He began attending a school in a nearby village, paying for his uniform and supplies by doing odd jobs, sleeping away from home in the dormitories set up for students who had too far and too dangerous a path to travel each day between home and school. To be out late in the evening or in the early morning was to risk being abducted by rebels—or to risk being mistaken for one.
In January 2002, when he was sixteen, he came back home to Pabbo on a short holiday. He planned to spend his time earning enough to pay for the next term of school. Late at night his first night at home, he was fast asleep on a thin mat in his family’s mud hut when he heard shouting from outside. Someone banged on the door.
“Open up, don’t try to run,” the man outside shouted in Acholi.
At first, David was more disoriented than scared. He stumbled out into the dark with his two younger stepbrothers. A rebel fighter in dirty fatigues pointed them toward a large group of children and teenagers gathered in an open area, flanked by armed rebels. Just then, his uncle’s house went up in flames. He heard the crackle of fire all over the camp. The air thickened with smoke. Adults were being rounded up nearby.
When all of the huts in David’s section of the camp had been emptied, a commander moved among the children, shoving them, shouting questions. “Where’s your brother? Where’s your sister?” Siblings were pushed together in clusters. Nearby, men were being shoved into one group, women into another.
David and his brothers huddled together, trying to keep track of their parents in the commotion. A commander approached them. His uniform was tattered, his hair in dreadlocks. He waved his bayonet at them. David held his brothers close. He was tall enough to look the rebel in the eye. He wanted to bow his head, to stare at the ground, to
look anywhere but into the commander’s fierce eyes, but he couldn’t look away.
“Where’s your father?” the commander barked at David.
David nodded toward the nearby group of men. He could recognize his father even at a distance, even in the dark, the calm and steady way he held himself. He could feel his father’s protectiveness, his fearlessness and commitment. David tried to gather his father’s strength into himself, to become a shelter for his brothers.
“Where’s your mother?” the commander demanded, shoving the bayonet toward David’s face. He saw her, arms crossed over her chest, eyes fixed on him and his brothers. She was a protector, too. After David’s biological father had died, one of his uncles had demanded to “inherit” his mother as a wife. She had refused. She had faced his anger, and worse, to protect against a forced marriage, to keep her children from having to leave their home. David felt his parents’ eyes on him now like a shield. He squeezed his arms around his brothers’ shoulders.
To Stop a Warlord Page 2
