Range CHAPTER 1: NIGHTMARISH
By the way, it is criminal to deny that the Lord’s Resistance Army rebellion is the cause of the worst ever tragedies in the contemporary history of Uganda. These LRA, as they are commonly known, are notorious for murdering hundreds besides displacing thousands of northerners from their homes. However, there are far darker events that have exclusively infested and greatly impacted upon the psychology of my fellow Acholi tribesmen. Unsurprisingly, they seldom share most of these ordeals for reasons you may soon discover. Personally, on December 19, 1998, I was confronted with exceptionally ruthless evil in my birthplace of Mucwini Sub-county situated in central-east Kitgum district.
Naturally, in such a context you would least expect a fifteen-year-old boy — like I was back then — to be permitted the slightest freedom of breeding the curiosity to encounter the said threat. But alas, my parents casually tasked me to ride on a bicycle across the open grasslands to sell harvested cassava in the thinly populated trading centre, three and a half miles northeast. Moreover, I used ominously irregular footpaths to move livestock in search of their signalgrass in the occasional peasant maize farmsteads within the adjacent greatly desolate villages. Being a bibliophile and the only scholar left in the household, the latter task was my sole routine in a period such as the school holidays, that had happened barely three weeks prior. This was after my promotion to primary seven; which would start in February the following year.
Doing the aforementioned tasks singlehandedly is surprising unless you learn that my current lighter weight is an unfortunate misrepresentation of the earlier meaty-body stature. Weighing a little over 143 pounds. That was significantly heavier than my brothers: Abitech and Omollo of 12 and 11 years respectively. Also, it could have been that my fairly short height of five feet, three inches — slightly below my brothers’ and teenage sisters’ Lanyero and Kadim — did not hold back a general consensus that I was a figure quite intimidating. I was often told that mere tightening of my knuckles made their jawbones reverberate; and when I threw blows in their faces, recipients felt as if hit with 10-pounds-heavy potatoes. Those who wished to deny others’ livestock prompt access to the basically erratic boreholes and streams knew better than provoking me.
However, uncle Bongomin often said that even the most hardboiled acknowledged that through my pair of tender-looking light brown eyes, I sought far too hard for appeasement. That I went to the extent of empathising with a person insane enough to overtly confront me regarding my light skin colour. The other household adults including my dad, mum, and aunties Atoo and Lucy remained indifferent to this. They never sided with the villagers who found this appearance rather unusual and in sharp contrast with the relatively darker complexion commonly associated with either my lineage or tribe. This oversimplification ignored the literal possibility of brown skin genetic traits being repressed throughout some prior generations, until me. Regardless of having minimal formal education, their reservations were solidified by the relatively high regional temperatures considered to facilitate the prevalent complexion.
On the aforementioned date, my ordeal began during a scorching gloomy midmorning. Barefoot, and dressed in a short-sleeved cream shirt and black shorts, I and our twelve roped goats were about five minutes to reach home from the fields, two miles southwards. Moving on the brittle ground covered by scanty couch grass, I suddenly heard: BLUM! BLUM! Sounds of random gun blasts! Though I was convinced that the shots were not within a one-mile radius from my position, their concurrent echoes created the impression that they ensued rather closer. In the subsequent silence, I paused to figure out the source. Instantly, I heard indistinct muted masculine and feminine wailings — of my family members!
In the chaos, I fiercely hurried the goats, not to join my family for breakfast as expected, but to guarantee our entire safety. Arriving via a hardly used south route through the backyard, I stepped onto our property of roughly two acres, located precisely south of Mucwini. Progressing past the predominantly rusty spear grass in the background, I saw a parade of nine chickens peacefully pecking at the countless grasshoppers interspersed in the vegetation. My nervous sweat-dripped face did not stimulate the birds to indicate an awareness of any recent dread. Anyhow, what combative role could they have played in that event? After all, they are not intelligent beings! The unusual complete absence of a human voice at home at daytime confirmed my premonition!
Unhesitant, I advanced towards the western foreground. Eighty yards ahead, the grass was protruded by five imperfectly round (three metres radii), high-peak-grass-thatched muddy huts: each decorated with circular white drawings on their wall. The huts more or less enclosed a thirty-feet-tall, probably fifty-year-old desiccating mango tree. Beneath the tree’s shade is where the two adult males usually sat, doing their usual eavesdropping while awaiting the next meal. My kid brothers were occasionally near the middle-aged men. Reaching there exaggerated my anxiety; for the first time in a long time until that day and in a similar moment, none was seated there.
Since one of the huts — the kitchen — was thinly smoky, I approached it to investigate. Inside was a sunken fireplace, holding a three-stone stove, a thick wooden pole blazed between two of the stones and heated a giant black clay pot half-full of porridge above. Cooking this breakfast was as often supposed to be a shared effort of the enchantingly gorgeous pubescent kid sisters. As each girl vigorously stirred the mixture of maize-flour and water with a mingling stick, mum and the two aunties (all three in their early thirties) gracefully supervised them. Like the males, none of them was present. The same result applied to the rest of the huts I quickly progressed to check. I turned in various directions of the compound and as loud as I could, called out names — only receiving the replies of the pleasant-sounding edible flycatchers.
Before thinking of a panic next step, my concern shifted to the unattended boiling food on the fire! I thought all the liquid could evaporate for it was way beyond the boiling point. So, I took off my shirt and used it to gently lift off the pot down to the kitchen floor, and covered its ceramic’s opening with a metallic pan. I wore my shirt and strolled around the expansive compound, covering every square metre in search for a slight indication of at least an injured person. Not to mention the absence of an inadvertently left detailed clue or trampled grass to prove a recent crime. Also, nothing like some minutes-old footprints in the ground to hint at an escape, or a scuffle to suggest a defense for survival against a foe or predator. My heart started pounding fiercely, such that I felt like my feet were in a torrential stream.
I had to ignore the prospect of the second of three departures in search of more pasture and water for the livestock which happened right after breakfast. Meanwhile, I figured to first return to the storage hut and probe whether my dads’ hunting spear, longbow, and all their nine arrows were in place. I intended to confirm a dubious departure to hunt an antelope which was an activity done only by men and only at nightfall. Firstly, there was the bow, and only eight arrows among some stacks of timber — one arrow was missing! At the middle of the bowstring were faded fingerprinted bloodstains — of seemingly fresh blood.
Though a fledgling to clearly tell apart human blood from that of any other mammal, the smell was very much of the former. Judging by the gunshots and this clue I sensed an abduction by the LRA. They were the most likely suspects capable of this besides government forces; for both wielded guns except that I believed the latter used them altruistically. And the week before, I had heard that the rebels attacked parts of Gulu district neighbouring Kitgum to the west. Also, the day before, an unconfirmed report had claimed that they had for the first time threatened the western sub-county of Layamo before the forces intervened and killed a dozen of them. Could the rebels have evolved their techniques of abduction by sedating their victims instead of brutal force?
And what I thought could make their work much easier was committing crime in this village that had a small demographic of 50 people at most. Our closest neighbours — also relatives — lived three miles northeast. Accessing their homesteads directly from ours was via a slightly visible trail, fifteen inches wide, connecting the courtyard northwards to other equally narrow paths radiating from it. Some of these paths culminated into a weathered road a full hour’s walk northwestwards. If it is the rebels, I thought, my family was being transported on other roads but the weathered, to avoid intrusion of any scale!
It was noon when I furiously woke up from that thought blankness while still in the storage hut. “The hell was that? Was it a nightmare”? I yelled on top of my voice. “Of course, this is real. Why shouldn’t it be”?
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