RIP: Alice Lakwena ...Alice Auma was born in 1956 and was said to have worked as a prostitute, though some accounts describe her as a fisherwoman. At some point she converted to Roman Catholicism.
...Each army unit was assigned "spiritual controllers" who, as well as tending Alice Lakwena when she was possessed, blessed stones which were supposed to explode like grenades. Combatants marched into battle in cross-shaped formations, singing hymns. Alice Lakwena Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 20/01/2007 Alice Lakwena, who died on Wednesday in the Ifo Refugee camp in northern Kenya aged 50, inspired a long-running insurgency in northern Uganda against the government forces of President Yoweri Museveni.
The origins of the insurgency date back to the defeat of the Okello regime by the army of Museveni (now president) in 1986. Okello, a former British Army sergeant, was an Acholi, the predominant ethnic group in northern Uganda which formed the backbone of the Ugandan army.
The defeat traumatised the Acholi, whose leaders formed the rebel Ugandan People's Democratic Army (UPDA) to force Museveni's forces out of the north and regain their previous status. However, apart from exacerbating the violence, they made little headway.
A self-proclaimed prophetess and spirit medium, Alice, an ethnic Acholi whose real name was Alice Auma, claimed to be possessed by the spirit of a dead Italian army officer called Lakwena who, in August 1986, ordered her to create a Holy Spirit Movement to liberate the world from sin and bring an end to the bloodshed.
The movement aimed to bring about the Second Coming of Christ and the initiation of a paradise on earth.
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