Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend
of local ethnographies and historiographies already existed that had been written by Acholi like Reuben Anywar, Alipayo Latigo, Noah Ochara, Lacito Okech, and R. M. Nono,5 to mention but a few. The texts of Europeans, especially those by missionaries from the Comboni Mission, by Crazzolara on the history of the Lwo (1937), and by Pelligrini on the history and ‘tradition’ of the Acholi (1949) found entry into these indigenous texts. So I had to ask myself whether the Acholi elders were telling me their or our story (cf. Bruner, 1986:148f.) and what that meant for distinguishing the interior (emic) from the exterior (etic) view (ibid). Bruner, who sought an answer to these questions in his research on the Pueblo Indians of the United States, assumes that Pueblo Indians and the anthropologists who write about them share the same discourse.
My position is that both Indian enactment, the story they tell about themselves, and our theory, the story we tell, are transformations of each other; they are retellings of a narrative derived from the discursive practice of our historical era (Foucault 1973), instances of never-ceasing reflexivity. (Bruner, 1986:149).
I agree only with part of this statement. For one thing, Bruner neglects the historical perspective, which is precisely where we can trace how a dominant discourse takes over. For those ethnographed, the subjects of our field research, do not share our discourse from the beginning. They put up resistance to their colonization and ‘invention’ (Mudimbe, 1988) and designed counter-discourses, even if (as will be shown in this study) these finally confirmed the hegemony of the European discourse (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991:18). But it is precisely the history of the hegemony of our discourse which also makes clear the difference that arises from the often original interpretation of the dominant discourse that the ethnographed come up with. In future, noting this difference as precisely as possible may be the ethnographer’s primary goal.
From the outbreak of the fighting in May and June 1986, northern Uganda became increasingly isolated from the rest of the country. The NRA government declared the Acholi District a war zone. Roadblocks controlled access. Transport and trade collapsed almost completely towards the end of 1987. As early as March, the NRA forced a large part of the population in Acholi to leave their farms and take ‘refuge’ in camps or in the city. But, I was told, many fled less from the so-called ‘rebels’ than from the soldiers of the NRA, who plundered, stole livestock, and burned houses, supplies, and fields.
In November 1989, I was able to visit northern Uganda – Acholi – for the first time. Most of the more than 150,000 refugees the war had created had now returned to their villages and begun to cultivate their fields. Following a government offer of an amnesty and a peace treaty with another resistance movement, the Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA), thousands of ‘rebels’ left the bush, returning to their villages or joining the NRA and militias to fight against their former allies. A few bushfighters who refused to surrender joined up with the Holy Spirit soldiers of Joseph Kony. They conducted a guerrilla war, staging ambushes here and there or daring an occasional attack.
The NRA seldom managed to catch Holy Spirit soldiers, and all too often vented their frustration on the local populace. After each defeat, they took vengeance on innocent people. The result was that the population indeed sympathized more or less with the Holy Spirit soldiers, though they too degenerated more and more into marauding bands of thieves.
In November 1989, Gulu, the capital of Acholi District, was a city ‘occupied’ by the NRA. Trucks carrying soldiers and weapons careered down the main street. Soldiers sat in small bars, rode bicycles, or strolled the streets in groups, singing songs. Some had tied chickens they had acquired to the handlebars of their bicycles, carried them in their knapsacks, or strapped them to the counter of the bar while they drank. The traces of the war had not been eliminated. Many houses lining the main street had been destroyed, their facades burned, the pavements torn up, the street signs perforated by bullets and twisted, and the central roundabout, once planted with glowing red bougainvillea, now consisted of nothing but a heap of stones. The scantily covered dead were carried on stretchers through the city followed by weeping relatives. One woman told me there had been too many dead taken by the war and now by AIDS as well.
While the war continued in the territory surrounding Gulu, and distant gunfire could often be heard, in the afternoons, and especially in the evenings, the sound of machine gun fire also emanated from the video halls in town where low-budget American films or karate films from Taiwan staged a reprise of war. These films provided the models avidly imitated by Holy Spirit soldiers and government troops alike. Soldiers I got to know gave themselves names like ‘Suicide’, ‘Karate’, ‘007’, and ‘James Bond’. And a spirit who liked to introduce himself as ‘King Bruce’, after the karate hero Bruce Lee, fought in the Holy Spirit Movement of Joseph Kony.
I did not pitch my tent in the middle of an Acholi village, as Malinowski exhorted, but took up my quarters in what had been a luxury hotel in town. I was advised to do this because I was told that the Holy Spirit soldiers still made the territory around Gulu insecure. Especially at night, ‘rebels’, militiamen, and government soldiers moved about in small groups plundering farms. Since they all wore the same uniforms, one could never be sure who the plunderers were. In the evenings, many people, especially women with children, came to the city to seek protection from such marauders, spending the night there then returning to their villages in the morning. Others, who lived too far from the city, were so afraid of the soldiers that they slept in the bush. The children were wrapped in blankets and hidden separately under certain trees or bushes. They were warned not to make a sound, whatever happened, and not to come back to the house until morning, when it was light again.
The hotel I stayed in had been plundered twice, once by Idi Amin’s soldiers, who had fled from the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) in 1979, and a second time by Bazilio Okello’s followers, who took flight from the National Resistance Army (NRA) in March 1986. Most of the windows were broken, and all the transportable furniture had been taken away. The doors had been smashed and could no longer be locked; the rooms contained nothing but a bed. In the evening, I was the only guest. The waiter put on livery in my honour and the kitchen boy arranged a bouquet of bougainvillea.
Under the conditions of a continuing war, it was impossible for me to carry out field research in the classic sense. George Devereux has shown that methods are a favoured means of reducing anxiety. Method derives from the Greek hodos, i.e. a path or road. Methods are paths one takes together with other scientists. They calm the feeling of insecurity; after all, one is not taking the path alone. But the information I was collecting for my work was not the only frightening thing; there were also the situations in which I had to collect it. I am sure I have not managed to understand what happened without displacements and blind spots (Crapanzano, 1977:69). Speaking of the unspeakable and making it my topic sometimes seemed the only escape. But my wish that everything not be so terrible was also very strong. At some point, I noticed that I tended to conduct discussions mostly with members of the Holy Spirit Movement who had been in its civilian wing and who had not themselves fought and killed.
During my study of anthropology and while conducting field research among the Tugen in northwestern Kenya, I had learned to defend the people on whom and with whom I was working. Here, too, I now wanted to sketch a picture of the HSM which showed them from their own perspective and in correspondence with their self-image, against the discrimination of the mass media. I assumed that the Holy Spirit Movement, like so many others, was a peasant revolt against the state; and I planned to take their side more or less clearly. But I was soon forced to realize that most of the original members of the Holy Spirit Movement were not peasants, but soldiers who had fought in the 1981–5 civil war and who could not or would not pursue any other occupation than waging war and killing. Their goal was to get rich, take their revenge, and regain the share in state power they had lost. I played with the idea of giving up my project, since I saw no possibility of depicting the Holy Spirit Movement and its history except by idealizing it unjustifiably or repeating stereotypes that would have been too close to certain colonial images of warlike, violent ‘savages’. Not until I talked with a former Holy Spirit soldier who had fought alongside Alice Lakwena from the beginning did I learn of the HSM’s serious attempt to wage a war against the war and to put an end to violence and terror; only then did I manage to regain the sympathy for the ‘object’ that seemed to me to be a necessary precondition