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C H R I S T I A N M I S S I O N A R I E S AS A N T I C O L O N I A L M I L I T A N T S

KAREN E. FIELDS

It is an ancient paradox of Christian otherworldliness that, because congrega- tions of believers must be organized in this world, accommodations have been

reached with all kinds of political regimes. Christian missionaries in British colonial Africa were no exception: they made peace with colonial domina- tion - and all its attendant inequities - to make war on "heathenism". The

colonial histories of Malawi (Nyasaland-) and Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) illustrate both the peace and the war. Imperialist voices such as that of David

Livingstone loudly proclaimed the missionary accommodation to Empire and thereby encouraged the view that the accommodation was unambiguous,

with a spiritual colonization naturally seconding the political one. But mis-

sionaries also subverted colonial political arrangements. Their determined

assault upon customary religious observance had as its inevitable consequence

an equally determined assault on customary authority. The missionaries' evangelistic war against "heathenism" amounted to a militant and concerted

campaign against colonial law and order.

The British colonial machinery pressed African customary rulers into the ser-

vice of the Empire. The well-known principle of "indirect rule" provided a

two-tiered structure, in which black and white rulers worked in separate but

necessarily interdependent spheres. The administration would transfer to

African rulers many of the tasks of the new colonial state - tax collection,

census, public works, law enforcement, and, gradually, others. At the same

time, in all respects consistent with the sovereignty of the British Crown and

"not repugnant to British law and custom," the old hierarchy would be

preserved in the villages with the blessing and support of the regime. Accord- ing to Leo Marquard, an enthusiastic observer who wrote in 1931, indirect rule might "almost be described as the theory of self-determination as applied to Native Tribes." It seemed to him "a positive theory of government based on the assumption that sound administration rests on the traditions of the people." 1 The colonial regime intended to channel for its own purposes the

Department of Sociology, Brandeis University.

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ligitimate authority it lacked but that customary rulers possessed. And it was

prepared to uphold those customs that went with the exercise of legitimate chiefly authority. According to Lord Frederick Lugard, the famous theoreti- cian of indirect rule, there was to be

rule by native chiefs, unfettered in their control of their people as regards those matters which are to them the most important attributes of rule, with scope for ini- tiative and responsibility, but admittedly - as far as the visible horizon is con- cerned - subordinate to the control of the Protecting Power in certain well-defined directions. 2

By "the most important attributes of rule" Lugard assuredly did not mean the right to enact laws, levy taxes, try capital crimes, coin money, or raise

armies. He meant "native law and custom," so long as they neither conflicted with the Crown's sovereignty nor scandalized British notions of justice. In this way African custom acquired a definite political role in colonial arrange-

ments. The hallmark of mission work was the attack upon "heathenism," the

missionaries' term for wide ranges of African custom. Although the mission- aries might serve colonial power by mediating the spread of Western culture

or by giving imperialism a humanitarian face, they could not simply snap into

position side by side with the grass-roots institutions of indirect rule. The political success of these institutions presupposed the continuing validity of

African custom; missionary success would mean its disappearance. In a sys- tem that strove to maintain African village life much as it had been before

colonial rule, changing it slowly and building upon its hierarchy, the missions

remained an anomaly.

Mission Christianity, by deliberate plan, corroded African village life. Its Gospel included such tangibles as Lancashire cotton, cash crops, red-brick

houses, Western medicine, tombstones, books, and money. The intangibles pertained not only to Christianity's transcendent God, but also to individual-

ism, formal schooling, the nuclear family, middle-class values and virtues, skilled trades, and ambition. All had religious meaning. Christian conversion

aimed at a cultural, as well as a religious, conversion. As missionaries were fond of saying, the converted "set themselves apart"; they "declared .for a completely changed life". 3 Reverend Robert Laws of Livingstonia Mission boasted that because a good Christian artisan could easily surpass a non-

Christian chief in wealth and personal attainment, he would speedily displace the chief as a model for the people. 4

Missions sought to create conditions to effect the total conversion of individ- uals. When possible they transplanted young pupils onto mission soil to cut them off from village influences and thus prepare them for their future role

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as witnesses to a "completely changed life". Toward this end Livingstonia

Mission campaigned to have indenture laws passed in Malawi. s African

pupils might then be kept in long association with their Christian mentors.

