The two LRA men seemed discomfited by the sudden formality of the meeting. The more senior man nodded.
‘Very good,’ said Luke. ‘In 1982 I was in England with my wife Rebecca,’ he identified Rebecca with a generous gesture, ‘and our daughter Azalea. While we were there,’ he said, and he tapped the table in thought, ‘while we were there . . .’
‘Luke,’ said Rebecca, ‘you don’t need to do this.’
‘No, it’s all right. It’s all right.’ He gave a thin smile at the men. ‘While we were in England in 1982,’ he said, ‘two SPLA men walked into the camp. Just the way you did now. Straight after breakfast. One of them had a Kalashnikov.’ Luke pointed at the gun slung over the first man’s shoulder. ‘Just like the one you’ve got there.’
The two men shuffled in their seats.
‘You know what happened next, don’t you?’ Luke asked. ‘Of course you do. You gentlemen are Acholi, aren’t you? You probably know the story very well. My parents, my brother . . .’
The man with the rifle reached over his shoulder and unclipped the weapon. He lifted it onto the table. ‘Of course, Mr Luke,’ he said. ‘We know what happened here.’
‘In that case,’ said Luke, ‘you can understand why we don’t welcome people who come marching in here with guns.’
‘We are not SPLA,’ said the man, as if this would excuse everything.
‘Perhaps not,’ said Rebecca, adding some urgency to the conversation, ‘but this is an orphanage, not a bloody shooting range. Anybody is welcome to come in here and talk – but not with guns.’
‘Missus – my gun is on the table,’ the LRA man protested, pushing it a bit further away. ‘We have not come here to make trouble.’
‘Then why have you come?’ Rebecca demanded.
The two men conferred softly in Acholi. Then the first man said, ‘If you please, Mr Luke, Mrs Luke, it is my turn to make my introduction.’
Luke leaned back and raised a hand to silence Rebecca. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘your turn.’
‘I am a man of God,’ the soldier said, ‘I am a preacher like you.’
Luke nodded without correcting him.
‘I am known throughout all of Acholiland as a holy man. That is right. Your man will tell you.’ He nodded towards Odokonyero.
Odokonyero looked down. ‘It is true what he says.’
‘You say everybody knows this man?’ Luke asked.
‘Everybody knows him,’ Odokonyero replied.
‘And he is a holy man?’
The cook nodded. ‘He is a holy man to the Acholi.’
‘I’ve never seen a holy man wearing an army uniform,’ said Rebecca.
The holy man – or the man who claimed to be holy – said, ‘Is it only the white man, then, who can fight for the Kingdom of God?’ He looked around the table and his eyes settled on Rebecca. ‘You are a child of God, are you not? Are you not commanded to take up arms to defeat the forces of evil in the world?’
The softly sinister implications of this question floated above the little meeting and settled like a moth on the rafters to watch the way the conversation went.
Rebecca said, ‘Our God commands us to love our enemies; to turn the other cheek.’ She flinched as a fly landed on her face, and swatted it away. Outside in the compound an unnatural silence prevailed.
‘So,’ said the holy man in the army uniform, ‘you do not know of the LRA?’
‘I was hoping,’ said Rebecca, ‘that you might enlighten us.’
Luke made a show of looking at his watch. ‘You gentlemen must excuse me for just one moment. I am as anxious as my wife to hear about the LRA, and what your aims are. But we need to ring the school bell. Classes should be starting.’
‘So soon?’ asked the soldier.
‘Oh yes,’ said Luke. ‘Forgive me just one moment.’
He stood up and walked over to the bell rope.
‘Are you familiar with the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers – marching off to war”?’ asked the solider of Rebecca.
Rebecca shrank slightly. ‘It’s marching as to war.’
The mission bell began to ring.
‘As to war,’ she said, ‘not off to war. It has a completely different meaning.’
Dingdingdingdingdingdingding.
