Boy Soldier

by Cola Bilkuei

  Along with these emotions, Mr Henry was violent. He used to thrash us with a cane, and the whole school was afraid of him. Older boys would want to fight him, and some even threatened to kill him, but he never seemed afraid. Most Madi people are friendly. They would rather talk through a problem than fight. But Mr Henry was different.

  The headmaster didn’t ever do anything to stop him, and he was rough as well. His name was Mr Burndoro, also from the Madi tribe. He was a better man than Mr Henry, though he never seemed to enjoy life. He walked around with a mournful expression on his face, and on the rare occasions when he laughed it was in a singular loud burst that seemed unnatural. I sometimes felt sorry for Mr Burndoro, because we used to give him a hard time. We would steal his lemons, and mix the juice with water and sugar. We loved it! He wasn’t a bad headmaster really. At 10 pm every night he would come and do rollcall. He knew all hundred of us by name, he knew who was a troublemaker and who was not. One time, seven of us went into Adjumani camp to watch a video and on the way back Mr Burndoro met us on the track. It was about ten o’clock at night and he was riding his pushbike. We ran away from him instantly, recognising that we were in trouble. He raced back to the dormitory on his bicycle to do his rollcall. We made it back just before he did and managed to bluff our way through, saying that we had not left the camp. He was angry, but all he did was yell at us: ‘Back, mental!’ It still perplexes me to this day, even though my English is so much better. I have no idea what he meant. All I know is that he would yell it at us repeatedly when he was angry.

  Unlike Mr Henry, Mr Burndoro was basically a good guy, and most of the students were keen to learn. We wanted to do well and play sport, and as a result we began improving the school’s image. We were getting a reputation for being well rounded: we could debate, win soccer matches, and do our lessons well. Eventually we gave Mr Burndoro a Dinka name. We called him Deng Adok. Deng, for rain, and Adok, for gum. If you made a mistake he was going to stick to you like wet gum or glue!

  We were given pens and books to write in, uniforms of grey shorts and a blue shirt with the school badge embroidered on the chest. We had no shoes and no underwear. What I learnt here was different to what I had learnt in Sudan and Ethiopia.

  It was in Uganda, at the Biyaya school, that I first heard the name Australia. The teachers said it was a small continent.

  I was confused, thinking that it must have lots of different countries like Africa. How could a whole continent have only one country? We saw a photograph of a kangaroo, which I found funny because it had a pouch – I had never seen an animal like it. We learnt about Aborigines: that they lived in the forests, that they were also Australian but that you couldn’t go to where they lived. (Later, when I went to South Africa, I was taught that Australia was the most racist country in the whole world!)

  Sometimes it seemed to me that since I had left my village violence had followed me around. Even Uganda, which I had looked forward to as a kind of paradise, was erupting in warfare, murder and death.

  Northern Uganda, where I was, had been terrorised by the LRA for almost twenty years. A lot of killing had happened between Adjumani and the nearest big town, Gulu. Buses and trucks travelling between the towns were often ambushed and robbed, and everyone was nervous when travelling. Villages were burnt down every day, and there were constant killings. Due to a lack of government control in the north, there were no proper hospitals or health-care systems. People were dying from a host of different diseases – typhoid, cholera, sleeping sickness spread by tsetse fly, malaria, malnutrition, lack of medication. The average life span for a Ugandan woman was between forty and fifty, for a man even less. Many of the population were affected by HIV and AIDS even then, and those who escaped direct contact with the war were often hit by the virus. AIDS was one of the few things the country seemed to unite over – there was a community-wide terror at the epidemic.

  For the two or three years I was in Uganda, I never saw pictures of the president, Youri Maseveni, and it was hard for the government in the capital, Kampala, to reach the people of the north with either aid or communications. And this, compared with Sudan and Ethiopia, was a relatively functional democracy.

  Like a typical bully, the LRA targeted civilians and vulnerable people. By the time the government responded, the guerrillas had vanished again into the jungle and it was too late.

