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Three

The Crisis ¹

At particular times, single individuals are able to gain a certain freedom, detachment, or separation from hitherto dominant ideas and practices. Ardener calls such times ‘periods of singularity’ (1989:148). They are characterized by paradigm shifts and epistemological fragmentation. At such times, prophets become noticeable, ‘because a category for the registration of the condition then becomes a necessity’ (ibid). Prophets appear at other times as well, but find no, or only limited, recognition; they remain silent.

This chapter elaborates on some characteristics of the ‘period of singularity’ that led to the emergence of the Holy Spirit Movement. First it describes the political history that provided the preconditions for the catastrophic situation in Acholi, and thus for the emergence of the HSM. Then – in contrast – it presents two discourses which attempt to explain the misfortunes and violence in northern Uganda from a local perspective. In a sense, they are local crisis theories. At the heart of the first are ideas of witchcraft that pin the blame for the misfortunes on relatives or neighbours. At the centre of the second, carried on primarily by the elders, are ideas of purity and impurity, the latter originating in violations of the moral order.

The third part of the chapter relates a story which became the official myth of the origin of the Holy Spirit Movement. In this ‘Story of the Journey to Paraa’, Alice – or rather the spirit Lakwena,² who took possession of Alice – describes the crisis in Acholi. Reinhart Koselleck has elucidated in an essay the semantic field of the term ‘crisis’ (1982:617ff.), including its juridical, theological, and medical usage. In the story of the journey to Paraa, crisis is used primarily in its juridical meaning, as a decision in the sense of administering justice and judging, in a manner properly termed critique. In Paraa, Lakwena sat in judgement, like a rwot or chief, over man and nature, handing down the decision to combat sinners. But an aspect of the theological meaning of crisis also shines through in the metaphor of the courtroom. For this court is, in a certain sense, a preliminary Last Judgment which also contains a promise of salvation.

Thus, the story of the journey to Paraa provides some of the local topics and images to which Alice had recourse in interpreting the crisis in Acholi. These images – rather than scientific categories – should guide the interpretation of the Holy Spirit Movement (cf., for example, Fernandez, 1979:40).

Political History

Uganda’s postcolonial history is one of violence and counterviolence. With the militarization of politics that had already begun under Obote in the 1960s, the state, which according to Hobbes ought to limit violence, has increasingly itself become an instrument of violent retaliation. Whoever took over state power was not only able to gain wealth, but also to take revenge – against members of other ethnic groups or religions – as in times before the existence of the state. The war of the Holy Spirit Movement must also be seen in this context.

After the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) toppled Idi Amin’s government with the help of Tanzanian troops and Obote returned to power – allegedly by means of rigged elections – a brutal civil war broke out in Uganda. The Acholi fought primarily on the side of the government army (UNLA) against the National Resistance Army (NRA), led by Yoweri Museveni. In this period of civil war, in which the Acholi suffered great losses, the spirit Lakwena appeared in Acholi on 2 January 1985, taking possession of Alice Auma, a young woman of Gulu.

Rivalries within the UNLA – Acholi soldiers suspected Obote of sacrificing them in battle to no purpose, while filling leadership positions with members of his own ethnic group, the Langi – led to a coup against Obote. Under the command of the Acholi Bazilio Okello, predominantly Acholi soldiers, together with some from the West Nile District and Sudan who had served under Idi Amin and whom Bazilio had won over, took Lira and then, in July 1985, Kampala. When they reached Kampala, Obote had already left the city and fled to Tanzania. Tito Okello, also an Acholi, became the new President. This was the first time in the history of Uganda that Acholi had achieved state power, which they used, like others before them, to amass wealth and wreak vengeance (on the Langi, for example). After this victory, the UNLA disintegrated into marauding bands who divided Kampala among themselves and plundered wherever they went.

Although the Okellos had concluded a peace agreement with the NRA in Nairobi in December 1985 – to this day the Acholi refer to these peace talks as ‘peace jokes’ – the NRA marched on Kampala as early as January, and, with the UNLA no longer able to put up effective resistance, brought down the Okellos on 26 January 1986. The Acholi had lost power again, and thousands of Acholi soldiers fled north to their home villages or across the border to Sudan.

