political principle of the Bemba polity. The royal court might choose to underemphasize this reciprocity, but the story told by Shimwalule reminded them of their promises. Shimwalule, as guardian of the royal graveyard and the spiritual center of the Bemba polity, was an especially powerful local agent, for he looked after the living dead. “Chitimukulu, Nkula and Mwamba always send me big presents because they know that I am their father,” Shimwalule told a burial party in the 1930s. “If I am doing my work wrong here as Shimwalule the spirits of the dead chiefs will be angry with me and punish me.”158 A former slave or subject was the interface between the living kings and their ancestors; he took care of the dead so that their anger would not intervene in the world. He alone was responsible for ensuring that the Crocodile Clan’s ancestral spirits would facilitate fecundity and fertility, bringing the sun down to warm the wet earth and allow the crops to germinate and grow.
The Crocodile Clan genesis story, then, opens up and attempts to reconcile through Chitimukulu’s death, the conflicting orientations of the Bemba political imagination: that of the sky and the earth, the royal court and the village, and men and women. The state was linked to the migration of the Crocodile Clan patriarchs who descended from a celestial mother, and were led by the prophet of dawn, Luchele Ng’anga. Then there was the earth, the spiritual powers of autochthonous women who held the secrets of production and reproduction. In death and burial, the Crocodile Clan patriarchs became enveloped in the earth, bringing heaven down to earth and offering a new polity to the people of the Bemba plateau. They created a state that harnessed the spiritual powers of women and overcame the turmoil and witchcraft of village, clan, and family. While the Crocodile Clan claimed that their ancestral spirits governed the land and displaced local ancestors and nature spirits, the polity still rested on an old expectation that government would play a role in the invisible world that ensured prosperity and protected from harm.
evil afflictions
The Crocodile Clan’s ability to deal with jealousy, witches, and angry spirits was not always convincing. Ancestral and nature spirits proved ineffective in explaining the war and upheaval linked to the growing trade in slaves. The quotidian hardships and afflictions of the mid- to late nineteenth century could be explained only by a generalized evil that seemed to afflict the land and the people, an evil that would increase with the European colonial and missionary occupation.
From the 1860s to the 1880s, the Bemba polity attained its greatest degree of centralization and geographic reach under the leadership of Chitapankwa (reigned from the 1860s to 1883; d. 1883), who became Chitimukulu after capturing the babenye relics from his sick mother’s brother, Bwembya.159 The expansion of the central Bemba polity under Chitapankwa was a reaction to the military challenge posed by the Ngoni of Mpezeni to the north and east. Chitapankwa strengthened Bemba military outposts, such as the Ichinga (the defensive fortress) province of Nkula, by appointing his closest matrilineal relatives as overlords who could defend the political heartland of Lubemba and the spiritual center, Mwalule. In addition to standing in a relationship of perpetual kinship to Chitimukulu, these relatives were in a position to succeed the king. The Crocodile Clan rulers also employed ambitious sons as lords, whose positions relied on their loyalty to their fathers as they were excluded from the usual opportunities of advancement available to the Crocodile Clan matrilineage. The Crocodile Clan and their direct dependents benefited from the growing trade in ivory and slaves with the East African Swahili and Nyamwezi. The process contributed to the militarization of the Bemba polity.160
There were internal challenges as well, especially in the areas where the Bemba established new military outposts. The class cleavages that had developed due to the imposition of Bemba rule and the opportunities for accumulating wealth were striking. In 1867, south of the Chambeshi, presumably in the area ruled by Nkula, Livingstone reported on “poor dependents on Bemba, or rather their slaves, who cultivate little, and then only in the rounded patches . . . so as to prevent their conquerors from taking away more than a small share. The subjects are Babisa—a miserable lying lot of serfs.”161The rulers, protected by stockades adorned with skulls, had access to so much Katangan copper that they were “obliged to walk in a stately style, from the weight.”162 Fifteen years later, Victor Giraud reported that the Bemba royals were large and fat, from beer. Nkula was dressed in imported cloth with chains of large red glass beads and surrounded by a hundred men armed with bows and arrows and flintlocks.163
