ISSN: 1570-0178 Volume 5, Issue 4 (10 July 2003) Teachings of the Jamaa movement: Texts and commentaries transcribed , translated, and commented by Johannes Fabian University of Amsterdam e-mail: fabian@pscw.uva.nl address: Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology University of Amsterdam Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185 1012 DK Amsterdam The Netherlands   Introduction Text 1: Of man (1) Text 2: Of man (2)   Text 3: Of angels Context and setting Swahili text and English translation Commentary

Text 3: Of angels

Context and setting

From the air the mine-workers' settlement of Musonoi looks like a suburban development. Two grids of rectangular blocks of houses touch each other at a slight angle. The one that appears out of line is divided by a mall which, on its median strip, contains a church at the southern end, then a community center, a medical building, and a school. The offices of the administration and the marketplace follow to the northeast. In the western and newer section the streets run from north to south and from east to west. An irregular trapeze is spared out between the western and eastern sections for what appear to be the entertainment facilities: a community hall, a bar, a sizable soccer stadium, and to the north in the dead center of the settlement, the Catholic church, with the rectory and the residence of the social workers.
There we met, in the office that served as my study, bedroom, and living room: Baba Binga, Fr. Peeraer, and I. Baba Binga faced us over the desk on which I had placed the tape recorder. There was some trouble with the microphone and it took a while to fix it. He waited with a patient smile. He had agreed to talk into my "machine," not without some apprehension but perhaps secretly pleased at the recognition we were giving to his authority. In the middle of a paternalist dream come true, in a place where the white man dealt out his wages, houses, food, education, medicines, his games and beer, and even his religion--he, an African working man, was asked to instruct us.
Then I signalled that I was ready. Baba Binga closed his eyes and, at once acknowledging and denying our presence, he addressed us as "fathers and mothers."