After this defeat, Bazilio Okello tried to organize resistance in Gulu and Kitgum. The populace, including girls and women, were issued with rifles taken from the armouries of the barracks in Gulu. Former soldiers of the UNLA gave them makeshift military instruction and, together with soldiers from the West Nile District, the Acholi were able to slow the NRA’s advance northward. At Karuma and Kamdini, the government troops encountered bitter resistance, but the Acholi suffered catastrophic losses and were forced to withdraw. In March 1986, the NRA took Gulu and Kitgum. After this defeat, Acholi resistance appeared to have been finally broken.

The former soldiers returned to their home villages, hid their weapons, and tried to live as peasants. But few were able to do so. During the civil war, they had lived by plundering and had learned to despise the peasant way of life. The soldiers wanted the high life, I was told. Like returned emigrant workers, they had become internal strangers³ (Werbner, 1989:239), and their return caused unrest and violence. Some of them began stealing and plundering in the villages and terrorizing those they did not like. The elders tried to enforce their own authority over the soldiers by referring to ‘Acholi tradition’ (Acholi macon), but they seldom prevailed in the ensuing power struggle.

After the NRA had established itself as the occupying power, tensions, conflicts, denunciations, and acts of revenge continued to increase among the Acholi. Many of them used the presence of the NRA to settle old scores. They denounced former adversaries to the NRA or paid NRA soldiers to eliminate a rival.

A new NRA battalion of former Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda (FEDEMU) soldiers, who had allied with the NRA against Obote’s UNLA and had fought against the Acholi in the civil war, mostly in Luwero, was stationed in Acholi. These soldiers exploited the opportunity to avenge themselves upon their former opponents by plundering, murdering, torturing, and raping. Some Acholi former soldiers took their weapons out of hiding and joined the resistance movement, the Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA), which had meanwhile been founded in Sudan. Many Acholi took the behaviour of the NRA as evidence that the new government had decided to kill all male Acholi, and their fear of revenge by the NRA was heightened by radio broadcasts from Kampala, which called the Acholi primitive and reviled them as criminals and murderers.⁴ When the NRA went so far as to order the general disarming of the Acholi, this recalled two traumatic events already mentioned in their history: first, the disarmament enforced by the colonial administration, which led to the Lamogi rebellion, and the murder of thousands of Acholi soldiers by Amin. While searching for weapons, some NRA soldiers began torturing Acholi by the notorious ‘three piece method’.⁵ And many were interned in so-called politicization camps,⁶ which resembled concentration camps. Thus threatened, more and more Acholi joined the UPDA.

Meanwhile, the UPDA, organized in a number of brigades under the supreme command of Odong Latek, began a guerrilla war. In contrast to the NRA, they knew the terrain and, at least in the beginning, were supported by the local population. They were thus able to force the NRA to withdraw from the countryside and to retreat to the cities of Gulu and Kitgum. But Odong Latek was unable to control the many UPDA groups, which operated more or less independently. Some of them began plundering and terrorizing the populace. If the peasants were unwilling to provide them with food, they more and more frequently took by force what was not handed over voluntarily. When it turned out that, despite initial successes, victory over the NRA would not come rapidly, many UPDA soldiers deserted and returned to their villages. But there, too, they created unrest and committed acts of violence.

On 6 August 1986, in this situation of extreme internal and external threat, the spirit Lakwena ordered his medium Alice to cease healing, since that was senseless, and to build up the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces (HSMF) instead, in order to wage war against Evil.

The good Lord who had sent the Lakwena decided to change his work from that of a doctor to that of a military commander for one simple reason: it is useless to cure a man today only that he be killed the next day. So it became an obligation on his part to stop the bloodshed before continuing his work as a doctor. (From a report that Holy Spirit members provided to missionaries in June 1987).

Still in Opit,⁷ Alice was able to win over about 80 soldiers of the former UNLA and to train them in the Holy Spirit Tactics. With these soldiers, under the leadership of Dennis Okot Ochaya, a former driver in the UNLA, Alice attacked Gulu on 19 October 1986 (Catherine Watson, personal communication). They were driven off and suffered high losses.

After this defeat, on orders from the spirit, Alice moved to Kitgum to unite the guerrilla groups of the UPDA under her leadership. On 28 October 1986, she reached Awere, and a few days later, arrived at the UPDA headquarters near Patongo, where she negotiated with the commander of the 70th brigade of the UPDA, Lt.-Col. Stephen Odyek, called Ojukwu, who put 150 soldiers under her command. With these 150 soldiers, she began rebuilding the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces to conduct war against the NRA in the North.

