CONTROVERSIAL INDIGENOUS RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS – LUMPA MISSION (PART FOUR) In my introduction to this chapter I pointed out that the Lumpa rising was a bitter disappointment for the Zambian nationalists, and a threat to their international public image. Meanwhile we have identified more profound reasons for the state’s stern reaction to Lumpa. The primary reason was, of course, that Lumpa did represent a very real threat to the state itself. Although declining and greatly harassed by conflicts with other groups in north-eastern Zambia, Lumpa represented to the end a successful peasant movement, comprising many thousands of people and binding these people in an effective organization that radically rejected state control and that was beginning to define its own infrastructure. With the years rural Lumpa did not settle down as a tolerant denomination attuned to the institutions of the wider society. Here Lumpa differs from most rural Watchtower communities founded before the Second World War. Under the mounting attacks by rural UNIP, Lumpa became increasingly intransigent vis-a-vis the outside world. Short of giving up the modern conception of the national state, or at least embarking upon a fundamental discussion of this conception, the logic of the state left no option but breaking the power of Lumpa once for all. And this is what happened. Additional reasons helped to shape the course of events. Taking the fundamental assumptions of the modern state for granted, the nationalists, once in power, proved as staunch supporters of state-enforced law and order as their colonial predecessors had ever been. A major justification for the sending of government troops was that the Lumpa adherents, in trying to create ‘a state within the state’, had become criminals. Moreover, there were tenacious rumours as to Lumpa’s links with Welensky’s United Federal Party (the nationalists’ main opponent), and with Tshombe’s secessionist movement in Zaire. So far the evidence for this allegation has been slight. It seems difficult to bring in line such political manoeuvring with the situation of the Lumpa church, which in 1963-4 increasingly entrenched itself in a retreatist and eschatological attitude. But whatever the facts, belief in these links with UNIP’s enemies appears to have influenced the UNIP-dominated government on the eve of independence. A third complex of reasons revolves around the problem of legitimation of the modern state. The following extracts from a speech of Kaunda show that the UNIP government was not merely trying to enforce its monopoly of power, but also tried to underpin its own legitimacy in the eyes of the Zambian population by presenting itself as the supreme guardian of religion and morality. Speaking about Lumpa, Kaunda says: They have become anti-society. They have been known, husband and wife, to plan to kill their own parents because they were non-Lumpa Church members and this they have done.... Innocent villagers and children trying to escape from their burning homes have been captured by the followers of Lenshina and thrown back alive into the flames. Senior men in the country’s security services have reported that the Lumpa followers have no human feelings and their ferocious attacks on security forces bear out the fanatical nature of what I can only describe again as lunatics.... I have no intention whatsoever of again unleashing such evil forces. Let me end by reiterating that my Government has no desire whatsoever to interfere with any individual’s religious beliefs but ...such a noble principle can only be respected where those charged with the spiritual, and I believe moral side of life, are sufficiently responsible to realise that freedom of worship becomes a menace and not a value when their sect commits murder and arson in the name of religion. No clean-living and thinking man can accept the Lenshina ‘Passports to Heaven’ as anything more than worthless pieces of paper a usurping by an imposter of the majesty of God Almighty. Such teaching cannot be allowed to continue to corrupt our people and cannot and would not be tolerated by any responsible government. In the context of modern Zambian society there can be little misunderstanding that here Kaunda is describing the Lumpa adherents as sorcerers, and tries to mobilise all the abhorrence that the general population feels with regard to sorcerers. Kaunda even points out, in the same passage, the need for the Lumpa members to be cleansed (as in witch-cleansing movements so popular in twentieth century Central Africa) before they can return to human society: When they have surrendered and look back at their actions, some of these people realise the horror, damage and sadness they have brought to this young nation and say plainly that they require some treatment to bring them back to sanity. They just cannot understand why they acted as they did. Kaunda presents and justifies state action in terms of religious and moral beliefs: the anti-social nature of sorcerers, and the ‘majesty of God Almighty’. These beliefs have a very strong appeal among the great majority of the modern Zambian population. By invoking them, Kaunda is in fact claiming implicitly a supreme moral and religious legitimation for his government. Yet his government has already, secularly, the fullest possible legitimacy