THE STATE AND
AFRICAN INDEPENDENT CHURCHES IN BOTSWANA PART V Wim van Binsbergen |
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Botswana state and churches | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV |
4. Conclusion: Beyond
acquiescence
Already
Sundkler pointed out that the narrowly political perspective (in
the sense of the churches alleged challenges of the state)
with regard to the African Independent churches is far from
fertile. His pronouncements on this point have formed the
starting point for much perceptive research ever since:
Claims that
political reasons are behind the Separatist Church
movement miss the mark. The few instances of radical party
affiliations of certain Ethiopian or Zionist groups do not offer
sufficient proof of any definite political trend; and even
admitting the existence of much outspoken anti-White propaganda
in most Independent Churches, one should not forget that the
attitude of the leaders and masses of these Ethiopians and
Zionists has on the whole been loyal, not least during the trying
experiences of war. (Sundkler 1970: 296)
Writing on
the Rolong Tshidi who straddle the Botswana/South African border
and whose ethnic cousins are the Rolong of Matsiloje and Moroka
the cradles of independency in the Francistown area
, Jean Comaroff in her recent Body of Power Spirit of
Resistance, adds a new note to this discussion.
Acknowledging a certain indebtedness to my own analysis of the
Lumpa church and Zambian religious change in general (van
Binsbergen 1981), she situates the specific local form of the
Zion Christian Church in the context of overall symbolic change
under the impact of capitalism and the modern state:
The purposive act of
reconstruction, on the part of the nonelite [ sic
] , focuses meaningly on the attempt to heal dislocations at the
level of experience, dislocations which derive from the failure
of the prevailing sign system to provide a model for their
subjectivity, for their meaningful and material being. Their
existence is increasingly dominated by generalized media of
exchange money, the written word, linear time, and the
universal God which fail to capture a recognizable
self-image. These media circulate through communicative processes
which themselves appear to marginalize people at the periphery;
hence the major vehicles of value have come to elude their grasp.
In these circumstances, efforts are made to restructure activity
so as to regain a sense of control. Repositories of value, like
the Zionists money, are resituated within practices that
promise to redirect their flow back to the impoverished, thus
healing their affliction. (Comaroff 1985: 253)
The attention for symbolic reconstruction, and its undercurrent
of political and class struggle, will be intuitively appreciated
as illuminating and profound. However, the matter must be even
more complicated than that, for Comaroffs reading of the
churches as symbolic protest would politically amount to a
rejection of the state and the modern economy, of which very
little can be found in the material brought together in the
present paper. Her analysis immediately invoked the critical
reaction of another writer on Botswana churches, Richard Werbner
(1986), who points out that in actual practice the Zionist
churches tacit support for the apartheid state constitutes
a major hindrance to socio-political reform in Southern Africa.
Werbners views converge with those of Matthew Schoffeleers
in the Netherlands (1991).
Schoffeleers views the relationship between African Independent
churches and the state in the perspective of political
acquiescence,[1] claiming that these churches
emphasis on healing would re-orientate the actors attention
from the national and political to the individual plane when it
comes to these actors conceptualizing and redressing of
sources of evil in life and society. The present argument
complements this approach, by looking at the organizational and
legal aspects of church/state interaction. By concentrating, as
the acquiescence perspective does, on the world-view
propounded by the African Independent churches, we risk to
overlook the fact that the bureaucratic organizational form of
these churches in themselves requires serious study in its own
right. Having grown up and functioning in a society where formal
bureaucratic organizations are the principal structural format of
society, North Atlantic academic observers may be accused of
myopia when they have, with few exceptions, failed to
problematize the successful implantation, rapid spread, and
creative adaptation and transformation of the imported model of
the formal bureaucratic organization on African soil since the
end of the nineteenth century, both in a state context (the
colonial and post-colonial state, its executive apparatus, and
state-controlled institutions such as schools, hospitals,
marketing boards etc.) and outside the state: voluntary
organizations including churches, recreational and professional
bodies etc. These fundamental societal forms, which have so
revolutionarized the pattern of social organization existing in
Africa before the colonial period, ought not to be taken for
granted. They are not the mere organizational vehicles for power
and ideology generated elsewhere, outside their scope: they are
the increasingly widening beddings of social life in Africa,
where power and ideology are being generated in their own right,
as a reflection or a result of organizational processes rather
than as an external influence upon such processes.
