Oxford University Press Journal of Social History

Liberating the Captives: Independent Watchtower as an Avatar of Colonial Revolt in
Southern Africa and Katanga, 1908-1941

Author(s): John Higginson
Source: Journal of Social History, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 55-80
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3788812
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LIBERATING THE CAPTIVES:
INDEPENDENT WATCHTOWER AS AN AVATAR OF
COLONIAL REVOLT IN SOUTHERN AFRICA AND
KATANGA, 1908-1941
By John Higginson University of Massachusetts
And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out
devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they
drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick,
and they shall recover.
Markl6:17-181
There is no country in the world where grievances are not widely felt. In a free
country the subject has the means of expressing them and of himself attempting
their removal. In Africa native opinion has neither the means of expression nor the
means of action. And when grievances are laid at the door of an alien government,
when its demands fall on all and its services are felt by none, education enables
growing numbers to reflect upon and nurse their grievances until some way of
resistance offers, however foolish or criminal or hopeless it may be.
Norman Leys to S. H. Oldham on the eve of the Chilembwe Rebellion of 19152
In rare instances the enthusiasm of popular aspirations and the heat of indus-
trial expansion have been jointly communicated by adventist and millenarian
beliefs. The outlook of the common people in the north and west of England at
the outset of the first Industrial Revolution gave dramatic display to the potency
of this coupling, and the eloquent and voluminous writings of British historians
such as E. P. Thompson, Asa Briggs and John Foster have drawn our attention
to some of its less predictable outcomes.3 Of that time and place a recent writer
says this:
... Religion offered sanction to workers' righteous anger, and it fit their local
struggles into a more global frame of reference. It provided a language for thinking
about the contradiction within everyday life and between its deeply held values
and limited possibilities.4
According to another writer, the situation had not changed appreciably a gener-
ation later, when Methodism became the most important agency of evangelism:
Methodist sectarianism was concentrated in the same areas in which Wesleyanism

and its evangelical allies and rivals had managed to establish themselves, . . . they
managed to preserve the rich variety of the early eighteenth century evangelical
revival and to retain its feisty distrust of earthly authority. Only in places free of
the control of the Church of England or the great landowners could their brand
of icottage religion' thrive.5
The spread of Watchtower sects in southern Africa during the 1920s and
1930s provides an important complement to the English example of the late
56 joumal of social history fall 1992
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For British evangelicals, even if they
did not initially choose to, could have laid claim to the legitimizing democratic
language of the European Enlightenment in much the same way that radical arS
tisans had done at the end of the eighteenth century. No such recourse obtained
in the colonies of southern Africa. Incipient republican ideals about personal
freedom and liberal notions of free trade were not at the forefront of industry's
advance. Gatling guns and caissons, as well as drilling rigs and machine tools,
led the way. Consequently, African Watchtower's emergence bore a strong reS
semblance to the Methodist chapels that emerged during the turbulent second
period of the Industrial Revolution rather than the more explicitly political
Chartist movement.6 This phase of Methodism} which was accompanied by
visions and 'sspeaking in tongues", represented a distilled instance of popular
reaction to the spread of factory production and to the cobbling together of a
national police force. Similarly, Watchtower reflected an African reaction to
drastic changes in the modalities of industrial capitalism and colonial rule from
the turn of the century to the Depression of the 1 930s.7 Examining the spread of
Watchtower therefore raises new and important questions about the scaffolding
of moral outrage and the perception of injustice by ordinary men and women in
a colonial setting.
A World Upside Down
Watchtower's metamorphosis was not straightforward. Its early history is

rather difficult to disentangle from the general upsurge of adventist and African
Independent churches at the tum of the century.8 Independent and Adventist
churches swept over both town and countryside in southern Africa once thou-
sands of Africans were driven from the land by punitive forms of taxation and
land enclosure. Disastrous occurrences such as the Boer or South African War
of 1899-1902, the Bambatha or Poll Tax Rebellion of 1906, and Germany's two
genocidal wars against the Herero people in South-West Africa and the Maji
Maji insurgents -in East Africa between 1903 and 1907 sharpened the sting of
expropriation and played havoc with the everyday experiences of the peasanS
try.9
The world of the villages was also changing-and for the worse in most in-
stances. Between 1895 and 1907 a series of long dry seasons and pestilence
sharply reduced the carrying capacity of villages as far north as the Rufiji and
Lualaba Rivers and as far south as the Transkei.10 These ecological shortfalls
coincided with the depression of 190448, the collapse and reconstruction of
the mining industry in Southern Rhodesia, and the opening of the mines of
the Union Mirliere du Haut-Katanga in the Belgian Congo. Competition be-
tween white farmers and the industrial magnates for potential African labor
intensified. Chronic indebtedness, larld shortages, poor harvests, shocking rates
of infant mortality, burgeoning rail lines, and a steady outpouring of migrant
laborers characterized those isolated rural communities that responded to the
prophetic thunder of the various millenarian and adventist churches.l l
The simultaneous mishandling of these troublesome situations by the existing
colonial governments further aggravated the living standards of rural Africans.
The more isolated groups of African peasants were particularly victimized by the
LIBERATING THE CAPTIVES 57
statutes and fiscal policies of the various colonial administrations. For example,
in 1907, in Katanga Province, BelgianCongo, local officials were informing their
superiors that they were obliged to go slowly with the government's proposed
scheme for cotton cultivation. For by the end of the year even those land chiefs
who were known collaborators had been prodded into intransigence by "opaque
sources of opposition" in the villages, according to these officials.l2
Four years earlier, in South Africa, labor legislation such as the ten shilling
labor tax attached to the Glen Grey Act had begun to acquire a more punitive
legal interpretation. Rural Africans in more removed areas such as the Ciskei
region found themselves in a particularly vulnerable position:
All sorts of expedients were resorted to. Land was divided and subdivided within
the family far past the point of declining returns for all involved. Marginally
productive and hitherto undesired land was ploughed and reploughed, until it was
leached of its limited fertility; hillsides, ridges, dry and stony patches were sought
out; reports are replete with phrases like 'every available inch of land is cultivated.'
Commonage was encroached upon by men anxious to sow and reap a modicum of
grain, often provoking bitter feuds.... Landless men sought to use any and all of
the feeble political devices which they might have at their call, both of traditional
and colonial varieties.... Others turned to stock theft and vagrancy; many entered
wage labour with the express intention of accumulating enough cash to buy or lease
land a little later.... With the twin pressures of increasing population and rising
land prices, fewer and fewer were able to achieve this aim.l3
58 journal of social history fall 1992
African villagers were not made to feel more sanguine by the reassurances
of administrators and missionaries, for they were uttered in the same breath as
demands for more adult male labor and more taxes. By 1908 numerous African
peasants in the two Rhodesias, Nyasaland, Mozambique, Angola, South Africa
and the eastern and southeastern provinces of the Belgian Congo found them-
selves squeezed beyond endurance. Many abandoned their ancestral homes; oth-
ers became squatters on their own land, or rack-rented tenants of white settlers;
women and old people, as opposed to able-bodied men, felled trees and broke
ground for crops during the rainy season. More than just the land and its sons
were "eaten" the world was turned upside down.l4
Meanwhile, men returning from six to nine month stints on South Africa's
Rand or from other work sites, were often the agents of subtle but perceptible
changes within their villages. Such men often came home in groups brandishing
hunting rifles, which were fired in unison to signal their return and also to pay
homage to their chiefs. On occasion they returned with a piece of clothing
in a heretofore unknown color, a handful of silver coins, or an explanation of
the world that flatly contradicted the one taught at the local mission school
or propounded at the palavers called by the village headman. Some entered or
returned to the fold of the established missions; others continued to worship their
ancestors. But there were also those who could not ignore the uncomfortable
disparity between the unconditional equality in Christ depicted in "Umatheru"
(Matthew) or in Paul's letters to the Corinthians and the peremptory manner
of the European missionaries. All these factors made for a disturbing undertone
just beneath the surface of the colonial order.l5
The various colonial governments in southern Africa were bent on creating
"natives" rather than men and women as a means of exploiting African labor.
What real African men and women thought of their condition was, from the
oflicial vantage point, superKuous, except during instances of popular unrest.l6
As a result, under certain conditions, the apparent dichotomy between African
members of the established Christian denominatiorls and those of the African
adventist and millenarian churches may have been a false one. Adventist and
millenarian churches sought to intervene in local situations with the expressed
purpose of eradicating this dichotomy.l7 They often transmitted altemative ideas
about the value of work and the accumulation of wealth that compelled Africans
to rethink the legitimacy of a given colonial regime. The "escapist" aspect of
the more evangelical African Christian sects was therefore situational and very
much dependent on time and place.l8 Consequently, African Watchtower's inS
tervention into the more secular areas of colonial life during the period follow-
ing the Depression of 1904-07 needs to be reconceptualized. For at this point
Watchtower and other millenial sects came to elaborate a "hidden transcript"
of popular grievances in the midst of sharp economic fluctuation.l9
The Advent of Watchtower
Between the end of the Boer or South African War of 1899-1902 and the end
of the Second World War, Watchtower was transformed from a rural populist
creed, which disputed the arbitrary power of government-appointed chiefs and
European missionaries, to a powerful means of connecting the horrifying experiS
LIBERATING THE CAPTIVES
59
ences of the African peasantry of the previous generation to the putative making
of an industrial working class. This connection became the catalyst for the emer-
gence of a militant but in the long run insufficient working class ideology.20
The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society was one of several North American
adventist and evangelical Christian denominations that poured tons of pulp
literature into southern Africa during this period.2l However, none of these de-
nominations established permanent missions in southern Africa until well over
a decade after the South African War.22 This situation contained unique and
paradoxical consequences; for it meant that the bulk of adventist literature, that
of the Watch Tower society in particular, was to be disseminated over a large
portion of southern Africa without the agency of European missionaries for over
a decade. As a result, the seeds of- an independent African Watchtower sect
had already begun to sprout long before the hrst official representative of the
Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, William Johnston, arrived in Capetown
in 1911.23
From 1911 until his departure from South Africa in 1918, Johnston met
sporadically with the leaders of a burgeoning group of potential African be-
lievers from Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and northern Mozambique. This
group numbered between 1,000 and 9,000 members on the eve of the First
World War, and they were not entirely unprepared for Johnston's arrival.24 For
in 1907, in a dank, musty storeroom of the commercial district of Cape Town,
their leaders Elliot Kamwana, Hanoc Sindano and perhaps Shadrach (Cha-
trek) Ngoma Shinkala, all of whom had been migrant workers and apostatized
members of the Free Church of Scotland's Livingstonia Mission in Nyasaland-
encountered one of the most unusual European missionaries ever to set foot
in southern Africa, Joseph Booth. This encounter which was to last for eight
months, and which took place less than a year after the savage repression of
some eleven thousand Zulu tenant farmers and sharecroppers during the Bam-
batha Rebellion was to mark the beginning of a powerful evangelical wave of
Christianity in southern Africa.25
As early as 1892 Booth was circulating in the Shire Highlands of Nyasaland

