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.

Ms Lakwena inspired her poorly equipped troops with claims that spirits spoke through her, and led them into battle singing Christian hymns.

Her rebellion, which drew up to 15,000 followers, was one of the most unusual and successful insurgent groups that began in northern Uganda after President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, and his troops swept the country and seized power in 1986.

Combining Christianity with the traditional beliefs of her Acholi tribe, she acted as a spiritual leader for her followers.

In 1987, Ms Lakwena’s ragtag army marched through Uganda and came to within 50 miles of the capital, Kampala, before Museveni crushed it in a bloody battle. Thousands of her followers, armed mainly with sticks and stones, died, and she fled to Kenya.

Her Holy Spirit Movement is widely believed to be the forerunner of today’s Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group led by her cousin, Joseph Kony. The Lord’s Resistance Army is accused of abducting 20,000 children to swell its ranks.