In February 1944, a revolt erupted in a village called Magoa in the region of Kivu, district of Masisi, in the easternmost part of what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo. The revolt was led by a man named Bushiri Lungunda, who professed himself to be the son of God, charged with the mission of redeeming his African people and relieving them of white rule and oppression. He claimed that his messianic doctrine, a variant of Kitawala, had come to him in a vision in December 1943. As he slept a nine-day-long slumber, he was transported by a white aeroplane to America, where God revealed to him that he was Yesu Mukombozi (Jesus the Redeemer) and that he must ‘complete the work of the first Jesus’ and save the Earth.Footnote 1 Shortly afterwards, Bushiri began preaching his message and baptizing his earliest followers into the movement. It was these followers who accompanied Bushiri when, on the eve of 16 February, they arrested a local colonial agent named De Schryver at Magoa and forced him to march along wearing nothing but a loincloth and carrying vines of rubber around his neck. De Schryver's arrest set in motion the events of the revolt, which lasted for more than a month and resulted in the arrests of two more Europeans, five local agents of the state, and numerous African men and women accused of witchcraft, many of whom were executed. ‘Mukombozi’ and his followers reportedly had plans to capture the 300 whites living in the area and then to attack the city of Costermansville (Bukavu). Before the revolt was forcefully repressed by the colonial army in mid-March, it had involved upwards of 10,000 men, women and children and resulted in hundreds of deaths.Footnote 2
Bushiri's uprising – one of the largest in the Belgian Congo's history – was an event notable, among other aspects, for the form, function and level of violence that characterized it. Much of that violence was perpetrated by the colonial state, which reacted with a fear that manifested in massacre and violent excess.Footnote 3 But the violence of the uprising was not limited to acts perpetrated by or against the colonial government, for Bushiri's movement was internally quite violent as well. It is unclear how many villagers in the region were arrested and beaten by Bushiri's band for practising witchcraft, but a single testimony – that of Alleloya, Bushiri's right-hand man – documents a minimum of fifty or sixty arrests.Footnote 4 Those arrested were whipped – with a chicotte – and more than half of them died in captivity.Footnote 5 The majority of those arrested were women, many of whom were subjected, in addition to whipping, to sexual violence and public displays of humiliation. In one village, Eliba, five male elders were arrested and forced to have sex with five women, also captives, in the public square.Footnote 6 In another village, Taweza, three women were whipped and then hung by their arms from a tree, where they were left to die. There is also at least one eyewitness account of female captives being raped.Footnote 7
Such images of atrocity evoke critical questions about the imaginaries and choreographies of violence at play in that historical moment, and yet the nature and role of violence in the uprising have never really been a subject of historical inquiry.Footnote 8 Given the location of the uprising – the region between Masisi and Lubutu – such oversight is somewhat troubling. Those familiar with the contemporary conflict in Eastern Congo will know that the same area has consistently been at the heart of the ongoing violence in the region. An area rich in productive tin and gold mines, it was and is the scene of fierce competition between various armed groups over the right to control those resources. It has thus been the scene of some of the most spectacular and devastating incidences of violence in the region, including the mass rape of 179 women in 2010.Footnote 9
This geographic overlap brings to mind questions about place and memory, exposing potential threads that might tie such a past to the present. In an article about red rubber, violence and historical repetition, Nancy Hunt has argued for ‘the importance of rewriting the standard Congo atrocity narrative in relation to urgent politics of the present’. Bearing in mind Hunt's warning that ‘tethering to the present’ must not be about ‘continuity or causality’ but about the ways in which certain modalities of violence are reproduced and somatized over time, in this article I argue for the importance of just such a rewriting of the history of the Kitawalist uprising of 1944 (Hunt Reference Hunt2008: 224, 243). However, this rewrite must not be simply about tethering to the present, but also about tethering to the past, to the imaginaries and modalities of violence that preceded the uprising in the region. Arguing for attention to the deep histories of violence and vulnerability in Central and Eastern Africa, David Schoenbrun writes that ‘histories of violence in Africa that take seriously the challenge of specifying the contexts for potential acts of violence must depict the theories of action that frame imaginary violence, the ever-present double of “real” violence’ (Reference Schoenbrun2006: 743). The centrality of witchcraft discourse in the uprising – discourse related to the moral and immoral use of spiritual power (puissance/force/nguvu) – and the imaginaries and choreographies of violence that accompanied that discourse must be understood not as tangential to the larger anti-colonial political struggle of Bushiri and his followers, but central to that struggle and the way in which it manifested in that historical moment.
Bushiri's uprising was clearly an overt challenge to the legitimacy of colonial rule. However, it was also, more broadly, a challenge to what Bushiri and his followers seemingly perceived as a dangerously imbalanced economy of power (embodied/disembodied, political/spiritual) in the region, which posed a grave threat to social health. The fact that it was a ‘perceived’ imbalance is a key qualification here. The notion that the onslaught of ‘modernity’ caused ‘imbalance’ in African societies is a classical colonial trope that has long been critiqued by historians for implying that there existed a point in time when societies were ‘balanced’. However, thinking about the perception of ‘imbalance’ at a given moment in time is not the same as claiming that ‘imbalance’ was necessarily real. As this article will illuminate, much about the known discourse of Bushiri and his followers indicates that they perceived and experienced ‘imbalance’. Yet, it is also clear from the longer history that the theories of moral action used to address imbalance are deeply rooted, strongly contesting the notion that a time of ‘balance’ ever existed. Nonetheless, it is difficult to deny that certain moments in time are, indeed, materially defined by more upheaval than others, which is in many cases what renders violence in those moments contingent.
