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van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1985, ‘From tribe to ethnicity in western Zambia: The unit of study as an ideological problem’, in: W.M.J. van Binsbergen & P. Geschiere, eds., Old modes of production and capitalist encroachment: Anthropological explorations in Africa, London: Kegan Paul International, pp. 181-234.
© 1985-2002 Wim
M.J. van Binsbergen
‘To get inside just one African tribe with as able and lucid a guide as Dr. van Velsen is both a salutary and a pleasurable experience and one which can be confidently recommended — Times Educational Supplement’.[1]
INTRODUCTION[2]
Not only on the
ground, in the political and economic aspects of the lives of the
people we study in Africa, have the 1970s been a decade of
discontinuity. Academically this discontinuity has meant the
discarding of so much of established anthropology. A different
type of anthropology is emerging: one blending with history and
political economy, and one in which structural-functionalist
one-tribe approaches hinging on culture or custom have given way,
by and large, to more comprehensive regional approaches.
Historical process and dialectics are about to take the place of
function. Allegedly firm and rigid cultural and ethnic boundaries
turn out to be breached by economic, political and ideological
processes of much wider scope than, e.g., ‘the Tallensi’,
‘the Kikuyu’, or ‘the Zulu’.
Turning to new paradigms, anthropology in
Africa has shed the tribe or ethnic group as its basic unit of
study. In this paper I shall argue that Zambian rural
anthropology is on the decline, and that this decline is related
to the reliance, among anthropologists, on this unit of study in
the past. The problem of the tribe as a unit of study is,
however, complicated by the fact that members of Central African
society themselves structure their social experience partly in
terms of tribes; it is hard for a researcher to tear himself away
from such a folk categorisation. I shall discuss this problem
with reference to my own research among the Nkoya of Western
Zambia. I shall then argue that one way to escape from the tribal
model on the analytical plane, without sacrificing the
subjects’ own organisation of their experience, is to try and
explain this experience as a form of consciousness emerging out
of the dialectics of political incorporation and, even more
fundamentally, the penetration of capitalism, in other words, the
articulation of capitalism and non-capitalist modes of
production. This leads to a picture of complex relationships, of
much greater scope and abstraction than, and extending in time
and place beyond, anything that could be meaningfully defined as
a unit of study. The alternative proposed here for the tribal
model as a unit of study is not another, better unit of study
(e.g. mode of production, social formation, or a well-defined
spatio-temporal portion of reality), but a growing awareness of
possible problems and interrelations, informed by insights from
history and political economy. Thus this paper, much like my
other recent work (cf. van Binsbergen 1981 and n.d.) will be an
exercise in the interaction of anthropology and history in the
analysis of a specific set of data. Such a form of anthropology
could try and make its comeback on the scene of rural studies of
Central and Southern Africa.
My analysis is set within the framework of
the articulation of modes of production — the guiding idea of
the present book. However, the inconclusive nature of my argument
reflects the fact that recent Marxist studies have not yet made
much progress towards a proper understanding of the ideological
aspects of modes of production and their articulation.[3] As will be argued by
Raatgever in her contribution to this book (vide infra) [
anders ] , Godelier’s attempts in this respect, dwelling on
the applicability of the infrastructure/superstructure metaphor,
has not managed to produce much clarity; moreover, his work
seldom specifically deals with the process of articulation of
modes of production. Yet, among the modern French Marxist
authors, Godelier appears to have been the only one to explicitly
consider the problem of ethnicity.[4] His Marxist inspiration is however largely
used to arrive at a formal and epistemological critique of the
concept of tribe in classic anthropology. Godelier does not
attempt (as is my intention in the present chapter) to identify
the political economic conditions, and the intersubjective
dynamics of participant observation, under which a group of
people, and a researcher studying them, would adopt respectively
reject the notion of tribe. With regard to other members of the
French School, it is only fair to admit that the notion of
bounded ethnic groups as more or less self-evident units of
analysis was at first uncritically adapted by them; it is the
work of Meillassoux and Terray which has made such groups as the
Guro and the Dida famous.[5]
More recently, a Marxist perspective on
ethnicity is beginning to be formulated by writers in the
Anglo-Saxon tradition, and largely by reference to East African
data. Thus John Saul, in a study of the dialectics of class and
tribe in that part of Africa (1979: ch. 14), offers three
allegedly complementary approaches along which ethnicity could be
drawn the orbit of a Marxist analysis. Ethnicity, he argues,
could be viewed, first as a response to imperialism, at the
sub-national level; secondly as an ideological aspect of the
articulation of modes of production; and thirdly, as a form of
ideological class struggle. Surprisingly, Saul fails to indicate
the obvious connections between these three interpretations,
which in actual fact would appear to be very closely related.
Behind political and military domination, imperialism very
obviously served the imposition of the capitalist mode of
production. It was thus a major factor in the articulation
between that mode of production and such modes of production as
were already in existence locally. In so far as it is inherent in
the articulation process that these pre-capitalist modes of
production retain their own distinct existence — if only in an
encapsulated and subservient form , a neo-traditionalist
expression of this distinct ‘identity’ (the very word refers
to a problematic which is typical of capitalist encroachment)
would readily assume the form of ethnicity. In so far as
capitalist encroachment involves local people in new, capitalist
relations of production, it amounts to class formation and thus
to manifest or latent class struggle.[6] If the ideological expression of such
articulation is predominantly in ethnic terms, the creation and
assertion of ethnic identity vis-a-vis other emerging ethnic
identities that form part of the ideological layout of the social
formation, might certainly take on militant overtones, but yet
such ethnicity would serve to conceal the underlying class nature
of the process that is thus being expressed. Therefore it would
be more appropriate to view ethnicity as an ideological diversion
of class struggle, rather than an ideological class struggle in
itself. The point has already been made in Mafeje’s (1971)
earlier analysis of ‘tribalism’, which draws on a more
general Marxist inspiration without using the idea of an
articulation of modes of production: such ethnicity could
essentially be called ‘false consciousness’.
In his review article (1981) on possible
explanations of ethnicity as found in the recent work by Mamdani
(1976), Leys (1975) and others, Joel Kahn is less sure of the
appropriateness of the term ‘false consciousness’ in
connexion with ethnicity (1981: 489). Kahn offers a number of
stimulating ideas. He dwells on the problematic of the relative
autonomy of the ideological instance, the specific forms of
domination found in the world-wide or national peripheries (cf.
Meillassoux 1975;) articulation of modes of production is however
not explicitly mentioned), the significance of class analysis in
this context, and the relevance of colonial forms of domination.
Somewhat superfluously, Kahn stresses that in the ten pages of
his article he is not ‘attempting to develop a universal theory
of primordialism’ (1981: 51). And while many of his pointers
have parallels in the analysis of ethnicity in Western Zambia as
set out in the present chapter, my attempt would even be more
modest in that I will largely focus on the concrete ethnographic
and historiographic forms in which this ethnicity manifests
itself to the researcher — shunning the explicit, abstract,
Marxist theorising in which Kahn hopes to find the key for the
explanation we both seek.
Finally, there is — precisely at the
ethnographic level — a dimension of ethnicity which is
surprisingly absent in scholarly analysis of the phenomenon:
ethnicity may be an ideological process at the level of
participants in any society under study, but our attempt to come
to terms with this process in the course of our own intellectual
production also has clear ideological implications.
In this chapter I shall argue a view of
ethnicity as an response, among African participants, to the
articulation of the pre-existing modes of production with
capitalism. Alternatively, it is now fairly accepted to look at
early anthropology as an ideological expression, among North
Atlantic participants, of an imperialism seeking to create
conditions for the world-wide penetration of the capitalist mode
of production (Leclerc 1972; Asad 1973; Copans 1975). This
imperialist heritage is likely to have some continued, if hidden,
impact on whatever study of whatever topic modern anthropology
undertakes in that part of the world where conditions of
peripheral capitalism prevail. Considering how long it took
anthropology to take up the study of incorporation processes,
capitalist penetration etc. (a very small trickle up to the
1960s, such studies only became a major topic in the 1970s), one
begins to suspect that anthropology is genetically conditioned to
turn a blind eye to the very processes of articulation of modes
of production to which it owns its own existence. Indulging in a
Freudian analogy, one might say that there is here a Primal Scene
which anthropology could not, until quite recently, afford to
face, for the sake of its own sanity. Since anthropology is
primarily a matter of intellectual, i.e. ideological, production,
this problematic might have a less devastating effect on
anthropological studies of economic or political aspects of the
articulation process — studies that do not concentrate on
ideology. But when anthropologists turn to the ideological
dimensions of the articulation of modes of production, and for
instance begin to study religious or ethnic responses under
conditions of capitalist encroachment, then the ideological
complexity of this research undertaking is raised to the power
‘two’.
For two ideological processes oddly converge in the
anthropological study of ethnicity: first, among anthropologists,
the modern transformation of an anthropology which started out as
an ideological transformation of imperialism; and secondly, the
emergence, as an ideological response to capitalist encroachment
in the Third World, of new group identities which seek historical
legitimation by posing as reminiscences or re-enactments of
pre-capitalist African social forms allegedly unaffected by
capitalism. Could such a convergence ever produce meaningful and
reliable results at all?
The answer to this question cannot be
given before we have fully analysed the extent to which the
modern social sciences reflect, in their theorising as well as in
the concrete organisation of their intellectual production
processes, the contradictions inherent in present-day capitalism
— in other words, before we have assessed to what extent modern
anthropology succeeds in escaping from its imperialist heritage.
The good intentions of today’s anthropologists, the inclusion
of Third World colleagues among their number, the emergence of a
self-reflexive, even revolutionary, anthropology, the radical
political stances a minority of anthropologists take in public
life — all this may be encouraging, but it is not sufficient
proof that the fundamental orientation of anthropology has
completely altered since its inception, a century ago. The
complexities of the situation are further revealed when we look
at the relations of intellectual production that prevail in
modern anthropology (cf. Van Binsbergen 1984). These largely
follow the pattern of modern capitalism: intellectual wage
labour, separation between intellectual workers and their means
of production (libraries, computers, office space, motor vehicles
used in the field), the bureaucratic organisation of production,
the reliance on underpaid local assistants in the field, the
commoditisation of such intellectual products as books, articles,
degrees, academic honours, the ensuing academic market pressures,
competition, etc. And this confusing complexity manifests itself
not just on the impersonal level of structures of academic
production, but also in the very personal intimacy of individual
thought processes, motivation in research, the sort of
‘rapport’ a field-worker concentrating on ideological themes
manages to establish with his or her informants, and the force
with which that research is drawn towards these informants’ own
viewpoints.
Once an ideological representative of
capitalist encroachment, the anthropologist today may be tempted
to identify with, if not to join, the forces fighting this
encroachment, e.g. through such ideological forms as ethnic
identity, authenticity, negritude, the African personality,
Christian independent churches, prophetic religious movements.
These forms appear to express aspirations which as yet — under
conditions of intercontinental dependency in the military,
monetary and cultural field — are still largely deprived of
economic and political reality. In this article I shall describe
an instance of such identification, on the part of the
anthropologist, as a temporary by-product of research into
ethnicity. The example does not stand on his own: several
researchers of modern religious expressions in Africa have
yielded to similar pressures by temporarily joining the religious
organisations they were studying (Jules-Rosette 1975; Martin
1975). Are these responses, among researchers, positive forms of
solidarity with the ideological struggles of their informants, or
do they amount to intellectual betrayal in so far as they further
the production of ‘false consciousness’ — stressing ethnic
or religious, over economic, analyses of reality?
These are immense questions, bearing on
our intellectual integrity, our class position in the world
system, and the viability of a Marxist anthropology. My present
argument will not offer adequate answers. Suffice it to say that
anthropological analysis of the ideological dimensions of the
articulation of modes of production contains a double bind, an
ideological puzzle, which more than justifies a closer look at
the anthropological researcher involved in such an exercise. This
is the reason why, in the course of this chapter, I shall have to
pay some attention to my own role as that of a researcher
blundering through ‘Nkoya’ ethnicity. At the same time it may
be the fundamental reason why, as yet, any analysis of the
ideological dimensions of the articulation of modes of production
will remain unsatisfactory. However, it is to such an analysis
that I shall now proceed.
THE END OF RURAL
ANTHROPOLOGY IN ZAMBIA?
