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©
1993-2002 W.M.J. van Binsbergen
1. Ethnicity
A perennial and probably universal aspect of
the human condition is that we give names,[ii] to elements of the non-human world which
surrounds us and to human individuals, but also to the groupings
into which we organize ourselves.[iii] Usually members of a society designate their
own grouping by a proper name, and in any case they give names to
other groupings around them. Such nomenclature is often vague,
but it brings about a dramatic ordering within the wider social
field which various communities share with one another. On the
logical plane, projecting onto another grouping a distinct name
which does not apply to one’s own grouping, denies that other
grouping the possibility of differing only gradually from one’s
own. Through the expression in words which make up the name, the
opposition between groupings is rendered absolute, and is in
principle subjected to the relentlessness of the dendrogram, of
binary opposition which plays such an important role in human
thought.[iv] By
calling the other category ‘A’ one’s own category in any
case identifies as ‘not-A’. The latter is usually also given
a name, ‘B’, by those which it has called ‘A’, and third
parties within the social field can either adopt this
nomenclature or replace it by one of their own invention.
Every society comprises, among other features, a large number of
named sets of people: for instance local communities, kin
groupings, production groupings, parts of an administrative
apparatus, cults, voluntary associations. We would call such a
named set of people an ‘ethnic group’ only if certain
additional characteristics are present: when individual
membership is primarily derived from a birth right (ascription);
when the set of people consciously and explicitly distinguishes
itself from other such sets in its social environment by
reference to specific cultural differences; and when the members
of such a set identify with one another on the basis of a shared
historical experience. ‘Ethnicity’, then, is the totality of
processes through which people, by reference to the ethnic groups
which they distinguish, structure the wider social and
geographical field in which they are involved so as to transform
it into an ethnic field.
The nature of the additional characteristics mentioned is gradual
and not absolute. For their formulation and application is in the
hands of the members of a society; the social scientist tries to
identify these socially constructed characteristics through
empirical research. In order to be effective the relationships
which people enter into with one another, have to be not only
systematic but also flexible and contradictory. The social
process creates boundaries, but also in order to cut across them.
For instance, most ethnic groups include a minority of members
who have gained their membership not at birth but only later in
life, in a context of marriage, migration, language acquisition,
adoption, the assumption of a new identity and a new life style,
religious conversion etc.[v]
Ethnic fields turn out to be differently organized at different
places in the world and in different periods of human history;
there is a great variation in the way in which people demarcate
ethnic groups through distinctive cultural attributes (for
instance, language) and through historical consciousness.[vi] Ethnic groups may often have a subjective
historical consciousness, but what they always have is an
objective history open to academic enquiry, from their emergence
to their disappearance,[vii] and
this history cannot be understood unless as part of the history
of the genesis of the encompassing ethnic field as a whole.
It is analytically useful to make a clear distinction, by
reference to strategically chosen characteristics, between ethnic
groups and other ascriptive groupings such as castes and classes,
but we must not expect that such analytically-imposed
distinctions stand in a clear-cut one-to-one relationship to
analogous distinctions in the consciousness of the social actors
themselves. For the distinction between such ethnic groups as
exist, side by side, within the same social field is not limited
to the logic of nomenclature (,which merely entails co-ordinative
relationships, without hierarchy), but tends to assume a
subordinative nature; within the overarching ethnic field, the
participants articulate political, economic and ritual
inequalities between ethnic groups in a way which the analyst
would rather associate with classes and castes.[viii]
Ethnic nomenclature is a complex social process which deserves
specific research in its own right. This is a position which
anthropology has only adopted in the most recent decades. Until
the middle of the twentieth century anthropology used ethnic
names as labels marking apparently self-evident units of culture
and social organization: within the units thus demarcated one
defined one’s research, but the demarcation in itself was
hardly problematized.
The card-index boxes and book shelves of the young
anthropological science filled with an overwhelming production of
ethnographic material which almost invariably was presented by
reference to an ethnic name intended to identify a ‘people’
or especially a ‘tribe’. Colonialism produced a nomenclatural
fragmentation of social fields in the colonized areas, with the
implied assumption that each of the units so identified displayed
absolute boundedness and internal integration, characteristics
which allegedly were inescapably underpinned by century-old
tradition. Such was the unit of analysis within which individual
careers of anthropologists could come to fruition.
It was only in the 1960s that the concept of ‘tribe’ was
subjected to profound criticism as an ethnocentric and reified
designation of an ethnic group within the global ethnic field
but outside the politically dominant civilization — in
other words in the so-called ‘Third World’.[ix]
Since then much has been written about the rise and fall of the
concept of tribe in Africa, in the context of political and
economic processes in this continent since the end of the
nineteenth century.
In a nutshell this body of literature revolves on: colonization
(in the course of which the state created administrative units
which were presented as ‘tribes’ — an optique which the
Africans soon took over in their own perception and political
action)[x]; the
implantation of the capitalist mode of production by means of
cash crops and migrant labour (which eroded local systems of
production, reproduction and signification, and at the same time
produced regional inequalities which soon came to be interpreted
in terms of an ethnic idiom); urbanization (in the course
of which a plurality of ethnic groups, and their members, engaged
in urban relationships which, through a process of selective
transformation, referred less and less to the traditional culture
of their respective region of origin);[xi] decolonization (the rise of a
nationalism which exposed ethnic fragmentation as a product of
manipulation by the state); and, notwithstanding the previous
point, the ethnic overtones of political mobilization and
networks of patronage in the post-colonial states;[xii] the vicissitudes of
military and one-party regimes which often presented themselves
as the solution for ethnically-based domestic political problems;
and most recently the rise of democratic alternatives which
despite their emphasis on constitutional universalism would yet
seem to offer new opportunities for ethnic mobilization.[xiii]
The Africanist literature on these topics is large and rapidly
increasing, but at the same time we know far less of the
processes of symbolic and cultural transformation which have
informed ethnicity in these contexts.[xiv] It is these processes, specifically, which
constitute the main topic of the present argument.