The fact that the ‘moral action’ or healing that Bushiri and his followers offered took the form of violence – and violence not just against the state and its agents, but also against those, often quite vulnerable, individuals who were presumed to be possessors and (immoral) wielders of disembodied power (witches) – raises important questions. In particular, it pushes us to interrogate the fraught relationship between healing and violence, as well as between power and vulnerability, in the history of both Kitawala and the broader region. It challenges scholars to see beyond analytical dichotomies that represent violence as either destructive or productive, legitimate or illegitimate.
Bushiri's uprising has been construed as both. Of course, the Belgians saw it as destructive violence, but so, too, did many within the communities touched by the uprising. One account describes the mothers of the victims of Bushiri's witchcraft accusations cursing and spitting at him as, in the aftermath of the revolt, he was paraded through villages to prove that he had been captured (Lovens Reference Lovens1974: 116). However, in the larger narrative of resistance against the violent and oppressive colonial state and the illness and discord it inflicted, the uprising seems geared towards productive and legitimate ends, towards ending oppressive and extractive colonial economic practices and reinstating self-rule. Not only does violence manifest on a continuum between productive and destructive that is shaped by historical circumstances (Rueedi, this issue), but its position on that continuum was and is situated subjectively, for questions of ‘legitimacy’ and ‘morality’ are rarely objective (Filippi Reference Filippi2013).Footnote 10
It is only by breaking down such dichotomies and highlighting the ambiguous nature of violence that we begin to see how the relative morality of violent acts committed by Bushiri's band was a contentious and negotiated subject within the Congolese communities they affected most directly. Moreover – and this is a central argument – we begin to see how this ambiguity of violence was mirrored in the language of power (puissance/nguvu/force) through which it was articulated. For, like violence, power in Central Africa has long been imagined in dualistic terms – destructive/productive, eating/healing – that have rendered its legitimacy a subject of contention and ambiguity. It is by tethering the history of such notions of power and violence to the deeper past in the region that we can begin to interrogate more fruitfully how they were reproduced and reimagined in the colonial context, allowing us, in turn, to more critically tether them to the present.
THE MONGANGA'S TESTIMONY
The arguments I have just articulated hinge on the understanding that the violence of Bushiri's uprising was predicated on what I have termed an imbalance in the economy of power (embodied/disembodied, political/spiritual) in the region. Elsewhere I have suggested using the term puissance to refer to this ambiguous form of power that, as Wyatt MacGaffey has argued, in Central Africa ‘is necessary to all effective leadership and is a component of all exceptional success, though it is also an instrument of evil (Eggers Reference Eggers2013a; MacGaffey Reference MacGaffey2000: 2). Of course, puissance is but one of a number of cognates for power that circulate in Central Africa – others might include nguvu, force, kindoki and bwanga – all of which refer to the form of spiritual power or ability that is understood to be embodied by those who effectively exercise the capacity to lead, to heal, and/or to harm.Footnote 11 Presumed access to puissance is what makes politicians effective, religious leaders charismatic, healers capable, and witches dangerous. Thus, when I use the term, I am evoking this historically and culturally situated notion of power. I am arguing that it was a perceived imbalance in puissance that inspired and ultimately shaped the uprising, allowing for its rapid spread and rendering Bushiri's claims to the puissance necessary to correct that imbalance – the puissance of God, which he embodied as Yesu Mukombozi – at once persuasive and contentious.
To clarify this argument, I turn now to evidence that can better contextualize these claims and further elucidate the nature of the uprising. In particular, I would like to highlight the testimony of Bushiri's second in command, Alleloya, who was a reputed healer or monganga. He specialized in a herbal medicine (dawa) he called mataifa (‘nation’ or ‘people’ in Swahili), and he and another healer, Albert, were the most powerful figures in the uprising, next to Bushiri. Alleloya's testimony after his arrest is a particularly rich source for understanding the nature of the uprising, although it was framed by the circumstances that produced it in some obvious ways. Alleloya was arrested and charged with inciting an uprising, and the testimony was his chance to explain his involvement. It is apparent as one reads the source that he was downplaying his own role, insisting that he was no more than a humble healer, unconnected to the violence. Nonetheless, the testimony paints a vivid picture of the uprising from the perspective of one of its leaders. For that reason, I reproduce it at some length here, narrated in the first person, as it was in the interrogation record, although I have edited it for clarity.Footnote 12 I have chosen to interrupt my analysis to present Alleloya's testimony in this narrative form because of the immediacy it lends to the events of the revolt, rendering the violence that characterized it and the notions of power that animated it real and palpable.Footnote 13
Alleloya's testimony
I had worked for years collecting rubber at Angumu. Sometime before the uprising, I became ill, close to death, and God came to me in a dream. In the dream, God gave me the name Alleloya. He then showed me the medicine of mataifa, and ordained me to heal the people with the dawa produced from the juice of the mataifa plant found in the forest. From that day, I took the name Alleloya, stopped collecting rubber and stayed at my home village in Musimia. Whenever there was a sick child, I was called on to help him/her with my dawa. In this way, I earned a reputation as a healer.
