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 HSMF marched from Kitgum to Lira, Soroti, Kumi, Mbale, Tororo, and as far as Jinja, where they were decisively defeated at the end of October 1987. Alice had to flee to Kenya, where she was granted political asylum, and she is alleged to be living in northern Kenya today.
The war in northern Uganda did not come to an end with her defeat, however, for the spirit Lakwena did not give up. He took possession of Alice’s father, who continued fighting with the remaining soldiers of the HSMF until he surrendered to the NRA in 1989. In addition, Lakwena took possession of a young man named Joseph Kony, who continued the war against the NRA up to the present.
Mass Media and Feedback
When I began my work, the subject of my research, Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement (HSM), had no place in the books and articles of my colleagues; it had not yet been taken up in scientific discourse. But I did not have the privilege of writing the first text on the movement, for the HSM had already been created by the mass media.
In 1986, when a young woman in Acholi, in northern Uganda, began creating an army on orders from a holy Christian spirit, this was not really noted as an event. Not until she had inflicted severe losses on the government army in several battles, especially the battle at Corner Kilak, and marched on the capital, Kampala, was she seized upon not only by the local but also by the international mass media. The press created the images and stereotypes that would shape discourse on the HSM. In local and international headlines, Alice was designated as a rebel or voodoo priest, a witch, a prophetess, a former prostitute, the future Queen of Uganda, and a Jeanne d’Arc in the Ugandan swamp. Jeanne d’Arc, too, was called a saint and a prophetess and was reviled by her enemies as a prostitute and a witch.) Her movement was depicted as a bizarre, anachronistic, suicidal enterprise in which hordes armed only with stones and sticks were conducting a senseless struggle.
The reporting addressed a topic that will be treated extensively in what follows, namely witchcraft and sorcery. In New Vision, a Ugandan daily paper loyal to the government, Alice was called a witch doctor as early as 21 March 1987. And on 3 April 1987, one could read: ‘The extraordinary casualties rate suffered by the rebels is largely explained by their continuing reliance on witchcraft as a means of primitive mobilisation.’ This was followed by a report that provides a typical example of war propaganda:
Alice murdered a child in a ghastly ritual sacrifice after the second attack on Lira 21 March [1987]. Lakwena found a woman who had twins and took one of them. The child was then killed and its liver eaten by the rebel soldiers. The sacrifice3 was intended to strengthen rebels through witchcraft . . . (New Vision, 3 April 1987).
It is commonplace that charges of witchcraft and cannibalism are among the stereotypes used to designate those to be excluded: the other, strangers, and enemies (cf. Arens 1980). War propaganda in the First and Second World Wars also employed this theme (cf. Fussell, 1977:115ff.).
The Holy Spirit soldiers did not remain uninfluenced by the mass media. They listened regularly to the radio, especially the BBC and Deutsche Welle. They also read newspapers and magazines. They heard and read the reports and reportage on themselves and their struggle. Their own significance was conveyed to them in the media.4 They learned how they were seen by others and attempted to live up to, as well as to contradict, the images drawn of them.
In an interview Alice – or rather, the spirit Lakwena – granted reporters a few days before her defeat at Jinja, she tried to correct the picture the media had sketched of her and her movement. She announced in the Acholi language (which one of her soldiers, Mike Ocan, translated into English) that the spirit Lakwena was fighting to depose the Museveni government and unite all the people in Uganda. She said that the war was also being conducted to remove all wrong elements from the society and to bring peace, and that she was here to proclaim the word of the holy spirit (Sunday Nation, 25 October 1987). In addition, she demanded balanced reporting (Allen, 1991:395).
Alice and the Holy Spirit soldiers were aware of the power of the mass media, and tried to build up a counterforce to meet it by setting up a Department of Information and Publicity within the HSM. It produced leaflets giving information on the goals of the movement, distributed them among the populace, wrote letters to chiefs and politicians, and also collected information. A radio set was available and a photographer took pictures of prisoners of war, visitors, captured weapons, and rituals. The Holy Spirit soldiers wrote their own texts. They kept diaries; the commanders and heads of the Frontline Co-ordination
