lasted up to a week, a type of funeral procession from Lubemba to the Mwalule graveyard, with stops at several sacred sites. The journey itself was perilous. The pallbearers fought with the embalmers to release the body and with the men of Shimwalule. A death in such ritual battles signaled good fortune. Slaves, dependents, and the three head wives of the dead paramount accompanied the procession. At the Mwalule graveyard, the bafingo struck them with a club on the bridge of the nose. If they lived, the dead paramount had “forgiven” them, “vomited them out” (mfumu ya muluka).170 Those who died were buried with Chitimukulu and those who lived became personal slaves of the gravekeepers. The paramount was laid to rest on top of the head wife, another wife supported his head, and another his feet. The burial, referencing and reinforcing the oral tradition of Chiti and Nkole, was a period of great terror that demonstrated the spiritual agency of the dead royals and their ties to the land. Their return to the earth below (–panshi) and conversion into ancestors, mipashi, claimed to secure the well-being of the kingdom and provided a model ritual for the correct ways of dealing with death.171
The occasional outburst of ceremony, grandeur, and terror did not legitimize the Bemba royals without contestation. The farther from the political center that Bemba authority spread, the less convincing the reach of the Crocodile Clan ancestral cult and the greater the profusion of alternative spiritual agents. Rulers who had only a shallow genealogy of local ancestors could not claim the same spiritual authority over the land as those who ruled at the same place as several generations of their ancestors. To the east, Chitimukulu’s perpetual nephew Nkula ruled the defensive fortress of Ichinga; to the north, Nkhweto watched over Chilinda (the place that is guarded); and to the south, Mwamba conquered the Bisa. In all of these border territories, many of them conquered by the Bemba only in the late nineteenth century, the Bemba faced invasion by the Ngoni and frequent challenges from exploited subjects, especially the Bisa. Here the ancestral cult of the Crocodile Clan was fractured by alternative spiritual agents. Among the Bisa, for example, agricultural tulubi shrines associated with ngulu were evident.172 To the south and west, mikishi (sing. mukishi), spiritual forces held in objects that were representative of communal cults, replaced the relics of the Crocodile Clan chiefs.173 One of the most famous of such communal or clan mikishi was Makumba of the Bena Ngulube (the Pig Clan) of the Aushi of Lake Bangweulu. Makumba was an object, perhaps a meteorite, dressed in python and human skin and adorned with feathers. It blessed the seed before planting, and was generally responsible for rites surrounding agriculture, in the same fashion as the skin of Chilimbulu.174
Independent hunting associations also dealt with spirits. The hunt was an emotionally intense time: the danger of the bush required bravery; killing and the conquest of nature needed the support of the ngulu. The Butwa association, for example, most prevalent east of the Bemba polity, especially around the Bangweulu and Luapula swamps, recognized the spiritual authority of the original inhabitants of the land, the “Batwa.” The associations had organized leaders, Shingulu (the father of ngulu), public gatherings, and sacred mulumbi houses.175 They had their own identity marks, scarification patterns that ran in a V-shape from the head to the chest. Figurines, sometimes representations of men, such as that depicted in figure 1.3 below, had copper eyes that viewed the spirits through trance, wide-open mouths that talked to spirits, and feet that traversed the visible and invisible worlds.176 Perhaps initiated by groups of hunters seeking good fortune before they ventured into the bush, the associations were territorial cults, “concerned with man’s role as a transformer and recipient from his natural environment.”177 They were probably linked to a more extensive system of Bulumbu possession and divination that stretched from Kasai to the southern edge of Lake Tanganyika.178
