Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
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religious movements that elite attempts to contain expectations through a program of secular moral reform were challenged.
By the early 1960s, the followers of Alice Lenshina and the nationalist movement fought for influence, resulting in a brutal civil war in northern Zambia. We witness in chapter 6, “Devils of War,” striking examples of spiritual agency during this civil war, as enemies became devils, bullets turned to water, and brave fighters were described as Christian heroes.
The war ended when Kaunda sent in colonial troops to forcefully disperse Lenshina’s followers’ villages. The victory of Kaunda’s nationalists and their seizure of the colonial state apparatus in 1964 promised to inaugurate an era of secular socialism, guided by Kaunda’s state religion, humanism. Chapter 7, “God in Heaven, Kaunda on Earth,” argues that humanism was never a convincing philosophy for Zambians. They turned instead to spiritual mediators, such as the Archbishop of Lusaka, Emmanuel Milingo, who exorcized the evil spirits that afflicted Zambians who were losing faith in the nationalist vision.
Chapter 8, “A Nation Reborn,” explores the agency of the neoliberal Holy Spirit, which promised wealth and advancement in a post-socialist era. In 1991, Christians led the way in challenging Kaunda and his humanist state religion, contributing to the downfall of Kaunda in 1991. Zambia’s second president, Frederick Chiluba, declared that Zambia, blessed by the Holy Spirit, would be reborn and prosper as a Christian nation. Pentecostal-inspired spirits framed the challenges and opportunities of a neoliberal order.
1 The Passion of Chitimukulu
The history of the Bemba kingdom’s rise prior to the nineteenth century remains vague. In Bemba renditions, the military conquest of the region by the Luba-related Crocodile Clan was entwined with stories of autochthonous magical powers, especially those of women, and the passion of the Crocodile Clan’s leader, Chitimukulu, “the Great Tree.” Objects such as the staff of rule, depicted below in figure 1.1 and on the cover, evoked memories of similar conquests across south-central Africa. Similar figurines could have represented a number of different iconic heroines praised in many of the savanna’s most renowned stories of conquest: Luweji of the Lunda, Bulanda of the Luba, or Nachituti of the Kazembe kingdom. For the Bemba it would have been of Chilimbulu, the woman with beautiful scarifications who seduced the roaming Bemba hero, Chitimukulu. Her half-closed eyes, sculpted ears, and enlarged navel and genitalia indicated paths of connection to the powers of the spirits. She held her breasts, perhaps containing secrets to human fertility and agricultural fecundity.92 The conquering king ruled by harnessing her powers; his failure to possess her, to contain and control the dangerous spiritual emotions that she invoked, would, men claimed, lead to the collapse of an order that underpinned their patriarchal civilization.
The objects and stories that tell of the Crocodile Clan’s powers built on older conceptions of the relationships between people, the land upon which they relied, and the dead; they reconciled the spiritual powers of the autochthons with claims to rule by conquerors. Politics, then, was also religion, and religion was politics; the competition over ideas with which people could comprehend their past and apprehend their future. New politico-religious constellations could not be imposed in a foreign vocabulary, for they would lose the powers that rendered them useful. Yet they could equally not celebrate the past, as they would then not provide legitimacy for the new rulers. The Crocodile Clan conquerors thus offered innovations within the existing collective political imagination. They claimed to intervene with the spiritual forces crucial for social and economic well-being, linking their ancestral spirits and their relics of rule to the most vital aspects of ordinary existence—the fertility of people and the fecundity of agriculture. The Bemba expected the Crocodile Clan’s government to ensure that ancestral and nature spirits were placated, and that the living prospered free from spiritual malaise and witchcraft.
The ideas of this Bemba politico-religious edifice were not written down: religion was not restricted to the dogmas of scriptures; politics was not subject to the laws of constitutions. No document would allow the future scholar to easily reconstruct the basis of rule. Surviving objects, such as the staff of rule described above, and various other relics, including stools, bow stands, and other objects, provide some clues. But the most important fragments of evidence are praises, proverbs, and stories, which would eventually be written down and come to be known collectively under the general rubric of “oral tradition.” At first glance, the oral tradition appears to be a historical representation. But, like all history, the oral tradition established its importance, relevance, and appeal not because it rendered past events correctly, but because it gave an account of the correct relationships among people, the world that sustained them, and the dead. Historical discourse, as V. Y. Mudimbe has established, was also religious discourse.93
Historians preoccupied with change in a narrowly conceived secular political realm have focused on struggles around physical forms of wealth such as people and land. Detailed histories of competing lords and polities leave out the language, idioms, and terms in which political struggle took place. The most significant study of precolonial Bemba political history, for example, argues that much in the Bemba political charter, their oral tradition of genesis, should be relegated to the “student of myth and social structure rather than the historian.”94 It would seem ludicrous in other contexts to exclude the central ideas and objectives of politics from a political history. As J. Matthew Schoffeleers demonstrates, such mythical elements point to the ideological basis of precolonial polities.95 The objectives of political struggle were the spiritual powers that allowed the people to reproduce and the land to produce.
There have, of course, been many accounts of “Bemba religion.” But in these accounts religion appears as superstition or, at best, a timeless tribal dogma that is a partial revelation of a true religion. Concerned to spread their religion, missionaries separated history from religion and focused on the relationships of local spiritual beliefs with Christian dogma.96 Anthropologists, too, discussed religion as if it somehow belonged to individual tribes. Audrey I. Richards’s seminal study conceived of religion as a functionalist legitimizing device for Bemba chieftaincy, “sacralising the political structure on which the tribe depend[s].”97 Hugo F. Hinfelaar’s more recent study combines missionary and anthropological approaches with a progressive concern for women’s agency. Here, Richards’s emphasis on Bemba chieftaincy is substituted with a Bemba religious dogma located among commoners and women.98 Religion was not dogma or tribal trait, however; it was history, a description of past relationships between peoples and spirits that held ongoing implications for the identities of the living.
Emotions are at the narrative center of Bemba historical discourse. The oral tradition moves forward through passionate actions linked to love, seduction, jealousy, and death. “Story is at the heart of the way humans see themselves, experience themselves within the context of their worlds,” according to renowned scholar of southern African oral traditions Harold Scheub. “And emotions are the soul of storytelling.”99 In his fieldwork notes on the nearby Nyakyusa, Godfrey Wilson noticed that “the ordinary intense feelings of men are often felt to have in themselves a directly religious quality. Sexual excitement, grief and fear bring into communion with ultimate realities.”100 Precisely because of their centrality to livelihood and their visceral manifestations, emotions were expressed spiritually. The Bemba oral tradition is a history of attempts to govern these spiritual emotions. The appeal and importance of the Bemba oral tradition emerged from these spiritual emotions. Audrey I. Richards thought that Bemba religion both sacralized political authorities and ritualized individual emotions.101 Yet, instead of these being discrete foci of Bemba religion (sacralizing the political structure on the one hand and ritualizing individual emotions on the other, as Richards claimed), they were one and the same. The Bemba oral tradition reminded people of the love that sustained life and the jealousy that threatened it. In the narrative, the Crocodile Clan of Chitimukulu promised control over the spiritual emotions that gave life, fertility, and fecundity, but which could also lead to death. Only through harnessing such individual passions was the political authority of the Crocodile Clan sacralized. Passion individualizes, as Emile Durkheim argued, but it also enslaves.102
During the late nineteenth century, global economic forces began