The Rise of Occult Powers, AIDS and the Roman Catholic Church in Western Uganda

Journal of Religion in Afr ica 37 (2007) 41-58 www.brill.nl/jra

Heike Behrend Institute for African Studies, University of Köln, Meister-Ekkehart-Str. 7, 50923 Köln, Germany [email protected]

Abstract Taking as my example a lay organisation of the Roman Catholic Church, the Uganda Martyrs Guild, which entered the public domain in western Uganda in the 1990s and started to organise witch and cannibal hunts, I offer two arguments to the ongoing debate on the rise of occult forces in Africa. First, against the tendency to find the origin of the rise of occult forces in the invisible hand of capital, I relate the dramatic activation and rise of occult forces in Africa to the large increase in death rates caused by the AIDS epidemic (and to a lesser extent local wars). Although various scholars have shown in detail that in Africa contemporary Christianity has not put an end to witchcraft and the occult, but instead provided a new context in which they make perfect sense, they missed the point that precisely the fight against the occult reproduces and strengthens the ‘enemy’. As I try to show, Christian anti-witchcraft movements are instrumental in reinstating the occult powers they fight against.

Keywords Uganda Martyrs Guild, Roman Catholic Church, cannibalism, witchcraft, AIDS

I n t r o d u c t i o n

When I came to Tooro in western Uganda in 1998, I was more than surprised to find people talking about abali wawantu, man-eaters or cannibals. Women and men from all social classes, in towns as well as in rural areas, complained that cannibals were killing and eating their relatives, friends and neighbours. These cannibals likewise were said to be witches, because they first bewitched their victims so that they died. Then, aft er the burial, cannibals resurrected the dead not so much to work for them as zombies (cf. Ardener 1970, Fisiy and Geschiere 2001: 241) but to eat them at a sinister banquet with other cannibals. Thus, these cannibals were part of a radicalised witchcraft discourse: whereas

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witches kill only once, cannibals kill twice, doubling and prolonging the horror of death. While, in the 1970s, man-eaters were still assumed to be confined to Kijura in Mwenge district, it was said that since the 1980s they had greatly multiplied and spread into other regions. In 1998, I was told that cannibals were everywhere; in some regions where they had become epidemic a sort of ‘internal terror’ (Lons- dale 1992: 355) reigned, a secret war, in which anyone you encountered could be an enemy, prepared to kill and eat you.1

Occult forces on the rise

In recent years, religion and even the ‘religious’ have resurfaced in various parts of the world with unprecedented force. Various religious groups, Islamic as well as Christian, entered the political arena, challenging the notion that secular society and the modern nation state can provide the moral fibre that unites national communities (Juergensmeyer 2000: 225). Responding to the forces of globalisation, the liberalisation of the market, the decline of states and the emergence of new media in the last two decades, political theologies have emerged that force- fully counter the western concept of religion as a private individual matter. The ‘return of the religious’ has also become the object of a complex debate among philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians of religion and anthropologists (for example de Vries and Weber 2001), reinforcing the view that the more or less uncontested narrative of a secular modernity had obscured the fact that in most historical formations the political in various ways had been contin- gent upon the authority or explicit sanctions of a dominant religion. Indeed, the clear-cut separation between the domains of the religious and the state became problematic and instead the interconnectedness and complementarity of both domains have been placed in the foreground (Derrida 2001). Among anthropologists working in Africa, the idea of ‘a return of the religious’, however, was shift ed more to themes like ‘the actuality of evil’ and ‘the rise of occult forces’. Yet, like their colleagues in other disciplines, most anthropologists took as the main causes for the dramatic rise in occult powers the global capitalism unleashed by neoliberalism and the breakdown of the public sphere in postcolonial states producing new exclusions, increasing poverty, illicit accu- mulations, and thereby radical inequalities2 (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993, 1999). While some authors stress the consequences of the Structural Adjust- ment Program of the IMF and the World Bank in ‘freeing the market’ and thereby freeing also the possibilities for marketing the occult (Sanders 2001: 162), for others it is, above all, illicit accumulation and the exploitative extrac-

