On 19 May 2004, Abola Wilson witnessed a massacre. Fourteen years later, he’s sitting under the shelter of a tree, bracing himself to be asked about it yet again. Journalists, lawyers, charity workers and politicians have come and gone, each time feeding on his memories, his trauma.
Wilson is from Lukodi, a small village in northern Uganda that is key to a case at the International Criminal Court (ICC) against former Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) commander Dominic Ongwen. The LRA slaughtered 69 people in Lukodi. The event has become emblematic of two decades of conflict, starting in the late 1980s, when LRA fighters became infamous for raping, murdering and pillaging, displacing almost two million people while forcibly enlisting tens of thousands of children to join its war against several central African governments.
