{"id":1716,"date":"2013-03-01T17:15:59","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T22:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=1716"},"modified":"2015-10-13T13:00:17","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T17:00:17","slug":"sequela-comboni","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2013\/03\/01\/sequela-comboni\/","title":{"rendered":"Sequela Comboni: Mission Anthropology in the Context of Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"
Download PDF:\u00a0Whitmore, Sequela Comboni<\/a><\/h5>\n
\n

Abstract<\/h3>\n

In the last half-dozen years or so, the idea and practice of borrowing ethnographic methods in the doing of theology has grown. Some contributors to this discussion, including myself, draw upon ethnographic methods in order to facilitate the writing of a theology that, we hope, exhibits solidarity with the poor and the marginalized. A key problem with the doing of theology as solidarity, however, is that writing itself has a troubled history. Levi-Strauss puts the point uncategorically: the only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of empires. If we want to practice theology as a form of solidarity, then we have to face directly the issue of writing. The best place to begin such discernment is to investigate previous efforts to do theologically-oriented ethnography. The focus of the present article is on the activity of the Comboni missionaries among the Acholi people of northern Uganda in the first half of the twentieth century. However, my primary aim in examining the practices of the Combonis is not to either justify or condemn\u00a0them, but rather to ask what their practices can tell us about the liabilities of\u00a0our\u00a0doing theological ethnography.<\/em><\/p>\n

In what follows, I first provide an overview of the religious practices of the ethnic Acholi. Then I elaborate how such practices have worked through an oral\/aural medium. This will allow me, in the next section, to show how the British used writing both to shut down the Acholi \u201cmagic\u201d and produce their own. When the colonial magic of the written word failed\u2014as evidenced in the panoply of forms of Acholi resistance\u2014the British turned to violence. In the ensuing sections, I show how, under imperial pressure and in response to their own sufferings, the Comboni missionaries who evangelized northern Uganda rewrote salvation history (such that explorer Samuel Baker becomes the new Moses and Gulu, a town constructed through forced labor, is the New Jerusalem) rather than follow Christ in a way that likely would have brought about either their internment or their expulsion. In the final section, I run a thought experiment that places the present-day academic theological ethnographer in a life-situation much like that of the Combonis\u2014curb your writing or face expulsion\u2014so as to give us a sense of what the social pressures were like for the missionaries.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n

The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is, the integration of large numbers of individuals in a political system and their grading into castes or classes. \u2026 It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment.<\/p>\n

\u2014Claude Levi-Strauss,\u00a0Tristes Tropiques\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the last half-dozen years or so, the idea and practice of borrowing ethnographic methods in the doing of theology has grown, as is evidenced by this, the second issue of\u00a0Practical Matters<\/em>\u00a0to focus on the subject. Some contributors to this discussion, including myself, draw upon ethnographic methods in order to facilitate the writing of a theology that, we hope, exhibits solidarity with the poor and the marginalized.1\u00a0Ethnography, if done well, helps to bring the lives and the voices of the poor and the marginalized into the project of theology. A key problem with the doing of theology as solidarity, however, is that writing itself has a troubled history. Levi-Strauss puts the point uncategorically: the\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0phenomenon with which writing has\u00a0always<\/em>\u00a0been concomitant is the creation of empires. Our own projects seem to have a second burden of proof in that professional anthropologists themselves have, with only a few exceptions, long held that theologically-oriented ethnography, most often carried out by missionaries, has been and is complicit in imperialism. John Burton writes regarding his time as an anthropology student that \u201cit was a moral imperative to profess a highly critical attitude towards missionaries of all devotions.\u201d Missionaries are not often the focus of anthropological writing, but when they are, according to Burton, \u201cthey are mentioned primarily as agents of colonialism.\u201d2\u00a0While theologians are by now used to countering criticisms of religion that are rooted in secularist biases and anxieties, we are less used to addressing the problematics associated with writing itself. If we want to practice theology as a form of solidarity, however, we have to face directly the issue of writing. Our vocations depend on discerning ways to be exceptions to Levi-Strauss\u2019s rule.<\/p>\n

The best place to begin such discernment is to investigate previous efforts to do theologically-oriented ethnography. Michael Rynkiewich, an anthropologist, argues, \u201cAnthropologists should treat missionaries as they do any other enigmatic group; they should do ethnographies of missionaries\u00a0before<\/em>\u00a0justifying or condemning, if either needs to be done\u201d.3\u00a0The focus of the present article is on the activity of the Comboni missionaries among the Acholi people of northern Uganda in the first half of the twentieth century. However, my primary aim in examining the practices of the Combonis is not either to justify or condemn\u00a0them<\/em>, but rather to ask what their practices can tell us about the liabilities of\u00a0our<\/em>\u00a0doing theological ethnography. I can say in advance that, in my judgment, under immense imperial pressure combined with the hardship of outpost evangelization, the Comboni community in northern Uganda used writing in way that, in the technical language of Catholic moral theology, constituted \u201cformal cooperation with evil,\u201d in this case, the evil of British imperialism.<\/p>\n

In their own, emic terms, the Combonis assessed themselves in light of the life of\u00a0sequela Christi<\/em>\u2014following Christ\u2014which for members of the congregation takes place through imitating the life of their founder, Daniel Comboni. Thus the title of this article. Over time and as the result of many, even daily, decisions, however, the Combonis turned\u2014in increments that I am sure were not fully perceptible to them\u2014from following Christ to actively supporting empire. It would be facile to assume that imperial pressures are any less forceful today. My aim is to investigate whether there are things in the Comboni response for which we ought to be watchful in our own practice of theological ethnography.<\/p>\n

I use the rubric of \u201cmagic\u201d to frame the analysis. Magic, as I am thinking of it here, is the capacity via symbolic action to transform one reality into another and to have the new reality accepted by the intended audiences. As we will see, the Acholi people of northern Uganda had their own forms of magic; the British brought the magic of writing. Writing, in the eyes of the newcomers, converted the vast \u201cempty\u201d land that was Africa into parceled colonies and protectorates belonging to Europeans. The Combonis\u2014with the Eucharist, devotion to the Cross, veneration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and belief in the miraculous efficacy of their practices\u2014brought still another magic. Yet they also brought writing and were, for all practical purposes, conscripted by the British to establish schools to teach writing for the sake of the empire to the Acholi.<\/p>\n

The mission setting was, therefore, one of competing magics. When the colonial magic of writing failed to convince the Acholi that their land was under the command of the British, the latter turned to violence. The Combonis found themselves in an ongoing quandary: collaborate in the writing-violence dynamic or be expelled and thus unable to practice the magic of the Eucharist. If the choice seems easy, then we have failed to account for the fact that the Combonis considered evangelization through word and sacrament to be their vocation, and that anthropologists themselves have questioned the binary equation of: missionary = preacher\/knower\/converter (or even destroyer); anthropologist = listener\/doubter\/conserver.4\u00a0Academic anthropologists\u2014religiously-oriented or otherwise\u2014have a vocation to write. Writing in the context of empire presents us with issues much like those that the Combonis faced. If we are to practice what George Stocking fittingly called \u201cthe ethnographer\u2019s magic\u201d\u2014 careful description and interpretation with a claim to the real\u2014without collaborating with imperial violence, then it is crucial that we learn what we can from earlier theologically-driven ethnographers.5<\/p>\n

In what follows, I proceed in several movements. First, I provide an overview of Acholi religiosity and the ways in which activity at clan and ancestral shrines and by free agent spirit mediums have worked the local magic. Then I elaborate how such religiosity has worked through an oral\/aural medium. This will allow me, in the next section, to show how the British used writing in an effort both to shut down the Acholi magic and produce their own. When the colonial magic of the written word failed\u2014as evidenced in the panoply of forms of Acholi resistance\u2014the British turned to violence. Enter the Combonis. In the ensuing sections, I show how, under imperial pressure and in response to their own sufferings, the missionaries rewrote salvation history (such that explorer Samuel Baker becomes the new Moses and Gulu, a town constructed through forced labor, is the New Jerusalem) rather than follow Christ in a way that likely would have brought about either their internment in or their expulsion from Uganda. In the final section, I run a thought experiment that places the present-day academic theological ethnographer in a life-situation much like that of the Combonis\u2014curb your writing or face expulsion\u2014so as to give us a sense of what the social pressures were like for the missionaries.<\/p>\n

Acholi Religiosity 6\u00a0<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n

Aya Korina stomps the ground and spits holy water at me. Not Korina, really, but one of her several\u00a0jogi<\/em>, who possesses her. Although there is a four-foot clay vat of it, the water, like consecrated holy water everywhere, is not for drinking. It is for blessing and healing purposes only\u2014and to ward off evil.\u00a0Jok Jagero<\/em>\u2014\u201cthe fierce one\u201d\u2014spits in the other three directions, using Korina\u2019s mouth and lips as his aspergillum.<\/p>\n

Jagero is a free\u00a0jok<\/em>\u2014literally, a “free spirit”\u2014who, in contrast to chiefdom or ancestral\u00a0jogi<\/em>, is not attached to a particular shrine or natural landmark like a river or rock outcropping. He can, and does, come from great distances, most often when Korina bids, but sometimes without her asking.<\/p>\n

Ten years ago, Korina fell sick, severely so, and went to an\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>, or, as the early mission dictionaries translate it, a witch doctor. The\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>\u00a0told her to slaughter a black male goat at a mountain called\u00a0Lacic<\/em>\u00a0and to sprinkle its blood. From the\u00a0ajwaka\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0house,\u00a0Jok Jagero<\/em>\u00a0lifted Korina, as she put it, \u201cup into the sky\u201d and placed her back on the ground at Mt. Lacic. \u201cIt came as a madness,\u201d Korina told me today before being possessed, \u201ca sort of cruelty.\u201d She slaughtered the goat, and \u201cthe gate of the mountain opened wide revealing a cave, showing me all of the items that I have shown you today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Animal hides cover the center floor of Korina\u2019s thatch-roofed and windowless wattle and daub home: one from\u00a0dolo<\/em>, a colobus monkey; two from\u00a0noya<\/em>, a fox-like animal with \u201ca cruelness like that of a leopard.\u201d She needs the skins of fierce animals to help bring in like-spirited\u00a0jogi<\/em>. Roots and herbs for curing ailments from anxiety to infertility trim the walls of the hut. As instructed by Jagero, she wears a garland and crisscrossing bandoliers of cowry shells. \u201cIf I do not wear them, the spirits will quarrel with me. \u2018Why don\u2019t you follow my law? My directive is to wear these shells. Put them on, then my spirit will be free to come.\u2019\u201d Such shells were first brought to northern Uganda when Arabic-speaking merchants and raiders came here from the north, using them as currency in the ivory and slave trade in the 1850s.<\/p>\n

A mushroom-shaped stool, called\u00a0adwi<\/em>, remains in the middle of the room from a curing-exorcism Korina completed just yesterday. The sick sit on the stool for three days, going outside only to relieve themselves. The\u00a0ajwaka\u2019s<\/em>assistants aid in feeding the person. Otherwise, they form a circle around the sick, shaking\u00a0ajaa<\/em>\u2014oil-smeared gourd rattles\u2014dancing and carrying out call-and-response chant with Korina while she goes about her work. On the third day they shave the patient\u2019s head hair. The small inverted pot\u2014koro tipu<\/em>, or literally, \u201chouse in which to chase and hold the spirit\u201d\u2014 that Korina placed on his head to draw the evil spirit out of him remains on the floor, together with scattered\u00a0nyim anyallo kweng<\/em>, a commonly eaten but also special kind of sesame seed used, when blessed, for healing the sick.<\/p>\n

Jagero barks and whoops and says something that I do not catch. I can follow Korina\u2019s Acholi far better than I can his. But the attendants have no problem and respond with well-timed assents and affirmations to the\u00a0jok\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0utterances and pronouncements. They, too\u2014six of them\u2014wear the cowry shell garlands. Jagero-Korina spins and dances facing the wall, with a\u00a0noya<\/em>\u00a0skin tied around her waist and strings of bells around each ankle so that each stomp is followed by a harsh yet melodic ringing. Seven times, s\/he alternates between call-and-response chant with the attendants and what to my ears\u2014since I cannot keep up\u2014sounds like Acholi glossolalia.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The possession lasts about half an hour. It winds down slowly: the stomps not as vigorous, the bells not as loud, the speech not as fast. Finally, Aya Korina sits down, facing me, her knees still bouncing, then slowing, then still\u2014everything quiet except her ribs and lungs, which do quick, though not as violent, compressions that expel sharp bursts of air, the traces of Jagero as he leaves.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

In order to understand the impact of the Combonis\u2019 practice of mission anthropology on Acholi culture and religiosity, it is important first to limn the shape of that culture and religiosity prior to colonial engagement.7\u00a0Okot p\u2019Bitek\u2019s\u00a0Religion of the Central Luo<\/em>\u00a0is taken by most scholars as a touchstone for what Acholi religiosity must have been like before the incursion of the British Empire. P\u2019Bitek focuses on three types of\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u2014spirits\u2014as they manifest themselves in different loci of religious practice.8\u00a0The first is the chiefdom\u00a0jok<\/em>, who is called upon in an annual feast at the chiefdom shrine. Priests, male and female, officiate at the rite\u2014an occasion when the person of the chief recedes and the emphasis is on the purification and rededication of the people to the chiefdom\u00a0jok<\/em>. The second locus of religious activity is the\u00a0abila<\/em>, the clan lineage ancestral shrine where there is a \u201cmeeting of the living and the dead.\u201d There is not, in traditional Acholi belief, a strong bifurcation between spirit and body. Therefore, the ancestors \u201cwere thought of as whole beings, not dismembered parts of man, i.e. spirits divorced from bodies.\u201d People encountered their ancestors, therefore, \u201cas they were known before death; their voices could be \u2018recognized\u2019 as they spoke through the diviner.\u201d9Put another way, the resurrected body is a given among the Acholi, with no waiting until the eschaton. The role of the\u00a0abila<\/em>, and the ancestors who gather there, is to protect the members of the clan against whatever dangers may confront them and to bring success to their endeavors, particularly hunting. “Abila pa wora muptio an ki want tino<\/em>, a woman sings at the shrine of her clan, “Oco! Abila pa wora ogwoko an do<\/em>“\u2014\u201cAbila<\/em>\u00a0of my father that fed me from infancy; Oh\u00a0abila<\/em>\u00a0of my father protect me oh.\u201d10<\/p>\n