Her success enabled her to recruit a large number of former soldiers who had become internal strangers. In this sense, the HSM can be interpreted as an attempt to solve the dilemma posed by the return of the soldiers: to discipline, reintegrate, and rehabilitate them.

The Internal Enemy

Various forms of witchcraft and sorcery existed and exist in Acholi, each with its own history (see Chapter 7.). The currently predominant forms, I was told, are first, poisoning,⁸ awola or yat in Acholi, and secondly, a type of witchcraft⁹ called kiroga that is supposed to come from Bunyoro (cf. Beattie, 1978:29ff.), and is associated with spirit possession. Kiroga is practised primarily to take revenge. If someone wants vengeance, he/she visits the medium of a spirit, an ajwaka, whose spirit then instigates a cen, the vengeful spirit of a person who has died a bad death, to inflict on the victim insanity, infertility, any of many kinds of disease – including AIDS – or death. Kiroga is, in a certain sense, an intensified or radicalized form of another type of witchcraft that has long been customary in Acholi under the name kooro tipu, i.e. ‘catching the spirit’. Here, too, an ajwaka invokes her spirit to catch the tipu, or shadow, of an enemy, which she shuts up in a pot, inducing the victim to lose his/her appetite and to weaken rapidly. The difference between the two forms lies primarily in the being of the spirits employed to do the harm: in contrast to the tipu, who are not inherently evil, the cen, who are the unreconciled spirits of those who have died by violence, are regarded as extremely evil, vengeful and dangerous.

The elders as well as younger men and women agreed that witchcraft, especially in the form of kiroga, had increased to an intolerable level in Acholi. For, as was explained to me, death in war was interpreted, like other misfortunes, in the idiom of kiroga.¹⁰ In some cases, however, ancestral spirits were held responsible for the death. The enemy’s bullet that killed an Acholi was not seen as the real cause of his death. If relatives suspected someone of witchcraft, on the occasion of the burial an ajwaka called on the spirit (tipu) of the deceased and asked who really killed him. It often turned out that a relative or neighbour who had come into conflict with the deceased had bewitched him and ensured that the enemy’s bullet hit him, rather than someone else. Thus, the conflict with an outer, alien enemy was shifted inward. It was not so much the NRA, the external foe, that did the killing; in the end, internal enemies – those closest to a person, relatives or neighbours in Acholi – were considered responsible for the suffering and death.

Since not only death in war, but also death from AIDS,¹¹ which has spread to a terrifying degree throughout Acholi, was interpreted in the idiom of kiroga, Acholi was transformed into a land where everyone suspected and tried to harm everyone else. For accusations of witchcraft not only reflect, but also generate, social tensions (cf. Turner, 1973:114). Whereas in 1973, for example, when many Acholi soldiers were cold-bloodedly murdered on orders from Idi Amin, the local administration answered the increasing suspicions and charges of witchcraft with witch hunts, in 1986 the chiefs were no longer in a position to do this. So the only solution left to those who felt threatened in Acholi was to seek protection with the help of an ajwaka or to take vengeance on a supposed evil-doer. Yet the victims of the retaliation measures would, in turn, interpret them as none other than acts of witchcraft, of kiroga, so that suspicions and accusations escalated.

Most of the suspicions and accusations, however, played themselves out within the domestic domain. Only if the elders found it opportune did they take up the charges, usually expressed by women, and make them public. But since each new death was seen as proof of the witches’ power in Acholi, while there was seldom a direct move against them, the discord and hatred¹² among the people in Acholi continued to escalate, and no way out could be found.