(presently Malawi) and northern Mozambique as an unofficial representative of
the Seventh Day Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists and several other adventist
American Christian sects (he switched back and forth as the mood struck him).
He began his missionary career in Africa by writing a broadside on behalf of
a group of African workers who had organized a strike against several large
farms run by the Presbyterian mission in Nyasaland.26 The reasoning behind
Booth's support of the striking workers was simple: How could one encourage
Africans to come to spiritual salvation of their own free will while undermining
their practice of free labor? For hadn't it been the great crusades of the mid-
nineteenth century Free Trade and the abolition of slavery that had brought
the missionary enterprise to Africa in the first place?Z7
Most, if not all, European missionaries failed to appreciate the connection
between free will, which they so enthusiastically espoused in matters of religious
conversion, and free labor. Hence their silence when colonial administrators
clapped African converts into jail for failing to pay the hut tax or refusing to do
corve'e labor. African converts readily explained their refusals with the common
retort, "I am a Christian. I do not work for nothing." or "I am a Christian, but
I am not a church member." In so doing, they further distanced themselves

from the missions.28 The basic principles of Christianity that what one did
mattered, and that one's efforts in this world would determine whether one
achieved etemal salvation ran far ahead of their European proponents among
African believers.
Booth's efforts in support of the striking agricultural laborers eamed him the
enmity of local white planters, the colonial government in Nyasaland, and the
established missions so much so, that in 1897 Booth thought it prudent to
accompany John Chilembwe, the reluctant leader of an armed uprising against
the Nyasaland Protectorate eighteen years later, on a visit to black Baptist col-
leges and missionary societies in the southern United States. Booth was much
impressed with what he saw on this visit, for it confilllled his own incipient ideas
about the primacy of Africans in the evangelization of their continent.29
Some missionaries and planters thought that Booth was simply naive. Others
thought he was a bit crazed because he and his family chose to remain outside
the confratemity of the missions, choosing indigenous Africans, like Chilem-
bwe and Kamwana, for collaborators and friends. All parties, with the possible
exception of disaffected African Christians, agreed that Booth was inimical to
their immediate interests.30
In 1908 Booth's influence declined precipitously, even among those upcountry
migrants who had so eagerly sought him out during the uncertain times that
followed the Bambatha Rebellion. Yet his earlier activities had illuminated the
more opaque aspects of the missionary presence for many of the young men from
the north. By his example, Booth had shown them that wages were the measure
of salvation as well as sin, and that free labor was the hidden but indispensable
corollary of the gospel of Free Trade. In other words, there was justification
for their disputes with the established missions within the broad universe of
Christian theology. Johnston's official mission three years later was but a pale
reflection of Booth's earlier enterprise.3l
By the end of 1908, Kamwana, Sindano, Shinkala and others like them took
the literature of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society as a point of departure;
but their understanding of Christian theology diverged sharply from the Amer-
ican based organization. They continued to acquire pamphlet literature from
the Watch Tower Society's branch offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg; but
the acceleration of land enclosure, which culminated in the creation of the first
African or native reserves, excessive and arbitrary taxation, the African peas-
antry's uneven access to the new markets, and excessive labor recruitment, gave
this literature a new purpose and context. An adventist theology, one which
advanced the prospect of liberation in this world as well as the next, was in the
making.32
The Second Wave 1908-1918
By 1908 independent Watchtower's message was conveyed by a small band

of men who had known each other frorn adolescence and who, at some point
between 1906 and 1907, had paid regular visits to Booth's reading room in Cape
Town. Many of them, including Kamwana, Sindano and Shinkala, were Tonga.
The Tonga people lived on the shores of Lake Nyasa (presently Lake Malawi) and
were one of the first groups of Africans north of the Zambezi River to be brought
entirely into the nexus of wage labor and Christian mission education.33 By
1907, Tonga Watchtower preachers made inroads among the Hehe and Nguni
of southwestern German East Africa (Tanganyika from 1918) after the failed
Maji Maji rebellion, and also among the Nguru-Lomwe people of northern
Mozambique just before the Chilembwe uprising.34 Independent Watchtower's
most important strongholds therefore were Nyasaland, southwestem Tanganyika
and northern Mozambique.
By the outset of the First World War, the new movement had spread through-
out southern Africa. As early as 1909, for example, in one corner of Nyasaland,
Elliot Kamwana baptized more than 9,000 people, most of whom had been
previously baptized by agents of Livingstonia mission.35 To be sure, the force
of Kamwana's personality and those of his immediate colleagues, Sindano and
Shinkala had much to do with the early mass conversions; yet their charismatic
appeal was helped along by some of grievances of Christianized African colonial
subjects. Many of these grievances took the form of complaints about witches
and witchcraft; for during the famine ridden years of 1909, 1910, 1911 and
1912 a period when thousands of Africans were pushed on to the barely arable
land of the "native reserves" African peasants saw the handiwork of witches
everywhere. Complaints of witchcraft were particularly numerous in the more
isolated regions of southern Africa, where the demands of the Europeans and
ecological disasters had initiated a cycle of structural overpopulation and falling
living standards as early as the 1870s.36
From the peasantry's vantage point, eradicating witchcraft could be done more
readily than managing capricious government officials, unscrupulous landlords,
and bad weather. Missionaries and colonial officials held to a different view.
For them, witchcraft represented a series of fragmented and incoherent beliefs.
Yet any territorial administrator could sit through the sermon of a clergyman
of his own race in which there might be references to Saul's consultations with
the witch of Endor or to the raising of the dead by Jesus Christ with a certain
amount of suspended disbelief. It was quite another matter for him to record
similar happenings in a village under his jurisdiction without first impugning the
judgement of local eyewitnesses. Consequently, there were huge gaps between
what police and administrators in the various colonies chose to write down
in their day books and what actually happened during periods of quickened
Watchtower activity.
While this disparity was partly a matter of perception, it was also the measure
of the advantage that Watchtower preachers had over the colonial authorities in
winning the allegiance of the peasantry. Famine, arbitrary taxes, and the imperi-
ous behavior of the European missionaries worked to disestablish the influence of
the missions in the villages and to underscore Kamwana's admonition that the
whites were "too cheaty and too thefty."37 But Watchtower preachers and adepts
expressed their advantage disingenuously until a series of incidents in Northern
Rhodesia in September 1918, which were popularly known as the "breaking of
the King's Peace."38 As Karen Fields reminds us, African Watchtower adherents
simply stated that "God was great" it was understood that the colonial regimes
and their agents were not.
By 1917 Northern Rhodesia became Watchtower's most important stronghold.
fall 1992
62 journal of social history
Its two most important bases were around Livingstone and the expanding south-
em cluster of white settler farms in the Kafiae Valley, and in the eastern regions
bordering the Luapula Valley and the border with Katanga. The eastern basS
tion, under the leadership of Hanoc Sindano, straddled the footpaths by which
African men voluntarily went north to the mines of the Union Mirliere du Haut-
Katanga or south to those of the British South Africa Company in Southern
Rhodesia. At Kawambwa and Fort Rosebery, a short distance away, Africans
were recruited for the mines of Katanga by Sir Robert Williams's Tanganyika
Concessions Limited.39
Toward the end of 1917 scores of Watchtower adherents were driven from
the mines of Southern Rhodesia. A year later a literal war broke out between
Sindano's followers and chiefs and headmen in Northern Rhodesia's Abercorn
and Fife districts. Northern Rhodesia had not been divided into provinces at
this point and local officials feared that the protests might quickly spread to the
entire colony and beyond. Even more ominous from the official viewpoint, was
the prospect of an alliance between Sindano's followers and well-armed African
Islamic millenarians led by one Mwalimu Isa and backed by Germany.40 Despite
the intensification of the First World War in Africa at this juncture, the prospect
of an alliance between Watchtower adherents and Muslim millenarians was pure
speculation. What was actually taking place was a good deal more damaging to
European rule a large number of peasants in the northern districts of Southern
Rhodesia and in the more remote regions of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia
had fallen below previous levels of subsistence and into the hands of Watchtower
prophets and adepts; the beginnings of what threatened to become a full-fledged
rebellion raged in one of the most important labor catchment regions for the
mines of both the Belgian and British colonial spheres; and the King's Writ was
neither heard nor obeyed in many of the districts of His Majesty's colonies in
southern Africa.4l
By September 1918 Sindano was imploring his followers to disobey the chiefs
and district officers, and to leave the villages of those headmen who continued
to keep the King's Peace. He urged them to refuse to work for Europeans and
to await the end of the world in December. Sindano was arrested but released
when the colonial government could not marshal enough evidence to convict
him of treason. Several weeks later Colonel von Lettow Worbeck's column of
African guerrilla fighters invaded the eastern districts of Northern Rhodesia and
burned the boma or government office in which Sindano had stood trial only
weeks before.42
British magistrates and colonial officers were forced to fall back from the east-
ern regions of Northern Rhodesia before they could properly establish their au-
thority. The paradoxical nature of the British withdrawal was not lost on the local
people who marvelled at how readily British magistrates and administrators-
men who had frequently dispensed corporal punishment and mulasa or forced
labor now appeared to flee in the wake of Sindano's prophesies. Watchtower
quickly moved into the vacuum created by the British withdrawal.
Doubts about the tenure of European rule were rife among Africans even
after the close of the First World War. For example, on 18 December 1923,
after several months of Watchtower preaching in the adjacent countryside, the
camp manager of the Wankie colliery in Southern Rhodesia was apprised of the
general mood of the African workers by way of an anonymous note:
. . . All these men are saying that you white people will leave on the 1st of January.
The first (to go) will be Mr. Thomson, with the Doctor and Mr. Darby, and you
Mr. Kidd. All of you shall go and your authority (ufumu) shall pass to the society. Is
this true? We want to know. Also they are saying that there is no Satan in heaven.
Satan (they say) is the Native Commissioner. Let us know if this is true.43
Peter Nielsen, the native commissioner at Wankie and reputed "Satan" of the
letter, urged the camp manager not to take the note seriously, for he had heard
such "prophesyings and vapourings" for well on to ten years at that point. Nielsen
went on to point out that since 1913 the number of Watchtower believers
between Wankie and the Globe and Phoenix mine had risen to about a 1000
and that he, Nielsen, had actually spoken with the man responsible for the most
of the conversions, one Nyasulo:
Nyasulo appears tO me to be a man of good character, with a personality which

