Erina Rwakatagoro was probably in late adolescence in the late 1930s, when she first heard people repenting in south-western Uganda. ‘The names of the sins I knew and I became afraid’, she recalled to an anthropologist in 1971. Erina had attended an Anglican church, but after hearing the confessions of East African revivalists (in Luganda, Balokole [pl.] or Mulokole [sing.]), she decided to stay away from church for a while. Her hiatus was interrupted: ‘I heard the voice. I became afraid of eating tobacco.’ She later went to a Revival fellowship meeting during which ‘I also repented [of] disagreeing with my husband and … others I had wronged before. I repented [of] my sexual matters I had indulged myself in. I repented and repented. I felt a new change. What had been done in the dark was revealed.’Footnote 1
Like other Balokole Christians, Erina believed that she had lived her life in spiritual darkness. Her conversion happened in a moment of repentance, and she demonstrated her repentance through the public confession of specific sins. By confessing her sins before others, Erina moved from spiritual darkness to the light of salvation. Revivalists believed that this act of confession effected conversion.Footnote 2 This initial act of confession would be followed by weekly – sometimes daily – fellowship meetings, where revivalists would open their lives to one another. Revivalists referred to these defining practices of the Revival – confessing and fellowshipping – as ‘walking in the light’, and they saw in their new lifestyle the antithesis of how they had lived before they entered the life of salvation.Footnote 3
Especially in its earliest years, between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s, when the Revival emerged and spread from Rwanda and Uganda throughout East Africa, revivalists’ sensibilities fit analytically with recent scholarly attention given to discontinuity within Christian, and particularly Pentecostal, conversion.Footnote 4 Led by anthropologists of religion like Birgit Meyer, Joel Robbins and Matthew Engelke, this trajectory of scholarship on conversion emphasises the emic prioritisation of converts’ self-narratives that are predicated on sharp distinctions between converts’ past and present selves. Moving beyond rhetoric, Engelke argues that scholars of African Christianity need to ‘grasp [converts’] interest in breaking with the past’, which has often been answered by giving attention to the material conditions in which conversionary discontinuity becomes desirable and possible.Footnote 5 Given that the majority of the analyses prioritising rupture are based upon contemporary ethnographic research, a common response to Engelke's invitation situates conversionary interest in ‘breaking with the past’ in contemporary concerns pertaining to civil wars, difficulties encountered in neoliberal economies, and the failures of post-colonial state infrastructure.Footnote 6 It is against this backdrop that a message holding out the possibility of breaking with dysfunction, violence or deprivation becomes an appealing option.Footnote 7 That is to say, material concerns are understood to occasion the possibility and desirability of enacting this form of religious ‘rupture’. For example, in his analysis of development projects and Pentecostalism in rural eastern Uganda, Ben Jones argues that ‘Moving on from this history [of a violent insurgency] was significant, and those institutions that made moving on a possibility mattered. Drawing a distinction between the present and the past was a defining feature of the way institutions organised themselves and of the way people talked about life.’Footnote 8 Discontinuity of belief and identity, so conceptualised, is contingent upon political and material relations. One can go so far as to say that material relations, in and of themselves, provide an explanatory narrative for the desire for discontinuity in a religious or spiritual discourse.
Prioritising the material and political dimensions of historical contexts has long been part of explanations of religious conversion in Africa. Robin Horton described ‘African conversion’ as the movement from a ‘microcosm’ to a ‘macrocosm’ – a process of ‘dissolving the boundaries’ that had existed between ‘the respective domains of spirits and supreme being’ in ‘traditional African cosmology’. In Horton's analysis, these boundaries are dissolved through a change in ‘social circumstances’ in which spirits whose function it is to provide explanation, prediction and control within the ‘microcosm’ slowly give way to a supreme being, who is better able to serve the same function for a broadening social imaginary produced through increased incorporation into a ‘wider world’.Footnote 9 Conversion to Christianity or Islam, according to Horton, is derivative of these material shifts: ‘The obvious inference is that acceptance of Islam and Christianity is due as much to development of the traditional cosmology in response to other features of the modern situation as it is to the activities of the missionaries.’Footnote 10 For Horton, these developments remain, provocatively, developments of converts’ ‘traditional cosmology’.
