Tonga Religious Life in the Twentieth Century

CHAPTER I. Time, Space and Language

CHAPTER I TIME, SPACE AND LANGUAGE Time, Space and Language A Definitional Problem This book deals with the religious life of Tonga-speaking peoples of southern Zambia through time. Time is the dimension that allows us to see process, and by process I do not mean a unidirectional trend. The Oxford Dictionary definition of process is that of “a state of going on or being carried on” and it is this state “of going on” with which I am concerned here along with the language in which it is expressed. Over time ideas, behaviour, and associations change, and they change in relationship to one another. As people meditate upon what they think is happening to themselves and others, try to make changes, and rethink what has happened, they come to new formulations that explain the why and how of their world and the extent to which their lives are controlled by forces which they think they may be able to influence by appropriate action, even if they cannot command them. In some contexts such thought and action is defined as science: in others it is defined as religion. Each is a way of acting and knowing that depends upon assumptions about extra-human forces that order the known world and produce change, whether change be cyclical or on-going. But religion, however else it is defined, has the very special characteristic of being person centred: it must provide some explanation not only of the stars and seasons but of variation in human fortune and the existence of both happiness and misery. My endeavor in this book may be regarded as unrealistically grandiose since I attempt to examine how Tonga-speaking people of the Southern Province of Zambia have thought about the nature of their world, the meaning of their own lives, and the sources of good and evil over the last century in which their cosmology and society have been transformed. It is this that I bring together under the rubric of religion although I am well aware that no word in ciTonga equates with the English term “religion”, and that the use of Western concepts in describing phenomena from elsewhere in the world has been derogated as a form of colonialism and as an attempt at intellectual domination that distorts local systems of knowledge. On the other hand, I am certain that Tonga-speakers fluent in English would maintain that their ancestors had a religion and that phenomena I bring together here should be included within that religion, or at least discussed in conjunction with it. They would agree with African theologians who 3 Tonga Religious Life in the Twentieth Century have pondered the thought of their own people and written of religion (Idowu 1975; Kalilombe 1999; Mbiti 1970, 1975; Muzorewa 2001). Despite the complexity of the task, I am encouraged by the precedent set me by Wendy James who has written of “the intimidating variety” of the “ritual practices, cosmological theories, and religious notions” among the Uduk of the Sudan, which seemed “to defy coherent description”, and found herself able to thread her way through the complexity by looking for integrating themes (1988:2). One Hundred Years of Change In 1890 the Tonga-speakers of Southern Province were subsistence hoe-cultivators with some stock, living in small villages surrounded by bush or high grass on the plateau and in the hills of the Zambezi escarpment and in larger villages near the alluvial soils of the Zambezi River. Even there homesteads and fields were pressed upon by bush from which emerged elephants, other game and predators which as gatherers and hunters the villagers exploited in their turn. Men and women were intimately acquainted with the resources of their immediate vicinity (Scudder 1971, 2004) and the small number of their co-residents, but to range beyond this was to venture on foreign territory and put oneself at risk. For the most part people emphasized self-sufficiency. They were both intolerant of attempts to exert authority over them and highly conscious of their vulnerability to drought, insect scourges, epidemics and raiding parties. Colonial rule, first under the British South Africa Company (18901924 ) and then under the British Colonial Office (1924-1964) brought relief from raiding neighbors and the attacks of slave raiders from the lower Zambezi or from the expanding Ndebele and Lozi states which made life precarious during the last half of the nineteenth century (Roberts 1976:136ff...