may be very impressive to the Natives when it is enhanced by his firmly expressed
belief in himself as a prophet of God. He is polite but very confident in himself,
the sort of man that would glory in being persecuted.44
Nielsen paused at this point of his report and interjected that he could be
wrong about the innocuous nature of Watchtower. After all, he had not talked
to any of the 1000 or so believers. In closing, he did a rare thing for a colonial
officer: He admitted that Nyasulo might have been stringing him along for
close to a decade, or certainly at least since the ban on Watchtower activity in
Southern Rhodesia in 1917. Meanwhile large numbers of Watchtower adherents
had been coming down from Northern Rhodesia right before his eyes. Where
had he gotten that figure of one thousand from his African messengers, from
Nyasulo? Several days later he reversed himself and suggested that the camp
manager canvas the colonial Special Branch or Criminal Investigations Division
(C.I.D.) for more information.45
After the First World War, however, British colonial officials in southern
Africa opened a new offensive against Watchtower. At the outset of 1925, for
example, Sindano and a number of his followers in Northern Rhodesia were
arrested again and his settlement "Jerusalem", just outside of Abercorn, was
burned to the ground. Watchtower's strongholds now moved into the north-
ern and central districts of Northern Rhodesia. Two district leaders Jeremiah
Gondwe at Chinsali and Tomo Nyirenda at Mkushi now assumed titular con-
trol over the movement.46
Early Efforts in Katanga
After Sindano's arrest Watchtower lost much of its original character. What
had once been a more or less monolithic movement split into two definite ten-
dencies, which were epitomized by the different approaches of Gondwe and
Nyirenda. According to contemporaries, Gondwe's sect was known as kitower
and was based in Nkana and Ndola, Northern Rhodesia. Gondwe implored his
followers to remove themselves from the industrial work sites and unbelieving
chieftaincies, and to form new, self sufficient rural communities. Nyirenda gar-
nered a constituency in the vicinity of the Union Miniere recruiting stations of
Kawambwa and Fort Rosebery, and in the villages of the Lala people in Northern
Rhodesia and Katanga. Nyirenda's sect, which sought to woo existing villages
away from the colonial governments and to establish an alternative pole of
political authority, came to be known as kitawala.47
The more spectacular features of Nyirenda's career his acquisition of the
ancient prophetic title of Mwana Lesa or Son of God from the Lala people,
the spectacular trail of baptisms and political assasinations by drowning be-
tween February and September of 1925, and his capture, trial and execution
by British authorities-have all been succinctly examined elsewhere.48 How-
ever, Nyirenda's stay in Belgian territory set into motion a series of events that
he himself did not see to closure. Nor could he have foreseen them given the
brevity of his career.
Nyirenda envisioned a general mobilization of the African population of the
Luapula Valley and beyond, in order to prepare the way for an armed intervention
by blacks from America. Afterwards the Europeans would be driven westward
into the sea. An era of peace would follow. This reign of peace would be followed
by a return of the ancestors from the east under the leadership of the hero ancestor
Luchele. The world would then become like the heaven described byJesus in the
twelfth chapter of Mark the dead would rise and all earthly forms of kinship
and, parenthetically, inequality would disappear.49
By the 1920s Nyirenda was enjoining his people to go pray in the wilderness,
to refuse to obey those chiefs who did the bidding of the colonial governments,
to watch for the eastern star, and to await the expulsion of the Europeans.
Baptisms and witch finding became a kind of oath a primary measure of the
individual believers' commitment to driving the Europeans from power. For
kitawala in Swahili and Nyanja means "the power to govern," and it was to this
end that Tomo Nyirenda sought to spread the message of Watchtower throughout
the southern portion of Katanga. Gondwe opposed such a plan. Yet many of
Nyirenda's followers continued to think of Gondwe as a prophet as well, in spite
of his quietist ideology of withdrawal from the work sites and industrial towns.
This was particularly so after Nyirenda was executed in 1926 and Gondwe was
forced into hiding the following year.50
Between 1923 and 1925, the first Watchtower adepts ever to establish con-
stituencies and bases of operation in the Belgian Congo crossed over into Katanga
from Northern Rhodesia in the south and from western Tanganyika in the east.
They attempted to convey this message to prospective followers
And, whatsoever house ye enter into, there abide and thence depart.
And whosoever will not receive you when you go out of that city, shake off the
very dust from your feet for a testimony against them.
Luke 9 4_551
These early Watchtower visionaries were imbued with an emotionally charged

and literal interpretation of the words of Jesus to His 70 followers, when they
went out from Bethesda tO announce His coming. Local territorial police reports
frequently noted this passage from Luke as the one with which the adepts either
brought entire villages in the Haut-Luapula and Tanganika-Moero Districts into
their network or cast them aside as part of the "wicked generation" that Jesus
had warned them against.52
As early as 1923 these adepts had acquired a respectable following in many
of the villages between Sakania and Luembe. By 1925, Nyirenda's kitawals was
firmly entrenched in a number of the southernmost villages of Katarlga. Those
of Mapola, Lufumbi and Mofimbi villages that had suffered greatly from exces-
sive labor recruitment and epidemic diseases between 1918 and 1924 rapidly
became the staging areas of the sect in the southern end of the province. Only
the chieftaincy of Kipulunga remained insulated from the advance of kitawala.
The territorial and police reports attributed Kipulunga's resistance to its "young
and energetic" chief. But it seems more likely that Kipulunga remained loyal
to the provincial government because it was occupied by govemment troops
well before Nyirenda's capture. Subsequent government reports mentioned that
a number of Kipulunga's inhabitants fled to the areas under Watchtower con-
trol several months after their village had become an advanced position for the
government's offensive against the new challenge to its authority.53
Watchtower's acquisition of a rural constituency in southern Katanga solid-
ified itS base of operations in the province, and from that base Watchtower
expanded northward. The movement's influence was no longer confined to the
routes of labor recruitment that originated in Northern Rhodesia. Yet several
logistical problems persisted. Watchtower had taken hold in the largest villages
of southern Katanga those with the lowest consistent rates of labor migration.
And while they offered up occasional domestic servants and casual laborers for
development work in Elisabethville, the provincial capital, and the other indus-
trial towns, such communities remained more or less isolated. Moreover, their
isolation was reinforced by the police dragnets of the latter 1920s.54
The isolated pockets of believers created by Nyirenda's aggressive initiatives
of 1925 were eventually picked up and reorganized by Mumbwa Napoleon Ja-
cob. Mumbwa kept many of Nyirenda's ideas and tactics, while putting his own
stamp on the reconstituted sect- to the point of renaming it the banapoleo7ai
or "Napoleon's people."55 The banapoleoni persisted in protesting head taxes
and government-appointed chiefs, since both continued to be egregious bur-
dens for the peasantry: However the previous isolation of many of the above
mentioned rural communities disappeared within a few years, once the expan-
sion of the mining industry on both sides of the Katanga-Northern Rhodesian
border prompted a sharp rural to-urban population shift in southern Katanga.56
These circumstances, combined with the relatively high cost of living in the
industrial towns, made prospective workers from Katanga's southern territories
less resistant to appeals of Watchtower preachers.
The Growth of the Urban Proletarian Wings of Watchtower, 1931-1941
The Elisabethville boycotts and popular protests of July-November 1931 were