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tion of labour and life-force that leads to the rise of witchcraft and cannibal accusations (Colson 2000, Shaw 2001). Against the integration of global factors, Maia Green, for example, emphasised that witchcraft panics must be under- stood, above all, in the context of the actual relationships between different local political institutions (Green 2003: 122), while Birgit Meyer stressed the impact of modern media, radio, TV, video and print media in spreading and increasing the reality (and truth) of occult powers (Meyer 2003: 28). Yet, while empha- sising different aspects, most authors agree more or less that the emergence of satanic spirits, witches, cannibals, ritual killings and human sacrifices have to be seen as the contradictory effects of global capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. It is interesting to note that religion in this African context has made its come- back not only as an empirical given, as the vehicle of various identities, values and cultural expressions, but also as an ‘interpretandum’ whose semantic, figu- rative and rhetorical potentials serve as a powerful analytical tool (de Vries 2001: 6 f.). Religious discourse came to be seen as diagnostic and as a more or less critical commentary on the unfolding of a (post)modernity in Africa in which witches, satanic spirits and cannibals expressed the dark side of kinship (Geschiere 1997) and the asocial greed necessary for accumulation in a capitalist market economy. Yet, to see witchcraft discourses as a local critique of globalisation and modernity resonates strongly with western anti-capitalist criticism (Moore and Sand- ers 2001: 13). Although I share this criticism, I am afraid that it may be that anthropologists are telling a popular liberal tale through ‘others’ (ibid.). To voice one’s own criticism through ‘the other’ has a long western tradition, starting with Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, and we have to be careful not to fall back on this tradition by making use of ‘others’ to articulate our own faultfinding. Thus, I agree with Moore and Sanders that we need to pay close attention to witchcraft in specific social and historical settings rather than assume monolithic meanings. In contrast to most of the authors who have participated in the debate, I think it possible to be more specific about the main causes of the recent rise of occult forces in Africa. Against the tendency to find the origin of their rise in the invisible hand of capital, I would like to introduce two arguments that have not been recognised sufficiently by other scholars. First, I would relate the dramatic activation and rise of occult forces in Africa to the increase in death rates through the AIDS epidemic (and to a lesser extent the local wars). The AIDS epidemic is also an epidemic of poverty and so my argument cannot be separated from economic and political conditions. Surely, to understand the rise of occult forces in the last decades in Africa we have to deal with a complex interplay of processes

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and forces. Yet, with Victor Turner I would like to claim that it is not sufficiently recognised how closely the rise of witch3 beliefs and accusations is associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality (Turner 1967: 113). In addition, although various scholars (Meyer 1999, Meyer and Pels 2003, Gifford 2004) have shown in detail that in Africa modern Christianity has not put an end to witchcraft and the occult but instead provided a new context in which they make perfect sense, they missed the point that precisely the fight against the occult reproduces and strengthens the ‘enemy’.4 Christian (and non- Christian) anti-witchcraft movements strongly reinstate the occult powers they fight against. Sometimes these movements—in Europe as well as in Africa— actually create the crisis or moral panic they react against and make use of it by identifying a new group of outsiders to gain power and legitimacy in the political arena (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994: 18). Thus, the recent rise of occult forces in Africa is also—to a certain extent—owed to the many Christian fundamentalist movements and churches who with the help of the Christian God and, above all, the Holy Spirit are fighting the occult (satanic) powers, thereby contributing to their reality and proliferation. In the following, I will unfold these two arguments and give as an example the situation in the kingdom of Tooro in western Uganda where the AIDS pandemic is rampant and a lay organisation of the Catholic Church started witch-hunting.

Epidemics and the dynamics of witchcraft

In an article published in 1964 on witchcraft and sorcery, Victor Turner, against the structural-functionalist approach of classic social anthropology, promoted process-theory, long-term studies and—most important—he made the point that ‘it is not sufficiently recognised how closely witch beliefs are associated with high rates of morbidity and mortality . . .’ (Turner 1964: 113). And he proposed seeing witchcraft accusations as the product of a complex interplay of processes and forces, such as epidemics, the rise and fall of death rates, labour migration, wars and feuds (ibid.: 115). Even before Turner’s text, Elenore Smith Bowen (alias Laura Bohannon), in her autobiographical novel Return to Laughter (1954), described a witch-craze following the outbreak of a smallpox epidemic in Northern Nigeria. One of her protagonists, an elder, himself accused of being a witch, says: ‘Who does not know the terror and the death and the hate that it (smallpox) brings? I fear noth- ing else, but I fear the “water” (smallpox)’ (Bowen 1954: 266). In Northern Nigeria smallpox was seen as a manifestation of witchcraft . As the epidemic was spreading, so also were witches, creating a situation of internal terror.

