Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend
of violent conflicts, this was barely mentioned in their monographs, though they certainly described the violent clashes in their personal letters and diaries (cf. Thornton, 1983:513ff.). One of the reasons for this may be that anthropologists conducted their field research in ‘pacified’ regions under the protection of colonial administrations, and implicitly accepted colonialism’s purported task of bringing peace and ending the ‘tribal wars’ (cf. Fukui and Turton, 1979:2). Since, on the one hand, the theories then current focused on the functions and structures of a supposedly static society which was more or less in equilibrium, violence and war had to appear as anomalies and to be excluded (ibid). The genre of scientific monographs also demanded the exclusion of violence and war, which were seen as a disturbance of the normal everyday life that was to be depicted (Thornton, 1983:513ff.). The constraints exercised by the genre did not allow the treatment or inclusion of the context in which the ethnographic field research took place (ibid:518).
In addition, the idea of the ethnic group as a totality, a closed unit, which was the object of most ethnographies, may have contributed to the exclusion of war, which, unlike feuds, took place between ethnic groups. Not until the concept of the ethnic group began to be criticized in the late 1960s was the ground cleared for studies on the genesis of ethnicity and on the relationships between ethnic groups, which were characterized not only by trade and marriage but also by war.
The beginning of an ethnology of war focusing on what was earlier excluded can be seen in the works of Bazin and Terray (1982), Ranger (1985), Geffray (1990), and especially David Lan (1987) on the war of liberation in Zimbabwe. From a historical perspective, Lan, for example, describes war against the background of a long-standing dialogue with the ancestors, mediated by spirit mediums. Western sociological categories like class affiliation and peasant consciousness (Ranger, 1985) no longer dominated the discourse; instead, the local perspective found expression – the view of the guerrilla fighters, spirit mediums, and peasants. Here the guerrillas’ ideology turned out to be expressed less in a political than in a religious discourse. The guerrillas, schooled in Marxism, legitimated their struggle and established a relationship with the populace with the aid of spirit mediums.
More recent investigations have meanwhile found that spirit mediums were used not only in Zimbabwe, but also by Renamo in Mozambique (Roesch, 1990). (In personal communication with the author, O. Roesch reported that Renamo leaders are supposed to have decided to employ spirit mediums for their goals after having read Ranger’s and Lan’s books). When, at the beginning of the 1990s, Renamo began gaining ground, a man named Manuel Antonio was possessed, like Alice, by various Christian spirits. On orders from these spirits, he built up the Naprama movement, which supported Frelimo and inflicted heavy losses on Renamo. The SPLA in southern Sudan also co-operates with prophets (Johnson, 1994; Hutchinson, 1996).
As will be shown in what follows, war and, with it, the use of modern technologies have led to astonishing autonomous inventions in Africa, which demonstrate the power of African cultures to resist as well as their enormous ability to change and to incorporate the new and the foreign. The examples discussed here are not the only ones to refute the idea that the introduction of modern technology to Africa would also be accompanied by a process of secularization and an end to magic, on the model of European development. In Africa, at the moment, there appears to be a tendency towards what could be called ‘depoliticization’. This does not mean that politics is disappearing, but that it is expressing itself less in a political than in a religious discourse. It tends to be prophets and spirit mediums, rather than politicians and party leaders, who lead new movements and cults and who ‘invent’ their discourse. This should not be understood as a backward step or a recourse to pre-modern or precolonial phenomena, but as an expression of, and response to, modern developments, for Africa continues to invent its own modernity in a dialogue with God, and gods or spirits (Bayart, 1993:12).
Before describing the Holy Spirit Movement’s organization and method of waging war, I want to digress briefly to attempt a reconstruction of war in Acholi in precolonial times. For certain patterns and modes of behaviour from this period were also taken up again in the HSM and its successors.
War in Precolonial Acholi
Since war, although a universal phenomenon, takes a variety of forms, it is questionable whether its appearance can be regarded as an analytical category in anthropology (Descola and Izard, 1991:313). Although it is defined, unlike the feud, as violent conflict between political units which are independent of each other (for example, Fukui and Turton, 1979:3f.; Bazin and Terray, 1982:14), it is precisely this criterion of war which is not always clearly identifiable in precolonial times in Acholi. Nevertheless I shall use the term war in a pragmatic way in the following argument since it comes closest to matching the Acholi term.
The Acholi distinguished two kinds of war: first, the ‘war of attack’, Iweny lapir, which took place when a group of warriors set out to take women, cattle, etc.; and second, Iweny kulo kwor, war as a retaliatory measure after an attack by an enemy. As with witchcraft, here too an initial act of aggression was distinguished from a later act of retaliation. But since every war was embedded in a history of attack and counterattack, a war could almost always be legitimated and turned into a ‘just war’ by declaring it a retaliatory measure. In Acholi, one spoke of lapi, i.e. of a ‘just cause’, in such a situation. If one had lapi on one’s side (as the Holy Spirit Movement claimed), then the war was justified.
It is difficult to define the role war had in the economy and social life of the Acholi in precolonial times. The loss of cattle and an increase in the death rate from various epidemics and wars make the second half of the nineteenth century appear to have been particularly catastrophic in northern Uganda; there is therefore the danger of unwarranted generalization from the conditions of this period. But the anomie in Acholi, as described by various Europeans (Baker, 1866; Emin Pasha, 1917–27), also served to legitimate the later colonialization, the description of which may have been somewhat distorted and exaggerated. Since the sources are in an unsatisfactory state, it is possible to sketch only a very fragmentary picture of individual aspects of war in Acholi.2
As Jacobs did for the Maasai (1979) and Almagor for the Dassanetch (1979:126), I too would like to distinguish two forms of warfare for the Acholi: first as raiding, a regular phenomenon of normal life; and secondly as an escalation of the raid and an activity which was probably only an exception. Like hunting, war as raiding took place more or less regularly at the beginning of the dry season. Groups of ambitious men usually went to war without the permission of the chief, seeking to avenge the murder of relatives, to earn an honorific title as killers, or to plunder cattle and women, with the cattle often used in turn to pay bride wealth. In contrast to many other East African societies, the Acholi do not seem to have had age sets functioning as regiments in battle. If war broke out, all able-bodied men were called to arms. As mentioned above, the killing of an enemy was considered proof of manliness, and brave warriors were celebrated as heroes. They usually chose dawn as the time to attack a village of another chiefdom or ethnic group. There were seldom a large number of wounded or killed. Although this form of warfare was endemic, it was subject to tight limits.
The only weapons the Acholi used were spears and shields. Each warrior carried about five spears and a ring knife around his wrist (Grove, 1919:164). Unlike the Madi, who also used bows and arrows in battle, the Acholi used the bow only to hunt (Israel Lubwa, personal communication).
Although the introduction of rifles brought a differentiation among warriors – only the richer ones could afford a rifle, while the poor continued to fight with spears – this did not lead to the formation of a warrior aristocracy. For rifles were not necessarily a guarantee of victory, as was demonstrated by the war between the Jie and the Acholi around 1900 (cf. Lamphear and Webster, 1971). In this war the Acholi, who had rifles, were defeated by the Jie, who were armed only with spears.
But if the war was a major undertaking, it was the responsibility of the rwot, the chief, to mobilize the men of his chiefdom and perhaps also to form alliances with other chiefdoms to wage war together. In the Acholi-Jie war at the turn of the century, the warriors of some nine chiefdoms united to fight the Jie. Each of the larger chiefdoms formed its own fighting group under its own leader. It has been estimated that the Acholi put about 2,050 warriors into the