The Shadow of the Sun

The Ambush

We were driving north from Kampala, toward Uganda’s border with Sudan. At the head of the motorcade was a truck with a heavy machine gun protruding above the cab, followed by a truck carrying a platoon of soldiers, then several passenger cars, and, at the rear, an open-backed Japanese pickup, in which we three journalists were seated. It had been a long while since I had traveled in such comfort, protected by a military unit, and, moreover, one armed with a heavy machine gun! But all this, of course, was not on my account. The escort was for three ministers from President Yoweri Museveni’s government, on a peace mission to the rebels marauding in the country’s northern regions. Museveni, in power for two years now (it is 1988), had just proclaimed an amnesty for those who surrendered and voluntarily turned in their arms. The fighters in question were soldiers from the armies of Idi Amin, Milton Obote, and Tito Okello, three successive Ugandan dictators who in recent years had fled abroad, leaving their troops behind. The armed men were now robbing and murdering, burning villages and stealing cattle, decimating and terrorizing the northern provinces — for all intents and purposes, half the country. Museveni’s divisions were too weak to control the rebels. Therefore, the president had extended an olive branch to them. He was the first Ugandan leader in twenty-five years to turn to his enemies with words of accord, understanding, and peace.

There are three soldiers in our pickup in addition to the two local reporters and myself. They have swung their Kalashnikovs over bare shoulders (it is hot, and they have removed their shirts). Their names are Onom, Semakula, and Konkoti. The eldest among them, Onom, is seventeen. I sometimes read stories about a child in America or Europe shooting at another child. A child killing one of his contemporaries, or an adult. Such news is usually accompanied by expressions of horror and outrage. In Africa, children kill children in enormous numbers, and have been doing so for years. In fact, modern wars on this continent have been, and still are, largely wars of children.

In those places where conflict has lasted decades (as in Angola or Sudan), the majority of older people were killed long ago, or perished from hunger and disease; children remain, and it is they who are doing the fighting. The bloody chaos in which various African countries are plunged has spawned tens of thousands of orphans, hungry and homeless. They look for anyone who might feed and shelter them, and it is easiest to find food where the troops are, because soldiers have the best chances of obtaining it: weapons in these countries are not only for waging war, but are a means of survival — sometimes the only means.

Abandoned, lonely children gravitate to where troops are garrisoned, where they have their barracks and camps. They help out, work, become part of the army, “sons of the regiment.” They are given weapons and quickly undergo a baptism by fire. Their older companions (also children) often laze about, and when a confrontation with the enemy is pending, send the little ones to the front lines, into the thick of battle. These armed encounters between youngsters are particularly fierce and bloody, because a child does not have the instinct for self-preservation, does not feel dread or comprehend death, does not experience the fear that only maturity will evoke.

The wars of children have also been made possible by technological developments. Today, handheld automatic weapons are short and light, the newer models increasingly resembling children’s toys. The old Mauser was too long, too big, and too heavy for a child. A child’s small arm could not reach freely for the trigger, and he had difficulty taking aim. Modern design has solved these problems, eliminated the inconveniences. The dimensions of weapons are now perfectly suited to a boy’s physique, so much so that in the hands of tall, massive men, the new guns appear somewhat comical and childish.

Because the child is capable only of using handheld, short-range weapons (he cannot conduct long-range artillery fire, or pilot a bomber), clashes in these children’s wars take the form of savagely unmediated collisions, of close, almost physical contact; the children fire at one another separated by just a step. The toll, typically, is frightful. And it is not only those killed then and there who perish. In the conditions under which these wars are fought, the wounded will also die — from loss of blood, from infection, from lack of medicines.

After a whole day of driving we reached the town of Soroti. Along the way we had passed burned-out villages and settlements — all of them plundered practically into nonexistence. The soldiers had taken everything they possibly could — not only what the inhabitants had on their backs, not only their furniture and household effects, the tools with which they worked and the dishes from which they ate, but all pipes, wires, and nails, all windows, doors, and even roofs. Like ants working on a bone, leaving behind not the tiniest trace of meat, so the successive waves of marauders in predatory flight had stripped the countryside of everything and anything that could be moved and transported. Soroti, too, was in ruins, the gas station wrecked, the pumps missing, the school benches carried off. Many of the houses had been reduced to mere skeletons, but some had survived, among them the hotel in which we stopped for the night. A group of local notables was already waiting for us — merchants, teachers, army men — surrounded by a crowd of curious onlookers. A round of greetings began, of shoulder slapping and laughter.

