In addition to the growth of wealth and military power from the late nineteenth century, a close examination of the ritual, ceremonial, and religious roles of Chitimukulu and the Bemba royals during the late nineteenth century suggests an attempted expansion (or at least a consolidation) of such roles. Chitimukulu Chitapankwa’s praise name was Mukungula mfuba (he who sweeps away the personal ancestral shrines), suggesting less of an increase in secular authority (as Andrew Roberts claims) than an attempt to enhance Chitimukulu’s spiritual powers by attacking older ancestral and nature shrines.164 Chitimukulu Chitapankwa was like the colonial and postcolonial prophets who eradicated the witchcraft of old and purified the people and the land. Under his reign, the Crocodile Clan’s ancestral welfare became tied to the welfare of the land and the people. When locusts and wild animals, lions and crocodiles, afflicted Lubemba and Ichinga, Chitimukulu Chitapankwa constructed a shrine to his uncle Bwembya (whom Chitapankwa had deposed) and sent offerings to Shimwalule at the royal graveyard.165 In war against the Ngoni, Chitimukulu Chitapankwa, after being purified by the babenye relics, invoked a patriotic ancestral appeal:
Oh my ancestors who were kings before me, lead me on this expedition to attack the Muchime [the stabbers, the Ngoni], who have come from afar to take the land from us without cause. . . . The land is ours, all our ancestors are buried in it, and we must save it, and drive our enemies away. Oh spirits of the ancestors, pray to God for us that we may be able to overcome the Muchime.166
The increasing demand for slaves to trade for guns and cloth ratcheted up the stakes in the Bemba royals’ claims to judicial authority. Compensation for crimes, including murder, adultery, poisoning, and witchcraft, was increasingly paid for in slaves and imported cloth (in turn purchased with slaves) instead of goats, hoes, and axes. While the victim of a crime received some compensation, the lord who had adjudicated the dispute also received payments. Those acquired through judicial services marched in Swahili, Ovimbundu, Nyamwezi, or Chikunda caravans toward an uncertain future in the Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds.167 The demand for slaves widened notions of criminal liability and increased the Bemba royals’ claims of judicial importance by emphasizing the Crocodile Clan’s ancestral ties to the land and their autonomy from the everyday forms of witchcraft that afflicted commoners. Only the Crocodile Clan could deal with the danger of witches. It was no surprise that Chitimukulu Chitapankwa swept away the shrines of lesser men, ancestors, and spirits. The intensification of the slave trade increased the stakes in claims to spiritual power as well as the greed, jealousy, and uncertainty that indicated the agency of angry and even evil spirits.
During Chitimukulu Chitapankwa’s reign, the spiritual powers of the Crocodile Clan came to be represented, enacted, and performed in royal ceremonies and dances, with abundant beer, the grandeur of which impressed and appealed to many. Consumption, patronage, and the possibilities and promises of wealth became part of these grand gatherings. Chitimukulu was the host, the mwine lupepo, the owner of the ceremony, secure in his political authority and demonstrative of his generosity. But most of all, such ceremonies venerated ancestral ties and imbued Chitimukulu with spiritual power.168 While few remain, it is also likely that in this period ancestral power objects, such as the Chilimbulu staff, either commissioned or traded from Luba artists, celebrated the sacred royalty of the Crocodile Clan.169
The burial of the chief was the most dangerous of times, when emotional turmoil could become spiritual and political turmoil unless ritual prescriptions were followed. The death of Chitimukulu Chitapankwa in 1883 probably established the “traditional” model for such ritual prescriptions. After his death, Chitimukulu was embalmed in the fashion referred to by the oral tradition. Only upon the ripening of the royal millet crop that was planted when he died could the king be buried. The close councilors (bakabilo) of the king and those who dealt with his death (bafingo) then embarked on a journey that lasted up to a week, a type of funeral procession from Lubemba to the Mwalule graveyard, with stops at several sacred sites. The journey itself was perilous. The pallbearers fought with the embalmers to release the body and with the men of Shimwalule. A death in such ritual battles signaled good fortune. Slaves, dependents, and the three head wives of the dead paramount accompanied the procession. At the Mwalule graveyard, the bafingo struck them with a club on the bridge of the nose. If they lived, the dead paramount had “forgiven” them, “vomited them out” (mfumu ya muluka).170 Those who died were buried with Chitimukulu and those who lived became personal slaves of the gravekeepers. The paramount was laid to rest on top of the head wife, another wife supported his head, and another his feet. The burial, referencing and reinforcing the oral tradition of Chiti and Nkole, was a period of great terror that demonstrated the spiritual agency of the dead royals and their ties to the land. Their return to the earth below (–panshi) and conversion into ancestors, mipashi, claimed to secure the well-being of the kingdom and provided a model ritual for the correct ways of dealing with death.171
The occasional outburst of ceremony, grandeur, and terror did not legitimize the Bemba royals without contestation. The farther from the political center that Bemba authority spread, the less convincing the reach of the Crocodile Clan ancestral cult and the greater the profusion of alternative spiritual agents. Rulers who had only a shallow genealogy of local ancestors could not claim the same spiritual authority over the land as those who ruled at the same place as several generations of their ancestors. To the east, Chitimukulu’s perpetual nephew Nkula ruled the defensive fortress of Ichinga; to the north, Nkhweto watched over Chilinda (the place that is guarded); and to the south, Mwamba conquered the Bisa. In all of these border territories, many of them conquered by the Bemba only in the late nineteenth century, the Bemba faced invasion by the Ngoni and frequent challenges from exploited subjects, especially the Bisa. Here the ancestral cult of the Crocodile Clan was fractured by alternative spiritual agents. Among the Bisa, for example, agricultural tulubi shrines associated with ngulu were evident.172 To the south and west, mikishi (sing. mukishi), spiritual forces held in objects that were representative of communal cults, replaced the relics of the Crocodile Clan chiefs.173 One of the most famous of such communal or clan mikishi was Makumba of the Bena Ngulube (the Pig Clan) of the Aushi of Lake Bangweulu. Makumba was an object, perhaps a meteorite, dressed in python and human skin and adorned with feathers. It blessed the seed before planting, and was generally responsible for rites surrounding agriculture, in the same fashion as the skin of Chilimbulu.174
Independent hunting associations also dealt with spirits. The hunt was an emotionally intense time: the danger of the bush required bravery; killing and the conquest of nature needed the support of the ngulu. The Butwa association, for example, most prevalent east of the Bemba polity, especially around the Bangweulu and Luapula swamps, recognized the spiritual authority of the original inhabitants of the land, the “Batwa.” The associations had organized leaders, Shingulu (the father of ngulu), public gatherings, and sacred mulumbi houses.175 They had their own identity marks, scarification patterns that ran in a V-shape from the head to the chest. Figurines, sometimes representations of men, such as that depicted in figure 1.3 below, had copper eyes that viewed the spirits through trance, wide-open mouths that talked to spirits, and feet that traversed the visible and invisible worlds.176 Perhaps initiated by groups of hunters seeking good fortune before they ventured into the bush, the associations were territorial cults, “concerned with man’s role as a transformer and recipient from his natural environment.”177 They were probably linked to a more extensive system of Bulumbu possession and divination that stretched from Kasai to the southern edge of Lake Tanganyika.178