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C. Bawa Yamba (1997), in a study on witchcraft accusations and witchfinding in Zambia, connected the rise of occult forces with the rising death toll from AIDS. And Susan Reynolds Whyte (1997) in her book on Bunyole in northeast Uganda suggested that the AIDS epidemic reinforced the usual suspicions that danger comes from other people (Whyte 1997: 222). Most people in Bunyole who probably had AIDS looked for agents like sorcerers and cursers not only to explain their suffering but also to involve meaningful action through anti- sorcery medicine and rituals, thereby explaining the suffering of people with AIDS in terms of cursing and sorcery (ibid.: 215f ). Likewise, outside Africa, in their studies on witchcraft and sorcery in Papua New Guinea, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern suggest that occult forces can also be precipitated by disease and epidemics (Stewart and Strathern 1999: 645). Besides other factors, they stress the epidemic spread of the disease and the epidemic of representations in terms of images of violence such as witches and cannibals. When death through an epidemic becomes omnipresent, witchcraft accusations rise. Yet, as the German historian Wolfgang Behringer in his study on the persecution of witches in Bavaria (1987) has shown, the connection between the rise of witchcraft accusations and epidemics is not static but dynamic and chang- ing. He points to various mechanisms of self-limitation, when, for example, close members of the dominant group of the accusers become accused, as well as to the possibility of a paradigm shift that leads, for example, to the interpretation of the epidemic as divine punishment, thereby reducing or even stopping witchcraft accusations.

Internal terror in Tooro

In western Uganda, the region I focus on, AIDS has reached its climax in the last years: 7.4% of the population are HIV-positive according to the latest survey of 2004/05. As my research assistant Jacinta Kabageny, aged about 50, explained to me, while she was young, once a year somebody would die, nowadays, she said, she has to go to funerals every week. Nearly every family, rich as well as poor, has lost one or more members. ‘Death is eating everybody’, many people in Tooro said. They also said that they do not have enough tears to mourn the dead. The high death rates contributed substantially to the creation of a situation of internal terror that (in some regions of Tooro) found expression in an epidemic of witches and cannibals.5 Following the classical witchcraft paradigm described by Evans-Pritchard, if a person becomes sick or dies, oft en somebody close to this person, a relative or a neighbour with whom the deceased was in conflict, is accused of being responsible for the death by having bewitched and eaten the

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victim. When the death rate is rising, this shift ing of responsibility and guilt to the inside of communities increases discord, hatred and fear, sometimes to an unbearable extent. The more people die, the more witches or cannibals seem to be active and responsible. Thus, the epidemic of AIDS, at least in two regions of Tooro—Kyarusozi and Kijura—was given cultural expression as an epidemic of witches and cannibals eating up bodies of people and leading to a self- exacerbating situation. The government and numerous NGOs have launched various information campaigns to medicalise AIDS. And it is true, in a way, they have been success- ful. Few people in western Uganda would deny that one contracts AIDS through sexual contact with an HIV-positive partner. Yet, unfortunately, this explanation is perfectly compatible with witchcraft accusations because the witchcraft discourse functions as a secondary rationalisation by addressing the question ‘Why me and not another?’. While Europeans are not really able to answer this question, referring to ‘chance’ or ‘bad luck’, or taking the responsibility on themselves, in western Uganda it is, at least up to now, the witchcraft discourse that most oft en gives the answer. Thus, although most people nowadays would agree that AIDS is a ‘natural’ disease, the campaigns have hardly diminished the suspicions and charges of witchcraft and cannibalism. Although many people know that AIDS is not caused directly by witchcraft , a witch can influence a man or a woman, for example, to drink too much beer so that he or she leaves all caution aside and has sex with a HIV-positive person and so may contract the virus. In addition, those who are HIV-positive and their kin usually deny a diagnosis of AIDS and try to identify a witch or cannibal whose evil acts can be counter- acted. AIDS therefore, like other epidemics, contributes substantially to the fear of witches (cf. Colson 2000: 353). In conversations with people from NGOs dealing with AIDS in Tooro, it became obvious that in their campaigns witchcraft as a subject of discussion was completely excluded. ‘We do not want to create unrest and conflict’, a woman told me. Likewise she insisted that ‘witches and cannibals are there’. Most people to whom I talked in Tooro—with one exception—shared her view.6 Thus, the medicalisation of AIDS has taken place only partially and does not bring to an end the agency of occult forces. Although officially promoting a medicalised concept of AIDS, many of the Christian churches in practice use concepts of sickness and healing that are based on supernatural powers, the powers of the Christian God and his adversary Satan. A Catholic explained to me that ‘the wage of a sin is disease!’ ‘Commit- ting sins’, he said, ‘opens the body for an invasion of satanic spirits’. Yet, he also said, ‘With God’s grace everything is possible.’ And he told me that he went for an AIDS test some years ago; it was positive; he prayed and prayed and prayed

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and when he went for the next test some time later, the result was negative! Thus, obviously the ‘medicalisation’ of AIDS never really challenged local meanings.

