Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend
regarded as an ethnographic method since Malinowski: participant observation. I agreed, paid the registration fee, and presented them with problems resulting from my daily life in Gulu, in a situation of war, menace, and fear. Like Acholi women, I too visited one of these mediums almost every day and asked her to consult the spirits. These visits became part of my daily life and, by allowing me to speak of the menace and fear I felt, in a sense making them public and ‘treating’ them, thus helped me reduce, acknowledge, and at least partially deal with them. ‘I know . . . and nonetheless!’ – this attitude, which Favret-Saada described among French peasants (1979:77), was also mine in Gulu. Like them, I tried to satisfy my desire for security, while at the same time knowing this was impossible. And although I, and perhaps other women in Acholi, considered ritual procedures futile, they were consoling.
I was able to speak English with most of the discussion partners named here (and also those who remain unnamed). Only in dealing with some of the spirit-mediums did I have to rely on translation into English from the Acholi. Since primarily Kiswahili and English, along with Acholi, were spoken in the Holy Spirit Movement, I abstained from learning Acholi or Lwo. But I worked out the semantic fields of certain Acholi words that seemed to me indispensable to any understanding of the HSM and its history. In what follows, I shall present them. To make it possible to see when and in which context in the discourse of the HSM English, Kiswahili, or Lwo were used, in this text I have left the terms in their original language.
This study deals with war, destruction, violence, suffering, and death. I have not managed to do linguistic justice to the events, for no language can ever approach the events themselves. In his outstanding analysis of the literature on the First World War, Paul Fussell (1977) pointed out that only with Mailer’s, Pynchon’s, and Vonnegut’s writings on the Second World War was a dimension in the depiction of war achieved – ironically, only after the death of most veterans of the First World War – that permitted the description of the limitless obscenity of the Great War (ibid:334). I hope that subsequent studies will do more justice to the events described here.
Notes
1. As well as this self-chosen designation, the name Holy Spirit Movement was also used. In what follows, I use the two terms synonymously. Outsiders also spoke of members as the ‘Lakwenas’.
2. Since 1995, after establishing the new constitution, the NRA is now called the Uganda People’s Defence Forces.
3. Although some spirits (jogi) in Acholi demanded human sacrifice, all the Holy Spirit soldiers with whom I spoke on this topic denied that there had been human sacrifice in the HSM.
4. Fussell quotes a report on the Second World War in which the soldiers ‘had almost completely substituted descriptions which they read in the newspapers or heard on the wireless for their own impressions’ (Fussell, 1977:173).
5. All of whom wrote their texts in Acholi. With the exception of R. M. Nono’s text, I was not able to collect and translate their writings, because the manuscripts had been lost or destroyed in the confusion of the civil war.
6. In the European tradition, being an eyewitness, or better still a participant, was considered an epistemological advantage as late as the eighteenth century; but since the development of historical-philological criticism, growing temporal distance from past events has served as a warranty of better knowledge (Koselleck, 1989:668f.).
7. The generosity of the University of Bayreuth’s Special Research Programme allowed me to invite Mike Ocan to come to Bayreuth and Berlin to continue the discussion.
8. I use the term ‘witch doctor’ quite pragmatically, as English-speaking Acholi also do. In my chapter on the history of religions I examine more closely the history of the term and the almost discriminatory connotation it carries.
Two
The History & Ethnogenesis of the Acholi
The subject of this book, Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement, originated in Acholi. Although it understood itself as a supra-ethnic movement and indeed managed to cross ethnic boundaries, in many respects it was closely tied to the Acholi culture.1 After its defeat at Jinja in October 1987, the successor Holy Spirit Movements were limited to Acholi, and became ethnic movements. Because I shall often refer to Acholi in what follows, a short digression on the ethnogenesis and history of the Acholi seems appropriate at this point.
The Acholi did not exist in precolonial times. The ethnonym came into usage during the colonial period. Earlier, the travelogues of Emin Pasha and Samuel Baker incorrectly categorized them as Shilluk and wrongly called them shuli (Gertzel, 1974:57; Atkinson, 1989:37). According to Girling, the designation Acholi could have arisen from an-loco-li, which means ‘I am a human being’ (1960:2). It would then be a typical (ethnocentric) self-description of the kind we find among many other ethnic groups.
Like the Lango,2 the Acholi owe the emergence of their ethnic identity not to any kind of inner consistence, but to concrete historical experience, especially the experience of migrations, which became the determining trait of their ethnic identity today (cf. Tosh, 1978:33). Starting around 1600, the people who would later be called the Acholi came with other Lwo in several waves of migration from the southern Sudan to their present territory and to Bunyoro (Crazzolara, 1937; Atkinson, 1984). Later, in the eighteenth century, a number of Lwo migrated from Bunyoro back to Acholi and into what is now Kenya (Bere, 1947). Some Acholi clans claim to be descended from a common ancestor named Lwo, and designate themselves accordingly as Lwo (ibid). A number of these clans constituted about thirty chiefdoms in today’s Acholi region; but these chiefdoms were extremely changeable, with constant splinterings and new foundings, processes perhaps corresponding to the Internal African Frontier model developed by Igor Kopytoff (Kopytoff, 1989:3ff.). A chief, called rwot, headed each chiefdom. This rwot was ‘owner of the land’ and was descended from kal, an aristocratic lineage, which formed the core surrounded by various other commoner lineages, labong.
The nineteenth century produced several contradictory reports on the position and power of the rwodi (plural of rwot). In some, the office of the chief is depicted as a central authority and the man himself as possessing political power; in others, he is portrayed as a person with no real political power of enforcement, but dependent on consensus with his ‘subjects’, who could drive him out or abandon him and seek a new rwot. In point of fact, both descriptions can be considered as justified. They bear witness to the dynamic social world in which the Acholi later congealed into an ethnic group.3 Centralized and acephalous societies should be seen less as taxonomic categories than as historical transformations (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991:128). The power of the rwot was constantly questioned and made the object of negotiations and public discussion. Disputes between the chief, who claimed political power, and the elders of the clan or lineage, who tried to assert their own power against that of the chief, were endemic in Acholi; depending on the respective constellation of power in a chiefdom at a particular time, the chief or the elders might prevail, i.e. centralist or decentralized tendencies might be realized.4 The rwot also had ritual duties. Like a Sacred King (cf., for example, de Heusch, 1987), he was responsible for the welfare of man and nature, for fertility, and above all for rain. But here, too, the sources are ambiguous. According to Girling (1960:82ff.), the Acholi were under a kind of dual authority, divided between the rwot and the priest, who together performed a ritual once a year to guarantee the fertility and well-being of the country. In this ritual, they also purified the chiefdom of witchcraft and sorcery.
But the ethnographic information can also be read differently. Each chiefdom had one or more shrines forming its ritual centre. These were the dwellings of the chiefdom jogi (sing. jok), spirits that watched over the moral order. Priests functioned as their spirit mediums, and shared responsibility with the rwot for the fertility and well-being of the country. It was the priests of the chiefdom jogi who installed the chief in office. Consequently, it is also possible to interpret the chiefdom as a cult of the chiefdom jogi and the chief as an initiate in this cult (cf MacGaffey, 1986).
The