Overview

More than 60,000 children were abducted in east and central Africa in the 1990s by the violent rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army and its notorious commander Joseph Kony. Evelyn Amony was one of them. I Am Evelyn Amony tells a harrowing story of heartbreaking loss, unrelenting horror, and courageous survival. Abducted in 1994 at the age of eleven, 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 in 2005 following her capture by the Ugandan military. Despite the trauma she endured with the LRA, Amony joined a Ugandan peace delegation to the LRA in 2006, 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.

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9780299304942

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Reviews

Evelyn Amony provides penetrating insights into one of the most notorious yet least understood armed groups, the Lord s Resistance Army. This is an invaluable account of what a woman experienced during years in captivity and, after escaping, her struggle to regain her humanity and agency. Essential reading for anyone studying armed opposition groups, women and war, transitional justice, and recovery. Dyan Mazurana, Tufts University

'I am Evelyn Amony may be the ultimate example of a determined woman using her own powerful voice.'-African Arguments In addition to the inherent drama of Amony's voyage, the book uses the immediacy of oral storytelling that transitions well into written form, conveying her observations interspersed with barbed, often poetic analysis. -International Journal of African Historical Studies

A survivor s testimony of kidnapping and survival in Uganda. . . . All the more harrowing for its matter-of-fact understatement. Kirkus Reviews

Author Information

Evelyn Amony is a human rights advocate for waraffected 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.

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