The evening of our lives: Elegy for Akonyi Bedo

NEXUS | The IGL Newsletter | Fall 2008

The evening of our lives: Elegy for Akonyi Bedo

By Sam James

Throughout the course of 22 years of conflict in Northern Uganda, Lazarus Nyero never left home. His village hut was not burned, unlike nearly every other hut in the area. He was never harmed, unlike the tens of thousands killed and maimed. The conflict uprooted nearly 1.9 million people, who fled their villages to sprawling camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). For more than 15 years, Lazarus lived in isolation.

Like his father, and many generations before him, Lazarus was born in Akonyi Bedo, a small Acholi village located 15 kilometers outside of Gulu town. Like his father, he was a farmer. His plot produced beans, maize, sugar cane and groundnuts. He built his home with his hands. He has lived there for 73 years.

In the late 1980s, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) began attacking civilians and abducting children. By the mid-1990s, Akonyi Bedo was abandoned, with most residents relocating to the nearby Unyama IDP camp. The LRA rebels came to Lazarus’ home often, demanding to know where the government soldiers were located. He did not know. They left him.

He had a family. His wife passed away at a young age. Of his four children, some were abducted, some returned.

In 2004, the Ugandan Army forced Lazarus to move closer to the village’s main road, where his safety could be better monitored by government troops who were assigned to protect the area. During this time, his original home was demolished, not by LRA attacks, but by termites.

He has never seen money, but maintains himself with quiet dignity. He keeps his one pair of nice shoes on a shelf in his hut. They are creased and weathered, but shined. On his straw mat, he keeps a neatly folded, thread bare, blanket. He uses a rope to hold up his oversized trousers. His bones are fragile and his skin loose. His face is carved with deep crevices and his eyes burn like black embers.

“I am the winner,” he says. He knows survival.

When fortunate, he sips the local “dry water” gin. Here he drifts in and out of memories. Adong, his 70-year old neighbor, serves him a glass. Adong only recently returned to the village after many years in the Unyama camp. Here in the village she spends her days brewing gin and tending to small children. She laughs as the baby in her lap tries to suck her breast. “I am dry,” she chuckles. Her dress stays loose, occasionally revealing ancient traces of motherhood. She pours herself a hot glass as well.

These are the elderly. Since the conflict ceasefire, they are the first to return home to the land that nurtured them. They enjoy simple pleasures. They are forever patient. But life is ephemeral. When a neighbor dies, they come together to fulfill their obligations.

In Acholiland, safe passage for the deceased is not ensured until three nights after the body is placed in the earth. Three nights after the death of their neighbor, Lazarus, Adong and the other village elders trek through the bush to join the family in mourning. They arrive as the sun sets. With one cup and a large plastic jug, they share dry water until their minds are thoroughly engulfed. Elderly men take turns beating cowhide drums with heavy wooden sticks. Elderly women scrape gourds across a log. They all sing.

With slow, wobbly steps and shuffles, they gather around the drummer. Lazarus gradually rises from his chair and joins the rickety mob of jiving elders. Though his fragile frame can no longer keep up with the frenetic Acholi stomp, his movements are graceful and composed.

Eventually, singing turns to shrieking, which in turn leads to stomping. The stomping continues into the early morning, until old bones can no longer stand straight.

So much depends on the rhythm. Periodically while dancing, old women tilt their heads back and wail into the sky. The tears flow deep into the night, but the bodies do not stop swaying to the drum. Joy and sorrow blend in the stomp. This is the release. With sweat and tears, the Acholi confront death and celebrate life.

For 22 years, the Acholi were unable to perform their cultural obligations to the dead. During the conflict, a body could sometimes be transported to the village during the day and quickly buried without ceremony. More commonly, the elders would be forced to conduct haphazard ceremonies within cramped and foreign IDP camps.

But now, they can resume their duties. Sipping gin in the twilight, exhausted elders huddle around a small bonfire, discussing the legacy of their culture. For the first time in nearly two decades they can feel free to pass the night in the village and properly celebrate their deceased brothers and sisters. But what is missing is that which has always been missing since the conflict. The youth have not returned

Abducted, displaced and uprooted, the youth remain scattered. Many have spent their entire lives in IDP camps. They have no connection to the land that nurtured the generations before them. This distresses the elders, whose duty it is to preserve and pass on the culture.

An ancient face around the fire proclaims, “This is the evening of our lives. The hours are weak. Let us not allow our culture fade away into the night.” They discuss until the new day arrives.

For Lazarus, it is the same as any day. Using his walking staff, he slowly eases himself from the wooden chair where he passed the night. Like so many days before, he resumes the solitary march to his field.

Samuel James is a senior, majoring in Political Science. He is an IGL Synaptic Scholar, a member of the EXPOSURE program, and was a student in the EPIIC 2007-08 class. This piece is based on the work he did as part of the EXPOSURE-Aftermath workshop in northern Uganda in August 2008.

The late August EXPOSURE workshop held in northern Uganda with Sara Terry of the Aftermath Project explored issues related to the longstanding civil war in northern Uganda, which has been on hold under a ceasefire agreement for the past few years.

A former staff correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and magazine freelance writer, Terry made a mid-career transition into photojournalism and documentary photography in the late 1990s. Her long-term project about the aftermath of war in Bosnia -- “Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace” -- was published in September 2005 by Channel Photographics. Her work has been widely exhibited, at such venues as the United Nations, the Museum of Photography in Antwerp, and the Moving Walls exhibition at the Open Society Institute in New York. Her photographs are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and in many private collections. In 2005, she received a prestigious Alicia Patterson Fellowship for her work in Bosnia. She is also the founder of The Aftermath Project (www.theaftermathproject.org), a non-profit grant program, which helps photographers cover the aftermath of conflict. She also received the prestigious Lucie Awards 2008 Humanitarian Award. She is represented by Polaris Images. She is currently working on her next long-term project, “Forgiveness and Conflict: Lessons from Africa.”

The workshop was designed to bring students into a post-conflict situation where they could study, through images and interviews, the issues that are all too often neglected in the aftermath of conflict -- when the media has already moved on, to cover other stories of war, while those affected by conflict are struggling to rebuild their lives. Terry invited Stephen Alvarez, a photographer who has worked extensively with National Geographic and who made several trips to northern Uganda during the height of the twenty-year-plus war there, to work as a guest teacher with her.

The seven Tufts students and one student from the University of Delhi (who had participated in the EPIIC symposium in 2008) explored a variety of issues, from life in a camp for internally displaced persons, to lives of the elderly and young women, as well as more personal subjects such as forgiveness and what does it mean to be twenty one years old in a post-conflict setting. Claire Putzeys, a second year Fletcher School graduate student who has worked with Terry in northern Uganda and who is writing her MALD thesis on the reintegration of child soldiers, assisted the students with their preparation and research at Tufts and in Uganda.