Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend
expressed in the symbolic ordering of space: the rwot had his compound in the midst of his ‘subjects’, who built their homes in a circle around his to protect him (cf. Girling, 1960:82f.).
Between various chiefdoms, peace (usually cemented by marital alliances: the first or ‘major’ wife of the rwot was often the daughter of another chief) or war might prevail. In times of war, the rwot used the power of the jogi of his chiefdom to kill. Their power could be used not only for good, to ‘heal’ the society, but also to kill. Again and again in what follows, I shall take up this polarity of healing and killing, connected in the concept of the jok, and try to develop its dialectic in the history of the Acholi and the Holy Spirit Movement. Thus, in precolonial times, there was no real Acholi ethnic identity, but only various clan identities, which determined one’s belonging to a territory and political unit, the chiefdom.
The arrival of the Arabs in Atiak in about 1850, their hunts for ivory and slaves, and their skilled manipulation of the conflicts between Acholi chiefdoms to their own advantage had devastating consequences. The Arabs established trading posts and forced the Acholi living nearby to pay taxes. If they were unable to comply, they were plundered (Gray 1951:129). From 1872 to 1888, as Nubian troops5 were settling in Acholi, the situation became even worse. Things did not change until the Mahdi rebellion interrupted relations between Egypt and Equatoria Province, and then not necessarily for the better, since the British again brought a number of Nubian soldiers into the country, where they were already notorious among the Acholi for their atrocities (ibid:45). When the British came to Acholi, they encountered a mistrustful, hostile populace (Pirouet, 1989:195).
The arrival of ivory and slave traders and the import of rifles from the north fundamentally changed the status of the rwodi. Some of them managed to build up private retinues of armed followers, on the model of the Egyptian administrative posts. They employed small armies equipped with rifles to attack neighbouring chiefdoms and other ethnic groups, such as the Madi or Langi, robbing cattle and enslaving women and children.
War was already endemic in northern Uganda at the beginning of the colonial period (Uganda became a British protectorate in 1894). The exchange of rifles for ivory and slaves had catastrophic results in Acholi, as in other parts of Africa (cf. Goody, 1980:39ff.; Smith, 1989:31ff.). The reports on the ‘pacification’ of Acholi at the beginning of the colonial period permit a rough estimate of the degree to which rifles had spread (Postlethwaite, 1947:51). When the colonial administration began registering guns and disarming the Acholi, the chiefs of Gondoroko and Gulu possessed almost 1500 rifles (Native Reports in the National Archives of 1910). And there is a note in the 1913 report that, in the month of March alone, more than 1,400 rifles were collected. Individual chiefs, like Awich of Payira,6 tried to use the colonial army for their own purposes. They denounced their enemies to the colonial administration and gave the military cause for punitive measures. They used the foreign military power to settle their own accounts.
The Acholi were not finally ‘pacified’ until 1913, with the defeat of the Lamogi rebellion (Adimola, 1954). The colonial administration had promised that they could keep their rifles if they allowed them to be registered, but after registration, many rifles were publicly burned. This betrayal became the node of a trauma in the history of the Acholi, repeating itself twice: first, under Idi Amin who, in 1971 and 1972, ordered thousands of Acholi soldiers into barracks and then had them murdered; and again in 1986 under the NRA government, which ordered the populace of Acholi to surrender their weapons. The fear of a repetition of the massacre led many men to keep their weapons and take to the ‘bush’ to join one of the various resistance movements – among them the Holy Spirit Movement.
After the Lamogi rebellion, only those chiefs appointed by the colonial administration continued to have access to rifles. They maintained a monopoly of force, using it for self-aggrandizement and as an instrument of vengeance against old and new rivals. A Divisional Chief explained: ‘You see we must rule by fear!’ (Girling, 1960:198); and Girling writes: ‘Government became little more than police.’ (ibid:199).
From the beginning, the colonial administration failed to create a public space characterized by at least the fiction of functionality and neutrality. On the contrary, the colonial state and its representatives appeared to profit from a policy of ‘eating’ and the ‘full belly’ (cf. Bayart, 1989) that served their own interests, but not those of the majority.
Against the chiefs installed by the colonial administration, who lacked local legitimation, the Acholi elected their own representatives, who were also called rwodi or jagi kweri, ‘chiefs of the hoe’. Like the colonial chiefs, they also maintained an enforcement staff of askaris, policemen, messengers, and clerks, who headed work groups to support each other’s labour in the fields and punished those who did not fulfill their obligations (Girling, 1960:193).
The various chiefdoms laid the foundation for the division into administrative units such as counties and subcounties. Up to 1937, there were two Acholi districts in the northern province: West Acholi with Gulu as its district capital and East Acholi with Kitgum as the capital. Only later were the two districts unified into a single Acholi District, thus creating an ethnic group that had not existed before.
With the dominance of colonial power,7 a complex process ensued in which ethnicity actualized itself more and more in the struggles to participate in central power. In relation to the Europeans, who held the central power, and to other ethnic groups, the Acholi increasingly objectified their own way of life, expressed in the ‘invention’ of ethnicity, ‘traditions’ of their own, and an ethnic history. Thus, in 1944, the Acholi Association was founded, a kind of sports and cultural club. With this, the Acholi congealed not only as an administrative, but also as a cultural unit. Lectures on Acholi music, language, etc., reinforced and spread this idea. In 1948, the wish first developed for a paramount chief for the entire Acholi District, and in 1950 a certain faction attempted to follow the model of the King of Buganda and establish a King of the Acholi, ‘to restore our beloved king Awich’. The latter was retroactively declared the King of all the Acholi, although during his lifetime he had been the extremely controversial representative of a single chiefdom, challenged by other chiefs. At the beginning of the 1950s, the first texts of a local Acholi literature appeared.
While an Acholi identity was forming in competition with other ethnic groups, the inner contradictions within the Acholi were also growing. The opposition between rich and poor, aristocrats and commoners, elders and the young, as well as between women and men was increasing, but an increasing economic and social inequality was also emerging between East and West Acholi. While the Gulu District in the West developed more rapidly, due to its proximity to the centre and its greater fertility, the Kitgum District in the East remained peripheral, serving more as a reservoir for recruiting labour, soldiers for the King’s African Rifles, and the police. Rudimentary formal education became the criterion for a military career (Omara-Otunnu, 1987:44). At the same time, the military profession offered the opportunity to rise socially and to integrate oneself in the modern sector (Mazrui, 1975:39).
Thus, the inequality of development among different ethnic groups was mirrored within the Acholi District. While the colonial administration recruited the bureaucratic elite from the south, especially from Buganda, the north of Uganda was used as a reservoir of labour. Especially during the Second World War, the colonial army recruited soldiers and police from the north (Mazrui, 1975). This ethnic division of labour later contributed substantially to the opposition between North and South8 (cf. Karugire, 1988:21) and between Nilotes and Bantus that became so significant in Uganda’s history. This opposition, which was ‘invented’ in the scholarly discourse of linguists, anthropologists, and historians, found renewed actualization in the history of the Holy Spirit Movement.
After Uganda attained political independence, the ethnic division of labour continued. Under Obote, a Lango from the North, up to 1985 almost two-thirds of the army came from the North, especially Acholi. In this period, not only did the opposition between North and South increase, the politicization of ethnic groups was exacerbated (cf. Hansen, 1977), although, or perhaps precisely because, Obote tried to pursue an anti-tribal policy. Since the Baganda, who had been privileged during the colonial period, now felt disadvantaged