of historical materialism”:
Collective consciousness is something other than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological [social] base. . . . If collective consciousness is to appear, a sui generis synthesis of individual consciousness must occur. The product of this synthesis is a whole world of feelings, ideas, and images that follow their own laws once they are born. They mutually attract one another, repel one another, fuse together, subdivide, and proliferate; and none of these combinations is directly commanded and necessitated by the state of the underlying reality. Indeed, the life thus unleashed enjoys such great independence that it sometimes plays about in forms that have no aim or utility of any kind, but only for the pleasure of affirming itself.29
For Durkheim, while the forms of belief engage with social functions, they do not simply replicate, represent, or symbolize them. In a similar fashion, historians can recognize that spirits morph to occupy historical landscapes, but are not determined by those landscapes. These spirits, as Luise White emphasizes, are a human dialogue about nonlinguistic worlds. However, even while they can engage with this world, they do not necessarily represent or symbolize it, and sometimes animate the imagination of people in unexpected ways. Spirits can thus mobilize bodies, summon feelings, and transform lives, not unlike charged and fraught discourses about “race,” in, say, US society.30 Their imagined forms (gods, ancestral shades, nature spirits) and qualities (good, evil, indifferent, jealous, or angry) affect how people conceive of and transform their respective realities.
An insistence on the relevance of a this-worldly context for spiritual beliefs thus need not and should not overemphasize social function. The tendency to render the functional aspect of belief is often attributed to British anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s, especially to Branislaw Malinowski, Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and their students, who sought to demonstrate the rationality of beliefs.31 The argument against a reductive functionalism seems to be a straw man: even in the 1940s, contemporaries such as Godfrey Wilson critiqued the tendency to dissolve “symbols into a mere reflection of the social structure.”32 Scholarship still explores the social functions of spirits, especially the interconnected “healing” of the body and the body politic. In one example from an excellent book, Neil Kodesh, drawing on much recent scholarship, argues that the idiom of healing was key to the history of political complexity in Buganda.33 And yet “healing” focuses on consensus-building rather than conflict, revealing only one aspect of the multiple public and private uses and conflicts that mobilized spiritual discourses. As in the insistence of the rationality of African beliefs by the early functionalist anthropologists, this neo-functionalist scholarship is yet another interpretative strategy employed by secularists to render spirits into an explanatory framework with which they are at ease.
A post-Enlightenment discourse that treats spirits as distant, prayer as an ineffective intervention, and miracles and curses as false makes it difficult to understand a world in which people believe that spirits wield influence. The secular mind struggles to appreciate invisible worlds where spirits mobilize bodies to action in a fashion comparable to the invisible forces of their society, such as the state and its laws. Unfortunately, since the burden of the truth about the past weighs heavily on historians, they have had an especially difficult time dealing with worlds invisible and implausible to them. In the classroom, when first confronted with a myth to be used as a historical source, many undergraduates claim that the myth did not “really happen.” Professional historians are more nuanced, and yet their visceral reaction is to insist on the language of false consciousness, or at best metaphoric and symbolic beliefs that demonstrate a subconscious rationality, rather than ideas that informed agency. Such scholars imply that spirits delude or obfuscate rather than empower. In the political imagination of many central Africans, spirits wielded power, or gave them or others power. Because spirits needed to be dealt with, they inspired agency. People—in popular movements, religious institutions, and state agencies—mobilized around their spiritual discourses.
the central african invisible world
Since the invisible world is important only insofar as it is a shared collective representation, a way that people talk about the world around them, it has to be appreciated at the level of this collectivity. General claims about the characteristics of the invisible world on a universal, continental, or even regional scale reveal only scholarly abstractions, not those of historical agents. Despite some similarities and pan-regional and transnational connections, Africans do not share an invisible world. Spiritual beliefs break down across nations, ethnicities, and even communities. For that reason, this book engages with a particular central African history, roughly falling within northern Zambia. However, certain general features of the central African region provide a useful backdrop to this particular history.
“Central Africa” is a geographic expression that conventionally refers to the region drained by the vast Congo River. It includes hundreds of ethnic groups, however defined; almost as many languages; kingdoms and decentralized village-based polities; territories colonized by French, Belgians, British, and Portuguese; and nation-states that emerged from these colonies, which range from Cameroon in the northwest to Zambia in the southeast. While the similarities between peoples in this vast region are elusive, commonly related languages that are grouped together as “Bantu” are spoken; in fact, the region constitutes the richest diversity of Bantu languages, indicating the historical depth of settlement by Bantu-speakers, who began to disperse from the Cameroon region more than three thousand years ago. Either through their common ancestry, through pan-regional connections, or through similar experiences (and probably a combination of all these factors), central Africans share certain cultural features and historical trajectories. Scholars have even claimed that there are commonalities to all central African religious movements.34 While I do not pursue this argument, in the following section some general features of the history of the central African invisible world are related to the particular case study presented in this book.
The central African invisible world has an ancient history. Based on the linguistic spread of religious terms, Christopher Ehret identifies a distinctive and millennia-old set of beliefs in the importance of ancestral spirits alongside the manipulation of evil by witches among central and eastern Bantu speakers.35 Using linguistic evidence for west-central African societies, Jan Vansina points to the centrality of spirits in forms of government.36 In the Congo River basin, according to Vansina, “early western Bantu speakers believed that the ‘real’ world went beyond the apparent world.”37 These early inhabitants of the central African forests acknowledged the religious ideas and even ancestral spirits of their predecessors, the Batwa peoples.38 Around four hundred years ago, European observers confirmed these spiritual beliefs.39 Recent ethnographies point to their continuity.40 In south-central Africa, remnants of Luba and Lunda oral and material cultures describe spiritual interventions in society and politics.41 Precisely because of shared beliefs, claims to power over people and productive resources were made through the spirit world. Land was unproductive without the spiritual power to make it fertile. At the same time, rival leaders and prophets challenged their opponents’ claims to intercede with the spirit world.
An overview of the literature, fieldwork experience, and the historical depth of belief in spirits suggests that spirits in central Africa have become connected to a core aspect of nonlinguistic existence: emotions. Spirits manifested viscerally; they were felt by individuals, and heard and seen through emotional phenomena. Dreams, trance states, and glossolalia were all highly emotive manifestations of the spirit world. Jealousy and anger were also related to spiritual forces, and could even cause death.42 Death separated the spirit from the body; birth brought them back together. Grief and joy gave ancestors their agency. Spirit possession was also gendered and sometimes even sexual. Love was often inspired by spirits (or by witchcraft), and spirits married those they possessed.43 Like emotions, which sometimes appear without explanation, central African spirits were capricious.
Since emotional actions led to political and social cohesion or transgression, collective imaginations suggested ways to manage emotions. This management or governance of emotions depends on the forces considered to inspire emotions. In Western modernity, social scientists, physicians,
