Core W7 Ranger TakingHoldLand 1987

Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe
Author(s): Terence Ranger

Source: Past & Present , Nov., 1987, No. 117 (Nov., 1987), pp. 158-194
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/650791
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TAKING HOLD OF THE LAND: HOLY
PLACES AND PILGRIMAGES IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY ZIMBABWE*
When the English looked at their land, at least from the

nationalist historical geography in the sixteenth century, the
as an exemplification of history and culture. It was a landscap
with concrete relics of the past work of men - towns, castles,
houses, farms. Where there were no such buildings, the coun
itself was seen as largely the creation of men, who had cle
domesticated it and appropriated it imaginatively. The Gra
familiarized educated Englishmen with similar historical and
geographies in western Europe; classical studies enabled t
read the Mediterranean landscape; biblical studies gave a ke
Middle East; orientalism to the landscapes of Asia.
But when the English ventured as explorers and settlers int
areas, where human relations with the land did not express the
through building or large-scale agriculture or historical writi
was a different matter. In Gaelic Ireland, for example, t
themselves possessed a largely oral historical geography, so th
run off the family names . . was to call to vision certain dist
hills, rivers and plains". But for the English settlers, "all that
background of myth . . . and history had no existence. The la
they looked upon was indeed but rocks and stones and tr
As eighteenth-century exploration took the English far beyon
regions in which landscape was securely related to history and
they began to look at landscape in and for itself. Landscap
than the human past became "heroic" or "picturesque"; geo
natural science became the master intellectual disciplines rath
history.2
* The research on which this article is based was supported by grants from the
University of Manchester and the Social Science Research Council. Earlier versions
were given to seminars at the University of Manchester and the University of Chicago
and I am grateful for the comments of colleagues which influenced revision of the
article.
1 Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth
Century (Dublin, 1924), pp. 64-6.
2 B. M. Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science and the Illustrated Travel
Account, 1760-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).

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HOLY PLACES AND PILGRIMAGES IN ZIMBABWE 159
As explorers and missionaries pushed into central and

Africa in the nineteenth century they certainly perceived
rather than history of culture. "The whole country looks, f
man has done", wrote David Livingstone, "just as it did
came from the hands of its Maker".3 Another traveller described
African villages as "hidden away in those endless forests, like birds'
nests in a wood".4 Africans were content merely to "squat" amid
landscape and to derive their significance from it. Such a view
legitimated colonialism, which was seen even more in terms of
mastery of the land than of mastery of people. The transforming
energies of capitalism, of literacy, of Christianity would at long last
historicize the African landscape. Towns would spring up in the
bush, great cathedrals of stone would be built, monuments to colonial
victories and heroes would be erected.
These were certainly the dominant white attitudes and expectations
in the colony of Southern Rhodesia, which is the subject of this
article. Admittedly, matters were complicated there by the existence
of the stone-built ruins at Great Zimbabwe and its offshoots. The
great walls at Zimbabwe implied history and culture, but whites dealt
with this contradiction by appropriating the ruins to the past of their
own race. The external, "white" origins of Great Zimbabwe became,
and remained to the last, an article of faith for Southern Rhodesian
settlers and officials. The ruins therefore assumed a disproportionate
significance to black nationalists, who correctly claimed them as
African and as evidence of a glorious past. It became inevitable that
the independent state which has now succeeded Southern Rhodesia
should be called Zimbabwe. Yet by far the greater part of the African
past was not embodied in such tangible relics. It was expressed rather
in oral traditions and myths, in rituals and ceremonies, which claimed
the land for particular peoples and chiefs and spirits. The "rocks and
stones and trees" on which white settlers looked incomprehendingly
were all incorporated into an African oral historical geography.
Hardly a hill or cave existed, in a landscape full of hills and caves,
which did not have a religious or political historical significance.
Whites in general ignored all this. Land was expropriated and
divided up for white settlement by the surveyors of the British South
Africa Company, who drew dead-straight boundary lines on the map,
regardless of physical obstacles, let alone imaginative ones. As settlers
3 David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries

(London, 1865), pp. 533-4.
4 H. Drummond, Tropical Africa (London, 1908).

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160 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 117
came to occupy these "farms", they gave them names drawn from
their own places of origin or illustrative of their own experiences and
hopes. In Makoni district in eastern Zimbabwe, for example, there
were by 1910 farms whose names invoked the English countryside
Bideford, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Lovedale; farms whose names con-
jured up scenes in Scotland or Ireland - Bannockburn, Carlow,
Erin, Emerald, Glen Spey, Rathcline, Mayo; others embodying hopes
of new towns arising in the Rhodesian bush - London, Liverpool,
or less ambitiously Woolwich and Maidstone. Some non-European
names were drawn from other colonial contexts in which whites had
"created" history, like Good Hope or Minnehaha. Some apparently
"native" names dissolved on examination into settler jokes, like
Meikle Brothers' farm, Notgotimyet.5 The boundaries of these farms
cut Africans off from many of their holy places or severed their
pilgrimage routes. Yet there were some whites who sought to under-
stand the African sense of historical geography, even if only for the
purpose of expropriating it. One of these was the colony's founder,
Cecil Rhodes, who laid it down that he should be buried in the
Matopo hills, south of Bulawayo, so that he might become the tutelary
deity of the land. A Rhodesian chronicler tells us that the royal
founder of the Ndebele nation, Mzilikazi:
was buried sixteen miles to the east of where Rhodes lies today, up in the highest
point of the Matopos. It was from this, and from the interest he always took in the
tombs of the Pharaohs, that Rhodes conceived the idea of being buried in these
mountains - the successor of Mzilikazi, the Lion of the North.6
After Rhodes's burial in the Matopos, with its recitation of Kipling's

funeral ode, which claimed that Rhodes's spirit would "quicken and
control" the land of Southern Rhodesia for ever, the grave became a
place of pilgrimage for white settlers.7
It was also offered to blacks as a symbol of the new order. Three
weeks after Rhodes's funeral, his brother Frank met the Ndebele
chiefs at the grave and gave them custody of it:
As a proof that I know the white man and the Matabele will be brothers and friends
for ever, I leave my brother's grave in your hands. I charge you to hand down this
5 National Archives, Harare (hereafter N.A.), file L 2/3/45, Acting Director of Land
Settlement to District Commissioner, Rusape, 13 Jan., 4 Oct. 1910.
6 Nancy Rouillard, Matabele Thompson (South Africa, 1953), p. 56.
7 Rhodes's funeral is described in R. Tredgold (ed.), The Matopos (Salisbury, 1956),
p. 15. The centenary pilgrimage to the grave to mark the hundredth anniversary of
Rhodes's birth on 5 July 1953 is described on p. 21.

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sacred trust to your sons that come after you and from generation to generat
I know if you do this my brother will be pleased.8
In this way, Rhodes's grave, marked by no monument, and sun

the solid granite of the Matopos, was designed to reorientate th
of mystical geography in the country that now bore his name.
Other whites tried to make a connection with African ideas ab
the land at a less grandiose level than Rhodes. African infor
remember pioneer white farmers who allowed Africans to
farm borders in order to visit their holy places and who thems
propitiated the spirits of the land so as to attain legitimacy in t
of their African tenants.10 But it was missionaries above all who
sought to understand African mystical geography and who sought to
create their own holy places and pilgrimage patterns so as to take
spiritual hold of the land. This article is an account of how missionar-
ies in one administrative district of Southern Rhodesia- Makoni
district in Manicaland - developed a theory and practice of such
imaginative appropriation of the land.
But it is not merely an entry into white intellectual history. Mission-
aries could have done little or nothing without the assent and partici-
pation of their converts. The story raises topics unusual in twentieth-
century historiography but familiar from the historiography of medi-
eval and early modern "popular religion" - transformations of ideas
about death and the grave; tensions beween ecclesiastical and lay
concepts of the shrine and of pilgrimage; tensions between local holy
places and the centralizing authority of bishops. These topics turn
out to be as important for the study of the development of an African
"popular Christianity" in Makoni, and in Zimbabwe as a whole, as
they have been in the study of European popular religion. Christian
appropriation of the land in Makoni was effected largely by African
evangelists and teachers who drew on the symbols and rituals of
8 J. G. McDonald, Rhodes: A Life (London, 1927). McDonald emphasized the

significance of Rhodes's funeral rites to both white and black. On its way north, he
writes, Rhodes's body was placed immediately after the train engine, "so that even in
death the great leader still led the way northward". The funeral was attended by all
white settlers who could possibly get there. Now, in the 1920s, "the grave of Rhodes
is watched over and guarded by the once savage tribes".
9 It proved impossible to reconcile the symbolic significance of Rhodes's grave to
both whites and blacks. In the 1940s Africans in the surrounding area were given
notice to leave because whites alleged that they were causing erosion in the hallowed
ground. Ndebele spokesmen at once objected that if they were evicted they could not
carry out their sacred obligation to watch over Rhodes's grave!
10 F. J. Mashasha, "J. H. Williams, Native Commissioner of Gutu, 1897-1902"
(History department, University of Zimbabwe, n.d.).

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Christianity to justify new claims to authority which were at the same

time couched in an idiom accessible to all Africans. To these leaders
the whole point of the way in which Christianity took hold of the
land was that it was at once similar to and yet clearly different from
the way in which kings and chiefs and traditional religious leaders
had done so.
PRE-COLONIAL HOLY PLACES AND PILGRIMAGES IN ZIMBABWE
The people of Makoni district shared in a culture common

eastern Shona-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe and Mozamb
Central to that culture over several centuries was an interconnection
between ideas about political authority and ideas about the right
management of land. So far from remaining passive and inert in the
face of nature, as British explorers asserted, eastern Shona political
authorities claimed to control the natural environment and to regulate
its exploitation by men. Each dynasty of kings or chiefs claimed that
its founders had instituted both agriculture and the rules of right
management of the environment. Power over the land lay with these
dead founders and other senior ancestors of the ruling dynasties.
They could ensure rain and fertility. Dead kings and chiefs were
embodied through living spirit mediums, who voiced the commands
of the ancestors. The mediums controlled the agricultural year,
issuing seed for the commencement of planting, regulating the use
of fire, protecting areas of woodland, conducting rain ceremonies and
first-fruits celebrations.
Livingstone complained that in central Africa there was nowhere
to be found "a grave nor a stone of remembrance"."1 But in fact
many spirit mediums had for centuries resided at the burial places
of kings and chiefs. Rulers were not buried in the ground under
commemorative memorials. Instead they were interred in caves in
the striking granite hills which are a feature of the eastern Shona
landscape. The whole hill then became a "stone of remembrance".
At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Portuguese recorded
that eastern Shona rulers went annually to mountains where their
ancestors were buried, where they mourned the dead and consulted
with the medium of one of the dead kings.12 In the late eighteenth
century it was noted that there still existed numbers of royal burial
1 David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London,

1857), pp. 213-14.
12 W. G. L. Randles, The Empire of Monomatapa (Gwelo, 1979), p. 74.

