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Invisible Agents

Spirits in a Central African History

David M. Gordon

ohio university press athens

new african histories series

Series editors: Jean Allman and Allen Isaacman

Books in this series are published with support from

the Ohio University National Resource Center for African Studies.

David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990

Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid

Gary Kynoch, We Are Fighting the World: A History of Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999

Stephanie Newell, The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku

Jacob A. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei

Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present

Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya in Senegal, 1853–1913

Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS

Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times

Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948

Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa

Moses Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression

Emily Burrill, Richard Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977

Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule

Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa

James R. Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania

Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, editors, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children

David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History

Acknowledgments

This book has been supported, sustained, and inspired by many communities. Zambians answered my questions with patience and care. Kampamba Mulenga was a wonderful companion in our journeys across Zambia’s Northern Province. I have fond memories of weeks spent with the members of Chinsali’s New Jerusalem community who introduced me to the power of their faith. A community of Africanist scholars pushed me to refine many of my ideas. Allen Roberts, Dan Magaziner, Kairn Klieman, Paul S. Landau, Stephen Ellis, Clifton Crais, Tom Spear, Anne Mager, James A. Pritchett, Karen Tranberg Hansen, Parker Shipton, Nancy Jacobs, Megan Vaughan, and Heather Sharkey helped with their insightful discussions and questions following many conference presentations. A community of Zambian scholars, associated with the Network for Historical Research in Zambia, hosted Zambia-focused symposia, which allowed me to fine-tune the details of the book. Marja Hinfelaar, Giacomo Macola, Walima T. Kalusa, Chris Annear, Miles Larmer, Mwelwa C. Musambachime, Jan-Bart Gewald, Bizeck J. Phiri, and several others have all contributed to an invigorated Zambian historiography. Marja Hinfelaar deserves special mention for her work in making available new archival resources that provide the empirical depth to sustain my ambitious arguments. The New African History series editors, Allen Isaacman and Jean Allman, and Ohio University Press’s Gillian Berchowitz had confidence in the book, and offered suggestions for improvement.

Bowdoin College provided an unmatched intellectual community. Students, especially in my seminar on Religion and Politics in Africa, inspired me with their enthusiasm and sophisticated thinking about issues unfamiliar to many of them. Discussions with colleagues, over lunch and during faculty forums, helped in conceptualization, writing, and revision. Allen Wells, Rachel Sturman, John Holt, and Elizabeth Pritchard read and provided insightful comments on parts of the book. The interlibrary loan staff, especially Guy Saldanha, persevered in tracking publications obscure to them but essential for my research. Eileen Johnson drew the map. The generous research support and sabbatical leave provided by Bowdoin College contributed to the timely completion of the book.

Academic nourishment alone does not sustain a good book. Arguments about politics and religion with my family, especially my siblings, are frequent; this is yet another stab at a discussion that will always be part of our lively dinner-table conversations. My mother and stepfather are not only supportive but interested in the details of my research. My brother Ryan helped to refine the images. In the ten years that I have been researching and writing this book, my love for my wife, Lesley, has inspired all of my most valuable accomplishments. Love does shape life. While I was nearing the book’s completion, my father died. My grief, and my knowledge that he lives on in so many ways, further convinced me of the power of our emotions, our hidden spirits, and our invisible worlds.

Abbreviations

AMU African Mineworkers Union

ANC African National Congress

ARC African Representative Council

BSAC British South Africa Company

CAF Central African Federation

CCZ Council of Churches in Zambia

CfAN Christ for All Nations

DC district commissioner

DRC Democratic Republic of Congo

EFZ Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia

ICOZ Independent Church Organization of Zambia

MMD Movement for Multiparty Democracy

MUZ Mineworkers Union of Zambia

NRR Northern Rhodesia Regiment

PC provincial commissioner

RLI Rhodes-Livingstone Institute

UCCAR United Church of Central Africa in Rhodesia

UCZ United Church of Zambia

UMCB United Missions of the Copperbelt

UNIP United National Independence Party

UPP United Progressive Party

ZANC Zambia African National Congress

ZCTU Zambia Congress of Trade Unions

ZEC Zambia Episcopal Conference

introduction

Seeing Invisible Worlds

Invisible forces mobilize us to action. Sometimes they are remote and absolute, such as “freedom” and “fate”; or they are proximate and changing human creations, such as the “state” and its “laws”; or they combine proximity with the personal, as in the emotions of “love” and “hate.” Invisible forces are sometimes imagined to be spirits that possess bodies, incarnate the dead, and guide the actions of the living. Yet not all agents of the invisible world are compatible. While we accept the influence of our own invisible worlds, those of others appear implausible forces for change in the visible world. We thus may seek to change, repress, or simply ignore the invisible worlds of others. This book considers various moments of social and political upheaval influenced by conflicting beliefs in invisible agents, including a precolonial ancestral government that claimed to control the spirits responsible for fertility, a prophet’s efforts to cleanse the colonial order of witchcraft and evil, and the overthrow of a postcolonial socialist regime thought to be influenced

by Satan.

A recent survey, a form of knowledge preferred by secular society, indicates that nearly nine out of ten sub-Saharan Africans consider “religion” to be very important in their lives. But what is meant by “religion”? And in what sense is this set of beliefs and practices termed religion “important”? In this survey, religion and its measure of importance are the spirits that flourish in Africa. For example, the survey indicates that roughly half of the 470 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa (Christians, we are told, make up 57 percent of the total population) believe that Jesus will return to the visible world within their lifetimes. Slightly more African Christians claim that God will grant prosperity to those with faith.1 But these beliefs are not part of a removed and detached otherworldliness that many secularists associate with “religion.” Even if implausible to some, the spirits of the invisible world—including ancestors, nature spirits, God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and Satan—hold implications for realms of human agency. Rather than a history of institutionalized religion, this book is a history of the spirits believed to have influenced this world.

Religious and secular authorities often claim that beliefs in spirits are “superstitions,” false beliefs. Spirits have been marginalized by a post-­Enlightenment Christianity that guides human actions in this world by focusing attention on the symbolic meanings of religion and on its moral implications. Spirits are distant, appearing only in an afterlife, in heaven and hell, instead of having a direct influence over happenings in the material world and the health and wealth of living beings. Clearly, this is not the position of all Christian believers in the West—now or in the past. Yet this nonspiritual type of religion is found among the mainstream Protestant and Catholic clergy and lay leadership, and has influenced scholarship. Drawing on such post-Enlightenment theological and scholarly abstractions, much scholarship focuses on the distinctions between the otherworldly qualities of sacred spirits and the this-worldly qualities of profane agents.2 Instead, the history of the entwined visible and invisible worlds that I propose here locates its arguments around the conceptions and sensory perceptions of historical agents who have thought that invisible spirits have exerted power in this world.

Africanist scholarship characterizes such belief in invisible spirits as part of an “African traditional religion” that continues to influence modern life. For philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, “most Africans, whether converted to Islam or Christianity or not, still share the beliefs of their ancestors in an ontology of invisible beings” (my emphasis).3 Such accounts draw on a long tradition of anthropological scholarship that describes ancestors as “shades” with a presence in the physical world.4 Theologians, historians, and other scholars of religion have joined in describing these ancestral religions as such.5 There is much of value in these accounts. For many people, ancestral and nature spirits have wielded power in this world. And yet the notion of African traditional religion implies a primordial set of beliefs that are static, closed to outside influences, and unengaged with historical changes. If they still exist in modern life, it is because Africans hold on to such beliefs with remarkable tenacity, or so it is argued. However, modernity, in Africa and elsewhere, is neither what it seems nor what it promotes itself to be. Religion is not the past of modernity, but integral to its present logic, the regulation of its rationality, and its modality of power.6 In this vein, recent scholarship on the African spirit world has shown that it is entwined with modernity rather than being only a residual traditional religion. Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar identify an invisible world that permeates postcolonial politics across much of Africa; anthropologists have found “witchcraft” and “magic” to be part of the quotidian experience of modernity.7 And even at the Western European heart of the supposed secular revolution, the triumph of secularism now appears to have been a mirage, the Enlightenment’s publicity stunt.8

Invisible Agents develops this line of inquiry. The invisible world discussed here is not a remnant of tradition, but an outcome of and engagement with a particular experience of modernity. My point is not to present Africans steeped in irrational, exotic, or traditional beliefs, but to describe how these rich products of the human imagination inform identities and actions; in other words, to offer an account of historical agency in a world populated with spirits.

the historiography of an invisible world

Implausible African beliefs have constituted one of the oldest—even foundational—problems for secular Africanist scholars. Nearly four decades ago, Terence O. Ranger published an article that considered connections between millenarian religion and anticolonial nationalism.9 This approach inspired an effervescence of historical scholarship. Historians found a rich source base in the writings of paranoid colonial administrators who referred incessantly to such connections. Movements that combined ancestral and Christian beliefs in millenarian efforts to rid the visible world of invisible forms of evil were thought pregnant with possibilities for nationalist movements in terms of their forms of organization and their anticolonial ideologies.10 Ancestral religious ideas, such as rainmaking, could also serve the anticolonial struggle.11 The recognition that spirits inspired anticolonial agency was a helpful and productive insight, albeit an incomplete and a very particular aspect of spiritual agency. In the emphasis on connections between modern politics and primary acts of rebellion, the spiritual beliefs of those who constituted these movements were subordinated to the formal—meaning African nationalist and anticolonial—political role that these movements played. If agency was primarily political and nationalist, spiritual beliefs were but an accident, a colorful detail of human agency.

Scholars have subsequently questioned the supposed evolution of forms of resistance, complicated arguments that religion was simply a cultural component of nationalist struggle, reconsidered the ties between religious organization and civil society, and taken the autonomous claims of faith more seriously. Ranger himself revised his original position in several regards. In a critical survey of the literature, he finds the notion that religious movements constitute “a stage in the evolution of anti-colonial protest” excessively teleological and often inaccurate. Such an approach invariably treats religion as a sort of false consciousness, awaiting an accurate historical consciousness in the form of working-class or nationalist ideas. The explicitly spiritual nature of these movements is ignored by focusing on anticolonial politics.12In a more recent literature survey, however, Ranger still seems uneasy with a focus on spirits, especially occult forces, which, he thinks, presents Africans as steeped in strange superstitions.13

That spirits are thought to hold power should point to the political importance of religious ideas, not suggest that they are false superstitions. Political scientist Michael Schatzberg has demonstrated the rich analyses that may follow from extending the “parameters of the political,” especially to spirits that are thought to exert power in this world.14 Not only do religious movements appear political in new ways, but conventional political movements engage in often unrecognized forms of spiritual politics.15 Yet much scholarship on religious movements remains embedded in a secular view of politics. For example, there have been many fruitful inquiries into the public role of Christianity, exploring whether churches are autonomous and promote opposition to the state or are captured by the state and become instruments of patronage politics.16 Other recent Africanist scholarship focuses on elements of civil society, for example the engagement of women with Christianity.17 Human agency is still viewed in terms of secular political claims and identities, however. The spiritual component of religion is not what is important; even if religious movements constitute civil society, spiritual beliefs remain a form of false consciousness, sometimes explicitly critiqued, sometimes ignored as irrelevant detail.

A linguistic turn in humanities and social science has helped to point out that the fields of meaning designated by “religion” and “politics” differ across time, societies, and languages. Imposing such labels often reflects interpretative translations of unfamiliar realms of human agency. Scholars sensitive to this problem have shunned “religion” to characterize certain African beliefs and practices. Instead, they often focus on how European missionaries rendered Christian concepts in vernacular linguistic worlds and thereby transformed both Christianity and the meanings of old words, often changing this-worldly political concepts into otherworldly religious concepts.18 Understanding the transformative power of translation is an important and worthy endeavor. Yet translation itself is not the only key to understanding the implications of spirits for historical agency. In her study of the Lourdes shrine, Ruth Harris expresses unease with the “totalistic way the ‘linguistic turn’ reduces all human experience to language.”19 Discourses are not closed and contained systems; they engage with sensory, visible, and nonlinguistic worlds that involve work, corporality, violence, and emotions—in other words, those actions, experiences, and interactions that constitute our sensory lives. To understand the agency of spirits, then, is to relate spirits—or spiritual discourses—to this nonlinguistic world.

One way to relate spirits to the nonlinguistic world is to view them as symbols for the sensory, visible world. Indeed, the symbolic form of analysis is a conventional way of reflecting on religious discourses. On the other hand, political discourses are not usually viewed in this symbolic fashion. But, as pointed out, there is no intrinsic reason for treating discourses that we term religious and political differently. Religious ideas, especially when they refer to this-worldly spirits, are also conscious statements on and about power, rather than subconscious or metaphoric reflections.20 The bias toward the symbolic study of religion is not evident in all scholarship. Given the clear role of missionary Christian discourses in creating colonial hegemonies, many scholars have discussed them as sources of power. For example, Jean and John L. Comaroff, J. D. Y. Peel, Elizabeth Elbourne, and Paul S. Landau all discuss the influence and African appropriations of colonial Christian missionary discourses, although they generally conceive of power in a Foucauldian disciplinary sense.21 Efforts to discuss spirits, Christian or otherwise, as sources of power have not been as frequently or as effectively carried out, with a few note­worthy exceptions. Ruth Marshall’s study of Pentecostal churches in Nigeria, for example, treats spiritual discourse as a “site of action [her emphasis]” rather than being reduced to “its function of signification,” in terms of metaphor, metonymy, or symbol.22

Most relevant to this book is Karen E. Fields’s treatment of religious discourses as sites of power in her pioneering study of Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witnesses) during the heyday of indirect rule in colonial Zambia. Fields argues that the colonial state, although purporting to be secular, relied on a range of religious agents, including missionaries and chiefs who claimed spiritual powers. The Watchtower emphasis on a personal relationship with God, through rituals such as speaking in tongues, radically undermined this colonial constellation of power. Political rebellion thus emerged directly from the spiritual claims of Watchtower adherents. By ensuring an independent form of spirit possession and communication, Watchtower members undercut the authority of chiefs and missionaries. While Fields may have proclaimed the end of the chiefs’ authority a little too soon—and overestimated Watchtower agency in ending it—her broader point stands; religion was politics. Political struggle invoked spiritual powers that defied and defined authority. Human agency to transform the world emerged directly from these spiritual beliefs. In this sense, spirits were not symbols or stand-ins for political struggles around “real” resources.23

Two recent studies of cannibalism and vampirism further illustrate the argument. In the first of these studies, Luise White develops metaphoric and symbolic associations between vampire rumors and the colonial “extractive” economy (even while she suggests that such rumors should not be viewed as “false”). White claims that “vampire accusations were specifically African ways of talking that identified new forms of violence and extraction.”24 She links vampire rumors to a variety of colonial relations, including labor relations, missionary rivalries, anticolonial nationalism, and intrusive medical interventions. The strength of this approach is in its ability to relate belief to historical context; its shortcoming is that the scholarly interpretation of metaphors and symbols may differ from that of historical actors.25 The relationship of vampires with the extractive colonial economy is an effective and engaging metaphor, but one developed by White, and not by the workers of the Copperbelt. Instead, for the inhabitants of Copperbelt towns, vampire rumors linked the spirit world to the physical world directly. On the central African Copperbelt, people acted on the knowledge that they were empowered or oppressed by invisible forces.

Stephen Ellis, in his Mask of Anarchy, also has an account of cannibals, but his cannibals are very real, literally those who eat others to gain power. In Liberia, there were rumors of cannibals similar to those found in central Africa. But for Ellis, the act of eating to gain power was more significant than any imputed metaphoric quality. Belief in cannibals, most importantly the belief that eating people gave rise to forms of power, was not a metaphor for social or political relations, although it probably was a conscious form of metaphor and metonymy employed to acquire power (I really eat people, and thus I “eat” people and exercise power over them).26 It was not a description of forms of exploitation as if they were like cannibalism, but instead, according to Ellis, people ritually ingested human body parts to gain power over others.27 The difference in these accounts rests on the emphasis by Ellis on the belief in these practices to acquire power on the one hand, and the emphasis by White on the metaphoric qualities of spiritual beliefs on the other.

If spirits are not metaphors or symbols, however, other ways to explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible worlds, of spirits to the nonlinguistic world of senses and experiences, need to be established. For if spiritual beliefs are only discourse, autonomous from an outside reality, they lose their historical relevance beyond the history of a fanciful and disconnected imagination. A critic of Ellis, for example, could claim that cannibalism was no more than a marginal detail of Liberian belief, hardly central to the unfolding of war and politics in Liberia.28 The actions of bodies and the quotidian interactions between peoples and with their environments become unimportant to the study of belief—or “belief” becomes reified and ahistorical. If spirits are not symbols, historians need to at least find ways of speaking, if not theorizing, about the relationship of spirits to human interactions and environments.

