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1 Christianity, ethnicity, and modernity
This chapter outlines the development of Ovimbundu modern ethnicity by looking at the impact of Christian missions in the promotion and shaping of modern ethnic identity, from the first decades of the 20th century until 1961, the year the Angolan liberation struggle began.
Setting Ovimbundu modernisation in relation to the impact of Protestant and Catholic expansion in the central highlands, besides setting a framework to examine the modernisation of ethnic awareness – as opposed to local awareness at the village or group of villages level – allows the introduction of one vital element of analysis: the inclusion of an exogenous force providing an impulse towards modernity, the western-educated intellectuals that not only triggered the intersection between ethnicity and modernisation, but also organised ethnic culture and assisted in creating an imaginary of belonging.1 These intellectuals, according to Leroy Vail (1989:11), could be European missionaries, or, as Harries, Vail and White, Jewsiewicki, and Papstein show, they could be European anthropologists and historians (see Vail, 1989). In the central highlands of Angola, these intellectuals were indeed missionaries, mostly Protestant American and Canadian Congregational missionaries and Catholic French Holy Ghost Fathers.
Christian missionaries were
often instrumental in providing the cultural symbols that could be organised into a cultural identity, especially a written language and a researched written history. They had the skills to reduce hitherto unwritten languages to written forms, thereby delivering the pedigrees that the new “tribes” required for acceptance.
But their work went vastly beyond the intellectual dimension. New forms of social and economic organisation were also introduced by Christian missionaries, some recovered from the Ovimbundu past and others imported from modern western thought.
The impact the arrival of Christian missionaries had in the minds and daily lives of the Ovimbundu is undeniable, perhaps only comparable to the military conquest of the region in the late 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. Maria da Conceição Neto notes that “from the late nineteenth century, missionaries of all sorts saw central Angola and especially the Ovimbundu as very receptive to social and cultural changes”, a fact that would make “the region a Protestant-Catholic spiritual battlefield” (Neto, 2012:178). Immediately after the military conquest of the central highlands, financial, human, and political limitations severely delayed the expansion of the Portuguese colonial bureaucratic order and, more importantly, the region’s de facto occupation and administration. Religious missions were the first to capitalise on this power vacuum, able to fill the voids left by the dismantled Ovimbundu kingdoms when the bureaucratic expansion and overall presence of the colonial state struggled to impose itself. Since the colonial state was mostly present around cities and in administration posts (postos de administração), but rather weak or absent in rural spaces, missionaries and African chiefs filled the gap between ruled and ruler. As Peel states, the “synchronic links between missions and colonial orders are contingent”. More importantly, even though missions were not integral organs of the colonial state,
since the higher rationale of the later European empires was the secular notion of civilization, colonial states took a more instrumental view of them, using them and supporting them where their activities coincided with colonial raison d’état, but keeping them at arm’s length or even restructuring them if that suited better.
Missionaries served as communication bridges between state officials and Africans, often even “attorneys”, alongside African chiefs, the sobas and sekulus, who would also inform state officials, administrators, and chefes de posto about events and problems in their region. New State officials relied on the missionaries “to plead their [the Ovimbundu’s] cases with chefes [de posto] and other government officials, to register births, obtain death and marriage certificates, to fill out their assimilation papers, and to respond to other official demands” (Heywood, 2000:116). But the statute Christian missionaries achieved among the Ovimbundu and other ethnic groups in Angola was not always of a benefactor, nor was the process of evangelisation free from difficulties and several constraints at the start. In fact, missionaries rapidly understood that their religion would not easily take root among the African population, since they already had their own deities and belief systems. As Peel rightly noted, “any overall mission situation is shaped by those whom a mission seeks to convert as well as by the power behind the mission” (2003:7).
The assimilation policy of the Portuguese colonial state became partially overtaken by these missions, particularly by the Catholic Church when it became intrinsically connected to the colonial state after the Missionary Accord of 1940.2 As a result, different forms of assimilation, of evangelising and “civilising”, were employed by the Catholic Church and its counterpart, the Protestant missions. While some areas had a much deeper contact with Christianity than others, the process had, nevertheless, different outcomes depending on whether the Catholic Church or Protestant missions were the main centre of “modernisation”. But both religious denominations implemented processes of proselytising and assimilation through the replacement or reshaping of culture and the adaptation of daily routines, under the guise of Christian evangelisation. Evangelisation in the missions was never solely focused on the spread of Christianity alone. Its philosophy rested upon teaching Africans a Christian notion of virtue. In the process, they imported western ideas and mannerisms onto the local way of life. Religious missions became small villages, equipped with churches, schools, and even small health centres in order to attract people. By contacting with the missionaries, many Africans began adopting western clothing, new housing, labour, and hygiene methods, and eventually began sending their children to school, believing that western modernity was the element which gave foreigners their power. In broad terms, this was the offset of evangelisation in the central highlands.