2. Ethnic identity and ethnic brokerage
A common term in the context of ethnicity
and ethnicity research is that of ‘identity’.[xv] As social scientists in
the narrower sense, we might define ‘identity’ as the
socially constructed perception of self as group membership.
Everybody plays various different roles in various groupings, and
therefore everybody has a plurality of identities, as acquired in
the course of one’s socialization to become a member of these
groupings.
Usually the rise of an ethnic group in Africa consists, as a
project, in the launching of a new identity and the installation
of that identity in the personalities of the ethnic group’s
prospective or intended members. The project of ethnicisation
presents the ethnic identity (as expressed by a group name) as
the ultimate, all-encompassing and most deeply anchored identity,
which is then supposed to incorporate all other identities which
one has acquired as a member of the local society.
Not by accident, such an ethnic identity reminds us strongly of
the concept of culture in classic anthropology, often
defined as: ‘everything one acquires as a member of a
society’. However, the local culture need not in the least be
limited, in place and time, to a specific named ethnic group;
often it has a much wider distribution. For instance, in the
savanna belt of South Central Africa, which will be the scene of
most of my argument, scores of ethnic groups have been
distinguished one next to the other since the nineteenth century;
yet if one were to concentrate on the distribution of patterns of
production, reproduction and signification one would perceive
such an underlying unity that there is every reason to speak of
one large cultural area in this part of the world.[xvi] Within this
far-reaching regional continuity distinct ethnic groups have
distinguished themselves — almost in the way one may cut
several differently shaped cookies out of the same slab of dough.
Among those sharing in this regional cultural continuity,
self-perception will be anchored in ethnic names (which do not
define cultural boundaries), and moreover, rather diffusely, in
references to kin groups and local groups at various levels of
inclusiveness and scale, in a landscape, a language, a
poly-ethnic state system etc.
Ethnicity comprises the process of taking consciousness (which
for many people means being actively persuaded to do so, by
ethnic leaders and brokers), in the course of which a plurality
of diffuse, accumulated, often cross-cutting, identities are
brought under the denominator of one ethnic identity,
which is then marked by a specific name. The ethnic name is
constructed so as to mark a cultural boundary, and therefore
pre-existing culture (or at least a selection of items from that
culture) has to be partly reconstructed so as to fall within that
boundary and to offer distinctive cultural attributes. In the
bundling and reshuffling of identities the personal experience of
self and of the world of transformed: the discovery of ‘I am a
— Fleming, Azeri, Yoruba, Nkoya’ etc. offers a ordering
perspective in which powerlessness, deprivation and estrangement
such as one has experienced earlier on in all kinds of
situations, suddenly appear in a new light: as if the collective
historical experience suddenly makes sense of them, and as if
there is reason for hope that these negative experiences will be
turned in their opposites through ethnic self-presentation.
Viewed in this way ethnicity has many parallels with other
ideological phenomena such as nationalism, the awakening of class
consciousness, religious conversion and religious innovation.
Ethnicity displays a remarkable dialectics which I am inclined to
consider as its engine.[xvii]
On the one hand, the binary opposition through nomenclature
offers a logical structure, which is further ossified through
ascription and which presents itself as unconditional,
bounded, inescapable and timeless;[xviii] on the other hand, the actual processual
realization (through the construction of a culture coinciding
with the group boundary, through distinctive cultural symbols,
through a shared historical consciousness, through that part of
membership which is non-ascriptive but acquired) means flexibility,
choice, constructedness and recent change. Both,
entirely contradictory, aspects form part of ethnicity. This
dialectics renders ethnicity particularly suitable for mediating,
in processes of social change, between social contexts with are
each of a fundamentally different structure, and particularly
between the local level on the one hand, and the state and wider
economic structures on the other.[xix] The ethnic name and the principle of
ascription produce the image of a bounded set of people.
Therefore integration between the local level and the national
and international level, which poses such bewildering problems of
structural discontinuity, under conditions of etnicization, no
longer remains a challenge which the vulnerable individual must
cope with on his own on the basis of his inadequate skills and
perceptions geared to the local level; on the contrary, such
integration becomes the object of group action.
Internally, a set of people is restructured so as to become an
ethnic group by designing a cultural package which, in its own
right (i.e. not just because of its symbolizing more abstract
power relations such as exist between the local level and the
more global levels) constitutes a major stake in the negotiations
between the emerging ethnic group and the outside world. One
takes a distance from rival ethnic groups at the local and
regional scene through a strategic emphasis on cultural and
linguistic elements; and on a more comprehensive, national level
of socio-political organization one competes for the state’s
political and economic prizes (primarily: for the exercise of
power and the benefit of government expenditure) by means of
the state’s recognition of the ethnically constructed cultural
package.
In this process the ethnic group more and more articulates itself
as just that. But although all persons involved in this process
are in principle equals as carriers of the ethnic identity, the
contact with the outside world, precisely if it shapes up
successfully, causes new inequalities within the group. The
mediation takes place via political, economic and ideological
brokers who (through greater knowledge, better education, more
experience, better political contacts and more material means of
sustaining such contacts) are more than their fellow-members of
the ethnic group in a position to exploit the opportunities
offered by the outside world.[xx] These brokers develop ethnic leadership to an
instrument of power formation which works in two directions:
— externally, towards the outside world,
where these leaders claim resources in exchange for an effective
ordering of the local domain;[xxi]
— and, internally, within the ethnic group
itself, where the brokers trade off a limited share of their
outside spoils for internal authority, prestige and control at
the local level.