The emerging picture turns out to be somewhat more complex and
less uniform than the acquiescence approach would lead us to
suggest. The African Independent churches appear to form what
Sally Moore (1978) so aptly called a semi-autonomous
field with regard to the state, and our data suggest a
number of possible ways in which this field can be linked to the
state. Those emphasizing acquiescence and seeking to explain it
in terms of individual healing emphasis, are primarily interested
in how the churches interfere, or rather do not interfere, with
the state. Throughout my present argument my emphasis, by way of
compensation, has been on how the state interferes, or fails to
interfere, with the churches. But in fact these two questions are
but two sides of the same coin.
The state with its universalist legal apparatus on the abstract
level takes for granted that the churches fall under its control,
and on the practical political level does seek to bring the
churches under its hegemony. Yet in actual fact it is clear that
the power of the state over the churches is far more limited.
When it comes to the larger cosmopolitan churches, their early
registration and easy exemption suggests an eagerness, on the
part of the state, to co-opt the support of these formidable,
internationally well-connected organizational bodies, which
constitute such a vital part of the civil society. But also with
regard to the larger African Independent churches we have seen
how the state e.g. in the case of the Spiritual Healing
Church readily adopts a Christian idiom of expression, so
that in a secular constitutional democracy like Botswana a
high-ranking government official offers a formal governmental
statement which sounds like a fully-fledged sermon. Here the
state seeks to co-opt non-state-derived organizational powers in
society without the slightest insistence on its own prerogatives
or hegemony. A term like acquiescence would not quite
do justice to this situation, since it is not the church which
keeps aloof from the state, but the state which adopts an
extremely accommodating attitude vis-à-vis the church.
Taken to its extremes, we have the situation of Guta ra Mwari,
where the state fails to confront even suspected criminal acts,
and practically admits its incapability to impose its control.
The case makes clear that ultimately the legal, bureaucratic
authority as embodied in the state (in other words, a secular,
impersonal and democratically-controlled premise of power) is
defeated in confrontation with a time-honoured premise of power
that revolves on notions of supernatural intervention and
election, sorcery, secrecy, and the manipulation of humans for
economic gain, provided this premise is articulated in an
effective organizational form whose public manifestations (feign
to) emulate the very forms of formal bureaucratic organization
which the state has taken itself and which the state seeks to
impose on churches. Superficially one might characterize the Guta
Ra Mwari position as acquiescent after all, the state is
not openly challenged, but simply ignored, from a position of
secure non-state-derived power. But in fact the position of this
church is far too cynical and manipulative vis-à-vis the state
to be called acquiescent. Nor is this a case of
nativistic or traditionalistic withdrawal: in its emphasis on
ritual means (admittedly an application and transformation of an
ancient local repertoire) alleged to ensure entrepreneurial
success in a thriving modernizing economy, the church seems to be
largely an attempt to generate power independently from the
state, and thus to organize modern life along modern goals but
by-passing the state. This position is reminiscent with that of
such writers as Bayart ( 1988) and Geschiere (1986, 1990) who see
in contemporary sorcery in Africa largely outside a formal
church contexts a popular mode of political action, in
which the post-colonial state is challenged. In the awareness of
people in Francistown, Guta Ra Mwari stands out as a rather
unique case, which tends to inspire the majority (the
non-joiners) with a great deal of fear and avoidance. One wonders
if the case is really so unique. The pursuit of economic gain
through drastic magical means forms, besides healing
and the need for spiritual advice ,one of the main concerns of
clients consulting non-Christian ritual specialists in
contemporary Botswana; one would therefore be surprised if Guta
Ra Mwari would be the only case of this concern spilling over
into the domain of African Independent Churches. Perhaps we
should make a more rigid distinction, in this connexion, between
healing, on the one hand, and intercession for economic success,
on the other; although Guta Ra Mwari professes to offer healing
along the same lines as other African Independent churches, its
manifest concentrating on success intercession might be
interpreted as a departure from the healing idiom which would
render the acquiescence-through-healing argument no longer
applicable.
The amazing success of Guta Ra Mwali, in terms of membership,
economic assets and freedom in the face of the state law shows
that state-church dynamics in Botswana has to be understood,
partly, as a dialogue over premises of power and their effective
organizational articulation in the civil society. In this
dialogue the state can afford to occasionally adopt the idiom of
established churches and larger African Independent churches like
the Spiritual Healing Church: their basic premises of power
(articulated in formal bureaucratic organization) converge, and
whatever theocratic inspiration the church may have nurtured
originally, is given up in exchange for formal state recognition
and protection, which makes it possible for these churches to
appeal to the state when they need arbitration in their own
ranks, and when they seek to expand in the wider society in terms
of assets (such as church plots, raffles, training institutes)
which only the state can provide or legitimate.
