Africa’s ghosts
Tens of thousands of children were kidnapped and forced to become soldiers in the jungles of Uganda and elsewhere. Many have returned to freedom — only to find they are still scarred by rapes and murders, haunting stories that come to life in two unusual graphic novels.
Children abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda struggle to resume normal life — facing stigma and war trauma. A new multimedia graphic novel tells their stories
LIRA, UGANDA— As the artist’s pencil dances across the paper, Christine Alaba is confronted with the face of her nightly tormentor.
The former child soldier is describing not a dreadlocked, gun-toting soldier from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) — but a little girl.
“It’s like you have seen her,” she whispers to Ugandan graphic novelist Christian Mafigiri as she looks at his rendering.
Christine was one of 30,000 children abducted by Joseph Kony’s rebel army, which terrorized northern Uganda for two decades in an attempt to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni.
These young boys and girls — some as young as 6 — were beaten, raped and forced to loot and kill, sometimes inflicting suffering upon their own communities.
After seven years in the jungle, Christine managed to escape the rebel army in 2005. But she has yet to find peace.
“Now when I am in bed at night, this child comes to me,” says Christine. “She asks me, ‘Mama — you gave me food but you never helped me when they killed me.’ ”
Christine’s experiences with the LRA were particularly traumatic: forced cannibalism and setting fire to huts with families inside are two anecdotes she recounts haltingly, tears cascading down her cheeks.
But 10 years on, it’s the girl she failed to save — a younger abductee whom she treated as a daughter — that weighs on her the most.
Thanks to the infamous KONY 2012 campaign many know who Joseph Kony is. But he remains free even as thousands of his former child soldiers struggle to rebuild their fragile lives in postwar Uganda.
I have written previously about the plight of female child soldiers, but the ongoing challenges for people such as Christine prompted me to seek a new way to tell their stories.
The result is an online graphic novel that depicts the stories of four female returnees — two of whom rejoined their pre-war communities as recently as September 2014.
Journalists and writers have increasingly turned to graphic novel formats, long associated with superheroes and the make-believe, to tell traumatic, true stories. Events including the Holocaust and Bosnian genocide have been told in the hand-drawn panels of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s Safe Area
Goražde, respectively. So, in collaboration with Mafigiri, we turned the stories of these women into online, interactive graphic journalism, with scroll-triggered animation, photographs and pop-up videos accompanying illustrated panels.
Christine’s story is sadly representative of the difficulties facing former child soldiers.
She is debilitated by post-traumatic stress disorder. She is coping with HIV, a result of being repeatedly raped in the jungle. After her return, her hut was burned down by distrustful neighbours.
And because she was abducted at such a young age, she lacks formal education; she ekes out an existence by doing back-breaking labour on a neighbour’s land for about $2 a day. It’s not enough to eat properly.
“I’m now taking antiretroviral drugs for my HIV,” she says. “But if I don’t have enough food I won’t take the tablets as otherwise they make me feel sick.”
Christine adjusts her black dress, which is sweatringed from that morning’s gardening. “My only prayer is that this virus will die from my body.”
Since the LRA was chased out of northern Uganda in 2006, the flood of returnees has reduced to a trickle. But as a result of the diminishing numbers, government and humanitarian funding has dried up, and so too have the services that the returnees desperately need.
Nearly 350 abductees came home in the first six months of 2015; there were 599 in 2014.
Many, like Christine in the nighttime, will have to face their ghosts on their own.