21. Three Wooden Images. Spirits of Ancestors. Ujiji.

As we neared Ujiji, the open descent, bare of trees, showed off the whole caravan to the best advantage at a glance; and never in my life have I seen a procession which has given me such joy and pleasure. Yonder is Ujiji, towards which we have so long marched and waded, and here in due order are our goods intact and ourselves in excellent health — 225 men in single file, each, save the head man, with his load on head or shoulder.

In front walks the portly and consequential Songoro, bearing the Union Jack with white border, then the porters’ kilangosi [leading and senior guide and porter], with lofty head-dress of nodding ostrich plumes, perseveringly working his legs to give due sound to the iron bells hung round his knees; and then come box, and bag, and bundle, tents, pots, and kettles, and little bundles of porters’ personal effects. In the centre of the procession Juma Mackay displays on a long bamboo the dove of peace with olive branch.^⁠1 

This excerpt, from the journal of Edward Coode Hore, captures something of the relief with which he completed his journey of 800 miles, begun at Zanzibar more than a year earlier. Initially led by the Rev. Roger Price, an experienced missionary from southern Africa (who was married to Robert Moffat’s daughter – Chapter 17), the expedition began as a wagon train, with oxen and drivers brought from the Cape.^⁠2 

Progress was slow, only six or seven miles a day, and by October 1877 most of the oxen had died. As the men began to sicken with malaria, Price left for London to persuade the Society’s Directors they should employ pagazi,  or carriers. Of the six Europeans who set out for Ujiji in 1877 only four completed the journey and two of those died soon afterwards. This left only the two lay members of the group, Hore, a master mariner, and Walter Hutley, a missionary artisan.^⁠3

Dr. Mullens, the London Missionary Society’s Foreign Secretary, arrived to oversee operations, joining a second expedition that left Zanzibar in June 1879. In less than a month, however, he too had died and was buried near a recently established Church Missionary Society station, Mpwapwa. Richard Lovett, official historian of the London Missionary Society, described the attempt to establish a new mission field in Central Africa as:

The outcome of a lofty hope, floated upon the tide of a great enthusiasm, it has nevertheless been one long tragedy in the sacrifice of life on the parts of those who have attempted to work it, and in the disappointment of the fondest anticipations of those who projected it.^⁠4

Following their arrival at Ujiji, Hore and Hutley lost no time establishing relationships with local Swahili speaking traders such as Tippu Tip, who dominated the settlement trading enslaved people, alongside other commodities such as ivory. Hore hired a vessel, the Calabash, fitting it with sails and rigging in the ‘English fashion’ in order to explore and map the lake, over 650km long and around 50km wide.^⁠5

Reinforcements arrived in September 1879 in the form of two young missionary recruits. One of these, William Griffith, would establish a mission station at Mtowa [Mutoa] north of the Lukuga River on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.^⁠6 Kasanga Mohongoro, the most important regional chief was welcoming, providing land, food and labourers to assist in establishing the station. The missionaries called this Plymouth Rock, after the place the Mayflower pilgrims disembarked in 1620, on their arrival in North America.^⁠7

In 1880, following the arrival of a third LMS expedition, Hore returned to England to oversee the construction of a missionary steamer, arriving home on 23 February 1881.^⁠8 The Good News was designed for lake conditions and transported from the East African coast in pieces, to be assembled on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and eventually launched in March 1885.^⁠9

When David Livingstone returned to Britain in December 1856, after sixteen years away, he was in many ways a fairly typical LMS missionary. Like his father-in-law, Robert Moffat (Chapter 17), John Williams (Chapter 15) and John Campbell (Chapter 3) before him, Livingstone wrote an account of his travels, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, published in November 1857.^⁠12 His now famous slogan ‘Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation’ was fairly conventional missionary rhetoric, as was his commitment to the abolition of slavery.

Certainly, Livingstone had travelled across the Kalahari to Lake Ngami in 1849, and had crossed the continent from the Atlantic to the Indian ocean between 1853 and 1856, stopping at Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders) to give the waterfall a new name in honour of his Queen. But these achievements were recognised, at least initially, mainly by London’s Royal Geographical Society, established in 1830. It was the time Livingstone spent in Britain, as well as his subsequent career as an explorer, which appear to have made his name a household one that would endure for much of the twentieth century.

In 1857, Livingstone resigned from the London Missionary Society to become a roving consul for the British government in Central Africa. He led an expedition up the Zambezi river using an iron river steamer transported from Britain, the Ma Robert. In many ways, Livingstone’s departure from the LMS marks a significant moment when missionary rhetoric, forged in evangelical churches during the first half of the century, was adopted by the British establishment. This paralleled the movement of a generation of young men, educated in public schools influenced by the muscular Christianity of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School between 1828 and 1841, into positions of leadership across British Society.

