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A Problem of Presence

University of California Press

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...........................................................................IXACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................................XIMAP OF ZIMBABWE.................................................................................XVIntroduction....................................................................................11 / Up in Smoke: Humility, Humiliation, and the Christian Book..................................462 / The Early Days of Johane Masowe.............................................................793 / The Question of Leadership: The Friday Message after Johane.................................1094 / Mutemo in Three Portraits...................................................................1385 / Listening for the True Bible: Live and Direct Language, Part I..............................1716 / Singing and the Metaphysics of Sound: Live and Direct Language, Part II.....................2007 / The Substance of Healing....................................................................224Conclusion......................................................................................244NOTES...........................................................................................253REFERENCES......................................................................................267INDEX...........................................................................................291

Chapter One

Humility, Humiliation, and the Christian Book

The simple reading and study of the Bible alone will convert the world. The missionary's work is to gain for it admission and attention, and then let it speak for itself. ISAAC HUGHES

IN OCTOBER 1999 I INTERVIEWED Gaylord Kambarami, general secretary of the Bible Society of Zimbabwe (BSZ), an ecumenical organization that traces its roots to the British and Foreign Bible Society, established in 1804. Many churches operating in Zimbabwe, including several independent churches, support the BSZ. Kambarami estimates that since 1980 the BSZ has distributed over three million copies of Scripture, or about one Bible for every four Zimbabweans alive today. Based on these figures alone and discounting distribution by individual churches (to say nothing of copies handed down from one generation to the next), there should be at least one Bible in every Zimbabwean household, Christian or not. I suggested to Kambarami these were impressive statistics, but he was not satisfied. His goal, he told me, is to put a Bible into the hands of every Zimbabwean. "The Bible transforms people's lives," he said. "When you read that book, somehow something takes change in you."

Kambarami shared a number of stories collected from thirty years of work to convince me of this fact. One of these stories has stayed with me, both for the pleasure Kambarami expressed as he told it and for the unusual manner in which it demonstrates a certain kind of investment in the power of the book:

In 1995 I went to the Murewa rural areas to distribute copies of the Shona New Testament. In one village, a headman refused to take it. He said he couldn't stand the Word of God. I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because it pollutes people." So he refused to buy it. I told him that he could have it and just give it to someone else. He said he could only accept it if I allowed him to use the pages of the New Testament for smoking purposes. In the rural areas, you know, people use newspaper and whatever else they can find to roll their cigarettes. I said, "Fine, on one condition: read each page before you smoke." He accepted this, because he was literate. So I left the book with him and didn't think about it very much after that. Then, in 1997, I took a return trip to Murewa area. We had a convention there under a big tent. I was invited to speak, and I told the people how this book could change people's lives. Now, the same man whom I had given the New Testament to smoke was in the audience. Before the closing of the service, he stood and said, "Please, let me say a few words to [Kambarami]." He was dressed smart, in a suit. I did not recognize him at first. He said, "This man doesn't remember me; because when I last saw him I was a drunkard. But he came to our village and persuaded me to take the Bible. I told him I would use the paper to roll cigarettes. But I promised to read each page before doing so, which I did. So I smoked my way through Matthew. And I smoked the whole of Mark too. Then I smoked Luke. I started smoking John, but when I came to John 3:16 [For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life], a light shone in my face. And now I am a churchgoing person. I saw the light." This is why we try to get people to read the Bible. Even reading it on your own, you can transform yourself. It can transform you. In fact we often say in the BSZ that the Bible reads people. It holds the answer.

The force of Kambarami's story resides initially in the tension provided by the headman, who aims to deny the Word's significance for anything other than facilitating his personal vice. But the tension is soon resolved. We are supposed to recognize the Bible not as hapless object but as humble subject. By going up in smoke-a resonant religious image in the areas where Kambarami and his staff operate-the Bible is sacrificing itself to itself, for the sake of the headman. As the story unfolds the Bible becomes not a representation of the Word but, through a literal inhalation, its presence. That smoke is a key index of the tension is only fitting because it challenges us to define what is central and what is epiphenomenal in this mode of signification. Sending the Bible up in smoke, only to see the light: Kambarami is playing expertly on the difficulty of separating the significance of the Bible from its materiality.

Using Kambarami's story as a point of departure, this chapter focuses on the issues of presence and representation through portraits of six Christians with deep investments in the power of the Bible. Taken together, they provide a picture of the kinds of semiotic ideologies that have had considerable purchase in colonial and postcolonial Africa. In this they exemplify the kinds of Christians the Friday apostolics argue against. Like Kambarami, these Christians suggest that the Bible is a definitive sign through which God's presence is manifested. And like Kambarami, they assume, and sometimes assert, that the materiality of the Bible functions meaningfully in what and how it signifies.

Like Kambarami's headman, Johane Masowe sent the Bible up in smoke, although in doing so he produced a different kind of Christianity. To understand Johane's motivations, we need to understand what the Friday apostolics position themselves against. The six portraits in this chapter comprise a range of examples of how the Bible is made significant as both word and thing, often in a manner that challenges the conceptual separation between word and thing, such that the question of its qualities is not always openly posed. And yet the Bible as a humble...