Though p\u2019Bitek treats the free\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u00a0separately from those of the chiefdom and the ancestral shrine, his accounts of all three show that the role of the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>, the third locus of Acholi religiosity, was fluid. He tells of one case where the priestess who officiated at the annual rite of the chiefdom shrine also had oversight of a lesser spirit, who was consulted, like the\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u00a0of\u00a0ajwagi<\/em>, \u201cfor minor individual problems and sufferings.\u201d In another case, the priestess, like an\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>, divines the sources of the illnesses and troubles of the people and proffers remedies. In yet a third, the\u00a0jok<\/em>\u00a0of a diviner who performs miracles\u00a0becomes<\/em>\u00a0a chiefdom\u00a0jok<\/em>.11<\/p>\n

When discussing the ancestral shrine, p\u2019Bitek explicitly refers to the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>\u00a0as playing a role that closely matches, complete with shuddering, the one that Aya Korina performs, with the exception that the Korina calls free\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u00a0rather than ancestors:<\/p>\n

\n

The\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>\u00a0sat by the central pole. \u2026 [S]he shook the rattle gourd,\u00a0ajaa<\/em>, called the names of the dead men of Pa-Cua, inviting them to come:<\/p>\n

Ludongo Cua, Lalwak Wod Twon, bin;<\/em>
\nGreat men of\u00a0Cua, Lalwak,<\/em>\u00a0Son of Bull, come;
\nAwobe gutoro komgi en, gikuri;<\/em>
\nAll the young men have gathered here, waiting for you;
\nBiyu wun weng, Keny Koropil, bin;<\/em>
\nCome all of you,\u00a0Keny Koropil<\/em>, come;
\nAryango, Olango, Bitek<\/em>
\n(Aryango, Olango, Bitek)
\nAwobe kuru-we en, biyu<\/em>.
\nThe young men are waiting for you here, come \u2026<\/p>\n

When \u2018they\u2019 came the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>\u00a0became very hysterical, and what she said was not clear. \u2026 Then the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>\u00a0calmed down, and although she now spoke very faintly, she was more audible.12<\/p>\n

The\u00a0ajwaka\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0fluidity in moving between chiefdom, ancestral and free\u00a0jok<\/em>\u00a0is notable given the rather strict demarcation between roles that holds today. (I asked one chief if he was concerned about\u00a0cen<\/em>\u2014vengeful spirits\u2014at his shrine. He answered, \u201cNo, that is the concern of the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>. I just care for the ancestral shrine. When I die, the task will rotate to another descendent.\u201d He made clear that there is a separation of spiritual powers between him, as chief, and the local\u00a0ajwagi<\/em>. His spirits are territorial, theirs are free; his ancestral, theirs of many originations.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The pre-colonial Acholi respected the power of the\u00a0ajwagi<\/em>. P\u2019Bitek elaborates, \u201cIn a significant way, their office operated as a powerful social control factor. They could always be hired by a man who had been wronged by someone stronger than him.\u201d13When forces or events overran the protective capacity of the\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u00a0of the chiefdom or clan ancestral shrines, the Acholi turned to the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>. And overrun the chiefdoms and clans is precisely what the British did. They brought their own magic: the power of the written and printed word. To understand the enormity of the shift from oral to written culture, it is helpful to unpack the work of three theorists who have focused extensively on this transition: Jack Goody, Eric Havelock and Walter Ong.<\/p>\n

From Orality to Literacy: Goody-Havelock-Ong and the Acholi<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Aliker, kel dyanga;<\/em><\/td>\nAliker, return my cattle;<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ka ilwor,<\/em><\/td>\nYou coward,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mony Gala<\/em><\/td>\nTell the army of the white man<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Cung ikura<\/em><\/td>\nTo stop, and wait for me<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Waciwaromo Lamola<\/em><\/td>\nWe shall meet at Lamola;<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Iyoo, iyoo,<\/em><\/td>\nO yes, o hes,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Muloji lwor<\/em><\/td>\nMuloji is a coward<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Dako loyo;<\/em><\/td>\nEven a woman defeats him;<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Muloji lwor,<\/em><\/td>\nMuloji is a coward,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Muloji lwor,<\/em><\/td>\nMuloji is a coward,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Dako loyo;<\/em><\/td>\nEven a woman defeats him;<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mouloji lwor,<\/em><\/td>\nMuloji is a coward,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ee, Agwe pyelo i kaki<\/em><\/td>\nHey, he shits his khaki trousers;<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Aliker, kel dyanga.<\/em><\/td>\nAliker, return my cattle.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

“Aliker, return my cattle.”\u00a0Aliker is the rwot kalam<\/em>\u2014\u201cchief of the pen\u201d\u2014who the British installed after shipping his father, the resistant Chief Awich, to prison near Kampala. In 1947, District Commissioner A.S.A. Wright ordered Aliker to build a new road. Aliker, though the son of Awich, knew he was really a chief by imperial appointment and that his hold on his own Payira people was tenuous. So he tried to outsource the work to the Labongo clan. The British administration, in its quest for hierarchical order among the decentralized Acholi chiefdoms, subordinated the Labongo people under Aliker and the Payira. But Labongo warriors blocked Aliker when he went to enforce the work order and killed his bodyguard. Aliker retreated and mustered British reinforcements, and together the colonialists and the Payira raided the Labongo villages, killing many of the inhabitants and stealing the cattle. A Labongo poet sang, “Aliker, return my cattle \/ You coward \/ Tell the army of the white man \/ to stop, and wait for me \/ We shall meet at Lamola.”<\/p>\n

He was not the first Acholi poet to sing defiance in the face of colonial power. Omal Lakana refused to take part in the forced labor system and the building of the town of Gulu commanded by the district commissioner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Ee, cuna mito telo,<\/em><\/td>\nEe, my penis wants to get erect,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
An aito wi lela,<\/em><\/td>\nI am mounting the bicycle,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Alaro Gulu;<\/em><\/td>\nI am hurrying to Gulu;<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ee, cuna mito telo,<\/em><\/td>\nEe, my penis wants to get erect,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
An anongo min Dici<\/em><\/td>\nWhen I find the District Commissioner\u2019s mother,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Agero I bar Pece;<\/em><\/td>\nI will fuck her in the football field at Pece;<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ee, cuna mito telo.<\/em><\/td>\nEe, my penis wants to get erect.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The British imprisoned Lakana for two years for his insolence. While in confinement, he composed the poem from which he received his popular name, Adok Too:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
Adok Too,<\/em><\/td>\nIf I could become Death,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Adok Too,<\/em><\/td>\nIf I could become Death,<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Kono apoto i wi munu.<\/em><\/td>\nI would fall upon the white man.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

P\u2019Bitek collected these and other song-poems\u2014called\u00a0wer<\/em>\u2014in the early 1970s and committed them to print.14\u00a0The question remains as to how they got passed down to p\u2019Bitek in the first place, as many as fifty years\u2014Adok Too composed his \u201cpenis poem\u201d in 1918\u2014after they were initially sung, particularly given colonial efforts to exile their composers and so expunge their content from Acholi culture. Oral communication is, in the words of classicist Eric Havelock, \u201clight as air, and as fleeting.\u201d15\u00a0The anthropologist Jack Goody adds, \u201cThere is no store for subsequent recall.\u201d16\u00a0Cultural historian Walter Ong refers to the \u201cwinged words\u201d that are \u201cconstantly moving\u201d in oral performance and elaborates, \u201cSound exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent. … There is no way to stop sound. … If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing.\u201d17\u00a0Havelock, Goody and Ong have all written extensively on the relationship between oral and literate cultures. Their insights overlap considerably and provide a way to both investigate the means of continuity in oral culture and assess the impact of the introduction of the written word in Acholiland.<\/p>\n

Sustaining oral compositions over time, according to Havelock, requires a tradition of encoded language, what Goody calls \u201cstandardized oral forms.\u201d18\u00a0The poet sets stock phrases to familiar rhythms and repeats them often: “Muloji is a coward \/ Muloji is a coward \/ Even a woman defeats him \/ Muloji is a coward.” The composer sets the poem to music, frequently accompanied by the nanga, a cigar-box-guitar-looking instrument laid flat and played in droning syncopated rhythms\u2014the Acholi blues. Oral tradition is somatically intense. After a few bars, the audience, often dancing, knows the refrain, and the song becomes call-and-response. At this point, the poet can add whatever vivid commentary he wishes: “Hey, he shits his khaki trousers.” The more vivid, the more memorable.<\/p>\n

An extended poem builds these memorable lines by parataxis, that is, the piling up of phrase upon phrase rather than by the subordination of points to a main thesis.19\u00a0Framed by repeated incantations of the line, “Ee, my penis wants to get erect,” the extended version of Adok Too\u2019s poem and its threat to the sexual security of colonial mothers (and thus to the manhood of their sons who are supposed to protect them) builds by working up the chain of hierarchical command. He makes the boast-threat in the first stanza to the Acholi sub-chief, the one who was the last to pass down the colonial order to forced labor; he makes the next boast-threats, in ascending order, to the chief, the district commissioner, and the king of England. The clear exaggeration involved in the last boast makes it all the more memorable for retelling.<\/p>\n

Havelock describes the \u201cperformative\u201d syntax and context of oral poetry as \u201ca continual dynamism,\u201d \u201ca flow of sound\u201d and \u201ca river of action.\u201d20\u00a0The result is that the community that carries the song may and likely will have more than one version of it. Parts of the song placed earlier in the performance by one poet in one context may be placed later by another in a different setting. The refrains and the more memorable phrases and short sequences remain relatively unaltered, even learned verbatim, and the narratives retain a certain trajectory. But listener-participants do not learn the poems verbatim throughout, in part because of the cognitive near impossibility of remembering the exact order and every word of a narrative performance, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, because to perform in oral culture is at once to recite and to compose. How tightly the community controls the performances depends on a number of factors, from the size and geographical stability of the community to the presence or lack thereof of internal and external disruptions. Havelock, in particular, stresses the need in oral societies for regular performative contexts for the community to call forth its tradition. He identifies \u201critualized utterances\u201d in the context of \u201ccommon festivals\u201d as the bearer of memory,21\u00a0which is less a matter of looking back at events than breathing them forth to life.<\/p>\n

Perhaps because Havelock is a classicist describing a tradition that he knows only through texts and the oral traditions that have lived on in texts, he, while rightly discussing special festivals, misses the ordinary-time means of retelling and reenacting the tradition. Among the rural Acholi, the practice of\u00a0wang oo<\/em>, the evening fire, is the center of the traditioning process. Both words in the term have multiple interrelated meanings.\u00a0Wang<\/em>\u00a0can mean time, moment or period, and\u00a0oo<\/em>\u00a0translates as arrival, so that we get \u201ctime of arrival.\u201d\u00a0Wang<\/em>\u00a0also means sight, appearance, opening or passage; and\u00a0oo<\/em>\u00a0can be rendered \u201cto warm,\u201d so that\u00a0wang oo<\/em>\u00a0is the warming fire where one can see and be present to others. The evening fire is the place where the Acholi gather to inform each other of the day\u2019s events and to tell stories of origin, history or entertainment. Parents pass out any necessary discipline. Everyone gossips.\u00a0Wang oo<\/em>\u00a0is where I learned that the Big Dipper is\u00a0Cing Lyec<\/em>, trunk of the elephant, and where I first heard the story of the dispute between the brothers Labongo and Nyipir as the source of the split between the Acholi and the Alur peoples.<\/p>\n

Around\u00a0wang oo<\/em>, the young learn not by study, but by participatory listening and observation. There are no grammars or dictionaries directing how to speak properly; rather there is what Goody terms \u201cdirect semantic ratification\u201d in both day-to-day activities and end-of-day\u00a0wang oo<\/em>\u00a0performative contexts. Ong concurs, \u201cThe oral mind is uninterested in definitions. Words acquire their meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat, which is not, as in a dictionary, simply other words, but includes also gestures, vocal inflections, facial expressions, and the entire human, existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs.\u201d22<\/p>\n

The practice of writing, particularly when it is brought from the outside by colonial powers, shocks the social latticework of performance in oral culture. Without adhering to any monocausal explanation, Goody argues that the shift in the means and mode of communication brought by writing and, later, print technology has as much explanatory power as Marx\u2019s stress on the modes of production for understanding social and cultural change. Goody, Havelock and Ong all make the case that writing and print bring profound changes, what Goody calls a \u201clinguistic recoding,\u201d to human consciousness.23\u00a0To understand the impact of the Comboni missionaries, therefore, we need to take into account the role of writing, particularly in imperial contexts.<\/p>\n

The Imperial Magic of Writing<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The explorer John Hanning Speke, in his journal from his 1860-1862 trip to Uganda, relates an exchange he had with the king of Bunyoro, the region just south of Acholiland: “The Mukama requested that I would spread a charm over all his subjects, so that their heart might be inclined towards him. … I said that there was only one charm by which he could gain the influence he required over his subjects\u2014this was, knowledge and power of the pen.24\u00a0The question arises as to how writing comes to have such a \u201cpower.\u201d Levi-Strauss gives what is perhaps the most trenchant analysis of how the magic of writing works. During a gift exchange with some Nambikwara indigenous of Brazil, he gave them paper and pencils, and later noticed them \u201cdrawing wavy horizontal lines.\u201d They were imitating his writing. The chief, however, went further. During the exchange of goods, he \u201cread\u201d from his piece of paper, as if checking the list of things that Levi-Strauss was giving to the Nambikwara in exchange for their offerings. Levi-Strauss interprets the chief\u2019s actions as an effort not just to mimic the physical act of reading, but also to access political power. The chief sought to \u201castonish his companions, to convince them that he was acting as an intermediary agent in the exchange of the goods, that he was in alliance with the white man and shared his secrets.\u201d He elaborates, \u201cWriting had, on that occasion, made its appearance among the Nambikwara but not, as one might have imagined, as a result of long and laborious training. It had been borrowed as a symbol, and for a sociological purpose, while its reality remained unknown.\u201d25\u00a0Again, magic, as I understand it, is the capacity via symbolic action to transform one reality into another\u2014from goats as property of Levi-Strauss to goats as possessions of the Nambikwara\u2014and to have the new reality accepted by the intended audiences. Levi-Strauss goes on to observe that local resistance to political domination among the Nambikwara\u2014the chief who tried to serve as an access man to the power of whites \u201cwas abandoned by most of his people\u201d\u2014manifested itself importantly as, among other things, resistance to writing. In the end, the locals did not believe in writing\u2019s magic, at least as practiced by whites.26<\/p>\n

