ARRIVAL OF AFRICAN CATECHISTS IN TOORO

The colonial administration in Uganda strove towards ‘national’ missions, on the principle that ‘whose land it is, to him belongs also religion’. Hence, after the religious wars, certain areas of Uganda were given to Protestants while others were reserved for Catholic missions (and for Muslims).

In 1894, the Catholic White Fathers asked for and received permission from the Protectorate administration to open a mission in Tooro which they considered to be a western extension of their sphere of influence. However, they did not have the personnel to take advantage of this permission until the end of 1895 when the first priest, Father Auguste Achte, finally reached Fort Portal, the capital of Tooro (Pirouet 1978).

The year before Achte arrived in Tooro, King Kasagama had already asked the Anglican Church Council in Mengo to send him missionaries to teach the new religion to his people (ibid.). As the Anglican Bishop Tucker also saw Tooro as lying within the Catholic sphere, he hesitated to send European missionaries to the area but instead sent some enthusiastic African catechists to bring Christianity to the Mountains of the Moon. Petero Nsubuga, Sedulaka Makwata, and one year later also Apolo Kivebulaya, all from Buganda, went to evangelize the people of Tooro (and the Congo) (Taylor 1958:64).

To send Baganda catechists to Tooro to evangelize the local people was a rather brave enterprise because the catechists belonged to the very kingdom that was remembered in Tooro for slave raiding, killing men and abducting women and children. In addition, at that time Baganda men were employed by the British as ‘sub-imperialists’ through whom the Protectorate government administered the outlying areas of Buganda.

The religious practices of the UMG are considered in this chapter as mediations. As Hughes and Meyer (2005) have shown, once religion is understood as a practice of mediation, media do no longer appear as alien to the realm of religion but as an inalienable element for accessing and rendering present other-worldly powers. Yet, in contrast to Meyer, I think it necessary to take a more critical view on processes of mediation by focusing also on the discontinuous, disturbing and disruptive aspects of mediation. Centring on the human body, I will explore how different materialities are (re)mediated or fail to do so due to disturbances and blockages, sometimes including technical mass media, and occasionally authenticating religious experience and authorizing religious leadership. In fact, within the UMG, faith was not so much understood as an inner, spiritual attitude that one could keep to oneself but in a far more material sense (cf. Meyer 2010). Interestingly, it is not only the communication of symbolic statements mimetically through the body and its movement, but also the body techniques themselves that induce the ‘orgiastic’, enthusiastic states of ‘altered consciousness’ in the performers. To understand the models and media of religious communication in more depth, I will take up again the themes of ‘pneuma’ and electricity in this chapter.

The UMG has created a full repertoire of body techniques and forms of mediating the Holy Spirit's power to expose the very material mechanics or technological existence of their community as communication (cf. Abreu 2009).

In recent decades, religion and even the ‘religious’ have resurfaced in various parts of the world with unprecedented force. Numerous religious groups – Islamic as well as Christian – have entered the political arena challenging the notion that secular society and the modern nation state can provide the moral fibre that unites national communities (Juergensmeyer 2000:225). Responding to the forces of globalization, the liberalization of the market, the decline of states and the rise of new media, political theologies have emerged that strongly counter the Western idea of the separation of church and state and the concept of religion as a private, individual matter.

The ‘return of the religious’ has become the object of a complex debate among philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians of religion and anthropologists (de Vries and Weber 2001; de Vries 2008; Meyer and Moors 2006), reinforcing the view that the more or less uncontested narrative of a secular modernity had apparently obscured the fact that in most historical formations, the political in various ways had been contingent upon the authority or explicit sanction of a dominant religion. The clear-cut separation between the domains of the religious and of the state has become problematic and instead the interconnectedness and complementarities of both domains have been placed in the foreground (Derrida 2001).

Among anthropologists working in Africa, the idea of ‘a return of the religious’, however, was shifted more into issues such as ‘the actuality of evil’ and ‘the rise of occult forces’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999).

In his famous article on the techniques of the body, Marcel Mauss encouraged scholars to move and explore the margins between their disciplines ‘where professors eat each other’, because in these deserted spaces the most urgent problems are to be found (Mauss 1975:199). By referring to ‘cannibalizing professors’ Mauss connected the protagonists of Western episteme with the most ostracized practice of eating, cannibalism, bridging the domains that are normally carefully separated, in particular by professors of anthropology (cf. Därmann 2010).

Cannibalism, in its many variations, seems everywhere to have been a matter of some cultural preoccupation – not only of Western anthropologists. It is not only in the West that interest in man-eating amounts almost to an obsession, but also societies in Papua New Guinea, Australia, Asia, the Americas and in Africa have produced cannibal discourses and sometimes cannibal practices.

