Boy Soldier

by Cola Bilkuei

  As a way of showing our appreciation, we gave her some biscuits to give to her own family, who were inside the camp.

  Despite the warm welcome, we were wary of just how welcome we would be in the rest of the camp. We agreed amongst ourselves that Kuot, Garang and Matouh would not speak Acholi, as the members of the camp would then know that we understood what they were saying. We had to act like spies: we would speak only Dinka. This proved more than helpful, as later that night Kuot overheard people talking about us in Acholi. It was not good. To our face they spoke of how they would help us find fellow Dinka and Nuer tribespeople in the camp, but behind our backs they spoke of how they would murder us and take our belongings.

  We huddled together, unable to go to sleep, watching nervously while Kuot went looking for friendlier people. Eventually he came back, saying he had found seven Nuer we could trust. So we picked up our belongings, watching the Acholi people warily, and went off to stay in a hut where the Nuer were living.

  They hosted us for two weeks. We sent Kuot back to the mission at Kichwa to tell them what had happened and to ask for money for a house that was being built next to the Ogujebe compound. The Acholi, who had been there the longest and were the ones doing the building, were offering the house for sale at twenty-five thousand Ugandan shillings. It was a lot of money: we could work for two years and not save anywhere near that much. We had nothing, but we saw the promise of this house as a base we could establish, to build up some kind of security for ourselves.

  Kuot exploited the sisters’ feeling of guilt for having turned us away. He told them that if we couldn’t have the house, we would all show up back in Kichwa and make pests of ourselves again. The sisters gave him the money to pay for it, but they, not we, became its owners. Kuot promised that we would be self-sufficient and not ask them for another thing.

  It was in Ogujebe that I registered with the United Nations as a refugee. Life was a little bit better, as I was getting food rations from the UN, which consisted of a little bag of beans, lentils, salt and oil handed to us every fifteen days, and no one was bombing me. I had shelter, and could return to school. I remember smiling for the first time in a long time, but then remembering that I didn’t know where my mother, father or any of the surviving members of my family were. If there were any survivors at all. My smile faded.

  ***

  As much as we were happy to have our own house, it didn’t take long for things to fall apart. We quickly found ourselves under financial stress. The UN food rations were too scant to go around, so we needed to trade things like salt and oil for meat, onion and fish. You could trade at the markets in Ogujebe where people would come in with fish and better food. But being new arrivals and young, we were right down the bottom of the system and had little of value to trade. I wanted to go to school, so there was also the matter of finding money for textbooks, materials and fees amounting to hundreds of Ugandan shillings. In time we had to sell almost everything we had. These pressures broke up our group: Kuot, his brother Garang and Matouh thought that things could be no worse back in Sudan, so they left. There were four of us left in the house: myself, Wour, Arop, and a guy called Samuel Dut who had followed us from Nimule. Now that the church had bought us the house, they were directing new boys from Sudan to come here. Samuel, whose English was fluent and who wanted to be a priest, would be followed by several more.

  I stayed behind because I wanted to study, and because I had nothing to go back to in Sudan. There was a flood of Sudanese leaving Nimule to come to Uganda. The SPLA, trying to stop this, were capturing boys and taking them back to the frontline north of Nimule.

  I felt sad saying goodbye to Kuot, but was sure I would see him again. We didn’t make a big deal of the farewell: I was already torn between going and staying, and didn’t want my friendship with Kuot to sway me to change my decision. So we made it a light-hearted, casual ‘see you later’.

  Despite having said goodbye to Kuot, I remembered my resolution to keep some germ of hope in my heart, and I placed that hope in the education I could get in Ogujebe. At last, with the war and the SPLA behind me, I thought I could concentrate on my studies. To me Uganda was a promising part of the world, relatively peaceful and totally different from my village in Panaruu. I longed to find some kind of happiness, and thought that it was now time for me to put my bad memories to rest and search for knowledge.

  The school, built by the UN, had more than two thousand kids in it. The classes each had forty to fifty children of all ages and standards, lasting from morning to late afternoon, five days a week. Mostly the teachers were Ugandan and were barely more advanced in their education than ourselves. But it was an organised education at least, and I grew cautiously optimistic about my future.

  Just as life seemed to make sense and I started to feel some kind of security, I got an unexpected visit from Atem, who had been one of my friends back in Pinyudo. He had made contact with the mission in Nimule and the sisters had told him that I was now in Ogujebe. He was one of the boys they sent after us.

  He arrived one evening with a letter from my uncle Dongwe, one of my father’s half-brothers. Atem told me that I had just missed my father, who had come to Nimule for a meeting of elders a short time after I had left for Uganda.

  After I had welcomed him, Atem said, ‘I have a letter for you.’ He reached into his bag and handed me a white envelope with a red and blue airmail border.

  Letters were not generally a good sign for me. After receiving such bad news the year before about the deaths of my sister and my grandmother, it now scared me to open the envelope. What if this letter brought more bad news from home? My hand started to tremble and I could feel my stomach tying into knots. Putting the envelope down again, I tried to make myself relax. This could be good news, I told myself, good news about my friends in Nimule.

