Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