BEMBA RELIGION

BEMBA RELIGION . The Bemba, also known as Awemba, inhabit the northeastern part of Zambia between lakes Tanganyika, Mweru, Malawi, and Bangweulu. According to oral traditions, three sons of the Luba king, Mukulumpe, who had fallen out with their father, led a migration of people from what is now the Shaba Province of southern Zaire to what became the Bemba territory. The royal clan of the Bemba traces its descent to these brothers and to their sister, Bwalya Chabala. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Bemba were established in their present territory. A paramount chief, or citimukulu (a title associated with Mukulumpe's sons), ruled the Bemba with the assistance of local chiefs, also of the royal clan, whom he appointed to govern the various districts under Bemba control.

The matrilineal clan structure of the Bemba can be traced to Bwalya Chabala's central role in the migrations from Shaba. According to tradition, the sons of Mukulumpe, after wandering in exile from their father's kingdom, realized that they needed the assistance of a royal woman to found their clan, so they went back to their father's compound and secretly carried Bwalya Chabala away with them. She is often mentioned as the person who brought the seeds and plants used in Bemba agriculture. In their tradition of a woman founding the royal clan as well as introducing agricultural knowledge, the Bemba assert the intimate connection between the principle of matrilineal descent and the fertility of the land. Bwalya Chabala's honored place in Bemba traditions can be seen in a sacred burial place, not far from the present-day Bemba capital, associated with her. Offerings of cloth and flour are brought to her burial shrine. A basket, which is said to be hers, hangs in the relic house of the citimukulu. Flour from this basket is used in several Bemba religious ceremonies.

Like other central African ethnic groups, the Bemba acknowledge a high god known as Lesa. Among the neighboring Lamba people, Lesa is thought to have been a man who lived on earth and helped his people. For the Bemba, however, Lesa was never a person. He is a creator god who controls the rains and the power of fertility manifested in humans, animals, and agriculture. He is the source of the creative power in the roots and shrubs that the Bemba use in healing and religious rituals. There is no organized cult associated with Lesa, and the Bemba do not ordinarily solicit his assistance. When serious problems of community-wide concern arise, however, they organize collective rituals to ask Lesa for help. These are particularly common in times of severe drought.

Spirits of the ancestors play a more central role in the day-to-day existence of the Bemba. Rituals are performed to seek assistance from the ancestors and to ensure that their considerable influence over the lives of the living becomes a force for good. Some of these ancestral spirits (mipashi ) are considered benign; others, called fiwa, are more dangerous. The fiwa are the spirits of those who died with a sense of grievance or injury and who trouble their descendants until the wrong is corrected.

When a pregnant woman feels the child moving in her womb, she knows that the mupashi of an ancestor has entered her body. After the child is born, the identity of this ancestor is ascertained by divination. The child's mupashi is believed to guard him wherever he goes and remains as a guardian for his descendants after he dies.

For every man or woman who dies there is a special succession ceremony (kupyamika ) in which a close relative assumes the dead man's bow or the dead woman's girdle. By doing so, the relative assumes some of the personal characteristics of the deceased as well as his or her position in the kinship system. Thus a young boy who is appointed in this way to succeed a dead man will thereafter address his fellow villagers using the same forms the deceased would have used; the villagers, in turn, will regard the boy as the husband of the dead man's widow and will speak of him as such.

The Bemba's paramount chief is said to succeed to the mipashi of his matrilineal ancestors, which dates back to the founding siblings. During the chief's succession ceremony, he is given a number of material objects associated with the mipashi; it is through these sacred relics that the citimukulu acquires power over his domains. This power can be weakened, however, by any failure of the chief to fulfill ritual obligations or to adhere to a series of sexual avoidances associated with his office. The ritual objects (babenya ) inherited by the chief are kept in special spirit huts in the capital where they are looked after by hereditary "councillors" (bakabilo ), who also trace their ancestry to the foundation of the Bemba state. The shrines are also guarded by "wives of the dead," who are direct descendants of the wives of former chiefs. The approximately four hundred bakabilo are responsible for purifying the paramount chief before he approaches the spirit huts and for protecting him from harmful influences. They prevent the ritually impure from approaching the chief and guard his power by quickly removing from the capital anyone who is in imminent danger of dying.

