Sculpture erected in Kampala as tribute to child victims of war

A young British artist has erected a large clay work in the centre of Uganda's capital Kampala as a tribute to the children suffering in one of Africa's longest running civil conflicts. Its aim is to raise awareness of the plight of youngsters caught up in northern Uganda’s 17-year-long insurgency. Madeline Lesley says her piece was inspired by her experiences working in the northern town of Gulu, where thousands of children trek each night to avoid being abducted by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Many of the children she worked with were former LRA soldiers, others had seen their families killed in LRA attacks. “I don’t know how therapeutic it really was, but it was good just to get a bunch of these kids together having fun with clay,” said Lesley. The work consists of four life size clay sculptures of children she worked with in Gulu, plus another 100 more abstract pieces, fashioned from clay body parts made by the children. It was inaugurated on Thursday in Constitution Square, in the heart of the city’s administrative and business district. “It’s really just to remind people about this problem,” Lesley said. “That the kids are suffering most and that it's going on not too far away from here. It’s also asking ‘for how long are we going to let this continue?’" Thousands of children converge on Gulu every evening to sleep out in the town’s dusty streets or its bus park, before returning home each morning. “One evening I did a headcount of all the areas of Gulu where they congregate,” Lesley commented. “I counted roughly 25,000 people, most of them children.” “My work was mostly with an organisation called the Noah’s Ark Children’s Ministry which had provided a shelter for around 2,000 of these kids in a big concrete building in the town centre,” she added.