AIDS, punishment and anti-westernism

As already mentioned, besides the witchcraft and cannibal discourse, alternative explanations of AIDS were spread by various institutions. Indeed, some of the Christian churches and movements in western Uganda tended to explain AIDS as a punishment by God for immoral and sinful behaviour. For example, the leaders7 of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Kanungu8 of the Rukungiri District, neighbouring Tooro, identified the AIDS epidemic—‘a disaster that has befallen the world’—as ‘a punishment that has been released to the world due to its disobedience’ and as a threat ‘unless you people, repent, you will all be wiped out by AIDS’ (Behrend 2001: 83). In the same way, some ‘traditionalists’ saw AIDS as a punishment of the ancestral spirits for having neglected ‘traditions’, the way of the ancestors. By doing so, both shift ed the responsibility for suffering to an otherworldly power—the Christian God or the ancestors—as well as to the suffering individual, thereby preventing the identification of witches or cannibals. It was the restoration of the moral order that both Christians and ‘traditionalists’ promoted as a way out of the pre- dicament. Besides this explanation of the AIDS epidemic as divine punishment, there is an increasingly anti-western discourse to be found in Tooro as well as in other parts of Africa. Some people with whom I talked interpreted the AIDS epidemic as a western conspiracy to reduce or even destroy the African population.9 Within the background of the dominant western discourse about family plan- ning and the necessary reduction of population growth in Africa by development agencies, this impression is not completely irrational. As no cure has so far been found for AIDS, western medicine and aid organisations are accused of being producers of death more than of life. In local popular counter-discourses to the western prevention activities10 in Tooro, for example, condoms were suspected of not protecting people from infection by HIV, but, instead, of being infected themselves and spreading the deadly disease. In addition, the presence of numerous western ‘experts’ was taken as a proof that aft er the deaths of all Africans the Wazungu (Europeans) would take over the country. To prepare for this takeover in near future, the Wa z u n g u , as I was told, already built all the beautiful houses and planted exotic trees to enjoy life when all Africans would be dead. Thus, a sort of re-colonisation was imagined, this time, however, on the basis of genocide.

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Furthermore, the practices of western AIDS researchers and their local coun- terparts have increased the mistrust in western medicine, which was practised with sometimes doubtful measures, some of which had been established during colonial times. For example, under the regime of colonial medicine people were forced to donate blood, a provision that, as Luise White has shown, substantially contributed to create or activate fears of vampirism (White 2000). As Bob Mwe- siye, a health worker of the German GTZ health project in Tooro, told me, even today people especially in the more rural areas are reluctant to give their blood for HIV testing because they fear it is being sold and drunk by Wazungu vampires. Thus, it seems that in spite of all western-inspired NGO campaigns of ‘enlightenment’ about the ‘natural’ AIDS epidemic, recent bio-medical practices have not succeeded in building up some trust, but instead they oft en reaffirmed the view of the west’s conspiracy to extinguish all Africans. So far, a self-limiting mechanism of the witchcraft epidemic through a radical paradigm change has not taken effect. Indeed, in spite of alternative discourses, the witchcraft and cannibal discourse in Tooro has served as the dominant explanation for the suffering and death of so many people. Indeed, witchcraft not only reflects social tensions and conflicts but actually is an aggravator of all hostilities and fears in a community. With the rise of death rates through the AIDS epidemic, witches and cannibals multiplied as internal enemies and created a situation of internal terror. While neither the king of Tooro, who in precolonial times had the duty to cleanse the country from evil, nor the local government took measures to fight against witches and cannibals, desperate villagers started killing those people they thought to be responsible for disease and death. I was told by a police officer that, for example, in Kijura, from January to August 2002 about five people had been lynched by enraged villagers. The local government could not deal with witches and cannibals, nor could it protect either villagers who felt threatened or their adversaries, suspected witches and cannibals, who fled into police custody to be guarded from mob justice. When I visited Fort Portal in August 2005, I saw an elderly woman of about 65 years of age sitting beside the main road in front of a Stanbic Bank. Like clochards in Paris, she had made this place her home, using plastic bags from famine relief to cover herself against rain and cold. When I asked my friends who she was I was told that she was a cannibal. She had been chased from her village and brought to the police. Because there was no evidence against her, the police had sent her back to her village but she refused to go home, fearing that the villagers would kill her. She moved to different places but was always rejected. People would scream and run away. She decided, therefore, to stay in town in front of Stanbic Bank under the protection of two policemen who were guard- ing the bank and whose presence prevented other people from stealing from her,

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raping or killing her. She had stayed at this place for more than six months as some sort of public visual reminder of her social exclusion.11

