In 1927, the Northern Rhodesian government decided to differentiate between real schools and what they termed “sub-schools.” The Church of Scotland managed 204 schools and 1,463 sub-schools, while the White Fathers had only 17 schools and 530 sub-schools. In other words, Catholic schools were fewer and inferior.210
African teachers and catechists carried the Christian message into villages, where, away from the direct influence of the mission, a far looser interpretation of mission doctrines prevailed. The missions accepted that for many instructed by the catechists and teachers, conversion would be partial and subject to “backsliding.” The ability to implement their vision in the villages and outside the immediate orbit of the mission was limited. Despite Catholic baptism, older rites and forms of veneration continued. Breaking with “paganism” was at best partial: mfuba shrines were relocated to outside the villages; chisungu inititation rites and ukupyana marital succession practices became secretive. Similarly, even while the Protestants may have attempted to spread their civilization, they were frustrated by what they witnessed in the villages. But the emphasis on Presbyterian Church autonomy meant that the Livingstonia Mission possessed even fewer coercive mechanisms than the Catholics in their attempts to implement the more ambitious aspects of their civilizing mission.
Much of the intellectual work in grafting the Christian invisible world onto the ancestral one involved translation. During one of his first tours of Chinsali with David Kaunda, Reverend MacMinn claimed, “Everywhere the cry was ‘books, books.’ It is pitiful to see a class of some twenty with a single tattered book between them.”211 The Protestants, MacMinn especially, set about to meet this demand. For the next two decades, together with mission collaborators, especially Paul B. Mushindo, MacMinn began translating portions of the Bible and popular Christian texts.212 The Presbyterians had an evolutionary theory of African religion, believing that it was tending toward monotheism and all they had to do was reinforce such tendencies.213 They thus searched for terms that could be appropriated and developed in a Christian direction, choosing the popular nature spirit, Lesa, as God; and the ancestral shades, mipashi (sing. mupashi), as the Holy Spirit.214 No local term was given for Satan: presumably because he had a name, and the old demons and angry ancestors, chiwa and chibanda, were not absolutely evil. Thus, Satan became “Satani” or (“Shetâni”).215 The construction of a new Christian vocabulary was preferred by the Catholics, who feared syncretism with a pagan past.
The spread of literacy and the distribution of Protestant printed books and pamphlets in ChiBemba proved decisive, even in the more remote villages. By the late 1920s, there were twenty-six ChiBemba titles in circulation, five of which concerned secular education, two moral stories for children, and the remainder religious texts: The Pilgrim’s Progress, translations of portions of the Bible, devotional services, catechisms, and notes for preachers.216 A full ChiBemba version of the Bible, however, was completed only in 1956, by Lubwa clergy Paul B. Mushindo and Reverend MacMinn.217 The Protestants thereby established the basic framework for a ChiBemba Christian vocabulary.
One of the most important Christian terms was “sin,” along with the Christian morality it implied. Catholics and Protestants viewed sin as a moral problem; they spoke of its pervasiveness in an attempt to spread the notion of guilt and Christian law. This was not how it was understood. Even the translation indicated confusion: lubembu, the word chosen for “sin,” originally meant adultery—the most immoral and antisocial action, which would supposedly bring about guilt. But such antisocial behavior was thought to be inspired by bewitchment: if, for example, a person sinned, he was most certainly a witch.218 Some African Christians at the time preferred the term bupondo when referring to sin, a direct reference to antisocial behavior that led to murder; in other words, the actions of witches.219 The appropriate course of action was to find the bwanga witchcraft and confess as a witch, not ask for forgiveness. The missionaries expressed great frustration at the lack of appreciation of their moral notion of sin and the lack of repentance. For example, the Catholic missionary Louis Etienne wrote:
Christian morality . . . is completely falsified and out of focus. To quote but one example: adultery is not an offence against God—this concept does not even enter into the native mind. . . . The idea of transgressing God’s commandments, and of incurring guilt, would never occur to anyone. The consequences can thus be well imagined.220
The Protestants had similar thoughts: after hearing of a mother’s drowning of a baby thought to be possessed by an evil spirit, Reverend MacMinn complained of the enormity of their religious task.221 But this did not mean that the Bemba lacked morality and thereby acted in an antisocial fashion. It meant that antisocial behavior, what the missionaries termed “sin,” was perceived as evidence of witchcraft. And the white missionaries were often guilty of such antisocial behavior. Villagers must have noted the double entendre when the missionaries declared that Satan is the enemy, mulwani, another term for the white foreigners (in addition to the less confrontational basungu).
Missionary translations would have had little effect if not for the historical context in which they occurred. In addition to the transformation due to the onset of colonial capitalism, people witnessed the emergence of fierce competition between those who claimed access to these new invisible agents. Following the favorable reports of the Phelps-Stokes commissioners on missionary schools, the colonial government offered inducements for missions to expand their educational facilities. The White Fathers realized that if they did not change their orientation and expand schooling, they would lose both funding and evangelical opportunities to the Protestants. They increased the number of schools, set up a teacher training center at Rosa Mission in 1926, and looked for opportunities to establish new missions.222 They also realized that through their early translation and publishing efforts the Protestants were gaining a monopoly over Bemba books, and thus the White Fathers began to be involved in translation work and the publication of vernacular instructional books. From the 1930s, the Catholics matched Protestant efforts in the publication of influential ChiBemba texts. Between 1929 and 1932, Fr. Van Sambeek, who pioneered the expansion of secular Catholic schools and the teacher training school, edited three Bemba readers, Ifyabukaya, written by his trainee teachers. Ifyabukaya was used as a school reader across Bembaland, and it quickly became the standard version of Bemba history. Compared to the Protestant texts, the Catholics focused more on traditional life and tribal histories and less on didactic works about Christian moral improvement. The first Catholic translations of portions of the Bible began to appear in 1953.223
The Lubwa missionaries, perceiving themselves as holding out against Catholic intrusion, responded with alarm when they learned of Catholic efforts to compete for government funds to open more schools and missions in their immediate vicinity.224 When the White Fathers established the Ilondola Mission barely ten miles from Lubwa in 1934, the Lubwa missionary David Brown complained: “The Roman Catholics invaded this year a district hitherto cared for by our Mission alone. They are said to have boasted that in a few years they alone will hold the field. . . . Though we endeavor to avoid friction, and have instructed our Native helpers to that effect, we do not propose giving way to Rome.”225 Soon afterward, Catholic missions were established at Chalabesa (1934), Mulobola (1935), Mulanga (1936), and Mulilansolo (1936), almost encircling the Protestant Lubwa Mission and the Chinsali District (see the map on p.xii.226
Competition between the missions seemed to be a holdover from old European rivalries. It had, however, a very local dimension that would echo previous Bemba struggles over spiritual power. Rumors of the evil and corrupt practices of the competing missionaries circulated within the missions and among the villages that had loose and tenuous affiliations to either the Catholics or the Protestants. A Lubwa missionary accused the Catholics of “shady and reprehensible means of proselytizing and thrusting [themselves] on the people. Bribing chiefs and headmen is one of these means. . . . One chief . . . seized and handcuffed one of our teachers and compelled him to sit through a Romanist service.”227 Complaints went well beyond the formal reports to the mission authorities, and led to vociferous campaigns across the Bemba highlands. For example, Protestant attempts to counter Catholic influence led to the distribution of ChiBemba-language anti-Catholic documents, such as “Fifty Reasons Why I Have Not Joined the Church of Rome,” which was also