Soroti is the capital of a region inhabited by the Iteso, a handsome Nilo-Hamitic people. They are more than a million strong, divided into numerous tribes and clans. Their main occupation is raising cattle. The cow is their greatest treasure. It is not only a measure of wealth, but is also thought to possess mystical attributes. Its existence, the mere fact of its presence, connects the human being to an invisible higher world. The Iteso give their cattle names, and believe that each one has its own personality, its own character. At a certain age, an Iteso boy is given a cow to take care of. During a special ceremony, he also assumes its name — from then on he will be called what it is called. The child plays with his cow, spends his free moments with it, is responsible for it.

Among those greeting us was an acquaintance of mine from the sixties, the then-minister Cuthbert Obwanor. I was happy at this encounter, and we fell immediately into conversation. I wanted him to show me around, because it was my first time in these parts. We set out for a walk, though I quickly found it a somewhat disconcerting experience. It is the local custom for women, when they see a man walking toward them, to move to the side, kneel, and wait on their knees until he approaches. He greets them, and in response to this they inquire whether there is anything they can do for him. If he answers “Nothing,” they wait until he passes, and only then rise and go on their way. Similar scenes were repeated later, as I sat with Cuthbert on a bench in front of his house: passing women came up to us, knelt, and silently waited. Sometimes my host, busy talking, failed to notice them. They would continue to wait, motionless, until he finally greeted them and wished them farewell, at which point they would get up and walk away. Despite its being evening already, it was still hot, and the atmosphere was stifling, warm and heavy. Hidden in the deep recesses of the night, crickets chirped loudly and insistently.

In the end, we were invited by the local authorities to the one bar still operating. It was called Club 2000. On the second floor was a little salon for important guests, where we were seated at a long table. The waitresses came in, young, tall girls. Each knelt down before her designated guest and said her name. Then they walked out, and returned carrying an enormous steaming clay pitcher filled with marva, a hot local beer made out of millet seeds. You drink marva through a long, hollowed-out reed called an epi. This reed now started to circulate among the guests. Each drew a few sips and passed it to his neighbor. As this was going on, the waitresses poured into the pitcher either more water or more marva: this — what they pour in and how quickly the epi circulates — determines the revelers’ degree of drunkenness. Soroti, like this entire region, has one of the highest incidences of AIDS in the world, and this drinking session took place in the days when it was still believed that HIV could be transmitted through saliva. Each time you reached for the epi, you were bidding your life farewell. But what could you do? Refuse? That would have been considered a great insult, a sign that you held your hosts in contempt.

In the morning, before we set off, two Dutch missionaries arrived, Albert and Johan. Exhausted, covered in dust, they had trudged to Soroti to “see people from the big world”: for them, living as they had for more than a decade in this outback, Kampala had become the great world. They did not travel to Europe, did not want to leave the church and the mission buildings (they lived somewhere near the Sudanese border), afraid that upon their return they would find only bare, scorched walls. The area where they worked is a vast, hot savannah, dry in the summer, green during the rainy season, the endless, remote stretches of northeastern Uganda, inhabited by the people who so fascinate many anthropologists, the Karimojong. The residents of Kampala speak of their kinsmen from Karimojong (it is at once the name of a place, a people, and a person) with distaste and embarrassment. The Karimojong walk around naked, and insist upon this custom, seeing the human body as beautiful (and in fact they are magnificently built, tall and slender). Their intransigence on this score has yet another basis: most of the Europeans who reached them in the early years of African exploration rapidly fell ill and died, from which the Karimojong deduced that clothing causes illness, and getting dressed is tantamount to sentencing yourself to death. (In their system of belief, furthermore, suicide is the greatest sin imaginable.) That is why they were always desperately afraid of clothing. Amin, who believed that going about naked demeans Africans, issued a decree against the custom, and his troops executed on the spot anyone they caught without clothes. The terrified Karimojong would obtain wherever they could a piece of fabric, a shirt, or pants, roll this up into a little bundle, and carry it around with them. Upon hearing that army vehicles were nearby, or that a government agent had been seen nosing about, they would get dressed, and with great relief remove everything again as soon as the coast was clear.

