adopted similar tactics by increasing the role of the lay apostolate in promoting Catholic loyalty and doctrine. Fervent Christians organized in “Catholic Action” cells that supervised and monitored the Christian behavior of the villagers. Catholic Action adopted the “Legion of Mary” handbook, pioneered in Ireland in the 1920s, with its distinctive military tenor and emphasis on aggressive evangelism.229
The missionaries’ attempts to convince the Bemba of the truth of their respective doctrines, and the misguided, even evil, beliefs of their competitors, introduced an aggressive tone to spiritual politics. Attempts to combat the advance of rivals became fervent, with the lay leaders focusing on the spiritual power of their particular brand of Christianity. The angry ancestors and devils of the past became associated with competing Christian doctrines. Evil had a new face, no longer a force of the jealous spirits, but of beliefs and doctrines, sometimes even inspired by Satan. The point was not that such beliefs were false, and thus spiritually impotent, but that they were evil and manipulated the spirit world for personal power. Rivalries gave greater force to claims that missionaries were witches or hid witches within their churches and communities.
By the 1930s, an educated class of Bemba teachers and catechists had emerged, influenced by missionary ideas, although not controlled by the missionaries in all regards. The distribution and dissemination of books and baptism, the new spiritual resources offered by the missionaries, did not remain under the control of the missions, their catechists, or educated teachers. As ordinary people became more involved in rivalries over doctrines and forms of salvation, the use of such spiritual resources expanded. Good and evil took on new qualities, referring not only to ancestors and spirits, but also to the beliefs and institutions of the living, their writings and their doctrines.
the cleansers
The Christian missionaries spread a vocabulary of sin and evil even as they denied the existence of witchcraft, the way in which such sin and evil were manifest. The refusal of Christian missionaries to acknowledge witches only meant that witches were able to hide within the new Christian churches. One young woman possessed by the ngulu spirits of old told her audience, “Christians said it was a sin to do as I do, but I see Christians full of sins.”230 The missionaries were alternately called witches (baloshi), enemies (balwani), or vampires (banyama); at the very least they harbored witches who fled to the missions to escape witchcraft accusations and trials.231 At the White Fathers’ Chilubula Mission, there was a tree that the White Fathers only had to shake, causing a leaf to fall; a person would die for each leaf that fell. “There are more Christian baloshi [witches] than any other kind,” an informant told Audrey I. Richards.232 Christianity concealed witches; and the colonial prohibition on witchcraft accusations, the Witchcraft Ordinance of 1914, left people vulnerable to witches:
At first there were only a few deaths, but the doctors burned the sorcerers. Then the Europeans came and told us not to burn sorcerers . . . and the doctors ceased. . . . This meant there was no one to cure people and no one to tell them what their illnesses were. . . . Those who could straighten things in the old way said, “We can do this only to go straight into gaol.” So the sick people went to the Europeans to be cured but some diseases were beyond the Europeans, so the sick people died.233
Ngulu nature spirits could have protected people from witches. But the colonial authorities made sure that those possessed were not “tempted into becoming a witchfinder.” Chinsali’s district commissioner diligently reported, “I personally make a point of interviewing all ngulu [or bangulu, those possessed by ngulu], thus letting them know that I am aware of their activities and trusting this knowledge will keep them off dangerous ground.”234 Witches started to afflict people in an unprecedented fashion. “Chinsali has a reputation for possessing more than the usual number of witches,” complained the same DC, even as he denied people the ability to eradicate them.235 Measures to combat the witches became more desperate. An old man was banished from the village after he caused a child to fall mysteriously into a fire. An old woman dreamed that a girl told her she was not a witch. Nevertheless, for the villagers this proved her witchcraft. She was banished and her home burned down when she refused to leave. A Lubwa schoolteacher was accused of rape and witchcraft. He passed a “boiling water test” to prove his innocence, apparently helped along by his knowledge of some “medicine” (muti). Nevertheless, the missionaries dismissed him from his teaching post at Lubwa for participating in the ordeal.236
The missionary claim that they were liberating people from the belief in witchcraft only contributed to the spread of witchcraft and rumors of occult evil. Audrey I. Richards argued that this surge in witchcraft was “inevitable as a product of violent changes in tribal organization and belief.”237 This was part of the story. But Richards, in a surprisingly shortsighted observation that could only have come about from a relentless focus on the breakdown of tribal institutions instead of the broader historical context, contrasted such violent changes with peaceful missionary teachings. The missionaries, like Richards, believed that fear was the source of witchcraft accusations, and that they, together with a progressive colonial state, needed to root out such fear. Referring to the witchfinders, the presbytery of Livingstonia appealed to the colonial government “to curb the sinister activities of these deceivers and robbers of their fellow Africans.” They called on “all Christian people, within and without its bounds, who have themselves liberated from belief in Witchcraft, and from fear of its imaginary powers, to strive continually by prayer, by example and by persuasion to free from this terrible bondage of fear all their fellow Africans.”238 For many Bemba, however, claims that Christians did not practice witchcraft were further evidence that they did. After all, the missionaries had proclaimed the pervasiveness of sin, a manifestation of witchcraft. And rivalry between the missionaries had introduced new fears and new notions of evil. Sin and witchcraft became associated with certain denominations. The evil that Catholics proclaimed of Protestants and vice versa became a popular discourse on spiritual others.
A new opportunity to get rid of witches and witchcraft came about in the early 1930s through traveling groups of young men who claimed to have a medicine that eradicated witchcraft. They called themselves Bamuchape, “the people who cleanse.” They promoted a purification that would rid the world of witchcraft and evil that emanated from the discontented dead. The Bamuchape heralded from colonial Malawi, where a mythical founder, Kamwende, was said to have died and been resurrected, with a vision to rid the world of buloshi witchcraft. The Bamuchape traveled from one village to the next, until they had cleansed much of northern Zambia. They used a mirror to identify witches, who were then forced to drink a soapy potion made out of a brownish-red powder that was said to come from the crushed roots of a tree found in Malanje, Malawi. If they should dare to perform witchcraft in the future, the potion would make them swell up and die. If witches tried to hide, the Bamuchape would reveal them—Kamwende himself could expose them. For three to six pence, the Bamuchape offered medicine to combat future acts of witchcraft or perhaps even make people immune to the demands of the colonial district officials.239
The local precedents for Bamuchape witchcraft cleansing were the mwavi ordeals, in the past administered by chiefs with the help of nganga doctors. Indirect rule and the Witchcraft Ordinance prevented chiefs from administering the mwavi ordeal, and the Bamuchape administered a form of the ordeal instead. Since they had no position of authority in the administration, the colonial administration allowed the Bamuchape to do their work, as long as they dealt with the witches without direct accusations and violence to them. Rather than direct accusations, their medicine (or “magic,” bwanga) worked by persuading people that they were witches. The consequences of admitting to being a witch were relatively minor, little more than confessing sins; witches only had to drink medicine to prevent them from performing witchcraft in the future. The medicine would do no harm; in fact, it could also protect from other witchcraft and from the attacks of wild animals such as lions and snakes (the protective medicine was sometimes different and offered at extra cost to the medicine that purified witches). In some cases, there was local pressure and a temptation to accuse people directly, which could result in physical violence against witches. A few of these instances came to the attention of the colonial authorities and prosecutions resulted in fines, canings,