Around this time, I had also been initiated into Kitawala. For several months before Bushiri's arrival, two men named Nziaka and Ndele had been moving through the area, initiating people into Kitawala. It was Ndele who initiated me, though he was ultimately arrested and beaten by Bushiri.
Before Bushiri came to Wenga, I did not know him. I had seen him when we both worked at Angumu, but we had never spoken. When we first heard news of his arrival, all we knew was that there was a man coming to Hunde from Wenga, preaching that the days of working rubber were over. When Bushiri arrived, someone told him that I practised the craft of monganga in the region and that I could heal the people with my dawa, mataifa. So Bushiri called on me to be his healer. I just prepared my dawa and I did not beat anyone, but because I was the monganga, I was considered as one of the leaders of the movement.
When Bushiri called on me, I went to him. Then I was called back to my village, so I left Bushiri's band briefly, but he soon called me back. By the time I returned, I found that a local clerk with the rubber collection company, Honoré, had been imprisoned and whipped by Bushiri and his followers. They had burned all of his files, but they kept his rubber meter. [Note: There were rumours about Bushiri having a meter, with which he could detect witchcraft. It was said that the meter was in his arm.]Footnote 14
Bushiri decreed that people were no longer to collect rubber. Instead, they should cultivate crops (particularly tobacco). They could sell their crops to him or to his friend, ‘Merika’ [America]. He said he would destroy the areas inhabited by the whites and take them as his own. His goals were to make war with the Europeans, forbid rubber collection, to kill the locals who worked with the whites, and to kill the Wanianga and the Bakusu, who had to be ‘exterminated’ because they ‘practised abortion’.Footnote 15 To execute this plan, Bushiri began by imprisoning people accused of witchcraft.
During the uprising, Bushiri took all of the women in the region who pleased him. Their husbands said nothing because they were afraid of being killed and there was no question of dote (bride price). Bushiri said that he would take 1,000 wives to demonstrate that he was the absolute master of the land. He promised each of his adepts 100 wives. He also decreed that it was necessary for each wife to have ten children. If a woman was not pregnant within three months of marrying, she would be killed. If her husband remarried and there were still no children, he would be killed.
It was at Magoa that Bushiri's men arrested ‘Bwana Mzuri’ (De Schryver). The band arrested and punished many people. One man was imprisoned for trying to hide his mother, who had been accused of witchcraft. He was whipped twelve times. The wife of one follower was imprisoned for making difficulties for her husband. She was whipped twenty times. Another man who worked as a policeman for the Belgians, Musafiri, was arrested and beaten. Bwana Mzuri was forced to participate in the beating. Musafiri died after receiving more than 600 lashes with the whip. Before he died he told Bushiri, ‘You can kill me, but the state will avenge me.’ Bushiri told the other prisoners who had worked for the Belgians – Honoré, Leon and Albert – to renounce the state, but they refused, repeating Musafiri's words.
As we moved between villages, we encountered a number of local notables. Some of them joined us, but others were arrested. We arrested Buhini, successor to the chief of Eliba and he was whipped to death.
In Wenga, five men were arrested for witchcraft. They fled to the forest, so Bushiri put their wives in prison and they were whipped 100 times. At least three of them died. In Abunambao, Bushiri arrested four more women and some of them also died after receiving 100 lashes.
On our way to Maliba, some twenty more people were arrested, many of whom were beaten and killed. An mfumu was denounced and killed. It was also near Maliba that the rubber clerk Honoré was ultimately beaten to death.
At Taweza, many more were arrested and beaten. Three women were whipped then tied to a tree, with their arms up. Their limbs were broken and they were left to die. At least a dozen people died at Taweza. When Bushiri classified someone as a sorcerer, their children would say nothing. They just let it happen.
Bushiri sent out a series of letters. He sent letters to the villages ahead of us to tell them to prepare to receive him. But, he also sent a letter to Bribosia, telling him that he would arrest and imprison him, that he alone was master of the land, and that the rule of the whites was over. Bushiri made Bwana Mzuri watch as he cursed the whites. He showed us on his skull where he had a large cross and told us that all of the lands in the four directions of this cross were his and he would not tolerate anyone against him. He said that once he had imprisoned the three white officials in the region, Bribosia, Reiles and Kiesel, all of the other whites would flee. He would install himself in a place called Bulambo, near the river Bilulu. He would build a road that would allow people to conduct trade there.
When we arrived in Eliba, the same torture as at Taweza was applied to another woman, but she did not die. For fun, Bushiri made five elders have sex with five women in the public square of the village of Eliba. They were then whipped. The rest of the victims were whipped to death or killed with blows to the nape of the neck.
It was in Eliba that we learned that the whites were coming. Bushiri told us to throw down our spears, as he would fight the Europeans himself with his words, which he said would be sufficient to kill them all. We went to the river and sang the ‘mataifa’ and the ‘alleloya’.Footnote 16 The whites did not come that day and we believed that our songs had made it so that the whites could not cross the river.
Then news reached us that Bwana Mzuri had been returned to the whites and Katshaka had been arrested by them. We asked Bushiri why he did not take the battle to the whites. He told us that he could not take the battle to the whites, because all of the villagers would flee. If they were in the way they would also be killed by his words, which were addressed to the whites. But then the whites came and we all fled into the forest, including Bushiri. I took refuge in the forest outside my village in Musimia. The state police camped out in my village. They told everyone that they were only there to arrest me, so I turned myself in.