The leaders negotiate both with the outside world and with their
potential followers in the local society. In this context of
brokerage between local community and the outside world, that
which constitutes one’s own identity becomes problematic, and
asserting the ‘traditional’, ‘authentic’ (but in fact
newly reconstructed) culture appears as an important task and as
a source of power for the brokers. Ethnic associations,
publications, and such manifestations as festivals, under the
direction of ethnic brokers, constitute widespread and
time-honoured strategies in this process.
The insistence on ethnic identity produces powerful ideological
claims, which the outside world sometimes meets with more
sympathy than with analytical understanding. These claims may not
be recognized as a recent, strategic, and rhetorical product, but
may be idealized (as they are idealized by the ethnic brokers
themselves) as, for instance, ‘...the courageous expressions,
worthy of our deepest respect, of an inescapable identity which
these people have acquired in childhood socialization and which
takes a desperate stand against the encroachments of the outside
world...’ For instance, in today’s thinking about
intercontinental development cooperation a fair place has been
reserved for such claims and the associated cultural expressions.
It is really the mediation of a deeply anchored tradition,
which is at stake here? Is that the reason why ethnic processes
deserve the kind of sympathy and support which we, in a rapidly
changing world, are inclined to extend to forms of culture
threatened with extinction? How do these ethnic manifestations
reveal the details of the negotiation process between the outside
world and the local community? How do they express new
inequalities? Can we find here new arguments for the classic
thesis of Marxist researchers and politicians, who claim that
the ethnic process produces a false consciousness which
prevents the actors from realizing the underlying structures of
exploitation such as should be interpreted in class terms?[xxii] What
does the analysis of the ethnic negotiation process teach us
about the characteristics of the wider political and economic
system in which this process is embedded in the world today?
I invite the reader to come with me to an ethnic festival in
central western Zambia, to which these questions are eminently
applicable, and where they may find some provisional answer.
3. The emergence of the Nkoya as an ethnic
group, and the ‘Kazanga Cultural Association’[xxiii]
Since 1988 every year on the first weekend
of July a peculiar ceremony, by the name of Kazanga, takes
place in Kaoma district, in western Zambia.
From its inception to 1991 Shikombwe was the scene of Kazanga.
Shikombwe is the capital of Mwene (i.e. Lord, Chief, King)
Mutondo. That Shikombwe is a royal residence (lukena,
plur. zinkena) is clear from the lilapa surrounding
the inner part of the agglomeration: a reed fence supported by
pointed poles, which is a royal prerogative. Inside the lilapa
we find a simple four-room house serving as a royal palace, and
moreover a reed audience hall, and a shelter where, as principal
regalia, the instruments of the royal orchestra are kept and
where they are played twice a day. A large open space outside the
lilapa is dominated by the modern court building, in front
of which a rough flagpole has been erected; here the kapasus
— constables attached to the royal court — hoist the Zambian
flag every morning. This open space is the scene of the Kazanga
festival. Around it lie the residential compounds of the
courtiers and members of the royal family. A narrow track
connects Shikombwe to the tar road over a distance of fifteen
kilometers, and along the tar road it is another twenty
kilometers to the district capital Kaoma, which until 1969 was
called Mankoya. Kaoma district is part of Western Province
(formerly called Barotseland), whose modern and traditional
capitals by the name of respectively Mongu and Lealui lie at the
end of the tar road two hundred kilometers west of Kaoma; at the
other end, four hundred kilometers east, lies the national
capital of Zambia, Lusaka. Mutondo’s area, about ten thousand
square kilometers, consists of fertile wooded savanna, inhabited
by peasants in small villages that are mostly concentrated along
the many rivers and streams. Many (by no means all) inhabitants
of this chief’s area consider themselves subjects of Mutondo
and members of the Nkoya ethnic group, and speak preferably (but
seldom exclusively) the Nkoya language; others identify with the
Lozi group[xxiv]
which is politically and socially dominant in western Zambia, or
with the groups which since the beginning of the twentieth
century have en masse immigrated from Angola: especially
the Luvale[xxv]
and Luchazi.
Mutondo derives his hereditary title and hence royal status from
a kingdom which was established in this region in the eighteenth
century A.D. by his ancestors, who were dissidents breaking away
from the famous Lunda empire in southern Zaire. The dynastic
group adopted the name of Nkoya, which was originally[xxvi] the name of a forested
area around the confluence of the Zambezi and the Kabompo rivers.
Given the cultural continuity in the region the name ‘Nkoya’
certainly did not designate a distinct and bounded culture; the
formation of the Nkoya as an ethnic group was still a thing of
the future. After Mutondo’s state and subjects became tributary
to Barotseland’s rulers in the middle of the nineteenth
century, they were, as a so-called ‘Lozi subject tribe’,
incorporated in the colonial state of Northern Rhodesia in 1900
under the name of ‘Mankoya’. In 1964 the colonial state
became the independent Republic of Zambia. At incorporation
Mutondo became a relatively high-ranking title within the Lozi
aristocracy. The lukena and its court retinue are still
subsidized by the national state on the basis of treaty which the
latter concluded with the Lozi king in 1900 and 1964.
Nonetheless Lozi-Nkoya relations have largely been experienced as
antagonistic and humiliating the Nkoya, especially under the
colonial state, which allowed the indigenous Lozi administration
considerable freedom. Mankoya district then sighed under Lozi
domination.[xxvii]
Besides Mutondo, only one royal title in the region managed to
survive the incorporation process into the Lozi state: Mwene
Kahare of the Mashasha people. The many other royal titles were
replaced by Lozi representative indunas. Two other princes
who were closely related to the Mutondo dynasty has in time moved
their seat to outside Barotseland: Mwene Kabulwebulwe and Mwene
Momba, who from the outset had been recognized by the colonial
state in their own right, but of course could not share in the
Lozi subsidy which was strictly limited to Barotseland.
