We arrived at a camp with several large lean-tos, more trucks and many more people. We were unloaded and left to stand in the dust, guarded by one of the older children. The sunlight felt hazy and unreal. Everything was strange, like we’d been dropped in a ghost forest, with demons lurking beneath rotting brush. The air was sour, metallic, and there were dragons everywhere, breathing smoke and fire.
Mosi was watching something intently, squinting against the sun. I followed his eyes to a loud group of dragon soldiers who were shoving each other and laughing. Some were sitting on the ground but most were standing, leaning on sticks, guns and machetes. They were all green except for a blue one in the centre. It was Mashaka, my brother. He was laughing too and never glanced our way no matter how hard we stared. Someone handed him a cigarette and as he held it to his mouth, his skin began to buckle, forming scales. By the time he had exhaled the grey smoke from his nose, he was a dragon too.
Hours passed and no one brought us anything to eat or drink, but the entire time two or three dragons with guns half-watched us. I became desperate to pee. When I stood up and gestured to the guard to try to show him what I needed, he glared at me and waved with his gun for me to sit down again. I sat. I was afraid and sick to my stomach from lack of food and fear all mixed up inside and in the end I peed where I sat. I could not look at anybody.
Mosi spent the time trying to soothe Kesi, but he could not talk above a whisper or the dragons would come and kick him. She just cried and cried. There was no hushing her or stopping her even when there were no tears left.
I shuffled away from where I had wet the ground and slumped over to lie with my cheek in the dust. I watched the ants. Funny how they never seemed to stop working. Sometimes I blew some air at one to force him to change his path. He would tumble over with all his legs waving wildly, then right himself and find his way back to the trail. I fell asleep trying to picture myself following them to their home, slipping into their hole and down, down into their kitchen. Sipping tea with their king and telling him how industrious and determined his subjects were.
The dragons left us there all night. When I woke the sky was as black as the ink in the little bottle on Baingana’s desk and I could see nothing at all, just feel Kesi still shuddering, hear Mosi still murmuring. I struggled to sit up, and then wiggled close to them, hoping to share our warmth.
The next day we were put into a truck and driven back to our village. We were all exhausted from broken sleep and weak from no food or water. My clothes were stiff and smelled sour from my accident. But as bad as I felt, our village looked a thousand times worse, blackened and burned and in places still smoking. Clothes and cooking utensils were strewn everywhere, but I didn’t see any people. They’d hurt Baingana, but maybe they just scared the rest away.
The soldiers let us out of the truck and didn’t seem to care if we wandered around—our hands were still tied. Mosi, Kesi and I ran awkwardly to our hut, but it had been burned to the ground. Our parents were not there.
My soul and the souls of my ancestors in me lurched in agony to see the faint pattern of what had been my mother’s garden, the clever design of beans and corn that her grandmother had passed down to her. This little plot of land—our garden, our hut—on which generations of our family had lived, died, been buried and born, had been alive. Now it was dead, and we had nothing.
Kesi began to cry again, but I felt as though I was floating away from her and from Mosi. I twisted to snap a twig off my charred avocado tree and tucked it in my waistband.
Some soldiers appeared and herded us back to the village centre, prodding us along with their guns. A swirl of sound and smells assaulted us there, and I felt like I’d gone blind. My head was spinning and I fell to the ground, a sharp, terrible smell of metal and salt in the air.
More soldiers were coming from the direction of the schoolhouse, shoving several adults in front of them. A woman fell, and several of the soldiers stopped to kick her, then hauled her up and pushed her toward us.
BANG! Everyone jumped and screamed, and looked around with the whites of their eyes showing. A tall man, a gun in his hand, was climbing out of the cab of another truck as several children jumped off the back to follow him.
“You see?” the man shouted at us. “These stupid people thought they would ambush you! Shoot and kill you! These are the enemies of the struggle. They are traitors, they are cockroaches, and they must be exterminated!”
Most of the adults were weeping, pleading. One woman sobbed and said, “We were protecting and supporting you,” but a young boy soldier pushed her and kicked her in the stomach as she fell, causing the others to laugh.
Mosi gasped, and we all saw Daddy. He saw us at the same moment and jerked forward, shouting our names.
The leader flew toward us like a giant wasp, his voice a buzzing drone. “If you are to join us, it is essential that you understand the importance of our fight and prove your loyalty. These traitors, they must be punished for starting this war, for turning against their people. They are nothing but infected dogs, they are dirty insects and must be destroyed before they infect more minds and pollute our cause of freedom.”
I stared at the ground, shaking, as Mosi raised himself up, his arms still tied behind his back.
“This is my father,” he said in a loud, clear voice. “These are all our people, and we will not allow them to be harmed.” A hideous scream, a terrible, terrible sound, punctuated Mosi’s words.