THE PROPHET AND THE HEALERS: TETHERING TO THE PAST
There is much to analyse within Alleloya's testimony. It raises questions about the prevalence of forms of violence that both critiqued and mirrored colonial violence, reflecting that violence back on colonial agents, but also directing it towards those deemed dangerous within their own communities. This, in turn, points to the question of women, who emerge at once as powerful wielders of dangerous puissance, assumed to be the source of ‘invisible’ violence (witches), and vulnerable victims of the movement's violence. But before I focus on those questions, I would like to return to the proposition that this Kitawalist uprising was an effort to address the imbalance in the economy of puissance. In making this argument, I am placing Bushiri's movement within a long history of other movements in Central Africa that have struggled to confront imbalances of puissance within distressed communities: those that have come to be understood as healing movements or associations. These are movements or associations – the Nyabingi cult, kubandwa, lemba, ryangombe, bwami – that historically emerged in Central and Eastern Africa to address both bodily and social ills, as well as to protect communities from such ills.Footnote 17
The literature on these movements has revealed much that can be of use in thinking about Bushiri and his followers specifically, and Kitawala more broadly, as part of this longer history. In particular, it has highlighted the role that ‘public healing’ has played in the maintenance and restoration of healthy communities. As Neil Kodesh notes in his recent work about the centrality of kubandwa mediumship in processes of state formation in early Bugandan history, ‘the semantic histories of words for medicine, different sorts of spirits, and healing techniques’ in much of Central Africa reveal that ‘historical actors thought about health and prosperity together’ (Reference Kodesh2010: 20).Footnote 18 Thus, public healers, as those charged with creating and maintaining prosperity – or a balance in the economy of puissance, as I argue above – were profoundly political leaders, although they did not imagine or articulate their roles in language that can be translated directly into secular–political or purely ‘religious’ functions without obscuring part of their significance. Moreover, it is precisely this connection between prosperity and health that historically made new healing associations – often in the form of what Janzen calls ‘cults of affliction’, claiming access to new kinds of spirits, or new means of accessing older spirits – one of the primary means through which people sought to wield creative power to address imbalances in the economy of puissance, in many cases opposing existing instrumental powers.Footnote 19
There is ample evidence in Alleloya's testimony to suggest that Bushiri's uprising in particular, and Kitawala more broadly, must be understood in the context of such movements and associations. Certainly, the most obvious evidence is the centrality of Alleloya himself in the movement. We know he was a reputed healer who claimed that he had been given the knowledge of a medicine called mataifa by God in a dream. It is difficult to know what the medicine was composed of, as Alleloya simply states that it came from the ‘mataifa plant’, which could be found in the forest; it is not clear what sort of plant it was or whether it had any biomedical healing properties. In any case, the name of the medicine is perhaps what is most interesting. Mataifa means ‘nation’ or ‘people’ in Swahili. Thus, it seems plausible to read the name of the medicine as a sign that it was geared towards curing social ills, the ills of a whole people revealed in the bodies of various individuals, many of whom, Alleloya indicates, were children.Footnote 20
It is also unclear whether knowledge of this medicine was specific to Alleloya and the region in which he lived, or whether it was a medicine more generally associated with Kitawala. What is clear is that Kitawalists across Congo historically garnered reputations for healing. The prevalence of ‘dawas’ within Kitawalist communities can be seen in colonial reports about Kitawala from its earliest manifestations in Katanga.Footnote 21 A particularly rich set of interrogation records from the province of Orientale in the 1940s and 1950s proves enlightening. In these records, a man named Yailo reported that he ‘entered Kitawala because they healed him’ by rubbing him with oil. Another man, Akaluko, reported that he had fallen ill and the Kitawalists healed him using ‘plants of the forest’ which were boiled in water and inhaled as a vapour. Another described a medicine called ‘sango’ that was ‘put on the body’ when one became ill. He noted that ‘if [the patient] is healed, he/she was in a good relationship with God’. Another man reported going to Kitawala in search of a cure for his daughter's epilepsy. Yet another told the interrogator that he was baptized very quickly into the movement because he was told that they had ‘an nkisi that heals people’ and he had been sick.Footnote 22
While there are few similar records detailing the concerns of Bushiri's followers, it is nonetheless clear that healing was a significant part of the movement, as it was Alleloya's reputation as a skilled healer that brought Bushiri to his village in the first place and earned him a position of power. Although Alleloya describes his role in the movement as largely passive – Bushiri ‘called him to the movement’ and he ‘just prepared his medicine’ – there is evidence to support the assertion that he was far more central than he admits. Note the following exchange between Alleloya and his interrogator, M. Kiesel, which came at the end of the testimony recounted above:
Kiesel: Before you joined Bushiri, he had not committed any extravagance, though he had been there [in Wenga] for several days. It was only when you arrived that the ‘danse macabre’ began. So it was you who called Bushiri into the region or at the very least you knew from the deserters from Semiba that he would arrive soon. There were many places he could have gone to find adepts, but he came directly to you. Explain.
Alleloya: All we knew was that there was a man coming to Hunde from Wenga who said that the days of working rubber were done.
