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Photography and the Religious Encounter: Ambiguity and Aesthetics in Missionary Representations of the Luba of South East Belgian Congo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2011

David Maxwell
David Maxwell*
Affiliation:
Keele University, England
*
d.j.maxwell@keele.ac.uk
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Extract

William F. P. Burton's career straddled several worlds that seemed at odds with each other. As a first-generation Pentecostal he pioneered, with James Salter, the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM) at Mwanza, Belgian Congo in 1915. The CEM became a paradigm for future Pentecostal Faith Mission work in Africa, thanks to Burton's propagandist writings that were published in at least thirty European and North American missionary periodicals. His extensive publications, some twenty-eight books, excluding tracts and articles in mission journals, reveal that the CEM was a missionary movement animated by a relentless proselytism, divine healing, exorcism, and the destruction of so-called “fetishes.” The CEM's Christocentric message required the new believer to make a public confession of sin and reject practices relating to ancestor religion, possession cults, divination, and witchcraft. It was a deeply iconoclastic form of Protestantism that maintained a strong distinction between an “advanced” Christian religion, mediated by the Bible, and an idolatrous primitive pagan religion. Burton's Pentecostalism had many of its own primitive urges, harkening back to an age where miraculous signs and wonders were the stuff of daily life, dreams and visions constituted normative authority, and the Bible was immune to higher criticism. But his vision also embraced social modernization and he preached the virtues of schooling and western styles of clothing, architecture, and agriculture. It was this combination of primitive and pragmatic tendencies that shaped the CEM's tense relations with the Belgian colonial state.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 38 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011

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85 Peel, Religious Encounter, 237.

86 CAM, Burton to Salter, 29 July 1933. In 1926 there was an official investigation of CEM catechists on the instigation of Catholic missionaries. General Council of the Assemblies of God, M + E (24) 43, CEM, L'Administrateur Werniers, Bukama, 2 Oct. 1926. On persecution, see Peel, Religious Encounter, 235–38.

87 Peel, Religious Encounter, 245.

88 Burton may have been referring to an nzunzi, but he and Womersley continued to use the term kanzunji (spelt slightly differently) for “dreamchild” or “bogey”: CEMR, May–June, 43; July–Aug. 1933; Nov.–Dec. 1937. There were differences in dialect across Luba territory.

89 CEMR 18, Oct.–Dec. 1927.

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102 In CEMR 57, Nov.–Dec. 1935, Harold Womersley published a photo of Chief Nangole of Kabongo, described as a modern chief: “A Trophy.”

103 Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Documentaires sur l'Afrique Centrale (CEDAC), Lumumbashi, DRC, Territoire de Moba 3.5.5.4, Dist du Tanganyika, “Extrait du rapport de voyage d'inspection du 13/9/15–au 17/1/1916.”

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130 CEMR 42, May–June 1933. Burton was referring to the Bakasandji healing association, whose members used fragments of human bone in their medicines. Nooter Roberts and Roberts, Memory, 180.

131 CEMR 45, May–June 1933.

132 CEMR 47, Oct.–Dec. 1933.

133 CEMR 95, July–Aug. 1942.

134 Wright, “An Unsuitable Man,” 47.

135 Ibid., 48.

136 CAM, Burton to Salter, 23 Oct. 1942.

137 CEMR 98, Jan.–Feb. 1943.