More recent anthropological work in Fiji supports Levi-Strauss\u2019s analysis. Using local materials, indigenous in Melanesia and Micronesia attempted to reconstruct\u2014that is, imitate\u2014modern artifacts ranging from airstrips to manifest logs in an effort to bring Western goods to themselves.27\u00a0Such symbolic actions are like the Nambikwara making wavy lines on paper. Martha Kaplan argues that the locals in Fiji were using magic against a prior colonial magic. Kaplan highlights the power of magic to create new social realities, and shows that, in the case of the British colonization of Fiji, the printed and distributed Deed of Cession constituted a \u201cmagical creation of a new polity\u201d: \u201cAnd from then on, everything that was official and real in the colony was made real via the printed word. If it wasn\u2019t \u2018gazetted,\u2019 it didn\u2019t officially exist. And one of the things that was official was the colonial state itself.\u201d28\u00a0Fiji resistance to colonial magic, Kaplan shows, was, therefore, from the start, magic interwoven with political resistance.<\/p>\n

In the case of the region that would become Uganda, the major European powers carried out the prime act of colonial magic in the form of the 1885 General Act of the Berlin Conference, twenty-three years after the explorer Speke recommended the \u201ccharm\u201d of the \u201cknowledge and power of the pen.\u201d The General Act parceled artificially demarcated territories to the attending conference parties in the creation of a new reality: \u201cAfrica.\u201d The particular power of the written and printed word in this case, as in the case of Fiji, is its fixity and consequent connotation of absoluteness and, thus, transcendence. There was no power of rebuttal against an officially printed and gazetted document. The Word was God.<\/p>\n

The magic of the written and printed word gave the colonialists the power of administration. The General Act\u2019s \u201cPrinciple of Effectivity\u201d required that the designated powers take actual possession of their granted lands via treaty with local leaders and by active administration. The British administered through \u201cindirect rule,\u201d that is, rule through the social leadership already in place in the targeted territory, in this case, the kings and chiefs. The kings and chiefs, on this theory, collect the taxes and enforce the work necessary to build the roads and buildings that make modern administration possible.29\u00a0Problems arose, however, when kings and chiefs refused to cooperate or their peoples resisted.<\/p>\n

In northern Uganda, Commissioner George Wilson described the local population as \u201cchild races to be educated firmly.\u201d A later commissioner wrote of Wilson that he \u201cadvocated strenuous measures to bring the Nilotic tribes [of northern Uganda] under our rule and that a somewhat imposing display of force\u201d was advisable.30\u00a0Chief Awich Aboki Lutanymoi headed the largest and strongest of the Acholi clans, the Payira. When refugees fled to Acholiland from British attack in the Bunyoro region to the south, Awich, following traditional practices of hospitality, refused to hand them over to the colonialists.31\u00a0For his refusal, the British imprisoned him in Kampala for two years.32<\/p>\n

Despite his resistance to colonial authority, Awich was the closest to a singular leader among the Acholi, so, in 1906, Wilson appointed him \u201cking,\u201d levied hut taxes and required\u00a0pro bono<\/em>\u00a0work on the part of the locals. Punishment for noncompliance was swift. Comboni missionary Joseph Pasquale Crazzolara noted in his journal:<\/p>\n

\n

11 Apr. 1911\u2014Some soldiers\/police come to the mission requesting 20 porters, including an Acooli (jagang) who just happens to be around. As the latter refuses, he is beaten up. Another one, who was engaged from his very home, seems to have caused some difficulties while on the march, near Rabwon, and was pierced to death with a bayonet.33<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The British found ruling a people as culturally independent and geographically scattered as the Acholi to be too difficult, and so\u2014by written and gazetted fiat\u2014ordered them to build from scratch and live in what was to become the largest town in northern Uganda: Gulu. Again, Crazzolara\u2019s journal narrates the scene:<\/p>\n

\n

On hearing the news, the population is thoroughly shaken. They still have their grains in the fields, but orders are that they must pick up cereals not for themselves but for [the support of] Gulu town. … [I]t is as if they were not in their own territory, but in a hostile one. The government has ordered to burn down any house or village of those who have made remonstrations. … I have seen burnt barns everywhere.34<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When \u201cKing\u201d Awich resisted orders, the British imprisoned him again. Commissioner R.M. Bere noted that already by this time\u2014the British had been consistently present in the region for only fourteen years35\u2014only about half of the chiefs came to their positions by traditional means. The rest were appointed by the British after the latter deposed the traditional chiefs who disobeyed. The imperial dismissals of local leaders were so frequent that the Acholi developed their own term for the ersatz replacements, notable for the reference to writing as the source of usurped power:\u00a0rwodi kalam<\/em>, \u201cchiefs of the pen,\u201d as distinct from\u00a0rwodi moo<\/em>, \u201cchiefs anointed with shea oil.\u201d The explorer Speke\u2019s claim\u2014that there is \u201conly one charm by which he could gain the influence he required over his subjects, knowledge and power of the pen\u201d\u2014 proved providential.<\/p>\n

Locals put up a wide array of forms of resistance, from the more passive refusal to work to active sabotage and even outright rebellion. The most famous occasion of resistance was the Lamogi rebellion of 1911-12,36\u00a0where the British chased an alliance of clans into the caves of the Guru Guru hills and laid siege. Even imperial-influenced reports stated that the trapped Acholi \u201cbegan to suffer from dysentery and diarrhea on a very large scale, and those who attempted to approach the rivers outside the caves were shot. Many women and children died as a result of infection.\u201d37\u00a0Ninety-one Acholi were shot and killed in the caverns; over 300 died of dysentery.38\u00a0Afterwards, the British deported all of the involved chiefs\u2014thirty-four of them, indicating the broad support for the rebellion\u2014to prison in Entebbe.39\u00a0The colonialists displaced the rest of the people to Gulu town with a forced march during which the Acholi \u201clost more men than during the fight.”40<\/p>\n

With the traditional chiefs deposed and replaced by the \u201cchiefs of the pen,\u201d the annual rite at the chiefdom shrine lost legitimation. With many of the other Acholi displaced from their lands, engagement with the ancestral spirits at their shrines on clan land diminished. Okot p\u2019Bitek\u2019s insight regarding the\u00a0ajwagi<\/em>\u00a0becomes pertinent: \u201cTheir office operated as a powerful social control factor. They could always be hired by a man who had been wronged by someone stronger than him.\u201d41\u00a0The British overran the protective capacity of the\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u00a0of the chiefdom and clan ancestral shrines. However, the free\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u00a0of the spirit-mediating\u00a0ajwagi<\/em>remained to defend the Acholi, to give them hope and power, and this presented a problem for the British.42\u00a0They could not, as they did with the chiefs, depose the\u00a0ajwagi<\/em>\u00a0because the latter held no political power. They could not displace them because theajwagi<\/em>\u00a0worked with free\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u00a0not tied to place. They sought to root out the spirit mediums with witchcraft laws, but these worked only if people were willing to turn in the\u00a0ajwagi<\/em>\u2014the only recourse they had left\u2014to the colonial powers.43\u00a0The British did not quite trust Roman Catholicism to root out the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>, not only for historical political reasons, but because Roman Catholicism, with its saints and relics, often itself verged on \u201csuperstition.\u201d However, the Brussels Act of 1890 meant that the colonialists could not exclude Catholic missionaries from their territories, and given the limits of bureaucracy and military force, the empire needed someone who had the particular kind of wares to confront the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>\u00a0directly. The Comboni missionaries, already in southern Sudan, were ready at hand. The British allowed them in so as to disrupt Acholi magic and bring the locals to conform to empire.<\/p>\n

Missionary Magic<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\n

Opira is well-off by IDP standards. He has three structures where he lives, a wattle and daub cooking hut, a similar storage hut, and a small brick sleeping abode. The front half of the sleeping dwelling is a sitting room\u2014a space that is perhaps five by seven feet\u2014with fold-out chairs and two small side tables. A suitcase rests on its side on one table, serving as a makeshift dresser. Here, he is the 1%.<\/p>\n

A backlit clock, running when batteries are available, features the figure of Jesus pointing towards his illuminated, glowing heart, which is garroted with a coil of thorns: the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a direct link to the Combonis.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I forget to ask Opira where he got the clock and guess that it was either from the shop at Holy Rosary Parish in Gulu or from one of the many entrepreneurs of religious wares at the annual feast of the Acholi martyrs in Paimol. The site of the celebration is called\u00a0Wipolo<\/em>\u2014heaven, or literally, \u201ctop of the sky.\u201d There the merchants place their items on sheets of plastic tarp laid end-to-end for stretches of fifty feet or more: prayer books, rosaries with beads from pink to green, icons of Daniel Comboni, three-inch wood crucifixes on stands, framed depictions of Madonna and child. According to Opira, time and money spent on the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>\u00a0is \u201cwasted\u201d: \u201cOnly prayer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus will end this war.\u201d<\/p>\n

The devotions that shaped Daniel Comboni grew out of very specific experiences in his life. He was praying in St. Peter\u2019s Cathedral in Rome during the triduum in preparation for the beatification of Margaret Mary Alacoque, the French nun and mystic whose visions gave rise to the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, when his \u201cPlan for the Regeneration of Africa\u201d came to him as itself inspired.44\u00a0So central was this devotion to him that Comboni named the order which he founded the \u201cSons of the Sacred Heart.\u201d45\u00a0The missionaries practiced and transplanted other devotions\u2014mediums of magic\u2014to Acholiland as well.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

\n

There is only the slightest of bends in the road, but still the Toyota Land Cruiser skids to the side, pebbles flying. Father Matthew Lagoro is driving one hundred kilometers an hour, faster when the road is straight. He sees me put my hand to the dash to steady the ride.<\/p>\n

I have come to visit him after joining in the celebration of the Acholi martyrs at\u00a0Wipolo<\/em>, but am regretting it at the moment. We are on our way from Madi Opei, the parish center in the far northeast corner of Acholiland, to Agoro. He is going there to perform twenty-six infant baptisms. Lagoro is better than many priests about getting to the outposts; still, the people are going to make the most of his visit. The priest to lay ratio is 1 to 30,000. The people of Agoro are not taking any chances, as this may be the last visit for another couple of months.<\/p>\n

It is perhaps six o\u2019clock in the evening. At certain points the low sun catches the windshield and we, or at least I, cannot see. I make some under-the-breath utterances that mix invective with severely pared versions of the travel prayers common out here. God. Slow! Jesus.<\/p>\n

\u201cI drive like this because I have been ambushed two times.\u201d<\/p>\n

Father Lagoro lets me take this in, not slowing down.<\/p>\n

The redound from a pothole jams me into the seat then catapults my head into the ceiling. The seatbelt does not work. I tried it when we started off, but I try it again now anyway.<\/p>\n

Lagoro looks over, \u201cI have to get that fixed.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a pause, he continues his earlier thread.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first ambush was 1997. I was traveling in a vehicle alone in the Pajule area. They attacked me at about 8:30 p.m. I jumped from the vehicle and hid in the river for about four hours. When I came out, leeches were attached all over my body.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I came onto the road, the first person I saw was my uncle, who was in the government military. He asked, \u2018You are the one?\u2019 I responded, \u2018Yes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

We drive by\u00a0Got Latoolim<\/em>\u2014Mountain of the Dead Visitor\u2014at about the halfway point. Agoro is the terminus of a north-south running road that comes to a halt at the base of the Imatong Mountains and the start of Sudan in this sector. In 2002, one thousand LRA rebel foot soldiers poured through a pass the UPDF claimed was impassable and overran the army.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe second time was in 2003. About ten UPDF soldiers stood in the roadway and shot at us. I got out and ran into the bush and passed out. The soldiers burned the vehicle and stole some of the goods to make it look like LRA. But the soldier who took the keys later gave them, stupidly, to a Christian to give back to me. That is how I know it was UPDF.\u201d<\/p>\n

Father Lagoro goes on, \u201cI do not ask for any more miracles than what I have already seen. The 1997 incident, I was too young to see this way. But before the second event, a friend of mine gave me a medal with the Virgin Mary and told me to put it on the dashboard of my vehicle to protect me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I look at the dash, partly in reaction to the comment, partly in prayer. We are still moving fast. Mary is not there now.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the second incident, one bullet went through the radiator, through the dashboard, deflected off the medal, and burned the skin on my left shoulder by the neck. It would have hit me. Another bullet burned the right of my abdomen and blew a hole in the seat. All of the windows were blown out. They counted ninety-seven bullet holes in the car.\u201d<\/p>\n

Father Lagoro talks like he drives and moves abruptly to yet another incident to buttress his central point.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, I asked the parents of the parish if their girls who go to our school could sleep in the church because of the insecurities of going back and forth between school and home. It was May 29, 2003. They were sleeping on the floor in between pews.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomehow, the rebels got word of this and planned a raid to abduct them. Four came in with flashlights, but somehow they did not see the girls on the floor. The rebels left.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeanwhile, the UPDF began firing mortar shells. They fired a bazooka into the church\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

I remember seeing a large irregular hole\u2014perhaps three by five feet\u2014in one of the main walls.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2014and it hit the floor right on the engraving in the aisle, even splitting the relics of the\u00a0Wipolo<\/em>\u00a0martyrs into two, creating a second martyrdom, with fragments scattering everywhere. The ceiling. Everywhere. Yet no shrapnel hit any of the girls.\u201d<\/p>\n

We reach Agoro, the small market center first. I later find out from a friend working for the UN about LRA rebels being on the camp perimeter during my visit. The trading center is like many others: low-slung brick buildings with corrugated tin-sheet awnings on either side of the road. A shadow shouts from a blue plastic chair as we pass, \u201cWhat are you going to do for me?\u201d<\/p>\n

A white woman likely too young to be a nun walks up to our vehicle, and we come to a halt. She is from\u00a0M\u00e9decins sans Fronti\u00e8res.<\/em>\u00a0She sticks her head, worried, almost frantic, in my window. I pull back.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have to tell them about the hepatitis E. Word has to get out. Scores are dying.\u201d I agree to serve as messenger, and we move on.<\/p>\n

The road comes to an end at the foot of the mountains. Cloud-shrouded and in low light, they speak of beauty and mystery. Dry, flat land suddenly becomes fertile and green as it heads upwards. A stream runs down into the town as if in greeting, \u201cCome all you who are thirsty\u2026\u201d But four pigs roll in the water upstream from a gaggle of pantless children. Below that, two women wash their clothes. A painted sign, misspelled, reads, \u201cPut children\u2019s feaces always in the latrine since they are also harmful.\u201d There are no latrines. I lower my eyes at this divine contradiction, this error in Judgment.<\/p>\n

Father Matthew stops the engine, and we sit quietly, looking at everything around us. He speaks out of the silence as if speaking not only to me but to all this.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not ask for any more miracles than what I have already seen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

