Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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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