Published in 2015
248 pages
Evelyn Amony is a human rights advocate for war-affected women in northern Uganda, working as chair of the Women’s Advocacy Network and with the Justice and Reconciliation Project in Gulu, Uganda. Erin Baines is an associate professor in the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia and the cofounder of the Justice and Reconciliation Project in Gulu, Northern Uganda. She is the author of Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the UN, and the Global Refugee Crisis.
What is this book about?
Abducted at the age of eleven, Evelyn Amony spent nearly eleven years inside the Lord’s Resistance Army, becoming a forced wife to Joseph Kony and mother to his children. She takes the reader into the inner circles of LRA commanders and reveals unprecedented personal and domestic details about Joseph Kony. Her account unflinchingly conveys the moral difficulties of choosing survival in a situation fraught with violence, threat, and death.
Amony was freed following her capture by the Ugandan military. Despite the trauma she endured with the LRA, Amony joined a Ugandan peace delegation to the LRA, trying to convince Kony to end the war that had lasted more than two decades. She recounts those experiences, as well as the stigma she and her children faced when she returned home as an adult.
This extraordinary testimony shatters stereotypes of war-affected women, revealing the complex ways that Amony navigated life inside the LRA and her current work as a human rights advocate to make a better life for her children and other women affected by war.