I raised my eyes to the squirming, writhing mass of our elders in front of us and saw flashes of blue, of red. And then my eyes focused on Mashaka, a soldier’s bandana around his head. He was holding a bloody machete in one hand and our father’s head in the other. He was grasping Daddy’s hair, tilting his face to the sky, his exposed neck split open like a goat’s. Mashaka was yelling and dancing and jerking in all directions. His eyes were wide and wild and seemed to pierce everything he looked at.
Mosi and I lunged forward, screaming, and everything exploded. Some of the soldiers began shooting and hacking at the elders, as others grabbed us children by the necks and pushed us to the ground. In the chaos I lost track of my sister, could not see the flash of pink anywhere.
Mosi was next to me, with a fat soldier’s knee in his back and a gun in his face.
“Where’s Kesi?” I choked out, my voice cracking.
Mosi began kicking, hard.
Then we heard her scream and both of our heads craned to find her under the mango tree in the schoolyard. The air turned thick between us as her tiny body was torn free of her brilliant pink wrapper. Giant black arms pulled her limbs, pushed her little skinny legs apart. She was screaming out of fear and pain, and Mosi attempted to fight his way up from the ground only to be hit in the head with a rifle butt and collapse face down in the dirt. Everyone around me went quiet then, all of us listening to the noises the soldiers were making over my sister. I did not look up until those noises stopped. The last man was doing up his belt as the rest of them moved away, and Kesi was lying still and quiet. I struggled to my feet and took an unsteady step toward her but then a massive blow to the back of my head knocked me to the ground, and all went black.
I woke in a blind panic, my heart pounding. My arms were free. I pushed myself to my feet and found myself in a grassy clearing, with low huts scattered here and there, and rows of lean-tos around it. It hurt to walk, and my head throbbed with every step, but I wanted to find Mosi.
There were soldiers everywhere, huddled in groups or carrying piles of wood and metal. Some were in army greens, others in blue jeans and long-sleeved shirts, still others were dressed like me, only dirtier.
Mosi wasn’t anywhere that I could see. The camp itself had a cluttered, messy feel to it. I could smell the uncertainty and chaos, I could feel it on my skin.
I looked down at my hands, which seemed far away and not a part of me. The wrists were raw and the palms were red. Red. My heart started to pound again and my eyes welled with tears, remembering. I pressed the tail of my shirt against my eyes hard, so colours swirled and flashed. My clothes were dirty and torn. No, I would not think.
Mosi was nowhere to be seen. I was all alone.
I felt something poking my back and reached into my waistband to find the charred avocado twig. Crying hard now, I snapped it in half, into quarters, destroying it like the rest of my world. Gone gone gone. Kidom destroyed as much as my home world.
An older boy walked straight toward me, thin and dressed in green camouflage. He gestured to me to sit down, and then he hunkered next to me and handed me a drink. I took the cup from him and drank the bitter liquid till the cup was empty, feeling both grateful and ashamed for taking anything from these people. But I had not eaten or drunk for two days.
The boy took the empty cup back without a word and patted me on the shoulder. My mouth was full of the nasty taste of the drink and I longed for some clear water.
I couldn’t help thinking about Kesi, and tears started to leak from my eyes when suddenly my brain seemed to leap to the side. Whoosh! Then it was normal again. Then whoosh, whoosh. I tried to raise my gaze from the ground but it followed me. Everything was swirling, and I could feel my sadness easing as the world transformed into giant grains of sand and huge monster blades of grass.
An ant crawled onto my hand and looked me in the eye. He waved his little front leg hello.
“Welcome,” he said. “You are finally here!”
I turned my head and body around slowly. I was in Kidom! It wasn’t destroyed and it wasn’t make-believe.
I was about to reply to the ant, when his pincers began to grow bigger and bigger. His face was growing cruel, and I was getting smaller and smaller.
More ants were coming toward me, crawling over me, nipping my flesh. I struggled to get away but my body was filled with wet sand. Then wasps and mosquitoes were filling the air around my head, moving in slow motion. Coming to get me. I fell back into the darkness, alone.
As the next day passed, I began to notice the comings and goings of these children in uniform. The only adults hung out under a shelter at the far end of the camp, sitting around wooden tables and talking long into the night, sometimes laughing loudly. Older boys led groups of littler children out into the bush around us, and sometimes I could hear the bang of guns. I could walk a little more easily, but my headache was unrelenting and they mostly left me to myself. I wanted to find Mosi and I wanted to get away from this terrible place. I needed a plan. Since I missed my family so much, surely these young soldiers must miss theirs too. Why did they all stay? There were no fences around the camp, but the bush was thick and I just did not know in what direction to go. My village was gone, my father and little sister were dead. I didn’t know what happened to my mother, or where Mosi was, and Mashaka … he was dead to me now.
The older boy who had given me the awful drink came to find me a couple times and talked to me a bit. One suppertime he brought me a bowl of beans, and as I ate he told me a little about himself.
“I was selected years ago,” he said, “and became a good fighter. Then one day a fancy white truck drove into our camp and some white people in clean shirts took me and the other boys away. We went to a tall building in the city, and were told we were no longer soldiers. I was given money—they called it a trust fund. I took the money and bought jeans and sneakers. Then I had nothing else to do and no one to talk to, and in that city there was no place to sleep except in an alley. So I came back.”