Scholarship on the discontinuity of conversion stands in contrast with etic anthropological inquiry, as well as a line of scholarship on conversion that highlighted continuity. Continuity might be seen in this scholarship on conversion through translation, syncretism, the recovery of tradition or simply the gradualness with which new religious ideas and practices were accepted or adopted.Footnote 11 In proposing their ‘stage’ model for conceptualising conversion, Lewis Rambo and Charles Farhadian accept ‘religious change as a pervasive – perhaps universal – characteristic of human life’. While they describe a stage of ‘crisis’, which could be societal (in the form of new trade or a military invasion) or personal (such as an illness or mystical experience), the importance of these instances, in their analysis, is that they ‘may give rise to greater openness to accept religious options which were either rejected previously or simply ignored’.Footnote 12 Their model is sufficiently broad to encompass analyses that prioritise rupture, but the weight of Rambo and Farhadian's model is etic and comparative rather than centred upon an emic analysis of converts’ narratives. Meyer, Robbins and Engelke critique this scholarship with respect to conversion to Christianity in Africa in particular, which, to use a biblical metaphor, generally seeks to trace how converts put new wine into old wineskins. Instead, to continue the metaphor, they ask, what happens when converts’ religious sensibilities are based upon the declaration that they have thrown out the old wineskins entirely?
This article brings the literature on conversionary discontinuity within Christianity to bear on the phenomenon of conversion in the East African Revival during the late colonial era (roughly, from the 1930s to the early 1960s). In many respects, revivalists, missionaries and subsequent historians have found in this movement the replication of evangelical sensibilities regarding the immediate and discontinuous nature of a dramatic personal experience of conversion.Footnote 13 The analysis presented in this article, however, highlights a distinctive feature of many Ugandan revivalists’ testimonies: their experience of hearing a ‘voice’ that gave them a specific message, after which they converted. In arguing that these voices ought not be understood exclusively in Christian theological terms (such as the voice of God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit), this article gives analytical priority to these kinds of exceptional experiences. The possibility that these voices were other kinds of ‘invisible agents’ who demanded Ugandans convert to the Revival movement is suggested by then considering related experiences from two revivalists on the periphery of the Revival movement.Footnote 14 Priming these extraordinary experiences illuminates the ways in which spiritual beings who were not exclusively Christian demanded radical change.Footnote 15 As a result, the problem of discontinuity in revivalists’ testimonies is the possibility that the spiritual agents who made themselves heard to revivalists might be understood in some cases as ancestral or tutelary spirits who were making new demands upon Ugandans. This article leverages this possibility in order to make two amendments to the literature on discontinuity in Christian conversion and the East African Revival. First, this literature often assumes either that discontinuity is the product of material conditions from which converts wish to distinguish themselves or gain some control over, or that discontinuity represents the triumph of the Christian God in a metaphysical contest over and against other spiritual beings. In response to this, the analysis of early Balokole testimonies suggests the possibility that the spiritual agents who told a convert to destroy a shrine were, in some cases, ancestral spirits themselves. Second, though related to the first, this article primes the means through which converts were pressed to make ‘breaks’, which often followed extraordinary experiences, including voice-hearing experiences. These extraordinary experiences ought to be considered ethnographic facts, at the very least, but they also introduce ambiguity into an analysis of processes of religious change in colonial East Africa. Incorporating extraordinary experiences into this analysis shows that such experiences were primary explanatory factors in the lives of Balokole converts, to the extent that for some revivalists conversion was the product of the active collusion of spirits, Jesus and the Christian God. This description of the process of Balokole conversion problematises a preoccupation with Christianity as the sole driver of discontinuity, or, by extension, of the Christian God as exclusively demanding discontinuity. This approach also questions a reduction of conversion to the sphere of rhetoric, polemics and politics. The article concludes by suggesting that a modified version of Horton's thesis could be helpful in understanding conversion within the Revival by paying attention to the ways in which the Revival's discontinuity can be understood as an outgrowth of ‘traditional cosmology’. By demonstrating that extraordinary accounts of spirits’ interventions ought to be taken seriously by historians as comprising essential – even if ambiguous – explanatory functions of converts’ interest in breaking with their past, this article's argument is as much historiographical as it is historical.