*****<\/p>\n

Daniel Comboni was ordained in 1854, only three weeks after Pope Pius IX defined the Immaculate Conception of Mary as official church doctrine. Comboni, in his turn, consecrated Africa to the Immaculate Virgin when he made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in France.46\u00a0Though immaculate virgin, Mary is also Mother of God, and, more particularly for Comboni, of Jesus\u2019 Sacred Heart. In 1875, the missionary combined these two devotions\u2014to Mary and the Sacred Heart\u2014to forge a new title under which to dedicate his specific vicariate in Africa: \u201cBehold us prostrate at your feet, Mary, blessed Virgin Mother of God. Full of joy, we salute you \u2026 with the new and glorious title of \u2018Our Lady of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.\u2019\u201d47<\/p>\n

The practical upshot of the devotions to Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus is that such veneration has earthly efficaciousness. When Comboni prayed, he did so for the success of his mission and was certain of the results: \u201cMary will be my dearest \u2018Mother\u2019 and Jesus will be my \u2018all.\u2019 In their company … I will succeed in giving life to the proposed Work for the regeneration of Africa.\u201d48The surety of success reflects the belief that this is an omnipotent God who acts through Mary and Jesus.49\u00a0Comboni most often described this power in terms of God\u2019s \u201cprotection\u201d of his confreres and him as they carried out their work;50\u00a0yet, at times, that power went beyond mere protection to the effecting of great acts: \u201cThe Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary are enough for all, and I expect miracles through their mediation.\u201d51\u00a0The only difference here between Comboni and Father Matthew Lagoro is that, at the time of the writing, Comboni\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0ask for\u2014and expected\u2014more miracles.<\/p>\n

The charisms of religious congregations are typically interpreted as having been first displayed in the person of their founder, and the Combonis are no different. Members of the order are called upon to focus on Daniel Comboni, according to Antonio Vignati, an early superior general, so as to \u201cstudy his life and virtues in order to imitate the great apostle who is Comboni, a spirituality to be inserted in our own spirituality.\u201d52\u00a0What the order\u2019s official documents refer to as the\u00a0sequela Christi<\/em>\u00a0(following Christ) is for the missionaries a matter of following Daniel Comboni.53\u00a0Consistent with the shape of Comboni\u2019s faith life, the missionaries have stressed the efficacious power that comes from such devotion, such that miracles follow. Two miracles predominate in the literature. The first in importance is Comboni\u2019s own, which he performed eighty-nine years after his earthly death, when his relics healed a terminally ill ten-year-old girl.54\u00a0Thirty-three years later, the relics of the Acholi martyrs protected the schoolgirls of Father Lagoro\u2019s Madi Opei parish from bazooka shrapnel. The second often-told miracle evidences again that, in this account of the world, the life that has devoted itself to God through Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus itself becomes powerful. I will let one of the missionaries tell the story:<\/p>\n

\n

At the end of August 1903, Fr. Beduschi fell dangerously sick and was given the last sacraments. But Sr. Giuseppa sent word to him saying, \u201cFather, you must not die because you must do much work here. I\u2019ll die instead of you.\u201d On the first of September Sr. Giuseppa was stricken by a violent fever and she sent for Fr. Beduschi to hear her last confession. The suffering priest was carried to the dying sister on a litter. \u2026 After the sister\u2019s confession, Fr. Beduschi asked two brothers to carry him back. \u201cNo,\u201d said Sr. Giuseppa, \u201cYou must go alone, on your feet.\u201d She touched his cassock and said, \u201cGo!\u201d At that moment Fr. Beduschi suddenly felt invaded by a new strength; as the onlookers watched stupefied, he arose and walked. Sr. Giuseppa passed away in the evening of the same day.55<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Much like with the Combonis, we have seen that the Acholi called on\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u00a0for the spirits\u2019 earthly powers. When the two traditions\u2014Christian and traditional African\u2014first confronted each other, the missionaries evangelized by presenting the Christian god as stronger\u2014more efficacious in this world\u2014than the local spirits. Father Angelo Vinco, a missionary priest who had a deep influence on Comboni,56\u00a0gave an early and indicative speech to chiefs in Sudan, five years before Comboni himself made it to Africa:<\/p>\n

\n

The God who created you and me, also created the sun, the moon, and the stars. … The same God who makes the grass and seeds grow\u2014in other words, the same God who from nothing created everything in heaven and on earth. [T]his God is, as yet, not known to you. … This is the God who makes the rain fall, thus preventing your fields from being scorched; He keeps you in good health; He multiplies your cattle; He gives you strength to overcome your enemies.57<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Like the British, the Combonis enlisted, again in the words of the explorer John Hanning Speke, the \u201cpower of the pen\u201d to manifest the power of their god.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

\n

The orthography adopted in this book follows that of the Rejaf Language Conference, 1928, and its suggestions. Additions, where necessary, have been made in accordance with the principles laid down by the conference. The so-called \u2018central\u2019 vowel-type is represented in the Rejaf orthography by the symbol \u00f6. As further vowels of this type had to be adopted, the diacritical mark \u00a8 has been used to distinguish them.<\/p>\n

\u2014Opening lines of the first chapter of J. P. Crazzolara,
\nA Study of the Acooli Language: Grammar and Vocabulary58<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Goody, Havelock and Ong all identify writing\u2019s ability to abstract language from its lived matrix. Written language has the capacity to be, in Ong\u2019s words, \u201ccontext free.\u201d59\u00a0In order to capture the \u201clight as air\u201d (Havelock) and \u201cconstantly moving winged words\u201d (Ong) of oral culture and fix them to a page, Crazzolara followed a set of rules set out by a conference of European orthographers studying African languages. This is the same missionary who lived sufficiently in the context of Acholi life during the colonial years that he could report firsthand, \u201cYet now it is as if they were not in their own territory, but in a hostile one.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prime innovation that facilitates the process of capturing words on paper is the invention of the alphabet and its ability to convert what was fleeting sound to a more permanent visual medium.60\u00a0Once this conversion takes place, language does not need performative reenactment to sustain a tradition. Writing itself provides a \u201cstorage\u201d mechanism.61\u00a0Scribes can compile long lists of objects\u2014things sold, gifts exchanged\u2014without reference to the occasions that make them worthy of noting.62\u00a0In time, words and their rules themselves become listed objects, ratified not in their use, but through reference to dictionaries and grammars. Crazzolara follows rule 1 above with, in numerical order, 536 more. There is no need in following such rules to refer to stolen cattle or cowards who lose control of their bowels in order to know what a verbal noun is and how to use it. And once abstracted from their lived context, words can be combined and reinserted in that context for other purposes.<\/p>\n

*****<\/p>\n

2005. My first trip to the region. I am staying with the Comboni Missionary Sisters\u2014first constituted in 1872 as the \u201cPious Mothers of the Nigritia\u201d\u2014at their residence. The lettering on the arch over the front gate announces to visitors that they are entering the \u201cComboni Missionary Animation Centre.\u201d A painted cast-relief icon of Daniel Comboni stares out, though not, I think, menacingly, from a pillar to the side. He is not smiling, but his eyes are kind. The grounds are immaculate. Sister Fernanda shows me to my room and allows me to get settled before dinner. We eat late, as is the norm here, and as we finish, a strange chanting rises from somewhere beyond the back wall of the compound. Children\u2019s voices. Many of them, though all in unison. It is sing-songy, yet at the same time solemn. High-pitched voices from low-pitched souls. I try to make out what they are saying, but it is quickly clear that this is not in any language that I yet understand.\u00a0Wonwa … somethingsomethingsomething … polo<\/em>. I get the last because the word sounds familiar. Then\u00a0miwa … somethingsomethingsomething … amen<\/em>. I try to pick out more words that I recognize, even if wrongly. Something\u00a0maria somethingsomething gracia. Maria maleng somethingsomething amen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Sister Fernanda, black and grey hair, brown eyes, white veil, and light blue smock dress with white print flowers, says across the table, \u201cEvening prayers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMay I go see?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n

I go through the back gate.<\/p>\n

There they are: perhaps one hundred fifty of them; perhaps more. Seated in six ad hoc but somehow orderly long rows under a single light bulb in front of a low-slung building on cathedral property, where they will be staying tonight. All face a single leader seated in a chair in front of them. The light crowns their heads with gold-orange. I recognize them\u2014so many now that they have their own moniker\u2014as \u201cnight commuters,\u201d children who leave their villages after an early supper and walk as far as twenty kilometers to the city, where they will be safer from LRA attack and abduction. At first light, they will return to their village school and start the process over. Forty thousand of them, it is estimated, all over northern Uganda.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

*****<\/p>\n

One of the first tasks which the Combonis undertook upon reaching Acholiland was to develop a dictionary so that they could instruct the locals in the catechism of the Catholic faith. The missionaries first abstracted the language from its lived context via the rules of grammar and definitions of the dictionary, then recomposed it as catechism for evangelical ends. Crazzolara\u2019s \u201cgrammar and vocabulary\u201d with its 537 rules is a stark crystallization of a process the Combonis began immediately upon their arrival in Gulu. The missionaries bore a Catholicism that was well placed for the task of verbatim catechism. As recently as 1888\u2014over thirty year after Daniel Comboni made his first trip to Africa\u2014Pope Leo XIII argued for paternalistic forms of government in Europe on the basis of the fact that the great majority of the people there constituted the\u00a0imperita multitudo<\/em>\u2014\u201cthe illiterate masses.\u201d The Pope would hardly expect something different in Africa. When the missionaries brought Catholicism to northern Uganda, they brought with them, according to the Comboni historian Mario Cisternino, a Christianity \u201cwholly and absolutely in a \u2018Latin\u2019 form.\u201d63\u00a0In doing so, they brought a strong emphasis on catechesis through exact verbal recitation: religion for the illiterate masses.64<\/p>\n

The mission community superior in Uganda, Albino Colombaroli, in Cisternino\u2019s words, \u201cforced his Missionaries to teach everything by heart, without any explanation. He himself started translating the catechism, and imposing it word for word.\u201d65\u00a0To facilitate memorization, the missionaries had the locals chant the catechism,66\u00a0and this, forged through life on the run in a conflict zone, gave the night commuters behind the Comboni Mission Animation Centre their haunting timbre in 2005. \u201cWonwa \u2026 somethingsomethingsomething … polo<\/em>\u201d is “Wonwa ma itye i polo<\/em>“\u2014\u201cOur Father, who is in heaven\u201d; \u201cSomething maria somethingsomething gracia<\/em>\u201d is “Morembe Maria ipong ki gracia<\/em>“\u2014\u201cHail Mary, full of grace.\u201d Now as then.<\/p>\n

Still, the Catholicism brought to the Acholi in the early twentieth century was of a mixed written-oral kind where literate consciousness was evident and dominant. Though the locals were instructed and responded verbally, the form of the speech was thoroughly structured by literate coding.67\u00a0Oral remembrance, though often exact with regard to standardized and particularly vivid phrases, is not, unlike the catechism, verbatim throughout. In fact, the \u201cflow of sound\u201d or \u201criver of action\u201d (Havelock) of oral communication often does not distinguish sharply between particular words.68\u00a0Writing simultaneously \u201cfreezes\u201d (Goody) or \u201cfossilizes\u201d (Havelock) language into a seemingly fixed form and cuts up the now frozen river of action (or fossilized flow of sound) into increasingly smaller units, from phrases to words and even to correct vowel and consonant sounds, as in the case of Crazzolara\u2019s grammar and vocabulary, for any further utterance.69\u00a0Learning the Catholic faith on the part of the Acholi, therefore, became a matter of learning \u201cby heart,\u201d which meant \u201cword for word.\u201d<\/p>\n

The kind of instruction-from-a-distance involved in mission\u2014bringing the teachings all the way from Rome and transplanting them to interior Africa\u2014seemed to require the capacity to abstract language from lived context that the technology of writing offers. Writing, in Ong\u2019s words, makes language \u201cautonomous … self-contained and complete.\u201d Print only furthers a text\u2019s unassailability. \u201cOnce a letterpress form is closed, locked up … and the sheet printed, the text does not accommodate changes (erasures, insertions) so readily as do written texts,\u201d making the printed word even more a \u201cparticularly pre-emptive and imperialist activity that tends to assimilate other things to itself.\u201d The result is what Goody calls the \u201corthodoxy of the book,\u201d in this case reinforcing a particular religious orthodoxy.70<\/p>\n

Such an arrangement could not last, however. The very capacity of writing and print to freeze or fossilize speech in visual form facilitates critical examination\u2014what Goody calls \u201cbackward scanning\u201d\u2014a process that allows what is written and printed \u201cto be inspected, manipulated and re-ordered.\u201d71\u00a0The non-literate Acholi tried to place the catechetical claims in some kind of broader lived interpretive framework\u2014typically one that they had inherited\u2014and this led them to inspect, manipulate and reorder the teachings they received from the Combonis. Father Joseph Zambonardi described the process in his Palaro Mission journal in 1915: \u201cAfter many months of explanations, when we wanted to summarize our teaching we heard them saying that the Father is older than the Son because no child can be older than his own father. … How could anyone live in Heaven without sorghum bread? Does one sleep up there? Does one go hunting?\u201d72<\/p>\n

Like with the British, then, the Combonis faced the real prospect of the failure of their magic to convert the Acholi. A 1917 epidemic in neighboring Moyo put the mission on the defensive when locals blamed the Catholic priests and their god. Father Joseph Zambondardi rebutted, \u201cIs it the mission\u2019s fault if people die? … God is the master of us all, and only He can give well-being. … Let us therefore love Him by doing what he desires.\u201d73\u00a0However, the charges of the ineffectiveness and even mendacity of the Christian god continued. A year later, a healthy Giuseppe Beduschi wrote, \u201cOne person says trembling that the 6 months spent in Gulu for Baptism causes boys and girls to starve to death! Another accusation is that death is also brought by thewaraga<\/em>.\u201d74\u00a0Significantly,\u00a0waraga<\/em>\u00a0literally means \u201cpaper,\u201d and more generally, \u201cschool,\u201d the place where paper is written upon. From the start, locals understood their misfortunes in terms of the imported act of writing. How then to respond? The missionaries had two basic options. One option was to draw upon key symbols from Daniel Comboni\u2019s spirituality of the Cross; the other was to graft the Gospel onto an imperial metanarrative.<\/p>\n

