Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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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