Swahili text and English translation

Commentary

Communicative Situation and Genre
If texts are considered products of a communicative situation giving access to a communicative context, then it seems our approach is severely taxed by instructions such as the one we just presented. The circumstances of its recording (made on May 9, 1966 at Musonoi) appear to be a far cry from those that "naturally" and spontaneously would result in an articulation of mawazo through instruction. The event was, so to speak, covered by layers of artificiality: the place--an office in the physical and symbolic center of bureaucratic structures; the time -- set by convenience and appointment; the speaker --acting as an "informant" who delivered a specimen of his teaching; the audience -- two people united in the same category of colonial classification but divided in terms of their past history with the movement and their present intentions and aims: one a leading follower, the other a curious outsider. The very absence of the Jamaa group could be expected to reinforce latent attitudes in a triangle of apprehensions and to lead to all but inconsequential communication. Yet, judged by criteria that define the genre mafundisho, the recorded text is almost undistinguishable from instructions produced in situations which we would consider natural, i.e., marked by the presence of the group, by authoritative delivery, and the by purpose of instruction in a specific chapter of the doctrine. Is it possible that "teaching" as a product may be separated from teaching as an event? Undoubtedly, Text 3 comes close to that. Not entirely by accident, I should add, because the Jamaa of Musonoi had experience with the fixation of mafundisho prior to my research. Recordings had been made, and, more importantly, the group had produced a written catechism of doctrine in the form of a document we called kitabu (Fabian 1971a:124-29). That such fixations had occurred points to a development beyond and away from the living context in which we have tried to place our interpretation of mawazo.
In sociological terms, it suggests a routinization of charisma, an organization of communication which eventually would place the Jamaa somewhere in a typology of separatist churches and sects. But at this point, these sociological categories do not elucidate the situation we try to comprehend. Clearly, the three of us had not assembled for the purpose of a sectarian fixation of doctrine. In fact, a second, more careful look at the text leads one to discover that beneath the artificiality of the external circumstances, baba Binga succeeded in defining the communicative situation in such a way that it remained within the range of those that might produce mafundisho. Anticipating our comments on style and content of this text, we can point to two important indicators supporting this observation. First, in his opening statement, as well as in the greetings throughout the text, the speaker retains a form of address which presupposes the presence of a Jamaa group. That this is not just a stylistic feature but a situation-defining expression is borne out by many similar situations in which I asked informants to recite mafundisho outside the proper context. Almost all of them insisted on the presence of at least one other member of the movement (a condition which, by the way, was fulfilled in the case of Text 3; Fr. Peeraer was a member) as well as on the spiritual presence of those to whom mawazo should be communicated. Second, Text 3 contains a section which, by way of contrast, gives further support to our interpretation. Throughout most of this instruction, the speaker aims at an imaginary or spiritually present Jamaa audience, but in several paragraphs (29, 30, and 32) he changes direction, so to speak, by addressing his mafundisho to the clergy represented in the room. The fact that he consciously acknowledged the actual circumstances while maintaining the frame of mafundisho as an ideal event clearly points to the power of Jamaa definitions of that communicative situation. In stepping out of it, the speaker acknowledges its boundaries and rules.
Nevertheless, ethnographically the status of Text 3 is precarious; it challenges the schemes of interpretation we applied elsewhere. In itself that should be taken as a sign that we confront a reality that escapes complete comprehension and definition. Theoretically, it underscores the contention that our view of text-production, and within it our model of generic differentiation (see Fabian 1991: ch. 3 [orig. 1974]), must not be misunderstood in terms of a linear causality. If we relate certain social rules and constraints defining a communicative situation to certain formal features determining the genre of a communicative product, i.e., the text, we are not proposing that the formal differentiation of discourse is "caused" by social norms. Much less do we want to give the impression that we advocate an ontological priority of the social over the "linguistic," as if the proper object of sociology were the phenomenon, whereas language communication would belong to an epiphenomenal domain whose study would have the only use of confirming sociologically gained insights. Nor, for that matter, do we want to turn that paradigm upside down and maintain that language communication is a self-contained domain reserved to "pure" linguistics to which sociology can add but contextual, i.e., non-essential, evidence. Our dialectical model attempts to avoid such reductionism when we insist on the notion of the communicative event as the mediator between social situation and language product.
The ethnography of Text 3 can shed some light on these theoretical postulates. Like other texts, it originated in an intersubjectice field between a speaker and his audience. It had a concrete subject as its producer (the speaker), and other subjects as co-producers (the audience). For, with respect to the text as a communicative product, listeners are co-producers. What makes such co-production possible is a condition we refer to as "shared temporality." Without shared temporality, the notion of a communicative event cannot be conceived. The important point is this: while it is possible to think of socially defined situations and of formally determined texts as facts, i.e., data-complexes whose recursive features, structures, determinants, may be accounted for in a cause-effect scheme, it is impossible to apply this view to the constitution of intersubjective events. The reason is that they can happen only when these elements of objective social reality are actualized in subjective time, i.e., in the temporal dimension without which the actions of subjects are inconceivable. The conflux of subjective temporality in the intersubjective event is of necessity an open process. It emerges out of the past of individual experiences and flows into the future of individual projects. Its social presence is constituted by communication to which we have access only as participants, but as active participants who at least potentially have the power to shape and define the event as it occurs.¹⁶ As it happens, our text offers some corroborating evidence for this theoretical statement. Consider the introductory and concluding formulae (1, 38). The speaker begins his instruction with a statement of time: "Today, fathers and mothers, let us talk ...". Without attempting to press the point, one may take this as evidence for his awareness of the present event as one that is embedded in a past of yesterdays and a future of tomorrows. The latter is taken up in the concluding sentence when the speaker announces that his instruction has come to an end but that his listeners "should go on thinking about it forever."¹⁷
We may assume that baba Binga had come to the meeting to oblige the missionary who acted as an intermediary for the anthropologist. Seen in these terms, the African informant appears as the owner of a piece of information, the missionary as some sort of broker, and the anthropologist as a recorder/processor of data. Persuasive and generally accepted as this view may seem, it does not describe what really happens, for the simple reason that we have no way of knowing that prior to the event of communication there was a piece of information that could be handed down in this fashion. It was the communicative event that produced the recorded text. The result is a product, a "work", not a datum. As such, it needs to be interpreted through notions and criteria that make it possible to understand the process of its production.
After this digression into some of the epistemological problems posed by the ethnography of Text 3, we may return to the task at hand and introduce the speaker. Baba Binga was among those who delivered mafundisho in the weekly meetings of the group. At the time when our recording was made, he was about forty years old, married, and the father of eleven children between the ages of one and twenty-one. Professionally, he had been successful; he was employed as a locomotive engineer and had attained one of the highest ranks in the evaluation scale used by the mining company. His past history in the movement had made him one of the most prominent leaders in Shaba. In 1953 he was initiated to the Jamaa by Father Tempels, and belonged to the small group of recognized founding fathers at Ruwe, near Kolwezi. In 1957 he and his wife were among three couples who, having been transferred to Musonoi, began with intensive propagation of the Jamaa. Ever since, baba Binga could claim the authority that derives form a high position in a system of spiritual kinship and filiation: he was the father of many "children."¹⁸
When Text 3 was recorded, baba Binga assumed quite naturally the role of an authoritative preceptor, not only in the tone of his delivery and judged by non-linguistic clues, but also in terms of the content of his instruction and the kind of rhetoric appeal he chose to create.¹⁹ His mafundisho was delivered in a style which makes little use of direct admonition or exhortation. Yet it had an effect more powerful than moralizing indoctrination to the extent that the speaker succeeds in conveying to the audience a sense of historical/practical urgency which derives from his concrete experience as a founder and shaper of Jamaa and mawazo.