Livingstonia generously provided haven to fugitives and ex-slaves, as well

as to other people with little motivation to return to their homes. 6 Converts

transformed by their experience on Christian soil would then be sent forth

to become foreign elements in non-Christian villages - in but not o f them. It

is easy to be misled by the manner in which British officials talked about

indirect rule. Following Lugard, they would refer to African customary rulers

as "mouthpieces" and "intermediaries," forgetting that these rulers were only

useful so long as they had authority of their own.

As elsewhere, Africans in colonial Zambia were mobilized en masse during

World War II. Some were called into the armed forces, others into war-con-

nected work. Ordinary villagers were pressed to grow supplementary food

supplies to meet the needs of urban workers in industrial enterprises. They

were even invited to invest their cash savings in bonds and to take part in a

Food for Britain campaign at the end of the war. 7 In rural localities the bur-

den of executing these various projects - and of meeting resistance to them -

fell upon the shoulders of chiefs and headmen. One chief, a certain Mulendema,

protested to the local District Commissioner that members of the Watch-

tower sect were making it difficult for him to carry out his orders. The

Watchtower, he began, is "agitating our sons":

We do not like it, sir, together with all our headmen who replied the same word, "we do not like it at a l l . " . . . . The reasons why we do not like it are these - 1) they have not help to government, they do not offer themselves for war work; 2) they do not respect their country and their chiefs; 3) they send women on long jour- neys to preach without the consent of their husbands; 4) they do not keep well their dead relatives, s

It would appear at first glance that Mulendema has put together disparate

complaints in an old man's rambling discontent with changing times. It is not

immediately obvious that young men's failure to revere dead relatives, or

young women's exercise of new independence, has much to do with the

orders of the colonial administration. But Mulendema has affirmed their inter-

connection, associating them with proper respect to himself. He was right:

The colonial regime needed Mulendema and his colleagues not only as execu- tive agents, but as defenders of customary piety - the ideological grounding

on which their own authority over their customary subjects depended. If

customary superiors could not compel a man to honor his elders, including

deceased members of his lineage, how could they compel him to do anything

else? Refusal to do war work and "keep dead relatives" were manifestations of a single problem of authority.

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Lugard saw these matters in their correct perspective when he wrote, "The profession of any creed . . . shall in no way absolve the convert from obedi- ence to customary rulers, or from the observance of native law and custom, when not repugnant to his conscience. ' '9 tie recognized that because African

custom and the execution of colonial policies could not be separated, impiety could become sedition, the fll effects of which could go far beyond offending the old-fashioned sensitivities of traditionalist chiefs. Hence, administrators engaged in surprising activities. In the Southern Province of Zambia, for example, they struggled to enforce wives' obedience to their husbands and uphold various rituals of rule; in the Northern Province they defended the integrity of the Bembas' royal burial grovesj ~ In short, colonial officials acquired a lively interest in indigenous customs, and even a genuine respect for them. Indirect rule took them a long way from the primitive hostility with which they had first viewed Africa's "heathen despots".

Whereas administrators had responsibility for the maintenance of order in vast territories, missionaries needed only to keep order among the Christian faithful. Anyone who disturbed this order by, as they put it, "reverting to heathenism," had only to be excommunicated. 11 But officials had to be more pragmatic about the speed with which they tried to carry forward the "civi- lizing" mission. When local politics required it, they were prepared, for example, to restore to chiefs the customary labor service they had at first regarded as a form of slavery. Indeed, they were prepared to qualify their attitudes toward witchcraft. Mulendema's troubles with the Watchtower sect, a millenarian breakaway movement, had wider significance. It has become so commonplace to view groups like the Watchtower as outstanding trouble- makers that their kinship with conservative missions is often missed. Break-

away movements were in many respects the true spiritual offspring of ordi- nary Christian missions. Attitudes toward funeral custom provide many cases in point, for like Watchtower groups, ordinary missions were forever vigilant against customs that smacked of ancestor worship.

Monica Wilson informs us that the Berlin Missionary Society in Tanzania demanded that African Christians refuse to make an obligatory contribution of food to their chiefs when a relative died) 2 Demanding that converts over- come the fear of supernatural punishment, missionaries believed that converts would manifest shining belief in the superiority of their new God. They understood that chiefs' ascendency in the religious sphere could not easily be separated from their right to command in other spheres. Thus, writes Wilson, when a non-Christian chief sent out a request for roadworkers to Christian and non-Christian subjects alike, the local missionary himself went to the dis- trict boma (administrative headquarters) to complain. He apparently under- stood that authority in one sphere implied authority in the other.