  I picked the envelope up again and tore it open. The letter, on a single sheet, was handwritten by some scribe at Dongwe’s dictation – I knew my uncle couldn’t have written it himself, as he was illiterate. I started to read. It was all right! My fears were for nothing. Atem’s letter was harmless. There was news about Nimule and the mission and what various people had been doing. Feeling relieved, I read on. By the time I got to the last paragraph I was completely calm. Then I got to the point of the letter, which lay concealed like a lion in long grass waiting for its moment to pounce.

  My uncle simply wrote: Chol I am sorry to say this but I have bad news for you–your mother is dead.

  There was no explanation, not one more word.

  I refused to believe it. This would not be the first time I had heard a false rumour about one of my family dying. My brother Monyleck, I thought, he has been killed many times! But now, even though he has been in many dangerous situations, he is alive and looking after my poor sister Ajok’s three orphans!

  I kept saying to myself: I know in my heart that my mother cannot be dead. I will go back and see her. I remembered her last words to me, calling me ‘Chol-dit’, and I remembered her fears that she would never see me again. This wasn’t real. I prayed, Please God, let it be untrue, please save her . . .

  My mind whirring around like a mad thing, I thought of all the suffering she had been through, the times my father had shouted at her and beaten her. I pictured the time he beat her when we’d left his mother in the grass when the militia were attacking us.

  At that moment the tears started pouring out of my eyes. The other boys read the letter and their reactions confirmed the truth of what I had read. I cried for three hours and then became very quiet, avoiding everyone else, not speaking to a soul. My cousin Thomas Wour tried his best to comfort me, saying, ‘It’s a war, everyone is dying.’ I refused to believe she was dead, yet I believed she was dead, both at the same time. It was unbearable. In the end, I managed to put it in God’s hands. I made a new resolution: if anyone came from my area, I would not ask for news. News was always bad! I had to surrender to fate. Whatever the future held for my mother, th
ere was nothing I could do about it. I realise now that this denial of news was what you would call my ‘defence mechanism’, my way of leaving some doubt about her death, and some hope that she was alive. Something as conclusive as her death was too much for me to take so suddenly. So I talked myself into imagining how much unreliability there could be in the news I had heard.

  After six months in Sudan, Kuot returned.

  He brought a sombre but not unexpected picture of what was happening in Sudan.

  The bombing over there was worse than when we had left. The SPLA were a constant menace, trying to recruit boys to fight. I felt vindicated, not going with him in the first place. Garang came back with him but Matouh never showed up. Kuot said Matouh had joined the SPLA, and I never heard of him again.

  Besides that, I was relieved to have Kuot back with me. He and Wour were my closest friends, and they would get me through the worst time of my life as it slowly sank in that I had lost my mum.

  But also at this time, there was an incident that would eventually cause us to leave Ogujebe.

  There was a disco in the camp every Friday and Saturday night, where they would play Congolese music, which was rhythmic and instrumental and gave people some relief in the joy of dancing. There were no age restrictions, and sometimes I would go there to watch videos. It was here that I saw a TV for the first time. There had been a television at the camp in Itang, but it was so competitive there, with everyone trying to watch it, a small boy like me could not get anywhere near it. Now that I was able to watch videos in Ogujebe, I was amazed and instantly addicted. I would go as often as possible. I was mainly addicted to movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, or Walker, Texas Ranger. It is strange, looking back, to think that at a time when my friends and I were renouncing war and soldiering, we were fascinated by films about killing people. Most of all, we loved kung-fu movies. After they were finished, we would run around and call ourselves ‘Jet Li’ and ‘Bruce Lee’ and practise kung-fu manoeuvres. That was pure fun.

  The disco and video area was between the dormitories, surrounded by a tightly knit grass fence. There were revolving coloured lights and when they had the music blaring it was an exciting place to be. They didn’t serve alcohol, but lots of people got drunk in other places, then came to the disco and got into fights. Being too young to drink, I couldn’t understand this kind of violence and kept as clear of it as I possibly could.

  The disco was a particularly dangerous place to go if you were Dinka, as I discovered when Mour Mour was killed there.

  I had first met Mour Mour in Nimule, where he was working for the SPLA’s intelligence unit. It was his job to seek out and arrest people who were suspected of crime within the region. He seemed to like his job; it gave him a sense of worth to be contributing to what he saw as the administration of justice.

  Mour Mour was very smart, well respected, and athletic. In his mid-twenties by then, he was light-hearted and loved to make others laugh. Despite his military background, he would never have hurt anyone. His downfall was his attachment to drinking. He would go to the disco every week and on this particular night he got involved in one of the regular fights. He was with another Dinka man, Manute, a hard guy who had spent time in the Cuban army after being taken there from Ethiopia.

  I never knew for sure, but I often wondered if someone at the club that night had been arrested by Mour Mour at some stage. Or it may have been random, who knows? But Mour Mour was set upon by a large group and kicked to death. Manute was also bashed, but managed to escape.

  It spelt bad news for us Dinka if two of the oldest and toughest men in our tribal group could be attacked like this. After Mour Mour was killed, we all grew anxious and insecure: we were worried that we were next. Even though bombs were falling everywhere in Sudan, some of the boys chose to go back there rather than be the target of Acholi gangs in the Ugandan camps. I wasn’t so intent on continuing my education there if going to watch a video meant risking death.

