RELIGIOUS INNOVATION AND POLITICAL CONFLICT IN ZAMBIA
The Lumpa rising (Part II)
Wim van Binsbergen
|
RELIGIOUS INNOVATION AND POLITICAL CONFLICT IN ZAMBIA The Lumpa rising (Part II) Wim van Binsbergen |
|
In every society the members have
explicit and mutually shared ideas concerning the universe,
society, and themselves. These ideas are supported by implicit,
often unconscious cognitive structures such as are studied by
structural and cognitive anthropology. The total arrangement of
these elements can be called the symbolic order, or the
superstructure. The superstructure defines a society’s
central concerns, major institutions, and basic norms and values.
Against these, actual behaviour can be evaluated in terms of good
and evil, status and success. The superstructure is the central
repository of meaning for the members of society. It offers them
an explanatory framework. While thus satisfying the
participants’ intellectual needs, the superstructure also,
on the level of action, patterns behaviour in recognised,
predictable units (roles), which the participants learn in the
course of their socialisation. Thus the superstructure provides
the participants with a sense of meaningfulness and competence in
their dealings with each other and with the non-human world.
Ritual and ceremonies, as well as internalisation in the
personality structure of individual members of society, reinforce
the superstructure and let it persist over time.
On the other hand, every society has what we can call an
infrastructure: the organisation of the production upon which the
participants’ lives depend, and particularly such
differential distribution of power and resources as dominate the
relations of production.
There is no simple solution for the long-standing problem of the
relation between superstructure and infrastructure. The problem
is particularly manifest in the study of religious innovation,
political ideology and mass mobilisation. When studied in some
concrete setting, it is often possible to determine the
infrastructural conditions accompanying these phenomena; yet
superstructural elements - the participants’ explicit or
implicit ideas - often appear as direct and major factors in
these contexts. The problem becomes acute in situations of rapid
change. For in a relatively stable situation infrastructure and
superstructure are likely to be attuned to each other. The
superstructure conveys meaning and competence, which are
ultimately derived from the way in which the superstructure
expresses, reinforces and legitimates the infrastructure But in
situations of rapid change the relative autonomy of
infrastructure and superstructure becomes more pronounced. As the
infrastructure undergoes profound changes, the superstructure has
no longer a grip on, is no longer fundamentally relevant to, the
practical experience of participants in economic life. The
superstructure therefore ceases to convey meaning and competence.
This creates in the participants existential problems: the
subjective experience of alienation. For these problems two
solutions exist. Upon the debris of an obsolete superstructure,
the participants may try to construct a new superstructure that
is more in line with the altered relations of production; I shall
call this superstructural reconstruction. Alternatively,
participants may attack the alienation problem on the
infrastructural level: reversing or redefining, once more, the
altered distribution of power and resources and the production
process as a whole, so as to bring it in line again with their
superstructure that has remained virtually unaltered.
A dialectical relation exists between such infrastructural
reconstruction and the superstructural solution. For
infrastructural reconstruction requires the co-ordinated action
of a large number of individuals; to enable this, new
superstructural elements (ideology, new roles within new groups)
have to be created. On the other hand, participants take to
superstructural reconstruction in response, in the first
instance, to their individual existential problems, and not on
the basis of a detached scientific analysis of their
society’s changed infrastructure; in other words, the new
ideas the participants produce derive at first from the symbolic
order and do not necessarily correspond closely with the altered
infrastructure. Therefore, their experiments with new ideas, even
if ultimately called forth by infrastructural change, may often
miss the mark and, failing to restore the correspondence between
superstructure and infrastructure, may instead lead on to a new
symbolic order that is just as remote as their old superstructure
from current infrastructural conditions.
The emergence of a new superstructure is a highly creative
process. It requires the efforts of visionary individuals who
experiment with both old and new symbols (the latter invented, or
introduced from elsewhere). The innovators generate new
combinations and permutations of their symbolic material, and
offer their tentative results to the surrounding population. This
population shares with the innovators in their midst problems of
interpretation and competence, as caused by the divorce between
infrastructure and superstructure. Therefore, an innovator’s
proposal of a new superstructure (as one individual’s
solution to his own problems) may yet appeal to the population at
large as a likely solution of their own, similar problems of
alienation.
