Bemba military expansion in the late nineteenth century to secure trade routes, guns, and slaves took the Crocodile Clan lords to areas where their spiritual powers were unknown and not respected. For example, when the Bemba royal Mwamba extended the reach of his authority over the Bisa, challenges to his rule were recalled in stories about the powers of Bisa prophets and spirits. In one such story, Mwamba tested the power of the Bisa prophets by challenging them to summon a lion to devour one of his wives while she drew water. She was caught and killed by a lion. An angry Mwamba had the prophets thrown into a bonfire, but they survived and were found sitting in the ashes of the fire the following morning. The prophets then summoned lions to chase Mwamba from their land.179 He fled, but a successor returned a few years later, and the conflict-ridden history continued. In 1888, just prior to the European colonial period, Mwamba captured Bisa subjects and sold them to Swahili slave traders.180 Farther south, the Bisa rebelled against the Bemba lord Chikwanda and killed him, exacting the revenge of Chitimukulu, which led to greater Bisa subjugation and exile.181
Warfare inspired emotions that gave reign to spirits. In accounts of warfare, the efficacy of both Bisa and Crocodile Clan magic looms large. The Bisa were especially renowned for their war magic, including the ilamfya, a horn or drum treated with various bwanga, most potently the blood of captives.182 Upon defeating their enemies, Bemba warriors cut up and burned their bodies, so that they could not become angry chiwa spirits and disturb the peace of the land.183 (The practice once again referenced Nkole’s treatment of Mwase’s body in the Bemba oral tradition.) They brought the heads of the slain opponents to the Crocodile Clan lords, where they adorned village stockades and suggested the powers that the royals had over living and dead.184 The Bemba also developed ilamfya to deal with the magic of their opponents and employed specialists, Bachamanga, to ensure success in war and to cleanse the warriors who might be haunted by those they had killed.185 Chitimukulu and his appointed chiefs claimed exclusive rights over the use of these ilamfya and war specialists.186 The murder of another person, perhaps the most emotional of all human actions, required special spiritual controls and governance.
New prophets claimed to mediate with ancient ancestors, the chiefs of old (mfumu sha kale) who evaded attempts at appropriation by the Bemba political authorities. The old chiefs were not even embodied by living kin; they appeared in dreams or possessed people or offered guidance on rituals concerning hunting and agriculture. No stories affiliated them with the Bemba royals. Such ancestors became spirits independent of narratives even as they were linked to nature.187 People found them in places of beauty and serenity—waterfalls, the sources of rivers, and in large trees—inscribed in the natural features of landscape.188 They also took the form of animals. When a hunter encountered a python, lion, or crocodile, he had to treat it with respect and wish it good health, lest it be the spirit of an old ancestor that had become an ngulu.189
At the center of the polity, Bemba politico-religious life attempted to marginalize other forms of spiritual power, such as territorial cults linked to ngulu veneration. The Crocodile Clan court organized a structured ritual and ceremonial life that replaced the localized system of ngulu appreciation and bwanga manipulation, even as it built on their spiritual conceptions. The most powerful Bemba ruler boasted that he “swept away” the ancestral shrines of others. He alone could control the spiritual emotions that gave rise to and threatened fertility and fecundity. Yet in the areas surrounding the Bemba villages, prophets mobilized alternative forms of spiritual power by claiming to be mediators with ancient ancestors and nature spirits more powerful than those of the Crocodile Clan. And even in the Crocodile Clan villages, the royals struggled to contain the use of bwanga and the spiritual agency of new prophets.