important flashpoints of Watchtower's urban emergence in Katanga. Despite
the lurches in the activity of the secret police, a spasmodic view of the African
workers' actions is nowhere suggested by the available evidence. The issue of
organization was of great importance tO the African workers, as it also was for
the Union Miniere and the colonial government. Both the mining comparly
and the govemment saw the protest as a culmination of the expansion of the
bashikutu or workers' lodges and the Watchtower sects among the urban African
population. Both forms of organization did in fact play a role in the conflict, but
not in the manner that the mining company or the govemment envisioned.57
The African boycott of retail stores in Elisabethville began in September 1931,
one month after the suppression of the African mineworkers' protest at the Prince
Leopold mine in the nearby town of Kipushi. Initially, the boycott attracted only
a small number of mineworkers; but after the failed protest at Kipushi and at
Ruashi, a smaller mining town, incurred so many violent reprisals, a growing
number of workers were drawn into the more pacific boycott by the beginning
of October.
The boycott reached its peak in late October and November, just when new
recruits were being brought to the worksites. This was also the peak season for
the Union Miniere's company store and the smaller commercial establishments.
It was therefore the most opportune time for the leaders of the boycott to en-
courage new recruits and other African workers to join their action. Outside
of casual laborers working in the commercial establishments of the town, the
greatest source of support for the boycott appeared to be among the African
construction workers at the Union Miniere, particularly those at the Star of
the Congo. Bricklayers and carpenters, for example, figured prominently among
those Africans whom the police claimed were both Watchtower and boycott
"leaders" after the police raid of 17 December 1931.58
The crash of the copper market had made many African workers aware of the
importance of the market and the business cycle for their employers. But their
grasp of the market's importance was infused with a great deal of moral content.
Consequently, they attributed the hard times of the first years of the Depression
to the mining company's refusal to censure usurious merchants. African workers
did not object altogether to the exploitation of their labor power at this point,
but "unjust" prices were, in their estimation, insufferable and a legitimate cause
for protest.59
It was perhaps the tailings of the workers' moral conception of economic life
that the authorities mistook for membership in one of the several Watchtower
sects.60 By October 1931, even though many workers had been influenced by
millenarian beliefs, only a small core belonged to any of the Watchtower groups.
Some, particularly those who had been especially active in the boycott, did
eventually join one of the several African Watchtower sects. But this was only
after the beginning of the police raids in the African quarter of the city in
November 1931, when the secret police determined to smash the boycott and
the Watchtower sects simultaneously.6l
A case in point was that of Vula Aroni or Vula Jean as he was known to the po-
lice. Vula became an organizer of the Elisabethville boycott in September 1931,
shortly after dismissal from his job as a shovelman at the Star of the Congo mine.
According to the police, he was linked to Watchtower through his relationship
with Mumbwa Napoleon Jacob. Apparently Vula and Mumbwa were from the
same village in the Luapula Valley. However, it seems Vula actually converted
tO Watchtower only after he had escaped the police in Elisabethville and fled
south to Sakania between late November and December 1931.62 Apparently the
ability of many of the Watchtower networks to elude the newly formed secret
police was one of the major reasons that some workers joined the movement at
this point.63
Even though the Roman Catholic Church was the state church in the Belgian
Congo, Watchtower beliefs were beginning to have a compelling influence on
some of African workers just before the boycott. For example, the Church forbade
the translation of the Bible into local languages, while enjoining its clergy to
suppress the reading of other religious publications. Watchtower leaders opposed
such practices, even though few of them had come to the movement as a result of
intellectual or doctrinal disagreement with the state sponsored Catholic clergy.
Rather, Watchtower leaders were men who had "wrestled with Satan" in the
labor camps and in the homes of Europeans as domestic servants. They believed
that the "new heaven and earth" of the Book of Revelations would be set up in the
everyday world, and that open-air baptisms, witch-finding and proclaiming that
all secular governments were creations of the devil were the most expedient
means of informing others about the coming of the new age. Their outlook
and personal aspirations did not differ much from the masses of underpaid and
mistreated colonial subjects they sought to convert. However much Watchtower
leaders denied a political interpretation of their doctrine and many did in the
face of police repression-the vagaries of colonial administration and official
Roman Catholicism determined the extent to which millenial beliefs became
politicized. For in the estimate of many Africans, colonialism presented itself
as an alien claim on their labor which left them little in the way of dignity.
Consequently, they secretly wished for its demise.64
Thousands of mineworkers returned to the rural areas in the wake of the
strikes and anti-repatriation riots at the Union Miniere. For their own reasons,
and in a more inchoate fashion, segments of the peasantry also rose against
the authorities. Local rebellions flickered throughout much of rural Katanga.
The immediate cause of the rural discontent the contradictory attempt of the
cotton refineries and local government to encourage cotton cultivation without
allowing peasants direct access to the market was painfully obvious. Rather
than destroy their own fields, peasants burned the refineries and warehouses
and smashed government-issued plows. Military promenades into the rural areas
followed closely behind. Land chiefs and returning workers regarded each other
differently in the midst of the turbulence.65
The government remained fixed in its contention that the popular protests
were the result of "atavistic native beliefs."66 Failing to see the apparently inad-
vertent connection between worker and peasant protest, the provincial secret
police suppressed first the one and then the other. The interests of the Union
Miniere and those of the state threatened to split apart in the wake of the
police repression. The mining company favored the commercial production of
foodstuffs over cotton as a means to hold down wages and to facilitate the repro-
duction of the workforce. Its view changed somewhat during the first phase of
the Depression; but its basic components peasant cultivators, an internal mar-
ket for food, casual laborers for development work at the mines, and a relatively
skilled, poorly remunerated core of miners and factory operatives remained the
same. Incredulous over the government's actions, and hard-pressed by soaring
freight rates and the cost of imported food, the mining company partially withS
drew from provincial politics. Even so, there was still a long way to go before
the peasantry would be unilaterally receptive to a call for insurrection by the
workers.
Some of the workers were in fact harbingers of rural protest as well as insubor-
dinate voices at the workplaces, just as the secret police claimed. Many did have
connections to millenial African religious sects, even though such connections
were, at this juncture, fleeting and circumstantial. However, these associations
and connections suggested that the extreme measures taken by the police had
pushed the workers into secretive and underground forms of organization in
order to save their lives.
What the colonial authorities and the mining company failed to realize about
the post 1931 situation was that Katanga and the contiguous countryside were
no longer a series of subsistence redoubts, and that peasants would not easily
swallow industry's losses in the form of repatriated workers. Nor would they
bear the cost of reproducing a future generation of workers unless coerced. For
example, by the end of 1932 Vula Aroni and one Kianza Djoni, who later became
an important Watchtower figure in northem Katanga, began to preach that the
end of the world was imminent, and that it was senseless to plant crops. However,
on 17 June 1934, the territorial police arrested Djoni and transported him to
northern Katanga, while Vula once again managed to escape capture.67
Between 1934 and 1937, as the mining company began to intensify its opera-
tions in the hinterland, the minimum requirements for rural discontent forced
labor, increased taxation, and falling prices for crops-were greatly exacerbated.
Industrial unrest-resumed as well, but in different forms and with slightly differS
ent objectives in some instances. These circumstances militated strongly in favor
of more broadly based popular protest on the eve of the Second World War. The
distance between the mineworkers and the peasantry narrowed considerably.68
New Prophets, New Visions
The police repression of 1931 and 1934 caused the African Watchtower sects
to percolate deeper into Katanga a fact that administrators and police officials
only grasped after 1936. Kianza Djoni's arrest was only one of many factors that
helped Watchtower to move northward.69 By 1935 the banapoleoni had also
acquired constituencies as far north as the Union Miniere factory complex at
Jadotville.70 By the end of 1936, they were also firrnly entrenched at the Geomines
and Union Miniere tin mines at Manono and Mwanza respectively.
Watchtower also made important inroads among the African railway workers
of the Chemi71 de Fer du Grand Lacs (CFL), who lived in company compounds less
than 200 kilometers north of the tin mines. Virtually all of these workers had been
baptized by pastors, preachers and deacons belonging to the banaoleoni network
organized by the adept Kulu Mupenda.7l Kulu Mupenda had been brought into
the banapoleoni tendency of Watchtower by a Nyasaland adept, Lobati Kima,
in 1930. According tO the police, Lobati Kima's place in the Elisabethville
organization was second only to that of Mumbwa Napoleon Jacob. After the
Elisabethville boycott and the subsequent police repression of December 1931,
Lobati and Kulu fled south to Sakania along with other banapoleoni.72
Still under the supervision of Lobati Kima in early 1936, Kulu Mupenda left
the border town of Sakania and went north to Albertville. Lobati on the other
hand was arrested at the end of 1936, after almost a decade of narrowly escaping
the Belgian authorities. Following these events, the barLclpoleoni also shifted
their emphasis from the southern end of Katanga to the northeastern and north
central regions of the province. By the end of 1936 they possessed strongholds in
Albertville, Bukama, Kongolo, and at the Union Miniere tin mine at Mwanza.73
Kulu Mupenda now assumed responsibility for the sect's entire network, which
stretched from the northernmost tin mines to the mouth of the Union Miniere
mining complex at Bukama.
Under Kulu's leadership the banapoleoni experienced a large degree of internal
reorganization. Painfully aware of the frequent arrests and isolation of Watch-
tower members, he created the office of portier or "doorkeeper." The primary
duty of the portier was to give shelter and anonymity to Watchtower adepts and
other leaders passing through a given region. The portier also arranged the time
and place of mass baptisms. Kulu also linked the work of the "doorkeepers" with
that of the baptists, the most physically mobile rung of Watchtower leadership.
Thus, the protection of adepts and leadership on one hand, and the expansion
of the movement at the local level on the other, fell largely into the hands of
this vertical file of leadership.74 The implications of this new office were vast,
for they militated against the sundering of the movement's basic organization by
police raids. Watchtower cells now had an alternate channel of communication.
On 26 September 1936 Kulu Mupenda himself was arrested in Albertville
and sent to the rural chieftaincy of Benze along with his deacon, Fungatumbu
Muhanguka. But by 27 April 1937 Kulu and Fungatumbu had forged a rural
network of believers around the Catholic mission at Niemba.75 Moreover, Kulu
determined to undermine the authority of chieftaincies in the vicinity of Benze.
As early as February 1937, according to the territorial agent in the area, Marcel
Etienne, the chief at Benze, had been forced to flee the village. Yet despite
Watchtower's rapid erosion of chiefly authority, its most important constituency
was in the workers' camps of the CFL and among the African workers at the
government owned cotton mill just outside Niemba.76
As a result of the close surveillance of his activities, Kulu and the other
Watchtower leaders turned first to Africans at the cotton refineries and then
to the African railwaymen. The railwaymen eventually carried Kulu's message
south to the tin mines of Manono between 1937 and the time of the great strike
and Watchtower protest of November 1941.77 By the outbreak of the Second
World War a respectable percentage of the African tin miners at Manono and
Mwanza had been brought into the fold.
By 1937 the authorities were obliged to adopt a new approach to Watch-
tower's suppression. For example, the chief police investigator, Louis Wauthion,
borrowed a locomotive from the chief engineer of the CFL, Paul Bruart, and
swept through the camps of the railway workers. Wauthion traveled up and
down the rail line in his borrowed locomotive arresting alleged Watchtower ad-
herents among the African workers from 24 April to 8 May 193 7. All of the men
arrested during this period were held in the military prison at Albertville rather
than rusticated.78 Once the suspected African railway workers were arrested,
Wauthion maintained that the African Watchtower movement in the area had
been crushed. But Kulu Mupenda, on the occasion of his trial, vigorously denied
this. In a deposition replete with biblical alIegories, he suggested that the very
methods that the authorities used to repress Watchtower had, in fact, given it a
broader constituency.
Watchtower excited the fears of local colonial adminisrators during the De-
pression because it forced them to confront the issue of the government's le-
gitimacy when they were least equipped to do so. Moreover, the secret police
extracted elaborate and dramatic confessions from Africans suspected of Watch-
tower activity, some of which were complete fabrications. This was beside the
point, however, for the sole purpose of the written confessions was to create a
climate of fear which would give rise to even more spurious confessions. The
banality of the whole affair rested with the fact that, after a point, the secret
police became interested in generating more confessions merely to justify their
own existence. Once Watchtower became a specter for the colonial authorities,
they chose to ignore the real grievances of their African subjects.79
Conclusion: The Insurrectionary Moment, 1937-1941
Tuna niama ya bazungu. Lakini tuna bantu Kama basungu. Kweli mbalo ya Baba
yenu. (We are oppressed by the whites. Yet we are men just as surely as they. Truly,
you [the whites] have strayed far from your God.)
excerpt of the statement of Amonsi Miselo, a Watchtower Baptist, as he stood
trial after the strike at the Geomines works on 18-20 November 19418°
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to
bring good tidings to the aMicted he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to
proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are
bound.
Isaiah 61:1, the biblical verse most frequently quoted
by Watchtower adepts when arrested during 1930S81
By 1941 Watchtower's difise network began to consolidate in and around