Cannibalism is clearly not a unitary phenomenon but varies in both cultural content and meaning. The difference between exo- and endo-cannibalism is deceptive and, besides the extremes, there are different intermediary forms that undermine clear-cut oppositions (Lévi-Strauss 1985). Mortuary, famine and revenge cannibalism, torture and sacrifice vary in both cultural content and meaning. Cannibalism may be displayed in the anguish of mourning; it may be an aspect of the life-cycle and rituals of regeneration; it may be projected outwardly to the realm of the gods or an ethnic landscape or inwardly as an idiom of dreams; it may be defined as a monstrous act against society or as a sacred moral duty (Sanday 1986:X).

Mimesis as a faculty to imitate and to explore difference played a central role in the encounters and interactions between Africans and white men in the second half of the 19th century and also later. In these encounters, Africans and Europeans folded into the assumed otherness of each other. What was taken to be an African practice met with what was taken as a European one; here assumed meanings met with assumed meanings to form strange mutual dependencies that bound African understandings of European understandings of Africans to European understandings of African understandings of Europeans (Taussig 1987:109).

Parts of central and east Africa emerged as a cross-cultural space in which terror was one of the means that helped to shape it. The figure of the cannibal became one of the main protagonists. Cannibals summed up all that was perceived as grotesquely different about Africans and Europeans as well as providing for the future colonists the allegory of colonization itself: cannibalizing Africa. Cannibalism became a metaphor for colonialism and the ‘savagery’ which colonialism promised to replace. Allegations of cannibalism served not only to enslave Africans; they also served to flesh out the repertoire of violence in the colonial imagination (ibid.:105). The fantastic stories about cannibals that Africans and Europeans told each other produced very real effects.

Africans and Europeans coexisted in these zones of terror through activating their mimetic faculties. Although it was rare that either side understood its other on that other's own terms, they managed somehow to carry on their business of the day (Roberts 1993).

This chapter examines some of the complexities of the figure of the cannibal in Tooro which oscillate between an internal as well as external Other. I will explore a local cannibal geography that not only locates cannibals beyond the margins of Tooro in the Congo but also inside Tooro, in a place named Kijura. In addition, I will trace the complicated relationship between witchcraft and cannibalism from a restricted historical perspective (1970s to the present) by analysing, in particular, two texts by local ethnographers of Tooro. The chapter concludes by showing that in the local perspective, cannibals, far from being a ‘traditional’ characteristic of Tooro, have become globalized and are found everywhere today.

CANNIBAL GEOGRAPHIES

As in Europe and other parts of the world, in Western Uganda discourses of alterity have emerged that locate the cannibal at the margins, or beyond, one's own inhabited world. Ideally, the field of social relations is conceived as a space in which those more socially distant are seen in terms of increasing inversion: walking on their heads, committing incest and eating human flesh.

Yet, cannibals, witches and incestuous beings were not only located outside but existed also in the centre of society. Kings in precolonial Tooro and Bunyoro committed incest and were necrophagous eaters. Like witches and twins, they were inhabited by a force named mahano that was created by transgression. Kings and witches were thus estranged figures in the centre of the kingdom or, as Luc de Heusch has suggested, power figures both beyond and inside society (Heusch 1972).

As this book explores cannibals, food, eating and being eaten in its many variations, I attempt a reconstruction of precolonial cosmology in Western Uganda as a vast machinery of consumption and digestion. As I will show later in the following chapters, images of consumption, cannibalizing and digestion continue to be used to describe relations of power and violence in colonial and postcolonial times up to today. I begin with a few general remarks about the relationship between body, food and society. As I strongly rely on the ethnography of the CMS missionary John Roscoe, a critical comment will be made also on its epistemological status.

The reconstruction of precolonial culture is a difficult and artificial task. On the one hand, the effort to establish a baseline implies a static society which of course was never the case. But in order to make sense of the processes of continuity and discontinuity, fracture and reconfiguration, we need to know something of the world in earlier times. The following reconstruction should thus be taken as a frozen moment of a world in motion and a starting point for the discussion of eating, cannibalizing, digestion, power and violence (cf. Livingston 2005:65f).

Eating is a practice of incorporation. The idea of incorporation depends upon and creates a radical division between inside and outside, an inside often associated with good while the outside tends to be related to bad. It is this division that produces the desire to return to oneness and total unity (Kilgour 1990:4/5).

INTRODUCTION

When exploring the figure of the cannibal in Tooro, I was surprised to find elements that were obviously taken from Christian discourse and practice. Cannibals in Tooro were not solitary figures like most witches but organized in a secret society and were, in particular, bound together by a common meal. They ate their victims following the widespread ‘classical’ image of the ‘cannibal feast’ that also recurs in fantasies as witches' Sabbaths. Cannibals in Tooro celebrating their sinister banquets thus appeared as an inverted form of the Eucharist, the Holy Communion.

