Bemba Traditional Religion

Lesa made the sky, sends the rain, and is invoked at the edges of Bemba speech, in oaths and in moments of wonder, but he keeps no shrine and receives no regular sacrifice. The religion's working attention goes instead to the imipashi, the spirits of the dead, who remain active members of the matrilineal family they belonged to in life. A senior ancestor's spirit may be understood to return in a newborn descendant, carrying the name and something of the character forward, and the imipashi are approached through diviners and mediums when illness, infertility or misfortune has no ordinary explanation. Alongside them stand the ngulu, spirits attached to particular places, pools and hills, who must be respected rather than worshipped in any regular sense.

Chieftainship folds directly into this structure rather than sitting apart from it. The paramount chief, the Chitimukulu, inherits not only a title but a set of sacred relics, the babenye, understood to carry the power of past chiefs, and installation rites bind the new chief to the spirits of his predecessors. A Bemba chief's authority is therefore religious authority as much as political authority, and the same logic that makes an ancestor present in a descendant's spirit makes a chief the living vessel of the chieftainship's accumulated dead.

Bemba tradition remembers its own origin as a migration, a founding party moving east from the Kola kingdom of the Luba-Lunda world, in the region of the modern Democratic Republic of Congo, under a leader whose title, Chitimukulu, every paramount chief has carried since. Settling the plateau around what is now Kasama, the migrants built a kingdom on matrilineal descent and a chiefly hierarchy whose legitimacy rested on inherited relics and ancestral spirits rather than on conquest alone, a structure already old by the time British traders and administrators arrived in the 1890s.

Colonial Northern Rhodesia drew Bemba men in large numbers to the Copperbelt mines, and Christian missions, Catholic White Fathers prominent among them, followed the same roads. The Watchtower movement, which became Jehovah's Witnesses, spread rapidly through the same migrant labour networks from early in the twentieth century. None of this displaced the ancestral religion so much as ran alongside it: Audrey Richards, doing fieldwork among the Bemba in the early 1930s, documented Chisungu and the ancestor cult as living institutions in villages that were, by her own account, already substantially Christian. Zambia's 1991 constitutional declaration of itself as a Christian nation describes the country most Bemba live in today, without describing the ancestral custom that continues underneath it.