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places at each of which resided a medium regularly possess

spirit of a dead king.l3 In the middle of the nineteenth
Portuguese observer produced a detailed account of the
of the mummified corpse of a recently deceased eastern Sh
in the mountain cave where all his predecessors were inter
the twentieth century Native administrators recorded from
of places in Zimbabwe that new chiefs should, by tra
installed at the burial place of their predecessors.15 As
mid-1970s it was reported of the Watungwa people of Chib
that "every year on an appointed day . . . thousands o
assemble" at the graves of their previous chiefs on Gwama
mountain.16
In Makoni, at the time of the arrival of the missionaries, there were
several of these holy places. One was located at Chipadze hill, amid
a stone-walled settlement, where the founding Makoni ancestors
Sabarawara and Gunguwo were interred. Every year their mediums
presided over the Masingo rain ceremony at Chipadze, at which they
recited the genealogies of the ancestors.17 Subsequent chief Makonis
were interred further to the east, in a cave in Matotwe hill, "wrapped
in cattle skin". Twentieth-century oral evidence provides striking
accounts of ceremonies at Matotwe:
What happens when a chief dies is that it is announced that "a mountain has fallen".
The svikiro [spirit medium] himself travels through the night to inform those in the
chieftainship line that someone has died. When you are so informed you are not
allowed to weep, you go there silently . . . You slaughter cattle while the ... in-
laws dry the corpse. After that the body is taken and buried.18
The Mhondoro [lion-spirits of the dead chiefs] are born of the liquid that comes from
the body of the chief as it is drying. Those responsible for that work collect that
liquid in a very big pot. They carry that to Matotwe where, after the body has been
placed in the cave, the liquid is poured into a prepared "grave" situated to one side.
That is closed and the top carefully swept. The people who look after the graves
then inspect the surface every day, watching for a hole to appear there. Once the
hole appears, they announce that the Chiefs Mhondoro has come out.
The bodies themselves are seated in their places in the cave and it is the duty of
13 Ibid., p. 75.
14 Ibid., p. 63.
15 For example, J. R. Peters, "The Fall of Dindikwa, Chief Mutambara, Head of
the Vagarwe Tribe of Melsetter District", Native Affairs Department Annual, xi, i
(1974).
16 D. E. F. Gumprich, "The Watungwa People, Chibi District: Notes on Suc-
cession", Native Affairs Department Annual, xi, iii (1976), p. 283.
17 D. Abraham, "The Principality of Maungwe", Native Affairs DepartmentAnnual,
xxviii (1951).
18 N.A., AOH/54, Interview between Dawson Munjeri and Aaron Mutambirwa
Makoni, 10, 17 May 1979.

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the new Chief to provide them with new cloths. The caretakers take these cloths to
the caves, and addressing each body by name, they tell it who the cloths come from
and that he is the new chief. They then dress the body in new cloths and take the
old ones away. This is done only on the day on which the last Chief is put into the
cave. 19
A third holy place was Chitsotso "where the Makoni princesses

were traditionally buried". The first written reference to Chitsotso
was inspired by a questionnaire circulated to Native Commissioners
in 1928 by the German ethnographer, Frobenius, which among much
else asked: "Have the natives any kind of sacred place in the Bush?".
One of the administrative staff who had served in Makoni responded
by describing the sacred grove at Chitsotso, 600 yards in circumfer-
ence, protected by a fire-brake cleared all around it, in which were
buried "the female members of the royal house of Makoni". As he
explained, "the reason for burying the females in the ground is to
keep the house of Makoni fertile. The male members are placed in a
cave".20 It was the responsibility of the Makoni chiefs to slaughter
cattle for two ceremonies held annually at Chitsotso - the Rukoto
rain ceremony in early October and the first-fruits ceremony in early
February.21
These were the chief holy places of the Makoni paramounts. But
there were many other significant places of interment of dead sub-
chiefs or headmen in caves or crevices in the rocks of the district.
There were also graves of important religious leaders who had not
been chiefs but who were nevertheless remembered and revered, like
the grave and shrine-hut on the Catholic mission farm at Triashill
on the eastern border of Makoni, which belonged to "a powerful
witchdoctor called Mugochori whose spirit used to possess one of the
natives here and was consulted and offered to. There was a hut over
his grave and the trees, shrubs, etc. growing around it were never
cut".22
19 District Office, Rusape (hereafter D.O.R.), file "Makoni", "The Vaungwe:

Chiefs Makoni and Chipunza", notes made by G. Broderick from information supplied
by Roland Hatendi and Sergeant Gumunya, enclosed in Secretary, Internal Affairs,
to District Commissioner, Rusape, 11 Feb. 1975.
20 N.A., file S.138.10.1928, Native Commissioner, Wankie, to Chief Native
Commissioner, 2 Feb. 1929.
21 "Delineation of Communities, Makoni District, Entry for Chihomwe", Nov.-
Dec. 1965. Successive Makoni chiefs strove to prevent Chitsotso from falling into
white settler hands since it stood on a surveyed farm. In the end they managed to raise
enough money to buy the land collectively.
22 One example of continuing veneration of headmen's graves is an undated docu-
ment in the file "Old Papers on Chief Makoni" which I saw in the District Office,
Rusape, in 1981. The document describes the successive burial hills of the Madziwa
clan. One of these was now on the farm Dunedin, from which Madziwa's people had
(cont. on p. 165)

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Plainly, then, there were holy places in pre-colonial Mako

there also pilgrimages? It is clear that there were regular m
of people to these holy places, annually for the fixed ce
at the death and installation of chiefs, and at moments
predicament such as severe drought. It is clear that offe
regularly made to the dead or to their living representatives
mediums. Sometimes only specially appointed officials v
holy places; sometimes large crowds flocked to the masingo a
ceremonies, or the feast of the first fruits. Generally it se
pilgrimages in pre-colonial Makoni conformed to Claude
findings about the contrasts between European and tradition
pilgrimage. "In black Africa", writes Riviere, "because of th
nance of domestic cults, the multiplicity of tribal or ethnic
pilgrimage circuits occupy a strictly limited space". Instead
mental sanctuaries", African holy places are located at extra
natural phenomena. Instead of being occasions for individua
ing and supplication, African pilgrimages are a "ritual
collective life".23 But it is important to note that Shona pil
circuits were not restricted to the "strictly limited spac
chiefdom. There were in fact hierarchies of spiritual re
really severe droughts, when the power of the ancestors of t
chiefs did not avail, emissaries were sent to spirit mediums
or to the oracular cave-shrines of the High God, Mwari,
western Zimbabwe. Indeed one sub-chief in Makoni dis
Rozwi chief Chiduku, sent his own priest, the Mavudz
report about the weather and gifts of black cloth and b
far-ranging tour of intercession to mediums and priests
with the Mwari cult. In the nineteenth century the Mav
this pilgrimage every year, whether or not drought was fe
representatives of the reigning chief Makoni went with him
MISSIONARIES AND THE LAND IN MAKONI
In pre-colonial Makoni, therefore, claims to authority and to

ship of land, as well as claims to control the character of agri
(n. 22 cont.)
been evicted, "so it became too distant a place to take corpses". For the
Mugochori, see N.A., file S.138.22.1930/1931, Father H. Kaibach, Triashill, t
Commissioner, Inyanga, 11 Feb. 1931.
23 Claude Riviere, "Pelerinage dans l'Afrique traditionelle", Le Mois en
ccxliii-ccxliv (Apr.-May 1986), p. 114.
24 N.A., file S138.22.1931/1933, Native Commissioner, Rusape, to Chie
Commissioner, 29 Dec. 1930.

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production, were expressed in the idiom of the holy burial place and
the regular flow of pilgrimage. After 1890 missionaries established
themselves in Makoni as large-scale landowners, exerting a patriarchal
authority over their tenants and advocating new forms of agricultural
production as they preached the "Gospel of the Plough". Missionary
interest in pre-colonial holy places and pilgrimages was not a mere
matter of antiquarian concern or of enlightened missiology. Mission-
aries were seeking to read existing maps of power. Similarly, as they
created new Christian holy places and pilgrimages, missionaries were
laying claim to power, over men and over land. As they did so,
however, they participated in the creation of a popular Christianity.
The first resident missionaries in Makoni district were the Angli-
cans. In the early 1890s they were dependent on the favour of Chief
Chingaira Makoni and of Sub-chief Chipunza, who allowed them to
build huts near Chipadze. At this stage the missionaries were seeking
to understand and where necessary to adapt to African rituals rather
than seeking to introduce new rituals of their own. From the begin-
ning they were made aware of the importance to the people of Makoni
of the cult of the dead, of the holy place and of assemblies at it. In
1893 J. A. Walker and the black South African catechist, Frank
Siqubu, were working at "Maconi's Mission Station". One of their
most influential patrons was Chitula, "son of Chipunza, the most
important of Makoni's tributary chiefs". But in December 1893
Chitula died and preparations were made to inter him at Chipadze.
Messengers went out to every settlement within a radius of twenty
miles to summon people to the funeral. The two missionaries went
to Chipunza's kraal on the day before the interment:
Some of the dances were accompanied by the firing of guns, which is a great
institution among the Mashona . . Knowing of this custom Frank and I had
brought our rifles, and at a suitable moment we fired a few shots which pleased
them all. Chipunza called Frank and told him how pleased he was that we had come
to show our sorrow for Chitula.
The following day they observed the interment itself. They went "to
the place 'where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep' and found
it among the ruins of a very large kraal where the ancestors of this
tribe used to live". A procession of four hundred Africans attended
the body there, firing guns, lamenting and singing. The body was
taken "to the foot of a huge block of granite, almost round at the
base, so that the bearers were able to place the body completely under
the rock". Walker and Siqubu were plainly endorsing an existing
Shona holy place rather than commencing a Christian seizure of

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the landscape. But Walker ended his account with two sign
premonitory remarks:
As we went away we could only look forward to the time when these poor m
would no longer be without Christian hope and consolation. It is not yet,
trust it is coming.
It would be interesting to compare the funeral customs of these people wit
of the nations with whom they have come into contact in times long pas
hope a better knowledge of both their language and customs will enable m
so in time.25
The position had been transformed by the late 1890s. The mission
station in Makoni had been destroyed in the uprising of 1896. One
of the catechists, the Mozambican Bernard Mizeki, had been killed in
a neighbouring district. All vestiges of the early period of collaboration
between missionaries and effectively autonomous chiefs were swept
away. Chief Chingaira Makoni was executed after the storming of his
kraal. His successor owed his installation to the victorious whites and
when the Anglicans returned to Makoni they did so as the dependents
of colonial power. They were granted the two large farms of Epiphany
and St. Faith's by the British South Africa Company and became the
landlords and masters of the Africans resident upon them. Chiefs
could no longer exclude missionaries from the land reserved for
African occupation. As missionaries began to master language and
customs, so also they began to see how they could innovate their own
rituals of authority and of relationship to the land.
They were particularly interested in the parallels between Shona
holy places and the Christian cult of the saints. In November 1898,
for example, W. F. Roxburgh described how "in times of sickness,
plague, rain etc." the Shona turned "to the spirit of some famous
chief, doctor or local celebrity", making offerings at their graves. He
found that the "idea that they worship devils is a mistaken view of
their propitiary rites". In fact they made propitiation to benevolent
spirits, "just as they did among the Hebrews and still more in the
days of the medieval saints".26 In 1906 the radical missionary, Arthur
Shearly Cripps, found a Shona funeral "very fine in a barbaric way",
and felt that "it should be possible to build upon these Mashona
convictions a magnificent faith in the Communion of Saints".27
The missionaries at St. Faith's/Epiphany longed to begin such a
25 "Extracts of Letters from Mr. D. A. Walker", Mashonaland Quart. Papers, viii

(Apr. 1894), pp. 13-15.
26 Letter from W. F. Roxburgh, 3 Nov. 1898, Mashonaland Quart. Papers, xxvii
(Feb. 1899), p. 12.
27 Letter from A. S. Cripps, Mashonaland Quart. Papers, xxxix (Feb. 1902), p. 6.

