Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 41-58 www.brill.

nl/jra

The Rise of Occult Powers, AIDS and the

Roman Catholic Church in Western Uganda

Heike Behrend
Institute for African Studies, University of Köln,
Meister-Ekkehart-Str. 7, 50923 Köln, Germany
heike.behrend@uni-koeln.de

Abstract
Taking as my example a lay organisation of the Roman Catholic Church, the Uganda Martyrs
Guild, which entered the public domain in western Uganda in the 1990s and started to organise
witch and cannibal hunts, I offer two arguments to the ongoing debate on the rise of occult forces
in Africa. First, against the tendency to find the origin of the rise of occult forces in the invisible
hand of capital, I relate the dramatic activation and rise of occult forces in Africa to the large increase
in death rates caused by the AIDS epidemic (and to a lesser extent local wars). Although various
scholars have shown in detail that in Africa contemporary Christianity has not put an end to witch-
craft and the occult, but instead provided a new context in which they make perfect sense, they
missed the point that precisely the fight against the occult reproduces and strengthens the ‘enemy’.
As I try to show, Christian anti-witchcraft movements are instrumental in reinstating the occult
powers they fight against.

Keywords
Uganda Martyrs Guild, Roman Catholic Church, cannibalism, witchcraft, AIDS

Introduction
When I came to Tooro in western Uganda in 1998, I was more than surprised to
find people talking about abali wawantu, man-eaters or cannibals. Women and
men from all social classes, in towns as well as in rural areas, complained that
cannibals were killing and eating their relatives, friends and neighbours. These
cannibals likewise were said to be witches, because they first bewitched their
victims so that they died. Then, after the burial, cannibals resurrected the
dead not so much to work for them as zombies (cf. Ardener 1970, Fisiy and
Geschiere 2001: 241) but to eat them at a sinister banquet with other cannibals.
Thus, these cannibals were part of a radicalised witchcraft discourse: whereas

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witches kill only once, cannibals kill twice, doubling and prolonging the horror
of death.
While, in the 1970s, man-eaters were still assumed to be confined to Kijura in
Mwenge district, it was said that since the 1980s they had greatly multiplied and
spread into other regions. In 1998, I was told that cannibals were everywhere; in
some regions where they had become epidemic a sort of ‘internal terror’ (Lons-
dale 1992: 355) reigned, a secret war, in which anyone you encountered could be
an enemy, prepared to kill and eat you.1

Occult forces on the rise

In recent years, religion and even the ‘religious’ have resurfaced in various parts
of the world with unprecedented force. Various religious groups, Islamic as well
as Christian, entered the political arena, challenging the notion that secular soci-
ety and the modern nation state can provide the moral fibre that unites national
communities ( Juergensmeyer 2000: 225). Responding to the forces of globalisa-
tion, the liberalisation of the market, the decline of states and the emergence of
new media in the last two decades, political theologies have emerged that force-
fully counter the western concept of religion as a private individual matter. The
‘return of the religious’ has also become the object of a complex debate among
philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians of religion and anthro-
pologists (for example de Vries and Weber 2001), reinforcing the view that the
more or less uncontested narrative of a secular modernity had obscured the fact
that in most historical formations the political in various ways had been contin-
gent upon the authority or explicit sanctions of a dominant religion. Indeed, the
clear-cut separation between the domains of the religious and the state became
problematic and instead the interconnectedness and complementarity of both
domains have been placed in the foreground (Derrida 2001).
Among anthropologists working in Africa, the idea of ‘a return of the reli-
gious’, however, was shifted more to themes like ‘the actuality of evil’ and ‘the rise
of occult forces’. Yet, like their colleagues in other disciplines, most anthropolo-
gists took as the main causes for the dramatic rise in occult powers the global
capitalism unleashed by neoliberalism and the breakdown of the public sphere
in postcolonial states producing new exclusions, increasing poverty, illicit accu-
mulations, and thereby radical inequalities2 (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993,
1999). While some authors stress the consequences of the Structural Adjust-
ment Program of the IMF and the World Bank in ‘freeing the market’ and
thereby freeing also the possibilities for marketing the occult (Sanders 2001:
162), for others it is, above all, illicit accumulation and the exploitative extrac-