in terms of the constitutional and democratic procedures from which its mandate derived. Why, then, this need to appeal to a religious basis for the legitimation of the Zambian state? Here we have reached the point where Lumpa illustrates the precarious situation of the modern, post-colonial state in Zambia, due to the latter’s incomplete legitimation in the eyes of a significant portion of the Zambian population. Whatever its access to means of physical coercion, the ultimate legitimation of a bureaucratic system like the state lies, in Weber’s terms, in a belief in the legality of patterns of normative rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands (legal authority). Now how does one establish and maintain such a legitimation if part of the state’s subjects are peasants for whom such an abstract, universalist ‘legal authority’, and the formal bureaucratic organizations based upon it, virtually have no meaning, in whose social experience at any rate they play no dominant part? In Zambia this problem has been duly acknowledged, if in different terms. Under the heading of ‘nation-building’, a tremendous effort has been launched along such lines as political mobilisation; youth movement; women’s movement; specific school curricula incorporating training for citizenship; rural development, etc. Populism, here in the form of the ideology of Zambian humanism, emerged as an attempt to overcome, if not to ignore, the fundamental contradictions inherent in the situation. The careful management of relations with the chiefs is part of the same effort. At the district level chiefs have retained considerable authority and state stipends, and nationally they are represented in the House of Chiefs. These arrangements (which, incidentally, strikingly contrast with the position assigned to chiefs in the Lumpa blueprint of society) constitute an attempt to incorporate rural, local foci of authority into the central government structure, so as to let the government benefit from the additional legitimation which this link with traditional authority may offer. Where this attempt fails, the state curtails the chiefs’ privileges, but such moves do not necessarily reduce the chiefs’ actual authority among the rural population. Ethnic and regional allegiances, as threats to ‘nation-building’ and as challenges, either implicit or explicit, to the supremacy of the state, are likewise denounced by the ruling elite. Lumpa, as the largest and most powerful peasant movement Zambia has yet seen, drove home the fact that large sections of the Zambian peasantry still opt out of the post-colonial national state. Lumpa antagonised precisely the grass-roots processes by which the post-colonial state expects to solve its problem of incomplete legitimation. For a national elite who find, to a great extent, in the state not only their livelihood but also the anchorage of their identity, this is a disconcerting fact, which hushing-up and ostentatious reconciliation may help to repress from consciousness. For the elite the situation is uncomfortable indeed, for the extermination of Lumpa has by no means solved the much wider problem of the incorporation of peasants into the Zambian state. New peasant movements are likely to emerge which, like Lumpa, may employ a religious idiom in an attempt to regain local control and to challenge wider incorporation. Meanwhile, given the general problem of legitimation, it is obvious that religion has a very significant role to play in Zambia and other Central African states. On the basis of a rather widespread and homogeneous cultural substratum, similar religious innovations (of the kinds I have discussed above) occurred throughout Central Africa. Sorcery beliefs and the prominence of the High God form the two main constants in the emerging supra-ethnic religious systems of modern Zambia. These two religious elements are subscribed to by virtually the entire African population of the country, no matter what various specific ritual forms and organizations the people adhere to. The process of secularisation, so marked in North Atlantic society, has not replicated itself in Central Africa - yet. Therefore, some form of appeal to this shared religious framework could provide extensive legitimation for contemporary authority structures, albeit along lines rather different from those stipulated by Weber under the heading of legal authority. For the result would be neither legal nor traditional authority, but charismatic authority. In the speech cited above, and in numerous other instances. Kaunda and other Zambian political leaders have employed a religious idiom to underpin the authority of themselves and of the state bureaucracy they represent. The situation is complicated by the existence, besides the party and the state, of specifically religious organizations, mainly in the form of Christian churches. These churches, having reached various stages in the process of the routinisation of charisma, have a rather direct access to religious legitimation. They generate a considerable social power, through their large number of adherents, the tatters’ effective organisation, loyalty, and above-average standards of education and income. Of course, the churches use their legitimating potential in the first instance for their own benefit. Therefore their social power is, at least latently, rival