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We first heard of Alice at a press conference on 19 January 1987, given by Yoweri Museveni, the man then relatively new to the Ugandan presidency. We’d been summoned to State Lodge in Mbale, at the foot of Mount Elgon in eastern Uganda, close to the border with Kenya. The colonial lodge had a veranda, and Museveni held the press conference there shortly after dark. He was just back, by army helicopter, from the scene of a battle that had taken place the day before, 320 kilometres to the northwest. “The situation in the north is excellent,” he told us. “Yesterday, we surrounded the rebels and really massacred them very badly, so that the dead bodies we saw today were 350, and rifles and other guns captured were 900.”
In a recent essay for The New Yorker magazine, Donald Trump was likened to Alice Lakwena and other prophets by Manvir Singh, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and author of a new book, Shamanism: The Timeless Religion. The situation in 1980s Uganda was worlds apart from the United States today, “But”, Singh writes, “in the eight years since Trump first took office, procedure has given way to prophecy. For millions of his followers, the President is no longer the Administrator-in-Chief but something closer to the hero Rama in the Hindu epic the Ramayana: a divine avatar destined to wage a holy war against evil.”
More than 38 years ago, Museveni described the battle he was referring to as a “turning point”, a decisive victory for his fledgling government, the kind of blow from which, in terms of casualties and loss of weaponry, the rebel groups fighting to remove him would never recover. They were already demoralized, he said, and had “resorted to mysticism”, employing the skills of a woman called Alice Lakwena, who said, “if you slaughter goats e.t.c [sic], bullets will not penetrate you. She became the priestess of the whole group.” Museveni added it was possible she’d died during the battle, as a woman’s body had been found among the casualties.
Ever since the fall of Idi Amin in 1979, Uganda, still trapped in turmoil, had been trying to rid itself of the image of bloodshed and barbarity. Museveni, then 42 (he’s now 80!), conjured an alternative image, that of an unspiritual, modern African, part. “This is the problem with Africans,” he said at the press conference in Mbale. I was then a journalist, based in Uganda, and I covered the Holy Spirit rebellion. Nine months later, I would interview Alice Lakwena with three other journalists – Mike Wooldridge of the BBC, Jonathan Wright of Reuters, and the VOA’s Jim Malone. But my first encounter with Lakwena had been five days before Museveni first named her.
*
January marks the advent of the dry season in northern Uganda, when trees shed their leaves, and the tall grass turns gold. In Eastern Africa, this is also the hottest time of the year. In early 1987, Museveni’s government had no control of the northern Ugandan countryside, maintaining only a fragile presence in the market towns of Gulu and Kitgum in Acholi District and Lira in Lango District, and placing battalions, often at half-strength, in villages strung between them. These were known as army detachments or “detaches”. Rural areas were otherwise the domain of rebel groups, composed mostly of Acholi and Langi soldiers who’d served in Uganda’s national army under the two consecutive, northern-led governments Museveni had recently toppled.
These 20,000 former soldiers were on home ground, with popular support. And, as rebels, they were gaining momentum. Museveni’s army – small, southern-led, ex-guerilla – was struggling, despite alliances and rapid recruitment, to match that number. Museveni wanted to launch an offensive to stop the rebellion in its tracks. He deployed “Commander Fred”, his Deputy Army Commander, to take charge of it.
Fred Rwigyema was young for the seniority of his post, only 29. (The Chief of Combat Operations, Museveni’s brother, Salim Saleh, was 26.) Rwigyema had distinguished himself in the 1979 military campaign that toppled Amin, and, with Saleh, had become a top field commander in the bush war that ended President Milton Obote’s second term in office (1981–85).
Christmas had been uneasy; the weeks leading up to it had witnessed attacks on detachments along the road linking Lira to Kitgum, not far from Sudan, the direction from which the best-equipped rebel units were coming. Seven battalions of rebels, forming a force of more than 2,000, were converging near a strategic T-junction called Corner Kilak, almost 80 kilometres due north of Lira.
I didn’t know there had been an attack on Corner Kilak when, on 14 January, I walked through a deserted suburb of Lira to find the Deputy Army Commander with a colleague, Cathy Watson. We wanted to get to Kitgum, but the road was closed to civilian traffic. We needed to join a military convoy in a civilian vehicle. When we found Rwigyema, he told us his men were reporting “scores of enemy dead” that morning and organized the use of a military helicopter to fly to the T-junction with us. We arrived there at four o’clock. The bodies of the fallen lay beyond the perimeter of the detachment, which was encircled by shallow foxholes. The army had taken casualties, too, but it wouldn’t say how many.