Content and Style
In marked contrast to Texts 1 and 2, the doctrinal content of this instruction is focused and clearly identifiable as one section of our catalog of major topics of Jamaa teaching. It recounts the story of the angels, the second theme in the division that we labelled "creation" (see Figure 1), with the exception of paragraphs 26-32, which, at this point, may be interpreted as an insertion taking up themes that can be located in both "origins" and "realizations."
Measured by the criteria we found to be characteristic of the mythical-historical style, this mafundisho about the angels approaches its pure form. Building on the categories developed in our commentary to the two preceding texts, we may attempt the following schematic presentation of this instruction (see Figure 6). Again, we distinguish major segments of a temporally oriented sequence along the horizontal axis, while contrasts between levels of discourse are marked on a vertical axis. The indicators that allow us to distinguish segments as well as levels are quite similar to those we found in Text 2 (see Figure 5). Along the horizontal axis we marked the following major divisions. The text is bounded by a clearly recognizable introductory statement (in paragraph 1, briefly developed in paragraphs 2 and 3), and a concluding formula (paragraph 38). The body of the mafundisho is structured by the speaker in terms of chapters. These are either explicitly announced as mawazo or kipande (e.g., in 4, 10, 25, 26, 38), or implicitly introduced trough changes in the main actors or major topics. On the basis of these two kinds of clues, we can discern five sections in Text 3: (1) the creation of the angels (paragraphs 4-9); (2) the "organization" of the angels and God's command to them (10-12); (3) the response of angels, centering on the action of the two leaders, Lucifer (13-20) and Michael (21-25); (4) an "inserted" section on the role of the hierarchical Church (26-32); and (5) a continuation of the primary account with the story of Michael's group and Lucifer's condemnation (33-37).

Figure 6: Narrative Structures of Text 3.

With the apparent exception of number four, these subjects are linked as subsequent events in a narrative of creation, division, confrontation, punishment, and promise. At crucial moments God Himself (Mungu) appears as an actor on the scene (4, 8, 10, 14, 23, 25, 33), thus giving additional inner unity to the account.
As expected, however, we find within each of the sections an interdigitation of segments that continue the narration of mythical events proper and others which relate these to a present state of affairs. As in Text 2, we regard these contrasts as indicators of switches in the level of discourse, marked along the vertical axis as "recall" versus "realization." Mythical events or states of affairs established in mythical events are invoked as forces or models for/of the present situation of the world, of the movement, and of its sociocultural context. In addition to these structural features, our text contains numerous lexical indicators for a mythical-historical style. But before we comment on these, we must clarify a number of structural problems.
The most important one is posed by what we have been calling an "insertion" in the main narrative sequence of Text 3 (26-32). Let us first examine the signals that mark an interruption of the main account and then interpret their significance. A first clue is given at the beginning of paragraph 26, when the speaker announces that he has reached the end of his instructions "in all of its chapters," and asks his audience whether they understood everything. Then he proceeds to give two examples (mifano, paragraphs 26 and 27), which turn out to be descriptions of the mission church, emphasizing its hierarchical and territorial organization and the precarious role of the Jamaa mediating between the Church and the pagans. Up to the that point the sections constituted by paragraphs 26 and 27 appear to be quite similar in function to the level of discourse which in Text 1 we labelled as "organization" (see Figure 3). Its concern we interpreted to be with integrating individual motivation into the institutional patterns of the Jamaa and the mission Church. However, there are contextual reasons which compel us to regard these external resemblances between Text 1 and Text 3 as deceptive. It turns out that the significant break between the main account of Text 3 and the inserted passage does not occur as a switch of levels but as a change in the sequence on the level of recall: In this section the main actor in the mythical events is no longer Mungu, but Bwana Yesu Kristo, the Lord Jesus Christ (see paragraphs 28 and 31). On the other hand, Bwana Yesu Kristo is not simply introduced as a new actor in a basically unchanged plot, as is the case with the angels Lucifer and Michael.
The mafundisho about the angels does not end with, and is not resolved by, Bwana Yesu Kristo. To achieve that, the speaker returns to the main story, and this he signals at the end of paragraph 32 when he refers rather abruptly to Michael and then carries on by resuming the story where he had left it in paragraph 25. This presents us with a problem, the solution of which leads us to distinguish between two different ways of accounting for the inserted passage. One of them could be sought in the motivation of the speaker, i.e., in the way he consciously controls the communicative situation. Earlier, we argued that paragraphs 26-32 are addressed to the actual, rather than the ideal, audience called for by the generic characteristics of the mafundisho. We are now in the position to point to certain text-immanent reasons which enable the speaker to change the direction of his rhetorical appeal without forcing him to abandon the rules governing the generic and stylistic identity of Text 3. The contrast between the main account and the insert can be interpreted as marking two different levels rather than sequences of mythical time: the time of Mungu and the time of Bwana Yesu Kristo, or in more abstract terms, the time of creation and the time of salvation. If this is accepted, then we must conclude that our two-dimensional schematic representation of narrative structure is not able to accommodate the complexities of temporal organization in Text 3. Somehow we must formally recognize the fact that our speaker creates the mythical-historical appeal of this instruction not only by recalling mythical models/sources for historical reality; he also invokes a progress within mythical time from the period of creation in which extra-mundane actors, God and the angels, established paradigmatic events and models, towards a period in which mundane actors (persons acting in the world) laid the foundations of the socially organized context in which the speaker locates himself and his audience.
Text 3 seems to tell us that what happened with and through the angels accounts for the division of humanity in terms of languages, race and culture, political organization, and class structure (references will be given below). The deeds of Christ and his apostles defined the task of the organized Church. We must conclude, then, that mythical time itself is structured in terms of contrasts. The challenge which this brings against the Lévi-Straussian model cannot simply be removed by pointing to the fact that a mafundisho is unlike a truly "primitive" myth in that it is influenced by a Christian conception of sacred history moving from creation to fall to redemption. If that would be the case, then our text should roughly have the following construction (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: The Christian Model of Sacred History.

