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The creation of Lubaland: missionary science and Christian literacy in the making of the Luba Katanga in Belgian Congo

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of missionary social scientific research and Protestant Christian literacy in the making of the Luba Katanga ethnicity in colonial Belgian Congo. While pre-colonial Luba identity was plural and fluid, those located in the polity’s heartlands shared a political aesthetic of divine kingship embodied in a rich material culture, which was emulated by neighbouring communities as marker of sophistication and civilisation. Under Belgian colonialism the scale and variety of Luba ethnic identity was limited by indirect rule, labour migration and the creation ethnic taxonomies. In the latter case, new categories of Luba were created by missionary work in ethnography, linguistics, collecting and photography, and these became the basis of linguistic zones for the production of vernacular scriptures and other Christian texts. Biblical literacy was spread by re-gathered ex-slave diaspora and young male Christian enthusiasts via an infrastructure of mission stations and schools in a spirit of grass roots ecumenism and had great appeal amongst labour migrants. The process was aided by the adoption of portable cyclostyled print technology by missionary societies. The article finishes by examining how the Luba cultural project became a political one as local intellectuals, Jason Sendwe and Bonaventure Makonga, sought to turn ethnic communities into political constituencies. The article modifies Benedict Anderson’s influential thesis about the emergence of fewer secular print languages in the modern period as the basis for national consciousness, by highlighting the proliferation of missionary produced sacred vernaculars for the purpose of proselytism.

This article examines the role of Christian literacy and missionary science, particularly ethnography and linguistics but also collecting and photography in the shaping of Luba ethnicity in Katanga, colonial Belgian Congo. In keeping with recent work on print media and the creation of new African publics, it builds upon and modifies the influential thesis advanced by Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities. 1 In the European context Anderson traced a process whereby multiple vernaculars were assembled into far fewer mechanically re-produced print languages for dissemination throughout a market. These new secular print languages replaced the old sacred languages of pre-print Europe and laid the basis of national consciousness. In Belgian Congo missionary literary productions in the vernacular did not equate to Anderson's idea of print capitalism in two important ways. First, national identity did not come to dominate the collective consciousness, but was one of a spectrum of identities that print media helped create. Missionary organisations in Katanga had neither the resources nor the intent to create a territory-wide market for missionary literature. They were interested in proselytism as well as capitalism, in reaching regionally based mission fields with vernacular language primers and scriptures that were constitutive of smaller collective subjectivities than the nation. 2 Secondly, the vernaculars they developed were sacred languages, part of a broader missionary endeavour to Christianise local African cultures. They were readily adopted by young male evangelists and freed slaves-turned-Christian proselytisers in struggles for authority with traditional elders, enabling them to convene communities larger than those of clan and chiefdom. It was labour migrants rather than missionaries who linked literacy with the industrial political economy. 3 Critical to these processes was the development of cyclostyled technology, which allowed for the multiplication of print vernaculars, and the growth of Protestant Bible societies, which published them.
These broader technological and infrastructural factors alone do not explain the how ethnic consciousness came to possess a subjective reality in the minds of the Luba. The creation of Luba ethnicity owed much to the ecumenical work of Protestant missionaries and the creativity of African Christian enthusiasts. The article examines the means by which language primers and scriptures were produced, diffused and acted upon. These processes involved the creation of the category of Luba Katanga; the generation of a body of myth, folklore, proverb and history with which to fill it; and its dissemination via a standardised and unified vernacular. As social engineers of new Christian communities, missionaries and African Christians made choices about cultural perseveration and eradication as they sought to Christianise culture. The outcome of these processes gave Luba Katanga ethnicity its distinctive character, sharpening differences with the Songye and Hemba in the north of the province where Catholic White Fathers were influential and worked in Swahili. 4 Several scholars have examined the role of missionaries and African Christians in the making of ethnicities in Belgian Congo. Allen Roberts has shown how the Tabwa 'Christian' Kingdom, created by the politicking of forceful Catholic cleric, Monsignor Roelens, was turned into modern Tabwa ethnic consciousness by the literate products of White Father schools and seminaries, and the evangelism of African catechists. 5 Martin Kalulambi Pongo has examined Christian literacy in the making of the Luba Kasai, showing how a popular Catholic periodical produced in local Tshiluba dialect by Belgian Scheutist missionaries and local Christian elites created a field of discourse that became the basis of a new collective identity. 6 And Honoré Vinck has studied the careers of Gustaaf Hulstaert and Edmond Boelart, missionary priests in the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (MSC), examining how their Flemish nationalism led them to fashion the idea of a pure, authentic Mongo ethnic culture as a bulwark to the deracinating effects of Belgian Colonialism. 7 Hitherto the Luba of Katanga have constituted an intensive site of research on pre-colonial identity. Pioneering work by archaeologists and anthropologists has examined how the boundaries of Luba were delimited by myth and material culture. 8 Taking a cultural historical approach this article explores the particular contribution of Protestant literary work to ethnic formation, studying the meaning of the label Luba Katanga during the era of Belgian colonialism.
The article commences with a discussion of pre-colonial Luba identities. The second part examines how missionaries in collaboration with African Christians, colonial officials and traditional leaders actively constructed a fixed identity of Luba Katanga by transforming pre-existing material and oral cultural resources into print. The third section traces the diffusion of those print resources through preaching, copying and reading. The article finishes with an exploration of how the Luba cultural project became a political one in which local intellectuals sought to turn ethnic communities into political constituencies. The processes of pioneering and proselytising, and linguistic and ethnographic research commenced simultaneously with the opening missionary encounter the 1910s such was Protestant desire to make converts who could commune with God via the scriptures. Moreover, the recording of cultural and linguistic data was also means by which missionaries understood their new surroundings and contributed to a broader colonial project of standardising, appropriating and controlling vernacular languages. 9 African dissemination of Christian literacy took place in the 1920s and 1930s as soon as new texts became available. African intellectual engagement with Luba ethnicity began in the late 1940s in the context of the colonial state's desire to bureaucratise colonial rule, and continued in the 1950s as Congolese nationalism took force. 10 With regard to the broader debate about ethnogenesis notably delineated by Tom Spear, this article steers a middle path between pre-colonial antecedents and twentiethcentury constructivism, and between missionary invention and African imagination. 11 While the Luba exhibited pre-colonial consciousness of community via a complex set of political aesthetics, that consciousness was transformed in the encounter with missionary literacy. And while missionaries and colonial officials engaged in colonial boundarydrawing, their new ethnic categories were actively imagined by African evangelists and disseminated by re-gathered ex-slave diaspora and deracinated labour migrants.