In December 1857, Livingstone was invited to address the University of Cambridge, having already spoken at the University of Oxford. One consequence of these lectures was the establishment of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, which brought together members of the Anglican universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Trinity College Dublin, in response to Livingstone’s call for an expansion of missionary work in Africa, north of the Zambezi river.^⁠13 Their first expedition, led by Bishop Charles Mackenzie in 1861, established a base near Lake Nyasa [Lake Malawi]. As with other attempts to settle European missionaries in the malarial zones of Central Africa, this did not last long, and in 1864 the mission withdrew to Zanzibar on the East African Coast.

At least part of the answer has to do with the death of David Livingstone in 1872, and his elevation to the status of a national hero. The immediate result of Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition was discouraging, with the expedition recalled by the British government. In 1866, however, Livingstone returned to Africa, hoping to locate the source of the Nile. Apparently “lost”, Livingstone was located at Ujiji by the Welsh-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley on 10 November 1871 – a major scoop for the New York Herald.^⁠16

Having been “found”, Livingstone remained in Africa, dying in May 1873. His African companions, led by Chuma and Susi, buried his internal organs and carried his bodily remains for 63 days to Bagamoyo on the Indian Ocean coast. Livingstone’s body was returned to London by steamer, kept in state at the Royal Geographical Society where it was identified using skeletal evidence of a lion attack decades earlier, and ultimately buried at Westminster Abbey on 18 April 1874, among the British nation’s heroes and poets.^⁠17

It was at least partly the impact of Livingstone’s state funeral, and the press attention it garnered, that inspired a series of further attempts to expand British Missionary activity in Central Africa during the subsequent decade. In 1874, the Universities Mission to Central Africa re-established a presence at Lake Nyasa, and in 1875, members of the Free Church of Scotland initiated the Livingstonia Mission to commemorate their celebrated countryman.

A significant part of the impetus for the expansion of the London Missionary Society into Central Africa seems to have resulted from the missionary enthusiasms of Robert Arthington, a former Quaker from Leeds in Yorkshire. Inheriting a brewing fortune, Arthington invested this in British and American railways and used the resulting profits to support the spread of the Good News, at least partly motivated by a belief this might initiate Christ’s return.^⁠18

In early 1876, Arthington offered £5000 to the London Missionary Society ‘towards the purchase of a steamer, and the establishment of a missionary station at some eligible place’ on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.^⁠19 The Society’s income had not increased significantly since the late 1830s, apart from occasional peaks during fundraising for a missionary ship, making the promise of these additional funds extremely tempting – Arthington would offer another £3000 for the steamer itself in February 1880.^⁠20 What was presumably not anticipated, however, were the considerable costs associated with this enterprise, resulting in a combined deficit of nearly £40,000 for the LMS over the next three years.^⁠21

Although Arthington had been associated with a Baptist Church since 1848, he seems to have been happy to support the work of a range of missionary societies as long as they contributed to the global expansion of Christianity, his ultimate goal. Alongside donations to the London Missionary Society, he funded the Baptist Missionary Society to establish a mission on the Congo River in 1877, subsequently paying for a river steamer, the Peace, which he hoped would connect with the LMS mission at Lake Tanganyika. At the same time, he seems to have anonymously supported the Church Missionary Society in establishing a new mission field at Uganda, hoping that a chain of British Protestant mission stations might shed ‘a line of Gospel light across the “dark continent”’.^⁠22 Lake Tanganyika, equipped with a missionary steamer, was presumably intended to become a source of light at the heart of this imagined darkness.

Searching for clues in the London Missionary Society archives, I came across a letter written by William Griffith at ‘Plymouth Rock’ on 19 May 1880.^⁠23 This contains an underlined title,  Religious notions of the Waguha, under which he provided an account that would find its way into print in the Missionary Chronicle in December 1880:

The religious notions of the Waguha are peculiar. There is a marked difference in this between the tribes on the eastern and tribes on the western shore of the Lake. While those on the eastern shore have neither images nor idols, those on the western have them in great numbers, and have certain beliefs connected with them. The first thing that strikes the African traveller on entering the western half of the continent is an image at the entrance to every village, and again at almost every native hut, especially that of the chief. Others are kept within huts, and their number varies according to the superstition of the worshipper. These images are carved after the shape of the human figure. Other images of lions are said to be kept in the corn-fields. The Waguha carve the images themselves, but the art exists in greater perfection among the Warua to the West.^⁠24