The Crocodile Clan posed a solution to a political imagination preoccupied with the spiritual power needed to ensure human reproduction and agricultural productivity. They claimed that their celestial origins catalyzed the power that led to the germination of crops and the reproduction of people. From the spiritual center at the Mwalule graveyard, their ancestors would intervene in the forces of nature. They appropriated sacred sites, incorporated old stories into their charter, and molded their babenye relics from the debris of conquest and the bwanga of old. The secrets to prosperity and reproduction lay with the spiritual emotions evoked by local women; the Crocodile Clan offered a government that controlled and harnessed these spiritual emotions. The scarified skin of Chilimbulu that had seduced Chitimukulu became the most sacred of royal relics, promising fertility and prosperity. The jealous husband, Mwase, could kill but would be contained by Crocodile Clan rule; and even the worst outcome of spiritual agency, death, could be dealt with through the mortuary rites introduced by the Crocodile Clan.
While the Crocodile Clan narrative of migration, sex, and death became a convincing politico-religious charter for well over a century, it remained vulnerable to alternative conceptions of spiritual agency. The Crocodile Clan’s spiritual power was drawn from many past stories and principles; they innovated existing politico-religious ideas rather than revolutionizing them. In an increasingly desperate effort to maintain their authority in the face of external and internal challenges during the late nineteenth century, royals became unjust and cruel toward their subjects. People must have wondered whether angry spirits had possessed their rulers; perhaps they thought that elites had become witches and were employing spirits to gain unprecedented power. In the midst of this scramble for power, the Crocodile Clan’s hegemony became precarious. Preoccupied with fertility and fecundity, their narrative offered no response to the injustice and harm that arose out of the wealth of new elites and the deepening subjugation, exploitation, and even sale into slavery of their dependents.
People needed to explain misfortune; they grasped for concepts that dealt with the global violence that challenged old relationships between people and the land. Destructive emotions of jealousy and anger were not sufficient to explain changes in the visible world. A new concept of evil became a convincing way to view the world; such evil had made people cruel and unjust. The Crocodile Clan could not control this roaming anger-cum-evil, in the wind, in wild animals, in slave traders, in disturbed ancestral shades, and in themselves. Many, even at times the Crocodile Clan (especially during war), turned to local specialists, such as the shinganga’s manipulation of bwanga. These specialists helped and healed, but, like the Crocodile Clan, they did not offer any lasting solutions to the scale of destructive change. People searched for collective ways to solve the problem of evil; they looked for the solar hero, Luchele Ng’anga, to lead them to a new dawn. And they became intrigued by the stories of a few strangers who roamed across Bembaland and spoke of eternal deliverance from the sin of witchcraft and the evil of Satan.
2 Christian Witches
In the early 1930s, the Roman Catholic missionary society of the White Fathers applied to open a mission in the Crocodile Clan chief Nkula’s area, around twelve miles from the already established Protestant mission of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland at Lubwa. Since the land was designated “Native Trust,” Nkula had to approve the White Fathers’ application before the colonial administration would agree to the mission. Nkula refused. He did not want the Catholics to open a mission in his chieftaincy, and especially not near his own village. At first glance, Nkula’s denial of permission for the White Fathers to build a mission seems strange. The White Fathers founding Bembaland missionary, Bishop Joseph Dupont, had boasted of his good relationship with the Crocodile Clan chiefs and had tried to cultivate a “Christian Kingdom” among the Bemba, at one point even claiming to inherit the Crocodile Clan royal title, Mwamba. Six missions had already been established near the Bemba heartland and another four on the periphery. The sacraments of the White Father held broad appeal; a significant proportion of the Bemba had been baptized. Nkula was quite accustomed to Catholics in his community. He was not a Christian and held no particular loyalty toward the nearby Presbyterian Lubwa Mission, a rival of the Catholics. Surely, the mission would bring employment, education, and medical resources, even if Nkula was not affiliated with the church. Yet Nkula was insistent in his refusal to allow the White Fathers mission. Then, quite suddenly, he changed his mind and agreed to the mission. If his initial refusal seems strange, his change of mind appears even more inexplicable.
Nkula’s decisions took place in the midst of a changing spiritual politics. Christian missionaries and prophets advocated doctrines that talked about the pervasiveness of