Gulu

Gulu is a district in northern Uganda whose name comes from the main commercial center of the [Page 298]district, the town of Gulu. It is one of the historical homelands of the Acholi ethnic group. The district has been a central point for religious change, both peaceful and violent, being one of the locations where the convergence of Christianity, Islam, and the traditional religion of the Acholi ethnic group is giving birth to new formations. These novel developments involve the mutual infusion into each other of notions and practices from both Christianity and traditional religions.

Traditional religion among the Acholi can be understood in relation to that among the Luo people, to which the Acholi belong. It is centered in veneration of, and relationships with, a concept of spirit known as Juok, which is realized in terms of a Supreme Being, ancestors, and other deities. These spiritual beings are understood to participate in all the particulars of the daily life of the believers.

The Christianity of the Acholi is characterized by the variants represented by Catholic, Protestant, and African Independent churches. The latter are an effort to develop forms of Christianity that meet a broader range of the spiritual needs of the devotees than older Christian forms have done. This happens because the older forms are based on conceptions about the character of the universe that derive from the Western origins of the missionaries who established these churches. These conceptions are significantly different from fundamental aspects of the metaphysical conceptions that are endogenous to the Acholi.

The African Independent churches, in contrast, embodying a synthesis of Christian and endogenous metaphysics, are able to address concerns that emanate from the persistence of these endogenous beliefs and attitudes. These beliefs include a close physical proximity to spirits of various types, benevolent, malevolent, and ambiguous, who are in intimate relationship with humans. Therefore, the phenomena of possession by spirits, exorcism, and witchcraft, among others, feature significantly in the culture of these churches.

Gulu has also witnessed the development of a form of Christianity that is distinctive in Africa, a militant Christianity. The district is the birthplace of Alice Auma and Joseph Kony, the originators of this militant religiosity. Alice Auma is the founder of the Holy Spirit Movement. Joseph Kony founded the Lord's Resistance Army, which emerged under the impetus of the earlier movement after it collapsed. The earlier and later groups have had as their raison d'etre the engagement with the Ugandan army to create a religiously inspired government, but they use significantly different tactics that suggest different modes of synchretization of traditional and Christian forms. One of these differences is the quasipacifist character of the earlier movement and the brutally violent nature of the later one.

Alice Auma's and Joseph Kony's characterizations of themselves as empowered in their leadership by their roles as spirit mediums evokes the traditional Acholi as well as the Christian understanding of human beings as capable of possession by spirits who enable the individual with psychological and magical resources that privilege them to act as leaders in their communities.

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