Invisible Agents - David M. Gordon New African Histories

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and French alike, relied on the local leaders who had previously mobilized—but did not monopolize—spiritual power. European administrators emphasized the legitimacy of these chosen leaders in terms of their supposed traditional depth and (often paradoxically) in terms of their civilizing potential. The colonial administrations remained at best embarrassed by such leaders’ spiritual claims, however, which they tended to discourage. As part of their civilizing mission, colonial regimes implemented legal restrictions on interventions into the spirit world, such as the Witchcraft Ordinance of 1914 in Northern Rhodesia, which expressly prohibited accusations of spirit possession and manipulation, and thereby curtailed old forms of political legitimacy. Movements that dealt with the spirit world became illegal, but remained influential as secretive and occult forms of power. As chapter 2 of this book indicates, when colonial forms of sovereignty disempowered the spiritual agency of chiefs, people sought alternative ways to deal with spiritual malaise and political impotence.

      Christian ideas propagated by the mainline Protestant and Catholic missionaries across central Africa worked with the colonial state to disenchant daily life, directing attention toward a spiritual afterlife and away from the presence of spirits in the immediate world. Twentieth-century European Christianity generally focused on spirits that were remote from the world of the living, even if these spirits held moral power and suasion over the living (with the exception of some nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries in South Africa and twentieth-century Pentecostals). European missionaries tried to distance the invisible from the visible worlds and, alongside the colonial administrations, discouraged—or prohibited, in the case of the Belgian Congo—international Christian missions and churches that conformed to existing central African notions of proximate spirits, such as those held by the Pentecostals and Jehovah’s Witnesses. These and related Christian movements still prospered and proliferated, but, as chapters 3 and 4 illustrate, outside or on the margins of colonial laws. In the postcolonial period, the mainline churches that emerged out of the European mission societies ignored, or remained inept at dealing with, spirits, especially evil spirits that brought death, sickness, and misfortune.

      The failure of European missions and their successor churches to distance the world of spirits from the world of the living does not mean that Christianity was unimportant to the history of the invisible world. Central African Christian beliefs advanced independently of colonial-era missionary doctrines. Even while many formal Christian denominations were established and thrived across central Africa, a particular form and experience of Christianity, replete with distinctive spiritual personae—vampires, ancestors, demons, witches, and prophets—emerged. A colonial (and denominational) focus leads to an incomplete understanding of the way that widespread spiritual beliefs transformed Christianity.46 Put another way, Christianity populated the invisible world with new spirits and replaced or eroded the powers of old spirits. International Christian ideas were incorporated into a central African invisible world, and, in turn, this invisible world informed a changing global Christianity.47

      Central African Christianity thereby came to accept direct spiritual interventions in the visible and physical world. Christian narratives were downloaded into the present. Biblical places were related to the immediate environment and biblical characters were inherited by the living, just as ancestral titles were previously inherited by systems of positional succession.48 New Jerusalems are now scattered across the region; many a Moses is remembered to have led his people against evil.49 Even the literate and bureaucratic culture of Western Christianity did not displace the powers of the spirits.50

      Central Africans recast the moral judgment at the center of European Christian notions of an afterlife in heaven or hell as a struggle against spiritual evil in this world. The spirits of the past, which may have been angry for lack of respect, recognition, or propitiation, became evil spirits. Sin meant the mobilization of these evil forces, and not the transgression of certain church-defined moral codes. On the other hand, the beneficent role of older spirits ceded to the beneficent Holy Spirit. Ancestors gave way to God and Jesus, while all other spirits became demons—regardless of whether such spirits were angry for a justifiable and explicable reason. Christianity thereby contributed to the Manichaean quality of spirits, good and evil, God and the devil, absent in the spirit world before Christianity. As communal ancestors ceded to a universal God, well-being focused on Christian rituals such as baptism, confession, and even exorcism, all of which replaced veneration and propitiation of ancestral and territorial spirits. As a Christian binary morality grafted onto a belief in the presence of spirits in this world, the angels of heaven and demons of hell became part of the immediate world, not just the afterlife. This Manichaean spiritual world became an effective way of characterizing a colonial order that spread hardship and misfortune. Colonialism—with its material forms of exploitation, its assaults on personal dignity, and its racial categorization of the visible world—was an evil to be cleansed by a radical spiritual revolution, an Armageddon.51

      Even while colonial-era missionaries failed to impose their vision of spiritual belief, they helped to shape secular ideologies and moralities. In alliance with colonial administrators and missionary-educated elites, colonial missionaries set about constructing what they deemed to be a moral civil society. In the postcolonial period this vision of a moral society inspired national philosophies of government, such as the state religion of Zambian humanism with its own civilizing mission that banished spiritual forces to the afterlife. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), despite the lifting of restrictions on African Christian movements, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Authenticité drew on colonial constructions to introduce invented traditions and promoted Mobutu as a heavenly force that descends to govern this world (as in the well-known Zairean state television clip). Nonetheless, both Christian and occult spirits remained a way of conceptualizing power and challenging authority.52In fact, precisely because of the inequalities linked to colonial and postcolonial societies, spiritual discourses on power proliferated. In the 1980s, as the final chapter in this book illustrates, Zambian humanism was swept away by a spiritual political theology held by Pentecostal and charismatic churches.

      The limitations of secular modes of authority, in particular the late colonial and postcolonial developmentalist state, and an accompanying growth in inexplicable and audacious forms of power, encouraged spiritual discourses. As the state failed to deliver the promised benefits of development, its core mission, justification, and claims to sovereignty were compromised. In the case of Zambia, a prosperous country at the time of independence, Zambians had high “expectations of modernity.” The disappointments of the developmentalist state were deeply felt.53 In other parts of central Africa, such as the DRC, where the developmentalist state gave way to the gatekeeper state, the failure was catastrophic.54 As the postcolonial state failed in its modernizing mission, or modernity benefited only a few, spirits appeared as a discourse on an unrequited faith in a universal modernity.

      The uncertainty of life in central Africa has also contributed to spiritual discourses. Here, another old quality of the spirits has been reaffirmed: that they are capricious. In a similar fashion to Adam Ashforth’s argument for the South African city of Soweto, where spirits manifest in a climate of postapartheid uncertainty, in central Africa the uncertainty of life contributed to beliefs in spiritual agency.55 Economic misfortune, violence, and disease indicated the agency of angry and evil spirits. Without apparent reason, violence afflicted communities or people died of mysterious new diseases. On the other hand, an ordinary person might become extraordinarily wealthy—perhaps even the leader of a new nation. Children could become wealthier than their parents, reversing or rendering chaotic older gerontocratic orders.56 Such unpredictability in life, inexplicable in terms of hegemonic and secular forms of sovereignty and morality, made the agency of good and evil spirits apparent. The modern Protestant notion that hard work leads to wealth and well-being has not conformed to the lived experiences of most people for whom a discourse on capricious spirits is far more convincing and realistic. Since modernity has been unpredictable, nonlinear, and frequently disappoints, a discourse on spiritual agency is a discourse on the lack of agency by living humans.57 Central Africans have discussed the capriciousness of spirits as they reflect on the arbitrariness of power and their own inabilities to transform their lives.

      Spirits could inspire ideas of revolutionary change. For the European-led missions, conversion to Christianity involved a gradual struggle toward enlightenment, as they inserted the convert into a progressive moral teleology

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