Any analysis of
ethnicity in Zambia today would have to reckon with the
exceptionally rich tradition of colonial anthropology in that
country, as created by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. In order
to understand the reliance on the tribal model among the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute researchers of rural Zambia, we
should not overlook the fact that they were adopting, into their
analytical frameworks, emic categories employed, at the time, by
Zambian villagers, townsmen, and colonial administrators alike.
In addition, their academic discipline
provided these researchers with at least two other reasons for
upholding the tribal model. First, the concept of culture at the
theoretical level reinforced the notion of tribe (as the most
obvious carrier of a distinct, internalised, many-sided culture);
it provided a perspective on allegedly deeply-rooted
‘primordial attachments’, which Shils [ check Shills ]
and Geertz have stressed with regard to ethnicity (cf. Doornbos
1972 and references cited there). And secondly, the adoption of
prolonged and intensive, participatory field-work as the main
method of data collection did much to strengthen, among
anthropologists, the concept of tribe at a personal level. The
intimate communion with the one culture that one studies as an
anthropologist can be seen as both an irritating cliche of the
professional sub-culture of classic anthropology, and at the same
time as a genuine, existential dimension of doing field-work in
that tradition. It suggests the adoption of one particular unit
of study, that whose boundaries are defined by the limits of the
cognitive and language field in which the anthropologist, after a
long and painful learning process, acquires a certain (always
hopelessly defective) mastery. ‘My people’. ‘My tribe’.
The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute
researchers working in rural Zambia have seldom explicitly
considered the analytical status of the ethnic labels they used
for their main units of study. The titles of their main
publications demonstrate that they defined their units of study
loosely in terms of tribes or ethnic groups.[7] Much sophistication, admittedly, went into the
assessment of the transformation these rural ethnic labels
underwent when they were introduced into the urban areas.[8] Within what was called
the ‘industrial-colonial complex of urban Northern Rhodesia’,
these labels were claimed to acquire categorical and situational
overtones quite different from the ‘total way of life’ they
were assumed to represent out in the rural areas. Not that the
rural researchers claimed to analyse this way of life
exhaustively. In fact, most of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute
studies emphatically concentrated on only one major aspect of
‘tribal life’: either kinship, or marriage, or the judicial
process, formal and particularly informal political organisation,
community crises, ritual, etc.
The concept of culture so conducive to the
classic tribal model, was rarely used explicitly; instead
Gluckman and associates preferred the term custom, with its
Malinowskian bird-of-paradise feathers. In contrast with American
idealist culturology, the Manchester researchers were little
inclined to view ‘custom’ as autonomously determining the
course of the social process. If blame them we must, it could be
for under-analysing, rather than for exaggerating, the cultural
dimension of social life. Van Velsen and Turner[9] presented dynamic and situational approaches
to village life in Southern Central Africa that were far richer
and more convincing that anything the classic
structural-functionalist paradigm had ever managed. Yet, even if
one had to limit one’s detailed study to selected aspects of
‘tribal’ life, even if one studied these aspects in a
masterly way, the tribe remained the basic unit of study. African
village life was essentially depicted as closed in itself and
following a logic of its own. ‘Outside contacts’, with
European administrators, mission, the modern market economy,
migrancy, nationalism, were tackled in introductory or concluding
chapters or in scattered articles, but not in the main books.
Of course, the anthropological discipline
had at the time no theoretical solution to offer for the
formidable problems posed by the persistence of Encapsulated
neo-traditional communities in a situation of articulation of
modes of production. Individual researchers could hardly be
blamed for the historical limitations of their discipline,
especially not when they themselves were aware of these
limitations. Like Jaap van Velsen who, finally realising that the
most fundamental questions concerning labour migration could not
be answered from within Tongaland, in the last minute withdraw
his chapters on this topic from the very galley proofs of
Politics of Kinship.[10]
Two exceptions to the general pattern are
Gluckman’s study of the Economy of the Central Barotse Plain
(1968a, repr.) and Cunnison’s (1959) Luapula Peoples. Both take
as their main unit of study not a single ‘tribe’, but
geographical areas which they see as filled with a variety of
tribes. While Gluckman takes tribes for granted, leaving the
concept unanalysed,[11]
Cunnison (1959: ch. 2) engages in a painstaking assessment of the
local and analytical meaning of the concept of tribe in the
Luapula context. It was the particular poly-ethnic structure of
their respective rural research areas that forced Gluckman and
Cunnison to discuss, with different degrees of sophistication,
the interactions between ‘tribes’. The other researchers were
hardly concerned with internal organisation at the tribal level,
but used the tribe rather as a comprehensive setting within which
the microscopic, face-to-face social process took place in which
they were really interested, and which they studied with
excellent results. This approach is particularly clear in
Turner’s Schism and Continuity:
‘I focus the investigation upon the village, a significant local unit, and analyse it successively as an independent social system and as a unit within several wider sets of social relations included in the total field of Ndembu society’ (Turner 1958a: xvii).
Paradoxically, the study that, among the
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute work, was most concerned with the
relations between a local, rural Zambian society and the wider
world as dominated by the capitalist mode of production
(Watson’s Tribal Cohesion in a Money Economy, 1958), was at the
same time the study that tried to make the most of the tribe,
conceived in terms that were essentially those of
structural-functionalist anthropology. Mambwe tribal society, far
from being a loosely-descriptive (and hence pardonable) category,
is for Watson a living, and surviving, integrated entity; tending
‘to adjust to new conditions through its existing social institutions. These institutions will survive, but with new values, in a changed social system’ (Watson 1958: 228).
Regrettably, Long’s (1968) impressive
attempt to break away from all this, in Social Change and the
Individual, was at the same time virtually the swan’s song of
Zambian rural anthropology. Long studied what might have been
called ‘Lala village life’ not as the enacting of changing
tribal institutions or of some manipulative internal social
process, but rather as the ‘social and religious responses to
innovation in a Zambian community’.[12] As a unit of study he used, at the
descriptive level, a geographically defined ‘Kapepa parish’.
Here he sought access, analytically, not to representative
glimpses of ‘Lala society’, but to a structurally complex
social field, accommodating both local cultural and structural
elements, and economic and social-structural pressures, as well
as occupational and religious experiences pertaining to distant
urban areas (Long 1969: 6). In the extended-case studies of Van
Velsen and Turner custom, elsewhere considered king, had been
dethroned, giving way to a complex social process that was
determined by the internal dynamics of local rural society; in
Long’s analysis, the wider world was finally allowed to step
in, and it offered altered patterns of agriculture and farm
management, dynamics of power and prestige, and religious
experience, that drove home the fact that the single tribe is not
a feasible unit of study at all.[13]
It is difficult to believe that Long’s
book, published in 1968 and dealing with the situation in 196364,
is in fact one of the most recent full-length anthropological
studies to be devoted to rural Zambia. In addition to Turner’s
Drums of Affliction (1986b) (where occasional references to
social and political conditions surrounding Ndembu village
society cannot take away the fact that Ndembu society remains the
crucial unit of study just as in Turner’s earlier studies), the
only other examples to come to mind are Elizabeth Colson’s
Consequences of Resettlement (1971), Stuart Mark’s Large
Mammals and a Brave People (1976); and George Bond’s Politics
of Change in a Zambian Community (1976), based on field-work in
the same period as Long’s. Whatever anthropology Robert
Bates’s (1976) Rural Responses to Industrialization contains is
best left undiscussed here (cf. van Binsbergen 1977). There must
be some interesting rural studies lying buried in unpublished
Ph.D. theses. Lancaster’s and Poewe’s articles foreshadowed
full-length books to be published in 1983.[14] But on the whole, Zambian rural anthropology
has been eloquently silent during the 1970s. There has been only
a faint trickle of publications, based mainly on field-work
conducted before the mid-1970s: this includes articles by Bond,
Colson, Scudder, Anita Spring Hansen, Marks, Robin Fielder,
Lancaster, Hansen, Holy, and myself. Today, the growth poles for
the study of Zambian society are history and political economy
— and not anthropology. The anthropological study of Zambia’s
rural areas has hardly been a field in which the University of
Zambia has excelled, and little rural anthropology has been
published in the Lusaka-based journal African Social Research.
One of the most significant studies of rural Southern Central and
Southern Africa, including Zambia, to be published in the 1970s
was Roots of Rural Poverty (Palmer & Parsons, 1977); this
book was inspired, to a limited extent, by radical anthropology
(including the recent French Marxist school) as developed with
reference to other parts of the Third World, but towards its
argument Zambian rural anthropology did not make much of a
contribution.[15]
Similarly, the Centre of African Studies in Edinburgh could
recently organise a full-length conference on the ‘Evolving
Structure of Zambian Society’ (1980) without a single
anthropologist among the contributors, and virtually without so
much as a passing reference to Zambian rural anthropology in the
footnotes to the papers.
This characterisation of the present state
of the art in Zambian rural anthropology of course relies on a
particular conception of anthropology, which may well be
debatable. I have elsewhere considered this question at somewhat
greater length (cf. van Binsbergen 1981a). Here let it suffice
that by anthropology I mean that body of social-scientific work
that directly (i.e. in a neo-classical, often implicitly
structural functionalist form), or preferably indirectly (i.e. in
a form inspired by regional, historical and politico-economic
considerations) derives from the methods and problematics of the
classic anthropology of the 1940s and 1950s.
It would seem as if anthropology, with its
prolonged participatory field-work and its profound insights in
family and kinship, the micro dynamics of the political and
economic processes, and the participants’ construction of
social and ritual meaning in terms of a local particularistic
symbolic idiom, is unable to make a meaningful contribution
either to the understanding of rural stagnation, today, or in
general to the ongoing research by historians, economists and
political scientist. This is in fact an opinion found, expressly
of tacitly, among many colleagues from other disciplines
currently engaged in the analysis of rural Southern Central
Africa. Rural anthropology in this part of the world may have
been too slow, or too entrenched in its classic problematics, to
address itself to the academic and societal problems of today.
Given its reliance, in the past, on the tribe or ethnic group as
a standard unit of study, a re-assessment of the unit of study
may help to find a way out of this dead end. For I am convinced
that the predicament is largely a theoretical one, and cannot be
explained away by such practical problems as the availability of
research funds, permits, and the hardships of rural field-work.
At the same time I would claim that the
perspective developed in the present book (that of modes of
production and their articulation) does provide a means to link
traditional, and meaningful, anthropological concerns, on the one
hand, and the economic and political realities beyond the local
rural community, on the other. Without denying the specificity
and the internal logic of the domestic or tributary mode of
production, the analysis does not stop short there, but instead
the conditions are identified for the continued existence (in
other words, the reproduction) of this mode of production; and
these conditions are not sought in internalised culture of
similar primordial attachments, but in the material and
ideological processes through which surpluses generated in modes
of production such as identified locally, are appropriated by
other modes (particularly the capitalist one) in such a way that
the domestic community is accorded a measure of distinct, but
Encapsulated and neo-traditional, identity.
THE UNIT OF STUDY
For an outsider to
the social sciences, and perhaps particularly for a natural
scientist, it would be difficult to appreciate a situation where
libraries have been filled with studies in the field of Southern
Central and Southern African Studies, and specialists hold
conference after conference, conversing happily without more than
the usual terminological confusion, whereas no real consensus has
been reached as to the solution of the problem of the unit of
study in this field of enquiry.
What makes our present situation less
dramatic than outsiders might view it, is the fact that
considerations of the unit of study tend to refer to a much
higher plane of abstraction and analysis than that on which our
raw data are usually collected. On the level of the life
experiences of the people inhabiting the part of the world we are
studying, the concrete data are fairly straightforward. Our
research notes consist of interviews, documents, observations,
local words and their meanings, and sometimes (for those of us
who are engaged in participatory research) the subjective
experience of partially sharing an initially unfamiliar variety
of human social life. These elementary particles of social and
historical research in Africa may form, in a strict
methodological sense, our real units of study, but they are not
the ones that concern us here. We have, I suppose, a sufficient
amount of trust in each other’s professional skill and
integrity to accept the descriptive evidence each of us digs up
from his particular academic gold-mine. The problem of the unit
of study as I understand it arises only when it comes to
collating these minute facts into meaningful patterns, into more
comprehensive complexes that have a systematic extension in space
and that go through an identifiable process in time. The question
boils down to: what scope of vision should the blinkers allow
through which we peer at reality? For ultimately, everything
social is related to everything else; so only the whole world
constitutes an adequate unit of study. But such a unit is
impossible to handle, and is as little interesting to read about
as the tiny particles of information that constitute our raw
data. An adequate unit of study should enable us to select as
well as to synthesise. We might define such a unit of study,
tentatively, as
an analytic construct which, in a manner acceptable to a specialist academic audience, allows for the meaningful and systematic integration of disconnected research data around a common focus, in such a way that the analytic construct thus arrived at is relevant for the pursuit of a specific scientific and/or societal problematic.
