There is a rich literature on the question of how the institution of colonial chieftainship emerged and how it survived the colonial period. Terence Ranger (1993) broke new ground by suggesting that colonial officials and African potentates imagined traditions so as to rule segments of peoples in an arbitrary manner through customs that they would intrinisically recognise. Building on Ranger’s insights, this paper examines the workings of chieftainship in a region in which the Catholic Church had a great deal of political authority: the Tanganyika province in the South-East of the Belgian Congo. It argues that the role of the Church was not confined to imagining ethnicities in the Tanganyika context. Following the East African Slave Trade and the colonial conquests, there were few pre-colonial institutions left intact to rule African societies. Given the lack of traditional, African political opposition, together with the lack of state coverage, the Catholic Church became a powerful social force in Tanganyika. In an effort to promote its political power by being seen as a mediating force, it provided council to chiefs as well as the colonial officials and in so doing facilitated the institution of chieftainship in an environment in which its operation was particularly challenging. In colluding with localism, the Church tried to create prestine Christian communities from the patchwork of polities that had resulted from the East African Slave Trade and the colonial conquests at the turn of the twentieth century.