The visionary’s proposal is therefore likely to be adopted
at first. On the subjective level, it may give psychological
relief, as long as the participants are confident that the
longed-for solution has been found. But whether the proposed
superstructural innovation actually does or does not correspond
more closely than the old superstructure with the altered
infrastructure will not be immediately clear. The participants
will find this out gradually, by on the one hand living through
their superstructural innovation, on the other hand continuing to
participate in the altered relations of production. In most cases
the superstructural reconstruction attempt will turn out to be
off the mark. After initial success it will die down, as the
people become increasingly aware that the new ideas do not
fundamentally relate to the actually prevailing structure of
production. Sometimes, however, superstructural innovation may
tune in with the altered relations of production, and in this way
the subjective experience of alienation may be dissolved. A truly
revolutionary situation occurs when superstructural innovation at
the same time stipulates such infrastructural changes as curb
alienation at the infrastructural level, i.e., in terms of
expropriation and control. Then a lasting change of the society
becomes possible.
Meanwhile, in order to work at all if only during a short time,
attempts at superstructural reconstruction apparently have to do
three things. First, they have to propound a new arrangement of
symbols. Thus they can restore the sense of meaningfulness,
subjectively and temporarily, even if the infrastructure from
which such meaningfulness ultimately derives is left unaffected.
Such a new arrangement of symbols must then focus on symbols that
are eminently effective and unassailable in the eyes of the
participants. The new superstructural reconstruction may be
predominantly religious (e.g., Lumpa), political (e.g., Zambian
nationalism), or presumably take some other course; essential is,
in all these cases, that the central symbols appear absolute to
the participants.
Second, superstructural reconstruction must restore the sense of
competence by stipulating new forms of action. This action may
vary from collective ritual to campaigns to check party cards
(such as have been conducted by UNIP members in Zambia). it is
important that participants are brought to look upon such action
as bringing about the new, desired social order where their
alienation problems will no longer exist. At the same time these
actions translate the movement’s central symbols into the
context of tangible, lived-through reality, thus reinforcing
them.
Finally, attempts at superstructural reconstruction, in order to
be at least initially successful, cannot stop at the level of
merely individual interpretations and actions, but must create
new group structures (e.g., restructured rural communities,
churches, political parties) within which the participants can
lead their new lives once their alienation problems have been
solved subjectively. The agents of superstructural reconstruction
will have to present recruitment into these new groups as the
solution to the alienation problems of individual people.
Expansion of the new group is often considered the main method to
create a new society.
As Vansina pointed out,[1] throughout Central Africa a fairly
similar superstructure prevailed before the recent processes of
social change made their impact. On the infrastructural level,
two major changes occurred since the eighteenth century. The
first consisted in the increasing involvement of local farming,
fishing and hunting communities (which until then had been
largely self-contained) in a new mode of production that was
dominated by long-distance trade and by the payment of tribute to
the states that emerged in Central Africa, partly as a result of
such trade.
The second major infrastructural change was the penetration of
capitalism. Directly, capitalism induced the rural population to
leave their villages and work as migrant labourers in the mines,
farms and towns of Central and Southern Africa; to adapt their
rural economy, and increasingly their total life, to the
consumption of manufactured commodities; and, in selected areas,
to embark on small-scale capitalist agricultural production.
Indirectly, the infrastructural accommodation to capitalism was
promoted by the colonial state; e.g., by the imposition of hut
tax; the destruction of pre-existing networks of trade and
tribute; the transformation of indigenous rulers into petty
administrators for the colonial state; the regulation of
migration between the rural areas and the places of work; the
provision of schools to serve the need for skilled workers and
clerks; urban housing; medical services; the occasional promotion
of African commercial farming, etc. Admittedly, the relations
between the colonial state and capitalism are rather more complex
than suggested here, and failure to work out these relations
(even although such had been impossible within the scope of the
present chapter ) is one of the shortcomings of my
argument.
The emergence of the trade-tribute mode of production and the
expansion of capitalism both constituted infrastructural changes
of sufficient scope to provide test cases for my provisional
theory of superstructural reconstruction. There is no a priori
reason why disjunction between an altered infrastructure and an
old superstructure should lead to predominantly religious
superstructural reconstruction. Historical evidence on Central
Africa is still rather scanty for the pre-colonial period, but
rather abundant for the colonial era. From this evidence one gets
the impression that religious innovation has for long constituted
the main response to recent infrastructural change. Only after
the Second World War mass nationalism appeared as a political
form of superstructural reconstruction, in addition to current
religious innovation. Probably this preponderance of religious
superstructural reconstruction has systematic reasons which a
more developed theory may identify in future.
