Invisible Agents - David M. Gordon New African Histories

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celebrated the emergence of this new order. Some looked to the precolonial period to identify indigenous forms of statecraft. Andrew Roberts charted the political history of the rise and fall of the Bemba polity, demonstrating the secular logic of precolonial forms of political organization, and culling religious and mythological aspects from his history.77 Robert I. Rotberg rendered the rise of African nationalism in central Africa as the growth of a liberal secular modernity against an authoritarian and anachronistic colonial state.78 Henry S. Meebelo looked to the early colonial period to identify how acts of resistance against the colonial state eventually manifested as the rise of a nationalist movement. Millenarian or “religious”-based agency was imagined to give way to secular nationalism.79 This intellectual project engaged with a political project, the creation of the state religion of Zambian humanism, which is documented in the United National Independence Party archives, a valuable resource for understanding the postcolonial state’s response to spiritual beliefs.

      When Kaunda’s rule failed to meet the expectation of party activists and the one-party state was declared, the nationalist historiography appeared Whiggish and dated. But even as Zambians became disillusioned and critical of Kaunda’s regime, scholarship remained muted, at least compared to the far more critical and analytical scholarship about, say, Mobutu’s Zaire. In part this was because under Kaunda, Zambia hosted southern African liberation movements, and hence was a sympathetic home to some of the radical historians and social theorists of southern Africa.80 The critical tradition of scholarship that did emerge during the 1970s and 1980s generally emphasized structural forces rather than historical agency. Scholars, drawing on a Marxist dependency theory then in vogue, wrote about the structural “roots of rural poverty,” a legacy that the postcolonial Zambian regime found difficult to counteract.81 Marxists were also interested in religion. In one example particularly pertinent to this book, Wim M. J. van Binsbergen placed religious practices within their socioeconomic contexts; or, in his language, he linked a distinctive religious superstructure to underlying transformations in the mode of production. Even while his descriptions were far more subtle than the determinism of his analytical model, van Binsbergen stressed class forces instead of treating the content of religious ideas as statements of power. Marxist abstractions replaced spiritual assertions. His chapter on the Christian Lumpa movement of Alice Lenshina, a central concern of this book, stands out in this regard. He argued that Lenshina’s movement was constituted by peasants who radically rejected state control and the petty bourgeois leadership of the nationalists, an analysis that he could only sustain with little reference to the concepts held by Lenshina’s followers.82

      By the 1990s Zambian historiography began to look beyond the blinkers of theoretical Marxism and view the heterodox struggles of ordinary people. Samuel N. Chipungu edited an important collection on the experiences of Zambians under colonialism.83 A new generation of anthropologists offered alternative views to the paradigms of tribal change developed by their predecessors, the RLI anthropologists.84 Karen Tranberg Hansen published ethnographies about marginalized groups, servants, women, small-scale traders, and youth.85 James A. Pritchett’s long period of fieldwork informed his analysis of alternative forms of corporate organization.86 Megan Vaughan and Henrietta L. Moore questioned Richards’s contention of a stable and traditional Bemba tribal society where practices such as chitemene (a form of slash-and-burn agriculture) were engrained in culture and would collapse under the stresses of modernity.87

      At the end of the 1990s, a post-nationalist historiography emerged. A seminal moment in the dissemination of this historiography was the convening of a conference in Lusaka in August 2005 and the publication of a selection of its proceedings, One Zambia, Many Histories. This was, in the words of the editors, a decisive attempt to “place at the centre of the analysis the counter-hegemonic political and religious histories and projects that stubbornly refused to be silenced in the name of national unity.”88 Some examples from the volume stand out in their relevance for this book. Giacomo Macola demonstrates the intolerant and exclusionary nature of UNIP’s nationalism, which allowed little opportunity for political dissent.89 Miles Larmer discusses the political opposition that was forced underground after the banning of the United Progressive Party (UPP) in 1972. Even the once-powerful trade union movement increasingly succumbed to—even as it resisted—co-option and incorporation into UNIP.90 The church, as Marja Hinfelaar points out, proved to be one of the few spheres of civil society that remained autonomous from UNIP and able to critique its leadership and practices.91 Their weekly newspaper, the National Mirror, thus provides an important source for independent voices in the postcolonial period, and is employed extensively in the final chapters of this book.

      My post-secular argument is related to this latest post-nationalist and in some senses postmodern trend. It questions some of the central tenets of nationalist history alongside modernization theory, with its assumptions of secular agencies and its progressive teleology. This focus on the multifarious and unexpected narratives and epistemologies, the centrality of spirits in Zambian history, may upset those who seek solace in their secular worlds. The methodological approach promoted here attempts to extend the vistas of my predecessors—the missionaries, colonial administrators, anthropologists, and progressive activists—and make visible the rich, complex, and dynamic worlds that they ignored, repressed, or rendered invisible.

      an overview

      This history of a world populated with spirits begins with the oral tradition of the Bemba Crocodile Clan royals that recalls their migration to northern Zambia, their battle with the “owners of the land,” and their death and burial in a sacred grove, indicating the ability of the royal ancestors to calm dangerous emotions and to ensure fertility and fecundity. The first chapter, “The Passion of Chitimukulu,” ends in the late nineteenth century, when the slave trade and warfare impinged on south-central Africa to an unprecedented degree, and local prophets challenged the hegemony and efficacy of these Crocodile Clan spiritual claims and interventions.

      Chapter 2, “Christian Witches,” turns to the early twentieth century, when the 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

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