‘It is a command for Christian Soldiers to fight,’ said the man, ‘to go off to war and fight.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ Rebecca said. ‘It’s a metaphor. The hymn is telling us that we must face up to evil – but not with violence.’
‘ “With the Cross of Jesus going on before”,’ said the solider triumphantly. ‘ “Onward into battle, see his banners go”.’
Dingdingdingdingdingdingding.
The LRA man’s attention began to turn towards Luke and his urgent ringing of the bell.
‘I think that’s enough, dear,’ said Rebecca to Luke.
The ringing stopped and Luke returned to the table. A little river of sweat was coiling down his face. He wiped it away. ‘You were going to explain to us about the LRA,’ he said, settling back down into his seat.
Luke and Rebecca Folley, as it happened, needed no explanation of the three humble initials. In reality, they needed no introduction to the man who sat opposite them in the uniform of a soldier with his roughly trimmed beard, his make-believe medal bars and with his beret angled firmly across his scalp; this man who claimed to be a holy man who had levered his gun onto their table. They knew him from photographs and newspaper reports and a dozen first-hand and second-hand accounts. They had seen him from time to time in Gulu and in Moyo, always with his ragbag army of hollow-eyed, gun-toting acolytes. They had seen the way pedestrians would dissolve from the streets as he passed, had seen how mothers would scoop up children and whisk them into the shadows, had seen how the news would be telegraphed down the street so that hiding places could be found. They had talked about this man, on the veranda here in the mission, on other verandas, over coffee in the day and over cold gin cocktails and beers as they watched the sun set over a land that no one could understand any more. They had given coins to callers in exchange for information about this man, had paid to find out where he was. Where had he been seen? Who was he with? Where was he heading? He had haunted their dreams and their waking hours. And now here he was, alone except for a batman with no teeth, sitting among them, drinking their coffee, smoking their cigarettes, misquoting hymns.
The man’s name was Joseph Kony. He still is called Joseph Kony, although if God and providence can ever join forces and do the right thing, then by now he and his tangle of associates will have been scoured from the face of the earth, and Kony will be rotting in a very deep and undiscovered grave. His people are the Lord’s Resistance Army, although that wasn’t always their name. When Luke and Rebecca and their daughter Azalea came to Langadi, there was no LRA. There were dozens of ragtag groups, of course, and a few of these represented the general grievances of the Acholi people. But when a president from the south, Yoweri Museveni, seized power in Kampala, then the murmuring among the northern peoples grew louder. First they were the Lord’s Army, and then they were the Uganda People’s Democratic Christian Army, and finally they became the LRA – but in truth it mattered not to the Folleys, or to the mothers of Acholi children, or to the Sudanese or Buganda or Karamojong. To them they were only ever Kony’s men, the vacant-faced, brutalised, undead army that did the bidding of Joseph Kony and did it without question, mercy or remorse.
Early in 1992, the same year that Kony came walking into the Langadi mission, LRA men had attacked two schools at Aboke, near Gulu. One was the Sacred Heart Secondary Boarding School for Girls; the other was St Mary’s Girls School. In an act that has become infamous in Ugandan history, forty-four girls were abducted. They were taken to become child soldiers and sex slaves for the nascent militia group. They were not the first, nor the last children to disappear from schools and missions in northern Uganda, but this public abduction was a startling message to Luke and Rebecca Foll
ey, and to every school and every parent, that the ambition and brutality of the LRA was on the rise. Long after the events told in this story – and not long before Azalea had given this account to Thomas Post – the International Criminal Court would estimate the number of children snatched by the LRA at thirty thousand. Some estimates would put the number at sixty thousand. Ten-year-old boys and girls were expected to fight. The youngest armed soldiers in Kony’s resistance army were often said to be five years old. They carried light arms, and could be relied upon to fire and kill with natural indiscrimination. Those children who were seized but who did not cooperate were not killed by Kony or his men. Instead they would be mutilated. Lips would be cut off. Ears and hands would be amputated. Genitals too. The mutilated – and often dying – child would be dumped back close to their home town as a warning to any future abductees. This, as the West went about its business; as we busily circled our world with satellites and criss-crossed the planet with roadways and watched our TV shows and piped our music into foreign lands – this was the fate handed down to hundreds upon hundreds of children. As we wept for a dead princess in London, as we hunted for weapons in Iraq, as we queued for our touch-screen mobile phones, children were lining up to have their hands hacked off. We are good at hiding ugly events, and after all, this was Africa, a continent effectively invisible to the outside world – not because light will fail to penetrate the darkness, but because very few will choose to look at what is revealed.