An important ad hoc explanation seems to lie in the fact that
among twentieth-century Zambians the concepts of politics as a
distinct sector of society is a recent innovation. The modern
concept of politics, just like that of religion, can only be
meaningful among the members of a highly differentiated, complex
society, where institutional spheres have acquired considerable
autonomy vis-_-vis one another. Contemporary Zambia has become
such a society. But sections of the rural population continue to
reject this differentiated view of politics. Instead they have a
rather holistic conception of society, in which religious,
political and economic power merge to a considerable extent.[2] in this respect many peasants have
retained the basic outlook of the old superstructure, in which
religious and non-religious aspects appear to have merged almost
entirely.
In the old superstructure, the link with the local dead was the
main legitimation for residence, political office, and for such a
variety of specialist roles as divining, healing, hunting,
iron-working and musical crafts. Through residence, veneration of
the local dead, and ritual focusing on land spirits, a special
ritual link with the land was established. Without such a link no
success could be expected in economically vital undertakings such
as agriculture, fishing, hunting and collecting. The
participant’s view of the society and of an
individual’s career arranged village life, the economic
process, politics and ritual in one comprehensive framework,
where each part had meaning by reference to all others. This view
was, therefore, religious as much as it was political or
economic. When the trade-tribute mode of production expanded, the
emergent major chiefs initially had to legitimise their political
and economic power in terms of this same view of society. Chiefly
cults came up which enabled the chiefs to claim ritual power over
the land’s fertility, either through ritual links with
deceased predecessors, or through non-royal priests or
councillors representing the original ‘owners of the
land’.[3] Thus, as a result of infrastructural
change, symbolic themes already present in the superstructure
were redefined; a new power distribution was acknowledged in the
superstructure; and a pattern that in the old superstructure
referred to merely local conditions was now applied to extensive
regional political structures which often comprised more than one
ethnic group. However, in this altered superstructure the merging
between religious and political aspects was still largely
retained.
Along with these chiefly cults, two other types of religious
innovation can be traced back to the late pre-colonial period and
to the infrastructural changes then occurring: the appearance of
prophets and the emergence of cults of affliction. Cults of
affliction concentrate on the individual, whose physical and/or
mental suffering they interpret in terms of possession by a
specific spirit, whilst treatment mainly consists of initiation
as a member of the cult venerating that spirit. Central African
prophets and the movements they trigger fall into three subtypes:
the ecological prophet whose main concern is with fertility and
the land; the eschatological prophet who predicts the imminent
end of the world such as it is known to his audience; and the
affliction prophet who establishes a new, regionally-organised
cult of affliction, which in many respects resembles an
independent church. For an initial treatment of these main types,
and references, I refer to Carter[4] and my own work[5]. Prophetic cults of these sub-types,
and cults of affliction, have continued to appear in Central
Africa during the colonial period, and still represent major
forms of religion among the Central African peasants. But in
addition the colonial era saw new types of religious innovation.
Preachers and dippers (advocating baptism through immersion)
appeared. They were connected, some more closely than others,
with the African Watchtower movement, which in itself derived
indirectly from the North American Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There were other independent churches which pursued more or less
clearly a Christian idiom. Finally, mission Christianity had in
fact penetrated before the imposition of colonial rule (1900),
but started to gain momentum much later.
Let us first consider all these cases of religious innovation as
superstructural experiments, which propounded a new symbolic
order.
Despite their differences in idiom, ritual and organisational
structure, it is amazing to see how the same few trends in
symbolic development dominate them all.[6] All struggle with the conception of
time. The cyclical present implicit in the old superstructure
(highlighting agriculture, hunting, and gathering on the scale of
the small village community) becomes obsolete. In the course of
these religious innovations, it gives way to a linear time
perspective that emphasises personal careers and historical
development, even to the extent of interpreting history as a
process of salvation in the Christian sense.[7] In some of these religious
innovations, the linear perspective is again supplanted by the
eschatological: the acute sense of time drawing to an end.
Moreover, almost all these innovations try to move away from the
‘ecological’ concern for the land and fertility that
dominated the old superstructure. The village dead as major
supernatural entities venerated in ritual give way to other, less
particularistic entities, especially the High God.
