Ugandan Child Soldier Tells Story To Spread Awareness

At nine years old, China Keitetsi was fighting with a gun she was barely big enough to carry.

Keitetsi, a former member of the National Resistance Army (NRA) in Uganda, recounted her story—a childhood spent killing in the bush, brutal rape and torture at the hands of superiors and an escape to Denmark—last night at Emerson hall to draw attention to the horrors faced by child soldiers in conflicts in Africa.

She is working to bring to justice adult military commanders who recruit child soldiers and to give a voice to those children.

“They have created these wars and we fight them because we are nobody’s child, so it’s ok,” she said.

Keitetsi is also raising publicity for her book, My Life as a Child Soldier in Uganda, which is currently a bestseller in Germany. It has not yet been released in the United States.

Now 26, Keitetsi fled Uganda in 1995 and currently resides in Denmark.

Since she made it to Europe, she has committed herself to the fight against child soldiering.

“I really can’t say that I’m free. I can say those words when my friends can say the same,” she added.

The event featured a 45-minute documentary about her life and escape from Uganda, followed by a brief talk.

According to the documentary, Keitetsi ran away from her father, whom she called “a very bad man,” in 1984 and shortly thereafter fell into the hands of the NRA. In 1986, the NRA overthrew the existing military government, and have been in power ever since.

During her time in the NRA, Keitetsi was subject to severe training, brutal bush fighting, and other abuses, including repeated rape which resulted in the birth of her son in 1991—when Keitetsi was only 14.

“I can stand here and tell you but you’ll never know how I feel inside. It’s like I have lived 100 years, because I have never been allowed to think as my age,” she said.

The intensity of the fighting, she said, left her feeling that she had no family. In fact, she escaped once during her 11 years in the NRA, but found it too difficult to adjust to the community life and returned to the army.

“We were told that the gun was our mother, is our friend, is our everything,” she said in the documentary.

At 17, Keitetsi refused to sleep with a general. After he accused her of stealing arms and threatened her with sexual abuse and torture, she tried unsuccessfully to flee through Kenya. She instead fled across the continent to South Africa, where she was abducted by the Ugandan secret service, beaten and tortured.

After six months there, she managed to escape and a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in South Africa placed her in Denmark.

“First love I got is from Europe, from Denmark,” she said.

Keitetsi lamented the corruption in Uganda, specifically the betrayal she felt after the NRA took power in 1986.

“We were told that we were fighting for freedom and to end injustice and tribalism,” she said. “When we took over, everyone was fighting for riches. They forget everything we were in the bush for.”

President Yoweri Museveni and the NRA are currently engaged in a brutal conflict with the Lord’s Resistance Army in north of Uganda.

The talk was part of a larger Northeast tour to promote awareness about child soldiering.

Tomorrow, Keitetsi will be speaking at the United Nations about the effects of child soldiering.

The U.N. is currently trying to get more countries to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an agreement which would eliminate military recruitment of children under the age of 18.

Only the United States and Somalia have not yet ratified the agreement. The other 191 U.N. member countries have ratified it.

About 30 students and faculty attended. The Harvard African Students Association (HASA) sponsored the screening at part of their series “War? What Is it Good For—A Look at Conflicts in Africa Through the Eyes of Scholars, Students and Survivors.”

HASA President Uzodinma C. Iweala ’04 said that because of the recent focus on the Middle East, “conflicts in Africa and all over the world have been completely overlooked.”