Why did so many people follow Lakwena and Alice? The immediate reason was that the leaders promised to rid the country of witchcraft. This might not ‘exist’ in actuality but beliefs about it did, as a dangerous sign of the evil that was taking over the land. The Acholi had suffered many years of wretchedness under Idi Amin, Obote and then Museveni, with continual military attacks and at times famine and sickness. The country was riven with dissension and greed, seen as the consequence of witchcraft; and the power of the enemy, the government, was also regarded as being based upon witchcraft. Alice and her spirits, as Christians, claimed first to rid northern Uganda of its ‘internal’ witchcraft and then to destroy the ‘external’ witchcraft throughout the rest of the country. Witchcraft, like armed violence, was a form of aggression, and Behrend discusses the links and analogies between them as being clearly at the heart of the movement.
The Holy Spirit Movement, and its military wing the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces, were concerned with the purification of society from sin, especially as expressed in ‘witchcraft’. Sin, unlike the breach of taboo, was considered a deliberate act for which the sinner had to take responsibility before both the living and the Divinity. To defeat external sin required armed force; to defeat internal sin demanded spiritual purification, and once that was gained the soldiers of the Holy Spirit Movement would be victorious against the government army. Pure soldiers had no fear of enemy bullets but stood in line singing psalms, their spirits deflecting the bullets. Defeat was seen as a consequence of their own moral backsliding and not of the superior military strength of the enemy.
Heike Behrend’s account of the internal organization of the Holy Spirit Movement is welcome, as there are very few such accounts in the literature. The organization of the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces, the military wing of the movement, was complex. Beneath the overall authority of Lakwena, entitled ‘Chairman and Commander in Chief, there were many levels of command and much use of written regulations such as the Holy Spirit Safety Precautions and the Holy Spirit Tactics. Many Acholi men had military experience, the older ones as members of the King’s African Rifles during the Second World War and the younger majority as either members or foes of the various armed forces that had been raised by Obote and Idi Amin and had engaged in civil wars throughout much of the postcolonial period. They knew how to organize a modern and literate army. But there was more to it than the merely military aspect. The organization of the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces provided a coherent structure in an incoherent situation, and created order within disorder. The emphasis on controlling witchcraft, the rules against taking food or women by force, of giving written receipts for ‘donations’, and the other regulations, were all part of constructing order. As Behrend states, to draw up and date documents provided proof that the transactions had actually taken place: they constructed history. These rules served to form a new community and gave a new and common identity to people of many descents and ethnic groups – Acholi, Lango, Teso and others. Their joining together validated Alice’s claim to the leadership of all Uganda.
Besides their own leaders and troops, the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces had other allies in the form of the denizens of ‘nature’ and the environment. These appeared during the semi-mythical ‘journey to Paraa’ (a traditional spiritual centre) in May 1985, when Alice’s prophetic powers began to take shape. She claimed to have persuaded many animals and natural phenomena to become allies; and in later battles her soldiers were aided by 140,000 spirits, bees, snakes, rivers, rocks and mountains. The link with nature meant more than merely extending Alice’s authority beyond the human and social. It implied that Lakwena gave animals, bees and rocks speech and the power to communicate with one another, that the horrors perpetrated by the Ugandan government and its army affected not only the Acholi but also insulted and destroyed the environment in which they lived, and that Lakwena and his adherents were fit to lead and control the entire world.
All this actually happened only a few years ago. We are grateful to Heike Behrend for presenting the history of Alice and her Holy Spirit Movement so lucidly and movingly.
Foreword
This book was first published in 1993 in Germany. Since that time, the situation in Acholi has changed; in addition, my perspective also has been slightly transformed. This book is a revised version of the German original. Thanks to the comments and kind criticism of Alex and Zeru D.O. Abukha, Aidan Southall and Frank Schubert, I was able to correct a number of mistakes and expand some parts of the subject. In the Epilogue, I attempt to tell the story of the various Holy Spirit Movements and their protagonists up to 1996.
I would like to thank J. C. Winter and Gert Spittler of Bayreuth for their help and support, as well as the University of Bayreuth’s Special Research Programme, ‘Identity in Africa’, whose generous support made this work possible. I thank Hans-Jürgen Greschat, Karl-Heinz Kohl, Fritz Kramer, Ute Luig, Claude Meillassoux, Louise Pirouet, and Catherine Watson for valuable discussions and information.
I would also like to mention Michael Twaddle and Holger Bernt Hansen, who, with the conferences they organized regularly in Roskilde, created a forum where many important topics that came into this work were discussed.
For their support in Gulu, I would especially like to thank the Lubwa family, Mike Ocan, R. M. Nono, Andrew Adimola, and Caroline Lamwaka, and, in Kampala, J. P. Ocitti, who provided valuable information.
This text could not have taken this shape without the friendship and co-operation of Alja Epp-Naliwaiko, Reiner Epp, and Maria Fischer in Kampala and Gennaro Ghirardelli in Berlin. I would also like to thank all those I cannot mention by name here, but who contributed to this work through the conversations they granted me.
Above all, my gratitude goes to Dan Mudoola, without whose generous help and friendship my ethnographic work in Acholi would not have been possible. He died on 22 February 1993 in Kampala from wounds inflicted in an attack. This book is dedicated to him.
Heike Behrend
One
Troubles of an Anthropologist
The Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena
In August 1986, Alice Auma, a young woman from Gulu in Acholi in northern Uganda, began raising an army, which was called the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (HSMF).1 From a local perspective, she did this on orders from and as the spirit-medium of a Christian holy spirit named Lakwena. Along with this spirit who was the Chairman and Commander in Chief of the movement, other spirits – like Wrong Element from the United States, Ching Po from Korea, Franko from Zaire, some Islamic fighting spirits, and a spirit named Nyaker from Acholi – also took possession of her. These spirits conducted the war. They also provided the other-worldly legitimation for the undertaking.
In a situation of extreme internal and external threat, Alice began waging a war against Evil. This evil manifested itself in a number of ways: first, as an external enemy, represented by the government army, the National Resistance Army (NRA);2 and secondly, as an internal enemy, in the form of impure soldiers, witches, and sorcerers.
In November 1986, Alice moved to Kitgum and took over 150 soldiers from another resistance movement, the Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA), which was also fighting the government. In a complex initiation ritual, she purified these soldiers of evil and taught them what she termed the Holy Spirit Tactics, a special method of fighting invented by the spirit Lakwena. She instituted a number of prohibitions, called Holy Spirit Safety Precautions, also ordered by the spirit Lakwena. With these 150 soldiers, at the end of November she began attacking various NRA units stationed in Acholi. Because she was successful and managed to gain the sympathy of a large part of the population even outside Acholi, she was joined not only by soldiers (from other movements), but also by peasants, school and college students, teachers, businessmen, a former government minister, and a number of girls and women.
The