In line with this, all these innovations tend to move away from
taking the old village community, in its archetypical form, as
the basic concept of society. In the cults of affliction this
process manifests itself in their extreme emphasis on the
suffering individual, and their underplaying of morality and
social obligations. In some of the other religious innovations
the same process reaches further: they explicitly strive towards
the creation of a new and fundamentally different community, a
new society to be brought about by the new religious inspiration
and new ritual.
Finally, in so far as in the old superstructure sorcery was
considered the main threat to human society, these religious
innovations each try to formulate alternatives to sorcery. The
cults of affliction and the mission churches attribute misfortune
and suffering to causes altogether different from those indicated
by sorcery. Most of the other innovations continue to accept the
reality of sorcery but try to eradicate it once for all so as to
make the new, transformed community possible.
The constant occurrence of these themes throughout recent
religious innovation in Central Africa suggests that underneath
the several types, each representing scores of individual
religious movements, one overall and persistent process of
superstructural change took place, in which the same symbolic
material was manipulated within rather narrow limits.
When we try to relate these superstructural experiments to
infrastructural change, it becomes necessary to distinguish
between two main streams of superstructural reconstruction. One
stream is of exclusively rural origin; the religious innovators
and their followers are peasants. This applies to cults of
affliction, and to the cults created by ecological,
eschatological and affliction prophets. The other stream springs
from what we can provisionally call the ‘intensive contact
situation’. This comprises the places of work which
attracted labour migrants from throughout Central Africa (mines,
farms and towns) and the rural extensions of these centres:
district administrative centres (bomas); rural Christian
missions; and military campaigns involving thousands of African
carriers, and fewer soldiers, near the Zambian-Tanzanian border
in the First World War. Watchtower dippers and preachers, other
independent churches, and mission Christianity are the religious
innovations belonging to this second stream. The two streams
roughly coincide with the division rural-urban. But the following
argument will make clear that much more is involved than a purely
geographical or demographic criterion. This justifies my
classifying of such countryside phenomena as bomas, missions,
farms and military campaigns in the second stream.
Typical of the first, truly rural stream is that it comprises
people still largely involved in a pre-capitalist mode of
production: shifting cultivation, hunting and gathering. State
expansion (before and after the imposition of colonial rule) and
the impact of capitalism have infringed on their local autonomy,
draining their products and labour force (through slave-raiding,
tribute, forced labour and urbanisation) and encroaching on their
rights on local land, hunting and fishing (e.g., by the creation
of chiefs’ hunting reserves, and later by the founding of
commercial farms, town, mines, native reserves and forest
reserves). The infrastructure of their local society has been
deeply affected by these developments. From free, autonomous
farmers whose system of production was effectively contained
within their social horizon and subject to their own control,
they became a peasant class in a world-wide society.
But while the facts of this process of incorporation and
expropriation are unmistakable and have come to affect every
aspect of village life, the agents of control in their new
situation have largely remained invisible at the village level.
The physical outlets of the state and of the capitalist economy
were confined to the district centres and the towns along the
line of rail, outside the everyday experience of the peasants.
Particularly after the creation of indirect rule (around 1930),
administrators and peasants alike could foster the illusion of an
essentially intact ‘traditional’ society whose
time-honoured social institutions, though heavily assailed (after
all, there was the reality of incorporation and alienation), were
still functioning. Under these circumstances, the rural
population’s reaction against being forced into a peasant
class position could hardly be expected to confront directly the
outside forces responsible for their expropriation. One does not
expect strongly anti-colonial responses in this context. A
pre-condition for such responses would have been that the
peasants had acquired some explicit assessment of the power
situation in the wider society in so far as this affected their
situation - and were prepared to challenge these structures. But
as Gluckman pointed out in one of his most comprehensive analyses
of political change in Southern and Central Africa:[8]
There were
plenty of hostilities [between black and white]; but they did not
continually affect the daily life of Africans; and the picture of
Africans in constant and unceasing antagonism to whites is false
for the rural areas.