“Why didn’t you try to find your family?”
He just looked at me as though I was stupid.
After that, he offered me more of the bitter drink, and instead of saying no I reached for the cup again.
Even though it didn’t seem like anyone was paying attention to me, when my head stopped hurting, they showed me a lean-to built of large branches from banana trees and said that this was where I would sleep. They put me to work collecting firewood with the other new recruits. Tired, thirsty, dirty, discouraged and lost, we were jumpy and raw. When I gathered firewood at home, I would often dawdle, playing in Kidom. Here, I was under guard, trapped in this world, the only release the bitter drink. But rather than making the world brighter and bigger, the drink closed things in so that I could cower inside it. If I asked for it, though, Christian (this was the older boy’s name) would laugh and walk away. For some reason, it had to be offered.
As we searched for wood and dried roots that would burn, we sometimes roamed as far as a training place cleared in the bush, where very young children and some my age, carrying sticks and knives, were barked at by the older soldiers. These children were not wearing uniforms, but I knew that now they were soldiers too.
One time when I approached, a group of them was sitting and listening to a commander give instructions. I moved close to a boy about my age at the end of a line and sat down near him, greeting him quietly. He raised his eyes briefly and glanced away from me, toward his commander, who wasn’t looking in our direction. I didn’t know how to ask the questions jumbled in my mind, so I just blurted them out, one by one.
“What are you doing?”
…
“How long have you been here?
…
“Is any of your family with you?”
…
“Have you ever tried to leave?”
…
The long pauses after my whispered questions were filled with silence from the boy, except for the last one, to which he finally mumbled, “Leave? Where would I go?”
He glanced again at his commander, whose attention was still elsewhere, then whispered, “Papa knew the soldiers were coming. He and Mama argued about it. I didn’t understand why until they came for me. They embraced Papa and shook his hand. They left him a parcel and took me with them. No one said a word, and my mother was crying and wouldn’t look at me as the truck pulled away. I called out for her but my father blocked her view and then I was gone.
“When I asked what was happening, one of the soldiers laughed and told me that my father had traded me to the soldiers and made a poor bargain of it. If I went home, he would just send me back.
“So now I do what the commander wants and stay out of the way of the older boys, and try not to be scared when we go to fight the enemy. I do not want to die like the others who were here with me when I arrived.”
I shivered and did not know what to say to this boy.
The next day a whole troop of children was sent out on foot, leading a convoy of trucks crammed with older boys and girls. I picked my moment and asked a grown-up soldier where they were going.
He stared down at me, picking then sucking his teeth, as if he was deciding whether I was worth an answer. Then he said, “The cockroaches bury anti-personnel and anti-tank mines on the roads and larger trails. We send new kids like you in first to clear the way because it’s better for the cause that you step on the mines—we don’t want to lose a soldier with more experience.”
He stared at me some more, as if daring me to argue with his logic, then said, “It makes sense. We also send you inexperienced ones ahead to attract enemy fire and use up most of their ammo—we know they don’t have much. If you survive your first battle then you might be worth really training.”
It seemed to me that the young ones were going to suffer a lot more than the older ones, but this whole world was upside down. I gathered my courage and asked him if he had any of the bitter drink. He laughed and gave me some sticky brown gum and told me to try it instead.
When the soldiers came back late that night, I stood at the opening of the lean-to and watched. I could not tell if any of the youngest ones were missing, though some of them were injured. The rest were either very happy, dancing and singing, or very quiet. I reached inside my waistband to find the last little bit of sticky gum, popped it in my mouth, went back inside and fell asleep.
Outside the commander’s lean-to, which stood out from all the rest because it was where smells of delicious food came from, a girl my age was sitting and weaving long grasses into a bracelet.
She smiled at me when I walked by and asked me to sit with her.
She told me that she was the commander’s best wife, and that because of this she always got the best food and drinks. She then offered me a piece of meat and some sliced cassava from her bowl, which I gobbled down greedily. Remembering my manners, I thanked her. I asked her why she was here, why she didn’t escape or try to go home.
She looked at me with a tilted head, then lowered her voice. “This must be my home now. Some of the girls were sent away from here because they were sick or pregnant, but one of them came back, begging to stay here. She told me that when she tried to go home to her village, she was shamed and turned away. Her own relatives threatened her. She works here now.
“And for me it would be worse. When they came to our hut, two soldiers tied up my father and brothers and took me in front of them. No, no, no. I cannot return.
“At first, I wished very much to escape—even just to disappear in the bush. Each night a different soldier would come and sleep with me. I was ashamed and wished to die.
“But then I was lucky. I was chosen by the commander to be one of his wives. Now I am protected from the other soldiers, I live in a hut, I eat nice food, I am in charge of much in the camp. I have a better life here than most girls.”
Sadly, silently, I nodded, and chewed another piece of my brown gum. I now knew that it was called hashish.