Discontinuity and divine agency in the East African Revival
The East African Revival, which emerged in the mid-1930s in southern Uganda and northern Rwanda, has proved to be analytically challenging. Unlike many African Independent Churches that formed during the colonial era, Balokole revivalists, especially in Uganda, generally sought to remain within mission churches, taking it as their duty to revive the mission churches from within. Balokole never sought some sort of recovery of ‘traditional’ practices or sensibilities; quite the opposite: revivalists were known for destroying the customs, sensibilities and structures of their societies. The East African Revival, therefore, cannot be understood as a syncretic movement, and Balokole Christians did not want to put new wine into the proverbial ‘old wineskins’ of what might be referred to as ‘African traditional religion’. Instead, revivalists sought to purify mission churches, which they believed were inhibited by the compromised spirituality and lax morality that they permitted among both African Christians and evangelical British missionaries. As Erica Sabiti, a prominent early revivalist who would become an Anglican archbishop, would later recall: ‘Those who had the blessing, knew the Lord and the experience of His saving power felt that the church was theirs, they were baptised in this church and felt that they would remain in this church.’Footnote 16
What revivalists wanted to see in mission churches stemmed, to some degree, from a model of conversion that many traced to an Anglican mission station at Gahini, Rwanda. Joe Church, a member of the staunchly evangelical Ruanda Mission of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) who would become a key European figure within the movement, described what became a defining scene from the early 1930s:
The night [Yosea] arrived [at Gahini] we had a long talk. He said that there had been a barrier between us which had gone for good, and that from then onwards he was going to stay and work with me for the salvation of the staff. Many other things he told me and he gave back money . . . From that time, five years ago, a movement of God has been going on at Gahini.Footnote 17
Balokole believed that a true Christian must have a testimony of how God had worked in their life to bring them to salvation, and the pattern that emerged among Revival preaching teams and fellowship groups in the 1930s held that sin must be confessed aloud in order to be repented of properly. Confession listed those things that defined one's spiritually dark life. Putting these things, sometimes physically, into public knowledge signified one's movement from secrecy to publicity; but also, more importantly, from spiritual darkness to light. It was this spiritual movement that naturally drew a contrast between past and present, or sin and salvation. For this reason, revivalists sometimes referred to themselves as abamusana, or ‘people of the light’. Balokole testimonies and practices of confession, therefore, were not only predicated on these formations of discontinuity, but they served to reproduce them as revivalists shared and re-shared their stories of leaving their past lifestyles and entering the new life of salvation in the late colonial era.Footnote 18
Revival teams dispersed from northern Rwanda and southern Uganda in the mid-1930s, spreading this message via mission stations, hospitals and schools into Burundi, Congo, Tanganyika, Kenya and Sudan by the mid-1940s. The revivalists’ message proved to be most appealing in these early years to East Africans who were often in their teens or twenties and had had some prior contact with missionary Christianity or colonial culture as it was found in the more cosmopolitan spaces of colonial cities, towns and institutions. While there were some Western missionaries, like Joe Church, who were intimately associated with the movement from its earliest years, it is clear that much of the work of the Revival's spread was rather due to the enterprising and energetic work of East African evangelists who created and sustained fellowship networks across the interlacustrine region. These Revival fellowships helped to infuse Balokole with the conviction that they had left their past ways in darkness and now walked in the new light of salvation.Footnote 19
After Balokole confessed their sins, they had to purge these things or behaviours from their lives. In cases of sexual acts, missionaries described girls at their schools building fires so that they could burn the blankets, dresses or other special items that they had been given by their sexual partners.Footnote 20 Others burned their fetishes or amulets.Footnote 21 ‘Mary’, a Mulokole living in eastern Uganda, described, when in her nineties, her initial response to becoming saved in the 1940s:
{T]hey saw me taking back things which I had taken. Putting things right. Some things I had stolen. Some things were from my boyfriends – I took them back to those people … God showed me this, this one is not yours. That one – that cloth is not yours. That dress. In fact when I took all [of the] things back, I remained with only one dress. And everything was taken back to the owners, who had given them to me.Footnote 22
These acts, which Mary and other Balokole called ‘putting things right’, were practical demonstrations of the distance that they had put between themselves and their past ways of life. In clearing out her house of the clothes that she had obtained ‘sinfully’, Mary was ensuring that things were ‘put right’ so that she could live fully in the light of salvation, without colluding with the darkness of her past way of life. For Balokole, confession and ‘putting things right’ were enactments of rupture – clear evidence that they had exited spiritual darkness and entered the light of salvation.