The Catholic Church in western Uganda

In Tooro, the gradual erosion of the state and the perceived failure of public institutions combined with the radicalisation and indigenisation of the churches has contributed to a situation in which especially the Catholic Church at the beginning of the 1990s entered the public arena. Not so much the clergy, but above all lay organisations responded to the situation of internal terror by challenging the notion that secular society and the modern nation state can provide the moral fibre that unites national communities (Juergensmeyer 2000: 225). Like believers in fundamentalist Islam, charismatic Catholics reclaimed the centre of public attention and authority. They made their appearance as a discourse of social order in a dramatic fashion: violently (ibid.: 243). In the Catholic Church in western Uganda, the last two decades have produced a wide range of popular expressions with strong lay and sometimes clerical participation (Kassimir 1999: 249 ff.). Although the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) favoured a theology of ‘inculturation’ to encourage the Africanisation of the Church, the implementation of this new religious policy from top-down in Tooro up to the 1980s largely failed. Also, up to this time, the most pressing spiritual interests of many Catholics—healing and protection from witchcraft —were not realised (ibid.). While, up to 1986, the Anglican as well as the Catholic Church more or less had a monopoly in Uganda, since the coming to power of Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement (NRM) this monopoly was shaken by various movements inside as well as outside the established churches, sometimes inspired and financed by American fundamentalist Christian groups. Since 1986 there has been a surge in Christian healing cults led, above all, by women and in apparitions of the Virgin Mary connected with miracle cures of AIDS and other diseases (Behrend 1997, 1999). During this time, the Catholic church started to lose more and more of its members to independent churches which specialised in healing and the fight against witchcraft . To counter this, the Catholic Charismatic revival movement took on a new thrust in 1981 when a Holy Cross sister and brother from the USA came to Fort Portal and founded the first charismatic prayer group. In it believers started to experience the pouring of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, deliverance from evil spirits and inner as well as physical healing. While the charismatic movement in Tooro attracted, above all, better-educated people and younger

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clergymen, various lay organisations of the Catholic Church, the Legio Maria or the Uganda Martyrs Guild, absorbed poor people, mainly women, who in the situation of internal terror were the ones who suffered most.

The Uganda Martyrs Guild

In 1885 and 1886, king Mwanga of Buganda beheaded, speared, hacked into pieces and burned a number of young Catholics, Protestants und Muslims,12 most of whom were working as pages at the king’s court. The reasons for the persecutions of Christians and Muslims in Buganda have been heavily debated (Kassimir 1991). Since this time, the Catholic Church, in particular, attempted to make the Catholic victims the centre of a cult of martyrs,13 interpreting them as the followers or sons of older African martyrs such as Perpetua, Felicity, and Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage. In 1897 the Uganda Martyrs Guild (UMG) was founded by Archbishop Henry Streicher who trained people to help in the evangelisation process. In 1920, the Uganda Martyrs were beatified and in Octo- ber 1964 canonised. The UMG evolved into an organisation for Catholic action which continued to have chapters in most districts and dioceses. Some of these chapters became highly politicised and had varying degrees of influence on local branches of the Democratic Party that was formed (as the party of the Catho- lics) in the 1950s (Kassimir 1991: 378). An impressive shrine was built in Namugongo to commemorate the martyrs and to establish a cult centre, but not until the emergence of a new form of popular Catholicism in the 1980s did this shrine, as well as those in Nakivubu and Katoosa, start to gain importance and large-scale and regular pilgrimages begin. Around 1995, the UMG started ‘to go and free people from evil in aban- doned places’, that is, they took up the practice of witch-hunts, now called ‘crusades’. Whereas the colonial state as well as the early Christian missionaries in their reluctance to fight witchcraft and witches were suspected by local people of protecting the evil forces and of being themselves witches and cannibals, the Catholic Church in Tooro now made use of the political potential of anti-witchcraft practices (cf. Green 2003: 140, Douglas 1999). Following the Inquisition and witch-hunts in the fift eenth to the seventeenth century in Europe, the enlightened Catholic Church, aft er resisting for a long time resorting to such practices in Africa, did not object when in the 1990s the UMG entered the political arena and started to fight evil. By doing so, the church appropriated an important aspect of precolonial and early colonial kingship (cf. Gifford 2004: 175): the king’s duty to cleanse the country from evil. In addition, through the fight against evil in the public arena, the Catholic Church succeeded in regain-

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ing power and ‘souls’ she had lost in the struggle with other established and independent churches.

