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David M. Gordon. Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History.

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 119; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/119.1.288

1937-5239

Norman Etherington,

Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

In 1991, following the general election that turned out Zambia's long-serving president, Kenneth Kaunda, the incoming administration of Frederick Chiluba dispatched a minister without portfolio and four evangelists to cleanse State House of evil spirits. About the same time Chiluba officially proclaimed Zambia to be a Christian nation. Explaining why a self-consciously modernizing state should engage in such acts means taking unseen spiritual forces seriously. David M. Gordon's approach to this task entails a historical investigation of religious change over time in a part of northeastern Zambia that has long been fertile ground for Western social scientists. Drawing on a great range of oral and written sources he interrogates the arguments of his scholarly predecessors and finds them wanting—primarily because they took for granted an inevitable Weberian progress toward secularization. The result is a recasting of twentieth-century Central African history that foregrounds invisible agency. Gordon begins with an account of how the precolonial Bemba kingdom attempted with less than total success to wrest control of the spiritual forces governing sky and earth from the local cults and practitioners on whose support all earthly power depended. With the arrival of Protestant and Catholic missionaries the contest over the unseen world took a new turn. Their scorn for idols and superstition did not at first displace the ancestral spirits, witch-finders, and sorcerers who had previously held sway. Instead Africans reimagined the struggle for spiritual power in terms of God and Satan. The older supernatural agents were not banished but rebadged as Lucifer's legions. Paradoxically, the missionaries' dismissal of witchcraft as a snare of the devil made the task of finding and destroying witches appear more urgent than ever. And when missionaries declared their own immunity to sorcery, some of them fell under suspicion. On Gordon's reading a gulf now yawned between missionary Christianity and the Christianity of their converts. The missionaries understood sin primarily as transgression of moral codes. Central African new Christians saw sin as the mobilization of evil forces. Combating sin meant cleansing the world of evil as a prelude to the final defeat of Satan. The political consequence was that colonialism itself was identified as Satanic because it bore responsibility for so many of the world's evils. That in turn suggests to Gordon that the anticolonial struggle for self-determination must be understood in spiritual as well as secular nationalist terms. Freedom meant triumph over Satan, sin, and demons. Seen this way, African nationalism is not simply informed by religion; nationalism and religion are two sides of the same coin.