A decisive year in the development of ‘Nkoya’ to a
self-assertive ethnic group was 1937, when the Lozi king
established a filial branch of his own court smack in the middle
of Mankoya district, in order to control the local chiefs,
judiciary and district finance. Another such year was 1947, when
Mutondo Muchayila was demoted and exiled for ten years by the
Lozi king on the grounds of restiveness. In the same time the
Rev. Johasaphat Shimunika, the first autochthonous pastor of the
Evangelic Church of Zambia,[xxviii] translated the New Testament and the Psalms[xxix] into the local language
which by then was already called ‘Nkoya’ along with its
speakers. Despite much effort from the missionary side it proved
impossible to have this language recognized for use in education
and in the media — understandably, since its speakers comprise
less than 1% of the Zambian population, in a country which in
addition to English as the official language has recognized as
many as seven regional languages including Lozi. In the years
1950-60 Rev. Shimunika also processed oral traditions into
writings which depicted a glorious past for the growing
‘Nkoya’ identity.[xxx]
He explicitly extended his pan-Nkoya efforts to include, besides
Mutondo, the princes Kahare, Kabulwebulwe and Momba along with
their subjects, and exposed Lozi domination as historically
unjustified.
The Nkoya during this formative period as an ethnic group
regarded Zambia’s struggle for national independence primarily
as an opportunity to end Lozi domination at the regional level.
Their political initiatives, presented under a Nkoya emblem, were
immediately prohibited.[xxxi]
Their choice in favour of the United National Independence Party
(UNIP), as opposed to Lozi power, fired back when in Barotseland
UNIP itself came under Lozi domination. Then many Nkoya went over
to the opposition. Thus in the first years of Zambia’s
independence they were estranged from the UNIP-ruled national
state. With the decline of the Lozi in national politics as from
1969,[xxxii]
and the disunity among Luvale and Luchazi voters in the district,
the Nkoya gained their first and only parliamentary seat and
ministerial position in the 1973 general elections, shortly after
Zambia had become a one-party state under UNIP. Afraid of
‘tribalism’, the government was still hostile to expressions
of Nkoya ethnicity. In the same period a large development
project was started in Nkeyema in the eastern part of the
district. The villagers hardly gained any direct benefits from
Nkeyema, by contrast to the enterprising African farmers who
flocked in from other districts, as well as the members of the
modern and the traditional political elite of the Nkoya, between
whom close kinship ties existed. This elite brought the villagers
to great enthusiasm and loyalty by formulating ethnic goals such
as increasing the subsidies of state-recognized chiefs , the
reinstatement of some titles which had disappeared, and the
propagation of the use of the Nkoya language in education and the
media. The growth of local UNIP branches under the leadership of
this modern elite rendered the expression of Nkoya ethnicity
acceptable to the national state. For the first time the Zambian
national anthem and the UNIP marching songs could be heard to be
sung in the Nkoya language.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century part of the life of
the inhabitants of this region would be lived outside the region,
on the commercial farms and the mines, and in the urban areas, of
Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The local people’s low level
of education, their limited job experience, small numbers as
migrants, and low ethnic status made it virtually impossible for
them to collectively and lastingly occupy niches of their own
within the capitalist labour market. Although before third
parties they could pass for Lozi, the latter highly successful
group denied the Nkoya access to Lozi resources in the towns.
Nonetheless one was forced to go to town: it was there that one
could find cash for consumption articles and bride wealth, and
also a refuge away from the tensions within the village community
— which were experienced in terms of sorcery. Because of the
uncertainty of the urban labour market the migrant usually
maintained a strong orientation on his village to which he
expected to return only too soon, and on his ‘homeboys’ in
town, who constituted his only support upon arrival, and in times
of unemployment, illness and death. Wherever in town their
numbers present allowed for collective ceremonial to be staged,
healing rites, puberty ceremonies and funerals offered the
opportunity to keep alive the contacts with their homeboys, in a
context marked by their own music and dance from home. For those
who had a measure of success in town the Evangelic Church of
Zambia offered an urban network, power base and identity; this
church was mainly active in their home area, and through its
mission schools had offered a modest channel of upward mobility.
Most villagers and urban migrants however participated
intensively in autochthonous and syncretistic cults, which might
or might not be combined with a nominal form of Christianity.
For a long time the urban component of the village community was
not formalized into an ethnic association, despite the fact that
colonial Zambia knew many such associations, which only later
became suspect in the post-colonial crusade against
‘tribalism’, and subsequently disappeared. Only in 1982 the
‘Kazanga Cultural Association’ materialized as a formally
registered society under the patronage of the Nkoya minister.
This was an initiative of a handful of people from Kaoma district
who, by their middle age, and against all odds, had made the
grade from insecure circulatory migrant labourer to member of the
capital’s middle class. With the drop in copper prizes in 1975
Zambia entered into a crisis which has lasted until today.
Therefore even the urban middle class could not ignore the
economic developments which were meanwhile taking place in Kaoma
district. Some returned to the district forever; other started a
farm there but continued to live in town. Their enthusiasm for
the Nkoya identity which became ever more articulated brought
these urbanites in close contact with the district’s political
elite, and brought them new credit in the eyes of the villagers
from which they had earlier taken a distance through their class
position and urbanization. They adopted the ethnic goals as
mentioned above. In addition the Kazanga association continued to
offer a support structure to migrants. Also did it offer the
infrastructure for a few conferences meant to validate the Nkoya
translation of the Old Testament, a project which Rev. Shimunika
had not been able to complete before his death in 1981. However,
the association’s main goal is the propagation, through an
annual festival of the same name, of the local culture which,
inevitably, was labelled ‘Nkoya’ as well. From the name of a
forest, via that of a dynasty and a district, that name had
developed to designate an ethnic group found in several
districts, and at the same time a language, a culture, and a
cultural project intended to articulate this newly emerged group
at the regional and national level.
