Clan rule; and even the worst outcome of spiritual agency, death, could be dealt with through the mortuary rites introduced by the Crocodile Clan.
While the Crocodile Clan narrative of migration, sex, and death became a convincing politico-religious charter for well over a century, it remained vulnerable to alternative conceptions of spiritual agency. The Crocodile Clan’s spiritual power was drawn from many past stories and principles; they innovated existing politico-religious ideas rather than revolutionizing them. In an increasingly desperate effort to maintain their authority in the face of external and internal challenges during the late nineteenth century, royals became unjust and cruel toward their subjects. People must have wondered whether angry spirits had possessed their rulers; perhaps they thought that elites had become witches and were employing spirits to gain unprecedented power. In the midst of this scramble for power, the Crocodile Clan’s hegemony became precarious. Preoccupied with fertility and fecundity, their narrative offered no response to the injustice and harm that arose out of the wealth of new elites and the deepening subjugation, exploitation, and even sale into slavery of their dependents.
People needed to explain misfortune; they grasped for concepts that dealt with the global violence that challenged old relationships between people and the land. Destructive emotions of jealousy and anger were not sufficient to explain changes in the visible world. A new concept of evil became a convincing way to view the world; such evil had made people cruel and unjust. The Crocodile Clan could not control this roaming anger-cum-evil, in the wind, in wild animals, in slave traders, in disturbed ancestral shades, and in themselves. Many, even at times the Crocodile Clan (especially during war), turned to local specialists, such as the shinganga’s manipulation of bwanga. These specialists helped and healed, but, like the Crocodile Clan, they did not offer any lasting solutions to the scale of destructive change. People searched for collective ways to solve the problem of evil; they looked for the solar hero, Luchele Ng’anga, to lead them to a new dawn. And they became intrigued by the stories of a few strangers who roamed across Bembaland and spoke of eternal deliverance from the sin of witchcraft and the evil of Satan.
2 Christian Witches
In the early 1930s, the Roman Catholic missionary society of the White Fathers applied to open a mission in the Crocodile Clan chief Nkula’s area, around twelve miles from the already established Protestant mission of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland at Lubwa. Since the land was designated “Native Trust,” Nkula had to approve the White Fathers’ application before the colonial administration would agree to the mission. Nkula refused. He did not want the Catholics to open a mission in his chieftaincy, and especially not near his own village. At first glance, Nkula’s denial of permission for the White Fathers to build a mission seems strange. The White Fathers founding Bembaland missionary, Bishop Joseph Dupont, had boasted of his good relationship with the Crocodile Clan chiefs and had tried to cultivate a “Christian Kingdom” among the Bemba, at one point even claiming to inherit the Crocodile Clan royal title, Mwamba. Six missions had already been established near the Bemba heartland and another four on the periphery. The sacraments of the White Father held broad appeal; a significant proportion of the Bemba had been baptized. Nkula was quite accustomed to Catholics in his community. He was not a Christian and held no particular loyalty toward the nearby Presbyterian Lubwa Mission, a rival of the Catholics. Surely, the mission would bring employment, education, and medical resources, even if Nkula was not affiliated with the church. Yet Nkula was insistent in his refusal to allow the White Fathers mission. Then, quite suddenly, he changed his mind and agreed to the mission. If his initial refusal seems strange, his change of mind appears even more inexplicable.
Nkula’s decisions took place in the midst of a changing spiritual politics. Christian missionaries and prophets advocated doctrines that talked about the pervasiveness of “sin,” and questioned the power of nature and ancestral spirits even as they spoke of new invisible agents, God and Satan. The Christian missionaries were also divided and fiercely competitive with one other, and spoke of false religious doctrines. Social and economic changes affected this spiritual history. Men departed for work opportunities on the central African Copperbelt and in Tanganyika. The absence of these men in addition to colonial tax demands increased quotidian burdens for those left behind. As the colonial order became more demanding, an emergent cosmology of evil became entwined with angry ancestors, economic conditions, missionary doctrines and rivalries, and political authorities.
Colonial indirect rule promoted the rule of Crocodile Clan lords, making Chitimukulu a “paramount chief,” and his closest clan members “chiefs,” each with their distinctive territories. At the same time, however, the Crocodile Clan was increasingly unable to intervene in the spiritual landscape. Indirect rule curtailed their ability to rid the land of witches and to promote fertility and prosperity with their babenye relics. Karen E. Fields argues that during colonialism, the notion of “customary rule” became entrenched as the chiefs’ secular power declined and new ways of justifying their authority became necessary. In her understanding, the “supernatural” aspect to chiefly rule was largely a product of the machinations of indirect rule and the writings of colonial anthropologists, especially the most famous ethnographer of the Bemba, Audrey I. Richards, who conducted her fieldwork in the 1930s at the height of indirect rule.190 In this regard, Fields overstates the influence of indirect rule. Chapter 1 demonstrated that aspirations for spiritual power were a significant aspect of the precolonial political struggle, even if such aspirations did not always legitimize the rule of chiefs, as Richards claimed. In fact, even at the height of indirect rule in the 1930s, there were tendencies by colonial administrators to de-emphasize the sacred powers of chiefs in favor of a notion of secular custom and tradition. The chiefs were prevented from performing their spiritual duties and encouraged to perform bureaucratic and administrative tasks instead. Thus, even as their colonial authority grew, chiefs were profoundly disempowered.
Those chiefs who dwelled on the past and carefully guarded their ancestral babenye relics remained invested in a narrow and anachronistic conception of ancestral power, relegated to a realm of tradition and unable to combat new forms of evil. The most influential new spiritual resources of the early colonial period were the Christian narratives of a god, his son, and a devil, the rituals offered by the Catholic missionaries (especially the sacrament of baptism), and books offered by the Protestants. The Bemba adoption and adaptation of these spiritual resources was part of a long-standing tradition in seeking out ways to access the invisible world. But the new spiritual concepts also applied to new colonial relationships: a Manichaean spiritual discourse engaged with a Manichaean colonial order. Christianity introduced a spiritual vocabulary that helped to engage with the colonial order.
Many Bemba interpreted one of the core missionary ideas—the pervasiveness of sin and the influence of Satan—as evidence of the pervasiveness of witches. But while the missionaries proclaimed the pervasiveness of sin, they, along with the colonial administration, denied people the ability to eradicate witches. People thought of these Christians not only as prophets but as witches, who could manipulate the invisible world for good and for evil. Christianity created witches and an unprecedented demand for their eradication, even as old forms of witchcraft eradication were prohibited by the colonial authorities. This disempowerment could be remedied only through prophetic movements that engaged with old and new invisible agents.
the missionaries
By the late nineteenth century, rumors of the return of the heroic magician, Luchele Ng’anga, spread across the Bemba highlands. European missionaries who wandered across the land were quick to claim that such rumors referred to them. David Livingstone had crossed the Bemba lands, circling around the marshlands of the Luapula and Bangweulu, before he died there in 1873. He babbled about a new god and his son, and promised a salvation for the living and the dead—but his words seemed too strange and his powers too insignificant to be taken seriously. Some twenty years later a man in white robes with a flowing white beard and fierce eyes appeared. He called himself Bishop Dupont, a Roman Catholic White Father missionary, and he told the Bemba that he was intent on making a home in their land, to spread the word of his god. Because of the ferocity of his expression and his temper, people
