Violated by Rebels, Violated by Family: Returnee Girls of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda
Abstract
In the prologue to his book Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa, Richard Reid recounts how in the first few years of the third millennium, the region of North-East Africa has been enmeshed in conflict. This region which includes Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Southern Sudan has experienced intermittent violent conflicts and destruction by wars based on reasons and excuses ranging from ethnicity and religion, to political disagreements caused by thirst for power. This region also includes Northern Uganda, particularly Acholi-land, which was caught up in the throes of violent conflict since the mid- eighties, between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government of Uganda. For more than three decades, Acholi-land was engulfed in untold suffering, unleashed upon its population by foes from without and, tragically, attackers from within! An historical occupation of being exceptionally good soldiers that had stood them in good stead in colonial and post-colonial times turned out to be a curse they would always true!
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References
Richard J. Reid, Frontiers of Violence in North-East Africa: Genealogies of Conflict since 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1.
Thomas Harlacher et al., Traditional Ways of Coping in Acholi: Cultural Provisions for Reconciliation and Healing from War (Kampala: Intersoft Business Services Limited, 2006), 1.
Susan McKay and Dyan Mazurana, where are the Girls? Girls Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique: Their Lives during and after War (Montreal, Quebec: Rights and Democracy, 2004), 28.
Els De Temmerman, Aboke Girls: Children Abducted in Northern Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2001), 12-13.
Villagers of Namkora, interviewed by author in Kitgum, Eight Hours, November 14, 2015.
Ronald Atkinson, The Roots of Ethnicity: The Origins of the Acholi of Uganda (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1999), 7.
‘Mutesa: The Last Days’, Daily Monitor, Sunday November 24, 2013.
‘LRA Rebels Cut off my Lips, Ears, Nose and Breast’ Daily Monitor, Saturday July 16, 2016.
Emeline Ndossi, The Reintegration of Female Returnees from Lords’ Resistance Army in the Acholi Society: Socio-Cultural Challenges and Opportunities (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Makerere University, Kampala, 2015), 3.
Steven Odongo, interviewed by author in Kampala on 18th March 2017.
Helen Nkabala Nambalirwa, ‘The Lord Destroyed the Cities and Everyone Who Lived in Them’: The Lord’s Resistance Army’s Use of the Old Testament Sodom/Gomorrah Narrative’, in Bard Maeland, ed., Culture, Religion, and the Reintegration of Female Child Soldiers in Northern Uganda (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2010), 184.
K. S. Carlston, Social Theory and African Tribal Organization: The Development of Socio-Legal Theory (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1968), 77.
Alcinda Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 44.
Harlacher, 42. See also Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. 1959), and Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1979).
Copyright (c) 2022 Wotsuna Khamalwa
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