Death, Belief and Politics in Central African History

CHAPTER III - Death, Christianity and African Miners: Contesting Indirect Rule on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1935–1962

CHAPTER III Death, Christianity and African Miners: Contesting Indirect Rule on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1935–1962 Walima T. Kalusa Introduction Early in 1956, Mukuka Nkoloso, a budding, mission-educated Bemba-speaking nationalist, had an old score to settle with the white District Commissioner of Ndola, the commercial and administrative hub of the colonial Zambian Copperbelt. Storming the DC’s office, Nkoloso demanded to know why the town’s European foreman, acting under the instructions of the colonial functionary, had been exhuming African corpses from a cemetery near Kabushi Location and relocating them to the outskirts of the town, despite stiff opposition from the inhabitants of the Location. Mukuka Nkoloso had earlier on added his own shrill chorus to the public outcry by complaining in the media against this desecration of the cemetery. This move had earned him the warm support of the African Urban Advisory Council, of which the nationalist himself was a member. Exasperated by the nationalist’s audacity to challenge the decision to inter the African dead on the outskirts of Ndola, the colonial officer threatened Nkoloso that he (the DC) ‘would call a meeting of the chiefs of the district where he would recommend the deportation’ of the recalcitrant political upstart to his ‘home district’ in north-eastern Zambia. ‘I don’t care,’ shouted the equally infuriated Nkoloso, as he stormed out of the European official’s office.1 Confrontations between colonial rulers and their subjects over issues of mortality and the disposal of the remains of the dead were ubiquitous on the African imperial frontier. Fuelled by the ‘politics of death,’2 such altercations frequently took place in areas as far removed in time and space as nineteenth century Ghana and South Africa, and twentieth-century Namibia, Cameroon, Botswana and, of course, the Zambian Copperbelt.3 In spite of their ubiquity and pervasiveness, these conflicts have surprisingly drawn little or no attention in historical writings. The gap in academic scholarship has been partly filled by social and symbolic anthropologists, whose main preoccupation since colonial rule has been to elucidate the cultural meaning and symbolism that non-Western societies infuse into death with its associated rituals.4 Symbolic anthropologists have long explored the myriad and significant avenues in which localized experiences of funerals and internments either wear thin or solidify kinship relationships and local networks of political power and authority.5 They have thus impressively demonstrated the significant role that death and rituals of mortality play in the exercise of chiefly power and social control at the grassroots level. Crucial as such analyses may be, they nonetheless open a very small window on how historical dynamics influence what anthropologist David Mandelbaum describes as the ‘social uses’ of mortuary and burial rites.6 This stems in part from the fact that such analyses scarcely shed light on how social, economic and political changes influence societal notions and practices of mortality.7 It is no surprise then that anthropological studies gloss over the ways in which African knowledge of and practices around death have mutated in response to such extra-local dynamics as colonial penetration, labour migration, urbanization, Christianity and, more recently, nationalism, 90 walima t. kalusa cross-border migration and globalization.8 In locating death, its rituals and their underlying belief systems outside the historical context in which they occur, anthropological interpretations obscure fundamental transformations that take place in the social and cultural meaning of death and of its rituals when societies come under the pressure of socioeconomic and political change. It is no surprise, then, that symbolic analyses of mortuary and practices hardly elucidate what symbolic meanings of death and death-related rituals actually signify in real-life conditions.9 By emphasizing the role of ceremonies of death in shaping local networks of power at local level, the anthropological discourse on mortality obfuscates how death with its rituals mediates relations between rulers who monopolize centralized state power and those that they govern. It is no wonder, then, that such discourses largely skirt how the subjects of empire deployed their shifting knowledge of dying, death and interment to not only contest but also to wrest power from their unwilling colonial masters.10 This study makes a modest attempt to rectify some of the shortcomings in the academic literature that glosses over the historicity of African knowledge of death and neglects the role that mortality and its related rituals played in shaping power relations between colonial authorities...