But for Luke and Rebecca, and the Mission of St Paul to the Needy of West Nile, there was to be no hiding. Joseph Kony, the butcher of Acholiland, soon to be labelled one of the most wanted criminals on earth, had brazenly walked into their compound, had accepted one of Rebecca’s cigarettes and had unshouldered his Indian-made copy of a Russian machine gun onto the table where children, just minutes earlier, had been devouring cassava porridge.
On this June day in 1992, Luke and Rebecca were not the only Britons present in the compound. Working alongside them were two VSOs, young people doing voluntary service overseas. Their story, too, became entwined with Azalea’s. On the day when Joseph Kony strolled into the mission, the VSOs had been in Uganda for exactly five days. They were doctors, each newly qualified. Or not quite; which is to say that both had concluded the arduous years of study and examination required of a physician, and only a few weeks stood between this and the awarding of a degree. Lauren Marks had just completed a five-year degree course at the University of Edinburgh, and now, before taking up a post as a junior doctor in a city-centre hospital, she had chosen to spend four months at the mission hospital in Uganda. The boy’s name was Richard Lewis, known to everyone as Ritchie. He too had just completed his degree in medicine; in his case, at Liverpool. Lauren and Ritchie had been on the same flight from London but had not met, and did not meet until they assembled with a dozen other VSOs at the airport in Entebbe, there to be peeled off to their respective assignments. There was a great deal of excitement and not a little trepidation.
At the airport, the pair were introduced by their VSO minder to a tall, aloof-looking English woman wearing an African cotton frock, smoking a mentholated cigarette and clutching the hand of a teenage girl. It was their first introduction to Rebecca and Azalea Folley. Rebecca threw their bags unceremoniously into the back of a battered twelve-seater minibus with a faded mission logo on the side, and their African adventure started as they wound their way out of the Kampala traffic for the four-hundred-mile, ten-hour journey to Moyo District.
It happens that Rebecca Folley knew that Ritchie Lewis and Lauren Marks would end up as a couple. She said this later to Luke. She knew it even as the minibus battled along the Lido Beach Drive past the steamy shallows of Lake Victoria, even before they left the built-up area around the airport, even as the two doctors were coming to terms with really being in Africa. Already, Rebecca could smell the sexual chemicals starting their ancient reactions, despite the fact that introductions at the airport had been hesitant and ridiculously polite: ‘Hello, I’m Ritchie’; ‘Delighted to meet you, I’m Lauren’. Even as the two would-be doctors sat deferentially on separate minibus seats, one gazing out of the left window and the other out of the right, and as they avoided looking directly at one another, even despite all this Rebecca could almost hear their raised heartbeats, could scent the pheromones, could practically count the days until they would be sharing a mosquito net.
They drove up the fertile Nile Valley through countless villages spread out among the hillsides, past the endless African array of farms and businesses – up past Masindi Port, where the Nile pours out of Lake Kyoga, where fishermen sold black piles of finger-sized fish along the roadside, where the soil was as red as Azalea’s hair. They stopped for a warm Coca-Cola at a makeshift grass-roofed café, and Lauren treated Azalea for a bee-sting with a potion from her bag. Azalea looked at her with instant affection.
