Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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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