Alone, we were taken to view some casualties, piled barefoot, straw tied around their ankles. In a notebook, I wrote: “18 men” clad in tatty military uniforms or civilian clothes, their bare chests smeared with an oily substance. Museveni’s soldiers described them as “good targets” and said, “They come quietly, but when they start fighting, they make a lot of noise.” We were still taking notes when a scout came up and told us the rebels had reappeared, marching from east to west in single file across the road only a few hundred metres away. There was a trading centre in the middle of the detachment. We turned and walked back into it. The helicopter was ordered to take off.
Cathy and I sat on a bench. Seated nearby, Rwigyema was talking to the battalion commander. He asked a soldier to get him an AK-47, checked his watch, and, half-turning to us, said he thought it was a bit late for an attack but, just in case, that foxhole over there was ours. As he finished talking, the rebels attacked.
*
In The New Yorker, Maniv Singh writes, “The Trumpian mystique echoes a dynamic that has occurred for centuries and across cultures.” Americans, in other words, are just as likely as Ugandans to be mesmerized by charismatic leaders and their promises, and by the prophecies supporting them. In early April 2025, as Trump slapped steep tariffs on imports to the US, Singh says “self-proclaimed prophets announced that a divine plan was underway.” Julie Green, an American evangelist, claimed God had warned her, “Your economy, and all the markets, have been overtaken by the enemies from within.” Her video was viewed nearly 400,000 times.
In the early 1990s, I did a great deal of research into the Holy Spirit rebel movement, interviewing scores of former rebels about their personal experiences of the war, as well as Alice for a second time. I wanted to write a book about it – about her – but the year I started it was 1994, the year of the genocide in Rwanda. After that, self-doubt set in, and the book, though mostly written by 1998, was never published. I was left with a wealth of interviews, gathered from different perspectives.
Former rebels, many of them Acholi, like Alice, wove stories of a parallel universe, replete with rituals and myths, many of them common to the larger Luo culture to which the Acholi people belong. “Trumpism revives these mythic structures,” says Singh. “There will come a moment, ‘the Storm’, when mass arrests and public reckonings will purge the country of evil and restore the rightful to power.” For Alice, that moment would be when her forces crossed the River Nile in Uganda. Then, she told her followers, all the sins of the past would be absolved.
Though one of Uganda’s minorities, comprising 4 per cent of a population of 14 million in 1982, the prominent role of Acholi in Uganda’s army had given them national clout, just as the suffering they endured under Amin, who viewed them as his principal rivals, created decades of trauma in their society. After taking power in 1971, Amin had Acholi and Langi soldiers rounded up and ruthlessly slaughtered in their barracks, sometimes by cutting off their feet – a hudud punishment, familiar to Amin’s Muslim troops. As many as 1,000 to 2,000 were killed.
I survived Wednesday’s second rebel attack on Kilak with the help of a government soldier, who grabbed my hand and told me to run. We headed south, through tall grass and spindly trees, rejoining the road where a junior officer was trying, unsuccessfully, to stop government troops from fleeing. Helped by another soldier, Cathy too appeared safely on the road. The retreat came to a halt seven kilometres south of Kilak in the deserted hamlet of Rac Koko. The road to Lira was unsecured, so we camped there overnight. There was a full moon.
*
It took three days for the army to prepare its counterattack, and the short distance between the army and the rebels meant each could spy on the other. Jo Aron, an Acholi who’d joined Museveni’s army, saw men and women in the rebel camp moving back and forth to the borehole. The thousands of people there needed water to drink, cook, and wash, but they were also dampening clay and moulding miniature replicas of artillery pieces with their hands.
The strategy Museveni’s army favoured to retake Kilak was one it had used before. It would trap the rebels with a noose of soldiers, who would crawl into position and press inwards. This meant government soldiers, most firing AK-47 semi-automatic rifles with an effective range of about 800 metres, risked being hit by friendly fire from the opposite side of the closing circle. The repeated use of this strategy of encirclement also made for devastating losses on the rebels’ side, affording them little chance of escape or surrender, even when they fought fanatically.