This sums up a couple of crucial points.
First, the distinctions we impose upon the phenomena we study,
are essentially arbitrary man-made constructs, and do not in
themselves emanate from the nature of these phenomena. Secondly,
the choice of a particular construct as a meaningful unit of
study is subject to a process of negotiation between colleagues.[16] Thirdly, a unit of
study is not on the same level as our concrete research data, nor
on the most abstract level of grand theory, but on some
intermediate level: that on which our disconnected raw data are
processed so as to bring out patterns capable of being
generalised and explained in fairly general terms that are yet
somewhat proper to the geographical area and the historical
period we are concentrating on. And finally, the choice for one
unit of study rather than for another may be fairly arbitrary
from the point of the True Structure of Reality (which we see
only in a Glass Darkly, anyway); but this choice is far from
arbitrary when considered within the process of academic
production, where such units of study should be selected as have
the greatest potential of enlightening the problematic which
informs the research that is undertaken. Such problematics,
moreover, are not exclusively defined by academics, holding
conferences, sitting on boards that distribute research funds
between them, or deciding on the publication of each other’s
papers and books. The study of kinship terminology and the
symbolic layout of homesteads would be even more of a booming
field of research,[17] if
research problematics were exclusively defined by so-called
disinterested intellectual concerns alone. Fortunately, however,
scholars are free, to a considerable extent, to turn to
problematics that seem to be of particular social relevance, and
that may help to explain, if not to alter, the vital predicaments
that beset the people they are studying. In this respect studying
the ‘roots of rural poverty’ (Palmer & Parsons 1977) may
be more relevant, as a problematic, than the kinship terminology
and symbolic structures obtaining in the same part of the world.
And whereas the latter problematic may lead one to distinguish
between a host of different tribes of ethnic groups, each with
its own total culture including kinship terminology and spatial
symbolism, the former problematic would lead one to look for
broad, comprehensive, regional patterns that would explain the
remarkable similarities in the present-day predicament of the
people of Southern Africa. Here, of course, anthropology is
merging with history and political economy, and the present
non-anthropological work on rural Zambia (e.g. by Muntemba,
Klepper, Palmer, Vail) takes on a new significance.
Nor is it only the conscience of more or
less committed scholars, and the whims of funding agencies
usually located in the North Atlantic region, that suggest the
adoption of one problematic rather than another. The official
institutions in the areas our research concentrates on, and the
very villagers and petty administrators that provide us with our
data on the ground, coax us towards the adoption of particular
problematics, and thus towards the adoption of particular units
of study. Needless to say that their prodding is not always in a
direction that coincides with the choices academics would wish to
make. The crisis at the University of Zambia, early in 1976, or
the state of the social and history sciences within the Republic
of South Africa, are only two examples that suggest that the
adoption of a radical problematic may not make us, as
researchers, more attractive in the eyes of the members of the
society we study. Below I shall reflect on my personal experience
with this problem at a local level, in the course of my
participatory and oral-historical research in Kaoma district
(Western Zambia), and among people from that area now living in
Lusaka, 400 km east of Kaoma.[18]
That definitional and methodological
rigidity is necessary in the handling of one’s unit of study
has particularly been emphasised by scholars trying to compare
the phenomena pertaining to different geographical areas or
different periods. The problem of the definition of the units of
cross-cultural comparison has haunted comparative studies in the
social sciences ever since the end of the last century. Although
there have been several attempts at cross-cultural comparison in
the Southern African region,[19] the problem of the unit of study was hardly
explicitly considered in the course of these attempts, and
probably some of the data used derived from loosely-defined units
(‘tribes’, ‘ethnic groups’, ‘cultures’,
‘societies’) that were essentially incomparable. The
assumption was that e.g. ‘the Bemba’, ‘the Lozi’, ‘the
Tonga’ etc. not only really existed as collective
representations of participants in Zambian society, but also
formed viable units of analysis.
The example of urban ethnicity may
illustrate that adopting a particular unit of study enlightens a
certain problematic, but at the same time forces, like all
classification, an essentially volatile and dynamic reality into
a strait-jacket. In their Copperbelt studies Mitchell, Epstein
and Harries-Jones have treated ethnic identity primarily as a
logical devise to classify individuals. These researchers
stressed the situational aspects of urban ethnicity. Reliance on
a particular ethnic identity is only one of many options a town
dweller has for his personal organisation of urban relationships.
He may temporarily drop this identity and emphasise, in different
urban situations involving the same or a different set of people,
a different ethnic identity. Among themselves, and vis-a-vis
‘Lozi’, the Lusaka migrants from Kaoma district would
identity as ‘Nkoya’, but in many urban situations they would
pose as ‘Lozi’, and sometimes they would try to pass for
‘Bemba’ or even ‘Nyanja’. Alternatively, the town dweller
may, situationally, stress a social identity derived from class,
occupation, educational level, political or religious
affiliation. The ways in which ethnicity is alternatively
dominant or played down can only be understood against the
background of the total social process in which the participants
are specifically involved.
Description implies fossilisation, no
matter how dynamic a reality we try to capture. The inevitable
result is: lack of precision. It is tedious to have to indicate
all the time that the unit of study one imposes only covers a
certain aspect of the social reality, only in certain situations,
and subject to the participants’ own conscious and unconscious
manipulation. One has to adopt shorthand formulae, and these tend
to acquire a life of their own in the course of one’s argument.
This accounts for instance for the following paradox: in his work
of the 1950s and early 1960s Mitchell is on the one hand clearly
aware of the situational and manipulative aspects of ethnicity,
yet does not shrink from detailed studies of, e.g. intertribal
prestige scores and differential fertility, where these tribes
are neatly boxed and appear as entries in sophisticated,
computerised tables — as if they formed both emic and etic
categories at the same time (cf. Mitchell 1956, 1965).
This methodological problem, by the way,
is not limited to the main unit of study that we adopt in our
analyses. Ever since the extended-case method has made us aware
of the shifting, inchoate, situational, competitive elements in
the social process, persuading us to consider these elements as
the real basic data out of which we have to build a picture of a
‘social structure’ and a ‘culture’, we run into the
epistemological difficulty that, in order to discuss the data,
and the emerging interpretation, at all, we have to lend them far
greater invariability and stability than our analysis would yet
show them to possess.[20]
STUDYING THE NKOYA
I have already
indicated how the choice of a particular unit of study can be
suggested to the researcher on the basis of other than strictly
academic concerns, for instance by his commitment to a
problematic that is of wider social relevance, or under the
pressure of members of the society he is trying to study. In so
far as participants are often ideologically determined to ignore
the true make-up of their own situation, there may be
considerable tension between these two possible influences on
one’s choice of a unit of study. In the remainder of this
paper, I shall bring out both the lure of the tribal model as a
unit of study for rural Western Zambia, and its spuriousness in
the light of a more profound analysis. In my conclusion I shall
indicate the implications of this experience for the problem of
the unit of study in general.
My first research contact with people from
Western Zambia was in Matero, a fairly respectable residential
area in the northwestern part of Zambia’s capital. Early in
1972 a friend took me and my family to a nocturnal healing
session, staged by one of the senior leaders of a cult of
affliction that had been founded by the prophet Simbinga in Kaoma
district in the 1930s, and that had been introduced into Lusaka
in the 1950s. The languages spoken at the session were Nkoya,
Nyanja, Lenje, Luvale, and English, in that order of frequency.
Most of the cultic personnel, and most of the patients and
onlookers, would when among themselves identify as belonging to
the ‘Nkoya tribe’ (mushobo wa shinkoya), notwithstanding the
fact, already indicated above, that for many social purposes
within the capital they would claim to be ‘Lozi’, and would
use, with varying success, the Lusaka lingua franca, Nyanja.
Hoping to penetrate the cultic and social
idiom acted out in that nocturnal urban session and in many
others I was to witness, deeply impressed by the dramatic and
aesthetic aspects of the cult, and in general comfortably unable
to resist the very great attraction that the remarkably
closely-knit, Encapsulated group of ‘Nkoya’ immigrants in
Lusaka was exerting on us (an uprooted nuclear family of Dutch
expatriate academics), I allowed the Nkoya-ness of this set of
ritual and social relations to dominate all other aspects of my
urban research (which had started out as a sociological survey of
religious organisations in Lusaka...). I learned the Nkoya
language (and no other) and got deeply involved in Nkoya urban
network contacts and collective ceremonies, which even in town
were of an amazing scope: while the number of Nkoya in Lusaka,
including children, was only about 1,000 out of a total urban
population of c. 350,000 (early 1970s), for girl’s puberty
ceremonies, healing sessions, and funerary wakes scores, even
hundred of participants were mobilised from all over the capital.
We were introduced to urban members of one Nkoya royal family,
and would be visited by the Chief himself in our urban home
whenever his membership of the House of Chiefs would take him to
Lusaka. As we acquired a working knowledge of those aspects of
Nkoya culture that were still prominent in the urban
relationships of our Nkoya friends and informants, my research
began to concentrate on urban-rural relations between what I then
labelled, provisionally, Nkoya village society, and Lusaka recent
immigrants from that society. After initial, exploratory visits
we settled in Chief Kahare’s capital, Kaoma district, for
participatory, quantitative, and oral-historical research into
the rural ends of the urban-rural networks whose urban ends we
have previously got to know fairly well. And while my main
published academic output during those years remained focused on
more general, regional concerns,[21] my main Zambian field-work experience, and my
main emotional identification as a researcher in Zambia, came to
lie with the Nkoya: a small ethnic minority whose homeland was
structurally peripheral to the Zambian nation-state, and whose
political and economic history over the past one and a half
centuries had been determined by their being peripheral even
within Barotseland (where they had been labelled a ‘Lozi
subject tribe’ along with so many other groups).
Developing out of a context of urban
ritual among migrants, I had certainly not selected my initial
set of informants on the basis that they might form a tribe. It
is they who told me they were a tribe, very different from the
scores of other tribes which (according to a folk classification
system they shared with virtually all Zambians, urban and rural)
make up the population of the country. My earlier research in
rural North Africa, far from preparing me for a countryside
apparently parcelled up into neat tribal units, had instead
conditioned me to look at a cultural region or subcontinent as
displaying essential cultural, structural and historical
continuity, and to play down local idiosyncrasies in this
regional pattern (cf. Gellner & Micaud 1972); urban-rural
differences might be far more significant than intra-rural
variation. I also knew that the anthropology of sub-Saharan
Africa since the late 1960s had been moving away from the tribal
model; such tribes as anthropologists, administrators and
Africans had distinguished, were beginning to be looked at as
more or less recent emic constructs, responses to increase of
political scale, as the creation of new political arenas (late
pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial) called for new
symbolic definitions of group opposition.[22]
And yet I could not resist the very strong
illusion implanted by day-to-day close interaction with people
who, in their dealings with me at least, emphatically identified
as Nkoya. Their Nkoya-ness very soon became their main, even only
characteristic in my eyes; and I myself became more or less
Nkoya-ised in the process.
Rich and rewarding though the experience
was, I had some reservations, and felt uneasy about them. As an
anthropologist I knew that my friends, modern peasants and
proletarians, were not just Nkoya and nothing more; but agreement
on their Nkoya-ness had become the raison d’etre of our
frequent interactions. Although I circulated widely my early
papers on the Nkoya among my Nkoya friends, I did not dare to
show them a conference paper I wrote shortly after my main
field-work (van Binsbergen 1975). There I tried to demonstrate
that, when all was said and done, Nkoya ethnic identity was only
a dependent variable, to be explained by reference to the
economic and political dynamics of relatively recent
incorporation in a market economy and wider state structure, both
pre-colonial and colonial; and I could trace the process of this
response in some detail. A few years later, when I gave a seminar
at the University of Zambia, Robert Serpell pointed out the
extent to which my research had a Nkoya bias, and wondered how
very different my analysis might have turned out had I not
learned the Nkoya language but conducted my urban research in
Nyanja. I pretended not to understand what he was aiming at: the
fact that most of the social life of my Nkoya friends was
determined by other principles than their claiming to be Nkoya.