Kiesel's question suggests that, in the process of their investigation, the colonial authorities may have acquired information placing Alleloya in a far more central role than he indicates in his testimony. The accuracy of their information is, of course, suspect, but so too is Alleloya's evasive response, as he had every reason to minimize his role. In any case, Alleloya acknowledges earlier that ‘it was because [he] was the monganga that he was considered one of the leaders of the movement’. What he seems to be denying in this exchange is that he had any formative or functional leadership role, beyond serving as the monganga.
Whatever the precise role Alleloya played in the movement vis-à-vis leadership, it seems clear that he had a reputation for being puissant and that Bushiri sought him out – along with Albert, the other healer (mfumu) who helped lead the uprising – so that he might bring that puissance into his movement, both strengthening and legitimating it. As historians such as David Schoenbrun have demonstrated, this process – whereby leaders (whether political, religious or healing) have historically sought to legitimate their own power by creating alliances with or, alternatively, opposing themselves to other powerful figures – has an extensive history in the region.Footnote 23 The centrality of the two healers in the leadership of Bushiri's movement must be read as part of that history. But so too must the fact that the movement was directly opposed to other figures presumed to be wielding puissance immorally: witches and the colonial state. Let me first elaborate on the latter of these two categories.
THE COLONIAL STATE: HOARDERS OF PUISSANCE AND THE ROOTS OF SOCIAL ILLS
The idea that the Europeans possessed an inordinate amount of puissance and that the resultant imbalance in the region was the root of social strife was central to the doctrine Bushiri preached and the cure that his rebellion was intended to provide: the redistribution of that puissance back to the Congolese people.Footnote 24 Asked to explain the core of his doctrine during an interrogation, Bushiri highlighted the following three points:
1. It is necessary to love God.
2. It is necessary to fight the Europeans and kill them because it is they who hold all the puissance.
3. It is necessary to give the puissance to the blacks.Footnote 25
This hoarding of puissance had material symptoms and was neither experienced nor articulated as an exclusively ‘invisible’ form of violence perpetrated by the Europeans. The material grievances of Bushiri and his followers are obvious in the sources. European puissance was evident as economic and political dominance, and redistribution of puissance quite clearly meant the reversal of that dominance. One of the central claims Bushiri made was that he would end the coercive rubber collection in the region and return the people to other forms of cultivation deemed more productive. He suggested, for example, cultivating tobacco and selling it to ‘Merika’ – or America – which was perceived within Kitawalist teachings as an ally of the Congolese in their struggle against European dominance. Recall, as well, from Alleloya's testimony that Bushiri promised his followers that once they had rid themselves of the Europeans, he would create a capital and ‘build a road that would allow people to conduct trade there’. In his interrogation, Bushiri directly claimed that one of the goals of his movement was the redistribution of European property to himself and his followers: ‘My people and I will take the autos, the trucks, the houses, the wealth, and the women of the Europeans.’Footnote 26
To argue that Bushiri's uprising was about an imbalance in the economy of puissance in the region is not to suggest that it was merely about redistributing ‘invisible’ forms of spiritual power from the Belgians, who were hoarding it, to the Congolese, who suffered from this ‘invisible’ form of Belgian greed. Bushiri and his followers, and all of the people in the region, quite obviously experienced material forms of violence and social upheaval inflicted on them by the colonial state. This is made abundantly clear in the work of the Congolese scholar Mwene-Batende, one of the few academics to have worked on the Kitawalist uprising of 1944. In his study, Mwene-Batende reconstructs the political and economic context of the region touched by the revolt (1982: 94–112). He argues that the Kumu – the ethnic group to which Bushiri and the vast majority of his followers belonged – had suffered from the profound and rapid disruption of their ‘ancestral mode of production’, particularly in the ten years preceding the uprising. The Kumu were historically a semi-nomadic group that subsisted largely on hunting in the forests with some seasonal cultivation. With the arrival of the Arab traders this had already begun to change, as the Kumu redirected their productive activity from a largely subsistence-based hunting economy towards supplying the Arab–Swahili caravans with ivory and food, which led to increased sedentariness (Mwene-Batende 1982: 94–9).
Mwene-Batende suggests, however, that the social effects of this reorientation towards trade with the Arab–Swahili paled in comparison to the profound transformation that came, beginning in the 1930s, with the rapid economic development of the region by the colonial government. Although Congo had been claimed by Leopold in 1885 and transferred into the control of the Belgian state in 1908, the remote region between Lubutu and Masisi remained comparatively untouched by colonial exploitation until the 1930s. Even in the years that immediately preceded the uprising, European presence in the region was relatively superficial.Footnote 27
Then, against the backdrop of the financial pressures of a world depression and an increasing awareness of the resources that existed there, the colonial government pressed for the rapid development of the region in the 1930s and 1940s. Between 1938 and 1944, four major mines were opened in the area. This rapid economic development had been preceded, only five years earlier, by the profound political and administrative reorganization of the region, which had upset the existing clan-based political power structures by transplanting and regrouping villages in more centralized – and therefore more easily administered – political formations and investing state-appointed ‘chiefs’ and ‘sultanis’ with political power. These ‘chiefs’ and ‘sultanis’ functioned as the local arm of colonial government, and in particular as the implementers of colonial taxation laws. These laws were used to coerce men, who saw their ancestral hunting grounds rapidly transformed into mines, into working in the very same mines that were destroying their means of subsistence (Mwene-Batende 1982: 107–12).
