How Acholi, Gov’t Held Brig. Okoya’s Ritualistic Reburial

At the age of 48, Brigadier General Pierino Yere Okoya, the then UNLA Deputy Army Commander, and his wife, Anna Akello Okoya, were gruesomely murdered on January 25, 1970, from their ancestral home in Koro village, Gulu district.

They were shot dead by Lt. Raymond Oryem, a UNLA soldier loyal to then Army Commander Idi Amin, who had for long viewed the deceased as an obstacle.

This incident sparked a long dispute between the Acholi people from Palaro and Lamogi clans.

On Friday, September 29, 2023, the late Brig. Okoya was reburied in order for the government to grant him a decent burial during a cultural ritual attended by President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.

Gulu Archdiocese Archbishop John Baptist Odama, speaking as the main celebrant, said the reburial of Okoya will facilitate urgent reconciliation between the two clans that hadn’t been at peace and will send a message of unity and harmony among different people in the region.

According to the State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Henry Okello Oryem, endless misfortunes had disturbed the Acholi people due to the delayed decent reburial of Gen. Okoya and his wife Akello, who had been gruesomely murdered.

“With the government stepping in to give a decent reburial, there will be prolonged peace and healing among the people of the Acholi sub-region and a lasting reconciliation with other neighbours,” said Minister Oryem.

Before the actual reburial of late Gen. Okoya, Acholi elders reportedly conducted critical cultural rituals to avert and counter the previous rituals and incantation that were executed at the time of his first burial against the people who were accused of murdering their son.

Yusuf Adek Okwonga, the Pageya Clan Chief who brokered the reconciliation between the Palaro clan and the Pujwani clan, whose son, Lt. Oryem, was suspected to have murdered Okoya on the orders of Amin, is optimistic about the lasting peace.

Sources among Acholi elders revealed that the late Okoya was buried with a bag of simsim and a strict cultural incantation cursing anyone who masterminded his murder. It is claimed that the elders who conducted the ritual prophesied and cursed the person who caused the death of Okoya to have his own people die in an equivalent number of sim-sim seeds in the bag put in his grave.

Okwonga said that the reburial of Okoya and his wife marks a new dawn for peace and healing in Acholi and an end to further gruesome murders of sons of the region.

President Museveni, who was the chief guest during the event, also commissioned a 200 million-shilling furnished house, built for the family members of Brig. Okoya by the UPDF Engineering Brigade at his ancestral home in Bongo-tyet village.

Brig. Okoya’s casket was lowered with 11 gun salutes fired by the Special Forces Command Artillery Brigade.

BACKGROUND;

The late Okoya was a remarkable figure in Uganda’s military history, having been born in 1928 in the serene village of Koro in Gulu district. His journey through life was one marked by unwavering dedication to his country.

Okoya’s life and career were tangled and woven into the fabric of Uganda’s thunderous political landscape during the tenures of Presidents Apollo Milton Obote and Idi Amin Dada.

He joined the army in 1948, and at the time, it was called the King’s African Rifles (KAR), which was a British Colonial Auxiliary Forces regiment raised from Britain’s East African colonies in 1902, with Uganda being the 4th Battalion based in Jinja, which was the first military headquarters (inaugural military headquarters).

The Acholi region experienced a series of insurgencies that led to the brutal murder of tens of thousands of local people; hundreds were mutilated and abducted, and about two million were displaced.

The LRA rebellion led by Joseph Kony began as an evolution of ‘the Holy Spirit Movement’—a rebellion against President Yoweri’s regime led by Alice Lakwena in the late 1980s.

Who is Joseph Kony?

Joseph Rao Kony was born in 1961 in Odek sub-county in northern Uganda. He was one of six children in the Acholi middle-class family of Luizi Obol and Nora Oting.

Kony’s parents were farmers. His father was a Catholic, his mother an Anglican. Kony was an altar boy until 1976. He dropped out of school at age 15 to become a traditional healer.

In 1987, aged 26, Kony founded the Lord’s Resistance Army, a heterodox Christian fundamentalist organisation that operated in northern Uganda until 2006.

Altar boy turned rebel leader, Kony rose to prominence after taking over the Holy Spirit Movement, a rebel group led by Alice Lakwena, his aunt, to topple the Ugandan government.

The Holy Spirit Movement was formed after Ugandan president Tito Okello, an Acholi, was overthrown by the National Resistance Army – led by Yoweri Museveni – in January 1986.

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