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Christianity gave people principled grounds for denying customary obliga- tions of all kinds - arranged marriages, prescribed remarriages, customary labor. That such obligations had supernatural sanction did not mean they might not be onerous or irksome, or that people would let pass the opportu- nity to be free of them. A Bemba, refusing to fulfill a customary labor obliga- tion, gave this classic expression when he told the anthropologist Audrey Richards: "I am a Christian. I don't do things for nothing. ''13 Christian belief

could also be appealed to against the demands of the colonial regime. Seventh Day Adventists, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Watchtower adherents alike preached pacifism during World War II, on the principled grounds of the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." Scoffing at the Watch- tower pacifists, Isaac Muwamba commented to an official, "They do not say that because they want to be good Christians. They only want to avoid death by being killed. ''14 Whatever the motivation, the very possibility of an appeal to conscience beyond wordly authority, an integral part of all Christian teach-

ing, was subversive in itself.

It is curious how seldom genuine missionary activism against customary authority is recognized for what it was, and in its full ramifications. Mission- ary subversion seems to have been most clearly heard when uttered by mem- bers of breakaway sects. Yet, the missionary assault upon customary authority

was continual, and conflicts between missionaries and administrators sensitive to breach of custom were commonplace. African evangelists employed by missions were notorious radicals who did not hesitate to scandalize village opinion by destroying ancestor shrines, breaking ceremonial beer pots, dis- rupting communal rituals, insulting and disobeying "heathen" elders, and aggressively advertising and displaying the material advantages of mission

membership. Because such activities were already common, officials prohib- ited Livingstonia from sending evangelists into the Chinsali District of Zambia in the early years of this century. Chinsali was the chiefdom of the official burier of the Bemba kings and site of the sacred burial groves, and adminis- trators feared large-scale rioting if Christian evangelists began work there) s Despite strict prohibition, evangelists led by David Kaunda (father of the President of Zambia) entered the area in 1904 or 1905. Given that Kaunda remained in the good graces of Livingstonia, which eventually promoted him to pastor, it is obvious that missionaries felt themselves subject to an author- ity higher than that of the terrestrial regime. 16

Believing that Christian evangelists, operating far from mission centers, were causing havoc in the villages, administrators demanded that they be placed under "adequate supervision". The Native School Ordinance of 1908, revised in 1915 and many times subsequently, was the outcome. But the missions,

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with limited resources, could not provide the close oversight that the Ordi- nance envisaged. Like the regime, the missions had quickly resorted to their own version of indirect rule for the same reason: they had few workers rela- tive to the task they undertook. According to one estimate, during the first decade of the twentieth century each of Livingstonia's mission stations claimed spiritual jurisdiction over 40,000 to 100,000 people. 17 Missions could

only succeed by depending heavily on African initiative. Thus evangelist- teachers, products of the intensive program at the mission centers, traveled widely, opening schools, holding services, preparing new candidates for bap- tism, and finding new talent. The congregation founded by Mr. Kaunda, for example, acquired a Missionary-in-Charge only in 1913. By that time some

twenty schools already existed. The schools, together with the congregation, were managed without white supervision for fully eight years. TM

The Native Schools Ordinance was revised repeatedly to spell out what the administration meant by "adequate supervision" of African evangelist- teachers. 19 Naturally, the missions themselves subscribed to the principle, but to them the advantages of spreading the Christian net far and wide usually outweighed the disadvantages of occasional trouble. If confronted with the choice between non-Christian order and Christian disorder, they were pre- pared to accept the latter without hesitation. When in 1915 the administra- tion revised the Ordinance to require a large increase in the proportion of European to African teachers, Reverend Walter Elmslie declared his readiness

to violate an "intolerable" law. The law meant either that missions would have to bear the higher cost of employing white teachers or they would have to withdraw practicing black teachers from the field. Wrote Elmslie: "The spread of the Gospel has been by the life and testimony of those whose hearts have been changed and we cannot admit any rule which would shut the mouth of a Christian who desires to lead others to Christ. ''2~ Elmslie and his colleagues at Livingstonia then proceeded solemnly to ignore the new enact- ment. Missionaries and administrators never saw eye to eye on the matter of adequate supervision.