The next day, after a breakfast of beans and goat’s milk, one of the lieutenants pulled me aside.
I don’t know what he was seeing on my face, but he explained to me that going back to the life I had before I was captured was not an option for me anymore.
“You and your pretty brother now belong to us, and you can be proud—you will soon be fighting this war too, for the good side, the side of freedom!” I didn’t know what he meant by this “freedom” because I was a prisoner here. Was there something that he and the others were doing that would make life better than it was when I was in my village and with my family? But all the leaders here said things like this over and over, during the days and the long evenings by the fires, and they said it like they were really convinced it was true.
I wanted so much to belong to something or someone so that I was not so alone and afraid all the time. I had not seen Mosi for days. I missed my mother and my father and my sister. I wanted to scream and run away no matter what. I couldn’t help myself and shouted at him, “My father was murdered! My sister …”
“It is terrible.” He was calm, his voice almost kind. “Your brother Mashaka was a bad young man—he was a traitor, you see. He had joined the opposing side and was acting as a spy. We have taken care of him, my friend. You are now safe. You and Mosi are with us now and we will avenge the terrible slaughter of your family.”
He stared at me so hard after he stopped talking I was confused. I tried to think back to that day, but it was a blur of strangers and chaos and blood.
My brother. Mashaka. He was gone too. Tears filled my eyes and I looked away to follow a pair of dragonflies soaring past me, into the sky. At least my father died trying to protect us, to defend our lives. My brother, he was dead only for war.
I followed the lieutenant to a field where they were teaching the newest children how to use guns. He picked one up and handed it to me and pointed to the others so that I knew I was to join in the training. He said I was going to learn to shoot people who were bad and needed to be punished. We were going to save our country. We were going to be the warriors who protect those who are oppressed in the struggle for freedom. Again he used the word freedom, but what did it really mean? I was not free, nor were any of the other children. How do we create freedom if we are not free?
The gun smelled of oil and was a little slippery and when I dropped it, the leader hit me with his stick. “Never drop your rifle because it is precious and it is your best friend from now on. You will clean it and sleep with it and carry it all the time. Your lieutenant will tell you when to put bullets in it, but for now we will teach you how to aim at targets. The first time you hit a target I promise you will find it very exciting, and you’ll be proud to see it burst into pieces.”
There were seven of us who slept on the dirt floor of the lean-to. It was too small for this many people, but in the loneliness of night it was somewhat comforting to be close, even to strangers.
All night, every night, I heard soft whimpers and muffled sobs from the other children. It seemed that we could say things to the black night that we couldn’t say to each other’s eyes in the day. Fragments of thoughts and unconnected words would float through the air above us, hovering, seeking a safe place to land.
“Mommy!”
“I had to.”
“No!”
“They made me.”
“I’m sorry.”
Hideous images were conjured on that ceiling: Flesh splitting under knife blades. Brothers butchered like animals. Sisters raped then tossed in latrine pits. Babies snatched from their mothers’ breasts and dashed to the ground with milk still spilling from their lips. People reduced to meat wrapped in cloth.
During the day I was so tired from the night, that I could not stop trying to cry. But I had no tears left. It just hurt and my eyes would get blurry and I would choke a little and feel my heart pounding. I was so homesick yet I had no more home.
“Training” consisted of waking before the sun. We would have to fill sacks with heavy rocks and then carry them on our backs as we ran around the compound in the dark or went for long marches in the darkest places in the bush. Where the night had once drawn safely around me like a curtain, it now frightened me. Everything—low bushes like enemies crouching, the rustle of insects like crunching boots on gravel—was potentially alive and dangerous. And yet, on those long night drills, my mind would sometimes still be lulled by the thick, soft darkness back to my home, my world, my child world, my Kidom.
If we faltered, the commanders chased us with thick sticks, hitting us on the backs of our knees. They would push us to the ground, shout in our ears and scream orders again and again. Before the sun was even at its peak, we were exhausted.
Then, often without being allowed to remove the sacks from our backs, we would practise shooting. The guns were not as heavy as they looked, though they were too long for some of the children to hold steady and straight. Those kids were sent back to do chores in the camp or to carry food and water and ammunition for the rest of the soldiers. I was scared the first time the leader put a bullet in my rifle and told me to shoot a big melon a little ways away. The rifle had come to life and it was now a dangerous thing. There were at least twenty of us training that day, and we were told to line up and shoot one after another. When it was my turn, I held the gun up and steadied it to see through the sights and find the melon. When the leader yelled “Fire!” I pulled the trigger and the gun made such a loud noise and hit my shoulder so hard I nearly dropped it. I do not know where my bullet went.
Even after all the kids fired, the melon was still there. The leader was very mad and yelled at us for wasting very valuable ammunition. He warned us that we had better try harder the next time. And there were so many next times until we could hit the melon.
Every so often, a gun would spit fire and hot metal pieces as the cartridge shattered at the breech instead of firing normally, and the child holding it would be burned on his face and arms, or be cut and bloody, or even blinded. Crying and screams were so common, though, that I got used to them and stopped noticing after a while.