As Derek Peterson has argued with respect to the East African Revival, such testimonies narrating the convert's break with their past can also be described ‘as a political action that opens novel paths of self-narration, constitutes new ways of living, and unsettles the inventions of tradition’.Footnote 23 This does not mean that Peterson thinks conversion to the East African Revival ought to be understood as ‘a religious vehicle for the advancement of material self-interest’, but rather as ‘a discursive act by which individuals take up a new position in the social world, reengineer time, and distance themselves from their native land’.Footnote 24 This insight is among Peterson's important contributions to scholarship on the Revival. Peterson sought to tear converts’ testimonies from the devotional literature in which they had been imbricated, thereby illuminating the ways in which these testimonies were not simply describing a spiritual rebirth but were also doing the work of political and cultural criticism. For this reason, Peterson sees revivalists’ testimonies – their disruptive speech – as a politics of dissent from contemporary late colonial political projects that sought to create loyalties around ethnically particular patria. According to Peterson's argument, the interest of Balokole converts in breaking with their past must be understood in relation to their contemporary politics of the late colonial era which sought to reify and mobilise that past. ‘Revivalists would not live within the boundaries that patriots erected. Converts were on the move’, Peterson observed.Footnote 25
The Church Missionary Society missionaries most intimately associated with the Revival movement would have agreed with Peterson's priming of rupture in revivalists’ testimonies. But missionaries and Balokole would have disagreed that testimonies were merely ‘a carefully practised literary form’ that performed the work of dissent. While these testimonies could be a form of dissent, they were not simply that. The world which Balokole inhabited was not simply a ‘polemical’ one, and revivalists remained steadfast that their testimonies were accounts of how their lives had been spiritually transformed.Footnote 26 In his 1981 autobiography, Quest for the highest, Joe Church, the central missionary historian of the movement, emphasises the Revival's Bible-centredness. Church located the origins of the movement in conversations he had with Simeon Nsimbambi, a Ganda Anglican, as they studied Church's Scofield Bible in 1929, repeatedly stressing that he and East African revivalists ‘would meet God over our Bibles’.Footnote 27 Toward the end of his account, and in keeping with his staunchly evangelical convictions, Church approvingly quotes a fellow missionary, who observed that the Revival was a ‘Bible-based movement all through’.Footnote 28 Church's Bible-centred history of the Revival was, however, a work of apologetics, a work which extends to the earliest days of the Revival movement, when missionaries and other actors were faced with parsing just how, or even if, they believed God was at work in the movement. Church's framing of the Revival as a ‘Bible-based’ movement was a defence against charges that the Revival led to ‘rowdyism’, disrespect for authority and to a disintegration of Christian unity – forms of ‘dissent’ that would factor prominently in Peterson's framing of the Revival.Footnote 29 For Church, looking back after half a century, the Bible demonstrated the surety of God's work – work which otherwise appeared to many in colonial East Africa as ambiguous and, to a few, even demonic.Footnote 30 For supportive European missionaries it was clear that it was God who was at work in the revival, leading East Africans to make dramatic changes in their lives, and that God worked primarily, though not exclusively, through the Bible. The perspectives on which spiritual forces were primarily at work in the Revival, and why, do not necessarily accord with those explanations offered by East African revivalists.
Voices in Balokole conversion narratives
‘I heard the voice’, Erina said, before she confessed her sins. Like most features of her testimony, Erina's voice-hearing experience is not unique. In fact, a number of Balokole testimonies include hearing a voice, or being approached by a mysterious person who suddenly disappeared, or receiving a vision, which then prompted them to confess their sins or surrender their hidden medicine horn to an evangelist.Footnote 31 While these voice-hearing experiences are quite common within revivalists’ testimonies, they have been either explicitly Christianised (in the case of later devotional literature) or marginalised (in the case of Peterson's analysis; and, to be fair, in my own earlier work as well).Footnote 32 Such experiences, however, are an essential component of the dynamic spiritual imagination of the early Revival movement.