Yet only a few weeks earlier, during a field trip to Kaoma
district, I had conducted collective interviews with chief’s
councils, and had consciously felt how the notables present
(representing both traditional and modern rural elites) were
manipulating me as a likely ally in the expression of a new,
proud Nkoya identity that would provide them with a political
base in a district and a province that were dominated by people
adhering to other ethnic labels than Nkoya (notably: Lozi, Luvale
and Mbunda). But then, again, had I not in the course of the same
field trip (which had brought me back to the area after three
years’ absence), at a collective celebration for which Chief
Kahare had spontaneously made available his royal (though 100%
state-subsidised) orchestra, been formally declared a Nkoya
(‘baji kankoya! baji kankoya!’), by the same Chief’s Prime
Minister; and had not the headman of the segment of the Chief’s
capital where we had lived during most of the main spell of rural
field-work, on that occasion publicly called me his sister’s
son (‘baji ba mwipa wami!’), offering me the most intimate
relationship than can exist between men in this local society...?
Already the situational use of Nkoya-ness
in the urban situation, and particularly the ‘passing’ to
more prestigious ethnic identities of certain middle-class people
born as Nkoya, made me realise that primordial attachments based
on a unique, total tribal heritage did not apply at all to the
Nkoya situation. But there was much more. For reasons of space I
must refrain, in this chapter, from a discussion of inter-ethnic
relations at the level of interpersonal, face-to-face
relationships, both in town and in the rural areas, as reflected
in residence, sexual and marital relations, friendship, political
and economic support, ritual and medical interaction. My
monograph on the ‘Nkoya’ research will be more explicit on
this point. Concentrating here on more or less static attributes
of ‘Nkoya-ness’, the data I had collected mainly by virtue of
the generosity of the Nkoya, made it very clear that the Nkoya
were not a ‘tribe’ characterised by a unique combination of
language, culture, political and social organisation, and
economy, dating back to the pre-colonial era.
Most people who identify as Nkoya are
effective members of the Nkoya speech community and in this
respect language could be said to underpin Nkoya identity. But
most are also fluent in one or more other Western Zambian
languages, or urban linguae francae; and due to the massive
amount of rural-rural and rural-urban migration, a considerable
percentage (perhaps 15%) of the people who today in their homes
use Nkoya as their main language, were born in a different speech
community or will spend their later life in yet other speech
communities.
Moreover, there never was a
‘traditional’ Nkoya culture, with unique distinctive
features. Asked to define Nkoya-ness in cultural terms, my
respondents invariably came up with features which were far from
peculiar to the Nkoya: their system of name-inheritance
(ushwana); their collective nocturnal celebrations in which a
singing and joking crowd dances around an orchestra composed of
xylophones and drums (ruhnwa); girl’s puberty ceremonies
(kutembwisha kankanga); absence of male puberty ceremonies
(mukanda); their skills as elephant hunters and musicians. Yet
apart from their language which, however, closely resembles
Luyana,[23]
Kwangwa, and Southern Lunda, there are no features of so-called
Nkoya culture that are not also found with lesser or greater
prominence in other parts of Western and even Central Zambia.
From girl’s puberty ceremonies to the Lunda-style ceremonial
culture surrounding chieftainship, from patterns of hunting and
cultivation to ancestral ritual and name-inheritance: whoever
knows the ethnographic literature of Zambia, or, better still,
has intensively participated in any rural village wherever in
Western or Central Zambia, will have strong illusions of deja-vu
in a Nkoya village today. Admittedly, there are specific details.
Nkoya music has unmistakable qualities which have allowed it to
become the court music par excellence throughout Western Zambia.
There are specific variations in style patterns as manifested in
cultivation or hunting, in food habits, girl’s initiation,
dancing, hair style, etc. Also it is possible that the amazing
cultural and structural homogeneity that characterises
present-day Western Zambia, is partly a result of processes of
political and economic incorporation over the last hundred years;
these may have obliterated much that was uniquely local, and may
have supplanted it for a neo-traditional hotch-potch of
peripheral-capitalist rural culture as prevailing throughout the
region. There are indications in the field of chieftainship and
religion that such a converging transformation was one among
several intertwined processes of cultural change affecting
Western Zambia. Present-day similarities should not offhand be
taken as proof of past identities.[24] Yet it is difficult to conceive of so-called
Nkoya culture as something else than a slightly idiosyncratic
combination and permutation of productive, social-organisational,
and symbolic patterns widely and abundantly available throughout
the region.
Some of the potentially distinguishing
cultural features of Nkoya-ness underwent considerable change
over the last few centuries. A case in point is male circumcision
(mukanda), which, introduced around the middle of the 19th
century by a Nkoya ruler with close Lunda connections, became a
rather widespread practice among Nkoya-speaking groups until
about the 1920s,[25] but
which over the past fifty years has entirely gone into disuse.
The fact that today Nkoya ridicule mukanda as a distinctive
feature of Luvale and Mbunda ethnic groups with whom they have
been in heavy political and ecological competition since the
1920s (when these immigrants from Angola started to arrive in
Kaoma district in large numbers), suggests that the absence of
male circumcision became a distinctive feature of Nkoya-ness,
only recently and in response to Luvale/Mbunda encroachment.
This does not mean that in the
pre-colonial past there never was a group of people designated as
Nkoya. Although the ethnic distinctions operating today in
Central African society have been greatly influenced by
inter-group processes within political arenas defined by the
colonial and post-colonial state, and therefore must be seen as
essentially recent phenomena (cf. Colson 1968; Ranger 1982),
there can be no doubt that many of the ethnic labels and cultural
symbols employed in that modern context have nominally a
pre-colonial origin, whatever fundamental changes in form and
function they have since undergone.
As anywhere else in the world, people in
pre-colonial Zambia saw themselves and each other as belonging to
various, named groups defined by any one of the following
criteria, or perhaps a loose combination: by language, place of
residence, culture, political organisation, economic
specialisation etc. Named social groups of wider or lesser scope
are too prominently and too consistently present in oral
traditions to be explained away as mere projections of colonial
or post-colonial realities into a pre-colonial past. Moreover,
the same names appear in written documents generated in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century, before the imposition of
a colonial administration could have made a deep impact on the
way people structured and named their social environment.
However, it is more than likely that, like almost anywhere in the
world, the various generic and proper names for groups thus
distinguished by Zambians in the pre-colonial period, operated at
various levels of inclusiveness; that their various dimensions
did not coincide (e.g. named political units did not coincide
with linguistic or economic ones); that these groups were
situational and often had blurred boundaries; and that they were
constantly manipulated in the course in inter-group interaction.
Only in this way did ‘tribes’ exist in pre-colonial Zambia;[26] and even so clans were
more prominent forms of social organisation. Distinctions and
identifications at the level of ‘tribe’ (the word exists in
every Zambian language) may have occasionally provided a
framework for political and military mobilisation, but are not
likely to have automatically determined actual group processes;
rather they were the shifting results of such processes. A tribal
model such as propounded by classic structural-functionalist
anthropology, could have explained pre-colonial societies in
Zambia no more than it throws light on contemporary social
realities in that part of the world.
The name ‘Nkoya’ stems without any
doubt from before the imposition of colonial rule.[27] According to
particularly convincing oral traditions, it is claimed to derive
from a toponym denoting a forest area near the confluence of the
Kabompo and the Zambezi rivers, where one of the royal clans (the
one owning the Mutondo chieftainship) of the Nkoya is said to
have dwelled around 1800.[28] As the
name of a social group, ‘Nkoya’ appears in several royal
praise-names with which Nkoya rulers acceded to their respective
thrones in the course of the nineteenth century; I feel certain
that these boastful mottoes are no recent fabrications projected
back into the past. But there never was, in the pre-colonial era,
an autonomous Nkoya polity encompassing the many thousands of
people who today are claimed to be Nkoya. Instead, the area has,
since the end of the eighteenth century, been the scene of a
number of mutually independent chiefdoms typically with
short-lived dynasties which hived off or replaced each other
following a complicated fissiparous pattern, and without
recognised hierarchy among them. The group named ‘Nkoya’
obviously had a political dimension, but it was a very small
group, and moreover, its boundaries certainly did not coincide
with the (much more extensive) areas of distribution of the
linguistic, cultural and economic features displayed by, among
others, the members of that group. In reports dating from the
19th and 20th century, the ‘Mashasha’ group centring on the
Kahare dynasty is at least equally prominent. The definition of
‘Nkoya’ and ‘Mashasha’ as more or less exclusive or (at
other times) mutually inclusive categories, and as major
constituents (along with Mbwela, Lukolwe, the Nkoya offshoots in
the Zambezi plain etc.) of today’s Nkoya, as well as the
contiguous geographical areas imputed to them on tribal maps,
have gone through a number of rather different versions, since
David Livingstone first marked the Bamasa ( = Mashasha) on the
‘Detailed Map’ in Missionary Travels and Researches.[29] An analysis of these
versions[30] would
take us too far in the present context; but it would certainly
corroborate the point I am trying to make: that as an ethnic
category ‘Nkoya’ is fluid, and expanding.
The extension of the name Nkoya to an
entire cluster encompassing several mutually independent
chiefdoms throughout Western Zambia dates only from the second
half of the last century, and was due, largely, to the
incorporation, with different degrees of effectiveness, of these
several shifting and unstable chiefdoms into the Kololo/Luyana
state, and its heir, the Barotseland Protectorate. This ethnic
labelling in the context of Lozi tributary relations, was further
formalised when in the first decade of the twentieth century a
boma was established and Mankoya[31] (sub)district was named after what was then
considered the main ‘tribe’ inhabiting the district. Thus
contained within a well-defined administrative and territorial
unit, Nkoya identity could further develop within the arenas
created by the colonial state, and the Lozi neo-traditional
government depending upon that state.
ETHNICITY, HISTORY AND
THE NKOYA EXPERIENCE
How did the Nkoya,
against so many odds, manage to convince me that they were ‘a
tribe’? Why was I lured into adopting this unit of study? My
tentative answer is that, although the Nkoya had never been a
tribe in the sense of classic anthropology, I became involved
with them at a point in their history when they were trying very
hard to believe that they constituted such a tribe; when this
attempt was finally beginning to pay off; when I was in a
position to help the attempt succeed, because of my access to
venues for publication; and, particularly, when, on my part,
underneath their mistaken idiom of ethnic expression I detected a
sense of deprivation, protest, struggle, with which I could
identify — and identification grew as I learned their language
and culture, and exposed myself and my family to appalling
conditions of rural life which, although commonplace to the
Nkoya, seemed to epitomise their deprivation.
For there was a serious, real-life
dimension which my earlier, hidden conference paper had not
managed to capture. The Nkoya experience may be understandable as
a product of historical circumstance, may even (as I shall argue
below) contain elements of one-sidedness and exaggeration, —
but this does not make it less real. The Nkoya ethnic pathos
swept me off my feet, not so much because it provided a temporary
shelter for my own uncertain identity, but particularly, because
it was so clearly and timely an active reaction to a collective
historical experience. And I was not the first anthropologist to
struggle with the experiential side of ethnicity. Whereas
Mitchell’s later work on urban ethnicity (1970, 1974) was
primarily a (successful) attempt to remedy the analytical
confusion of emic and etic aspects in urban ethnic
categorisation, Epstein went much further in his revision. In
Ethos and Identity (Epstein 1978), he elaborated on aspects which
the Copperbelt studies initially had left untouched: the emotive
aspects of identity as deriving from a sense of collective
history, and from identification between (alternate) generations.
Perhaps the emotional struggle to do justice to this experiential
side has tempted so many students of ethnicity to adopt such
terms as identity and primordial attachments, as ultimate
explanations.
Let me summarise how contemporary Nkoya
look upon their history since the emergence of their own major
chieftainships in the early nineteenth century. They migrated to
their present territory, in the course of the last centuries,
under the impact of Kaonde and Yeke pressure.[32] Their royal capitals were pillaged by the
Lozi (who earlier, in Mulambwa’s time, the early nineteenth
century, are believed to have come and begged for chiefly
medicine and chiefly instruments from the Nkoya!). Since the
first decade of this century they were supervised and humiliated
by Lozi representative indunas; and since 1937 had been relegated
to an inferior position altogether with the creation of the
Mankoya Native Treasury and the Lozi court at Naliele (near the
Kaoma district capital), occupied by a senior member of the Lozi
royal family. Their lands were encroached upon by Lozi and
especially by thousands of Angolan (Mbunda, Luvale, Luchazi)
immigrants into the district, since the 1920s. They were evicted
from much of their agricultural and hunting territory at the
creation of Kafue National Park in the 1930s. They were left
without adequate mission-provided educational and medical
facilities, which (in the Nkoya view) were concentrated near the
centres of Lozi power in the district and in Barotseland as a
whole.
