This book was first published in 1993 in Germany. Since that time, the situation in Acholi has changed; in addition, my perspective also has been slightly transformed. This book is a revised version of the German original. Thanks to the comments and kind criticism of Alex and Zeru D.O. Abukha, Aidan Southall and Frank Schubert, I was able to correct a number of mistakes and expand some parts of the subject. In the Epilogue, I attempt to tell the story of the various Holy Spirit Movements and their protagonists up to 1996.

I would like to thank J. C. Winter and Gert Spittler of Bayreuth for their help and support, as well as the University of Bayreuth's Special Research Programme, ‘Identity in Africa’, whose generous support made this work possible. I thank Hans-Jurgen Greschat, Karl-Heinz Kohl, Fritz Kramer, Ute Luig, Claude Meillassoux, Louise Pirouet, and Catherine Watson for valuable discussions and information.

I would also like to mention Michael Twaddle and Holger Bernt Hansen, who, with the conferences they organized regularly in Roskilde, created a forum where many important topics that came into this work were discussed.

For their support in Gulu, I would especially like to thank the Lubwa family, Mike Ocan, R. M. Nono, Andrew Adimola, and Caroline Lamwaka, and, in Kampala, J. P. Ocitti, who provided valuable information.

This text could not have taken this shape without the friendship and co-operation of Alja Epp-Naliwaiko, Reiner Epp, and Maria Fischer in Kampala and Gennaro Ghirardelli in Berlin. I would also like to thank all those I cannot mention by name here, but who contributed to this work through the conversations they granted me.

Above all, my gratitude goes to Dan Mudoola, without whose generous help and friendship my ethnographic work in Acholi would not have been possible. He died on 22 February 1993 in Kampala from wounds inflicted in an attack. This book is dedicated to him.