Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend
a type of witchcraft9 called kiroga that is supposed to come from Bunyoro (cf. Beattie, 1978:29ff.), and is associated with spirit possession. Kiroga is practised primarily to take revenge. If someone wants vengeance, he/she visits the medium of a spirit, an ajwaka, whose spirit then instigates a cen, the vengeful spirit of a person who has died a bad death, to inflict on the victim insanity, infertility, any of many kinds of disease – including AIDS – or death. Kiroga is, in a certain sense, an intensified or radicalized form of another type of witchcraft that has long been customary in Acholi under the name kooro tipu, i.e. ‘catching the spirit’. Here, too, an ajwaka invokes her spirit to catch the tipu, or shadow, of an enemy, which she shuts up in a pot, inducing the victim to lose his/her appetite and to weaken rapidly. The difference between the two forms lies primarily in the being of the spirits employed to do the harm: in contrast to the tipu, who are not inherently evil, the cen, who are the unreconciled spirits of those who have died by violence, are regarded as extremely evil, vengeful and dangerous.
The elders as well as younger men and women agreed that witchcraft, especially in the form of kiroga, had increased to an intolerable level in Acholi. For, as was explained to me, death in war was interpreted, like other misfortunes, in the idiom of kiroga.10 In some cases, however, ancestral spirits were held responsible for the death. The enemy’s bullet that killed an Acholi was not seen as the real cause of his death. If relatives suspected someone of witchcraft, on the occasion of the burial an ajwaka called on the spirit (tipu) of the deceased and asked who really killed him. It often turned out that a relative or neighbour who had come into conflict with the deceased had bewitched him and ensured that the enemy’s bullet hit him, rather than someone else. Thus, the conflict with an outer, alien enemy was shifted inward. It was not so much the NRA, the external foe, that did the killing; in the end, internal enemies – those closest to a person, relatives or neighbours in Acholi – were considered responsible for the suffering and death.
Since not only death in war, but also death from AIDS,11 which has spread to a terrifying degree throughout Acholi, was interpreted in the idiom of kiroga, Acholi was transformed into a land where everyone suspected and tried to harm everyone else. For accusations of witchcraft not only reflect, but also generate, social tensions (cf. Turner, 1973:114). Whereas in 1973, for example, when many Acholi soldiers were cold-bloodedly murdered on orders from Idi Amin, the local administration answered the increasing suspicions and charges of witchcraft with witch hunts, in 1986 the chiefs were no longer in a position to do this. So the only solution left to those who felt threatened in Acholi was to seek protection with the help of an ajwaka or to take vengeance on a supposed evil-doer. Yet the victims of the retaliation measures would, in turn, interpret them as none other than acts of witchcraft, of kiroga, so that suspicions and accusations escalated.
Most of the suspicions and accusations, however, played themselves out within the domestic domain. Only if the elders found it opportune did they take up the charges, usually expressed by women, and make them public. But since each new death was seen as proof of the witches’ power in Acholi, while there was seldom a direct move against them, the discord and hatred12 among the people in Acholi continued to escalate, and no way out could be found.
The increase in charges of witchcraft is quite clearly connected to the increase in deaths through war and AIDS (Turner, 1973:113). Unfortunately, I do not have enough quantitative data to support this hypothesis more precisely. But I should point out that the correlation between deaths and charges of witchcraft in Acholi is this clear only until about 1988. Only up to this date was witchcraft (kiroga) taken as the primary explanation for deaths. It seems that a mechanism of self-limitation took effect thereafter. AIDS became increasingly interpreted as either a natural disease or a divine punishment. In February 1991, for example, after a woman had died of AIDS, an ancestral spirit that had taken possession of an ajwaka said that neither he nor anyone else was to blame for the woman’s death, but that she had died of AIDS, and that AIDS was a natural disease for which no one could be held responsible. Since by now there is hardly a family in Gulu that does not mourn for one or more members killed by AIDS or in war, accusations of witchcraft seem absurd. Other interpretations that do not demand retaliation are given priority.13
The Impurity of the Soldiers
In the power struggle that developed between the elders and the returned soldiers,14 the elders did not assert their authority directly but by referring to ‘Acholi tradition’ (Acholi macon). For these elders, the returnees were the cause of all evil. They had become alien to those who had remained at home. During the civil war, they had plundered, tortured, and murdered, primarily in Luwero, and had become of ‘impure heart’. Because they had killed, they brought cen, the spirits of the killed, to Acholi, thus threatening the lives of those who had stayed at home. But it was not actually the killing that violated the moral order. In precolonial times and also during the colonial period, a warrior brought home the head of the foe he had killed as evidence of his deed. He was then greeted with the triumphal songs of the women, but, as a liminal person, had to spend several days in seclusion until he had been cleansed in a ritual and the spirit of the killed person had been appeased and sent away by means of a sacrifice. The warrior then received an honorific, the moi name, as a sign of his bravery and his new status.
In the First and Second World Wars, Acholi soldiers of the King’s African Rifles (KAR) brought back to Acholi a memento – a bit of cloth, a button, or an insignia – of the enemies they had killed, and submitted themselves to the ritual of purification. But in the confusion of the civil war, many soldiers were unable, or did not want, to submit to the ritual; the cen, the spirits of those they had killed, remained unreconciled. Thus, the soldiers remained impure,15 and the unappeased spirits of those killed tried to avenge themselves on the soldiers or their relatives.
The threat from the cen increased when, after Museveni’s victory, thousands of soldiers sought refuge in Acholi, bringing with them large numbers of cen of the foes they had killed. And most of them also refused the ritual purification. They were blamed for the misfortunes and suffering that had come upon Acholi – AIDS, the civil war, the loss of participation in state power, the internal discord. The elders took Acholi’s historic undoing as a punishment, a sign of condemnation for violations of the moral order. In the vocabulary of the pure and the impure, they expressed a semantics of guilt (Ricoeur, 1988:46) that focused on the soldiers. The elders attempted to reconstitute the moral order by setting up a catalogue of proscriptions, as in precolonial and colonial times, but they were unable to enforce these rules. The returned soldiers (among others) refused to comply with the proscriptions.
But it was not only the elders’ lack of authority in their power struggle with the soldiers that lent the situation in Acholi an appearance of such ‘impurity’ and inescapability; indeed, some of the elders also entertained doubts about the efficacy of the ‘tradition’. Israel Lubwa, for example, said that the ritual of purification could only be carried out if a battle ‘between man and man’ had taken place. But with the increasing automation and the resulting anonymity of modern warfare, one could no longer know whom one had killed; this rendered the ritual obsolete. The technical perfection of the weapons made it possible to kill in a way that necessarily excluded heroism. For Israel Lubwa, there was no longer any possibility of dealing with, and warding off, the threat of the cen produced in such great numbers in the civil war. He admitted his helplessness.
Since, as was mentioned above, the cen could also be employed for purposes of witchcraft, their presence – heightened by the return of the soldiers – increased fears of kiroga. Thus, the two discourses about the misfortunes in Acholi were not only compatible, they complemented each other in a kind of vicious circle. For the increase in witchcraft also increased the impurity in Acholi, calling forth natural and social catastrophes like AIDS, war, and drought as punishment for the violation of the moral order. The sufferings produced by these catastrophes were in turn partially interpreted in the idiom of witchcraft, once again increasing the internal discord.16 In this situation, this ‘period of singularity’ (to take up Ardener’s category again), the customary measures taken against evil failed. A prophetic condition, as Ardener termed it, was given