Preacher, chief and prophetess: moruti Seakgano in the Ngwato Kingdom, East-central Botswana

A fruitful way to deal with religious change in southern Africa as elsewhere, is to seek the shifting articulation between people's behaviour, their changing material circumstances, and their categories of meaning. History clearly has much to contribute here. I focus on the life of a MoTswana Christian preacher, Moruti Seakgano Ncaga, and on two contests over the scope of his authority in and around the Ngwato Kingdom. This specific profile illuminates aspects of the creation of the role of moruti ('one who preaches or teaches'), a key part of the history of southern African Christianity. Seakgano pushed and pulled at the boundaries around what Christians could do. In view of King Khama's successful co-optation of the London Missionary Society (LMS) Ngwato Church, Seakgano's conflict in 1915 with Khama's rebellious son is seen as resulting from the moruti's personification of Ngwato hegemony. The outcome, an aborted attack on Seakgano, arose from a combination of his role as commonly understood, and his own vigour in prosecuting it. Seakgano's subsequent 1921 conflict with a cult prophetess shows how he further shaped his own practice. Moreover, the fact that the Church unified village elites in a multiethnic network rendered him useful, and the prophetess useless, to Khama. This too affected the development of the moruti. The role of moruti, as lived by Seakgano and by others, grew and changed. It drew on aspects of chiefship (as in the 1915 conflict) and healer-priestship (as in 1921) for some of its raw material. Powerful, incorporative religious leaders like the 'prophets' of the today's Healing Churches thus had a local precedent. To understand such rooted precedents is to invest the picture of southern African religion with the richness of specificity and change.