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tion of labour and life-force that leads to the rise of witchcraft and cannibal accu-
sations (Colson 2000, Shaw 2001). Against the integration of global factors,
Maia Green, for example, emphasised that witchcraft panics must be under-
stood, above all, in the context of the actual relationships between different local
political institutions (Green 2003: 122), while Birgit Meyer stressed the impact
of modern media, radio, TV, video and print media in spreading and increasing
the reality (and truth) of occult powers (Meyer 2003: 28). Yet, while empha-
sising different aspects, most authors agree more or less that the emergence
of satanic spirits, witches, cannibals, ritual killings and human sacrifices have
to be seen as the contradictory effects of global capitalism and the culture of
neoliberalism.
It is interesting to note that religion in this African context has made its come-
back not only as an empirical given, as the vehicle of various identities, values
and cultural expressions, but also as an ‘interpretandum’ whose semantic, figu-
rative and rhetorical potentials serve as a powerful analytical tool (de Vries 2001:
6 f.). Religious discourse came to be seen as diagnostic and as a more or less
critical commentary on the unfolding of a (post)modernity in Africa in which
witches, satanic spirits and cannibals expressed the dark side of kinship (Geschiere
1997) and the asocial greed necessary for accumulation in a capitalist market
economy.
Yet, to see witchcraft discourses as a local critique of globalisation and moder-
nity resonates strongly with western anti-capitalist criticism (Moore and Sand-
ers 2001: 13). Although I share this criticism, I am afraid that it may be that
anthropologists are telling a popular liberal tale through ‘others’ (ibid.). To voice
one’s own criticism through ‘the other’ has a long western tradition, starting
with Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, and we have to be careful not to fall back
on this tradition by making use of ‘others’ to articulate our own faultfinding.
Thus, I agree with Moore and Sanders that we need to pay close attention to
witchcraft in specific social and historical settings rather than assume monolithic
meanings.
In contrast to most of the authors who have participated in the debate, I think
it possible to be more specific about the main causes of the recent rise of occult
forces in Africa. Against the tendency to find the origin of their rise in the invis-
ible hand of capital, I would like to introduce two arguments that have not been
recognised sufficiently by other scholars. First, I would relate the dramatic acti-
vation and rise of occult forces in Africa to the increase in death rates through
the AIDS epidemic (and to a lesser extent the local wars). The AIDS epidemic is
also an epidemic of poverty and so my argument cannot be separated from eco-
nomic and political conditions. Surely, to understand the rise of occult forces in
the last decades in Africa we have to deal with a complex interplay of processes

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and forces. Yet, with Victor Turner I would like to claim that it is not sufficiently
recognised how closely the rise of witch3 beliefs and accusations is associated
with high rates of morbidity and mortality (Turner 1967: 113).
In addition, although various scholars (Meyer 1999, Meyer and Pels 2003,
Gifford 2004) have shown in detail that in Africa modern Christianity has not
put an end to witchcraft and the occult but instead provided a new context in
which they make perfect sense, they missed the point that precisely the fight
against the occult reproduces and strengthens the ‘enemy’.4 Christian (and non-
Christian) anti-witchcraft movements strongly reinstate the occult powers they
fight against. Sometimes these movements—in Europe as well as in Africa—
actually create the crisis or moral panic they react against and make use of it by
identifying a new group of outsiders to gain power and legitimacy in the political
arena (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994: 18). Thus, the recent rise of occult forces
in Africa is also—to a certain extent—owed to the many Christian fundamen-
talist movements and churches who with the help of the Christian God and,
above all, the Holy Spirit are fighting the occult (satanic) powers, thereby con-
tributing to their reality and proliferation.
In the following, I will unfold these two arguments and give as an example
the situation in the kingdom of Tooro in western Uganda where the AIDS
pandemic is rampant and a lay organisation of the Catholic Church started
witch-hunting.

Epidemics and the dynamics of witchcraft

In an article published in 1964 on witchcraft and sorcery, Victor Turner, against
the structural-functionalist approach of classic social anthropology, promoted
process-theory, long-term studies and—most important—he made the point
that ‘it is not sufficiently recognised how closely witch beliefs are associated with
high rates of morbidity and mortality . . .’ (Turner 1964: 113). And he proposed
seeing witchcraft accusations as the product of a complex interplay of processes
and forces, such as epidemics, the rise and fall of death rates, labour migration,
wars and feuds (ibid.: 115).
Even before Turner’s text, Elenore Smith Bowen (alias Laura Bohannon), in
her autobiographical novel Return to Laughter (1954), described a witch-craze
following the outbreak of a smallpox epidemic in Northern Nigeria. One of her
protagonists, an elder, himself accused of being a witch, says: ‘Who does not
know the terror and the death and the hate that it (smallpox) brings? I fear noth-
ing else, but I fear the “water” (smallpox)’ (Bowen 1954: 266). In Northern
Nigeria smallpox was seen as a manifestation of witchcraft. As the epidemic was
spreading, so also were witches, creating a situation of internal terror.