4. The Kazanga festival in 1989
In the remainder of my argument I shall
limit myself to the 1989 Kazanga festival, on which I have
detailed information.
In the open space around the court building reed shelters have
been erected, offering a refuge from the winter’s sun to a
minority of the audience, numbering in total roughly one
thousand. Also two ‘loges’ have been constructed out of the
same material: one for the chiefs, and, at the other side of a
reed wall, another one for a handful of state dignitaries,
including two ministers.[xxxiii]
The two-sided strategy of ethnic mediation could not be expressed
more eloquently: the construction of ethnic identity
towards the chiefs’ loge coincides, along a parallel
axis in the same viewing direction, with the assertion of
that identity towards the state loge.
Since in 1989 the media were still disappointingly absent from
Kazanga, no special recording facilities are required. However,
there is a loudspeaker installation, which constantly squeals and
thus leaves no doubt about the fact that the local music, song
and dance are now to be produced in a format different from the
usual one. The audience does not pay an entrance fee — the
costs are paid out of spontaneous contribution from the audience
during the dances (when people come up to the dancing ground to
place their coins and bills on the head or shoulders of the
dancers), from a general collection, and from money which the
Kazanga association has earned by the sale of Nkoya-language
calendars depicting ‘heights of Nkoya culture’: the dance of
the kankanga (which marks the end of the life phase
between a woman’s menarche and her becoming nubile), and
the traditional hunter complete with his bow and arrow, axe and
tinderbox.
After the spectators have installed themselves on the festival
grounds the four chiefs one after the other make their dramatic
entrance. The festival direction tells the people to kneel down
for the traditional royal salute. Directly in front of a small
thatched shrine which is situated in the centre of the festival
grounds, musicians produce the unique sounds of the snare drum (ngoma
ntambwe) and the royal bell (ngongi) — which are
very rarely heard even at the royal courts. Preceded by a kapasu
walking with measured parade steps the chief struts onto the
festival grounds, followed by a procession of subjects which, in
front staying narrowly behind the chief, towards the back tapers
out to the left and the right, where the stately steps go over
into dancing. The women in the retinue ululate thrilling guttural
sounds. The musicians immediately behind the chief are all but
pushed away by two members of the festival direction who on their
shoulders carry a cassette recorder like one carries a relic
shrine — in order to record at least in sound every aspect of
Kazanga; in 1989 the urban middle class which makes up the core
of the Kazanga association not yet possessed video cameras (a
situation which ended in 1991). When the chief has traversed the
festival grounds halfway, a few other members of the Kazanga
association step forward to welcome him. Cheered by the crowd,
and while the chief’s traditional praise names blast from the
loudspeakers, he takes his place in the loge. After a few minutes
of silence (which several more owners of cassette recorders use
to place their equipment, in recording position, near the
musicians) the crowd claps the royal salute, after which the
musicians, kneeling behind their instruments, sound one of the
praise songs from their habitual repertoire. This sequence is
repeated for each of the four chiefs.
Besides the chief’s entrances the day’s mimeographed
programme as distributed displays the following items:
— an official part featuring the Zambian
national anthem (of course in Nkoya) and speeches by the chairman
of the Kazanga association, and the minister of culture; and
— performances by various dancing groups,
solo dancers and the accompanying orchestra composed of
xylophones and drums, in order to present a representative
sample of Nkoya expressive culture.[xxxiv]
We shall first look at the official part, in which Kazanga
clearly appears as mediation towards the national state. Then we
shall assess how the festival, by virtue of its organizational
structure, selects and transforms the local culture. We shall see
how it does not only express new inequalities, but also exerts a
decisive influence on the hierarchy of the traditional chiefs.
Finally we shall pay attention to the specific nature of the
symbolic production which characterizes the festival and in which
its mediatory nature is most acutely expressed.
5. Kazanga and the state
The mediation around which Kazanga
revolves is exclusively directed, vertically, at the state and
not, horizontally, at other ethnic groups.
The festival no longer carries any explicit reference to the Lozi
as ethnic enemies or as a reference group.[xxxv] Meanwhile the Lozi at the district level have
been partly supplanted by the Luvale and the Luchazi, who in 1988
conquered Mr Kalaluka’s parliamentary seat. Their makishi mask
dances, which are never absent from cultural manifestations at
the district level, are excluded from the Kazanga festival as
non-Nkoya, even though male circumcision (a widespread ritual
complex throughout the region, of which the makishi dances
form part) was still practiced as late as the end of the
nineteenth century, by the ancestors op those now identifying as
Nkoya, and particularly in the Mutondo state.[xxxvi]
In his address the Kazanga chairman expresses his disappointment
about the absence of the media, which, he claims, is even more
unjustified since Kazanga is not a tribal ceremony:
‘Kazanga
ceremony is a ceremony of the Nkoya people like any other
ceremony that are [sic] held in other parts of the
Republic. I wish the government could help us organize this
ceremony as the other kinds[xxxvii] have received
the same help. And I would have wished the TV to cover this
ceremony and at the same time the radio. But unfortunately enough
this has not been the case on our ceremony for the second time.
The party and its government have been made to believe that Kazanga
is a tribal ceremony. [xxxviii] I say: No!
And it is quite unfortunate that people have said so. Kazanga
is merely a ceremony of the Nkoya people just like any other
ceremony as I have said.’ (applause)[xxxix]
The Junior Minister of Culture, Mr. Tembo, hails from eastern
Zambia, and like 95%[xl]
of the Zambian population he does not know Nkoya. Until a few
years ago his speech would have been simply in English. But many
things have changed in Zambia. Before the ceremony, therefore,
the Minister has had one of the Kazanga leaders (the ex-trade
unionist and now game-skin dealer Mr D. Mupishi) dictate a number
of appropriate Nkoya phrases to him, and these he now pronounces
— not visibly from paper but from braille notes in his jacket
pocket. This is the very first time that a state representative
in an official capacity addresses the Nkoya in their own
language. The acclamation is overwhelming.