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building. Edgar Lloyd, Cripps's great friend, was particularly con-

scious of how un-Christian was both the physical and the symbolic
landscape round his station at Epiphany. Epiphany lay at the foot of
Chevuti hill, which Lloyd loved to climb. But from its top "the eye
can look in vain for enclosed fields, or hamlets", the marks of a
Christianized landscape. "No village church" could be seen. Instead
one saw only boulders and rocks, some of which Lloyd was aware
were places of local pilgrimage. Lloyd was a convinced advocate of
an African peasant Christianity; he preached "the Christ of the
village"; if he had his way the Makoni landscape would be trans-
formed as hamlets and fields and Anglican village churches began
to spring up. Meanwhile Chevuti hill itself came to dominate his
imagination. In 1905 he confessed that "when we sing the old
evangelical hymn, 'Rock of Ages cleft for me', thought bears me to
the hill". Lloyd thought that Epiphany might well be called "Mission
of the Cleft Rock", but the clefts of Chevuti were laden with the
bodies of dead headmen rather than those of Christian saints. "It had
long been a place of sepulchre".28 Lloyd might well lift his eyes to
the hills in search of spiritual help, but the "prophetic or apocalyptic"
meaning which Chevuti seemed to him to possess was still a traditional
rather than a Christian one. Some symbolic initiative was needed to
make Epiphany a genuine manifestation of Christ's lordship.
Slowly Lloyd and Archdeacon Upcher at St. Faith's began to move
towards their own language of signs, sometimes with results that
seem odd enough to us. Late in 1905, for example, Upcher was able
to report that he had nine catechumens at St. Faith's, to whom he
had offered the "right hand of fellowship": "I do not shake hands
with the heathen as I believe it to be a privilege accorded a Christian
only . . . Christianity has its privileges and signs".29 In 1906, how-
ever, the opportunity arose to Christianize the sepulchre at Chevuti.
In March 1906 Upcher had baptized the aged and sick headman
at Epiphany, Mhoma, who became "Barnabas, a new man". On 25
June Mhoma died and Upcher and Lloyd had on their hands a very
valuable symbolic property - a dead headman, and a dead Christian
headman at that. Mhoma would have been buried with his prede-
cessors in a cleft on Chevuti; Barnabas was to be the first interment
in a Christian holy place:
28 Edgar Lloyd, "Mission of the Epiphany, Rusape", Mashonaland Quart. Papers,

liii (Aug. 1905), pp. 16-17.
29 "Extracts of Letters from Archdeacon Upcher", 15 Jan. 1906, Mashonaland
Quart. Papers, lvi (May 1906), pp. 6-7.

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Being the death of the first Christian, of course, there came the question
he was to be buried [wrote Upcher]. I found out he wished to be buried on
hill opposite the Mission, called Chevuti. I toiled to the top, got a gloriou
but found the cave in which his father's body lay was not on the [missio
besides it would be a terrible toil to get the body there, and we wanted a
where future Christians should be buried. They pointed out another spot
crack of a big boulder; but no-one else could be buried there.
Significant burials were to be moved from Chevuti hill down

mission station. Upcher decided on "a charming spot by som
trees". He explained to the old headman's relatives "why we
him buried there - that we might have a Christian buryin
touched several of them and said, 'When you are Christians yo
be buried there with us.' ". A grave was dug; a path from the
was made; "but the great wonder was how we should keep the
from coming on the body! For in burying in a cave this
happens; the body dries up. They wanted to make a cave
ground - the earth on the body seemed to them somethin
horrible". The body was placed on a ledge cut into the side
grave so that the earth would not fall on it. Then Upcher p
on "an old man forsaking all his heathen ways ... his restin
now in Paradise surrounded by loving spirits, and his worn-ou
waiting for a new body at the Resurrection Day".30
In his report on the burial, Upcher rejoiced in "the first Ch
grave, and that of the Headman of the village, who had lived
life here, and now had led the way to the better land".31
Upcher handed over St. Faith's/Epiphany to Lloyd in Apri
this burial loomed large in Lloyd's account of his achievement
years ago he came to an abandoned Mission Station .. .Now
is a well-built Church school, a small but growing Christi
munity . . . The old chief lies in the little Christian grave
Here at St. Faith's the signs are of good omen".32
Christian teaching on the holy place of the cemetery and
fate of the soul took a central place in the debate among
Makoni's elders when Lloyd asked for permission to open
station at the chiefs kraal early in 1909. Lloyd was supported
men of the Chipunza chiefdom, particularly by the relat
Mhoma/Barnabas. On the other side, the leading counsellors of
Ndapfunya Makoni spoke out for traditional ideas of the holy
30 Letter from Archdeacon Upcher, 25 June 1906, Mashonaland Quart. Pap

(Aug. 1906), p. 9.
31 Ibid., p. 10.
32 Edgar Lloyd, "Makoni Mission, St. Faith's", Mashonaland Quart. Pap
(Aug. 1905), pp. 16-17.

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and of the distinguished dead. Ndapfunya lived close to both Chit-

sotso, the grove of the princesses, and Matotwe, the burial hill of the
Makoni chiefs. It was all the more important to him that he carry
out his obligations to care for the traditional holy places, since his
legitimacy was challenged by those who disliked his collaboration
with the whites. Now his elders argued that Christian teaching was
"plainly unnatural", since "did it not forbid reverence to their dead,
and the customary sacrificial offering?". Lloyd replied through his
interpreter, John Kapuya:
"The teacher says," interpreted John, "that the Sanganorino Katoleke (the Catholic
Church) teaches that it is a good thing to remember in our private prayers those
who have gone before us. He says," continued John, "that the spirits cannot help
you themselves, but that there is one great Spirit who has risen from the dead who
can help you".
This somewhat less than fully elaborated doctrine of the saints, this
"rough apologia", supported as it was by the Chipunza Christians,
won the day and permission was granted for the opening of an out-
station. At the climax of the debate, as Lloyd later recounted, an
elder rose:
"Listen to me, men," he said, and they listened. "We are all men. We were born
of our mothers . . . We shall all die. Our bodies will be put in the rocks and our
spirits will go with the departed spirits. We do not know where they are going. The
teachers know more than we do. Let them have permission to gather the children
and teach them."33
St. Faith's developed on the model of missions throughout southern

Africa, "a village with Church, school and graveyard at its centre".34
Popular Christianity was taking off in Makoni. The graveyards at St.
Faith's/Epiphany began to fill; relatives of the dead came annually to
weed and tidy the graves; All Souls and All Saints Day ceremonies
were held there. In Anglican areas of Makoni district there grew up
a network of villages, each under its local teacher-evangelist and each
engaged in peasant production for the market. By 1916 the district's
Native Commissioner was telling his department's head that authority
now lay neither with the African chiefs nor with the representatives
of the colonial state:
You may not be aware to what extent this district is in the hands of Missions. Nearly
every kraal in the district is itself a Mission state . . . At Makoni's kraal and at
Tandi's kraal there are mission stations and so it goes on all over the district . ..
33 Ibid.
34 Sheila Meintjes, "Law and Nineteenth Century Natal" (History Workshop,
University of the Witwatersrand, Feb. 1984), p. 7.

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The Missions have what may be called the monopoly of the confidences
large sections of the native communities.35
By this time a folk-Catholicism had risen to rival folk-Anglic

The Native Commissioner reported that by 1916 Chief Nda
Makoni had come to think of English Anglicans and German C
almost as two distinct "nations", on the brink of war with each
other.36 Catholic popular Christianity, too, was partly based on the
graveyard. In December 1911, for example, the German Trappist/
Mariannhill missionaries at Triashill, on the eastern border of Makoni
district, blessed "the Lourdes grotto in the cemetery", thereby fusing
ideas of healing and intercession with the idea of the Christian dead.
In all the changes of control that later took place at Triashill - first
to English Jesuits and then to German Jesuits and then to Irish
Carmelites - the Lourdes grotto remained a constant feature of
veneration and masses were as constantly said for the souls of the
dead "at the gravesites at the Mission".37
But what was the character and significance of the symbolic change
that had taken place? It is instructive to compare what had happened
in Makoni with other transformations elsewhere. Thus Peter Brown
has argued that early Christian burial practice broke down hitherto
impenetrable barriers in the minds of people in the late antique
Mediterranean world, turning the despised charnel-house into a place
of dignity and power by "joining heaven and earth at the grave of a
dead human being".38 Clearly, no such profound innovations took
place in Makoni. No Shona traditionalist was likely to accuse the
missionaries and their converts, as Brown quotes Julian the Apostate
accusing the Christians of his time: "You have filled the whole world
with tombs and sepulchres". The eastern Shona had possessed for
many centuries their own ways of joining heaven and earth at the
grave.
A closer parallel with Makoni is provided by Olivia Harris's
fascinating account of missionary interaction with the cult of the dead
35 N.A., file N 3/32/1/1, Native Commissioner, Rusape, to Chief Native Com-

missioner, 12 Sept. 1916.
36 Ibid.
37 "Chronicle of Triashill", translated from the original German, in the archives of
Triashill, entry for 8 Dec. 1911. For a more recent example, see entry for 2 Nov.
1969 in the Triashill Carmelite Diary: "Large congregations participated in Masses
for the Deceased . . . Masses were offered at the gravesites at the Mission, St. Nicholas
and St. Joachim, the people prepared the graveyards beforehand".
38 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (London, 1981), ch. 1.

