Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend
several thousand were not rare. As late as 1910, the National Archives report a campaign of 6,000 warriors from Acholi and Madi who attacked the Didinga together.
Before each war, the ajwaka, priests of the chiefdom’s jok, were asked whether the war would run a favourable or unfavorable course. This enabled them to influence the decision for or against war. If war was decided on, the support of the chiefdom’s jok was requested. Although he was basically responsible for the welfare of people and nature in a chiefdom, now he was mobilized for killing. But since the war was directed outward, against strangers, and often brought riches, cattle, and women, the jok’s power to kill did not really contradict his power to guarantee the welfare of the chiefdom.
As before a hunt, the warriors also had to be ‘pure’ before a campaign, i.e. they were not allowed to sleep with their wives the night before. Before setting off, they brought their spears, and later their rifles, to the shrine of the chiefdom’s jok. Here weapons and warriors were blessed by the chief’s mother or another old woman from the chief’s clan, who sprinkled them with the branches of an olwedo tree (poncho carpus laxiflorus) that had been dipped in a mixture of water and millet flour (Israel Lubwa, personal communication).
I was unable to learn much about Acholi battle tactics. Lamphear and Webster (1971) described how, in the Jie-Acholi war, the Acholi formed three units, in the centre and on each flank, with the right flank consisting of two smaller groups. Unlike the Jie, who were armed only with spears, many Acholi warriors in this campaign carried simple breech-loading rifles. But few of these functioned during the attack as they had been drenched in a heavy rainstorm and, in fact, the outnumbered Jie wrested victory from the Acholi. The Acholi were led by Tongotut, a famous warrior who had earlier defeated the Labwor and captured a large number of goats and women (ibid:33). He was also an ajwaka and had advanced from spirit medium to successful war commander (ibid). Many cases of ritual experts in the widest sense becoming military leaders are known, for example from the history of the Maasai Jacobs, 1965:77) and the Nandi (Matson, 1972). Alice too, who initially worked as a spirit medium and healer, later had a career as a war commander.
After this defeat, the Acholi sued for peace, underscoring this with a ritual. They interpreted their failure in a number of ways. First, they attributed it to the strength of the foes’ jok (see Chapter 7) and the weakness of their own. Secondly, some elders admitted that they, the Acholi, had been unjust in attacking their allies, the Jie (i.e. they had no lapi), and they therefore took defeat as a more or less just punishment. Thirdly, there was also a suspicion that a spy could have betrayed the plan to the Jie (ibid:35).
Grove (1919) describes fighting tactics in Acholi as follows. While the older warriors formed a front line and sought to use their shields to protect the younger warriors standing behind them, the latter threw their spears at the foe. If the enemy weakened, the younger warriors broke through the line of shields to stage a frontal attack (ibid: 164).
The rwodi apparently never took an active part in the fighting before the introduction of rifles,3 but appointed a military leader instead, since the chiefdom’s welfare and fertility were associated with the rwot’s bodily intactness and strength and his injury or death would have meant catastrophe for the chiefdom (Lamphear and Webster 1971:34f.). On the other hand, it is reported that rwot Awich, for example, successfully led a number of military campaigns – but this was later, during the colonial period (Girling, 1960:102).
When the warriors returned home after killing their enemies, the women received them at the entrance to the village with songs of praise. The elders placed a forked branch with an egg in the fork on the path to the village.4 The returning warriors trampled on the egg on their way to the kac, the ancestral shrine of their own lineage, which they circled three times. On one of the next few days, the warriors, who were considered impure, sacrificed a black and white billy goat in the bush by running it through with a spear. The men present then collected firewood with their left hands, to make a fire on which they roasted the animal without adding salt.5 After the meal, they gathered up the bones, threw them in the fire, laid twigs over them, and stamped on the flames until they were extinguished. I was told that the sacrificial animal was killed to pacify the cen, the evil, vengeance-seeking spirits of the enemies, who had been killed.
But even after this sacrifice, the killer was still not pure. He had to sleep in the same room as a girl who had not yet menstruated, with the door open. Only after he had been led to a termite hill and termites placed on his right upper arm had bitten him was he granted the title of a killer, the moi name. The girl who slept beside him and was also bitten by termites also received an honorific moi name. Only now were both of them considered pure. They ran back to the ancestral shrine ‘as fast as if they wanted to go to war again’, and there the community ate and drank, and songs of praise were sung. A male ajwaka who had already received a moi name carried out the ritual activities (R.M. Nono and I. Lubwa, personal communication).
Girling also provided a supplementary description of the purification ritual. The head of the enemy who had been killed was blessed at the ancestral shrine by sprinkling it with olwedo branches dipped in a mixture of water and millet flour. A young girl was symbolically given to the warrior as a wife, and remained with him in his hut for three or four nights. Every morning and every evening they both followed the path the warrior had taken when he returned to the village. When they came to the village, the man blew a whistle, shouted the names of the dead person, and called on his spirit to come to the ancestral shrine. The warrior received three cuts on his right shoulder if he had killed a man and four if he had killed a woman. Then the men sacrificed a sheep in the bush and distributed the uncooked meat. Only then did the man and the girl receive moi names (Girling, 1960:103). This purification ritual was also carried out for hunters who had killed big game like elephants, buffalo, or antelope.
Wars in northern Uganda can be assumed to have increased with the coming of the slave traders and the introduction of rifles. Along with cattle theft and retaliation, the goal of these undertakings was now to capture women and children to be sold as slaves (cf. Lamphear and Webster, 1971:26, 32) in order to obtain rifles.6 And although the Acholi were initially victims of the slave hunts, some chiefs and their warriors managed to become slave hunters themselves (cf. Meillassoux, 1989). The theft of livestock and women recurred in postcolonial times: its practice was renewed by the soldiers of Joseph Kony’s Holy Spirit Movement, by the UPDA, and by some of the NRA (less by the soldiers of Alice Lakwena).
The ‘pacification’ and demilitarization of Acholi society that took place in the colonial period have already been noted (see p. 17ff). It should also be mentioned that, during the Second World War, many Acholi men joined the King’s African Rifles, in order to kill and thus receive a moi name. As soldiers, they were able to take up and continue the warlike ‘tradition’ in altered form in colonial and postcolonial times.
After the First and Second World Wars, these soldiers returned and were reintegrated in Acholi with relatively few problems (they received compensation and were ‘retrained’ in special programmes). But under Amin at the latest, a process began that Mazrui has termed the formation of a ‘lumpen militariat’ (1975). The increasing brutality, the lack of discipline, and the soldiers’ degeneration into robber bands have already been described (see pp. 25ff.). The Holy Spirit Movement was also an attempt to reverse this development, to discipline the soldiers, and to redefine their place in society.
Initiation in the Holy Spirit Movement
As I already explained above, the Holy Spirit Movement also served to reintegrate and rehabilitate a large number of Acholi soldiers who, as internal strangers, had become liminal and impure. In a ritual that the spirit invented while she was still in Kitgum, Alice purified the first 150 soldiers and made them holy.