sanction. Such official sanction did come from the chiefs who welcomed the Bamuchape and often insisted that all their people gather for purification.240 People welcomed the permission granted by the colonial authorities and the support of the chiefs: “This is the best thing the Bwanas have ever done for us,” Richards was told. “Now at last they are allowing us to free our country from witchcraft.”241 Indeed, perceiving that witchcraft was integral to local religious beliefs and not a violent aberration, the colonial state in Northern Rhodesia became somewhat more tolerant, focusing on witchcraft accusations (not the belief in witchcraft itself), and reducing the punishment for accusations.242 A solution to witchcraft seemed to be at hand, and the Bamuchape were enthusiastically received.
The Bamuchape deployed techniques and concepts introduced by the missionaries. As if they were delivering a church sermon, the Bamuchape lined people up and instructed them. They claimed to spread the word and power of God, Lesa, who would eradicate the witches. “God has sent the Muchapi with a strong remedy, much stronger than European drugs, because it is a cure for the country, it will kill all sorcerers and put an end to sorcery in the entire world,” declared one Muchape in 1935.243 Unlike mwavi, which was used to identify and administer justice to witches after they had performed witchcraft, the Bamuchape offered a purification that cleansed the witchcraft of past, present, and future. It was a salvation. Their mwavi ordeal thus resembled baptism, a Christian spiritual resource adapted to protect from witchcraft. In August 1933, in the Ufipa District, slightly north of the Zambian border with Tanzania, the head of the Bamuchape preached to a gathering of nearly two thousand people:
Your Missionaries came to the country some 50 years ago; they tried with all their best to save the people and teach you not to kill one another yet without success. But we feel sympathy for you have lost dear friends, some of you standing here, not because God took them away—but by being poisoned by these witchcraft, whom you will see today. We follow God’s law that “Thou shalt not kill.” This commandment is being observed and fulfilled by us [more] than any religion. For they all fail to save people—but we do. . . . I know that some of your Christians argue, but I tell you some of your native ministers of religion have been found in possession of a skull of a European Lady. I do not know where they killed this lady, and took her skull. So you must not trust the Christians, they are the people who are hiding in this religion, and are the great witchcrafts more than any one else.244
The Bamuchape, then, acted against sin (thou shall not kill) by combating witchcraft. They promoted the salvation that the Christians promised but were unable to deliver because they harbored their own witchcraft. Conflicts with the missionaries, especially the Catholics who prohibited their followers from being cleansed, became more pronounced, and gave even more substance to the rumors that the White Fathers were witches or harbored witches within their church.
Despite their rivalries, the missionaries and Bamuchape were similar in many regards, most of all in their insistence on a transformation, a “conversion” that rejected old practices. For the Bamuchape, while there was no permanent salvation, no heaven or hell, and no millenarian vision attached to purification, there was the promise of a new identity through the eradication of evil witchcraft and thereby the promotion of good in the individual and the community. This new identity would be achieved by cleansing old forms of sin and magic. The most fervent Christian missionaries and their local agents had burned the shrines and other “idolatrous” objects; or, at the very least, they insisted that such shrines be situated well away from the villages that they visited.245 Eternal life in heaven would thereby be achieved, the missionaries claimed. However, by insisting that they were combating the evil spirits that afflicted this world, the Bamuchape were far more successful than the missionaries in the purification of such objects. Emptied of their spiritual power, they were discarded. Outside the villages, “charms” that the missionaries had tried to eradicate for decades, mostly horns (nsengo) containing potent medicine (muti), piled up.
the chiefs
Like the missionaries, the Bamuchape attacked the evil of the past. In fact, they went beyond the missionaries in confronting the ancestral religions oriented around mfuba spirit shrines and even the relics of clans and chiefs. Much to Audrey I. Richards’s amazement (and perhaps disappointment), the Bamuchape identified sacred objects, including protective magic and even the babenye relics of chiefs, as potential magic bwanga, and insisted that they also be given up and purified. In her persistent focus on a systematic “Bemba religion,” Richards thought these were the actions of “quacks,” exploiting the ignorance of the young as tribal institutions collapsed. These were not acts of charlatans preying on ignorance, however, but popular attempts to associate the spiritual resources of the past, including those of the chiefs, with witchcraft. Chiefs not only had their spiritual roles sidelined by indirect rule; popular movements attacked the basis of their spiritual authority. In doing so, the Bamuchape were only partially successful; a more thorough attack on the spiritual agency of chiefs would have to wait another twenty years.
Why, then, did chiefs collaborate with the Bamuchape? Chitimukulu, for example, welcomed the Bamuchape in the hope that they would “take away all the buloshi witches in the country.”246 One reason was that the strictures of indirect rule had changed the nature of chieftaincy by basing their political power on their ties to the colonial state instead of their spiritual mediations.247 Progressive colonial officials, such as the one-time district commissioner and amateur ethnographer W. Vernon Brelsford, perhaps in an unconscious reflection about the nature of European colonial rule, went as far as arguing that the spiritual authority of the Crocodile Clan was never as important as their authority by right of physical conquest.248 The missions and their Christian followers further questioned the spiritual power of the chiefs by denying the validity of ancestral claims over the fertility of the land and the people. Yet people still expected chiefs to deal with the spirit world, eradicate witches, ensure fertility, and bring good fortune. There were rumors that the chiefs had actually been bribed to permit witches and vampires in their areas or were themselves vampires.249 To maintain legitimacy, chiefs had to find new ways to respond to these challenges and mobilize the appropriate spiritual resources. Their subjects forced them to work with prophets, who in many ways challenged their authority and legitimacy. South of the Bemba heartland, the Lala chief Shaiwila collaborated with the son of God (Mwana Lesa), Tom Nyirenda, to kill the witches that plagued his people.250 Similarly, the Crocodile Clan chiefs worked with the Bamuchape to rid the country of witchcraft.
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