Guidance may be sought in the century-old discussions about the relationship between society and belief among sociologists of religion that cycle through the socioeconomic determinism of Marx’s opium of the people, the ethnocentrism of Weber’s Protestant ethic, and the functionalism of Durk­heim’s religion as “social fact.” Each approach holds insight and problems, which cannot be revisited here. Durkheim’s formulation is the most insistent on the social importance of religion, and yet theoretically cautionary and qualified enough for empirical historians. For Durkheim, the context of religion is central: “If we want to understand that aptitude for living outside the real, which is seemingly so remarkable, all we need to do is relate it to the social conditions upon which it rests.” But he also insists that this view is not a “refurbishment of historical materialism”:

Collective consciousness is something other than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological [social] base. . . . If collective consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousness must occur. The product of this synthesis is a whole world of feelings, ideas, and images that follow their own laws once they are born. They mutually attract one another, repel one another, fuse together, subdivide, and proliferate; and none of these combinations is directly commanded and necessitated by the state of the underlying reality. Indeed, the life thus unleashed enjoys such great independence that it sometimes plays about in forms that have no aim or utility of any kind, but only for the pleasure of affirming itself.29

For Durkheim, while the forms of belief engage with social functions, they do not simply replicate, represent, or symbolize them. In a similar fashion, historians can recognize that spirits morph to occupy historical landscapes, but are not determined by those landscapes. These spirits, as Luise White emphasizes, are a human dialogue about nonlinguistic worlds. However, even while they can engage with this world, they do not necessarily represent or symbolize it, and sometimes animate the imagination of people in unexpected ways. Spirits can thus mobilize bodies, summon feelings, and transform lives, not unlike charged and fraught discourses about “race,” in, say, US society.30 Their imagined forms (gods, ancestral shades, nature spirits) and qualities (good, evil, indifferent, jealous, or angry) affect how people conceive of and transform their respective realities.

An insistence on the relevance of a this-worldly context for spiritual beliefs thus need not and should not overemphasize social function. The tendency to render the functional aspect of belief is often attributed to British anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s, especially to Branislaw Malinowski, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and their students, who sought to demonstrate the rationality of beliefs.31 The argument against a reductive functionalism seems to be a straw man: even in the 1940s, contemporaries such as Godfrey Wilson critiqued the tendency to dissolve “symbols into a mere reflection of the social structure.”32 Scholarship still explores the social functions of spirits, especially the interconnected “healing” of the body and the body politic. In one example from an excellent book, Neil Kodesh, drawing on much recent scholarship, argues that the idiom of healing was key to the history of political complexity in Buganda.33 And yet “healing” focuses on consensus-building rather than conflict, revealing only one aspect of the multiple public and private uses and conflicts that mobilized spiritual discourses. As in the insistence of the rationality of African beliefs by the early functionalist anthropologists, this neo-functionalist scholarship is yet another interpretative strategy employed by secularists to render spirits into an explanatory framework with which they are at ease.

A post-Enlightenment discourse that treats spirits as distant, prayer as an ineffective intervention, and miracles and curses as false makes it difficult to understand a world in which people believe that spirits wield influence. The secular mind struggles to appreciate invisible worlds where spirits mobilize bodies to action in a fashion comparable to the invisible forces of their society, such as the state and its laws. Unfortunately, since the burden of the truth about the past weighs heavily on historians, they have had an especially difficult time dealing with worlds invisible and implausible to them. In the classroom, when first confronted with a myth to be used as a historical source, many undergraduates claim that the myth did not “really happen.” Professional historians are more nuanced, and yet their visceral reaction is to insist on the language of false consciousness, or at best metaphoric and symbolic beliefs that demonstrate a subconscious rationality, rather than ideas that informed agency. Such scholars imply that spirits delude or obfuscate rather than empower. In the political imagination of many central Africans, spirits wielded power, or gave them or others power. Because spirits needed to be dealt with, they inspired agency. People—in popular movements, religious institutions, and state agencies—mobilized around their spiritual discourses.

the central african invisible world

Since the invisible world is important only insofar as it is a shared collective representation, a way that people talk about the world around them, it has to be appreciated at the level of this collectivity. General claims about the characteristics of the invisible world on a universal, continental, or even regional scale reveal only scholarly abstractions, not those of historical agents. Despite some similarities and pan-regional and transnational connections, Africans do not share an invisible world. Spiritual beliefs break down across nations, ethnicities, and even communities. For that reason, this book engages with a particular central African history, roughly falling within northern Zambia. However, certain general features of the central African region provide a useful backdrop to this particular history.

“Central Africa” is a geographic expression that conventionally refers to the region drained by the vast Congo River. It includes hundreds of ethnic groups, however defined; almost as many languages; kingdoms and decentralized village-based polities; territories colonized by French, Belgians, British, and Portuguese; and nation-states that emerged from these colonies, which range from Cameroon in the northwest to Zambia in the southeast. While the similarities between peoples in this vast region are elusive, commonly related languages that are grouped together as “Bantu” are spoken; in fact, the region constitutes the richest diversity of Bantu languages, indicating the historical depth of settlement by Bantu-speakers, who began to disperse from the Cameroon region more than three thousand years ago. Either through their common ancestry, through pan-regional connections, or through similar experiences (and probably a combination of all these factors), central Africans share certain cultural features and historical trajectories. Scholars have even claimed that there are commonalities to all central African religious movements.34 While I do not pursue this argument, in the following section some general features of the history of the central African invisible world are related to the particular case study presented in this book.

The central African invisible world has an ancient history. Based on the linguistic spread of religious terms, Christopher Ehret identifies a distinctive and millennia-old set of beliefs in the importance of ancestral spirits alongside the manipulation of evil by witches among central and eastern Bantu speakers.35 Using linguistic evidence for west-central African societies, Jan Vansina points to the centrality of spirits in forms of government.36 In the Congo River basin, according to Vansina, “early western Bantu speakers believed that the ‘real’ world went beyond the apparent world.”37 These early inhabitants of the central African forests acknowledged the religious ideas and even ancestral spirits of their predecessors, the Batwa peoples.38 Around four hundred years ago, European observers confirmed these spiritual beliefs.39 Recent ethnographies point to their continuity.40 In south-central Africa, remnants of Luba and Lunda oral and material cultures describe spiritual interventions in society and politics.41 Precisely because of shared beliefs, claims to power over people and productive resources were made through the spirit world. Land was unproductive without the spiritual power to make it fertile. At the same time, rival leaders and prophets challenged their opponents’ claims to intercede with the spirit world.

An overview of the literature, fieldwork experience, and the historical depth of belief in spirits suggests that spirits in central Africa have become connected to a core aspect of nonlinguistic existence: emotions. Spirits manifested viscerally; they were felt by individuals, and heard and seen through emotional phenomena. Dreams, trance states, and glossolalia were all highly emotive manifestations of the spirit world. Jealousy and anger were also related to spiritual forces, and could even cause death.42 Death separated the spirit from the body; birth brought them back together. Grief and joy gave ancestors their agency. Spirit possession was also gendered and sometimes even sexual. Love was often inspired by spirits (or by witchcraft), and spirits married those they possessed.43 Like emotions, which sometimes appear without explanation, central African spirits were capricious.

Since emotional actions led to political and social cohesion or transgression, collective imaginations suggested ways to manage emotions. This management or governance of emotions depends on the forces considered to inspire emotions. In Western modernity, social scientists, physicians, and psychologists have theories of emotions and have developed corresponding biomedical, educational, and legal institutions to control emotions, minimize the damage they do, or harness them to acceptable social and cultural ends (from the emotion of love to the institution of monogamous marriage, for example). In central Africa, comparable institutions needed to control the spirits that potentially disrupted or misdirected the stable functioning of society. The management of such spiritual emotions was required at the immediate family and community levels, precisely because of the emotions that familiar intimacy engenders. Across central Africa and beyond, an old form of spiritual government combated “witchcraft,” the dangerous spiritual emotions located primarily within the family and local community. That is why witchcraft was the “dark side of kinship,” as Peter Geschiere has put it.44

The antiquity of the management of spiritual emotions is illustrated in central African oral traditions and charters of governance that join quotidian concerns about witchcraft within the family and the community to stories of powerful conquerors who overcame local witchcraft, especially spiritual emotions such as love and jealousy, or perished while doing so. In such oral traditions, the success of precolonial rulers in calming spiritual emotions indicated their ability to promote fertility and keep in check illness and death. The first chapter of this book describes the dangers and promises of spiritual emotions, and indicates the rituals needed to avert death and to encourage fertility.

Old spiritual beliefs survived even as they morphed to maintain their relevance in modern times. Across the region, the uncertainties of the late nineteenth century, linked to the violent expansion of the slave and ivory trades, ratcheted up the need for spiritual security, especially among the most vulnerable.45 At first the colonial rulers of central Africa, the British, Belgian, Portuguese, and French alike, relied on the local leaders who had previously mobilized—but did not monopolize—spiritual power. European administrators emphasized the legitimacy of these chosen leaders in terms of their supposed traditional depth and (often paradoxically) in terms of their civilizing potential. The colonial administrations remained at best embarrassed by such leaders’ spiritual claims, however, which they tended to discourage. As part of their civilizing mission, colonial regimes implemented legal restrictions on interventions into the spirit world, such as the Witchcraft Ordinance of 1914 in Northern Rhodesia, which expressly prohibited accusations of spirit possession and manipulation, and thereby curtailed old forms of political legitimacy. Movements that dealt with the spirit world became illegal, but remained influential as secretive and occult forms of power. As chapter 2 of this book indicates, when colonial forms of sovereignty disempowered the spiritual agency of chiefs, people sought alternative ways to deal with spiritual malaise and political impotence.

Christian ideas propagated by the mainline Protestant and Catholic missionaries across central Africa worked with the colonial state to disenchant daily life, directing attention toward a spiritual afterlife and away from the presence of spirits in the immediate world. Twentieth-century European Christianity generally focused on spirits that were remote from the world of the living, even if these spirits held moral power and suasion over the living (with the exception of some nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries in South Africa and twentieth-century Pentecostals). European missionaries tried to distance the invisible from the visible worlds and, alongside the colonial administrations, discouraged—or prohibited, in the case of the Belgian Congo—international Christian missions and churches that conformed to existing central African notions of proximate spirits, such as those held by the Pentecostals and Jehovah’s Witnesses. These and related Christian movements still prospered and proliferated, but, as chapters 3 and 4 illustrate, outside or on the margins of colonial laws. In the postcolonial period, the mainline churches that emerged out of the European mission societies ignored, or remained inept at dealing with, spirits, especially evil spirits that brought death, sickness, and misfortune.

The failure of European missions and their successor churches to distance the world of spirits from the world of the living does not mean that Christianity was unimportant to the history of the invisible world. Central African Christian beliefs advanced independently of colonial-era missionary doctrines. Even while many formal Christian denominations were established and thrived across central Africa, a particular form and experience of Christianity, replete with distinctive spiritual personae—vampires, ancestors, demons, witches, and prophets—emerged. A colonial (and denominational) focus leads to an incomplete understanding of the way that widespread spiritual beliefs transformed Christianity.46 Put another way, Christianity populated the invisible world with new spirits and replaced or eroded the powers of old spirits. International Christian ideas were incorporated into a central African invisible world, and, in turn, this invisible world informed a changing global Christianity.47

Central African Christianity thereby came to accept direct spiritual interventions in the visible and physical world. Christian narratives were downloaded into the present. Biblical places were related to the immediate environment and biblical characters were inherited by the living, just as ancestral titles were previously inherited by systems of positional succession.48 New Jerusalems are now scattered across the region; many a Moses is remembered to have led his people against evil.49 Even the literate and bureaucratic culture of Western Christianity did not displace the powers of the spirits.50

Central Africans recast the moral judgment at the center of European Christian notions of an afterlife in heaven or hell as a struggle against spiritual evil in this world. The spirits of the past, which may have been angry for lack of respect, recognition, or propitiation, became evil spirits. Sin meant the mobilization of these evil forces, and not the transgression of certain church-defined moral codes. On the other hand, the beneficent role of older spirits ceded to the beneficent Holy Spirit. Ancestors gave way to God and Jesus, while all other spirits became demons—regardless of whether such spirits were angry for a justifiable and explicable reason. Christianity thereby contributed to the Manichaean quality of spirits, good and evil, God and the devil, absent in the spirit world before Christianity. As communal ancestors ceded to a universal God, well-being focused on Christian rituals such as baptism, confession, and even exorcism, all of which replaced veneration and propitiation of ancestral and territorial spirits. As a Christian binary morality grafted onto a belief in the presence of spirits in this world, the angels of heaven and demons of hell became part of the immediate world, not just the afterlife. This Manichaean spiritual world became an effective way of characterizing a colonial order that spread hardship and misfortune. Colonialism—with its material forms of exploitation, its assaults on personal dignity, and its racial categorization of the visible world—was an evil to be cleansed by a radical spiritual revolution, an Armageddon.51

Even while colonial-era missionaries failed to impose their vision of spiritual belief, they helped to shape secular ideologies and moralities. In alliance with colonial administrators and missionary-educated elites, colonial missionaries set about constructing what they deemed to be a moral civil society. In the postcolonial period this vision of a moral society inspired national philosophies of government, such as the state religion of Zambian humanism with its own civilizing mission that banished spiritual forces to the afterlife. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), despite the lifting of restrictions on African Christian movements, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Authenticité drew on colonial constructions to introduce invented traditions and promoted Mobutu as a heavenly force that descends to govern this world (as in the well-known Zairean state television clip). Nonetheless, both Christian and occult spirits remained a way of conceptualizing power and challenging authority.52In fact, precisely because of the inequalities linked to colonial and postcolonial societies, spiritual discourses on power proliferated. In the 1980s, as the final chapter in this book illustrates, Zambian humanism was swept away by a spiritual political theology held by Pentecostal and charismatic churches.

The limitations of secular modes of authority, in particular the late colonial and postcolonial developmentalist state, and an accompanying growth in inexplicable and audacious forms of power, encouraged spiritual discourses. As the state failed to deliver the promised benefits of development, its core mission, justification, and claims to sovereignty were compromised. In the case of Zambia, a prosperous country at the time of independence, Zambians had high “expectations of modernity.” The disappointments of the developmentalist state were deeply felt.53 In other parts of central Africa, such as the DRC, where the developmentalist state gave way to the gatekeeper state, the failure was catastrophic.54 As the postcolonial state failed in its modernizing mission, or modernity benefited only a few, spirits appeared as a discourse on an unrequited faith in a universal modernity.

The uncertainty of life in central Africa has also contributed to spiritual discourses. Here, another old quality of the spirits has been reaffirmed: that they are capricious. In a similar fashion to Adam Ashforth’s argument for the South African city of Soweto, where spirits manifest in a climate of postapartheid uncertainty, in central Africa the uncertainty of life contributed to beliefs in spiritual agency.55 Economic misfortune, violence, and disease indicated the agency of angry and evil spirits. Without apparent reason, violence afflicted communities or people died of mysterious new diseases. On the other hand, an ordinary person might become extraordinarily wealthy—perhaps even the leader of a new nation. Children could become wealthier than their parents, reversing or rendering chaotic older gerontocratic orders.56 Such unpredictability in life, inexplicable in terms of hegemonic and secular forms of sovereignty and morality, made the agency of good and evil spirits apparent. The modern Protestant notion that hard work leads to wealth and well-being has not conformed to the lived experiences of most people for whom a discourse on capricious spirits is far more convincing and realistic. Since modernity has been unpredictable, nonlinear, and frequently disappoints, a discourse on spiritual agency is a discourse on the lack of agency by living humans.57 Central Africans have discussed the capriciousness of spirits as they reflect on the arbitrariness of power and their own inabilities to transform their lives.

Spirits could inspire ideas of revolutionary change. For the European-led missions, conversion to Christianity involved a gradual struggle toward enlightenment, as they inserted the convert into a progressive moral teleology guided by an established church hierarchy. For those who led the nationalist movement, the party would serve the same moral purpose as the mission church. On the other hand, the prophetic spiritual movements examined in this book posed a radical model of conversion that sought to transform the individual as a basis for a spiritual revolution. Conversion in this framework harnessed spirits to local concerns and identities; it critiqued old practices, addressed inequalities, and promoted a utopian future. Since spiritual forces possessed the individual, they allowed for a remarkable and sudden personal transformation. Conversion purified the individual of evil and laid the foundations for a new society. The revolution, often violent, was a cleansing of evil, a personal catharsis or exorcism that led to a reborn individual and nation, and ultimately to heaven on earth.

