9 - The Texts of the Holy Spirit Movement

Summary

The advance and spread of writing and the modern mass media in what were called scripdess cultures have led to fundamental changes. Since the ethnographed, the subjects of our study, are now beginning to create their own texts, anthropologists have lost forever the privilege of writing the first text. The soldiers of the Holy Spirit Movement also produced their own texts, which will be examined more closely in this chapter. First, a short digression will depict the spread of writing in Acholi from a historical perspective. Then various texts by Holy Spirit soldiers will be presented with an elucidation of how they were received; here I am primarily interested in what was remembered and considered worth writing down and which experiences found expression in these texts. Since I had access to an unfortunately limited number of texts, what follows must be regarded as provisional and incomplete.

Aspects of the History of Writing in Acholi

As in other regions of Africa, the introduction of writing in Acholi was closely connected with Christian evangelization. Accordingly, the practice of the Christian religion was translated as ‘reading dini ’ or ‘counting dini’ and Christians were termed readers.

Protestant as well as Catholic missionaries placed the Book of Books, the Bible, at the centre of their teaching and their cult. Since they constantly referred to the Bible as the path to salvation, many Acholi were bound to see it as the key to the Europeans’ power (cf. Janzen, 1985:229). And although, or precisely because, the missionaries condemned all magical practices as devil's work, they could not prevent the Africans from regarding the Bible as a magical object, comparable to an amulet, or strong medicine, useful for the purposes of sorcery and divination. Like the ability to affect the world in ritual, the ability to read and write appeared to them to be a kind of ritual, a magical activity providing access to power and thus exercising an effect on the world (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991:192). To this day, the idea of the magic potency of reading and writing continues. Thus, an ajwaka once told me that the coin she used in divination was her Bible and that she read from it.