In independent Botswana, new African Independent churches
typically emerge in a penumbra beyond direct state interference,
and our statistical analyses have shown that as long as they
remain very small and do not seek a more than minimal and local
impact on society, they may subsequently wax and wane, without
the state even noticing. The majority of these churches however
move out of this penumbra towards the state centre, seek
registration, and in the process (against the background of an
authoritarian attitude towards African Independent churches
dating back to the colonial era) are subjected to far greater
state interference with regard to their doctrine, organization
and therapeutic practices, than would be stipulated by the letter
of the law. Are they on their way to join the cosmopolitan
churches and established African Independent churches? Or are
many more only seeking cover under the appearances of
acquiescent, while in fact following a track that would bring
them closer to the Guta Ra Mwali position? Or is there, in
addition to this symbolic challenge under the cover of
bureaucratic dissimulation, yet another trajectory, that which
leads to open challenge of a theocratic or even military nature
as in the well-known case of the Zambian Lumpa church?[2] The acquiescence perspective would
suggest that in the course of such a development churches would
have to discard healing for a more political, theocratic
conception of good and evil; but then, even in the Lumpa church,
healing was a central concern.
There is yet another dimension to state-church interaction in the
context of African Independent churches in Botswana. Our
statistical analysis, while highlighted the strong
over-representation of urban congregations. Although many rural
congregations exist, Independency is the expression par
excellence of people in the process of urbanization
and, by implication, of extensive involvement in the capitalist
mode of production. In a continent where uncontrolled urban
masses have constituted the main nightmare of colonial and
post-colonial governments, the urban bias in Botswana
independency must constitute a significant factor in the
states attempts to control these churches and force a
formal bureaucratic logic upon them.
Finally, the example of the Hosanna Religious and Traditional
Association brings out another aspect of the limitations of state
control over religious organizations through the Societies Act.
Underneath the somewhat surprising adoption of a modern
state-defined juridical form, such an organization is primarily
concerned with historic continuity: it seeks to safeguard the
Mwali cult in the modern age. The state-registered association is
only one facet of the cult today, and in addition (as closer
observation and participation reveals), parallel to the
bureaucratic mode, it retains in historic and
institutionalized ways as set out by Werbner (1989) the
cultic territorial organization, circulation of cult leaders,
pilgrims and money, and the cults symbolic and ritual
repertoire, which are not at all stipulated by the formal
constitution as deposited with the Registrar of Societies. The
partial adoption of a new bureaucratic form is only an attempt to
ensure that one can go on doing what one has been doing for,
literally, centuries. The same could be said for
Botswanas several associations of traditional healers,[3] one of which (the Kwame (Legwame)
Traditional Association of Botswana) in fact constitutes the
modern face of another branch of the Mwali cult, having its
Botswana headquarters not in Ramagwebana (like the Hosanna
Traditional and Religious Association) but in Nata, two-hundred
kilometres northwest of Francistown.[4] In these cases, as in those of many
independent churches, the adoption of a state-defined
bureaucratic form allows religious leaders and therapists
(through the acquisition of bank accounts, plots and buildings,
motor vehicles, shops etc.) to expand into a modern economy whose
conditions are largely set and controlled by the state, without
fundamentally altering the premises under which leadership is
gained and exercised, and under which the cult is organized. Here
modernity and continuity go hand in hand in a way which is
typical for present-day Botswana, and which may well help to
explain the countrys peculiar cultural and political
stability.
These are some of the questions for further research. A note of
caution, meanwhile, is in order with regard to the role of the
church leadership. I have far from escaped the usual tendencies
towards reification, and spoken of the state and the churches as
if they were actors in themselves. Instead, of course, what we
witness is the interaction between state officials and church
leaders. To the extent to which churches form a semi-autonomous
field vis-à-vis the state, church leaders can be said to
straddle both structural domains, and by their activities as
ritual and organizational entrepreneurs or brokers determine the
dynamics of their mutual relationship. Church leaders are not
only seeking to further the collective interests of their church
through the formal means provided by the state; they also have
their personal agendas, and not infrequently church assets end up
being appropriated by individual church leaders. As a far wider
range of case material than can be presented here indicates, the
leaders balancing of perceived individual and group
organizational interest, and the way this management is supported
or challenged by the subaltern leadership and the followers at
large, enables us to trace, and to a large extent explain, the
trajectory of individual churches in their relationship to the
state. The occurrence of many non-registered churches, on the
other hand, shows that for these churches, and their leaders, the
services the state could offer are not essential for their
spiritual and material orientation.