Instead, the peasants sought a solution
for their predicament of alienation entirely at the local level;
and not primarily through the creation of new relations of
production, but mainly through the formulation of a new
superstructure. The innovators’ messages and their ritual,
though explicable from the predicament of
‘peasantisation’, in nearly all cases remained without
overt references to this predicament. The various rural-based
religious innovations were attempts to render, on a local scale,
village life once again meaningful by reference to new symbols,
restoring the sense of competence by new ritual. Whereas the
cults of affliction attempted to do this on the exclusively
individual level (and thus dealt with only part of the problem,
even at the mere superstructural level), the various prophetic
cults went further; they aimed at ushering the local population
into a radically new community. Usually this community was
conceived entirely in ritual terms. Most prophetic cults did not
attempt to work out the infrastructural requirements, in terms of
relations of production, by which such a new community might
really have formed a lasting answer to the predicament of
peasantisation. Lumpa was an important exception to this.
Divorced from a production base, in other words entirely based on
an illusion, most cults of affliction and prophetic cults soon
lost their vigour. But their idiom remained attractive: in many
regions we see a succession of such cults, at intervals of a few
years or decades. The second stream of superstructural
reconstruction sprang from a quite different social situation. In
the places of migrant work, the bomas, the missions, and while
involved in a military campaign, the Africans experienced the
distant effects of the expansion of state systems and capitalism.
In general, they were born and raised within the peasant context
indicated above, retaining more or less close links with their
rural kin. yet they had entered into a different class position,
or were on their way to doing so. They lived outside their
villages, in a social setting dominated not by the inclusive,
reciprocal social relationships typical of the village, but by
formal organisations, patterned after those of modern North
Atlantic society. Their daily working experience was determined
by forms of control characteristic of capitalist relations of
production. In this situation, their livelihood was entirely
dependent upon their taking part in the production process as
wage-labourers. Therefore their class positions was largely that
of proletarians, even though the majority attempted to keep open
the lines back into the village, and still had rights to rural
land should they return home.
The forces of the state and capitalism, that in the villages
remained distant, anonymous and often below the threshold of
explicit awareness, were in this proletarian situation blatantly
manifest. These forces pervaded every aspect of the worker’s
social experience, and found a personified manifestation in
concrete people: white employers, foremen, administrative
officers and missionaries. Exploitation, economic insecurity,
humiliation and racial intimidation were the specific forms in
which the causes of the African predicament were visibly driven
home in this situation.
Essentially all this applies equally to the rural Christian
missions. I am not denying that the flavour of human relations in
the missions may have been somewhat more humanitarian than at the
migrants’ places of work. But infrastructurally the missions
represented a social setting very similar to the latter, in such
terms as: formal, bureaucratic forms of organisation and control;
race relations; predominance of capitalism, as manifested in
exclusive land rights wage labour. and distribution of
manufactured commodities.[9]
Africans in the intensive contact situation were experiencing
problems of alienation rather similar to those of their kinsmen
in the village. But their response had to be different. Well
advanced in the process of proletarisation, they had acquired a
working knowledge and understanding of capitalist structures.
They could no longer take the strictly local, rural scene as
their exclusive frame of reference. Like the peasants, they felt
the existential need for reconstruction, but then reconstruction
of the wider society and particularly of those manifest (albeit
often secondary) aspects of the power distribution therein that
had caused their most bitter experiences.
For many thousands of people in colonial Zambia,
mission-propagated Christianity seemed to provide the solution
they were looking for. This religious innovation promised a new
life and a new society. Its organisational structure as well as
its moral and ethical codes were, not surprisingly, well attuned
to colonial society and capitalism. However, for this very reason
conversion did not solve the predicament of alienation; it added
but a new dimension to it. A substantial proportion of
independent Christian churches in Zambia were founded as a result
of African converts realising that joining a mission church had
by no means offered them the solution for the problems engendered
by the intensive contact situation.
In this intensive contact situation a general and explicit
reaction was generated against white domination in both the
political and the religious field. Springing from the same
setting, the political and religious responses were rather
parallel and initially merged to a considerable degree. African
Watchtower and other independent churches (along with the
black-controlled African Methodist Episcopal Church, as
introduced from North America via South Africa), are the more
predominantly religious manifestations of the second, non-rural
stream of superstructural reconstruction. The political
manifestations led through Welfare Societies and labour agitation
at the Copperbelt to the nationalist movement which took a
concrete form after the Second World War.