Katanga's outlying mines. Watchtower's active presence at Manono, for example,
was signaled by the strike of 19-20 November 1941. The strike also collapsed
differences between the barlapoltoni tendency of African Watchtower and the
Djoni tendency. Whatever diiderences these two wings of African Watchtower
maintained in the rural areas were of little consequence in the mining camps
and industrial towns.82
The Manono strike began on 18 November 1941. Shortly after the work stop-
page, a group of Watchtower adherents, whose spokesman for the occasion was
Amonzi Kiluba Miselo, marched to the territorial administrator's ofice to air
their grievances against the company. Miselo read a list of misdeeds that the
workers attributed to the Geomines company and the govemment. By midday
a crowd of over 2,000 people had gathered at the territorial administrator's of-
fice. According to the report of the prosecution, many of them were singing
the African Watchtower anthems Mataifa ("All Nations") and Kuliana ("Stick
Together") while some chanted anti-government slogans.83 The report also said
that by late afternoon African demonstrators had broken through the outer bar-
ricades of the territorial administrator's office. The soldiers who were guarding
the Europeans "panicked." Fourteen African demonstrators were killed, while
another thirty were wounded. There were government casualties as well. How-
ever, despite eyewitness reports that said that the troops had fired on the miners
and their wives without provocation, and that the miners were unarmed, the
report of the prosecution maintained that "all would have been lost had it not
been for the steadfastness of the European officers."84
On 19 November 1941, a contingent of African miners returned again to the
vicinity of the territorial administrator's office. A European witness described
the events of the second day of the strike in this manner:
They did not try to hide their purpose. It was to drive the whites from the country
and replace the blue flag of Belgium with the black flag of kitawala in order to signal
a change in the regime. On the other hand, some of the defendants had come to
the demonstration without arms and without hostile intentions.85
The prosecution's account of the strike mentioned that the African demon-
strators had been unarmed. It also maintained that the Watchtower adepts had
told the demonstrators that "'divine intervention' would vanquish their ene-
mies." Assuming that the government allegation against the sect's leaders was
true, and that the government and the military knew that the demonstrators
were going to be unarmed beforehand, the soldiers and their officers simply took
their common expedient of firing on unarmed civilians. The police and military
tribunals chose to ignore this logical inconsistency in the prosecution's case,
concluding that the African mineworkers "simply could not resist these skill-
fully advanced doctrines because their primitive minds had been so disheveled
by modern industry."86
Women also played a role in the strike and in the witness bearing and proph-
esying that accompanied it. On the second day of the strike several groups of
African workers and their wives ran through the workers' camps of Manono
announcing the "second coming" and the end of the colonial government. Two
women leaders, Ilunga Eva and Kabangi Alikoya, came to the attention of the
authorities at this point. The police tribunal believed that there was evidence
enough to give them both two year prison sentences. Thus the tribunal abet-
ted the not uncommon method of deadly force against the unarmed, and also
the uncommon one of taking women demonstrators seriously enough to punish
them with prison sentences. Doubtless, the court resorted to such severity so
that others would not choose to emulate their example.87
By 20 November 1941 the news of the strike at Manono had spread to the
nearby Union Miniere work sites through the efforts of the Watchtower adept,
Goy Samuel. Goy was an itinerant African peddler who had been a pivotal figure
in bringing the Watchtower message from the villages to the mines. Since he
had been born in the village of Kisungu, which was midway between the mines
at Mwanza and Busanga, he could readily send information to both places.88
Some of Goy's letters to Watchtower members at Mwanza were intercepted
by the police censor. The censor claimed the letters had been written "in such
a fashion that they struck the natives with fear and anxiety."89 Whether Goy
Samuel's letters had stricken the African mineworkers at Mwanza with "fear and
anxietyZ' was, of course, conjecture. But by the end of November both Mwanza
and Kikole had experienced instances of worker protest. The protest that broke
out at Mwanza was very much like that at Manono. Flags, Watchtower songs
and crowds that "threatened" European officials were very much in evidence
However, a strike did not emerge.90
A strike had in fact broken out at Kikole a week before the one at Manono.
Like the strike at Manono, the strike at Kikole revolved around a rumor of
an American occupation of the Congo and a subsequent American seizure of
the mines.9l African miners at Kikole, for example, talked of commandeering
jeeps and joining forces with 'Africans' from America and Kenya in the wake of
the occupation. At Kikole one strike leader exhorted his fellow workers in the
following manner:
The whites have been defeated in Europe by blacks from Kenya and America.
Why can't we defeat them here as well? ... We have the right to eat eggs and
own automobiles just like the whites. Let us break into the store and divide up the
stock. It belongs to us anyway since the Union Miniere has bought these goods
with our labor. We will cut down the trees and bridges and thereby keep the boss
from sendinf us to Kayumbo. Let them send us to Kenya instead, so that we may
kill whites.9
The theme of American liberators was as old as the first instances of millenarS
ian popular protest in southem Africa. The rumor of an American seizure of the
mines was not. And in so far as the rumor was based on an actual American pres-
ence at the Union Miniere during the Second World War it was an important
factor in the spread of the 1941 strike movement.93 For example, by July 1941,
the Union Miniere's quotas for cobalt, uranium, copper, and tin were set by the
American government through the of fice of the Assistant Secretary of State for
Economic Affairs, Herbert Feis. The subsequent increase in output fell hardest
on those African workers at the outlying mines, for it was there that the largest
deposits of cobalt, tin andl uranium were found. The ';American takeover" of the
mines had, in fact, already occurred by the time of the second strike at Kikole
in November 1941.94
The closeness in the timing of the Manono and Kikole strikes and the general
strike at the Union Miniere on 3 December 1941 compelled the colonial govern-
ment to try some of the leaders of the first three strikes before separate military
and police tribunals at Kamina and Albertville respectively. But the proximity
of the strikes continued to haunt the authorities, for the court proceedings failed
to establish just how "circumstantial" their timing had actually been.95
Watchtower adherents injected an inchoate but insurrectionary language and
vocabulary into worker protest. Perhaps only a minority of workers took it litS
erally. Years of deference to the colonial masters and political repression had
made them cautious even in the face of incipient popular protest. Yet the po-
litical vocabulary generated by the movement in Swahili and other indigenous
languages was shared by both the credulous and the skeptical. Consequently,
Watchtower reached new heights of proselytization and recruitment, once its
chief stronghold was situated at a point equidistant from Jadotville, the most
heavily industrialized city of the province, and the more remote regions of the
north and west. Peasant support was crucial for both the compressed strike wave
of 1941 and the spread of Watchtower. The peasantry did not hesitate to give its
support to both in view of its own bleak circumstances. Railwaymen and ped-
dlers also played a role. For a brief period, urban proletarian leaders moved easily
among the mral masses in the villages. Watchtower enabled them to traverse
the moral space between leaders and led, while also communicating the outrage
of the mineworkers and peasants over the exactions of the mining company and
the govetnment.
Conversely, the established missions sought to destroy African Watchtower
with every means at their disposal. But the missions could not overthrow the
doctrine behind Watchtower theology without first repudiating the idea of the
unmitigated equality of peoples in Christ. A repudiation of this nature would
have endangered their own existence, however. The missions temporized. It
was not so much a matter of the rightness or wrongness of the doctrine, but of
when it could be appropriately practiced; for missionaries} like colonial officials,
claimed willy nilly that Africans were somewhere between a century and a half
a millennium behind the Europeans in their cultural development. Watchtower
doctrine deprived the established missions of this line of defense by claiming
that all secular govemments were creations of the devil and, more importantly,
by restating the New Testament claim that no one knew the hour or day when
Christ would return. As a result, the ostensible backwardness of the Africans
became largely irrelevant.
Watchtower adherents believed their God to be both great and demanding.
His demands bewildered colonial officials and ran counter to the daily require-
ments of colonial rule, particularly after God's Kingdom did not come to pass
during the First World War or with the commencement of the Depression. A
more explicitly stated corollary had to be attached to the initial declaration that
God was great; He, in time, would surely vanquish his enemies. But after 1941
that vanquishing required the more prosaic agency of ordinary men and women.
God's affairs and those of southern Africa's workers and peasants had moved
beyond the comprehension of prophets and adepts.
Department of History
Amherst, Massachusetts 01003
ENDNOTES
1. The Holy Bible (Nashville, 1972), 903.
2. John W. Cell (ed.), By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys andJ.H.
Oldham (Chicago, 1976), 119.
3. See for example E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New
York, 1963), 640-60; Asa Briggs, "National Bearings," in Chartist Studies, Asa Briggs
(ed.), (London 1959); John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London,
1973), 203-223.
4. Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle (Chicago, 1982 ), 72.
5. See Clark Garret, "Popular Religion and the Laboring Classes in Nineteenth Century
Europe," International Labor and Working Class History no. 34 (Fall, 1988): 87; for a more
detailed account of the situation in the West Riding, see Deborah Valenze, Prophetic
Sons and Daughters: Female Preachingand Popular Religion in Industrial England (Princeton,
1985).
6. To have expected them to is partly ahistorical. But we do know that the indignation
of the Chartists did, on occasion, assume a religious form: See Eileen Yeo, "Christianity
in Chartist Struggle," Past and Present no. 91, (May 1981): 109-39; see also Foster, Class
Struggle in the Industrial Revolution, 64.
7. For a gripping description of the expanding berth of African awareness in the regard
see Karen Fieid's Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton, 1985 ), 128-92.
8. For a succinct description of the early churches see: Bengt Sundkler, Bantu Prophets
in South Africa (London, 1961); Bengt Sundkler, "The Concept of Christianity in the
African Independent Churches," Africa 20 (1961): 203-13; and George Shepperson,
"Church and Sect in Central Africa," Rhodes-Livingstone InstituteSournal 33 (June 1963):
34S58.
9. See Peter Warwick, Black People and the South African War, 1899-1902 (London
1983); W. R. Nasson, "Moving Lord Kitchner: Black Military Transport and Supply Work
in the South African War, 1899-1902, with particular reference to the Cape Colony,"
Journal of Southem African Studi'es 11 (1984): 25-51; Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebe11ion
(Oxford, 1970); Shula Marks, "Class, Ideology and the Bambatha Rebellion," in Banditry,
RebellionandSocialProtestinAfrica, DonaldCrummey, ed., (London, 1986),351-72; Jon
M. Bridgman, The Revolt of the Herreros (Berkeley, 1981); John Iliffe, "The Organization
of the Maji Maji Rebellion,"Journal of Aprican History 8 (1967): 495-512.
10. John Iliffe, Tanganyika under German Rule, 1905-1912 (London, 1969); John Hig-
ginson, A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial lmbor Policy, Private Enterprise
and the Aprican Mineworkers, 1907-1951 (Madison, 1989): 21-25; William Beinart and
Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (Berkeley, 1987),21.
11. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York, 1987),48: Charles van
Onselen, Chibaro (London, 1976),17-28; Higginson, A Working Class in the Making, 3-
15; I. R. Phimister, "Peasant Production and Underdevelopment in Southern Rhodesia,
1890-1914," Afri'can Affairs 73, no. 291 (April 1974): 217-228; Colin Darch, "Notas
sobre fontes estatEsticas oWcias referentes a economia colonial Mosambicana: uma crltica
geral," EstudosMofambicanos 4 (1983): 103-125.
12. Thomas Reefe Collection Luba Documents/Chicago (henceforth TRCLD), Maroyez,