Missionaries did not always agree with administrators about which acts by evangelists were excesses meriting punishment. The immediate stimulus for enacting the Native Schools Ordinance in 1908 was a violent confrontation between a young evangelist and a village headman. The headman flogged the youth and his colleague for speaking and acting "disrespectfully". For his part, the youth claimed that he had only resisted the headman's efforts to stop his preaching. When the events had been reported, the youth's super- visor, the Rev. Mr. Prentice of Livingstonia, defended the youth. There fol- lowed an acrimonious exchange of correspondence. The missionary upheld

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the youth's right to preach and condemned the headman's action: the official

insisted that it would shortly be impossible to keep order if white men abet-

ted young African "scoundrels". z~ Freely admitting that their teachers were sometimes overbearing, intolerant, arrogant, and high-handed, missionaries were disinclined to judge harshly when their teachers' opponents were old men who sought to retard the advance of the Christian Message. And they were prepared to shed few tears for the demise of customary order. Writing about the efforts of village headmen to obstruct hearers' classes, the Rev.

Mr. Henderson admitted that "the new teaching tends to sweep aside before it is able to make adequate compensations, customs not in any way wrong but apparently childish, which nevertheless are the real bonds of native society and the main safeguards of its moral code." But, he continued, "To attribute [weight] generally to considerations of this nature would be a great stretch of generosity. ''22

As these remarks of Reverend Henderson intimate, missionaries in person might be quite as dangerous to law and order as the black men (and occasion- ally women) whom they recruited as their proxies. 23 In the Northern Province of Zambia, for example, there was for years a running feud between (Catholic) White Father missionaries and the regime on the matter of divorce. 24 The Fathers opposed it. When authorized African judges accorded divorces to converts, the Fathers moved to overrule them. While officials could appreci-

ate the religious principle, they also understood the serious political issue at stake. In societies organized on the basis of kinship, marriage and divorce engage important public interests; they are not merely private, domestic mat- ters. Marital discord could disturb the peace of a whole village community

and might extend far beyond into the respective kin groups of the partners. The regulation of marriage and divorce constituted an integral part of the maintenance of law and order. And because enforcement fell to customary authorities, missionaries' interference with it was, as administrators quickly

recognized, a far-reaching political act. 2s Thus the men concerned with over- seeing the peace had to block the White Fathers' pursuit of religious ideals.

Sometimes missionaries' radicalism came in the guise of accommodation to Empire. They sought in various ways to overrule those village headmen and elders who refused to permit evangelists to preach and to organize classes. Opposing young upstarts from the missions, headmen and elders sought to protect both their religion and their power. But faced with this opposition, missionaries tended to think of these men as wholly selfish, as well as igno- rant, superstitious, "beer-bloated" (a favorite phrase of teetotalling Protestant sects), and "lascivious" (i.e., polygamous). Launching an all-out invasion into these moral depths seemed fully justified, with all means fair. One expedient

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was to appear in person and use, as Reverend Donald Fraser put it, "the pres- tige of his white face," to overcome resistance. 26 Parading in this special uni-

form of the Empire could be effective because villagers generally assumed

that mission and boma were kith and kin, and that missionaries did whatever

they did with the blessing of the regime. A variant of Fraser's tactic was to

summon a chief or headman to the mission to "speak to him," just as local

officials summoned these men to the boma for instructions and discipline, z7

Here then was radicalism of a peculiar kind. It consisted in using the prestige

of the colonial state to advance teaching that would presently free men and

women from the moral authority of customary religion and from the political

authority it justified.

To appreciate fully the import of missionary radicalism, we must keep in

mind the nature of indirect rule and of customary rulers' place within it. The village headman was, to use Max Gluckman's phrase, the "non-commissioned officer ''28 of the Empire. Along with chief and elder, he carried the burden of

keeping the Pax Britannica in the villages. Through this efforts the work of

administration was done in rural areas. Through him His Majesty spoke the local vernacular. But indirect rule was not simply a matter of passing "mod- ern" duties into the hands of indigenous leaders. It provided for their con-

tinued performance of old-fashioned ones. Above all it strove to maintain

customary controls on the behavior of individuals. The Pax Britannica, as

enforced by African rulers, comprised both the Crown's law and order and customary law and order. Not anxious to have the full burden of ruling