Response to Mission Failure, I: The Cross<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Comboni interpreted ill fortune, and thus the seeming ineffectiveness of the Christian god, in terms of the Cross. Like in the instances of the devotions to Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Comboni\u2019s theology of the Cross arose out of concrete circumstances. While on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land just before his first trip to Africa, he visited Calvary. It had a profound effect on him.75\u00a0The Cross reveals, Comboni repeatedly claimed, a particular understanding of God\u2019s activity in the world that is otherwise unavailable: God brings success\u00a0through<\/em>\u00a0human failure.76\u00a0Comboni took it as empirically verifiable that failure and death is the only true source of success in the spread of the Gospel: \u201cThat all the works of salvation are born and grow at the foot of the Cross is a fact proved by the constant experience of nineteen centuries. … It is through the Cross and martyrdom that all the missions have been founded and prospered.\u201d77<\/p>\n

Upon his arrival in Africa in 1857, Comboni had plenty of experiences to reinforce his devotion to the Cross. Between 1848 and 1862, forty-six missionaries died in the region\u2014twenty-two in one year\u2014mostly from illnesses ranging from malaria to fevers without identifiable sources.78\u00a0Comboni wrote, \u201cHere, from evening to morning, people are dying. Here, there is no time to prepare oneself for death: you have always to be ready.\u201d79\u00a0Comboni himself had to return to Europe after only two years because of severe illness. The pope closed down all of the missions in the region. Comboni later returned to Africa and in 1872 became the new pro-vicar. But further deaths took their toll on his followers, and the Vatican then gave almost all of the vicariate to Charles Martial Lavigerie, the founder of the White Fathers and Comboni\u2019s frequent intra-ecclesial competitor. Broken, Comboni returned ill to Europe once again. He ventured back to Africa one last time, but was too ill to stay out in the field and had to retreat to Khartoum, where he died in 1881. He and his followers managed to convert only thirty families, indicating a rather high missionary-death-to-convert ratio. The number of priests was so low that Mario Cisternino, himself a priest of the congregation, was forced to write, \u201cTo be honest, Comboni\u2019s priests were very few at the time: a good number had died, several others returned to Europe, and no leader had been found among the remainder.\u201d80\u00a0Death and failure: it seems safe to say that Comboni earned his appeal to the Cross.<\/p>\n

In the face of death and failure, the task of the missionary, according to Comboni, was to trust in God\u2019s wisdom.81\u00a0That trust was precisely in God\u2019s capacity\u2014God\u2019s power\u2014to bring about the success of the mission of evangelization. It was a trust that followers\u2014or even other people entirely\u2014would continue the mission in\u00a0sequela Comboni,<\/em>\u00a0as he had imitated Jesus Christ:<\/p>\n

\n

The Gospel wins its victories in a very different way from the politicians. The apostle does not work for himself, but for eternity; he does not seek his own happiness, but that of his fellows; he knows that his work does not die with him and that his grave is the cradle of new apostles.82<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Such trust in God involved a willingness to die\u2014even \u201cthe slow martyrdom of privation, fatigue or the burning climate\u201d\u2014rather than betray one\u2019s mission.83<\/p>\n

Comboni was clear that the willingness to die in evangelization did not mean that the missionary did not exercise prudence; rather it meant that she or he undertook discernment about risk within a different interpretive context, one that the writings identify variously as the \u201ceconomy\u201d or \u201claw\u201d of \u201cGod\u2019s Providence.\u201d In this context, sacrifice and even martyrdom were the normal means of apostolic success; in the economy of Providence, \u201cThe Cross, contradictions, obstacles and sacrifices are the ordinary sign of the holiness of a work.\u201d84\u00a0The practical upshot of the appeal to the Cross was that the seeming failure of the Spirit to intervene on one\u2019s behalf did not, unlike with colonial magic, entail the turn to military force as backup. Comboni is clear on this point. Although historically it has been \u201creverenced on the standards of armies,\u201d the Cross itself involves \u201ca strength which is gentle and does not kill.\u201d It has \u201cgreat power\u201d because \u201cthe Nazarene … stretched out one arm to the East and the other to the West, and gathered his elect from the whole world into the embrace of the Church with pierced hands.\u201d85<\/p>\n

The idea and practice of success through failure in the Cross provided a stark alternative to the turn to violence when colonial magic failed, and, at least at first, the missionary critique of colonialism was strong. An early letter from Comboni to Cardinal Allesandro Barnab\u00f2 regarding Samuel Baker states:<\/p>\n

\n

Letting the diplomats believe that the purpose of this enterprise was to introduce European civilization to these tribes and to abolish and destroy slavery there, [Baker] stationed various companies of soldiers on the principal points along the White Nile. … As a result of this violent invasion, the majority of the Africans of the White Nile withdrew westwards to the interior to flee the oppression of the conquerors … and many thousands of Africans were killed.86<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

However, soon thereafter, Comboni measured the impact of direct confrontation with the British and elected to remain silent about their atrocities. According to a private letter he wrote to Cardinal Barnab\u00f2, Comboni met with the British ambassador to Egypt but kept silent with regard to the explorer\u2019s crimes: \u201cThe illustrious Sir Bartle Fr\u00e8re, Her Majesty\u2019s ambassador, came to see me with his entourage. … However, I thought it prudent to keep quiet for the time being about the massacre of the Africans another Englishman, Sir Samuel Baker, is perpetuating.\u201d87\u00a0Later, what was supposed to be a particular instance of prudence \u201cfor the time being\u201d became Comboni\u2019s mission policy: \u201cIt is of supreme interest of the Mission of Central Africa that we should entertain good relations with the Khedive and the Egyptian Government [of which Baker was the representative in southern Sudan] and that maximum prudence should be used in dealing with them.\u201d88\u00a0In the process of establishing their mission in Gulu, Comboni\u2019s followers took the exercise of prudence in seeking good relations with the Empire to extreme form. Father Louis Molinaro wrote in his memoirs regarding the relationship of another priest, Antonio Vignato (who would later become the Comboni superior general), with J.R.P. Postlethwaite, the first district commissioner of northern Uganda:<\/p>\n

\n

How did Fr. Vignato earn the Officer\u2019s friendship? Through his humility. He didn\u2019t disdain to go up to the office on foot (half and hour\u2019s walk) when Postlethwaite summoned him, which happened often. His many years passed in the Bahr-el-Ghazal meant great experience and prudence. … In Venetian dialect, Vignato commented, \u201cThey say that I polish the Englishman\u2019s shoes. Not only will I polish them, but even kiss them if the Mission\u2019s survival is at stake.\u201d89<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Over time and through repeated interactions like those above, the Combonis moved from obsequious deference to the British to active support of empire\u2014through writing\u2014by grafting the Gospel narrative onto the colonial one in a grand metanarrative that, unlike verbatim catechesis, explicitly articulated how Acholi history fit within the context of a new history. This is most evident in the writing and publication of the pedagogical document\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cOld Acholi\u201d), written by Father Vincent Pelligrini. Published in 1949 and going through multiple editions,\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>\u00a0saw 45,000 copies distributed among the Acholi via the school system by the 1960s, and it is still used in the schools into the twenty-first century.90<\/p>\n

Response to Mission Failure, II: Acholi Macon<\/strong><\/h3>\n

A 1921 gathering of Combonis set out as one of its key resolutions that all converts, in the words of then Monsignor Angelo Negri, \u201cbe able to at least read the primer\u201d before baptism.91\u00a0Negri set up primary and secondary schools for both boys and girls in Gulu.92\u00a0Later, as bishop in the early- to mid-1940s, he founded an indigenous women\u2019s religious order, the Little Sisters of Mary Immaculate, with a focus on teaching, and it is at this point that literacy began to spread more significantly among Catholic Acholi. Mgr. Giovanni Battista Cesana conveyed the consensus from Gulu in 1948: \u201cCatechism is no longer enough. We must give them something more; we must give them education.\u201d93\u00a0That same year the Combonis brought a printing press to Gulu and, while still emphasizing English literacy, began to produce ethnographic texts on the Acholi\u00a0in<\/em>\u00a0Acholi for consumption\u00a0by<\/em>\u00a0the Acholi.94\u00a0The following year, the Combonis, under the Archdiocese of Gulu, published Father Pellegrini\u2019s local vernacular account,\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>, and made it required reading in their schools.<\/p>\n

The title,\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>, translates \u201cOld Acholi,\u201d and the first line makes clear the audience and purpose of the booklet: \u201cWe write these historical matters so that you, the new people (jo manyen<\/em>) may know about your ancestors, so that these issues are not forgotten.\u201d95\u00a0To make clear who these \u201cnew people\u201d are, the present edition includes a photo of St. Joseph\u2019s Cathedral in Gulu. The photo shows Acholi heading towards the cathedral entrance flanked by its four pillars with the caption, “Abila pa Jo manyen i Gulu<\/em>“\u2014\u201cShrine of the new people of Gulu.\u201d Traditionally,\u00a0abila<\/em>\u00a0refers to the clan ancestral shrine. For the\u00a0jo manyen<\/em>, however, the cathedral has displaced the traditional shrine.<\/p>\n

Pellegrini\u2019s reframing in terms of salvation history makes clear the supersessionist trajectory of his interpretation of local history: the new Acholi replace the old. Pellegrini, it needs to be clear, intends no disrespect towards Acholi history. On the contrary, he describes it as venerable.96\u00a0In the background here is Thomas Aquinas\u2019s account of the relationship between the New and the Old Law, which informed the Council of Trent and, in so doing, subsequent Catholic teaching. The Old Law, as manifested in the Hebrew Bible, relates to the New Law as \u201cimperfect\u201d to \u201cperfect.\u201d While the former aims for the earthly good by shaping our external acts through the fear of punishment, the latter, according to Aquinas, directs us to the heavenly good by forming our internal inclinations towards love.97\u00a0Aquinas is clear that the Old Law is good, as is evidenced by the fact that it was given to humans by God. The important point for Aquinas is that whatever a tradition\u2014whether ancient Israelite or \u201cold Acholi\u201d\u2014adds of its own on top of the Old or Natural Law is no longer binding.98\u00a0It is no longer necessary, or even desirable, to sacrifice to the ancestors now that the holy sacrifice of the Eucharist is available. The cathedral is the new\u00a0abila<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Despite what Pelligrini writes about how \u201cancestral issues may be a source of learning\u201d for the new Acholi, he takes the obsolescence of the\u00a0lodito<\/em>\u2014the traditional elders\u2014to be a given and goes on to make clear that the missionaries will serve as the relevant guides for the new Acholi. While the British replaced chiefs that they deemed inadequate for the new order with\u00a0rwodi kalam<\/em>\u2014”chiefs of the pen”\u2014the Combonis appointed themselves the new\u00a0lodito kalam\u00a0<\/em>(my term)\u2014elders of the pen.99\u00a0In light of previous shifts from orality to literacy in other cultures, this deliberate, if not at all times conscious, displacement is not surprising. Havelock writes of Plato and the impact on ancient Greek pedagogy of the turn to prose and the writing down of the Socratic discourses:<\/p>\n

\n

He was attacking the poets less for their poetry (one might say) than for the instruction which it had been their accepted role to provide. They had been the teachers of Greece. … Greek literature had been poetic because the poetry had performed a social function, that of preserving the tradition by which the Greeks lived and instructing them in it. \u2026 It was precisely this didactic function and the authority that went with it to which Plato objected.100<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the Acholi case, as the\u00a0lodito kalam<\/em>\u00a0worked to displace the traditional elders, the school\u2014alternately called waraga, literally \u201cpaper,\u201d to denote its literate basis, and\u00a0gang kwan<\/em>, or \u201chome for reading\u201d\u2014began to replace\u00a0wang oo<\/em>, the evening fire where teaching and learning takes place in the context of the extended family (a process that becomes more complete after the more recent displacement of the Acholi by Museveni). Pellegrini writes as if he is retrieving Acholi tradition at the very moment that he is displacing it.<\/p>\n

What is all the more striking about the re-narration of Acholi history in terms of salvation history in\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>\u00a0is that there is very little reference to the missionaries themselves. The Combonis merit just two paragraphs of perfunctory description of how they settled in Gulu after the British established the town.101\u00a0The main protagonists in bringing the new out of the old are the British. The explorer Samuel Baker serves as a Moses figure. Arabic-speaking slave-traders, which the Acholi called\u00a0Kuturia<\/em>, had preceded Baker from Egypt-Sudan. While Baker did not bring the Acholi out of Egypt on this account, he did much to get (Arabic) Egypt out of Acholiland. As governor of Equatoria in the 1860s and 70s in what is now South Sudan, Baker \u201cimmediately thought of visiting Acholiland so that he could stop people who were hunting for slaves.\u201d He set up a camp in Patiko in 1872, according to Pellegrini, in order to root out the\u00a0Kuturia<\/em>. Baker had momentarily to go southward to the Bunyoro region, but he left behind a Nubian security detail \u201cto help provide protection for the people.\u201d When the security detail faltered, Baker came back and routed the Arabs. Pellegrini comments, \u201cYou cannot narrate the kind of joy everyone had on seeing Baker return;\u201d Baker \u201cstruggled so hard to put an end to the slave trading that the Arabs had started.\u201d102<\/p>\n

Pellegrini lists a dozen chiefs who established treaties with Major James Macdonald and Lieutenant Cyril Martyr.103\u00a0Subsequent soldier-administrators found \u201cthe majority of the Acholi chiefs\u201d (“rwodi Acholi mapol<\/em>“) to be supportive of the new \u201crules of cooperation\u201d (“cik me mer<\/em>“).104\u00a0The exception was Chief Awich, who distrusted the British and resisted the rules of the new Acholiland. He \u201cstarted inciting\u201d (“ocako piyo<\/em>“) not only his own Payira people, but other clans as well, to \u201cstart giving the government trouble\u201d (“wek giyel government<\/em>“), thereby necessitating his first imprisonment.105\u00a0Many chiefs, according to Pellegrini, helped the British round up Awich and his followers. The peace that followed allowed the British, the Acholi and the missionaries together to start the \u201cnew town\u201d (“goma manyen<\/em>“) and \u201cnew mission\u201d (“Mission manyen<\/em>“) at a place they would come to call Gulu.106\u00a0If Samuel Baker is the Moses figure in Pellegrini\u2019s re-narration of Acholi history, Gulu is the New Jerusalem. Chief Awich\u2019s resistance to the formation of Gulu after his initial release warranted his second and longer imprisonment.<\/p>\n

