Read Online Coincidence: A Novel by J. W. Ironmonger - Free Book Online

‘But I know where Uganda is. Have you been?’
    â€˜No,’ he shakes his head and there is a suggestion of disappointment in the gesture. ‘All I know is what Azalea told me.’ He tries to imagine it, but how can you visualise a place you’ve never visited? He doesn’t even have a photograph. He has scoured the internet for pictures looking for a mission that may, or may not, exist, and a township as remote from his world as any he might dream of; and he has tried to picture the hard red dust and the deep green hills, and the swirl of the great river. But imagination is no substitute for experience. Thomas knows this. He has heard these stories from Azalea. She can talk of the Albert Nile, and the markets of Gulu, and the voices of the Acholi people, and the cold eyes of the Lord’s Resistance Army. But can he do the same?
    â€˜It starts,’ he tells Clementine, ‘in a little town called Langadi.’

9
    1909–1984 / October 1969
    T he little township of Langadi lies north of the Nile River in that part of Uganda known as Moyo District in the province of West Nile. It is a remote place, the West Nile. It hugs the north and west borders of the country, cleanly severed from the rest of Uganda by the great river that snips off its top left corner. Only two fragile connections exist to link this secluded district to the rest of Uganda. One is an ancient ferry service that groans across the Nile at Laropi once every hour between sunrise and sunset, laden with lorryloads of produce from the south en route to the far-flung communities of West Nile and the markets of Sudan. The other is the great bridge at Pakwatch some two hundred miles or so, down perilous roads, to the west. Moyo town itself is little more than a straggle of buildings set around the confluence of half a dozen dusty murrum roads the colour of soft terracotta. There’s a sprawling local marketplace and a handful of respectable buildings, and then a spidery network of poorly maintained dirt roadways and footpaths that link the town to its neighbours and to an endless succession of village communities each with its cluster of circular thatched Acholi huts, its farms, animals and ragged children. If you continue to travel north, past the patchwork of farms that roll out to the hills in the west and to the Nile Valley in the east, you will reach the border post with the country we must now call Southern Sudan – although in 1984, when Luke, Rebecca and Azalea Folley arrived in Langadi, the huge country to the north was all simply ‘Sudan’, and the region to the north of the border post was the Sudanese district of Central Equatoria. The great civil war that had raged since the mid-1950s in Sudan subsided in the early 1980s, but this was only a temporary armistice; in 1983 it erupted again and would escalate brutally for another two decades as the largely non-Arab, non-Muslim southern Sudanese rebelled against the authoritarian, Islamic rule of the north. For Ugandan border townships such as Langadi, Moyo and Arua, and even for the regional capital, the city of Gulu, two hours’ drive to the south-east, the conflict that affected their northern neighbour would encroach upon their life too. Even during lulls in the civil war, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army – the SPLA – would mount cross-border attacks. Armed militia groups would cross the border to raid farms and market stalls for food to take to their comrades-in-arms in Sudan; shots would be fired, and sometimes casualties would result.
    The upshot of this little piece of history was an influx, every year, of tens of thousands of refugees into a part of the world with a limited ability to accommodate them. It wasn’t a particularly proud time in Ugandan history, either. It was a period that became known locally as the ‘Ugandan Bush War’ when a whole chaotic gaggle of government and rebel groups pitted forces against one