style="font-size:15px;"> and local nature spirits
The division between ngulu nature spirits and mipashi ancestral spirits further illustrates the ways that the Crocodile Clan governed spiritual emotions. Ngulu were old spirits that were said to exist prior to the rise of the Bemba polity.122 They were independent of people, sometimes manifest in wild animals or natural sites. Throughout the region, such ngulu inspired spiritual emotions. When they possessed people, they had very physical effects, including emission of rhythmic whimpers (ukusemuka), as well as a form of glossolalia or prophecy (ukusesema). At times they inspired those possessed to dance.123
Mipashi, by contrast, were the ancestral spirits of the dead, freed from their corporeal form. Mipashi could control phenomena in the natural world, and at times they inspired people to act in certain ways. It was most important that an ancestral mupashi return to its original clan. A newborn baby cried until an ancestral mipashi had possessed and given the baby a name. However, after a death of one partner in marriage, the most intimate of emotional relationships, something of the dead remained in the grieving spouse: that something was the mupashi spirit. It had to return to the original clan, and that was why a partner had to be “married” (or cleansed by sex) with a member of the dead spouse’s clan.124
Within the Bemba polity, as well as the related eastern Lunda, royal clans claimed that their ancestral mipashi replaced the emotional ngulu spirit possession of commoners. The ancestors of humans achieved dominance over the spirits of nature. At least in the political heartland of the Bemba, non-chiefly ancestors and ngulu spirits became relatively marginal. The Crocodile Clan could not be possessed by ngulu and directed veneration toward their ancestors instead.125 The ancestral mipashi of royalty calmed people, displacing the turbulence that ngulu inspired.
Among non–Crocodile Clan commoners, however, alternative spiritual formulations proliferated. Spiritual emotions were dealt with primarily at the local level. The head of a family, clan, or village had personal shrines, mfuba, either in the individual houses, at the foot of a bed, where their personal ancestors resided, or in or near sacred points in the village in miniature hut shrines. In 1868 Livingstone found such shrines in villages across the northern plateau. Places of veneration were also found in old burial grounds.126 Termite mounds were the most sacred of burial sites, the “church of the ancestors.”127 The Crocodile Clan attempted to appropriate and innovate this local spiritual governance. By being buried under a termite mound, Nkole and Chiti could become the ancestral archetype. The politico-religious Crocodile Clan constellation oriented itself around these existing quotidian spiritual forms by offering a centralized polity that dealt with the emotional turmoil of family and collective economic ventures such as hunting and agriculture.
In addition to local ancestral shrines, people made use of the supernatural agency of objects to combat and to harness spiritual emotions. If used in the right fashion, many objects had the potential to affect nature and people. Bwanga, commonly translated as “magic,” more accurately refers to the power of objects used for a required purpose, ranging from bravery and success on a hunting expedition to love and fertility. A feather, a leaf, a root, or part of an animal or person could be used, as long as it was understood and manipulated in the correct way, often through metaphor and metonymy. For example, the chibyalilo planting ceremony (from the verb ukubyalo, “to sow”), which was performed to ensure that a seed grew into a plant, required objects that grew and expanded, such as bark from a tree that became swollen when wet, the skin of a type of animal that grew in size when wounded, or the soil from a termite mound that rose from the earth. All people could use bwanga; it was part of everyday life. But individuals who faced difficult circumstances employed specialists, men and women of knowledge who were adept in knowing the powers of objects, shinganga (literally, the father of the art of bwanga).128
At the center of the Bemba polity, the presence of shinganga and the use of bwanga were discouraged. The Bemba royals claimed that they were immune from bwanga and that they were personally responsible for the welfare of the people and the land. The bwanga used in the chibyalilo agricultural ceremony, for example, were linked directly to Chitimukulu. In his village, the wife of the relic (muka benya) wore a belt made from Chilimbulu’s scarified skin and planted the first seeds. People could then plant their own gardens and be sure of prosperity. The crops would grow, like the termite mound under which the first Crocodile Clan royals were buried. Nevertheless, while the royal clan tried to control the use and proliferation of bwanga, it remained an autonomous invisible agent used in quotidian life.129
During times of war, sickness, and death, when emotions afflicted all, government intervention in the invisible world was most urgently required. If Chitimukulu should fall ill and fail to perform the appropriate ancestral rites, the land would spoil, no rain would fall, crops would not grow, and general misfortune would abound. During such times leaders needed to demonstrate their spiritual agency. Rites of passion, which involved a leader having sex with his head wife (“the wife of the land”), ensured the fertility of the land and blessed the most significant tools of agriculture, the ax and the seed. During and after such acts, when the king was most closely linked to the land, both good and bad fortune could result.130 Such rites affirmed and acted out aspects of the original charter, especially the dangerous sexual relations between the migrant Chiti and the autochthon Chilimbulu.
The graveyard where the kings were buried became the spiritual center of the Bemba polity, the place where the ancestral kings remained. It combined the ancestral graves and shrines of the Crocodile Clan with their particular bwanga, their chiefly babenye relics. Many of Chitimukulu’s sacred babenye relics, such as the skin of Chilimbulu, were kept in a shrine hut at Mwalule, allegedly built by the prophet Luchele Ng’anga. These relics were the keys to the land, and their possession indicated ownership over the land. A usurper had to capture the relics before conquering the land. Three elderly women, the “wives of the relics” (bamukabenye), were their protectors. About once a month Chitimukulu’s chief councilors, the bakabilo, came to Mwalule to make sure the relics were well kept and to perform ceremonies appropriate to agricultural, hunting, or military affairs.131 The territory around the graveyard was known as Chilinda (the place that is guarded). The actual graveyard fell under the control of the autochthon Kabotwe’s descendants, who retained the title of the father of the graveyard, Shimwalule.132 That Chitimukulu’s graveyard, Mwalule, would be cared for by a former “slave” indicated the sacred power of subordinates and dependents. The story established a social hierarchy, but recognized the spiritual agencies of those at the bottom of the hierarchy, illustrating the acts of negotiation involved in developing the consensus between conquerors and autochthons necessary to consolidate a polity.
The Mwalule graveyard and its babenye shrine center joined other local rulers and places, with their distinctive stories, to the royal court. The Chishimba Falls, for example, where the Chambeshi River cascades in a series of magnificent waterfalls, were long associated with the suicides of a father, Chishimba, and his daughter and her suitor, after a failed marriage. Chitimukulu took the lamp used to illuminate the marital hut and kept it as bwanga, one of his babenye relics, at the Mwalule shrine. At Chishimba, a goat was given to the ngulu spirit, and left in a cave behind the waterfall. The royal clan appropriated or at least associated older stories of love, familial strife, and serene natural wonders with their spiritual center. A story and a relic attached an ancestor, such as Chishimba, to Chitimukulu’s court. The ancestor’s name became the title of a local ruler or a bakabilo councilor to the king.133
A few abstract nature spirits escaped the focused politico-religious attention of the Crocodile Clan rulers. The most general of such nonancestral spirits was Lesa, an omnipresent but remote spirit. Lesa was prevalent across the region from at least the late eighteenth century and probably much earlier; in 1799 Father Pinto, of José Maria de Lacerda’s expedition, reported belief in “the existence of a sovereign creator of the world . . . ‘Reza’[Lesa] . . . a tyrant that permits his creatures’ death.”134 The linguistic spread of the term and of proverbs regarding Lesa suggests an even older presence.135 Oral testimony indicates that Lesa might have replaced older ancestral cults of the earth or bush, especially those linked