Conceptualising Luba identity
Described in The New Encyclopaedia of Africa as a cluster of peoples numbering around 4 million, the Luba have attracted a good deal of scholarly attention providing both a significant and challenging case study for students of ethnicity. 12 Historians and archaeologists interested in pre-colonial state formation have studied the Luba Kingdom as one of the largest and most influential polities in nineteenth-century Central Africa. 13 The polity was located on the Upemba Plateau, equidistant from the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, and its institutions grew out of the remarkable resources located there. The region's well stocked rivers and fertile banks supported an unusually high density of population, while the waterways formed a unique communication network for dugout canoes. Such close ties meant that the small villages characteristic of Central African settlement patterns evolved into larger communities. Rich deposits of iron and salt attracted hundreds of workers and merchants during the dry season, and these and other products, flowing to the court as tribute to the King, caused the Luba heartland to become an important centre in a network of trade between Eastern Kasai, Western Katanga and the Copper Belt. 14 Luba political and cultural accomplishments were equally significant. Their myth of sacred kingship was exported to surrounding polities as a model of civilised rule via an oral charter and by means of a rich material culture of coiffures, cicatarisation, emblems and regalia, all represented in sculpted objects. 15 Groups residing on the eastern periphery of the heartlands were 'Lubaised' through marriage alliances, the commissioning of 'statement art' and the purchasing of Luba-style art from itinerant sculptors. 16 Alongside calling themselves Luba, the peoples of the Upemba Plateau could also self-identify as members of regional trading networks or take on more local identities as members of households, clans or religious associations. They also drew identity from the landscape as savannah or river dwellers.
Researchers have approached the Luba in a variety of ways. Missionaries and colonial administrators, influenced by functionalist anthropology and theories of indirect rule, sought to identify primordial ethnicities worthy of preservation and large ethno-structures, which would be more amenable to colonial government. 17 In a far-sited study that prefigured scholarship on ethnic construction, Crawford Young showed how these missionary and colonial notions underpinned the creation of the Luba as a super-tribe under Belgian Colonial rule, whereby various communities in rural eastern Congo were grouped together to become one of 'three or four urban ethnic reference groups', their language given privileged vehicular status. 18 Within the colonial labour market Luba were given preference over neighbouring ethnicities, due in part, to their superior education, which came by virtue of their proximity to Christian missions. Preference for Luba also resulted from prejudice. Older notions of civilisation were combined with more recent ethnic stereotypes such as industriousness and entrepreneurship to cast the Luba as the 'Jews' or 'Whites' of Belgian Congo. 19 Colonial and missionary partiality towards the Luba unsurprisingly created ethnic tension with neighbouring ethnic communities and a good deal of internal conflict within the so-called super-tribe, where resources were channelled disproportionately towards the Luba-Kasai. 20 Thus the Luba were also studied as actors in some of the earliest manifestations of ethnic conflict in late colonial and early post-colonial Africa such as the Luba-Lulua Crisis of 1959 and secessions of Katanga and South Kasai from Independent Congo in 1960. 21 The example of Luba is challenging because as Pierre de Maret observes: 'in recent years it has been shown to be a most ambiguous category, covering many different territories and identities and ethnonyms'. 22 In an article on the ethnogenesis of the Luba and their neighbours, Thomas Turner demonstrates the recent nature of ethnic categories and how labels and ethnic stereotypes shifted from one referent to another before assuming their present meanings. 23 According to Allen Roberts and Pierre Petit, the label Luba can refer to people of the heartland, sometimes called Luba Shankadi after their association with the sacred kings. It can also refer to peoples living in a much wider land sometimes called Urua who migrated from the Luba polity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, or who sought to make political and symbolic connection with it. 24 Crawford Young identifies five major groups for whom the category has some resonance, inhabiting a vast region stretching out from the historic centre of the Luba polity into Colonial Kasai and Northern Katanga. In a summary of attempts at classification, Olga Boone, the scholar responsible for the South Eastern Section of the Carte Ethnique Du Congo (1960), observed that Luba was an ensemble of populations of diverse origins, which had come to acquire a certain unity of language and culture. Writing at a time of interethnic conflict, she identified three major divisions, Luba Kasai, Luba Katanga and Luba Hemba, whose differences were shaping nationalist and secessionist politics. 25 Thus the category of Luba can be used extensively or in a narrower sense, and in certain contexts, not at all, when people groups have preferred to describe themselves in terms of dialects, clans and chieftaincies. 26 In an influential essay on ethnic construction, Bogumil Jewsiewicki took an expansive view showing how the Luba super-tribe emerged out of the evolving colonial political economy 1880s-1920s, whereby previously diverse peoples were socialised as a group through urbanisation, wage-labour and cash-crop production. The virtue of Jewsiewicki's model was its examination of the socio-economic factors that provided the context for ethnic construction in South East Belgian Congo. 27 However, derived from an urban perspective his model was not sufficiently alert to internal differentiation within the Luba, and made more sense when applied to the Luba-Kasai rather than the Luba Katanga. These two groups had very different relations to the historic Luba polity and spoke different languages, Tshliuba and Kiluba, respectively. 28 The Luba Kasai benefited from greater employer preference in mining and colonial administration, often acting as cultural brokers between Europeans and Africans. The processes of ethnic construction involved narrowing and subdivision as well as amalgamation. Alongside the notion of a super tribe, which functioned in the urban industrial sector, a narrower category of Luba Katanga was created; their formation involved the exclusion of other ethnic groups such as the Songye and Lulua, whose own identities were heightened in the process. 29 Missionary science and the creation of the Luba Katanga Johan Lagae has argued that knowledge production in Belgian Congo surpassed that of all other African colonies. 30 This was partly because science was a vital source of legitimation for a colony rocked by the Red Rubber Scandal (ca 1890-1906) and the ensuing crisis of sleeping sickness. More importantly, social scientific research helped colonial administrators to arrange the territory into discrete chiefdoms in the faltering process that led to a diluted form of indirect rule. 31 The colonial state actively sought out Catholic missionary researchers alongside its colonial officers, and a guide to the collecting of ethnographic objects was sent to all Catholic missions in 1908. Protestants also carried out research, and their work often made a more significant impact locally because it was disseminated through Christian literacy, such was the Protestant belief that God's voice could only be authentically mediated via the scriptures.