The most astonishing aspect of the cannibal in Tooro was, however, his capacity to resurrect his victims. Cannibals were said to bring the dead back to life to be eaten, to be killed a second time. After the funeral, cannibals would resurrect the dead by playing a bamboo flute or by other means. They would call the dead body to reach the place where they had gathered and then give orders to fetch water, gather fire wood, sharpen a knife and place banana leaves on the ground. When the water was boiling, the resurrected body lay down on the banana leaves; a cannibal would take a knife and cut the body into pieces, to boil them in a pot. He called the other cannibals together and they started their sinister banquet. The cannibalistic witches in Tooro thus practised a diabolic caricature of the Christian resurrection: not God, but a cannibal made the dead rise; the resurrected did not enter heaven but ended up in the stomach of the cannibal.

Enid Schildkrout and Curtiz Keim report that today, the Mangbetu, who were famous cannibals in travelogues of the 19th century in the Congo, tell tales of their former cannibalism with great amusement and point to the Eucharist as evidence that Europeans manifest the same tastes and even practise cannibalism overtly (Schildkrout and Keim 1990:258 n 3, 34). This (anecdotal) connection between the Eucharist and cannibalism has also been noted by other Western scholars. A few of them attempted to relate in particular the identification of Catholic missionaries as cannibals by Africans with the transcendent cannibalism inherent in the Eucharist and the Mass. They argued that Africans' understandings of missionary action led to cannibal (and vampire) accusations (cf. Fox-Pitt cit. White 2000).

Yet, in Africa, even before the arrival of Christian missionaries, Western travellers and explorers were rather often identified as cannibals by local people, an identification that was made independent of missionary practices of the Eucharist. Besides missionaries, colonial administrators were also associated with cannibalism. It follows that the identification of white men with cannibals conforms, above all, to the ‘classical’ stereotype of radical otherness. This chapter attempts to show that while the figure of the resurrecting cannibal in Tooro was indeed informed by missionary practices, the transcendent cannibalism inherent in the Holy Communion seems to have played only a minor role.

Whereas the relationship between cannibalism and the Eucharist in the history of the West was hotly debated (see Chapter Three), in the 19th century in Central Africa, more or less enlightened missionaries either silenced or rationalized the Eucharist when teaching Africans.

Since the 1980s, Christianity – in the wider context of a ‘return of the religious’ on a global scale (de Vries 2001:3) – has come to have widespread acceptance, not only in many regions of Africa, but also in Western Uganda. As Catholicism is a ‘world religion’, understanding the specific history of the Catholic Church at the periphery in Western Uganda cannot be restricted to an analysis that treats it as a purely self-contained social and cultural unit. The religious arena in which the Catholic Church operates extends far beyond Rome, and even Tooro and has gained a new quality since the end of the 1980s. Especially through the Charismatic movement, the localized Church became part of a wider movement that has been dominated by North American believers but is becoming increasingly transnational with time (cf. Coleman 2000:13).

Also in Tooro, in the face of increasing marginalization in global terms, the Charismatic movement within the Catholic Church provides an important vehicle for international contacts as well as exchanges. The localization of the Catholic Church in Western Uganda has thus to be seen as a process taking place in a field of tensions between the local and the global. This entanglement of local and global forces is further complicated by the play of oppositions between local churches and movements. In a pluralist process, different Christians-in-the-making are involved, interacting among themselves and their neighbours. In fact, the localization of different Christianities is also mediated by local oppositions and differences (Werbner 1997:8).

THE RISE OF CANNIBALS

Tooro is a small kingdom in Western Uganda at the foot of the legendary Mountains of the Moon. These steep, partly snow-covered mountains form part of the East African Rift Valley. Named after a celestial body, the moon, thereby transcending the boundaries of the earth, the Mountains of the Moon formed part of an imaginary geography in antiquity. The ancient Greek geographer Ptolemy filled his map of the then unknown heart of Africa with a range of snowcapped mountains that he named ‘Mountains of the Moon’. According to his geography, the people inhabiting the area around the Mountains of the Moon were dwarfs and man-eaters, the radical Other of ancient people.

When I came to Fort Portal, the capital of Tooro, in 1998, I was more than surprised to find people talking about cannibals. Not only women and men with little schooling in the rural areas but also people with higher education, from the elite in the capital, were talking about cannibals. Cannibals, they said, bewitched people so that they fell sick and died only to be resurrected and die a second time by being eaten. Through these cannibals, the horror of witchcraft and of death was radicalized by their killing twice. The boundary between life and death, between the living and the dead, had become ever more permeable and insecure, resulting in a sort of ‘zombification’ of postcolonial life in Tooro – as has been described also for other regions of east and central Africa (de Boeck 1998:49).