INTRODUCTION

Approaching African Christianity

Christianity is a marked feature of contemporary Zambia. Large church buildings in the country's towns and cities - most of them modern, others obviously relics of colonial times - affirm this fact just as do the smaller and much simpler meeting halls that mushroom along the Zambian highways and bush roads. Statistical figures, however reliable or not, corroborate such sketchy visual impressions. According to Barrett (1982:765) 64.9% of the total Zambian population belonged to one of the Christian churches in 1969 (census date), and the number of Christians in Zambia grows by more than 4% per annum. Characteristic for Zambian, or even African, Christianity is not only the increase in membership but also the vast variety of the Christian denominations. In the emergent township of Sinazeze in the southern part of the Zambezi Valley, for example, the number of local Christian churches rose by more than 100% within five years from 13 in 1988 to 28 in 1993 (personal communication Ute Luig). This perplexing number included most of the former mission churches, like the United Church of Zambia, Roman Catholic Church, Salvation Army, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehova's Witnesses etc., but also an increasing number of so-called African churches, like the Maranke Church (see Jules-Rosette 1975) and several Mutumwa churches (see Dillon-Malone 1983). Membership of the churches seems to be fluid and depending on changing fashions. While some people attend services of several churches to find out which one suits them best, others adhere to one particular denomination that they regard as their Church. However, in most denominations people from all social strata and of diverse educational backgrounds are present, although women and adolescent girls and boys are the most ardent participants. Thus, Christianity is not confined to urban and semi-urban areas, but is also well rooted in the rural hinterland of these centres of modernity. Even in the most distant villages of the Gwembe Valley young people gather in the evenings for choir and prayer sessions, and their singing and drumming, their exhilarating prayers continue long after midnight.

However, this spreading of Christianity is only a recent development. Until the 1950s, the Zambezi Valley was one of the remotest parts of the country, enclosed by a steep, rugged escarpment that formed a natural barrier between the valley floor and the adjacent plateaux. The Valley population, known as the Valley or Gwembe Tonga, comprised some 86,000 people by the mid-fifties, of whom 55,000 lived on the north bank of the Zambezi River (now Zambia) and 31,000 on the south bank (now Zimbabwe). During most of the colonial period the villages in the Valley remained in relative isolation. Although Primitive Methodist Missionaries, since their arrival in 1901, continuously laboured to convert the Valley population to Christianity, the people clung tenaciously to their established ways of life, customs, and religious traditions. Up to the middle of this century the success of the Methodist Missionary was minute in terms of church membership. The small group of Christian converts was more or less confined to those people who found employment with the mission as teachers or evangelists. In the late fifties, however, when the planned formation of the Kariba Lake necessitated the resettlement of large portions of the population, the Valley was drawn closer to mainstream Zambia. The building of roads, the expansion of government services, and the consecutive integration into the national market economy, together with the upheavals caused by the resettlement and the end of the colonial era, were the major factors that pressed for social and cultural adjustment to the new circumstances. At the same time, Christianity began to gain momentum in the Valley on a larger scale.

This growth of Christian influences is far from