‘Our culture’,
says Mr Tembo in laboriously, but imperfectly, pronounced Nkoya,
‘is the Nkoya culture, the culture of Zambia, a great culture
which is very dear to us.’[xli]
Soon switching to English, which Mr Mupishi
translates into Nkoya, the minister praises the festival
organizers for the excellent reception they have given the
politicians, and declares their ethnic mediation successful:
‘We are here to
express the party’s policy of cultural unity through diversity.
Kazanga is a Zambian ceremony.’
He calls upon the elders to educate the youth
‘on the meaning of Kazanga’, and exhorts the youth to show
interest.
‘Let us all be
proud that we are Zambians.’
This year, 1989, the silver anniversary of
Zambian Independence will be celebrated, and the minister praises
God’s great blessings and the wisdom of President Kaunda:
‘When we think
of the miraculous — er — escape from certain tribes [!].
When we think of the wisdom of our leadership — our great
beloved President’s wisdom. (...) We will meaningfully praise
God if we treasure what we have. God wants us to look after our
nation by following the party’s policy, the party’s
direction; by treasuring our leadership; to listen to them
especially when they tell us over and over again: ‘‘love one
another’’, ‘‘love one another’’.’ [xlii]
The Zambian state is bankrupt and needs all
the support it can get. The Kaunda regime is near its end; in the
democratic elections in 1991 UNIP, after controlling the state
for almost thirty years, will be defeated by a national
democratic coalition named MMD (Movement for Multi-party
Democracy) led by Mr F. Chiluba. In the night before Kazanga in
1989 the Zambian currency was once again devaluated by 100%. The
religious idiom must conceal the fact that politically the
minister has nothing more to say. But that does not disqualify
him in the eyes of his audience. Particularly in the light of
Nkoya humiliation during the colonial period, and the initial
distrust between the Nkoya and the post-colonial state, Minister
Tembo’s message of the unconditional acceptance of Nkoya
ethnicity by the state is more than sufficient.
At the end of his speech the blind minister, once Zambia’s most
popular singer, calls upon the public to sing — in Nkoya, and
to a tune that accompanied a dancing group of schoolgirls earlier
in the ceremony — a simple song on Zambian development which
the minister just wrote. His call is answered reluctantly, while
in accompaniment he strikes the folding parts of his blindman’s
stick in front of the microphone. Ethnic mediation is something
this minister understands only too well; he was my final-year
student at the University of Zambia in the early 1970s.
Let us now analyze the details of the ethnic mediation process as
it presents itself at the Kazanga festival.
6. Cultural selection and transformation in
Kazanga
It is essential for ethnic mediation that
the brokers’ leadership can assert itself not only through
serving the ethnic group in an organizational capacity but also
through cultural selection and transformation.
In Zambia, as almost anywhere in the modern world public life and
the national political culture are dominated by the media,
especially radio and television. Ethnic mediation towards the
outside world seeks media access, and festivals are a
time-honoured means to acquire such access. In the specific case
of the Nkoya two important reasons must be added to this. Of old,
Kaoma district has had an extremely rich musical tradition.[xliii] At the beginning of the
nineteenth century the Nkoya royal orchestra was even permanently
adopted by the Lozi. Therefore, music which the Nkoya rightly
recognize as their own can often be heard at the Zambian media
— but then as an attribute of the hated Lozi traditional
establishment; all efforts which Nkoya have made over the years
to have radio broadcasts in their own language, have been in vain
until very recently. And, secondly, the principal public
expression of that power is the Kuomboka ceremony, which is held
every year in April at the occasion of the Lozi king’s (later
paramount chief’s) moving, by ceremonial barge, from his summer
residence to his winter residence. For a century Kuomboka has
attracted the keen attention of the media and of national
dignitaries. The Kazanga ceremony was meant as the Nkoya’s
answer to Kuomboka,[xliv]
just like the Kazanga association (up to and including printed
T-shirts for the associations’ members and to be worn as part
of the dancers’ uniform) is an attempt to emulate the much
richer, more powerful, more numerous and more efficient Lozi
association which year after year makes Kuomboka possible.[xlv]
Thus the Kazanga festival is a strategically chosen new form. In
what ways does it select and transform the existing local
culture?
6.1. Kazanga in the nineteenth century
The name Kazanga is derived from a ritual
that has gone in disuse since the end of the nineteenth century.[xlvi] Through the ritual one
hoped to gain supernatural permission to partake of the new
harvest. The king was the ritual’s principal officiant. The
climax was the sacrifice of one or more slaves over an anthill (a
symbol of the fertility of the land); the blood was led into the
ground along gullies dug for that purpose.[xlvii] Kazanga was the only moment in the year when
the entire people came together around the king, and it was
surrounded by extensive performance of music and dance. It is
exclusively the latter aspects which the leaders of the new
association have selected when designing a new and modern Kazanga
ceremony.
Zambia is a post-colonial state insisting on its respect for
human rights. The Nkoya try to articulate themselves as an ethnic
group in a context of peripheral capitalism, where food and food
crops have turned into commodities and where the fertility of the
land has lost its sacred nature. The Nkoya identity first emerged
within the Evangelical Church of Zambia, and Nkoya chiefs counted
among theat church’s founding members. The integral revival of
the old harvest ceremony was therefore unthinkable.
6.2. Kazanga for four chiefs
As an expression of the recent Nkoya
identity the new-style Kazanga ceremony would only make sense if
it was not limited to one chief or king (as was originally the
case) but involved all four chiefs with their retinue and
subjects. Here a major problem arose.