For these reasons, Mwene-Batende is probably correct in his assertion that the effects that these rapid changes had on the well-being of the communities they touched should not be underestimated. The dislocation of male, able-bodied workers undoubtedly affected the gendered division of subsistence labour and probably led to a poorer diet and, by proxy, poorer health.Footnote 28 It seems that it also had deleterious effects on processes of marriage and reproduction, as migratory young men delayed marriage or spent long periods away from their communities. It is significant that Bushiri and his followers targeted old men for using witchcraft and taking all of the wives as the young men were away working. It is also significant that infertile women were the other main target of witchcraft accusations and executions. Indeed, most of the witchcraft victims of the uprising were sterile women and old men who were accused by Bushiri of, among other things, ‘killing small children’.Footnote 29 While it is undoubtedly true that the colonial state offered new and important opportunities for many Congolese, it is also the case that, for many more, the onslaught of economic and political change in the region created grave social ills, with tangible, material effects.
YESU MUKOMBOZI IN THE ECONOMY OF PUISSANCE
Yet the social ills experienced by the people in the region were neither imagined nor articulated in exclusively material, or ‘this-worldly’, terms. The uprising was as much a reaction to the ‘imaginary’ violence inflicted by the state (the hoarding of puissance and the use of it for illegitimate purposes of political and material accumulation) as it was a response to the state's ‘real’ violence (forced relocation, forced or coerced labour and economic exploitation). Only by acknowledging the ‘realness’ of that ‘imaginary’ violence for those who acted against it can we begin to contemplate the ‘theories of action’ that guided them.Footnote 30 In emphasizing puissance as central to such theories, I draw on a language that can encapsulate both the material and the imaginary aspects of that violence, bringing them together into the same frame of reference and acknowledging their intimate connection. Calling it an ‘economy’ of puissance emphasizes the fact that the field of puissance was broad and there was a myriad of actors perceived to be operating within that field, each making claims to legitimacy or illegitimacy, or sometimes being accused of operating within that field independent of their own claims (as with people accused of witchcraft).
Bushiri was just one actor in that economy, but he was offering access to a particularly potent form of puissance: as Yesu Mukombozi, he laid claim to the puissance of the Christian God. And his claims to that puissance – bolstered by the allegiance of the puissant healer figures of Alleloya and Albert – clearly had currency, given the rapidity with which he amassed followers. When the territorial administrator Bribosia visited one of the Catholic missions in the region at the beginning of the uprising, the priests running the mission at Mutongo told him that there were rumours of a ‘mufalme ngufu (puissant king/leader) with 400 warriors’. A group of schoolchildren were forthcoming in their assessment of Bushiri:
He is really the son of God. He is all-puissant. He has the gift of omnipresence. He has a black head, a steel chest, and white legs. He baptizes his followers and is a friend to the missions. He draws his force from himself and his followers and he wants to relieve the poor blacks from rubber collection. He doesn't want to kill the whites, but just to arrest them. (Bribosia Reference Bribosia1944: 2–3)
Furthermore, the Father Superior informed Bribosia that he had encountered ‘much trouble convincing his flock that Catholicism and Kitawala [were] not compatible’ (ibid.). This final point suggests that the Father Superior's ‘flock’ saw Kitawala – and Bushiri's movement in particular – as one potentially potent source of puissance in the larger economy, not necessarily incompatible and perhaps even complementary with others (namely, Catholicism).
Thus, Bushiri tethered his claims of puissance to the past, not through a bounded set of ancestral practices and beliefs, but through the evocation of a dynamic theory of power. And that dynamic theory of power allowed for innovation, for the embodiment of puissance from a relatively new source that had proven formidable – the Christian God – in order to correct the imbalance in the community. And when Bushiri entered into the economy of puissance, claiming that he embodied that power as Yesu Mukombozi and that he could correct the imbalance at the root of their social ills, people believed him and they followed him – whether this was out of fear (because he threatened to kill all those who did not follow him) or from a genuine desire for the social healing he promised (the vanquishing of witches and the overturning of the colonial order) and the hope that he could provide this healing. Ultimately, as the children Bribosia spoke with so wisely observed, he drew his power – ‘his force’ – from those who followed him. One of Bushiri's captains reportedly echoed this sentiment: ‘Bushiri was powerful because he was followed.’Footnote 31 His claims to puissance were rendered true because people believed his claims and followed him. But they followed him because he drew on theories of power, or puissance, that they recognized at a time when colonial imposition left them feeling vulnerable. Thus, Bushiri's ‘imaginary’ power and his ‘real’ power were one and the same. But there was a darker side to Bushiri's puissance, the violent side of his healing, which needs to be interrogated.
