The farmers had paid David Nabutsilili to bring rain. They were furious when they got it.
Too much fell on their vegetable gardens in eastern Uganda, flooding the crops they had hoped the rain would save. The farmers chased Nabutsilili through the hills until he fell on a rock and broke his femur.
Sixteen years later, the rainmaker still feels pain in his leg.
“People beat us because sometimes the rain is too much, or there is no rain,” Nabutsilili told the Associated Press.
Rainmaking has always been risky work. Droughts and floods existed long before anyone spoke of climate change, and no religious ritual has ever been proven to make weather totally predictable. But across eastern Africa, climate change is making an already unpredictable relationship with rain even harder to read. Dry spells can stretch longer. Heavy downpours are expected to grow more intense. Rainy seasons themselves are changing.
Reading the Sky
Nabutsilili is one of several rainmakers in Namatsokha, a village in the hills of eastern Uganda. The Associated Press describes African rainmakers as spiritual leaders who perform rituals asking deities for rainfall, although practices and beliefs vary enormously from community to community.
Anthropologist Walter E.A. van Beek, who has studied rainmaking traditions across Africa, describes rituals in which communities explicitly ask God for rain. In one community he observed, a rainmaker sacrificed a rooster while calling out to “God in heaven.” Other traditions invoke ancestors or spirits believed to connect the community with the divine.
It is also a mistake to assume that ritual was historically divorced from practical knowledge of the weather.
Rainmakers and traditional forecasters often accumulated generations of close observation about the natural world around them. Across East Africa, researchers have documented people watching the direction of winds, the shape and color of clouds, nighttime temperatures, lightning, stars, flowering plants, insects, birds, and even the movement of frogs and ants for clues about coming rain.
Among the Nganyi people of western Kenya, that knowledge became useful enough that modern meteorologists decided to test it. Researchers compared forecasts made by traditional Nganyi forecasters with data from a nearby weather station and found considerable agreement. A subsequent climate project brought the two groups together to produce seasonal forecasts combining meteorological data with the Nganyi's local knowledge.
Religion and observation do not necessarily cancel one another out. The combination has deep historical precedent. Maya calendar specialists could predict eclipse windows while treating eclipses as religious events; Babylonian scholars likewise forecast lunar eclipses while performing rituals in response to them. Prediction did not make the events less sacred.
That history makes climate change especially disruptive to traditions built around the weather. A bird may migrate at a different time. A plant may flower earlier. Familiar winds may no longer reliably announce the same rains. Researchers studying traditional forecasting elsewhere in East Africa have already found communities reporting that old indicators are becoming harder to rely on as drought and climate variability intensify.
In Namatsokha, Nabutsilili and another rainmaker, Kilindon Simiyu, recently descended toward a waterfall, chewed herbs, and appeared to pray. The village had gone weeks without rain.
On that day, their prayer went unanswered.
“We are having difficulties because, sometimes when it is supposed to rain, it doesn't rain,” Simiyu said afterward. “So we use our powers to try and bring it, but it doesn't come as it used to come in those days.”
When Rainmakers Pay the Price
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found that eastern Africa is already experiencing substantial rainfall variability. Its projections are not as simple as “everything gets drier.” Some parts of the region may actually receive more total rainfall. Heavy rainfall events are expected to become more intense, while parts of the region, including South Sudan, face increasing drought risk.
Sometimes, the danger can be fatal. Rainmakers among the Lopit have sometimes been blamed when drought persists, and in multiple documented cases they have been buried alive.
In 2024, rainmaker Solomon Oture fled the village of Lohobohobo after repeated dry seasons damaged his standing in the community. Men eventually brought him back. Witnesses said he was forced into a grave and buried alive.
He was not an isolated case. Al Jazeera found reports of at least five other rainmakers buried alive in the Lopit Mountains over the previous four decades. Another, Albino Lobillia, was reportedly abducted and buried alive this past June during a prolonged dry spell.
“There was no food, and animals began dying in large numbers because of the drought,” Lobillia's relative Madelina Tito told the AP.
Researchers studying the Lopit say rainmakers are believed to retain dangerous spiritual power after death. If one person delivers the fatal blow, the rainmaker's spirit may know who killed him and seek vengeance against that person or their descendants. Burying the person spreads responsibility across the community instead, sparing any one person from spiritual revenge.
One recent study of 24 recorded killings of Lopit rainmakers found that live burial was the most commonly documented method, used in nine cases.
Oture's killing allegedly also involved personal and political disputes, but the broader record shows that rainmakers can become targets when drought devastates a community.
What Happens When Prayer Fails?
Americans know something about that uncertainty too, even if religious leaders here rarely pay such a high price when the weather fails to cooperate.
By April 2011, drought and wildfires had become so severe that Texas Gov. Rick Perry issued an official proclamation setting aside three “Days of Prayer for Rain.”
“I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers,” the proclamation read, asking for “the healing of our land.”
Texans prayed. The drought got worse.
By early October, 97 percent of the state was experiencing extreme or "exceptional drought," the latter being most severe classification used by the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Texas climatologists ultimately ranked 2011 as the worst single year of drought in the state's recorded history.
Fifteen years later, American believers were still asking.
Just this past July, roughly 200 Christians gathered on a farm near Zeeland, Michigan, after a dry spring and summer. Five Christian Reformed congregations joined in a service asking God for rain.
This time, the rain arrived before the group had even begun to pray.
“You have shown your mercy to us in advance of our even asking,” Pastor Mark Neymeiyer claimed.
Nabutsilili has a simpler way of accounting for the times when the rain does not come.
“In life there are always things that fail,” he told the AP.
Religious traditions have always had to make sense of both apparent answers and apparent silence. Climate change makes the conditions surrounding those prayers increasingly unstable.
Not Just Rain. The Right Rain.
Prayers for rain have rarely been as simple as asking for water to fall from the sky.
The traditional Church of England prayer specifically asks God for “moderate rain and showers.” Jewish Tefillat Geshem, the Prayer for Rain recited on Shemini Atzeret, asks that rain come “for blessing and not for curse.”
A farmer needs enough rain to keep crops alive, but not so much that the fields flood. They also need it to arrive at the correct point in the growing season. A downpour after harvest cannot repair months of drought.
Nabutsilili knows that problem intimately. He was chased down that hill not because the rain failed to come, but because too much arrived.
With the consequences of climate change in the picture, the problem is no longer simply whether rain comes. It is when it comes, how much comes, how hard it falls, and what happens in between.
When Prayer Meets Adaptation
Some religious communities are already confronting the challenges of climate change by pairing prayer with attempts to change human behavior.
Last month, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints addressed continuing drought concerns and the declining Great Salt Lake by calling on Mormons to pray and fast for precipitation.
But prayer was only part of the response. The LDS Church has also started to advocate for water conservation efforts, including the use of more efficient irrigation techniques. It also donated tens of thousands of acre-feet of water to help refill the dying lake.
Utah's secular government has taken things even further.
The state now operates the largest remotely controlled ground-based cloud-seeding network in the United States. When suitable winter storms arrive, generators release particles of silver iodide into the atmosphere, giving supercooled water droplets something around which to freeze. Utah officials say that the cloud-seeding has increased precipitation by up to 15% in some areas. "Rainmaking" is beginning to look a whole lot different.
Humans have always tried to influence weather with whatever tools were available to them. Sometimes those tools have been prayers, sacrifices, rituals, or processions. Today they also include satellite forecasts, irrigation systems, and even complex machines releasing silver iodide into the sky.
But at what point does stewardship become an attempt to play God?
And perhaps more importantly, what happens when neither prayer nor technology can restore the climate people remember?
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