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C. Bawa Yamba (1997), in a study on witchcraft accusations and witchfinding

in Zambia, connected the rise of occult forces with the rising death toll from
AIDS. And Susan Reynolds Whyte (1997) in her book on Bunyole in northeast
Uganda suggested that the AIDS epidemic reinforced the usual suspicions that
danger comes from other people (Whyte 1997: 222). Most people in Bunyole
who probably had AIDS looked for agents like sorcerers and cursers not only
to explain their suffering but also to involve meaningful action through anti-
sorcery medicine and rituals, thereby explaining the suffering of people with
AIDS in terms of cursing and sorcery (ibid.: 215f ).
Likewise, outside Africa, in their studies on witchcraft and sorcery in Papua
New Guinea, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern suggest that occult forces
can also be precipitated by disease and epidemics (Stewart and Strathern 1999:
645). Besides other factors, they stress the epidemic spread of the disease and the
epidemic of representations in terms of images of violence such as witches and
cannibals.
When death through an epidemic becomes omnipresent, witchcraft accusa-
tions rise. Yet, as the German historian Wolfgang Behringer in his study on the
persecution of witches in Bavaria (1987) has shown, the connection between the
rise of witchcraft accusations and epidemics is not static but dynamic and chang-
ing. He points to various mechanisms of self-limitation, when, for example, close
members of the dominant group of the accusers become accused, as well as to the
possibility of a paradigm shift that leads, for example, to the interpretation of the
epidemic as divine punishment, thereby reducing or even stopping witchcraft
accusations.

Internal terror in Tooro

In western Uganda, the region I focus on, AIDS has reached its climax in the last
years: 7.4% of the population are HIV-positive according to the latest survey of
2004/05. As my research assistant Jacinta Kabageny, aged about 50, explained to
me, while she was young, once a year somebody would die, nowadays, she said,
she has to go to funerals every week. Nearly every family, rich as well as poor, has
lost one or more members. ‘Death is eating everybody’, many people in Tooro
said. They also said that they do not have enough tears to mourn the dead.
The high death rates contributed substantially to the creation of a situation of
internal terror that (in some regions of Tooro) found expression in an epidemic
of witches and cannibals.5 Following the classical witchcraft paradigm described
by Evans-Pritchard, if a person becomes sick or dies, often somebody close to this
person, a relative or a neighbour with whom the deceased was in conflict, is
accused of being responsible for the death by having bewitched and eaten the

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victim. When the death rate is rising, this shifting of responsibility and guilt to
the inside of communities increases discord, hatred and fear, sometimes to an
unbearable extent. The more people die, the more witches or cannibals seem
to be active and responsible. Thus, the epidemic of AIDS, at least in two regions
of Tooro—Kyarusozi and Kijura—was given cultural expression as an epide-
mic of witches and cannibals eating up bodies of people and leading to a self-
exacerbating situation.
The government and numerous NGOs have launched various information
campaigns to medicalise AIDS. And it is true, in a way, they have been success-
ful. Few people in western Uganda would deny that one contracts AIDS through
sexual contact with an HIV-positive partner. Yet, unfortunately, this explanation
is perfectly compatible with witchcraft accusations because the witchcraft dis-
course functions as a secondary rationalisation by addressing the question ‘Why
me and not another?’. While Europeans are not really able to answer this ques-
tion, referring to ‘chance’ or ‘bad luck’, or taking the responsibility on themselves,
in western Uganda it is, at least up to now, the witchcraft discourse that most
often gives the answer. Thus, although most people nowadays would agree that
AIDS is a ‘natural’ disease, the campaigns have hardly diminished the suspicions
and charges of witchcraft and cannibalism. Although many people know that
AIDS is not caused directly by witchcraft, a witch can influence a man or a
woman, for example, to drink too much beer so that he or she leaves all caution
aside and has sex with a HIV-positive person and so may contract the virus. In
addition, those who are HIV-positive and their kin usually deny a diagnosis of
AIDS and try to identify a witch or cannibal whose evil acts can be counter-
acted. AIDS therefore, like other epidemics, contributes substantially to the fear
of witches (cf. Colson 2000: 353).
In conversations with people from NGOs dealing with AIDS in Tooro, it
became obvious that in their campaigns witchcraft as a subject of discussion was
completely excluded. ‘We do not want to create unrest and conflict’, a woman
told me. Likewise she insisted that ‘witches and cannibals are there’. Most people
to whom I talked in Tooro—with one exception—shared her view.6 Thus, the
medicalisation of AIDS has taken place only partially and does not bring to an
end the agency of occult forces.
Although officially promoting a medicalised concept of AIDS, many of the
Christian churches in practice use concepts of sickness and healing that are based
on supernatural powers, the powers of the Christian God and his adversary
Satan. A Catholic explained to me that ‘the wage of a sin is disease!’ ‘Commit-
ting sins’, he said, ‘opens the body for an invasion of satanic spirits’. Yet, he also
said, ‘With God’s grace everything is possible.’ And he told me that he went for
an AIDS test some years ago; it was positive; he prayed and prayed and prayed

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and when he went for the next test some time later, the result was negative! Thus,
obviously the ‘medicalisation’ of AIDS never really challenged local meanings.