Given these comments, we can reasonably conclude that the figures at the British Museum originated in Uguha, and if they weren’t obtained there by Griffith, Hutley or Hore, must have crossed the lake by other means. Mtowa near to ‘Plymouth Rock’ was a significant transit location for cargoes that crossed the lake as part of the caravan trade. Although the village only had a permanent population of around 300 people, Walter Hutley, observed many thousands of people passing through during the year he spent there.^⁠25

In his letter, Griffith stated that some visitors came on trading expeditions from distant districts, lingering ‘for many days about our Mission House’.^⁠26 One group of visitors, the Warua, brought cloth to trade, made from palm leaves. Hutley, however, suggested that there was little to distinguish the people of Uguha from the Warua ‘except in their language, which slightly differs from Kirua’. According to local tradition, their first chief had originally come from Goma, but had been joined ‘by many from Urua and Marungu’ to form ‘themselves into a a separate tribe’.^⁠27

The connection between the people living at Mutoa and the ‘Warua’ was clearly important enough to be expressed through myths of shared origin, as well as ongoing relationships of trade. Walter Hutley’s private diary suggested that one reason the Warua came to Mutoa was to embark on a joint raiding expedition to capture people to enslave.^⁠28

Warua seems to have been a Kiswahili transliteration of the term Baluba, which itself referred to people living across a wide area of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, united by a recognition of Luba forms of royal, ceremonial and sacred power associated with the bambudye secret societies.^⁠29 The term Luba, alongside that of ‘Gua’ (as in Uguha), may have originally been names given to these people ‘by neighbours they have intimidated (‘Luba’ may originally have meant ‘the ferocious ones’).^⁠30

Many ethnic names and identifications would be transformed over the decades that followed, as European colonialists attempted to identify and consolidate tribal units they could govern through forms of indirect rule.^⁠31 Today, the people who live around Mutoa are known as the Holoholo, a name given to them by the Belgians on account their greeting. Given their earlier engagements with British missionaries, one wonders whether they were in fact just trying to say ‘Hello hello’?

According to Hore, the people of Uguha adorned their bodies extensively, wearing elaborate head-dresses, as well as many ornaments of shell, bead, brass and copper wire. Their houses were ‘very beautiful structures’ arranged in regular rows or streets, and they produced:

Very beautiful mats, basket-work, pottery, wooden bowls, and various small carved work^⁠32…

Griffith went on to note that carved figures were known as ‘Mkissi’, explaining that this word ‘means the same thing as the ‘Kiswahili Mzimu’, or ‘the English Spirit’.^⁠33 Describing the rewards given to ‘Mkissi’ when they performed a service for the living, Griffith noted that they had shelters built for them and were presented with offerings of food and drink, becoming the focus for a range of ceremonies:

the drum is played there, dances performed, and the good qualities of the Mkissi praised in songs.^⁠34

Griffith also noted that spirits could also induce fear. He described the extreme reluctance with which anyone would approach the island opposite the mission station. Finally managing to land, Griffith was shown the location of a sacred grove inhabited by a powerful spirit associated with the grave of an important ancestor, Kirindi, but forbidden from approaching it. When the missionaries made a flagpole from a tree they cut down on the island, they were accused of magic and made to return it.^⁠35

Griffith seems to have recognised that the primary ceremonial and religious focus for the people among whom he lived were the spirits of their ancestors, who visited them frequently, advising and warning them through dreams and visions. In many ways this was not unlike the situation in southern Africa, where LMS missionaries had worked for eight decades. What was distinctive, or to use Griffith’s word ‘peculiar’, were the carved figures which provided these spirits with a tangible body and a visible presence.

Attempting to understand their function, Griffith drew on European frameworks, noting that although ‘these images… are prayed unto in difficulty and trouble, or when on a journey or in war’, people nevertheless acknowledged ‘a Higher Being…to whom the Mkissi is, as it were, only a means of approach’.^⁠36 This made Mkissi the equivalent of Roman Catholic saints, also frequently represented in material form.

