Rebels Without A Cause

By Daniel Simpson

GULU, Uganda - What can atone for the mutilated children who’ve learned to smile without lips, to clasp pens with stumpy limbs and even to flirt with forgiveness? For the militia of abducted villagers and teenage gunmen terrorising northern Uganda, the first step towards justice crushes an egg.

On a knoll outside Gulu, a bustling town on the frontier of Africa’s most neglected war zone, 60 former rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) line up to repent of their crimes at a traditional cleansing ceremony. All have recently surrendered to the government, or been captured in skirmishes with Ugandan troops. Their right feet are bare. On their left, some sport battered flip-flops; others the footwear of choice for guerrillas across the continent: green wellington boots.

Wailing ululations from local tribeswomen crescendo above a bassline beat out by a drummer in a “50 Cent” T-shirt as the procession of LRA commanders, footsoldiers and their child brides hobbles towards a solitary egg, propped up in the dust by a forked stick. The first foot cracks its shell, smearing the branch with a slimy coating for the others to tread on before shaking hands with a tribal chief clad in white robes and a pinstriped jacket. Reconciliation is officially under way.

FILM: available here.

“When two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled.” (African proverb)

“This is just a peace-building measure to build confidence, to let them come back, let us have peace and then people are going to talk,” explained Rwot David Onen Acana II, who was crowned paramount chief of the Acholi tribe in January after studying conflict resolution strategies at Birmingham University. “An egg symbolises purity and innocence and yet there is life in it, so we do this as a means of purification and indicating the innocence of these people because they were taken against their will.”

The LRA doesn’t accept recruits; it kidnaps them. Tens of thousands of abducted Acholis, a substantial proportion of them children, have kept the northern insurgency alive for 19 years. Their obedience is secured at gunpoint, sometimes accompanied by orders to commit atrocities as grotesque as murdering their own families and eating the boiled corpses.