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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 rwot represented the unity of the chiefdom. This was also 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 (Obote abolished their kingdom), his policies produced an effect quite opposite to his intention.

Even under Obote, a process set in that would prove extremely significant for the later history of Uganda: the militarization of politics. During the colonial period, the British had actually managed to demilitarize Uganda (Mazrui, 1975:55ff.) and to reduce, or even end, the endemic intra- and inter-ethnic wars. But already under Obote, with the destruction of the palace of the Kabaka (see, for example, Karugire, 1988:49), the military became an instrument of domestic politics, until finally Amin set up the first of a series of military dictatorships.

In January 1986, when Museveni violently seized power, many Acholi soldiers of the former government’s army fled to their homeland in the North. There, as ‘internal strangers’ (Werbner, 1989:236), they caused unrest and conflict; only a few of them managed to reintegrate themselves into peasant life. The Holy Spirit Movement, which incorporated many of these ‘unemployed’ soldiers, can thus also be seen as an attempt to rehabilitate soldiers who had become internal strangers and to regain participation in the central power.

Notes

1. It would be better if I were to speak, not of the Acholi culture, but, like the Comaroffs, of a ‘cultural field’ of the Acholi (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991:27), in order to make it clear that we are dealing not with a homogeneous unit neatly shut off from the outside, but with something constantly moving, a contradictory field hosting a diversity of ‘cultures’ within itself. But since the Acholi themselves have meanwhile adopted the old concept of culture and speak of an Acholi culture, which they define in opposition to other cultures, I have retained the term.

2. The Lango or Langi are neighbours of the Acholi and, like them, speak a Lwo language (a subdivision of the Nilotic language group).

3. In a competition carried out by the colonial government in 1953, one participant and prizewinner wrote on the origin of the Acholi chiefdom: ‘A long time ago, the various Acholi clans roamed from place to place. They were nomads and did not care who the land belonged to. They hunted. One day they followed an antelope, which escaped from them along with a herd of cattle. But the hunters didn’t give up, and they managed to surround and catch the herd of cattle. They divided them among themselves, making cattle the property of humans for the first time. But among these hunters was a man who could not run fast enough and who had remained behind on top of a termite nest. Since he couldn’t claim any cattle for himself, he took the land as his property and told the others: “You have taken the cattle, I take the land, and from now on your cattle will graze on my land.” One of the men answered, “Truly, the land belongs to you, and we will share the cattle with you. You shall receive half the cattle from each of us.” In this way, the owner of the land grew rich and thus became the rwot’ (Bere, 1955:49).

4. The sources (for example Girling, 1960:125ff.; Okot p’Bitek, 1980:10ff; Atkinson, 1984:92ff.) provide no unambiguous description of the relationship between the various chiefdoms in Acholi and the Kingdom of Bunyoro. Some reports speak of an almost feudal dependency, others merely of ritual recognition.

5. On the history of the Nubians, see Kokole, 1985.

6. On Awich, see the biography by Reuben S. Anywar, an Acholi ethnographer and historian (1948).

7. On the history of the Acholi in the colonial period, see Dwyer (1972).

8. There are fragments of evidence showing how, in Uganda’s history, the stereotype of the warlike Nilotics arose in contrast to that of the peaceful Bantu peasants. The establishment of the one stereotype produced the other like a mirror. Both entered into scholarly discourse and became part of mute practices (Habermas, 1985:284) that entered that discourse in turn. Thus, the Annual Report of 1905 maintained that it was almost impossible to recruit soldiers in Acholi because the chiefs did not want to lose the service of their men.

The Annual Report of the Northern Province of 1911–12 notes: ‘Experience, when circumstances recently necessitated our using Acholi as native levies, has proved that the Acholi is not a brave man; but when drilled and disciplined, and a rifle on his shoulder, he may subsequently prove of use . . . I would advocate his being drafted to any unit other than those that may be stationed in Acholi country, as from experience I know the Acholi are unreliable when it comes to police measures to be taken against their own kith and kin. The Acholi youth has a wonderful ear for martial music.’ (26; emphasis added). Here ‘the Acholi’ is not yet brave, but at least he already likes to listen to martial music.

In 1916, a Northern Recruiting Depot was established in Gulu to recruit soldiers for the King’s African Rifles. In July 1916, 113 soldiers were recruited from the whole district and hundreds of others who volunteered were turned down (Northern Province Monthly Report, July 1916). In May 1917, 400 KAR recruits left Gulu; thereafter, due to a meningitis epidemic, the depot was transferred from Gulu to Arua and men were recruited less from Gulu than from Kitgum, called Chua at the time, and from the West Nile District. In 1918, only a few isolated Acholi were recruited from Gulu on 18 April, 2 May, and 12 July; but these were mustered out again due to chickenpox.

In 1919 and 1920, the KAR soldiers who had fought in and survived the First World War returned to Acholi; trade boomed due to the money they brought back with them, for ‘large sums have been paid as war gratuities to the natives of the district who served during the Great War in the KAR’.

In the 1911–12 Report, ‘the future possible utility of the Acholi as material for police’ is noted.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Annual Reports of the Provincial Commissioners on Native Administration 1939–46 noted: ‘Although in all Districts the native rulers, governments and chiefs and people all immediately expressed their loyalties to the Empire and their willingness to help in any way possible, it was the able-bodied men of the Nilotic area who put this into practical effect by coming forward in large numbers as recruits for essentially fighting units of the Army.’

And in 1946 it was determined that the Nilotics were ‘a more fighting race’, although in fact the number of men taken into the army was higher for the Bantu region than for the Nilotic area. While the Bantu, with a population of about 1,075,000, provided about 20,000 men, the Nilotes, with 777,000, provided only 13,000.