Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Walking through the kingdom of the Bunyoro had been much more challenging than our
earlier trek through the southern parts of Uganda. Perhaps memories of Baker lingered,
but it seemed outsiders were not looked upon kindly here. The local Bunyoro people had
given us little by way of help, and for the most part had been suspicious to the point of
being hostile.
'It's because of the LRA,' said Boston as, circumventing Masindi, we sat at the side of
a red dirt track with our rucksacks piled up. We had one spare rucksack that neither of us
could carry and in that was our food, water, tents and electrical gear - all the spare batter-
ies, cameras and solar panels we needed to charge them up. Emmanuel had left us on the
road to Masindi, returning proudly to his village with enough money to fulfil his dream of
owning a motorbike, only to be stopped and searched by police who, after giving the mat-
ter some careful consideration, decided to liberate him of all his hard-earned wages. Since
then, we'd managed to find lads with bicycles who'd been willing to come along for cash
and a bit of adventure, but one after another they absconded. We waited in the midday sun,
with only a banana tree for shade, and hoped that someone would come along and offer
help.
'The LRA ravaged this area,' Boston went on. 'They stole kids and raped women. That's
why these people are scared of foreigners. Did you see the way the children run away and
hide in the bush whenever we get near?'
I had, and I'd wondered why. It wasn't like in Rwanda, where they'd done it smiling,
for fun. Here they were genuinely scared.
'And all that was only a few years ago. The LRA were in these parts until about 2007,
before they ran further north.'
The LRA were the Lord's Resistance Army, a militant movement - and, in many ways, a
religious cult - with their heartland in northern Uganda and South Sudan, and bases of op-
eration as far afield as Boston's beloved Congo. Formed from the remnants of a civilian or-
ganisation called the Holy Spirit Mobile Force, which fought against the acts of terror per-
petrated by the government against the northern tribes in the mid-1980s, the Lord's Resist-
ance Army claims to be founding a theocratic state out of northern Uganda and southern
South Sudan, a nation based on a strict understanding of the Ten Commandments, as well
as on local traditions. This unique blend of African mysticism and Christian fundamental-
ism has manifested itself in frequent bouts of violence and human rights' abuses all across
the region. Boston was talking about rape and child abduction in Masindi, and stories like
this are not uncommon. The LRA has been accused of engaging in child-sex-trafficking,
female genital mutilation, as well as forcibly enlisting abducted children to their armies
and ritually preparing those enlistees as rapists of the future. The International Criminal
Court has had warrants out for the arrest of its leader, Joseph Kony - who proclaims him-
self God's spokesman on earth - for war crimes and human rights abuses since 2005, but