The increase in charges of witchcraft is quite clearly connected to the increase in deaths through war and AIDS (Turner, 1973:113). Unfortunately, I do not have enough quantitative data to support this hypothesis more precisely. But I should point out that the correlation between deaths and charges of witchcraft in Acholi is this clear only until about 1988. Only up to this date was witchcraft (kiroga) taken as the primary explanation for deaths. It seems that a mechanism of self-limitation took effect thereafter. AIDS became increasingly interpreted as either a natural disease or a divine punishment. In February 1991, for example, after a woman had died of AIDS, an ancestral spirit that had taken possession of an ajwaka said that neither he nor anyone else was to blame for the woman’s death, but that she had died of AIDS, and that AIDS was a natural disease for which no one could be held responsible. Since by now there is hardly a family in Gulu that does not mourn for one or more members killed by AIDS or in war, accusations of witchcraft seem absurd. Other interpretations that do not demand retaliation are given priority.¹³

The Impurity of the Soldiers

In the power struggle that developed between the elders and the returned soldiers,¹⁴ the elders did not assert their authority directly but by referring to ‘Acholi tradition’ (Acholi macon). For these elders, the returnees were the cause of all evil. They had become alien to those who had remained at home. During the civil war, they had plundered, tortured, and murdered, primarily in Luwero, and had become of ‘impure heart’. Because they had killed, they brought cen, the spirits of the killed, to Acholi, thus threatening the lives of those who had stayed at home. But it was not actually the killing that violated the moral order. In precolonial times and also during the colonial period, a warrior brought home the head of the foe he had killed as evidence of his deed. He was then greeted with the triumphal songs of the women, but, as a liminal person, had to spend several days in seclusion until he had been cleansed in a ritual and the spirit of the killed person had been appeased and sent away by means of a sacrifice. The warrior then received an honorific, the moi name, as a sign of his bravery and his new status.

In the First and Second World Wars, Acholi soldiers of the King’s African Rifles (KAR) brought back to Acholi a memento – a bit of cloth, a button, or an insignia – of the enemies they had killed, and submitted themselves to the ritual of purification. But in the confusion of the civil war, many soldiers were unable, or did not want, to submit to the ritual; the cen, the spirits of those they had killed, remained unreconciled. Thus, the soldiers remained impure,¹⁵ and the unappeased spirits of those killed tried to avenge themselves on the soldiers or their relatives.

The threat from the cen increased when, after Museveni’s victory, thousands of soldiers sought refuge in Acholi, bringing with them large numbers of cen of the foes they had killed. And most of them also refused the ritual purification. They were blamed for the misfortunes and suffering that had come upon Acholi – AIDS, the civil war, the loss of participation in state power, the internal discord. The elders took Acholi’s historic undoing as a punishment, a sign of condemnation for violations of the moral order. In the vocabulary of the pure and the impure, they expressed a semantics of guilt (Ricoeur, 1988:46) that focused on the soldiers. The elders attempted to reconstitute the moral order by setting up a catalogue of proscriptions, as in precolonial and colonial times, but they were unable to enforce these rules. The returned soldiers (among others) refused to comply with the proscriptions.

But it was not only the elders’ lack of authority in their power struggle with the soldiers that lent the situation in Acholi an appearance of such ‘impurity’ and inescapability; indeed, some of the elders also entertained doubts about the efficacy of the ‘tradition’. Israel Lubwa, for example, said that the ritual of purification could only be carried out if a battle ‘between man and man’ had taken place. But with the increasing automation and the resulting anonymity of modern warfare, one could no longer know whom one had killed; this rendered the ritual obsolete. The technical perfection of the weapons made it possible to kill in a way that necessarily excluded heroism. For Israel Lubwa, there was no longer any possibility of dealing with, and warding off, the threat of the cen produced in such great numbers in the civil war. He admitted his helplessness.

Since, as was mentioned above, the cen could also be employed for purposes of witchcraft, their presence – heightened by the return of the soldiers – increased fears of kiroga. Thus, the two discourses about the misfortunes in Acholi were not only compatible, they complemented each other in a kind of vicious circle. For the increase in witchcraft also increased the impurity in Acholi, calling forth natural and social catastrophes like AIDS, war, and drought as punishment for the violation of the moral order. The sufferings produced by these catastrophes were in turn partially interpreted in the idiom of witchcraft, once again increasing the internal discord.¹⁶ In this situation, this ‘period of singularity’ (to take up Ardener’s category again), the customary measures taken against evil failed. A prophetic condition, as Ardener termed it, was given (Ardener 1989:135). Now it lay with the prophets¹⁷ to obtain recognition and to establish a new discourse and new practices, in order to dissolve the vicious cycle and put an end to the evil.