It is interesting to note that Tempels' own published version of the instructions about angels does in fact follow that schema (Tempels 1962:191-99). There the account of the primordial events is not interdigitated with segments describing historical realizations. In fact, there is a tendency to depict the events as a dynamic of ideas (those of the three thoughts) rather than as actions. The story of Lucifer is explicitly related to that of Adam and Eve, and the account ends with Christ and His Church. The practical context, by the way, is evidently not viewed from the vantage point of an African leader in a phase of external consolidation and internal troubles. Tempels relates his story of Satan to the perils of "politics," i.e., the upheavals following accession to Independence. The shape of Text 3 is quite different. Despite the fact that the speaker occasionally asserts that "Jamaa is the Church," or vice versa, we find in the narrative construction of this mafundisho an entirely different message. Jamaa pre-exists the organized Church in the sense that it has its paradigmatic models in events and entities before the Fall, and even before Creation, as we have seen in the instructions on umuntu. Jamaa exists apart from the Church, which must be concluded from the fact that the main task of the movement is to serve as a mediator between the organized Church and the pagan world. In other words, the idea of the Church as founded by Jesus Christ and represented in the hierarchy of his successors is not placed at the end of history of creation/salvation, but is encased in a total conception of reality in terms of past mythical reality and its present actualizations. Thus Text 3 is more appropriately represented by the following graph.

Figure 8: Construction of Text 3

If the outer cube represents the main account and the inner cube the inserted passage, our graph indicates that the construction of Text 3 shows a third dimension -- incorporation -- beyond the two distinguished earlier (level of discourse and narrative sequence). It is this incorporative dimension which allows the Jamaa to resorb the challenges of a concrete historical situation (i.e. the relationship between the movement and the Mission Church). Text 3 presents us with an example for this tendency. One may assume that the inserted passage expresses a contradiction between the speaker's momentary motivation (to address the representative of the church in his audience) and the inner, stylistic logic of the text which calls for a continuation of the doctrinal account.
Our mafundisho about the angels shows ways in which such contradictions can be resolved in the praxis of the Jamaa. Acceptance of, and involvement with, mawazo enables the followers to cope with the challenges of their everyday world. What in our analysis of Text 3 is suggested graphically seems to be achieved by the Jamaa follower existentially: challenges are met not by confrontation but by incorporation. We shall further investigate that aspect in the following section.
First, however, we must briefly reject a tempting avenue of speculation. It would seem that the difference of thought and argumentation revealed in the two schematic representations of Text 3, Figures 7 and 8, simply reflects long-established contrasts between "linear-historical" Western views and a mythical "African" conception. This notion has been held for a long time. For instance, John S. Mbiti, especially in his description of the typically African concept of history and pre-history (1970:29-31), expressed a thought that seems to fit our own analysis of Texts 2 and 3 quite well:

African peoples expect human history to continue forever, in the rhythm moving from the Sasa [now] to the Zamani [then], and there is nothing to suggest that this rhythm shall ever come to an end (ibid. 31).

