AT A place called
Wang Jok, in Paraa National Park in northern Uganda, the Nile flows strongly
among trees and over rapids. This is a magic spot: coins, pots and human figures
sometimes mysteriously appear from the river. And if you had visited Wang
Jok in May 1986 you might have seen, sitting beside the water, a young woman
of 30 apparently talking to herself. People from Opit, the railway town where
she lived, knew her as Alice Auma. She sold fish and flour with another woman
and had had two husbands, both of whom had deserted her because she was barren.
But it was not Alice Auma who was sitting by the Nile. She was possessed by
a spirit called Lakwena, and he was holding a consultation with all the animals
of the park.They swarmed round him in a huge bellowing crowd, elephants and
hippopotami and crocodiles and giraffes, many of them holding up wounded
limbs to be healed. Thus began Alice's mission to purify first her native
Acholi, then Uganda, then the world. Lakwena gave her stones and water, with
which she went back to Opit and began to heal people. Beside the railway station
she built a temple of mud-blocks and thatch in which, as Lakwena, she would
sit on a throne and give instructions. When the men muttered that she was
only a woman, Lakwena would announce in his commanding voice that he had possessed
her precisely because she was a woman and a sinner, who had never got beyond
seventh year in primary school; he was making an example of a hard case, saving
her first, before he saved the wicked Acholi in general. Their methods were
unorthodox. Lakwena, giving orders that his soldiers wrote down neatly in
school exercise books, forbade them to use weapons. They did not need to,
because they were pure. Each man had burned his witchcraft charms, and had
appeased the spirit of anyone he had killed previously; and as the army marched
into battle, singing Catholic hymns and with their bare torsos smothered in
shea-nut oil, the bullets of the enemy would bounce right off them.
Lakwena expressed these war-rules through Alice twice a day, at seven in the
morning and seven at night, as she sat in a white robe on a fold-up chair
in the middle of the camp. He made her repeat the 20 Holy Spirit Safety Precautions:
no walking-sticks on the battlefield, no hiding behind anthills, no smoking,
and each man to have “two testicles, neither more nor less”. Alice
revealed a little about Lakwena. He was an Italian army captain, drowned in
the Nile in the first world war, who spoke 74 languages, including Latin.
He had taken possession of her so violently in January 1985 that she ran amok
and could not hear or speak. Sometimes, to discipline her, he would make her
ill or order that she should
be beaten six times with a stick. Gradually, however, she seemed to resolve
into an ordinary wilful woman. As the HSMF marched south towards Kampala in
the late summer of 1987, the influence of the spirits and Alice's own power
seemed alike to be fading. The bullets no longer bounced off, and the enemy
didn't run away. Alice settled in a refugee camp in Kenya, a greying barfly
drinking gin and Coke. Lakwena returned to the Nile, and the Nile flows on.