Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. Heike Behrend

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      Mike Ocan’s text is the essential foundation of this book. It also formed the basis for a long dialogue he and I conducted on the Holy Spirit Movement.⁷ Thus, we re-uttered the text and in this long conversation were able to give speech back its due.

      Aside from Mike Ocan, I also conducted talks with some elders about Acholi macon, the Acholi ‘tradition’ and history. Special mention is due to R. M. Nono, who himself wrote an ethnography and history of Acholi, which I received after his death in the Autumn of 1990. I visited him often on his farm a few kilometres outside Gulu. We sat in the shadow of a mango tree, and he read to me from his manuscripts, which he kept in a briefcase made of goatskin. Again, his text was the basis for our talks.

      In contrast to R. M. Nono, who was something of a self-styled historian and ethnographer of his own society, Andrew Adimola had studied at Makerere University and even published an essay on the Lamogi Rebellion in the Uganda Journal (1954). He had been a Minister under Idi Amin, but had left the country to organize resistance against the dictator from exile. He was a leading politician of the Democratic Party (DP), which was banned under Museveni. In the Spring of 1991 he and seventeen other people were arrested and accused of high treason. The charges had to be dropped for lack of evidence, and when I left Uganda in January 1992, he was a free man again. With Adimola I conducted talks primarily about the past and present political situations.

      Along with these elders, Israel Lubwa, his wife Candida Lubwa, and their children provided essential help in my research in Gulu. Patrick Olango, their son, had returned to Uganda after studying ethnology in Bayreuth, and their two daughters, Carol Lubwa and Margaret Adokorach, worked as my research assistants.

      Israel Lubwa had studied agriculture at Makerere and had been an agricultural officer during the colonial period. In our talks, he repeatedly stressed his own unsuitability: he said he could not be an authentic informant, because he had read too much. He was well aware of the epistemological problems that arise when ‘informants’ have read the books and articles published on their own culture and history. Some of the essential insights of this study emerged in talks with him.

      With Mrs. Lubwa and her two daughters, Carol and Margaret, I talked primarily about witchcraft. The discourse on witchcraft is conducted mostly by women. Only in some cases is it adopted by men, which then makes it a public discourse.

      Jeanne Favret-Saada (1979) has shown that, from the local perspective, no one ever speaks of witchcraft simply to learn something, but always to gain power. There is no disinterested talk about witchcraft, for the discourse on witchcraft itself already possesses real power (ibid:249). In conversations about witchcraft, the ethnographer loses his/her apparently neutral position and finds him/herself in a power configuration in which he/she is assigned a specific role. The three women were unable to speak with me openly (or more openly) on this topic until I myself began going to various witch doctors,⁸ who discovered that I, too, was a victim of witchcraft, whereupon they lifted the spell on me and put one on my enemy.

      These witch doctors, who, as spirit mediums, divined and healed, considered it important that I should not remain an outside observer, but should become a client or, better still, a patient. They assigned me a clear place in their network of relationships and thus called on me to carry out what has been regarded as an ethnographic method since Malinowski: participant observation. I agreed, paid the registration fee, and presented them with problems resulting from my daily life in Gulu, in a situation of war, menace, and fear. Like Acholi women, I too visited one of these mediums almost every day and asked her to consult the spirits. These visits became part of my daily life and, by allowing me to speak of the menace and fear I felt, in a sense making them public and ‘treating’ them, thus helped me reduce, acknowledge, and at least partially deal with them. ‘I know . . . and nonetheless!’ – this attitude, which Favret-Saada described among French peasants (1979:77), was also mine in Gulu. Like them, I tried to satisfy my desire for security, while at the same time knowing this was impossible. And although I, and perhaps other women in Acholi, considered ritual procedures futile, they were consoling.

      I was able to speak English with most of the discussion partners named here (and also those who remain unnamed). Only in dealing with some of the spirit-mediums did I have to rely on translation into English from the Acholi. Since primarily Kiswahili and English, along with Acholi, were spoken in the Holy Spirit Movement, I abstained from learning Acholi or Lwo. But I worked out the semantic fields of certain Acholi words that seemed to me indispensable to any understanding of the HSM and its history. In what follows, I shall present them. To make it possible to see when and in which context in the discourse of the HSM English, Kiswahili, or Lwo were used, in this text I have left the terms in their original language.

      This study deals with war, destruction, violence, suffering, and death. I have not managed to do linguistic justice to the events, for no language can ever approach the events themselves. In his outstanding analysis of the literature on the First World War, Paul Fussell (1977) pointed out that only with Mailer’s, Pynchon’s, and Vonnegut’s writings on the Second World War was a dimension in the depiction of war achieved – ironically, only after the death of most veterans of the First World War – that permitted the description of the limitless obscenity of the Great War (ibid:334). I hope that subsequent studies will do more justice to the events described here.

       Notes

      1. As well as this self-chosen designation, the name Holy Spirit Movement was also used. In what follows, I use the two terms synonymously. Outsiders also spoke of members as the ‘Lakwenas’.

      2. Since 1995, after establishing the new constitution, the NRA is now called the Uganda People’s Defence Forces.

      3. Although some spirits (jogi) in Acholi demanded human sacrifice, all the Holy Spirit soldiers with whom I spoke on this topic denied that there had been human sacrifice in the HSM.

      4. Fussell quotes a report on the Second World War in which the soldiers ‘had almost completely substituted descriptions which they read in the newspapers or heard on the wireless for their own impressions’ (Fussell, 1977:173).

      5. All of whom wrote their texts in Acholi. With the exception of R. M. Nono’s text, I was not able to collect and translate their writings, because the manuscripts had been lost or destroyed in the confusion of the civil war.

      6. In the European tradition, being an eyewitness, or better still a participant, was considered an epistemological advantage as late as the eighteenth century; but since the development of historical-philological criticism, growing temporal distance from past events has served as a warranty of better knowledge (Koselleck, 1989:668f.).

      7. The generosity of the University of Bayreuth’s Special Research Programme allowed me to invite Mike Ocan to come to Bayreuth and Berlin to continue the discussion.

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