The “tribe” of God
Christianity was at the very centre of the modernisation of Ovimbundu ethnicity since it arrived in the central highlands at the end of the 19th century. Between 1879 and 1881, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) began sending missionaries to Bailundo and Bié. It was later joined by the Canadian Congregational Foreign Missionary Society of British North America (CCFMS), followed by Swiss missionaries, Seventh Day Adventists, and Plymouth Brethren, totalling the major religious Protestant orders operating in the central highlands. Having opened a first station in 1884 in Bié, by 1915 Protestants already had missions at Chilesso (1902), in Bailundo, Elende (1906) and its most important station at Dondi (1914).3
The Catholic Church had a different pace. Its influence, at first slow to spread, was defined against Protestant expansion and in collaboration with the colonial state. Although the church had been engaged in the process of evangelising African people in the Angolan central highlands since the late 19th century, the best part of the first half of the 20th century was mainly characterised by several setbacks and difficulties which heavily strained Catholic activity in the region. Since the very first attempts to open a Catholic mission in Bié, which date back to the beginning of 1890, closed by the end of the same year, to the shutting down of the mission of Bailundo in 1889, Catholic expansion in the central highlands at its earliest stages was not a simple endeavour. The Catholic mission in Bailundo perfectly exemplifies these difficulties. In letters exchanged between the Bishop of Angola and Congo and Father Lecomte, the latter explains how people destroyed the mission, the chapel, and the school in Bailundo due to the bad behaviour of Father Bernardo, who was trying to establish the mission there since 1887 (Henderson, 1990:75). Only in 1896 did Bailundo have some sort of Catholic missionary activity, pushed by the French Holy Ghost Fathers – the largest male Catholic order in Angola – hereafter Spiritans, under the supervision of Father Lecomte from Caconda (Neto, 1994:101–118). Spiritans founded their first mission in southern Angola in 1889, in Caconda, and reached Huambo in 1910, at the dawn of the first Portuguese Republic.
Christians came to the central highlands with the objective of creating a new kingdom of God in Africa, a project that rapidly evolved into replacing and reshaping African customs through western assimilation, by redefining what was considered right and wrong, accepted and sinful, backward and enlightened. Childs writes about these Protestant designs quite straightforwardly, acknowledging that “the village is the key to an educational or mission approach to the Ovimbundu”, whilst discussing the “problems of building a new structure upon a solid foundation”, the “adaptation or adoption of Bantu cultural elements”, and the importance of kinship, a force to be “widely utilized by the church until a new order can be built upon the firm foundations of the old”. Childs was convinced that the “tribe” of God the church was calling into practice in Africa had to be firmly rooted in traditional social heritage or risk falling apart and create uprooted individuals (Childs: 1949:63–74). Through much of this work of mixture between the traditional and the modern, the new Ovimbundu converts under Christian influence and guidance began adopting a new vision of life, upheld by a reshaped system of beliefs and norms. Under violent colonial circumstances their Christian values and western education permitted a glimpse of integration in specific colonial settings, mostly in Catholic neighbourhoods and schools, while still able to live side by side with non-converts who professed traditional Ovimbundu customs and beliefs and applied methods of governing life and labour as their forefathers did.4 These Christianised Ovimbundu were able to navigate both the traditional and the modern, and represented the faction of the Ovimbundu better able to extract and combine elements of both worlds, a true bricolage, ultimately creating a new and modern Ovimbundu ethnicity. There were, however, tensions when navigating both the traditional and the modern worlds, especially under an unforgiving colonial regime. Sakaita and Loth Savimbi’s story, Jonas Savimbi’s grandfather and father respectively, is especially enlightening of this duality. As Fred Bridgland explains:
When Sakaita, who for the rest of his life brooded with resentment at his treatment by the Portuguese, heard that Loth planned to go to [Protestant] mission school he forbade what he saw as a sell-out to the whites and their religion: Sakaita was an animist, not a Christian. Loth nevertheless went ahead and thus became estranged from Sakaita for 20 years.
Loth became what Christine Messiant called nouveaux assimilée, those who adopted western modernity in the 20th century, as opposed to the ancién assimilée, peoples and families in contact with Europeans decades before, mainly around the coastal areas of Angola (Messiant, 2008:39–46). When requesting assimilated status, Loth “did it in a manner and with the determination that, whatever happened, it would not diminish his devotion to his own people and that he would advance their welfare, the good points of their culture, in every possible way” (Bridgland, 1986:35). The expression “the good points of their culture” is interesting, insofar as it permits the choosing of particular elements of Ovimbundu culture while benefitting from whatever opportunities the Portuguese had to offer, the opportunities of the modern world. Loth’s embrace of modern life and his wish to advance his people’s welfare are perhaps more evident in the amount of schools and ...