"directly" thrust upon them, clear-sighted imperialists speedily grasped the point. As early as 1909 the nightmare vision of having the rule directly had

already come to a British governor, Girouard, whom Lugard quotes in his

treatise on indirect rule. After noting that "various agencies" were "breaking

down the tribal system, denationalizing the native, and emancipating him from the rule of this chief," Girouard continued:

If we allow tribal authority to be ignored or broken it will mean that we, who numer- ically form a small minority in the country, shall be obliged to deal with a rabble, with thousands of persons in a savage or semi-savage state, all acting on their own impulses, and making themselves a danger to society generally.29

Commenting after World War I on the decline of "respect for tribal author- ity," Justice P. J. Macdonnell used apocalyptic language: he "saw the abyss opening". 3~ (It will surprise no one to learn that Macdonnell's plan for closing the "abyss" included revisions in the Native Schools Ordinance designed to make it easier for headmen to reject the services of Christian teachers.) Book after book about indirect rule contains such expressions as: "But all real

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power remained in the hands of the colonial authorities," or worse, "in the

hands of the British Monarch" and similar confusions of legal formulation

with political fact. Quite the contrary, the authorities and the Crown derived power from the customary order; and they derived it not in the legal sense

but in a political one. When a District Commissioner reported year after year,

on the basis of an annual or biannual tour to a locality, that all was orderly, he was not reporting on his own doing - whatever the mystique of Empire led him to believe. For the rural masses, most of the time, and in most aspects

of day-to-day life, white officials could not and did not rule.

Failure to recognize that customary rulers remained, necessarily, real rulers

leads to misreading the extent of missions' accommodation to the political

requirements of colonial domination. While officials acquired some of the "respect for tribal authority" which they enjoined upon the African masses,

missionaries remained intent on their battles against "heathenism". They

were among Girouard's "various agencies" that were injecting foreign bodies

into the "tribal systems," which Girouard and the other technicians of indi- rect rule labored to keep in good working order. This primary concern with order generated what might be called a "politics of custom" - a set of trans-

actions and adjustments designed to harness local beliefs and practices to give His Majesty power, even in remote villages. The term "politics" may appear

inappropriate. For most of the colonial period, the regime recognized no

African politics as such. Officials spoke instead of "native administration" and fell back on the language of bureaucracy. (Thus they spoke of the "per-

formance" of chiefs, "employees" of the administration, as "competent" or

"inefficient." As Karl Mannheim said so well, "The inherent tendency of all bureaucratic thought is to transform problems of politics into problems of

administration. ''31) But if when we speak of "politics" we refer to contests over the ultimate deployment of legitimate authority in a population, 32 then

indirect rule demanded a vigorous politics within the customary order.

Because the regime was a consumer of some of the power generated here, the

"politics of custom" regularly drew officials in. A substantial part of their

behavior cannot be explained in other terms. One example must suffice: the

astonishing way in which administrators could be led to modify their views about custom, even on such matters as witchcraft.

At first administrators stood with missionaries in a common unbelief in witchcraft and in a common hostility to the practices associated with its con- trol in African societies. After the passage of the Witchcraft Ordinance of 1914 in Zambia (1911 in Malawi), they operated in a legal context that pro- hibited the indictment and prosecution of witches. 33 Thus administrators soon found themselves arresting chiefs and village headmen for undertaking

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such prosecutions illegally - as well as arresting villagers who, vigilante-like, did what their own law enforcement agencies were no longer authorized to do. But the practical logic of indirect rule could lead white officials to moder- ate this policy. In the mid-1930s a huge anti-witchcraft movement, called the

Mucapi Movement, spread rapidly through Malawi, Zambia, and parts of

neighboring territories. The essence of the Mucapi Movement was to organize

the surrender of medicines and magical objects during large communal rituals.

Witches would confess, and all would drink the mucapi medicine together, so that they would henceforth be invulnerable to witchcraft. Missionaries were

deeply disturbed by a movement that drew Christians away from the rituals

of their new faith. Administrators, however, were disturbed by this new,

large-scale violation of the Witchcraft Ordinance, for the movement swept

through huge areas at an amazing speed. Some administrators soon noticed that many chiefs gave the Bamucapi medicine men their wholehearted sup-

port - even chiefs whom they had become accustomed to calling "loyal,"

"responsible," and "competent". In a curious chain of developments, the

regimes of Malawi and Zambia decided to tolerate the Bamucapi rather than

to arrest and prosecute them, despite their evident violation of the law. 34

Remarkable as this step was, it grew directly from the effort to maintain law

and order.

