Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