An ethnography of ritual and politics in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)

Abstract

Five decades after its publication in English, in 1976, Peter Fry’s book, Spirits of Protest. Spirit-mediums and the articulation of consensus among the Zezuru of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), is finally reaching Portuguese-speaking readers. The aim of the book is to understand the relationship between religion and politics amongst the Zezuru people (who belong to the Shona speaking congeries). To this end, between 1964 and 1966, the author carried out participant observation and extensive fieldwork. At the time, as a result of his research, Peter Fry discovered that the Zezuru people’s attempt to return to “tradition” involved the revival of an institution that had always remained latent and which, during the fieldwork, took on a more explicit form: mediumship and spirit worship. This review therefore discusses Fry’s research, which remains little known in Brazil: that is to say the ethnography he carried out for his PhD in what was then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. The review describes the context in which the fieldwork was conducted and depicts the socio-political mood Fry encountered in 1964 when he arrived in Southern Rhodesia. At the time of his arrival, the country was in a state of upheaval, whilst the nascent Zimbabwean nationalism was oscillating between various tendencies. However, beyond mere ideological divisions, there were other dimensions of social life, less explicit and more “invisible”, that needed to be mapped out and understood. Fry’s ethnography describes, precisely, the role of mediums in the province of Mashonaland (the location of the research), against a backdrop of political suspicion and persecution. Finally, the review comments on the originality and contribution of this research by Peter Fry, both in terms of the field of African studies and in terms of our understanding of the relationship between religion and politics.