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199 co ncl usion The Spirit Realm of Agency By Christian humanism, I mean that we discover all that is worth knowing about God through our fellow men and unconditional service of our fellow men is the purest form of the service of God. I believe that Man must be the servant of a vision which is bigger than himself; that his path is illumined by God’s revelation and that when he shows love towards his fellow men, he is sharing the very life of God, who is Love. When Man learns, by bitter experience if in no other way, that the only hope for peace and happiness of the world is to give political and economic expression to love for others we shall have entered not the Kingdom of Man but the Kingdom of God. —Kenneth Kaunda, 1966 On behalf of the people of Zambia, I repent of our wicked ways of idolatry, witchcraft, immorality, injustice and corruption. I pray for the healing, restoration, revival, blessing, and prosperity for Zambia. On behalf of the nation, I have now entered a covenant with the living God. . . . I submit the Government and the entire nation of Zambia to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I further declare that Zambia is a Christian Nation that will seek to be governed by the righteous principles of the Word of God. Righteousness and justice must prevail in all levels of authority, and then we shall see the righteousness of God exalting Zambia. —Frederick Chiluba, 1991 Some of the most significant political movements and moments in Zambian history—Bemba chieftaincy, Bamuchape, Watchtower, Lenshina’s church, popular nationalism, Kaunda’s humanism, and Chiluba’s reborn Christian nation—have been part of an ongoing Zambian debate about the relationships between the individual, the community, the state, and the spirits . By talking about spirits, people made sense of the worlds that enveloped their lives, and, in turn, transformed these worlds. In this regard, the ideas of Zambia’s first and second presidents, Kenneth Kaunda and Frederick Chiluba , shortly after they came to office, represent two conflicting notions of the spirit world dealt with by this book. Both were concerned with the relationship 200 w Conclusion between God and the Zambian people, but in very different ways. For Kaunda, through bitter experience people would follow God’s path in showing love toward one another. Kaunda’s humanism struggled against exploitation, greed, excess, and injustice in a moral language faithful to its Protestant roots. For Chiluba, the evil was found within, and good would come through direct spiritual intervention, “a covenant with the living God.” Chiluba made this spiritual salvation a condition for the possibility of a public utopia. In a formulation that would be familiar to Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo or even to Lenshina, Chiluba recognized that spiritual evil afflicted Zambians and promised to cleanse it. For many Zambians, Chiluba’s declaration represented an important corrective to a humanist vision that viewed spirits as populating another world, heaven and hell, which could inspire moral actions in this world but did not intervene in it directly. In precolonial forms of governance, the centrality of spirits to political rule and conflict was accepted; after all, the most important duties of government, the provision of agricultural fecundity and human fertility, rested on the relationship of the spirits to living rulers. The colonial state created a dissonance in this regard: it claimed a secular sovereignty and ruled through the “traditions ” of chiefs, which were divorced from the spirit world. To the colonial administrators who lorded over the chiefs, spiritual powers were at best a source of embarrassment and arcane anthropological interest; they had to be discouraged , repressed, sometimes prohibited, or at the very least removed from the quotidian running of the administration. In this sense, even while indirect rule seemed to give chiefs power, the chiefs were spiritually and thus politically disempowered. Christian missionaries aided in this civilizing mission. They claimed that since the world of the living was separate from the world of the dead, spirits did not inhabit and influence this world. Coming from a European tradition that sought to separate the church and state, the missionaries accepted a formal division between politics and religion, at least in theory (in practice, their local standing was tied to the colonial administration). For the missionaries , spiritual interventions, the miracles of the distant biblical past, rarely occurred, and if they did, they were performed by a chosen few within church hierarchies that excluded Africans. For...

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