‘But in 1939, that is when I heard the voice, telling me that I was to die for the sins I had’, Rwamfiizi testified. ‘Then I became obedient to that voice.’ The voice knew him and his habits intimately, telling Rwamfiizi ‘that I was a drunkard, I liked fighting, was short-tempered, and quarrelsome’. That voice, he said, made people realise that ‘what they practiced before was useless’. He eventually clarified the voice's identity in a terse commentary: ‘Jesus told me that I was a bad person.’Footnote 33 Similarly, Yeremiah Betsimbire testified that he had ‘gone collecting firewood in the swamp’ when he ‘heard the voice of Jesus telling me to kneel down and pray and that it would save me’. Others, like Yeremiah Rwakatagoro, simply said, ‘I heard the voice telling me I could be saved.’Footnote 34 Likewise, Joshua Kabarebe testified that he first heard the ‘voice’ in 1924 after he was baptised into the Anglican Church (over a decade, it should be added, before the Revival movement is generally thought to have begun in the mid-1930s). It was then that Kabarebe ‘had no respect for emandwa’ – the cultic practices of western and southern Uganda. He heard the same voice again in the mid-1930s, ‘telling me I was to die’, Kabarebe remembered. This experience then led him to confess ‘to my Saviour’. Having confessed his sins, he testified: ‘My heart felt at ease from dinner parties, where I used to spend whole nights, and from the racking fear of the emandwa and Nyabingi which were cast down.’Footnote 35 These revivalist testimonies suggest that the voice that converts heard demanded rupture with their pasts, particularly as those pasts were indexed to material objects and social practices, like emandwa shrines, beer parties hosted by chiefs, sexual habits, food taboos and amulets. Converts, especially with the hindsight of a few decades (most of the quotations above come from interviews conducted in the early 1970s), sometimes described the voice that they heard as that of the Christian God or Jesus (though rarely, if ever, the Holy Spirit); but many of them did not make that association.
Erisa Ruhindi, for example, recalled a series of experiences in south-western Uganda.
In 1936 is when I heard a voice calling me to be saved. I didn't get saved but the voice urged me to think about a neighbor I used to hate. After hearing that voice I didn't repent my sins. The voice entered me and I was afraid and then I started crying. Since then I stayed like that without repenting my sins … Ignoring the voice I had heard … [Then, when working as a houseboy in 1941, the voice returned]. After hearing it I was convicted. I thought I would repent my sins that did not please God. The voice I heard made me leave my job because I thought that if I continued it I would be continuing with [these wrong things]. But when I heard the voice I thought I should stop working and go home and be saved.Footnote 36
In Erisa's testimony, the voice led him to repent, and he acknowledged Jesus as his ‘Saviour’, but he did not necessarily conflate the voice and the person of Jesus, focusing instead on the causal connection between hearing the voice, repenting and joining the Revival movement. Faith Bugaare's testimony evinces a similar dynamic between hearing the voice and repenting, while also distinguishing that voice from God:
In 1940, I heard the voice … The voice told me that I should be saved and go to church for it was when the preaching about the Gospel started in homes where preachers would be found. These preachers would talk to our parents that there was destruction … My parents hated them completely, and they could hate them. But then it was when the voice entered me and I decided to be saved although my parents hated them. When I heard that voice, I prayed to God although I did not know him, to show me the way and go to the church, so as to be saved … When I entered the church, that voice I had prayed to and the God I had prayed to defeated them and I believed and became saved.Footnote 37
It should be clear from these examples that many Balokole, especially in the 1930s and '40s, made radical changes in their lives after hearing a distinct voice. To these experiences, one could also add other extraordinary phenomena, like the presence of a mysterious fire that hovered over the backs of cattle, after which, according to one revivalist's account, ‘in the dark a voice called him and told him to go to the church to pray’. Upon arriving, he found about thirty people already in the church, likewise ‘impelled by some unknown force’ to pray and confess.Footnote 38 The early history of the Revival is full of such accounts. Robert Orsi might describe these as ‘abundant events’, where ‘2 + 2 = 5, for better or worse, meaning that the sum of 2 + 2 can also be cruelty and violence, cultural dissolution as well as cultural innovation’.Footnote 39 The events, in other words, suggest that they are more than the sum of their materialist parts, nor was the world of the Revival constituted or defined merely by its polemics.
It is not possible to know whether some revivalists' identification of the voice with Jesus or God happened at the moment they heard the voice, or if that identification was a later interpretive feature of their testimony. On this point, it seems sufficiently important to show that, even with thirty or more years of hindsight, Balokole did not describe the voice itself in a uniform manner: for some it was the voice of God or Jesus, others simply heard it, while others still felt the voice enter into them. Balokole would agree that the voice that they heard demanded rupture. Here rupture ought not be understood on simply the level of the individual (such as a person making a significant life change). Rather, the voice demanded a kind of spiritual rupture in which converts set about ‘burning their past’ by attacking practices like blood brotherhood, food taboos, building ancestral shrines and the making of fetishes.Footnote 40 But, if the voice Balokole heard was not exclusively described as ‘God’, then what, or who, was the voice that asked them to change their lives, often radically?
