Highlighting the historical context of the movement illustrates the immutability of political movements. The goals of today’s Lord’s Resistance Army are a continuation of what Alice Auma set out to accomplish through the Holy Spirits Movement. However, as the leaders of the movement changed, so did the goals of the movement. I assert that the strategies changed primarily because the gender of the leader changed, and gender influences and informs acts of resistance because of its relationship to power.
Secondly, it is important to note that this movement started with a woman in Uganda, a country where women held virtually no control on the state level or community level at that time. Though Alice Auma is universally recognized as the creator of the Holy Spirits Movement, not much is known about her life outside of the movement. I contend that there is much to be said about the separation of Alice Auma’s life from the history of the movement within the narrative. With the exception of Heike Behrand’s Alice Lawkwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985-97, there are little to no resources that provide information about Alice’s life before or after the movement. I am interested unearthing who she was and in interrogating the silence surrounding Alice’s life. Additionally, African women have a rich history of leading resistance movements against a centralized power, but historians fail to analyze and interrogate the women who led the movements and the importance of gender in those contexts.
Lastly, until recently, historians have not considered the importance of allowing African women to theorize about their gender and shape their own histories. As an oral historian, a major aspect of this project for me will require conducting interviews to shape Auma’s history, as there is a scarcity of primary resources available that address her specifically. As such, I see this as an opportunity to have Ugandan and Kenyan women, more specifically Acholi women, construct Auma’s history while also giving them a platform to voice their concerns about the state of the movement today and the impact of the movement on Northern Uganda. My goal, beyond completing this project, is to organize the interviews I collect and make them available to the public via a digital archive.
[1]Heiki Behrand. Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985-97. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 26.