When George Omona first saw soldiers in the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, he was amazed. The scary fighters who had terrorised people for decades across a big chunk of Africa turned out to be emaciated teenagers with dirty clothes who could hardly hold the big guns they carried. Some were unarmed children, barely ten years old. He felt sorry for them. ‘They could not have known anything else but living in the forest like wild animals.’
Soon he had joined their pack, a reluctant member of one of the world’s most notorious rebel groups. A bright boy who dreamed of becoming a teacher, George ended up a bodyguard to one of the world’s most bloodstained killers. He sought to avoid the massacres, murder and rape that were the trademarks of Joseph Kony’s army. But then he was forced to bayonet an old man in the chest, soon going on to beat and stab several more people to death. ‘It’s not my fault,’ he told himself. ‘I am just a soldier, only obeying orders.’
This is, of course, the standard defence of barbarism. Yet what is revealing in this absorbing book is both the utter wretchedness of life in a guerrilla group and the pointless dynamic of the spiralling violence that wrecks so many lives in one of the poorest parts of the planet. The author says he has interviewed more than 500 former LRA members, but in George he struck lucky and found someone with the ability to articulate the harsh reality of life inside a haggard group that has spread terror for so long in four countries on the continent.
George joined voluntarily after growing up in in its Acholi heartland of northern Uganda.
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