Zambia

Across the plateaus that became Zambia, the high god was Leza, remote but acknowledged in proverb and prayer, while daily religion worked through ancestors, territorial spirits and the diviners who read misfortune's causes. David Livingstone died kneeling at Chitambo in 1873, and his followers buried his heart under a mpundu tree there before carrying his body to the coast, an event that made the region a target of memorial mission fervour.

The London Missionary Society, the Paris Evangelical mission in Barotseland, Scottish Presbyterians in the northeast and the White Fathers all planted stations, and the copper towns later mixed their converts into new urban congregations. The interwar Copperbelt also bred independent movements, most notably the Watchtower or Kitawala preachers whose millennial message unsettled colonial administrators, and later Alice Lenshina's Lumpa Church.

At independence in 1964 Kenneth Kaunda, a mission son, preached a gentle humanism, but it was Frederick Chiluba who in 1991 declared Zambia a Christian nation, a phrase written into the constitutional preamble in 1996 and defended fiercely in public life since. Pentecostal churches have boomed under its banner, a national house of prayer has been built, and candidates for office still contend over who best embodies the declaration.

Sources A History of ZambiaAndrew Roberts with President Frederick Chiluba and Zambia: Evangelicals and Democracy in a "Christian Nation" (in Evangelical Christianity and Democracy in Africa)Isabel Apawo Phiri, in Terence O. Ranger (ed.)

In 1953 a Bemba woman named Alice Mulenga Mubisha, near the Presbyterian mission at Lubwa, reported that she had died, met Christ, and been sent back with a commission. Taking the name Lenshina, from regina, queen, she began receiving penitents, and her movement, the Lumpa Church, whose name means best of all or supreme, grew within a few years into one of the largest religious movements in central Africa. Lenshina preached against witchcraft and sorcery, and villagers surrendered charms and horns to her by the basketload; her hymns, composed in Bemba, spread faster than any mission catechism, and at Kasomo she built a great cathedral called Sione, Zion.

Trouble came with nationalist politics. Lumpa members, taught that the church belonged to no earthly power, refused to buy party cards, and in the tense months around independence in 1964 the standoff with the United National Independence Party turned to open violence. Government forces and party militants fought Lumpa villagers armed with muskets and spears, several hundred people died, the church was banned, and Lenshina surrendered and spent most of the rest of her life in detention, dying in 1978. Thousands of members fled into Congolese exile. The episode remains Zambia's hardest lesson in what happens when a new state and a new church each claim the whole of a person's loyalty.