Warrior priestess with ‘spiritual powers’ laid to rest

ALICE Lakwena, a Ugandan warrior priestess who led an insurgency in the 1980s and claimed to have spiritual powers to protect her fighters from bullets by anointing them with oil, has been laid to rest at a funeral attended by several hundred followers.

Ms Lakwena was 50 when she died from unknown causes on January 17 in neighbouring Kenya, where she had lived in a refugee camp for 20 years.

Her casket was flown on Friday to Uganda, and on Saturday she was buried in her mother’s home village of Bungatira, in the Gulu district of the country’s troubled north. No senior Ugandan officials attended the funeral.