  After the murder, Kuot, Wour, Atem, Arop, Samuel and I were among a group of Dinka taken to Par Kela, a small town with a UN store about three hours’ walk away. The United Nations had decided it was safer to put Dinka into Par Kela than to try to separate us from the Acholi in the huge camp at Ogujebe. Many other Sudanese tribes often blamed the Dinka for starting the war, because John Garang was Dinka and he had founded the SPLA. To my mind, this showed that they did not understand the causes of the war. The Acholi had suffered greatly from the fighting, but being further in the south they had not been invaded as we had by the Muslim militias. All they could see was what was nearest to them, which was armed Dinka men fighting in SPLA uniforms. So they saw us, wrongly, as the aggressors.

  The camp was one mile from the local town of Par Kela. It consisted of two big buildings, looking like old factory warehouses, surrounded by a lot of trees. All the boys lived together. People who were married or had families were in one building, single boys in the other. There was a shared kitchen where about six hundred people would get fed, and it was first in, first served. If you were late, you could wait for hours.

  Par Kela housed members of the Ugandan army and United Nations staff. The houses of the town were mainly built along the side of the bitumen main road, and many of the families had businesses out the front of their houses. Mostly they would sell tomatoes, food, cigarettes, or other wares that they had brought from the bigger markets at the town of Adjumani. The Lord’s Resistance Army had been looting Par Kela constantly, so even though the Ugandan army controlled it there was a feeling of depression and fear in the town that never seemed to lift.

  The United Nations people were generous to us in the camp. Nevertheless, we felt isolated because we were not allowed to move around very much. The more we moved, the more we could be a target for other tribes who hated the Dinka.

  A Sudanese church minister called Father Joseph Ayok used to come to the camp every morning and every afternoon. It was the first time I had seen a black person married to a white person – Father Joseph’s wife Karen came from England. I had heard about England from looking at the maps in school at Pinyudo. He had adopted many aspects of white culture – he used to hold his wife’s hand and was affectionate to her in public. We all expected her to behave like an African woman, but when she went to get water she would carry a jerry can in her hand instead of carrying it on her head. She was very friendly and popular. She was pretty, with long blonde hair and green eyes, and drew crowds everywhere she went. Boys would find any excuse to go up and talk to her. She charmed us all with her warm smile. But she was also a very strong woman. People asked a lot of her – to find them clothes, food and so on, and she would go out and get it done.

  Father Joseph was tall and muscular. He and Karen were in their mid-thirties or perhaps early forties. He loved soccer and always wanted everyone to play. He would play as well, and sometimes Karen would referee. Joseph treated everyone the same and always with respect.

  There were about a hundred of us there who had no family, among a thousand or so other people, most of whom came from Sudan. Father Joseph was one of our Dinka people, but missionaries had taken him to England as a young boy.

  Before long we had to move again, because it was better to put us in a big dormitory at a proper school rather than the improvised situation in Par Kela. The hundred orphans, as we were called, were to be moved on to Adjumani. But the good news was that Father Joseph had bought some acres there, and we were allowed to live in tents on his land, about five to a tent in a group of twenty tents. We had to choose our groups, and here I would live together again with Kuot and his brother Garang. Garang was always arguing with people and no one ever wanted to share with him, but we decided to let him stay with us because Kuot and I knew that if he got out of hand, together we could overpower him.

  It was Kuot’s job to make sure that all the tents were clean and that the boys were looking after themselves. A lot of the boys needed guidance, and were lucky to have anyon
e at all who cared about them on a personal level. I worked with Kuot to help supervise the boys who would not clean themselves or do as they were told. I would either give them plots of land to dig or, if they chose, they could be beaten instead. Not many chose a beating, which was good, because I didn’t like doing it.

  Seven of the orphans were older than the rest of us, and we held them up as our elders and looked to them for guidance. We had members in charge of food and agriculture. At night we would take a cold shower by taking a jerry can into the bush behind the accommodation area and tipping it over ourselves. For breakfast we would have porridge. If you were on breakfast duty, you would wake up at 3 am to go and get the water, light the fire to heat the water, make the porridge and so on. The firewood was collected on a Saturday morning, a duty that was shared by everyone. Sometimes we would find maggots in the porridge, and we had no choice but to eat it. If we refused, we would just starve. After repeatedly finding maggots in our food, we devised a system of draining the porridge through a mesh.

  It was in Adjumani that my education got going again, at the Biyaya private school. It was crazy, but there were no resources to split up the ages and teach us in different classes – there were students of twenty learning alongside kids as young as four. I questioned the humanity of the teachers sometimes too. They were rough. The Maths teacher, Mr Henry, was about twenty-four and was short and muscular. He did karate. He was from Uganda and belonged to the Madi tribe.

  The Madi tribe were well known for showing their emotions publicly. When Madi gathered for a funeral, there was lots of drinking, lots of music and lots of crying. It was strange to me. In Dinka tribes, when someone dies we are just plain sad and don’t want to do anything.