Tonga Religious Life in the Twentieth Century (review)

Elizabeth Colson's studies of the Zambezi Valley Tonga stretch back to the carefully researched ethnographies of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, which Colson once directed, and forward to the ethnographies of the postcolonial predicament. The breadth of Colson's academic expertise is matched by a depth of fieldwork experience that ranges over nearly fifty years. Unsurprisingly, Colson's latest appreciation of the religious life of the Tonga has a nostalgic quality. She first encountered Tonga religious ideas at the height of post–World War II colonialism, a very different historic moment to that of the challenged but proud Christian nation of present-day Zambia. Even though similar religious ideas are evident, historical change—the conventional thorn in the side of anthropology—leads Colson's depiction of Tonga religious life to appear as an effort to recall departed ancestors.

The first two chapters discuss the most influential scholarship on African religion against the backdrop of the basic themes of Tonga religious life. Colson offers a sensible definition of religion that centers on the need for people to explain and to make sense of their surroundings and fortunes. Most of all, religion for the Tonga is "practice that works rather than a closed dogmatic system. It is perpetually at test and therefore always in flux" (15–16). The book struggles with describing this changing system of religious ideas, especially as more dogmatic religious and ideological formulations, such as "tribal tradition" and Christianity, took hold over the course of the twentieth century.

Several chapters detail the relationship of Tonga religious ideas to social groupings and life-events, such as births, marriages, and deaths. At the center of the system is an animating force, a breath of life, muuya, and an abstract creator spirit, Leza. Closer to the living is the muzimo, the ancestral shade or spirit, and the basangu spirit of nature. All people engage with these spiritual forces, although specialists or "mediums" are adept at their propitiation and manipulation. Colson describes the substantial variations in these basic spiritual forces and their manipulators, largely through referencing her extensive fieldwork experiences. Aside from some minor linguistic and ritual differences, such spiritual forces seem similar to those found among surrounding Bantu-speakers. Perhaps what distinguishes the Tonga from many of their neighbors is their insistence on individual relationships with the spirit world, and the profusion of personal and local land shrines, spirit gates, and ancestors—to such an extent that there are no unifying myths, no national shrines, and no temples. Neither prophets nor royal clans managed to impose—or amalgamate—the many personal ancestral forms into a national religious structure. It is, then, precisely the lack of a Tonga religion that characterizes Tonga religious life.

The final two chapters consider the most dynamic religious changes of the last century, including an increase in witchcraft accusations and the spread of Christianity. Here Colson references the diaries of research assistants from the 1990s, original material that has not appeared in her previous publications. Modern witchcraft evolved from the ideas of angry spiritual forces that intervened in the visible world. Influenced by Christianity, these spiritual forces became associated with an abstract—or supernatural—evil, which Colson argues was absent in earlier Tonga thought. She views Christianity as an imposed religion that has sterilized rather than engaged ancestral religious ideas, consigning all spiritual forces to the realm of evil, or even denying their agency altogether. Besides this axis of destructive engagement, however, Christianity and Tonga ancestral religion seem to exist in separate spheres. As Colson points out, people may draw upon ancestral and Christian religious ideas. Yet the lack of any consideration of the dynamic conceptual engagement between them seems strange—or at least inadequately explained.

Perhaps the lack of attention to such engagement stems from Colson's view of Christianity as the religious fashion of a people who celebrate the power of a Western modernity even as it has...