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among the Bolivian Laymi.39 The Laymi traditionally embalmed

royals in caves, the mummies of the ancestors being "identified
closely with the land they had once worked". The Spanish destroyed
the cave shrines and burned the venerated mummies in the village
squares. "Control over the dead was a cornerstone of Christian policy
. . . The village church had become the only acceptable place to be
buried; part of a wider colonial policy to concentrate the indigenous
population into large villages".40 The Laymi at first responded by
secretly disinterring the dead from Christian cemeteries in order to
free them from the torment of being bound to the earth. Later they
became reluctantly reconciled to the village cemetery, but it remained
a place to be avoided by the living. Harris argues that now there was
no connection between the dead and indigenous political authority,
the Laymi could not overcome their fear of the unchecked power
given by death. They did not believe that Christian souls went to
heaven but feared their continued presence and possible malevolence.
All Souls and All Saints became crucial rituals of transition at which
the dead were separated from the living. These festivals came at the
onset of the rains and the beginnings of planting. "The initiation of
the agricultural cycle is, then, marked by the 'socialization' of the
graveyard which at all other times is a place to be avoided with fear
and repugnance".41
This is an account rich with suggestions for interpretation of the
eastern Shona case. But before these are explored, a crucial contrast
must be noted. Catholic Christianity in Bolivia was enforced by the
colonial state which did all that it could to destroy traditional religion.
In Makoni the state protected the rights of traditionalists and even at
times actively fostered the cult of their holy places. (In the early
1930s, for example, when the depression threatened to destroy mis-
sion-backed peasant production for the market and hence to create
social instability, the Native Department threw its weight behind
traditional authority and subsistence ideologies. Native Com-
missioners wrote to all white landlords, including missionaries, asking
them to allow pilgrimages to the graves of dead chiefs situated on
their farms.) In Makoni the rites of Chitsotso and Matotwe are
observed to this day. Of course, the loss of real political power by
39 Olivia Harris, "The Dead and the Devils among the Bolivian Laymi", in M.
Bloch and Jonathan Parry (eds.), Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge,
1982).
40 Ibid., p. 49.
41 Ibid., p. 56.

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chiefs, the alienation of land to whites, the rise of market prod

and of mission-educated African entrepreneurs - all comb
subvert pre-colonial ideas about the essential relationships b
the cult of the dead and traditional modes of perceiving the la
and managing the land. Nevertheless adherence to mission Chr
ity was voluntary rather than coerced. This gave missiona
Makoni more rather than less genuine authority than Catholic
had exercised in Bolivia. Makoni Christian communities were com-
munities of adherence, both to a popular Christianity and to peasant
production. A real authority resided with the heads of these communi-
ties, both white and black, and this authority was manifestly connec-
ted to the cult of the dead in its Christian manifestation. Hence there
was much less resistance and much more commitment to the cult of
the Christian holy places than Harris found among the Laymi.
Some disjunctions between Christian and traditional practice were
productive of the sort of tensions Harris describes, but others served
to dramatize the distinction between the new community of Christian
adherence and its predecessors. Thus one distinction was very deliber-
ately made. Traditionally the bodies of chiefs and headmen were
interred quite separately from those of commoners. "When a chief is
buried on a kopje [hill]", one of the Native Department antiquarians
tells us, "no one else may be buried there".42 But Upcher refused
to bury headman Mhoma/Barnabas "in the crack of a big boulder"
on Chevuti precisely because "no one else could be buried there".
In mission cemeteries headmen and commoners were buried together.
The democracy of the Christian graveyard emphasized that all Christ-
ians were members of a new elect group, all leaders of a new
society. It also emphasized that Christian fellowship was the basis of
community rather than kin relations.
In placing their cemeteries at the centre of the mission village the
missionaries were deliberately seeking to transform attitudes to the
dead. However important some burial places may have been to the
eastern Shona, the idea of bringing the dead in among the dwellings
of the living struck them as unnatural and dangerous. Shona graves
were always situated well away from human habitations. The body
was carried with its head pointing towards the homestead, but when
the grave was reached it was turned about several times so as to
confuse the spirit should it wish to return and trouble the household.
The anthropologist Michael Bourdillon tells us that:
42 R. J. Powell, "Notes on Burial Customs in the Bushu Reserve", Native Affairs
Department Annual, xxxiii (1956), p. 7.

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A grave always carries with it the danger associated with death, but it also has a
sacred character . . Graves are always avoided . . and mingled with the fear of
death is a fear of occult powers which are believed to linger around any grave . . .
Mishaps may be attributed to the proximity of graves.43
The inhabitants of mission villages now had to live in close proximity

to the graves of the Christian dead, and regular ceremonies held in
the cemetery emphasized that it was a place of solace rather than a
place of danger.
These contrasts were deliberate. But there was one very important
contrast with Shona belief and practice which was, at least at first,
inadvertent. Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalfe, in their com-
parative ethnography of mortuary ritual, emphasize the key signifi-
cance for cultures all over the world of rites of transition after burial:
"The corpse is feared because, until its reconstruction in the beyond
is complete, part of its spiritual essence remains behind, where it
menaces the living with the threat of further death".44 The eastern
Shona possessed well-developed rites of transition. Immediately after
burial a "white shadow . .. which is eventually to become the
mudzimu or ancestral spirit ... is believed to be somehow in or about
the grave". The spirit is thought of as dangerously unpredictable and
is not mentioned in the prayers of the family or community addressed
to the spirit elders. As Bourdillon writes, "the full status of family
spirit guardian is acquired only at a later funerary rite, the rite of
settling the spirit". Often taking place at the grave itself, this rite
involved libations of beer, requests for the spirit to return to its home
and celebrations at the homestead to welcome the spirit. Thereafter
the spirit is believed to be on friendly terms with the living; is
mentioned in prayers; can possess mediums. The dead man's prop-
erty can then be distributed and his widows passed on to his
brothers.45
Plainly Upcher had no intention that any of this should happen at
the cemetery at St. Faith's/Epiphany. Anglican widows were not to
43 Michael Bourdillon, The Shona Peoples (Gwelo, 1976), p. 237. There certainly
were continuing tensions over the mission village cemeteries. One example comes as
late as 23 May 1950 in an entry from the St. Barbara's Journal, which is now at
Triashill. The diarist gives an example of "the superstitions of our people". A two-
month-old child died in the mission hospital. The missionary priest began a funeral
service in church but no one attended except an African nun. No one followed the
body to the cemetery: "The child is from afar, people here will have nothing to do
with its burial. They fear the spirit. Father speaks of the corporal works of mercy".
44 Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalfe, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology
of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge, 1979), p. 63.
45 Bourdillon, Shona Peoples, pp. 242, 259.

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be inherited by their husband's brothers. There were

mediums for the Christian dead. The spirits of the Chri
moreover, were not to be ranked or listed with the ancestr
of the past. They were to sacralize the beginning of a
St. Faith's Christians were not only prohibited from car
"settling" rites for their own dead, but also prohibited fro
pation in the rites organized by their non-Christian kin. Bu
the other disjunctions with Shona practice, this one was no
the provision of Christian alternatives. African converts cou
to the democracy of the mission cemetery or to the i
Christian dead as a source of benevolence at the centre of t
But they could not respond to Christian rites of transition
simple reason that they were not offered any.
Anglican and Catholic missionaries alike regarded Christia
as a rite complete and final in itself. Upcher preached that
Barnabas had gone straight to paradise. There was no n
purgatory. All Souls and All Saints, though celebrated, were
as days of commemoration only and certainly not as days of
with the spirits of the dead. This poverty of twentieth-centu
Christian notions of transition meant that converts somehow had to
supply their own rituals. Some secretly attended the graves of their
dead in the mission cemeteries and carried out "settling" rites there;
others asked non-Christian relatives to carry out such rites on their
behalf; others interpreted All Souls ceremonies as constituting a
further stage of the funerary rites and All Saints ceremonies as
entering their dead into the lists of the Christian community ancestors.
This creativity on the part of African Christians, added to the
calculated innovations of the missionaries, overcame the weaknesses
of mission Christian theology and practice. Despite continued ten-
sions and despite a widespread interaction of Christian and non-
Christian ideas about death, burial and the spirit,46 the mystical
46 In the 1960s Marshall Murphree carried out a survey in Mtoko district, north-
east Zimbabwe, questioning people about their ideas on the fate of the soul. Among
non-Christians 56 per cent "responded with the Christian concept that a man's spirit
'goes to heaven' after his death". On the other hand, 16 per cent of Methodists and
22 per cent of Catholics "stated that a person became a mudzimu [ancestor spirit] at
death". Murphree tells a story which graphically illustrates possible interaction. A
devout Catholic died and was buried in the Christian cemetery. Thereafter his
granddaughter Agnes, also a Catholic, fell ill and it was finally diagnosed that her
illness was caused by her grandfather's spirit, seeking to speak through her. Through
his granddaughter the spirit commanded: "I want you to dig me up. The grave you
have dug me is too narrow and my head is twisted and uncomfortable. You must dig
the grave wider and longer. And put all my clothes in the grave!". But while
(cont. on p. 176)

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geography of Makoni steadily changed. Outraged by the "demo-

cratic" character of the Christian cemetery and by its connection with
an entrepreneurial exploitation of the countryside, the major chiefs
remained aloof from Christianity. It was not until the 1940s that a
chief Makoni was baptized as an Anglican - and even he was interred
after his death in Matotwe cave. But many headmen came to abandon
the old funerary rites and the old ecological ceremonies, not only on
mission farms but also in the Reserves. In 1965 the Rhodesia Front
government, seeking to counter African nationalism by reviving
"tribal" culture and institutions, instructed the district administrators
of Makoni to "delineate" and describe traditional communities. Care-
ful attention was paid to whether and where ceremonies for rain and
first fruits were carried out. The report revealed that the African
Reserves in Makoni were broken up into Christian and non-Christian
ritual zones.
Headman Gandanzara, in Makoni Reserve, was found to have "no
spiritual functions of traditional nature; the people are all Christians".
Headman Nyangombe, in Chiduku Reserve, held"no spiritual func-
tions, as all the people are either Methodists or Mapostle [Apos-
tolics]". The people and elders of the area around Chitsotso, on the
other hand, were angry at Chief Zambe Makoni, "for failing to live
in the traditional home and failing to carry out the spiritual duties
allied to his position".47 Headman Madziwa of Makoni Reserve was
also found to carry out no sacrifices at the graves of his ancestors and
no ceremonies for rain. In the neo-traditionalist atmosphere of the
1960s, the Madziwa elders feared that this would lose them govern-
ment recognition. So they drew up a document entitled "Tidyings of
Graveyards" in which they described the offerings once made at the
cave graves of a long line of Madziwa ancestors going back several
hundreds of years. "Reasons for neglecting the ceremony", they
explained, "was because of church beliefs. Our womenfolk were
made to believe that it was a sin to observe the ceremony".48 There
were some striking correlations between zones of Christian ritual and
zones of entrepreneurial peasant production.49
(n. 46 cont.)
communicating in this thoroughly unorthodox way, the spirit also asked that the
Catholic Brothers of All Souls should attend the reburial and sing prayers for him.
M. Murphree, Christianity and the Shona (London, 1969), pp. 134-5.
47 "Delineation of Communities, Makoni District, Entries for Nyangombe and
Chihomwa", Nov.-Dec. 1965.
48 D.O.R., file "Old Papers on Chief Makoni", "Tidyings of Graveyards", n.d.
49 Terence Ranger, "Religions and Rural Protests in Makoni District, Zimbabwe,
1900-1980", in J. M. Bak and G. Benecke (eds.), Religion and Rural Revolt (Manches-
(cont. on p. 177)