On a sufficiently general level, this may be true; our own focus on the emergence of a concrete body of thought would necessitate a number of qualifications. To begin with a minor point, the direction of argument is not always from the present to a mythical past. In Text 3, this does occur, for instance, at the junctures between paragraphs 6 and 7, 11 and 12, and above all 27 and 28. But generally it proceeds the other way round. It is in the sequence of mythical events that we find the narrative continuity of the account, giving a meaningful continuity to whatever present realities are being traced to mythical events. Any given pair of segments in which we see the switch from recall to realization may leave the impression that the temporal direction is a reversible one; the mythical model may be stated and then identified in present reality or, conversely, a concrete state of affairs may be traced to a mythical model. However, in the total context of the narrative, the temporal dimension is expressed in an irreversible sequence of consecutive events. This is true for the "Western" as well as the "African" scheme. The decisive difference seems to lie in the contrast between an exclusive conception of sacred history and an incorporative view such as the one suggested in Text 3. However, the Jamaa material offers no evidence in support of a clear-cut distinction between Western and African ways of thought along these lines. What appears to be closest to the African type is in fact but one of the possible realization of mawazo, deriving its characteristic structure from one of the possible styles of presentation. The structure of Text 3 is not unique, as we could demonstrate on a number of similarly constructed mafundisho, but neither is it the dominant form throughout Jamaa teachings.
Furthermore, as is often the case in high-level comparisons of Western and non-Western modes of thought, the entire argument is based on a fallacious presumption uniformity in the Western counterpart. Rigorous investigation of Christian folk-religiosity, which is almost completely lacking, and knowledge of the history of theological thought, for which there is ample material, would reveal that decisively "non-Western" views have played and still are playing an important role in the ideological makeup of Western Christian thought.²⁰
The point is that critical anthropological interpretation cannot rest on applications of highly generalized schemes. These are bound to dissolve into irrelevance as soon as a system of thought is confronted in the practical dimension of its production and communication. Only if it were to be taken out of its context could Text 3 serve as evidence for basic differences between Western and non-Western styles of historical thought.
Having disposed of a tempting shortcut, we can now seek further understanding of the mythical-historical style shaping our text by examining some of the more prominent lexical features. First, Text 3 contains overwhelming evidence for a cosmological setting. The world is divided into heaven (mbingu) and earth (dunia) and this is constantly asserted either by explicitly listing the contrast or by locating a given event in one of the two spheres, implying the existence of the other (see paragraphs 1, 3, 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 34). The contrast between heaven and earth may serve to distinguish between a Jamaa above and a Jamaa below (as for instance in paragraphs 12, 13, and 22), or it may be the logical frame for the actions of God who "descends" (kushuka, paragraph 23), and puts down, places man on earth (kuweka, paragraphs 8, 27). The latter term is particularly interesting in that it reveals some of the intricacies of the mythical-historical style. In paragraph 27, kuweka is used to signify both the cosmological placement of the Jamaa on earth and the institution of the Church. In other words, the legitimation of authority in the hierarchical church is being rejoined to the general cosmological act of creation rather than traced to a specific historical mission.
Corresponding to this general setting is the prominence of another cosmological key term, kazi, work and its verbal forms, especially kutumika (see paragraphs 2, 8, 9, 14, 17, 18, 21, 22, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35). Its most frequent connotation is that of the task given by God to the angels (e.g., paragraphs 2, 8) and to man (e.g., 9). It is the raison d'etre for the angels (e.g., 14), but it may also express the everyday labors of the priests (17) and of laymen (22) and their common lot (26), seen in contrast to "other interests" such as politics, industry, and commerce (32) and especially the machinations of Satan (35). An interesting lead is provided by the word kutumika, to work, which is a derivation from kutuma, to send. This makes it possible to express the "mission" of man through different forms of the same term (as in paragraph 18) and to link them to the general movement of mawazo, for instance when God tells Michael that he is similar to Him "because you love to work with my thoughts" (33).
