Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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For those who led the nationalist movement, the party would serve the same moral purpose as the mission church. On the other hand, the prophetic spiritual movements examined in this book posed a radical model of conversion that sought to transform the individual as a basis for a spiritual revolution. Conversion in this framework harnessed spirits to local concerns and identities; it critiqued old practices, addressed inequalities, and promoted a utopian future. Since spiritual forces possessed the individual, they allowed for a remarkable and sudden personal transformation. Conversion purified the individual of evil and laid the foundations for a new society. The revolution, often violent, was a cleansing of evil, a personal catharsis or exorcism that led to a reborn individual and nation, and ultimately to heaven on earth.
The connection between violence and beliefs in a spirit world is an understudied aspect of central African history. Violence is often attributed to “big men” who manipulate and indoctrinate credulous and underage soldiers, set about capturing valuable resources, or, in a more sophisticated argument, “rage against the machine” of dysfunctional governance.58 Such reasonings may explain why people take to arms; they do not explain acts of ritualized brutality and quotidian violence. The belief that people were fighting the devil—or human incarnations of evil spirits—may have inspired violence, or at least represented and made sense of violence. Because of the gendered nature of spirit possession, such violence often targeted women. When nationalist- supporting villagers massacred a community of Lumpa Church members, many of them women, brutalizing and raping them, as described in chapter 6, they considered the members to be incarnations of evil, possessed by demons. For the villagers who committed these acts, killing was not sufficient. The demons needed to be publicly and ritually vilified so that they would fear returning to the land of the living. There is a widely held misconception that Christianity in Africa inspired peace, while colonialism caused trauma and violence. According to this idea, the violence and disruption caused by Christianity and Christian missionaries were due to their role as agents of colonialism; the missionaries were not “true” Christians. To the contrary, as in other periods in the history of Christianity, Christian spiritual beliefs engaged with violent histories, and sometimes inspired violence. Christian spirits could be violent agents. Chapters 5 and 6 of this book point to how Christian beliefs contributed to violence during decolonization. Other examples drawn from the central African region indicate similar histories.59
Of course, spirits are not unfamiliar to other parts of Africa and to other parts of the world. In South Africa, spirits formed an important element of political and religious discourse, providing life-giving rain, inspiring struggles against taxation in the nineteenth century, envisaging Zion for the many followers of Isaiah Shembe, revealing apartheid-era witches in the late twentieth century, and contributing to the uncertainties of life in the twenty-first century.60 The most emotive refrain in the South African national anthem, “Nkosi Sikilel’ iAfrica” (God Bless Africa), resounds with a call, “Woza moya,” for the Holy Spirit to come down and bless Africa. The proliferation of Pentecostal and charismatic churches in southern Nigeria and Ghana, with their ongoing struggles against evil demons, indicates comparable spiritual agencies.61 In Liberia, Poro societies provided a parallel power to the state.62 The Tongnaab deity has offered good fortune in life and commerce to the increasing number of pilgrims who make their way to its shrine in northern Ghana.63 Spiritual agents can be identified in the history of the African diaspora in the Americas—Haiti, Cuba, North America, and Brazil, for example.64 Similar conceptions of spiritual power were also found among people with no relationship to Africa, such as in Southeast Asia.65 On the other hand, spirits have not been as central to religion and to politics in other parts of the African continent. In parts of the African Sahel, for example, even while forms of spirit possession have long prospered, Sharia Islam, with its focus on texts, moral codes, and the afterlife, has repressed spiritual interventions (although Sufi Islam allowed for direct spiritual interventions).66 Here, the introduction of Christianity engaged with a different set of concerns and politico-religious configurations.67
In outlining some of these general features of the central African region, I do not argue that there are unchanging and homogeneous central African traditions, but only point to the importance of proximate and capricious invisible agents in early modern and modern central African history. The exact nature and historical trajectory of this invisible world and its relationship to the visible world diverge in many central African communities. Particular histories were created out of similar experiences, such as the slave-and-ivory trading wars of the nineteenth century, colonial impositions, postcolonial nationalism and socialism, and neoliberalism; and similar changes in the spirit world, including the appearance of an evil Satan, a good God, as well as the diminished role of ancestral shades and nature spirits. This book discusses the role of invisible inspirations in one of these Zambian histories.
methodology and zambian historiography
Even while spiritual beliefs are shared, they are private, and thus require the historian to appreciate an internal perspective, a challenge since there are so few written accounts left by believers and since personal beliefs remain hidden from secular authorities. Often the historian reads belief from the accounts of skeptical outsiders. Many of these outside authorities impose categorizations, especially those of “religion” and “politics,” onto the experiences and activities of people. To grapple with these methodological quandaries, the contexts that motivated and inspired the writing of the primary and secondary source material have to be appreciated.
This book employs three types of evidence used in Africanist scholarship: fieldwork, oral testimony, and documentary sources. Informal fieldwork for this project began in 1997–1998, when I conducted the research that informed my first book on environment, society, and culture in the Luapula Valley, located adjacent to the Lubemba Plateau, and when I came to appreciate the importance of spirits as a political resource, and began to think about the history explored here.68I also developed competency in ChiBemba, the language of the Lubemba Plateau, as well as one of the principal languages of Zambia’s urban areas (I studied ChiBemba at Ilondola Mission, one of the Catholic missions discussed in chapter 2). Since then, I have returned to Zambia almost yearly, with significant intervals of fieldwork devoted to this book in 2005 and 2008. My fieldwork involved living in villages and in church compounds, attending services and seminars, and discussing the issues found in this book with the followers and principal clergy of the movements examined. Upon identifying reliable informants, I recorded interviews: in 2005, on popular Christianity (especially the Lumpa movement of Alice Lenshina) and the anticolonial nationalist movement in northern Zambia during the 1950s and 1960s; in 2008, on the Pentecostal and charismatic churches that have proliferated across Zambia since the 1980s. Like all historical sources, memory represses, disguises, and reveals selectively. Yet fieldwork and interviews open up local perspectives, even in the interpretation of documentary sources.
The documentary sources, including unpublished archival material but also publications such as newspapers, memoirs, and government publications, that inform this book are found in libraries and archives in Zambia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the United States. Each repository holds secrets that yield only after lengthy investigation and interpretation. Crucial to the interpretation of documents is an appreciation of the contexts of their writing: What was emphasized? What was left out? And why? Any one document emerges from multiple perspectives, prejudices, experiences, informants, and other documents. In an archive, the enterprising historian can identify the paper trail, the many revealing documents, often hidden in obscurely titled files and boxes, that lie behind a single published government report or commission of inquiry. Historical investigation is an engagement with archives to understand this multilayered construction of documents, a sort of fieldwork in the archives, which in turn relies on understanding the historical contexts in which the documents were written.
An effective appreciation of local history and historiography is thus crucial to the interpretation of documents. The writing of Zambian history began in the encounter between Zambian oral historians and outsiders, including missionaries, colonial officials, and anthropologists. The first accounts of the precolonial Zambian past, generally the migration of Luba and Lunda royals into a land inhabited by much earlier settlements of Bantu-speakers, appeared in the district notebooks of colonial officials and the publications of mission societies. Certain missionaries or mission societies took special interest in collecting these stories.