In western Zambia royal persons, as an expression of their
incomparable political and ritual status, are separated from
their subjects through strict rules of avoidance and respect. For
instance, they must not eat together with anybody else (except
very close kin), nor come in touch with death. They can only be
approached through the intervention of court dignitaries, and on
such occasions the visitor displays humility through the adoption
of a kneeling, squatting or sitting position and through rhythmic
clapping. The purpose of court life is not so much the handling
of administrative affairs but the glorification of the king and
the guarding of his prestige, protocol and person. The king is
the living axis of the community, the lukena is the centre
of the universe, in which there is strictly speaking only room
for one king. It is this fundamental idea which was expressed by
the old Kazanga ceremony.
Kings who are not each other’s vassal and lord respectively,
but equals, can strictly speaking not visit each other, and must
certainly not eat together or sleep under one roof.[xlviii] When nonetheless it is
inevitable that they should meet, the visiting king is to have
his own retinue and own temporary lukena at his disposal.[xlix] Bringing together, as
in the new-style Kazanga, several royal chiefs was therefore a
profound innovation, which required sacrificing much of the Nkoya
cultural logic. At a considerable distance (ca. 1 km) from the
festival location four temporary royal residences had to be
erected. complete with lilapa. The royal procession and
entrance in itself did follow a historic model,[l] but their fourfold repetition was unheard-of.
6.3. Kazanga and the dynastic shrine of
Mutondo
In the middle of the festival area we have
seen a low round thatched shelter, inside of which a dozen sticks
had been placed into the ground; each stick was segmented through
a large number of transverse incisions. This was a shrine for the
deceased members of the Mutondo dynasty. The shrine had been
especially erected for the occasion of Kazanga, and at a most
exceptional spot: for a village shrine should not be situated
along the public road but at the centre of the settlement,
between the village headman’s house and the men’s shelter (kuta);
the proper place for a dynastic shrine is inside the lilapa
— but it would be unthinkable to organize a massive festival in
that secluded ands sacred space.[li]
For the conceptualization of space and time, and for the
unleashing of the symbolic potential of new-style Kazanga, all
this is of the greatest importance. The shrine adds to the
festival the sanction of an ancestral past, a strong suggestion
of continuity vis-a-vis the tradition, which helps to dissimulate
such actual breaches of the cultural logic as we have already
spotted. Revolutionarily situated in the open festival space, it
turns the latter into a sacred space.
Thus a symbolic decrease of scale is brought about: the dynastic
shrine poses as village shrine, namely of the entire region
transformed into an imaginary Nkoya village; of this village the
loges represent the men’s shelter; and the nearby lilapa
represents the headman’s house, which implies that Mutondo —
unjustifiably — is symbolically turned into the traditional
leader not only of his own subjects but of all those who embrace
the Nkoya identity — including the other Nkoya chiefs’
subjects. By articulating itself as the sacred centre of the
entire social and geographical space within which Nkoya identity
is being constructed and expressed, the shrine lends a cosmic
significance to that identity. It is near this shrine that the
most sacred, ancient and rare royal instruments are played.[lii]
Also in its new form Kazanga remains a glorification of the
kingship, which hence remains one of the pillars of Nkoya
ethnicity. But this idea is expressed by means of a shrine that
symbolically replaces the sacrificial anthill in the old Kazanga
ritual, and that should not be where it is; it represents a
double breach of tradition.
7. Kazanga in 1989 as confirmation of Mutondo
hegemony
While the ethnic brokers who organize
Kazanga strengthen their own positions of power both in the
outside world and within the Nkoya ethnic group, they also have
an impact on the hierarchy of the traditional chiefs. The 1989
festival presented Mutondo in a position of seniority to which
traditionally he can lay no claim.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century a fair number of royal
titles defined as many independent states. The political
relationships such as existed between groups at a particularly
decisive moment in their genesis used to be expressed, within the
Lunda sphere of influence in South Central Africa, as a permanent
kinship relation between titles, in such a way that each holder
of title Y, regardless of period, age, sex or actual biological
relationship, would appear as the ‘younger brother’,
‘father’ etc. of each holder of title Z. This system of
so-called ‘perpetual kinship’[liii] formed the basis for ‘positional
succession’, according to which individual title-holders in the
course of their career would be promoted from lower to higher
titles as the latter became vacant through death or demotion.
However, these time-honoured instruments of political integration
were not applied within and between the states of Kaoma district;[liv] this led to an extreme
political fragmentation which made these states defenseless
against Lozi expansion and the colonial state. When locally only
the two titles of Mutondo and Kahare survived, a sharp dichotomy
arose with a strong rivalry between either chief’s following.
The colonial district was named after the Mutondo dynasty, and in
accordance with Kahare’s more peripheral geographical position
Mutondo’s following claimed seniority for their prince. It is
only from this early colonial period that Kahare (in a belated
attempt at perpetual kinship, and despite the greater antiquity
of his own title)[lv]
addresses Mutondo as ‘elder brother’ (yaya). Also
Kabulwebulwe and Momba follow this convention vis-a-vis Mutondo,
and for somewhat better reasons since certain early incumbents of
these titles are known to be have broken away from the Mutondo
dynastic group as recently as the nineteenth century.[lvi]
This formal subordination is not confirmed by the outside world.
In general, the hierarchy of state-recognized chiefs in Zambia
comprises ‘Paramount Chiefs’, ‘Senior Chiefs’, and
‘Chiefs’; Mutondo and Kahare are each only ‘Chief; and as
such each other’s equals. Also in the hierarchy of the Lozi
indigenous administration they occupy the same, relatively
exalted level, as royal chiefs entitled to a lilapa and to
an orchestra but not to the most senior type of royal drums, the Mawoma
kettle drums.[lvii]
Under the post-colonial state, Kahare’s position[lviii] has always been even
stronger than that of Mutondo.