Two Womersley lacked Burton's social and intellectual connections, and his work did not reach an academic audience until after he retired in 1970, but he was the preeminent man on the spot and local culture broker who engaged with traditional leaders, colonial administrators and Luba intellectuals. The CEM was not the earliest Protestant mission in Southern Katanga; it was preceded by the Plymouth Brethren who first arrived in Mulongo in 1912. Although the bulk of Brethren work was located to the east of the Congo-Lualaba River and Luba territory, it was an important influence in ethnic construction due to the work of one of its missionary linguists, John Alexander Clarke. The Methodist Episcopal Church also had a presence in the region, founding a mission in Kabongo, the historic capital of the Luba, in 1917, and its missionaries were also ecumenical players in production and dissemination of the Luba scriptures prior to handing their station over to the CEM in 1933. But it was the CEM that occupied most of the former Luba heartlands and peripheries. By 1932 some 50 white missionaries and their Congolese allies had established no less than a dozen stations, 300 schools and 3000 assemblies reaching over 1000 villages in a region of 80,000 square miles. 32 Like many philologists, theologians, Biblical scholars, travellers and contemporary ethnographers influenced by the romantic tradition, CEM missionaries Burton and Womersley believed that tribe was the natural African unit of society. 33 Burton was aware of the immense social and cultural change experienced by the peoples of Katanga in the half century preceding his mission's arrival there in 1915. In his most historically minded piece for The Geographical Journal (1927), he wrote with authority about the recent nature of identities shaped by the activities of Luso-African and Ovimbundu slavers from the South West, and Swahili traders and new Arabised polities on the Eastern borders of Katanga, and the rise of the Yeke polity to the South. 34 Yet, although aware of difference, in his more prolific ethnographic publications he continually returned to the notion of an essential homogenous Luba 'race', which resided in a bounded territory called Lubaland. 35 Why Protestant missionaries devoted so much energy to researching and reconstructing pristine tribal units initially appears to be something of a conundrum, given that they were so intent on changing the beliefs and customs they described. But missionary response to African culture was selective. Pentecostal missionaries were challenged by the existential threat posed by traditional religious institutions because these bodies competed for the same ground as the church. Traditional political structures were more useful. Missionaries feared the corrosive effects of deracination that accompanied labour migration to mines and towns, and observed that the allure of urban life emptied the countryside of youthful converts leaving churches of just elders and children. Tribes provided order and stability, the preferred option being a Christian tribe under a Christian chief. 36 Research and translation were also evangelical acts in themselves, providing an opportunity to Christianise traditional culture by rendering a 'purified' version in print.
As well as essentialising the Luba, the vast majority of early of missionary and colonial ethnographers who researched the polity worked on its margins and generalised the impressions formed from their peripheral point of entry, consequently expanding the Luba classification beyond the heartlands. 37 It was in this vein that Father Pierre Colle who founded the Catholic Mission in Lubaized Kyombo entitled his monograph Les Baluba (1913). 38 Burton, who lived on the southern edge of the polity, engaged in a similar process of expansive classification. Local Mwanza chiefs who paid tribute to King at Kabongo intermittently out of polite deference, and had little genealogical connection with the monarchy were nevertheless labelled Luba. 39 Likewise, the vast majority of Burton's ethnographic photos were captioned Luba even when recording peoples outside of the pre-colonial polity. 40 Burton used his photos in the same manner as the Swiss missionary ethnographer, Henri Alexander Junod, to create 'an image of tribal verisimilitude'. 41 Photographs of native fishermen and sculptors represented individual behaviour as general tribal practice. In a similar manner he gave all material culture the ethnic taxonomy, Luba, including objects collected beyond the heartlands. And he ascribed an expansive Luba identity to many of the subjects of his published ethnographies. Like the Anglican missionary ethnographer, George Basden, whose work expanded the notion of the Ibo of Nigeria, Burton extrapolated a model of the Luba from research predominantly carried out in villages within a 30 miles radius of Mwanza. 42 His impression of an expanded Luba territory also came from an atelier situated close to his mission station, in which worked a prolific collection of Luba sculptors whose productions drew leading chiefs and headmen in search of royal regalia from across the polity and beyond. 43 Harold Womersley was the only European to spend a sustained period of time in the key centres of the Luba polity, which had been divided by civil war in the late nineteenth century. He worked in both capitals, Kasongo Niembo and Kabongo, residing in the latter 1933-1954, longer than any other European. He eventually became a confidant of the king and his royal entourage, particularly the men of memory [bana balutê], who recounted Luba oral traditions. These connections enabled him to write an in-depth study of Luba political history. Meanwhile Christian converts with whom he built deep relations of trust, granted him special access to sacred murals and to regalia of kingship, which he was allowed to copy. 44 Womersley's privileged access to data on Luba history and material culture profoundly shaped his conclusions. His reliance on official accounts of dynastic history recounted by elder male elites, whose status and powers had declined under colonialism, led him to exaggerate the pre-colonial reach of the Luba polity and their influence within it. Womersley helped initiate Tom Reefe into his doctoral research on the Luba, eventually published as The Rainbow Kings (1986). 45 Although Reefe was far more reflexive about his data than Womersley, the latter doubtless shaped the former's overly centralised model of the Luba 'Empire'. Reefe assisted Womersley to publish his researches in Legends of the Luba, where it is clear from the missionary's preface that his priority was to write a history of and for his friends rather than an academic tome. 46 Although, Womersley neither published in scholarly or administrative journals nor engaged with few academics besides Tom Reefe, his work was widely disseminated locally, shaping the content of Luba ethnicity. He was also a player in the ecumenical politics of Bible translation.

