ABSTRACT
In chapter 7 I suggest that the processes of religious change which have been identified in the preceding chapters might be regarded as aspects of this articulation process. Particularly the emergence of cults of affliction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their subsequent development into prophetic cults, and back into nonprophetic cults, keeps pace with the triple sequence of articulation indicated above. The emergence of non-prophetic non-regional cults of affliction in western Zambia in the nineteenth century is seen as an aspect of the articulation of mercantile capitalism and the domestic mode of production. Bituma and Nzila, as prophetic regional cults, developed in the 1930s out of the substratum of non-regional cults of affliction, when mercantile capitalism had effectively given way to industrial capitalism. Urban-rural relations between urban migrants from rural western Zambia, and their home communities, are an aspect of the articulation between the domestic and the industrial-capitalist mode of production. According to Meillassoux’s penetrating analysis of circulatory labour migration,115 urban immigration of workers (raised in the village, and likely to retire in the village whenever they are expendable in the capitalist sector) represents a major device through which the capitalist mode of production, in Zambia as elsewhere in Africa, reproduces itself at the expense of the domestic mode which is mainly located in distant rural villages. The extensive regional cults of affliction (such as Nzila) may be more appropriate to a situation closer to definite proletarization (i.e., when urban migrants no longer define themselves by reference to the domestic mode of production, and de facto have been divorced from the rural means of production). Alternatively the fragmentation of a prophetic, regional cult into a form reminiscent of the earlier non-regional cults of affliction (such as happened in the case of Bituma), may be more appropriate to migrants in the earlier stages of proletarization, i.e., when they still rely heavily on the domestic mode of production.
