It started some years ago. Over coffee in a Nairobi café, my friend, the lawyer and writer Charles Okwir, told me about the floods in South Sudan, where he works for the United Nations peacekeeping mission. He spoke about the surreal view they had created in what otherwise is one of the most fertile, virgin, and beautiful parts of Africa.
After a thoughtful pause Okwir said the only place more beautiful were the Agoro Hills of northern Uganda’s Lamwo District. Most Ugandans are more familiar with the historically famous Kitgum, from which Lamwo was created in 2009. “Agoro Hills is where Heaven meets Earth,” Okwir declared. He’s not a man given to hyperbole, and, as he was born not too far from Agoro, he should know. For some reason, what he said stuck vividly in the mind. I read about Agoro Hills, and finally I went there in early 2023.
The journey to Agoro wasn’t a straight one, and I am glad it wasn’t. I had crisscrossed the country, first stopping in Gulu from eastern Uganda, but, because of a tight writing and documentary scoping schedule, dashing to West Nile, and then, through Bunyoro, onward to Tooro, Kasese, Kabale and Kisoro. We returned, circled around and spent a day in Rukungiri. We left Rukungiri very early the next day, took an arduous drive, and ended back in Gulu, all weary, deep in the night. At daybreak we set off for Agoro.
Travelling around Uganda over the years, but particularly strikingly on this frenzied trip, I thought about roadside food and the vendors who sell it. I relish roasted maize, and keep a note of the towns and settlements along the highways that do or don’t offer roasted maize, gonja, or meat. I put question marks against those that don’t. It’s an anomaly, and I wonder why.
I also note the most common foods and fruits sold by vendors. There are often sweet potatoes, matooke, bananas, onions, oranges, mangoes, vegetables, eggplant, pumpkins, sometimes cassava, and, in Busoga, jackfruit. I always wondered why there was little diversity in the foods on sale. How much potato can one buy along a 300-kilometre stretch of road? Why, I kept asking, is the Ugandan countryside unlike Zimbabwe or South Africa, where you can pass through a region and be confronted by unique roadside art, and see architecture very different from that in the last town you drove through? Or stop at a restaurant and find a peculiar regional cuisine?
Maybe it was the Agoro Hills that did it, but I finally found the answers to some of those questions. Okwir didn’t lie. The Agoro Hills are a beauty. But that wasn’t the only thing to be said of them. They are strange, because they aren’t traditional hills. They are like rocks, more rugged and standing taller, but they aren’t rocks. They are like mountains, with more browned stone and sparse vegetation, but they are smaller than a mountain range. It was hot, and the tall grass stood dry, yellowed, and visible in its majesty into the distance. I was disappointed that I hadn’t encountered an exploration of these hills before Okwir spoke of them. We spent some time looking, taking it all in, and photographing. We shall return. We must return.
Yet there are those who see the Agoro Hills more regularly and have experienced them more intimately than I could hope to achieve in a single visit. From one of them, the journalist Otim Lucima, there was much to learn of the Agoro landscape. He explained to me about the shadow the hills have cast over him and others. It’s where his mother comes from. The area is popularly called “Gule,” from the Luo word “Gul,” which refers to an enclave, and I guessed, listening to him, that this was how Gulu got its name.
The Agoro valley has a long history of irrigation, pre-dating the arrival of the missionaries and the colonizers. The Okura river and its tributaries enabled migrating groups to establish settlements, and the emergence of early irrigation systems. Modern irrigation schemes were built on the back of these traditional systems, but they have largely been a flop. “They have failed to live up to the sustainable success of the old systems based on indigenous knowledge,” Lucima said.
The Agoro lands have produced some of Acholiland’s – and Uganda’s – finest. Jack Dwonga, co-founder with Justin Okeny of mattress maker Vita Foam in Jinja, is a son of the soil. It was Dwonga who built the little Anglican Church nearby with thick mahogany pews that are, Lucima swears, among the best one can behold in Uganda.
One of Agoro Primary School’s luminaries was Dwonga’s brother Henry Obonyo, a leading surgeon who served as health minister in the short-lived Military Council of Gen. Tito Okello Lutwa, the leader of the junta that overthrew Milton Obote’s second administration in July 1985.
Obonyo, his wife Kevina, and daughters Eliza and Marjorie were killed in a road crash in 2016 while visiting relatives near Gulu. The trip had been Obonyo’s first to Uganda from the United Kingdom after nearly 30 years of exile.