Rapports mensuels: CSK, juillet-septembre 1908.
13. There remained a flicker of resistance just beneath these crushing exactions, howS
ever. In the Transkei and Natal Provinces of South Africa, for example, rural African
opposition to the ten shilling labor tax of the Glen Grey Act was nearly universal. Former
government headmen and collaborators often curtly responded to the official claim that
the countryside was redolent with potential African laborers with the retort that young
men could not be idle in their fathers' houses: see Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fa11 of the
SouthAfncan Peasantry (Berkeley, 1978), 117; see also William Beinart and Colin Bundy,
Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (Berkeley, 1987), 142 44.
14. See: Diana Wiley, "The Changing Face of Hunger in Southern African History,
1880-1980" Past and Present 122 (1989). See also: S. E. Katzenellenbogen, Railways
and Mines of Katanga (Oxford, 1973); S. E. Katzenellenbogen, South Afn'ca and Souther
Mozambique (Manchester, 1982); Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic
History ofthe Witwatesranzl, volume 2 (London, 1982), 1-72; and Shula Marks and Stanley
Trapido, "Lord Milner and the South African State," History Workshop 8 (1979): 5040.
15. The misery and human wastage that accompanied the growth of towns and industry
underscored what amounted to an all-out war against the most economically active
segments of the African peasantry. In 1887, for example, Johannesburg had been a sleepy
rural hamlet of about 3,000 people; by 1900, less than 14 years after the initial discovery
of gold, it was a bustling industrial city of more than 100,000 people, will all the grim
social ills of a boom town. These ills included drunkenness, prostitution, dangerous
working conditions, crime of both an organized and gratuitous nature, a near complete
absence of public transportation and a means of disposing waste, and a sharp, vicious
competition for housing and services among the city's working population. Analogous,
albeit smaller, dens of iniquity and industrial malaise sprang up as the rail line moved
northward: Bulawayo in 1897; Salisbury and Beira in 1902; NVankie in 1906; Broken Hill
and Ndola in 1907; Mufulira, Elisabethville and Kambove between 1908 and 1912. Yet
while the new industrial towns contained the most concentrated expressions of misery
the most numerous of these unfortunate circumstances were found in the rural areas. See
Robin Palmer, Landand Racial Domination in Southern Rhodesia (Berkeley,1977); Bogumil
Jewsiewicki, Agriculture itinerante et economie capitaliste. Histoire des essais de modemisation
de l'agriculture africaine au Zaire d l'epoque colonial, 2 vols. (Lubumbashi, 1975); Beinart
and Bundy, Hidden Struggles; Ruth First, Black Gold (New York,1983); Fernando Ganhao,
"Problemas e prioridades na forma,cao em ciencias sociais," Estubs Mo,cambicanos 4
(1983): 5-17; John Higginson, "The Formation of an Industrial Proletariat in Africa:
The Second Phase, 1921-1949," in Immanuel Wallerstein, ed., Labor in the World Social
Structure (Beverly Hills, 1983), 127-29.
16. John McCracken, "Marginal Men: The Colonial Experience in Malawi," Journal
of Southern African Studies 15 (1989): 537-64; Les Switzer, "The Ambiguities of Protest
in South Africa: Rural Politics and the Press during the 1920s," InternationalJournal of
African Historical Studies 23 (1990): 87-109.
17. Fields, Revival antl Rebellion, 34-40.
18. Fields, ibid., 41.
19. I have shamelessly appropriated this term from a lecture given by James Scott on
the problems of the Malaysian peasantry. For a fuller explanation of its import, see James
Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, 1985), 241-303.
20. See Higginson, A Working Class in the Making, 122-125; see also Charles Perrings,
"Consciousness, Conflict and Proletarianization: an assessment of the 1935 minework-
ers' strike on the Northern Rhodesian copperbelt," Joumal of Southern Africarl Stuzlies 4
(October 1977): 49-50; Sholto Cross, "The Watchtower Movement in South Central
Africa, 1908-1945," (Oxford University, D.Phil, October 1973).
21. See: George Shepperson, "Nyasaland and the Millenium," in Millenial Dreams in
Action, Sylvia Thrupp, ed., (New York, 1970), 145; and John Cell, The Highest Stage of
White Supremacy (Cambridge, 1982), 32-35.
2 2 . Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 1 0 1 - 1 1 3 .
23. Archives of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvarlia (AWTCT), A/A
le 16 decembre 1964, "Histoire du developpement de l'oeuvre des temoins de Jehovah au
Congo," 1-5. I wish to thank the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society for photocopying
and sending me this and other important documents from their archives in Brooklyn, New
York. I also want to thank Citoyen Kinkobo Nzazi, the chief administrator of the American
Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in Zaire. Citoyen Nzazi was most concerned to
show me the crucial differences between Witnesses and the adherents of kitawala. He was
generous with his time and shared his knowledge and insight with me without imposing
stipulations or conditions.
24. George Shepperson and Thomas Price, Indepe7ldent African (Edinburgh, 1958), 30-
47; Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 102-105.
25. Marks, "Class Ideology and the Bambatha Rebellion," 352; arld Fields, Revival and
Rebellion, 105.
26. Shepperson and Price, Inzlependent African, 153-59.
27. For a succinct explanation of this ideology and perspective see: Frederick Cooper,
From Slaves to Squatters (New Haven, 1980), 2448.
28. Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 1 12; and John Cell, By Kenya Possessed, 1 19-121.
29. James Hooker, "Witness and Watchtower in the Rhodesias and Nyasalarld,"
Journal of Afcan History 6 (1965): 91-106; Shepperson and Price, Irulependerlt African,
153.
30. Back in Nyasaland a year later Booth found himself under constant surveillance by
the authorities. In 1899 he was expeiled from the colony, but was allowed tO return several
months after his expulsion under a promise that his relations with Africans would assume
a more appropriate form. In 1902 Booth was expelled for a second and final time. By 1906
he had reached Cape Town and began enthusiastically, albeit unofficially, preaching the
chiliastic message of the lehovah's Witnesses: See Shepperson and Price, Indeperint
African, 397a00; Fields, Revival anzl Rebellion, 105.
31. See Terence Ranger, The African Voice (Evanston, 1970), 112-15; Robin Palmer
and Neil Parsons, eds., The Roots of Rural Poverty in Central and Southon Africa (Berkeley,
1977); see also Terence Ranger, "The Mwana Lesa Movement of 1925," in Terence O.
Ranger and lohn Weller, eds., Themes in the Christian History of Cerleral Africa (Berkeley,
1975), 64-68.
32. Marks, "Class, Ideology and the Bambatha Rebellion," 352; Fields, Revival and Re-
bellion, 105.
33. Shepperson and Price, InSpenderlt African, 153; Fields, Revival and Rebelliorl,
107-09.
34. Shepperson and Price, Independent Africa, 400; Cross, "The Watchtower Move-
ment," 8-20.
35. Kamwana chalked up this striking number of converts shortly after the Livingstonia
mission had impressed a large number of African converts to lay out a golf course at
Ekvwendeni for the planters and to make 70,000 bricks for a European "rest home". See
Fields, Revival arld Rebellion, 125.
36. See Rik Ceyssens, "Mutumbula. Mythe de l'Opprime," Cultures et developpement

