Invisible Agents. David M. Gordon
of local ancestors with Luba sacred royalty, creating a new form of leadership, the mfumu (usually translated as “chief”).114 Such a secular political interpretation has been developed by Andrew Roberts, who wrote the still-unrivaled account of the precolonial history of the Bemba, and discusses the oral tradition as a founding political charter that establishes a relationship of dominance of the migrating Crocodile Clan over the autochthons. The story has no greater historical relevance for Roberts. However, that it remained a political charter through the nineteenth century, was so popular, and took on such a generic form, so similar to the many narratives of the south-central African interior, indicates the centrality of the story to Bemba consciousness during this time period.
The Bemba oral tradition is distinctive from the generic Luba oral tradition in one important way. The Luba genesis narrative features Nkongolo as the uncivilized king who is overcome by the foreigners (the hunter Mbidi Kiluwe and his sons) who bring sacred kingship. The Bemba oral tradition, by contrast, places emphasis on autochthonous spiritual powers by claiming that sacred governance was present in the form of the sacred mulopwe kings before the arrival of Chitimukulu.115 The claims of divine kingship were thus not sufficient to legitimize Chitimukulu’s rule; he had to join the sacred principles of kingship with the powers of the local owners of the land. He did this by first having sex with a local woman, then being killed by her husband, and finally being buried in the earth. In his burial, the king became part of the land and a local ancestral spirit. Even while they killed the autochthons, the Crocodile Clan royals died at their hands. For they could then claim to have conquered and succumbed, both of which were necessary to become the ancestors, the mipashi (sing. mupashi) of the land.
Throughout the Bemba oral tradition, there is reference to powers of the sky and the earth, along with attempts to bring about a new dawn by joining the sky with the earth. Perhaps, like a millenarian Christian movement, these represented efforts to create heaven on earth. For Luc de Heusch, this aspect of the oral tradition explores structural oppositions between sun and earth, civilization and savagery, which informed Bemba cosmology. The dangerous but necessary attempts to join the spirits above and below, the sky and the earth, as in the liminal moments of dawn, are indeed evident throughout the oral tradition: from the Crocodile Clan’s failed adolescent attempts to reach their celestial mother’s homeland to their migration led by the solar hero Luchele Ng’anga toward the rising sun in the east, and finally their death and burial, in which the Crocodile Clan established their celestial connections through being dried by the sun’s rays and thus bringing the sun down to earth.116 Documentary evidence from the nineteenth century provides some support for this ambitious symbolic interpretation. In 1868, Livingstone was told that the Bemba believe in “Reza above [Lesa, or “God”], who kills people, and Reza below, who carries them away after death.”117 Bemba cosmology associated ancestral spirits, mipashi, with the earth below, panshi, where the ancestors are buried (even while the etymology of –pashi and panshi may be distinct). Nature spirits, ngulu, by contrast, refer to the sky above (–ulu).118The opposition of spiritual forces from above and below may have ancient roots in Bantu-speaking societies: objects of power, such as minkisi from the western Bantu-speaking Kongo, were also known to come from above or below.119
The symbolism needs to be supplemented with the more mundane and emotional aspects that made the story all the more gripping and significant for listeners. Sex, jealousy, and death are all age-old sources of fascination for storytellers and their listeners. The narrative is an emotional tragedy that describes a family feud, the fleeing of sons, exile, an illicit desire, and an adulterous relationship that leads to death and revenge and—more death. What is interesting—and constrasts with secular emotional tragedies that unfold due to the mysterious and fatalistic qualities of “love”—is how linked emotions are to spiritual forces: love and seduction to the spiritual and ritual forces that promote fertility; jealousy and anger to the witchcraft that kills Chiti and Nkole. Chilimbulu seduces (and perhaps bewitches) Chiti with her scarified skin. This same magical and beguiling skin was then used to bless the land. The skin relic brings about fertility, a mysterious power that referred to the water monitor (mbulu), a secretive and strange creature.120Mwase, the jealous husband, fights with Chiti over Chilimbulu, and kills him with his magic. Even in death, his witchcraft kills Nkole. Such is the power of love and of jealousy—it inspires fertility and it inspires death. Only through rituals were such passions contained and made productive for health and wealth. Like Jesus Christ, Chiti died for his people. However, his passion, unlike Christ’s, was anything but ascetic. It was ignited by the body of Chilimbulu and had to be controlled by the Crocodile Clan ancestors.
