True Stories – the Independence Day Murders
Image by Goran Horvat from Pixabay
by Anton Lutz
It is September 16, 2017. Independence Day.
Rose is riding on the bus from Wabag to her home near Pausa in Wapenamanda District. Suddenly the driver turns the wheel hard and stops. Says he will now return to Wabag.
She says, “I need to go to Pausa, you said you were going to Pausa.”
He replies, “You need to go to the other Pausa in Main tribe? That’s your own problem. This is Pausa in the Kaikin tribe, and this is as far as we are going.”
There is nothing the poor girl can do. She is a stranger in this area, and a young mother, less than twenty years old. She gets out of the bus. She puts her shopping bag on her shoulder and begins to walk along the Highlands Highway toward home. By herself. It is the middle of a beautiful afternoon.
Up ahead, however, a young boy has just collapsed and died. The boy’s mother cries out, and the young men come running to see what has happened.
“Susan, Susan was just here! And my boy is now dead!”
The men run after Susan and drag her back.
“What did you do with his heart? Did you eat his heart?”
Susan does not know what to say. She has no idea why she is being questioned like this.
One of the men notices Rose walking along the road with her shopping bag. A stranger on a beautiful afternoon. What is she doing here? Is she one of the women who helped Susan remove and eat the boy’s heart?
Within moments, Rose and Susan are both thrown to the ground and stripped naked. A fire is kindled. Pieces of metal are heated red hot and pressed onto their bodies. All parts of their bodies.
“Bring him back to life!” “Put his heart back!”
The torture goes on all night, sizzle and pop. And screaming.
Calls are made to local village Councillors. District Administration officers. The police.
“Oh yes. I did hear that something like that was happening.”
“Oh no, I don’t think there’s a way that I could organize anyone to go try to intervene.”
“Do you see the time? I’m at home with my family!”
“Why don’t you try to call so and so?”
The Independence Day celebrations continue through the night.
When the police arrive the next morning, someone is filming what has happened. We see Susan’s broken body over there under the banana tree. She died sometime during the night. The little boy’s dead body is a few meters away, silent in the morning sun.
Rose is still alive.
She looks into the lens of the camera. Is she angry? frightened? in shock? How do you read the emotions on a face like hers?
The men who did the torturing tell the police: “We told the women to put the little fellow’s heart back and bring him back to life, but for some reason… they didn’t…”.
The police take Susan’s body to the morgue. Rose gets taken to the local hospital. The community gathers to protest the presence of a sanguma woman at “their” hospital. What if she causes others to get sick and die?
Two young men stand their ground and insist that Rose’s injuries are treated. They then call for help when they realise she won’t survive in this local hospital with few resources.
A midnight run across the highlands, Rose semi-conscious on a mattress in the back of a Land Cruiser.
“Rose, when you are all better, you can sit up here with me in the front. Rose? Rose. Stay with us, Rose. You’ll be okay, Rose.”
“Why have you brought her here? Who is she to you? This looks like a domestic violence case. The fee is K400.”
“She is no-one to me. She is my sister, my mother.”
The fees are waived.
The two young men give their blood to try to save her life. “Why?”, I ask? “She needs help,” one replies.
Doctors, nurses, pastors, missionaries, the week after Independence Day is busy.
Rose’s mother stays with her as she lies in the hospital, crying and holding the shopping bag. “My daughter was just trying to come home!” she cries, over and over.
After a week, Rose dies.
We take her body home. Her mother and her little daughter ride with me.
The post-mortem on the little boy shows a piece of sweet potato stuck in his throat.
The video clearly shows the faces of the men who did this.
None have been arrested.