C r u s a d e s

The first crusades the UMG organised were extremely violent. I was told that in Kabende an elderly Protestant woman was identified as a notorious cannibal. When she was caught by some members of the UMG, she turned into a black cat. The cat was beaten, but, as soon as they started to burn it, the animal changed again into the woman, who was seriously injured and had to be taken to hospital. She sued three members of the UMG—among them the president—and they were punished and imprisoned. Because more people complained, aft er this incident the Catholic Church forbade further crusades. For two years, members of the UMG were taught in workshops not only the Bible but also, and above all, how to carry out non- violent witch- and cannibal-hunts. Aft er these instructions, Guild members were allowed to continue crusades which now followed a rather fixed pattern. Under the guidance of an American priest and the president of the UMG the witch-hunts or crusades were directed against ‘pagans’ as well as women and men from other Christian denominations,14 some of whom were identified as witches and cannibals. Thus, the UMG appropriated a discourse that connected religion and violence and turned war into a ‘holy war’. Like everywhere else in the world where these concepts are used, in Tooro they idealised violence, declared a just war and legitimised the stigmatisation and exclusion of certain people. Before the UMG went on an ‘operation’ or ‘crusade’, they announced their plans in monthly papers and on the radio. They sent letters to the local council and to the police, and sometimes, when they feared fierce resistance they asked for police protection. The day before the operation they fasted; the night was spent in church singing and praying until their bodies were filled with the Holy Spirit. In addition, the ‘weapons’ to fight the enemy—Bible, plastic bottles filled with holy water, rosaries and crucifixes—were ‘loaded’ with the Holy Spirit to empower them and transform them into efficient instruments to fight evil. In the early morning they took off in lorries. As the president of the UMG explained to me, they had to be very careful because witches and cannibals would set traps to fight the UMG. Aft er arrival in the villages, they walked from house to house, an ‘operation’ known as ‘carpet bombing’. Thus, they used the vocabu- lary of modern warfare. They moved in groups of twelve to twenty people, each group having a secre- tary who recorded what was said and done. When they reached a house in which something evil was thought to be present, the Holy Spirit used their bodies as an

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indicator for the presence of satanic powers. Then some especially gift ed members of the UMG, oft en children, fell to the ground, trembling and shaking violently until the evil person or thing had been detected. When all the satanic items had been collected—such as pots, a dried human hand, pieces of cloth belonging to people who had died and been eaten, horns (mahembe) and all sorts of medicine—they were displayed in front of the church to be seen by everybody. They gave material evidence of their repudiation and likewise were made the relics of a great transformation providing a powerful mechanism—also used by western missionaries—to express materially the fact of conversion and the triumph over satanic forces (Thomas 1991: 155 f.). The satanic items were also photographed, the photographs supplying proof of what had taken place. The pictures were circulated and put into albums that were shown to visitors as a sort of trophy and memory of the UMG’s power and success. In addition, politicians were called to witness the event. Aft er being displayed and photographed, the satanic objects were destroyed and burned. To end a crusade, members of the UMG offered night sessions of preaching and praying, answered questions from the local population, and the Catholic parish priest led a service of holy communion.

Healing cannibals and witches

Cannibals and witches were seen as only indirectly responsible for their evil deeds because the forces of Satan made them do what they did. They were therefore given the chance to be cleansed and healed.15 Besides being prayed for and having hands laid on their heads, they were also made to vomit, to reverse the process of incorporation which had produced their greediness for human flesh. Part of the healing process was the witch’s or cannibal’s confession in which the accused had to narrate in detail whom he/she had eaten, and when and how it had happened. Furthermore, if a cannibal was identified s/he had to give the names of other cannibals s/he had been working with. As during the times of the Inquisition in Europe, in Tooro whole networks of people were established and then put under pressure to confess their satanic deeds. The confessions produced more detailed knowledge about witches and cannibals, leading to a further proliferation and differentiation of the cannibal discourse and gave additional proof to the reality of occult forces. There were very few people who insisted on their innocence and refused to confess that they were cannibals. When, during my last stay in 2005, I asked the UMG’s president why the woman accused of cannibalism who had taken refuge in front of the Stanbic Bank had not been cleansed by Guild members, he told

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me that she had refused to be treated by the UMG. The cleansing required confession, but she had maintained her innocence and therefore not accepted the offer. Her refusal, however, led the UMG’s president not to doubt that she was a cannibal but to declare her as mad, thus pathologising her. By insisting on her innocence, the woman had to pay the price of radical social exclusion. Thus, there was a strong pressure to confess and thereby reinstate the reality of occult forces. When I visited the areas that had been the targets of the UMG’s first crusades, people told me that they had not realised how many cannibals were living in their villages before the UMG came and brought evidence of the presence of evil. They also said that it was only the UMG that succeeded in providing material evidence of cannibalism such as the ‘dried human hand’, or pieces of cloth from people who had been eaten. Thus, the revelation of and fight against occult forces led to their being reinstated and growing even more powerful. Indeed, the crusades reinforced the belief that local witches and cannibals were the root of suffering, thereby con- tinuing to target those close at hand and vulnerable to local pressures rather than accuse those in power (cf. Colson 2000: 344). And most local people in Tooro with whom I had the chance to talk were grateful for the discovery and cleansing of evil powers. It is important to note that, although the UMG stigmatised and excluded certain people by identifying them as agents of evil, they nonetheless through practices of healing made possible their reintegration. While asserting the presence of occult powers and contributing to their proliferation, the more or less violent witch-hunts nevertheless provided a sense of security and empower- ment to desperate communities and marginalised people, while at the same time stigmatising and excluding a few women and men as scapegoats. Although the UMG, by trying to deal with, explain and terminate the situation of internal terror, itself ended up participating in the very process of production of the crisis, it nevertheless succeeded in containing violence. As already mentioned, the healing or cleansing of the identified witches and cannibals reversed their exclusion and gave them the chance to be reintegrated into village life. Ex-cannibals aft er confessing and being cleansed went back to their villages. People would accept their being healed, yet, I was told, a certain suspicion remained. Whenever misfortune befell a person or somebody became sick or died, it was, first of all, the (ex-)cannibal who was accused. In this ambig- uous position, many people who felt (potentially) hunted decided to join the hunters, the UMG. I was told by the UMG’s president that the Guild at the end of the 1980s had about 30 members; in 2002 it had about 10,000. He also told me that up to now no active member of the Guild had been accused of being a