to that of the state and the party. Between the established Christian churches (Roman Catholic Church, United Church of Zambia, Reformed Church in Zambia, Anglican Church, etc.) and the Zambian state a not always easy, but on the whole productive, symbiosis has developed. The churches lend both their expertise and their legitimating potential to the government, in exchange for very considerable autonomy in the religious field. The settings in which this interaction takes shape include: public ceremonies in which political and religious leaders partake side by side; the implementation of ‘development’; the participation of religious leaders in governmental and party committees; and informal consultations between top-ranking political and religious leaders. An important factor in this pattern seems to be the fact that the established Zambian churches derive from North Atlantic ones which, in their countries of origin, had already solved the problem of the relation between church and state prior to missionary expansion in Africa. Even so, there have been minor clashes, and more serious ones may follow in the future. For state-church symbiosis cannot really solve the problem of the state’s incomplete legitimation in terms of legal authority. A religious underpinning of the state’s authority automatically implies enhancing the authority of the religious Organisations, which may thus come to represent, through a feed-back, an even greater challenge to the state’s authority. Ultimately, a shift towards purely legal authority for the state may require a process of ‘disenchantment’ (already noticeable among the Zambian intellectuals). Such a process would undermine the churches’ authority and would be likely to bring the latter to concerted remonstrance in one form or another. For the independent churches the situation tends to be more acutely difficult. Although it is still far too early to generalise, these independent churches seem to cater typically for Zambians in the early stages of proletarisation. The independent churches are most in evidence at the local level: the bomas and the urban compounds. The superstructural reconstruction they offer their adherents, and the extensive extra-religious impact they make on the latter’s lives (e.g., in the spheres of recreation, marriage, domestic conflict, illness, death and burial) not infrequently clash with the local party organization which often works along similar lines. Despite instances of felicitous co-operation between independent church and party at the local level, conflict remotely reminiscent of the UNIP/Lumpa feuding seems more frequent. Among the Zambian elite there is little knowledge of and less sympathy for the independent churches. Not only the party, but also the established churches tend to see them as a threat. It is therefore unlikely that the independent churches will ever be called upon, to any significant extent, to play the religiously-legitimating role which the established churches now regularly perform for the state. The Lumpa rising provides an extreme example of what form church/ state interaction can take in the context of independent churches. On the other hand, the organisational and interpretative experiments still going on in the Zambian independent churches may represent a major form of superstructural reconstruction in the decades to come with presumably profound repercussions for the state and the nationalist movement. Conclusion This chapter represents an attempt to explore the deeper structural implications of the Lumpa rising in the context of religious innovation, class formation and the state in Zambia. In presenting a tentative interpretation, my main ambition has been to highlight a number of problems, and to indicate a direction in which some answers may be found in the future. Meanwhile, many important problems have not even been mentioned in the present argument. If Lumpa was essentially a peasant movement, pursuing an idiom of religious innovation that was far from unique in the Central African context, why was it unique in its scope and historical development, and why did it occur precisely among the Bemba of north-eastern Zambia? Another important problem, that can throw light both on Lumpa and on the relations between the state and the established churches, is the development of relations between the established churches and Lumpa during and after the rising. The churches organised a rehabilitation mission right into the areas of combat, and afterwards the United Church of Zambia (into which Lubwa’s Church of Scotland had merged) even tried to win Lenshina back into its fold. As more data become available, these issues may be tackled successfully. At the moment, many essential data on the Lumpa episode are still lacking. The sociology of contemporary Zambian religion still largely remains to be written. And the whole Lumpa tragedy and its aftermath is still a cause of grief for thousands of Zambians from all walks of life. Under these circumstances, nothing but the most preliminary analysis is possible; but even such an analysis may be helpful in defining tasks, and not just academic ones, for the future. (END) *Extract from Wim van Binsbergens RELIGIOUS INNOVATION AND POLITICAL CONFLICT IN ZAMBIA
Posted on: Wed, 07 May 2014 20:26:16 +0000
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