The late Professor J.P. Ocitti, the prominent educationist, also sprung from Agoro. Within view of Agoro is the grave of a controversial figure of Ugandan politics and military history, Basilio Olara Okello. Although sparsely educated, and not particularly articulate, Basilio was credited with bravery and native military cunning. He played a notable role in the Tanzanian-led war that ousted Idi Amin in 1979, and was, with Okello Lutwa, at the head of the coup that ended Obote II. A foe of President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army after it seized power in January 1986, Basilio died in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in
1990.
He was a vilified figure, especially in southern and western Uganda, but in Acholiland he’s remembered more generously. Lucima said that after the Okello regime was defeated by the NRA, and Basilio fled to Sudan, members of the local Catholic Church spirited his children who had been left behind to the Madera Catholic mission in Soroti, until they were taken abroad.
There are beautiful paved roads that have been, or are being, built in northern Uganda. The road from which you branch to get to the Agoro Hills takes you all the way to the border with South Sudan. These regions were ravaged in the savage, near-two-decade war by Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, and in what human rights groups said was an equally brutal counter-insurgency by the Museveni government.
At the peak of the war, there were nearly 2.5 million people herded into grim camps for the internally displaced in northern Uganda. Gardens and plantations were burned by the army to deny the rebels food. To discourage people from snitching the rebels would padlock the mouths of some of them and walk away with the keys. They cut off the legs of people they caught riding bicycles on what they decreed as holy days.
In all, from 1987 to 2012, the LRA rebellion was responsible for more than 100,000 deaths as well as the abduction of between 60,000 and 100,000 children. Many of the abducted boys and girls were beaten, raped, and forced to loot and kill.
On the drive to and from Agoro, it’s striking how there are no visible scars of these war horrors either on the faces of the people or the towns and settlements in which they live. There is thriving trade in the towns. There are many new buildings rising up. All along the highway there are passable primary schools, with some elegant private ones. These are fertile lands, as they have always been, and they were spotted with lush fields.
The disfigurement and pain are below the surface. A local council leader from the area we met, later in Gulu, told us that Acholiland is battling an epidemic of deadly domestic violence. Men beating women. Women beating men. Alcoholism is rampant. Teenage pregnancy is rife, and the rate at which girls are dropping out of school is “unacceptable.” Many people are still battling the trauma of the war and, he said, mental health is a big issue.
I told him it wasn’t obvious, that I hadn’t noticed much of it. “Most of it comes out when the night falls,” he replied, “and you need to live in the community to see the tragedies”. I had encountered similar sentiments in Gulu on a visit a few weeks earlier, at the end of 2022.
On January 1, after very wild New Year celebrations in the city, I went to St. Philips Cathedral cemetery to pay my respects at the grave of Okot P’Bitek, Uganda’s most famous poet and the author of the inimitable Song of Lawino. As I walked about the cemetery in search of the poet’s grave, a priest stepped out of the church and I asked him to help.
As we stood over Okot’s grave, I remarked on how Gulu, the cathedral, and the area around it had changed beyond recognition from the war years. He told me that, at least on the surface, the transformation of Acholiland was remarkable, but nightmares lurked just beneath the surface. He himself had been abducted as a child. He narrated some of the atrocities, and how they were forced to cook and eat human flesh. “If you didn’t eat, you would be the next one in the pot,” he said calmly.
On reflection, we had seen this pattern before. By 2001 in Kampala, fifteen years after Museveni had taken power by force, the last public signs of the fight – the bullet holes in the walls, the bombed-out buildings – had all but disappeared with the mushrooming of shiny structures built over graveyards. It seems to have taken fifteen years to wipe out the visible signs of war in the north too.
The road through Lamwo, with the majesty of Agoro to the left as you head to South Sudan, was still relatively smooth. It was a beautiful drive. The road markings were sharp. The road signs had not yet weathered or been stolen by scrap-metal vandals.
The statistics people famously say that if you torture any data long enough, it will confess and tell you a story. I figured that if you travel a country’s roads for as long as I had, and torture its paths, they too will eventually confess their secrets, or yield their souls to you.
I cast a long reflective stare on the road as we headed back into Gulu. Nearly ten hours of driving lay ahead of us. Finally a faint light came on. I could see it. These roads wrapped themselves like a giant dark bandage over the wounds of northern Uganda.
And I also finally begun to figure out the deeper significance of the vendors, and the numbing monotony of the potatoes, onions, bananas, and vegetables that are a roadside feature in this republic of Uganda. Perhaps they are telling us that we really are one people. That our lands bear the same kind of fruit. If Chinua Achebe had written their story, he might have said that they were making offerings to Eshu, the god of travellers. Or perhaps to Oko, the god of agriculture and fertility.