"If living together is undermined today, it is also because, culturally and spiritually, society has failed somewhere. We sometimes refuse to be ourselves, to take refuge comfortably in the culture and spirituality of others, designed at given times in history, for given civilizations, and which are sometimes far from our current realities. No morality of our ancestors, no spirituality of our ancestors says to attack innocent populations blindly, to burn their crops, to loot their property and their livestock, or even to attack those who have no not the same culture or the same spirituality as oneself". (Apollinaire Kyelem de Tambéla, Prime Minister of Burkina Faso.)
In 1986, a Ugandan woman named Alice Auma, born in 1956, said she was possessed by a spirit called Lakwena (the messenger), which is the spirit of a dead Italian officer drowned in the Nile who would ask her to fight a war against evil. She therefore took the name of Alice Lakwena and founded a movement called "Mobile Forces of the Holy Spirit" which began a guerrilla war against the power of Yoweri Museveni. In October 1987, she launched her "army" against the city of Kampala. Her fighters are armed only with stones which, according to her, should be transformed into bombs by the Holy Spirit. Before going into battle, they sprinkle themselves with water that she says is holy.
After the failure of this offensive, Alice Lakwena was forced into exile in Kenya where she died in January 2007. Joseph Kony, who claims to be a member of Alice Lakwena's family, took over and founded the The Lord's Resistance Army to overthrow power and install a theocratic system based on the principles of the Bible and the Ten Commandments issued by Moses. 80% of his army is made up of children taken from their families and reduced to slavery (often sexual for young girls). His army has been guilty of massacres of many civilians, abuses, destruction and looting and is also rampant in Congo and the Central African Republic. Joseph Kony is responsible for the deaths of at least 100,000 people and the displacement of 2.5 million people over the past twenty-five years. Joseph Kony is still running.
In 2002, a Muslim preacher by the name of Mohamed Yusuf created in Maiduguri, in northeastern Nigeria, a sect which advocates a radical and rigorous Islam, hostile to any Western influence and nicknamed Boko Haram which would be a distortion of "Book is haram”, that is to say the book is Haram, which means forbidden, because it does not conform to the precepts of Islam. In 2009 Boko Haram launched an insurgency in which Mohamed Yusuf was killed. He is replaced by Abubakar Shekau and the movement becomes an armed group that approaches the jihadist theses of the Islamic State. The movement is at the origin of numerous massacres, attacks and kidnappings against civilian populations of all faiths, in Nigeria, but also in Cameroon, Niger and Chad. Boko Haram fighters are real barbarians who kill hundreds of people all year round, machine-gun churches, throw grenades into mosques described as “lukewarm”, kidnap young girls to force them to marry jihadists. It is impossible to quantify the number of people killed by this group.
In 2013, in the wake of the Tuareg separatists, jihadist groups entered Mali with the aim of creating a caliphate in this country. They were stopped in their cavalcade towards Bamako by the French army. Then they dispersed throughout the country and despite all the efforts of the French and all the international forces that went to the aid of Mali, their influence only increased. Currently there are very few portions of Malian territory where they are not rampant. These jihadist groups have extended their influence into neighboring Burkina Faso and Niger. Even our country Côte d'Ivoire has been hit.
Today, in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon, Somalia, Uganda, Central African Republic, Congo, Mozambique, Africans massacre in the name of religions from elsewhere. Why wouldn't we seek to live in peace with our own spirituality?
By Venance Konan
*This article has been translated from French into English by Marcus Boni Teiga
