Founder: Alice Lakwena
In Acholi in northern Uganda several self-proclaimed prophets emerged in the 1980s announcing as their mission the overthrow of the National Resistance Army (NRA) which was under the command of Yoweri Museveni later to become President of Uganda. Among these prophets was Alice Auma from Gulu in Acholi who claimed to be possessed by a previously unknown Christian spirit named Lakwena, meaning messenger or apostle in Acholi. Alice Lakwena (she is known by the name of the possessing spirit) declared that her mission was to heal society. In pre-colonial and pre-Christian times possession by jok (spirit) of humans, animals, and material objects could endow them with the power to heal or make the land fertile and turn an immoral, decadent society into a moral and upright one. Such possession could also result in harm in the form of moral, social, and natural catastrophes.
The arrival of Christianity in the twentieth century eventually gave rise to the emergence of a spirit world in which Christian spirits were thought to heal and purify from witchcraft without harming the one who was responsible for bringing it about and thus breaking the cycle of retaliatory bewitching. This came to be contrasted with the traditional spirits or joki (plural of jok) who were believed not only to heal and release from witchcraft but also to kill the one who had perpetrated the affliction.
It was this new, Christian understanding that, under Lakwena’s guidance, Alice tried to advance by working as a healer and diviner. In August 1986 she organized the ‘Holy Spirit Mobile Forces’ (HSMF) a movement that was joined by many regular soldiers for the purposes of waging war on the government, witches, and ‘impure’ soldiers. Initial successes against the NRA were attributed by Alice Lakwena to ‘Holy Spirit Tactics’ a method of warfare that combined modern techniques with magical practices and led to further support for her armed resistance among the general population.
In 1987 Lakwena’s army of around ten thousand soldiers who in theory were under the command of spirits reached within thirty miles of the Uganda capital Kampala before being defeated by government forces. While many of the rebel soldiers were killed Lakwena escaped to nearby Kenya where she continues to reside.
The spirit Lakwena then took possession of Alice’s father Saverino Lukoya who for a short time led the various remaining HSMF forces—these were never fully united into one movement—until the one-time soldier in another of Acholi’s rebel groups, Joseph Kony, took over. Kony was also from Gulu and claims to be a cousin of Alice.
Sometime after Joseph Kony took over from Severino Kony, Joseph Kony renamed the movement the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Though he sought to distance himself from Alice Kony he has retained many of the rites and ritual techniques that she had devised including the same rite of initiation for army recruits. He likewise has endorsed the Holy Spirit Safety Precautions, a set of behavioural rules drawn up by Alice, and has used as she did the Holy Spirit Tactics and fought as vehemently as she did against witchcraft and pagan spirit mediums or ajwakas.
However, there are marked differences between Kony and Lakwena which the former has used to highlight the discontinuity between his movement and that led by Alice. For example he claims to have been possessed not by Lakwena but by the spirit Juma Oris who replaced Lakwena as chairman and commander of his army. Another of his spirits is Silli Sillindi (St Cecilia) from the Sudan who leads the Mary Company which consists of the women soldiers of the movement and acts as commander of operations. Kony has established an international network of spirits that goes well beyond Africa to China, Korea and the United States and though their names are new the functions they perform are very often the same as those undertaken by Alice’s spirits.
Where Joseph Kerry seems to have made a clear break with Alice is in the area of army discipline and recruitment. Under him abduction of children for initiation in to the army is seemingly commonplace as is drug use by soldiers and the practices of torture, rape and pillaging.
Thus, a movement that began with the aim of healing and unifying society and of reconstituting the moral order has turned into one of random violence and killing.
