The Bullhoek massacre highlights a recurrent theme in the histories of new religious movements in colonial situations. Colonial officials generally accommodated these movements as long as they operated within orthodox religious boundaries or limited their challenges to mission denominations. However, once they adopted beliefs that appeared to transgress political boundaries and question the legitimacy of colonial authority, officials usually misinterpreted the religious messages and aggressively confronted these movements, often with tragic consequences. Millenarian movements, with their visions of an impending end of the world, their unwillingness to compromise, and their rigid division of society into the saved and the damned, particularly vexed secular officials, whether during or after the colonial period.
In Central Africa the greatest religious challenge to Pax Britannica was Watch Tower (after 1931, Jehovah’s Witnesses), founded in the 1870s in America by Charles Taze Russell. He predicted that Armageddon would follow Christ’s return to earth in 1914. African migrant workers in mining compounds and domestic service imbibed Watch Tower’s message and spread it throughout southern Africa. Watch Tower’s leading salesmen of salvation in Central Africa, Hanoc Sinwano and Elliott Kenan Kamwana, both Free Church of Scotland members, had worked as labour migrants in Cape Town. There they had received Watch Tower’s message from Joseph Booth, a one-time Baptist missionary in Nyasaland whose egalitarian views on African autonomy put him at odds with most European missionaries. Returning to Nyasaland in 1908, Kamwana preached that colonial taxes and labour recruitment represented a form of witchcraft. His revivalist campaign promoted mass baptisms by immersion as protection against evil, while those who refused to be dipped were labelled ‘wasatani or devils’. The Watch Tower message offered a searing indictment not only of specific colonial abuses but also of white rule itself. As Karen Fields has put it, Kamwana’s words offered ‘an intelligible ideology’ for his followers that the forces of good and evil were engaged in mortal combat, and that colonial officials undermined and corrupted the religious authority of white missionaries and African traditional rulers alike. This ‘satanic alliance’, he declared, between mission churches and colonial officials had to be destroyed. His incendiary preaching sparked conflict with civil authorities. He was repeatedly deported to remote areas of Nyasaland and ultimately exiled to the Seychelles islands in 1915. That same year Watch Tower was banned in Nyasaland and two years later in Southern Rhodesia.
Although the outbreak of world war in 1914 was not precisely the millennium Watch Tower adherents expected, it brought enormous trauma to Africans in Central Africa as colonial officials increased their demands. The war radicalized John Chilembwe. After being taught by Booth and schooled at an African American theological seminary in Virginia, Chilembwe returned to Nyasaland to found the Providence Industrial Mission. A firm believer in Booker T. Washington’s gradualist philosophy of industrial education, he was a model of respectability. (See pp. 267-71.) However, he grew increasingly critical of the abusive treatment of African tenants and labourers on European plantations. He was further angered when British officials imposed additional taxes and threw hundreds of thousands of African soldiers and porters into the fight against the Germans in East Africa. With a small band of conspirators, he hastily launched a rebellion in early 1915 against British rule and European plantation owners. He likely knew that his uprising was doomed to failure, but thought it worthwhile to ‘strike a blow and die’ in the manner of one of his heroes, the American abolitionist John Brown. Kamwana, in contrast, refused to join the plot on the ground that Jehovah was about to usher in the millennium. Chilembwe’s rising alarmed colonial officials, who recognized that their ‘thin white line’ was stretched to the limits. Northern Rhodesia’s Chief Justice Macdonnell believed Watch-tower had exposed ‘our fragile... hold over these people, and, at times, one saw the abyss opening’. Officials voiced fears that they had little or no control over the black evangelists and mission schoolteachers who assumed key positions at mission stations after white missionaries were called up for military service. These teachers undermined the efforts to enlist Africans, and inspired black soldiers and police to challenge the colonial order. As a result African employees of mission stations and Watch Tower evangelists were singled out for persecution. In September 1918 two Watch Tower members were arrested for resisting an order to serve as porters and for inciting others to follow suit. Their defence was straightforward: they would not ‘serve two masters—God and man’.
In South Africa the Bullhoek massacre created a government security psychosis which put any new prophet under extreme suspicion. Nontetha Nkwenkwe, a middle-aged Xhosa widow with grown children, fell deathly ill during the 1918 influenza pandemic and learned in a vision that this disaster was God’s punishment for the sins of her people. They must turn away from drunkenness, adultery, and circumcision. An illiterate, Nontetha preached Scripture from the palms of her hands, calling on her faithful to convert to Christianity, attend schools, and prepare for doomsday. Clearly, Nontetha was not preaching sedition; if anything, her teaching suggested accommodation rather than resistance to white rule. However, white officials, fearing another Bullhoek showdown, tried to remove her from the scene. Though she had broken no laws, a magistrate declared her mentally ill, and in 1922 she was committed to a nearby asylum. When followers continued to visit her, officials removed her to a Pretoria mental hospital. Even then her followers organized two remarkable ‘Pilgrimages of Grace’, setting out on foot on a 600 mile journey to visit her. Hospital psychiatrists, who admitted that she posed no physical threat to anyone, nonetheless accepted the State’s view that she must be locked away lest she agitate her followers and create problems. When she died in 1935, authorities refused to surrender her body to her family and buried her in an anonymous grave in a pauper’s held.
