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 to impinge on the Bemba kingdom in an unprecedented fashion. As a result of internal dissent stemming from the spread of the kingdom and the subjugation of people such as the Bisa and external challenges from the Ngoni and an intensified slave trade, the Bemba kingdom faced new challenges. The instabilities of the nineteenth century ratcheted up the stakes in battles over political power. The Crocodile Clan rulers made a concerted effort to harness and control spiritual emotions. Only through the Crocodile Clan, the rulers claimed, would people fall in love, fertility and fecundity flourish, jealous and angry spirits be placated, and hunters and soldiers be imbued with the bravery to capture their prey and defeat their enemies. Even while the Crocodile Clan sponsored rituals and ceremonies that enhanced their access to the spirits, prophets also offered alternative spiritual interventions. This violent turmoil of people, spirits, and emotions led to the proliferation of invisible agents that began to be perceived as evil.
desire and death
The Bemba politico-religious constellation rested on a frightening, magical, and dangerous story of desire and death. The characters existed in the liminality of human experience and had access to a world that was beyond the ordinary.103We do not know the narrative’s exact performance and articulation prior to the nineteenth century; indeed, it might not have been rendered as a single story, but performed on many different occasions with different emphases. If the bare outline of the founding story refers to “historical facts,” they probably took place in the seventeenth century.104 But the oral tradition was likely influenced by the wars of the nineteenth century. The Roman Catholic White Father missionary Edouard Labrecque wrote down the most complete version of the oral tradition in the early twentieth century. Through the twentieth century, several successive attempts to write down the oral tradition in its entirety display differences in both form and content. Instead of attempting to write down a more authentic version—since there is no urtext—I have culled and summarized sequences from several sources that are most important for this discussion.105
On one level, the oral tradition is a fairly typical story of the strife between fathers and sons and the restoration of ties between sisters and brothers found within charters of the ChiBemba-speaking Lala, Lamba, and Aushi matrilineal clans that surround the central Bemba polity.106 Thereby, the narrative introduces many familiar elements, necessary and convincing fragments and clichés that joined it to other stories—and places the Crocodile Clan’s polity within a vast network of matrilineal cultures. But unlike many of the more ordinary and widespread clan-based narratives, the Bemba oral tradition makes a claim for the divine origins of the Crocodile Clan. The first sequence of the story establishes these grandiose origins through their link with a celestial mother. The joining of sky and earth, a basic principle of sacred Luba politico-religious kings—and a refrain to which the Bemba oral tradition returns repeatedly—was thereby achieved:
A lord, Mukulumpe, was hunting in a forest when he met a beautiful woman with large ears like an elephant. She said that her name was Mumbi Mukasa, she had come from the sky, and she belonged to the Crocodile Clan. Mukulumpe and Mumbi Mukasa married and had three sons, Nkole, Chiti, Katongo, and one daughter, Chilufya (or Bwalya Chabala).
The marriage between the hunter and the celestial woman, Mumbi Mukasa, establishes the possibilities for a royal family, as illustrated in figure 1.2, and for the spread of Luba and Lunda political institutions. But in family there was also jealousy and discord. The sons display their maternal devotion by building a tower to their mother’s home, but after it collapses and causes destruction, they have to flee the wrath of their father. They rescue their sister, however, restoring their most affectionate matrilineal affiliations:
The royal sons tried to build a tower to their mother’s home in the sky. But it collapsed and killed many people. Their angry father, Mukulumpe, banished their mother to the sky and imprisoned their sister, Chilufya. He blinded one son, Katongo, who managed to send a warning with the talking drum to his brothers, Nkole and Chiti, of a trap set by their father. The brothers fled eastward, led by a white magician, Luchele Ng’anga. After they crossed the Luapula River, Chiti sent five men to rescue his sister, Chilufya. She joined her brothers, carrying seeds for Bemba agriculture in her hair (in some versions, Nkole carried the seeds in his hair).107
The white magician, Luchele Ng’anga, was the first of a line of famous migrant prophets who ignited the political imagination of northeastern Zambians over the next two centuries. Perhaps, as the anthropologist Luc de Heusch claims, Luchele Ng’anga was a solar hero, representing the dawn of the new era, the rays of the rising sun that led the Crocodile Clan eastward.108
While the potential symbolic interpretations are further discussed below, here I want to draw attention to the quotidian aspects of the story, the basic emotional principles upon which the mythical grandeur was built. The falling in love, the establishment of family, the emotional ties between mothers and sons and brothers and sisters, all of which move our story forward, and lead to the eastward migration of the Crocodile Clan. Upon arriving in the new land, there is a second love affair: a married woman, Chilimbulu, the Bemba heroine depicted on the staff of rule, seduces the most admirable of the migrating sons, Chiti, with her beautiful tattoo. The jealousy that this act of passion ignites leads to Chiti’s death. But his death, and the consequent revenge killing, provides the sacred principles upon which the Bemba kingdom comes to rest. In his death, Chiti became the ancestor who ruled over the land, Chiti the Great, Chitimukulu, the title of the Bemba