The Story of the Journey to Paraa

As mentioned earlier, the story of the journey to Paraa became the official myth of the origin of the Holy Spirit Movement. It was told repeatedly by Alice’s father Severino Lukoya (also called Saverio Okoya) as well as by the spirits of the HSM. Here is Mike Ocan’s version:¹⁸

Severino, Alice’s father, came to Opit on 15 May 1985. There he met his daughter, who was completely possessed by the spirit Lakwena. The spirit ordered her to go to Paraa in the National Park to hold court on all creatures on earth. On 24 May she set out. She reached Anaka on 26 May and, on the following day, Wang Kwar. There, on 28 May Lakwena held court on all the animals in Paraa Park. (Lakwena said to the animals: ‘You animals, God sent me to ask you whether you bear responsibility for the bloodshed in Uganda.’ The animals denied blame, and the buffalo displayed a wound on his leg, and the hippopotamus displayed a wound on his arm. And the crocodile said they, the wild animals of the water, could not be guilty, because they could not leave the water.)

The next day, 29 May the spirit held court on the water. On the spirit’s order, the water of the waterfall suddenly stood still, as did the wind. (Lakwena said to the waterfall: ‘Water, I am coming to ask you about the sins and the bloodshed in this world.’ And the water said: ‘The people with two legs kill their brothers and throw the bodies into the water.’ The spirit asked the water what it did with the sinners, and the water said: ‘I fight against the sinners, for they are the ones to blame for the bloodshed. Go and fight against the sinners, because they throw their brothers in the water.’ And the water also said: ‘Bring something to placate the spirits of the dead [cen] whose bodies were thrown in the water.’ And the water ordered that a sheep, coins, and cowry shells be brought for a sacrifice. And it promised to give holy water to cleanse sins away and to heal sicknesses.)

Then Lakwena said: ‘All creatures shall be fruitful and multiply, for they are free from sin.’

They left the waterfall and returned to Opit on 30 May. On 3 June, on the spirit’s orders, they journeyed to Mount Kilak. On 6 June, they reached their destination. On the following day, at 10 in the morning, the mountain exploded three times to greet Lakwena and Severino. They arranged to meet at 10 in the evening. In the evening, Alice and Severino returned to the mountain. It was very dark, and their arrival at the mountain was tardy, about midnight. A bright light, as bright as a star, shone from the peak of the mountain and led them to a certain spot, a pond filled with water possessing healing power. (The spirit Lakwena said to the mountain or to the rock: ‘God has sent me to find out why there is theft in the world.’ The mountain answered: ‘I have gone nowhere and have stolen no one’s children. But people come here to me and name the names of those whom I should kill [by casting spells]. Some ask me for medicine [to bewitch]. This is the sin of the people. I want to give you water to heal diseases. But you must fight against the sinners.’)

They drew water and brought it to Opit. They reached Opit on 12 June and, with the aid of the water, Alice began healing diseases and also wounds inflicted in the war.

The spirit ordered Severino to make a holy offering, as Abraham had done. And Severino produced a lamb.

Later, Alice and her father journeyed again to Paraa, to examine their judgment. The wild animals complained that people still bothered, hurt, and poached them. The animals of the water also complained that people could not live in peace with other creatures. Their evil nature drove them to practise witchcraft. And Lakwena ordered that, from now on, all witchcraft must have an end. From now on, all holy spirits should heal and lead people to God. On 20 June they left Paraa Park and journeyed to Mount Kilak, to examine their judgment there as well. The mountain complained that people were still sinners. And Alice obtained there the power to heal all diseases. (On 15 August they returned to Opit.) As the day approached when the holy offering was to be made, Severino wept and said to God: ‘What should I do, since I am only a poor man?’ And God heard him and sent him some people who helped him and gave him coins for the offering. After the offering, God said that there was a tribe in Uganda that was hated everywhere. This tribe was the Acholi. And God ordered that a lamb be offered, so that they should repent their sins and to put an end to the bloodshed in Acholi. The lamb was sacrificed.

After all these events, the spirit Lakwena began to heal the sick in Opit through Alice, his medium.

(Two days after the offering, soldiers of the UPDA came to Opit. They attacked the railroad. The locomotive engineer was able to escape, and took refuge in Alice’s house. The UPDA soldiers pursued him and shot at Alice, but the bullets bounced off and smoke rose. When the soldiers saw the wonder, they asked Alice to support them in battle and to give them spiritual support.)

