Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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young as tribal institutions collapsed. These were not acts of charlatans preying on ignorance, however, but popular attempts to associate the spiritual resources of the past, including those of the chiefs, with witchcraft. Chiefs not only had their spiritual roles sidelined by indirect rule; popular movements attacked the basis of their spiritual authority. In doing so, the Bamuchape were only partially successful; a more thorough attack on the spiritual agency of chiefs would have to wait another twenty years.
Why, then, did chiefs collaborate with the Bamuchape? Chitimukulu, for example, welcomed the Bamuchape in the hope that they would “take away all the buloshi witches in the country.”246 One reason was that the strictures of indirect rule had changed the nature of chieftaincy by basing their political power on their ties to the colonial state instead of their spiritual mediations.247 Progressive colonial officials, such as the one-time district commissioner and amateur ethnographer W. Vernon Brelsford, perhaps in an unconscious reflection about the nature of European colonial rule, went as far as arguing that the spiritual authority of the Crocodile Clan was never as important as their authority by right of physical conquest.248 The missions and their Christian followers further questioned the spiritual power of the chiefs by denying the validity of ancestral claims over the fertility of the land and the people. Yet people still expected chiefs to deal with the spirit world, eradicate witches, ensure fertility, and bring good fortune. There were rumors that the chiefs had actually been bribed to permit witches and vampires in their areas or were themselves vampires.249 To maintain legitimacy, chiefs had to find new ways to respond to these challenges and mobilize the appropriate spiritual resources. Their subjects forced them to work with prophets, who in many ways challenged their authority and legitimacy. South of the Bemba heartland, the Lala chief Shaiwila collaborated with the son of God (Mwana Lesa), Tom Nyirenda, to kill the witches that plagued his people.250 Similarly, the Crocodile Clan chiefs worked with the Bamuchape to rid the country of witchcraft.
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