African apocalypse: Uganda’s child terrorists

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However cretinous and misguided the recent internet documentary on Joseph Kony — Kony 2012 — may be, the fact that 32 million people watched it in four days suggests that people have finally cottoned on to the horrors perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. The tragedy, of course, is that it’s all come far too late. Kony is currently in hiding somewhere in southern Sudan while, according to Ugandan army sources, there are only about 200 LRA members left in the jungle.

But the legacy of Kony’s violence will be around for a long time. This was brutality of an unimaginable kind. Parents were forced to bludgeon their own children to death — and children to do the same to their parents. The LRA made their victims eat human flesh, cut off their noses and lips and “derived sensual pleasure from burning people alive”.

What made these crimes especially dreadful was that they were carried out by children — some as young as eight. As Wojciech Jagielski explains, in many respects children make ideal soldiers: they’re not afraid of death; they’re too young to know the difference between good and evil and, most importantly, “you can teach them anything you like”.

There have been plenty of books on the LRA before but I very much doubt if there will be a better one than this. Jagielski, a veteran Polish foreign correspondent, carefully sets the LRA rebellion in context, showing how tribal divisions, political chaos and the growth of a particularly apocalyptic brand of fundamentalism provided conditions in which Kony was able to thrive.

However, the book is far more than just a history: it’s a journey into human baseness, a journey from which no one — including Jagielski himself — emerges unscarred, or entirely rational. It’s a journey too into a place where the normal hierachy of life — old at the top, young at the bottom — has been turned on its head.

“Children are different here,” someone tells him at the start. An army colonel warns Jagielski that if he’s driving along and sees a group of children up ahead, he must turn back immediately. “And if they show up close to you and it’s too late to turn around, keep going at full speed.”

At times, he finds, it’s like living in a terrible dreamscape where everyone — perpetrators as well as victims — has turned into hollowed-out husks. As night descends in one town, children materialise out of the darkness — some in school uniform, some holding hands — and lie down and sleep in the street, fearful of being kidnapped if they stay in the bush. “The next morning there wasn’t a trace of the children left.”

Later on, Jagielski meets Kony’s former deputy, Kenneth Banya, notorious for forcing pubescent girls to be his “brides”. He finds a white-haired, neatly dressed old man who “looked more like a respectable retired civic dignitary than a savage rebel from the bush”. They sit and drink tea together with Banya asking solicitously: “Would you like a drop more milk?”

Jagielski is a rich, dark stylist who occasionally topples into over-writing — although this might be the fault of the translation. At the same time, he’s not the sort of writer who bangs on about himself any more than necessary. But by the end of this remarkable book, there’s a sense that he has lost almost all the convictions that underpinned his life and is having to build himself up again from scratch. As for the people he leaves behind, they, I suspect, are shattered beyond any hope of repair.

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