Traditionally, when a paramount chief was at the point of death, the bakabilo, who traced their membership in the royal clan by paternal descent and were therefore ineligible to succeed him, gathered in the royal hut to ensure that the necessary rituals were carried out precisely as dictated by tradition. Their leader determined when the bakabilo should strangle the paramount chief. The bakabilo had to be careful to do this at the proper moment, for to strangle the king too soon would have been considered murder and to wait too long might have allowed the royal mipashi to escape, with devastating consequences for the entire kingdom. (The Bemba citimukulu may be seen as conforming to James G. Frazer's model of a "divine king.") After the death of the citimukulu, the bakabilo removed the ritual objects associated with the office and took them to a neighboring village for safekeeping until the succession ceremony took place.

The burial of the chief had to be done according to strict ritual procedures to ensure that the spiritual power of the office was not weakened. The corpse was washed by the three senior women—the chief's mother, his senior sister, and his head wife—then placed in the fetal position upon a platform made of branches. Hereditary royal buriers completed the rituals by pouring a special bean sauce over the body at dawn and at noon. The skin of a newly sacrificed bull was wrapped around the body, followed by a special cloth. At the end of a yearlong mourning period and after the millet had been harvested, the chief's remains were moved to the sacred burial place (mwalule ). Before the bakabilo set out for the burial place, the senior widow was slain in sacrifice. On their way to the burial site, the bakabilo sacrificed all the chickens and goats that they encountered. Commoners were supposed to hide from the burial procession. The chief's wives and servants were buried with his remains. Ivory tusks and other valuable goods were placed on top of his grave, which was guarded by the "wives of the dead."

The hereditary burier of the citimukulu, who was in charge of the royal burial ground, was known as shinwalule ("lord of the burial ground"). In addition to playing a prominent role in the succession ceremonies of the new chief, the shinwalule performed a variety of rituals associated with rain and the fertility of the land.

One of the most important Bemba rituals is the female initiation ceremony, Chisungu, held shortly after the onset of menstruation. Between one and three girls take part in the ceremony. During her first menstruation, a girl undergoes an individual purification rite designed to "bring her to the hearth" or "show her the fire," because it is believed that her condition has made her "cold." (Fire is often used in Bemba rituals to purify a person who has passed through a dangerous or impure condition.) Medicines treated with fire play an important part in the girl's purification ritual.

The actual Chisungu ritual is held at a convenient time relatively soon after the menstrual purification ritual. Chisungu is a nubility rite in the sense that it is less concerned with the physical transformations of puberty than with the social changes necessary for a woman to be ready for marriage. Normally the girl is already betrothed; the ritual is designed to protect the couple from the dangers associated with their first act of sexual intercourse and to establish the rights of the future husband to engage in sexual relations. It is also a time when women elders teach younger women the religious and social responsibilities of women in their community. The rite entails no physical operation but involves singing and dancing both within the village and in the bush. There is no comparable ritual for boys.

Bibliography

For background history of the Bemba, see Andrew D. Roberts's A History of the Bemba (Madison, Wis., 1973). The following of my own works should also be consulted: "The Bemba of North-Eastern Rhodesia," in Seven Tribes of British Central Africa, edited by Elizabeth Colson and Max Gluckman (Oxford, 1951), pp. 164–193, gives a preliminary treatment of Bemba religion; Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia (Oxford, 1939) contains accounts of religious ceremonies related to the economic life of the people; "Keeping the King Divine" in Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1968) draws on information provided by hereditary bearers of the citimukulu; and Chisungu, 2d edition (London, 1982), examines this important female initiation ceremony. A. H. Muenya's "The Burial of Chitimukulu Mubanga," African Affairs 46 (1947): 101–104, offers an eyewitness account of the burial of a recent citimukulu.

New Sources

Badenberg, Robert. The Body, Soul and Spirit Concept of the Bemba in Zambia: Fundamental Characteristics of Being Human in an African Ethnic Group. Bonn, 1999.

Davoli, Umberto. The Dancing Elephant: A Collection of the Tales of the Bemba People. Ndola, Zambia, 1992.

Hinfelaar, Hugo F. Bemba-Speaking Women of Zambia: A Century of Religious Change, 1892–1992. Leiden and New York, 1994.

James, Eric. Moment of Encounter. New York, 1984.

Moore, Henrietta L. Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia 1890–1990. Portsmouth, N.H., 1994.

Richards, Audrey Isabel. Chisungu: A Girl's Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia. London and New York, 1988.

Audrey I. Richards (1987)

Revised Bibliography