Nor did the first ten years of Zambia’s
Independence do much to restore Nkoya pride. At the district’s
primary schools, use of the missionaries’ Nkoya textbooks was
abolished, and Lozi ones substituted, in the late 1960s; the
predominantly non-Nkoya teachers were blamed for the very poor
educational success of their Nkoya pupils, most of whom received
their education in a language (Lozi) they could not speak at
home. Secondary school entrance was very low, and access to
higher educational institutions negligible. Radio broadcasting in
the Nkoya language, never more than a few minutes per week
anyway, was discontinued altogether. At the provincial level,
Lozi, and at the district level especially Mbunda and Luvale,
dominated the national party, UNIP, as well as the various
elected bodies of local government; and the Nkoya mainly
supported ANC until this party was integrated into UNIP at the
creation of the one-party state (1972). Like the whole of Western
Zambia, the Nkoya saw their major access to capitalist labour
markets cut off when labour recruitment for the South African
mines was stopped shortly after UDI. But, somewhat different from
the Lozi, the Nkoya, because of their different educational and
mission history, and because of their lack of previously
established urban footholds, could find little of a compensation
in migratory opportunities along the Zambian line of rail.
Cash-cropping opportunities were slowly rising in the district,
including agricultural extension work, the erection of National
Agricultural Marketing Depots, and a massive tobacco and maize
scheme of the Tobacco Board of Zambia. But again preciously few
Nkoya benefited by these, except as lowly-paid agricultural
workers. And people in the outlying village negotiated in vain
for tractors to come to their villages and plough their maize
fields. Among the villagers, cash-crop production still tends to
be limited to a few bags of maize a year; seed maize and
fertiliser are difficult to get, and after marketing their crops
the peasants have to wait for months until they get paid. In 1969
the name of the district was changed from Mankoya to Kaoma,
wiping out the last traces of official recognition that
originally the district was Nkoya land. The two main Nkoya
chiefs, Kahare and Mutondo, continued to maintain a
state-subsidised royal establishment, as guaranteed under the
1964 Barotse Agreement (the 1969 alterations did not affect this
point). But they were denied the status of senior chiefs, and
their subsidies were substantially lower than those received at
Naliele.
The Nkoya keenly resent their lack of
success in the wider society, which they blame on their history
of deprivation. By the mid-1970s, the Nkoya could boast only one
University graduate (junior partner in a law firm). In addition,
a few dozen had, through their good fortune, political credit,
and education, managed to occupy middle-range positions in
government institutions and private enterprise in urban areas. A
similar, small number were established as modern farmers in
Kaoma, Mumbwa and Namwala districts. Among these people, the
pressure from poor relatives and the stigma of belonging to a
despised ethnic group is severely felt, and some go through
periods when they deny being Nkoya, and no longer honour claims
to kinship support.
The majority of the Nkoya, meanwhile, are
still dependent on labour migration for their family income, and
have only unskilled labour to offer. They partly maintain a
pattern of circulatory migration and family separation which
for others in Zambia is increasingly a thing of the past. The
Nkoya presence in the urban areas along the line of rail is
limited and has a rapid turnover: it even seems to be declining
under the effects of a shrinking market for unskilled labour, and
the increasing competition from people from areas that have more
established urban footholds (easterners in Lusaka, northerners on
the Copperbelt).
Above I have discussed this stereotyped
experience as a collective representation among a set of people[33] — recent history as
most Nkoya today would see it, and not history as a detached
historian with free access to all relevant sources would write
it.[34] For instance, the
extent and variation of nineteenth-century Lozi and Kololo
control over the eastern part of what is now Western province
remains a problem which crops up again and again in Nkoya oral
sources: some admit established tributary relations, others
stress the common origin between Nkoya and Lozi, and still others
deny any Lozi domination of the Nkoya prior to colonial rule.
How, and where, to distinguish between history as
self-expression, and history as a detached outsider’s
undertaking? The point is crucial, since Nkoya today are people
united, not so much by the distinguishing features of a common
language, culture, or rural production system, but by a
particular conception of their recent past. They define
themselves mainly as the bearers of a common history, and (as
came out very clearly in the course of my work sessions with the
chiefs’ councils at the two main Nkoya royal establishments in
the district) they expect from the explicit formulation, and
circulation, of this version of history an internal mobilisation
and an outside recognition, which, when translated into political
and economic benefits, will remedy their predicament through
government appointments and development projects coming their
way.
In this emic version of their history,
their misery is set off against delusions of past grandeur and of
immense geographical extension, comprising all speakers of Nkoya,
Mashasha, Mbwela and related dialects, and their descendants,
throughout Zambia’s Western, Northwestern, Central and Southern
Provinces. It is not so much the redefinition of history in the
hands of an ethnic group, but rather the creation of history as
an aspect of the contemporary emergence of an ethnic group.
The Nkoya today would thus appear to be a
case of what Abner Cohen has so aptly termed retribalisation:
‘a process by which a group from one ethnic category, whose members are involved in a struggle for power and privilege with the members of a group from another ethnic category, within the framework of a formal political system, manipulate some customs, values, myths, symbols and ceremonials from their cultural tradition in order to articulate an informal political organisation which is used as a weapon in that struggle’ (Cohen 1969: 2).
During the colonial period various attempt
to confront Lozi domination met with utter defeat. Chief Kahare
Timuna was temporarily demoted in 1923 (Gluckman 1968b: 95). When
in the 1930s Watchtower agitation in Mankoya district was
challenging the Lozi administration, the latter banned the
preachers and threatened with demotion the Nkoya chiefs siding
with them (cf. van Binsbergen 1981b: 344f, n. 73,77, and
references cited there). Soon after the creation of the Naliele
Court, the incumbent of the Mutondo chieftainship died under what
the Nkoya consider to be suspicious circumstances; ten years
later his successor Muchayila was dethroned and exiled to Kalabo
for ten years (Shimunika, n.d.; Anonymous, n.d.). Witchcraft
cases in Mankoya district in the late 1950s, directed in part
against the local Lozi establishment, were vigorously squashed
(Reynolds 1963). In 1960 a Nkoya-based ANC[35] branch was refused registration as
‘it was felt that any political organisation in the Nkoya area would stir up long-standing secessionist agitation among a subject tribe against the Barotse government’ (Mulford 1967: 223).
Attempts to
organise a Nkoya tribal association along the line of rail, and a
political party largely on a Nkoya ethnic basis, were also
undertaken around 1960, but failed, partly due to difficulties
arising from the recently enacted Societies Ordinance.
It was probably no coincidence that my
research among the Nkoya took place in a period when the tide
seemed to turn for the Nkoya, due to a number of developments at
the national level in Zambia. The same move that led to the
alteration of the district name from Mankoya to Kaoma, implied
far-reaching measures that all but dismantled the remnants of the
Lozi state within the Republic of Zambia, and that marked the
defeat of the strong Lozi faction within the Zambian government
(Caplan 1970: 223). This diminished the extent to which non-Lozi
western Zambians would be dependent on Lozi patronage for a
political career; in fact, the former became likely allies of the
state against the Lozi establishment. The integration of ANC into
UNIP in 1972 relieved former ANC candidates from the stigma of
disloyalty, and the one Nkoya candidate, defeated on an ANC
ticket in 1968, was victorious for UNIP in the 1973 and the 1977
general elections. He became the first Nkoya MP (representing,
though, only part of the area inhabited by Nkoya). Yet he might
just as well have identified as Lozi and in fact often does: his
father was Lozi, but he spent part of his childhood at one of the
Nkoya chief’s capitals, from which his mother originated. In
addition, a few Nkoya became appointed, i.e. non-elected members
of the Kaoma Rural Council, partly on the strength of their
traditional offices. No Nkoya played leading roles in UNIP at the
district level (Regional Office) or above.
Modern Nkoya politicians rely not only on
their roots in the Nkoya royal families, but also try to instil a
sense of new possibilities existing at the national and district
level, now that Lozi power is so clearly on the decline. They
stir up a new ethnic pride. Thus they create a local following;
their action manages to pull local people, distrustful of the
independent Zambian state and of UNIP, back into national
political participation. One of their proudest achievements is
that in the newly-established party branches for the first time
in Zambian history well-known UNIP songs (like Tiyende pamodzi
— a Nyanja text) are now sung in Nkoya translations. Besides
their political activities, they also further the interests of
traditional leadership, instigating discussions about the height
of subsidies for Nkoya chiefs, the revival of certain
chieftainships had been abolished in the colonial era, and the
creation of senior chieftainships among the Nkoya. A sign of the
changing tide is the reinstatement in office (1980) of Chief
Muchayila Mutondo, decades after his demotion and exile. Besides
these political activities the new leaders availed themselves of
the new economic opportunities which, particularly, the Tobacco
Board of Zambia is creating in the district. In this context they
act as employers of agricultural wage labour and as entrepreneurs
in the retail trade.
In additional to active Nkoya politicians
in recent times, a major builder of Nkoya ethnicity has been Rev.
J.M. Shimunika. Born c. 1910 as a member of the Mutondo royal
family, he is rumoured to have been a nganga (diviner-priest)
prior to his conversion to Christianity, which came to the
district in 1923 (after A.W. Bailey’s abortive attempt in
191314). Shimunika was a teacher, an evangelist, and finally a
pastor with the South Africa General Mission (now the Africa
Evangelical Fellowship; its missionary activities have led to the
creation of the Evangelical Church of Zambia). Shimunika’s
translation of the New Testament and the Psalms was published in
1952;[36] his
Old Testament translation was completed in the 1970s. In the
1950s he published a short pamphlet in the Nkoya language,
Muhumpu wa Byambo bya Mwaka (Anonymous n.d.), which is a
selection taken from his larger work, Likota lya Bankoya (The
History of the Nkoya), which is now in press (Shimunika, n.d.).
Instead of boosting Nkoya morale, Muhumpu created internal
animosity, because of the allegations it contained as to the weak
stand of a particular Nkoya royal family vis-a-vis the Lozi.
Educated Nkoya of a younger generation than Rev. Shimunika’s
have invested a great deal of time and energy in order to enable
me to publish Likota in a from that is to avoid similar animosity
in future.
My research was firmly supported by both
traditional officeholders, and their kinsmen, the Nkoya modern
politicians. Without the introductions extended by the latter, a
substantial part of my data could never have been collected. But
in the first year of my Nkoya research this element was still
absent. The eager support the Nkoya townsmen in the compounds
offered me at that stage, derived from a less sophisticated
perception of my possible role, but was likewise cast in ethnic
terms. The following episode brings this out clearly:
By May, 1973, I had decided to add some systematic, quantitative census data to my observational and participatory urban data as acquired so far. I prepared a mimeographed one-page questionnaire, and administered it to scores of Nkoya assembled for a girl’s puberty ceremony in Lusaka compound. One elderly man showed a healthy suspicion, and wanted to know why I needed the basic information I had asked him. But before I could explain my intentions at length, he was scolded by his fellows: ‘You better answer him, you stupid fool. Otherwise we are never going to have a book about ourselves, like the Lozi have and all those other tribes!...’
This eagerness to tell their tale, to have
themselves put on the ethnographic and historical map, was even
the main force behind my initial concentration on the Nkoya,
during my urban research. Confronted with the very strong force
with which this emerging ethnic group positively attracted me, I
had no reason to resist.
NKOYA ETHNICITY, THE ARTICULATION OF MODES OF
PRODUCTION, AND THE DIALECTICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
With the preceding
two sections of this chapter, we may have gained tentative
insights in the nature of Nkoya ethnicity which could not have
been arrived at through consistent application of the classic
tribal model. The contemporary Nkoya situation turns out to have
many of the ingredients stressed by current interpretations of
ethnicity in the Central African context. Underneath a strongly
situational and manipulatory surface which is particularly
apparent in urban and middle-class contexts, there is a genuine
Nkoya identity, but it is based not so much on primordial
attachment to a way of life, culture and language, but on a
collective sense of deprivation in the course of a shared recent
history. Expecting to extract, from the state and the party,
goods and services which until recently have been denied them
(Bates 1973), peasants identifying as Nkoya on the basis of this
historical consciousness give voting support to politicians from
their midst; the latter, linked to Nkoya royal families but
likewise, through their education and careers, involved in modern
economic life, explore the possibilities of ethnic
identification, and actively further the building of Nkoya
ethnicity, in an attempt to safeguard their own positions (cf.