Christianising culture through Bible translation
In 1921 the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) published the Gospels and Acts in what it consistently described as the 'Luba Katanga' dialect. Two years later it published the complete New Testament with the Psalms. Brethren and CEM missionaries had initially made use of the Luba Sanga scriptures, first printed in 1904. 47 Brethren Missionary, Dan Crawford, who had worked beyond the Luba periphery to the South, had translated the Sanga scriptures, and the text was not entirely intelligible to those heartlands. 48 Following a meeting of the three Protestant bodies who worked the Luba heartlands in 1919, it was decided to approach the BFBS for a new translation. A committee comprising one CEM member, two Methodists and three Brethren would supervise the work, but the text was to be produced by the Brethren missionary, John Alexander Clarke. 49 Clarke was the longest serving missionary in the field and a gifted linguist. 50 The object of this ecumenical effort had been outlined to the General Conference of Missionaries and Protestant Societies Working in Congo just one year earlier by the renowned Swedish missionary ethnographer Karl Laman: 'Above all there should only be one definite dialect for the written language, when the same society has stations in several parts of the country'. 51 The principle of standardisation was also actively promoted by the BFBS, which wanted to avoid the cost of multiple translations and ensure the widest possible circulation for its testaments. Thus Clarke hoped that his translations would have a vehicular quality: 'Of course there are always local variations to be encountered and considered but, more and more, we must concentrate on the big "branch" languages rather than waste time with the "twigs"'. 52 Clarke chose 'Lualaba' to be the foundational dialect, arguing that it was the 'mutual acquaintance' of all districts given that in the nineteenth century the river area had been the preeminent place of trade and barter within the polity and beyond. 53 Thus the terrain of gradual lexical and idiomatic change within pre-textual Kiluba was transformed into a discrete language zone in a process that mirrored ethnic formation elsewhere in Africa. 54 For the most part, relations between the three Protestant Missions in Southern Katanga were courteous and constructive. They offered each other hospitality, exchanged African evangelists, shared resources for religious instruction and formulated a strategy for the Luba Katanga field. The American Methodists interfered little in Clarke's work, acknowledging their limited stake in the field and their partial grasp of Luba culture and language. But the Pentecostal missionaries of the CEM took great interest in the process of translation, recognising an opportunity to Christianise Luba cosmology. Their approach is best illustrated by long-running debates surrounding the translation of the Old Testament, which appeared after much delay in 1950. Motivated by prudery and belief that the entire Luba pantheon was demonic, Burton and Womersley sought to erase from the text words that they found 'distasteful' or would 'give encouragement to superstition', preferring transliterations to pre-existing vocabulary. 55 They objected to words that suggested female nakedness or indirectly hinted at sexuality such as lukuku for breastplate. And they sought to remove words that had a traditional religious resonance, and thus possibly keep that practice alive. Burton objected to the use of Dikumbo for the Ark of the Covenant because this large box was used to carry the sacred fire of Luba kingship. 56 In an earlier skirmish concerning the translation of the Sonyge New Testament, Womersley, keen to assert the primacy and uniqueness of the Holy Spirit, rejected mudzimu, a word widespread amongst the Bantu for ancestor, claiming that it meant a demon or evil spirit. According to Womersley's dualistic Pentecostal worldview the ancestors were demonic. But his objection so incensed the famous missionary statesman and anthropologist Edwin Smith, who was then editorial superintendent of the BFBS, that the latter personally intervened, insisting that a mudzimu was 'a disembodied human spirit'. 57 In the ensuing debate, the Pentecostals reminded Clarke and the BFBS that the CEM used 'by far the largest proportion of Luba Katanga New Testaments', and that they were by no means 'novices' in Kiluba: Mr Burton has spent more time among the natives of the 'Luba-Katanga' area than any other Protestant missionary now in service; that includes Mr Clarke. The latter was in the Congo before Mr Burton … but he was among the Luba-Sanga speaking folks'. 58 Occasionally Clarke conceded to the Pentecostals, but for most part his superior knowledge of Kiluba, Greek and New Testament Theology won the day. With the support of the Bible Society, he observed that the writers of the New Testament had not hesitated to adapt words in the traditional religious lexicon, and that: 'if every word held to be tainted by heathen magical avocation were to be rejected, it would be impossible to name a number of objects except by cumbrous, paraphrases or transliterations, or else by weak equivalents'. 59 Clarke's arguments also had authority because his translation team also comprised African members. The participation of 'educated clever natives, already trained in the official language' had been asserted by Laman as an essential precondition for successful translation work in his 1918 paper. 60 Clarke claimed: Not a single determination has ever been mine alone. All has been done in closest concert with our African Council of elder brethren, all of whom have been many years in Christ … None of these are 'mission boys'; that is, they spent their early lives among their own people as heathen Africans themselves, and know them in every aspect of life and tongue. I felt that I must always adhere to their desire rather than to that of younger, white men. 61 Detailed descriptions of his practice for the New Testament translation reveal that Clarke assembled a broad team of 12 local translators, some of whom had been traditional religious practitioners and office holders prior to conversion. Translation was an extended discussion between the missionaries and the 12 Luba. Missionaries and Luba translators would independently work on a passage and then thrash out the final translation together. Missionary translators also attended royal court at Kabongo and dialogued with court officials. 62 African participation in translation work limited the linguistic colonialism often attributed to missionary translation work, and ensured that the Testaments had a popular resonance. 63 Missionaries brought orthography and word-division to Bible translation; their African contributors contributed vocabulary, ensuring that they negotiated 'their own images into its word'. 64 Critical to the success of the Luba Scriptures was the manner in which African translators ensured that ideas and images associated with Luba civilisation and kingship were included in the text thereby creating a powerful resonance with the past. Thus the Comforter became N'senga Mukwashithe king's helpful advocate. And kinsman-redeemer became Mpwani-mipolo a Luba kinsman with the right to redeem his relatives sold into slavery. The phrase, 'Long live the King', occurring several times in the Old Testament, was initially translated literally until an indigenous member of the translation team pointed out that at the coronation of the king the Luba would exclaim, 'Let the king die in good old age'. 65 The New Testament was supplemented by other publications: hymn and chorus books, school texts and booklets on hygiene. 66 Of these, language primers were the most important. Oral traditions, proverbs and folklore formed the basis of the primers, both giving content to the Luba Katanga ethnic category and locating it in time and space. Nkindi [Proverbs] first published in 1921 was a pivotal text for this process. The primer had 59 lessons, each of which consisted of a proverb, story or oral tradition, amplified by a verse of scripture followed by a Christian gloss. Often the lesson was illustrated by a simple but memorable pen and ink drawing resembling those found in children's books in Europe of the interwar period, indeed many of the stories bore resemblance to Aesops' Fables. A pristine world of Luba folklore inhabited by animals, insects, hunters, fishermen and great chiefs illustrated a basic evangelical message concerning the urgent need to avoid Satan's enticements, and choose light over darkness, the narrow path over the wide path, or risk burning in the fiery lake of Hell (Figure 1).
