Celebrating 27 Years of Torture

I spent the last week working and traveling in northern Uganda, staying in Gulu for the majority of my time there. Over the last two years I’ve spent somewhere around a collective of two weeks in the center of what was once considered by Jan England and the United Nations as the world’s most pressing, dire, and ultimately forgotten conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda (GOU) – consisting of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and its military wing, the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF). Two weeks is nowhere near enough time to consider my hand to be on the pulse of the everyday realities of life in Gulu; while I work in post-conflict recovery and conflict legacies, I can’t pretend to grasp what it is to live through what I write or read about on a daily basis. 

Because of that lack of understanding, I have always viewed Gulu through the lens of the literature on the conflict that I either read about or contribute to. The Acholi Inn has meaning not because I used their shower, but because it was mentioned in Green’s The Wizard of the Nile; Pece Stadium has an importance not because I watched a soccer game there, but because the atrocities carried out within its grounds were discussed in Living With Bad Surroundings. Conversations with local politicians and stakeholders, or even boda drivers who mention the conflict while taking me to the bar, provide words that seem trapped in typeset. When you associate your surroundings with the catalog of material you read back in the comforts of home instead of the reality in front of your eyes, history is perpetually abstract and stagnated, bound to the pages of a book.

I worked at our Gulu office on Tuesday, and at the end of the work day I was told that we had the next day off for a national holiday. Wednesday was NRM Day, a celebration of the party’s 27 years in power. The co-worker who told me about our day off, an Acholi who lived through the LRA conflict, described it as “being forced to celebrate 27 years of torture.” On my way to lunch yesterday afternoon I passed by a large parade ground, filled with hundreds of UPDF soldiers marching in formation in front of a smattering of observers.

As we passed the rifles and bayonets flashing in the sun, the words I had been reading for years were finally released from the page.

I can only imagine that, for northern Ugandans, NRM Day is comparable to Native Americans in the United States taking a day off work for Columbus Day. This was not a celebration of liberation, but rather a forced recognition that history reflects the narrative of victors, not the reality of the marginalized. One imagines that had the LRA managed a successful insurgency and taken Kampala, an LRA Day would have replaced NRM Day; instead of taking off work in recognition of forced displacement and decades of government-sponsored rape, pillage, and murder, the people of northern Uganda would be forced to accept child abduction, torture and brutality as the means to whatever end was deemed as the conclusion.  

There is no good side because in reality they are good, but because the play requires them in order to reach a resolution. And just like a play, this was a farce, a perception of events consumed by an audience with no say in the story being told.  

I didn’t know what to do after my colleague made his remark. All I could do was drift my eyes away from his, shake my head and smile for fear of not knowing how else to react. My books and my job are his life. Those soldiers in formation, the Acholi Inn and Pece Stadium are my landmarks shaped through literature, read in coffee houses and apartment complexes 8,000 miles away from Gulu.  For him and every other Ugandan I have interacted with north of the bellowing Nile, those bayonets were nothing more than acknowledgement of subjugation. 

I had nothing but silence to offer my colleague, and I have no sage words to close with. I still think, perpetually and ultimately, that mankind is virtuous, wise and considerate of each other. But yesterday was confirmation that this is a thought not ground in fact, that our daily experiences can be nothing more than smokescreens created by somebody powerful enough to convince us that what is a myth is in fact tangible and real. Guns, uniforms, and marches will always be more immediate than words on a page, even if their motions are ground in nothing more than the spoils of the victor.