AIDS, punishment and anti-westernism

As already mentioned, besides the witchcraft and cannibal discourse, alternative

explanations of AIDS were spread by various institutions. Indeed, some of the
Christian churches and movements in western Uganda tended to explain AIDS
as a punishment by God for immoral and sinful behaviour. For example, the
leaders7 of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of
God in Kanungu8 of the Rukungiri District, neighbouring Tooro, identified the
AIDS epidemic—‘a disaster that has befallen the world’—as ‘a punishment that
has been released to the world due to its disobedience’ and as a threat ‘unless you
people, repent, you will all be wiped out by AIDS’ (Behrend 2001: 83). In the
same way, some ‘traditionalists’ saw AIDS as a punishment of the ancestral spir-
its for having neglected ‘traditions’, the way of the ancestors. By doing so, both
shifted the responsibility for suffering to an otherworldly power—the Christian
God or the ancestors—as well as to the suffering individual, thereby preventing
the identification of witches or cannibals. It was the restoration of the moral
order that both Christians and ‘traditionalists’ promoted as a way out of the pre-
dicament.
Besides this explanation of the AIDS epidemic as divine punishment, there is
an increasingly anti-western discourse to be found in Tooro as well as in other
parts of Africa. Some people with whom I talked interpreted the AIDS epidemic
as a western conspiracy to reduce or even destroy the African population.9
Within the background of the dominant western discourse about family plan-
ning and the necessary reduction of population growth in Africa by develop-
ment agencies, this impression is not completely irrational. As no cure has so far
been found for AIDS, western medicine and aid organisations are accused of
being producers of death more than of life. In local popular counter-discourses
to the western prevention activities10 in Tooro, for example, condoms were sus-
pected of not protecting people from infection by HIV, but, instead, of being
infected themselves and spreading the deadly disease. In addition, the presence
of numerous western ‘experts’ was taken as a proof that after the deaths of all
Africans the Wazungu (Europeans) would take over the country. To prepare for
this takeover in near future, the Wazungu, as I was told, already built all the
beautiful houses and planted exotic trees to enjoy life when all Africans would
be dead. Thus, a sort of re-colonisation was imagined, this time, however, on the
basis of genocide.

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Furthermore, the practices of western AIDS researchers and their local coun-
terparts have increased the mistrust in western medicine, which was practised
with sometimes doubtful measures, some of which had been established during
colonial times. For example, under the regime of colonial medicine people were
forced to donate blood, a provision that, as Luise White has shown, substantially
contributed to create or activate fears of vampirism (White 2000). As Bob Mwe-
siye, a health worker of the German GTZ health project in Tooro, told me, even
today people especially in the more rural areas are reluctant to give their blood
for HIV testing because they fear it is being sold and drunk by Wazungu vam-
pires. Thus, it seems that in spite of all western-inspired NGO campaigns of
‘enlightenment’ about the ‘natural’ AIDS epidemic, recent bio-medical practices
have not succeeded in building up some trust, but instead they often reaffirmed
the view of the west’s conspiracy to extinguish all Africans.
So far, a self-limiting mechanism of the witchcraft epidemic through a radical
paradigm change has not taken effect. Indeed, in spite of alternative discourses,
the witchcraft and cannibal discourse in Tooro has served as the dominant expla-
nation for the suffering and death of so many people.
Indeed, witchcraft not only reflects social tensions and conflicts but actually is
an aggravator of all hostilities and fears in a community. With the rise of death
rates through the AIDS epidemic, witches and cannibals multiplied as internal
enemies and created a situation of internal terror. While neither the king of
Tooro, who in precolonial times had the duty to cleanse the country from evil,
nor the local government took measures to fight against witches and cannibals,
desperate villagers started killing those people they thought to be responsible for
disease and death. I was told by a police officer that, for example, in Kijura, from
January to August 2002 about five people had been lynched by enraged villagers.
The local government could not deal with witches and cannibals, nor could it
protect either villagers who felt threatened or their adversaries, suspected witches
and cannibals, who fled into police custody to be guarded from mob justice.
When I visited Fort Portal in August 2005, I saw an elderly woman of about
65 years of age sitting beside the main road in front of a Stanbic Bank. Like
clochards in Paris, she had made this place her home, using plastic bags from
famine relief to cover herself against rain and cold. When I asked my friends who
she was I was told that she was a cannibal. She had been chased from her village
and brought to the police. Because there was no evidence against her, the police
had sent her back to her village but she refused to go home, fearing that the vil-
lagers would kill her. She moved to different places but was always rejected.
People would scream and run away. She decided, therefore, to stay in town in
front of Stanbic Bank under the protection of two policemen who were guard-
ing the bank and whose presence prevented other people from stealing from her,

