I am going to talk about imagination and history. I am not talking about imagining what happened in order to write historical fiction. One uses the imagination in historical fiction, but I am not looking at that task. Nor am I using “imagination” as a code word for “guess”. Sometimes we do guess at what happened and then seek confirmation, but I am not looking at that task either.
Rather I am listening to the texts I read with my imagination alive to notes that the recorder of the event may not have recognized in order to set questions for further inquiry. I am using especially my training in cultural studies to hear echoes from reports written over 100 years ago.
I am in the process of researching and writing a history of Brethren in Christ World Missions. I worked with the BIC in Zambia and Zimbabwe for seven years. My parents in their turn served with BICWM from 1946 to 1965. Before them, my grandparents were with the mission from 1921 to 1929. It is important to note that I am investigating and writing the history of my own home church, so that the reader can be aware of any bias or special pleading in my work. I am using the written reports that the missionaries sent to the home church to provide the basic story.
The story of BICWM breaks naturally into three periods:
• 1896 to 1920, Beginnings and first missionaries: The BIC sent their first missionary party to Zimbabwe in 1898. The first period of work culminated with World War One, and I take the story up to the influx of new missionaries following the war, in about 1920.
• 1920 to 1945, Institutionalization of the mission in Africa and India: The period between the wars, culminating in World War Two.
• 1945 to 1980, Apex and Withdrawal: The 1950s were the high water mark of BIC missions in Africa and India, with work beginning also in Japan and Nicaragua. The withdrawal of missionaries from Zimbabwe during the Liberation War there marks the shift into a new pattern of missionary outreach that continues today. I end my story when the North American missionaries returned home from Zimbabwe.
The Love Feast
I want to look at an incident in 1899, less than a year after the missionaries entered Zimbabwe. In the middle of 1898, four pioneering missionaries arrived at Matopo Mission: Jesse and Elizabeth Engle, Alice Heisey, and Frances Davidson. The following May they were joined by Clifford and Sara Cress and by Isaac Lehman. These seven missionaries immediately held what the Brethren in Christ call a Love Feast.
The basic process of a Love Feast is as follows: A common meal (or several meals) eaten together, a baptismal service (if there are any candidates for baptism), a service of “washing the saints feet”, and finally a communion service. This first Love Feast in Zimbabwe was significantly abbreviated, given that it was held among the seven pioneer missionaries only, with the Ndebele people looking on. Here is Clifford Cress’ description of the event, written for the Evangelical Visitor ( the BIC church paper, issued twice a month):
"Before the appointed time all were in their places and then followed a solemn and impressive season as we seven in childlike simplicity and love poured water into basins and washed each others’ feet, the kiss of love following. The usual Scriptures were read in the Zulu tongue and then followed the commemoration of the death and sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was an occasion long to be remembered, probably never to be forgotten by us and the congregation who sat before us in silence and for the first time in their darkened lives witnessed these solemn ceremonies. Some were aged and silvered for the tomb and yet had never seen these blessed and precious services: and until our workers told them had never heard the story of the cross. Many tears were shed throughout the entire day and at eventide we felt that God had indeed been with us. As the sun was lowering toward the western mountains the natives gave us a farewell salutation and one by one began winding their homeward way among the rocks and trees that line the valleys."
We see the following elements of the Love Feast in this account: Washing the Saints’ Feet, and the Lord’s Table. The common meal and baptisms were not a part of this first celebration.
Cress himself may have had similar questions as I do, most importantly: What did the Ndebele people watching them think that this ceremony meant? Consider again what the assembled people saw.
1) The four missionary women would have gathered in one place, and the two missionary men would have gathered in another.
2) The participants removed their shoes and socks/stockings. The three men would have washed each other’s feet – one kneeling before the other, placing the other’s feet in the basin of water (one at a time) and washing them, then drying them with a large towel tied around his waist. The second would repeat the process with the third, and the third would complete the circle with the first.
The four women would also have formed a circle. The first would have knelt before the second and washed her feet, the second before the third, the third before the fourth, and the fourth would have completed the circle. In each case, once the feet have been washed and dried, the two participants would have stood and embraced and kissed each other on the cheek.
3) All six would then have proceeded to the Lord’s Table for the communion service. The lead minister (Jesse Engle) would have prayed over the bread (a special, unleavened bread used at communion services). Traditionally, each one serves the next, so we can assume that they passed the bread down the row, and that the last person probably served Engle to complete the process. Then Engle would have prayed over the cup, which would have been juice (what kind of juice in their context, we do not know), and then passed the cup down the row in the same way as the bread. We do not know if they used individual cups or a common cup.
