Love in the bush

Mar 27, 2009

Angela, a 19-year-old mother now under the care of Rachelle Rehabilitation Centre, Lira, says she was abducted by LRA when she was 12 and repeatedly raped.

Angela, a 19-year-old mother now under the care of Rachelle Rehabilitation Centre, Lira, says she was abducted by LRA when she was 12 and repeatedly raped.

She says at the time she was in the bush, Kony had 52 wives and that many young abducted girls became his sex slaves once they reached puberty.

Angela, a short, soft-spoken woman, guesses that she was Kony’s forty-sixth ‘wife’. Today Angella is the mother of Kony’s three-year-old son. She says Kony loves his children and names them according to circumstance in which they were born.

The view that Kony loves his children is reinforced by other former abductees. Kony’s children are said to receive preferential treatment. They are given better food and receive primary school education from abducted teachers.

“While we were in Sudan, Kony’s children and his commanders were going to school. They ate food from Juba. The rest of us only ate the beans and millet we cultivated,” says Bernard Ochan, a former abductee.

“During droughts, the rest of us had to attack Sudanese villages to get food, while Kony’s children continued to be well-fed,” the 17-year-old added.
However, the rebel chief has sired so many children that he doesn’t know some of them.

Ochora narrates that during the 2006 Juba talks, he took Kony’s son, Lubagatek. “When I told him, ‘Joseph, this is your son’, he could not believe though he was happy to see him,” Ochora said.

Lubagatek, one of Kony’s elder sons, is in Senior Six vacation and lives in Gulu.

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