7, 3-4 (1975): 485-550, Colin Bundy The Rise ard Full of ie South Africarl PeasS
antry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979j: see also Elias Mandala, Work and Control in
a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tehiri Valley in Maklwi 1859-1960 (Madison,
1990).
37. Hooker, "Witnesses and NVatchtower," 94.
38. Fields, Revival and Rebelliorl, 133-167; Robert Cornevin, Histoire de l'Afrique, tome
3 (Paris, 1975), 211-14
39. Tanganyika Concessions/Union Miniere: London (TC/IJM), no. 64, Annexes A, B

and C, "Reports and Correspondence during the Great War 1914-1918;" see also Higgin-
son, A Working Class in the Making, 25-31. For an altemative view of these developments
see Bruce Fetter, The Creaiion of Elisabethville (Palo Alto, 1978), 34-58.
40. Shepperson and Price, Irdependent African, 408.
41. See Sholto Cross, "A prophet not without honour: Jeremiah Gondwe," in African
Perspeciives, Christopher Allen and R.W. Johnson, eds., ( London,1970),172-74; Fields,
Revival and Rebellion, 144 45; Higginson, "The Formation of an Industrial Proletariat,"
135-36.
42. Fields, Revival antl Rebellion, 144.
43. National Archives of Zimbabwe/Harare (Na Zim), 5/38/106, 1923-1928, Wankie:

Confidential 238/712," Superintendent of Natives Bulawayo.
44. Na Zim, 5/38/106, "Report of Peter Nielsen, Native Commissioner at Bulawayo, 30

November 1923".
45. Na Zim, 5/38/106, "Nielsen: 130 & 10.20/811," 26 March 1924.
46. Mariin de Ryc1ce Papers (Congo Collection/East Lansing) [hereafter MRPCC], Secte
"Kitawala" (handwritten notes), "Tomo Nyirenda alias Mwana Lesa c.a.d. 'Fils du Dieu"'.
47. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala," (handwritten notes), "Tomo Nyirenda"; see also Cross,
"A prophet not without honor," 176-79.
48. See Fields, Reviq)al antl Rebellion, 163-92; and Ranger, "Mwana Lesa."
49. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (handwritten notes), "Tomo Nyirenda"; see also Fields,
Revival antl Rebellion, ibid.
50. MRPCC, "Tomo Nyirenda"; Fields, Revival and Rebellion, ibid.
51. Sholto Cross maintains mistakenly that "kitwala" is, in fact, a coincidental African
corruption of the English word "tower." He also puts forth the incorrect notion that it
may have some affinity with the Kiswahili word meaning "to cleanse." However, none
of the Kiswahili words for cleanse "kusafisha," "kueua" and "kutukasha" fits Cross'
contention. The most appropriate verb for "cleanse" in a ritual or ceremonial sense,
"kuenua," bears no discernible etymological relationship to kitawala. On the other hand,
there is a Kiswahili word "kutawala" or "tawala," which means "to control," or more
appropriately, "to rule." Ki is a Swahili prefix, which, in terms of the thought structure of
the latter language, means, "in the way of," custom or culture. The most probable English
translation of "kitawala" would be, then, "in the way of ruling," or more precisely, "a way
of ruling."
At least three informants in Mufulira, Zambia, Mokambo and Mwanza, Zaire confirmed
this reading of the word for me. Two of these informants, Muyombo Tarsis and Citoyen
Tshikalu Masisa, were orthodox ehovah's Witnesses, who, in the late 1920s and 1930s,
had been close to either the banapoleoni tendency of African Watchtower or Jeremiah
Gondwe's kitower tendency. The third informant, Citoyen Kasanda Mutombo, had been
a Watchtower adherent, but is presently a Methodist evangelist.
When speaking about the origins of an African Watchtower movement in Katanga, all
three men described the tendencies of Tomo Nyirenda and Mumbwa Napoleon Jacob as
kitawala. Gondwe's tendency, on the other hand, was referred to as the kitower movement.
Both of the Jehovah's Witnesses made a distinction between these latter two African
tendencies of Watchtower and the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of the United
States. See Cross, 6; interview with Muyombo Tarsis, Mufulira, Zambia, 2 luly 1974;
interview with Tshikalu Masisa, Mokambo, Zaire, 11 July 1974; interview with Kasanda
Mutombo, Mwanza, Zaire, 21 July 1974. See also MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala," Province
d'Elisabethville, District du Tanganika, Secret-Surete Publique, Rapport no. 2, 8 mai

1937, "Rapport sur les agisements du nomme Kulu Mupenda alias Kandeke Sendwe
propageant, les doctrines du 'KITAWALA' en chefferie Benze-du Territoire d'Albertville,
District du Tanganika."
52. Ibid.
53. MRPCC, "Tomo Nyirenda."
54. See Bruce Fetter, "Statistical Approaches to Two Incidents of Colonial Millenari-
ans," in J. P. Smaldone, ed., Exploraiions in Quaniitaiive AJiican History (Syracuse, 1977),
81-1 14.
55. See L. Verbeek, "Kitawala et detecteurs de sorciers dans la Botte de Sakania