The Karimojong are cattle breeders, and milk is their main source of nourishment. Related to the Iteso, they too regard cows as mystical beings and their greatest treasure. They believe that God gave to them, and to them alone, all the cattle in the world, and that it is their historical mission to recover these creatures. With this goal in mind, they relentlessly organize armed incursions against neighboring tribes. These cattle raids are part pillaging expeditions, part patriotic missions, and part religious duty. A young boy must take part in a cattle raid to attain the status of a man. The forays are the principal subject of native legends, tales, myths. They have their heroes, their histories, their mystical themes.

Father Albert described such an expedition. The Karimojong walk single file, he said, at an even pace, in tight formation. They move along well-trodden paths of war. Each division numbers two hundred, three hundred men. They sing songs or emit loud, rhythmic cries. Their reconnaissance having earlier established the location of grazing herds belonging to another people, their objective is to abduct these herds. When they reach their destination, there is a battle. The Karimojong are well-trained, fearless fighters, which is why they usually triumph and succeed in making off with the spoils.

“The thing is,” said Father Albert, “that in times past these columns were armed with spears and arrows. During a skirmish, several people died, and the rest either surrendered or fled. And today? There are still these columns of naked men, but now they are armed to the teeth with automatic weapons. They start firing right away, massacre the local population, destroy villages with grenades, sow death. These are still the traditional tribal conflicts, the same ones as centuries ago, only now they claim an incomparably greater number of victims. Modern civilization has not reached us,” he concludes. “There are no electric lamps here, no telephones, no television. The only aspect of it that has penetratred is automatic weapons.”

I asked the missionary what their work entails, what kinds of problems they face.

“This is a very difficult terrain,” Father Johan admitted. “These people ask us how many gods there are in our religion, and whether we have a special god for cattle. We explain to them that there is only one god. This disappoints them. Our religion is better, they say; we have a special god who takes care of cattle. After all, cows are the most important thing!”

We set off, before noon, heading deeper north, our pickup again bringing up the rear, but we had not gone far before we heard an explosion, shots, and then terrifying screams. We were on a narrow laterite road, full of holes and ruts, running between two walls of dense, three-meter-high elephant grass.

We had fallen into an ambush.

We cowered inside the truck, not knowing what to do. Stay inside? Jump out?

In Africa, the ambush is the most frequently used form of combat. It has many advantages for those setting it. First of all, the benefit of surprise: people driving along a road are incapable of maintaining their alertness and readiness for an entire day; in this climate, on these roads, they tire quickly and become drowsy. Secondly, the attackers are invisible to those approaching, and so are safe themselves. Thirdly, the successful ambush not only defeats an adversary, but also yields invaluable material conquests — cars, uniforms, provisions, weapons. The technique of the ambush also suits those for whom heat, hunger, and thirst (the permanent state of the local rebels and soldiers) make long marches and rapid regroupings difficult. A group of armed men can occupy a shady, comfortable place in the bush and calmly lounge about until their victim falls into their hands.

They apply two different tactics. The first is called hit and run, and this still gives those being ambushed some chance of collecting themselves and fighting back. The second, hit and hit (i.e., shoot, and shoot again), usually ends in death for the ambushed.

In the end, we jumped out of the car and ran to the front of the column. The attackers had hit the truck with a missile. A dead soldier lay on the truck bed, and two others were wounded. The front window had shattered; blood was seeping from under the sleeve of one man’s uniform. There was chaos, disorder, people running along the length of the convoy, here and there, without rhyme or reason. No one knew what would happen the very next moment, the very next second. Were our enemies close by, hidden behind the thick, tall grasses, observing our hysterical commotion, pointing their guns at us, calmly taking aim? We had no idea what awaited us, into whose hands we had fallen. Instinctively I started to scrutinize the walls of green, trying to make out the shapes of gun barrels pointed in our direction.

Eventually, the truck went back to Soroti, in reverse gear, because the road was too narrow for it to turn around. We pushed on ahead. However, the officers decided that we should not ride in the cars, but proceed slowly on foot, walking behind the soldiers who, guns at the ready, headed up the procession.