Explosions from hand grenades and bullets were terrifying. The older soldiers fired near us so that we would get used to the sounds of battle. I was always scared that one of them would aim too close or too poorly. Dirt would shower us with each explosion. Our tears and sweat caked the dirt, and our clothes and skin were torn from running in the bush.
Each day, one or two children were pulled aside, usually after they had inflicted some degree of torment on someone smaller than themselves. The next day they’d turn up with a camouflage bandana, a bunch of feathers, an army vest—a reward from the commander.
This one afternoon when the sun was at its hottest, we were lined up as usual at long rickety tables and instructed to tend to the weapons. We piled ammunition, and then stripped, oiled and reassembled our guns. The leaders made us repeat these drills for hours so we could do them with our eyes closed, just as we would have to do when we went for a long night march to battle and had to clean our weapons before the attack. I soon got very good at this, and the lieutenant noticed that the kids near me would ask me for help with theirs. I actually was proud of my new skills, and I became attached to my own AK-47 and did my best to keep it clean and oiled.
A young girl I had seen before came up to me this day as I was putting my gun back together. She winked at me and held out her fists. I stuck out my palms, and into one hand she placed a piece of candied fruit. And into the other, a pretty pink beetle shell that looked like a jewel, it was so shiny and smooth.
I longed to speak to her, but the lieutenant shouted for me to get back to work.
I put the fruit in my mouth, and the shell in my pocket, gently. As the sweetness melted on my tongue, the shiny pink of the shell misted my sight, and I was back with Kesi, flying through Kidom.
Later that day, after a shooting practice and an interminable hike with heavy sacks, I went to seek out the girl. It was quite dark already, and I didn’t know which shelter she was in. I peeked into several to see youths playing cards and smoking. I checked the area around the cooking fire where many of the girls congregated, watching over some of the younger children who were doing chores, but she was not there.
The camp at night was poorly lit with small fires, and there were many shadows and sounds of exaggerated laughter, submissive moaning and the odd shriek. Several of the children were sick and uncared for, or, having been beaten, they were suffering from wounds. At night, the hell of day turned into a black hole where devils were even more evident: living ghosts.
As I passed by the commander’s tent, I thought I would ask his best wife if she knew the girl. I heard a commotion coming from behind the tent and crept carefully to peer around the corner. The commander and two of his lieutenants were standing around a girl who was lying on the ground. The commander’s wife was holding her shoulders down. As the girl writhed back and forth, I could see it was my friend.
She was naked, and one at a time the men lay on top of her, grunting and groaning. The leaders often did that to young girls but also to some of the most delicate of the young boys too. It was so evil and it hurt us so much. This was torture and punishment, but with luck you might avoid it by being a very good and obedient foot soldier.
I went back to my dirty hut and sat on the floor facing the wall, chewing the last of my hashish. I pulled the delicate beetle shell from my pocket and crushed it in my fist.
For days, Gamba, the lieutenant assigned to my group, had been preparing us for a supplies raid.
The youngest children in our group had gravitated to me, and they followed me with more and more devotion each day. Sometimes I told them stories of Kidom, or played with them the quieter games that I had played with Kesi, games that Mosi had also played with me. But other times I didn’t feel like it. I would tell them to be quiet and listen to Gamba so that I could be alone.
We spent a lot of time listening to Gamba talk and talk and talk, but it was so difficult to understand what he was really saying. It was even harder to measure what he kept telling us against what I had seen and what had happened over these last weeks. The more he spoke, the more confused I became. The hashish, the lack of food, the nightmares that woke me every time I tried to sleep: all these things were mixing me up.
Some of the young soldiers had told me stories of being forced to kill people with machetes. They would chop up the bodies, and blood would splatter all over their hands and arms and legs and uniform. The leaders wanted to teach people a lesson by making them suffer, but other times they used the machetes because they did not have any bullets left. But Gamba insisted that we were in the right to do these things, that the evils being perpetrated against us were what we were fighting about. I shook my head to clear it but the horror scenes were always there. This madness was being forced into our heads day in and day out. It was like a sickness in my brain that would not leave except when I could get some of the drugs, and then all would become cloudy again and I was numb and nothing hurt me for some hours. It was an escape I wanted more and more.
One afternoon I set the little ones up with some hard nuts we had collected so they could play a game of marbles, and I went off on my own. Gamba came after me. He told me in confidence that I was crucial to the success of my group, that I was not only the tallest but also the smartest and understood better than anyone the importance of our work. I did not tell him how little I understood. I never questioned his reasons for selecting me. I was just relieved to be noticed without reprimand.
We were standing on a dusty patch behind my lean-to. I told him that I was ready to be in charge of the younger ones and I would do what I could to protect them, but I wasn’t sure I could go into battle. “What if someone fought back? I am still afraid that I could kill someone for real. Mosi would never do such a thing.”
