Africa 24 Media Photography

A two-decade war in Northern Uganda, which started in the early 1980s left thousands of people mutilated, hundreds of women and children raped and an estimated four hundred thousand people homeless. The war, which ended in 2006 after on and off talks between the Lord Resistance Army (LRA) guerilla group and the Ugandan government, mostly affected young children who were not only displaced from school but also swept into treacherous streets and terraces where most of them spent their nights.

As the war continued in various places, tens of children between the ages of 3 and 17, who became commonly known as night commuters, walked quietly in darkness for miles into main towns to be safe from the (LRA) group of Joseph Kony, which had been waging an atrocious war especially in the districts of Gulu, Pader and Kitgum. The war left children with no security in their own homes or villages, forcing them to take risks every night in an attempt to escape abduction, physical abuse, sexual exploitation, cruelty and LRA’s vindictive brutality. In bare foot and carrying mats, blankets, school books, and at times some food, they would enter the towns, seeking a place to sleep for the night.  Hospital and shop verandas, schools, sidewalks, taxi bus parks were common sleeping grounds for most of the children. At times, the thunderous sound of a storm brewing in the distance or lightening flashes across the sky, would find children clamped in streets. Young girls suffered even more as some of them became mothers as young as twelve years old. At the height of the night commuting phase during 2003, up to 40,000 children sought refuge from the LRA in the towns of the north. With the peace talk between the LRA and the Ugandan government, a cessation of hostilities was signed and slowly safety returned to Northern Uganda closing most of the night commuter centers by the end of 2006. And even though the armed conflict between the two factions ended, most boys and girls are still haunted by their horrendous experience as combatants or sex slaves.

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