In addition to the growth of wealth and military power from the late nineteenth century, a close examination of the ritual, ceremonial, and religious roles of Chitimukulu and the Bemba royals during the late nineteenth century suggests an attempted expansion (or at least a consolidation) of such roles. Chitimukulu Chitapankwa’s praise name was Mukungula mfuba (he who sweeps away the personal ancestral shrines), suggesting less of an increase in secular authority (as Andrew Roberts claims) than an attempt to enhance Chitimukulu’s spiritual powers by attacking older ancestral and nature shrines.164 Chitimukulu Chitapankwa was like the colonial and postcolonial prophets who eradicated the witchcraft of old and purified the people and the land. Under his reign, the Crocodile Clan’s ancestral welfare became tied to the welfare of the land and the people. When locusts and wild animals, lions and crocodiles, afflicted Lubemba and Ichinga, Chitimukulu Chitapankwa constructed a shrine to his uncle Bwembya (whom Chitapankwa had deposed) and sent offerings to Shimwalule at the royal graveyard.165 In war against the Ngoni, Chitimukulu Chitapankwa, after being purified by the babenye relics, invoked a patriotic ancestral appeal:
Oh my ancestors who were kings before me, lead me on this expedition to attack the Muchime [the stabbers, the Ngoni], who have come from afar to take the land from us without cause. . . . The land is ours, all our ancestors are buried in it, and we must save it, and drive our enemies away. Oh spirits of the ancestors, pray to God for us that we may be able to overcome the Muchime.166
The increasing demand for slaves to trade for guns and cloth ratcheted up the stakes in the Bemba royals’ claims to judicial authority. Compensation for crimes, including murder, adultery, poisoning, and witchcraft, was increasingly paid for in slaves and imported cloth (in turn purchased with slaves) instead of goats, hoes, and axes. While the victim of a crime received some compensation, the lord who had adjudicated the dispute also received payments. Those acquired through judicial services marched in Swahili, Ovimbundu, Nyamwezi, or Chikunda caravans toward an uncertain future in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds.167 The demand for slaves widened notions of criminal liability and increased the Bemba royals’ claims of judicial importance by emphasizing the Crocodile Clan’s ancestral ties to the land and their autonomy from the everyday forms of witchcraft that afflicted commoners. Only the Crocodile Clan could deal with the danger of witches. It was no surprise that Chitimukulu Chitapankwa swept away the shrines of lesser men, ancestors, and spirits. The intensification of the slave trade increased the stakes in claims to spiritual power as well as the greed, jealousy, and uncertainty that indicated the agency of angry and even evil spirits.
During Chitimukulu Chitapankwa’s reign, the spiritual powers of the Crocodile Clan came to be represented, enacted, and performed in royal ceremonies and dances, with abundant beer, the grandeur of which impressed and appealed to many. Consumption, patronage, and the possibilities and promises of wealth became part of these grand gatherings. Chitimukulu was the host, the mwine lupepo, the owner of the ceremony, secure in his political authority and demonstrative of his generosity. But most of all, such ceremonies venerated ancestral ties and imbued Chitimukulu with spiritual power.168 While few remain, it is also likely that in this period ancestral power objects, such as the Chilimbulu staff, either commissioned or traded from Luba artists, celebrated the sacred royalty of the Crocodile Clan.169
The burial of the chief was the most dangerous of times, when emotional turmoil could become spiritual and political turmoil unless ritual prescriptions were followed. The death of Chitimukulu Chitapankwa in 1883 probably established the “traditional” model for such ritual prescriptions. After his death, Chitimukulu was embalmed in the fashion referred to by the oral tradition. Only upon the ripening of the royal millet crop that was planted when he died could the king be buried. The close councilors (bakabilo) of the king and those who dealt with his death (bafingo)