They drove north, skirting the Karuma game reserve. Now Ritchie and Lauren were on the same long seat with a perfect excuse, for the wildlife would be out in the park to their left. Azalea came to join them in the back of the bus while Rebecca sat stoically in the front with Stanton the driver.
That had been the introduction to Africa for Lauren Marks and Ritchie Lewis – that ten-hour drive. Lauren would eagerly write in her journal the names of all the animals she had spotted – distant giraffe hiding among the tall trees, baboons lingering along the roadside in search of discarded scraps, and huge bald marabou storks lurking like dirty old men in the ditches. She would record how she saw children gathering maize, women carrying firewood, men pedalling wobbly bicycles, boys herding cattle with horns longer than a human arm, children in bright pink uniforms coming home from school, toddlers selling mangoes and charcoal. Soon after Kampala, the tarmac roadway gave way to a dirt track and the minibus slowed to negotiate the potholes. Ritchie took photographs, cautiously conserving his film. They stopped by the bridge at Karuma where the broiling froth of the Victoria Nile hurtled beneath the road, and Ritchie photographed the whole group standing by the barrier – including Stanton the driver. Then Stanton took a photograph of Rebecca and Azalea and Ritchie and Lauren, and already they were so close they were touching.
The roadblocks started soon after Karuma, wire barricades strung across the track manned by soldiers in torn, unwashed uniforms. They were searching for LRA. Rebecca obdurately refused to bribe, so the delays were long. In the dark hours before they got to Langadi, Rebecca told Ritchie and Lauren what they needed to know about Uganda.
For all her dispassionate demeanour, Rebecca Folley had a good heart. She would never have endured nine years at a godforsaken mission in a civil war zone without one. She didn’t deliver the voluble European invective so often heaped upon the poor of Africa. Rebecca, almost to her own surprise, had grown to love the country, could almost call it home. She told the young VSOs about the mission, and what she could about the medical needs of the hospital. ‘We are hopelessly understaffed,’ she told them. ‘But we simply can’t afford to pay more wages. We have sixteen inpatients because we have sixteen beds and sixteen mattresses – not because we have the staff or the medicines or the doctors or the money to treat sixteen patients – not because that is the right number to serve the population of a town like Langadi. So what do we do when a child comes in with malaria? We send someone else home. Someone else with malaria, or TB, or sleeping sickness or AIDS.’
It was almost dark when they got to the ferry at Laropi. A colonial-era barge, the last of the day, bore them heavily over the dark waters of the Nile. Now they were truly separated from the world they had left behind. The ferry slammed into the sandy bank and Rebecca said, ‘Welcome to West Nile. There’s no way back now,’ and she laughed. ‘Unless you fancy your chances in Sudan.’
They arrived a little before midnight. Azalea was asleep on Lauren’s knee.
Rebecca knew that the proximity of the little bedrooms that they had cleared at the end of the mission hall for the two young doctors,
with nothing but a brushwood wall between them, would only fuel the sexual tension. But what could she do? No better accommodation was available. She shrugged silently to herself. Lauren and Ritchie were adults, she figured. By the time she was their age, she had been through a dozen partners or more. They could work things out for themselves. They would only be in Langadi for sixteen weeks.
She was wrong. It would be only five days.
When the alarm bell sounded out over the thatched roof of the mission mess – the dingdingdingding urgent call – it was a rhythm unfamiliar to Lauren and Ritchie, who had yet to rehearse the ritual of the alarm. Each, still with their own mosquito net, was enclosed in their own small room behind the mission hall when the bell sounded. Lauren was cleaning her teeth with bottled water. Ritchie was shuffling items among his luggage.
Lauren, alerted by the noise, glanced through her window to see the disappearing heels of children fleeing into the bush. One child sped past her window, arms flailing, her face set in such a look of consternation that Lauren was immediately infected by a sense of apprehension. She slid from her room and knocked lightly on Ritchie’s door.
‘I think something’s wrong,’ she said when he came to the door.
Coincidence: A Novel Page 11