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ANGLICANISM AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PILGRIMAGE
The development of mission graveyards as Christian hol

contributed to taking hold of the land. But the establishm
mission graveyards was certainly not going to be enough in i
establish symbolic domination of the Makoni landscape. F
beginning the Anglican clergy, and particularly Edgar Lloyd
friend Cripps, thought naturally in terms of pilgrimage. They
naturally in such terms partly because the terminology of pi
came along with the rest of their romantic Anglo-Catholicism
they also wished to develop pilgrimage quite deliberately in o
set up flows of African Christians along the key latitudes of
mystical geography.
At the opening of the twentieth century the Anglicans
prospect of instituting a pilgrimage to the shrine of a martyr
Admittedly, the Mozambican catechist, Bernard Mizeki, h
killed in the 1896 risings. But as Lloyd wrote later in a retros
St. Faith's almost miraculous emergence from its "early y
waiting, of weariness, of disaster", "Bernard lay dead in an u
grave".50 In 1909 Archdeacon Foster recorded what had com
seen as Mizeki's martyrdom and what had come to be believed
the marvels that had attended it. But he also recorded the church's
incapacity to commemorate it: "No trace of his body was ever
discovered. He was our first actual martyr in the Mission. Some of
the natives say that a strange and unaccountable light was seen that
night on the kopje where he is supposed to have died. We do not
know what it was".51
In the absence of a martyr's shrine, Makoni pilgrimages had to be
directed to other objects. The first reference to the idea comes in a
letter from Upcher in January 1906. The feast of Epiphany had been
celebrated at the mission which bore its name by a march of a hundred
African Christian "pilgrims", who visited in turn "each of the four
kraals on the farm". It was an undramatic sort of pilgrimage but a
necessary one to begin with. The residents of the mission farm had
to be turned into a single sacred community by this literal linking
(n. 49 cont.)
ter, 1985); Terence Ranger, "Religion, Development and African Christian Identity:
The Case of Zimbabwe", Neue Zeitschrift fur Missionswissenschaft, xlii (1986).
50 United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Archives, Tufton Street,
Westminster (hereafter U.S.P.G.), Southern Rhodesian Annual Reports Ser., Edgar
Lloyd, Annual Report, St. Faith's, 1931.
51 H. N. Foster, "Letter from Archdeacon of Matabeleland", 21 June 1909,
Mashonaland Quart. Papers, lxix (Aug. 1909), pp. 8-9.

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before the mission station could itself become an object of pilgrimage

to people living elsewhere.
But soon the "pilgrimages" took a different form as people from
all the Makoni out-stations poured in at feast-days to the mother
church at St. Faith's:
This Christmas has been a glad time [wrote Lloyd's wife, Elaine, early in 1908].
We have been having weeks of tropical rains, but nothing was going to deter the
Makoni native from spending a good Christmas under the flag of St. Faith!
John, the Catechist of the Mission of the Epiphany, crossed the now-swollen
river, with his large band .. .Matthew and Matthias . .. brought their contingent
from afar ... At noon all assembled on the veld outside the church, and a procession
was formed, headed by the banners of the Missions of Epiphany and St. Faith's.
Singing "On Jordan's Bank", all moved down to the river, where rocks form a
natural front. It was a striking scene. On the further bank stood the mass of the
heathen, on the eastern the Priests and Catechumens ... At our feet was the
baptismal stream . . . Later in the day a Church Council was held. The heathen
were invited to sit around and listen to the rules drawn up for the guidance of the
little Christian community . . . These heathen must surely have been dimly aware
of a power now amongst them, to be reckoned with in the future.52
At this Christmas festival of 1907 only three catechists marched

contingents of "pilgrims" to St. Faith's. But soon a grass-roots
Christian enthusiasm seized Makoni. By Easter 1915 there were
twenty-four such contingents, each marching behind its own banner;
by Christmas 1916 there were thirty-four. "Never Temple Pilgrim
or Crusader arrived more gladly", wrote Edgar Lloyd at Easter 1914:
"Some had come forty or fifty miles, from the more distant out-
stations of the Chiduku, Makoni, Weya and Wedza Reserves".53
Where once pilgrimage had brought together the people of one
mission farm it now brought together the Anglican people of a whole
district.
But this pilgrimage strategy could not have worked so well had it
not spoken very directly to the interests of the chief allies of the
missionaries, the teacher-evangelists who were in many ways the real
creators of Anglican popular Christianity. Many of these men were
in a real sense self-appointed. They were often returned labour-
migrants, who had acquired Christian literacy at the mines, and who
did not wish to submit to chiefs or headmen or family elders on their
return to the countryside. They aspired to found their own villages,
and they attracted people to them by setting up a church and school.
52 "Extracts of Letters from Archdeacon Upcher", 9 Jan. 1906, Mashonaland Quart.

Papers, Iv (Feb. 1906), p. 1; Elaine Lloyd, "With the Women of St. Faith's Mission,
Rusape", Mashonaland Quart; Papers, lxiv (May 1908), pp. 17-18.
53 Edgar Lloyd, "Easter at St Faith's", Mashonaland Quart. Papers, lxxxix (Aug.
1914), p. 13.

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Jacob at Tande, for instance, "began work there at his own

(he lives there) and worked as a teacher for a year witho
was noted in 1911 that he had moved away from his ho
because of its drunkenness and that it was probable that "a
village will grow up around him".54 In 1914 it was rep
Matthias at Mutenteruru that "a whole village" had sprung
him.55 What gave such men authority was their control of
church and school, their mastery of new skills, and also th
to the legitimating centre at St. Faith's.
Edgar Lloyd did all he could to make St. Faith's itself an a
ately indigenous focal point for this new mystical geograph
of the out-stations had its own banner, bearing a totemic a
the mother church building at St. Faith's was built by Afri
African style:
I saw while I was in South Africa [wrote Archdeacon Cameron in 19
more impressive than evensong at St. Faith's . . . Canon Lloyd has t
they are not absolutely opposed to Christianity, to christianize the nat
Above the arches of the nave are banners of various colours bearing rep
of the different tribal totems - an eland, a leopard, a wild cat, or a m
over each a verse of the Benedicite.56
When the teacher-evangelists brought their followers to St. Faith's,

each group behind its own banner, it was as if each brought an
essential component to the totality of the symbolic community. Each
contingent arrived "singing at the top of their voices" and had "a
good march round to show itself off'; once inside the church for
evensong, the catechists "in white cassocks with red sashes" carried
their banners "in procession round the Church". On the festive day
"there is tremendous marching and singing all round the veld near
the church", each contingent singing its own different song simul-
taneously.57
Aware as they were of the quasi-regal state kept by some of the
teacher-evangelists in their own villages, the missionaries came to feel
that this sort of "pilgrimage" to St. Faith's had become too much an
occasion for "showing off'. For the patronal festival, St. Faith's Day
1917, they planned something more spiritually significant:
54 "Our Trek to Wremingham", Mashonaland Quart. Papers, lxxvii (Aug. 1911),

p. 19.
55 Elaine Lloyd, "Our Trek", Mashonaland Quart. Papers, lxxxvii (Feb. 1914), p.
14.
56 Archdeacon Cameron's report, Transvaal and Southern Rhodesia (Oct. 1929), p.
141.
57 H. Lowndes, "My Dear Children", Letters for the Children, lxxx (Nov. 1915),
pp. 3-4.

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We hope to gather the folk in for a Mission [wrote Upcher] ... We want the people
to make the journey as a pilgrimage- so as to give the journey a religious
signification, an act of faith. Prayers to be said and hymns sung on the journey . . .
to remind us of our pilgrimage through this world, where we have no continuing
city. The sight of many gathered together will be a strength, so many of one mind,
the inspiration of numbers, the column of prayer and praise rising up from a
multitude.58
But during the three days of the mission it was once again the
teacher-evangelists who played the central role. They spoke like "real
prophets" and "with such fire". The climax was once again a "Choral
Evensong, with all the banners and everyone marching round the
Church, it was very stirring".59
These Anglican pilgrimages in Makoni were plainly - in the words
Riviere uses about pilgrimages in traditional African religion - local
in focus, occupying "strictly limited space", and a ritualization of
Christian "collective life". Once again, they did not make a break
with pre-Christian ideas and forms. Like pre-colonial pilgrimages
they served to dramatize and validate authority. Yet like the mission
cemetery, they were legitimating and subversive at one and the same
time. The radical element in Lloyd's pilgrimages is illuminated by
reference to the pilgrimage patterns developed in Charter district by
his friend Arthur Shearly Cripps. Cripps called his central station
Maronda Mashanu - "The Five Wounds" - after the emblem of
a rural revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace. This was, wrote Cripps
"an emblem rather of sacrifice than success"; a badge for pilgrim
crusaders against pagan materialism and also against the soulless rule
of the capitalist Chartered Company.60 The church at Maronda
Mashanu was modelled on traditional Shona stone-walling - "th
church-cum-school building is unique", wrote a schools inspector
disparagingly, "and is an ambitious but poor repliqua of Zimbabwe.
It savours highly of Anglo-Catholicism".61 Similar structures sprang
up at out-stations all over Cripps's district.
But even these structures did not seem to Cripps suitable as a focus
58 "Extracts of Letters from Archdeacon Upcher", 9 Sept. 1917, Southern Rhodesia

Quart. Papers, cii (Nov. 1917), p. 5.
59 "Extracts of Letters from Archdeacon Upcher", St. Faith's Day 1917, Southern
Rhodesian Quart. Papers, cii (Nov. 1917), p. 7.
60 Arthur Shearly Cripps, Bay Tree Country (London, 1913). For a discussion o
Cripps's views on pilgrimage and his assessment of Edgar Lloyd's work at St. Faith's
see Terence Ranger, "Literature and Political Economy: Arthur Shearly Cripps and
the Makoni Labour Crisis of 1911", Jl. Southern African Studies, ix (Oct. 1982), pp
33-53.
61 N.A., file S.138.17.1930/1933, Inspector of Schools, Salisbury circuit, to Direc-
tor, Native Development Department, 6 Aug. 1930.

