Place-making and the everyday lives of children born into the Lord’s Resistance Army

ABSTRACT

After decades of war in northern Uganda, children born of forced marriage in the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) struggle to feel belonging. Based on data collected through a longitudinal study in the urban centre of Gulu town in northern Uganda with 29 children born into the LRA, this article offers a way to understand why the children are stigmatized in the places of their everyday lives. Stigmatization in the local postwar context is defined as having a moral dimension in which the children embody the insecurity and immorality of the war. Drawing on their stories about school and church, the article argues that stigmatization of the children can be understood as a place-making mechanism in people’s efforts to reclaim former places of violence, which results in the children’s sense of exclusion. The article concludes with a reflection on the importance of research with children born of war.

KEYWORDS:

• Children born into the LRA
• belonging
• place-making
• stigmatization
• Lord’s Resistance Army
• born of war

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I refer to this population of children as ‘children born into the LRA,’ rather than the more common refrain, ‘children born in captivity.’ I chose to do this, with approval from the study’s participants, to avoid the limitations inherent in the term captivity. Their experiences in the bush cannot uniformly be described as living in captivity.

2 Hereafter Proscovia.

3 Kristin Cheney (2007, 189–201) found a similar valuation of the child identity among former LRA child soldiers whereby they strategically used it to tap into international discourses of childhood to support their efforts to reintegrate and be accepted. Like Cheney’s informants, the children in this study likely insist on this identity for similar strategic reasons – to access the protections, rights, and assumptions of innocence.

4 Pseudonym.

5 Pseudonym.

6 The children consistently identified four important places in their lives: school, home/town, village, and church.

7 Often, people refer to children born into the LRA as Kony’s children, whether or not he is their biological father.

8 Pseudonym.

9 The boy referred to here was a study participant, Junior. Another participant and one non-participant were also students at this time. Junior’s background was given by his guardians and sponsoring organization.

10 Pseudonym.

11 CBC refers to children born in captivity. This acronym has become popular through the organization Watye ki gen, which works with many children born into the LRA.

12 Pseudonym.

13 Pseudonym.

14 Pseudonym.

15 All of Idro’s writing is in English. I made small grammatical corrections for clarity.

16 The 2000 Amnesty Act gave amnesty to those who reported to local officials, denounced the rebellion, and rescinded weapons.

17 My data suggest that the child’s past provides legitimacy to stepfathers’ disinterest and abuse. It is likely that general social permissibility of stigmatization toward children born into the LRA contributes to their reportedly high rates of domestic insecurity. Mothers also report stigmatization from husbands and in-laws, which they endure for reasons including financial need and social legitimacy of having a husband.

18 (Oloya 2002)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the doctoral award from the International Development Research Centre, and fieldwork and publication grants from the Liu Institute for Global Issues.