The primer was a means of folklorisation, creating nostalgia for the past and desire to preserve vanishing customs and traditions. The notion of an essential 'Lubaland' was evoked throughout its pages, but crucially Christianity was presented as the natural culmination of Luba custom and oral tradition. Protestant missionaries envisaged ruptures with practices of divination, sorcery and ancestor religion, but saw Christianity as compatible with Luba wisdom. Particularly important was the inclusion of the mythic charter of divine kingship, which gave Luba across the region a common explanation of their origins. Finally, the primer had a practical modern aspect, closing with a few pages of cursive script that provided readers with a useful training for deciphering bills and work orders. 67 The production of the Nkindi involved the same processes of standardisation and sanitising that were used in the production of scriptures and missionary ethnographies. Rich and detailed traditions and fables that could take an hour to recite and which vary according to time, region and orator were reduced to simplified forms, and proverbs which were addressed to specific social categories or communities were generalised as simple ethical admonitions or everyday wisdom. 68 It was also censored whereby intimate and sexual content was 'omitted or veiled'. 69 And it was partial, principally knowledge, collected from elder male traditional leaders and professional storytellers. One of Burton's two research assistants was the son of a local Mwanza mfumu [councillor]. 70 Brethren and American Methodists made use of the CEM primer, and by 1925, 8000 copies of Nkindi had been distributed. In that year the CEM began to use the Brethren primer Kibelo, which was of a similar genre. The primers were well remembered by Luba Christians, not just the proverbs, but also the simple but vivid and sometimes fantastic illustrations. 71 They were used to imagine what John Lonsdale calls civic virtue, namely the type of behaviour necessary to create a Luba moral order 72 (Figure 2).

The popular reception Christian literacy
By 1923 Protestant missionaries had requested 7000 copies of the Gospels and Acts and 5000 New Testaments and Psalms in the Luba Katanga dialect. The BFBS willingly obliged, happy also to print the individual Gospels separately in order to reach the estimated 300,000 Luba Katanga speakers. 73 The initial attraction of literacy owed much to its capacity to create new identities. A new generation of mission-schooled elites, teachers, evangelists, clerks and labour migrants was able to supplant their elders by drawing authority not from their legal utterances and ability to organise domestic production, but via their mastery of the printed word, which allowed them to comprehend the practices of an alien colonial state. Literacy had as Lonsdale observes 'a wider convening power than elders' speech', allowing 'Africans to conceive of larger moral communities'. 74 Two commentaries by CEM missionaries shed light upon individual and collective appeal the Luba scriptures. The first came from James Salter, who described the reception of the Gospels and Psalms at Mwanza in 1921. He began his account with the delight of Abraham, the CEM's first convert: '"Why … it is my language; it talks to me". He read on cracking fingers with glee, "It speaks to my heart! It is my very own tongue"'. Salter continued: 'It was easy to find porters to carry the packages of Bibles back to the Station and they returned up the hill singing "God's word has come! God's book has arrived!"' All those given a copy of the scriptures wanted their names written inside. Each wrapped their New Testament in paper to keep it clean. The following Sunday the mission church service had record attendance and the service was a record length as all became 'little preachers'. Salter observed: 'Really there was nothing new; we had been telling them the same things for years, but now they had found them for themselves and that made them all alive'. 75 Two years later, Burton reflected on the impact of the New Testament and Psalms: The effect of this book on the whole of the mission, whites, nationals, stations and outstations, was galvanic. It gave tremendous impetus to literacy and was received with unbounded enthusiasm by tens of thousands who had been taught to read in mission schools. 76 As in other encounters with literacy in African societies, the Luba and their neighbours initially saw reading and writing as new sources of power and authority, rituals to be harnessed rather than simple skills to be acquired. 77 CEM convert Abraham referred to above collected a secret stash of wood chips in the trunk under his bed inscribed with messages he had been asked to carry between the missionaries. 78 Subsequently, African evangelists crafted humorous sermon illustrations describing their early encounter with the unseen power of the written word. 79 The Bible also had a talismanic quality. Missionary photographs of bonfire meetings for the purpose of destroying charms reassigned as polluted substances show converts holding the scriptures aloft to ward off evil spirits that might jump from the fire. 80 By the mid-1910s there was a popular desire for literacy; its utility soon apparent to those young men entering the migrant labour economy on the Copper Belt and the tin mines around Manono. The demand began in Lunda territory, which was closer to the mines, and was missionised by the American Methodist Episcopal Church half a decade before Luba speaking areas. 81 Here, letter writing became a staple of the migrant labour system, essential for the conduct of both household finances and romance. 82 There were differences in Catholic and Protestant missionary strategies, but these can be exaggerated. Catholicism placed more emphasis on the priest, sacred medals and statues as mediators of God's presence than the scriptures, which they were slow to translate or place in African hands. Catholic catechists never had the same freedom to evangelise or establish churches as Protestant evangelists, and neither were they subject to same missionary interest as future leaders of an African church. Moreover, Catholic Holy Ghost Fathers in Katanga were more pessimistic than Protestants about their ability to turn the Congolese into proper Christians, believing it best to form authentic Catholics from childhood. 83 Nevertheless, once Catholic missionaries commenced their work of creating a network of village schools across Katanga, there was similar response to Christian literacy amongst Catholic youth. Children flocked to the Catholic schools, keen to learn the catechism and wear distinctive new uniforms. In the Luba region of Lake Kisale it was reported in 1912 that youth left their villages for instruction at the Catholic mission station with 'une étonnante rapidité'. Others became loyal allies of missionaries, happy to break secrets, or reveal where the sick lay hidden so that priests could administer prayer or last rites. 84 In early twentieth-century Katanga Christian literacy fostered new types of subjectivity beyond kinship, the membership of associations and cults, and the patronage of big men, which was more suited to the needs of labour migrants and mission elites seeking to separate themselves from the demands of their elders. Transcriptions of African sermons in the Congo Evangelistic Mission Report and missionary hagiographies reveal how converts were captured by the new revolutionary idea of personal responsibility for one's fate, which was underpinned by Christian notions of freewill and judgement, and articulated to new capitalist relations. 