Then there is the idea of "the way," which is typical of the mythical-historical style. In Text 3 the nominal form, njia, occurs only once in the phrase njia ya bukristo, the way of Christianity (at the end of paragraph 30). But the idea of walking or traveling as a method for guiding the movements's conception of its historical mission is expressed in a number of verbal forms (for instance, kuenda, to go; kupita, to pass, to visit). These occur in contexts which deal with the practical task of the Jamaa (such as converting pagans and destitute Christians, see paragraphs 27, 29, 31, and 32) but also with its final aim, which is to go to heaven (kuenda mbinguni, see paragraph 22).
Finally, we must direct our attention to a group of terms which occupy in Text 3 a position at least as prominent as the cosmological concepts we expected to be characteristic of the mythical-historical style. We shall list these now with brief comments, although we shall be in a position to explore their significance more fully when, in the following section, we examine the socio-cultural context of our document.
In clear contrast to the instructions on umuntu where Jamaa thought is predicated on "man" in the universal, transcendental meaning of the word, the present mafundisho is dominated by a notion of man stressing his social nature. This is expressed in the term nkundi, a group, a multitude, or society, which pervades the entire text (paragraphs 4, 8, 10, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 26, 32, 33, 37). Following the pattern of a cosmological dualism, the account pictures the angels as divided into groups, first on the basis of created differences such as language (paragraph 4), or intelligence (paragraphs 7, 12), but later on through alliance with the two leaders, Lucifer and Michael. All these divisions are also the models or actual causes of divisions among people based on race and culture (for instance, paragraphs 5 and 6), but also on social status and class (for instance, paragraph 22).
One would, of course, have to ask why these mythical roots are sought among the angels rather than among the people of primordial times. The answer may have to be sought in a conscious attempt by the founder to link the Christian idea of angels to African conceptions of spirit-beings (see, for instance, Tempels 1962:191). Jamaa doctrine, however, indicates that in the course of that translation the idea of the angels assumed a specifically African, or perhaps Luba, connotation in that ultimately all spirit-beings are also ancestors (see the Luba notion of vidye in Van Avermaet and Mbuya 1954:783 ff). Our text, by the way, contains an interesting indirect confirmation of this view. In paragraph 11 we find an error or slip of the tongue, suggesting that in the mind of the speaker a close proximity of the idea of Lucifer, the leader of the bad angels, and of Cain, the Biblical ancestor of bad people.
Social reality appears to be firmly rooted in a mythical past. But the mythical constitution of social reality does not at all imply a static image of the world. In the main plot of the story, as well as in several segments of its realization, the diversity of groups is explained in terms of active pursuits, such as an intention to split (kukata) what should be united (paragraphs 20, 21, 23) or, more importantly, to create divisions in the course of searching for power over others (see the notion of bukubwa, paragraphs 10, 12, 17, 18, 19, 22). Nor are all divisions (see mbali mbali, paragraphs 6, 7, 8, 23) intrinsically and irremediably bad. At one point the speaker offers a thought which we found in other contexts of Jamaa teaching: God created the angels with different languages and different degrees of intelligence so that they should create unity out of diversity (see a similar application to the household, paragraphs 7, 9). This introduces a dialectical slant into the argument. Similarly, man's integration into a social group is not stated as a flat proposition, but is placed in a field of tension between sociality and absolute individualism (see the concept of upeke and similar forms in paragraphs 18, 23, 25, 36). It is true that these appeals to a mythical past give meaning to present reality, but they are by no means system-maintaining justifications or rationalizations, as anthropological analysis has often maintained, at least not in the obvious way in which this was thought to be the case. The point is that mythical thought, like any other thought, derives its effects from argumentation and discursive reasoning, not from simple moralizing.
Finally, regarding the use of stylistic devices in Text 3, we have little to add to our previous observations. Greetings and above all sentence-completion are less frequently employed than in Text 2. This is probably due to the fact that the size of the audience and the locale made intensification of speaker-listener contacts unnecessary. Occasionally, the speaker announces that he is going to give a "little example" or a concrete illustration (mufano, see paragraphs 5, 9, 18, 26, 27), but it is difficult to separate these segments as distinct devices from the overall stylistic structure of the text, in terms of which a switch from the level of recall to that of realization may be signalled by the term mufano (for instance, paragraphs 5, 9).