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raping or killing her. She had stayed at this place for more than six months as
some sort of public visual reminder of her social exclusion.11

The Catholic Church in western Uganda

In Tooro, the gradual erosion of the state and the perceived failure of public
institutions combined with the radicalisation and indigenisation of the churches
has contributed to a situation in which especially the Catholic Church at the
beginning of the 1990s entered the public arena. Not so much the clergy, but
above all lay organisations responded to the situation of internal terror by chal-
lenging the notion that secular society and the modern nation state can provide
the moral fibre that unites national communities ( Juergensmeyer 2000: 225).
Like believers in fundamentalist Islam, charismatic Catholics reclaimed the cen-
tre of public attention and authority. They made their appearance as a discourse
of social order in a dramatic fashion: violently (ibid.: 243).
In the Catholic Church in western Uganda, the last two decades have pro-
duced a wide range of popular expressions with strong lay and sometimes clerical
participation (Kassimir 1999: 249 ff.). Although the Catholic Church since the
Second Vatican Council (1962-65) favoured a theology of ‘inculturation’ to
encourage the Africanisation of the Church, the implementation of this new
religious policy from top-down in Tooro up to the 1980s largely failed. Also, up
to this time, the most pressing spiritual interests of many Catholics—healing
and protection from witchcraft—were not realised (ibid.).
While, up to 1986, the Anglican as well as the Catholic Church more or less
had a monopoly in Uganda, since the coming to power of Yoweri Museveni and
his National Resistance Movement (NRM) this monopoly was shaken by vari-
ous movements inside as well as outside the established churches, sometimes
inspired and financed by American fundamentalist Christian groups. Since 1986
there has been a surge in Christian healing cults led, above all, by women and in
apparitions of the Virgin Mary connected with miracle cures of AIDS and other
diseases (Behrend 1997, 1999). During this time, the Catholic church started to
lose more and more of its members to independent churches which specialised
in healing and the fight against witchcraft.
To counter this, the Catholic Charismatic revival movement took on a
new thrust in 1981 when a Holy Cross sister and brother from the USA came to
Fort Portal and founded the first charismatic prayer group. In it believers started
to experience the pouring of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, deliverance
from evil spirits and inner as well as physical healing. While the charismatic
movement in Tooro attracted, above all, better-educated people and younger

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clergymen, various lay organisations of the Catholic Church, the Legio Maria or
the Uganda Martyrs Guild, absorbed poor people, mainly women, who in the
situation of internal terror were the ones who suffered most.

The Uganda Martyrs Guild

In 1885 and 1886, king Mwanga of Buganda beheaded, speared, hacked into
pieces and burned a number of young Catholics, Protestants und Muslims,12
most of whom were working as pages at the king’s court. The reasons for the
persecutions of Christians and Muslims in Buganda have been heavily debated
(Kassimir 1991). Since this time, the Catholic Church, in particular, attempted
to make the Catholic victims the centre of a cult of martyrs,13 interpreting them
as the followers or sons of older African martyrs such as Perpetua, Felicity, and
Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage. In 1897 the Uganda Martyrs Guild (UMG)
was founded by Archbishop Henry Streicher who trained people to help in the
evangelisation process. In 1920, the Uganda Martyrs were beatified and in Octo-
ber 1964 canonised. The UMG evolved into an organisation for Catholic action
which continued to have chapters in most districts and dioceses. Some of these
chapters became highly politicised and had varying degrees of influence on local
branches of the Democratic Party that was formed (as the party of the Catho-
lics) in the 1950s (Kassimir 1991: 378).
An impressive shrine was built in Namugongo to commemorate the martyrs
and to establish a cult centre, but not until the emergence of a new form of
popular Catholicism in the 1980s did this shrine, as well as those in Nakivubu
and Katoosa, start to gain importance and large-scale and regular pilgrimages
begin.
Around 1995, the UMG started ‘to go and free people from evil in aban-
doned places’, that is, they took up the practice of witch-hunts, now called ‘cru-
sades’. Whereas the colonial state as well as the early Christian missionaries in
their reluctance to fight witchcraft and witches were suspected by local people of
protecting the evil forces and of being themselves witches and cannibals, the
Catholic Church in Tooro now made use of the political potential of anti-witch-
craft practices (cf. Green 2003: 140, Douglas 1999). Following the Inquisition
and witch-hunts in the fifteenth to the seventeenth century in Europe, the
enlightened Catholic Church, after resisting for a long time resorting to such
practices in Africa, did not object when in the 1990s the UMG entered the
political arena and started to fight evil. By doing so, the church appropriated an
important aspect of precolonial and early colonial kingship (cf. Gifford 2004:
175): the king’s duty to cleanse the country from evil. In addition, through the
fight against evil in the public arena, the Catholic Church succeeded in regain-

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ing power and ‘souls’ she had lost in the struggle with other established and inde-
pendent churches.

