I use the term ‘witch doctor’ quite pragmatically, as English-speaking Acholi also do. In my chapter on the history of religions I examine more closely the history of the term and the almost discriminatory connotation it carries.
Two
The History & Ethnogenesis of the Acholi
The subject of this book, Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement, originated in Acholi. Although it understood itself as a supra-ethnic movement and indeed managed to cross ethnic boundaries, in many respects it was closely tied to the Acholi culture.1 After its defeat at Jinja in October 1987, the successor Holy Spirit Movements were limited to Acholi, and became ethnic movements. Because I shall often refer to Acholi in what follows, a short digression on the ethnogenesis and history of the Acholi seems appropriate at this point.
The Acholi did not exist in precolonial times. The ethnonym came into usage during the colonial period. Earlier, the travelogues of Emin Pasha and Samuel Baker incorrectly categorized them as Shilluk and wrongly called them shuli (Gertzel, 1974:57; Atkinson, 1989:37). According to Girling, the designation Acholi could have arisen from an-loco-li, which means ‘I am a human being’ (1960:2). It would then be a typical (ethnocentric) self-description of the kind we find among many other ethnic groups.
Like the Lango,2 the Acholi owe the emergence of their ethnic identity not to any kind of inner consistence, but to concrete historical experience, especially the experience of migrations, which became the determining trait of their ethnic identity today (cf. Tosh, 1978:33). Starting around 1600, the people who would later be called the Acholi came with other Lwo in several waves of migration from the southern Sudan to their present territory and to Bunyoro (Crazzolara, 1937; Atkinson, 1984). Later, in the eighteenth century, a number of Lwo migrated from Bunyoro back to Acholi and into what is now Kenya (Bere, 1947). Some Acholi clans claim to be descended from a common ancestor named Lwo, and designate themselves accordingly as Lwo (ibid). A number of these clans constituted about thirty chiefdoms in today’s Acholi region; but these chiefdoms were extremely changeable, with constant splinterings and new foundings, processes perhaps corresponding to the Internal African Frontier model developed by Igor Kopytoff (Kopytoff, 1989:3ff.). A chief, called rwot, headed each chiefdom. This rwot was ‘owner of the land’ and was descended from kal, an aristocratic lineage, which formed the core surrounded by various other commoner lineages, labong.
The nineteenth century produced several contradictory reports on the position and power of the rwodi (plural of rwot). In some, the office of the chief is depicted as a central authority and the man himself as possessing political power; in others, he is portrayed as a person with no real political power of enforcement, but dependent on consensus with his ‘subjects’, who could drive him out or abandon him and seek a new rwot. In point of fact, both descriptions can be considered as justified. They bear witness to the dynamic social world in which the Acholi later congealed into an ethnic group.3 Centralized and acephalous societies should be seen less as taxonomic categories than as historical transformations (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991:128). The power of the rwot was constantly questioned and made the object of negotiations and public discussion. Disputes between the chief, who claimed political power, and the elders of the clan or lineage, who tried to assert their own power against that of the chief, were endemic in Acholi; depending on the respective constellation of power in a chiefdom at a particular time, the chief or the elders might prevail, i.e. centralist or decentralized tendencies might be realized.4 The rwot also had ritual duties. Like a Sacred King (cf., for example, de Heusch, 1987), he was responsible for the welfare of man and nature, for fertility, and above all for rain. But here, too, the sources are ambiguous. According to Girling (1960:82ff.), the Acholi were under a kind of dual authority, divided between the rwot and the priest, who together performed a ritual once a year to guarantee the fertility and well-being of the country. In this ritual, they also purified the chiefdom of witchcraft and sorcery.
But the ethnographic information can also be read differently. Each chiefdom had one or more shrines forming its ritual centre. These were the dwellings of the chiefdom jogi (sing. jok), spirits that watched over the moral order. Priests functioned as their spirit mediums, and shared responsibility with the rwot for the fertility and well-being of the country. It was the priests of the chiefdom jogi who installed the chief in office. Consequently, it is also possible to interpret the chiefdom as a cult of the chiefdom jogi and the chief as an initiate in this cult (cf MacGaffey, 1986).
The rwot represented the unity of the chiefdom. This was also expressed in the symbolic ordering of space: the rwot had his compound in the midst of his ‘subjects’, who built their homes in a circle around his to protect him (cf. Girling, 1960:82f.).
Between various chiefdoms, peace (usually cemented by marital alliances: the first or ‘major’ wife of the rwot was often the daughter of another chief) or war might prevail. In times of war, the rwot used the power of the jogi of his chiefdom to kill. Their power could be used not only for good, to ‘heal’ the society, but also to kill. Again and again in what follows, I shall take up this polarity of healing and killing, connected in the concept of the jok, and try to develop its dialectic in the history of the Acholi and the Holy Spirit Movement. Thus, in precolonial times, there was no real Acholi ethnic identity, but only various clan identities, which determined one’s belonging to a territory and political unit, the chiefdom.
The arrival of the Arabs in Atiak in about 1850, their hunts for ivory and slaves, and their skilled manipulation of the conflicts between Acholi chiefdoms to their own advantage had devastating consequences. The Arabs established trading posts and forced the Acholi living nearby to pay taxes. If they were unable to comply, they were plundered (Gray 1951:129). From 1872 to 1888, as Nubian troops5 were settling in Acholi, the situation became even worse. Things did not change until the Mahdi rebellion interrupted relations between Egypt and Equatoria Province, and then not necessarily for the better, since the British again brought a number of Nubian soldiers into the country, where they were already notorious among the Acholi for their atrocities (ibid:45). When the British came to Acholi, they encountered a mistrustful, hostile populace (Pirouet, 1989:195).
The arrival of ivory and slave traders and the import of rifles from the north fundamentally changed the status of the rwodi. Some of them managed to build up private retinues of armed followers, on the model of the Egyptian administrative posts. They employed small armies equipped with rifles to attack neighbouring chiefdoms and other ethnic groups, such as the Madi or Langi, robbing cattle and enslaving women and children.
War was already endemic in northern Uganda at the beginning of the colonial period (Uganda became a British protectorate in 1894). The exchange of rifles for ivory and slaves had catastrophic results in Acholi, as in other parts of Africa (cf. Goody, 1980:39ff.; Smith, 1989:31ff.). The reports on the ‘pacification’ of Acholi at the beginning of the colonial period permit a rough estimate of the degree to which rifles had spread (Postlethwaite, 1947:51). When the colonial administration began registering guns and disarming the Acholi, the chiefs of Gondoroko and Gulu possessed almost 1500 rifles (Native Reports in the National Archives of 1910). And there is a note in the 1913 report that, in the month of March alone, more than 1,400 rifles were collected. Individual chiefs, like Awich of Payira,6 tried to use the colonial army for their own purposes. They denounced their enemies to the colonial administration and gave the military cause for punitive measures. They used the foreign military power to settle their own accounts.
The Acholi were not finally ‘pacified’ until 1913, with the defeat of the Lamogi rebellion (Adimola, 1954). The colonial administration had promised that they could keep their rifles if they allowed them to be registered, but after registration, many rifles were publicly burned. This betrayal became the node of a trauma in the history of
