Spirits and Letters

Reading, Writing and Charisma in African Christianity

Thomas G. Kirsch

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857450104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Studies of religion have a tendency to conceptualise 'the Spirit' and 'the Letter' as mutually exclusive and intrinsically antagonistic. However, the history of religions abounds in cases where charismatic leaders deliberately refer to and make use of writings. This book challenges prevailing scholarly notions of the relationship between 'charisma' and 'institution' by analysing reading and writing practices in contemporary Christianity. Taking up the continuing anthropological interest in Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, and representing the first book-length treatment of literacy practices among African Christians, this volume explores how church leaders in Zambia refer to the Bible and other religious literature, and how they organise a church bureaucracy in the Pentecostal-charismatic mode. Thus, by examining social processes and conflicts that revolve around the conjunction of Pentecostal-charismatic and literacy practices in Africa, Spirits and Letters reconsiders influential conceptual dichotomies in the social sciences and the humanities and is therefore of interest not only to anthropologists but also to scholars working in the fields of African studies, religious studies, and the sociology of religion.

PART I

HISTORIES AND ETHNOGRAPHIES

Chapter 1

Colonial Literacies

The role of literacy in Western colonial projects in Africa can hardly be overestimated. For the missionaries, the Bible simultaneously represented the divine assignment for evangelization, the essential script for proselytism, a means for its enactment and the pivotal symbol of self-representation. As metaphor and practice, religious literacy thus often represented the sine qua non for converting ‘pagans’ and transforming them into what the missionaries considered to be divinely ordained subjectivities. The colonial administration, on the other hand, was striving to regulate and control the colonized by entangling them in a network of passes, statistics and files. Theirs represented an attempt to identify and ultimately shape realities through acts of taxonomic classification, standardization and formalization that assumed the form of written records and translated colonial subjects into administered objects. Moreover, the cartographical inscription of colonial spaces on to maps (Worby 1994) and the linguistic standardization of vernacular languages in, for example, grammars and textbooks (Errington 2005; Fabian 1986; Posner 2003) also had an influence on cultural, ethnic and political configurations in the African colonies. Formal schooling, in its turn, conveyed to the colonized who had been subdued ‘a sharp image of their place in the world’ (Comaroff 1996: 28), while at the same time giving rise to new elites, thus introducing socio-economic differentiations based on the distinction between ‘literates’ and ‘illiterates’ (cf. Cook-Gumperz 1986).

Yet, as has been amply demonstrated by both anthropologists and historians, colonialism was neither ‘monolithic nor omnipotent’ (Cooper and Stoler 1989: 609), but a complex, contingent and contradictory process (see, for example, Dirks 1992; Elbourne 2002; Peel 2000; Pels 1997; Cooper and Stoler 1997) involving actors from different backgrounds, with disparate and changing agendas. Colonialism consequently represented a site of struggles and negotiations that altered not only the colonized, but also the colonizers themselves (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997).

This chapter sets out to trace some of the complexities of religious, educational and administrative literacies in colonial Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). I shall not provide a comprehensive historical overview but will instead highlight certain features concerning the promotion and adaptation of colonial literacies that are important for the overall argument of this book. I shall indicate, for example, that the coalescence of ‘religious literacy’ and ‘bureaucratic literacy’ that is characteristic of contemporary Pentecostal-charismatic churches in my area of research is not a newly invented practice, but actually had its precursors under colonialism.

Mission, School and Printing Press

Right from the very start, the introduction of Christianity into southern Africa by European and American missionaries was intimately linked to school education as a principal method of evangelisation (Ragsdale 1986: 28–29).¹ Despite denominational differences in educational approach, for most missionary organizations: ‘Schooling actually provided the model for conversion; conversion, the model for schooling. Each aimed at the systematic, moral reconstruction of the person in a world in which individuals were increasingly viewed as capable of being formed and reformed by social institutions’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 233).

