Three Rhodes University journalism graduates who went to document the after-effects of war in Gulu province, Northern Uganda, found their work to be a world away from life in Grahamstown.
Three Rhodes University journalism graduates who went to document the after-effects of war in Gulu province, Northern Uganda, found their work to be a world away from life in Grahamstown.
Everena Okott, 67, finishes speaking in the dim light of her tin-roofed hut. Geoffrey translates politely, “She says, as you can see, the small lights here (he points to the ceiling) these were bullets and they were firing… that’s what she says… There is no one to get up there and fix it. And when it starts raining there’s actually no defence… But she is now old, and when she looks at her children, yeah, she doesn’t know what their future is.”
Outside, back in the hot sun, I ask Geoffrey about the Acholi word nego-nego that Everena had used frequently in places during the interview. I’m trying to learn Acholi, and it’s clearly a common word. It’d be easy enough to remember, like afoyo, which seems to be a blend of thank you and hello.
Or the more effusive afoyo matek. Geoffrey looks at me strangely, and explains that nego-nego, in Acholi, means killing. So would go the next fortnight of interviews in Gulu province, Northern Uganda.
Thomas Holder, Saskia Kuiper and I had only just finished up our final courses in journalism at Rhodes. Not a month later and we’d departed to Uganda to cover the stories of a community trying to recover their lives in the years after the two-decade war between the Ugandan military and the Lord’s Resistance Army tore the region apart.
Notorious for abducting children to serve as troops, the LRA and the Ugandan army between them managed to visit years of violence on the population of Northern Uganda.
Despite widespread atrocities, in 2003 the UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland said of the conflict that, “I cannot find any other part of the world that is having an emergency on the scale of Uganda, that is getting such little international attention."
It would be only in 2004 that the scale of events in Northern Uganda became widely known after the publication of the documentary, Invisible Children, which explored the plight of thousands of children fleeing their homes at night to avoid the risk of abduction by the LRA.
In 2006, after a failed peace agreement, the LRA relocated operations to the Democratic Republic of Congo. There they continue unhindered today, having displaced up to a quarter of a million people, yet largely disappearing from the list of tragedies that the world’s media covers.
Their violence in Northern Uganda finally at an end, camps that had served to notionally protect many Ugandans from the LRA finally began the process of emptying. The camps had provided safety for displaced people by reducing permanent danger from the LRA to merely occasional raids, and the risk of rape from the army officers supposedly guarding them.
Unsurprisingly, family and community life in the affected provinces has been shattered. It was the process of trying to regain what was lost, of re-establishing what was possible of old lives that the three of us had come to document.
For three aspirant journalists new to investigating the after-effects of war, the work of daily interviews was gruelling. Sleeping on the floor of an empty house, collecting water each day from the pump up the road and listening to stories into the night was a world away from life in Grahamstown.
People were kidnapped, people lost children, people learned to move on and make a life with what remained. More stories than could ever fit into one page. Human stories, in all their troublesome complexity, serving as a lesson in trying to tell anything simply.
Like Aringo Stella, kidnapped by the LRA at 13, who then went on to fight as an LRA soldier for two years. Or the community who accepted her back, forgave her and with whom she is building a new life.
Each of us had a shared motivation in going to Uganda. That we wanted to practice a journalism that mattered, in the places whose stories are the least heard. That an opportunity would come to document a small corner of Uganda was a logistical coincidence – an unexpected chance for three journalists who wanted to go to places in conflict to take a first step in those careers.
As to what we learned – how we grew as journalists – is a question too complicated to answer in simple terms. We learned how much stories – told and retold – can mean. That even people in the landscape that war has left can smile freely. And that conflict isn’t remotely enough of a lens to describe the complex lives people create for themselves.
Nego nego, for the most part, lives on only as words in a story now. But it lives, nevertheless.
More complete accounts of their journeys to Gulu can be found on Richard, Thomas and Saskia’s blogs.