85 Early twentieth-century Katanga was a paraliterate world in which oral culture retained great importance. 86 The power of words was inseparable from political authority, and could also affect personal and collective security from evil spirits and pestilences. For elders the legitimacy of a political claim in the absence of written documents rested largely on an eloquent case made to subjects. Youthful evangelists found themselves caught up in sophisticated debates about religion with elders who possessed extraordinary rhetorical skills, particularly their use of proverbs. The scriptures armed Christian enthusiasts with new battery of ideas and images with which to bless, curse and admonish. 87 The appeal of Christian literacy also lay in its ability to create new collective identities such as ethnic communities. Aged converts reflected that where strangers once encountered each other with spears, they now greeted each other in the sacred language of the gospel. 88 Crucial was the notion that the vernacular Bible fostered a sense of being chosen: God had spoken to the Luba as well as the whites. 89 The widespread adoption of the scriptures owed much to Clarke's shrewd choice of the Lualaba as the vehicular dialect, which ensured that they reached 'hamlets' and 'mining centres' across Katanga. 90 Their success was also product of new print technologies and an effective network of dissemination.

The technology and infrastructure of ethnic creation
By the mid-1920s Katanga had a well-established network of schools and churches, along which Christian literacy was disseminated via an army of evangelists, pastors and schoolteachers. Institutions of learning were crucial in the dissemination and concretisation of Luba Katanga identity, legitimating the written vernacular via a modern association. Beyond the use of the scriptures and primers, lectures were given on Luba history and culture at the CEM's training institute for ministers. Similarly, duplicated genealogies of Luba kings were supplied to the mission's secondary schools for history lessons. 91 The arrival of the CEM's first Gestetner duplicator in 1935 was a significant moment, and the machine's success meant that others quickly followed for both the CEM and Brethren. The New Testament and primers were supplemented by other religious publications, such as more hymnals and school books in the vernacular. Particularly significant was the 1938 bi-monthly newspaper, which aimed 'to give news of Christian work in this land and thus establish a bond of fellowship between believers in various places'. 92 Portable, cyclostyled technology intensified vernacular literacy through the local mass production of texts. It also facilitated the multiplication of ethnic difference and diversity by making possible the production of new vernaculars for hitherto neglected peoples such as the neighbouring Songye. 93 But more important than technological advance was the manner in which Luba Christian enthusiasts mediated ethnicity on the ground. On the role of local agents in the making of Yoruba ethnicity, J. D. Y. Peel writes: 'the first Yoruba everywhere were teachers, catechists and clergymen; the Christian evangelists were unavoidably ethnic missionaries too'. 94 The same was true for the Luba, whose pioneering evangelists came from two social categories. The first was returned slaves from Bié in Angola. They had been taken there by Ovimbundu and Afro-Portuguese slavers, and had been Christianised by Canadian and Brethren missionaries while working in plantations. Like the Saro returnee slaves-cum-evangelists to the Yoruba, they were 'doubly alienated' from their society. Enforced exile had broken many former ties and opened up new horizons, making them especially prone to further alienation that accompanied conversion to Christianity. Their ambivalence towards their local communities -'drawn to them (as home) and repelled by them (as pagan)'caused them to adopt what Peel calls a 'two-tier ethnic identification'. First, they identified with their place of birth and local chiefdom, 'entities with a real political existence'. Secondly, they identified with a concept of Luba 'as a potentially Christian nation, a thing existing only in posse but prefigured in the network of Christian congregations using the [Luba] Bible'. 95 Few returnees immersed themselves in local traditional politics, and most remained in mission communities or founded their own Christian villages. But their horizons were supralocal. They pushed Christianity ahead of the missionary frontier, embarking on evangelising treks and returning with dozens of enquirers, and founding preaching centres, which later became the nuclei of new mission stations. Formed by different mission societies in Angola, they had limited loyalties to mission societies working in Katanga, moving between them as evangelists or schoolteachers in a grass roots ecumenism. 96 The former slaves sought to make sense of the trauma of their captivity through the story of exodus, exile and return in the Hebrew Scriptures. 97 Their belief in their manifest destiny heightened the sense of divine election with which they themselves and other Luba greeted the reception of their scriptures.
The second group of ethnic missionaries were first generation male converts. Like the former slaves they also put themselves beyond local society. Having little stake in the gerontocratic social order, they did battle with traditional religious leaders, engaging in graphic acts of iconoclasm and disenchantment, breaking secrets to missionaries and violating sacred places. As new literate elites, their horizons also extended beyond their villages. They taught in new schools across the territory and married elite, missionised women raised on stations. Often persecuted by traditional authorities, they persevered because, as in the Yoruba context, 'they sensed that the future was theirs'. 98 It was a future in which the ethnic message 'was wrapped up in the language of literacy' which was rapidly adopted at grassroots level. 99 In a 1924 report on mission work in the mining communities of Katanga, Methodist Episcopal Missionary, John Springer, observed: Comparatively few of those who come to mines, especially as recruited workers, have ever attended school, and thousands of these illiterates buy primers and begin learning to read and write for the first time, often being taught by some friend living in the same compound … Our book store has been one of our most potent agencies. … We have utilised as colporteurs many natives who had regular employment elsewhere and who sold books in the compounds, camps, and locations in their spare time. 100 It was also striking how print dissemination of the vernacular was amplified via the practice of 'copying'. Around 1939 Burton wrote: It is the spirit of eagerness, an intense desire for everything that can help the study of Scriptures, an ardour that has taken hold of the churches and grows in intensity month by month … the notes given in Bible school are copied and re-copied … .
