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Matthew Engelke is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at London School of Economics and Political Science.

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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 subject-which is how it functions in Kambarami's story-ought to be investigated, in light of the role its physical qualities play in the constitution of this status. The portraits in this chapter show that the book-as-object has been central to establishing its authority as the Christian sign, even as the materiality of this sign has often been taken for granted. For this, indeed, is the dual character of any object: "its extreme visibility and its extreme invisibility" (Miller 1987, 108). It is precisely when the Bible's material meaning is not taken for granted-and it never is, not uniformly-that we are prompted to consider how the humility of objects can turn into the humiliation of objects. Sending the Bible up in smoke can be either, and much in between.

The first two portraits, of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries from Great Britain, give us a sense of the efforts to circulate the Bible as widely as possible in early modern evangelical work. Like Kambarami, these missionaries understood the Bible as an agent in itself-something that could reconfigure the world as Christian. The power of the Bible relied chiefly on its introduction: where it was present it could act by "reading" as much as by being read. The second two portraits, of a Zulu Christian prophet and an Acholi Christian medium, make clear that Christian reconfigurations were not always according to missionary expectations. Contrary to the suggestion of Isaac Hughes in the epigraph, there is no such thing as a simple reading and study of the Bible. At the same time (and as Kambarami clearly hopes) Christianity has demanded an engagement with the text. This last point is evident in the second set of portraits but is developed further in the third set, which focuses on two African clergymen, an archbishop in the Anglican Church and a Methodist theologian. For them, the book has a tenacity that provides their theological ground, although the ground for each is distinctly different, as is the nature of the Bible's tenacity.

In what follows I paint in broad strokes. My goal is to provide a general picture of how Christians address the problem of presence through their understandings of the Bible's qualities as a sign. I necessarily leave out some important aspects of what defined African mission fields-the economic dimensions, for example, as well as several social and political ones. When I turn to the ethnography of the Masowe apostolics, some of the aspects left out here come to the fore. The broad-stroked picture omits important theological points too. Thomas O. Beidelman (1974, 1982) has rightly noted that historians and anthropologists have often conflated the approaches and philosophies of missions, assuming that Christianity is a monolithic force and Christians themselves a fairly homogeneous lot. One of the crucial differences to acknowledge here, extending discussions in the introduction, is that Protestants and Catholics "have sharply different views on the religious significance of literacy" (Beidelman 1982, 14). Unlike many of their Protestant counterparts, Catholic missionaries have not, in accordance with Church doctrine, presented the Bible as a sufficient source of faith. For much of the period under consideration, Catholics placed the Bible in the hands of the clergy more firmly than the congregation. What's more, not all Protestant churches have emphasized reading the Bible to the same extent. It has often been cast alongside other indexes such as gifts of the spirit and institutional-specific teachings.

At the same time I want to argue that since at least the 1850s the Bible in Africa has become an increasingly significant index of Christianity that has obscured otherwise obvious confessional distinctions. In fact, according to Norman Etherington (1977), the insistence on Protestant and Catholic difference is not always supported by the historical record. In southeastern Africa, for example, there were nine Protestant and Catholic missions from seven national traditions operating among the Nguni-speaking peoples in the mid-nineteenth century. When each began work there were indeed "marked differences" among and between them; by 1880, however, Etherington tells us, "these variations hardly mattered" (1977, 32, 35). They hardly mattered because missionaries could never define their work by theology alone-if they had time to preach a theology, which was not always the case. African converts and potential converts (to say nothing of colonial authorities) had their own agendas and interests-some pragmatic, some religious. By downplaying historical and theological specificities in this chapter, however, I do not want to deny their existence or reject their importance. Rather, through this temporary suspension of the anthropological sensibility, I want to highlight the discourse of how the Bible has been set apart to lay the groundwork for how the Masowe apostolics approach the Bible in light of its materiality.

If the Bible once defined a paradigm of evangelical Protestantism, it is today something more, something that Christians in Africa have emphasized on their own accord-even, to some extent, in Catholic mission fields and communities. Signs and their circulation are always difficult to control as both objects and ideas (Thomas 1991). The portraits here suggest the Bible has proven a particularly robust and unpredictable sign: robust, in the sense that its presence spread throughout a range of semiotic ideologies; unpredictable, because this was not always according to the plans of those who were spreading it. Even when they are not sent up in smoke, it is important to recognize that "objects change in defiance of their material stability" (Thomas 1991, 125).