Crusades
The first crusades the UMG organised were extremely violent. I was told that in
Kabende an elderly Protestant woman was identified as a notorious cannibal.
When she was caught by some members of the UMG, she turned into a black
cat. The cat was beaten, but, as soon as they started to burn it, the animal changed
again into the woman, who was seriously injured and had to be taken to hospital.
She sued three members of the UMG—among them the president—and they
were punished and imprisoned.
Because more people complained, after this incident the Catholic Church
forbade further crusades. For two years, members of the UMG were taught
in workshops not only the Bible but also, and above all, how to carry out non-
violent witch- and cannibal-hunts. After these instructions, Guild members were
allowed to continue crusades which now followed a rather fixed pattern.
Under the guidance of an American priest and the president of the UMG the
witch-hunts or crusades were directed against ‘pagans’ as well as women and men
from other Christian denominations,14 some of whom were identified as witches
and cannibals. Thus, the UMG appropriated a discourse that connected religion
and violence and turned war into a ‘holy war’. Like everywhere else in the world
where these concepts are used, in Tooro they idealised violence, declared a just
war and legitimised the stigmatisation and exclusion of certain people.
Before the UMG went on an ‘operation’ or ‘crusade’, they announced their
plans in monthly papers and on the radio. They sent letters to the local council
and to the police, and sometimes, when they feared fierce resistance they asked
for police protection. The day before the operation they fasted; the night was
spent in church singing and praying until their bodies were filled with the Holy
Spirit. In addition, the ‘weapons’ to fight the enemy—Bible, plastic bottles filled
with holy water, rosaries and crucifixes—were ‘loaded’ with the Holy Spirit to
empower them and transform them into efficient instruments to fight evil.
In the early morning they took off in lorries. As the president of the UMG
explained to me, they had to be very careful because witches and cannibals would
set traps to fight the UMG. After arrival in the villages, they walked from house
to house, an ‘operation’ known as ‘carpet bombing’. Thus, they used the vocabu-
lary of modern warfare.
They moved in groups of twelve to twenty people, each group having a secre-
tary who recorded what was said and done. When they reached a house in which
something evil was thought to be present, the Holy Spirit used their bodies as an

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indicator for the presence of satanic powers. Then some especially gifted mem-
bers of the UMG, often children, fell to the ground, trembling and shaking vio-
lently until the evil person or thing had been detected.
When all the satanic items had been collected—such as pots, a dried human
hand, pieces of cloth belonging to people who had died and been eaten, horns
(mahembe) and all sorts of medicine—they were displayed in front of the church
to be seen by everybody. They gave material evidence of their repudiation and
likewise were made the relics of a great transformation providing a powerful
mechanism—also used by western missionaries—to express materially the fact
of conversion and the triumph over satanic forces (Thomas 1991: 155 f.). The
satanic items were also photographed, the photographs supplying proof of what
had taken place. The pictures were circulated and put into albums that were
shown to visitors as a sort of trophy and memory of the UMG’s power and suc-
cess. In addition, politicians were called to witness the event. After being dis-
played and photographed, the satanic objects were destroyed and burned. To
end a crusade, members of the UMG offered night sessions of preaching and
praying, answered questions from the local population, and the Catholic parish
priest led a service of holy communion.

Healing cannibals and witches

Cannibals and witches were seen as only indirectly responsible for their evil
deeds because the forces of Satan made them do what they did. They were there-
fore given the chance to be cleansed and healed.15 Besides being prayed for and
having hands laid on their heads, they were also made to vomit, to reverse the
process of incorporation which had produced their greediness for human flesh.
Part of the healing process was the witch’s or cannibal’s confession in which
the accused had to narrate in detail whom he/she had eaten, and when and how
it had happened. Furthermore, if a cannibal was identified s/he had to give the
names of other cannibals s/he had been working with. As during the times of the
Inquisition in Europe, in Tooro whole networks of people were established and
then put under pressure to confess their satanic deeds. The confessions produced
more detailed knowledge about witches and cannibals, leading to a further pro-
liferation and differentiation of the cannibal discourse and gave additional proof
to the reality of occult forces.
There were very few people who insisted on their innocence and refused to
confess that they were cannibals. When, during my last stay in 2005, I asked the
UMG’s president why the woman accused of cannibalism who had taken refuge
in front of the Stanbic Bank had not been cleansed by Guild members, he told

