Achiro P. Olwoch — Playwright, Novelist, Filmmaker

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Achiro Patricia Olwoch hails from Gulu, in Northern Uganda. Achiro has just completed her year as an artist at risk in residence at Westbeth. She is an award-winning writer, director and producer with numerous nominations and awards for her Coffee Shop TV series as creator and writer and Yat Madit as head writer, and for her short films: The Surrogate, The Mineral Basket, Maraya Ni. Her feature documentary My Prison Diary has recently been released at selected festivals around the world. She is also in the process of completing her late father’s manuscripts, which he left behind after his death in 1994. This is alongside her first novel, Sex or Slave, set in 1940s Uganda during colonialism.

The Ambush

I cannot help smiling at the shock on people’s faces when I tell them the story about how my family and I escaped an ambush by rebels. I realize it is no laughing matter; maybe the smile on my face is my way to cope with the idea that I might have been some rebel’s wife or even dead—and my story would be told to you by someone else with a whole different light.

It was 2002, and the war in Northern Uganda was still raging between the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels and the government of Uganda. More and more people were being abducted, there were more ambushes on the roads, and people had been displaced. It was a wonder that we were actually going through with the burial of my mom. My mom had a brother in the army who had organized protection for us both to and from the burial. The condition was that it was a one-day trip. Go bury her, and come back the same day. Now for anyone who knows anything about African burial traditions, regardless of the tribe, the family of the deceased cannot just dump the body and come back the same day. They are required to stay a couple of days and perform some rituals before returning to their normal lives. Alas this was not going to be the case. I understood why this was so when we got there. There were no huts for miles around. There were no homesteads or villages. They had all been destroyed by the rebels over the years. The people of Northern Uganda were in camps set up in different designated spaces that were being guarded by the army. In fact the few people who came to attend the burial were close family members on my father’s side who had to be there. At the funeral, I saw movement in the trees about 100 meters from where we were. Then I saw a couple of people in the bushes. They were wearing a dark green uniform that was very different from the one the soldiers were wearing. I saw them, and they saw me looking at them. Then as silently as they had appeared, they disappeared into the bushes right before my eyes. I saw the soldier look in my direction and gesture for me to be quiet but also to move and head back to the rest of the people. I knew then that I had seen the rebels. He had seen them too but did not want to start a shoot-out. The rebels were outnumbered, at least I like to think that they were. From the stories I had heard about them and their movements, they had come to rob “the people from Kampala.” This was something they did often. They listened to the radio and knew when a procession would be coming up north for a burial so that they could waylay the mourners.

After the burial, we immediately boarded the buses and cars to head back to Kampala. It was now 6 p.m. This was the time that people stopped moving. Even the night commuters were already on their journey to the town. No one wanted to be out and about when nightfall came. The people of Gulu all gathered so that they could be escorted back. This was the most abnormal thing at a funeral. We did not even get to share a meal afterward as was customary. There was no time. We all needed to leave the area. I could see that even the soldiers were getting fidgety. They too were afraid of the rebels. All the vehicles lined up to get ready to leave. We all had to travel in a convoy complete with an army truck at the front and at the rear with some soldiers in the different buses and the cars that made up the convoy. When they were all set, the journey started with all the cars required to drive at breakneck speed at least until they got through the “danger zone.” When we got to a safe place, we were told that there were a couple of cars behind our convoy that had been hit by the rebels. None of our family members were involved. This was how we survived the ambush. Maybe my mom’s spirit was looking out for us after all. The more I tell this story, the more I really believe that she must have been looking out for us. This is probably the reason that I always have a smile on my face when I tell the story. I never tell this story from a place of sadness—now I know why.