PRELUDE TO THE PORTRAITS: THE BRITISH AND FOREIGN BIBLE SOCIETY

"Printing," Martin Luther once wrote, "is the ultimate gift of God and the greatest one. Indeed, by means of it God wants to spread word of the cause of the true religion to all the earth, to the extremities of the world" (quoted in Gilmont 1999, 213). It was the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), progenitor of organizations such as Kambarami's BSZ, that did the most to facilitate the actualization of this "gift," and we cannot present the six portraits without first considering the "scriptural imperialism" (Sugirtharajah 2001, 4573) Bible societies helped to put into place.

Printing presses were brought to the Cape Colony by the London Missionary Society in 1814 and 1819 (see Bradlow 1987), following on the heels of a concerted effort to provide texts in the emerging mission fields. No organization was more responsible for setting this mandate than the BFBS. Its "sole aim" was (and still is) "the production and distribution of the Scriptures in the languages of the world" (Fenn 1963, 387). Its advocates were convinced "that the secret of England's greatness was its reading of the Bible" (Sugirtharajah 2001, 53). The BFBS was not a mission society, and none of its editions (all based initially on translations from the Authorized King James version) contained any exegetical material, notes, or comments. Founders of the society worked under the assumption that if the peoples of the world had access to the book that they would want it and that "study and practice would automatically follow" (Howsam 1991, 3).

There was a growing sense in England at the end of the eighteenth century that reading the Bible was the key to salvation and that those without access to it were, in effect, being denied the essence of faith. One clergyman returning to London from Wales, where the poorest subjects were complaining of their lack of access to the text, declared in 1793, "Is there poverty like their poverty, who have not the Bible of God?" (quoted in Owen 1817, 3). His lament was captured in a well-known story from the time-still told today-of a girl named Mary Jones who wanted to buy a copy of the Bible in Welsh. After working hard to save money, she made the long trek to the bookseller's, only to find that there were no copies available. Mary Jones became a symbolic catalyst for the evangelicals. It was unforgivable to deny people's desire-their need-for the book. Mary's story was retold to children throughout the British Isles. "And if for Wales," one evangelist said, "why not also for the Empire and the world?" (quoted in Howsam 1991, 3).

Those sympathetic to the goals of the BFBS tried to suggest an innate desire for the book in the "lower races." John Owen, the Anglican secretary of the society, quoted J.D. Carlyle, professor of Arabic at Cambridge University, who drew on the explorer Mungo Park's observations among West Africa Muslims, to support the argument of this desire. Carlyle wrote in 1803, a year before the BFBS was founded: "According to Mr. Park, the negroes are proud of their literature, and seldom travel without a book slung by their side. Amongst their books he has perceived the Pentateuch, the Book of Psalms, and the Prophet Isaiah. All of these they prize very highly; and such is the general eagerness to obtain them, that he believes no articles would be more saleable in Africa than copies of the Scriptures in Arabic. He has seen a copy of the Pentateuch alone, sold at the price of one prime slave, i.e. about 20 guineas" (quoted in Owen 1817, 157). Carlyle's report asserts a natural, almost unconscious, progression toward Christianity expressed through African desires to read. And not only did West African Muslims already have a penchant for some of the key texts in the Christian tradition, they were willing to pay dearly for them.

It is worth stressing-certainly here, in light of the focus on materiality-that the BFBS and other Bible societies resist the characterization of the Bible as a commodity. Their underlying principle is the provision of "cheap Bibles" (see Howsam 1991), and none makes a profit. But neither do they encourage giving the Bible away for free, "since people do not value what they get for nothing" (Fenn 1963, 399). This makes Carlyle's report all the more notable. The parallel Carlyle draws between the value of human life and of Scripture is not only a comment on the spiritual worth of the written word, but its desirability as a commodity. It suggests that as part of an emerging ideology of Christianity, commerce, and civilization, the Bible would prove a useful weapon in the abolition of the slave trade. The slave trade might end if there were books to buy instead. In this sense its materiality operated at several levels, indexing it as both the Gospel and a good.

(Continues...)

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