Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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undertook extensive surveys of all aspects of culture, history, and religion in the areas where they proselytized. This represented the beginnings of a long tradition of Catholic missionary scholarship that stretches from Edouard Labrecque, whom Giacomo Macola describes as an “indefatigable organizer of culture throughout northeastern Zambia,” to Hugo F. Hinfelaar’s insightful work on Bemba women’s engagement with Christianity.69 (While Protestant missionaries also collected histories, their emphasis on a progressive civilizing mission meant that they were less interested in historical traditions than were the Catholics.) Many of these missionaries spent decades in the field, were fluent in local languages, and were avid collectors of culture and history.
Missionaries believed that there was only one religion, even while each group could possess a different secular history. Thus, non-Christian narratives deemed religious were problematic, while those narratives that were viewed as historical were acceptable. Christian stories had to replace ostensibly religious narratives, but ostensibly secular histories were permitted, and could even be promoted. Missionary publications thus separated the religious from the historical; the former were beliefs that had to give way to Christianity; the latter could be kept as markers of distinct human communities. In mission-recorded oral traditions, the agency of living beings replaced the agency of spirits. Stories about the spirit that the missionaries would call God (Lesa) and the origins of humankind, for example, were unacceptable in the published missionary scholarship. Much subsequent historical scholarship is based on these sanitized missionary publications. Fortunately, the missionary researchers left a paper trail: the original unpublished writings and research notes are now available in mission archives. These notes were the product of careful research: the missionaries considered knowledge of customs repugnant to them as a weapon in efforts to combat them. “Morally speaking, many customs are directly opposed to the Christian code,” a White Father, Louis Etienne, wrote. But he also noted that “as long as the missionary does not acquire a thorough knowledge of these customs, he will be unable to remedy them; he will be able to impart only a superficial culture, a semblance of Christianity, which will always be merely a thin veneer superimposed upon paganism, fatally lacking in depth, and certain to crumble under any serious trial.”70 Accounts of such customs and histories thus exist in many missionary documents, although they rarely found their way to missionary publications. If possible and necessary, I have made use of these unsanitized research notes.
In the late nineteenth century, the British government awarded a charter to Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (BSAC) to rule a vast territory, which included present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe. The BSAC recruited colonial officials who were responsible for the implementation of a variety of colonial exactions, such as taxation and the recruitment and organization of labor for the incipient mining industry. Since they struggled to govern their vast districts, colonial administrators turned to existing elites in their efforts to maintain control. In order to determine the “legitimate” rulers of any particular area, they collected histories, which were reproduced in many district notebooks, now found in the National Archives of Zambia (NAZ). The tendency to research and write down local histories and traditions increased after the British government declined to renew the BSAC’s charter in 1923 and took over the administration of Northern Rhodesia in 1924, formally introducing indirect rule during the 1930s. Officials responsible for the implementation of indirect rule, such as W. Vernon Brelsford, produced several monographs and articles from their collection of local knowledge, first written as appendices to their many “tour reports,” which are also found in the NAZ.
Like the missionaries, these local colonial officials were interested in particular narratives. Mirroring a concept of royalty and aristocracy in their own societies, colonial officials focused on lineage and on the strength of inherited traditions. Thus, despite the fact that many of the colonial officials spent several years in an area and developed fluency in local languages, their accounts of the basis of political power were partial and culled to their particular interests. However, these officials also viewed it as their duty to repress “false” beliefs. Thus, in their battle against the spirits, they left valuable archival traces that can be employed by the historian. At times, such archives represent the prejudices of a secular mind, identifying an exotic and irrational “other.” And yet, like the missionaries, colonial officials knew that success in their struggle against beliefs they considered false depended on the accuracy of their data.
The third productive encounter between Zambians and outsiders occurred with the arrival of the anthropologist. In northern Zambia, Audrey I. Richards, Bronislaw Malinowski’s student, was a pioneer of colonial anthropology. Her work on the northern Zambian kingdom and people termed the “Bemba” began in the 1930s and drew on a long collaboration with Paul B. Mushindo, an elder of the Church of Scotland’s mission in northern Zambia, as well as the support of various liberal settlers and colonial officials such as Stewart Gore-Brown and Thomas Fox-Pitt. Richards’s work, characterized as functionalism, sought to appreciate the totality of cultural and religious forms that informed sociopolitical arrangements. A major concern of her initial analysis was with the forces of change that she perceived as having disrupted the cohesive functioning of tribal society.71 Richards continued to publish about Bemba society and visited occasionally up until the late 1960s. Her many articles, which drew on copious field research notes, detail Bemba sociopolitical organization and their religious expressions.72
Richards’s functionalism gave way to an embrace of change by a progressive school of colonial-era anthropologists centered at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI). They, too, benefited from a dialogue with local interpreters and ethnographers.73 There was great diversity in their scholarship, which included the sociological studies of Godfrey Wilson and Monica H. Wilson (close collaborators and friends of Richards), the symbolic cultural ethnographies of Victor Turner, the structural functionalism of Max Gluckman, the detailed longitudinal field investigations of Elizabeth Colson, and the liberal historical accounts of Lewis H. Gann. Many of them wrote about what they presumed to be single ethnic groups (the Lozi, Lunda, Tonga, etc.). But instead of fearing change and “detribalization” with increased urbanization and the growth of the copper-mining economy, a preoccupation of functionalist scholarship, the RLI anthropologists were fascinated by the new cultural forms emerging in the towns. They sought to represent African societies of Northern Rhodesia in the midst of a great transformation from village to urban life. To a certain extent, their progressive politics may have led them to overestimate the permanence and the linearity of such changes. Their “expectations of modernity,” as James Ferguson’s more recent ethnography puts it, shared by the growing literate and cosmopolitan urban Zambian population, would not materialize in the postcolonial period.74
As with the colonial missionaries and administrators, there was much that was repressed by these anthropologists. Richards imagined an ordered tribal society where power devolved from the paramount; that which did not fit in this view was left out (or represented as anomalous signs of tribal breakdown). The RLI anthropologists struggled to relate spirits to society. Often influenced by Marxism, they ignored the richest components of their data (e.g., for Godfrey Wilson), or they focused on ritual (Gluckman) or symbol (Turner) rather than spiritual agency.75 Fortunately, as with the missionaries and colonial officials, these anthropologists left detailed field notes in various archives, and, when carefully examined, they, too, provide richer source material than the final published accounts. This book has especially benefited from a careful reading of Richards’s research notes.
As independence approached, rival political and religious movements fought over followers and over the implications of the end of European colonialism. The conflict between popular nationalism and other prophetic movements around the time of Zambian independence left rich archival traces, underappreciated by other studies. For example, this is the first book to employ the detailed archival sources on the battles between the United National Independence Party (UNIP) and prophetic movements such as Watchtower and Alice Lenshina’s Lumpa Church. Readers who want to appreciate the multiple perspective and documents that lie behind a widely cited official report, the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the Lumpa Church, the long-established authoritative text on the Lumpa Church, should consider the archival documents referenced in chapter 6.76
In the heady days after independence, as Kenneth Kaunda and the UNIP took over the control of the colonial state and a booming copper economy, Zambians