Officials were in a delicate position. Trying at first to arrest and prosecute the Bamucapi, they soon recognized that the logistical problem of arresting the

men exceeded their resources. The Bamucapi carefully skirted mission and

borna, concentrating on the villages, moving swiftly from one village to the next. Arresting them would have required the active cooperation of villagers and local leaders. But villagers usually failed to inform the authorities of these

visits, and the first word received at the boma typically came long after the Mucapi had done his work and moved on. Thus the officials could at best

hope for a few arrests carried out haphazardly. It became clear that any attempt to crush the Mucapi Movement systematically was bound to fail. Thoughtful men pondered the ramifications of trying hard to enforce existing

law and failing in full view of all the villagers. The immense popularity of the

rnucapi medicine among the villagers raised the stakes higher. While yielding no significant result, isolated arrests would generate much ill will. And com- plicating further the problem of ill will, the villages were full of restless young men whom the Great Depression had thrown out of work in the urban cen- ters. For all these reasons, when officials saw that chiefs whose abilities they had come to count on were determined to bring the Bamucapi into their chiefdoms, they had to pay attention.

The chiefs' position was as delicate as that of the officials. Custom provided

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that they should be responsible for the control of crime, including witch-

craft, so as to protect the health and well-being of their people. The Witch-

craft Ordinance prevented their acting officially in their own right, but the

Bamucapi provided the oppor tuni ty to offer a service in popular demand.

Few serious politicians anywhere would lightly let such an oppor tuni ty pass.

Insofar as the early efforts to prosecute required their help, these efforts must

have been an embarrassment. For if chiefs could enhance their populari ty by

accepting the Bamucapi, equally they could do themselves incalculable politi-

cal harm by appearing to stand in the way of men determined to help the

people. Richard Stuart reports that some reluctant chiefs in Malawi were

actually pressed by their people to cooperate in the distribution of the

rnucapi. As he puts it, they "had to appear to take the lead". 3s Opposing the

rnucapi medicine could easily appear as favoring witchcraft. For these and

other reasons, chiefs supplied officials with favorable reports about the

Bamucapi and their medicine. The officials responded, after considerable dis-

cussion and correspondence, by according to the Bamucapi a "watchful toler-

ance" while holding the chiefs responsible for any violence that might result

from the medicine men's work.

F. H. Melland, District Commissioner in one of the areas affected by the

Mucapi Movement, published in 1935 a remarkable paper enti t led "Ethical

and Political Aspects of African Witchcraft ." He contended that it was neces-

sary, if indirect rule was to work, that customary rulers be allowed to protect

their subjects against witchcraft , as custom demanded:

It is not recognized that in this system of indirect rule we are making the position untenable. We tell headman to try cases, but not when they refer to a non-existent thing like witchcraft, the greatest evil in all their eyes. We tell the people to listen to their headmen and abhor the witchdoctor. The two may be one and the same! . . . Even when they are not the sub rosa trial will take place . . . . As regards this particular matter we have put the headman in an impossible position, and that is ethically wrong while politically it is a very serious introduction of "foreign matter" into the machinery we have established. 36

This logic led Melland to suggest that administrators not only permit witch-

craft eradication, but also that they seek actively to cooperate with witch~

finders. And he made the extraordinary assertion that there are "better-class"

witchdoctors, with whom Britons ought to make common cause:

Everyone who has intimate knowledge of such matters knows that the word of a witchdoctor has infinitely more weight with the majority of Africans than that of an official or missionary. Is it not common sense that we should make an alliance with him - get the use of his power [ ! ] and of his services? From personal experience in individual cases, I have found that the better-class witchdoctor can so cooperate and is perfectly willing to do so. 3~

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These suggestions belie the simplistic view that indirect rule transformed cus- tomary rulers into mere "mouthpieces" of the colonial administration.

They show in what direction the practical logic of indirect rule could lead. What was good for the practice of indirect rule was not always good for mis-

sion evangelism - and vice versa. The "foreign" matter to which Melland

referred was being ground into the machinery of the regime by the missions

as well as by the Witchcraft Ordinance. Missions had their own Christian rea-

sons for denying the right and responsibility of customary rulers to protect all

their people from witchcraft. On this issue the missionaries obviously could not afford to make concessions in the interest of colonial law and order. To

be sure, an occasional missionary had the boldness of a Melland. The Rev.

