often be heard, in the afternoons, and especially in the evenings, the sound of machine gun fire also emanated from the video halls in town where low-budget American films or karate films from Taiwan staged a reprise of war. These films provided the models avidly imitated by Holy Spirit soldiers and government troops alike. Soldiers I got to know gave themselves names like ‘Suicide’, ‘Karate’, ‘007’, and ‘James Bond’. And a spirit who liked to introduce himself as ‘King Bruce’, after the karate hero Bruce Lee, fought in the Holy Spirit Movement of Joseph Kony.
I did not pitch my tent in the middle of an Acholi village, as Malinowski exhorted, but took up my quarters in what had been a luxury hotel in town. I was advised to do this because I was told that the Holy Spirit soldiers still made the territory around Gulu insecure. Especially at night, ‘rebels’, militiamen, and government soldiers moved about in small groups plundering farms. Since they all wore the same uniforms, one could never be sure who the plunderers were. In the evenings, many people, especially women with children, came to the city to seek protection from such marauders, spending the night there then returning to their villages in the morning. Others, who lived too far from the city, were so afraid of the soldiers that they slept in the bush. The children were wrapped in blankets and hidden separately under certain trees or bushes. They were warned not to make a sound, whatever happened, and not to come back to the house until morning, when it was light again.
The hotel I stayed in had been plundered twice, once by Idi Amin’s soldiers, who had fled from the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) in 1979, and a second time by Bazilio Okello’s followers, who took flight from the National Resistance Army (NRA) in March 1986. Most of the windows were broken, and all the transportable furniture had been taken away. The doors had been smashed and could no longer be locked; the rooms contained nothing but a bed. In the evening, I was the only guest. The waiter put on livery in my honour and the kitchen boy arranged a bouquet of bougainvillea.
Under the conditions of a continuing war, it was impossible for me to carry out field research in the classic sense. George Devereux has shown that methods are a favoured means of reducing anxiety. Method derives from the Greek hodos, i.e. a path or road. Methods are paths one takes together with other scientists. They calm the feeling of insecurity; after all, one is not taking the path alone. But the information I was collecting for my work was not the only frightening thing; there were also the situations in which I had to collect it. I am sure I have not managed to understand what happened without displacements and blind spots (Crapanzano, 1977:69). Speaking of the unspeakable and making it my topic sometimes seemed the only escape. But my wish that everything not be so terrible was also very strong. At some point, I noticed that I tended to conduct discussions mostly with members of the Holy Spirit Movement who had been in its civilian wing and who had not themselves fought and killed.
During my study of anthropology and while conducting field research among the Tugen in northwestern Kenya, I had learned to defend the people on whom and with whom I was working. Here, too, I now wanted to sketch a picture of the HSM which showed them from their own perspective and in correspondence with their self-image, against the discrimination of the mass media. I assumed that the Holy Spirit Movement, like so many others, was a peasant revolt against the state; and I planned to take their side more or less clearly. But I was soon forced to realize that most of the original members of the Holy Spirit Movement were not peasants, but soldiers who had fought in the 1981–5 civil war and who could not or would not pursue any other occupation than waging war and killing. Their goal was to get rich, take their revenge, and regain the share in state power they had lost. I played with the idea of giving up my project, since I saw no possibility of depicting the Holy Spirit Movement and its history except by idealizing it unjustifiably or repeating stereotypes that would have been too close to certain colonial images of warlike, violent ‘savages’. Not until I talked with a former Holy Spirit soldier who had fought alongside Alice Lakwena from the beginning did I learn of the HSM’s serious attempt to wage a war against the war and to put an end to violence and terror; only then did I manage to regain the sympathy for the ‘object’ that seemed to me to be a necessary precondition for ethnography. And although I tried to trace the inner kinship of humanism and terror as well as the double movement of liberation and enslavement (cf. Habermas, 1985:289) in the history of the HSM, this precondition may, I fear, be to blame for a certain tendency to idealization in my depiction. My discussion partners, who used me and my work to justify their own past, also exhibited this tendency.
The postmodern call for heterogeneity (for example, Lyotard, 1977; Derrida, 1988), for interpretations that not only call forth counter-positions, but which also take account of what lies in between or alongside, is very difficult to fulfill in ethnographies (on war), because in such a situation one indeed thinks in oppositions and in opposition to something. But I hope, especially in the historical chapters, that I have brought to light the transitions, that which lies between the oppositions (cf. Parkin, 1987:15).
I conducted a number of extensive discussions, sometimes over periods of several days, with some fifteen former Holy Spirit soldiers in Gulu and Kampala. Their willingness to talk to me was rooted in the task the spirit Lakwena had assigned them of correcting the false image the government had spread about the movement in the mass media. Many of them still acted on behalf of the spirit, even though they had left the movement.
All of them, with one exception, made me promise not to mention their names in my text. The exception was Mike Ocan, a former member of the civilian wing, the Frontline Co-ordination Team of the HSM. He had been taken prisoner after the fighting in Jinja in October 1987, had been in prison, had been ‘politicized’ in a camp, and afterwards rehabilitated. When I got to know him in the Spring of 1991, he was working as headmaster at a school in Gulu. He had already served as an informant to Apollo Lukermoi (1990), a student writing a thesis in Religious Studies and Philosophy at Makerere University, and he felt himself called to be the historiographer and ethnographer of the Holy Spirit Movement. Since he was on the side not of the victors but of the defeated, he was under great pressure to explain himself and under a greater burden of proof than a victor, for whom success itself speaks (cf. Koselleck, 1989:669).
He derived his ethnographic and historiographic authority (cf. Clifford, 1988) from being an eyewitness and a participant, which he considered an epistemological advantage that assured the truth of his story (ibid:668).6 But he also appealed to the authority of an otherworldly power, the spirit Lakwena. In the text he gave me, he wrote: ‘The Lakwena bestowed upon me the authority to inform the world about his mission on Earth and I feel in duty bound to do so.’ Just as the Holy Spirit Movement legitimated itself transcendentally with reference to the spirits, Mike Ocan adopted this legitimation for his story.
At my request, he wrote the ‘first text’ about the HSM, a ‘thick description’ in Geertz’s sense (1983). He thus gave the past the status of a written story and, by putting it in writing, irrevocably fixed the difference between the story that had passed and the linguistic form it had now gained (cf. Koselleck 1989:669).
But this text is also an attempt to translate the organization of the Holy Spirit Movement, its content, goals, meanings, and history, for a European audience. Anthropologists are not the only ones confronted with the problem of translation; the same is true for those who try to produce a text that crosses cultural boundaries. It is in this context that we must place Mike Ocan’s assurance at the beginning of his text that ‘the accounts here contained are by no means fictitious. They are real life experiences which took place a couple of years back.’ The distance from events that a text for Europeans required from him permitted him to recognize the ‘exoticism’ of the Holy Spirit Movement and its history. But perhaps it was also the influence of the mass media and the stereotypes and images from an external perspective that led him to defend his own text as non-fiction. With this remark, he also sought – in the best anthropological tradition – to enhance once more the truth of his portrayal.
In 1995, Mike Ocan and I visited another intellectual of the HSM. Like Mike Ocan, he had been working in the Frontline Coordination Team and, in addition, as the secretary, or chief
