Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T03:22:21.911Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Territorial Cults in the history of Central Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Terence Ranger
Terence Ranger
Affiliation:
U.C.L.A
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Recent research on the territorial cults of Central Africa allows us to arrive at some tentative general patterns. The historical development of territorial cults has been worked out most fully for Malawi. Here it seems to be agreed that there was an essentially similar early cultic pattern among the proto-Chewa, the proto-Mang'anja and the proto-Tumbuka. Cults dedicated to the High God and tended by spirit wives were widely diffused. Much of the religious history of Malawi can be seen in terms of the differing relationships of these cults with incoming political authorities, producing a richly various situation.

It is not clear whether this sort of analysis can be applied to the wealth of material available on Shona territorial cults, even though the initial comparisons are suggestive. It is plain, however, that the most interesting recent work on these territorial cults suggests other dynamics of change. Shona cult history is not merely a matter of inter-relationships between cults and kings, but also very much a matter of the working out of built-in conflicts within cultic systems themselves. The much more dynamic view which it is now necessary to hold of the operations of Shona religion makes a great deal more sense of nineteenth and twentieth-century data than the previous centralized and hierarchical analysis.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 1973 , pp. 581 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Newitt, M. D. D., Portuguese Settlement on the Zambesi. Exploration, Land Tenure and Colonial Rule in East Africa (London, 1973), 30–1.Google Scholar

2 The rapid development of the field is apparent in the contrast between this article and the initial hypotheses about cults of kingship made in ‘Introduction’, The Historical Study of African Religion, eds. Ranger, T. O. and Kimambo, Isaria (London, 1972), 4–9.Google Scholar

3 This article is a revision of a report on the Lusaka Conference which first appeared in the newsletter, African Religious Research, II, no. 2, Dec. 1972. The whole issue of the newsletter was devoted to a report on the Conference, which also discussed the history of mass spirit possession and of witchcraft eradication movements in Central Africa. African Religious Research appears twice yearly and aims to provide information about the progress of historical research on African religious systems. It contains reports of past and future conferences, book reviews and essays in addition to a listing of on-going research. It can be obtained free, thanks to the support of the Ford Foundation, by request to Professor Terence Ranger, African Studies Centre, U.C.L.A., Los Angeles, California 90024.Google Scholar

4 Douglas Werner's account of the Miao spirit shrines in the Southern Lake Tanganyika Region gives a good impression of environmental versatility. ‘Miao spirits are responsible for the wealth of the land. They control the rains and the locusts, the fertility of the seeds and the soil, and the strength of the winds and the waves which endanger the fishermen on the lake. These attributes are common to all miao spirits, and from their control of these phenomena comes the respect of those who live within their territories’. Werner, Douglas, ‘Aspects of History in the Miao spirit system of the Southern Lake Tanganyika Region: the case of Kapembwa’, Lusaka, 2 Sept. 1972.Google Scholar

5 Vail, Leroy, ‘Religion, Language and the Tribal Myth: the Tumbuka and Chewa of Malawi’, Lusaka, 31 08. 1972.Google Scholar

6 Linden, Ian, ‘The shrines of the Karongas at Mankhamba: some problems in the religious history of Central Malawi’, Lusaka, 31 08 1972.Google Scholar

7 A vivid fictional account of the Tunga cult in Mkanda's area is given in a recent Zambian novel, Andreya Masiye, Before Dawn (Lusaka, 1970).Google Scholar

8 Swantz, Lloyd, ‘The Role of the Medicine Man Among the Zaramo of Dar es Salaam’, thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Dar es Salaam, 1972), 301–10.Google Scholar

9 Schoffeleers, J. M., ‘The Chisumphi and M'bona cults in Malawi: a comparative history’, Lusaka, 31 08 1972.Google Scholar

10 Linden, ‘The shrines of the Karongas at Mhankamba: some problems in the religious history of Central Malawi’.Google Scholar

11 Schoffeleers has explored the relations of the M'bona cult with Christianity further in, ‘The Interaction between the M'bona cult and Christianity, 1859–1963’, Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa, edited T. O. Ranger and John Weller, forthcoming. An earlier and slightly different account of the history of the M'bona cult is, ‘The History and Role of the M'Bona cult among the Mang'anja’Google Scholar, The Historical Study of African Religion, edited Ranger, T. O. and Kimambo, Isaria (London, 1972).Google Scholar

12 An account of the spirit mediums of Western Mashonaland which contrasts them sharply with the descriptions available for the Korekore, is Sister Weinrich, Mary Aquina, Chiefs and Councils in Rhodesia (London, 1971), 106–113.Google Scholar

