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 devel-
opments 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 asJuok, which is realized in terms
of a Supreme Being, ancestors, and other deities.
These spiritual beings are understood to partici-
pate 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 concep-
tions about the character of the universe that
derive from the Western origins of the mission-
aries who established these churches. These
conceptions are significantly different from fun-
damental aspects of the metaphysical concep-
tions that are endogenous to the Acholi.
The African Independent churches, in con-
trast, 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 spir-
its 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 move-
ment after it collapsed. The earlier and later
groups have had as theirraison d’etrethe engage-
ment with the Ugandan army to create a reli-
giously 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 characteriza-
tions of themselves as empowered in their leader-
ship by their roles as spirit mediums evokes the
traditional Acholi as well as the Christian under-
standing of human beings as capable of possession
by spirits who enable the individual with psycho-
logical and magical resources that privilege them
to act as leaders in their communities.
The Holy Spirit Movement developed and
operated according to a quasipacifist ideology
that involved a strict practice of justice in rela-
tion to civilians. This ideology was intimately
related to conceptions of justice rooted in a sense
of natural order. This sense of order embodies
ideas about agency in nature, both animate
and inanimate, through which this order is
expressed. This conception of natural order dra-
matizes, in a novel form, traditional Acholi
notions of nature as vitalistic and agentive. The
movement’s conception of military activity as an
effort to restore the harmony of nature violated
by previous conflict in Uganda is a dramatization
of a practical imperative emerging from this
sense of natural order.
Another central influence on religion among the
Gulu is Islam. Islam has also been described among
these people as involving a juxtaposition of pre-
Islamic and more conventional Islamic elements.
The development of religious forms in relation
to the transformation of metaphysical conceptions
under the pressure of sociopolitical experience
continues in Gulu because the district is central to
current conflicts in Uganda, in which religion and
politics converge.Oluwatoyin Vincent AdepojuSee alsoBagandaGulu 299