“Bah, Mosi.” Gamba rolled his eyes, but wouldn’t explain himself, or answer any of my questions about my brother, who I’d only seen once at a distance, carrying a load of firewood. “Don’t be stupid,” Gamba said. “Do you feel bad when you swat flies? Or pluck blades of grass? These people are nothing—insects standing in our way. Besides, we don’t kill everyone. I have the power to pick and choose. The best, like you, we take.”
Swatting flies. My mind leapt back to me and Kesi sitting on her mat, perfectly still, the circle drawn around us, willing the pretty green flies to settle on our out-stretched arms, which we had smeared with honey. If we charmed enough flies to cling to our arms, maybe we could fly too. We begged them to come to us, treasured those that landed, sang to them.
I tried not to share this memory with Gamba, but it came out anyway. He laughed loudly, and then pulled black feathers out of his pocket, which he twisted into my hair, like Tinochika’s horrible fetish. He told me he could grant me flight and that I never had to crawl with vermin again.
For three days he spent all his spare time with me. We would sit and chew hashish or smoke marijuana and I would fly and fly. He discussed our higher purpose of freedom with me as if I was an adult. All those words were still difficult for me to grasp or feel. But I had gotten used to the repetition of the argument and was not so confused when he talked about the cause. He pushed on me the reasons for the cruelty, the reasons for the horrors, why it was so important to fight back and even kill people. He pushed me: could I do it? I couldn’t answer and that annoyed Gamba, but he would continue to talk and gave me the drugs that I needed to create the numbness I craved. Constant and repetitious words driven into our ears and minds, drills and drugs day in and day out, following orders because of the drugs and to get more drugs. We were like machines most of the time as long as we had enough drugs. And I realized that I had become a child soldier like the older ones and that my small group would surely be tested soon. With people, not melons, at the end of my gun.
——
On the evening of that third day, Gamba took me for a walk. He had two machetes with him, which he gave me to carry, along with hashish, and a sharp mix of cocaine and gunpowder, which I sniffed up my nose. He laughed as my eyes grew big and my lips stretched in a grin. I felt the back of my neck tingling and my shell breaking open. I felt the unfolding of my wings, stretching bigger and wider.
Then we were in a clearing, and I was spinning in the star-filled sky, swinging my long sharp claws, laughing crazily. I was a giant, I was ruler of everything. Gamba was cheering me, shouting at me to “squash it—smash the dirty thing.”
I saw a stupid fly, dirty and useless, wriggling on the ground, and my control was perfect and total. I swung my arm with its long silver blade and severed the fly in two. I tore its wings off and jumped back to watch it writhe and buzz uselessly, and then stop.
Many other young soldiers swooped in close to me, jumping and dancing and shooting their guns. Sparks and flashes and noise were everywhere. Gamba loomed near and offered me more of the gunpowder cocaine, and I sniffed it straight into my brain and it all went wild and stayed wild for some time.
I was dancing too, dripping with sweat. My clothes felt sticky on me and my head was full of loud sounds and bright sights and I was not seeing very well at all. After what seemed like hours, I was so tired that I stumbled and fell, and the others picked me up and shoved me into the middle of a circle of grinning faces and white-rimmed eyes. The world started to slow to near paralysis and I looked down at the broken fly in the centre of the circle and saw Mosi’s beautiful face staring up at me, his eyes surprised, frozen. I staggered toward him, but Gamba pushed me away and down the path that led back to camp.
“I think I killed him,” I shouted, and I began sobbing and could not catch my breath as tears gushed out of my eyes like blood. “No, no, no, no …” Gasping, choking, my face aching, I struggled to breathe through my cries. Gamba walked beside me, a hand on my back. Every time my tears would stop, my brain would force Mosi’s face, his eyes, into my mind. That beautiful, gentle face.
“No, I couldn’t have,” I sobbed.
And Gamba began to sing softly, “Life is a circle; there is no need to cry.” He put one strong arm around my shoulders and held me up and told me that I had acted like a courageous soldier committed to the cause. I had passed the test and was now a young leader, and he seemed so proud of me. I felt sick and disoriented and could not stop crying, but I never wanted him to take his arm away.
At last we stepped out of the shadows into the circle of fires at the camp. At last my tears dried up as I felt myself enter another, familiar world. Not my own, but at least not that one where I had just been. Maybe it hadn’t really happened.
Then my machete, which I was dragging behind me, hit a rock. The thump reminded me, and I saw Mosi’s eyes again. My stomach lurched. The blade was heavy and burning in my hand and I dropped it, letting go of what seemed like a thousand pounds. I would never carry a machete again, I swore. I was dirty and wet. The smell of drying blood on my arms and face sickened me. Now I was a monster just like them, these soldier leaders, and they were happy for me.
Gamba walked me to my lean-to, to my comrades. No one asked me anything, and someone handed me a beer. It was wet and delicious on my sore throat.
