Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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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