Recent work on crime fiction has highlighted the genre’s increasingly transnational focus and the growing number of migrant detectives. Matsotsi, a little-known Nyanja text published in Zambia in the early 1960s, provides a much earlier example of this figure in Sergeant Balala, an Angolan detective fighting to contain the tsotsi menace in Johannesburg, South Africa. Matsotsi, however, does more than point to cross-border detection as a means of elucidating transnational relationships. Shonga and Zulu’s text manipulates the genres of the detective novel and the bildungsroman to tell a story about the relationships among the individual, the state, and the wider region at a key moment in southern African history, when Zambia and Malawi were on the cusp of independence. Although African language writing has often been considered too localized to be used for nationalist purposes, here it is mobilized for the purpose of state-making in a transnational context.

This paper explores the use of the Chewa and Nyanja concepts of mbumba and nkhoswe in Central Africa and Southern Africa as interpretive tools for an Anglican ecclesiology and theology of leadership. Following an exposition of these two concepts, it conceptualizes mbumba as a diocese, and bishops as nkhoswe deriving from Christ as Nkhoswe par excellence. These two concepts entail critical values including responsibility, accountability and mutuality, which can be used as a model to enhance the relationship between a diocese and bishop. Conceptualizing a diocese as mbumba and the role of a bishop as that of nkhoswe has the potential to enhance missional practice in Central and Southern Africa.