The Quaker anthropologist E.B. Tylor argued in Primitive Culture, his foundational 1871 book, that a belief in spiritual beings was an essential element in all religious practices. Critiquing the apparently contradictory statements of missionaries such as Robert Moffat (Chapter 17) who declared that the people among whom he worked had no conception if immortality, while in the previous sentence giving a word for the shades or spirits of the dead, Tylor observed:

But for the most part the “religious world” is so occupied in hating and despising the beliefs of the heathen whose vast regions of the globe are painted black on missionary maps, that they have little time or capacity left to understand them.^⁠39

Instead, Tylor argued for the development of ‘kindly interest’ in ‘all record of men’s earnest seeking after truth with such light as they could find’, and it seems that this message may have impacted William Griffith’s attempt to understand ‘The Religious Notions of the Waguha’.^⁠40 Tylor’s vision of the relationship between Christianity and other religions is worth considering, since it captures a perspective on civilisation and its history that was animating the establishment of museums of ethnology and anthropology across contemporary Britain, which would, in time, provide a home for many missionary collected artefacts (Chapter 22):

No religion of mankind lies in utter isolation from the rest, and the thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to intellectual clues which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the very origin of human civilisation, perhaps even of human existence.^⁠41

Since Griffith wrote his observations in May 1880, many missionaries, anthropologists and art historians have attempted to understand the ways in which Central Africa people understand and engage with the world of the spirits. What has emerged is a picture not significantly different to that articulated by Griffith. Indeed, W.F.P. Burton, Director of the Congo Evangelistic Mission, established in 1919, suggested that:

Fear of the spirit-world holds the Luba in the most hideous thraldom, and is perhaps the biggest factor in controlling their entire lives from birth to death. ^⁠45

In a chapter of his book on Luba Religion and Magic with the title ‘The Idol’, Burton noted a confusion ‘among superficial observers of Luba custom’ between the spirit and the ‘idol-form in which he is supposed to live’:

The distinction is as follows: a simple carved or moulded form is called <<nkishi>> (pl/ <<bankishi>>). It is a powerless lifeless image in wood or clay. The invisible being associated with a dead body is called a <<mukishi>> (pl. <<bakishi>>). One who is dead is often said to have become a <<mukishi>>, while a man who decorates the end of his walking stick with a human head is said to have carved a <<nkishi>>.^⁠46

Linked by a common root ‘-kishi’ the spirit and the carved image are theoretically distinct, although not always in practice. Burton noted that a spirit had to be induced ‘to enter into the form prepared for it’ through a process known as ‘kuyola’:

Often a piece of bone from a dead person is compounded with other ingredients {known as <<bijimba>>), in a horn or shell, and this charm is then inserted in the carved image, or tied about it, that the spirit may be induced to enter and to inhabit this form. When inhabited by a spirit, the form is no longer called a <<nkishi>> but a <<mukishi>>.^⁠47

Mary Nooter Roberts, who spent time researching Luba art during the 1980s, noted that the reason so many carvings take the form of female bodies is that only female bodies, perfected and enhanced by bodily decoration including deliberate scarification, were regarded as strong enough to contain powerful spirits, such as those of departed kings. Many Luba figures, like one of those at The British Museum (Af1910,-.441), gesture to their breasts, but rather than having sexual connotations this action alludes to a devotion to the secrets of Luba royal knowledge, safely kept there.^⁠48

How then should we regard the three figures now at The British Museum? Are they ‘bankishi’ or ‘bakishi’, carvings or spirits? One might assume that if they were simply carvings or ’bankishi’, that they would not display signs of either ‘kuyola’, or of subsequent veneration. The same figure (Af1910,-.441) shines with the repeated coatings of oil that have been applied to its surface, while the strips of metal at the top of the head likely represent the blacksmith’s anvil, a core symbol of the power across the Luba Kingdom. Its hair tresses likely form part of the magical additions made to the carving as part of the kuyola process.

A second figure (Af1910,-,440) appears to have a removable lid on top of its head, covering a cavity into which magical substances were likely inserted. The third (Af1910,-,439) is an extraordinary assemblage of six faces, each looking in different directions, that includes no less than eight wooden horns, all of which appear to contain magical substances, bijimba. All three, it seems, are likely to have been ‘bakishi’, and therefore inhabited by spirits, at least at some point in their biographies.

Burton tells us that when someone dies, ‘the charm is pulled out and the idol thrown away or allowed to rot’, but this does not seem to have happened in the case of these three images.^⁠49 If someone became sick, had repeated bad luck hunting, or his gardens failed, according to Burton, the owner of a mukishi might thrash it, starve it, or leave it out in the rain.^⁠50 Might an uncooperative mukishi even have been given to a visiting European missionary?