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cannibal or a witch by Guild members. Thus, it is not by chance that the UMG became the fastest growing lay organisation of the Catholic Church in Tooro. Finally, let me come back to the rise and proliferation of occult powers. As already mentioned, various scholars have shown in detail that in Africa modern Christianity has not put an end to witchcraft and the occult but instead provided a new context in which they make perfect sense. In addition, as I have tried to show, it is precisely the fight against the occult forces that reproduces and strengthens the ‘enemy’. The UMG, in its struggle against satanic agents, witches and cannibals, strongly reinstated the occult powers they fought against. Indeed, the logic of mutual outbidding that characterised the Guild’s fight against evil made it inevitable that their members, and in particular, their leaders, constantly gave proof of dangerous evil forces to show their own superior power. When the satanic forces intensified and proliferated, then also the powers of the Catholic God had to do so and vice versa. In a way, the UMG was trapped in this dynamic of the mutual constitution of good and evil, of a boundary and its transgression. Because of this dynamic, evil spread and obtained even a cosmic dimension. It was to be exposed not only in human beings, but also in trees, flowers and other plants, as well as in black cats, dogs, monkeys, snakes, lizards, frogs and cockroaches. The Guild’s members contributed extensively to this proliferation of evil powers and reacted to it by producing what I would call ‘Christian Magic’, an endless series of miracles and wonders that made their practices more powerful. While, on the one hand, connecting with the Christian tradition of wonders, they, on the other hand, also took recourse to the local tradition of miracle production and calculated show effects of ‘pagan’ spirit mediums and ‘witch doc- tors’, thereby increasingly approaching what they were refusing and fighting against. As a former witch-doctor explained to me, many people converted when they saw the power of the UMG. Although sometimes interpreting AIDS and other diseases as ‘natural’ or as divine punishment, Guild members did not really attempt to abandon the witchcraft discourse. They did not try to establish a self-reliant Christian person. Although members of the Guild took sin as a precondition for the invasion of the sinner’s body by satanic forces and so introduced an element of responsibility into their discourse, they had to insist not only on the existence but also on the permanent threat of outside satanic forces, because only through fighting these forces could they give proof of their own powers. Thus, not only the increasing number of deaths from AIDS and the interpretation of disease and death in terms of witchcraft , but also the anti-witchcraft activities of the UMG, trapped in the dynamics of the mutual constitution of

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good and evil, contributed to and intensified the rise of occult forces, while likewise containing violence.

R e f e r e n c e s

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Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. 1994. Moral Panics:. The Social Construction of Deviance. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Green, Maia. 2003. Priests, Witches and Power: Popular Christianity after Mission in Southern Tanzania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2000. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kassimir, Ron. 1991. ‘Complex Martyrs: Symbols of Catholic Church Formation and Politi- cal Differentiation in Uganda’.African Affairs 90, 357-382. ———. 1999. ‘The Politics of Popular Catholicism in Uganda’, in Thomas Spear and Isaria Kimambo (eds.), East African Expressions of Christianity. Oxford: James Currey, 248-274. Lonsdale, John. 1992. ‘The Moral Economy of Mau Mau’, in Bruce Berman and John Lons- dale (eds.), Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa. London: James Currey. Machein, Henning. 2000. ‘AIDS, Wissen und Macht in Afrika: Zur Produktion von Wissen in der Aidsprävention in Mali’. MA thesis, Institute of African Studies, University of Cologne. Meyer, Birgit. 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2003. ‘Visions of Blood, Sex and Money: Fantasy Spaces in Popular Ghanaian Cin- ema’. Visual Anthropology 16, 15-41. Meyer, Birgit, and Peter Pels (eds.). 2003. Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Moore, Henrietta, and Todd Sanders (eds.). 2001. Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft and the Occult in Africa. London and New York: Routledge. Sanders, Todd. 2001. ‘Save our Skins: Structural Adjustment, Morality and the Occult in Tan- zania’, in Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders (eds.), Magical Interpretations, Material Realities. London and New York: Routledge, 160-183. Shaw, Rosalind. 2001. ‘Cannibal Transformations: Colonialism and Commodification in the Sierra Leone Hinterland’, in Henrietta Moore and Todd Sanders (eds.), Magical Inter- pretations, Material Realities. London and New York: Routledge, 50-70. Stewart, Pamela J., and Andrew Strathern. 1999. ‘Feasting on my Enemy: Images of Violence and Change in the New Guinea Highlands’. Ethnohistory 46, 4. Thomas, Nicholas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Turner, Victor. 1967. ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery: Taxonomy versus Dynamics’, in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. White, Luise. 2000. Speaking with Vampires: Rumour and History in Colonial Africa. Berke- ley: University of California Press. Yamba, C. Bawa. 1997. ‘Cosmologies in Turmoil: Witchcraft and Aids in Chiawa, Zambia’. Africa 67, 2, 200-23.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Paul Gifford and the participants in the Seminar on Faith and Aids in Africa, organised by SOAS and the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in London for their helpful comments. In addition, I would like to thank Brad Weiss for his review and kind critical remarks. Furthermore, my thanks go to the VW-Foundation and the Special Research Program 427 for having generously financed my research.