One of the other adult leaders ducked into our shelter and dropped the bloody machete in front of us and laughed as we all stared at it. One of my comrades picked up the bloody weapon and slapped me on the back, and carried it away to a corner where he cleaned it as we had been taught to do, then sharpened it with a stone, the rhythm of his strokes the only sound in the hut. There was some sympathy in the faces around me, and at last one of the older ones said, “The first is the hardest. You want the ground to open up and swallow you afterwards. You do not want to go on. The second time, you wait to feel that bad again, but you do not, and you hate yourself for that. By the third time, you are curious to see what happens.”
I could not ask if the first person he had killed was his own brother.
We smoked marijuana late into the night, and I thought, for me there is no home world, there is no Kidom. All I have now is this. Kill or be killed. Teach the others to become just like me, so I won’t be the only one.
Over the next two weeks, I was officially put in charge of a small group of children. I was to train them to use the weapons and ensure that they were made strong. A few of the others in the camp also came to me after their initiation with helpless, defeated eyes, often with the blood of the dead dried on their lips.
I understood that these initiations were important to prepare good soldiers, but I still felt … well, I still felt. But not very much.
Then one morning Gamba told us we needed to prepare for a raid.
“Go through the village like you are shopping at a market,” he said. “Take anything we can use—things, people.”
Please, please, please, please, please, no machetes, I thought. Just my AK-47. How much easier just to shoot and never see the people up close, or look into their eyes. Just stand back and pull the trigger. No slice, no thump, just BANG! I shook my head, shook out my thoughts and reached into my pocket for some hashish to chew.
Gamba stared at me for a moment, and then handed me some knotted grey rags to wrap all around the full length of my barrel. These rags turned my AK invisible in my hands, not a gun anymore but a power stick to bring death, the work of the devil. I was a rebel leader now, and my lieutenant had faith in me. I straightened my shoulders and looked around for my assigned followers.
We headed out, several groups of kids, each with its own leader, along with Gamba and two other lieutenants. My soldiers trusted me totally now, especially because of Gamba’s constant acknowledgement of my fitness to lead them. I walked at the head of them all. I was the smartest and the strongest. I am the leader, I thought, and they are my army, behind me.
The sun’s heat made the thick green leaves in the valley shimmer as we passed. We marched and marched, singing loudly and boldly, shouting slogans the commander and the lieutenants had taught us.
We marched for a very long time, checking the position of the sun for direction, but soon it was directly overhead—of no help at all.
“So,” called Gamba, “now we sleep. We will march the rest of the way in the cool of the night, and you will make your attack in the morning.”
That night the sky was beautiful and the moon ever-present. This made it much easier to lead the way along the small tracks through the dense bamboo forest, but it also made me and the others nervous that our movement might be seen from the hillsides around us. We had slept most of the afternoon, but the sleep had not been restful. So much was wildly bouncing around inside my head.
Gamba had told us to expect an exciting day. By attacking this village, we were going to teach all of the people that they had better remain loyal to us and our cause or they would be exterminated.
After hours on the trail we stopped to rest by a small creek. I was called with the other junior leaders to receive our final orders, repeated several times so they would sink in. We were to attack from the wooded side of the village at dawn with the sun at our backs so we could see the targets clearly but the villagers would have a hard time seeing us. We would attack as they awoke for morning chores and we would catch them totally by surprise. This was good because it would mean less chance of any of my group being injured or killed. Back at the camp during the long nights, I had heard how so many others had been abandoned during attacks or later, along the trail, to be prey for animals, insects or the surviving villagers, or to die slowly, and alone.
Just as Gamba finished talking, a crash of thunder followed by lightning shocked us all. Then came the torrential rain that we always expected in this season, but which had held off until now. As I stumbled through the downpour toward my group, I looked back at Gamba and he was beaming.
“It is a perfect cover for our approach,” he called after us. “They won’t be able to see or hear us through the rain.”
I found my eleven boys and girls, all armed and in their ill-fitting uniforms, huddled together under large banana leaves, trying to stay dry. They gathered around me, and I spoke as quietly as I could over the roar of the rain on the trees and splashing puddles all around us, giving them their orders.
We got the signal to move forward at first light, the rain still pouring down. At the edge of the trees, I ordered my comrades to spread out at arm’s length from each other. Despite the training and everyone’s confidence in me, my palms were sweating. This was a critical moment for our surprise attack but also for me. The commander was ruthless with leaders who failed to live up to what was expected of them. I also knew that if I showed any fear to my small band of young soldiers, we would be lost. So I went to each one of them in turn as they crouched in the wet, tall grass at the edge of the bush and asked if they were okay. There were sets of eyes that were fierce and angry, who wanted to go in fast and furious. There were other sets of eyes that were blurred by drugs but were at least pointed in the right direction, their guns ready. And then there were eyes on the edge of shock and fear that looked straight ahead, hoping that they would not see any people or have to shoot their guns at them. I gave them as much encouragement as I could, then crept into the grass ahead of them and waited for the signal from the lieutenant.