Cooperation with Evil<\/strong><\/h3>\n

We have seen Comboni judgment shift gradually but definitely from condemnation of British colonialism to celebration of it, from Samuel Baker as the leader of a \u201cviolent invasion\u201d in which \u201cmany thousands of Africans were killed,\u201d to Baker as a source of \u201cjoy\u201d because he offered \u201cprotection for the people.\u201d The technologies of writing and print facilitated this process by abstracting Acholi language from its life setting, where it had been ratified not in dictionaries and grammars but in local daily interaction. Once abstracted from its immediate life context, the language became manipulatable in the hands of those who wielded the power of the pen. The Combonis reinserted the abstracted language into an imperial life narrative. The primary problem, in my judgment, is not with the abstraction per se, which is unavoidable when using the technology of writing, but with the particular reinsertion that the Combonis invented: the life of the Acholi as one indebted to the great acts and good will of the colonizers. The missionaries could have reinserted the Acholi language into a Gospel narrative centered, in the tradition of the early Daniel Comboni, around an interpretation of the Cross that promotes nonviolence, decries injustice and serves as a brake on the acceleration and accrual of prudential judgments that end in a policy of justifying, by silence and words, imperialism.107\u00a0In their first half-century in northern Uganda, however, they selected the imperial narrative. The result was\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is helpful here to analyze this consequence in Comboni-emic terms, that is, in terms that Combonis even at the time would have accepted, even if they would have rejected my conclusions. (Again, my aim in undertaking such analysis is less to litigate the actions of the Combonis than to set before ourselves just how difficult it is to write in an imperial context in a way that does no further injustice.) One of the key issues that framed Catholic moral analysis at the time was that of the \u201ccooperation with evil.\u201d Medieval theologians detailed the conditions under which a person owed restitution to a victim even when someone else committed the primary act of injustice. According to Aquinas\u2019s list of conditions, a third party owes restitution to a victim when the former helps bring about the injustice \u201c[b]y command, by counsel, by consent, by flattery, by receiving [some of the material goods gained by the injustice], by participation, by silence, by not preventing, by not denouncing.\u201d108\u00a0In the eighteenth century, Alphonsus Liguori took up the list and described it in terms of \u201ccooperation\u201d with the injustice.109\u00a0His further analysis of what constitutes licit and illicit cooperation with evil quickly became the standard for Roman Catholic moral theology and canon law. The key distinction is that between formal cooperation, where one confirms, at least in part, the object of the wrongdoer\u2019s action, and material cooperation, where one\u2019s actions simply somehow overlap with and inadvertently aid the wrongdoer.<\/p>\n

The Comboni missionaries in northern Uganda were aware of the formal\/material distinction. During the earlier Mahdist uprising in Sudan (1881-1898), the rebels captured several of the missionaries and held them for as long as twelve years. The men were tortured, and the women were under constant threat of sexual assault. Most of the priests and brothers, under duress, abjured the faith\u2014they signed a document made public, thus giving their act the authority of being written and gazetted. Upon the liberation of the missionaries, the main question for Rome was whether their apostasy was formal, an affirmation in one way or another of Islam, or merely material, done with the aim of preserving their lives and no more.110<\/p>\n

Liguori makes the distinction in the following way: \u201cThat [cooperation] is formal which concurs in the bad will of the other, and it cannot be without sin; that [cooperation] is material which concurs only in the bad action of the other, apart from the cooperator\u2019s intention.\u201d111\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>\u2014again, required reading for all students in an institutional setting, the school, that functioned to displace the extended family, evening-fire context for passing on the tradition\u2014inscribes Acholi history into a salvation history where the primary bearers of that history are the colonialists. Such a rewriting of Acholi history constitutes, in Liguori\u2019s terms and the language of the time, formal cooperation in the evil of colonialism because it \u201cconcurs in the bad will\u201d of the British. Rather than being a Moses-like figure who delivered people from slavery, Samuel Baker owned slaves himself in Mauritius and Ceylon. He bought his Nubian troops\u2014called \u201cKhartoumers\u201d after the place in which they were sold\u2014out of slavery simply in order to make them mercenaries against other Africans. Baker did not, as\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>\u00a0states, simply \u201cjourney\u201d to the Bunyoro region to the south of Acholiland; he used his Nubian mercenaries to attack the kingdom there. As indicated earlier, Daniel Comboni and his confreres knew about Baker\u2019s patterns of behavior.<\/p>\n

Acholi Macon<\/em>\u00a0supports its presentation that there was little or no Acholi resistance to colonization by isolating Awich as the lone defiant chief, leaving the broad coalition involved in the Lamogi rebellion\u2014the British arrested thirty-four chiefs\u2014out of its account. This contrasts with the assistant district commissioner\u2019s own report that \u201cthe whole of the southern portion of the district\u201d was \u201cadopting bravado tactics.\u201d112\u00a0With regard to the forced labor and displacement that the British used to forge the largest town in northern Uganda,\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>\u00a0simply states, as if it was created\u00a0ex nihilo<\/em>, \u201cGulu town started in February 1911 when Mr. Bainer and Mr. Sullivan came.\u201d The events to which Crazzolara and other Combonis were eyewitnesses and the insights that the former adds in his private diary\u2014”Now it is as if they were not in their own territory, but in a hostile one. … I have seen burnt barns everywhere\u2014never make it into the publicly printed booklet. Again, Alphonsus Liguori delineated the distinction between formal and material cooperation in response to a longer tradition from the Middle Ages seeking to address the problem of third-party culpability in unjust acts. Aquinas included \u201csilence\u201d and \u201cnot renouncing\u201d injustice in his list of third-party acts that require restitution to the victims. It is clear that the Combonis\u2019 public silence in\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>\u00a0and elsewhere fits Liguori\u2019s understanding of formal cooperation.<\/p>\n

It was the Combonis\u2019 judgment that the conversion of the Africans, and thereby the possibility of their experiencing the beatific vision in the afterlife, was more than proportionate to whatever the latter might suffer at the hands of the British in the present one. Daniel Comboni was clear: \u201cThe only thing that matters to me, I say, is that Africa should be converted.\u201d113\u00a0However, in Catholic moral theology, then as now, it is not licit to commit an evil act or formally cooperate in such an act even in order to achieve what is taken to be a greater good. In Liguori\u2019s words, formal cooperation with evil \u201ccannot be without sin\u201d (“nequit esse sine peccato<\/em>“). This is true even though it is likely that if the missionaries had spoken out against the colonial practices, the British would have either interned or expelled them.<\/p>\n

At this point, it is helpful for further illumination to bring in the emic distinction between objective wrongdoing and subjective culpability. Catholic missionaries in Sudan prior to and after the formation of the Comboni order died at an extraordinary rate as a result of following their vocations. Again, twenty-two died in a single year. And again, Mahdist rebels held captive for a period of up to twelve years, threatened, and often tortured all those missionaries, male and female, who could not flee in time. For instance, the Mahdists took scissors and cut the partition between one sister\u2019s nostrils; they suspended another from a tree and beat the soles of her feet until they were \u201cswollen and black.\u201d114<\/p>\n

I hope that it is clear that what the Comboni missionaries endured during this period was more than most of us could bear. It takes no stretch of the imagination to see that the Comboni community after the Mahdist rebellion was in a state of collective shock. In its wake, they viewed the retaking of Egypt-Sudan by the British not only as a reprieve, but as a kind of liberation that they then projected onto the situation in Acholiland. Baker became Moses, Gulu the New Jerusalem. The pressures of World War I only furthered\u2014or as Aquinas would say, \u201cincreased\u201d\u2014the disposition not to speak of the British injustices. Many of the Combonis were Austrian and thus on the \u201cwrong\u201d side of the war. The British arrested and interned the Austrian missionaries and required even the Italians to declare allegiance to the Empire. Given that Italy and England were on the opposite sides of World War II, the years leading up to the publishing of\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>\u00a0in 1948 provided little reprieve for the Combonis. How much such pressures mitigate the subjective culpability of the Combonis I leave open for debate, but that there were such pressures is unquestionable.<\/p>\n

Lessons for Current Theological Ethnographers: A Thought Experiment<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over one hundred ten years after the British made Uganda a protectorate, a form of indirect rule continues. Following victory in a five-year bush war (1980-1985), current President Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army\/Movement (NRA\/M) forces pursued opponents from northern Uganda back to their homes, massacring people and raiding cattle along the way. An excerpt from an interview I gathered:<\/p>\n

\n

I have a few things that I will never forget in my life\u2014atrocious acts of killing that I have seen in my home among my Acholi people. I will not forget this. I would see how people were arrested, and how people were tortured and eventually killed. I have seen so many young people arrested, for no reason, and taken away. \u2026 I have seen young people arrested in my area and put underground where a big hole had been dug by the military. And there, they suffered underground, and they [the military] would make bread and throw it to these people who were suffering in the ground, like little rats. I have also seen many of these young people who were thrown in the ground, in a pit, being killed by shooting, being killed by beating. Many people died in this way. They died from many causes\u2014either you suffocated or you were beaten to death or you were shot and left dead in the pit.<\/p>\n

One other thing that I will not forget that the military has done in this area is taking away all the possessions from people\u2014the cattle\u2014taking away from people whatever they had in their food store\u2014the rice, maize, groundnuts\u2014all foodstuffs, taking them away. The military would come and defecate in our pots where we had clean water, and they would expect you to drink this when you come, thirsty, back into your house.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In 1996, Museveni ordered all people in Gulu district not living in towns to move to \u201cprotected\u201d Internally Displaced Persons camps (a new \u201cprotectorate\u201d). Refusal to go to the camps on the part of the people was met with armed attack by the NRM\u2019s newly constituted army, the Ugandan Peoples Defense Forces (UPDF). By 2005, over 90% of the people in the North lived in the camps. Numerically, this constituted over a million Acholi and between 1.6 and 1.8 million people overall. That same year, a World Health Organization study, after careful analysis of the situation on the ground in comparison with \u201cnon-crisis\u201d levels in the IDP camps in the Acholiand districts, found that there were almost a thousand excess deaths per week due to such causes as malaria, AIDS, malnutrition and diarrhea (much like in the caves during the Lamogi rebellion).115\u00a0More, the camps served as LRA magnets. One peasant farmer told me, \u201cThe government soldiers who were protecting us were few. Many times when these people [the LRA] came, they [the government soldiers] ran away. They could not protect the people in the camp. The rebels would do whatever they wanted at will.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the government was ostensively protecting the people in the camps, a far greater number of its soldiers were, under Museveni\u2019s orders, robbing natural resources from the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of the \u201cnew scramble for Africa.\u201d116A 2010 United Nations report details the level of violence that the Ugandan government was willing to perpetrate in the DRC\u2014much like it did in Acholiland, with detention in pits, torture and execution.117\u00a0That the dominant powers in the international community have not acted upon the findings of either the International Court of Justice or the United Nations, but rather have continued to fund Museveni\u2019s government, indicates that the dynamics of indirect rule continue. To back his policies, Museveni has appealed to the colonial language of \u201cmodern\u201d society civilizing those who are \u201cbackwards.\u201d118\u00a0More, his National Resistance Movement government has received up to half of its budget from foreign aid in a way that has reinforced his twenty-five-year presidency and lack of democratic accountability. Donor nations get a president who meets their geo-strategic interests, and he gets to rule in perpetuity.119<\/p>\n

In May and June 2011, Ugandan security personnel shot and killed nine people peacefully protesting skyrocketing fuel and food prices. When priests decried the actions, they were charged with \u201cincitement against the government.\u201d120\u00a0Intimidation and even the disappearance of journalists who dare criticize the government continue unabated.121\u00a0When pressed, one U.S. State Department official said, \u201cWe\u2019re watching the situation very carefully. But we aren\u2019t considering sanctions.\u201d122\u00a0On the contrary, in June 2011, the Pentagon authorized $45 million for support to the 5,000-soldier Ugandan contingent fighting alongside Burundian soldiers in proxy for the United States in Somalia. In 2012, when the Ugandan prime minister\u2019s office stole $12 million in aid intended for northern Uganda, the European Union suspended aid, but the United States did not.123\u00a0Indirect rule continues.<\/p>\n

So here is a thought experiment: You are a junior professor doing work in rural northern Uganda among the\u00a0megi<\/em>, the women elders. You are in your third year at a prestigious university that requires, in addition to a list of articles, a minimum of one book\u2014one that is not a reworking of your dissertation\u2014for tenure. You do not mind the requirements, however, because you have known since you were twelve that your vocation is to write and, more specifically, to write from the social location of the academy. You have poured years of energy into your effort, taking the time\u2014itself years\u2014to learn to speak Acholi because many of the\u00a0megi<\/em>, particularly the older ones in the more remote areas, are non-literate and speak virtually no English. In fact, you focus on the lives of the\u00a0megi<\/em>\u00a0precisely because their voices are among the most excluded in the discourses about sub-Saharan Africa. You have conscientiously learned ethnographic methods as an act of solidarity so that their voices can be heard. You are studying how it is that non-literate, non-English or -Italian speaking women became Christian and how their Christianity provided or failed to provide hope for them during the LRA war. It is your sabbatical year, the one meant to give you the time to undertake the year or so more on the ground that will give you enough data in the form of interviews and observations to write your tenure book when you return to the United States.<\/p>\n

In your first month, you find a disturbing pattern already arising: the women testifying that rape has been and\u2014this is the thought-experiment part\u2014even continues to be carried out by government soldiers upon Acholi women as a means of spreading AIDS among the population.124\u00a0The women do not want to report it themselves because they are afraid that their husbands will find out that their wives, specifically, have been raped. The women urge you to write something. The International Criminal Court representative gives you a two sentence thank-you-and-we\u2019ll-get-back-to-you-if-necessary reply. The U.S. embassy officer nods and holds out his hands in a \u201cbut-what-can-we-do\u201d gesture. You approach Human Rights Watch. They are supportive of your work, but their hands are too full addressing the bill in the Ugandan Parliament that would give the death penalty for homosexual acts for them to give adequate attention to the problem of rape in northern Uganda at this time.125<\/p>\n

It is up to you. You figure another month of investigation focused on the problem of AIDS-intended rape will give you enough data to write an article. However, this would be a month directed away from your tenure book project. More problematically, publication of the article could well mean your expulsion from Uganda, or, minimally, the inability to reenter. If this turned out to be the case, you would not be able to finish your tenure book. You would have to start from scratch\u2014different culture, different language\u2014with only three years to work up and publish a new book project. Three years is nowhere near enough time. You would not get tenure. Given the all-or-nothing prospect involved with tenure\u2014many, if not most, professors who fail to get it find that they must leave the academy in order to find gainful employment\u2014the years you spent professionally (eight in graduate school and three as a junior professor) would be lost. You would not fulfill your vocation. And your $50,000 in student loans remains unpaid. You could wait until the book project is done to report the rapes, but how many will have taken place during the interval of silence?<\/p>\n

