The night-walkers of Uganda

Some carry sacks or rolled-up blankets on their shoulders. They scramble over grassy banks and hurry down the sun-scorched roadside on the way to the night shelters, which are guarded by government troops.

In any other country a 14-year-old girl leaving her home and an anxious mother for the night would spell rebellion. Here, it’s simply about survival. “We fear the rebels, we fear thugs and robbers who come at night to disturb us,” says Mary as she walks with a swinging stride.

On a troubled continent, the war in this region stands out. It is Africa’s longest-running civil war, and perhaps the only conflict in history in which children are both the main victims and the principal aggressors. Mary and the other children walk to safety every night because they fear, with good reason, abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Christian fundamentalist rebel group that uses children as soldiers, porters and sexual slaves. The LRA carries out its raids at night, storming into villages from the surrounding bush, killing adults and forcing children to beat their parents before marching them away to camps deep in the bush.

Mary’s 15-year-old brother, Geoffrey, was abducted by the rebels; he was held for three months. “They made him carry heavy loads, beat him at times, he went without food,” says their mother, Agnes. Geoffrey only escaped when a government helicopter gunship attacked the rebels holding him. Mary’s neighbour, a girl named Florence, was abducted too. She spent three years with the rebels: she was forced into sexual slavery and became pregnant.

Desperate to keep the child-snatchers from their doors, parents in northern Uganda began sending their children into nearby towns at night in 2002. 40,000 children across the region started walking into towns to sleep. Aid agencies set up shelters to give them somewhere safe to go, and it’s one of these that Mary is heading for.

As she approaches Lacor, she walks past bars lit by a single lightbulb and tiny shops whose wooden shelves are crammed with cooking oil, salt, soap powder and mobile phone top-up cards. As the shadows spread, the shopkeepers open their thief-proof metal doors and step out. Mary lives near the town but some of the other children walk for hours to reach safety. When she reaches the shelter, it is already full of children, some of them barely toddlers, others in their late teens. The shelter is made up of stark concrete buildings, bare as a barn inside, as well as rows of giant white canvas tents.

Lillian Apiyo, 14, is already inside. “I come here for protection,” she says. “I always get new friends from here. There is nowhere to stay at home.” The children filter through the gates looking subdued, but a party atmosphere soon develops. A dozen or so children begin dancing. At other shelters there is frenetic singing of motivational songs. The shelters are busy enough as it is, and if food were provided, they would be overwhelmed.

Adult wardens patrol with torches, breaking up the occasional fight over a blanket and checking on children who look scared or upset. “When I am here, I feel I am somebody,” says Gabriel Oloya, who studies his schoolbooks in the dim light. “When I am at home, I’m always upset. I feel lonely and so many thoughts come into my mind. Here, I tend to forget such things.” Gabriel, 15, is responsible for the four younger brothers who walk with him to the shelter. “My parents are dead, killed by the rebels,” he says.

Childhood is short in rural Africa, but it is rare for children to be thrown so completely on their own resources as they are in this war-damaged society. The children who come to the shelters crave affection. Many of them are orphans whose parents were murdered by the rebels and who have been taken in by their ex­tended family. The girls comb each other’s hair while the boys spin bottle-tops or engage in play fights.

In the shelter the wardens keep boys and girls apart, but outside its gates young couples are cuddling in the semi-darkness.

This sort of thing does worry Mary’s mother. “We can’t follow our children up to the shelter,” Agnes says. “Sometimes a girl says she has gone there, but she has gone to a boyfriend, and she becomes pregnant and drops out of school.” But then there is more to worry about than teenage boys. The Acholi and Lango tribes of northern Uganda were once farmers, living in scattered villages amid their herds of cattle and fields of maize. But 19 years of war have warped everything: almost the entire population of the north, 1.5 million people, has been displaced into crowded, dusty encampments on the outskirts of towns. Despair has bred alcoholism and violence; the horror of war is part and parcel of life.

As the older generation dies out, so does the hope of returning to a normal life. This is a culture with few written records, which relies on memories to place the boundaries of farmland and the distance to the nearest stream. When their parents are gone, the children’s link with their original villages will be broken for ever. “For me, the worst thing that may happen here is a situation where officially there is no war, but everybody remains in the camps,” says Father Carlos Rodriguez Soto, a Roman Catholic priest who has spent 18 years in Uganda.

The sun has not quite risen when the wardens rouse the children. After a prayer and a wash, the children who have blankets roll them on to their shoulders, the older ones gather up younger brothers and sisters and they begin to slip out of the gates and stream on to the road. By 9 a.m. the sun will burn and sweat will drip from every forehead, but now it is gentle. It is a good time to walk home.