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of pilgrimage. It was the landscape itself that seized him. Like

he lifted his eyes to the hills, though it did not worry Cripps
they might be stuffed with dead chiefs. Cripps and Lloy
their own annual pilgrimage, walking towards each other from
stations until they met on the "holy" Mount Wedza. And
with his usual lack of tact, sent one of his poems to the new b
Edward Paget, in December 1925, making his feelings about
cathedral completely clear:
Seek not as Pilgrim alien Salisbury:
Her pseudo mother Church, her outland rites;
Whereat no Native guest will welcom'd be:
Hail these e'erlasting Hills, which head-bare stand
As Christ's Cathedral in Mashonaland.62
CATHOLICISM AND PILGRIMAGE
Although German Catholics and English Anglicans in M

garded each other with suspicion and dislike, their pilgrimag
had a good deal in common. Just as Lloyd and Cripps ca
themselves as men of the countryside, in opposition to the m
tal colonial Anglicanism of the towns, so the Trappist/M
fathers in eastern Zimbabwe saw themselves as opponen
Jesuits who controlled Catholic missions in the rest of the
They expressed this opposition by fostering among the
Shona converts an intensely local popular Catholicism. Th
in the local dialect - chiManyika; they taught local his
they explored local ideas of the holy place and of pilgrimag
The Catholic mission farms of Triashill and St. Barbara's consti-
tuted jointly a huge block of land, which needed a good deal more
practical and symbolic endeavour to turn into a community than had
St. Faith's/Epiphany. Moreover this Catholic land was far from
markets or good roads, cut off by the mountainous hills of eastern
Makoni. While Lloyd could seek to produce peasant families, with
male labour invested in production for the market, Triashill/St.
Barbara's had to cope with most of its Christian men being away for
long periods in the towns and mines of Rhodesia and South Africa.
It was even more essential than it had been at St. Faith's to turn the
great Catholic farm into holy ground. Pilgrimages at Triashill/St.
Barbara's took the form of journeys within and around the farm, or
62 N.A., file ANG 1/1/9, poem enclosed in Cripps to Edward Paget, 16 Dec. 1925.
63Terence Ranger, "Poverty and Prophetism: Religious Movements in the Makoni
District" (seminar paper, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, Oct. 1981).

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of returns to sacred home ground by the men working in the cities

of the south.
Of course, Triashill was not made into popular Catholic territory
merely by symbolic innovation. The fathers used their authority as
landowners. Thus in October 1911 Father Fleischer sent to the Native
Commissioner, Inyanga, draft regulations "to make a Catholic farm
of this farm here". These laid down that no polygamists could remain
as tenants; that "no Protestant families will be allowed to settle on
the farm"; and that "pagan families which show themselves totally
averse to Christianity for two years" should also have to leave. He
enquired whether "should anyone . . . refuse to leave I am entitled
to use force or burn the huts".64 The grove around the grave of
Mugochori, a place of traditional pilgrimage, was cut down. Yet the
fathers never achieved coercive control over the people living on their
land. The colonial state did not support evictions on moral or religious
grounds and it deplored the destruction of Mugochori's grove. In
any case the people themselves were too numerous and resilient to
be bullied. "The people do not take very seriously any admonitions
regarding the abolition of abuses", wrote Father Brosig in 1939:
"They nod their heads and say 'yes' and turn around and speak among
themselves: 'Let him talk, soon comes another in his place.'".65
The creation of popular Catholicism depended considerably on the
voluntary interaction of priests and people in the creation of a new
mystical geography.
The three hills which gave Triashill its name were soon appropri-
ated, one becoming GomoraMaria, another GomoraJoseph.66 A large
cross was erected on Chiramba, the highest hill on the farm. Pilgrim-
ages were made to the chapel of Our Lady of Dolours on the edge of
the escarpment. The venerations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century Catholic peasant Europe were introduced - Lourdes grottos,
Fatima devotions, ceremonies and processions for the veneration of
Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The European Marian apparitions, after
all, had sacralized a peasant countryside in the midst of urban and
industrial growth. The climax of all this came in August 1950 when
the statue of the Virgin from the Fatima shrine in Portugal was
brought to Triashill/St. Barbara's for a two-week stay, during which
64 N.A., file N 3/5/1/1, Father Fleischer to Native Commissioner, Inyanga, 29 Oct.
1911.
65 Jesuit Archives, Mount Pleasant, Harare, Box 209, Father Brosig to Father
Johanny, 9 Feb. 1939.
66 Patrick Denis Chiwara, "Sister Ida Mwatse, Triashill Mission, Manicaland", a
transcribed interview now at Triashill.

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flocks of "pilgrims", including many male migrant labourers f

towns, crowded to venerate it. The statue was carried in proc
accompanied by flags and green branches, and taken across th
to Our Lady of Fatima out-school. In these ways, all the r
of popular Catholicism were deployed to make Triashill/St. Ba
itself holy and a sufficient object of pilgrimage.67
In all this the pioneer African Catholic leaders played a prom
role. But while the missionary appropriation of the land emp
the emergence of a new order, the converts developed an oral t
which laid stress on local continuities of sacrality. One of the
nuns of the local order of the Little Children of Our Bles
was Martha Changunda, granddaughter of the Chief Mand
had greeted the priests, who became Sister Rita. Her testimon
the very first Catholic holy places at Triashill emphasized the
with the traditional history of Mandeya's people. The first Tr
party to arrive at the farm in a preliminary and abortive recon
in 1896 had carved a cross on a prominent rock. According to
Rita:
It had been a place of Indaba, a meeting place ... In front of the rock
chair, made of slabs of granite, which was used by Paramount Chief Ma
When the people passed this chair they had to leave something as a sign o
. .. This chair was in place long before the white man came, the cust
traditional.
Similarly, the first Trappist camp had been made in Ninga's cave,
the secret hiding-place of Sub-chief Changunda's people: "As long
as the Trappists had remained at Triashill, a yearly pilgrimage was
made to the rock and the cave every Trinity Sunday. She remembers
that the brothers used to go into the cave with lanterns".68
Such a fusion of "tradition" and Catholic pilgrimage was so success-
ful in taking hold of the land that when in the 1970s guerrillas
of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army
entered Makoni district and sought to gain legitimate access to its
holy hiding-places and strongholds, they worked in most places with
the spirit medium guardians of chiefly burial shrines, but at Triashill/
67 "Chronicle of Triashill", entry for 11 Dec. 1911; "Sisters' Chronicle, Triashill",

entry for 30 Apr. 1936; "Historia Domus, Triashill", entries for 19 Mar., 30 Apr.,
13 July 1936; "Carmelite Diary, Triashill", entries for 1, 2 Nov. 1969; "St. Barbara's
Journal", entries for 22 Apr. 1934, Mar. 1943, 28 Feb. 1947, 4, 11, 13, 20 Aug. 1950;
"Historia Domus, St. Killian's, Makoni", entries for 3 Oct. 1958, 4 Sept. 1960. With
the exception of the "Historia Domus, Triashill", which is in the Jesuit Archives in
Harare, all the other diaries are at the stations to which they relate.
68 Jesuit Archives, Box 196, Hylda Richards, "Return to Triashill, 1908-1936"
(unpublished MS.), pp. 1J2, 3.

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St. Barbara's worked instead with the Irish Catholic priest-in-charge

and his catechists, who were felt to be the only men able to legitimate
access to the holy places of popular Catholicism.69
PILGRIMAGE AND THE CENTRALIZING CHURCH
Pilgrimages, the creation of holy places, the desire for scho

publication of local histories in missionary chiManyika,
roots of the authority of African evangelists - all these pro
intense local loyalty to their form of popular Christiani
Makoni Anglicans and Catholics. It is clear that African
felt that the land had been taken hold of in their name and not in the
name of a remote hierarchical church. In 1929, for instance, the
Jesuits succeeded in displacing their hated Trappist/Mariannhill rivals
from eastern Zimbabwe and Jesuit priests arrived to administer
Triashill/St. Barbara's. They were at once denounced as alien inter-
lopers into the sacred land, particularly by Triashill labour migrants
in Johannesburg who had come to feel a proprietary interest in local
popular Catholicism. "We do not want Jesuits at all", wrote Triashill
Christians working on the Rand. "We say that the Jesuits came to
despise us. They came to despise us we black people and the authority
to come to us where did they get it from? Triashill is ours, it does
not belong to whites".70
The chief spokesman of the protestors was no secular nationalist
but the visionary and devout Patrick Kwesha, of all folk-Catholics
the most soaked in Marian veneration and the most familar with the
symbolic language of popular Catholicism. When the Jesuits could
not after all be dislodged from Triashill, Kwesha in Johannesburg
turned to dream of creating his own centre of pilgrimage, to the east
of Triashill, in the valley of Samanga. Kwesha planned a systematic
symbolic appropriation of Samanga by his projected black missionary
order, the African Franciscans of the Family of St. Joseph:
[It] would mean the opening of the world's second Lourdes, or Lourdes of Africa
... a centre of religious civilisation, but all to be conducted by African priests,
brothers and sisters ... We also want a grotto or a huge crucifix somewhere round
our Convent . . Because, my dear brethren, our places must be very religious to
69 Terence Ranger, "Holy Men and Rural Communities in Zimbabwe, 1970-1980",

in W. J. Sheils (ed.), The Church and War (Oxford, 1983), pp. 443-61.
70 Jesuit Archives, Box 195, Adminst. Apostolic to Deleg. Apostolic, 18 Mar. 1931,
enclosing a translation of a letter from Triashill Christians on the Rand.

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attract our brethren just as the angels in heaven are attracted by the sigh
· . .And your places shall be resorts places for the whole world.71
Kwesha's black missionary order never developed, but in t

the persistence of Triashill's popular Catholicism eroded even J
rigour. After the Second World War the Jesuits handed ov
eastern Shona stations to Irish Carmelites with whom the old
co-operation in symbolic innovation was soon resumed. K
returned from Johannesburg and worked closely with the Car
Father Roche, the two men itinerating the country east of Tr
When we took over [says the Carmelite Peter Turner] we were accepted wi
reserve at St. Barbara's because of Patrick Kwesha's influence. But Fath
Roche came to strike up a close alliance with Patrick and would do nothing
consulting him. In fact they were astonishingly alike in temperament and asp
and they both had a deep Marian devotion. They battled against Anglic
Methodists in the Hondi valley and in Samanga. They found a particular
Samanga, Masamiki rock, where they thought they saw Mary in profile, whic
called Madonna rock. Roche would cry and laugh with the people and h
travel for miles with men like Patrick Kwesha, men of little education b
shrewd and devout.72
Yet pilgrimages and the appropriation of rocks and caves as Chris-

tian holy places did not always operate to confirm local popular
Christianities. In other parts of the world bishops, archbishops,
princes and popes had sought to generalize and canalize pilgrimage
flows so that they sustained the authority of the nation state or of the
national episcopate or of the papacy. A similar development took
place within twentieth-century Zimbabwean Anglicanism.
When Edward Paget became bishop of Mashonaland in 1925 he
set about modernizing Anglicanism. This meant training a new
generation of African teachers and clergy, educated to professional
standards, and putting them in the places of the old teacher-evangel-
ists. The new men were trained in diocesan institutions and were to
have no local connections with the schools and churches to which
they were posted. Many long-standing out-stations were closed
down in a process of rationalization and economy. Paget accepted
government grants and government control over education, thereby
privileging centralized curricula and standards over local traditions.
Such a policy inevitably led to a confrontation with men like Cripps
and Lloyd, who had given their lives to the local, village church
71 Red notebook, "Wrote 1943 Johannesburg: By Patrick Kwesha". This, together

with other papers and notebooks written by Kwesha, are now in the custody of his
brother, Augustine Kwesha, Manyika Communal Area, Zimbabwe.
72 Interview between Terence Ranger and Father Peter Turner, Umtali, Zimbabwe,
14 Mar. 1981.