  The hundred of us without families tried our best to work together. Often there was squabbling, but we also knew that the only way to survive was to cooperate.

  One night two LRA guerrillas came to rob Father Joseph. They got past the security guard, broke into the house and threatened Joseph and Karen with a gun. They stole everything, taking what money there was and leaving Joseph and Karen fearing for their lives. Ugandan police came later that night and said they had arrested the two men in the town, but that didn’t settle our fears. No one knew if it was an isolated robbery or part of a new campaign that we should be more concerned about. Eventually Joseph and Karen felt too threatened to stay and left to go back to England.

  This was a terrible turn of events for us. Without Joseph’s support, everything became hard again. Food rations shrank, and morale in the camp was ruined. Arguments broke out more frequently among us, once with devastating effect. Ring was a boy I had met back in Nimule. Early one morning, he was on cooking duty with a boy called Sebat. Ring was asking Sebat why he hadn’t tidied up; they started to wrestle, and Ring punched Sebat in the chest. Sebat stopped breathing. Kuot was woken and gave Sebat mouth to mouth, then CPR (we had been taught basic first aid back in Nimule by Sister Shaun and Sister Rita). The first aid failed to work, however, and Sebat died.

  Ring ran into the bush and was never seen or heard of again. We tried to follow him and eventually came across some footprints and a patch where he’d urinated and defecated, but we never found him. Ring was an athlete, a great soccer player, and he always encouraged us to play sports. He liked to mess around and laugh a lot. He didn’t usually fight with anyone – this was the first time I’d heard of him being aggressive. In their argument, Sebat had said he was too sick to clean up. Ring hadn’t seemed to realise that Sebat actually was sick. Ring always took everything as a joke, and this time he must have thought the joke was at his expense.

  We heard later that Ring sneaked back to the camp to take his belongings. The police hadn’t acted on Sebat’s death, apart from doing a few initial interviews. They didn’t investigate to the point of going through Ring’s things. It didn’t surprise us that they never found him. We heard that he had gone back to fight in the war in Sudan.

  Kuot was the only one who’d got into the kitchen before Sebat died. The body was taken by ambulance to the mortuary, and Kuot was asked to sleep with it, maybe to protect it. He refused. No one was asked any further questions and it just seemed to disappear from the police’s minds. There were no counsellors to talk to us, no Father Joseph, and we lived in despair. The impact of Sebat’s death seemed more personal as we weren’t supposed to be at war among ourselves. We were at peace within the group; his death didn’t make any sense. We were all like brothers by now, we all had our own duties and talents that we spent time developing – soccer, athletics, high jump, long jump and so on – but we associated these activities with Ring, and after he left we lost the heart for games.

  It took us a couple of months before we started to heal. Sebat’s cousin was Malek and Ring’s cousin was Deng. They were now the next generation of the two families, and we were worried that one would take revenge against the other. But Malek just ended up lonely. No one seemed to support him, and in fact the opposite was true: most people seemed to be against him. He remained angry at Sebat’s death and refused to understand that it was an accident. Deng was younger than Malek, smaller and incapable of defending himself, and everyone was afraid of what Malek would do to him in his anger. They came from different regions, and some of the people in the camp thought that it may have been an underlying tribal issue that
contributed to Malek not understanding. The camp was united in trying to get the two to see the event for what it had been.

  We were also stressed because Ring and Sebat were well-known at school. By the time we went back to school two days later, it was all the talk. We had to talk to all the other kids about the whole thing – we relived it over and over with each explanation. Ring had been very popular at school, so the event sent a shock wave throughout the campus. Even the teachers seemed to be in a state of shock.

  The whole thing affected me very deeply. I had first met Ring in 1992, and we went to school together, played together and worked together. I felt terrible that Sebat was dead. I felt terrible that we didn’t know where Ring was. I didn’t want to see Ring punished more than he should have been, but if he had stayed he could have proven that it was an accident. By fleeing he made it seem as though he’d done it on purpose. I was angry at him for running away, for killing Sebat in the first place, and finally because it was all so unresolved and we were now left to pick up the pieces.