Molteno 1979), as well as to serve their people’s interest at
the same time. Their efforts at retribalisation converge, and
sometimes coincide, with those of local intellectuals. Just like
everything social, Nkoya ethnicity turns out to be man-made, and
even amazingly recent; but to realise that the Nkoya are not a
‘natural’, primordial unit, renders social and historical
meaning to Nkoya-ness, instead of — as I thought in my first
disappointment — depriving it of meaning.
However, showing how one particular unit
of study, the tribe — already subjected to so much criticism
— is inadequate in the Nkoya case as well, only goes halfway
towards solving the problem of the unit of study. I shall now
carry the argument further, sketching the wider sociological
implications of the picture of Nkoya ethnicity presented above,
and arguing that the structure of the social field which thus
becomes visible, solves the problem of the unit of study for us.
I have discussed Nkoya ethnicity as a form
of consciousness, which may lead on, situationally, to social and
political mobilisation, but which primarily is a process of
self-definition among a set of people perceiving themselves as
sharing a common history of deprivation. Now one of the major
tasks confronting the social sciences today is: the development
of a sophisticated theory of the conditions under which
particular forms of consciousness relate to particular social,
political and particularly economic processes. As has been argued
by Kahn in the article referred to above (1981), an idealist,
culturological position such as taken by those looking for
primordial attachments, is just as untenable as a vulgar
materialist position which, against all evidence, posits a simple
one-to-one relationship between economic conditions and the
attending forms of consciousness. The task is fundamental, on the
one hand because the social sciences in themselves are a form of
consciousness, on the other hand, because it is precisely by
virtue of other, non-scientific phantasms of consciousness that
conditions of deprivation, injustice, exploitation persist —
just as they are actively challenged, and altered, as a result of
an emerging, truer consciousness.
What further insights in Nkoya ethnicity
can we gather if we subject this form of consciousness to a
Marxist-inspired contextual analysis?
In order to answer this question, let us
briefly review the history of the social formation of Kaoma
district, in terms of the articulation between successively
emerging modes of production (cf. van Binsbergen 1981b: 25863).
In the nineteenth century dramatic changes
took place in that social formation. By the end of the eighteenth
century, the social formation was already a highly complex one,
in which, as a result of the emergence and articulation of
various modes of production in previous centuries, various
mutually dependent branches or forms of production[37] coexisted: highly
developed hunting and gathering; rather crude fishing and
farming; a limited form of domestic slavery;[38] and petty commodity production (particularly
ironware) for local trade circuits. Clan chieftainship was
largely confined to ritual functions concerning the land, and to
exclusive claims to certain proceeds from hunting, which were
locally consumed or hoarded but were not yet circulated in
long-distance trade and tribute.
Oral tradition, and written documents
relating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,[39] as well as the
converging evidence from scholarly studies of neighbouring areas,[40] suggest the following
trends for the period starting c. 1800. Small militant groups
coming in from the north brought a new, more exalted style of
chieftainship, as well as some of the economic prerequisites
(better crops, cattle, and cattle raiding) with which to generate
a surplus on which such chieftainship could thrive. Domestic
slavery was greatly increased, and lost the earlier kinship
connotations of pawnship. Between local communities and the
emerging chiefly courts, and between courts of different
importance, tributary networks were developed, along which
travelled not only the products of local branches of production,
but also slaves in increasing numbers. This process was further
intensified by the advent, around 1850, of long-distance trade in
the hands of Mambari and Swahili caravan traders, and the marked
ascent, some 200 kilometres to the west, of the Luyana/Kololo
state. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the economy
of that state became largely dependent upon slave labour; hence
large raiding expeditions for slaves and cattle were organised,
and they extended well to the east of the Nkoya lands. Whereas in
the social formation before 1800 a domestic mode of production
could be said to be dominant, the later period saw the gradual
subordination of this mode to tributary and, via long-distance
trade, mercantile-capitalist modes of production. The new modes
of production emerging in the nineteenth century were closely
linked to each other. Most if not all slaves were controlled by
chiefs and their office-bearers; this gave these nobles unique
opportunities to have a local surplus generated, available for
long-distance trade. It appears that domestic slavery rapidly
declined to a trade in humans from which even close kinsmen
(notably sister’s sons) were not excluded.
The precise interrelations between the
tributary and the mercantile-capitalist mode of production await
further research. Both were still groping to establish
themselves, and both never attained the full realisation of their
respective models. But what is important here, and fairly well
documented, is the subordination of the domestic mode of
production to other modes.
As the penetration of the capitalist mode
of production in the social formation of Kaoma district proceeded
(and as this social formation itself became integrated in a much
wider formation: Northern Rhodesia, and the capitalist world at
large), the tributary and mercantile-capitalist modes of
production (having gained dominance in the nineteenth century)
were encapsulated and largely destroyed. That colonial rule was
committed to the spread of capitalist relations of production no
longer requires a lengthy discussion. Very soon after its
imposition (1900) the flow of commodities into the area would be
channelled through the rather ill-equipped rural trading stores,
but particularly through the purchases by labour migrants at
their distant places of work. Long-distance trade was forced to
an end. The tributary mode of production was destroyed by
colonial legislation abolishing slavery and tributary labour.
Government subsidies allowed some of the chiefs and aristocrats
to keep up the remnants of a political and ideological
pre-capitalist structure, after the relations of production
underlying that structure had been radically altered.[41] These subsidies were
paid out of the revenues from hut tax, a direct form of surplus
extraction imposed by the colonial administration, and one that
soon forced people to sell their labour for money, after the
rapid breakdown of local participation in the agricultural
market. The circulation of traders, commodities and slaves (the
local manifestations of extraction by an as yet invisible
mercantile capitalism) had given way to the circulation of money
and of labour migrants, and many people had become directly
(though seldom permanently) involved in capitalist relations of
production.
The contemporary Nkoya situation provides
a good illustration of the articulation of a domestic mode of
production, stripped, to a considerable extent, of the remains of
the tributary mode, and articulated to the dominant industrial
capitalist mode. The old branches of production organised by
kinship are more or less surviving, although they have been
encroached upon by state control (alienation of land for game
reserves and (para)statal agricultural enterprise; and
prohibitions on hunting). Likewise they have been eroded by the
exodus of male labour; the penetration of capitalist consumer
markets (all clothing, most implements, and some food, are now
bought from outside); and the introduction, at a limited scale,
of cash cropping and agricultural wage labour.
Adult males participate as migrants in the
urban capitalist economy and a minority of them manage to set up
and maintain urban nuclear families which, if continuously
successful in town, are going to contribute directly to the
reproduction of the capitalist sector. However, the footing of
these urban migrants is particularly insecure; and many of the
members of their households may ultimately end up in the rural
sector. While remaining in town, these migrants can find greater
security in the domestic domain by participation in dyadic
networks as well as collective ceremonies and rituals, which
encompass both urban wage-earners, recent arrivals, urban
dropouts about to return home, and people without any
participation in the urban relations of production: women and
villagers. The domestic sector extends well into the urban areas,
and into the households of the urban wage-earners. Religious and
ethnic ceremonies, mobilising a large proportion of the
‘Nkoya’ population of a particular town, provide a setting
for this interpenetration, as well as a means to re-circulate
money earned in the urban capitalist sector to those debarred
from it. These ceremonies constitute instruments of articulation,
and notably such as siphon resources back into the domestic
sector, contributing to the latter’s reproduction rather than
to its exploitation.
Armed with this cursory analytical view of
the articulation of modes of production as determining the Nkoya
situation today, let us now return to their collective view of
Nkoya history.
Viewed as a possible response to the
articulation of modes of production, it is a crucial feature of
the Nkoya view of their history that no distinction is made
between those aspects of local decline that were due to national
or global processes of the penetration of capitalism as mediated
by the colonial state (and that, therefore, effected the people
of the district in a way unrelated to them being, or not being,
Nkoya); and those that more directly reflected intrusion by other
Africans (Lozi, Angolans). Analytically, only the latter — if
still only superficially — could be dealt with in ethnic terms.
The colonial state served the creation of capitalist conditions,
and the attuning of pre-existing non-capitalist modes of
production to these conditions. However, the colonial state
realised its aims partly by furthering a neo-traditional
indigenous Lozi administration, sanctioning the latter’s hold
upon the peripheral groups in Barotseland, as well as allowing
the settlement of large numbers of Angolan immigrants — not, of
course, near the centres of Lozi presence, but in the same
outlying areas. The Nkoya clearly perceived the Lozi and the
Angolan immigrants, but failed to detect the forces of the
colonial state and of capitalism behind them. Therefore, the
colonial state remained fairly neutral in the conscious
historical perception of the Nkoya. The frequent expressions of
Nkoya protest in the colonial period, if they did at all take on
political overtones and were not entirely clad in religious forms
(cf. van Binsbergen 1981b: 58f, ch. 4, and for sources pp. 344)
were directly against Lozi domination, and not against the state.
One of the most shocking aspects of my field-work in a
newly-independent country was to hear peasants, as a standard
turn in their everyday conversation and certainly not prompted by
interviewing, praise colonial conditions and the economic and
political security they had implied, in contrast with the
situation after Independence. The penetration of capitalism had
numerous structural effects on the local society (wage labour,
migrancy, monetarisation of bridewealth, fragmentation of
productive units and of settlement, partial dismantling of
traditional authority by divorcing it from its exploitative
economic base). But in so far as these effects were not welcomed
(they often were), they were blamed on the Lozi. The negative
aspects in the Nkoya collective experience came to be almost
entirely perceived in terms of ethnic conflict. Even the modern
national state is for the Nkoya primarily veiled under ethnic
perceptions. For the Nkoya today the modern state of Zambia is
largely considered as a remote affair of the Bemba, Tonga, Lozi
and Chewa, in various shifting alliances; Nkoya peasants even
frequently use the word ‘Zambia’ when from the context it is
clear that they exclusively refer to the ‘line of rail’: the
area extending from Livingstone, through Lusaka and Kabwe, to the
Copperbelt — and the part of Zambia where the capitalist mode
of production is the most manifest and dominant. As recently as
1973, when the district authorities staged meetings in the
villages in preparation of the general elections, these meetings
were boycotted or challenged because they were in the hated Lozi
language; and the two contenders of the one Nkoya candidate were
primarily unattractive since they were known to be Mbunda
respectively Luvale.
This ethnic fixation however enables Nkoya
politicians to look to the post-colonial state with new
expectations, now that the main perceived enemy, the Lozi ethnic
group, is no longer so closely allied with the state as used to
be the case in the colonial era and in the first years after
Independence.
It would be foolish to accept the
Nkoya’s one-sided view of history, and to attribute their
predicament entirely to the effects of Lozi domination. As a
‘Lozi subject tribe’, the Nkoya were exposed to both Lozi and
European imperialism. Historically these followed each other in
quick succession, and the two could be argued to be indirectly
related also in the pre-colonial period,[42] for both were specific forms through which
the penetration of the capitalist mode of production was
ultimately effected. After 1900, the class alliance between the
Lozi aristocracy and the colonial powers led to fundamental
changes in the type of economic exploitation to which the people
in the eastern periphery of Barotseland were subjected. The
taking of slaves, and the payment of tribute, within two decades
after the imposition of colonial rule had completely given way of
forms of taxation which virtually reduced the Lozi to a mere
administrative presence, whereas the economic exploitation was
achieved through the mechanism of labour migration as furthered
by the colonial state. In that period, the deprivation on the
surface (in the fields of chieftainship, educational and medical
facilities etc.) for which the Lozi were blamed, ultimately
sprang from the logic of imperialism. From this angle, Nkoya
ethnicity, even in the powerless form in which it expressed
itself during the colonial period, had the effect of obscuring
such class consciousness as might have emerged among the
villagers in the first decades of their incorporation in
capitalism. Indirectly, therefore, such ethnicity appears as an
ideological effect of imperialism.
Interestingly, among the non-Nkoya
inhabitants of Western Zambia the prevailing stereotype about the
Nkoya is not that of people deprived under the impact of Lozi
domination, but that of hunters drinking honey beer, expertly
playing their xylophones, hiding in the forest from the
responsibilities and vicissitudes of modern life, uninterested in
commercial farming, and actively furthering truancy in their
children. In other words, people who can afford to shun
participation in modern life because their old ways are still
fairly intact — rather than people who have been denied access
to modern life as a result of Lozi machinations. This would
suggest, as a possibility, that it is precisely the relative
viability of their non-capitalist modes of production which
prevented them from successfully manipulating capitalism to their
own lasting benefit. But of course, stereotypes are not enough to
go by.
