Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend
sent the spirit Lakwena to them (and to no other ethnic group). Their particular sinfulness and guilt was thus not only transformed into a promise of salvation; it also made them God’s chosen people, like the children of Israel, thus legitimating the claim they would make to leadership of the Holy Spirit Movement.
Notes
1. I am aware that the term ‘crisis’ is extremely imprecise and carries a great variety of meanings. Nor has it recently gained in clarity and precision in the social sciences (Koselleck, 1982:647). With the introduction of this term, I do not want to associate the Holy Spirit Movement with what anthropology designates as a crisis cult (La Barre, 1971). I use the term precisely because of its semantic breadth, in order to include its juridical, medical, theological, and political connotations in the local crisis theories that I want to present.
2. In what follows, whenever Alice is in the state of possession, and thus not herself but the spirit, I shall always speak of Lakwena, thus giving the local perspective in which not she, but the spirit, is the active and speaking being.
3. Werbner (1989:223ff.) showed that the arrival and integration of strangers are accompanied by certain shifts in discourse. He distinguishes between external and internal strangers, a distinction Fortes (1975:242) had already made. While external strangers are really strangers, for example Europeans, internal strangers are natives who have become strange, and who, after long absence, for example as emigrant workers or soldiers, return to and must be reintegrated into their homeland. In Acholi, first internal strangers arrived – the remaining UNLA soldiers fleeing home after their defeat – followed in March by external strangers, the soldiers of the NRA, who established themselves as the occupying power.
4. That of all people it was the Bahima – Museveni is a Muhima (singular of Bahima) from Ankole – who called them primitive particularly upset many Acholi, because in Gulu District a number of Bahima from Ankole and Rwanda had worked for them as herdsmen; and in accordance with popular theories of evolution, the latter were considered primitive. I should note, however, that I did not hear these radio broadcasts, and can merely recount how they were received in Acholi.
5. ‘Three piece tying’, or kandooya, is a form of torture in which the arms are tied tightly behind the back at the wrists and elbows. Kandooya strains the chest and impedes breathing, and sometimes severely damages the nerves of the arms (Pirouet, 1991:200).
6. In the politicization camps of Luwero and Mbarara, both of which were in the centre of ‘formerly’ enemy territory, the former UNLA and UPDA soldiers had to perform labour, such as producing bricks to rebuild the buildings their armies had destroyed. Many Acholi, and especially the elders, were reminded of the forced labour of the colonial period, which they had interpreted as a form of slavery.
7. In Opit, about 30 km away from Gulu, Alice had set up a shrine as a spirit medium, diviner, and healer.
8. That poisoning could become the currently predominant form of witchcraft may be due to the colonial judicial decisions which recognized only those forms of witchcraft or sorcery in which poisonous substances could be traced (compare Allen, 1991:385).
9. Various forms of witchcraft and sorcery are distinguished in Acholi. When spirit possession is also involved, the boundary between the two cannot be clearly drawn, so in what follows I shall use the term witchcraft, as do those Acholi who speak English.
10. I collected about ten cases from this period in which mostly women were suspected of or charged with witchcraft.
11. Although the government has launched several Western-style information campaigns, this has hardly diminished the suspicions and charges of witchcraft, because the two explanations are not mutually exclusive, but compatible. Few in Uganda today would deny that one contracts AIDS through sexual contact. But the idiom of witchcraft addresses the question ‘Why me and not another?’
12. In Return to Laughter, E. Bowen, alias Laura Bohannan, described a similar situation that developed among the Tiv, when an epidemic of chickenpox broke out and accusations of witchcraft escalated terribly (cf. Bowen, 1964).
13. Janet Seeley, who has worked on AIDS in Uganda, in Rakai and Masaka, has reported a similar paradigm shift. Wolfgang Behringer has described the same tendency in his excellent book on the persecution of witches in Bavaria (1987:205).
14. On the power struggle between the elders and the young men in the idiom of witchcraft, see, for example, Offiong (1983).
15. As internal strangers, the impure soldiers can also be described as liminal persons (compare Shack and Skinner, 1979).
16. In his work on the Cattle-Killing Movement among the Xhosa from 1856 to 1857, J.B. Peires (1989) described the rise of a similarly self-exacerbating situation.
17. Here I do not want to posit any causal relationship between crisis and the emergence of prophetic movements. Of course, there have often been crises without the development of prophetic movements. But since the Holy Spirit Movement was, above all, an anti-witchcraft movement, and since a correlation between crisis and an increase in witchcraft is regarded as proven (cf. Ardener, 1970; Turner, 1973:115; Behringer, 1987:419ff.), I do want to postulate a connection between this crisis, described from several perspectives, and the rise of the Holy Spirit Movement, while conceding that contingency also plays a role.
18. I published the other version, by Caroline Lamwaka, who conducted an interview with Severino Lukoya, in 1995 (Behrend, 1995). I include parts of this version in brackets, but present here Mike Ocan’s version because it corresponds more closely to the story as told by the spirits. There are, in fact, different accounts of the date of Alice’s possession. Her father seems to have first realized her possession on 2 January, but her special relationship with Lakwena, becoming Lakwena’s medium, was ‘officially’ dated 25 May.
19. In a certain way, purifying and healing are equivalents in Acholi. The state of impurity is caused by the violation of specific prohibitions, and the infraction is punished with suffering, disease, and death. It is as if the infraction were a direct insult to the power of what was prohibited and as if this insult inexorably triggered retaliation (Ricoeur, 1988:39).
Four
The War of the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces
Since the First World War at the latest, the war economy has become an essential part of the Western world’s economy as such and has thus altered the relationship between war and politics (Virilio and Lotringer, 1984:49ff.). If Clausewitz could still define war as the continuation of politics by other means, politics gradually receded into the background as the destructive power of armaments increased. In recent decades, the technical development of weapons has reached the point where it is no longer possible to imagine a political goal commensurate with the potential for annihilation (Arendt, 1985:7). The perfection of the means of violence is on the point of precluding its goal, the waging of war (ibid:9). But unfortunately, the development of the means of destruction has not led to an end to wars. Today, wars take place because the enormous war economy necessitates the testing of new and the scrapping of old weapons technologies (Theweleit, 1991:191ff.). With the introduction of a new generation of electronic weapons in the Western industrial countries, trade in and sales of the old, now technologically obsolete weapons to the so-called Third World has increased. These arms exports, the collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe and thus the end of the Cold War’s precarious balance of power, the Bretton Woods institutions’ prescription of democratization in many states, and the formation of resistance movements just as ‘predatory’ as the ‘predatory’ states they oppose (cf. Darbon, 1990) have all contributed to an increase in wars in Africa: in Somalia, Liberia, the former Zaïre, Rwanda, and Uganda.
Political scientists and developmental sociologists primarily – and less so anthropologists – attempted to grapple with the new conditions in Africa and to do justice to them in their scientific discourses. With few exceptions,1 by contrast, anthropologists excluded war from their theoretical discussion (cf. Clastres, 1977:25). Although Evans-Pritchard, Callaway, Junod, and Roscoe, for example,