Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend

       Preface

      JOHN MIDDLETON

      On 2 January 1985, an Acholi woman from northern Uganda named Alice Auma was possessed by an alien Christian spirit known as Lakwena (‘Messenger’ in Acholi), and became known as Alice Lakwena. From this event ensued a powerful prophetic movement, the Holy Spirit Movement, and its very nearly successful military insurrection against the government of Uganda. Alice was still alive, a refugee in Kenya, when this book was published. A last report was of her sitting in a bar drinking gin and Pepsi-Cola: Lakwena had deserted her. Hers was a personal tragedy. But if we look behind her, as is done in this valuable book, we can discern a far greater tragedy, namely, the history of the many thousands of Acholi men and women who took her as their prophet and followed Lakwena’s message to put right the cruel and sinful world in which they lived, a message that led them to defeat and even greater misery. Alice’s Holy Spirit Movement failed: yet, like many ‘failures’ it transformed its country’s history.

      Prophets and prophetic movements are nothing new in African history, but few prophets have been observed by outsiders. Many appeared during the colonial period in reaction to unpopular administrations; the colonial administrators considered the prophets to be rebels and tried to prevent outsiders from meeting them. A problem in studying them is that many prophetic movements have today been mythologized as national independence movements, and most of their prophets have become mythical personages. It is difficult to reconstruct events.

      Many sanguine politicians expected that, after political independence, these movements would cease, but they have not done so. We should ask why these movements still appear and become strong enough to lead to overt political action. The people who take part in them are ordinary citizens and not crazed religious maniacs. Why do people follow self-proclaimed prophets, and why do they die for their beliefs? These are important questions, and this book provides some of the answers within a specific region at a specific time in history, rather than giving wholly ‘theoretical’ generalizations.

      Heike Behrend was not able to meet Alice Lakwena; but she had contact with many of Alice’s former followers, in both Uganda and elsewhere, as she tells us in her introduction. Her research was as deep as was possible in the confused conditions of the time, and she managed to find many veterans of Alice’s movement who were willing to tell its history as they recalled it. Behrend writes without sentimentality of Alice’s followers, some of whom, after suffering cruel defeat by a brutal government army, themselves degenerated into a crew of predatory brigands.

      Alice was originally one of many local Christian healers but only she appears to have become recognized as a powerful prophet. She organized and led the Holy Spirit Movement through its victories against the central government, then to its defeat and her final loss of authority when she became known as a mere witch doctor. At first she was the medium of an Italian military engineer, known as the spirit Lakwena, then later a medium for several alien spirits from America, Korea and Zaïre. Her authority was that of Lakwena himself and the other spirits who spoke through her body and voice; later she remembered nothing of what ‘she’ had uttered. These spirits possessed Alice on different occasions, and their various personalities and identities became known to her listeners as soon as she uttered their words. On another level considerable authority was exercised by the person known as the ‘chief clerk’ who summarized Alice’s words to those listening. There was a triad of spirit, medium and translator. Alice had three ‘chief clerks’