Sister Burton's Sunday school lessons, Brother Yesson's notes for evangelists, my sermon outlines, and a lot more are thus spread abroad, and these are copied again and again on labels torn from tin cans, old scraps of brown paper, envelopes turned inside out, and even on shavings from the carpenter's shop. … . The sermon I preach on Sunday is re-preached on the following Sunday, with variations, in scores of villages, and in a fortnight's time I may hear it a hundred miles away. 101 In his famous Bantu Philosophy (1946) the Flemish Franciscan missionary, Placide Tempels, noted the discovery of scribbled magic formulae by state authorities during the 1944 Katanga Revolt, explaining it as the illogical actions of deracincés who had failed to grasp the significance of western technologies in their desire to master white power. 102 In the Protestant case the scribbling was a devotional act strongly associated with religious revivals, in which enthusiasts sought to spread the sacred message of the scriptures and assert their prestige as literates. 103 The so-called scribbling of religious messages ensured that the unified Luba Katanga dialect reached the furthest corners of the territory.
The grassroots ecumenism fostered amongst African Christian enthusiasts was matched by an equally effective missionary ecumenism. The Brethren took on the major work of translating the scriptures, but Methodists and Pentecostals participated in the translation team. Pentecostal missionaries Burton and Womersley also did much of the pioneering linguistic work, leading to the latter's widely consulted Kiluba grammar published in 1931. 104 Brethren and CEM missions exchanged language primers, and the Methodists sang CEM hymns and made use of Burton's sketches and photographs in their publications. All of these denominations shared an Evangelical Theology, and were united in their dislike of Roman Catholicism. Nevertheless, the project of literacy extended to Catholicism. Womersley's Kiluba grammar in English for missionaries was borrowed and expanded by the Franciscans and eventually published in French. 105 The New Testament was also checked by Catholic linguists and subsequently used by Luba Catholics. Because there was no rival Catholic edition, the text had a widespread acceptance, and this added to the cohesiveness of the linguistic definition of Luba Katanga identity. 106 Hence Catholic missionaries in southern Katanga played a very different role in ethnic formation than they did in other parts of Belgian colony, being too fragmented to have a unifying effect. There was no radical Flemish order such as the MSC with an 'indigeniste' project for Luba culture. The Scheutists, whose missionary priests and catechists in Kasai had done much to develop an ethnic identity via printed vernacular Tsiluba, were few and far between with only three stations in Katanga. Most numerous were the Franciscans, whose most famous practitioner was the Placide Tempels who had worked in Katanga. His Bantu Philosophy was radical in its appeal to inculturate Christianity rather than pursue assimilation, but he advocated a generic Bantu philosophy and not a Luba one. The other major Catholic missionary presence was the Spiritans (Holy Ghost Fathers), who did not produce an extensive vernacular literature and sought to raise a Frenchspeaking, cosmopolitan-minded Luba elite by taking the most promising students out of the locality and placing them in regional seminaries. 107

Ethnicity becomes a political project
In the era of decolonisation the cultural project of Luba ethnicity became a political one. Luba intellectuals-cum-politicians operationalised ethnic categories to form the basis of political constituencies. The process of translation from cultural blocks to political parties was never clear-cut, because some ethnicities split and others amalgamated with neighbours with whom they shared experiences of being governed or residing in an urban location. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern broad patterns.
Two Luba intellectuals bare a particular relevance to this paper, Bonaventure Makonga and Jason Sendwe.  108 Makonga then worked as an assistant in the Colonial Information service. He belonged to the Cercle de St Benoît, an elite club for évolués founded by Verbeken and another liberal, the Attorney General, Paul Van Arenberg in 1931, and was a member of the Conseil de Centre extra-coutumier of Elisabethville during 1947-1954. 109 Sendwe's formation, in contrast. was in the Methodist Episcopal Church at Kabongo, where he attended primary and secondary school. He subsequently trained as a nurse in Yakusu, Stanleyville and then Elisabethville, graduating in 1938. He was son of the Chief Mwania, and married the granddaughter of the Luba paramount chief, Kasongo Niembo. He worked in the hospital at Kamina in the southern portion of Luba territory. 110 Makonga and Sendwe had a good deal in common as elites with political ambitions, and for a period shared the same political platform. Like most missionary and colonial researchers before them, their point of entry for research was the frontiers of Luba territory, rather than the heartlands. 111 Both based their writing on data gathered in Kamina, though Sendwe had grown up in Kabongo. And both researched under the tutelage of missionary Harold Womersley who had worked in both locations. 112 Neither had the profile of the African intellectual and ethnic architect, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, but both had credentials as 'cultural experts'. 113 Given that class formation was so limited, and that évolués were compelled to organise under state surveillance, it was important to possess what Crawford Young calls 'traditional sources of modern prestige' and to be able to mobilise ethnic constituencies. 114 However, Makonga and Sendwe's literary productions varied considerably in terms of content and purpose. The latter penned two linked articles on the tradition and culture of the Baluba for the Bulletin du Centre d'Etude des Problèmes Sociaux Indigènes in 1954 and 1955. 115 These pieces asserted a common body of culture and language for a significant group of people whom Sendwe described as the Baluba Shankadji. Sendwe's work bore a strong resemblance to Burton's description of central Luba institutions, and his account of the Luba past was similar to Womersley's work. Moreover, Luba Shankadji territory coincided remarkably closely with the areas of Protestant missionary activity in Northern Katanga, including Lubaised peoples such as those living under chiefs Mwanza and Kinda. The closing paragraphs of Sendwe's 1954 article were programmatic, expressing regret that the centralised pre-colonial empire he had described was no longer in existence, conjecturing whether the colonial authorities could reunite it or administer it from a common 'Bureau' for the Baluba Shankadji. 