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CHAPTER I - Translating the Soul: Death and Catholicism in Northern Zambia
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CHAPTER I Translating the Soul: Death and Catholicism in Northern Zambia Megan Vaughan When priests of the White Fathers order first made their way into Bemba territory in what is now northern Zambia in the 1890s, they arrived onto a scene of death, in more ways than one. Here was a region decimated by the deathly traffic of the slave trade. Here was a dominant political culture (that of the Bemba ‘Crocodile Clan’) with a complex and powerful death ritual at the centre of its chiefly cult. And to add to this was the very public deathbed scene of Chief Mwamba, a powerful and much-feared Bemba chief, whose dying wishes were whispered into the ears of an ambitious young priest. These were perfect conditions, it would seem, for the preaching of a Christian gospel which promised that death need no more be feared and that the final sacrifice had been made. The story of the White Fathers’ mission to northern Zambia is served by a rich literature, which itself is in part the product of the wealth of documentation produced by the order and of its own powerful intellectual tradition. As Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola have argued, the ethnohistorical scholarly tradition of the White Fathers permeates the standard histories and is particularly unavoidable in relation to the history of belief systems.1 This question has recently been explored in more depth by David M. Gordon, in his illuminating account of ‘spiritual sovereignties’ in Central Africa.2 Zambian readers will be familiar with the central lines of the history of the Catholic mission to northern Zambia and its relationship with the Bemba political system. My aim is not to completely retell a history which has already been fully explored in the rich corpus of work on Zambia’s religious history. My focus is a narrower one, but one that I think has relevance for the wider debates on death and political culture in Africa that we have exploredintheIntroduction.Thisisafocusontheentanglements of a range of beliefs and practices on death in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the political context of early colonial rule. Within this, my primary concern is with the White Fathers’ mission, and the Catholic version of death, sacrifice and the afterlife contained within their doctrine. It should be borne in mind, however, that for the entire period covered here the White Fathers operated in a contextofintensespiritualcompetition,notonlywithpowerful pre-existing beliefs, but also with radical, new and sometimes apocalyptic visions derived from the teachings of their Protestant rivals in the region. The result was a complex landscape of ideas and practices connected to death and the afterlife and to ideas about sin, responsibility and temporality. In the year 2000 the bones of Monseigneur Joseph Dupont, formerly Bishop of the Nyassa Province, were disinterred and transported from Tunisia to be reburied, with a mix of local ceremonial and Catholic ritual, at the Chilubula Mission in northern Zambia.3 Dupont’s reburial was a reminder of his controversial claim to a kind of Bemba ancestry as well as to his position as a ‘grandfather’ of the Catholic Church in Zambia. Dupont had first arrived in what is now northern Zambia in 1895. Following the dictates of Charles Lavigerie, the founder of the Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Dupont and his colleagues worked explicitly with the assumption that the conversion of the politically powerful (in this case the peoples’ chiefs)wasessentialtolong-lastingandeffectiveevangelization. 2 megan vaughan [44.222.149.13] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:08 GMT) Dupont had been a restless seminarian in France who seems to have found personal fulfilment at the front in the Franco– Prussian war, and subsequently volunteered to put down the Paris Commune. Posted to the Lake Tanganyika region, at the heart of the east African slave trade, he had thrown himself into local politics, in one instance supplying men and guns to a chief under pressure from a rival. His fieriness, vigorous masculinity and hyperactivity had earned him the Swahili nickname ‘Moto-Moto’ (Fire Fire). Although the White Fathers had an active commitment to opposing the slave trade, which they demonstrated in East Africa, this commitment did not always sit easily with their desire to pursue powerful rulers as converts. Moving in from the east, Dupont’s sights were set on the powerful Bemba chiefs, and he seems to have been barely able to contain his impatience at having to spend so much time waiting in the wings with the Mambwe...