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and to an alliance with the old teacher-evangelists in substantial

independence from the state.
Cripps would make no compromise. He resigned in 1926 in protest
against acceptance of government education grants but returned in
the early 1930s to work as an independent missionary in his old
Charter district. In a real sense there were two Anglicanisms in
Charter in the 1930s-Cripps representing local, popular Anglican-
ism and the priest-in-charge of the official Wremingham parish
representing central authority and orthodoxy. The clash came to a
head in 1933 when a priest from Nyasaland was put in charge of
Wremingham and "proceeded to impose what he declared to be a
proper order on the Anglican Mission churches of the Charter Dis-
trict. He insisted that individual church assessments for each African
station be paid promptly and .. .actually burnt down several of the
mission stations which were delinquent in their assessments".73
Cripps witnessed with prophetic fury his holy places desecrated and
his stone-built Christian Zimbabwes put to the torch.
Paget's confrontation with Lloyd was less dramatic but just as
significant. Lloyd stayed on at St. Faith's, audibly grumbling that
Paget showed no realization of the importance of the local church.
He publicly accused Paget of sacrificing the needs of rural African
work in order to sustain work among whites, and of seeking to
"curtail the liberty of free prophesying". As Lloyd's wife noted in
her journal in September 1933, they believed that Paget had "no
sympathy for the older generation of missionaries . .. Give youthful
inexperienced men the responsible jobs seems the craze, promote
them over men (of black or white skins) whether they know anything
of the language or the history or the racial intricacies of the natives
here or not".74
For his part, Paget was immune to the charms of St. Faith's and
of its popular Anglicanism. In June 1933 he visited St. Faith's to take
part in a typical local ritual - the dedication of a memorial bridge
across the river between Epiphany and St. Faith's. The ceremony of
dedication, wrote Lloyd characteristically, appeared "but to express
more articulately what the land itself yearns to utter". Lloyd had
devised a Christian version of the traditional custom whereby a
traveller placed a stone on a heap of such offerings. The new bridge
bore the inscription "Traveller, Whosoever Thou Art, When Thou
73 D. V. Steere, God's Irregular, Arthur Shearly Cripps: A Rhodesian Epic (London,
1973), p. 137.
74 N.A., file ANG 16/11/1, Olive Lloyd, circular letter, 23 Sept. 1933.

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Crossest This Bridge, Place a Stone to the Glory of the

God". Lloyd rubbed the message in: "In the old days the wis
humanity of the Church made pagan observation and rit
Christian practices".75 Paget did not think that "pagan obse
had been adequately subsumed. "The atmosphere at St.
none too good", he wrote in September 1933. "A Sister,
not work at St. Faith's but paid a visit there, said to me
day, apropos of the Devil's hold in this country, 'I've never
Devil so much as at St. Faith's!' ".76 So Paget set out to crea
fully Christian pilgrimage centre, not for a single parish o
but for the whole of the diocese. He was able to turn to his
a "discovery" made in the Marandellas district, which
Makoni to the west.
As we have seen, the martyred Bernard Mizeki had no known
burial place which could have been made the focus of a pilgrimage.
But now early in 1933 Father E. W. J. Crane:
discovered the actual floor of the hut where he was mortally wounded . . . We found
the mud floor quite hard and in almost perfect condition . . . There was a slate
pencil which was quite clean and there were the remains of a Huntley and Palmers
Biscuit Box which no doubt Bernard used for placing his pencils and chalk.
In a real sense these homely articles, which might have been thought
unpromising material for veneration, could readily have been disco-
vered at any time in the past thirty-five years, since the site of
Bernard's hut at Chief Mangwende's was well enough known. Never-
theless, as Crane recorded, "to us who came upon this holy ground,
these discoveries moved us to wonder. And so we were commissioned
by the Bishop to erect a concrete platform over the floor and to built
an altar upon the platform".77
Paget indeed seized upon the discovery. In June 1933 he took the
visiting archbishop of Capetown to hold a service "on the site of the
martyrdom of Bernard Mizeki".78 In January 1934 he reported that
he planned to "hold a service annually on the anniversary of ... the
proto-martyr's death".79 The pilgrimage to the shrine at Mizeki's hut
developed rapidly over the next few years. In June 1934 "there was a
75 U.S.P.G., Missionary Correspondence, Edgar Lloyd, "St Faith's, Rusape: The

Archbishop's Visit", June 1933. See also N.A., file ANG 16/11/1, Olive Lloyd, circular
letter, June 1933.
76 N.A., file ANG 1/1/15, Edward Paget to A. C. Knights, 13 Sept. 1933, Paget
Out-Letter Book.
77 U.S.P.G., E. W. J. Crane, Annual Report, 30 Dec. 1936.
78 U.S.P.G., E. W. J. Crane, Annual Report, 10 Jan. 1934.
79 U.S.P.G., Edward Paget, Annual Report, 6 Jan. 1934.

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great gathering of Bantu Christians around the site of the martyrdom,

which will mean much in the life and inspiration of the Bantu
peoples of this land . . . In years to come perhaps there will be great
pilgrimages to this shrine".80 By June 1936 a circular cement platform
had been built on brick pillars, with an altar at its east end. In June
1938 the fully built shrine was consecrated and a march was made
"to the old site of Mangwende's kraal, right up on a high rock
overlooking the country around ... It was from this site that some
of Mangwende's people descended on June 18th 1896 to murder
Catechist Bernard Mizeki. On this rock we have now erected a huge
cross".81
All this was not designed merely in order to take hold of
Mangwende's country for popular Christianity. It was designed very
specifically as a national shrine. In June 1936 Paget preached to
"them who claimed Bernard as an ancestor", and whose loyalties
transcended kin, clan, tribe and parish. The gathering was also
addressed by the governor of Southern Rhodesia, Sir Herbert Stanley.
Stanley stressed that Bernard was originally a foreigner but that he
had become "one of the great ones of your people" by laying down
his life for "the people he loved".82 The Order for the Consecration
in June 1936 asked God "to receive all of whatever kindred and
people, tongue and nation who came hither to worship".83 In 1946,
in its report on the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Mizeki's
death, the diocesan magazine wrote that "common citizenship and
common faith" were the "fruit of the seed which was sown by a
martyr's blood".84 Each year whites as well as blacks participated in
the pilgrimage.
It seemed as though Paget had been successful in this new central-
ized form of pilgrimage. The numbers going to Mizeki's shrine
increased every year while the festival celebrations at St. Faith's
dwindled. In 1933 Mrs. Lloyd was still able to record that "all the
teachers . . . outside with their banners from about 48 little villages
. . .made such a long and imposing row".85 Ten years later, after
80 "Our Proto-Martyr", Transvaal and Southern Rhodesia (Aug. 1934), p. 33.
81 "Our Jubilee -Our Martyr -and Our Future", Transvaal and Southern
Rhodesia (Aug. 1938), pp. 40-2.
82 U.S.P.G., E. W. J. Crane, Annual Report, 30 Dec. 1936; "Rhodesia's Martyr",
Transvaal and Southern Rhodesia (Aug. 1936), pp. 31-4.
83 N.A., file ANG 16/17/12/2, "Order for the Consecration of the Site and Shrine
(Altar) in Honour of Bernard Mizeki, June 18th 1936".
84 The Link, July 1946, p. 93. A file "Umtali Church Records" (N.A., ANG 5/10/
5), contains further material on the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations.
85 N.A., file ANG 16/11/1, Olive Lloyd, circular letter, 5 Oct. 1934.

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many out-stations had been closed down or transferre

Faith's, after Lloyd had retired, and after a new generation
had taken office, whose legitimacy lay in professional
rather than processional banners, much of St. Faith's sym
trality for a whole zone of popular Anglicanism had been
Yet appearances were in many ways deceptive. Paget's
were subverted in three ways. In one district at least the
of the enthusiasms of popular Anglicanism created so stro
lash that Paget had to give way. Moreover, despite Paget's
to create in the Mizeki shrine a non-racial, national f
African Anglicans were nevertheless able to interpret
traditional terms and to exploit their own relationshi
achieve greatly increased prestige and legitimacy. Fina
successor, Bishop Cecil Alderson, gave a very different sig
both to the martyrdom of Mizeki and to the traditions of
Christianity.
The district of folk-Christian backlash was, not surprisi
Charter district of Arthur Shearly Cripps. Cripps respond
burning of his churches by organizing a "band of Gosp
to go round with their drum, holding services where this
ministering".86 Paget had to intervene, making a "little p
pilgrimage". The bishop, "in purple penitence, let Art
stand in the ashes and preach, as only a wounded proph
the gathered Africans".87 Then Paget "celebrated Holy
on each burnt-out altar". It taught him a good deal a
commitment of local Anglicans to their holy places.
Moreover, just as the early teacher-evangelists had draw
from local pilgrimages, so many of the better-qualified Af
of the 1940s and 1950s managed to achieve increased le
from their association with the Mizeki cult. According to
Glover, an octagenarian Anglican mission worker, man
including African clergy, knew the site of Bernard Mi
which they kept as a great secret from whites. They s
Europeans have Bernard's kitchen: we have the grave
offered prayers to the martyr at "a cave with a burial".88
or not there was such a secret, inner cult, African clergy
effective use even of the official shrine. At a conference
86 Geoffrey Gibson, Paget of Rhodesia (Johannesburg, 1973), pp. 14

87 Steere, God's Irregular (London, 1973), p. 137.
88 Interview between Terence Ranger and Iona Margaret Katherine G
Zimbabwe, 2 Mar. 1981.

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history in Lusaka in September 1972 Father Salathiel Madziyire

presented an account of his "pilgrimage" from being the son of a
senior spirit medium in Charter district to being priest-in-charge of
the Mizeki shrine. Madziyire was the son of the medium of the great
Kasosa spirit:
Very many people travelled from all over the Reserve and even from far away in
other districts to seek his advice. He was the first man who received the missionaries
and provided them a place to worship in. The first Mass in the country was celebrated
in his mother's hut. But it took him the rest of his life to get converted, although
his children and wives became Christians, teachers, preachers, and priests.
Madziyire himself was a protege of Cripps and had soaked up Cripps's

ideas on the substantial continuity between traditional holy men and
the Christian cult of the saints. So it seemed to him to be the natural
consummation of his whole religious life when he was sent to be
guardian of Mizeki's shrine. Around the shrine, he told the Lusaka
conference, there grew the same special herbs and plants which had
grown around "Kasosa's" kraal. Miracles of healing took place at the
Mizeki shrine. In Madziyire's version, the shrine was more a "cultural
nationalist" than a non-racial national centre.89
In any case, Paget's successor, Cecil Alderson, himself aware of
the African nationalist climate of the 1960s, reinterpreted Mizeki's
significance radically. Alderson no longer saw Mizeki as the prototype
of a Christian colonial citizenship but rather as the forerunner of the
African nationalist intellectual. "The window in our sacrament chapel
here", said Alderson to a congregation in Salisbury Cathedral in June
1961, "pictures him as a half-clothed primitive evangelist. This is
stupidity. Bernard . . . read Latin and Greek and French . . . Bernard
Mizeki was murdered precisely because the profession of Christ
interfered too much with the profitable interests of his contemporar-
ies". Mizeki, thought Alderson, stood in the line of Anglican radicals
like Trevor Huddleston. He was a prophet clashing with "official,
popular and ecclesiastical opinion and custom".90
In this process of reinterpretation of Zimbabwe's Anglican heri-
tage, Alderson treated the missionary founders of folk-Anglicanism
almost as patron saints, realizing that the church could only escape
from its image as a white-dominated, establishment organization by
stressing its local roots. "I have at Salisbury", Alderson told a school
89 Salathiel Madziyire, "Heathen Practices in the Urban and Rural Parts of Maran-
dellas Area and their Effects upon Christianity", in Terence Ranger and John Weller
(eds.), Themes in the Christian History of Central Africa (London, 1975), pp. 75-82.
90 N.A., file AL 7/15/13/1-31, Cecil Alderson, sermon preached on 18 June 1961
for the Feast of Bernard Mizeki, Salisbury Cathedral.