The diaries of Walter Hutley at Mutoa make it clear that he was actively engaged in building a personal collection. On 17 April 1880, he was given a bow stand and ‘some fine bananas’ by Kabulwe. On 1 July he bought another bow stand and a ‘small wooden medal’, the function of which he could not establish.^⁠51

Five days later, Hutley received a load of cloth with which to buy curios for his friend Captain Carter, employed by the Association Internationale Africaine to deploy four Asian elephants as beasts of burden.^⁠52 This significantly increased the resources available to Hutley, somewhat to the irritation of Griffith, purchasing further bow stands, as well as a number of axes.^⁠53

Hutley was extremely interested in the use of bakishi, noting on 17 August 1880 that when Kabulwe’s wife went to fetch his drinking water, she carried a carved female figure with her and during that time was allowed to speak to no one.^⁠54 On 7 September 1880, he discovered all the villagers had brought their charms and bakishi out into the sun, it being the first day of the moon.^⁠55

When Hutley found a stone implement while bathing in the lake on 2 August 1880, he was told it was a relic of the past and that finding a spirit suggested he was fortunate. He was even given leaves to lay it on by Karembwe, who:

said that now I was his brother this spirit was my father or some ancestor, and were I to leave it here and go to England it would find its way there. He gave me a lot of instructions as to what to do and promised that he himself would come up in the afternoon to give it the final touch required.^⁠56

Whether Hutley followed these instructions is unclear, but when Edward Coode Hore addressed the Royal Geographical Society in November 1881 he referred to two pieces of stone, given to him by Hutley, stating that they were regarded with ‘great reverence as representatives or messengers from their deceased ancestors, storing them carefully away in little huts or baskets, carefully secured from damage’.^⁠57 Hore felt these might originally have been part of digging stick weights, as used in Southern Africa,. He then noted:

I have brought home specimens of arms, pottery, basket-work, cotton, bark, and palm-fibre cloths, as well as samples of the lake water, the water of the hot springs of Uguha, palm oil, mpufu oil, cotton, tobacco, china, clay, and the salt of Uvinsa and Ugogo, which may be seen at the London Missionary Society’s museum.^⁠58

Hore did not mention ‘wooden images’ or ‘spirits of the ancestors’.

Hutley noted that in this house were ‘a large number of images female and male’, including one female with its head in the middle of a bunch of arrows. Asking about its function, he found people ‘very chary of telling me about their customs with regard to these figures’, but learned that they ‘pray in some manner to these by making certain mixtures of herbs and roots and placing them in the interior of the figure and saying at the same time the things they want’.^⁠61

One of the three figures now at The British Museum, that with six faces (Af1910,-,439), appeared under the title ‘Spirits of Ancestors’  in a section on Odds & Ends from our Museum in News from Afar, an LMS children’s magazine in March 1897.^⁠62 The article states that it was brought to England by Walter Hutley, who did not leave Central Africa until near the end of 1881, suggesting it would not have been among the items taken to Manchester in April that year.

In his diary, Hutley records that on 16 June 1881, as he was preparing to leave:

I receive a large, six-headed image from Griffith to take home to the Society, also a small parcel for some friend of his. Arrange with Palmer about sending over the boat as soon as possible. In the evening Kasanga Mahongoro sent word that he wanted us to take over some eight men and loads to Ujiji. We sent word back that our boat was too heavily laden this voyage.^⁠63

In 1899, the same six-headed figure appeared in a photograph that accompanied a magazine article on the London Missionary Society museum, together with three other items captioned as ‘Wooden Representations of the Spirits of Ancestors from Central Africa’. While the figures on the left and right are recognisably the ones now at The British Museum, the location of the smaller figure at the front centre of the photograph, almost entirely covered by its palm fibre dress, is unknown today.

At the point this image was made, all the female images seem to have had some form of dress below the waist. One might expect these were missionary coverings, added for modesty, but their materials suggest their dresses were made in Africa and likely accompanied the items to Europe. Arriving in Europe were they simply ‘wooden images’, or were they still inhabited by the ‘spirits of ancestors’?

William Burton tells us that if a charm was removed from the location in which it has been erected:

the spirit is supposed to depart at once, and the empty form which remains is regarded with contempt as useless.^⁠64

Perhaps these figures had been ‘bakishi’, inhabited by the ‘spirits of ancestors’  through the kuyola process, but having been removed from the locations they were at work, lost their spiritual potency to become ‘bankishi’ or simple ‘wooden images’ once again.

When European modernists began to look at African sculpture with new eyes in the early decades of the twentieth century, these same images would come to be imbued with a new kind of potency (see Chapter 27).

An image of one of these artefacts (Af1910,-.441) was included in a 1920 article on ‘Negro Art’, still wearing its fibre dress. The text suggested that until that point such works in the British Museum has been regarded as ‘curious and picturesque’, but that this:

prevented them from seeing in these wooden sculptures and rare bronzes the only thing which matters — the element of essential beauty. We cannot feel this beauty until we have discarded the vulgar sentiment, — in itself a civilised barbarism…^⁠65