Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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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