WIVES AND WITCHES? WOMEN, PUISSANCE AND VULNERABILITY
As Alleloya's testimony makes clear, the brunt of the physical violence of Bushiri's uprising was borne by those accused of witchcraft and those who represented the state. Of those who were accused of witchcraft, the majority were women, although men were also accused. As noted above, the accused tended to be old men charged with immoral accumulation – ‘eating’ the resources of the community (particularly wives) – and sterile women who were charged with harming others out of jealousy, usually by killing their children or hindering their ability to reproduce. As in most of Africa, there is a deep relationship between communal prosperity or health and fertility in Central Africa, and issues relating to infertility – high child mortality (often due to malnutrition, which, as noted above, was exacerbated by the colonial situation), sterility, and generally poor maternal health – had caused palpable problems within the communities in the region of the revolt. Women, therefore, often found themselves in a precarious position. They were often assumed to be potent wielders of puissance at the precise moment when they were most vulnerable. When witchcraft is thought to be prevalent in communities – which, for the reasons outlined above, is increasingly common in times of deprivation and social upheaval – this fraught relationship between puissance and vulnerability is exacerbated. This was the case with Bushiri's uprising, and it is still true in Eastern Congo, as in much of Africa, today.Footnote 32
Yet I would like to caution against seeing women only as victims of the uprising. Looking at the archival evidence, this presents a challenge. In Alleloya's testimony, we can see women emerging only as victims of witchcraft accusations, wives of men accused of witchcraft who are punished in the place of their husbands, and women who are coerced into marrying Bushiri and his followers. Bushiri, Alleloya reports, planned to marry 1,000 wives and give each of his followers 100 wives, and over the course of the revolt, we are told, he seized numerous women for himself and his followers. De Schryver reported that Bushiri had a ‘harem of some 20 women’.Footnote 33 De Schryver also reported at least one rape of a woman who was taken captive and Alleloya himself reported the incident of the five men and women forced to have sex in the public square. There is also Alleloya's report of the women – accused witches – who were whipped and had their limbs broken and then were tied to trees and left to die. In short, the imagery of women as passive figures and victims in the archive is strong.
Nonetheless, one must try to read against the archival grain. The numbers that Maurice Lovens presented in his study of the uprising suggest that anywhere from one-half to two-thirds of those involved were women and children (Lovens Reference Lovens1974: 23). In the wake of the massacre at Djembe, noted above, 120 women and children were arrested along with 160 men. They were integral to the ‘singing and dancing’ that so frightened the colonial soldiers that they opened fire on the unarmed crowd. In short, women were there and they were not there by force. They were purposefully participating in the movement, and it is therefore unreasonable to assume that they were all coerced into joining or somehow passive victims. This raises the question of what their role might have been within the movement. There is little evidence in the archives relating to the revolt that can definitively answer that question, but there is some oral evidence, collected during my fieldwork in 2010, that is suggestive.
In today's Kitawalist church – for it still exists – women hold a central role in what Benetta Jules-Rosette has called ‘ceremonial leadership’ (Reference Jules-Rosette and Jules-Rosette1979: 127–44; see also Hoehler-Fatton Reference Hoehler-Fatton1996: 99). They are the ‘mamas of the prayer chambers’ and it is they who lead prayer ceremonies in which God and the ancestors are evoked in order to heal people. Two elders of the church in the territory of Fizi in South Kivu explained why women have this central role:
Kibasomba-Wakilongo: You know that if we look at the history of prophecy, the mamas have 80 per cent of the nguvu (puissance) of the heavens. The men have just 20 per cent. You don't know that all nguvu is women?
Mama Amisa: It is the mamas who give birth. Everything is the mamas. The babas [men] are just helpers.Footnote 34
In a separate exchange, further south in Northern Katanga, in Kalemie, a regional leader of the Kitawalist church, Kabanga Kamalondo, explained the significance of women in the history of the church as follows:
Those who were arrested were mostly men, because they were the ones who were in conflict with the Belgians. But the mamas, they were praying in the prayer chambers. When someone was arrested, the mamas came together to pray that they would find success. So they created that ‘pouvoir’ within the prayer chambers. They were doing very powerful evocations. They were doing evocations so that we would defeat the Belgians. A man would go into the chamber, he would get the power to be victorious [ushindi] and he would go. Since the beginning women were in the church, until today. When the men were dying in the prison camps, the women were there doing evocations for them.Footnote 35
As Kabanga Kamalondo explains it, women played an indispensable role in the church as they were the ones who ritualistically evoked the puissance that allowed men to resist the Belgians. But this was the kind of role that was fulfilled in the secrecy of a prayer chamber, not in the public space of a revolt. It is arguably possible that the women who followed Bushiri exercised a similar function. Moreover, if they did, it should not be entirely surprising that they do not appear in the archives: such forms of power would undoubtedly have been invisible to colonial officials. Even the Belgian researchers sent to study Kitawala in the wake of the revolt would not necessarily have seen such roles.Footnote 36 For as Maman Kalema, a Kitawalist healer I met in South Kivu, once told me: ‘Such knowledge is the domain of women.’Footnote 37
The purpose here is not to ‘prove’ that women held such roles as ceremonial leaders in Bushiri's uprising, but to problematize the archive, which represents them largely as victims, and to suggest that they might have been something more. Such assertions are based not only on the oral evidence presented above, but on the significant body of research that highlights the important role of women as wielders of ‘creative power’ in healing movements and independent churches in African history.Footnote 38 We know that Bushiri claimed to draw on the puissance of God in order to correct the imbalance in the economy of puissance caused by both the colonial state and the witches presumed to be sowing harm within communities. But we also know that he drew puissance from his followers. It is arguable, then, that just as some men were deemed moral wielders of puissance and drawn into the movement by Bushiri (the healers Alleloya and Albert, for example) while others were considered immoral and became the victims of the movement's violence, some women may have been drawn into the movement as moral wielders of puissance who could strengthen Bushiri and his followers by performing evocations in prayer chambers, while other women were punished violently as they were thought to be immoral wielders of puissance.