Dreams, voices and the problem of discontinuity
This question and its possible answers will be explored here through the story of one Ugandan woman (whom I will call ‘Stella’) as it was recorded by a British anthropologist, Derek Stenning, in the 1950s in Ankole, in south-western Uganda. As Stenning recorded her story, in the 1920s, Stella began dreaming repeatedly of two men. In the waking world the men also engaged in mischief: they would let the chickens out at night, or place calves in the wrong kraals. Eventually, however, they killed one of her children and, after that, her husband. The two men then appeared at her husband's funeral and claimed to be emissaries of a tutelary spirit and asked Stella to come with them, for the spirit wanted her. Stella then served the tutelary spirit through the 1920s, and the two men would appear occasionally, making requests for her to do various kinds of work, for which she was arrested under the colonial Witchcraft Ordinance. After her release from jail, she married a Christian husband and joined the East African Revival. When her husband died some years later, she resumed her responsibilities serving the spirit. At this point, however, she wandered through kraals across the region, instructing that the spirits were against blood brotherhood and that the ancestors ought not be placated with offerings. She insisted that clan taboos should not be observed, and she even claimed that the spirits no longer required ‘worship’. The same two men who first appeared to her in a dream instructed her to remain a member of a Revival fellowship into the 1950s but did not permit her to attend meetings.Footnote 41
Stella's story – a testimony of sorts – breaks significantly with many testimonies of the East African Revival movement, which often detailed evidence of a revivalist's life in spiritual darkness, their coming to see certain behaviours as being sinful, repenting of those sins, and experiencing a dynamic ‘life of salvation’ with other revivalists. To be clear, most (if not all) revivalists today would view Stella as someone who ‘failed in salvation’, or as someone who never truly converted in the first place. But her story opens up novel possibilities for thinking about conversion within the movement.Footnote 42 Stella is clear that the reason that she converted to the Revival and remained within the Revival was because of the influence of two emissaries of a tutelary spirit who had visited her in a dream. She made no pretence of Christianising their identity. Taking this interpretation another step, one might say, provocatively, that she converted to the Revival because the spirits wanted her to do so. Stella's interactions with the spirits and their emissaries changed her understanding of what the spirits wanted both from her and from others in south-western Uganda. When Stenning encountered her in the 1950s, she was teaching about the reforms that the spirits wanted. For her, the etiology of the messengers casts the destructive changes that they demanded in a radically different light. It was the spirits, not God or Jesus, who wished particular practices to cease; it was the spirits who demanded discontinuity. Stella's story, therefore, provides an analytically productive vantage point from which we might view many of the testimonies of the early Revival movement, particularly those testimonies that described a ‘voice’ as the agent of their conversion. Some of the converts who heard a voice tell them to change their lives radically or to throw away their medicine horns later identified the voice with Jesus or God, but many did not. They simply heard voices whose desires they followed.
What is unique and important here is not simply that Stella or other Balokole heard a voice or encountered spiritual ‘others’ in a dream or vision, but rather the complex etiology of the spiritual agents in these experiences, particularly as these agents relate to the question of discontinuity in conversion.Footnote 43 One could follow some revivalists’ later interpretations that these were instances of God or Jesus communicating with them.Footnote 44 Or, furthermore, one could follow Peterson's argument that these experiences were really the work of cultural criticism.Footnote 45 Stella's account, however, opens a more provocative possibility: that ancestral spirits ordered their own reformation, seeking radical change in the late colonial era. Some of the voices that other Balokole heard asked them to do similar things to Stella's spirits, to commit similar acts of ‘metaphysical violence’ by disregarding food taboos, burning medicine horns or ‘fetishes’. or destroying ancestral shrines.Footnote 46 If one considers both the proximity of the messages between Balokole and Stella, alongside the ambiguity of the identity of the ‘voice’ that many Balokole testified to hearing, then one is left with the possibility that it was the ancestral spirits who demanded discontinuity.