The connection between violence and beliefs in a spirit world is an understudied aspect of central African history. Violence is often attributed to “big men” who manipulate and indoctrinate credulous and underage soldiers, set about capturing valuable resources, or, in a more sophisticated argument, “rage against the machine” of dysfunctional governance.58 Such reasonings may explain why people take to arms; they do not explain acts of ritualized brutality and quotidian violence. The belief that people were fighting the devil—or human incarnations of evil spirits—may have inspired violence, or at least represented and made sense of violence. Because of the gendered nature of spirit possession, such violence often targeted women. When nationalist- supporting villagers massacred a community of Lumpa Church members, many of them women, brutalizing and raping them, as described in chapter 6, they considered the members to be incarnations of evil, possessed by demons. For the villagers who committed these acts, killing was not sufficient. The demons needed to be publicly and ritually vilified so that they would fear returning to the land of the living. There is a widely held misconception that Christianity in Africa inspired peace, while colonialism caused trauma and violence. According to this idea, the violence and disruption caused by Christianity and Christian missionaries were due to their role as agents of colonialism; the missionaries were not “true” Christians. To the contrary, as in other periods in the history of Christianity, Christian spiritual beliefs engaged with violent histories, and sometimes inspired violence. Christian spirits could be violent agents. Chapters 5 and 6 of this book point to how Christian beliefs contributed to violence during decolonization. Other examples drawn from the central African region indicate similar histories.59

Of course, spirits are not unfamiliar to other parts of Africa and to other parts of the world. In South Africa, spirits formed an important element of political and religious discourse, providing life-giving rain, inspiring struggles against taxation in the nineteenth century, envisaging Zion for the many followers of Isaiah Shembe, revealing apartheid-era witches in the late twentieth century, and contributing to the uncertainties of life in the twenty-first century.60 The most emotive refrain in the South African national anthem, “Nkosi Sikilel’ iAfrica” (God Bless Africa), resounds with a call, “Woza moya,” for the Holy Spirit to come down and bless Africa. The proliferation of Pentecostal and charismatic churches in southern Nigeria and Ghana, with their ongoing struggles against evil demons, indicates comparable spiritual agencies.61 In Liberia, Poro societies provided a parallel power to the state.62 The Tongnaab deity has offered good fortune in life and commerce to the increasing number of pilgrims who make their way to its shrine in northern Ghana.63 Spiritual agents can be identified in the history of the African diaspora in the Americas—Haiti, Cuba, North America, and Brazil, for example.64 Similar conceptions of spiritual power were also found among people with no relationship to Africa, such as in Southeast Asia.65 On the other hand, spirits have not been as central to religion and to politics in other parts of the African continent. In parts of the African Sahel, for example, even while forms of spirit possession have long prospered, Sharia Islam, with its focus on texts, moral codes, and the afterlife, has repressed spiritual interventions (although Sufi Islam allowed for direct spiritual interventions).66 Here, the introduction of Christianity engaged with a different set of concerns and politico-religious configurations.67

In outlining some of these general features of the central African region, I do not argue that there are unchanging and homogeneous central African traditions, but only point to the importance of proximate and capricious invisible agents in early modern and modern central African history. The exact nature and historical trajectory of this invisible world and its relationship to the visible world diverge in many central African communities. Particular histories were created out of similar experiences, such as the slave-and-ivory trading wars of the nineteenth century, colonial impositions, postcolonial nationalism and socialism, and neoliberalism; and similar changes in the spirit world, including the appearance of an evil Satan, a good God, as well as the diminished role of ancestral shades and nature spirits. This book discusses the role of invisible inspirations in one of these Zambian histories.

methodology and zambian historiography

Even while spiritual beliefs are shared, they are private, and thus require the historian to appreciate an internal perspective, a challenge since there are so few written accounts left by believers and since personal beliefs remain hidden from secular authorities. Often the historian reads belief from the accounts of skeptical outsiders. Many of these outside authorities impose categorizations, especially those of “religion” and “politics,” onto the experiences and activities of people. To grapple with these methodological quandaries, the contexts that motivated and inspired the writing of the primary and secondary source material have to be appreciated.

This book employs three types of evidence used in Africanist scholarship: fieldwork, oral testimony, and documentary sources. Informal fieldwork for this project began in 1997–1998, when I conducted the research that informed my first book on environment, society, and culture in the Luapula Valley, located adjacent to the Lubemba Plateau, and when I came to appreciate the importance of spirits as a political resource, and began to think about the history explored here.68I also developed competency in ChiBemba, the language of the Lubemba Plateau, as well as one of the principal languages of Zambia’s urban areas (I studied ChiBemba at Ilondola Mission, one of the Catholic missions discussed in chapter 2). Since then, I have returned to Zambia almost yearly, with significant intervals of fieldwork devoted to this book in 2005 and 2008. My fieldwork involved living in villages and in church compounds, attending services and seminars, and discussing the issues found in this book with the followers and principal clergy of the movements examined. Upon identifying reliable informants, I recorded interviews: in 2005, on popular Christianity (especially the Lumpa movement of Alice Lenshina) and the anticolonial nationalist movement in northern Zambia during the 1950s and 1960s; in 2008, on the Pentecostal and charismatic churches that have proliferated across Zambia since the 1980s. Like all historical sources, memory represses, disguises, and reveals selectively. Yet fieldwork and interviews open up local perspectives, even in the interpretation of documentary sources.

The documentary sources, including unpublished archival material but also publications such as newspapers, memoirs, and government publications, that inform this book are found in libraries and archives in Zambia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the United States. Each repository holds secrets that yield only after lengthy investigation and interpretation. Crucial to the interpretation of documents is an appreciation of the contexts of their writing: What was emphasized? What was left out? And why? Any one document emerges from multiple perspectives, prejudices, experiences, informants, and other documents. In an archive, the enterprising historian can identify the paper trail, the many revealing documents, often hidden in obscurely titled files and boxes, that lie behind a single published government report or commission of inquiry. Historical investigation is an engagement with archives to understand this multilayered construction of documents, a sort of fieldwork in the archives, which in turn relies on understanding the historical contexts in which the documents were written.

An effective appreciation of local history and historiography is thus crucial to the interpretation of documents. The writing of Zambian history began in the encounter between Zambian oral historians and outsiders, including missionaries, colonial officials, and anthropologists. The first accounts of the precolonial Zambian past, generally the migration of Luba and Lunda royals into a land inhabited by much earlier settlements of Bantu-speakers, appeared in the district notebooks of colonial officials and the publications of mission societies. Certain missionaries or mission societies took special interest in collecting these stories. The Catholic mission society, the White Fathers, for example, undertook extensive surveys of all aspects of culture, history, and religion in the areas where they proselytized. This represented the beginnings of a long tradition of Catholic missionary scholarship that stretches from Edouard Labrecque, whom Giacomo Macola describes as an “indefatigable organizer of culture throughout northeastern Zambia,” to Hugo F. Hinfelaar’s insightful work on Bemba women’s engagement with Christianity.69 (While Protestant missionaries also collected histories, their emphasis on a progressive civilizing mission meant that they were less interested in historical traditions than were the Catholics.) Many of these missionaries spent decades in the field, were fluent in local languages, and were avid collectors of culture and history.

Missionaries believed that there was only one religion, even while each group could possess a different secular history. Thus, non-Christian narratives deemed religious were problematic, while those narratives that were viewed as historical were acceptable. Christian stories had to replace ostensibly religious narratives, but ostensibly secular histories were permitted, and could even be promoted. Missionary publications thus separated the religious from the historical; the former were beliefs that had to give way to Christianity; the latter could be kept as markers of distinct human communities. In mission-recorded oral traditions, the agency of living beings replaced the agency of spirits. Stories about the spirit that the missionaries would call God (Lesa) and the origins of humankind, for example, were unacceptable in the published missionary scholarship. Much subsequent historical scholarship is based on these sanitized missionary publications. Fortunately, the missionary researchers left a paper trail: the original unpublished writings and research notes are now available in mission archives. These notes were the product of careful research: the missionaries considered knowledge of customs repugnant to them as a weapon in efforts to combat them. “Morally speaking, many customs are directly opposed to the Christian code,” a White Father, Louis Etienne, wrote. But he also noted that “as long as the missionary does not acquire a thorough knowledge of these customs, he will be unable to remedy them; he will be able to impart only a superficial culture, a semblance of Christianity, which will always be merely a thin veneer superimposed upon paganism, fatally lacking in depth, and certain to crumble under any serious trial.”70 Accounts of such customs and histories thus exist in many missionary documents, although they rarely found their way to missionary publications. If possible and necessary, I have made use of these unsanitized research notes.

In the late nineteenth century, the British government awarded a charter to Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (BSAC) to rule a vast territory, which included present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe. The BSAC recruited colonial officials who were responsible for the implementation of a variety of colonial exactions, such as taxation and the recruitment and organization of labor for the incipient mining industry. Since they struggled to govern their vast districts, colonial administrators turned to existing elites in their efforts to maintain control. In order to determine the “legitimate” rulers of any particular area, they collected histories, which were reproduced in many district notebooks, now found in the National Archives of Zambia (NAZ). The tendency to research and write down local histories and traditions increased after the British government declined to renew the BSAC’s charter in 1923 and took over the administration of Northern Rhodesia in 1924, formally introducing indirect rule during the 1930s. Officials responsible for the implementation of indirect rule, such as W. Vernon Brelsford, produced several monographs and articles from their collection of local knowledge, first written as appendices to their many “tour reports,” which are also found in the NAZ.

Like the missionaries, these local colonial officials were interested in particular narratives. Mirroring a concept of royalty and aristocracy in their own societies, colonial officials focused on lineage and on the strength of inherited traditions. Thus, despite the fact that many of the colonial officials spent several years in an area and developed fluency in local languages, their accounts of the basis of political power were partial and culled to their particular interests. However, these officials also viewed it as their duty to repress “false” beliefs. Thus, in their battle against the spirits, they left valuable archival traces that can be employed by the historian. At times, such archives represent the prejudices of a secular mind, identifying an exotic and irrational “other.” And yet, like the missionaries, colonial officials knew that success in their struggle against beliefs they considered false depended on the accuracy of their data.

The third productive encounter between Zambians and outsiders occurred with the arrival of the anthropologist. In northern Zambia, Audrey I. Richards, Bronislaw Malinowski’s student, was a pioneer of colonial anthropology. Her work on the northern Zambian kingdom and people termed the “Bemba” began in the 1930s and drew on a long collaboration with Paul B. Mushindo, an elder of the Church of Scotland’s mission in northern Zambia, as well as the support of various liberal settlers and colonial officials such as Stewart Gore-Brown and Thomas Fox-Pitt. Richards’s work, characterized as functionalism, sought to appreciate the totality of cultural and religious forms that informed sociopolitical arrangements. A major concern of her initial analysis was with the forces of change that she perceived as having disrupted the cohesive functioning of tribal society.71 Richards continued to publish about Bemba society and visited occasionally up until the late 1960s. Her many articles, which drew on copious field research notes, detail Bemba sociopolitical organization and their religious expressions.72

Richards’s functionalism gave way to an embrace of change by a progressive school of colonial-era anthropologists centered at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI). They, too, benefited from a dialogue with local interpreters and ethnographers.73 There was great diversity in their scholarship, which included the sociological studies of Godfrey Wilson and Monica H. Wilson (close collaborators and friends of Richards), the symbolic cultural ethnographies of Victor Turner, the structural functionalism of Max Gluckman, the detailed longitudinal field investigations of Elizabeth Colson, and the liberal historical accounts of Lewis H. Gann. Many of them wrote about what they presumed to be single ethnic groups (the Lozi, Lunda, Tonga, etc.). But instead of fearing change and “detribalization” with increased urbanization and the growth of the copper-mining economy, a preoccupation of functionalist scholarship, the RLI anthropologists were fascinated by the new cultural forms emerging in the towns. They sought to represent African societies of Northern Rhodesia in the midst of a great transformation from village to urban life. To a certain extent, their progressive politics may have led them to over­estimate the permanence and the linearity of such changes. Their “expectations of modernity,” as James Ferguson’s more recent ethnography puts it, shared by the growing literate and cosmopolitan urban Zambian population, would not materialize in the postcolonial period.74

As with the colonial missionaries and administrators, there was much that was repressed by these anthropologists. Richards imagined an ordered tribal society where power devolved from the paramount; that which did not fit in this view was left out (or represented as anomalous signs of tribal breakdown). The RLI anthropologists struggled to relate spirits to society. Often influenced by Marxism, they ignored the richest components of their data (e.g., for Godfrey Wilson), or they focused on ritual (Gluckman) or symbol (Turner) rather than spiritual agency.75 Fortunately, as with the missionaries and colonial officials, these anthropologists left detailed field notes in various archives, and, when carefully examined, they, too, provide richer source material than the final published accounts. This book has especially benefited from a careful reading of Richards’s research notes.

As independence approached, rival political and religious movements fought over followers and over the implications of the end of European colonialism. The conflict between popular nationalism and other prophetic movements around the time of Zambian independence left rich archival traces, underappreciated by other studies. For example, this is the first book to employ the detailed archival sources on the battles between the United National Independence Party (UNIP) and prophetic movements such as Watchtower and Alice Lenshina’s Lumpa Church. Readers who want to appreciate the multiple perspective and documents that lie behind a widely cited official report, the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Lumpa Church, the long-established authoritative text on the Lumpa Church, should consider the archival documents referenced in chapter 6.76

In the heady days after independence, as Kenneth Kaunda and the UNIP took over the control of the colonial state and a booming copper economy, Zambians and foreign scholars expressed high hopes for the nation. A nationalist historiography celebrated the emergence of this new order. Some looked to the precolonial period to identify indigenous forms of statecraft. Andrew Roberts charted the political history of the rise and fall of the Bemba polity, demonstrating the secular logic of precolonial forms of political organization, and culling religious and mythological aspects from his history.77 Robert I. Rotberg rendered the rise of African nationalism in central Africa as the growth of a liberal secular modernity against an authoritarian and anachronistic colonial state.78 Henry S. Meebelo looked to the early colonial period to identify how acts of resistance against the colonial state eventually manifested as the rise of a nationalist movement. Millenarian or “religious”-based agency was imagined to give way to secular nationalism.79 This intellectual project engaged with a political project, the creation of the state religion of Zambian humanism, which is documented in the United National Independence Party archives, a valuable resource for understanding the postcolonial state’s response to spiritual beliefs.

When Kaunda’s rule failed to meet the expectation of party activists and the one-party state was declared, the nationalist historiography appeared Whiggish and dated. But even as Zambians became disillusioned and critical of Kaunda’s regime, scholarship remained muted, at least compared to the far more critical and analytical scholarship about, say, Mobutu’s Zaire. In part this was because under Kaunda, Zambia hosted southern African liberation movements, and hence was a sympathetic home to some of the radical historians and social theorists of southern Africa.80 The critical tradition of scholarship that did emerge during the 1970s and 1980s generally emphasized structural forces rather than historical agency. Scholars, drawing on a Marxist dependency theory then in vogue, wrote about the structural “roots of rural poverty,” a legacy that the postcolonial Zambian regime found difficult to counteract.81 Marxists were also interested in religion. In one example particularly pertinent to this book, Wim M. J. van Binsbergen placed religious practices within their socioeconomic contexts; or, in his language, he linked a distinctive religious superstructure to underlying transformations in the mode of production. Even while his descriptions were far more subtle than the determinism of his analytical model, van Binsbergen stressed class forces instead of treating the content of religious ideas as statements of power. Marxist abstractions replaced spiritual assertions. His chapter on the Christian Lumpa movement of Alice Lenshina, a central concern of this book, stands out in this regard. He argued that Lenshina’s movement was constituted by peasants who radically rejected state control and the petty bourgeois leadership of the nationalists, an analysis that he could only sustain with little reference to the concepts held by Lenshina’s followers.82

By the 1990s Zambian historiography began to look beyond the blinkers of theoretical Marxism and view the heterodox struggles of ordinary people. Samuel N. Chipungu edited an important collection on the experiences of Zambians under colonialism.83 A new generation of anthropologists offered alternative views to the paradigms of tribal change developed by their predecessors, the RLI anthropologists.84 Karen Tranberg Hansen published ethnographies about marginalized groups, servants, women, small-scale traders, and youth.85 James A. Pritchett’s long period of fieldwork informed his analysis of alternative forms of corporate organization.86 Megan Vaughan and Henrietta L. Moore questioned Richards’s contention of a stable and traditional Bemba tribal society where practices such as chitemene (a form of slash-and-burn agriculture) were engrained in culture and would collapse under the stresses of modernity.87

At the end of the 1990s, a post-nationalist historiography emerged. A seminal moment in the dissemination of this historiography was the convening of a conference in Lusaka in August 2005 and the publication of a selection of its proceedings, One Zambia, Many Histories. This was, in the words of the editors, a decisive attempt to “place at the centre of the analysis the counter-hegemonic political and religious histories and projects that stubbornly refused to be silenced in the name of national unity.”88 Some examples from the volume stand out in their relevance for this book. Giacomo Macola demonstrates the intolerant and exclusionary nature of UNIP’s nationalism, which allowed little opportunity for political dissent.89 Miles Larmer discusses the political opposition that was forced underground after the banning of the United Progressive Party (UPP) in 1972. Even the once-powerful trade union movement increasingly succumbed to—even as it resisted—co-option and incorporation into UNIP.90 The church, as Marja Hinfelaar points out, proved to be one of the few spheres of civil society that remained autonomous from UNIP and able to critique its leadership and practices.91 Their weekly newspaper, the National Mirror, thus provides an important source for independent voices in the postcolonial period, and is employed extensively in the final chapters of this book.

My post-secular argument is related to this latest post-nationalist and in some senses postmodern trend. It questions some of the central tenets of nationalist history alongside modernization theory, with its assumptions of secular agencies and its progressive teleology. This focus on the multifarious and unexpected narratives and epistemologies, the centrality of spirits in Zambian history, may upset those who seek solace in their secular worlds. The methodological approach promoted here attempts to extend the vistas of my predecessors—the missionaries, colonial administrators, anthropologists, and progressive activists—and make visible the rich, complex, and dynamic worlds that they ignored, repressed, or rendered invisible.

an overview

This history of a world populated with spirits begins with the oral tradition of the Bemba Crocodile Clan royals that recalls their migration to northern Zambia, their battle with the “owners of the land,” and their death and burial in a sacred grove, indicating the ability of the royal ancestors to calm dangerous emotions and to ensure fertility and fecundity. The first chapter, “The Passion of Chitimukulu,” ends in the late nineteenth century, when the slave trade and warfare impinged on south-central Africa to an unprecedented degree, and local prophets challenged the hegemony and efficacy of these Crocodile Clan spiritual claims and interventions.