The scene at the T-junction grew more and more extraordinary. “Now every morning, we just woke up, we prayed. We made small exercise, we drilled,” said Lajul, a former rebel I interviewed later, who went by the nom de guerre James Bond. The morning of Sunday, 18 January, was no different. “And that is how the army found us,” Lajul said. “They got us when we were doing many things – drilling, singing songs, collecting water, cleaning arms.”
At around six o’clock, the army had started pounding the camp with mortar fire. Alice was praying in the last house at the end of the trading centre, where she and her “Chief Clerks” had put up overnight. As the attack started, she came out and stood still.
*
John Otim was a Holy Spirit rebel under Lajul’s command. He’d missed the battle we’d been caught in, having been sent to collect donations of posho and speckled kidney beans for Alice’s hungry forces from local farmers. These were short-term loans for which farmers expected to be paid back with interest. The Holy Spirit rebel force purchased its supplies on credit, Alice promising to repay its debts once it had taken power and gained access to the Treasury. But, with the best of two planting seasons already missed, not many peasant families in East Acholi could afford to part with grain or livestock, and these loans would become a grudge, to which the hope of compensation for the lost lives of their sons would be added. These questions of compensation and unpaid debts were to dog Alice’s thoughts for years to come.
Otim was 22. The year before, he had been studying for his A-levels, but now he was cut off from his college in Lira. He was on parade when the Sunday attack began. His company began to fire when they could see the faces of the soldiers crawling towards them. Otim was terrified. “The fear was there,” he said. After several hours, he felt a sense of security. He’d fought his way to the borehole. The fighting around it was so intense that the army had been forced to withdraw, abandoning hundreds of hand grenades.
Otim could find nowhere to put his feet. An unarmed sector of the rebel force was bringing up the rear. “Behind me,” said Otim, “came the people belonging to the spirit of Cim Po, the healthy-not-sworn people.” This was “Track Unit”, and they were picking up the grenades and handing them out. At about one in the afternoon, after seven hours of fighting, Otim made his way north along the road, veering off onto a bush path. Injured in the arm, he was in a state of shock. Above him, from a vantage point in the sky, an army helicopter pilot saw a column of rebels heading northeast out of Kilak, like a trail of ants.
This was the battle Museveni referred to in his press conference in Mbale in January 1987. Many more would take place that year – at Pajule, Corner Kilak, Alero, Cwero, Lira (I), Alito, Lira (II), Icheme, Lira (III), Opit, Soroti (attacks I, II, III, and IV), Atuturu, Rumongi, Kayiti, Paya, Iyolwa (I, II, and III), Igero, Magamaga, Waibuga, Tirinyi.
*
By October 1987, the Holy Spirit forces had reached the outskirts of Jinja, where Lake Victoria flows into the Nile, about 80 kilometres east of Kampala, the Ugandan capital. This is where I would interview Alice for the first time, with Mike, Jonathan, and Jim.
We drove into a town of tumbledown shops with corrugated iron roofs. A Ugandan flag, black, red, gold, and threadbare, flew outside a government office. Inside, a clerk was cyclostyling a document. A local government official sat at a hardwood desk. Young and pretty, Justine Kazungu was the Assistant District Administrator. This morning, she told us, the Holy Spirit rebels had advanced and then retreated a bit. They were asking how far it was to the ordnance depot at Magamaga. That was their next target, she said, and then Kampala. They were telling everyone they wanted to hold fresh national elections. The bulk of the rebel force, she added, was now camped south of us, near a village.
We set off for it. The village was in a state of uproar, scores of people gathering to debate the wisdom of hosting, albeit unwillingly, members of a rebel army so close by. We stopped the car. “Have you seen any rebels?” we asked. “Yes, they arrived here this morning. Right now, they’re having lunch. They are busy boozing and roasting our cows,” said a bystander. “Are they armed?” we ventured. “Yes, they have many guns that cannot be lifted on bicycles,” came the reply.
We bought ourselves warm Pepsi-Colas at the village kiosk. Visiting a rebel camp could be risky, but if we were going to do it, we should do it now, before military intelligence officers caught up with us and turned us back. We parked the car and made our way on foot uphill through elephant grass and fields of beans with tiny, red flowers, until someone jumped out, blocking our way. Barefoot and courteous, he extended his right hand. “Ochen Otto Pax, Holy Spirit Secret Service,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you.”
Since the middle of 1986, broadcasts on short-wave radio had been the main source of news for rebel groups. And suddenly, here we were, a few of the disembodied voices they knew, presenting them with their first opportunity to speak directly to the international press. Our interviews with Alice and her closest advisors took place beyond the bean field, in a banana grove, and lasted 45 minutes. We were detained by army intelligence officers as soon as we left. They took us to Magamaga to see Rwigyema.
