Earnest: This statement comes from a man who got less than 1% (0.87) of the vote in the presidential election in January 2015, who is a televangelist Pastor when he is not playing politics, and who, on losing the presidential election "sold the part of [his political party] he is holding to president Edgar Lungu" in exchange for an appointment as ambassador to some country in South America.
Jehovah's Witnesses are too well known in Zambia for anyone to pay attention to this ploy.
Thank you for this information, Earnest, and I apologize for my mistake in saying that it was the President of Zambia who wants to ban the JWs. With your information, the issue is not that the government in Zambia dislikes JWs. The opposition to the government doesn't like them - which makes sense given what you say about them being too well known in Zambia. And it fits better into what I have read about the JWs in Zambia.
I apologize if my mistake made it seem like the government was opposed to the JWs in Zambia. It isn't. The opposition opposes them. The government in Zambia is fine with the JWs in Zambia.
*can my title be edited?
To go back to Vidiot's comment,
.vidiot: OrphanCrow - "...a religion that claims to be politically neutral yet still impacts the political landscape..."
I'd never realized that before, but that's very perceptive.
A book that gives political commentary on the history of the Watch Tower movement in Africa:
Reaction to Colonialism: A Prelude to thePolitics of Independence in Northern Zambia 1893-1939 by Henry S. Meebelo, University of Zambia. Institute for African Studies. 1971.
From pg. 178:
…the vicissitudes of Watch-towerism seem to have been a direct response to changes in the social and economic conditions in the country. The movement burst into a political conflagration at the end of World War I and spread rapidly when labour redundancy increased as the soldiers and military porters returned home to throw in their lot with a population resentful of the war and its after-effects. During the 1920s, when the anti-war fever and the war’s social and economic ‘fall-out’ had subsided almost to oblivion, and when the traditional ruling class was slowly but surely equipping itself to look after the welfare of its people better, the movement was apparently in the doldrums. It was, so it seems, only rejuvenated from this moribund state by the economic conditions of the world slump and its after-effects. If this postulate is something one can go by, it seems clear that the Watch Tower movement thrived on social and economic discontent, and as long as such popular discontent was at a low ebb, it tended to relapse into comparative obscurity. This, perhaps more than any other single factor, determined the movement’s political character and dynamism at any given time.
If the Watch Tower movement was a failure , it was so only in the political sense. But as a religious organization – even if one called it a ‘novel movement of religious anarchism’, as Gann has somewhat unbenignly branded it – it grew from strength to strength in Northern Rhodesia, especially as the European-controlled Jehovah’s Witnesses gradually gained influence over African Watch Tower in the country. J. L. Keith, District Commissioner , Ndola, in his evidence to the Russell Commission, testified that Watch Tower had ‘almost become part and parcel of native custom in the villages’ and that ‘nearly the whole country is affected now’; and a year before Northern Rhodesia became the independent sovereign State of Zambia in 1964, there were some 28,300 ‘active Jehovah’s Witnesses’ in the country.
But if there is any sense in which the Watch Tower movement could be said to have left a mark on the Northern Province’s political history, it is the lessons the civil authorities and the rising African elite had to learn from the movement. The Administration woke up to a new realization that the African, in spite if his relative docility in the past to European rule, could not be taken for granted. Something more than merely governing him must be done: he had to have something in return for his obliging attitude and services. This was the realization which had dawned upon Macdonell after the mass trial of Watch Tower leaders at Kasama. To the chiefs, the movement was a parabolical lesson in one important sense: it showed then that unless they looked after their people well, they always stood the risk of losing the people’s loyalty to any ‘upstart’ movement or persons. For the educated Africans, Watch-towerism was a great discredit to intellectual leadership in the local people’s endeavours to better themselves under colonial rule.