(1925-1975)," Enquetes et documents d'histoire africaine 2 (1977): 86-107.
56. Higginson, A Working Ckzss in the Making, 113-123.
57. Archives General Cameres et Mines C8, "Proces Verbal de seance tenue le 20 octobre
1931;" MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" Publique, Rapport no. 2, 8 mai 1937, "Rapport sur les
agissements du nomme Kulu Mupenda atias Kandeke Sandwe, propageant, les doctrines
du 'KITAWALA' en chefferie Benze du Territoire d'Albertville, District du Tanganika.
58. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (handwritten notes) "Origines du 'Kitawala."'
59. Archives Generale des Cameres er Mines/LubumbasOu' (henceforth AG) C8 Reunion

MOI, 9-3-32, "Rapport du Comite Regional due UMHK sur les vivres des camps;" AG
B12, no. 121/MOI, 21-12-38, "Ventes aux indigenes-ventes a credit." See also Bruce
Fetter, "Zambian Watchtower at Elisabethville, 1931-1934: An Analysis of Personal and
Aggregate Data" (unpublished paper: African Studies Association Meeting, 1975), 7 and
appendix I.
60. Japanese and American manufacturers began to replace German ones in supplying
the industrial areas of Katanga with manufactured goods after World War One. The
articles that seemed to have the greatest demand among African workers were: buckles,
money clips, flet hats, Khaki and white pants, gym shoes, coats with gold buttons, naptha,
clothes brushes, hatchets, hammers, hoes, hand towels, Flag brand cigarettes, corned beef,
sardines, musical instruments-especially harmonicas and mouth harps and miniature
British flags. Notre Colonie1 le annee, no. 6 (20 mars 1920) "article part le commerce
du Congo," (Anon), p. 39; AG B6, MOI no. 8253, E'ville 9-6-37, "Contrat du Travail,"
and Malira Kubuya-Namulemba, "Regard de la situation sociale de la citoyenne Lushoise
d'avant 1950, " Likundoli 2 (1974): 69.
61. Bruce Fetter, The Creation of Elisabethville (Palo Alto, 1916), 128-29.
62. AG C9, 15 aout 1928, "Stabilisation du MOI/RU;" and AG C8, D13 3-9-28 Elisa-
bethville, "Discipline des travailleurs."
63. AG, "Discipline des travailleurs;" Rapport sur l'administration du Congo Belge,
"Province d'Elisabethville: Situation Economique," 932, 233.
64. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (Renseignements generaux) Dossier du Police au Katan-

ga, Territorie du Kongolo, "Extrait du Dossier Administratif du nomme Kianza Djoni."
65. MRPCC, ibid.; Rapport sur l'administration, 1932.
66. Some portents of this way of thinking were evident as early as 1915 during the
Chilembwe uprising in Nyasaland. While Chilembwe's movement was not a NVatchtower
movement, many of the agricultural laborers at the base of the movement found Watch-
tower slogans and themes attractive. "Kairos," the watchword of the poorly remunerated
laborers during the rebellion, meant "the due season is here," for example. The advent
of Watchtower at Isoka, Northern Rhodesia, in 1922 was heralded by a cessation of crop
cultivation. Chiefs were insulted and physically assaulted in some instances. According
to a subsequent report by the Belgian colonial administration in neighboring Katanga,
" . . . brawls and riots broke out, and the authorities were obliged to call out the military
police to quell the delinquents . . . " See Shepperson and Price, InSperint African, 409;
and Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 145-72 MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (handwritten notes
"Tomo Nyirenda alias Mwana Lesa c.a.l., 'Fils du Dieu'."
67. Rapport sur l'Administration, 1932, 234.
68. AG, "Stabilisation;" Rapport sur l'Administration, 1932, 234-37.
69. AG, C8, 20/11/38, Elisabethville, "Proces Verbal 36;" AG, C8, Proces Verbal de
Seance Tenue le 20 octobre 1931;" AG, D6, no. 193, 24-9-35, Kikole, "Requisitoires
pour Repatriement des Travailleurs."
70. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (Renseignment generaux) Province d'Elisabethville,

District du Tanganika, Territoire de Kongolo, le 29 mai 1943, "Rapport sur les activites
de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."
71. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (Renseignment generaux), Dossier du Police au Katanga

Territoire du Dossier Administratif du nomme Kianza Djoni.
72. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala," "Rapport sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kon-
. ,,
gOlO.
73. Kianza Djoni's tendency of Watchtower acquired a following among the African
soldiers of Force Publique stationed in Katanga during World War II. Many of the
movement's followers in the military were from Djoni's home territory of Kongolo or
from neighboring villages in the Tanganika District (Tanganika-Moero before 1934) of
Katanga. While Djoni himself seemed not to have played a major role in the provincial
insurrection of 1944, many of his followers in the colonial army provided the insurrec-
tion with line officers. See: MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala," . . . Secte "Kitawala," Extrait du
Dossier Administratif du nomme Kianza Djoni."
74. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" ... "Rapport sur les agissements du nomme Kulu Mu-
penda."
penda."
penda."
penda."
penda."
penda."
penda."
penda."
penda."
penda."
84. MRPCC, "Manono; R. 2169 Suite de Jugement du 6 janvier 1942".
85. An army private, Goy Kupwe Judaisa, who joined the Djoni movement at the
military camp near Kahenga<Kintoto, said that he would not hesitate 'uto kill Europeans, if
given the order." See MRPCC, "Rapport sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."
86. Edouard Bustin, The Luni under Belgiarl Rule (Cambridge, 1975), 140q1.
87. MRPCC, "Extrait du Dossier Administratif du nomme Kianza Djoni."
88. MRPCC, "Rapports sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."
91. MRPCC, "Rapport sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."
92. See AG B21, MOI/D23 1, "Greves(Chef de Camp Moppe)," 15 novembre 1941; AG

B17, MOI/D243 "Greves (Kipushi)," 1 1 novembrel941; see also MRPCC, "Rapport sur
les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."
93. Ibid.

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Liberating the Captives: Independent Watchtower as an Avatar of Colonial Revolt in

Southern Africa and Katanga, 1908-1941

By John Higginson University of Massachusetts

Methodist sectarianism was concentrated in the same areas in which Wesleyanism

A World Upside Down

Watchtower's metamorphosis was not straightforward. Its early history is

The Advent of Watchtower

As early as 1892 Booth was circulating in the Shire Highlands of Nyasaland

I am not a church member." In so doing, they further distanced themselves

The Second Wave 1908-1918

By 1908 independent Watchtower's message was conveyed by a small band

Nyasulo appears tO me to be a man of good character, with a personality which

Early Efforts in Katanga

These early Watchtower visionaries were imbued with an emotionally charged

The Growth of the Urban Proletarian Wings of Watchtower, 1931-1941

The Elisabethville boycotts and popular protests of July-November 1931 were

New Prophets, New Visions

Conclusion: The Insurrectionary Moment, 1937-1941

By 1941 Watchtower's difise network began to consolidate in and around

1. The Holy Bible (Nashville, 1972), 903.

4. Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle (Chicago, 1982 ), 72.

12. Thomas Reefe Collection Luba Documents/Chicago (henceforth TRCLD), Maroyez,

17. Fields, Revival antl Rebellion, 34-40.

18. Fields, ibid., 41.

2 2 . Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 1 0 1 - 1 1 3 .

26. Shepperson and Price, Inzlependent African, 153-59.

36. See Rik Ceyssens, "Mutumbula. Mythe de l'Opprime," Cultures et developpement

37. Hooker, "Witnesses and NVatchtower," 94.

39. Tanganyika Concessions/Union Miniere: London (TC/IJM), no. 64, Annexes A, B

40. Shepperson and Price, Irdependent African, 408.

42. Fields, Revival antl Rebellion, 144.

43. National Archives of Zimbabwe/Harare (Na Zim), 5/38/106, 1923-1928, Wankie:

44. Na Zim, 5/38/106, "Report of Peter Nielsen, Native Commissioner at Bulawayo, 30

45. Na Zim, 5/38/106, "Nielsen: 130 & 10.20/811," 26 March 1924.

50. MRPCC, "Tomo Nyirenda"; Fields, Revival and Rebellion, ibid.

d'Elisabethville, District du Tanganika, Secret-Surete Publique, Rapport no. 2, 8 mai

53. MRPCC, "Tomo Nyirenda."

55. See L. Verbeek, "Kitawala et detecteurs de sorciers dans la Botte de Sakania

56. Higginson, A Working Ckzss in the Making, 113-123.

58. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (handwritten notes) "Origines du 'Kitawala."'

59. Archives Generale des Cameres er Mines/LubumbasOu' (henceforth AG) C8 Reunion

64. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (Renseignements generaux) Dossier du Police au Katan-

65. MRPCC, ibid.; Rapport sur l'administration, 1932.

67. Rapport sur l'Administration, 1932, 234.

68. AG, "Stabilisation;" Rapport sur l'Administration, 1932, 234-37.

70. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (Renseignment generaux) Province d'Elisabethville,

71. MRPCC, Secte "Kitawala" (Renseignment generaux), Dossier du Police au Katanga

84. MRPCC, "Manono; R. 2169 Suite de Jugement du 6 janvier 1942".

87. MRPCC, "Extrait du Dossier Administratif du nomme Kianza Djoni."

88. MRPCC, "Rapports sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."

89. MRPCC, "Rapports sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."

90. MRPCC, "Rapports sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."

91. MRPCC, "Rapport sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."

92. See AG B21, MOI/D23 1, "Greves(Chef de Camp Moppe)," 15 novembre 1941; AG

94. MRPCC, "Rapport sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."

95. MRPCC, "Rapport sur les activites de la Secte Kitawala a Kongolo."

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