-
CHAPTER II - Sex, Death and Colonial Anthropologists in the Inter-War Period
- The Lembani Trust
- Chapter
- Additional Information
CHAPTER II Sex, Death and Colonial Anthropologists in the Inter-War Period Megan Vaughan As we have seen in Chapter I, the complex and lengthy mortuary rituals of the paramount chief of the Bemba people, the Chitimukulu, attracted the attention of both colonial administrators and anthropologists in Northern Rhodesia.1 The administrators were concerned with preventing human sacrifice and containing ritualized disorder while attempting to maintain the legitimacy of the traditional hierarchy on which Indirect Rule depended. The anthropologists meanwhile incorporated accounts of the chiefly death ritual into debates on the nature of ‘divine kingship’ and sovereignty in Africa. The British social anthropologist Audrey Richards contributed to these debates, and to a structural-functionalist reading of the Bemba political system, though she was also careful to point out that there were severe limits to the direct exercise of chiefly power. As a rereading of her fieldnotes indicates, political power resided less in the threat of death than in the promise to create and protect life, particularly (as I have argued in Chapter I) through control over sexuality, and this power was located in the practices of quotidian life.2 As we have seen, colonial rule certainly diminished the power of chiefs to make compelling the threat of violence and death, but, more importantly, a combination of economic and social change and the spread of Christianity undermined their ability to control 48 megan vaughan sexuality and to protect life. To the north, over the border in Tanganyika, the people who had come to be known as the Nyakyusa faced similar issues. Theirs was a decentralized polity, very different to that of the Bemba, but the link between sexuality and death was also strong here. Nyakyusa death practices (as documented by Richards’ friends and fellow anthropologists, Godfrey and Monica Wilson) made this link in an explicit way, to the horror of the Moravian and Lutheran missionaries. Here, as in Northern Rhodesia, Christian missionaries attacked local death practices, challenging their converts to choose between ‘ways of death’. Divine Kingship and Death in Lubemba In 1968 Audrey Richards delivered the Henry Myers Lecture at the Royal Anthropological Institute. The title of her lecture was ‘Keeping the King Divine’, and in it she drew on her 1930s fieldwork in the north-east of Northern Rhodesia, and her revisittherein1957,tooutlineBembabeliefsinthesupernatural powers of their chiefs in relation to the Frazer–Seligman thesis of divine kingship, and to discuss the ‘processes by which these beliefs are maintained’.3 Richards had written extensively on the Bemba political system before, and a whole bevy of British anthropologists had joined in with their contributions.4 This attention to the Bemba political system can be explained in part by its intrinsic interest to anthropological theories of succession and African political systems more generally, and partly by the problems it posed (and the opportunities it presented) to the engineers of the Indirect Rule system in Northern Rhodesia. British administrators in this part of Africa were generally relieved when they found hierarchical ‘traditional’ polities in place, but the Bemba polity also posed some challenges to orderly colonial administration. The [54.157.61.194] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:36 GMT) chapter ii 49 structural opposition between the Chief and his councillors was one issue; and the frequent and prolonged succession disputes at the death of a Chitimukulu (and of two or three other major chiefs) was another. When the Chitimukulu died, a game of musical chairs ensued, with incumbents of the other major chieftaincies (Mwamba and Nkula in particular) vying for the top job. Furthermore, after the death of the Chitimukulu there was always an interregnum of a year, institutionalized through a complex and very lengthy death ritual that involved the embalming of the dead chief’s body and (within living memory when Richards conducted her research) human sacrifice. So the death of a Chitimukulu was of direct interest to the colonial administration for more than one reason, and it remains of interest to the modern state of Zambia. The Bemba-speaking people form a large and politically significant group within the nation – the election of the Chitimukulu matters to party politics in the age of democratization, as it mattered in the colonial period when urbanized Bembaspeaking peoples played a crucial role in emerging urban politics of the industrial Copperbelt. Though the structural features of the Bemba political system are undoubtedly fascinating, functionalist descriptions of this system were misleading in some respects, giving the impression of a well-oiled, even bureaucratic system. The...