Juxtaposing this discussion of women as healers and wielders of creative power with that of women as wielders of immoral power and victims of witchcraft accusations highlights the ambiguous and duplicitous nature of puissance. Indeed, it underscores the reasons why one must think about Bushiri's uprising not in terms of an anti-colonial or political movement, a healing movement, or even a prophetic movement, but as a movement concerned with restoring a balance in puissance. It was all of those things – prophetic, anti-colonial, political, healing – but it was more than each of those things alone. It is particularly important when tethering movements such as Bushiri's to the past not only to recognize the language of healing at work, but to move beyond thinking of that language in terms of ‘healing’, as this can have a tendency to create a positive moral valence that obscures the violent side of such movements, just as thinking of them exclusively in anti-colonial or political terms obscures their healing side. But perhaps most importantly, it obscures how ambiguous, volatile and contested the theories of puissance that Bushiri and his followers drew on could be.
TETHERING TO THE PRESENT: CHOREOGRAPHIES OF VIOLENCE AND THEORIES OF POWER
Thinking back to Alleloya's testimony, I would like to conclude by considering the choreographies of violence that were at play in the uprising, returning to the questions of memory, somatization and reproduction that were raised in the introduction. One of the most significant aspects of the violence as described by Alleloya and other witnesses is the extent to which it both reproduced and overtly critiqued colonial forms of violence. The prevalence of whipping with the chicotte – one of the most wretched icons of colonial dominance – is striking. As is the fact that Bushiri claimed that he could detect witches and other puissant deviants with a meter in his arm – an instrument of colonial domination, used by its agents to weigh and process any number of things, including rubber. Bushiri used it to ‘test’ the morality of people. Also notable is the image of De Schryver, the embodiment of the colonial state, stripped naked and forced to porter rubber, subjected to a humiliation that had long been borne by Congo's colonial subjects. The choreographies of each of these forms of violence were written by the colonial state long before Bushiri and his followers performed them, and their use during the uprising was a mirror held up to the colonial government, which largely failed to recognize in it the reflection of its own brutality, the choreography that it had written.Footnote 39 One recalls Jean-Paul Sartre's words in his preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth: ‘For it is not first of all their violence, it is ours, on the rebound, that grows and tears them apart’ (Reference Sartre and Fanon1961: lii).
It is undoubtedly true that the choreography and the context of the violence performed by Bushiri and his followers were in many ways a reflection of the violence created by the colonial state. But if, as Nancy Hunt argues, ‘it is no longer tenable to imagine that one can write an urgent, effective history about violence and ruination … without tethering it to the present’, the question remains of how and to what it can be tethered (Reference Hunt2008: 243). One might attempt to tether the history of Bushiri's uprising to the present by looking for the reproduction of choreographies of violence first performed by the colonial state. Looking at the ways in which violence against women emerged in Bushiri's uprising – rape, torture, forced public performance of sexual acts – it is possible to see that such choreographies were a repetition of modes of violence condoned and perpetrated by the colonial state and its agents. Hunt very clearly outlines the prevalence of such forms of violence in Leopold's Congo, a history she quite rightly suggests has been silenced for too long.Footnote 40 And it seems fair to suggest that the repetitions of such forms of violence in the present might, indeed, be tethered to the colonial past, where they were first choreographed by the colonial state, only to be mirrored by Bushiri and his followers, and then again in the contemporary conflict.
But if we are going to tether violence in the colonial era to the present, then we must also consider the ways in which much older imaginaries of violence and power can be tethered both to the colonial context and to the present. Of course, one must not give currency to ‘essentializing notions of Africa's past as one soaked in blood’ by suggesting that Central Africa has a ‘culture of violence’ (Schoenbrun Reference Schoenbrun2006: 742). But nor did Central Africa have a history devoid of violence before colonialism. As this article has endeavoured to demonstrate, the imaginaries through which violence was articulated prior to colonial occupation did not disappear with the colonial era, and nor should we assume that they have disappeared since then. In the region of the 1944 Kitawalist uprising, as in most of Central and Eastern Africa, violence and its relative legitimacy have been imagined and articulated historically through the ambiguous and contested language of puissance. In that language, violence can be healing, and healing can be violent, particularly when an imbalance in the economy of puissance has resulted in grave social ills. In a contemporary context where Mai-Mai soldiers make claims to potent puissance in the form of various dawa, one cannot help but recall the image of Bushiri's claim to the mataifa medicine of Alleloya. In the image of contemporary armed groups perpetrating violent acts in the name of protecting particular segments of the population, one cannot help but recall Bushiri and his men, claiming to protect the Kumu from the Wanianga, the Bakusu and the Europeans. In the image of a population experiencing grave social ills, but fearful and unconvinced by the legitimacy of emergent leaders perpetrating violence in the name of their protection, one can see the image of mothers of daughters murdered as witches spitting in the face of a captive Bushiri. Yet, at the same time, one sees the language of puissance reflected in Fizi and Kalemie, where the mamas of the prayer chambers evoke the puissance of God and their ancestors to heal people who come to them looking for relief from the ills inflicted on them by structural violence.