Chapter 2, “Christian Witches,” turns to the early twentieth century, when the Bemba royals were incorporated into the colonial state. Even as the Bemba rulers were empowered as indirect rulers by the colonial district commissioners (DCs), they were disempowered as mediators with their ancestral spirits. In addition, new Christian spirits challenged or replaced the ancestors. And yet evil proliferated, in part because Christian moralities and notions of sin became associated with angry spirits and even witchcraft. But ideas of evil spiritual agents also spread because they provided an effective way to describe the colonial order. Movements such as the Bamuchape witchcraft cleansers harnessed new Christian spirits to cleanse the evil that the missionaries stubbornly refused to recognize.

The newly established copper-mining towns of the 1920s and 1930s, where a number of Bemba men and women sought employment and opportunities, form the backdrop to the third chapter, “Satan in the City.” Here a new type of Christian movement, free from European missionaries, the “Watchtower,” took guidance from the international Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets that associated the authorities of this world with Satan. For the Watchtower movement on the Copperbelt, the colonial authorities and mining companies were Satan’s agents. In the name of the Armageddon and a new heaven on earth, Watchtower fomented opposition among workers dislocated from rural environs and liberated from indirect rule. In a series of strikes, they confronted the colonial authorities, missionaries, European-educated African elites, and the secular urban civil society that these elites were in the process of creating.

Chapter 4, “A New Jerusalem,” returns to the rural Bemba heartland by considering the rise of a revolutionary church led by the Queen, “Regina” or “Lenshina” in the ChiBemba language, who sought to replace old beneficent spirits with new spirits, God and Jesus, in order to eradicate the influence of evil witchcraft. Not only did Lenshina innovate the ideas of the Bamuchape witchfinders and Watchtower to challenge the Christianity of the missionaries and the political sovereignty of the colonial state, but her spiritual quest addressed the afflictions of the most marginalized of groups, rural women, burdened by a patriarchal colonial order.

Popular nationalism spread in the same areas as the popular Christian movements. Chapter 5, “The Dawn,” considers the rise of a nationalist movement that brought Christian spiritual notions into the struggle for a popular sovereignty, leading to an explosive, Manichaean, and sometimes violent movement that demanded faithful adherence to the mass movement. Popular nationalism had such a close resemblance to millenarian religious movements that elite attempts to contain expectations through a program of secular moral reform were challenged.

By the early 1960s, the followers of Alice Lenshina and the nationalist movement fought for influence, resulting in a brutal civil war in northern Zambia. We witness in chapter 6, “Devils of War,” striking examples of spiritual agency during this civil war, as enemies became devils, bullets turned to water, and brave fighters were described as Christian heroes.

The war ended when Kaunda sent in colonial troops to forcefully disperse Lenshina’s followers’ villages. The victory of Kaunda’s nationalists and their seizure of the colonial state apparatus in 1964 promised to inaugurate an era of secular socialism, guided by Kaunda’s state religion, humanism. Chapter 7, “God in Heaven, Kaunda on Earth,” argues that humanism was never a convincing philosophy for Zambians. They turned instead to spiritual mediators, such as the Archbishop of Lusaka, Emmanuel Milingo, who exorcized the evil spirits that afflicted Zambians who were losing faith in the nationalist vision.

Chapter 8, “A Nation Reborn,” explores the agency of the neoliberal Holy Spirit, which promised wealth and advancement in a post-socialist era. In 1991, Christians led the way in challenging Kaunda and his humanist state religion, contributing to the downfall of Kaunda in 1991. Zambia’s second president, Frederick Chiluba, declared that Zambia, blessed by the Holy Spirit, would be reborn and prosper as a Christian nation. Pentecostal-inspired spirits framed the challenges and opportunities of a neoliberal order.

1 The Passion of Chitimukulu

The history of the Bemba kingdom’s rise prior to the nineteenth century remains vague. In Bemba renditions, the military conquest of the region by the Luba-related Crocodile Clan was entwined with stories of autochthonous magical powers, especially those of women, and the passion of the Crocodile Clan’s leader, Chitimukulu, “the Great Tree.” Objects such as the staff of rule, depicted below in figure 1.1 and on the cover, evoked memories of similar conquests across south-central Africa. Similar figurines could have represented a number of different iconic heroines praised in many of the savanna’s most renowned stories of conquest: Luweji of the Lunda, Bulanda of the Luba, or Nachituti of the Kazembe kingdom. For the Bemba it would have been of Chilimbulu, the woman with beautiful scarifications who seduced the roaming Bemba hero, Chitimukulu. Her half-closed eyes, sculpted ears, and enlarged navel and genitalia indicated paths of connection to the powers of the spirits. She held her breasts, perhaps containing secrets to human fertility and agricultural fecundity.92 The conquering king ruled by harnessing her powers; his failure to possess her, to contain and control the dangerous spiritual emotions that she invoked, would, men claimed, lead to the collapse of an order that underpinned their patriarchal civilization.

The objects and stories that tell of the Crocodile Clan’s powers built on older conceptions of the relationships between people, the land upon which they relied, and the dead; they reconciled the spiritual powers of the auto­chthons with claims to rule by conquerors. Politics, then, was also religion, and religion was politics; the competition over ideas with which people could comprehend their past and apprehend their future. New politico-religious constellations could not be imposed in a foreign vocabulary, for they would lose the powers that rendered them useful. Yet they could equally not celebrate the past, as they would then not provide legitimacy for the new rulers. The Crocodile Clan conquerors thus offered innovations within the existing collective political imagination. They claimed to intervene with the spiritual forces crucial for social and economic well-being, linking their ancestral spirits and their relics of rule to the most vital aspects of ordinary existence—the fertility of people and the fecundity of agriculture. The Bemba expected the Crocodile Clan’s government to ensure that ancestral and nature spirits were placated, and that the living prospered free from spiritual malaise and witchcraft.

The ideas of this Bemba politico-religious edifice were not written down: religion was not restricted to the dogmas of scriptures; politics was not subject to the laws of constitutions. No document would allow the future scholar to easily reconstruct the basis of rule. Surviving objects, such as the staff of rule described above, and various other relics, including stools, bow stands, and other objects, provide some clues. But the most important fragments of evidence are praises, proverbs, and stories, which would eventually be written down and come to be known collectively under the general rubric of “oral tradition.” At first glance, the oral tradition appears to be a historical representation. But, like all history, the oral tradition established its importance, relevance, and appeal not because it rendered past events correctly, but because it gave an account of the correct relationships among people, the world that sustained them, and the dead. Historical discourse, as V. Y. Mudimbe has established, was also religious discourse.93

Historians preoccupied with change in a narrowly conceived secular political realm have focused on struggles around physical forms of wealth such as people and land. Detailed histories of competing lords and polities leave out the language, idioms, and terms in which political struggle took place. The most significant study of precolonial Bemba political history, for example, argues that much in the Bemba political charter, their oral tradition of genesis, should be relegated to the “student of myth and social structure rather than the historian.”94 It would seem ludicrous in other contexts to exclude the central ideas and objectives of politics from a political history. As J. Matthew Schoffeleers demonstrates, such mythical elements point to the ideological basis of precolonial polities.95 The objectives of political struggle were the spiritual powers that allowed the people to reproduce and the land to produce.

There have, of course, been many accounts of “Bemba religion.” But in these accounts religion appears as superstition or, at best, a timeless tribal dogma that is a partial revelation of a true religion. Concerned to spread their religion, missionaries separated history from religion and focused on the relationships of local spiritual beliefs with Christian dogma.96 Anthropologists, too, discussed religion as if it somehow belonged to individual tribes. Audrey I. Richards’s seminal study conceived of religion as a functionalist legitimizing device for Bemba chieftaincy, “sacralising the political structure on which the tribe depend[s].”97 Hugo F. Hinfelaar’s more recent study combines missionary and anthropological approaches with a progressive concern for women’s agency. Here, Richards’s emphasis on Bemba chieftaincy is substituted with a Bemba religious dogma located among commoners and women.98 Religion was not dogma or tribal trait, however; it was history, a description of past relationships between peoples and spirits that held ongoing implications for the identities of the living.

Emotions are at the narrative center of Bemba historical discourse. The oral tradition moves forward through passionate actions linked to love, seduction, jealousy, and death. “Story is at the heart of the way humans see themselves, experience themselves within the context of their worlds,” according to renowned scholar of southern African oral traditions Harold Scheub. “And emotions are the soul of storytelling.”99 In his fieldwork notes on the nearby Nyakyusa, Godfrey Wilson noticed that “the ordinary intense feelings of men are often felt to have in themselves a directly religious quality. Sexual excitement, grief and fear bring into communion with ultimate realities.”100 Precisely because of their centrality to livelihood and their visceral manifestations, emotions were expressed spiritually. The Bemba oral tradition is a history of attempts to govern these spiritual emotions. The appeal and importance of the Bemba oral tradition emerged from these spiritual emotions. Audrey I. Richards thought that Bemba religion both sacralized political authorities and ritualized individual emotions.101 Yet, instead of these being discrete foci of Bemba religion (sacralizing the political structure on the one hand and ritualizing individual emotions on the other, as Richards claimed), they were one and the same. The Bemba oral tradition reminded people of the love that sustained life and the jealousy that threatened it. In the narrative, the Crocodile Clan of Chitimukulu promised control over the spiritual emotions that gave life, fertility, and fecundity, but which could also lead to death. Only through harnessing such individual passions was the political authority of the Crocodile Clan sacralized. Passion individualizes, as Emile Durkheim argued, but it also enslaves.102

During the late nineteenth century, global economic forces began to impinge on the Bemba kingdom in an unprecedented fashion. As a result of internal dissent stemming from the spread of the kingdom and the subjugation of people such as the Bisa and external challenges from the Ngoni and an intensified slave trade, the Bemba kingdom faced new challenges. The instabilities of the nineteenth century ratcheted up the stakes in battles over political power. The Crocodile Clan rulers made a concerted effort to harness and control spiritual emotions. Only through the Crocodile Clan, the rulers claimed, would people fall in love, fertility and fecundity flourish, jealous and angry spirits be placated, and hunters and soldiers be imbued with the bravery to capture their prey and defeat their enemies. Even while the Crocodile Clan sponsored rituals and ceremonies that enhanced their access to the spirits, prophets also offered alternative spiritual interventions. This violent turmoil of people, spirits, and emotions led to the proliferation of invisible agents that began to be perceived as evil.

desire and death

The Bemba politico-religious constellation rested on a frightening, magical, and dangerous story of desire and death. The characters existed in the liminality of human experience and had access to a world that was beyond the ordinary.103We do not know the narrative’s exact performance and articulation prior to the nineteenth century; indeed, it might not have been rendered as a single story, but performed on many different occasions with different emphases. If the bare outline of the founding story refers to “historical facts,” they probably took place in the seventeenth century.104 But the oral tradition was likely influenced by the wars of the nineteenth century. The Roman Catholic White Father missionary Edouard Labrecque wrote down the most complete version of the oral tradition in the early twentieth century. Through the twentieth century, several successive attempts to write down the oral tradition in its entirety display differences in both form and content. Instead of attempting to write down a more authentic version—since there is no urtext—I have culled and summarized sequences from several sources that are most important for this discussion.105

On one level, the oral tradition is a fairly typical story of the strife between fathers and sons and the restoration of ties between sisters and brothers found within charters of the ChiBemba-speaking Lala, Lamba, and Aushi matrilineal clans that surround the central Bemba polity.106 Thereby, the narrative introduces many familiar elements, necessary and convincing fragments and clichés that joined it to other stories—and places the Crocodile Clan’s polity within a vast network of matrilineal cultures. But unlike many of the more ordinary and widespread clan-based narratives, the Bemba oral tradition makes a claim for the divine origins of the Crocodile Clan. The first sequence of the story establishes these grandiose origins through their link with a celestial mother. The joining of sky and earth, a basic principle of sacred Luba politico-religious kings—and a refrain to which the Bemba oral tradition returns repeatedly—was thereby achieved:

A lord, Mukulumpe, was hunting in a forest when he met a beautiful woman with large ears like an elephant. She said that her name was Mumbi Mukasa, she had come from the sky, and she belonged to the Crocodile Clan. Mukulumpe and Mumbi Mukasa married and had three sons, Nkole, Chiti, Katongo, and one daughter, Chilufya (or Bwalya Chabala).

The marriage between the hunter and the celestial woman, Mumbi Mukasa, establishes the possibilities for a royal family, as illustrated in figure 1.2, and for the spread of Luba and Lunda political institutions. But in family there was also jealousy and discord. The sons display their maternal devotion by building a tower to their mother’s home, but after it collapses and causes destruction, they have to flee the wrath of their father. They rescue their sister, however, restoring their most affectionate matrilineal affiliations:

The royal sons tried to build a tower to their mother’s home in the sky. But it collapsed and killed many people. Their angry father, Mukulumpe, banished their mother to the sky and imprisoned their sister, Chilufya. He blinded one son, Katongo, who managed to send a warning with the talking drum to his brothers, Nkole and Chiti, of a trap set by their father. The brothers fled eastward, led by a white magician, Luchele Ng’anga. After they crossed the Luapula River, Chiti sent five men to rescue his sister, Chilufya. She joined her brothers, carrying seeds for Bemba agriculture in her hair (in some versions, Nkole carried the seeds in his hair).107

The white magician, Luchele Ng’anga, was the first of a line of famous migrant prophets who ignited the political imagination of northeastern Zambians over the next two centuries. Perhaps, as the anthropologist Luc de Heusch claims, Luchele Ng’anga was a solar hero, representing the dawn of the new era, the rays of the rising sun that led the Crocodile Clan eastward.108

While the potential symbolic interpretations are further discussed below, here I want to draw attention to the quotidian aspects of the story, the basic emotional principles upon which the mythical grandeur was built. The falling in love, the establishment of family, the emotional ties between mothers and sons and brothers and sisters, all of which move our story forward, and lead to the eastward migration of the Crocodile Clan. Upon arriving in the new land, there is a second love affair: a married woman, Chilimbulu, the Bemba heroine depicted on the staff of rule, seduces the most admirable of the migrating sons, Chiti, with her beautiful tattoo. The jealousy that this act of passion ignites leads to Chiti’s death. But his death, and the consequent revenge killing, provides the sacred principles upon which the Bemba kingdom comes to rest. In his death, Chiti became the ancestor who ruled over the land, Chiti the Great, Chitimukulu, the title of the Bemba paramount, and a position inherited by succeeding Crocodile Clan patriarchs:

Chilimbulu was the wife of the hunter Mwase. With her attractive scarifications, she seduced Chiti. But Mwase caught them while they were having sex. They fought over Chilimbulu, and Mwase killed Chiti with a poisoned arrow. Nkole then avenged the death of his brother Chiti. He killed Mwase and Chilimbulu and cut up their bodies, but carefully preserved Chilimbulu’s attractive scarified skin. In future, the skin would be kept as a royal relic, a babenye. A “virgin” (or guardian of the relic) would wear the skin of Chilimbulu when it was time to plant the first seeds.109

The celestial ancestry of the Crocodile Clan could not overcome the local magic of the earth; the dangerous desires that a woman inspires. Such desires had to be appropriated and made productive: the skin of Chilimbulu became the chibyalilo object of power used to bless the seeds when it was time to plant.110 While the paramount Chitimukulu kept Chilimbulu’s skin, subordinate Crocodile Clan rulers received a staff of rule with designs that traced out Chilimbulu’s scarified skin and represented her body as a means to communicate with the spirit world.111

Chiti’s brother Nkole then found a place to bury Chiti. The graveyard also had to be cleansed by an act of passion:

Nkole then searched for a graveyard to bury his brother Chiti. He found an unmarried Luba woman of the Sorghum Clan, Chimbala. She offered a beautiful forested grove for Chiti’s grave. Nkole requested that she cleanse the burial party. But cleansing could only be performed by a woman after she had had sex with her husband. So her slave Kabotwe had sex with her. Kabotwe (or Chimbala) would then become the caretaker of the graveyard, Mwalule, the father of “Mwalule,” “Shimwalule.”112

Chiti was buried, bringing the spiritual power of the celestial Crocodile Clan down to earth. Nkole arranged the burial and then joined his brother:

Nkole carefully preserved the corpse of Chiti by soaking it, drying it in the sun, and wrapping it in a cow’s hide. He burned the remains of Mwase and Chilimbulu, so that they could be buried with Chiti. But the smoke from the fire also killed Nkole. They then prepared the body of Nkole in the same way. As the elder brother he was buried above Chiti. They were both buried beneath a termite mound, with their heads facing east.

The graveyard, termed “Mwalule,” became the spiritual center of human and agricultural fertility. The burial of Chiti and Nkole is the end of the charter tradition of genesis, although the oral tradition of the Crocodile Clan continues to narrate significant episodes of their rule, mostly during the nineteenth century.

emotional powers

There are various ways to interpret this first portion of the oral tradition. In typical Luba stories of the founding of the sacred kings (mulopwe), the migrating royal marries the local earth priest.113 This marriage has been interpreted to indicate the unification of local ancestors with Luba sacred royalty, creating a new form of leadership, the mfumu (usually translated as “chief”).114 Such a secular political interpretation has been developed by Andrew Roberts, who wrote the still-unrivaled account of the precolonial history of the Bemba, and discusses the oral tradition as a founding political charter that establishes a relationship of dominance of the migrating Crocodile Clan over the autochthons. The story has no greater historical relevance for Roberts. However, that it remained a political charter through the nineteenth century, was so popular, and took on such a generic form, so similar to the many narratives of the south-central African interior, indicates the centrality of the story to Bemba consciousness during this time period.