Official misperceptions also plagued the Kikuyu Kanitha wa Roho (Church of the Holy Spirit) in Kenya. In 1926 Moses Thuo and Joseph Ng’anga felt themselves miraculously filled with the Holy Spirit that called them to prophetic ministries. They appropriated the name ‘arathi’, a word for diviners or prophets who had an intimate relationship with Ngai, the Creator God. But their interpretation of arathi, reflecting their reading of the Old Testament, diverged from traditional precepts. They saw God not as a remote figure, but as one who engaged in the daily affairs of humans and sided with the oppressed and downtrodden. It was logical for arathi to relate their own experience of colonialism with the Israelites, a chosen people destined to be delivered from bondage. Their eschatology preached that a day of redemption was coming in which the British colonizers would be expelled from Kikuyu lands. Arathi scorned not only colonial rule, but also aspects of both traditional and mission-taught values. They attacked witchcraft and ritual sacrifices to the ancestors and Ngai, while condemning the missions for corrupting African customs and introducing modern trappings such as clothes, shoes, and money. The arathis autonomous value system was based on their own rendering of biblical precepts. Although the movement supported Kikuyu independent schools and churches, it saw these institutions as too closely identified with Western ideas and values. For their part, Kikuyu independent church members distrusted arathi and gathered intelligence about its activities for colonial officials. Colonial officials, who initially dismissed arathi as ‘pseudo-religious fanatics’, grew alarmed after observing arathi men carrying bows and arrows and doubleedged swords. The arathi justified arming themselves for defensive purposes because a prophecy predicted that a great war was imminent. Colonial officials closely monitored their activities, and, in 1934, prohibited arathi meetings and gaoled anyone contravening the regulation. In February 1934 police killed three arathi, including Ng’anga, during a skirmish in the Ndaragu forest. Thuo, on the other hand, lent his support to the Kikuyu Central Association, although few of his followers joined him.
One of the last major Maori prophets, Rua Kenana, came to prominence after further pakeha land grabs on North Island. Between 1892 and 1900 almost 3 million of the 7 million acres held by Maori were sold off to white settlers. When Rua was tapped by God, he declared that he was fulfilling Te Kooti’s prophecy before his death in 1893 that a prophet would appear in the East to carry on his work and that Rua had a special mission to address the land crisis: ‘If your wish’, Rua told God, ‘is for me to save my people, I won’t help, but if it is to save this land, then I shall carry out this task.’ Claiming that the Holy Spirit spoke through him, Rua called his movement Wairua Tapu (Holy Spirit) movement and his followers Israelites. Male Israelites wore their hair long in the style of the biblical Nazarites. Rua’s campaign to redress land inequities led him to make a bold prediction that the British monarch, Edward VII, would arrive in Gisborne, Rua’s home town, on 26 June 1906 and present £4 million to buy back all of the alienated Maori land. Rua persuaded his adherents to journey to his home to await this millennial happening. His message especially resonated with Maori contract workers on white farms or in occupations such as sheep-shearers, ploughmen, and fencers. A thousand or so of the faithful responded to the call. Rua’s predictions about expulsions threw the white community into a panic. When rumours spread that the Israelites possessed firearms, the government targeted Rua as the fomenter of armed rebellion through the Tohunga Suppression Act in 1907. After King Edward failed to materialize, Rua led his followers to land he owned in the nearby Urewera Reserve and founded his own community. His New Jerusalem was near his birthplace at the base of the sacred mountain Maungapohatu (Mountain of Stone), whose caves held the bones of Maori ancestors. Rua’s Israelites escaped the tragic fate of Mgijima’s Israelites in South Africa. As a landowner he was able to exchange a parcel of his land with the government in order to gain additional land for his community. However, the government still perceived him as a rabble-rouser and, in 1915, arrested him for selling liquor without a licence. After serving a one-year gaol term, he failed to respond to additional charges and further inflamed the situation by admitting to an official that he hoped the Germans would win the First World War. In April 1916 a police force sent to arrest him for sedition clashed with Rua and his Israelites. Two Israelites were killed and three more wounded.
Prophetic churches continued to trouble the colonial state right up to the eve of independence. In September 1953 Alice Lenshina, an illiterate woman in her early thirties living in Bemba territory, Northern Rhodesia, emerged from a coma and announced that she had died and been resurrected. Christ had shown her a true Bible specifically for Africans, from which she drew a puritanical moral code prohibiting beer-drinking and tobacco-smoking, polygyny, traditional dances, sorcery, and divination. Several years after her baptism in a Presbyterian mission, she founded the Lumpa (To Be Superior) Church, which attracted adherents away from Presbyterian and Catholic congregants. Some of her appeal lay in her offer of protection from witchcraft by administering a powerful medicine, a practice similar to the bamucapi cult that had entered Bemba territory from Nyasaland several decades before. Although Lenshina expressed no political aspirations, her church recognized only her authority and was antagonistic to both the colonial regime and mission churches. The Lumpa Church became an independent force, establishing villages throughout the region. The Church collected tribute from chiefs, and her deacons (badikoni) harassed people who did not pay. Its principal leaders were teachers who had lost their jobs after colonial officials upgraded teachers’ standards. Many women were attracted to Lenshina because she portrayed herself as a mediator between earth and God, a traditional women’s role, and stressed the sacredness of home and marital purity and harmony. In 1959 colonial officials brought conflict to a head by sending police to expel illegal residents at Kasomo. The following year Lenshina went to teach at the copperbelt; in her absence, many of her followers lent their support to the nationalist political parties leading the struggle for independence. When Lenshina returned home several years later, she enjoined her followers not to participate in politics. However, after the 1962 election produced the territory’s first African government, the United National Independence Party, featuring Bemba leaders such as Kenneth Kaunda and Simon Kapwepwe, clashes between her female followers and male party members regularly broke out. Lumpa members perceived themselves in a life-and-death struggle for survival, and it did not matter whether they were confronting white or black rulers. As independence neared in late 1964, several incidents escalated into confrontations with government forces between June and October in which over 1,500 church members died. Conflict between Church and State would survive the end of Empire.