Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism and the Creation of Cultural Knowledge and the Making of the Luba Katanga

The notion of “entanglement” has become a productive analytical tool for social historians. “Entanglement” recognizes that categories used to delineate sets of things frequently create artificial boundaries that require interrogation. It acknowledges that human agency is a condition of interdependency, one which operates within and between social groups possessing different sorts of power. David Maxwell, following Tony Ballantyne’s Entanglements of Empire (2014), deftly deploys the notion to examine the “plural interaction, recursion, transcultural and cross-cultural engagement, interaction with science and social border crossing” (12) in colonial Katanga, amongst Luba, colonial officials, and missionaries of various nationalities and confessions. In doing so, he shows how the Luba people were intertwined in religious revival, in the establishment of Pentecostal churches, and in the formation of knowledge—and its international exchange—of themselves as a people. The span of topics is impressive and necessary in order to examine the extent and nature of entanglement. It is the Luba Katanga, both people and the place they inhabit, that provides the point of focus.Eight main chapters introduce us to the actors and their interdependent projects. The first chapter places the Congo Evangelistic Mission and its main protagonist William Burton in a transnational history of early twentieth-century Pentecostal revival that, in chapter 4, is shown to challenge the orthodoxies of Catholic missions and the Belgian colonial state. The second chapter provides a precolonial history of the powerful Luba Kingdom and its demise through the slave trades operating on both sides of the continent. This provides the background for explaining the development of a Luba Christian movement in chapter 3 in which expectations of gender and generation were revised in the formation of new identities and communities. An extended discussion of knowledge production is provided in chapters 5 to 7, showing the ways in which knowledge was co-created and how it both challenged and complied with anthropological and colonial knowledge production. The scientific endeavor had social and cultural effects in creating a more defined modern Luba identity, as Luba themselves worked at their morals and their language. Men like Shalumbo, Kangoi, and Ngoloma led emerging churches, by teaching, healing, and exorcising, and created “pathways” to knowledge through Bible translation and proverb collection. Yet the adoption of modernizing tendencies was selective and contested: for example, early convert Abraham rejected Christianity and became a charm-maker. The final chapter demonstrates how entangled social, religious, and scientific projects converted missionaries to new ways of understanding the world. The study of the scholarship of Burton and Placide Tempels, Burton’s better-known Franciscan counterpart and author of Bantu Philosophy (1946), reveals an evolution in their understanding of and respect for the Luba. The book concludes that friendship between missionaries and Luba, formed by close contact in villages and on journeys, and in language learning, produced religious entanglements that produced thorough if flawed knowledge. This process set in motion a vibrant form of Christianity that has only grown and spread in the postcolonial era.The book makes an important contribution to the discussion on colonialism, Christianity, and knowledge production. Maxwell takes the asymmetries of colonial power dynamics seriously, disaggregating their hierarchies so that readers can learn, for example, where Pentecostal movements in the Belgian and Catholic Congo came in this pecking order, and how Luba kings and men freed from slavery had different forms of influence at their disposal. He discusses Burton’s commitment to construct a precontact, essentialized Luba past, even as such functionalist anthropology was on the wane. He notes how informants and assistants were erased from Burton’s scientific work in the name of “objectivity” and, conversely, included as important agents in his missionary writings. Maxwell shows how relationships and movements of change worked in a complex political sphere. He identifies how European missionaries could preach a common humanity and perceive it being actualized in their relationships while, at the same, displaying attitudes of European superiority and conforming to the restrictions of colonial categories. With the inclusion of many photographs, Maxwell identifies the different gazes—intrusive, judging, generous, and insightful—of Burton’s camera that contributed to Belgian and South African anthropological inquiry. There are many pen sketches of Luba chiefs, evangelists, and spiritual experts. This reader was curious to know more about the influence of Burton’s wife, Hettie, whose close work with women may have provided a distinct understanding of the Luba, men like Chungu and Chokwe who were early Brethren Christians in the area, and Iska Lupichi who collected Luba proverbs for Burton. Here we are probably at the mercy of missionary priorities of recordkeeping for home supporters and may never know the extent of their contribution. For, throughout the volume, Maxwell works hard with the sources at his disposal to bring the actions and collective change of the Luba—both men and women—to the fore.This a fine, rich book which refuses to allow the inequities of the colonial past to erase the history of entangled transcultural relationships that effected social change, forged new collective identities, and created cultural knowledge with and about the Luba Katanga. It offers a method and framework for understanding socioreligious change elsewhere on the African continent.