The site Wang Kwar, which is Acholi for ‘Red Eye’, or Wang Jok, ‘Jok’s Eye’, was already the centre of a regional cult in Paraa in precolonial times. In a shrine here lived a jok, a spirit attended by a number of spirit-mediums who functioned as ajwaka, or priests. Wang Kwar was a kind of sanctum, to which many people – and not only from Acholi – made pilgrimage, to avert misfortune and to be healed. A. Adimola explained that Wang Kwar or Wang Jok was also regarded as a site of wonders. Strange things emerged from the waters of the Nile – a pot, a woman, or coins and cowry shells – vanishing again after a while. As late as the 1960s and 1970s, the shrine on the Nile was a popular site for outings, an indigenous tourist and pilgrimage attraction. But by 1979-80, Paraa had been devastated by the soldiers of Idi Amin, who were fleeing the UNLA, and who wreaked mass carnage on the wild animals with their machine guns (Avirgan and Honey, 1983:189). During the civil war, poachers and soldiers continued to kill animals indiscriminately, and the shrine of the jok was criminally neglected.

Thus, to make judgement Alice chose a site that already had significance as a religious centre for Acholi. In this way, she was able to establish a continuity despite the new Christian discourse she sought to establish.

The judgment that Alice or rather the spirit Lakwena held over animate and inanimate nature already drew the lines between good and evil and between friend and foe that would primarily determine the war of the Holy Spirit Movement. The ‘structure of rejection’ (Foucault, 1973:12) that would become more radical in the course of the history of the HSM was laid down here for the first time. Like the discourses of the elders, the spirit Lakwena also put the blame for the misfortunes in Acholi on the witches and the soldiers who brought the cen into the country. With this, the HSM was marked out as an anti-witchcraft movement.

But at the same time, parts of animate and inanimate nature – wild animals, water, and rocks – were cleared of blame. They called on Lakwena to wreak vengeance and to fight against the guilty. They also offered their aid in the fight against evil. The water and also the rocks gave ‘holy’ water to purify the sinners and heal the sick.¹⁹

In Paraa, Alice encountered an insulted and threatened nature, with which she entered into an alliance. Because the wild animals, the water, and the rock had been injured in an immoral manner, they were able to legitimate the fight against sinners who had violated the moral order, as a measure of retribution. A further essential characteristic of the war of the Holy Spirit Movement is thus prefigured in the story of the journey to Paraa, namely, the struggle as a unified undertaking of people, spirits, and parts of animate and inanimate nature, as a cosmic uprising.

Alice and her father undertook their journey to Paraa and to Mount Kilak during the civil war, when many Acholi civilians, as well as the soldiers fighting against the NRA in Luwero, lost their lives. An elder told me that, at this time, hardly a day passed without the news that one of the sons of one family or another had been killed. But although many Acholi saw themselves as victims, it was also well known that the soldiers of the government army (UNLA), composed mostly of Acholi, had not only plundered Luwero, but also committed many atrocities. The Acholi soldiers had become guilty in Luwero, and this guilt was recognized in the story of the journey to Paraa. There God declared that there was one tribe in Uganda that was hated everywhere, and that this tribe was the Acholi. And God demanded an offering to atone for the guilt, and this offering was made.

Because the Acholi were so especially sinful, God sent the spirit Lakwena to them (and to no other ethnic group). Their particular sinfulness and guilt was thus not only transformed into a promise of salvation; it also made them God’s chosen people, like the children of Israel, thus legitimating the claim they would make to leadership of the Holy Spirit Movement.

Notes

1. I am aware that the term ‘crisis’ is extremely imprecise and carries a great variety of meanings. Nor has it recently gained in clarity and precision in the social sciences (Koselleck, 1982:647). With the introduction of this term, I do not want to associate the Holy Spirit Movement with what anthropology designates as a crisis cult (La Barre, 1971). I use the term precisely because of its semantic breadth, in order to include its juridical, medical, theological, and political connotations in the local crisis theories that I want to present.

2. In what follows, whenever Alice is in the state of possession, and thus not herself but the spirit, I shall always speak of Lakwena, thus giving the local perspective in which not she, but the spirit, is the active and speaking being.