Given the fact of circulatory labour migration, in which a large
proportion of the Central African male population was involved,
the two streams of superstructural reconstruction could not
remain entirely screened off from each other. Significant
exchanges took place between the superstructural responses of
peasantisation and those of proletarisation. [ consider:
proletarianisation ] The introduction of peasant cults of
affliction into the intensive contact situation is a common
phenomenon in Central Africa.[10] Alternatively, the
‘proletarian’ superstructural responses were soon
propagated in the rural areas as well. As the social settings of
proletarisation and peasantisation were very different, the
innovations had to undergo substantial transformations as they
crossed from one setting to the other. The case of the Zambia
Nzila sect shows how a cult of affliction, when introduced into
the setting of proletarisation, could take on a formal
organisational structure and develop into a fully-fledged and
exceptionally successful independent church.
African Watchtower shows the opposite process, by which a
religious innovation properly belonging to the proletarian
context is greatly transformed so as to fit the context of
peasantisation.[11] in the late 1920s and the 1930s
Watchtower was propagated in the rural areas of Central Africa on
a very large scale. The proletarian preachers and dippers
expressed anti-colonial attitudes, and attracted state
persecution on this basis. However, the massive peasant audiences
they inspired and brought to baptism seemed to respond less to
their anti-colonialism and their analysis of the wider society.
Instead the peasants were looking for reconstruction of just the
local, rural society by ritual means, and therefore chose to
emphasise selectively the eschatological and witch-cleansing
elements in the preachers’ messages. And the latter were not
hesitant to oblige. A case in point is the rapid transformation
of Tomo Nyirenda (‘Mwana Lesa’) from an orthodox
Watchtower adherent in the typical intensive contact situation,
to a self-styled rural witch-finder whose lethal efficiency cost
scores of lives (and finally his own).[12]
Nyirenda’s case appears to have been only an extreme example
of what seems to have happened to many Watchtower preachers.
Their messages, deriving from a different class situation, were
rapidly attuned to the idiom in which the peasants were phrasing
their own attempts at superstructural reconstruction. The
specific Watchtower message, including its anti-colonial
overtones, got lost behind the peasants’ perception of the
preachers as predominantly engaged in the eradication of sorcery.
They were supposed to usher the local society into a radically
new state, but on a strictly local scale and ignoring the wider
colonial and capitalist conditions which had both intensified the
predicament of peasantisation, and had originally triggered the
proletarian Watchtower response.
By no means all religious innovators who exhorted local rural
communities to cleanse themselves from sorcery had Watchtower
connotations. Some were channelled into other independent church
movements. Others were individual innovators who adopted elements
from the current idiom (dipping, hymn-singing, or the use of a
Bible and other material paraphernalia for the identification and
cleansing of sorcerers) without identifying themselves as
belonging to any specific movement. Many claimed, or were
regarded, to belong to the Mchape movement, which from Malawi
spread over Central Africa from the 1920s onwards. Several other
such movements have been described for Zambia and the surrounding
areas.[13]
Willis[14] has aptly characterised the common
purpose of all these rural movements with the phrase
‘instant millennium’. Unlike cargo cults and many other
millennarian movements, these Central African witch-cleansing
cults not only contained the expectation of a radically different
new society: they actually claimed to provide the apparatus and
ritual that was to bring about this new society. Despite waves of
religious innovation that had temporarily superimposed
alternative interpretations, sorcery had remained the standard
explanation for misfortune. In such a context the claim to remove
all sorcery from the community inevitably amounts to nothing less
than the creation of a realm of eternal bliss, of a community
that belongs to a totally different order of existence. Mary
Douglas[15] suggested that recurrent
witch-cleansing cults form part and parcel of the
‘traditional’ set-up of Central African rural society.
My interpretation would be rather different .
Admittedly, the well-known debate[16] on the methodological difficulties
involved in the hypothesis that modern social change had led to
an increase of sorcery and sorcery accusation, discourages any
further argument along that line. Instead of a change in the
incidence of sorcery or alleged sorcery, I would suggest that the
significant element of change lay in the personnel and the idiom
of witch-cleansing. This is again not something that is easily
assessed for an illiterate past, but at least it is a qualitative
instead of an unsolvable [ check ] quantitative problem. In
the old superstructure, sorcery formed the central moral issue.
The necessity to control sorcery and to expose and eliminate
sorcerers was fully acknowledged. These functions were the
prerogatives of those exercising political and religious
authority, or were largely controlled by the latter. The battle
against sorcery was waged continually and formed a major test for
the amount of protection and well-being those in authority could
offer their followers.
