In eastern Uganda, David Nabutsilili said farmers once paid him to summon rain, then chased him up and down hills when so much rain fell that their vegetable gardens flooded. He said they stopped only when he fell on a rock and broke a femur. Sixteen years later, he still feels pain in his leg.
That’s the raw edge of this story: people living off subsistence agriculture, trapped between erratic weather and the blame game that follows, while those with spiritual authority get dragged into the violence of failed seasons. Nabutsilili said many of the same people who once pursued him still seek his help during planting season and at other times. If he fails to meet their expectations, he sometimes has to leave home for his own safety. “People beat us because sometimes the rain is too much, or there is no rain,” he said.
Who Gets Blamed When the Sky Fails
African rainmakers have long served as spiritual leaders in their communities, performing rituals to ask deities to bring rain. The role is often passed down through generations. In some clans, the rainmaking spirit is believed to enter members of particular families. Joseph Weyusya, an elder with Inzu ya Masaaba, said becoming a rainmaker is inherited, not chosen. “These people called rainmakers do not just wake up one morning and become rainmakers. They have clans (families) they are coming from. If that clan, right from the very beginning, were rainmakers, then somebody else comes up — not because of his will, but because of the ancestral way. We have what we call ‘khumusambwa’. It is believed to be a spirit that enters somebody to start performing,” he said.
Weyusya said rainmakers have sometimes succeeded. “We have been with these people, and indeed sometimes they have done (rituals) and we have had rain,” he said. But he added that weather can turn against them. “When the rains refuse, people gather around the village and then start looking for them — ‘Why are we not having rain?’” he said. “And most times they have beaten such people to almost near death.”
The pressure has grown as weather patterns have become more erratic. Droughts and unpredictable rainfall are destroying crops and livelihoods, while rainmakers are increasingly blamed for their inability to deliver the rain communities expect. In South Sudan, which borders Uganda to the north, at least two rainmakers have been killed in the past few years. In 2024, Solomon Oture was buried alive in the remote village of Lohobohobo during a dry spell. In June, men abducted a rainmaker named Albino Lobillia in a southeastern area facing a prolonged dry spell and buried him alive, according to witnesses.
Madelina Tito, a relative of Lobillia and a local chief, said the drought left people desperate. “There was no food, and animals began dying in large numbers because of the drought,” she said. “They held meetings and decided he should be killed because, according to them, he had refused to command the rain.”
What Climate Volatility Does to the Bottom
A study last year in the International Journal of Environment and Climate Change found that the average annual number of rainy days in the Kapoeta region, which borders Lobillia’s home area, had fallen from 90 in the 1980s to 46 by the mid-2010s, the most recent period for which figures were available. When rain does come, it is often sudden and intense. Joris Gasper, a researcher for REACH Initiative, said, “Communities in the most flood-prone areas have spent the last few years alternating between losing crops to floods and losing them to drought.”
In Uganda, as in South Sudan, millions depend on subsistence agriculture to feed their families, and erratic weather can destroy livelihoods. Matthew Oromo, a government official in Lobillia’s home area, said violence against rainmakers is getting worse. “It’s becoming worse and worse,” he said. “People are not aware of what is happening. They don’t understand this issue of climate change.”
Ugandan rainmakers have not been killed, but some have been assaulted and reported to authorities for allegedly obtaining money under false pretenses. Those who seek their services are expected to pay a fee, sometimes as little as $13 and in some cases as much as $260. Nabutsilili said he was paid $260 to prevent rain during President Yoweri Museveni’s campaign visit to the area last year. It did not rain that day.
Rainmakers can be consulted in their homes or in bars where they go to drink. The quid pro quo can fuel conflict when people believe a rainmaker has failed and refuse to accept that the weather did not change. Unlike Christian priests and medicine men, who generally command respect, rainmakers are sometimes seen as malicious people who retaliate against whole communities for quarrels with their neighbors. Farmer Paul Boyi said, “Sometimes when you have grown your crops, like this season, and there is no rain and you give them money to bring rain, they bring rain that destroys our crops.”
Ritual, Rivalry, and the Price of Power
In Namatsokha, there are at least four rainmakers, and their competing claims to power can create rivalries. Kilindon Simiyu, 30, said rainmakers sometimes try to discredit one another, with tensions eased only when they come together in associations. He said, “You can give me money to stop the rain. Then my colleague finds out that they have given me money to stop the rain and the colleague brings rain.”
Nabutsilili, who walks barefoot wherever he goes, is widely seen as spiritually strong enough to summon rain without even going to the waterfall where others perform rituals. Many in his village say his authority is not in doubt. He said he first became possessed by the rainmaking spirit as a 14-year-old boy when his legs mysteriously developed wounds. He said his first task came from cabbage transporters who put him atop their truck and asked him to keep the rain away. It did not rain on them, and he went on to become his village’s most reliable rainmaker even as erratic weather patterns occasionally confounded him and those he serves.
One recent morning, Simiyu and Nabutsilili descended into the depths of a waterfall and appeared to pray as they chewed on herbs. Namatsokha had not received rain for many weeks, and many locals described the spell as one of the driest they had known. Some seemed skeptical as the men performed the ritual. Afterward, Simiyu said, “We are having difficulties because, sometimes when it is supposed to rain, it doesn’t rain. So we use our powers to try and bring it, but it doesn’t come as it used to come in those days.”