Modern-Day ‘Joan of Arc’ Leads Uganda Rebels : Witchcraft Empowers Warlord Alice Lakwena

TORORO, Uganda — Some say she isn’t a person but a spirit “engulfed in shadow” with a direct line to the divine. To the government, rebel leader Alice Lakwena is a con artist, a witch and Public Enemy No. 1.

Before January, few Ugandans outside her home district in the north had ever heard of Lakwena. Now there are few in the nation who do not know her. Her followers believe she can make them impervious to bullets.

She is an extraordinary Ugandan phenomenon--a woman warlord in a deeply superstitious country where females work as water carriers and woodcutters.

“There is something of Joan of Arc about her, the female visionary leading her warriors,” said one observer in the eastern town of Tororo.

Civil War Flares

“We shall end her career in this district,” countered Tororo District Administrator Francis Mwanyina. “We want her alive so that we can slice the cranium of her head and find out what goes on, so that we can prevent more Lakwenas being born again in Uganda.”

Lakwena’s rebellion grew from northern tribal opposition to President Yoweri Museveni, whose base of support is among the light-skinned Bantu of the south and west. The rebels have accused Museveni’s government of repressing the darker northern tribes.

The rebellion flared into civil war with attacks on government posts around Gulu and Kitgum in disaffected Acholi territory in August last year.

It continues to rumble on, startling observers with the strangeness of its guerrilla tactics and the staying power of its female leader.

Unarmed Attack

In January, government’s National Resistance Army troops were attacked by a large concentration of rebels at Corner Killack, East of Gulu. The troops, armed with modern weapons, were horrified when the ragged and often unarmed northerners charged at them bare-chested, smeared with some kind of oil and singing Christian hymns.

When the battle was over and more than 400 of the mostly Acholi tribesmen lay dead, the NRA found a circle outlined with stones at the Corner Killack crossroads.

An oily concoction, the remains of rats and animals and small packets of herbal charms bore witness to some kind of black rite before the battle.

The sole Acholi survivor confirmed widespread rumors that the rebels were using a tribal witch called Lakwena, Acholi for “savior,” to prepare the men for battle.

5,000 Rebels

Since then, Lakwena has emerged as a powerful leader of the northern revolt and has brought a 5,000-strong rebel group south and east to recruit support among the Nilotic Teso people living among the Bantu in Tororo district.

A recent visit to a former Lakwena camp at Kaiti revealed traces of her quasi-Christian, black magic rituals. Strewn around burnt-out campfires in the shade of banana trees were the bones and skulls of small animals, a civet or genet cat skin and the shear nuts from which Lakwena presses the anointing oil, which her followers believe makes them immune to bullets.

Thousands of small paper packets littered the ground. Folded from the pages of blue-lined exercise books, a spy thriller and even an English grammar primer, each packet contained charms--bee honeycombs, pieces of snake bone and herbs.

The makings lay nearby in sacks--a red ochre powder, dried grasses and a bag of animal dung. A crude map of Uganda had been drawn in the fertile earth, and wire models of NRA helicopters and heavy guns lay in the ashes.

Astonishing Stories

The few wounded survivors of the battle--getting scant medical treatment for festering bullet wounds in the stench-filled wards of Tororo hospitals--told astonishing stories of their beliefs in the witch priestess few of them had ever seen.

Sent into battle mostly unarmed, they said they were told the paper packets should be thrown into NRA foxholes.

Each packet was to wreak havoc with the enemy: a honeycomb would turn into a cloud of bees, snake bones into a plague of serpents, the herbs into poisons that would bewitch and kill the NRA.

Lakwena also gave her followers rocks that she told them would explode, like fragmentation grenades, into thousands of pieces.

No Photo of Lakwena

At a battlefield at nearby Iyolwa, reporters were shown the corpse of a young Acholi tribesman, his upper body ripped apart by rounds from a heavy NRA machine gun. A simple rock was clutched in his stiff, bloodstained hand.

“She is not a person. She is a spirit engulfed in shadow,” one of the Acholi survivors in Tororo said. “We follow her because she is good.”

Others, who said they had seen her, described Alice Lakwena as a slim, dark, short-haired and beautiful woman who often dresses in white robes.

Lakwena, said to be in her 30s and the daughter of Roman Catholic parents, has never made a public appearance as such or given a news conference. And, to add to the mystique that surrounds her, no photograph of her is known to exist.

“The Holy Spirit comes to her. She prays in tongues in the name of God,” said Anthony Okello, a 40-year-old Acholi from Gulu.

Belief Unshaken

“If you have the charms, the bullets should not hurt you. I would go back to her,” said John Olweni, 29, an Acholi from Kitgum. “I have to. I will die if I betray her.”

Asked to explain how, given his belief in the charms, he had been shot, Olweni said that he might have run too close to a termite mound.

Lakwena tells her followers that she invests termite and ant mounds, trees and bushes--any form of cover--with a spirit that will kill any who seek to hide from battle, preventing her men from doing anything other than charging directly at the enemy.

Olweni said that commanders marked the ground behind the advancing tribesmen with water, telling them that retreat over the markings was certain death.

No New Combination

The water, the bulletproofing spells and the mix of Christian evangelism and black African magic are not a new combination.

The Maji-Maji Rebellion against the German colonialists in Tanzania was characterized by tribal rites in which the rebels were anointed with bewitched maji, Swahili for water, and told that no bullet could hurt them.

Similar beliefs have surfaced in Sudanese insurgencies, and there was a parallel for Alice in a black magic-inspired insurrection led by a woman in Zambia.

Museveni, army commanders and the mostly state-run Ugandan press say that Lakwena is finished if she attempts to break out of Teso territory and strike west through Bantu country toward the lake port of Jinja, the key Nile bridge and hydroelectric scheme at Owen’s Falls and Kampala.

No Trucks, Few Guns

Lakwena has no armored vehicles, no trucks and too few guns. Only about 60% to 80% of her troops have old AK47 rifles captured from NRA troops and left over from 25 years of Ugandan civil war.

She lost more than 700 men in two weeks of fighting around Tororo and Mbale that left few NRA casualties. Bantu villagers also have attacked rebel stragglers.

“Horrific reports are emerging of fierce attacks on disorganized rebels who ran out of ammunition or lost contact with the main Lakwena group. Local people are said to have killed many rebels with pangas, buried and burned them alive,” the state-run New Vision newspaper said last month. The report was confirmed by villagers at Kaiti.

But the Alice Lakwena legend is still growing and, against all odds, she appears to be pushing west through the bush towards Iganga and Jinja.

Promises of Wealth

“She tells the men she is going to Kampala and they will get Mercedes and government jobs,” an NRA commander said.