In this oral tradition, then, we have some early evidence of the governance of spiritual emotions, which lead to reproduction and fertility or to death. Rulers needed to channel and deal with such dangerous emotions, and if death resulted, they had to know proper mortuary rites, so as to prevent the unruly behavior by dissatisfied ancestors (hence the detailed focus on the way Chiti and Nkole were buried).121 The political charter legitimized the Crocodile Clan patriarchs’ claims to harness the spiritual emotions: if emotions were calmed and directed, they could lead to fertility and reproduction; jealousy, on the other hand, led to death, the consequences of which could be dealt with only through prescribed rituals.
royal ancestral spirits
and local nature spirits
The division between ngulu nature spirits and mipashi ancestral spirits further illustrates the ways that the Crocodile Clan governed spiritual emotions. Ngulu were old spirits that were said to exist prior to the rise of the Bemba polity.122 They were independent of people, sometimes manifest in wild animals or natural sites. Throughout the region, such ngulu inspired spiritual emotions. When they possessed people, they had very physical effects, including emission of rhythmic whimpers (ukusemuka), as well as a form of glossolalia or prophecy (ukusesema). At times they inspired those possessed to dance.123
Mipashi, by contrast, were the ancestral spirits of the dead, freed from their corporeal form. Mipashi could control phenomena in the natural world, and at times they inspired people to act in certain ways. It was most important that an ancestral mupashi return to its original clan. A newborn baby cried until an ancestral mipashi had possessed and given the baby a name. However, after a death of one partner in marriage, the most intimate of emotional relationships, something of the dead remained in the grieving spouse: that something was the mupashi spirit. It had to return to the original clan, and that was why a partner had to be “married” (or cleansed by sex) with a member of the dead spouse’s clan.124
Within the Bemba polity, as well as the related eastern Lunda, royal clans claimed that their ancestral mipashi replaced the emotional ngulu spirit possession of commoners. The ancestors of humans achieved dominance over the spirits of nature. At least in the political heartland of the Bemba, non-chiefly ancestors and ngulu spirits became relatively marginal. The Crocodile Clan could not be possessed by ngulu and directed veneration toward their ancestors instead.125 The ancestral mipashi of royalty calmed people, displacing the turbulence that ngulu inspired.
Among non–Crocodile Clan commoners, however, alternative spiritual formulations proliferated. Spiritual emotions were dealt with primarily at the local level. The head of a family, clan, or village had personal shrines, mfuba, either in the individual houses, at the foot of a bed, where their personal ancestors resided, or in or near sacred points in the village in miniature hut shrines. In 1868 Livingstone found such shrines in villages across the northern plateau. Places of veneration were also found in old burial grounds.126 Termite mounds were the most sacred of burial sites, the “church of the ancestors.”127 The Crocodile Clan attempted to appropriate and innovate this local spiritual governance. By being buried under a termite mound, Nkole and Chiti could become the ancestral archetype. The politico-religious Crocodile Clan constellation oriented itself around these existing quotidian spiritual forms by offering a centralized polity that dealt with the emotional turmoil of family and collective economic ventures such as hunting and agriculture.
In addition to local ancestral shrines, people made use of the supernatural agency of objects to combat and to harness spiritual emotions. If used in the right fashion, many objects had the potential to affect nature and people. Bwanga, commonly translated as “magic,” more accurately refers to the power of objects used for a required purpose, ranging from bravery and success