IN northern Uganda, the dry season is used to burn bushes; the fire drives snakes and other predators away. On the Ugandan side of the border with South Sudan, below a mountainous ridge along the Nile, is a village called Odrupele by locals. It is a place teeming with snakes.

Until a few years ago, children walking along the village’s paths were stalked by a greater threat lurking in the bushes — possible abduction by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, whose leader, Joseph Kony, started a brutal campaign in the late 1980s to overthrow Uganda’s government by using child soldiers. The dry season was better; but like serpents, L.R.A. fighters returned with the rains.

That cult of fear was immortalized earlier this month when the film “Kony 2012” went viral on the Internet. But long before Mr. Kony, people in northern Uganda were preyed upon — by the armies of King Leopold of Belgium, the dictator Idi Amin, and later Ugandan governments. Violence is an enterprise that does not involve one man or his organization alone, no matter how cruel.

The village of Odrupele (also called Dufile), near where I went to primary and secondary school, once served as an inland port for cargoes of ivory and slaves. By a twist of history, Mr. Kony is now in the Democratic Republic of Congo, King Leopold’s old playground, having relocated there in late 2005. Carving his own bloody path with rope, knives and guns, he is surviving on low-tech methods while 100 members of the world’s most advanced army have joined the effort to kill or capture him.