Mr. Fraser of Livingstonia is reported on one occasion to have used tech-

niques like those of the Bamucapi, inviting his congregration to bring their

medicines and magical objects to church. 38 But by and large such adaptations

could not become widespread or open practice in the missions, even though many African Christians did not accept the missionaries' attitude toward

witchcraft as reasonable. Indeed, one of the reasons commonly given for the success of various breakaway churches is their freedom to take into account

indigenous conceptions of sin.

Thus, missionary accommodation to colonial rule was far from straight-

forward. Men and women who left for the African missions in the late nine-

teenth century could dream of the overthrow of "heathen" and "despotic" chiefs by the ever-growing legions of converts they would raise. They had no

way of knowing that these same "despots" would presently be converted by

indirect rule into line officers of His Majesty's power. But even after they had learned better, they could hardly change their viewpoint and remain mission- aries: The triumph of Christianity over "heathenism" remained their fore-

most ambition, but "heathenism" supported rule within the customary order. Missionaries had to part company with the colonial regime on the matter

of custom. To the missions custom was a stumbling block, to the regime a prop. Attacking custom, therefore, missionaries attacked indirect rule at its

foundation.

NOTES

1. Leo Marquard, "The Problem of Government," in J. Merle Davis, ed., Modern Industry and the African: An Enquiry into the Effect of the Copper Mines of Cen- tral Africa upon Native Society and the Work of Christian Missions, Made Under the Auspices of the Department of Social and Industrial Research of the Interna- tional Missionary Council (London, 1933), 251 - 252.

2. Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, 5th ed. (Hamden, Conn., 1965), 197.

3. Rev. W. Vernon Stone in a personal communication.

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4. William Pringle Livingstone, Laws of Livingstonia: A Narrative of Missionary Adventure and Enterprise (London, 1921), 377. Livingstonia was founded by the United Free Church of Scotland - a Presbyterian denomination now joined with the Church of Scotland - in honor of David Livingstone.

5. 7884, Elmslie to Smith, 141211901, National Library of Scotland; Livingstone, 275. 6. Livingstone, 176. 7. Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VII, Provincial Commissioner (Broken Hill) to Chief Secretary,

5/411943 and 16/311943; Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VI, A Muwamba to T. F. Sanford, 31/8]1940; Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VI, Tour Report (Copperbelt) to Secretary for Native Affairs, 7]1942; Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VIII, Acting Provincial Commissioner to Chief Secretary, 26/3] 1946, National Archives of Zambia.

8. Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VII, Mulendema to District Commissioner (Luangwa), 218/1942, National Archives of Zambia.

9. Lugard, 590-591. 10. Marquard, in Davis, 239; ZA 1/10 (1919-1926) , Native Commissioner (Fort

Jameson) to Magistrate, 21]7/1925; Sec/Nat 312, Vol. VI, District Commissioner (Mongu-Lealui) to Provincial Commissioner, 25/8/1935; BS1/115, Young to Wallace, 9/9/1908.

11. As one may well imagine, such expulsions could lead to agitation by disgruntled ex-members of a mission. Missions were sometimes explicitly criticized for the political difficulties that were created in this way. For a principled defense of this practice, see United Free Church Foreign Mission Committee, Report, 1909, 4, National Library of Scotland.

12. Monica Wilson, "An African Christian Morality," Africa (1937), 288-290. 13. Audrey I. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet: An Economic Survey of the Bemba

Tribe (London, 1939), 258. 14. ZA 1/10, Vol. II, I. C. Muwamba to D. MacKenzie-Kennedy, 22/6]1924, National

Archives of Zambia. 15. BS1/115, Young to Wallace, 91911908; ZA 7/1/411, Annual Report (Northern

Province, Chinsali District), 1919-1920, National Archives of Zambia. 16. W. Vernon Stone, "Livingstonia Mission and the Bemba," Bulletin of the Society

for African Church History (1968), 312-313 ,315 . 17. Livingstone, 378. 18. The first baptisms were performed in 1911, during a rare pastoral visit by the Rev.

Mr. Chisholm to the area. See Stone, 314. On African initiative, see also Kenneth John McCracken, "Livingstonia Mission and the Evolution of Malawi, 1875 - 1939," Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1967.