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2. Although the question of whether witchcraft and the resort to occult forces is increasing in contemporary Africa is difficult to answer because the data base is rather insecure, there is no doubt that many people in Africa are experiencing what they believe to be an upsurge in occult powers (Moore and Sanders 2001: 10). 3. In the following, I shall use the term ‘witchcraft ’ to include also sorcery, as do English- speaking people in Tooro. 4. While much ink has been spilt on legal and political institutions, such as courts in Cameroon that invigorate the occult, only rarely have scholars dealt with Christian churches and movements doing the same. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who made me aware of this fact (and others). 5. The emergence of a situation of internal terror has as its main mechanism the witchcraft discourse, yet it has also to be seen within the background of economic depression, a guerrilla war by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), the decline of the local government, widespread corruption and struggles about land. I have dealt in detail with the discussion of internal terror in Tooro already in two articles: one article in German (Behrend 2004), the second on the same subject in English (Behrend 2006a, in press) while a further text deals more with the various practices of evidence production by the Catholic lay organisation of the Uganda Martyrs and the local government (Behrend 2006b). 6. The exception was a high-ranking police officer coming from another area of Uganda who told me that he could not afford to believe in witchcraft ; if he did, he would not be able to do his job. 7. Th e leaders of the movement were all Catholics; some of them, however, were excom- municated. 8. On 17 March 2000, about 500 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTCG), most of them women and children, perished in Noah’s Ark, their main church, in Kanungu of the Rukungiri District in western Uganda. When in the following weeks more and more graves were found in Kanungu and other areas of Uganda, what had at first seemed to be a mass suicide turned out to be a mass killing as well (Behrend 2001). 9. This vision is not confined to Uganda but is also shared in Kenya and some parts of western Africa. In Mali, for example, the image of a ‘perverse European’ was constructed in a sort of ‘myth of origin’ of the AIDS epidemic. People told of a European development agent or expert who paid an African prostitute to have sex with a dog while he watched. Out of this perverse intercourse AIDS was born (Machein 1999: 43). This story also circulates on the Kenyan coast, in Ghana and Nigeria and is, for instance, taken up in the Nigerian video production, ‘Glamour Girls II: The Italian Connection’, by Christian Onu (1996). 10. This is even more remarkable because Kabarole District was chosen for a long-term AIDS project already launched in 1986. This project financed by the German GTZ in some aspects was exemplary, for example, by integrating local ‘traditional’ healers and by giving out free condoms. Yet even these attempts did not prevent anti-western discourse from proliferat- ing, and they may even have furthered it. 11. When we visited her, she told us that she was protected by Jesus and Holy Mary, show- ing us a little silver cross she was wearing around her neck; she said she was Catholic and had lost all her children and even her grandchildren. They all had died from ‘slim’ (the local Eng- lish term for AIDS). She said that she had not eaten them. 12. Under King Mutesa, Mwanga’s father, some ‘pagans’ also became martyrs, as I was told, because they refused to convert to Islam, the religion the king favoured for some time.

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13. Ron Kassimir (1991) has shown in detail how the executions of Christian Baganda came to be represented and substantially known as the martyrdom of Catholic Ugandans. 14. One crusade in which I was allowed to participate in August 2002 was taking place in Kyamiaga in Buhesi subcounty and obviously was an attempt of the UMG to regain ‘lost souls’ from the Seven-Day-Adventists. 15. akihikirire is a concept in Lutooro that connotates ‘to be without blemish’, ‘spotless’, ‘pure’ and ‘holy’; thus cleansing, healing and making holy are merged.

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