‘Mama Alice’, warrior priestess

ALICE LAKWENA, a Ugandan warrior priestess who led an insurgency in the 1980s and claimed to have spiritual powers to protect her fighters from bullets by anointing them with oil, has died at a Kenyan refugee camp, a government official said Thursday.

Lakwena, who was in her 40s, died last Wednesday after being sick for about a week with an unknown illness at the Ifo refugee camp in the eastern Garrisa district, said Dennis Ogola, a local administrator. The daughter of a clergyman from the small Acholi tribe in northern Uganda, she mesmerised her followers with claims that spirits spoke through her.Lakwena led the Holy Spirit Movement, which combined Christianity with traditional beliefs of her Acholi people, in a year-long insurgency aimed at toppling Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.Army troops defeated the movement in late 1987.Her cousin, Joseph Kony, is the messianic leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army.His rebellion in northern Uganda continues today and has seen as many as 1.8 million people displaced, tens of thousands killed and an estimated 20 000 children abducted.Lakwena became a major embarrassment to the Ugandan government because the foreign media had reported so extensively on her bizarre exploits.Her rebellion – one of about a half-dozen in Uganda at the time – began soon after Museveni, a southerner, overthrew a military government led by a northerner.Known as ‘Mama Alice’, she raised a battalion of followers numbering as many as 15 000, armed with only sticks and stones.She inspired them to go into battle singing hymns, their chests smeared with oil that they believed would repel bullets.She told them the sticks could turn bees into bullets and the stones would explode like grenades.Thousands of her followers died before Museveni’s army crushed her campaign.Lakwena, who called herself a prophet and a medium of God, fled to Kenya in December 1987, where she was promptly jailed for three months for illegally entering the country.Lakwena’s followers released the news of her death last Thursday.”The people around her regarded her as some kind of spiritual medium.May be that is why they did not inform us” earlier, Ogola told The Associated Press.In the Ugandan capital of Kampala, the government said it will help Lakwena’s family to return her body to Uganda and asked any relatives to come forward.”Lakwena could have done a lot of atrocities, which could have led to deaths of many innocent Ugandans, but it is our duty to assist her relatives to bring her body back,” Information Minister Kirunda Kivejinja said.Nampa-APThe daughter of a clergyman from the small Acholi tribe in northern Uganda, she mesmerised her followers with claims that spirits spoke through her.Lakwena led the Holy Spirit Movement, which combined Christianity with traditional beliefs of her Acholi people, in a year-long insurgency aimed at toppling Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.Army troops defeated the movement in late 1987.Her cousin, Joseph Kony, is the messianic leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army.His rebellion in northern Uganda continues today and has seen as many as 1.8 million people displaced, tens of thousands killed and an estimated 20 000 children abducted.Lakwena became a major embarrassment to the Ugandan government because the foreign media had reported so extensively on her bizarre exploits.Her rebellion – one of about a half-dozen in Uganda at the time – began soon after Museveni, a southerner, overthrew a military government led by a northerner.Known as ‘Mama Alice’, she raised a battalion of followers numbering as many as 15 000, armed with only sticks and stones.She inspired them to go into battle singing hymns, their chests smeared with oil that they believed would repel bullets.She told them the sticks could turn bees into bullets and the stones would explode like grenades.Thousands of her followers died before Museveni’s army crushed her campaign.Lakwena, who called herself a prophet and a medium of God, fled to Kenya in December 1987, where she was promptly jailed for three months for illegally entering the country.Lakwena’s followers released the news of her death last Thursday.”The people around her regarded her as some kind of spiritual medium.May be that is why they did not inform us” earlier, Ogola told The Associated Press.In the Ugandan capital of Kampala, the government said it will help Lakwena’s family to return her body to Uganda and asked any relatives to come forward.”Lakwena could have done a lot of atrocities, which could have led to deaths of many innocent Ugandans, but it is our duty to assist her relatives to bring her body back,” Information Minister Kirunda Kivejinja said.Nampa-AP