The Bemba oral tradition is distinctive from the generic Luba oral tradition in one important way. The Luba genesis narrative features Nkongolo as the uncivilized king who is overcome by the foreigners (the hunter Mbidi Kiluwe and his sons) who bring sacred kingship. The Bemba oral tradition, by contrast, places emphasis on autochthonous spiritual powers by claiming that sacred governance was present in the form of the sacred mulopwe kings before the arrival of Chitimukulu.115 The claims of divine kingship were thus not sufficient to legitimize Chitimukulu’s rule; he had to join the sacred principles of kingship with the powers of the local owners of the land. He did this by first having sex with a local woman, then being killed by her husband, and finally being buried in the earth. In his burial, the king became part of the land and a local ancestral spirit. Even while they killed the autochthons, the Crocodile Clan royals died at their hands. For they could then claim to have conquered and succumbed, both of which were necessary to become the ancestors, the mipashi (sing. mupashi) of the land.

Throughout the Bemba oral tradition, there is reference to powers of the sky and the earth, along with attempts to bring about a new dawn by joining the sky with the earth. Perhaps, like a millenarian Christian movement, these represented efforts to create heaven on earth. For Luc de Heusch, this aspect of the oral tradition explores structural oppositions between sun and earth, civilization and savagery, which informed Bemba cosmology. The dangerous but necessary attempts to join the spirits above and below, the sky and the earth, as in the liminal moments of dawn, are indeed evident throughout the oral tradition: from the Crocodile Clan’s failed adolescent attempts to reach their celestial mother’s homeland to their migration led by the solar hero Luchele Ng’anga toward the rising sun in the east, and finally their death and burial, in which the Crocodile Clan established their celestial connections through being dried by the sun’s rays and thus bringing the sun down to earth.116 Documentary evidence from the nineteenth century provides some support for this ambitious symbolic interpretation. In 1868, Livingstone was told that the Bemba believe in “Reza above [Lesa, or “God”], who kills people, and Reza below, who carries them away after death.”117 Bemba cosmology associated ancestral spirits, mipashi, with the earth below, panshi, where the ancestors are buried (even while the etymology of –pashi and panshi may be distinct). Nature spirits, ngulu, by contrast, refer to the sky above (–ulu).118The opposition of spiritual forces from above and below may have ancient roots in Bantu-speaking societies: objects of power, such as minkisi from the western Bantu-speaking Kongo, were also known to come from above or below.119

The symbolism needs to be supplemented with the more mundane and emotional aspects that made the story all the more gripping and significant for listeners. Sex, jealousy, and death are all age-old sources of fascination for storytellers and their listeners. The narrative is an emotional tragedy that describes a family feud, the fleeing of sons, exile, an illicit desire, and an adulterous relationship that leads to death and revenge and—more death. What is interesting—and constrasts with secular emotional tragedies that unfold due to the mysterious and fatalistic qualities of “love”—is how linked emotions are to spiritual forces: love and seduction to the spiritual and ritual forces that promote fertility; jealousy and anger to the witchcraft that kills Chiti and Nkole. Chilimbulu seduces (and perhaps bewitches) Chiti with her scarified skin. This same magical and beguiling skin was then used to bless the land. The skin relic brings about fertility, a mysterious power that referred to the water monitor (mbulu), a secretive and strange creature.120Mwase, the jealous husband, fights with Chiti over Chilimbulu, and kills him with his magic. Even in death, his witchcraft kills Nkole. Such is the power of love and of jealousy—it inspires fertility and it inspires death. Only through rituals were such passions contained and made productive for health and wealth. Like Jesus Christ, Chiti died for his people. However, his passion, unlike Christ’s, was anything but ascetic. It was ignited by the body of Chilimbulu and had to be controlled by the Crocodile Clan ancestors.

In this oral tradition, then, we have some early evidence of the governance of spiritual emotions, which lead to reproduction and fertility or to death. Rulers needed to channel and deal with such dangerous emotions, and if death resulted, they had to know proper mortuary rites, so as to prevent the unruly behavior by dissatisfied ancestors (hence the detailed focus on the way Chiti and Nkole were buried).121 The political charter legitimized the Crocodile Clan patriarchs’ claims to harness the spiritual emotions: if emotions were calmed and directed, they could lead to fertility and reproduction; jealousy, on the other hand, led to death, the consequences of which could be dealt with only through prescribed rituals.

royal ancestral spirits

and local nature spirits

The division between ngulu nature spirits and mipashi ancestral spirits further illustrates the ways that the Crocodile Clan governed spiritual emotions. Ngulu were old spirits that were said to exist prior to the rise of the Bemba polity.122 They were independent of people, sometimes manifest in wild animals or natural sites. Throughout the region, such ngulu inspired spiritual emotions. When they possessed people, they had very physical effects, including emission of rhythmic whimpers (ukusemuka), as well as a form of glossolalia or prophecy (ukusesema). At times they inspired those possessed to dance.123

Mipashi, by contrast, were the ancestral spirits of the dead, freed from their corporeal form. Mipashi could control phenomena in the natural world, and at times they inspired people to act in certain ways. It was most important that an ancestral mupashi return to its original clan. A newborn baby cried until an ancestral mipashi had possessed and given the baby a name. However, after a death of one partner in marriage, the most intimate of emotional relationships, something of the dead remained in the grieving spouse: that something was the mupashi spirit. It had to return to the original clan, and that was why a partner had to be “married” (or cleansed by sex) with a member of the dead spouse’s clan.124

Within the Bemba polity, as well as the related eastern Lunda, royal clans claimed that their ancestral mipashi replaced the emotional ngulu spirit possession of commoners. The ancestors of humans achieved dominance over the spirits of nature. At least in the political heartland of the Bemba, non-chiefly ancestors and ngulu spirits became relatively marginal. The Crocodile Clan could not be possessed by ngulu and directed veneration toward their ancestors instead.125 The ancestral mipashi of royalty calmed people, displacing the turbulence that ngulu inspired.

Among non–Crocodile Clan commoners, however, alternative spiritual formulations proliferated. Spiritual emotions were dealt with primarily at the local level. The head of a family, clan, or village had personal shrines, mfuba, either in the individual houses, at the foot of a bed, where their personal ancestors resided, or in or near sacred points in the village in miniature hut shrines. In 1868 Livingstone found such shrines in villages across the northern plateau. Places of veneration were also found in old burial grounds.126 Termite mounds were the most sacred of burial sites, the “church of the ancestors.”127 The Crocodile Clan attempted to appropriate and innovate this local spiritual governance. By being buried under a termite mound, Nkole and Chiti could become the ancestral archetype. The politico-religious Crocodile Clan constellation oriented itself around these existing quotidian spiritual forms by offering a centralized polity that dealt with the emotional turmoil of family and collective economic ventures such as hunting and agriculture.

In addition to local ancestral shrines, people made use of the supernatural agency of objects to combat and to harness spiritual emotions. If used in the right fashion, many objects had the potential to affect nature and people. Bwanga, commonly translated as “magic,” more accurately refers to the power of objects used for a required purpose, ranging from bravery and success on a hunting expedition to love and fertility. A feather, a leaf, a root, or part of an animal or person could be used, as long as it was understood and manipulated in the correct way, often through metaphor and metonymy. For example, the chibyalilo planting ceremony (from the verb ukubyalo, “to sow”), which was performed to ensure that a seed grew into a plant, required objects that grew and expanded, such as bark from a tree that became swollen when wet, the skin of a type of animal that grew in size when wounded, or the soil from a termite mound that rose from the earth. All people could use bwanga; it was part of everyday life. But individuals who faced difficult circumstances employed specialists, men and women of knowledge who were adept in knowing the powers of objects, shinganga (literally, the father of the art of bwanga).128

At the center of the Bemba polity, the presence of shinganga and the use of bwanga were discouraged. The Bemba royals claimed that they were immune from bwanga and that they were personally responsible for the welfare of the people and the land. The bwanga used in the chibyalilo agricultural ceremony, for example, were linked directly to Chitimukulu. In his village, the wife of the relic (muka benya) wore a belt made from Chilimbulu’s scarified skin and planted the first seeds. People could then plant their own gardens and be sure of prosperity. The crops would grow, like the termite mound under which the first Crocodile Clan royals were buried. Nevertheless, while the royal clan tried to control the use and proliferation of bwanga, it remained an autonomous invisible agent used in quotidian life.129

During times of war, sickness, and death, when emotions afflicted all, government intervention in the invisible world was most urgently required. If Chitimukulu should fall ill and fail to perform the appropriate ancestral rites, the land would spoil, no rain would fall, crops would not grow, and general misfortune would abound. During such times leaders needed to demonstrate their spiritual agency. Rites of passion, which involved a leader having sex with his head wife (“the wife of the land”), ensured the fertility of the land and blessed the most significant tools of agriculture, the ax and the seed. During and after such acts, when the king was most closely linked to the land, both good and bad fortune could result.130 Such rites affirmed and acted out aspects of the original charter, especially the dangerous sexual relations between the migrant Chiti and the autochthon Chilimbulu.

The graveyard where the kings were buried became the spiritual center of the Bemba polity, the place where the ancestral kings remained. It combined the ancestral graves and shrines of the Crocodile Clan with their particular bwanga, their chiefly babenye relics. Many of Chitimukulu’s sacred babenye relics, such as the skin of Chilimbulu, were kept in a shrine hut at Mwalule, allegedly built by the prophet Luchele Ng’anga. These relics were the keys to the land, and their possession indicated ownership over the land. A usurper had to capture the relics before conquering the land. Three elderly women, the “wives of the relics” (bamukabenye), were their protectors. About once a month Chitimukulu’s chief councilors, the bakabilo, came to Mwalule to make sure the relics were well kept and to perform ceremonies appropriate to agricultural, hunting, or military affairs.131 The territory around the graveyard was known as Chilinda (the place that is guarded). The actual graveyard fell under the control of the autochthon Kabotwe’s descendants, who retained the title of the father of the graveyard, Shimwalule.132 That Chitimukulu’s graveyard, Mwalule, would be cared for by a former “slave” indicated the sacred power of subordinates and dependents. The story established a social hierarchy, but recognized the spiritual agencies of those at the bottom of the hierarchy, illustrating the acts of negotiation involved in developing the consensus between conquerors and autochthons necessary to consolidate a polity.

The Mwalule graveyard and its babenye shrine center joined other local rulers and places, with their distinctive stories, to the royal court. The Chishimba Falls, for example, where the Chambeshi River cascades in a series of magnificent waterfalls, were long associated with the suicides of a father, Chishimba, and his daughter and her suitor, after a failed marriage. Chitimukulu took the lamp used to illuminate the marital hut and kept it as bwanga, one of his babenye relics, at the Mwalule shrine. At Chishimba, a goat was given to the ngulu spirit, and left in a cave behind the waterfall. The royal clan appropriated or at least associated older stories of love, familial strife, and serene natural wonders with their spiritual center. A story and a relic attached an ancestor, such as Chishimba, to Chitimukulu’s court. The ancestor’s name became the title of a local ruler or a bakabilo councilor to the king.133

A few abstract nature spirits escaped the focused politico-religious attention of the Crocodile Clan rulers. The most general of such nonancestral spirits was Lesa, an omnipresent but remote spirit. Lesa was prevalent across the region from at least the late eighteenth century and probably much earlier; in 1799 Father Pinto, of José Maria de Lacerda’s expedition, reported belief in “the existence of a sovereign creator of the world . . . ‘Reza’[Lesa] . . . a tyrant that permits his creatures’ death.”134 The linguistic spread of the term and of proverbs regarding Lesa suggests an even older presence.135 Oral testimony indicates that Lesa might have replaced older ancestral cults of the earth or bush, especially those linked to Shakapanga (the father of the bush) or Mushili Mfumu (the earth chief). There is some evidence of Lesa as a feminine owner of the earth, a “mother-earth” spirit that “gives birth to crops as a mother brings forth children.”136 However, many names related to Lesa indicate an association with thunder and with the sky, which contrast with the spirits of the earth below.137 The earliest recorded stories about Lesa tell of it giving a man and a woman the choice between food and eternal life; the couple chose food, and hence humans became mortal, returning from the sky to the earth below.138 Of course, this story may have been influenced by biblical Eden narratives that could have spread across the region from the eighteenth century, if not earlier. Indeed, since so many proverbs and narratives have been influenced by the Christian missionary translation of Lesa as the Christian God, a precise precolonial definition of Lesa is elusive.139 Nevertheless, while Lesa may have been thought of as the original spirit, omnipresent and allowing life and death, it was marginal compared to the ancestral and nature spirits who intervened directly in the affairs of family and in the immediate bounties of nature, or who were agents in causing illness and death.

Lesa or similar spirits were favorable and benevolent spirits, an indication of emotional well-being, the way relationships between people and nature should be in the absence of turmoil. Yet times of death and upheaval led to a proliferation of angry and jealous spirits, almost evil, that disrupted normal life. Chiwa and chibanda were the bad living dead, those who died with a grudge, from suicide, or who were wrongly accused by their relatives.140 Or they were roaming ancestors, unable to find their people and have their names restored to newborn babies.141 Stories of capture and consumption by such angry spirits were frequent. Specialists dealt with this type of spirits; if the disruption was connected with the dead, they dug up the bones of the dead and burned them, so that they could no longer haunt the living. In other cases, disembodied chiwa evil, almost an evil wind (umuze uwipe), inspired people to do harmful acts, such as killing a neighbor or relative.142 Sometimes harm originated from savage mythical figures, such as Mwansakabinga or Kanama, who kidnapped and carried away young children.143 Such angry forces inspired antisocial actions in men; agency lay in what the missionary Edouard Labrecque termed “occult” forces, rather than living people. A murderer, for example, was one who was “seized” by such magic (Bamwikata bwanga).144

Jealous people mobilized occult forces and were perhaps even initiated into associations of witches (baloshi). They accessed spiritual power to harm others and were also experts in the use of poison. Among the Luba, witches were detected by the use of potions or horns with powder inside, objects that gave people the power to see the invisible. If caught, the accused persons could be subjected to the mwavi poison ordeal. Those who were guilty would die instead of vomiting the poison. The killing of a witch was dangerous, as unless certain ritual prescriptions were followed, the spirit of the witch returned to cause havoc in the community. People cut up and burned witches in a ritual that resembled the burning of the original jealous husband, Mwase, so that they could no longer employ their witchcraft.145 At the center of the Bemba polity, the Crocodile Clan claimed to deal with such dangerous individuals, obviating the need for other shinganga.

Good fortune could also “fall upon” (ukuwilwa) people. When possession was good, it meant a step on the path toward recovery from sickness, misfortune, or even anger and jealousy. A benevolent ngulu spirit spoke through the possessed and often entranced person, who prophesized (ukusesema), revealed unknown things, including the name of the ngulu protective spirit. Henceforth, the person would belong to that spirit, they would become bangulu, and through their possession they would help others to understand the spiritual forces behind possession.146 An early twentieth-century description points to women as especially potent victims and agents of possession:

These women assert that they are possessed by the spirit of some dead chief, and when they feel the “divine afflatus,” whiten their faces to attract attention, and anoint themselves with flour which has a religious and sanctifying potency. One of their number beats a drum, and the others dance, at the same time singing a weird song, with curious intervals. Finally when they have arrived at the requisite pitch of religious exaltation the possessed fall to the ground, and burst forth into a low and almost inarticulate chant, which has a most uncanny effect. All at once are silent and the b’asing’anga [Bashinganga] gather round to interpret the voice of the spirit.147

Women were especially prone to such emotional possession, perhaps because they were closer to the spirit realm of the bush (mpanga) or that of the earth or bush spirits of Lesa and Shakapanga.148 But these explanations are the intellectual reasonings of Western scholars. Perhaps women felt the spirits, and because of this ability, women were prophets, but also victims of possession and agents of witchcraft who met in the most secret of associations.149 They were most closely linked to the spirit world, with its opportunities and dangers—in other words, its powers.

Crocodile Clan attempts to harness and control the spiritual power of women is further illustrated in their relationship to the chisungu ceremonies that introduced girls after puberty into womanhood and prepared them for marriage and childbirth. The consistency of chisungu instruction was maintained by the molding of clay figurines, mbusa—a lion, a tree, a bracelet, a stupid husband, a snake—which were associated with songs and dances that taught of the duties and relationships between husband and wife. A “mother” of the mbusa relics, nachimbusa, organized the ceremonies and was responsible for teaching songs and dances along with their meanings to the girls. In addition to being paid to oversee ceremonies, she attained a special status and could wear a feathered headdress reserved for royalty. The ceremonies, which lasted for several months, culminated in a celebration at the transition to womanhood and marriage.150 Even in this rite, the Crocodile Clan’s influence became evident. The Chilimbulu design painted on the huts used for the chisungu rites reminded initiates of Chilimbulu’s scarified skin that had seduced Chiti and led to his death.151 Around the Crocodile mbusa, women sang: “Take the girl to the crocodile,” meaning the initiate should be put under the authority of the Crocodile Clan.152 Twentieth-century accounts of the ceremony associate its history with the oral tradition of the Crocodile Clan and claim that the migrants, Chiti, Nkole, and Chilufya, brought it with them—even while its widespread prevalence indicates an older and auto­chthonous presence.153 According to Hinfelaar, in the nineteenth century the royal clan began to appoint nachimbusa, and the ceremony prepared women to be submissive wives of royals rather than emphasize their autonomy and religious importance.154 Yet evidence for the depth of this transformation in the precolonial period is spotty; one of the earliest twentieth-century observers reported neither crocodile mbusa nor the imposition of the authority of the Crocodile Clan on the ceremonial rites.155 Outside the Bemba political center, chisungu rites remained autonomous of Crocodile Clan influence.