Our weapons were ready and loaded. I cocked my weapon and listened to the snap of safeties being released on guns behind me. I had put so much oil on my AK-47 that the rain was making bubbles on any part of the barrel that was bare of the rag coverings. I was sure it would fire if I pulled the trigger and that gave me some security.
Gamba finally blew the whistle around his neck. On and on it sounded, and as though powered by some hidden spring, I jumped up and ran forward from the line of trees through the tall grass and corn patches between us and the first huts. I was yelling and pulling the trigger, shooting from the hip toward the huts. As I rushed forward I could feel my comrades following me, firing and running, firing and running. Large bangs from rocket launchers and hand grenades boomed extra loud in the rain and low clouds, but I kept us moving toward the edge of the village. I concentrated on the circular, mud-brick house ahead of me, shooting at the windows, and then angling left to cut between it and the other huts. My heart pounded and my dry throat made it hard to yell at the others as well as frighten the villagers, but I kept acting out the plan according to my training, and the fear and apprehension of only moments before totally dissolved, and I was suddenly as high as I’d been on the gunpowder cocaine.
Like ants scurrying out of their hill, people began to spill from the huts, screaming and running in all directions. A grenade hit the hut I’d been shooting at, and it burst into flames. No one was putting up a fight—they were just trying to get away from us. I was sure it would be over soon. I finally reached the gap between the burning hut and the house beside it. As I had been trained, I continued firing my machine gun as I ran between the huts, prepared to shoot blindly inside the door the minute I was in front of the building.
Suddenly, the sound of gunfire greatly intensified and became massive in my ears. There was a lot of shouting from the centre of the village, and many more weapons seemed to join in. But I was already so focused on my next move that these sounds barely registered.
I could sense my group of young warriors behind me, moving at the same reckless speed as I was. Some had already opened fire toward the next row of huts and the open spaces in between. A couple steps more and I was in front of the hut, firing without ceasing, ready to kick in the door. Not twenty feet in front of me was a tall grown-up soldier wearing a blue helmet so bright against the dull colours of the bush and the rest of his uniform that it shocked me so much I nearly stopped. He had his rifle pointed right at me.
My eyes were burning and my mind was overloaded with conflicting instructions and emotions. I felt as much wild excitement as fear. In this moment, we were two warriors—he with his gun, me with mine—and I was still pulling hard and long on the trigger.
I could see my bullets chewing at the bricks, creating small explosions of dried mud as they went. The soldier in the blue helmet moved away from the wall and I saw the tiny flash from his weapon.
I was slammed by what seemed like a big stick right across my chest. The overwhelming force and instant pain tumbled me over backwards so fast I lost all sense of direction and strength. Suddenly, I was on my back in the mud with the rain still falling on me but so gently I could barely feel it. My chest burned as if it was on fire, but I couldn’t put it out.
I did not seem to be able to move. I tasted blood in my mouth and my breathing became difficult, like I was underwater and not able to get any new air in my lungs. It came to my mind simply and clearly: I have been shot by the blue helmet and I am going to die.
My mind began to race so fast that I felt lost in it all, searching, grappling for something familiar, something to protect me. Kesi, Mosi, Momma, Daddy, Jacob, Mashaka, Baingana, the creatures of Kidom—these made me hurt even more, from a different place, from my stomach, from my inside. I had suffered so many nights and days of being lonesome for my family, my friends, my home, my world, and now I was going to lose them forever. A wave of lonely pain and fear spread deeper through me, dumping me into blackness.
I can see him beside me now. This soldier. I can make out as if through a haze his pale face and big eyes staring down at me in surprise. I too am surprised. He is enormous, but still. His khaki uniform is dark but his helmet is light blue with the letters “UN” written on it. I know what this means. It is the sign of peace, of the peace-keepers, of protection. But what is he doing here? Why did Gamba not tell us that peacekeepers were protecting this village? This was wrong—we were not supposed to be fighting the peacekeepers and they were not supposed to be fighting us. The commander told us that all of us were working for security, for victory, and we had to punish this village so that it would stop the fighting and the war.
My mind is thick and jumbled but I can make out the shadow of his leg beside my hand, and I reach out to clutch the cloth of his trousers. His bullets have hit me and I am hurting so, but I see his white face, his shocked eyes. My bullets did not hit him and I am not supposed to miss. Why did I miss and why did his bullets crash through me?
The pain in my chest is suffocating me. Where is my mother and brothers, my little sister, my father, where is Baingana, my teacher, whose words were so full of wisdom? I reach out my other hand to try to draw a circle around me, because this is not for real, just as Kidom was not for real. But I want to go there. I want it back.
My chest still hurts, but I feel lighter and the silence around me is like it was at night when I used to create Kidom with my stick under the dark sky with so many bright stars above me.
I do not feel alone now. I might even let Kesi enter my circle again if she is quiet. I am not angry or mad or sad or lonely. I am not a soldier or a warrior, either. I am free to be me. I am free now. I have been freed by this pain in my chest and I am me again.
I am flying, gripping the wings of a dragonfly. I am no more, I am nowhere. I was a warrior and now I am a child again.