No matter how many times I ran into him during the war, and after it, Rwigyema remained, to me at least, an enigma – a handsome, taciturn man, mild-mannered to many (and accepting, according to Aron, of tactical advice) but harsh to rebel captives and to Acholi in the lower ranks when he chose to make an example of soldiers for crimes towards civilians. He asked each of us in turn if we’d interviewed Alice. He said he would deport us – we assumed, back to Kenya, where we’d driven from – or send us to Uganda’s Luzira maximum-security prison. After conferring with his superiors by walkie-talkie, it was decided that we should drive to Kampala to apologize to his boss, the Army Commander Elly Tumwine, for sneaking through the lines to interview the enemy.
Uganda was still an unpredictable and violent place, and the circumstances surrounding our meeting with Alice were strange. Did the army allow us to venture ahead? Was it using us to gather information? Or, in finding Alice, did we humiliate it? Whatever the reason, it let us go, with our notebooks, audio tapes, and undeveloped rolls of film.
*
Manvir Singh talks about the rise in the US of the QAnon conspiracy movement during Trump’s first presidency (2016–2020), its followers numbering “in the tens of thousands in 2018” but surging “to millions by 2020”, before fizzling out in 2021, or so it seemed, when its predictions of Trump’s victory against Jo Biden failed to materialize. By the end of 2021, however, polling showed that more than one in six Americans accepted QAnon’s core beliefs on salvation, spiritual warfare, and diabolic foes, many of which Singh says “merged seamlessly” into evangelicalism. “Q’s ideas” also “found believers among yoga instructors, wellness influencers, and suburban moms”. Singh asks if such beliefs will wither when Trump’s power fades: “Or will a new messiah rise to take his place?”
As the Holy Spirit rebellion faltered, many of its followers were killed or captured in skirmishes. Some deserted and made it home. My colleagues returned to Nairobi, but my base in Kampala meant that I continued to cover the Ugandan army’s pursuit of Alice until, in November, the rebellion collapsed. Alice fled to Kenya.
That Christmas, I went to join my family in Pakistan, where my parents were working on an aid project. Life moved on, and from afar it looked as if “the war in the north” had subsided. Close up, however, this was not the case. Claiming powers of prophecy, another Acholi, Joseph Kony, was emerging to lead the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebellion more inward-looking than Alice’s, and more brutal. The phenomenon would last another 30 years, Kony leaving Uganda in 2006 to terrorize parts of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic.
The chaos of those years is reflected in parish records, recording the names, professions (“peasant”, “pupil”, “trader”, “tsetse control worker”), and manner of death of civilians killed in East Acholi between 1986 and 1988. Of more than 500 deaths, roughly half are attributed to Museveni’s soldiers and the rest to the Holy Spirit rebel group, other rebels, and Karamojong cattle raiders. “Beaten” seems to be the manner of death most frequently described. In September 1986, 33 men were burnt to death in a cotton store by the army’s 61st battalion. “All were peasants,” it says.
In 1995, I revisited Corner Kilak. The main burial site was south of the trading centre, off the road. After the battles, the dead had been buried in mounds, but the earth around them had eroded, leaving many skeletons exposed. Thirteen heaps of bones. I took notes: A short femur, a dangling arm, a pair of shattered legs. Finger bones, clawing their way to the topsoil. And skulls, there were skulls everywhere. Skulls always seem to surface first. I counted 16-30-47-54-62-78-103-123-136-138, but stopped before I’d finished. I made notes of plastic plimsolls and ammo cases, a rusty bayonet, melted gumboots, and the twisted belt of a green raincoat, “also scorched”. A camouflage jacket, worn by a skeleton. A beige sock, the small bones of the feet rattling in it, like a Christmas cracker.
Night fell. The friends who were with me returned to the trading centre by car, but I chose to walk back along the road, which rises and falls gently, passing a low bridge and a cool, swampy forest. The road was no longer empty but lined with clusters of soldiers sitting on their heels, exhausted in the strong moonlight, their fingers wrapped around a hundred lighted cigarettes, and the only sounds those of quiet, tense laughter. A man taller than the rest approaches, ambling almost casually from the direction of the trading centre, an AK-47 slung across one shoulder. His walk is relaxed, but his face is worried.