I pose such questions not to exonerate the Combonis\u2014I think that they formally cooperated with evil\u2014but to help give us a feel for the pressures under which they operated in the first half of the twentieth century. They, too, had a vocation; acting on the initial formulation of that vocation in terms of the nonviolent cross that decries colonial injustice would have led, minimally, to their expulsion. The twin seismic shifts of 1962\u2014the end of colonial rule in Uganda and the start of the Second Vatican Council\u2014fundamentally altered the missionary landscape for the Combonis in a way that allowed life in accordance with the Cross to reemerge. Five were killed by Amin\u2019s soldiers. Comboni missionaries were also at the forefront of negotiations with the LRA in ways that placed their lives at daily risk.126\u00a0Now it is your turn. You have decoded the patois of the\u00a0megi<\/em>, abstracted it in your own notes to an extent rivaling the Comboni dictionaries and grammars. Into which narrative do you reinsert it, and when?<\/p>\n

\n

Notes<\/h4>\n
    \n
  1. See, for instance, Todd Whitmore, \u201cCrossing the Road: The Case for Ethnographic Fieldwork in Christian Ethics,\u201d\u00a0Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics<\/em>27, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 273-294; Mary McClintock Fulkerson,\u00a0Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church<\/em>\u00a0(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Christian Scharen and Aana Marie Vigen, eds.,\u00a0Ethnography as Christian Theology and Ethics<\/em>\u00a0(London: Continuum, 2011).<\/li>\n
  2. John W. Burton, with Orsolya Arva Burton, \u201cSome Reflections on Anthropology\u2019s Missionary Positions,\u201d\u00a0Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute<\/em>13 (2007): 209. For the anthropology of Christianity, see Fenella Cannell, ed.,\u00a0The Anthropology of Christianity<\/em>\u00a0(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). For an anthropology that enters into conversation with Christian theology, see Joel Robbins, \u201cAnthropology and Theology: An Awkward Relationship?\u201dAnthropological Quarterly<\/em>\u00a079, no. 2 (2006): 285-295. Robbins and his students are at the forefront of an effort in anthropology to be in more conversation with theology.<\/li>\n
  3. Michael A. Rynkiewich, response to Charles E. Stipe, \u201cAnthropologists versus Missionaries: The Influence of Presuppositions,\u201d\u00a0Current Anthropology<\/em>21, no. 2 (April 1980): 165-179, at 174, emphasis in original. For nuanced essays by anthropologists on their relationships with missionaries, see also the articles in Roland Bonsen, Hans Marks, and Jelle Miedema, eds.,\u00a0The Ambiguity of Rapprochement: Reflections of Anthropologists on their Controversial Relationships with Missionaries<\/em>\u00a0(City: Publisher, publication year).<\/li>\n
  4. On these binary depictions, see Sjaak van der Geest, \u201cAnthropologists and Missionaries: Brothers under the Skin,\u201d Man,\u00a0New Series<\/em>, 25, no. 4 (1990): 588-601.<\/li>\n
  5. George W. Stocking, Jr.,\u00a0The Ethnographer\u2019s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology<\/em>(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992).<\/li>\n
  6. I am here deliberately if momentarily reversing the Western tendency to identify its own practices as \u201creligion\u201d and those of indigenous peoples elsewhere as \u201cmagic.\u201d Concomitant with the development of religious freedom in Western democracy was an anxious need to identify and delimit the not-religion. \u201cMagic\u201d and \u201cwitchcraft\u201d became umbrella terms to cover all cultural ritual practices that were not \u201creligion.\u201d<\/li>\n
  7. It is difficult to ascertain an \u201coriginal,\u201d pre-colonial Acholi religiosity, both because of the migrations, and thus religious flux, of the peoples who would become \u201cthe Acholi\u201d even prior to colonial contact, and because of the role of colonization itself in the formation of something like a unified Acholi identity.<\/li>\n
  8. There is a fourth kind of\u00a0jok<\/em>, one that is attached to a natural landmark but is not associated with a chiefdom or clan lineage. P\u2019Bitek addresses this kind as part of his chapter on chiefdom\u00a0jogi<\/em>, but they are not the same, even though some chiefdom\u00a0jogi<\/em>are associated with natural landmarks.<\/li>\n
  9. Okot P\u2019Bitek,\u00a0Religion of the Central Luo<\/em>(Nairobi\/Kampala\/Dar Es Salaam: East African Literature Bureau, 1971), 96 and 104.<\/li>\n
  10. Ibid., 94.<\/li>\n
  11. Ibid., 94, 76, 80, and 74.<\/li>\n
  12. Ibid., 95-96.<\/li>\n
  13. Ibid., 143.<\/li>\n
  14. See Okot p\u2019Bitek,\u00a0Horn of My Love<\/em>(Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya Ltd, 1974), 12-14. I alter p\u2019Bitek\u2019s translation of\u00a0pyelo i kaki<\/em>\u00a0from \u201che excretes in his khaki trousers\u201d to \u201che shits his khaki trousers\u201d because\u00a0pyelo<\/em>\u00a0is the cruder term for\u00a0konynye<\/em>, the latter meaning literally, \u201cto ease oneself.\u201d Both the wordpyelo<\/em>\u00a0and the context of mocking merit the cruder translation. P\u2019Bitek does not hesitate in the second poem to translate\u00a0gero<\/em>, which means, even in a non-crude sense, both sexual intercourse and marriage, as \u201cfuck.\u201d The defiant, mocking tone of the second poem also seems to warrant the cruder translation.<\/li>\n
  15. Eric Havelock,\u00a0The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present<\/em>(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 66.<\/li>\n
  16. Jack Goody,\u00a0The Domestication of the Savage Mind<\/em>(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 14.<\/li>\n
  17. Walter Ong,\u00a0Orality and Literacy<\/em>(London: Routledge, 2002), 76 and 32.<\/li>\n
  18. Havelock,\u00a0The Muse Learns to Write<\/em>, 69; cf also 54 and 57; Goody,\u00a0The Domestication of the Savage Mind<\/em>, 113.<\/li>\n
  19. Havelock,\u00a0The Muse Learns to Write<\/em>, 76; Ong,\u00a0Orality and Literacy<\/em>, 37-41.<\/li>\n
  20. Havelock,\u00a0The Muse Learns to Write<\/em>, 76.<\/li>\n
  21. Ibid., 70, 77, and 79.<\/li>\n
  22. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, \u201cThe Consequences of Literacy,\u201d in\u00a0Literacy in Traditional Societies<\/em>, ed. Jack Goody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 29; Ong,\u00a0Orality and Literacy<\/em>, 46-47.<\/li>\n
  23. Goody,\u00a0The Domestication of the Savage Mind<\/em>, 109; cf. also 111, 128, and 160-161. For Ong and Havelock on how writing changes consciousness, see Ong,\u00a0Orality and Literacy<\/em>, 50-56; and Havelock,\u00a0The Muse Learns to Write<\/em>, 98-116.<\/li>\n
  24. John Hanning Speke,\u00a0Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile<\/em>(London: William Blackwood, 1863), 535-537.<\/li>\n
  25. Claude Levi-Strauss,\u00a0Tristes Tropiques<\/em>(New York: Atheneum, 1981), 296 and 297-298.<\/li>\n
  26. Ibid.<\/li>\n
  27. On cargo cults, see Lamont Lindstrom,\u00a0Cargo Cult: Strange Stories from Melanesia and Beyond<\/em>(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993).<\/li>\n
  28. Martha Kaplan, \u201cThe Magical Power of the (Printed) Word,\u201d in\u00a0Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment<\/em>, eds. Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 190.<\/li>\n
  29. At first blush, this system appears to be more humane than direct rule and was claimed to be just that. Indirect rule meant that Uganda was not formally a colony, but merely a \u201cprotectorate.\u201d<\/li>\n
  30. Cited in Mario Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa: Missionary and Imperial Papers on the Evangelization of Uganda and Sudan, 1848-1923<\/em>(Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2004), 316 and 316, n. 40.<\/li>\n
  31. The possibility that the spirits of any killed returnees might visit upon the Acholi as\u00a0cen<\/em>\u2014vengeful ghosts\u2014also loomed.<\/li>\n
  32. Reuben S. Anywar, \u201cThe Life of Rwot Iburaim Awich,”\u00a0Uganda Journal<\/em>12, no. 1 (1948): 76.<\/li>\n
  33. Cited in Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 363.<\/li>\n
  34. Ibid., 361.<\/li>\n
  35. Due to the Mahdist rebellion in Sudan, the British were absent from Acholiland from 1888-98. R. M. Bere, \u201cAwich\u2014A Biographical Note and a Chapter of Acholi History,\u201d\u00a0Uganda Journal<\/em>10, no. 2 (1946): 77.<\/li>\n
  36. On the variety of forms of resistance by locals under imperial presence, see James C. Scott,\u00a0Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts<\/em>(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).<\/li>\n
  37. A. D. Adimola, \u201cThe Lamogi Rebellion, 1911-1912,\u201d\u00a0Uganda Journal<\/em>18, no. 2 (1954): 175. Cisternino states that \u201c300 and more died of dysentery.\u201d Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 375.<\/li>\n
  38. Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 375.<\/li>\n
  39. Ibid.<\/li>\n
  40. Adimola, \u201cThe Lamogi Rebellion, 1911-1912,\u201d 176.<\/li>\n
  41. Ibid., 143.<\/li>\n
  42. Heike Behrend writes, in her overview of the impact of colonialism on Acholi religiosity, \u201cSince the colonial period, the power of the\u00a0jogi<\/em>of the chiefdoms and the clans has generally tended to fade into the background, while the free\u00a0jogi<\/em>\u00a0and the witches gained ever more power.\u201d Behrend,\u00a0Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda<\/em>\u00a0(Oxford: James Curry\/ Kampala: Fountain Publishers\/ Nairobi: EAEP\/ Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 107.<\/li>\n
  43. The first missionaries to Gulu were aided in their spiritual combat by the colonial Witchcraft Ordinance of 1912, which was revised in 1921 to make punishment for practice more severe\u2014increasing incarceration from one to five years and including penalties for possession of the objects of practice. See A. Adu Boahen,\u00a0Africa under Colonial Domination, 1880-1935<\/em>, vol. 7 of UNESCO\u00a0General History of Africa<\/em>, abridged ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 218.<\/li>\n
  44. On Margaret Mary Alacoque, see Robert Russell, \u201cSt. Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Sacre Coeur,\u201d\u00a0Buckfast Chronicle<\/em>32, no. 3 (Autumn 1962): 168.<\/li>\n
  45. The devotion remains prominent in the order, now called the \u201cComboni Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus.\u201d<\/li>\n
  46. La Salette is the site of an apparition of Mary witnessed by two children in 1846. Daniel Comboni,\u00a0Daniel Comboni: The Man and His Message<\/em>, ed. and trans. Aldo Gilli (Bologna: Edittrice Missionaria Italiana, 1980), 189-190.<\/li>\n
  47. Ibid., 192.<\/li>\n
  48. Ibid., 209.<\/li>\n
  49. Ibid., 212: \u201cMy work is in itself hard and arduous, and only God\u2019s infinite power is able to make it succeed. So all my hope is in the Heart of Jesus and in the intercession of Mary.\u201d For further references in Comboni\u2019s writings to God\u2019s power, particularly as exercised through Mary, see also 189 and 193.<\/li>\n
  50. On God\u2019s protective role, particularly through Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, see, for instance, Daniel Comboni, Daniel Comboni, 219: \u201cThe Scared Heart of Jesus and Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, to whom Central Africa is consecrated, they will protect our work.\u201d See also 194 (\u201cguard us as your property and heritage\u201d), 214, 232 (\u201cGod should give me those who can help me … and should keep them safe), and 257.<\/li>\n
  51. Ibid., 68.<\/li>\n
  52. Fr. Tarcisio Agostoni,\u00a0The Comboni Missionaries: An Outline History, 1867-1997<\/em>(Rome: Bibliotheca Comboniana, 2003), 290, referring to a letter to the Institute written by Vicar General Antonio Vignato in 1937.<\/li>\n
  53. Agostoni,\u00a0The Comboni Missionaries<\/em>, 486: The Comboni Rule of Life is \u201cthe concrete path of our \u2018sequela Christi\u2019 as followers of Comboni (sequela).\u201d On the\u00a0sequela Christi<\/em>in the Comboni Rule, see also 468 and 469.<\/li>\n
  54. Ibid., 515.<\/li>\n
  55. Giovanni Vantini, \u201cLul: The First Missionary Outpost in Southern Sudan in the Twentieth Century,\u201d in\u00a0White Nile, Black Blood: War, Leadership, and Ethnicity from Khartoum to Kampala<\/em>, ed. Jay Spalding and Stephanie Beswick (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2000), 320.<\/li>\n
  56. Vinco taught at the Mazza Institute, to which Comboni belonged before forming his own group of missionaries. See Giovanni Vantini,\u00a0Christianity in the Sudan<\/em>(Bologna: EMI, 1981), 237.<\/li>\n
  57. Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 13.<\/li>\n
  58. J. P. Crazzolara,\u00a0A Study of the Acooli Language: Grammar and Vocabulary<\/em>(City of Publication: Publisher, 1955), 1. In the earlier stages of the movement from orality to literacy, the spellings of words remain in flux. Crazzolara uses\u00a0c<\/em>\u00a0to symbolize the \u201cch\u201d sound, and this is still the usage with many words. However, the more common spelling of\u00a0Acooli<\/em>\u00a0now is\u00a0Acholi<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  59. Ong,\u00a0Orality and Literacy<\/em>, 77; cf. also 100 and 102.<\/li>\n
  60. See Havelock,\u00a0The Muse Learns to Write<\/em>, 8-12, 58, and 61-2, 106; Ong,\u00a0Orality and Literacy<\/em>, 84.<\/li>\n
  61. Goody,\u00a0The Domestication of the Savage Mind<\/em>, 78 and 148; Havelock,\u00a0The Muse Learns to Write<\/em>, 58-62.<\/li>\n
  62. On the development of lists due to the technology of writing, see Goody,\u00a0The Domestication of the Savage Mind<\/em>, 74-111.<\/li>\n
  63. Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 64. Cisternino is a Comboni historian in the sense that he is both a historian of and member of the order. Rev. Cisternino died in June 2011.<\/li>\n
