*THE BIBLE AND THE POLITICS OF CONVERSION IN BEMBALAND: A POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE*
1. Introduction:
2. Geopolitics of Bembaland:
•This research argues that biblical transmission, translation
and reception in Bembaland is largely the narrative of the
dominant, patriarchal, androcentric and elite voice.
•During both the colonial and postcolonial eras the Bemba
divinity became colonised and masculinised.
•During the colonial era the Zambian woman was subject to
what is today called “double colonisation” (Young 1995:
162): as a colonised subject as well as a subaltern woman.
•During the postcolonial era woman tends to be absent or
elided from the documentary archives.
•A liberative and transformative use of the Bible in
Bembaland requires decolonising and de-masculinising God
by rewriting woman‟s history from below, employing a
“hermeneutic of suspicion and hermeneutic of retrieval or
restoration” (Punt 2003: 59).
1.1 “Turning and turning in the
widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart, the centre cannot
hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is
drowned
The best lack all conviction, while
the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”
(The Second Coming by W.B.
Yeats)
1.2 “It was therefore wholly
appropriate that sexual
exchange, and its miscegenated
product ... should become the
dominant paradigm through
which the passionate economic
and political trafficking of
colonialism was conceived”
(Colonialism and the Desiring
Machine in: Colonial Desire by
Robert J.C. Young)
3. Methodology and Approach of
the Research:
•Quadri-polar cross-disciplinary method combining critical
discourse analysis, reader-response criticism, comparative
historical method and social-scientific criticism under the
umbrella of postcolonial biblical criticism.
•Robin Horton‟s intellectualist theory of African conversion.
•Robert Young‟s paradigm of colonialism as a sexualised
discourse.
5. Colonialism and
Evangelisation: Paradigm of
Sexualised Discourse:
•Zambia comprises nine provinces and a total area of
290,585 square miles.
•Bembaland accounts for less than one third [Northern,
Luapula and Copperbelt].
•The capital city is Lusaka, located in the south-central
part of the country.
•Bembaland first opened up to colonialism and
evangelisation in 1890, almost coinciding with the
Scramble for Africa (1884-1914).
•Until 1964 Zambia was a colony of the United
Kingdom.
6. Politics of Conversion:
•According to Max Weber, traditional primitive or magical
religions are contrasted with universal or rational ones such
as Christianity (Farriss 1984: 334).
•Robin Horton takes all religions as theoretical systems
intended for the explanation, prediction and control of
space-time events (Horton 1971: 94).
•The typical traditional African cosmology is a two-tiered
cosmology (Horton 1971: 101): The first tier is the world of
the lesser spirits concerned with the microcosm. In the
second tier is the Supreme Being concerned with the
macrocosm.
•Following Robin Horton, Bemba traditional microcosm and
macrocosm, under the catalytic influence of Christianity and
colonialism, were challenged and ruptured .
1.3 “[T]he colonial „subject‟ – constructed through the technologies or practices of
power/knowledge – is brought into being within multiple discourses and on
multiple sites. One such site is translation”
(Siting Translation by Tejaswini Niranjana)
•The paradigm of sexual domination as colonisation is
not as strange or as new as it may sound. In Greek
mythology Zeus turns into a bull, abducts and deflowers
the fair Tyrean maiden Europa.
•In poems “Ocean‟s Love to Ireland,” “Act of Union”
and “An Open Letter” (Moloney 2007: 73), Seamus
Heaney allegorises the English colonial conquest of
Ireland as rape. This is not surprising as both rape and
colonialism reduce the other to an object of conquest,
foregoing a relationship of reciprocity between equals.
• Ania Loomba argues that rape is “an abiding and
recurrent metaphor of colonial relations” (Loomba 1998:
164).
•Because of the collusion of colonialism and
evangelisation, attitudes to sexuality and race determined
to a large extent relationships between
coloniser/colonised and missionary/missionised, all
germane to the Bemba of Bembaland, in spite of biblical
teaching of equality (Genesis 1:26).
7. Conclusion:
•Conversion in the context of the Bemba of Bembaland was
never a free act. It is best understood as a rupture of the
cosmic boundaries in the microcosm and macrocosm and
the primal culture‟s attempt to appropriate new categories
proposed by the missionaries and colonialists in explaining,
predicting and controlling data in the new macrocosm.
•Conversion to the new epistemological framework was
fraught right from the beginning as the neophytes were
more interested in the western accoutrements of the
proposed macrocosm that accompanied evangelisation than
in the new religion and its monolatria per se.
•In the process of the evangelisation of the Bemba, their
local androgynous divinity was colonised and masculinised.
•This divinity needs to be deconstructed, de-gendered and
de-masculinised for a healthy appropriation of Christianity
by modern African Christians in their pursuit of perfection
or wholeness (Ubutuntulu) after the manner of their
Supreme Being whose nature comprises both the masculine
(Ubwaume) and feminine (Ubukota).
By Tarcisius Mukuka, St Mary‟s University College, Twickenham, London
Email: mukukat@smuc.ac.uk
4. The Bible and Colonisation of a
Bemba divinity (Deus Otiosus):
•Before the advent of Christianity the Bemba believed in a
Supreme Being whom they called Lesa (nurturer).
•Lesa, an androgynous benevolent divine being, included
masculine and feminine attributes but his/her main attributes
were: parent (Umufyashi) and creator (Kabumba).
•In Robin Horton‟s intellectualist theory Lesa underpinned
the second tier of the Bemba macrocosm as a Deus Otiosus,
but most people operated in the microcosm of the first tier
of lesser spirits such as Mulenga wa Mpanga.
•One of the paradoxes of evangelisation in Bembaland was
that much of its success depended on colonising a
traditional Bemba notion of a remote but benevolent Lesa
into a male, violent, vengeful and Janus-faced God.
5.1 “Speaking broad
Devonshire
Ralegh has backed the maid to
a tree
As Ireland is backed to England
And drives inland
Till all her strands are
breathless: Sweesir, Swatter!
Sweesir, Swatter!
He is water, he is ocean, lifting
Her farthingale like a scarf of
weed lifting
In the front of a wave”
(Ocean’s Love to Ireland in:
North by Seamus Heaney)
8. Literature Cited:
Farriss, Nancy (1984), Maya Society under colonial Rule, Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press
Heaney, Seamus (1975), “Ocean‟s Love to Ireland,” in: North, London:
Faber & Faber
Horton, Robin (1971), “African Conversion,” Africa 41 (2): 85-108
Loomba, Ania (1998), Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London: Routledge
Moloney, Karen Marguerite (2007), Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of
Hope, Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press
Niranjana, Tejaswini (1992), Siting Translation: History, PostStructuralism, and the Colonial Context, Berkeley CA: University of
California Press
Punt, Jeremy (2003), “Postcolonial Biblical Criticism in South Africa:
Some Mind and Road Mapping,” Neotestamentica 37(1): 59-85
Yeats, William Butler (1920), “The Second coming”
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html (Accessed on 16.03.11)
Young, Robert J.C (1995), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture
and Race, London: Routledge
9. Acknowledgments:
My gratitude to Dr. Anthony Towey, Head of the School of Theology,
Philosophy, and History for facilitating a grant to cover travel costs to
Zambia for field research from June to September 2010; to Samantha
Chant for organising the ticket; to Prof. Nur Masalha for advice on the
theoretical framework for this research and to Prof. Rasiah Sugirtharajah
for pointing me in the direction of postcolonial biblical criticism.