In order to study these specific trajectories and strategies we
would have to leave the aggregate approach on the present study,
and return to detailed case studies. The latter will provide
explanations for the patterns which the quantitative study merely
brought out but cannot begin to explain: why beyond the
effect of state support through registration, which I discussed
in the context of factor analysis above do some of these
churches grow so fast and others do not?; why are some of them
rapidly disintegrating while others manage to retain their unity
without fragmenting into smaller church bodies breaking away? why
do some adjacent African Independent churches co-exist in
considerable harmony and spiritual fellowship, while others are
at daggers drawn? Some of the most important questions that
should be asked with regard to the African Independent churches
in Botswana cannot be answered from the perspective of
state-church interaction alone. The extensive literature
available on church dynamics in other countries in Southern
Africa, and particularly Daneels (1971, 1974, 1988)
monumental study of southern Shona churches in Zimbabwe, creates
a favourable background for such further research. In this wider
context of the sub-continent as a whole, further study should
also explore the extent to which the perception of state-church
relations in Zimbabwe and particularly South Africa has
influenced Botswana state officials, and particularly the
Registrar of Societies, to adopt particular attitudes vis-à-vis
African Independent churches in Botswana, particularly those
(like many of the larger ones) which originate from those
countries. One would suppose that the acquiescence argument would
not quite work out the same way in a totalitarian South Africa of
the 1970s and 80s, in UDI Rhodesia, in independent
Zimbabwe, and in the populist democracy of Botswana since 1966,
even if the legal instruments for state interventions might be
shown to be similar.
Finally, is the churches accommodation vis-à-vis the state
merely a strategy to create freedom from further state
interference? Are those which do register perhaps not very
different, in their political and social aspirations, from those
that escape registration? The test lies in the extent to which
the churches not only, inevitably, generate social power outside
the state, but also aspire to have this power extended to fields
of social life monopolized by the state. Being reticent and
populist, the Botswana states claims in this respect are
far less expansive than those of many other African states, where
every case of student protest or every minor administrative row
may automatically be interpreted as a challenge of the state and
invoke state action (a repeated theme in the works of Bayart and
Geschiere). To judge from their constitutions, theocratic
tendencies are hardly developed among African Independent
churches in Botswana; but then, we have to realize that these
constitutions are primarily formal instruments meant to function
in a context of church/state interaction. For an adequate
assessment of theocratic orientation, which would pose challenges
even the Botswana state cannot afford to ignore, we have to go
and look elsewhere. And as the studied peacefulness of Botswana
public life is slowly eroded, these last few years, by public
riots and state violence which show that the careful texture of
consensus is being rent by mounting class conflict,
party-political conflict and anomie, August
1990 saw a case of church leaders being imprisoned for failure to
respect such national symbols as the flag and the anthem.
The peculiar emphasis on consensus in Botswana socio-political
structure has prevented the dilemmas, cleavages and
contradictions typical of peripheral capitalism, to find explicit
political expressions and solutions. The exponential growth of
African Independent churches must be understood in this context:
offering symbolic, organizational, financial and therapeutic
responses for existential problems engendered by modern
conditions but hardly confronted by the state in e.g. its
educational and cultural policies. It is probable that the
present aloofness and accommodation of African Independent
churches vis-à-vis the Botswana state is only a passing phase,
and that ultimately the demands of symbolic reconstruction which
Comaroff so rightly stresses, will lead to more extensive and
possibly violent confrontation.
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Botswana state and churches | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV |
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Botswana state and churches | Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV |
[1] Cf.
van Binsbergen 1981: 57f.
[2] Cf.
van Binsbergen 1981 and references cited there.
[3] Notably
Kwame (Legwame) Traditional Association (file no. H28/30/34 vol.
I, registered 2.5.1977) and United Herbalist Association (file
no. H28/80/91 vol. I, registered 2.3.1979. Two other such
associations mentioned by Staugård (1985: 229) no longer
function legally if at all. As a qualified traditional healer,
the author has been a member of the Kwame Traditional Association
since 1990, cf. van Binsbergen 1991.
[4] Incidentally,
both cultic headquarters have extensive relations with African
Independent churches and, as High God shrines, are involved in
the empowerment not only of non-Christian therapists but also of
church leaders.
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