THE BEMBA TRIBE OF NORTH-EASTERN RHODESIA 115
are big establishments, with enormous and impressive cathedrals, They own and cultivate ground, attract a following, have villages on their estates regarded as 'mission people/ just as the bena musumba are considered to be the personal following of a chief. Each society, again, has introduced what is, in native eyes, its own new code of laws, often differing from those of the Government and those of the chiefs, e.g. most missions prohibit polygamy, some divorce, others beer-drinking, dancing, or religious ceremonial of different kinds. In native eyes at present there are certain well-known rules binding on the Christian members of the community, sometimes even bringing them into conflict with the other authorities of the society, the district official and the chief, and a new category of offence known as fya busenshi ('things of heathendom'), or fya kale ('things of the past') believed to be strongly condemned.1
' Besides their own villagers, the missionary societies exert authority over Christians scattered in nearly every community in the territory, and their grip over these distant 'subjects5 must in some cases be just as strong as those of the chiefs of old days. At the Roman Catholic missions at any rate, each baby of Christian parents is registered and summoned at the right time for instruction, however far away he or she lives. Each village is constantly visited by travelling native teachers and evangelists, and by the white missionaries themselves.
The sanctions of the missionaries' authority are many. On the positive side, their teaching and their way of living command a new allegiance and a new opportunity for advance and their personalities very often inspire admiration, affection, and personal loyalty. On the negative side, there is the introduction of a new supernatural sanction quite as powerful as those that supported the chief's authority,2 and the threat to withdraw the Christian members of a community in which the Christian kw is being flouted by a headman or prominent member. This acts as a powerful deterrent in the case of many Roman Catholic villages,
1 This last is, of course, an injustice to the modern missionary, who is often one of the first to try to enc9urage interest in and respect for native custom.
2 The fear of hell-fire, and, in the case of the older and less educated natives, the fear of curses seriously believed to be uttered by missionaries, evidently on the strength of some such statement as 'God will punish you if you behave like that'—such a belief being almost inevitable in an area where chiefs were thought to have power to curse.