The Crocodile Clan royalty incorporated local spheres of politico-religious experience by replicating their ancestral shrines in the villages that they conquered and over which they claimed authority, thus replacing shrines to local ancestral and nature spirits with ones to their own ancestors. They claimed responsibility for overcoming and harnessing spiritual emotions and for getting rid of witches. Their personal bwanga, the babenye relics, ensured prosperity. All termite mounds represented the graves in which the titleholder Shimwalule buried Chiti and Nkole. Such sacred sites became conduits for the spread of the Crocodile Clan’s power. Like the colonial administrative centers, the Bomas, which later spread the constellations of power of indirect rule, the authority of the Bemba court spread to outlying villages through its sacred sites.

These sacred sites were not only about legitimizing the Crocodile Clan, however; locals viewed them as an opportunity to indicate their own agency in the Crocodile Clan government.156 This was particularly the case in oral traditions for which there were no authoritative texts that established and fixed their meanings, no dogma. Individuals could retell and refine stories in substantially different ways, appealing to different interpretations. Shimwalule, the caretaker of the graveyard, told a different version of the story, for example. He was not a slave of Chimbala (the original owner of the Crocodile Clan graveyard) but her lover, and he married her upon the request of Nkole. In exchange for the land and for taking care of the graveyard, Chitimukulu was to send a portion of his wealth to Shimwalule.157For such leaders, the reciprocity between conqueror and conquered formed the basic political principle of the Bemba polity. The royal court might choose to underemphasize this reciprocity, but the story told by Shimwalule reminded them of their promises. Shimwalule, as guardian of the royal graveyard and the spiritual center of the Bemba polity, was an especially powerful local agent, for he looked after the living dead. “Chitimukulu, Nkula and Mwamba always send me big presents because they know that I am their father,” Shimwalule told a burial party in the 1930s. “If I am doing my work wrong here as Shimwalule the spirits of the dead chiefs will be angry with me and punish me.”158 A former slave or subject was the interface between the living kings and their ancestors; he took care of the dead so that their anger would not intervene in the world. He alone was responsible for ensuring that the Crocodile Clan’s ancestral spirits would facilitate fecundity and fertility, bringing the sun down to warm the wet earth and allow the crops to germinate and grow.

The Crocodile Clan genesis story, then, opens up and attempts to reconcile through Chitimukulu’s death, the conflicting orientations of the Bemba political imagination: that of the sky and the earth, the royal court and the village, and men and women. The state was linked to the migration of the Crocodile Clan patriarchs who descended from a celestial mother, and were led by the prophet of dawn, Luchele Ng’anga. Then there was the earth, the spiritual powers of autochthonous women who held the secrets of production and reproduction. In death and burial, the Crocodile Clan patriarchs became enveloped in the earth, bringing heaven down to earth and offering a new polity to the people of the Bemba plateau. They created a state that harnessed the spiritual powers of women and overcame the turmoil and witchcraft of village, clan, and family. While the Crocodile Clan claimed that their ancestral spirits governed the land and displaced local ancestors and nature spirits, the polity still rested on an old expectation that government would play a role in the invisible world that ensured prosperity and protected from harm.

evil afflictions

The Crocodile Clan’s ability to deal with jealousy, witches, and angry spirits was not always convincing. Ancestral and nature spirits proved ineffective in explaining the war and upheaval linked to the growing trade in slaves. The quotidian hardships and afflictions of the mid- to late nineteenth century could be explained only by a generalized evil that seemed to afflict the land and the people, an evil that would increase with the European colonial and missionary occupation.

From the 1860s to the 1880s, the Bemba polity attained its greatest degree of centralization and geographic reach under the leadership of Chitapankwa (reigned from the 1860s to 1883; d. 1883), who became Chitimukulu after capturing the babenye relics from his sick mother’s brother, Bwembya.159 The expansion of the central Bemba polity under Chitapankwa was a reaction to the military challenge posed by the Ngoni of Mpezeni to the north and east. Chitapankwa strengthened Bemba military outposts, such as the Ichinga (the defensive fortress) province of Nkula, by appointing his closest matrilineal relatives as overlords who could defend the political heartland of Lubemba and the spiritual center, Mwalule. In addition to standing in a relationship of perpetual kinship to Chitimukulu, these relatives were in a position to succeed the king. The Crocodile Clan rulers also employed ambitious sons as lords, whose positions relied on their loyalty to their fathers as they were excluded from the usual opportunities of advancement available to the Crocodile Clan matrilineage. The Crocodile Clan and their direct dependents benefited from the growing trade in ivory and slaves with the East African Swahili and Nyamwezi. The process contributed to the militarization of the Bemba polity.160

There were internal challenges as well, especially in the areas where the Bemba established new military outposts. The class cleavages that had developed due to the imposition of Bemba rule and the opportunities for accumulating wealth were striking. In 1867, south of the Chambeshi, presumably in the area ruled by Nkula, Livingstone reported on “poor dependents on Bemba, or rather their slaves, who cultivate little, and then only in the rounded patches . . . so as to prevent their conquerors from taking away more than a small share. The subjects are Babisa—a miserable lying lot of serfs.”161The rulers, protected by stockades adorned with skulls, had access to so much Katangan copper that they were “obliged to walk in a stately style, from the weight.”162 Fifteen years later, Victor Giraud reported that the Bemba royals were large and fat, from beer. Nkula was dressed in imported cloth with chains of large red glass beads and surrounded by a hundred men armed with bows and arrows and flintlocks.163

In addition to the growth of wealth and military power from the late nineteenth century, a close examination of the ritual, ceremonial, and religious roles of Chitimukulu and the Bemba royals during the late nineteenth century suggests an attempted expansion (or at least a consolidation) of such roles. Chitimukulu Chitapankwa’s praise name was Mukungula mfuba (he who sweeps away the personal ancestral shrines), suggesting less of an increase in secular authority (as Andrew Roberts claims) than an attempt to enhance Chitimukulu’s spiritual powers by attacking older ancestral and nature shrines.164 Chitimukulu Chitapankwa was like the colonial and postcolonial prophets who eradicated the witchcraft of old and purified the people and the land. Under his reign, the Crocodile Clan’s ancestral welfare became tied to the welfare of the land and the people. When locusts and wild animals, lions and crocodiles, afflicted Lubemba and Ichinga, Chitimukulu Chitapankwa constructed a shrine to his uncle Bwembya (whom Chitapankwa had deposed) and sent offerings to Shimwalule at the royal graveyard.165 In war against the Ngoni, Chitimukulu Chitapankwa, after being purified by the babenye relics, invoked a patriotic ancestral appeal:

Oh my ancestors who were kings before me, lead me on this expedition to attack the Muchime [the stabbers, the Ngoni], who have come from afar to take the land from us without cause. . . . The land is ours, all our ancestors are buried in it, and we must save it, and drive our enemies away. Oh spirits of the ancestors, pray to God for us that we may be able to overcome the Muchime.166

The increasing demand for slaves to trade for guns and cloth ratcheted up the stakes in the Bemba royals’ claims to judicial authority. Compensation for crimes, including murder, adultery, poisoning, and witchcraft, was increasingly paid for in slaves and imported cloth (in turn purchased with slaves) instead of goats, hoes, and axes. While the victim of a crime received some compensation, the lord who had adjudicated the dispute also received payments. Those acquired through judicial services marched in Swahili, Ovimbundu, Nyamwezi, or Chikunda caravans toward an uncertain future in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds.167 The demand for slaves widened notions of criminal liability and increased the Bemba royals’ claims of judicial importance by emphasizing the Crocodile Clan’s ancestral ties to the land and their autonomy from the everyday forms of witchcraft that afflicted commoners. Only the Crocodile Clan could deal with the danger of witches. It was no surprise that Chitimukulu Chitapankwa swept away the shrines of lesser men, ancestors, and spirits. The intensification of the slave trade increased the stakes in claims to spiritual power as well as the greed, jealousy, and uncertainty that indicated the agency of angry and even evil spirits.

During Chitimukulu Chitapankwa’s reign, the spiritual powers of the Crocodile Clan came to be represented, enacted, and performed in royal ceremonies and dances, with abundant beer, the grandeur of which impressed and appealed to many. Consumption, patronage, and the possibilities and promises of wealth became part of these grand gatherings. Chitimukulu was the host, the mwine lupepo, the owner of the ceremony, secure in his political authority and demonstrative of his generosity. But most of all, such ceremonies venerated ancestral ties and imbued Chitimukulu with spiritual power.168 While few remain, it is also likely that in this period ancestral power objects, such as the Chilimbulu staff, either commissioned or traded from Luba artists, celebrated the sacred royalty of the Crocodile Clan.169

The burial of the chief was the most dangerous of times, when emotional turmoil could become spiritual and political turmoil unless ritual prescriptions were followed. The death of Chitimukulu Chitapankwa in 1883 probably established the “traditional” model for such ritual prescriptions. After his death, Chitimukulu was embalmed in the fashion referred to by the oral tradition. Only upon the ripening of the royal millet crop that was planted when he died could the king be buried. The close councilors (bakabilo) of the king and those who dealt with his death (bafingo) then embarked on a journey that lasted up to a week, a type of funeral procession from Lubemba to the Mwalule graveyard, with stops at several sacred sites. The journey itself was perilous. The pallbearers fought with the embalmers to release the body and with the men of Shimwalule. A death in such ritual battles signaled good fortune. Slaves, dependents, and the three head wives of the dead paramount accompanied the procession. At the Mwalule graveyard, the bafingo struck them with a club on the bridge of the nose. If they lived, the dead paramount had “forgiven” them, “vomited them out” (mfumu ya muluka).170 Those who died were buried with Chitimukulu and those who lived became personal slaves of the gravekeepers. The paramount was laid to rest on top of the head wife, another wife supported his head, and another his feet. The burial, referencing and reinforcing the oral tradition of Chiti and Nkole, was a period of great terror that demonstrated the spiritual agency of the dead royals and their ties to the land. Their return to the earth below (–panshi) and conversion into ancestors, mipashi, claimed to secure the well-being of the kingdom and provided a model ritual for the correct ways of dealing with death.171

The occasional outburst of ceremony, grandeur, and terror did not legitimize the Bemba royals without contestation. The farther from the political center that Bemba authority spread, the less convincing the reach of the Crocodile Clan ancestral cult and the greater the profusion of alternative spiritual agents. Rulers who had only a shallow genealogy of local ancestors could not claim the same spiritual authority over the land as those who ruled at the same place as several generations of their ancestors. To the east, Chitimukulu’s perpetual nephew Nkula ruled the defensive fortress of Ichinga; to the north, Nkhweto watched over Chilinda (the place that is guarded); and to the south, Mwamba conquered the Bisa. In all of these border territories, many of them conquered by the Bemba only in the late nineteenth century, the Bemba faced invasion by the Ngoni and frequent challenges from exploited subjects, especially the Bisa. Here the ancestral cult of the Crocodile Clan was fractured by alternative spiritual agents. Among the Bisa, for example, agricultural tulubi shrines associated with ngulu were evident.172 To the south and west, mikishi (sing. mukishi), spiritual forces held in objects that were representative of communal cults, replaced the relics of the Crocodile Clan chiefs.173 One of the most famous of such communal or clan mikishi was Makumba of the Bena Ngulube (the Pig Clan) of the Aushi of Lake Bangweulu. Makumba was an object, perhaps a meteorite, dressed in python and human skin and adorned with feathers. It blessed the seed before planting, and was generally responsible for rites surrounding agriculture, in the same fashion as the skin of Chilimbulu.174

Independent hunting associations also dealt with spirits. The hunt was an emotionally intense time: the danger of the bush required bravery; killing and the conquest of nature needed the support of the ngulu. The Butwa association, for example, most prevalent east of the Bemba polity, especially around the Bangweulu and Luapula swamps, recognized the spiritual authority of the original inhabitants of the land, the “Batwa.” The associations had organized leaders, Shingulu (the father of ngulu), public gatherings, and sacred mulumbi houses.175 They had their own identity marks, scarification patterns that ran in a V-shape from the head to the chest. Figurines, sometimes representations of men, such as that depicted in figure 1.3 below, had copper eyes that viewed the spirits through trance, wide-open mouths that talked to spirits, and feet that traversed the visible and invisible worlds.176 Perhaps initiated by groups of hunters seeking good fortune before they ventured into the bush, the associations were territorial cults, “concerned with man’s role as a transformer and recipient from his natural environment.”177 They were probably linked to a more extensive system of Bulumbu possession and divination that stretched from Kasai to the southern edge of Lake Tanganyika.178

Bemba military expansion in the late nineteenth century to secure trade routes, guns, and slaves took the Crocodile Clan lords to areas where their spiritual powers were unknown and not respected. For example, when the Bemba royal Mwamba extended the reach of his authority over the Bisa, challenges to his rule were recalled in stories about the powers of Bisa prophets and spirits. In one such story, Mwamba tested the power of the Bisa prophets by challenging them to summon a lion to devour one of his wives while she drew water. She was caught and killed by a lion. An angry Mwamba had the prophets thrown into a bonfire, but they survived and were found sitting in the ashes of the fire the following morning. The prophets then summoned lions to chase Mwamba from their land.179 He fled, but a successor returned a few years later, and the conflict-ridden history continued. In 1888, just prior to the European colonial period, Mwamba captured Bisa subjects and sold them to Swahili slave traders.180 Farther south, the Bisa rebelled against the Bemba lord Chikwanda and killed him, exacting the revenge of Chitimukulu, which led to greater Bisa subjugation and exile.181

Warfare inspired emotions that gave reign to spirits. In accounts of warfare, the efficacy of both Bisa and Crocodile Clan magic looms large. The Bisa were especially renowned for their war magic, including the ilamfya, a horn or drum treated with various bwanga, most potently the blood of captives.182 Upon defeating their enemies, Bemba warriors cut up and burned their bodies, so that they could not become angry chiwa spirits and disturb the peace of the land.183 (The practice once again referenced Nkole’s treatment of Mwase’s body in the Bemba oral tradition.) They brought the heads of the slain opponents to the Crocodile Clan lords, where they adorned village stockades and suggested the powers that the royals had over living and dead.184 The Bemba also developed ilamfya to deal with the magic of their opponents and employed specialists, Bachamanga, to ensure success in war and to cleanse the warriors who might be haunted by those they had killed.185 Chitimukulu and his appointed chiefs claimed exclusive rights over the use of these ilamfya and war specialists.186 The murder of another person, perhaps the most emotional of all human actions, required special spiritual controls and governance.

New prophets claimed to mediate with ancient ancestors, the chiefs of old (mfumu sha kale) who evaded attempts at appropriation by the Bemba political authorities. The old chiefs were not even embodied by living kin; they appeared in dreams or possessed people or offered guidance on rituals concerning hunting and agriculture. No stories affiliated them with the Bemba royals. Such ancestors became spirits independent of narratives even as they were linked to nature.187 People found them in places of beauty and serenity—waterfalls, the sources of rivers, and in large trees—inscribed in the natural features of landscape.188 They also took the form of animals. When a hunter encountered a python, lion, or crocodile, he had to treat it with respect and wish it good health, lest it be the spirit of an old ancestor that had become an ngulu.189

At the center of the polity, Bemba politico-religious life attempted to marginalize other forms of spiritual power, such as territorial cults linked to ngulu veneration. The Crocodile Clan court organized a structured ritual and ceremonial life that replaced the localized system of ngulu appreciation and bwanga manipulation, even as it built on their spiritual conceptions. The most powerful Bemba ruler boasted that he “swept away” the ancestral shrines of others. He alone could control the spiritual emotions that gave rise to and threatened fertility and fecundity. Yet in the areas surrounding the Bemba villages, prophets mobilized alternative forms of spiritual power by claiming to be mediators with ancient ancestors and nature spirits more powerful than those of the Crocodile Clan. And even in the Crocodile Clan villages, the royals struggled to contain the use of bwanga and the spiritual agency of new prophets.

The Crocodile Clan posed a solution to a political imagination preoccupied with the spiritual power needed to ensure human reproduction and agricultural productivity. They claimed that their celestial origins catalyzed the power that led to the germination of crops and the reproduction of people. From the spiritual center at the Mwalule graveyard, their ancestors would intervene in the forces of nature. They appropriated sacred sites, incorporated old stories into their charter, and molded their babenye relics from the debris of conquest and the bwanga of old. The secrets to prosperity and reproduction lay with the spiritual emotions evoked by local women; the Crocodile Clan offered a government that controlled and harnessed these spiritual emotions. The scarified skin of Chilimbulu that had seduced Chitimukulu became the most sacred of royal relics, promising fertility and prosperity. The jealous husband, Mwase, could kill but would be contained by Crocodile Clan rule; and even the worst outcome of spiritual agency, death, could be dealt with through the mortuary rites introduced by the Crocodile Clan.