19. ZA 1/9/158/2, "Memo re Closing of Schools in Petauke District," National Archives of Zambia. The text of the Ordinance is included here.

20. United Free Church Foreign Mission Committee, Review of Foreign Missions (1915),43.

21. BS1]I 13, Wallace to Prentice, 10/4]1908, National Archives of Zambia. 22. United Free Church Foreign Mission Committee, Livingstonia Mission Report

(1901), 6, National Library of Scotland. 23. This language conveys the missionaries' conception that evangelists were mere

appendages of their white employers. For an interesting commentary on this out- look from an African viewpoint, see Paul Mushindo, The Life of an African Evan- gelist, with an Editorial Foreword by J. van Velsen (Lusaka: University of Zambia. Institute for African Studies, Communication no. 9, 1973).

24. Brian Garvey, "The Development of the White Fathers Mission Among the Bemba- Speaking Peoples, 1891-1964," D. Phil. diss., University of London, 1974, 115, 123. See also ZA 711/5]1, Annual Report (Northern Province, Kasama and Luwingu Districts), 1920-1921; ZA7[1]IO]I, Annual Report (Northern Province, Luwingu District), 1925-1926; ZA 7]1/15]1, Annual Report (Northern Province, Kasama District), 1931-1932; ZA 711116]5 (Northern Province, Mweru-Luapula and Kasama Districts), 1933, National Archives of Zambia. The order acquired its name from the Fathers' habit of a long white cassock and mantle. Founded by Charles Martial AUemand Lavigerie, Archbishop of Algiers and later Cardinal, it was originally called the Society of Missionaries of the Venerable Geronimo.

25. ZA 7/11311, Annual Report (Awemba Province), 1915, refers to "great mistakes" made in divorce cases by early "direct" rulers, National Archives of Zambia. See also note 24. Annual District Reports show that there was very little theft and vio- lent crime in the villages. The great preponderance of cases tried in African courts concerned marriage disputes.

26. United Free Church Foreign Mission Committee, Livingstonia Mission Report (1902), 36, National Library of Scotland.

27. BS11115, Peuth to Leyer,18/7]1910, National Archives of Zambia.

108

28. Max Gluckman, J. A. Barnes, and J. C. Mitchell, "The Village Headman in British Central Africa," Africa (1949), 89.

29. Lugard, 216. 30. ZA 1/10, Macdonnell to Administration, 5/5/1919, National Archives of Zambia. 31. Karl Mannheim, ldeology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowl-

edge (New York, 1936), 118. 32. Lugard's case for indirect rule rested on a strategy of skillful organization - poten-

tially quite cheap - rather than force, which would engender high costs. Martin Kilson has aptly called indirect rule "colonialism-on-the-cheap". See Martin L. Kilson, Political Change in a West African State: A Study in the Modernization Process (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 24.

33. For a detailed discussion of this enactment, see Geoffrey St. J. Orde Browne, "Witchcraft and British Colonial Law," Africa (1935), 481-487.

34. The medicine was called mucapL its purveyors Bamucapi (Mucapi, singular). On the Mucapi episode, see Audrey I. Richards, "A Modern Movement of Witchfinders," Africa (1935), 448-456, and Terence O. Ranger, "Mucapi and the Study of Witch- craft Eradication," paper presented to the Conference on Central African Religions (Lusaka, Zambia, 1973, mimeographed). This account is drawn mainly from ZA 1/15/M/2, National Archives of Zambia, a folio of contemporary reports, cir- culars, and correspondence. The episode is presented in greater detail in Karen E. Fields~ "Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa: Social and Political Con- sequences of Missionary Enterprise," Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1977, 106- 150.

35. Richard Stuart, "The Mucapi on Likoma Island," paper presented to the Conference on Central African Religions (Lusaka, Zambia, 1972, mimeographed), 10.

36. Frank H. Melland, "Ethical and Political Aspects of African Witchcraft," Africa (1935), 503.

37. 1bid. 38. Peter Bolink, Towards Church Union in Zambia (Sneek, The Netherlands, 1967),

108.

Acknowledgments

The author grateful ly acknowledges the suppor t o f a grant f rom the Social

Science Research Council to carry on the research on which this paper is

based.

Theory and Society 11 (1982) 85-108 0304-2421/82/0000-0000/$02.75 �9 1982 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company