The French School of Marxist anthropology
(cf. Meillassoux 1975; Rey 1971, 1973; and the extensive
discussions elsewhere in the present book) has two illuminating
insights to offer for an understanding of the Nkoya situation.
First, capitalism penetrating the Third World has a well-defined
interest in the partial survival of encapsulated, non-capitalist
modes of production: for these are the niches where a new labour
force is reproduced and where a discarded labour force is taken
care of, at virtually no costs for the capitalist sector. And
secondly, capitalism makes inroads into these non-capitalist
modes of production by means of class alliances between capital,
on the one hand, and the exploiting class-like groups in the
non-capitalist modes of production, on the other.
What the Nkoya resent in their situation
today, from this perspective would appear as common features of a
labour reserve in a context of peripheral capitalism: lack of
capitalist amenities that serve the reproduction of the labour
force (schools, hospitals); and the limited size of local
capitalist markets for labour and petty commodities (cash crops).
But the reverse to this medal is that, in their area,
non-capitalist modes of production have persisted throughout the
colonial era and, even if made subservient to the reproduction of
labour for capitalist markets, still proved rather viable.
Hunting, fishing, collecting and subsistence agriculture,
organised on a kinship basis, even today are still economically
vital undertakings, especially in the eastern part of the
district. Of course, these forms of non-capitalist production
cannot in themselves supply the cash needed today for clothing,
tools, transport etc. Moreover, none of these forms persist
unaffected by capitalism. For instance, the Nkoya hunter today is
often a youth who does not own the gun and ammunition he uses,
but offers his skills to the owner of the gun in exchange for a
portion of the bag he brings home; and this owner is usually at
the same time a senior kinsman of the hunter, a village headman,
and a retired labour migrant, who has purchased a gun out of the
proceeds of his sale of labour in the capitalist sector, and who
sells most of the meat thus procured. Relations of production in
hunting combine capitalist aspects (separation between worker and
means of production, separation between worker and product, and
sale of this product as a commodity) with forms of authority and
reciprocity proper to domestic and tributary modes of production
outside capitalism.
These historical relations of production
can only survive, more or less, if they continue to be embedded
in the social, judicial and ritual forms in which they used to be
enshrined in the past; or, more accurately, in forms mimicking
these historical ones. Although these forms do not derive from a
capitalist logic, it is not in the interest of capital to destroy
them. And in some cases, particularly those where capital can
strike a class alliance with exploitative elements in the older
modes of production, it actively supports them. For a different
part of Africa, Rey (1971) has argued how the monetarisation of
bridewealth was one way to synchronise the interest of capital
and village elders: thus the latter could continue to exploit
male youths through their control over marriageable women, but
now in a form which forced these youths to go and sell their
labour as migrants. Also among the Nkoya this process took place
(Van Binsbergen & Geschiere, vide infra, chapter 7). But an
even more striking form of class alliance formed the subsidies
which the state paid to chiefs. Due to historical circumstances
which we need not enter into now, in Barotseland these subsidies
were higher than anywhere else in Northern Rhodesia, and the
Nkoya chiefs shared in them. At Independence, this state of
affairs was reinforced, and in recent years the subsidies have
even been substantially increased. Paid out of state revenue, and
in early years consisting of a fixed percentage of the revenue
from hut tax, these subsidies amount to a sharing out of the
fruits of capitalist exploitation to the remnants of a tributary
mode of production. Capitalism, while reproducing still a
substantial part of its labour force via an encapsulated domestic
mode of production such as found among the Nkoya today, in its
turn reproduces an encapsulated tributary mode, at least in its
symbolic and ceremonial form of councillors, retainers, kapasus
(court messengers with police functions), royal musicians, a
palace of sorts. In passing we note that Nkoya chiefs benefit
from an updated form of a treaty between the colonial state and
the Lozi aristocracy; so surely the Lozi’s effect on the Nkoya
experience was not entirely negative.
Much more important is that we now find,
in the political economy of the area, a reason for the Nkoya’s
insistence on the existence and persistence of their ‘tribe’.
As a distinct culture and society, in other words as a tribe, the
Nkoya have never existed. However, to the extent to which the
persistence of historical forms in an encapsulated,
neo-traditional version is part and parcel of the mechanism of
the reproduction of cheap labour, and to the extent to which the
articulation of modes of production crystallises around a
state-subsidised neo-traditional chieftainship,[43] Nkoya ethnicity can be considered a product
of this situation of articulation.
In this perspective, the view of ethnicity
as primordial attachment to a tribal model dating back to
pre-colonial times becomes more than bad social science: it
becomes part of the ideology of capitalism itself — but I am
sure that advocates of that view would have equally nasty things
to say about the conception of ethnicity advanced here.
In the juxtaposition between
non-capitalist aspects of Nkoya rural society, and capitalism,
the specific features of the former take on a new function: they
are to be the legitimation of kin-based claims of assistance, and
the resulting security, through which people peripherally
participating in a capitalist order seek shelter in
non-capitalist relations of production which exist in the shadow
of, and in servitude to, that capitalist order. Nkoya ethnicity
is the expression of this problem at the level of consciousness:
by stressing the viability, splendour, and antiquity of the
non-capitalist modes of production, it struggles to keep them
intact, so that the individual worker in the process of
peasantisation and proletarianisation can effectively benefit
from what remnants of these non-capitalist modes still exist.
Their survival has become both problematic and vital — hence
ethnicity to endow them with rather more reality and resilience
than they in fact possess.
Also the role of modern politicians is
thrown in relief. At the level of the state’s organisational
and ideological apparatus (government and the party), these
leaders represent a new phase in the class alliances by means of
which capitalism imposes itself on pre-existing modes of
production; combining traditional elite connotations, ethnicity
building and their own capitalist enterprises, they represent
solutions for the contradictions inherent in articulation:
through their activities in the retail trade, agricultural
development schemes (for which they hire wage labour), and their
supervisory capacity as members of party and local-government
bodies, they further capitalism — at the same time as helping
to buttress non-capitalist modes of production against
capitalism, by the emphatic support they give traditional
authorities and the Nkoya ethnic identity in general. They
further incorporation in the national state, but in a form that
conceals the exploitative and manipulative elements of the
political process, and of their own role; and thus, as political
and ideological brokers, they legitimate the state in the eyes of
the Nkoya, and at the same time further Nkoya interests within
national and sub-national political areas.
Under these conditions it would be
ludicrous to expect, with John Saul (1979), the Nkoya to display
explicit surface manifestations of class struggle, albeit in the
ideological idiom of ethnicity. Both the incorporation in the
Lozi state in the course of the 19th century, and the peripheral
integration in capitalism, objectively can be taken as forms of
class formation: the imposition of new forms of exploitation. It
would not be altogether unjustified to ultimately attribute the
depth of emotion and the vehemence of expression attending Nkoya
ethnicity today, to a form of class struggle seeking in vain to
break through. This, I realised much later, is probably an
important reason behind my own emotional identification with the
Nkoya.
Analysis of Nkoya ethnicity in terms of
the articulation of modes of production brings out both the
limitations of ethnicity and its power. In their ideology of
ethnicity the Nkoya express a partial interpretation of
historical developments: they identify the Lozi as their
oppressors, but fail to recognise the forces of capitalism and
colonialism that lay behind Lozi domination. In this respect
there would be some reason to consider Nkoya ethnicity, with
Mafeje (1971), as ‘false consciousness’. Yet such a
characterisation would be less adequate in so far as it
underestimates the very real power of ethnicity — its emotional
appeal. In the perspective of an articulation of modes of
production we have the beginning of an explanation as to why
ethnicity can get such a powerful grip on people: ethnicity is
revealed as an ideological reaction not to phantasms of the
imagination but to very real conditions — the uprootedness
resulting from capitalist penetration.[44]
However, the trappings of ethnicity, under
conditions of articulation and class alliances, prevent the Nkoya
from taking anything remotely resembling a revolutionary
consciousness. Considering the remarkable choice of revolutionary
and counterrevolutionary ideological positions available in the
district in the 1970s — from Maoist Chinese building the
Lusaka-Kaoma highway, through MPLA and SWAPO guerrilla camps, to
the South Africa sponsored adventurer Mushala — the Nkoya have
not exactly shown an inclination towards left-wing radicalism, to
say the least.
CONCLUSION
Seeking to project
himself against the surging flood of data, the researcher
tentatively cuts out a field of study for his personal attention;
and since he is studying people who themselves are constantly
constructing and reconstructing their reality, he may be tempted
to let his analytical distinctions coincide with folk
distinctions. What the would-be Nkoya expected from me, in this
context, was that I would lend my own intellectual resources
(access to national and international media of publication and
scholarship) — not for the production of a more penetrating and
thus liberating form of knowledge and consciousness, but for the
buttressing of their own emerging ethnic illusion. It was up to
me to describe ‘the Nkoya’ in all the historical glory of
their nineteenth-century chieftainships, and to enlist, among the
present-day population of Zambia, a maximal number of inhabitants
of Western and Central Zambia as de facto or potential members of
the ‘Nkoya tribe’. I have described how I was at first caught
in this trap, and how I scrambled out of it by the adoption of
the analytical framework of modes of production and their
articulation which not only belong to a different realm of
discourse than that in which the Nkoya consider themselves a
tribe, but that also explodes the whole notion of the Nkoya, or
some such groups, as a unit of study. What remains is a
complicated picture of relationships, informed by Marxist
anthropology, historiography and political economy, and far
removed from the Nkoya experience and from the unit of study it
seemed to suggest. There is no obvious, let alone a natural, unit
of studies that is more likely than others to give insight in the
sort of relationships which I have tried to disentangle in this
argument. A simple spatio-temporal delineation would not do
either: the picture of a field of specific relationships which
emerges as the major result of my Nkoya research, is neither
geographically contiguous (for it extends, far beyond the Nkoya
chief’s areas of Kaoma district, into urban Zambia, North
Atlantic metropoles, and my own department), nor historically
defined — extending as it does from the twentieth century into
the eighteenth.[45]
Instead of a clear-cut unit of study as a
source of security for the field-worker and as a handy artefact
to be manipulated by the cross-cultural comparativist, we thus
end up with an awareness of interesting questions and possible
sources of inspiration; an interdisciplinary outlook; and the
intention to analyse the dialectics of consciousness not only
among the people selected for study, but also within the realm of
scholarship, and ultimately, in one’s private reactions as a
researcher.
The emerging picture, while explaining to
some extent the nature of Nkoya-ness, hopefully helps to
eradicate the stereotype of bounded ethnic groups which happily
lend themselves to cross-cultural analysis. As the Kaoma District
Governor exclaimed during a heated political meeting, in
preparation of the 1973 general elections:
‘This nonsense has to stop! Chief, you must control your people! There are no Nkoya! ‘‘Nkoya’’ does not exist!’
Neither do the
Lozi, Bemba, Tonga or Ndembu — unless as phenomena at the level
of consciousness, whose dialectics we — as the producers of a
different, and hopefully more liberating, sort of consciousness
— should trace and explain, instead of adopt. Our results may
at first puzzle, disappoint or infuriate the people we are
writing about; but ultimately we may manage to show them their
own situation in a form less veiled by the phantasms produced by
their politico-economic situation.
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[1] Quoted on the jacket of Colson (1970); this
quotation is meant to illustrate the uncritical use of the tribal
model in anthropology as manifested by the Times Educational
Supplement review, not as an adequate description of van Velsen
(1964).
[2] Earlier drafts of this chapter were presented
at the Journal of Southern African Studies/Social Science
Research Council Conference on the Interactions of History and
Anthropology in Southern Africa, Manchester, September 1980; and
at the African Studies Centre’s Africa Colloquium Leiden,
February, 1981. An earlier version was published in Journal of
Southern African Studies, 8, 1: 51-81; it was subsequently
reprinted, in a revised version, as ‘From tribe to ethnicity in
Western Zambia: The unit of study as an ideological problem’,
in: W.M.J. van Binsbergen & P.L. Geschiere (eds.), Old modes
of production and capitalist encroachment, London/Boston: Kegan
Paul International, chapter 6, by the kind permission of the
journal’s editors and of Oxford University Press. I am indebted
to R. Buijtenhuijs, C. Bundy, R. Frankenberg, P. Konings, A.