In a general address given to the General Missionary Conference of North-West Rhodesia in 1914, for example, Reverend J. R. Fell from the mission station of the Primitive Methodist Missionary Society (PMMS) in the Gwembe Valley outlined the educational ideals and methods of his mission society by laying emphasis on a triad of civilization, Christianity and school education:

As a civilising force Education has no equal. It will make rational thinking men who perceive cause and effect instead of those believing the silly notions arising from generations of paganism. It is a valuable adjunct in Christianising. The spread of Christianity is largely dependent on education. … First and foremost, it must be Christian education. Instruction in the three R’s [reading, writing, arithmetic] is an important factor in civilising the people, but we are not concerned with civilisation merely. The best in civilisation is the outcome of Christian influence and the civilisation best suited to the native is a Christian education. In all educational work we must have Bible and moral training (1914: 24).

In general, this assessment was unreservedly shared by most Protestant mission societies. Instruction in the ‘three R’s’ and the emphasis on Bible training thus presupposed translation work and the publication and dissemination of various kinds of literature.

The missionaries of the PMMS, whose stations in the area of Northern Rhodesia were initially called the BaIla-BaTonga Mission, concentrated from the very beginning on linguistic work. In 1911, some parts of the Bible had already been translated into Chitonga and printed. It took up to 1949, however, for the whole of the New Testament to be published in the vernacular; the complete Chitonga Bible was only published in 1963. Various other literature had been translated and printed during the early decades of their activities. In 1906, for example, the first Tonga primer was published (cf. Doke 1945), while in 1914, Revd Fell is reported to have ‘adapted our Ila Hymnbook and (with additions) Catechism’ (1914: 14). Fell had purchased a small hand-printing press – one of the first in Northern Rhodesia – which he henceforth used for printing works in the dialect of the Mweemba area in the Gwembe Valley (Baxter 1958: 489). In 1919, the BaIla-BaTonga Mission reported:

The Mission Book Room acts as a distributing centre for our necessary literature both English and Vernacular as well as all school materials. Our vernacular books include School Primers, Folk tales, New Testament, Phrase books, Hymn Book, Catechism, Science Reader on Common Objects, Hygiene Reader, and Grammar of both Ila and Tonga. Other books are in preparation (1919: 18).

Translating, printing and distributing literature, and teaching with reference to writings, were among the preoccupations of the PMMS, as well as of most other mission societies.² Les Switzer thus remarks, in relation to South Africa:

The mission’s ultimate success … stemmed from its monopoly over the written word. Mission station communities were centered on the church, school and either possession of or access to a printing press. Churches and schools were inseparable even on the more primitive stations, because the education of an African Christian community imbued with certain moral, emotional and intellectual qualities was deemed essential for the preservation and expansion of the Church. In turn, the preaching and teaching ministry was dependent on the mission’s control and manipulation of literate culture (1984: 459).

Yet, it did not prove easy to introduce a ‘literate culture’, as J. P. Bruwer of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission remarked in a statement made to the General Missionary Conference of Northern Rhodesia in 1944. Under the heading ‘The Problem of Reading’, he states:

The main fact is that the Bantu are not a reading people; they are a talking people. They know how to talk and find great delight in it. In addition to their conversational gifts, they possess a flexible and highly differentiated family of languages. Most of these have been reduced to writing, but the people on the whole still cling to the social gathering. The murmuring in the village square still has the power to lure the literate away from the new-found love of learning. Probably this problem of cultivating in a race of talkers a love for reading is one of the greatest that will have to be overcome. A welcome sign however in this respect is that the people are willing and even eager to listen for long periods if some one will read to them, whether because being read to approximates in some degree to talking, or because it requires less mental effort. We should make use of this possibility especially where a great number of people is still illiterate. This type of community reading should in any case to my opinion come before any literacy campaign to cultivate in the people a thirst for more knowledge, and to persuade them to master the art of reading (1944: 27).

In these quotations, mission activities, which are claimed to depend on a ‘love for reading’, must still be stimulated by public readings that ultimately promise to raise interest in the ‘art of reading’. Bruwer also observes that certain environmental aspects are hampering the development of an indigenous reading public: ‘The African hut was evolved by and for a non-reading community … The absence of lamps or other artificial light in the African home may be overcome if there is a reading room for the community. This room may well replace the talking hut or yard of the old African village’ (1944: 27–28).

