These women assert that they are possessed by the spirit of some dead chief, and when they feel the “divine afflatus,” whiten their faces to attract attention, and anoint themselves with flour which has a religious and sanctifying potency. One of their number beats a drum, and the others dance, at the same time singing a weird song, with curious intervals. Finally when they have arrived at the requisite pitch of religious exaltation the possessed fall to the ground, and burst forth into a low and almost inarticulate chant, which has a most uncanny effect. All at once are silent and the b’asing’anga [Bashinganga] gather round to interpret the voice of the spirit.147
Women were especially prone to such emotional possession, perhaps because they were closer to the spirit realm of the bush (mpanga) or that of the earth or bush spirits of Lesa and Shakapanga.148 But these explanations are the intellectual reasonings of Western scholars. Perhaps women felt the spirits, and because of this ability, women were prophets, but also victims of possession and agents of witchcraft who met in the most secret of associations.149 They were most closely linked to the spirit world, with its opportunities and dangers—in other words, its powers.
Crocodile Clan attempts to harness and control the spiritual power of women is further illustrated in their relationship to the chisungu ceremonies that introduced girls after puberty into womanhood and prepared them for marriage and childbirth. The consistency of chisungu instruction was maintained by the molding of clay figurines, mbusa—a lion, a tree, a bracelet, a stupid husband, a snake—which were associated with songs and dances that taught of the duties and relationships between husband and wife. A “mother” of the mbusa relics, nachimbusa, organized the ceremonies and was responsible for teaching songs and dances along with their meanings to the girls. In addition to being paid to oversee ceremonies, she attained a special status and could wear a feathered headdress reserved for royalty. The ceremonies, which lasted for several months, culminated in a celebration at the transition to womanhood and marriage.150 Even in this rite, the Crocodile Clan’s influence became evident. The Chilimbulu design painted on the huts used for the chisungu rites reminded initiates of Chilimbulu’s scarified skin that had seduced Chiti and led to his death.151 Around the Crocodile mbusa, women sang: “Take the girl to the crocodile,” meaning the initiate should be put under the authority of the Crocodile Clan.152 Twentieth-century accounts of the ceremony associate its history with the oral tradition of the Crocodile Clan and claim that the migrants, Chiti, Nkole, and Chilufya, brought it with them—even while its widespread prevalence indicates an older and autochthonous presence.153 According to Hinfelaar, in the nineteenth century the royal clan began to appoint nachimbusa, and the ceremony prepared women to be submissive wives of royals rather than emphasize their autonomy and religious importance.154 Yet evidence for the depth of this transformation in the precolonial period is spotty; one of the earliest twentieth-century observers reported neither crocodile mbusa nor the imposition of the authority of the Crocodile Clan on the ceremonial rites.155 Outside the Bemba political center, chisungu rites remained autonomous of Crocodile Clan influence.
The Crocodile Clan royalty incorporated local spheres of politico-religious experience by replicating their ancestral shrines in the villages that they conquered and over which they claimed authority, thus replacing shrines to local ancestral and nature spirits with ones to their own ancestors. They claimed responsibility for overcoming and harnessing spiritual emotions and for getting rid of witches. Their personal bwanga, the babenye relics, ensured prosperity. All termite mounds represented the graves in which the titleholder Shimwalule buried Chiti and Nkole. Such sacred sites became conduits for the spread of the Crocodile Clan’s power. Like the colonial administrative centers, the Bomas, which later spread the constellations of power of indirect rule, the authority of the Bemba court spread to outlying villages through its sacred sites.
These sacred sites were not only about legitimizing the Crocodile Clan, however; locals viewed them as an opportunity to indicate their own agency in the Crocodile Clan government.156 This was particularly the case in oral traditions for which there were no authoritative texts that established and fixed their meanings, no dogma. Individuals could retell and refine stories in substantially different ways, appealing to different interpretations. Shimwalule, the caretaker of the graveyard, told a different version of the story, for example. He was not a slave of Chimbala (the original owner of the Crocodile Clan graveyard) but her lover, and he married her upon the request of Nkole. In exchange for the land and for taking care of the graveyard, Chitimukulu was to send a portion of his wealth to Shimwalule.157For such leaders, the reciprocity between conqueror and conquered formed the basic political principle of the Bemba polity. The royal court might choose to underemphasize this reciprocity, but the story told by Shimwalule reminded them of their promises. Shimwalule, as guardian of the royal graveyard and the spiritual center of the Bemba polity, was an especially powerful local agent, for he looked after the living dead. “Chitimukulu, Nkula and Mwamba always send me big presents because they know that I am their father,” Shimwalule told a burial party in the 1930s. “If I am doing my work wrong here as Shimwalule the spirits of the dead chiefs will be angry with me and punish me.”158 A former slave or subject was the interface between the living kings and their ancestors; he took care of the dead so that their anger would not intervene in the world. He alone was responsible for ensuring that the Crocodile Clan’s ancestral spirits would facilitate fecundity and fertility, bringing the sun down to warm the wet earth and allow the crops to germinate and grow.
The Crocodile Clan genesis story, then, opens up and attempts to reconcile through Chitimukulu’s death, the conflicting orientations of the Bemba political imagination: that of the sky and the earth, the royal court and the village, and men and women. The state was linked to the migration of the Crocodile Clan patriarchs who descended from a celestial mother, and were led by the prophet of dawn, Luchele Ng’anga. Then there was the earth, the spiritual powers of autochthonous women who held the secrets of production and reproduction. In death and burial, the Crocodile Clan patriarchs became enveloped in the earth, bringing heaven down to earth and offering a new polity to the people of the Bemba plateau. They created a state that harnessed the spiritual powers of women and overcame the turmoil and witchcraft of village, clan, and family. While the Crocodile Clan claimed that their ancestral spirits governed the land and displaced local ancestors and nature spirits, the polity still rested on an old expectation that government would play a role in the invisible world that ensured prosperity and protected from harm.
evil afflictions
The Crocodile Clan’s ability to deal with jealousy, witches, and angry spirits was not always convincing. Ancestral and nature spirits proved ineffective in explaining the war and upheaval linked to the growing trade in slaves. The quotidian hardships and afflictions of the mid- to late nineteenth century could be explained only by a generalized evil that seemed to afflict the land and the people, an evil that would increase with the European colonial and missionary occupation.
From the 1860s to the 1880s, the Bemba polity attained its greatest degree of centralization and geographic reach under the leadership of Chitapankwa (reigned from the 1860s to 1883; d. 1883), who became Chitimukulu after capturing the babenye relics from his sick mother’s brother, Bwembya.159 The expansion of the central Bemba polity under Chitapankwa was a reaction to the military challenge posed by the Ngoni of Mpezeni to the north and east. Chitapankwa strengthened Bemba military outposts, such as the Ichinga (the defensive fortress) province of Nkula, by appointing his closest matrilineal relatives as overlords who could defend the political heartland of Lubemba and the spiritual center, Mwalule. In addition to standing in a relationship of perpetual kinship to Chitimukulu, these relatives were in a position to succeed the king. The Crocodile Clan rulers also employed ambitious sons as lords, whose positions relied on their loyalty to their fathers as they were excluded from the usual opportunities of advancement available to the Crocodile Clan matrilineage. The Crocodile Clan and their direct dependents benefited from the growing trade in ivory and slaves with the East African Swahili and Nyamwezi. The process contributed to the militarization of the Bemba polity.160