While the Crocodile Clan narrative of migration, sex, and death became a convincing politico-religious charter for well over a century, it remained vulnerable to alternative conceptions of spiritual agency. The Crocodile Clan’s spiritual power was drawn from many past stories and principles; they innovated existing politico-religious ideas rather than revolutionizing them. In an increasingly desperate effort to maintain their authority in the face of external and internal challenges during the late nineteenth century, royals became unjust and cruel toward their subjects. People must have wondered whether angry spirits had possessed their rulers; perhaps they thought that elites had become witches and were employing spirits to gain unprecedented power. In the midst of this scramble for power, the Crocodile Clan’s hegemony became precarious. Preoccupied with fertility and fecundity, their narrative offered no response to the injustice and harm that arose out of the wealth of new elites and the deepening subjugation, exploitation, and even sale into slavery of their dependents.

People needed to explain misfortune; they grasped for concepts that dealt with the global violence that challenged old relationships between people and the land. Destructive emotions of jealousy and anger were not sufficient to explain changes in the visible world. A new concept of evil became a convincing way to view the world; such evil had made people cruel and unjust. The Crocodile Clan could not control this roaming anger-cum-evil, in the wind, in wild animals, in slave traders, in disturbed ancestral shades, and in themselves. Many, even at times the Crocodile Clan (especially during war), turned to local specialists, such as the shinganga’s manipulation of bwanga. These specialists helped and healed, but, like the Crocodile Clan, they did not offer any lasting solutions to the scale of destructive change. People searched for collective ways to solve the problem of evil; they looked for the solar hero, Luchele Ng’anga, to lead them to a new dawn. And they became intrigued by the stories of a few strangers who roamed across Bembaland and spoke of eternal deliverance from the sin of witchcraft and the evil of Satan.

2 Christian Witches

In the early 1930s, the Roman Catholic missionary society of the White Fathers applied to open a mission in the Crocodile Clan chief Nkula’s area, around twelve miles from the already established Protestant mission of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland at Lubwa. Since the land was designated “Native Trust,” Nkula had to approve the White Fathers’ application before the colonial administration would agree to the mission. Nkula refused. He did not want the Catholics to open a mission in his chieftaincy, and especially not near his own village. At first glance, Nkula’s denial of permission for the White Fathers to build a mission seems strange. The White Fathers founding Bembaland missionary, Bishop Joseph Dupont, had boasted of his good relationship with the Crocodile Clan chiefs and had tried to cultivate a “Christian Kingdom” among the Bemba, at one point even claiming to inherit the Crocodile Clan royal title, Mwamba. Six missions had already been established near the Bemba heartland and another four on the periphery. The sacraments of the White Father held broad appeal; a significant proportion of the Bemba had been baptized. Nkula was quite accustomed to Catholics in his community. He was not a Christian and held no particular loyalty toward the nearby Presbyterian Lubwa Mission, a rival of the Catholics. Surely, the mission would bring employment, education, and medical resources, even if Nkula was not affiliated with the church. Yet Nkula was insistent in his refusal to allow the White Fathers mission. Then, quite suddenly, he changed his mind and agreed to the mission. If his initial refusal seems strange, his change of mind appears even more inexplicable.

Nkula’s decisions took place in the midst of a changing spiritual politics. Christian missionaries and prophets advocated doctrines that talked about the pervasiveness of “sin,” and questioned the power of nature and ancestral spirits even as they spoke of new invisible agents, God and Satan. The Christian missionaries were also divided and fiercely competitive with one other, and spoke of false religious doctrines. Social and economic changes affected this spiritual history. Men departed for work opportunities on the central African Copperbelt and in Tanganyika. The absence of these men in addition to colonial tax demands increased quotidian burdens for those left behind. As the colonial order became more demanding, an emergent cosmology of evil became entwined with angry ancestors, economic conditions, missionary doctrines and rivalries, and political authorities.

Colonial indirect rule promoted the rule of Crocodile Clan lords, making Chitimukulu a “paramount chief,” and his closest clan members “chiefs,” each with their distinctive territories. At the same time, however, the Crocodile Clan was increasingly unable to intervene in the spiritual landscape. Indirect rule curtailed their ability to rid the land of witches and to promote fertility and prosperity with their babenye relics. Karen E. Fields argues that during colonialism, the notion of “customary rule” became entrenched as the chiefs’ secular power declined and new ways of justifying their authority became necessary. In her understanding, the “supernatural” aspect to chiefly rule was largely a product of the machinations of indirect rule and the writings of colonial anthropologists, especially the most famous ethnographer of the Bemba, Audrey I. Richards, who conducted her fieldwork in the 1930s at the height of indirect rule.190 In this regard, Fields overstates the influence of indirect rule. Chapter 1 demonstrated that aspirations for spiritual power were a significant aspect of the precolonial political struggle, even if such aspirations did not always legitimize the rule of chiefs, as Richards claimed. In fact, even at the height of indirect rule in the 1930s, there were tendencies by colonial administrators to de-emphasize the sacred powers of chiefs in favor of a notion of secular custom and tradition. The chiefs were prevented from performing their spiritual duties and encouraged to perform bureaucratic and administrative tasks instead. Thus, even as their colonial authority grew, chiefs were profoundly disempowered.

Those chiefs who dwelled on the past and carefully guarded their ancestral babenye relics remained invested in a narrow and anachronistic conception of ancestral power, relegated to a realm of tradition and unable to combat new forms of evil. The most influential new spiritual resources of the early colonial period were the Christian narratives of a god, his son, and a devil, the rituals offered by the Catholic missionaries (especially the sacrament of baptism), and books offered by the Protestants. The Bemba adoption and adaptation of these spiritual resources was part of a long-standing tradition in seeking out ways to access the invisible world. But the new spiritual concepts also applied to new colonial relationships: a Manichaean spiritual discourse engaged with a Manichaean colonial order. Christianity introduced a spiritual vocabulary that helped to engage with the colonial order.

Many Bemba interpreted one of the core missionary ideas—the pervasiveness of sin and the influence of Satan—as evidence of the pervasiveness of witches. But while the missionaries proclaimed the pervasiveness of sin, they, along with the colonial administration, denied people the ability to eradicate witches. People thought of these Christians not only as prophets but as witches, who could manipulate the invisible world for good and for evil. Christianity created witches and an unprecedented demand for their eradication, even as old forms of witchcraft eradication were prohibited by the colonial authorities. This disempowerment could be remedied only through prophetic movements that engaged with old and new invisible agents.

the missionaries

By the late nineteenth century, rumors of the return of the heroic magician, Luchele Ng’anga, spread across the Bemba highlands. European missionaries who wandered across the land were quick to claim that such rumors referred to them. David Livingstone had crossed the Bemba lands, circling around the marshlands of the Luapula and Bangweulu, before he died there in 1873. He babbled about a new god and his son, and promised a salvation for the living and the dead—but his words seemed too strange and his powers too insignificant to be taken seriously. Some twenty years later a man in white robes with a flowing white beard and fierce eyes appeared. He called himself Bishop Dupont, a Roman Catholic White Father missionary, and he told the Bemba that he was intent on making a home in their land, to spread the word of his god. Because of the ferocity of his expression and his temper, people called him Moto Moto, “the Fire.” At the same time, new men were coming from the east, black men; some of them spoke ChiBemba and had been sold only a few years prior as slaves. Now, they also spoke the white man’s language. They asked about David Livingstone, told people of the new civilization promised to Africans, and of the schools that people should attend if they wanted to become part of this civilization. They spoke of Satan, who had possessed the rulers of the Bemba and caused them to act in evil ways. One of these black missionaries, David Kaunda, settled in Nkula’s area, near the Boma outpost established by the white men and called Chinsali.

The Roman Catholic White Fathers first set up a mission among the Mambwe, a small and politically marginal group north of the Bemba, in 1891. But they soon began to make overtures to the Bemba. In keeping with the policy of their founder, Bishop Lavigerie, who encouraged the conversion of kings instead of ordinary folk, the White Fathers imagined that the conversion of such a powerful kingdom would be the most effective way to spread their religion.191 At first Chitimukulu had warned the missionaries not to enter his kingdom. So instead, Moto Moto approached Makasa, Chitimukulu’s perpetual son and oftentimes rival. In 1895, Makasa invited Dupont to establish a mission station and then withdrew the invitation, apparently fearing the retaliation of his subjects or of Chitimukulu himself.192 Dupont persisted, and Makasa agreed eventually to the building of a mission on Kayambi hill. From there, Dupont went on tours, enticing Crocodile Clan royals with gifts, and promising British South Africa Company (BSAC) officials that he would help to end the Bemba slave trade with the Swahili. Through his diplomacy, Dupont hoped to make a claim for the White Fathers across the Bemba lands. Three years after his mission was established at Kayambi, an ailing Crocodile Clan lord, Mwamba, called for Dupont and allegedly named him as his successor before he died. While the BSAC dismissed Dupont’s claim to chieftaincy, Dupont was able to secure a second Bemba mission at Chilubula, and the BSAC recognized the White Fathers’ influence over a large part of Bemba highlands.193

The districts of Chinsali, as well as those to the north and south of the Catholic influence, fell under the control of the Presbyterian Livingstonia Mission.194 By the end of the century, the Livingstonia Mission had established the Mwenzo Mission (1894) and the Overtoun Institute to train teachers and craftsmen. They did not have the resources to open their own missions among the Bemba and observed the Catholic advance with frustration. But they did have a growing corps of trained African teachers and evangelists whom they could send westward to stall the Catholic advance. They thought the situation was desperate: “a veritable slumland—a seething mass of sinful humanity beyond all remedy save the ‘all-remedy,’ of the great physician. Jesus the Great Physician—His never-failing medicine for sin-sick souls—His accessibility.”195 In 1904, fifty students at the teacher training institute accompanied a European missionary to the Bemba area. They included David Kaunda and two Christian Bemba who had been rescued from a slave caravan. Upon their return, the group reported that “these Bemba are very ready to receive Christ as their King.”196 Livingstonia decided to open a mission at Chinsali. At first, there was no European available, and so in 1905, they instructed David Kaunda and his wife, Helen Nyirenda Kaunda, to open a school and to start mission work.

In contrast to the White Fathers’ emphasis on kings, Kaunda and the teachers encouraged the conversion of ordinary people; after all, many of the teachers were former slaves. The Presbyterian emphasis on egalitarianism and individual achievement cut against the hierarchical tendencies of both the Catholic Church and the Crocodile Clan rulers. Kaunda roamed the area, selecting young men whom he encouraged to come to his school. He reported that there was a great desire for education. By 1907, Kaunda had established a network of schools and a congregation of several hundred who gathered in churches and sang approximately fifty different hymns that Kaunda had translated into ChiBemba from the ChiNyanja and ChiNyamwanga languages. (Despite their proliferation, the Christian schools were clearly opposed by some—there was at least one instance of a chief of ancestors, mfumu ya mipashi, instructing girls to desist from going to school.)197 Helen Kaunda also attracted a following of enthusiastic women who advocated against beer drinking. Eight years later, in 1913, Rev. Robert D. MacMinn and his wife, Josephine Haarhoff, joined this small but growing community of young men and women.198

While Catholic and Protestant missionaries wanted to ensure that the converted were well-versed in their particular doctrines, they also wanted to ensure that their competitors did not gain a foothold in the villages. Thus, mission rivalries led to two distinct emphases in their ongoing efforts to create Christians: on the one hand, there was a vanguard of evangelists who were converted and trained; and on the other, a populace trained in turn by these evangelists who had only a loose affiliation to the mission and their doctrines.

The character of this evangelical vanguard depended on the mission. By 1904, the Catholic Kayambi Mission had expanded the recruitment of adult men to become a cohort of paid catechists. They were required to undertake schooling at the mission and annual retreats to ensure loyalty and discipline.199Their long period of official instruction was not a broad education and hardly touched on secular matters. Instruction was paternalistic and autonomous activities were discouraged.200 The Protestants, by contrast, relied on paid teachers who were literate and had received a broader education than their Catholic counterparts. Early Protestant educational efforts should not be exaggerated, however: James Chisholm, one of the first missionaries at Mwenzo, wrote to his superiors that “many of the natives are born teachers, and do not need to know much till they are fit to impart their knowledge.”201 Nevertheless, education was seen to be part of evangelization and “the most potent barrier against the inroads of Catholicism and Islamism.”202 In addition to secular school instruction, the teachers also offered church classes and Sunday school. In keeping with the vision of the Livingstonia Mission’s Presbyterian Kirk emphasis on self-governing and self-supporting churches, the teachers, the most faithful cohort of church followers, were granted greater autonomy than the Catholic catechists.203

The Catholic missionaries desired a break with “paganism” and, in return, promised the introduction of new rituals, such as communal prayer and the administration of sacraments of baptism, confession, and marriage. Candidates for baptism had to abstain from older practices, ranging from sacred dances to polygamy. They then had to memorize catechism in daily sessions during a three-week intensive training course, even if they could not understand the catechism. (Dupont’s Catéchisme en Kibemba, published in 1900, was, according to later missionaries, “full of nonsense and contradictions.”)204 The most popular aspects of Catholic conversion were the sacraments of confession and communion, perceived by the Bemba as a path to purification.205 As a result, the Catholics counted the large number of baptized Africans as their successful “converts”: in 1913, when the Bembaland mission separated from Nyasaland, there were 6,000 baptized Christians; in 1946 the number was about 180,000 of an approximate 500,000 total people in Northern Province.206

The White Fathers did not share the Protestant concern with a “civilizing mission.” They placed less emphasis on transformations in the domestic realm (with the exception of prohibiting polygamy), less emphasis on transformation in the moral order of society, and less emphasis on broader education and literacy. They did not seek to impose new temporal work regimens, such as those described by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff in their study of Protestant missionaries among the Tswana.207 For the Protestants, education was key since conversion entailed the individual’s ability to approach and understand the scriptures. By contrast, prior to the 1920s, especially under the influence of Bishop Dupont, the White Fathers discouraged education that would lead to acculturation—they sought conversion without the “destructive” influences of “civilization.”208 There was more than a philosophical and theological difference: few of the White Fathers knew English, the colonial language, and hence the capacity for secular instruction was limited. Since services were still in Latin, there was also less of a religious need to learn English. Their pupils and catechists were thus at a marked disadvantage regarding secular education compared to those taught by predominantly English and Scottish Protestants, and at least a few Bemba abandoned Catholic schools for Protestant schools. Thus, while the Catholics counted the number of baptized Christians as evidence of their success, the Protestants counted the number of teachers and schools established. By 1925, Lubwa Mission had established 99 schools where 141 teachers taught 4,218 students (2,457 male and 1,761 female).209 In 1927, the Northern Rhodesian government decided to differentiate between real schools and what they termed “sub-schools.” The Church of Scotland managed 204 schools and 1,463 sub-schools, while the White Fathers had only 17 schools and 530 sub-schools. In other words, Catholic schools were fewer and inferior.210

African teachers and catechists carried the Christian message into villages, where, away from the direct influence of the mission, a far looser interpretation of mission doctrines prevailed. The missions accepted that for many instructed by the catechists and teachers, conversion would be partial and subject to “backsliding.” The ability to implement their vision in the villages and outside the immediate orbit of the mission was limited. Despite Catholic baptism, older rites and forms of veneration continued. Breaking with “paganism” was at best partial: mfuba shrines were relocated to outside the villages; chisungu inititation rites and ukupyana marital succession practices became secretive. Similarly, even while the Protestants may have attempted to spread their civilization, they were frustrated by what they witnessed in the villages. But the emphasis on Presbyterian Church autonomy meant that the Livingstonia Mission possessed even fewer coercive mechanisms than the Catholics in their attempts to implement the more ambitious aspects of their civilizing mission.

Much of the intellectual work in grafting the Christian invisible world onto the ancestral one involved translation. During one of his first tours of Chinsali with David Kaunda, Reverend MacMinn claimed, “Everywhere the cry was ‘books, books.’ It is pitiful to see a class of some twenty with a single tattered book between them.”211 The Protestants, MacMinn especially, set about to meet this demand. For the next two decades, together with mission collaborators, especially Paul B. Mushindo, MacMinn began translating portions of the Bible and popular Christian texts.212 The Presbyterians had an evolutionary theory of African religion, believing that it was tending toward monotheism and all they had to do was reinforce such tendencies.213 They thus searched for terms that could be appropriated and developed in a Christian direction, choosing the popular nature spirit, Lesa, as God; and the ancestral shades, mipashi (sing. mupashi), as the Holy Spirit.214 No local term was given for Satan: presumably because he had a name, and the old demons and angry ancestors, chiwa and chibanda, were not absolutely evil. Thus, Satan became “Satani” or (“Shetâni”).215 The construction of a new Christian vocabulary was preferred by the Catholics, who feared syncretism with a pagan past.

The spread of literacy and the distribution of Protestant printed books and pamphlets in ChiBemba proved decisive, even in the more remote villages. By the late 1920s, there were twenty-six ChiBemba titles in circulation, five of which concerned secular education, two moral stories for children, and the remainder religious texts: The Pilgrim’s Progress, translations of portions of the Bible, devotional services, catechisms, and notes for preachers.216 A full ChiBemba version of the Bible, however, was completed only in 1956, by Lubwa clergy Paul B. Mushindo and Reverend MacMinn.217 The Protestants thereby established the basic framework for a ChiBemba Christian vocabulary.