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 H. Behrend / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 41-58 53

me that she had refused to be treated by the UMG. The cleansing required con-
fession, but she had maintained her innocence and therefore not accepted
the offer. Her refusal, however, led the UMG’s president not to doubt that
she was a cannibal but to declare her as mad, thus pathologising her. By insisting
on her innocence, the woman had to pay the price of radical social exclusion.
Thus, there was a strong pressure to confess and thereby reinstate the reality of
occult forces.
When I visited the areas that had been the targets of the UMG’s first crusades,
people told me that they had not realised how many cannibals were living in
their villages before the UMG came and brought evidence of the presence of
evil. They also said that it was only the UMG that succeeded in providing mate-
rial evidence of cannibalism such as the ‘dried human hand’, or pieces of cloth
from people who had been eaten.
Thus, the revelation of and fight against occult forces led to their being rein-
stated and growing even more powerful. Indeed, the crusades reinforced the
belief that local witches and cannibals were the root of suffering, thereby con-
tinuing to target those close at hand and vulnerable to local pressures rather than
accuse those in power (cf. Colson 2000: 344). And most local people in Tooro
with whom I had the chance to talk were grateful for the discovery and cleansing
of evil powers.
It is important to note that, although the UMG stigmatised and excluded
certain people by identifying them as agents of evil, they nonetheless through
practices of healing made possible their reintegration. While asserting the pres-
ence of occult powers and contributing to their proliferation, the more or less
violent witch-hunts nevertheless provided a sense of security and empower-
ment to desperate communities and marginalised people, while at the same time
stigmatising and excluding a few women and men as scapegoats. Although the
UMG, by trying to deal with, explain and terminate the situation of internal ter-
ror, itself ended up participating in the very process of production of the crisis, it
nevertheless succeeded in containing violence.
As already mentioned, the healing or cleansing of the identified witches and
cannibals reversed their exclusion and gave them the chance to be reintegrated
into village life. Ex-cannibals after confessing and being cleansed went back to
their villages. People would accept their being healed, yet, I was told, a certain
suspicion remained. Whenever misfortune befell a person or somebody became
sick or died, it was, first of all, the (ex-)cannibal who was accused. In this ambig-
uous position, many people who felt (potentially) hunted decided to join the
hunters, the UMG. I was told by the UMG’s president that the Guild at the end
of the 1980s had about 30 members; in 2002 it had about 10,000. He also told
me that up to now no active member of the Guild had been accused of being a

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 54 H. Behrend / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 41-58

cannibal or a witch by Guild members. Thus, it is not by chance that the UMG
became the fastest growing lay organisation of the Catholic Church in Tooro.
Finally, let me come back to the rise and proliferation of occult powers. As
already mentioned, various scholars have shown in detail that in Africa modern
Christianity has not put an end to witchcraft and the occult but instead pro-
vided a new context in which they make perfect sense. In addition, as I have tried
to show, it is precisely the fight against the occult forces that reproduces and
strengthens the ‘enemy’. The UMG, in its struggle against satanic agents, witches
and cannibals, strongly reinstated the occult powers they fought against. Indeed,
the logic of mutual outbidding that characterised the Guild’s fight against evil
made it inevitable that their members, and in particular, their leaders, constantly
gave proof of dangerous evil forces to show their own superior power. When the
satanic forces intensified and proliferated, then also the powers of the Catholic
God had to do so and vice versa. In a way, the UMG was trapped in this dynamic
of the mutual constitution of good and evil, of a boundary and its transgression.
Because of this dynamic, evil spread and obtained even a cosmic dimension.
It was to be exposed not only in human beings, but also in trees, flowers and
other plants, as well as in black cats, dogs, monkeys, snakes, lizards, frogs and
cockroaches.
The Guild’s members contributed extensively to this proliferation of evil
powers and reacted to it by producing what I would call ‘Christian Magic’, an
endless series of miracles and wonders that made their practices more powerful.
While, on the one hand, connecting with the Christian tradition of wonders,
they, on the other hand, also took recourse to the local tradition of miracle pro-
duction and calculated show effects of ‘pagan’ spirit mediums and ‘witch doc-
tors’, thereby increasingly approaching what they were refusing and fighting
against. As a former witch-doctor explained to me, many people converted when
they saw the power of the UMG.
Although sometimes interpreting AIDS and other diseases as ‘natural’ or as
divine punishment, Guild members did not really attempt to abandon the witch-
craft discourse. They did not try to establish a self-reliant Christian person.
Although members of the Guild took sin as a precondition for the invasion of
the sinner’s body by satanic forces and so introduced an element of responsibility
into their discourse, they had to insist not only on the existence but also on the
permanent threat of outside satanic forces, because only through fighting these
forces could they give proof of their own powers.
Thus, not only the increasing number of deaths from AIDS and the interpre-
tation of disease and death in terms of witchcraft, but also the anti-witchcraft
activities of the UMG, trapped in the dynamics of the mutual constitution of

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 H. Behrend / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 41-58 55

good and evil, contributed to and intensified the rise of occult forces, while like-
wise containing violence.