Destruction – physical, social and spiritual – of African societies was a part of the colonial project in which missionaries participated by the very nature of their mission. They often spoke, particularly when they were talking back to metropolitan audiences in newsletters, in Manichaean terms. As Albert Cook, a missionary doctor who had devoted a career to Uganda, wrote in 1934: ‘The whole story is a magnificent epic of how light has prevailed over darkness, modern science over ignorance, and God-blessed energy over fatalism.’Footnote 47 Though the analyses might focus upon the implications of missionaries’ beliefs about conversion, language, medicine or education, critiques of colonial-era missions have tended to highlight and condemn missionaries’ implicit or explicit interest in the cultural destruction of the so-called ‘heathen’ or ‘pagans’. These analyses have not been without a riposte.Footnote 48
David Chidester has convincingly argued for the importance of taking seriously the decidedly immateriality of dreams with respect to Zulu-speaking people in the nineteenth century, observing that ‘dreaming remained a vital medium for negotiating and navigating with a contact zone’ with European colonists.Footnote 49 While Chidester's argument focuses upon dreams as places of exchange in which ‘calls to action’ were made by ancestors asserting ‘claims on a territory’, the evidence from encounters recounted by Balokole in the late colonial period suggests that visions and voices could also be places in which ancestors gave up claims to a territory. Bilinda Straight observes in a provocative article on ‘extraordinary metaphysical violence’ in colonial Kenya that ‘at various points on the stage of those encounters, two rather clear ontological sides met and engaged in what has often been a struggle with important metaphysical dimensions and that moreover crucially shaped the complexly entangled identities and understandings that followed’.Footnote 50 The voices that ordered Balokole to convert, confess their sins and destroy certain objects could be interpreted as evidence of surrender amidst an ontological struggle. If it was surrender, it certainly seems to have been a brash and rather a scorched-earth policy toward their ontological terrain, but there is reason to question the permanence of this ontological destruction and the finality of the discontinuity that it attempted to enact.Footnote 51
A later account of a man named Waswa is revealing on this point. Waswa had health problems that began in the 1970s and would frequent diviners and healers as he travelled throughout East Africa for work. In 1979 he became a Mulokole and began seeing a biomedical doctor, though Waswa felt that his condition worsened. Then, in 1981, both he and his daughter fell severely ill, which prompted him to return to a diviner. ‘I had been resistant till then because I was a saved Christian [Mulokole]’, he said. The diviner told him, ‘Your ancestors were princes but your case is complicated because you threw away your things and you are all going to die.’ When his daughter improved after drinking the diviner's herbal infusions, Waswa took some of the ‘things’ the diviner had requested for ritual purposes to him: a stool made from a jirikiti tree, three spears and a double-headed knife. Waswa reasoned:
My ancestors had selected me long ago as their medium. With the help of the diviner I recalled that when I was young I used to be slapped in the face by invisible hands. If I was sleeping I would wake up with a swollen face. My school work was poor; apparently it was my ancestors wanting me not to do white people's work but to serve them. I finally gave in to their demands following a near-fatal accident early in 1982. I had just opened up a building materials store when I felt faint, but I put it down to tiredness and went on to attend a party for new Balokole. Next day I woke up in hospital surrounded by people saying I was lucky to be alive: an army lorry had completely smashed my car. While in hospital I had a dream in which my grandfather's sister told me that I would go on suffering until I redeemed ‘our things’; it was I who bore the burden of being able to redress the situation. My great-great-grandfather had become a Christian and had given land to missionaries; he had agreed to burn the baskets, gourds and barkcloth bundles containing the family spirits. My grandfather, who had abandoned his wife when she was pregnant and become a Roman Catholic priest, choked to death on a piece of meat during his graduation party. In my dream I was told to sell all my belongings and raise money to recover ‘our things’. Soon after, I had another dream encounter with my grandfather's sister, who told me that if I followed her instructions my days of poverty and childlessness would be over. I had to do what my ancestors wanted: I had to sell all my belongings, I was to get married properly and name the son I was soon to have Kiwanuka, after the god of thunder.Footnote 52
As Waswa described it, his grandfather's destruction of his ‘things’ was hardly final, and it was clearly not tantamount to destroying the spirits themselves. When the health of Waswa and his daughter worsened, he came to learn that the illnesses were due to the spirits that his grandfather had committed violence against, despite the fact that Waswa was a Mulokole. The spirits’ later intrusion into his life, evidenced by distressing experiences, eventually led Waswa to become a ‘traditional healer’, enacting another kind of break with his recent past of being a Mulokole. One can see in Waswa's family history, therefore, the limited efficacy of individual acts of colonial metaphysical violence and the long historical arc through which the spirits could become present again in the Ugandan nation state.