  64. I prefer to distinguish between \u201cnon-literate\u201d persons in oral culture and \u201cilliterate\u201d persons whom a literate culture has failed to teach to read and write. Here, however, in order to indicate the parallel approach of Catholic catechesis in Europe and Africa at the time, I use Leo XIII\u2019s term, \u201cilliterate.\u201d This also highlights the fact that European culture at the time viewed Africans not as non-literate, that is oral, but as illiterate and therefore lesser.<\/li>\n
  65. Cisternino, Passion for Africa, 353.<\/li>\n
  66. Fr. Mario Marchetti,\u00a0Too Long in the Dark: The Story of the Two Martyrs of Paimol and the Relevance to Uganda Today<\/em>(Gulu: Archdiocese of Gulu, 1999), 44.<\/li>\n
  67. Oral-literate combinations of various kinds have been and continue to be common. In the early stages in the literacy of a culture, for instance, most writing intended for public consumption was read aloud. The scribe was a specialist alongside the chief, the\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>and the poet. Even in societies that are deemed \u201cfully literate,\u201d technologies like radio and film keep what Ong calls a \u201csecondary orality\u201d in play. The pertinent question is which of the two linguistic codings in the mix is dominant, and in the case of the form of catechism brought by the Combonis, it is the coding of literate consciousness. Ong,Orality and Literacy<\/em>, 133-35.<\/li>\n
  68. Goody,\u00a0The Domestication of the Savage Mind<\/em>, 115.<\/li>\n
  69. Ibid., 71; Havelock,\u00a0The Muse Learns to Write<\/em>, 66.<\/li>\n
  70. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 130 and 12; Goody,\u00a0The Domestication of the Savage Mind<\/em>, 37.<\/li>\n
  71. Goody,\u00a0The Domestication of the Savage Mind<\/em>, 128 and 76.<\/li>\n
  72. Cisternino , 433.<\/li>\n
  73. Ibid., 458.<\/li>\n
  74. Ibid., 469-470.<\/li>\n
  75. Daniel Comboni,\u00a0Daniel Comboni<\/em>, 200.<\/li>\n
  76. Ibid., 208: \u201cThe God-Man showed his wisdom in no better way than in making the Cross.\u201d See also 210 and 218.<\/li>\n
  77. Ibid., 213-14 and 219-220. See also 235.<\/li>\n
  78. Giovanni Vantini,\u00a0Christianity in the Sudan<\/em>(Bologna: EMI, 1981), 240.<\/li>\n
  79. Daniel Comboni,\u00a0Daniel Comboni<\/em>, 203.<\/li>\n
  80. Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 212, n.29.<\/li>\n
  81. Daniel Comboni,\u00a0Daniel Comboni<\/em>, 211. On the theme of trust in God, see also 42,136, 203-205, 209, 232, and 236.<\/li>\n
  82. Ibid., 136. See also 212.<\/li>\n
  83. Ibid., 220. See also 42.<\/li>\n
  84. Ibid., 221. On the \u201ceconomy of Providence,\u201d see also 201-202; on the \u201claw of God\u2019s Providence,\u201d see 213; on prudence, see, for instance, 69.<\/li>\n
  85. Ibid., 215-216.<\/li>\n
  86. Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 80.<\/li>\n
  87. Ibid., 210, note 25.<\/li>\n
  88. Ibid., 85.<\/li>\n
  89. Ibid., 410.<\/li>\n
  90. Tim Allen, \u201cReview of Ronald Atkinson, The Roots of Ethnicity,\u201d\u00a0Africa<\/em>66, no. 3 (1996): 474; and Behrend,\u00a0Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits<\/em>, 150. As of this writing, the most recent edition of Acholi Macon was published in 2006. Vincent Pellegrini, Acholi Macon (Gulu: Gulu Archdiocese: 2006).<\/li>\n
  91. Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 529-530.<\/li>\n
  92. The schools were named Angelo Negri Primary and Secondary School, Mary Immaculate Primary School and Sacred Heart Secondary School. See Sam Lawino, \u201cFootprints of Colonialism in the North,\u201d\u00a0Daily Monitor<\/em>(July 20, 2012),http:\/\/www.monitor.co.ug\/SpecialReports\/ugandaat50\/Footprints+of+colonialism+in+the+north\/-\/1370466\/1458240\/-\/kl62lz\/-\/index.html\u00a0(accessed July 28, 2012).<\/li>\n
  93. Agostoni,\u00a0The Comboni Missionaries<\/em>, 338.<\/li>\n
  94. See Behrend,\u00a0Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits<\/em>, 148-150.<\/li>\n
  95. Pellegrini,\u00a0Acholi<\/em>Macon, (2. The Acholi reads, \u201cLok manok man ma wacoyo kany watimo wek wunu jo manyen wungee maber lok pa kwarowu, wek kop man ducu pe dok orweny ki bot dano<\/em>.\u201d I am indebted to Ketty Anyeko for translating key sections of the document for me. She translates much more rapidly and accurately than I can, and she saved me much time and headache. I have adjusted Ms. Anyeko\u2019s translation in a few places and in minor ways where I thought different wording conveyed the meaning more fully.<\/li>\n
  96. Pellegrini,\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>, 2: \u201cLok pa jo macon obed pwony pi jo manyen. Ka bed buk pe kano lok man kono gin ducu ma kwarowu otimo orwenyo woko oyotyot.<\/em>\u201d<\/li>\n
  97. Thomas Aquinas,\u00a0Summa Theologica<\/em>, Ia-IIae, q. 91, a.5. (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948).<\/li>\n
  98. Aquinas,\u00a0Summa Theologica<\/em>, Ia-IIae, q. 98.<\/li>\n
  99. Heike Behrend notes that the \u201cfeedback to the self-image of the Acholi and their ideas of their history\u201d that resulted from the writing of\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>\u201cshould not be underestimated.\u201d However, given that Behrend, by her own admission \u201cabstained from learning Acholi or Lwo,\u201d she has no way of knowing just what that feedback effect is given that\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>is written in Acholi Lwo. This severely delimits the depth of her analysis in what is, in many ways, a very good book. Behrend,\u00a0Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits,<\/em>\u00a0150 and 12-13. The Combonis tried at first to convert adults, but did not have much success, so focused on children, for whom the missionaries became spiritual parents.<\/li>\n
  100. Havelock,\u00a0The Muse Learns to Write<\/em>, 8. For the full exposition of Havelock\u2019s argument on this point, see Havelock,\u00a0Preface to Plato<\/em>(Cambridge,MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963).<\/li>\n
  101. Pellegrini,\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>, 54: \u201cMons. Geyer otito ki gin tic ma Mission obino ka tiyo<\/em>\u201d and \u201cLotino me lokotyeno gucako bino mapol<\/em>.\u201d<\/li>\n
  102. Pellegrini,\u00a0Acholi Macon<\/em>, 37-41. \u201cBaker immediately thought of visiting Acholiland so that he could stop people who were hunting for slaves,\u201d in the original is, \u201cBaker otamo me cako limone cut, wek ecigeng ki kunnu jo yenyo dano<\/em>.\u201d \u201cStruggled so hard to put an end to the slave trading that the Arabs had started; his name became famous among the Acholi,\u201d is \u201coyelle mada wek etyek lok ma jo Arab gu cako me cato dano calo opi; nyinge oywek mada i kin Acoli, ma giloko pire wa onyo<\/em>.\u201d<\/li>\n
  103. Ibid., 49-50.<\/li>\n
  104. Ibid., 51.<\/li>\n
  105. Ibid., 51.\u00a0Piyo<\/em>, to persuade, urge, induce, or incite, comes from its form as a verbal noun meaning to stir with a pestle. According to Pellegrini, Chief Awich was literally \u201cstirring things up.\u201d<\/li>\n
  106. Ibid., 52.<\/li>\n
  107. The Combonis also could have, as much as is possible, taught only the technology of writing and allowed the Acholi to reinsert the language into their life history and practices in ways that they deemed fit. Given that the Combonis were missionaries, the likelihood of this option was nil.<\/li>\n
  108. Aquinas,\u00a0Summa Theologica<\/em>, IIa IIae, q. 62, a. 7.<\/li>\n
  109. Alphonsus Liguori,\u00a0Theologia Moralis<\/em>, ed. L. Gaude, 4 vols (Rome: Ex Typographia Vaticana, 1905-12), 2:258-70 (lib. III, sections 557-78).<\/li>\n
  110. Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 233.<\/li>\n
  111. Liguori,\u00a0Theologia Moralis<\/em>, 1:357 (lib. II, section 63). The Latin reads: \u201cSed melius cum aliis dicendum, illam esse formalem, quae concurrit ad malam voluntatem alterius, et nequit esse sine peccato; materialem vero illam, quae concurrit tantum ad malam actionem alterius, prater intenionem cooperantis<\/em>.\u201d<\/li>\n
  112. Adimola, \u201cThe Lamogi Rebellion, 1911-1912,\u201d 172.<\/li>\n
  113. Comboni, Daniel Comboni, 232; cf. also Comboni\u2019s letter to Cardinal Simeoni in Cisternino,\u00a0Passion for Africa<\/em>, 143: \u201cWhat I totally care for (and this has been the only and true passion of my whole life, and so will it be until death, and I will not blush about it) is that Africa should be converted.\u201d<\/li>\n
  114. Ibid., 215, 216, and 229.<\/li>\n
  115. Ministry of Health, The Republic of Uganda,\u00a0Health and Mortality Survey Among Internally Displaced Persons in Gulu, Kitgu, and Pader Districts, Northern Uganda<\/em>(July 2005): ii. Available at\u00a0http:\/\/www.who.int\/hac\/crises\/uga\/sitreps\/Ugandamortsurvey.pdf\u00a0(retrieved April 22, 2013).<\/li>\n
  116. On the \u201cnew scramble,\u201d see Roger Southall and Henning Melber, eds.,\u00a0A New Scramble for Africa?: Imperialism, Investment and Development<\/em>(Scottsville, South Africa: University of Kwa-Zulu Press, 2009). In 2005, the International Court of Justice found the government of Uganda guilty of the illegal extraction of raw materials and ordered it to pay the DRC $10 billion in restitution, an amount that remains unpaid. See International Court of Justice, \u201cArmed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Uganda),\u201d December 19, 2005,\u00a0http:\/\/www.icj-cij.org\/docket\/files\/116\/10521.pdf\u00a0(accessed March 28, 2013). See also\u00a0United Nations Expert Panel on Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)<\/em>, \u201cReport of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo\u201d (2002),\u00a0http:\/\/www.un.org\/News\/dh\/latest\/drcongo.htm\u00a0(accessed March 28, 2013).<\/li>\n
  117. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNOHCHR), \u201cDemocratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003: Report of the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo between March 1993 and June 2003,\u201d paragraph 349, August 2010 (Released on October 1, 2010),http:\/\/www.ohchr.org\/Documents\/Countries\/ZR\/DRC_MAPPING_REPORT_FINAL_EN.pdf\u00a0(accessed March 28, 2013).<\/li>\n
  118. See \u201cMuseveni directs final Lakwena offensive,\u201d\u00a0New Vision<\/em>(November 6, 1987); and New Vision (July 23, 2006).<\/li>\n
  119. Kenya is another example that is perhaps even more trenchant than that of Uganda. In the case of Uganda, the International Criminal Court has refused to indict President Yoweri Museveni because the more serious of the crimes that he committed occurred before the founding of the court. The United States, therefore, can support him more readily than otherwise. In the case of Kenya, however, the newly elected president, Uhuru Kenyatta, has already been indicted by the court. Kenya, as well as Uganda, is a geo-politically strategic country for the United States, and both East African countries have soldiers fighting on behalf of the United States and its allies in Somalia. Kenya exports tea, coffee, and flowers to the United States and Europe and depends on their tourism for income. Kenya receives $1 billion annually in aid from the United States. See, \u201cKenya\u2019s Awkward Choice for President,”\u00a0New York Times<\/em>, March 13, 2013,\u00a0http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/03\/14\/opinion\/kenyas-awkward-choice-for-president.html?ref=uhurukenyatta&_r=0\u00a0(accessed March 16, 2013).<\/li>\n
  120. \u201cUganda: priests charged with incitement against government,\u201d May 13, 2011,\u00a0http:\/\/www.catholicculture.org\/news\/headlines\/index.cfm?storyid=10327&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CatholicWorldNewsFeatureStories+%28Catholic+World+News+%28on+CatholicCulture.org%29%29\u00a0(accessed March 28, 2013).<\/li>\n
  121. See Human Rights Watch,\u00a0A Media Minefield: Increased Threats to Freedom of Expression in Uganda<\/em>, May 3, 2010,\u00a0http:\/\/www.hrw.org\/node\/90067(accessed March 28, 2013); Human Rights Watch, \u201cUganda: Charge or Release Charged Journalist: Radio Reporter Disappeared After Meeting with Security Officer,\u201d July 23, 2011,\u00a0http:\/\/www.hrw.org\/en\/news\/2011\/07\/23\/uganda-charge-or-release-detained-journalist\u00a0(accessed March 28, 2013); and Committee to Protect Journalists, \u201cUganda illegally detains journalist without charge,\u201d July 26, 2011,\u00a0http:\/\/www.cpj.org\/2011\/07\/uganda-illegally-detains-journalist-without-charge.php\u00a0(accessed March 28, 2013).<\/li>\n
  122. Helen Epstein, \u201cWhat the US is ignoring in Uganda,\u201d\u00a0The Monitor<\/em>, July 24, 2011,http:\/\/www.monitor.co.ug\/News\/National\/-\/688334\/1206294\/-\/bl38vkz\/-\/index.html\u00a0(accessed March 28, 2103).<\/li>\n
  123. Dear Jeanne and John Njoroge, \u201cDonors cut all budget support to Uganda until 2015,\u201d\u00a0Africa Review<\/em>, December 12, 2012,http:\/\/www.africareview.com\/News\/Donors-cut-all-direct-aid-to-Uganda\/-\/979180\/1636076\/-\/11k5ymv\/-\/index.html\u00a0(accessed March 16, 2013).<\/li>\n
  124. That rape for such reasons was carried out in the past by government soldiers has been reported to me on a number of occasions. What is unclear to me from what I been told is how the witnesses know that the rapes were carried out for the specific purpose of spreading AIDS. I know of no recent incidents of rape by government forces in northern Uganda.<\/li>\n
  125. See Rasmus Thirup Beck, \u201cGay people in Uganda: love on the run,\u201d\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>, February 3, 2013,http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/2013\/feb\/04\/gay-people-uganda-love-run\u00a0(retrieved March 16, 2013).<\/li>\n
  126. One of the missionaries who risked his life repeatedly is Carlos Rordriquez Soto. Though he has since left the order, he details his time in Uganda inTall Grass: Stories of Suffering and Peace in Northern Uganda<\/em>(Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2009).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Download PDF:\u00a0Whitmore, Sequela Comboni Abstract In the last half-dozen years or so, the idea and practice of borrowing ethnographic methods in the doing of theology has grown. Some contributors to this discussion, including myself, draw upon ethnographic methods in order<\/p>\n

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