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Notes
1. I am grateful to Paul Gifford and the participants in the Seminar on Faith and Aids in
Africa, organised by SOAS and the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in London for
their helpful comments. In addition, I would like to thank Brad Weiss for his review and kind
critical remarks. Furthermore, my thanks go to the VW-Foundation and the Special Research
Program 427 for having generously financed my research.

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2. Although the question of whether witchcraft and the resort to occult forces is increas-
ing in contemporary Africa is difficult to answer because the data base is rather insecure, there
is no doubt that many people in Africa are experiencing what they believe to be an upsurge in
occult powers (Moore and Sanders 2001: 10).
3. In the following, I shall use the term ‘witchcraft’ to include also sorcery, as do English-
speaking people in Tooro.
4. While much ink has been spilt on legal and political institutions, such as courts in
Cameroon that invigorate the occult, only rarely have scholars dealt with Christian churches
and movements doing the same. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who made me aware
of this fact (and others).
5. The emergence of a situation of internal terror has as its main mechanism the witch-
craft discourse, yet it has also to be seen within the background of economic depression, a
guerrilla war by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), the decline of the local government,
widespread corruption and struggles about land. I have dealt in detail with the discussion of
internal terror in Tooro already in two articles: one article in German (Behrend 2004), the
second on the same subject in English (Behrend 2006a, in press) while a further text deals
more with the various practices of evidence production by the Catholic lay organisation of the
Uganda Martyrs and the local government (Behrend 2006b).
6. The exception was a high-ranking police officer coming from another area of Uganda
who told me that he could not afford to believe in witchcraft; if he did, he would not be able
to do his job.
7. The leaders of the movement were all Catholics; some of them, however, were excom-
municated.
8. On 17 March 2000, about 500 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the
Ten Commandments of God (MRTCG), most of them women and children, perished in
Noah’s Ark, their main church, in Kanungu of the Rukungiri District in western Uganda.
When in the following weeks more and more graves were found in Kanungu and other areas
of Uganda, what had at first seemed to be a mass suicide turned out to be a mass killing as well
(Behrend 2001).
9. This vision is not confined to Uganda but is also shared in Kenya and some parts of
western Africa. In Mali, for example, the image of a ‘perverse European’ was constructed in a
sort of ‘myth of origin’ of the AIDS epidemic. People told of a European development agent
or expert who paid an African prostitute to have sex with a dog while he watched. Out of this
perverse intercourse AIDS was born (Machein 1999: 43). This story also circulates on the
Kenyan coast, in Ghana and Nigeria and is, for instance, taken up in the Nigerian video pro-
duction, ‘Glamour Girls II: The Italian Connection’, by Christian Onu (1996).
10. This is even more remarkable because Kabarole District was chosen for a long-term
AIDS project already launched in 1986. This project financed by the German GTZ in some
aspects was exemplary, for example, by integrating local ‘traditional’ healers and by giving out
free condoms. Yet even these attempts did not prevent anti-western discourse from proliferat-
ing, and they may even have furthered it.
11. When we visited her, she told us that she was protected by Jesus and Holy Mary, show-
ing us a little silver cross she was wearing around her neck; she said she was Catholic and had
lost all her children and even her grandchildren. They all had died from ‘slim’ (the local Eng-
lish term for AIDS). She said that she had not eaten them.
12. Under King Mutesa, Mwanga’s father, some ‘pagans’ also became martyrs, as I was told,
because they refused to convert to Islam, the religion the king favoured for some time.

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13. Ron Kassimir (1991) has shown in detail how the executions of Christian Baganda
came to be represented and substantially known as the martyrdom of Catholic Ugandans.
14. One crusade in which I was allowed to participate in August 2002 was taking place in
Kyamiaga in Buhesi subcounty and obviously was an attempt of the UMG to regain ‘lost
souls’ from the Seven-Day-Adventists.
15. akihikirire is a concept in Lutooro that connotates ‘to be without blemish’, ‘spotless’,
‘pure’ and ‘holy’; thus cleansing, healing and making holy are merged.

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