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In rural parts of East Africa, where shifting environmental patterns are creating severe weather volatility, traditional rainmakers increasingly face brutal retaliation from agrarian communities. As erratic conditions destroy essential harvests, subsistence farmers struggling for survival are channeling their frustration toward local spiritual practitioners whom they hold accountable for both catastrophic droughts and damaging floods.
In the Namisindwa district of eastern Uganda, 45-year-old rainmaker David Nabutsilili has experienced the violent consequences of uncooperative weather firsthand. Sixteen years ago, local growers paid him to summon moisture for their crops, but the resulting deluge flooded their vegetable patches. Enraged by the destruction of their produce, an angry mob pursued Nabutsilili across the hilly terrain until he fell onto a rock and suffered a broken femur.
The severe fracture left Nabutsilili with chronic leg pain that persists today. Despite the violent encounter, many of the same community members continue to seek out his spiritual interventions, requesting rituals to encourage rainfall during the planting season or to hold back storms when skies threaten downpours. However, the threat of renewed violence forces him to live in constant vigilance.
Whenever the local weather fails to match the expectations of the farmers, Nabutsilili must abandon his home and temporarily go into hiding to protect his personal safety. He explained that rainmakers endure physical assaults regardless of the outcome, facing attacks both when rainfall proves excessive and when the skies remain entirely dry.
Nabutsilili recounted that his initiation into rainmaking began during his youth at the age of 14, following the sudden emergence of mysterious wounds on his legs. His first practical assignment involved performing rituals from the top of a truck on behalf of merchants transporting cabbage, beginning a lifelong occupation that has placed him repeatedly in the crosshairs of community anger.
The cultural reliance on these traditional practitioners remains widespread in the region. Joseph Weyusya, an elder with Inzu ya Masaaba—a traditional cultural institution representing the Bagisu people of eastern Uganda—noted that communities have historically witnessed rituals followed by successful rainfall. Yet, when atmospheric conditions do not cooperate, the collective reaction often turns hostile.
According to Weyusya, whenever seasonal rains fail to appear, local villagers frequently organize search parties to locate rainmakers and interrogate them regarding the dry conditions. These encounters routinely culminate in severe physical violence, with practitioners often being beaten to the brink of death by agitated crowds demanding answers for their ruined crops.
While rainmakers in Uganda have so far avoided fatal attacks, the hostility against them has also expanded into formal legal disputes alongside physical beatings. Some aggrieved clients have turned to local law enforcement authorities, lodging formal criminal complaints against rainmakers for allegedly obtaining financial payments under false pretenses after weather rituals failed to deliver the desired results.
Across the northern border in South Sudan, the hostility targeting rainmakers has escalated into lethal violence. Over the course of the past two years, at least two traditional practitioners have been killed during severe dry spells, as impoverished communities blamed them for withholding life-giving rain during critical agricultural windows.
In June, an abducted rainmaker named Albino Lobillia was killed in southeastern South Sudan amid an ongoing, intense drought. According to witnesses in the area, a group of men seized Lobillia and buried him alive after accusing him of causing the dry spell by refusing to command rainfall for the parched land.
Madelina Tito, a local chief and a relative of Lobillia, described the desperate circumstances that culminated in the killing. She explained that local food supplies had completely vanished and livestock were perishing in large numbers due to the severe drought. Community members held formal gatherings and concluded that Lobillia deserved execution for allegedly refusing to intervene on their behalf.
Lobillia’s death followed a similar fatal attack in 2024, in which another rainmaker, Solomon Oture, was also buried alive during a harsh dry spell in Lohobohobo, an isolated mountain community. These killings highlight how traditional systems of blame have turned deadly as environmental stressors intensify throughout the region.
Scientific findings document the dramatic environmental shifts fueling this rural desperation. A study published last year in the International Journal of Environment and Climate Change revealed that the Kapoeta region, which borders Lobillia's home area, experienced a steep decline in annual precipitation days, dropping from an average of 90 rainy days per year in the 1980s to just 46 by the mid-2010s. When rain does fall, it typically arrives in sudden, destructive bursts.
Humanitarian researchers observe that these volatile patterns leave vulnerable populations with little room to recover between climate shocks. Joris Gasper, a researcher with the humanitarian organization REACH Initiative, pointed out that communities residing in flood-prone territories have spent recent years caught in an alternating cycle, losing their agricultural yields to sudden floods in some seasons and to severe droughts in others.
Because millions of rural inhabitants across both Uganda and South Sudan depend entirely on subsistence farming to feed their families, the destruction of a single harvest can result in catastrophic food insecurity. This precarious existence drives farmers to target traditional intermediaries who claim spiritual influence over atmospheric phenomena.
Local administrators stress that the lack of public awareness regarding broader ecological changes remains a major driver of the ongoing violence. Matthew Oromo, a government official in the district where Lobillia resided, observed that hostility toward rainmakers continues to worsen because local populations do not understand global climate change, misinterpreting broad shifts in weather patterns as deliberate, localized sabotage.
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