He thus suggests that libraries should form the centre of social and political life. Houses with chairs, desks, books and windows will ensure the Africans’ enlightenment, in a metaphorical but also a very literal sense. Under the heading ‘The Problem of Printing’, Bruwer also advocates setting up local presses to produce texts in the vernacular: ‘There are also great possibilities for small handpresses, and even for duplicating machines. Every Mission Station should have one of these. Summaries of lessons and talks given at refresher courses, synopses of lectures, tracts and pamphlets may with success be produced on these’ (1944: 29).

Nevertheless, paper shortages and distribution difficulties would pose problems for such enterprises. An indigenous reluctance to purchase literature would also be detrimental to the ‘art of reading’:

The Africans are utilitarians, and they are not easily induced to buy books unless they are convinced of their usefulness and necessity. On the other hand they will read anything that is given free, probably as much because it is free as because it is reading matter. … Perhaps the outstanding difficulty is that the African has not yet developed a book-sense (1944: 30).

On the whole, Bruwer’s statement concerning Christian literature provides us with some impressions of the Protestant missionaries’ ideas and aims in developing an African reading community. Their ideas on literacy were frequently informed by notions of ‘fine art’ and enlightenment, and literacy itself was also seen as promising ‘the ascendance of the reflective, inner-directed self: a self, long enshrined in Protestant personhood’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 63). The famous Swiss missionary and anthropologist Henri-Alexandre Junod, for example, who at the turn of the twentieth century worked in South Africa, ‘felt that deciphering the characters printed on a page … concentrated the mind and encouraged reflection’ (Harries 2001: 409) and that ‘reading, as a silent, private practice, would cause Africans to think about personal choice and individual responsibility’ (ibid.: 411). Literacy as cognitive and social practice was consequently envisaged as being a medium for the construction of new subjectivities.

That such efforts were ultimately only partially successful will become clear over the course of this book, as we examine the literacy practices of Pentecostal-charismatic churches in rural Zambia. More than fifty years after Bruwer wrote many Christians in the area of my research had become ‘a reading people’, though they had actually developed a ‘book-sense’ of a different kind. This difference still had to do with what Bruwer had already indicated in 1944: the problem of illumination, the crucial role of public readings and a certain disinclination to purchase books. But most importantly, it also had to do with notions concerning the spiritual permeability of the human body, discussed in Chapter 10. The idea that ‘personhood’ might not (only) enshrine a human self but also (temporarily) spiritual entities imbued literacy practices with epistemological premises that differed significantly from those projected by the early Protestant missionaries.

Steps towards Secularization

The early mission societies’ training of converts was also aimed at the diffusion of school education. Describing common practices among his colleagues in 1908, Revd A. Baldwin of the PMMS states:

The new policy is really the employment of converts as active Christian workers. The principle is that, as soon as a young man has given adequate proof of conversion, and has made some advancement in school knowledge, he is encouraged to go out and take charge for a term of a village school. He may know little, but that little he can go and teach others. He then comes back for a further spell to the head station to carry his own studies on a further step. He not only teaches, but holds religious services, and preaches what he knows of the rudiments of the gospel (cited in Ulrich Luig 1997: 111).

The establishment of out-schools in the villages using indigenous teachers was a common practice among the early mission societies in the territory of Northern Rhodesia (Ragsdale 1986: 33; cf. Gray 1990). Providing a means of ‘evangelization-on-the-cheap’ (Fields 1985: 45), out-schools not only compensated for the shortage of Western staff, but also enabled the missions to expand and demarcate their respective spheres of influence: wherever a mission society had established schools, other missions were less inclined to embark on evangelisation activities.

The colonial administration, however, was often rather critical with respect to such out-schools. A Native Commissioner’s report for the year 1917, for example, states with regard to PMMS educational activities in the Gwembe Valley:

There are four outside schools each in the charge of a native teacher, one of whom is a Masuto and the others Batonga. These teachers have little influence being stationed alone and at some distance from the European Missionary. The headmen of the villages do not send their children to these out-schools and the result is that the teachers have nothing to do. Under white supremacy these native teachers might be put to some good use which at present they are not. … When one realizes that this Primitive Methodist Mis...