Lwendo trembled when he considered the dangers of working in a virtual war zone. His luck had held during the guerrilla war: Would it hold in the north, a region he did not know and feared like hell? He feared getting ambushed more than anything else. Lwendo also imagined himself in a Rehab Ministry van or truck, flying in the air on the wings of a land mine and losing his limbs. The thought of becoming handicapped for the rest of his life almost made him lose his mind.
As a government representative, he would have to bend over backward to oblige the people, because the government wanted the northern people behind it in order to avoid looking like a southerner-dominated force of occupation.
Lwendo told me of his banishment and asked me for advice. I didn’t think he needed advice. He only wanted to hear his voice reflected in mine.
“Did you agree to go?” I asked.
“A soldier has to obey.”
“But you don’t have to. Drop out of the army.”
“That is what I am thinking about, but in the meantime, I have to act as though I am committed to going north.”
“Scary, eh!” I tried to make a joke of the situation.
“I would not want to be one of our boys fighting there. The army is extra strict on them in order to avoid vengeful atrocities on innocent civilians. I thought I had escaped all that mess, and now this bastard orders me to fly straight into that hell!”
I shook my head sadly.
“I would like you to do something for me,” he said, looking me in the eye. He had not shaved for a week, and he looked scruffy. I am being asked to pay for the money we made, I thought sickly.
“Yes?” I said none too cheerfully.
“I would like you to accompany me to the north on a scouting mission.”
“Are you mad? Do you want me to get killed?” The possibility loomed large of our vehicle rolling over a land mine that had been idly lying around for years. There were attacks by former Obote army brigands, meaner than ever because of the defeat and the hard times they had fallen on. I went over the map of northern Uganda in my mind. It was one thing to know the names of towns, the cash crops produced and what people did and fed on, but it was terra incognita in real terms. Beyond Lake Kyoga and the Nile River, every spot seemed to be full of brigands and hardened Obote fighters. “Do you want me to die?” I demanded.
Lwendo laughed hard, strangely. He was enjoying this bit, or he was just afraid that I would let him down. “Why are you so afraid of death?”
“I have eluded death all these years. Why do I have to go looking for it in the north?”
“That is putting it a bit too strongly. Most of the north has been pacified, except for some pockets of resistance. As it was here in the eighties, the fighting is confined to only a few areas. Elsewhere life is more or less normal.” He was saying this to reassure himself, not me. I convinced myself that I had no choice. I wasn’t feeling too loyal. I was just under a curious spell. I wanted to see part of the north for myself, and the truth was that I did not fear death, only the pain that might precede it.
Within seven days, we were on our way. I did not tell Aunt Lwandeka where I was going. She assumed that we were going to some Devastatated Area on some survey. We rode on a Ministry of Rehabilitation truck, which was part of a convoy taking supplies to the north. We had an army escort of four young boys around seventeen years of age. They were armed with AK-47 rifles, which reminded me of my nocturnal encounter with the Infernal Trinity. This was the first time in years that I had associated the attack directly with those ubiquitous guns. I looked at the curved magazines, the tapering muzzles and the shiny wooden bits and imagined the power that came from tickling the trigger. It wasn’t that glamorous. The price was indeed too high. As I looked at these boys who were the age of my SIMC students, I wondered how many people they had killed, and what their future would be like. Did they think about the people they shot? Would they think about them as they grew older? What effect would it have on their lives? Would they become compulsive killers? Here they were, escorting us, looking as though they could piss on a land mine and disarm it. I estimated that at the time they entered the bush, they must have been no older than thirteen. They had grown up in the bush. How were they adjusting to barracks life? They loved the power they had. I could see the swagger. They had been promised things, but what would happen if those promises were not fulfilled? I was more afraid of these kid soldiers than of their adult counterparts. The older soldiers seemed corruptible, a bit more cognizant of the problems of life: you could negotiate if you had something to offer them. These kids seemed addicted to obeying orders.
I remembered the time I was the age they were when they joined the guerrillas, the time I was having so much trouble with Padlock and Serenity and their despotism. If I had had the chance, or if the circumstances had been right for joining the army, I would have become a soldier. Where would I be now? Rattling in my cupboard would have been a few actual skeletons. I felt lucky that things had not come to that. I might have killed many Padlocks in proxy while the real Padlock was eating and breathing and raising her shitters in the pagoda. Maybe I would have doubled back and tortured her to death, consuming each gasp of blood-soaked breath with gusto. Well …
There was not much talk on our truck, or on the others for that matter. Lwendo, particularly, wanted to maintain his distance from the kid soldiers. He always warned me to keep away from soldiers.
“It is not worth it. When the chips fall, a friend will shoot you if ordered to.”
The other people on the truck also preferred to entertain their own thoughts. The boys, too, were afraid of the north and were trying to reassure themselves that the fear was in their minds. We were inside the former Luwero Triangle, speeding along the famous Gulu Road. I had never been this far before, and I was excited in a strange way. We stopped several times to piss, and to buy bananas, roasted corn on the cob, sweet potatoes and banana juice from peddlers along the road.
At Masindi, which was approximately at the latitude across the middle of the country where the old southern kingdoms came in contact with northern peoples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I started feeling that we were on foreign territory. I felt like a southern raider going north on some sinister mission. At the turn of the century, our grandfathers had come this far to help spread British colonial rule. Now we were on our way to see if the north and the south could live together after all that had happened. Lango District, a plains region, was just a river away. Its most famous son, Milton Obote, was seeking refuge in some foreign country, well away from the troubles he had caused the area and all of Uganda. Almost thirty years ago, he had left these harsh plains, crossed to the south like a true raider and, manipulating a political system riddled with faults, arrogance and ignorance, captured the biggest booty: leadership of Uganda. Now he had hung up his guns and his boots, leaving his people to their own devices. I tried to see what he had done for them. There was not much evidence of anything.
The ubiquitous green of the south had gone, giving way to open, dry land of short, sparse grass, puny trees and endless skies. It was hot and harsh here, and just looking at the dry, bare soil made me thirstier. The sun pounded down directly from the sky, without anything to catch it, and concentrated its fury on the land and the people. Winds picked up the dust and spun it in the sky in seemingly playful whirlwinds. This was tough country, where food and water and life had to be fought for every inch of the way.
We had some scary moments when one truck in the convoy broke down. While the problem was being fixed, everyone was on edge, as though brigands were going to surface from the earth and mow us down. The boy soldiers no longer looked so confident. I could see my friend Lwendo sweating hard under his armpits and looking this way and that, as though the place were haunted by vampires.