Socio-Cultural Context
Why did baba Binga, when asked to give a mafundisho, choose this particular topic? My field notes do not indicate that either I or the missionary had asked for an instruction on the angels. The reasons why it was selected from among the many possible mafundisho may have been accidental but there is enough circumstantial evidence to allow us to assume a connection between topic as well as style and the concrete situation of the speaker. When the recording was made, baba Binga had come to the end of his career as a Jamaa leader in the Kolwezi area. He had decided to quit employment by the mining company and to return to his native region in the Kasai. (He was a speaker of Kete.) He departed from Musonoi in June, 1966, leaving the group with considerable problems of successorship. His was not an unusual move; many workers returned to their home villages for different reasons. On the other hand, baba Binga was at that time only about forty years old and held a very good position. It may well be that he capitulated in the face of insurmountable difficulties with the movement.
In our collection of texts, we have a testimony of his in which he recalls the sufferings and visions he had during a brief and unwarranted imprisonment. These he links to his efforts to preserve or restore the unity of the movement in Kolwezi and in the Likasi and Lubumbashi areas. His account concludes with the following paragraph:

I had lost so much weight that some became worried when they saw how much I suffered. Some said: Bababa, let us listen to the things this man tells us. Because we see the suffering of baba Binga, what he tells us is killing him in his soul. This is how I worked and then I returned to Kolwezi.

It is on the background of his labors which, in the end, were frustrated and must have forced baba Binga to perceive his failure that we must appreciate his allusion to the "dangers" in the Jamaa (kintu kya hatari, see paragraph 17) and to actual schism (ibid.). In fact, his account of the big rally of the angels (paragraph 23) in which the split between Lucifer and Michael was finalized almost literally (see Fabian, 1971a:85-88) repeats a passage in the testimony quoted above in which he recalls a similar confrontation and split between two leaders of the group of Musonoi. In both cases he sees competition for power behind these divisions. In his chosen role as the one who fights for unity and integrity of the movement, he had to face the enemy on other fronts, too. There was the danger of resignation and paternalist reliance on the hierarchical church (paragraph 18). And there are the challenges from outsiders who speak with the tongue of Lucifer and denounce Christianity as the white man's contraption, who try to undermine the men's belief in monogamous marriage and win the women for part-time prostitution (see paragraphs 35, also 37). Furthermore, he is quite aware of the fact that all these afflictions and temptations arise in the wider context of a problematic and often corrupt (post-)colonial situation. Text 3 contains many astute observations and incisive vignettes which deserve our attention. At times baba Binga's comment on colonial reality is oblique and perhaps unintended, for instance, when he chooses the system of grading and evaluation in mission schools to illustrate the intellectual superiority of Lucifer over other angels (paragraph 15); or when he describes the intentions of the white missionaries as not being concerned with colonial administration, or commercial or industrial enterprises. Of course, by the very choice of terms his statement is charged with subtle irony and criticism (see paragraph 32). At other times he is more direct. In the guise of recounting the attitudes of Jesus Christ towards the ignorant, the simple, and the weak, he castigates the Pharisean pretensions of the clergy (see paragraph 28). In one passage he gives a poignant image of the poor worker's consciousness (paragraph 22). Similarly astute are his observations of the ethnic and linguistic problems facing a new nation (for instance, paragraphs 5 and 6). All in all, one cannot help but be impressed by the intellectual effort which the speaker brings to bear on a social reality he perceived as threatening, divisive, and antagonistic. He expresses a characteristic stance of Jamaa thought when he deals with these problems not by denying them, but by incorporating them into the system of reasoning called mawazo.

