This is the first ethnography of the Uganda Martyrs Guild [UMG], a lay
movement of the Catholic Church, and its organized witch-hunts in the
kingdom of Tooro, Western Uganda.
This book explores cannibalism, food, eating and being eaten in its many
variations. It deals with people who feel threatened by cannibals,
churches who combat cannibals and anthropologists who find themselves
suspected of being cannibals. It describes how different African and
European images of the cannibal intersected and influenced each other in
Tooro, Western Uganda, where the figure of the resurrecting cannibal
draws on both pre-Christian ideas andchurch dogma of the bodily
resurrection and the ritual of Holy Communion.
In Tooro cannibals are witches: they bewitch people so that they die
only to be resurrected and eaten. This is how they were perceived in the
1990s when a lay movement of the Catholic Church, the Uganda Martyrs
Guild [UMG] organized witch-hunts to cleanse the country. The UMG was
responding to an extended crisis: growing poverty, the retreat and
corruption of the local government, a guerrilla war, a high death rate
through AIDS, accompanied by an upsurge of occult forces in the form of
cannibal witches. By trying to deal, explain and "heal" the situation of
"internal terror", the UMG reinforced the perception of the reality of
witches and cannibals while at the same time containing violence and
regaining power for the Catholic Church in competition for "lost souls"
with other Pentecostal churches and movements.
This volumeincludes the DVD of a video film by Armin Linke and Heike
Behrend showing a "crusade" to identify and cleanse witches and
cannibals organized by the UMG in the rural area of Kyamiaga in 2002.
With a heightened awareness and reflective use of the medium, UMG
members created a domesticated version of their crusade for Western (and
local) consumption as part of a "shared ethnography".
Heike Behrend is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the
University of Cologne, Germany, the author of Alice Lakwena and the Holy
Spirits [James Currey, 1999], and co-editor of Spirit Possession,
Modernity and Power in Africa[James Currey, 1999]