The removal overnight of all sorcerers, as in eradication
movements, does not by any means fit into this pattern. The
cyclical time perception characteristic of the old superstructure
is likewise incompatible with the idea of ‘instant
millennium’. These millennarian expectations, the
recruitment of witch-cleansing agents from amongst outsiders
divorced from local foci of authority (even if often invited and
protected by chiefs), the new symbols (dipping, the High God,
hymns and sermons), the massive response which made the
populations of entire villages and regions step forward, hand in
their sorcery apparatus, and get cleansed all this suggests not a
recurrent ‘traditional’ phenomenon, but a dramatic
attempt at superstructural reconstruction that properly belongs
to the chapter of recent religious innovation in Central Africa.
On the descriptive levels I have now
prepared the ground for an interpretation of Lumpa against the
total background of recent religious and political movements in
Central Africa. For a fuller understanding it is necessary to
examine this material in the light of two fundamental issues:
class struggle and the overall distribution of power. We touch
here on basic problems of both modern African society and social
theory. Therefore, as I rush in where angels fear to tread, the
following ideas are offered as extremely tentative.
I have argued that the various superstructural reconstruction
movements were peculiar to the two specific class situations of
peasantisation and proletarisation. However, they were much more
than mere sub-cultural traits contributing to the life-style of a
social class (such as diet, fashion in clothing, patterns of
recreation, etc.). Directly springing from the predicament of
alienation, and trying to solve it, these movements should be
recognised as manifestations of class struggle.
Here the broad distinction between the peasant stream and the
proletarian stream is relevant, again. The various peasant
responses reveal the attempt to reconstruct a whole,
self-supporting, autonomous rural community. Trapped as they
usually were in superstructural illusions, ignoring the
infrastructural requirements (in terms of relations of
production) for such a reconstruction, most of these attempts
were unrealistic and failed entirely. Yet in essence they are
extremely radical in that they attempt to reverse the process of
peasantisation, by denying the rural community’s
incapsulation in a wider colonial and capitalist system. By
contrast, the ‘urban’ responses were decidedly less
radical. For they took for granted the fundamental structure of
capitalism, and aimed not at an overthrow of capitalist relations
of production, but at material and psychological improvement of
the proletarian experience within this overall structure. Thus in
Zambia the proletarian class struggle in the trappings of African
nationalism was fought within the terms of the very structure
that had brought about the process of proletarisation; it was
reformist, not revolutionary. Thus Zambian nationalism, having
emerged as the main response to proletarization,[17] entirely lost its aspect of class
struggle. After UNIP brought about territorial independence, this
nationalist party and its leaders have instead greatly enhanced
state control as a means to consolidate the capitalist structure
of Zambian society. The capitalist infrastructure was left
intact, and after the replacement of this structure’s white
executive personnel by Africans, its further expansion was
stimulated. The growth of UNIP in the rural areas, where the
party increasingly implements and controls state-promoted
projects of ‘rural development’, represents a further
phase in the domination of rural communities by the state and
capitalism.
Within the proletarian response Watchtower came closest to
radical class struggle. It did not analyse and counteract the
capitalist relations of production. On the contrary, Watchtower
adherents have been described as quite successfully adapted to
capitalist production. This was particularly the case when the
movement, introduced into the rural areas, could resist the
peasants’ redefinition of its idiom in terms of
witch-cleansing, and enduring Watchtower communities emerged.[18] However, Watchtower radicalism did
show in its theocratic rejection of the authority of the state -
both colonial and post-colonial. Watchtower has thus opposed a
structure of domination that, as I indicated above, was closely
linked to capitalist structures.
This rejection of the state also brought Watchtower close to the
peasants’ reconstruction attempts. For although the latter
were not explicitly anti-state or anti-colonial, their insistence
on a strictly local rural society left no room whatever for
structures of control beyond the local level.
Most Central African peasant reconstruction movements were of
limited scope, organisationally weak, and lacked infrastructural
initiatives. This caused them, in general, to yield and die down
as soon as effectively confronted with the power of the state.
Lumpa, however, shows the great potential of these movements,
once they comprise a sufficient number of people and explore, in
addition to superstructural reconstruction, the possibility of
infrastructural reconstruction.
