In the aftermath of late nineteenth-century conquests, European intellectuals developed social scientific concepts that compared political and religious institutions. ‘Divine kingship’, one such concept, signified a premodern institution that unified spiritual and secular power in the body of a man who ensured the welfare of land and people. By tracing the development of the concept of divine kingship and its application to the Bemba rulers of Northern Zambia, this article explores Western intellectual engagements with changing African spiritual and secular sovereignties. Divine kingship helped scholars, including Godfrey and Monica Wilson, Audrey Richards, Luc de Heusch, and Jan Vansina construct spatial and temporal models of sovereignty amidst struggles over the nature of sovereignty itself. Tracing its evolution sheds light on the historiography of embodied power. The article demonstrates how divine kingship theory helped historians imagine kingship as a key political institution in Central African historiography as well as inform ideas of political secularization and religious change.

In a historiography that paints relations between chiefs and women as antagonistic, the history of the Nazaretha Church in Mtunzini, South Africa in the early twentieth century sheds light on conditions that allowed chiefs and women to find common ground. During the era of segregation, Mtunzini was, on one hand, subject to relatively less interference from white government officials, but, on the other, ravaged by social and economic change. In this context, the Nazaretha Church flourished thanks to the support of many chiefs and women. The religious community not only proposed new answers to related questions about health, healing, and morality, but it also afforded chiefs and women important social options amid rural decline and challenges to traditional authority.