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audience in April 1962, "a carved wooden crozier made from

tree that grew outside Canon Lloyd's house at St. Faith'
August 1964, preaching upon the twelfth anniversary o
death, Alderson developed a full doctrine of the saints:
believe strongly in the prayers and influence of the spir
departed. That is a strong Christian belief. Our Father Crip
dead, not asleep, but living . . We are praying for him
he is praying for us".91
CONCLUSION
There has in fact been a constant oscillation in the Christian h

of Zimbabwe between the local and the central, the popular and
institutional. The holy place and the pilgrimage have som
served to validate the one, and sometimes to validate the ot
times one has seemed to triumph and the other to collapse, but
have survived in continuous and creative tension with each other. In
the early 1930s, for example, the effects of the depression called the
whole message of mission Christianity into question. Prices for peas-
ant grain collapsed and there were no jobs for labour migrants. One
of the results was the rise and rapid spread in Makoni district,
as elsewhere, of independent African prophetic churches. These
Apostolic or Vapostori churches preached a doctrine of withdrawal
from the colonial economy. Their members were to be neither peas-
ants nor labour migrants but were either to work collectively on
church fields or to work as craftsmen and artisans. The Vapostori
attacked both traditional religion and mission Christianity and at once
began to create their own holy places. Expensive church buildings
and schools were not needed, they thought. Their members could
meet freely in the open air, wherever the Holy Spirit might come
down. All over Makoni the Vapostori seized upon hills as holy places
sanctified by the descent of the Spirit. The most potent grave in
Makoni today, and the object of the most spectacular pilgrimage, is
the tomb of Johana Masowe, John of the Wilderness, whose sepulchre
on a hill in eastern Makoni is visited every year by thousands of
white-robed Vapostori from all over southern Africa.92 For a while in
the 1930s it looked as if this form of popular Christianity might sweep
91 N.A., file AL 7/15/13/1-31, Cecil Alderson, sermons preached on 8 Apr. 1961,

1 Aug. 1964.
92 C. M. Dillon-Malone, The Korsten Basket Makers: A Study of the Masowe Apostles
(Manchester, 1978).

131.111.5.182 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 12:40:55 +00:00
away the influence of St. Faith's and Triashill and frustrate Paget's
attempt to institute the national pilgrimage cult of Bernard Mizeki.
Yet as the colonial economy revived in the later 1930s, and the peasant
option recovered, movements of revival led by African members of
the mission churches regained much of the lost ground. The Vapostori
remained as one part of the increasingly rich religious and symbolic
pattern of Makoni.
Again, in the 1970s when guerrilla war spread through Makoni,
only local holy places and holy men seemed any longer relevant.
The central, urban structures of Anglicanism and Catholicism were
discredited and impotent, and many commentators announced that
legitimacy and authority had moved to the suffering rural and local
churches.93 Indeed there was intense local interaction between the
guerrillas, those men of the bush, and local holy places and their
guardians. Guerrillas gained legitimate access to the caves and hills
by working with the representative figures of local popular religion
the spirit mediums guarding the burial hill of the Makoni chiefs,
the Irish priest-in-charge at Triashill and St. Barbara's.94 Guerrilla
capacity to read and use the mystical geography of Makoni was one
source of their advantage over the security forces. Yet since the end
of the war in 1980 central church institutions have turned out still to
have a great deal of life left in them, and not only the vitality of
material resources placed at the service of the new government's
educational and health policies. The symbolic resources of the ecclesi-
astical centre are not yet exhausted. The Bernard Mizeki pilgrimage
provides a striking illustration of this. During the war, with Mizeki
denounced as a colonial collaborator and with rural travel disrupted,
the pilgrimage had virtually come to an end. But it has now revived,
under the control of black bishops and with quite a new message.
Mizeki was, after all, a Mozambican. In June 1986, just as Mozam-
bique's leader, Samora Machel, was paying a visit to Zimbabwe and
the increasing military collaboration of the two countries against
South Africa was being described in the press, the black Anglican
hierarchy of Zimbabwe was manifesting its own fraternal links with
Mozambique:
Thousands of Christians, mainly women clad in the Anglican Church's colours
converged on the Bernard Mizeki Shrine to celebrate the Centenary of the Christian
martyr's baptism . . .The five-day festival . . . was also attended by 16 pilgrims
from Mozambique headed by the Bishop of Lebombo, the Right Reverend Dinis
93 I. Linden, The Catholic Church and the Struggle for Zimbabwe (London, 1980).
94 Ranger, "Holy Men and Rural Communities in Zimbabwe".

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Sengulane . . . Bishop Sengulane presented the Mizeki Shrine with a cro

his Lebombo Diocese. He pointed out that one of the delegates in his g
born near where Bernard Mizeki was born, and that was a blessing for the pi
. . He also invited the mammoth congregation to similar celebrations to
in Mozambique . . . "Even if the 10,000 of you come, there is enough r
you in Mozambique".95
A cult which had once been used to symbolize a shared co

citizenship now expresses a radical regional solidarity.
A similar tension has arisen since 1980 between the local and
national shrines of the guerrilla war. At the centre the new Zim-
babwean state has built its elaborate Heroes Acre, where lie buried
the political leaders of the liberation movements. Annual ceremonies
are performed there but for the moment more power seems to reside
in district shrines. In 1984, for instance, a huge mass grave was
uncovered near Rusape, the administrative centre of Makoni district.
In it lay jumbled together the bodies of some five thousand guerrillas
and their peasant supporters, killed during the war by the Selous
Scouts and other Rhodesian government forces. The idea of all
these improperly buried dead is horrifying to the people of Makoni,
Christian and non-Christian alike. Yet identification of the bodies
and individual reburial has proved impossible. The place has become
Makoni's Heroes Acre, to which pilgrimages are made on Heroes
Day every year. Chiefs, spirit mediums, leaders of independent
churches and local leaders of the mission-founded churches have
been consulted on the appropriate ceremonies to appease the spirits
of the dead and to turn this mass grave into a place of positive spiritual
energy.
Meanwhile, however this dialectic between local and central works
itself out, the expatriate historian needs more than ever to be able to
read the mystical geography of Makoni in order to make sense of its
modern as well as its traditional history. There are still few monu-
ments erected in the Makoni district. But the informed eye can read
its landscape. From the hill at the little independent church of St.
Francis at the edge of Makoni communal lands one can pick out the
grove of Chitsotso, the burial caves at Matotwe, the hills above the
Catholic station of St. Killian's where Patrick Kwesha lies buried,
his grave still an object of pilgrimage for members of the African lay
members of the Franciscan Third Order which he founded. Further
afield rise the hills of eastern Makoni - Gwidza, where the Holy
Spirit came down on African Methodists in 1918, and Masowe, where
95 Sunday Mail [Harare], 29 June 1986.

131.111.5.182 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 12:40:55 +00:00
John of the Wilderness lies buried and his followers flock every
September. At St. Francis itself, a community which broke away
from the Anglican church in the 1930s and whose priest and leader,
killed by Rhodesian government police during the guerrilla war, is
himself the object of annual pilgrimage, the Gregory chapel behind
the altar of its little church contains a rock from one of the traditionally
holy hills of Makoni.96 It remains to be seen whether the agrarian
change envisaged by the Zimbabwe government, which plans radical
new uses of the land, will secularize this landscape, appropriated as
it has been for so many mystical geographies.
St. Antony's College, Oxford Terence Ranger
96 Patricia Chater, Caught in the Crossfire (Harare, 1985).

131.111.5.182 on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 12:40:55 +00:00

Core W7 Ranger TakingHoldLand 1987

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Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe

Author(s): Terence Ranger

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/650791

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When the English looked at their land, at least from the

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As explorers and missionaries pushed into central and

3 David Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries

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After Rhodes's burial in the Matopos, with its recitation of Kipling's

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In this way, Rhodes's grave, marked by no monument, and sun

8 J. G. McDonald, Rhodes: A Life (London, 1927). McDonald emphasized the

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Christianity to justify new claims to authority which were at the same

PRE-COLONIAL HOLY PLACES AND PILGRIMAGES IN ZIMBABWE

The people of Makoni district shared in a culture common

1 David Livingstone, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London,

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places at each of which resided a medium regularly possess

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A third holy place was Chitsotso "where the Makoni princesses

19 District Office, Rusape (hereafter D.O.R.), file "Makoni", "The Vaungwe:

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Plainly, then, there were holy places in pre-colonial Mako

MISSIONARIES AND THE LAND IN MAKONI

In pre-colonial Makoni, therefore, claims to authority and to

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25 "Extracts of Letters from Mr. D. A. Walker", Mashonaland Quart. Papers, viii

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building. Edgar Lloyd, Cripps's great friend, was particularly con-

28 Edgar Lloyd, "Mission of the Epiphany, Rusape", Mashonaland Quart. Papers,

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Significant burials were to be moved from Chevuti hill down

30 Letter from Archdeacon Upcher, 25 June 1906, Mashonaland Quart. Pap

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and of the distinguished dead. Ndapfunya lived close to both Chit-

St. Faith's developed on the model of missions throughout southern

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By this time a folk-Catholicism had risen to rival folk-Anglic

35 N.A., file N 3/32/1/1, Native Commissioner, Rusape, to Chief Native Com-

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among the Bolivian Laymi.39 The Laymi traditionally embalmed

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chiefs, the alienation of land to whites, the rise of market prod

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The inhabitants of mission villages now had to live in close proximity

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be inherited by their husband's brothers. There were

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geography of Makoni steadily changed. Outraged by the "demo-

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ANGLICANISM AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PILGRIMAGE

The development of mission graveyards as Christian hol

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before the mission station could itself become an object of pilgrimage

At this Christmas festival of 1907 only three catechists marched

52 "Extracts of Letters from Archdeacon Upcher", 9 Jan. 1906, Mashonaland Quart.

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