Uganda Goodbye, Mama Alice

By William R. Doerner

At first, it was hard to tell whether rebel troops in northern and eastern Uganda favored the weapons technology of the 20th century or that of the Stone Age. While some insurgents fought government troops with Kalashnikov rifles, many others went into battle bare chested and armed with nothing more than sticks and rocks. These warriors were following the orders of a 27-year-old self-styled "priestess" known as Mama Alice, who was trying to overthrow the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni with an odd mixture of Christian theology and African witchcraft. Believers in her Holy Spirit Movement, she told followers, could ward off enemy bullets by coating themselves with the oil of a local tree and could lob stones that would magically explode like grenades in battle.

Last week, twelve months and dozens of battles after she embarked on her campaign, Alice's quixotic crusade seemed close to collapse. Her army of followers, which once numbered several thousand, had been reduced by death and desertion to several hundred. Alice, wounded in the leg by government soldiers, was reported by authorities to be in hiding near the town of Iganga, about 80 miles east of Kampala, the capital. According to the Kampala-based newspaper Munno, the once fearless rebel was afraid that she would be killed if she surrendered to villagers or the army.

The rise and fall of Mama Alice is rooted in Uganda's tribal politics as well as in Africa's tradition of magic worship. The daughter of an Anglican clergyman and a member of the small Acholi tribe in the savannas of northern Uganda, Alice has appealed to regional animosities to build her rebel force, composed mostly of peasant farmers, teenage boys and ex-soldiers. One source of strong resentment is the domination of Museveni's National Resistance Army by Bantu-speaking southerners and westerners. Alice claimed to be under the command of a holy spirit called lakwena, the Acholi word for messiah, which she adopted as her family name. Her goal: to seize Kampala and install a civilian government, presumably one led by fellow northerners.

Though she claimed to have converted to Roman Catholicism and wore a plastic rosary and crucifix around her neck, Alice declared herself the possessor of many supernatural powers that have no connection with Christian belief. She spoke only Acholi and a smattering of English but claimed that her spirit was fluent in 74 languages. The oil she encouraged rebel fighters to smear on their bodies, which came from shea trees and is used in the manufacture of shampoo in the West, would make bullets "slip on top of your skin" and bounce back at the enemy. Alice also passed out sachets of powder ground from squirrels' bones that she promised would make the recipients invisible to government soldiers. The widespread belief in magical powers that pervades the region induced thousands of Ugandans to accept these assertions. After they turned out to be manifestly untrue in the harsh reality of battle, Alice claimed that she would resurrect her army's casualties after she had parted the Nile River and captured Kampala.

Faced with at least three other rebel groups, Museveni was slow in committing his troops to quell the Holy Spirit Movement. Beginning in October, however, heavily armed government forces went on the offensive, with predictable results. With all the fervor of a fanatic, Alice continued to press-gang new recruits and ordered the death of doubters. "We leave everything in the hands of God," she said three weeks ago, sitting in the dappled shade of a banana grove near Lake Victoria. By the time Mama Alice went into hiding two weeks later, seated on a bicycle that was being pushed by half a dozen still loyal followers, as many as 6,000 Ugandans had died in the hapless cause of lakwena.

With reporting by Catherine Bond/Kampala