Stella and Waswa were Balokole with distinct and unique experiences in their testimonies, at least compared to most other Balokole. Their lives illuminate the porousness of Revival sensibilities regarding what it meant to break with one's past. For both Stella and Waswa, the agency of spirits was central to their lives. The reality that spirits had disrupted and made demands upon their lives had direct implications for how they lived and regarded their relationship to the Revival. Despite having converted to Balokole Christianity and, therefore, passed from spiritual darkness to light, Stella and Waswa found their discontinuity disrupted. Both of their testimonies provide a constructive, if peripheral, vantage point from which one might think through the testimonies of other Balokole and the spiritual agents who wanted them to enact radical changes in the late colonial (and post-colonial) period.
The continuity of discontinuity
With respect to religious change in Africa, scholars have often located agency in actions that indicate a break with the status quo, such as a rejection of missionary Christianity, or rebelling against the colonial order; that is, agency has been rooted in forms of dissent. Questions of agency, as they relate to Christianity, cannot entirely be left to considerations of exclusively human forms of agency.Footnote 53 British missionaries described the ways in which the Christian God was at work, coaxing converts to break with their pasts, and recent literature on discontinuity, if not theological, seems to at least imply that the Christian God wins when there is spiritual rupture. Furthermore, analyses of conversionary rupture seem to assume the permanence of that rupture, as well as its continuation. But what about a different possibility: of a model of discontinuity in Christian conversion predicated upon the work of spiritual agents that were not Christianised? Considering this possibility with respect to the instances that I described above would require the historian not to assume a clear trajectory of progress, which is endemic to a modern, Western conceptualisation of history itself. The past, present and future would need to become configured in more complex ways than simply the present being a rupture with the past in order to create a new future. In Waswa's case, and, in a different way, in Stella's as well, there is a rupture with the past so that that past can return. Perhaps this is a form of the ‘abundance’ of these kinds of events, as per Orsi.
This line of argumentation suggests that there is a kind of metaphysical continuity present in some Balokole experiences of conversion which were based upon hearing voices or receiving a vision or dream. This observation recasts some of revivalists’ associated acts of ‘metaphysical violence’ against objects like medicine horns, ancestral shrines, amulets and fetishes because the analysis cannot simply be about the actions themselves, but rather the etiology of those demanding the actions. Furthermore, these violent acts were not conclusive or permanent, as the case of Waswa made clear, an observation that casts my argument against analyses like those given by Bilinda Straight with respect to colonial acts of extraordinary metaphysical violence.Footnote 54 For some early Balokole, the Revival had something to do with ancestral spirits demanding discontinuity. In this sense, some conversions to the East African Revival might even be understood as resulting from the active collusion of the ancestors and the Christian God in the production of something novel, which then ought not be regarded as syncretistic.Footnote 55 Revivalists demanded that changes in ethical behaviour and religious practice, including the destruction of what had come before, were necessary to move into something new, which they called the life of salvation.Footnote 56 This novelty was taken by missionaries, historians and even African revivalists themselves as being an inherent rupture with their pasts. The literature on religious change, and especially the literature on conversionary discontinuity, has privileged the role of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in providing the language and means through which discontinuity becomes possible. And with respect to the Revival, language itself has been defined as the locus of political, and, therefore, creative action; Peterson described revivalists as existing in a ‘polemical world’, in which they ‘created a cosmopolitan sphere of discourse’.Footnote 57 It is also clear, however, that conversion to the East African Revival occurred because spirits ordered the destruction of their own ‘things’.Footnote 58 In other words, some revivalists broke with their pasts because their ancestors told them to do so. Such a conclusion accords with Horton, as one could say that this is a development arising out of ‘the traditional cosmology’.Footnote 59 It certainly agrees with Horton's assessment that conversion might not have had as much to do with missionaries’ influence as some colonial missionary hagiographies would have us think. While much of the evidence of voice-hearing and other extraordinary experiences related to the East African Revival did lead to an emphasis upon God, as Horton would have expected, this is not the entire story. Returning to Waswa's story, if one is to take the agency of these spirits seriously, then one can see that such destructive demands made by the spirits in the late colonial period did not preclude their return in the independent Ugandan nation state.
