The narratives and experiences of formerly abducted children in Northern Uganda's two decades armed conflict: a case of Amuru District

Abstract

This paper is based on thinking about narrative and experiences of formerly abducted children who suffered LRA armed conflict attacks. It is always important to remember the contexts of the story telling and experience. The lenses through which we see the world and the minds with which we interpret it, are culturally formed and will color and shape the way we perceive and think about past and present experiences. Narratives told are inseparable from the culture in which they are perceived, which is especially important to keep in mind when listening to narratives told in a context of armed conflict and instability. A first general point about conflict narrative is that it is difficult to sustain the premise that there can be narratives independent of the situations in which they are narrated. When thinking about the context in which narratives are perceived in northern Uganda, it is important to realize that these perceptions are coming from a place of historical trauma. The generation in Northern Uganda is the inheritor of a societal and historical trauma context that spans generations. Recognizing that narratives in northern Uganda are in a context of historical traumatic individual experiences that brings in a new dynamic of lasting psychological traumas on the on the formerly abducted young population. Theories relating to psychological traumas have been “increasingly deployed by scholars to discuss the legacy of the holocaust and slavery. Not just for those who directly experienced such events, nor just for the second-generation of survivors, but as a kind of living ‘racial’ memory that spans across time and space and haunts generations and former abducted children throughout their ages.