13 A very suggestive treatment of the history of the Zambezi valley in all the complexity of its population movements and self identifications is, Chet Lancaster, ‘Pre-Colonial Trade, Migration and Ethnic Identity in the Middle Zambezi Valley’, unpublished MS.Google Scholar

14 Rennie, Keith, ‘Christianity, Colonisation and the Origins of Nationalism among the Ndau of Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1935’, doctoral dissertation, Northwestern, 1973, Chapter II.Google Scholar

15 Bourdillon, M. F. C., ‘The cults of Dzivaguru and Karuva among the northeastern Shona peoples’, Lusaka, 1 09 1972.Google Scholar

16 Mudenge, S. I., ‘The Rozvi empire and the feira of Zumbo’, Ph.D. Thesis, London, 1972.Google Scholar

17 The work of Chet Lancaster, Alan Isaacman, Maud Muntemba and the projected research of Albert Williams-Myers will bring the Zambezi valley into clearer focus. Perhaps an inter-university conference on the history of the valley could be regarded as a high priority for Central African historiography.Google Scholar

18 Schoffeleers, J. M., ‘The Chisumphi and M'bona cults in Malawi: a Comparative history’, Lusaka, 31 08 1972.Google Scholar

19 Bhebe, N. M., ‘The Ndebele and Mwari before 1893: a religious conquest of the conquerors by the vanquished’, Lusaka, 1 09 1972.Google Scholar

20 Bhebe, N. M., ‘Christian missions in Matabeleland 1859–1923’, Ph.D. Thesis, London, 1972.Google Scholar

21 Daneel, M. L., The God of the Matopo Hills—An Essay on the Mwari Cult in Rhodesia, Africa Study Centre Communications (Leiden, 1970);Google ScholarDaneel, M. L., Old and New in Southern Shana Independent Churches, I (The Hague, 1971), 86–91.Google Scholar

22 Mwanza, G., ‘Mwari: the God of the Karanga’, Lusaka, 1 09 1972.Google Scholar

23 Parsons, Q. N., ‘The impact of the Mwari cult on the eastern Tswana’, Lusaka, 1 09 1972.Google Scholar

24 Madziyire, Salathiel, ‘An obstacle race towards understanding Bernard Mizeki, Mashonaland martyr’, Lusaka, 4 09 1973.Google Scholar

25 I owe this information about the Chisumphi cult of affliction in Chipata to Bill Rau, who is preparing a doctorate for U.C.L.A. on the history of the Chipata Ngoni, and who is contributing a paper to Matthew Schoffeleers's book.Google Scholar

26 Daneel, M. L., Old and New in Southern Shona Independent Churches, 126.Google Scholar

27 Houser, Tillman, ‘The extent of Karanga-speaking spirit possession among the Hlengwe in Rhodesia’, Lusaka, 5 09 1972.Google ScholarAt the Lusaka conference other examples were given of the ‘break-down’ of structured territorial cults into wider spirit possession. Douglas Werner reconstructed the Bemba case in these terms. The Ngulu ‘nature’ spirits, which now possess people in Ubemba in a cult of affliction, were once the focus of a very decentralized territorial cult system. When the Bemba chiefly dynasty developed, the cult of the veneration of the chiefly dead was built up as the central cult of the state. Ngulu possession became more diffused, though still limited and was linked with the legitimization of professional skills. In recent times, when the veneration of chiefly ancestors has lost much of its central significance, Ngulu possession has developed into a cult of affliction.Google Scholar

28 The last three paragraphs are a greatly condensed version of a long report of the discussions at Lusaka on the history of mass spirit possession in Central Africa, published in African Religious Research, II, no. 2 (November 1972), 57–26. The point that was being made was not, of course, that all peripheral spirit possession can be accounted for by the break-down of control over territorial cults or by the break-down of territorial cultsaltogether, but merely that enough of it can be explained in this way to make the question an important one in the historical study of possession. A discussion of the links between territorial cults and movements of witchcraft eradication—an important topic which it has been impossible to pursue here—can be found ins African Religious Research, II, no. 2 (November 1972), 27–29. Readers of this article, who wish to follow up the papers to which it mainly refers, can obtain sets of the Lusaka conference proceedings on application to the Publications Officer, Institute for African Studies, University of Zambia, P.O. Box 900, Lusaka, Zambia, at the cost of duplication and postage. The conference proceedings are not to be published as such, but two books will develop out of the conference. One of these is Matthew Schoffeleers's collection on territorial cults. The other will be a comparative study of witchcraft eradication movements, to be edited by Terence Ranger and Sholto Cross, under the title, The Problem of Evil in Eastern Africa.Google Scholar