Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend
to trace the inner kinship of humanism and terror as well as the double movement of liberation and enslavement (cf. Habermas, 1985:289) in the history of the HSM, this precondition may, I fear, be to blame for a certain tendency to idealization in my depiction. My discussion partners, who used me and my work to justify their own past, also exhibited this tendency.
The postmodern call for heterogeneity (for example, Lyotard, 1977; Derrida, 1988), for interpretations that not only call forth counter-positions, but which also take account of what lies in between or alongside, is very difficult to fulfill in ethnographies (on war), because in such a situation one indeed thinks in oppositions and in opposition to something. But I hope, especially in the historical chapters, that I have brought to light the transitions, that which lies between the oppositions (cf. Parkin, 1987:15).
I conducted a number of extensive discussions, sometimes over periods of several days, with some fifteen former Holy Spirit soldiers in Gulu and Kampala. Their willingness to talk to me was rooted in the task the spirit Lakwena had assigned them of correcting the false image the government had spread about the movement in the mass media. Many of them still acted on behalf of the spirit, even though they had left the movement.
All of them, with one exception, made me promise not to mention their names in my text. The exception was Mike Ocan, a former member of the civilian wing, the Frontline Co-ordination Team of the HSM. He had been taken prisoner after the fighting in Jinja in October 1987, had been in prison, had been ‘politicized’ in a camp, and afterwards rehabilitated. When I got to know him in the Spring of 1991, he was working as headmaster at a school in Gulu. He had already served as an informant to Apollo Lukermoi (1990), a student writing a thesis in Religious Studies and Philosophy at Makerere University, and he felt himself called to be the historiographer and ethnographer of the Holy Spirit Movement. Since he was on the side not of the victors but of the defeated, he was under great pressure to explain himself and under a greater burden of proof than a victor, for whom success itself speaks (cf. Koselleck, 1989:669).
He derived his ethnographic and historiographic authority (cf. Clifford, 1988) from being an eyewitness and a participant, which he considered an epistemological advantage that assured the truth of his story (ibid:668).6 But he also appealed to the authority of an otherworldly power, the spirit Lakwena. In the text he gave me, he wrote: ‘The Lakwena bestowed upon me the authority to inform the world about his mission on Earth and I feel in duty bound to do so.’ Just as the Holy Spirit Movement legitimated itself transcendentally with reference to the spirits, Mike Ocan adopted this legitimation for his story.
At my request, he wrote the ‘first text’ about the HSM, a ‘thick description’ in Geertz’s sense (1983). He thus gave the past the status of a written story and, by putting it in writing, irrevocably fixed the difference between the story that had passed and the linguistic form it had now gained (cf. Koselleck 1989:669).
But this text is also an attempt to translate the organization of the Holy Spirit Movement, its content, goals, meanings, and history, for a European audience. Anthropologists are not the only ones confronted with the problem of translation; the same is true for those who try to produce a text that crosses cultural boundaries. It is in this context that we must place Mike Ocan’s assurance at the beginning of his text that ‘the accounts here contained are by no means fictitious. They are real life experiences which took place a couple of years back.’ The distance from events that a text for Europeans required from him permitted him to recognize the ‘exoticism’ of the Holy Spirit Movement and its history. But perhaps it was also the influence of the mass media and the stereotypes and images from an external perspective that led him to defend his own text as non-fiction. With this remark, he also sought – in the best anthropological tradition – to enhance once more the truth of his portrayal.
In 1995, Mike Ocan and I visited another intellectual of the HSM. Like Mike Ocan, he had been working in the Frontline Coordination Team and, in addition, as the secretary, or chief clerk, of Alice Lakwena. The first question he asked me was if I believed. Hesitantly, I said that I would believe and take seriously what other people believed. This answer obviously did not please him. ‘Do you believe that when bombs are falling and you believe and pray and I put up my hand against the sky the bombs stop falling? Do you believe that when you believe and bullets are coming straight towards you they start encircling you without hitting or injuring your body?’ He asked Mike Ocan to give other examples which Mike did. Both started talking passionately and somewhat nostalgically about the old days in the HSM. And I suddenly realized something of the atmosphere that at certain times must have prevailed among the Holy Spirit soldiers, an atmosphere of powerful enthusiasm and absolute trust in God, the spirits sent by Him, and the believing self. This aspect has been excluded almost completely from Mike Ocan’s text and my interpretation. Mike Ocan knew very well the difference between belief and knowledge, and in his text he presented the latter as I had asked him to do. In the short encounter with the chief clerk, however, I had the chance to get a glimpse of this powerful force called belief, which is not treated in this book.
Mike Ocan’s text is the essential foundation of this book. It also formed the basis for a long dialogue he and I conducted on the Holy Spirit Movement.7 Thus, we re-uttered the text and in this long conversation were able to give speech back its due.
Aside from Mike Ocan, I also conducted talks with some elders about Acholi macon, the Acholi ‘tradition’ and history. Special mention is due to R. M. Nono, who himself wrote an ethnography and history of Acholi, which I received after his death in the Autumn of 1990. I visited him often on his farm a few kilometres outside Gulu. We sat in the shadow of a mango tree, and he read to me from his manuscripts, which he kept in a briefcase made of goatskin. Again, his text was the basis for our talks.
In contrast to R. M. Nono, who was something of a self-styled historian and ethnographer of his own society, Andrew Adimola had studied at Makerere University and even published an essay on the Lamogi Rebellion in the Uganda Journal (1954). He had been a Minister under Idi Amin, but had left the country to organize resistance against the dictator from exile. He was a leading politician of the Democratic Party (DP), which was banned under Museveni. In the Spring of 1991 he and seventeen other people were arrested and accused of high treason. The charges had to be dropped for lack of evidence, and when I left Uganda in January 1992, he was a free man again. With Adimola I conducted talks primarily about the past and present political situations.
Along with these elders, Israel Lubwa, his wife Candida Lubwa, and their children provided essential help in my research in Gulu. Patrick Olango, their son, had returned to Uganda after studying ethnology in Bayreuth, and their two daughters, Carol Lubwa and Margaret Adokorach, worked as my research assistants.
Israel Lubwa had studied agriculture at Makerere and had been an agricultural officer during the colonial period. In our talks, he repeatedly stressed his own unsuitability: he said he could not be an authentic informant, because he had read too much. He was well aware of the epistemological problems that arise when ‘informants’ have read the books and articles published on their own culture and history. Some of the essential insights of this study emerged in talks with him.
With Mrs. Lubwa and her two daughters, Carol and Margaret, I talked primarily about witchcraft. The discourse on witchcraft is conducted mostly by women. Only in some cases is it adopted by men, which then makes it a public discourse.
Jeanne Favret-Saada (1979) has shown that, from the local perspective, no one ever speaks of witchcraft simply to learn something, but always to gain power. There is no disinterested talk about witchcraft, for the discourse on witchcraft itself already possesses real power (ibid:249). In conversations about witchcraft, the ethnographer loses his/her apparently neutral position and finds him/herself in a power configuration in which he/she is assigned a specific role. The three women were unable to speak with me openly (or more openly) on this topic until I myself began going to various witch doctors,8 who discovered that I, too, was a victim of witchcraft, whereupon they lifted the spell on me and put one on my enemy.
These witch doctors, who, as spirit mediums, divined and healed, considered it important that I should not remain an outside observer, but should become a client or, better still, a patient. They assigned me a clear place in their network of relationships