Incorporation of rural communities in a system of state control
under capitalist conditions is not only an infrastructural
problem. The superstructural innovations discussed here
emphasised the importance of people’s conceptualisation of
their society, and of their own place therein. It is impossible
to build a state on sheer coercion alone, and anyway the Zambian
leaders would seem to abhor the very idea. In addition to actual
control through effective structures, the Zambian state seeks
legitimacy in the eyes of its subjects. In the present-day
context it is therefore of great importance that the state, as
the culmination of supra-local control, has remained a distant
and alien element in the social perception of many Zambian
peasants, also after independence. The colonial state, for
various reasons, was contented to have only a distant grip on
rural villages, and concentrated its efforts in the bomas and in
the urban centres. The post-colonial state is now struggling for
both effective domination and acceptance right down to the
grass-roots level of the remotest villages. Expansion of the
party and of other rural foci of state control (schools, clinics,
agricultural extensions and courts) in itself cannot take away
the fact that the state still has not legitimated itself entirely
in the eyes of a considerable portion of the Zambian peasantry.
This situation causes strain and insecurity among the Zambian
leaders, and they tend to react forcibly against rural (or
whatever other) challenges of their power and legitimacy. Of this
Lumpa, again, offers an example.
homepage | index
page Lumpa | Part
I
| Part III | Part
IV
[1]
Vansina (1966): 19f.
[2]
Van Binsbergen (forthcoming (a)).
[3]
Van Binsbergen 1979b, this volume, chapter 3.
[4]
Carter (1972).
[5]
Van Binsbergen (1972b, this volume, chapter 2); 1976a (cf.
chapter 4),1977a (chapter 5); cf. this volume, chapters I and 7.
[6]
Van Binsbergen (1976a); cf. this volume, chapter 4.
[7]
Eliade (1949).
[8]
Gluckman (1971).
[9]
Rotberg (1965).
[10]
Cf. this volume, chapters 6 and 7.
[11]
On Nzila, see Muntemba (1972b); Van Binsbergen (1977a, this
volume, chapter 5). on Watchtower in the period indicated, see,
e.g., Hooker (1965); Assimeng (1970); Rotberg (1967):136f;
Greschat (1967); Cross (1970, 1973) and by that same author a
number of unpublished papers which I have no authority to cite.
Hooker’s reference (1965 :99) to Watchtower in Kasempa
district, north-western Zambia, as early as 1913 (instead of the
correct date of the 1930s) is based on a mis-reading of Chibanza
(1961 :81). In the 1910s, African Watchtower in Zambia was
confined to the extreme north-east, where it was closely
connected with the military campaign against the Germans in
Tanzania, during the First World War (Meebelo, 1971: 133f;
Rotberg, 1967:136f.). Much of African Watchtower in Zambia
indirectly derived from the movement of John Chilembwe in Malawi,
which ended in the 1915 rising (Shepperson and Price, 1958; for a
recent reinterpretation cf. Linden and Linden, 1971). My views on
the rural adaptation process in Watchtower are based not only on
secondary literature, but also on the events in rural western
Zambia in the 1920s and 1930s, as documented in Zambia National
Archives files: KDD 1/4/1; ZA 1/9/181/(3); KDD 1/2/l; KDE8/1/18;
ZA7/1/16/3;KSX l/l/I; ZA7/1/17/ 5; SEC/NAT/66A; ZA 1/15/M/I;
SEC/NAT/393; ZA 1/9/62/1/6; ZA 1/10/file no. 62; ZA 1/10/vol. 3,
no. 4; ZA 1/15/M/2.
[12]
Rotberg (1967):142f; Ranger (1975).
[13]
Ranger (1972a); Willis provides a lengthy bibliography (1970),
including all the classic references; specifically for
north-eastern Zambia - the area of the Lumpa Church - cf. Roberts
1972 :4f., 8f.
[14]
Willis (1970).
[15]
Douglas (1963).
[16]
Aptly summarised in B.R. Wilson (1975):56.
[17]
Henderson (1970a). A fascinating study could be written on the
use of socialist catchwords, the adoption of Zambian humanism as
a conveniently evasive ideology and the yielding to capitalist
constraints and temptations among the Zambian nationalist
leaders;cf. the useful remarks in Molteno (1974):80f., and
Molteno and Tordoff (1974):388f.
[18]
Examples of such successful latter-day Watchtower communities are
described by Long (1968) and Cross (e .g.,1970).
homepage | index
page Lumpa | Part
I
| Part III | Part
IV
page last modified: 2000-05-17 20:01:34