One of the most important Christian terms was “sin,” along with the Christian morality it implied. Catholics and Protestants viewed sin as a moral problem; they spoke of its pervasiveness in an attempt to spread the notion of guilt and Christian law. This was not how it was understood. Even the translation indicated confusion: lubembu, the word chosen for “sin,” originally meant adultery—the most immoral and antisocial action, which would supposedly bring about guilt. But such antisocial behavior was thought to be inspired by bewitchment: if, for example, a person sinned, he was most certainly a witch.218 Some African Christians at the time preferred the term bupondo when referring to sin, a direct reference to antisocial behavior that led to murder; in other words, the actions of witches.219 The appropriate course of action was to find the bwanga witchcraft and confess as a witch, not ask for forgiveness. The missionaries expressed great frustration at the lack of appreciation of their moral notion of sin and the lack of repentance. For example, the Catholic missionary Louis Etienne wrote:

Christian morality . . . is completely falsified and out of focus. To quote but one example: adultery is not an offence against God—this concept does not even enter into the native mind. . . . The idea of transgressing God’s commandments, and of incurring guilt, would never occur to anyone. The consequences can thus be well imagined.220

The Protestants had similar thoughts: after hearing of a mother’s drowning of a baby thought to be possessed by an evil spirit, Reverend MacMinn complained of the enormity of their religious task.221 But this did not mean that the Bemba lacked morality and thereby acted in an antisocial fashion. It meant that antisocial behavior, what the missionaries termed “sin,” was perceived as evidence of witchcraft. And the white missionaries were often guilty of such antisocial behavior. Villagers must have noted the double entendre when the missionaries declared that Satan is the enemy, mulwani, another term for the white foreigners (in addition to the less confrontational basungu).

Missionary translations would have had little effect if not for the historical context in which they occurred. In addition to the transformation due to the onset of colonial capitalism, people witnessed the emergence of fierce competition between those who claimed access to these new invisible agents. Following the favorable reports of the Phelps-Stokes commissioners on missionary schools, the colonial government offered inducements for missions to expand their educational facilities. The White Fathers realized that if they did not change their orientation and expand schooling, they would lose both funding and evangelical opportunities to the Protestants. They increased the number of schools, set up a teacher training center at Rosa Mission in 1926, and looked for opportunities to establish new missions.222 They also realized that through their early translation and publishing efforts the Protestants were gaining a monopoly over Bemba books, and thus the White Fathers began to be involved in translation work and the publication of vernacular instructional books. From the 1930s, the Catholics matched Protestant efforts in the publication of influential ChiBemba texts. Between 1929 and 1932, Fr. Van Sambeek, who pioneered the expansion of secular Catholic schools and the teacher training school, edited three Bemba readers, Ifyabukaya, written by his trainee teachers. Ifyabukaya was used as a school reader across Bembaland, and it quickly became the standard version of Bemba history. Compared to the Protestant texts, the Catholics focused more on traditional life and tribal histories and less on didactic works about Christian moral improvement. The first Catholic translations of portions of the Bible began to appear in 1953.223

The Lubwa missionaries, perceiving themselves as holding out against Catholic intrusion, responded with alarm when they learned of Catholic efforts to compete for government funds to open more schools and missions in their immediate vicinity.224 When the White Fathers established the Ilondola Mission barely ten miles from Lubwa in 1934, the Lubwa missionary David Brown complained: “The Roman Catholics invaded this year a district hitherto cared for by our Mission alone. They are said to have boasted that in a few years they alone will hold the field. . . . Though we endeavor to avoid friction, and have instructed our Native helpers to that effect, we do not propose giving way to Rome.”225 Soon afterward, Catholic missions were established at Chalabesa (1934), Mulobola (1935), Mulanga (1936), and Mulilansolo (1936), almost encircling the Protestant Lubwa Mission and the Chinsali District (see the map on p.xii.226

Competition between the missions seemed to be a holdover from old European rivalries. It had, however, a very local dimension that would echo previous Bemba struggles over spiritual power. Rumors of the evil and corrupt practices of the competing missionaries circulated within the missions and among the villages that had loose and tenuous affiliations to either the Catholics or the Protestants. A Lubwa missionary accused the Catholics of “shady and reprehensible means of proselytizing and thrusting [themselves] on the people. Bribing chiefs and headmen is one of these means. . . . One chief . . . seized and handcuffed one of our teachers and compelled him to sit through a Romanist service.”227 Complaints went well beyond the formal reports to the mission authorities, and led to vociferous campaigns across the Bemba highlands. For example, Protestant attempts to counter Catholic influence led to the distribution of ChiBemba-language anti-Catholic documents, such as “Fifty Reasons Why I Have Not Joined the Church of Rome,” which was also the subject of an essay competition among Lubwa’s teachers.228 The Catholics adopted similar tactics by increasing the role of the lay apostolate in promoting Catholic loyalty and doctrine. Fervent Christians organized in “Catholic Action” cells that supervised and monitored the Christian behavior of the villagers. Catholic Action adopted the “Legion of Mary” handbook, pioneered in Ireland in the 1920s, with its distinctive military tenor and emphasis on aggressive evangelism.229

The missionaries’ attempts to convince the Bemba of the truth of their respective doctrines, and the misguided, even evil, beliefs of their competitors, introduced an aggressive tone to spiritual politics. Attempts to combat the advance of rivals became fervent, with the lay leaders focusing on the spiritual power of their particular brand of Christianity. The angry ancestors and devils of the past became associated with competing Christian doctrines. Evil had a new face, no longer a force of the jealous spirits, but of beliefs and doctrines, sometimes even inspired by Satan. The point was not that such beliefs were false, and thus spiritually impotent, but that they were evil and manipulated the spirit world for personal power. Rivalries gave greater force to claims that missionaries were witches or hid witches within their churches and communities.

By the 1930s, an educated class of Bemba teachers and catechists had emerged, influenced by missionary ideas, although not controlled by the missionaries in all regards. The distribution and dissemination of books and baptism, the new spiritual resources offered by the missionaries, did not remain under the control of the missions, their catechists, or educated teachers. As ordinary people became more involved in rivalries over doctrines and forms of salvation, the use of such spiritual resources expanded. Good and evil took on new qualities, referring not only to ancestors and spirits, but also to the beliefs and institutions of the living, their writings and their doctrines.

the cleansers

The Christian missionaries spread a vocabulary of sin and evil even as they denied the existence of witchcraft, the way in which such sin and evil were manifest. The refusal of Christian missionaries to acknowledge witches only meant that witches were able to hide within the new Christian churches. One young woman possessed by the ngulu spirits of old told her audience, “Christians said it was a sin to do as I do, but I see Christians full of sins.”230 The missionaries were alternately called witches (baloshi), enemies (balwani), or vampires (banyama); at the very least they harbored witches who fled to the missions to escape witchcraft accusations and trials.231 At the White Fathers’ Chilubula Mission, there was a tree that the White Fathers only had to shake, causing a leaf to fall; a person would die for each leaf that fell. “There are more Christian baloshi [witches] than any other kind,” an informant told Audrey I. Richards.232 Christianity concealed witches; and the colonial prohibition on witchcraft accusations, the Witchcraft Ordinance of 1914, left people vulnerable to witches:

At first there were only a few deaths, but the doctors burned the sorcerers. Then the Europeans came and told us not to burn sorcerers . . . and the doctors ceased. . . . This meant there was no one to cure people and no one to tell them what their illnesses were. . . . Those who could straighten things in the old way said, “We can do this only to go straight into gaol.” So the sick people went to the Europeans to be cured but some diseases were beyond the Europeans, so the sick people died.233

Ngulu nature spirits could have protected people from witches. But the colonial authorities made sure that those possessed were not “tempted into becoming a witchfinder.” Chinsali’s district commissioner diligently reported, “I personally make a point of interviewing all ngulu [or bangulu, those possessed by ngulu], thus letting them know that I am aware of their activities and trusting this knowledge will keep them off dangerous ground.”234 Witches started to afflict people in an unprecedented fashion. “Chinsali has a reputation for possessing more than the usual number of witches,” complained the same DC, even as he denied people the ability to eradicate them.235 Measures to combat the witches became more desperate. An old man was banished from the village after he caused a child to fall mysteriously into a fire. An old woman dreamed that a girl told her she was not a witch. Nevertheless, for the villagers this proved her witchcraft. She was banished and her home burned down when she refused to leave. A Lubwa schoolteacher was accused of rape and witchcraft. He passed a “boiling water test” to prove his innocence, apparently helped along by his knowledge of some “medicine” (muti). Nevertheless, the missionaries dismissed him from his teaching post at Lubwa for participating in the ordeal.236

The missionary claim that they were liberating people from the belief in witchcraft only contributed to the spread of witchcraft and rumors of occult evil. Audrey I. Richards argued that this surge in witchcraft was “inevitable as a product of violent changes in tribal organization and belief.”237 This was part of the story. But Richards, in a surprisingly shortsighted observation that could only have come about from a relentless focus on the breakdown of tribal institutions instead of the broader historical context, contrasted such violent changes with peaceful missionary teachings. The missionaries, like Richards, believed that fear was the source of witchcraft accusations, and that they, together with a progressive colonial state, needed to root out such fear. Referring to the witchfinders, the presbytery of Livingstonia appealed to the colonial government “to curb the sinister activities of these deceivers and robbers of their fellow Africans.” They called on “all Christian people, within and without its bounds, who have themselves liberated from belief in Witchcraft, and from fear of its imaginary powers, to strive continually by prayer, by example and by persuasion to free from this terrible bondage of fear all their fellow Africans.”238 For many Bemba, however, claims that Christians did not practice witchcraft were further evidence that they did. After all, the missionaries had proclaimed the pervasiveness of sin, a manifestation of witchcraft. And rivalry between the missionaries had introduced new fears and new notions of evil. Sin and witchcraft became associated with certain denominations. The evil that Catholics proclaimed of Protestants and vice versa became a popular discourse on spiritual others.

A new opportunity to get rid of witches and witchcraft came about in the early 1930s through traveling groups of young men who claimed to have a medicine that eradicated witchcraft. They called themselves Bamuchape, “the people who cleanse.” They promoted a purification that would rid the world of witchcraft and evil that emanated from the discontented dead. The Bamuchape heralded from colonial Malawi, where a mythical founder, Kamwende, was said to have died and been resurrected, with a vision to rid the world of buloshi witchcraft. The Bamuchape traveled from one village to the next, until they had cleansed much of northern Zambia. They used a mirror to identify witches, who were then forced to drink a soapy potion made out of a brownish-red powder that was said to come from the crushed roots of a tree found in Malanje, Malawi. If they should dare to perform witchcraft in the future, the potion would make them swell up and die. If witches tried to hide, the Bamuchape would reveal them—Kamwende himself could expose them. For three to six pence, the Bamuchape offered medicine to combat future acts of witchcraft or perhaps even make people immune to the demands of the colonial district officials.239

The local precedents for Bamuchape witchcraft cleansing were the mwavi ordeals, in the past administered by chiefs with the help of nganga doctors. Indirect rule and the Witchcraft Ordinance prevented chiefs from administering the mwavi ordeal, and the Bamuchape administered a form of the ordeal instead. Since they had no position of authority in the administration, the colonial administration allowed the Bamuchape to do their work, as long as they dealt with the witches without direct accusations and violence to them. Rather than direct accusations, their medicine (or “magic,” bwanga) worked by persuading people that they were witches. The consequences of admitting to being a witch were relatively minor, little more than confessing sins; witches only had to drink medicine to prevent them from performing witchcraft in the future. The medicine would do no harm; in fact, it could also protect from other witchcraft and from the attacks of wild animals such as lions and snakes (the protective medicine was sometimes different and offered at extra cost to the medicine that purified witches). In some cases, there was local pressure and a temptation to accuse people directly, which could result in physical violence against witches. A few of these instances came to the attention of the colonial authorities and prosecutions resulted in fines, canings, and imprisonment that ranged from a few months to several years of hard labor. For that reason, the Bamuchape were careful to secure the permission of the district officials, who were instructed by their superiors to allow the Bamuchape to work but not to give them any official written permission for fear that it would be treated as official sanction. Such official sanction did come from the chiefs who welcomed the Bamuchape and often insisted that all their people gather for purification.240 People welcomed the permission granted by the colonial authorities and the support of the chiefs: “This is the best thing the Bwanas have ever done for us,” Richards was told. “Now at last they are allowing us to free our country from witchcraft.”241 Indeed, perceiving that witchcraft was integral to local religious beliefs and not a violent aberration, the colonial state in Northern Rhodesia became somewhat more tolerant, focusing on witchcraft accusations (not the belief in witchcraft itself), and reducing the punishment for accusations.242 A solution to witchcraft seemed to be at hand, and the Bamuchape were enthusiastically received.

The Bamuchape deployed techniques and concepts introduced by the missionaries. As if they were delivering a church sermon, the Bamuchape lined people up and instructed them. They claimed to spread the word and power of God, Lesa, who would eradicate the witches. “God has sent the Muchapi with a strong remedy, much stronger than European drugs, because it is a cure for the country, it will kill all sorcerers and put an end to sorcery in the entire world,” declared one Muchape in 1935.243 Unlike mwavi, which was used to identify and administer justice to witches after they had performed witchcraft, the Bamuchape offered a purification that cleansed the witchcraft of past, present, and future. It was a salvation. Their mwavi ordeal thus resembled baptism, a Christian spiritual resource adapted to protect from witchcraft. In August 1933, in the Ufipa District, slightly north of the Zambian border with Tanzania, the head of the Bamuchape preached to a gathering of nearly two thousand people:

Your Missionaries came to the country some 50 years ago; they tried with all their best to save the people and teach you not to kill one another yet without success. But we feel sympathy for you have lost dear friends, some of you standing here, not because God took them away—but by being poisoned by these witchcraft, whom you will see today. We follow God’s law that “Thou shalt not kill.” This commandment is being observed and fulfilled by us [more] than any religion. For they all fail to save people—but we do. . . . I know that some of your Christians argue, but I tell you some of your native ministers of religion have been found in possession of a skull of a European Lady. I do not know where they killed this lady, and took her skull. So you must not trust the Christians, they are the people who are hiding in this religion, and are the great witchcrafts more than any one else.244

The Bamuchape, then, acted against sin (thou shall not kill) by combating witchcraft. They promoted the salvation that the Christians promised but were unable to deliver because they harbored their own witchcraft. Conflicts with the missionaries, especially the Catholics who prohibited their followers from being cleansed, became more pronounced, and gave even more substance to the rumors that the White Fathers were witches or harbored witches within their church.

Despite their rivalries, the missionaries and Bamuchape were similar in many regards, most of all in their insistence on a transformation, a “conversion” that rejected old practices. For the Bamuchape, while there was no permanent salvation, no heaven or hell, and no millenarian vision attached to purification, there was the promise of a new identity through the eradication of evil witchcraft and thereby the promotion of good in the individual and the community. This new identity would be achieved by cleansing old forms of sin and magic. The most fervent Christian missionaries and their local agents had burned the shrines and other “idolatrous” objects; or, at the very least, they insisted that such shrines be situated well away from the villages that they visited.245 Eternal life in heaven would thereby be achieved, the missionaries claimed. However, by insisting that they were combating the evil spirits that afflicted this world, the Bamuchape were far more successful than the missionaries in the purification of such objects. Emptied of their spiritual power, they were discarded. Outside the villages, “charms” that the missionaries had tried to eradicate for decades, mostly horns (nsengo) containing potent medicine (muti), piled up.

the chiefs

Like the missionaries, the Bamuchape attacked the evil of the past. In fact, they went beyond the missionaries in confronting the ancestral religions oriented around mfuba spirit shrines and even the relics of clans and chiefs. Much to Audrey I. Richards’s amazement (and perhaps disappointment), the Bamuchape identified sacred objects, including protective magic and even the babenye relics of chiefs, as potential magic bwanga, and insisted that they also be given up and purified. In her persistent focus on a systematic “Bemba religion,” Richards thought these were the actions of “quacks,” exploiting the ignorance of the young as tribal institutions collapsed. These were not acts of charlatans preying on ignorance, however, but popular attempts to associate the spiritual resources of the past, including those of the chiefs, with witchcraft. Chiefs not only had their spiritual roles sidelined by indirect rule; popular movements attacked the basis of their spiritual authority. In doing so, the Bamuchape were only partially successful; a more thorough attack on the spiritual agency of chiefs would have to wait another twenty years.

Why, then, did chiefs collaborate with the Bamuchape? Chitimukulu, for example, welcomed the Bamuchape in the hope that they would “take away all the buloshi witches in the country.”246 One reason was that the strictures of indirect rule had changed the nature of chieftaincy by basing their political power on their ties to the colonial state instead of their spiritual mediations.247 Progressive colonial officials, such as the one-time district commissioner and amateur ethnographer W. Vernon Brelsford, perhaps in an unconscious reflection about the nature of European colonial rule, went as far as arguing that the spiritual authority of the Crocodile Clan was never as important as their authority by right of physical conquest.248 The missions and their Christian followers further questioned the spiritual power of the chiefs by denying the validity of ancestral claims over the fertility of the land and the people. Yet people still expected chiefs to deal with the spirit world, eradicate witches, ensure fertility, and bring good fortune. There were rumors that the chiefs had actually been bribed to permit witches and vampires in their areas or were themselves vampires.249 To maintain legitimacy, chiefs had to find new ways to respond to these challenges and mobilize the appropriate spiritual resources. Their subjects forced them to work with prophets, who in many ways challenged their authority and legitimacy. South of the Bemba heartland, the Lala chief Shaiwila collaborated with the son of God (Mwana Lesa), Tom Nyirenda, to kill the witches that plagued his people.250 Similarly, the Crocodile Clan chiefs worked with the Bamuchape to rid the country of witchcraft.