116 Makonga's work was more reflexive, attentive to internal differentiation and change, aware of the mutability of culture. He was uninterested in a monolithic pristine version Luba that supposedly coincided with a Luba empire, preferring to deconstruct it. In his initial articles published in 1948, he rejected the expansive category of Luba as a fitting label for his own community of Bene Samba living in the region of Kinda, choosing instead to reconstruct their particular dynastic history. Though the Samba shared common cultural antecedents and civilisation with the Luba, emerging from the same internal revolutions, they were authentically separate, possessing their own glorious traditions. 117 A subsequent series of articles in 1951 and 1955 asserted the malleability of culture in the face of labour migration and urban existence. Written from his perspective as an évolué residing in the centre extra-coutumier of Elisabethville, Makonga described, with some regret, the transformation and corruption of practices relating to birth, marriage and death amongst an embryonic class of clerks and foremen trying to prosper in the city. He also condemned the replacement of idiomatically rich local dialects of Baluba with Kiswahili, which he cast as a vulgar language associated with the law and order and detribalisation. 118 Both Makonga and Sendwe believed in the integrity of tribes as cultural units, but owed loyalties to different ethnic groups. Sendwe's ecumenical Protestant experience reinforced his sense of a broad Luba Katanga identity, leading him to found the Association des Baluba in 1957. Makonga's Catholic formation instilled no such rigidity, allowing him to fashion a more exclusive Bene Samba identity. In addition, Makonga had spent more time in the regional capital, Elisabethville, where he had witnessed the violent sectarianism of ethnic associations and the growing dominance of the Luba Kasai. Because Katanga was sparsely populated, labour recruiters for the mining centres in Elisabethville, Kolwezi and Jadtoville had looked further afield for labour, giving preference to the Luba Kasai due to their superior education. By the 1950s the local Lunda of Elisabethville were outnumbered four to one by the Luba Kasai who dominated the more highly paid commercial and clerical positions available to Africans. Luba Kasai also dominated African Communal administrations, where burgomasters granted them permanent residence but repatriated unemployed Luba Katanga. 119 Given the limited extent of secondary education in the colony, Belgian Congo did not have a developed public sphere such as, for instance, that which existed on the Gold Coast in the 1920s-1930s, where the literati offered views on social and cultural issues in clubs and debating societies. 120 Only liberal whites and a small number of évolués, intent on modernising traditions via their careful evolution, debated the work of Makonga and Sendwe. Both men also exaggerated the primacy and authenticity of their ethnic identities, and ignored the manner in which Swahili had come to articulate a new urban culture, even while it had been intended as a language of colonial control. 121 Nevertheless their observations on tribal solidarities seemed to resonate more widely.
In October 1958 growing resentment at the Kasaien domination of municipal institutions led to the founding of the Confederation des Associations Tribales du Katanga or Conakat, by Moise Tshombe and Godefroid Munongo. Unsurprisingly its areas of strength lay in the Katanga urban areas and adjacent Luba Katanga regions. In February 1959 Sendwe's Association des Baluba briefly joined Conakat. At this juncture, as Crawford Young explains, the tensions, while partly expressed in ethnic terms, also were in good part founded on the administrative reality of Katanga as a valid point of reference. The Kasai Baluba 'were "foreign" not only because they were Baluba but also because they came from Kasai. The Katanga Baluba shared the resentments of their Conakat partners at the partisan use of communal office'. 122 Tsombe initially described Conakat as the party of authentic Katangans, though his loyalties were first and foremost towards the indigenous Lunda and Bayeke of Southern Katanga and directed against the Luba Kasai. This increasingly sectarian outlook lost him support of the Luba Katanga who felt some affinity to the Luba Kasai. In November 1959, Sendwe's Association Des Baluba withdrew from Conakat in response to the latter's secessionist ideals that were being encouraged by Europeans. In the same month, Sendwe founded the Balubakat Party, which had some membership in urban areas but was dominant in northern Katanga amongst the Baluba Shankadi, Hemba and Butumbwe. Although its membership was regional, Balubakat subscribed to a territorial nationalism. In the meantime, Makonga had resigned his membership of the Association Des Baluba to participate in the foundation of Conokat. The desire to neutralise Kasai Baluba power in Southern Katanga, and the growing realisation that the Baluba of northern Katanga would hold more sway in central government, was enough to propel Tsombe, Makonga and Conokat into secession at Independence. Separation was, however, only effective in the South where the Lunda and Bayeke resided. In the north, the separate movement amongst the Katanga Baluba remained committed to territorial independence, although their loss of power at the provincial level propelled them into violence against Conakat rivals. 123

Conclusion
This article has shown how within the broader context of indirect rule and labour migration, missionaries and African Christians were key agents in Luba ethnic formation. The widespread missionary belief that language was the primary marker of identity and their willingness to privilege one vernacular over another did much to create ethnic categories. African Christians then filled them with imaginative and moral content. But this religious impetus was animated by contradictory tendencies. While Protestant missionaries cast themselves as agents of social transformation, they also preserved culture, re-presenting it to the Luba in pristine form. They condemned traditional religious practices as demonic, idolatrous or fraudulent, but embraced traditional authorities as sources of social stability. On the one hand they sought to contain the emancipation of women and youth through custom, and on the other they encouraged the adversarial Christian religious politics of their young male evangelists, which were often directed against patriarchal elders. The creative tensions in the work of African Christian enthusiasts are best described as embodying the aspirations of both 'cosmopolitans' and 'patriots', to use Derek Peterson's useful distinction. Like the East African Revivalists they embraced Africa's new communication technologies to rework their social lives. 124 But while they imagined larger communities than those of clan and chiefdom, the sense of being 'chosen', the dynamics of migrant labour market and need to build political constituencies instilled a commitment to a bordered homeland.