Bemba military expansion in the late nineteenth century to secure trade routes, guns, and slaves took the Crocodile Clan lords to areas where their spiritual powers were unknown and not respected. For example, when the Bemba royal Mwamba extended the reach of his authority over the Bisa, challenges to his rule were recalled in stories about the powers of Bisa prophets and spirits. In one such story, Mwamba tested the power of the Bisa prophets by challenging them to summon a lion to devour one of his wives while she drew water. She was caught and killed by a lion. An angry Mwamba had the prophets thrown into a bonfire, but they survived and were found sitting in the ashes of the fire the following morning. The prophets then summoned lions to chase Mwamba from their land.179 He fled, but a successor returned a few years later, and the conflict-ridden history continued. In 1888, just prior to the European colonial period, Mwamba captured Bisa subjects and sold them to Swahili slave traders.180 Farther south, the Bisa rebelled against the Bemba lord Chikwanda and killed him, exacting the revenge of Chitimukulu, which led to greater Bisa subjugation and exile.181
Warfare inspired emotions that gave reign to spirits. In accounts of warfare, the efficacy of both Bisa and Crocodile Clan magic looms large. The Bisa were especially renowned for their war magic, including the ilamfya, a horn or drum treated with various bwanga, most potently the blood of captives.182 Upon defeating their enemies, Bemba warriors cut up and burned their bodies, so that they could not become angry chiwa spirits and disturb the peace of the land.183 (The practice once again referenced Nkole’s treatment of Mwase’s body in the Bemba oral tradition.) They brought the heads of the slain opponents to the Crocodile Clan lords, where they adorned village stockades and suggested the powers that the royals had over living and dead.184 The Bemba also developed ilamfya to deal with the magic of their opponents and employed specialists, Bachamanga, to ensure success in war and to cleanse the warriors who might be haunted by those they had killed.185 Chitimukulu and his appointed chiefs claimed exclusive rights over the use of these ilamfya and war specialists.186 The murder of another person, perhaps the most emotional of all human actions, required special spiritual controls and governance.
New prophets claimed to mediate with ancient ancestors, the chiefs of old (mfumu sha kale) who evaded attempts at appropriation by the Bemba political authorities. The old chiefs were not even embodied by living kin; they appeared in dreams or possessed people or offered guidance on rituals concerning hunting and agriculture. No stories affiliated them with the Bemba royals. Such ancestors became spirits independent of narratives even as they were linked to nature.187 People found them in places of beauty and serenity—waterfalls, the sources of rivers, and in large trees—inscribed in the natural features of landscape.188 They also took the form of animals. When a hunter encountered a python, lion, or crocodile, he had to treat it with respect and wish it good health, lest it be the spirit of an old ancestor that had become an ngulu.189
At the center of the polity, Bemba politico-religious life attempted to marginalize other forms of spiritual power, such as territorial cults linked to ngulu veneration. The Crocodile Clan court organized a structured ritual and ceremonial life that replaced the localized system of ngulu appreciation and bwanga manipulation, even as it built on their spiritual conceptions. The most powerful Bemba ruler boasted that he “swept away” the ancestral shrines of others. He alone could control the spiritual emotions that gave rise to and threatened fertility and fecundity. Yet in the areas surrounding the Bemba villages, prophets mobilized alternative forms of spiritual power by claiming to be mediators with ancient ancestors and nature spirits more powerful than those of the Crocodile Clan. And even in the Crocodile Clan villages, the royals struggled to contain the use of bwanga and the spiritual agency of new prophets.
The Crocodile Clan posed a solution to a political imagination preoccupied with the spiritual power needed to ensure human reproduction and agricultural productivity. They claimed that their celestial origins catalyzed the power that led to the germination of crops and the reproduction of people. From the spiritual center at the Mwalule graveyard, their ancestors would intervene in the forces of nature. They appropriated sacred sites, incorporated old stories into their charter, and molded their babenye relics from the debris of conquest and the bwanga of old. The secrets to prosperity and reproduction lay with the spiritual emotions evoked by local women; the Crocodile Clan offered a government that controlled and harnessed these spiritual emotions. The scarified skin of Chilimbulu that had seduced Chitimukulu became the most sacred of royal relics, promising fertility and prosperity. The jealous husband,