Mafeje, C. Mitchell, C. Murray, T. Ranger, P. Worsley and
especially P. Geschiere for comments and criticism; for full
acknowledgements concerning my research into ‘Nkoya’
ethnicity, cf. van Binsbergen (1981b): 5f. The approach as
developed in this chapter was greatly influenced by the
discussions of the Amsterdam Working Group on Marxist
Anthropology; however, for reasons set out in the Preface to the
present book, this chapter could not benefit from specific
discussions within the Working Group.
[3] Some progress, however, has been made with
regard to the religious aspect of modes of production, cf.
Houtart (1980), Houtart & Lemercinier (1977a), and with
special emphasis on articulation, van Binsbergen (1981b).
[4] Godelier 1973: ch. 1.3, pp. 93-131, ‘le
concept de tribu’.
[5] Cf. Meillassoux (1964); Terray 1969; similar
criticism also in Kahn & Llobera (1980): 88:
‘these
writers appear to share the view that ‘‘societies’’ as
conceived by traditional anthropology are relevant units of
analysis.’
Rey, however is a
different case: without explicitly discussing the problem of
ethnicity, in his monograph on the Mossendjo area
(Congo-Brazzaville) he takes not a ‘tribe’, but the region as
his unit of analysis. For an assessment of Rey’s approach to
ideology, cf. van Binsbergen 1984.
[6] This point is argued at great length in van
Binsbergen (1981b): ch. 1, 7, 8.
[7] This is already clear from the book titles of
Colson (1958, 1969, 1970), Watson (1958), Turner (1968a, 1968b),
Colson & Gluckman (1951), Gluckman (1957, 1965), Cunnison
(1959), Marwick (1965), Scudder (1962). This selection does not
include articles and papers; studies by Rhodes-Livingstone
researchers outside rural Zambia; or studies (like Richards 1939)
not published under the aegis of the Rhodes-Livingstone
Institute.
[8] Mitchell (1956, 1969), Epstein (1958), Gluckman
(1960), Harries-Jones (1969).
[9] Van Velsen (1964, 1967), Turner (1968a).
Strictly speaking, of course, van Velsen’s work was not a
direct contribution to Zambian rural anthropology, based as it
was on field-work in Malawi. Its impact on both rural and urban
studies in Zambia was, however, immense.
[10] J. van Velsen, personal communication, September,
1980.
[11] Gluckman (1968a); cf. Gluckman (1945), where the
concept of tribe is used in the same fashion. One would have
expected a lengthy discussion of the problem of tribe in
Gluckman’s Closed systems and open minds: The limits of naivety
in social anthropology (1964): but apart from a cursory remark
relating to Bailey’s research in India, little of relevance
can be found here. The book is about the uses and limitations of
anthropologists’ naivety vis-a-vis other disciplines, not
vis-a-vis their own. Hence, I suppose, the statement by Gluckman
(p. 199, n. 44) that he considers himself to possess an
‘expertise on tribes’...
[12] The subtitle of Long (1968).
[13] Perhaps, the last time that, on the basis of his
own field-work, a researcher discussed contemporary social
situations in rural Zambia in terms of a ‘tribal community’
was: Johnson & Bond (1974). However, in his monograph, Bond
(1976) did much better than that. Meanwhile the Zambian material
remains available for non-field-workers to take their pick. Thus
Sharp (1981) discusses an Afrikaans South African M.A. thesis on
ethnicity in Zambia, by J.H. Booyens, PUCHO, 1978. Based on
library research, Booyens’s argument is built on the notion of
nineteenth-century tribes (ethniee) founded in primordial
attachments and insurmountable mutual hostilities. Sharp, of
course, points at the close links between such a view of
ethnicity, and the ideology of Apartheid.
[14] Lancaster (1966, 1971, 1974, 1977). The title of
Lancaster’s book (1981) follows the Rhodes-Livingstone pattern
in its loosely-descriptive use of the tribal label. Poewe’s
work on Luapula is remarkably free from tribal illusions (1978,
1979, 1981), in which she continues the pattern set by Cunnison.
[15] Extensive reference, however, is made to
Gluckman’s work on Barotseland. Gwyn Prins’s (1979)
dismissive review of Roots (as the book is affectionately called
among Southern Africanists, who have already accorded it the
status of a modern classic) seems to imply that the book could
have done with rather more anthropological inspiration.
[16] On the crucial significance of the specialist
audience in the process of methodological and theoretical
innovation, cf. de Groot (1966): 27f.
[17] Cf. Kuper (1977b, 1980). Quoted in this context,
these references do not do full justice to the type of regional
comparative analysis Kuper is engaged in.
[18] My field-work was conducted alternately in Kaoma
district, Western Zambia, and Lusaka, from February 1972 to April
1974; September-November 1977, and August 1978.
[19] Douglas (1964), Richards (1950), Turner (1967), van
Binsbergen (1981b); the latter study, however, does reflect on
the problem of the unit of study, cf. (1981b): 13f, 66f, 136f,
216f.
[20] Cf. van Binsbergen (1979): 31f, for a discussion of
this problem with regard to the definition of kin groups among
the ‘Nkoya’; the significance of situational aspects in the
description and analysis of religious phenomena is stressed in
van Binsbergen (1981b: 37f, 84), and in the Introduction of van
Binsbergen & Schoffeleers (n.d.).
[21] Notably, an exploration of regional patterns of
religious change throughout Southern Central Africa; cf. van
Binsbergen (1981b).
[22] Cf. Helm (1968); Gutkind (1970); Godelier (1973).
While the concept of ‘tribe’ is under heavy attack in modern
anthropology, we should not ignore the fact that outside this
discipline and particularly in political science, there is a
considerable amount of literature that still attaches primary, or
at least independent, significance to ethnic factors (such
authors as Bienen, Rotchild [ check Rothchild ] ,
LeVine). [ het is beter hier ook inderdaad referenties te
geven ]
[23] Luyana (cf. Givon 1971) is the old court language
among the Lozi. It has managed to preserve itself despite the
rapid and universal adoption of the Southern Bantu Kololo
language in the first half of the nineteenth century. Luyana and
Kololo ( = Lozi) are not mutually intelligible, but Luyana and
Nkoya (or Mashasha) are.
[24] Cf. van Binsbergen (1981b): 21, where this point is
argued at greater length.
[25] It was reported, as such, by: G.H. Nicholls,
‘Notes on the natives inhabiting the Baluba subdistrict’
1906, enclosure in KTJ 2/1, Zambia National Archives, Lusaka;
Stirke (1922): 63; Smith & Dale (1920): vol. i, p. 94; Clay
(1945): 4; Shimunika (n.d.). For a daring, but historically
untenable approach to male puberty ceremonies in this part of
Zambia, cf. de Heusch (1978).
[26] Cf. Colson (1964, 1968). In her 1964 chapter she
critically assesses the tribal model as applied to pre-colonial
Africa. However, the greater sophistication vis-a-vis tribes in
Colson’s later work does not seem to affect the validity of my
observations concerning the implicit, loosely descriptive use of
the tribal model in much of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute
work, including her own. Further see: Lancaster (1974), Roberts
(1976): 63f.
[27] Cf. Tabler (1963a); Nicholls (see note 21); reports
on the Gielgud-Anderson expedition to the Kafue Hook, BS1/93 and
KTJ 1/1, Zambia National Archives, Lusaka; Shimunika (n.d.),
Bailey (1913, 1914), Smith & Dale (1920), Holy (1975).
[28] Shimunika (n.d.); interview, Naliele Royal
Establishment, Kaoma district, 28 October 1977.
[29] Livingstone (1958). In addition to the sources
mentioned in note 23, and the official tribal and linguistic maps
published over the years by the Surveyor general, sources on this
point include: Merle et al. (1933): ‘tribal map’; Fortune
(1959, 1963); and Mankoya District Notebook, KSX 4, Zambia
National Archives, Lusaka.
[30] Adopting Lancaster’s (1974) approach.
[31] The Lozi prefix Ma- instead of the Nkoya
form Ba- points to the fact that the administrators’
perception of the Nkoya as an ethnic group reflected Lozi views,
rather than the local people’s self-perception.
[32] The probably more substantial pressure from the
side of Chinyama chiefs coming in from the north is not reflected
in collective Nkoya memory as documented in my data — probably
as a result of two factors: extensive assimilation of Chinyama
and Mbwela/Nkoya elements over the past centuries, and the
considerable geographical distance between the main sites where I
conducted oral historical research, and the area where the
Chinyama impact was primarily felt. See, however, Derricourt
& Papstein (1977), Papstein (1978).
[33] A very similar case are the Luvale as studied by
Papstein (1978, 1980). My discussions with Robert Papstein since
1974 have greatly contributed to my understanding of Nkoya
history and its crucial role in Nkoya ethnicity.
[34] For the history of Western Zambia, cf. Mainga
(1972). Dr. Mainga’s work is particularly resented by modern
and traditional Nkoya leaders today because of the way she
handled the oral materials presented to her at the Nkoya chiefly
capitals; however, this is not the place to assess whether such
resentment is justified. Further: Caplan (1970); Stokes (1966);
Mulford (1967): ch. vi; Prins (1980); Ranger (1968). For
approaches from a Marxist point of view, see Clarence-Smith
(1979); Frankenberg (1978). On the Nkoya specifically: Clay
(1946); Shimunika (n.d.), Anonymous (n.d.); van Binsbergen
(1981b): ch. 4, 5, 7.
[35] ANC = African National Congress, the political
party from which UNIP ( = United National Independence Party)
branched off in 1959; in 1972 ANC was incorporated in UNIP as
part of the creation of ‘one-party participatory democracy’
in Zambia.
[36] Testamenta ya Yipya/Nyimbo, (1952).
[37] The term ‘branch of production’, for a complex
of productive activities that can be meaningfully distinguished
within a mode of production, derives from Terray (1969). Beach
applied this term successfully to the pre-colonial Shona economy
(1977), although his argument is essentially non-Marxist. A
related concept is that of ‘form of production’, defined by
Le Brun and Gerry (1975: 20) as existing for instance, ‘at the
margins of the capitalist mode of production, but (...)
nevertheless integrated into and subordinate to it’. For a
preliminary description of branches of production in the social
formation at Kaoma district, see Van Binsbergen (1978); however,
that analysis is theoretically still very defective. A much
revised version is forthcoming in Africa.
[38] Oral evidence on this institution and its
historical development is scanty, but we may surmise that what
was involved was actually a local version of the institution of
pawnship, postulated by Douglas (1964) to form a general feature
of clan structures in the Central African matrilineal belt.
[39] In addition to oral traditions I collected myself,
there are four collections systematised by their
collectors/authors: Clay (1946); Ikacana (1971); Shimunika
(n.d.); Anonymous (n.d.). Extensive treatment of this material
and relevant archival data, is in my forthcoming monograph on the
Nkoya.
[40] Mainga (1973); Papstein (1978); Van Horn (1977);
Clarence-Smith (1979).
[41] Stokes (1966); Caplan (1970); Van Horn (1977):
155f.
[42] Materials for such an interpretation could be
gleaned from: Mainga (1972), Prins (1980), Roberts (1976): 115f,
Flint (1979).
[43] This is an important point. Allegiance to a
particular chief tends to form a focus for a Zambian’s
perception of his or her rural home and ethnic affiliation. This
is reflected, and reinforced, in Zambia’s administrative
procedures. Since Independence (1964) ethnic affiliation has
never been asked by census enumerators — in ‘One Zambia One
Nation’ (one of UNIP’s main slogans) ethnic affiliation
officially does not exist but a person’s chief appears on a
citizen’s National Registration Card.
[44] This interpretation of ethnicity as an ideological
response to the articulation of modes of production comes close
to my analysis of religious, as distinct from ethnic,
mobilisation in the case of the Lumpa church in Northern Zambia;
cf. van Binsbergen 1981b: 4865, 266-316.
[45] If one were to define the concept of social
formation as the particular interrelationship between various
articulated modes of production at a given time and place
(Terray), rather than as a specific interrelationship between
infrastructure and superstructure at a given time and place
(Godelier), such a concept of social formation might in fact
begin to provide the sort of unit of study under which to subsume
the present analysis of ethnicity in terms of, among others, a
response to the articulation of modes of production. However,
such a social formation would have to be considered,
Wallerstein-fashion, in the context of the total world system,
since the dialectics of Nkoya ethnicity refer at the same time to
the provincial, the national and the intercontinental level; the
analytical gains of adopting such an expanding, and theoretically
contentious, unit of study would then be very limited.
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