  Amid this feeling of loss and insecurity, we began to think that the LRA or the Ugandan government would come to our camp at any time and take us to fight in their armies. We had no security. Authority was represented only by the headmaster Mr Burndoro, but what would he be able to do? He had his own family to protect. With Father Joseph gone, we felt truly like orphans. The food was decreasing, we were constantly being punished at school, and there was no one to turn to. Joseph would have given us the shirt off his own back, but now we were lucky to get any clothes at all. Any hope we had was fading fast.

  By this time, the LRA were frequently coming into the camp, shooting and looting. The SPLA were also coming in, taking young boys with them to fight back in Sudan. I hid from them, feeling confused about the situation. I didn’t want to fight, but if I had no choice, then maybe it was best to go back with the SPLA because they at least would give me a gun to protect myself. Either way, stay or leave, my life was increasingly at risk.

  Deep down, I believed that to go back to Sudan would be like committing suicide. I would go back for only one reason – to follow my dead brother. I had survived too long to die so easily. And I wouldn’t have my mother to return to. That weighed heavily on my mind. I was now faced with a terrible decision: going back to Sudan was suicidal, while staying in Uganda somehow seemed even worse.

  One of Father Joseph’s relatives had told us of a camp in Kenya, from which boys were being taken to America. Of course, we all knew of Manute Bol, the Sudanese basketballer who had become a huge star in the American NBA. I had been in Nimule when Manute Bol had visited around 1992, but hadn’t been able to get close to him with all the crowds and cameras. He had done more than anyone to build ties between southern Sudan and America.

  At school in Adjumani, we had written to penfriends in Michigan, at a school called Olive Elementary. Father Joseph had given them our names, and they had written to us personally and sent their pictures. We wrote back about our lives, although sometimes this made me sad as my life had so little in common with those kids in Michigan. But this part of my education had brought America into the picture, and I shared the belief of many young Africans: living in a white person’s country would be like living in heaven. I decided to go to Kenya, driven by the idea of getting myself to America.

  This was a huge turning point for me, as it was the first time I really contemplated giving up on my country, leaving what was left of my family behind me and starting a new life in a different part of the world. But it was an intoxicating idea. I could go to America and study and work – and, most of all, feel safe. Just the idea of it provided me with new hope and allowed me to think of new possibilities.

  I told Kuot about my plan and asked him to come with me. He said we should first get into secondary school in Uganda, but I didn’t think I would be able to do that. I wasn’t even finished primary school! I thought that if I stayed, Uganda would finish me. I told him I didn’t want to waste time. I wanted to move to the next country that would give me an opportunity to go overseas.

  So I decided to leave Kuot and all my other friends behind. I walked out at night. I had some books and blankets, but left them all to Kuot. I kept some clothes and my school uniform. I walked an hour to a camp nearby called Mire, where the younger Dinka boys had been sent for their protection. I stayed for a week. The night I finally left, I went back to the school. I wanted to spend my last night there, to say goodbye properly to Kuot and my closest friends. Mr Burndoro had been looking for me all week, and still was. He was furious with me and would thrash me within an inch of my life. All the kids wanted to talk to me, but Kuot kept them quiet so I could hide from Mr Burndoro. No one had told the headmaster that I was back there, as it would have come back on Kuot. The headmaster wanted my uniform back but I wanted to keep it to remind me of the school, the friends that I had there, and Father Joseph.

  My last night in Adjumani, Kuot and I didn’t sleep at all. We stayed up all night talking about how Kuot would follow me. We laughed a lot. Kuot was busy talking about how he wanted me to buy him books and clothes when I was rich. He wanted books on English grammar, maths and physics. He was a good student, and knew that he would continue through to high school. Usually the teachers were the only ones with the books, but Kuot wanted his own.

  I was excited about moving on, but worried about the challenges I was going to face along the way. My first challenge was closer to home. As I went to leave, I spotted Mr Burndoro before he had a chance to notice me. I just ran.

  Kuot caught up and took me to the bus stop.

