The Notorious Joseph Kony: The Man Behind Africa’s Lord’s Resistance Army

Joseph Kony, the founder of the Lord’s Resistance Army, is one of Africa’s most wanted fugitives. His forces are believed to be responsible for the deaths of over 100,000 people, the abduction of at least 20,000 children, and the displacement of more than two million people. Most of the world hadn’t heard of Kony until 2012 when a controversial documentary called Kony 2012 catapulted his name onto the global stage.

Kony was born in 1961 in northern Uganda, where he grew up as one of six children in a middle-class family. His parents were farmers, and his father was a Catholic while his mother was an Anglican. Kony was an altar boy until the age of 15 when he dropped out of school to become a traditional healer.

In 1987, Kony founded the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Christian fundamentalist organization that operated in northern Uganda until 2006. Kony rose to prominence after taking over the Holy Spirit Movement, a rebel group led by his aunt, Alice Lakwena, who aimed to topple the Ugandan government.

The Acholi people largely occupy northern Uganda, and when the National Resistance Army came to power, it appeared to deliberately target the Acholi population. Villagers were violently attacked by army troops, subjected to food shortages, and forced to flee their homes.

Kony joined the Holy Spirit Movement to fight for the rights of the Acholi, but by 1987, army troops had crushed the movement, and Lakwena had escaped to Kenya, where she died in a refugee camp in 2007.

Kony established the Lord’s Resistance Army and proclaimed himself the people’s prophet. He soon turned against his supporters, supposedly in an effort to “purify” the Acholi and turn Uganda into a theocracy.
The rebel group carried out indiscriminate killings and forcibly recruited boys as soldiers and girls as sex slaves. Ideologically, the group espoused a mix of mysticism, Acholi nationalism, and Christian fundamentalism. Kony claimed to be establishing a theocratic state based on the biblical 10 commandments and Acholi tradition, and he proclaimed himself the spokesperson of God, claiming to have been visited by a multinational host of 13 spirits, including a Chinese phantom.

The Lord’s Resistance Army waged war for more than two decades within Uganda and later in the politically unstable neighboring countries of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and the Central African Republic, in an effort to topple Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

In 2005, the International Criminal Court brought charges of crimes against humanity against Kony and four of his top commanders. Despite a US$5 million bounty for information leading to his capture, Kony remains at large, and the International Criminal Court hopes to renew international efforts to find him by confirming the charges against him in his absence.

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