ALICE IN JUJULAND
Jeremy Gavron on the
Ugandan witch who promises immunity from bullets
Eastern Uganda SO FOUL and fair a woman Uganda has not seen. Rebel leaders in Africa seem, these days, to be of a certain type; smooth, well-spoken, good at soldiering and even better at public relations, like Unita's Jonas Savimbi in Angola or John Garang of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army. But the inspiration behind the popular uprisings in the north and east of Uganda over the past ten months is something quite new or, truer perhaps, a throwback to something rather old.
Alice Lakwena is a witch, a high pries- tess of magic. When I tracked her down near Ibanga at the weekend I found a young, slight and pretty woman. Her dis- ciples attest to her skills in black magic: spells against bullets, charms that manipu- late nature., More concrete is her startling ability to inspire Ugandans to follow her. Since she and her Holy Spirit Movement first emerged at the battle of Corner Kilak early this year, Alice has marched more than 250 miles southwards, gathering thousands of followers on the way — and sending hundreds to their deaths on the bullets of the National Resistance Army.
Battlefields where the Holy Spirit Move- ment has fought are littered with the products of her witchcraft. While many of her soldiers go into battle armed with Russian automatics, others face the NRA guns carrying only rocks and charms, which they throw at the enemy in the belief that the charms will turn to snakes and bite, or burst into a stinging swarm of bees. Before an attack, the Holy Spirit soldiers strip to the waist, roll their trousers up and rub shea-nut oil, specially concocted by the priestess, onto their skin as a shield against bullets.
At the crossroads of two dirt tracks near Tororo in eastern Uganda, where Alice had ordered her troops to attack the previous day, I saw more than a hundred bodies lying dull-faced, their chests glisten- ing in the sun. Dressed herself in a white robe and chanting in strange tongues, Lakwena had encouraged her troops from behind. NRA soldiers described how these bare-chested men ran, singing hymns, into the machine-gun fire. What possesses them to follow Lakwena and take suicide orders? Certainly an element is political. All her followers are Nilotic people, dark blue-black, with quite different languages and tribal traditions from the Bantu tribes in the south, to which President Yoweri Museveni belongs. There is an age-old distrust between the Bantu and the Nilotic (the same hatred that forces a wedge between the Nilotic Luo and the Bantu Kikuyu in Kenya). Idi Amin and Milton Obote were both from the north and murdered southerners in their hundreds of thousands. With Museveni in power, the Nilotic tribes are nervous. Their people no longer make up Uganda's army — bringing precious wages home — and instead they have the hostile NRA, mostly Bantu, which while not terribly behaved has committed enough rape, robbery and assault against the local people to stir up bad feelings.
Lakwena plays on this. One young Lakwena follower (whom I and other journalists found wounded in the bush with three others, and took to hospital — and therefore was more willing to talk than those captured by the NRA) said he had been told Museveni was coming to kill them, and was whipped up to a state of tribal fervour. But other rebel groups in Nilotic Uganda with greater political credi- bility and senior figures involved have failed to inspire the popular support that has swollen the ranks of the Holy Spirit Movement to at least 5,000.
Lakwena's main attraction is above and beyond politics or tribalism. She leads an African uprising in the grand old style, a movement of the imagination. A hundred years ago, such things were common. In 1905, the natives in the south of German East Africa (now Tanzania) rose up against a cotton scheme imposed by the Germans in what became known as `Maji-Maji'. A fanatical movement, its members believed that a magic water brewed by a medicine man and rubbed on their bodies would protect them against bullets. They ran into battle shouting, `Maji! Maji!' (Water! Wa- ter!) and faced gunfire without flinching. Like the Holy Spirit Movement, which first appeared in January 1987 but was recruit- ing as early as May 1986, Maji-Maji was apparently planned for several months in advance. Several thousand Africans died before it fell away.
That this kind of fanatical movement has re-emerged in Uganda is hardly surprising. Many of those who have joined Lakwena were soldiers under Amin and Obote, men who have lost any respect for human life. Tribal tensions, which remained quiet while each tribe stayed in its own home- land, have been set off by the movements of armies and refugees.
In the face of this, the thousands who follow Lakwena have sought solace in traditional magic — with a modern touch. Like much in Africa, the Holy Spirit Movement is a curious mixture of the old and the new. Lakwena herself, an Acholi from near Kitgum, bears a striking re- semblance to the ancient priestess `Ajwa- ka' of the Acholi, who went into a trance so that the Acholi god, Jok, could speak through her lips. But Alice's god is the Catholic one. Her adopted name, Lakwe- na (her real one is Auma), means prophet in Acholi, and is sometimes used to denote Christ. When she talks in tongues, her followers believe it is the voice of Christ they are hearing. And the hymns her soldiers sing when they march into battle are Catholic ones: 'Jesus died and Jesus will come back from heaven'.
This mixture of missionary mysticism and witchcraft bravado has kept Lakwena in men on her long march, from Kitgum in the far north of Uganda to Tororo, 250 miles to the south. Two reasons are given for this march: one, her avowed intention to storm Kampala and replace Museveni as president; and two, that after each battle, when her magic clearly does not work, she loses popularity in that area and is forced to move on. The latter is not completely true. The young man we found in the bush, a 'Lance Commander' in charge of 100 men, was determined to rejoin Lakwena. He had been wounded, he said, only because he broke one of Lakwena's 23 rules (do not eat snakes, do not have sex, do not take cover in a battle and so on) and ran over an ant-hill.
Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit Movement has gone as far on the road to Kampala as it can realistically go. It has run out of Nilotics. From Tororo district to the capit- al, the land is filled with Bantu people, none of whom is sympathetic to Lakwena. The NRA is prepared to bide its time and wait for the movement to run out of guns, steam and magic. The government wants Lakwena alive, to find out how a lady apparently so fair can be responsible for things so foul. 'That is one woman we want alive,' says Frances Wanyina, the district administrator in Tororo, 'so we can slice the cranium off her head and find out exactly what goes on in there.'
Jeremy Gavron is Africa correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.
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