3. Werbner (1989:223ff.) showed that the arrival and integration of strangers are accompanied by certain shifts in discourse. He distinguishes between external and internal strangers, a distinction Fortes (1975:242) had already made. While external strangers are really strangers, for example Europeans, internal strangers are natives who have become strange, and who, after long absence, for example as emigrant workers or soldiers, return to and must be reintegrated into their homeland. In Acholi, first internal strangers arrived – the remaining UNLA soldiers fleeing home after their defeat – followed in March by external strangers, the soldiers of the NRA, who established themselves as the occupying power.

4. That of all people it was the Bahima – Museveni is a Muhima (singular of Bahima) from Ankole – who called them primitive particularly upset many Acholi, because in Gulu District a number of Bahima from Ankole and Rwanda had worked for them as herdsmen; and in accordance with popular theories of evolution, the latter were considered primitive. I should note, however, that I did not hear these radio broadcasts, and can merely recount how they were received in Acholi.

5. ‘Three piece tying’, or kandooya, is a form of torture in which the arms are tied tightly behind the back at the wrists and elbows. Kandooya strains the chest and impedes breathing, and sometimes severely damages the nerves of the arms (Pirouet, 1991:200).

6. In the politicization camps of Luwero and Mbarara, both of which were in the centre of ‘formerly’ enemy territory, the former UNLA and UPDA soldiers had to perform labour, such as producing bricks to rebuild the buildings their armies had destroyed. Many Acholi, and especially the elders, were reminded of the forced labour of the colonial period, which they had interpreted as a form of slavery.

7. In Opit, about 30 km away from Gulu, Alice had set up a shrine as a spirit medium, diviner, and healer.

8. That poisoning could become the currently predominant form of witchcraft may be due to the colonial judicial decisions which recognized only those forms of witchcraft or sorcery in which poisonous substances could be traced (compare Allen, 1991:385).

9. Various forms of witchcraft and sorcery are distinguished in Acholi. When spirit possession is also involved, the boundary between the two cannot be clearly drawn, so in what follows I shall use the term witchcraft, as do those Acholi who speak English.

10. I collected about ten cases from this period in which mostly women were suspected of or charged with witchcraft.

11. Although the government has launched several Western-style information campaigns, this has hardly diminished the suspicions and charges of witchcraft, because the two explanations are not mutually exclusive, but compatible. Few in Uganda today would deny that one contracts AIDS through sexual contact. But the idiom of witchcraft addresses the question ‘Why me and not another?’

12. In Return to Laughter, E. Bowen, alias Laura Bohannan, described a similar situation that developed among the Tiv, when an epidemic of chickenpox broke out and accusations of witchcraft escalated terribly (cf. Bowen, 1964).

13. Janet Seeley, who has worked on AIDS in Uganda, in Rakai and Masaka, has reported a similar paradigm shift. Wolfgang Behringer has described the same tendency in his excellent book on the persecution of witches in Bavaria (1987:205).

14. On the power struggle between the elders and the young men in the idiom of witchcraft, see, for example, Offiong (1983).

15. As internal strangers, the impure soldiers can also be described as liminal persons (compare Shack and Skinner, 1979).

16. In his work on the Cattle-Killing Movement among the Xhosa from 1856 to 1857, J.B. Peires (1989) described the rise of a similarly self-exacerbating situation.

17. Here I do not want to posit any causal relationship between crisis and the emergence of prophetic movements. Of course, there have often been crises without the development of prophetic movements. But since the Holy Spirit Movement was, above all, an anti-witchcraft movement, and since a correlation between crisis and an increase in witchcraft is regarded as proven (cf. Ardener, 1970; Turner, 1973:115; Behringer, 1987:419ff.), I do want to postulate a connection between this crisis, described from several perspectives, and the rise of the Holy Spirit Movement, while conceding that contingency also plays a role.

18. I published the other version, by Caroline Lamwaka, who conducted an interview with Severino Lukoya, in 1995 (Behrend, 1995). I include parts of this version in brackets, but present here Mike Ocan’s version because it corresponds more closely to the story as told by the spirits. There are, in fact, different accounts of the date of Alice’s possession. Her father seems to have first realized her possession on 2 January, but her special relationship with Lakwena, becoming Lakwena’s medium, was ‘officially’ dated 25 May.

19. In a certain way, purifying and healing are equivalents in Acholi. The state of impurity is caused by the violation of specific prohibitions, and the infraction is punished with suffering, disease, and death. It is as if the infraction were a direct insult to the power of what was prohibited and as if this insult inexorably triggered retaliation (Ricoeur, 1988:39).