Bemba royals were incorporated into the colonial state. Even as the Bemba rulers were empowered as indirect rulers by the colonial district commissioners (DCs), they were disempowered as mediators with their ancestral spirits. In addition, new Christian spirits challenged or replaced the ancestors. And yet evil proliferated, in part because Christian moralities and notions of sin became associated with angry spirits and even witchcraft. But ideas of evil spiritual agents also spread because they provided an effective way to describe the colonial order. Movements such as the Bamuchape witchcraft cleansers harnessed new Christian spirits to cleanse the evil that the missionaries stubbornly refused to recognize.
The newly established copper-mining towns of the 1920s and 1930s, where a number of Bemba men and women sought employment and opportunities, form the backdrop to the third chapter, “Satan in the City.” Here a new type of Christian movement, free from European missionaries, the “Watchtower,” took guidance from the international Jehovah’s Witnesses pamphlets that associated the authorities of this world with Satan. For the Watchtower movement on the Copperbelt, the colonial authorities and mining companies were Satan’s agents. In the name of the Armageddon and a new heaven on earth, Watchtower fomented opposition among workers dislocated from rural environs and liberated from indirect rule. In a series of strikes, they confronted the colonial authorities, missionaries, European-educated African elites, and the secular urban civil society that these elites were in the process of creating.
Chapter 4, “A New Jerusalem,” returns to the rural Bemba heartland by considering the rise of a revolutionary church led by the Queen, “Regina” or “Lenshina” in the ChiBemba language, who sought to replace old beneficent spirits with new spirits, God and Jesus, in order to eradicate the influence of evil witchcraft. Not only did Lenshina innovate the ideas of the Bamuchape witchfinders and Watchtower to challenge the Christianity of the missionaries and the political sovereignty of the colonial state, but her spiritual quest addressed the afflictions of the most marginalized of groups, rural women, burdened by a patriarchal colonial order.
Popular nationalism spread in the same areas as the popular Christian movements. Chapter 5, “The Dawn,” considers the rise of a nationalist movement that brought Christian spiritual notions into the struggle for a popular sovereignty, leading to an explosive, Manichaean, and sometimes violent movement that demanded faithful adherence to the mass movement. Popular nationalism had such a close resemblance to millenarian religious movements that elite attempts to contain expectations through a program of secular moral reform were challenged.
By the early 1960s, the followers of Alice Lenshina and the nationalist movement fought for influence, resulting in a brutal civil war in northern Zambia. We witness in chapter 6, “Devils of War,” striking examples of spiritual agency during this civil war, as enemies became devils, bullets turned to water, and brave fighters were described as Christian heroes.
The war ended when Kaunda sent in colonial troops to forcefully disperse Lenshina’s followers’ villages. The victory of Kaunda’s nationalists and their seizure of the colonial state apparatus in 1964 promised to inaugurate an era of secular socialism, guided by Kaunda’s state religion, humanism. Chapter 7, “God in Heaven, Kaunda on Earth,” argues that humanism was never a convincing philosophy for Zambians. They turned instead to spiritual mediators, such as the Archbishop of Lusaka, Emmanuel Milingo, who exorcized the evil spirits that afflicted Zambians who were losing faith in the nationalist vision.
Chapter 8, “A Nation Reborn,” explores the agency of the neoliberal Holy Spirit, which promised wealth and advancement in a post-socialist era. In 1991, Christians led the way in challenging Kaunda and his humanist state religion, contributing to the downfall of Kaunda in 1991. Zambia’s second president, Frederick Chiluba, declared that Zambia, blessed by the Holy Spirit, would be reborn and prosper as a Christian nation. Pentecostal-inspired spirits framed the challenges and opportunities of a neoliberal order.
1 The Passion of Chitimukulu
The history of the Bemba kingdom’s rise prior to the nineteenth century remains vague. In Bemba renditions, the military conquest of the region by the Luba-related Crocodile Clan was entwined with stories of autochthonous magical powers, especially those of women, and the passion of the Crocodile Clan’s leader, Chitimukulu, “the Great Tree.” Objects such as the staff of rule, depicted below in figure 1.1 and on the cover, evoked memories of similar conquests across south-central Africa. Similar figurines could have represented a number of different iconic heroines praised in many of the savanna’s most renowned stories of conquest: Luweji of the Lunda, Bulanda of the Luba, or Nachituti of the Kazembe kingdom. For the Bemba it would have been of Chilimbulu, the woman with beautiful scarifications who seduced the roaming Bemba hero, Chitimukulu. Her half-closed eyes, sculpted ears, and enlarged navel and genitalia indicated paths of connection to the powers of the spirits. She held her breasts, perhaps containing secrets to human fertility and agricultural fecundity.92 The conquering king ruled by harnessing her powers; his failure to possess her, to contain and control the dangerous spiritual emotions that she invoked, would, men claimed, lead to the collapse of an order that underpinned their patriarchal civilization.
The objects and stories that tell of the Crocodile Clan’s powers built on older conceptions of the relationships between people, the land upon which they relied, and the dead; they reconciled the spiritual powers of the autochthons with claims to rule by conquerors. Politics, then, was also religion, and religion was politics; the competition over ideas with which people could comprehend their past and apprehend their future. New politico-religious constellations could not be imposed in a foreign vocabulary, for they would lose the powers that rendered them useful. Yet they could equally not celebrate the past, as they would then not provide legitimacy for the new rulers. The Crocodile Clan conquerors thus offered innovations within the existing collective political imagination. They claimed to intervene with the spiritual forces crucial for social and economic well-being, linking their ancestral spirits and their relics of rule to the most vital aspects of ordinary existence—the fertility of people and the fecundity of agriculture. The Bemba expected the Crocodile Clan’s government to ensure that ancestral and nature spirits were placated, and that the living prospered free from spiritual malaise and witchcraft.
The ideas of this Bemba politico-religious edifice were not written down: religion was not restricted to the dogmas of scriptures; politics was not subject to the laws of constitutions. No document would allow the future scholar to easily reconstruct the basis of rule. Surviving objects, such as the staff of rule described above, and various other relics, including stools, bow stands, and other objects, provide some clues. But the most important fragments of evidence are praises, proverbs, and stories, which would eventually be written down and come to be known collectively under the general rubric of “oral tradition.” At first glance, the oral tradition appears to be a historical representation. But, like all history, the oral tradition established its importance, relevance, and appeal not because it rendered past events correctly, but because it gave an account of the correct relationships among people, the world that sustained them, and the dead. Historical discourse, as V. Y. Mudimbe has established, was also religious discourse.93
Historians preoccupied with change in a narrowly conceived secular political realm have focused on struggles around physical forms of wealth such as people and land. Detailed histories of competing lords and polities leave out the language, idioms, and terms in which political struggle took place. The most significant study of precolonial Bemba political history, for example, argues that much in the Bemba political charter, their oral tradition of genesis, should be relegated to the “student of myth and social structure rather than the historian.”94 It would seem ludicrous in other contexts to exclude the central ideas and objectives of politics from a political history. As J. Matthew Schoffeleers demonstrates, such mythical elements point to the ideological basis of precolonial polities.95 The objectives of political struggle were the spiritual powers that allowed the people to reproduce and the land to produce.
There