So we have the question, “what did the watching people think this meant?” This is where we must use our cultural imagination.
To gain some insight into this question, we consider briefly the history and religious culture of the Ndebele people. The Ndebele migrated from Botswana to southwestern Zimbabwe in the late 1830s. A small group of the larger Zulu People within the KwaZulu Natal area of South Africa had migrated north and west under their leader, Mzilikazi, who fled from the threat posed to him and the Ndebele by Tshaka, the king of the Zulu People. They moved first to modern Botswana, where they incorporated a large number of Tswana and Swazi people. Under further threat from the Boer farmers who were also seeking control of the area, they move further north to the area around modern Bulawayo in southwestern Zimbabwe.
In the 60 years between establishing their new home and the arrival of the first BIC missionaries, the Ndebele established control over a large territory and brought into their population the people who already lived there. Their basic social structure included a strong military focus, which made them a formidable force opposing the expansion of White Settler society.
White Settlers were on the move in any case. In 1888, Cecil Rhodes negotiated permission for his agents to explore for gold and other minerals in the area north and east of Ndebele territory. The Ndebele ruler then was the son of Mzilikazi, named Lobengula. Lobengula saw clearly that this movement from Cecil Rhodes’ emissaries would cost him control of the Ndebele homeland, but also could see no way to resist it. As he foresaw, White Settlers moved into the area east of his homeland, and in 1893, they provoked hostilities with the Ndebele People. This conflict ended with Lobengula’s death, and the Ndebele People retreated into the Matopo Hills, south of Bulawayo. Three years later, they rose up against the White Settlers, who had built a new city on the ruins of Lobengula’s capital. At first it appeared that they might throw the Whites out of the country, but reinforcements sent by Rhodes in South Africa eventually forced the Ndebele to hide in the Matopo Hills, until finally, in October 1897, they made a peace treaty, allowing the White Settlers to take control of the country. Less than a year later, the BIC missionaries – good pacifists all – arrived in the Matopo Hills, in the very centre of the place where the Ndebele had taken final refuge from the White Settlers.
So much for a brief overview of the historical background. The cultural and religious background is also complex. We do not have time to look at it properly, so I will note simply three basic features of traditional Ndebele culture and religion.
• The Ndebele believed in a creator God, remote from people and accessible only through the ancestors.
• The ancestors – those who had died recently – remained in close contact with those still alive.
• The whole of life was seen as thoroughly spiritual. Many things had a spiritual cause – from early death in a family to sickness to drought to excessive rainfall. The normal response to such events was a ritual involving the spirits of the ancestors and mediated by the spiritual specialists (diviners and herbalists).
Put your imagination to work as you read/hear about the first Love Feast.
1) The Ndebele watching the event knew the White Settlers first as people who had dispossessed them of the land. That dispossession had begun, but was not nearly complete, when this Love Feast took place. The site of the Love Feast was the home of the people who had been killing White Settlers less than two years before, and defending themselves against attack less than a year before. Yet here were White people, taking off their shoes and socks and carrying out a ceremony that could hardly have looked more different than anything the invading settlers did.
The first baptisms took place within the next few months, and then the people saw these white missionaries embracing the newly baptised members of the church and giving them “the kiss of love”. Again, they would have recognized an important ritual, and they must have wondered about these strange amakhiwa who looked like the soldiers they had fought against, but who embraced them as brothers and sisters.
2) As a deeply spiritual people, the Ndebele recognized rituals when they saw them, so they would have understood that the missionaries were doing something significant. Most of their own rituals involved communicating with the ancestors, so they might have interpreted the words about remembering what Jesus said in that light.
3) As a spiritual people, the Ndebele would have assumed spiritual causes and consequences to having been dispossessed of control over their land. They may have wondered if they were watching ritual activities designed to give the White settlers the power to have entered their land against their united opposition.
Conclusion
These are the kinds of questions that I have put down on paper to guide further research into the coming of the first missionaries and their contact with the host people in the Matopo Hills. Clifford Cress clearly saw that the Love Feast was strange to the observers. I wonder if the missionaries fully understood just how strange all of this would have looked. I suspect that one central dynamic was to set the missionaries apart from the White settlers as different, and perhaps as worth developing a relationship with. I keep reading, and asking questions, and talking with the BIC Church in Zimbabwe, searching for answers to the questions of historical imagination.
Daryl Climenhaga
30 Nov 2017
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