Notes

¹ Unlike in Text 1, here the color triad is introduced without replacing the neutral term beupe (= mweupe, "white") with the racial category muzungu (see Text 1, note 8).
² In this passage the formation of terms signifying languages and countries is somewhat muddled. In tshi-ma-ngala the speaker compounds the prefix used for languages, tshi- (the Tshiluba equivalent of ki-), and the collective plural ma-; for "French" the prefix is followed by the name of the country, whereas for "Belgian" and "English" adjectives are used as stems. The plural form ma-bulaya yote is also unusual. Among the possible alternative translations "all the foreign countries" and "all the parts of Europe," I chose the latter, since bulaya (East Coast Swahili ulaya) consistently refers to Europe.
³ Our translation is abbreviated, avoiding a difficulty posed by the form kulipanda. Most likely this is the speaker's pronunciation of the reflexive form ku-ji-panda, "to raise oneself".
⁴ The original has the verb -tenga, "to order, to put in place". Perhaps the speaker wanted to allude to the constant danger of the formation of groups leading to separation.
⁵ The original gives a more vivid impression of contempt for the simple working man by using expressions for the lowest possible category of manual labor in the mines, tout travail or, in Swahili with Fanagalo reminiscences, kutumika piki na posholo.
⁶ Mukoshi the Katanga Swahili form mkosi, "bad omen" (Oxford Standard Dictionary, p. 287).
⁷ It is tempting to translate inchi ya bantu as "country of the Bantu," if it were not for the sentence immediately following. In Shaba/Katanga the term bantu has not been narrowed down to the South African usage. Nevertheless, the phrase carries a connotation of "country of the natives," as can be documented in other contexts (cf. Fabian, 1971a:183).
⁸ The French terms province and parcelle are the administrative categories for national and municipal partitions. Zaire was divided into provinces; a homeowner in a city is allotted a parcelle. Similarly, quartier is an official term for subdivisions of a city for which colonial planning provided a church and parish.
⁹ Here we have an interesting example of the many meanings of mawazo. In an immediate sense the term refers to the preceding account. But the idea behind it seems to be not so much a division as a realization of mawazo. Notice that mawazo is the grammatical subject of these sentences: mawazo... inamuwaza, lit. "thought thinks him".
¹⁰ This is our translation for neno, lit. "word", which in Katanga Swahili most often occurs in the plural form, maneno, signifying a case of litigation, a palaver, or simply a person's affairs.
¹¹ In this translation I am following local usage, which refers, e.g., to the fishing communities along the Lualaba River as baluba ya maji. Kushonkesha palata is the local expression for collecting the head-tax imposed by the colonial government (see Van Avermaet and Mbuya 1954:633; palata derives from the Portuguese plata, "silver").
¹² I translate the French mouvement as organization. The speaker knows it as a label for many religious and other organizations, and his remark is directed against a merely sociological interpretation of the Jamaa. In this he directly reflects the founder's arguments. Notice also that he now addresses the persons present, not the fictive audience of a Jamaa group.
¹³ Bilakushi most probably derives from ku-laguisha, a current expression in Shaba/Katanga Swahili for "to consult a diviner" (from ku-agua).
¹⁴ This is one possible translation of mwenzetu (a pronominal possessive, see other forms below) that can connote all sorts of relations of closeness or equality -- same age, same gender, same ethnic or regional origin.
¹⁵ Ku-benga (possibly related to East Coast ku-beja?) is a current expression in Katanga Swahili for showing lack of respect. Probably taken over from Kiluba (cf. Van Avermaet and Mbuya 1954:62), it seems to have preserved the semantic complexities of its original setting (for an extended commentary, see Fabian 1971a:89).
¹⁶ For the philosophical "Foundations of a Theory of Intersubjective Understanding" see an essay by A. Schütz (1967:97-138). Note 2003: This passage formulates thoughts that were to guide my work ever since (see Fabian 1991: ch. 1 [orig. 1971b] and 2002 [1983]).
¹⁷Although this is not our present concern, we may point out that the extension of the future into indeterminate eternity (milele na milele) may be a distinctive mark of mythical argumentation. Furthermore, the evocation of a "today" as well as the formulaic character of the conclusion have direct counterparts in the language of Christian liturgy.
18See on this Fabian 1971a:87f.
19 When the missionary and I worked on the transcription of Text 3, baba Binga was asked to help us with some difficulties. He agreed but upon hearing his recorded voice he accused us--half seriously -- of "stealing" his mafundisho. He left no doubt about his sense of authority and authorship.
20 The case of Jamaa doctrine raises some particularly interesting problems. It has been observed by others (DeCraemer 1965:54) that Tempels received through his Franciscan education a "Scotist" theological orientation which, in contrast to dominant Aristotelian-Thomist schools, held ideas of the pre-existence of God-Man and of the Church quite similar to those which we find in Jamaa teaching.

References

De Craemer, Willy. (1965). Analyse sociologique de la Jama. Léopoldville: Centre de Recherches Sociologiques.
Fabian, Johannes. (1971a). Jamaa: A Charismatic Movement in Katanga. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Fabian, Johannes. (1971b). Language, History, and Anthropology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 1: 19-47.
Fabian, Johannes. (1991). Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays 1971-1991. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Fabian, Johannes. (2002). Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. Second Edition. With an Introduction by Matti Bunzl. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mbiti, John S. (1970). African Religion and Philosophies. Garden City, N. J.: Doubleday Anchor Books.
Schütz, Alfred. (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Tempels, Placide. (1962). Notre rencontre. Léopoldville: Entre d'Etudes Pastorales.
Van Avermaet, E. and B. Mbuya. (1954). Dictionnaire Kiluba-Français. Tervuren: Musée Royal du Congo Belge.

[Introduction]

[Text 1: Of man (1)]

[Text 2: Of man (2)]

[Text 3: Of angels ]

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