Lumpa Church

Lumpa movement was in the 1950s, a Christian renewal movement in present-day Zambia, who gave himself the name Lumpa Church.

The Lumpa movement is closely linked with the charismatic personality of Alice Lenshina. Lumpa means better than anyone else in Bemba. This movement was strongly anti - animistic, turned radically against sorcery, polygamy and alcohol. In the center of her cult was Christian baptism. Their hymns are still among the most popular in Zambia and have been taken over by established churches.

The Lumpa movement came in 1958 in increasing conflicts with the authorities because they refused to pay taxes, rejecting their own registration as a church and even started their own courts. Shortly after achieving independence led to the escalation that over 700, write other sources than 1,500 deaths in the Lumpa movement and a great escape shaft into the now the Democratic Republic of Congo had the consequence. Alice Lenshina was placed under arrest and released after ten years in 1975. Less than two years later, she was arrested again, as they had renewed the Lumpa movement.

Then the Lumpa movement broke up officially, but found in the Catholic lay movement Marie Legion an accepted form of organization, where the hymns were taken. In addition, the Lumpa movement by no means regarded as extinct, but apparently lives very reduced in the underground.

The Lumpa movement is by no means confined to purely religious motives. She was a mass movement with up to 100,000 followers, and therefore about one-tenth of the former population of this region, so the dominant intellectual force and organization in the north of Zambia. She put Catholicism and the Scottish church in this region almost by their believers converted to her. The independence of Zambia is strong mentally rooted in the Lumpa movement. The dominant politicians of the independence as Kenneth Kaunda and Simon Kapwepwe came from Chinsali, ie, from the same district, and as Alice Lenshina their supporters asked to leave the United National Independence Party, this suddenly missing in this region almost all party members.

The Lumpa movement may be gone, but she is together with charitable organizations in the Copperbelt during the colonial period, one of the two roots of Zambian politics. Both roots are decided nationally, and I come across, both have the national consciousness in Zambia so marked that tribalism even in Barotseland to this day has no chance of being politically virulent.