Lenshina Mulenga

The rainy season is over, and this week along the roads and trails and bicycle tracks of Northern Rhodesia, thousands of Africans are trudging through the bush to a clump of 20-odd huts called the village of Kasomo. They come from as far as 400 miles away to see and hear a plump, 32-year-old native woman and be baptized by her in the name of God--the black man's God. Her name is Lenshina Mulenga, and her magnetic hold on the people around Kasomo is confounding Christian missionaries there.

One day in September 1953, Lenshina Mulenga walked into the Church of Scotland's Lubwa mission, about eight miles away from Kasomo. She was there, she said, because she had recently died; she had been about to cross the river into heaven when God stopped her and told her to go back and teach her people to give up witchcraft and repent their sins. She should go to Lubwa, said the Almighty, to be taught and baptized.

A Strange Whistling. The Presbyterian mission named her "Alice" and duly sent a native evangelist back to Kasomo with her, and the villagers began to flock to her hut. Soon she had another word from God. There were two books, He told her, one for whites and one for blacks, and the black book was the right one. Once again Lenshina appeared in Lubwa, this time to demand the use of the mission church to preach in. When the missionaries turned her down, she went back to her village with the story that the missionaries had stolen her African book and sent it off to Scotland. She began attacking the New Testament, calling it icibolya--"a deserted village, a hollow shell."

As her fame spread, more and more pilgrims came to hear her oracular utterances and her vague version of black man's Christianity. In the clearing behind her hut she collected them, 500 or more at a time, ordered them on pain of death to close their eyes and listen to the voice of the Almighty--a strange, whistling noise. Spies from a nearby Roman Catholic mission risked opening their eyes and reported that Lenshina merely stepped behind a tree and blew a whistle.

But the natives were more impressed than ever. When she commanded pilgrims to bring" their charms and symbols of witchcraft and leave them at shrines built for the purpose in her village, there were soon high piles of teeth, fur scraps, beads and symbolic axes for killing devils. Nervously, the Presbyterian mission sent word to the home office that a new threat to Christianity, "the Cult of Alice," had appeared in Northern Rhodesia.

"When Shall We Be Saved?" In twelve months 60,000 came to see Lenshina and be baptized. Even in the rainy season, they were coming by the hundreds. The pennies they bring her have mounted into a sizable treasury presided over by her fanatical husband Petrus, who, some say, is the power behind Lenshina. And the Presbyterian mission of Lubwa, the oldest in Northern Rhodesia, is on its last legs.

Last fall, in a desperate effort to regain some of the native Christians who had joined Lenshina's movement, five missionaries and a score of African evangelists visited hundreds of villages. But most of their former converts would not even listen; out of 4,000, only 400 agreed to desert Lenshina.

"What are you going to do?" asks the Rev. John Eraser, 41, of Glasgow, who recently took over the Lubwa mission. "We must get out more into the field and teach the Bible. For ten years we've been too busy keeping the mission going to get out and do field work. Lenshina just stepped into a natural opportunity, I suppose."

She did. The tribes of Northern Rhodesia have lived in a broken society since the white district commissioners weakened the authority of the tribal chiefs. White authorities and missions dealt with witchcraft as though it did not exist; Lenshina Mulenga fights it effectively, gives natives the sense of belonging to their own church, where salvation is in the here-and-now, not far-off.

Aside from her effect on the mission, authorities are most concerned lest Lenshina be taken over by the anti-white movement in Africa. Though she has given no indication that she will, this is a constant possibility; many mission-educated Africans among her followers have been changing their names from Christopher or John back to Shamwa or Mkoshi.

And day after day, Lenshina leads her followers in a chant of her cult:

When shall we be saved?

We who love the country of darkness!

We who love the country of slavery!

When shall we be saved?

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