  After this, I would have to find my own way. Even though Kuot and I were laughing, we each knew how sad the other was. We had been close friends since Nimule, and I trusted him more than a member of my own family.

  I had saved enough money, seven thousand Ugandan shillings, for my fare to Gulu, which was the next big town to the south and the transport hub for roads east to Kenya.

  The bus, like most buses in Uganda, wasn’t a scheduled service but a vehicle on its way to Gulu that would pick people up along the way. I joined about ten people sitting on top of the goods they were going to sell in the town: blankets, cartons of oil, maize and beans. It was a long ride, leaving around seven in the morning and arriving at four in the afternoon, even though the total distance was only about a hundred kilometres. Everyone travelled in fear, as hundreds of civilians had been killed on this road. The LRA had stopped a lot of buses, stolen the goods and harassed or killed the passengers. Sometimes as a result of these attacks, all transport on the road was closed, for as long as a month at a time. For a while, when it resumed, the Ugandan army would escort the buses.

  We were all afraid, and soon no one was speaking. The road was bumpy, meandering through thick forest, and the driver had to wind the bus along the narrow road to avoid the landmines planted along the way. Some small towns that we drove through were deserted – not one single inhabitant remained. We began to pass a lot of Ugandan army posts, so we relaxed for a little while and felt safer. When army vehicles escorted us for small sections of the trip, we started talking again. Even in the safer areas, however, we passed a lot of houses that had been burned to the ground.

  My first impression of Gulu was of a nice, civilised city. On the way in to town there was a colourful billboard welcoming visitors. We passed a high school: it was big, much bigger than my school in Adjumani. Its size and impressive façade excited my imagination: I wondered what it would be like to learn there.

  In Gulu there were big open parks. At one of them, Pope John Paul II had come to pray with the locals. It was a place that I had wanted to see. I was dazzled by the city. There were so many cars, the most I had ever seen in one area. They were banked up in actual traffic, not just isolated cars passing every now and then. The shops were bigger than any I’d seen, and sold different kinds of groceries. We stopped on the roadside and I jumped off the bus and looked for a place to eat. There was a milk bar like nothin
g I’d ever seen before. It sold nothing but milk, both plain and flavoured. It had tables and chairs, and the tables were covered in white tablecloths. On the top of each table were small white bowls of sugar and carafes of water. I went in and sat down, feeling impressed but also intimidated and shy. I looked at the signs to see what type of food I could buy, but it seemed they only sold milk. I ordered some, and was brought a jug of sour milk to which I added sugar. It was one of the best things I’d ever had. I bought glass after glass, guzzling it down. It was the first time since my home in Panaruu that I’d had a lot of milk to drink. I never thought I’d miss milk so much!

  After four jugs, they told me they wouldn’t sell me any more. They told me my stomach would burst. I was so full, I had to sit there for a while. I didn’t need to eat that night. We got talking and I told the people at the shop that my father had more than 2000 cattle. They laughed at me, refusing to believe that a skinny young boy who had wandered in from the street could come from such a prosperous family.

  I went to stay in the cheapest hotel I could find. It seemed clean and reasonable, and I was able to stay there for one week. But everything was costing me money, and mine was running out. Every morning I would go back to the milk bar. I met some other Sudanese there, who told me they were staying in a local garage for free. I ended up there for another week, during which one of the mechanics talked to me about the possibility of working as an assistant to one of the drivers. I wasn’t interested because I saw how the others were treated. Some guys at the garage also talked about robbing banks, and one of the mechanics who had wanted me to work with him went to Adjumani to rob a bank with six others. The mechanic was killed by the security guards during the robbery.

  I wanted to keep going towards Kenya, but did not have enough money. Also, at this point the war in Sudan was going even worse for the SPLA. They had been pushed right down to Nimule – our soldiers were nearly being pushed out of our own country. I had a sudden flare of conscience and regretted my decision to go to Kenya. I did an about-face. I jumped onto one of the many SPLA trucks that were plying the road between Gulu and Nimule, and rode with the army back up to the border.