The issue of equality among the Nkoya chiefs has played a great
role in the choice of the location of the new-style Kazanga
festival. The large majority of those identifying as Nkoya live
in Kaoma district as subjects of either Mutondo or Kahare, and a
location outside the district was therefore not contemplated. The
district capital (where the Nkoya are politically and
economically a minority as compared to the Lozi, Luvale and
Luchazi) was rejected as a possible location, and initially
preference was given to either of the two zinkena. In
principle it was decided to have Kazanga alternate each year
between Mutondo’s and Kahare’s capital. In practice however
all festivals have taken place at Shikombwe between 1988 and
1991. It was here that in 1981 Muchayila, who had been
demoted as chief in 1947, was re-instated after the death of his
successor, a pro-Lozi figurehead; until Muchayila’s own death
in 1990, i.e. in the formative years of Kazanga as an association
and as a festival, the hale and hearty Muchayila was to remain
the undisputed symbol of Nkoya ascendancy.
The shrine in the middle of the festival grounds explicitly
referred only to the Mutondo kingship and its previous
incumbents.
Despite the pan-Nkoya signature of Kazanga, and the presence of
other chiefs with their retinue, it is Mutondo’s royal bell and
snare drums which are being played here, by his musicians.
The few solo dancers who will significantly touch the shrine
during their performance are members of the Mutondo royal family,
and so are the score of people who, as a separate item on the
festival programme, are to dance around the shrine.
The subordination of the other chiefdoms under Mutondo hegemony
in the context of Kazanga is also clear from other details in the
course of the festival.
Mutondo is not only the chief who makes the first entrance (at
the same time as the modern dignitaries, who unobtrusively take
to their place in the loge) but it is also him who, standing in
front of the royal loge, welcomes the other chiefs with a
handshake upon their arrival. As compared to the historic
clapping among the Nkoya this is a downright exotic gesture,
which however has become a completely accepted aspect of the
Zambian urban and national culture today; in the present context
it underlines the lack of protocol for royals meeting. With the
handshake Mutondo asserts himself as the host and as senior to
the other chiefs at this pan-Nkoya festival. As if to stress that
Mutondo, more than his colleagues, represents the link with the
glorious past, he is the only one to wear historic regalia over
his western costume: his breast and back are covered with leopard
skins, and he dons three spiralled shell disks[lix] on his brow. However, all four chiefs carry
an eland tail (hefu) as regalium, which they wield as a
fly-switch when walking or sitting in state.[lx]
The presentation, in the context of Kazanga, of Mutondo as the
most senior Nkoya chief is immediately taken over by the state
representatives at the festival. Minister Tembo explicitly
directs his speech to Mutondo, whom he erroneously calls ‘Senior
Chief’ and whom he addresses by the Nkoya honorific ‘ba
Hekulu’ (‘Your Majesty’). No doubt this is partly due
to his preparatory conversation with Mr Mupishi, member of the
Mutondo royal family.
Expressing the pan-Nkoya identity in new-style Kazanga turns out
to have as its price: giving in to the seniority aspirations of
the Mutondo title and its followers. Integration of the
geographically and politically highly fragmented local groupings
under the Nkoya emblem does not produce a unity of equals.
Presentation of one’s ethnic identity to the outside world does
not do away with the internal contradictions but, on the
contrary, reinforces the latter, within the new political space
which opens up by contact with the state.
However, we shall see that this attempt at hegemony through
Kazanga did not last, and most recently was resolved in a
compromise which combined such potential for unity as could be
derived both from village culture and from the meiation towards
the state.
8. Expressive culture in Kazanga
As a form of ethnic mediation Kazanga seeks
to present a sample of Nkoya culture. What would we expect such a
sample to look like, given the habitual forms of expressive
culture in the village situation?
8.1. Expressive culture in the village
situation
For two centuries the local music and dance
(always with their song texts in the Nkoya language) have been a
model for the whole of western Zambia. The riches in this field
are in contrast with the fact that visual arts and ornamental
architecture are virtually non-existent here.[lxi] Most forms of expressive culture are linked
to specific ceremonial situations: girls’ initiation, marriage,
therapy, name inheritance, royal accession, the twice-daily
performance of the royal orchestra, the hunters’ guild’s
celebrations. Besides there is a, fashionably changing, festival
repertoire (ruhnwa) to entertain those villagers who take
part in these situations playing non-specialist roles. Playing
the main instruments (drums and xylophone) is reserved to men;
the royal instruments are reserved to paid court musicians; the
ceremonial situations enumerated above define for some
participants solo roles as singer or dancer; and certain
expressive forms (makwasha) are reserved to people of
middle age or older. But apart from this relatively limited
structuring of the expressive domain, each member of the
community has both the right and the competence to make public
and active use of virtually the entire repertoire of Nkoya
expressive culture.
Singing along with others, dancing along with others, supporting
the sound of drums and xylophone by clapping, by shaking a rattle
or by shouting exhortations, criticisms and witticisms, and
rewarding the dancers by dancing forward oneself and putting
money on the dancer’s head or shoulders — for the villager
music and dance always mean the actualization of a cultural
domain in which he or she is in principle competent, both in the
cognitive sense (of knowing how to appreciate and what to do) and
in the normative sense of possessing an unchallenged birthright
to participation. This does not mean that in every musical event
everybody present dances and sings along constantly. Many of
those present are content, most of the time, with a place at the
men’s fire or the women’s fire, where people engage in
conversation, where the plastic beer container, the cigarette and
the snuff box are passed form hand to hand, and where ambiguous
joking is standard; however, the expectation of active
participation is there during the entire ceremony and almost
everybody does participate at one moment or another in the course
of the event.
In this domain, it is only in the context of the royal orchestra
that one can witness pure musical and dancing consumption
with exclusion of the possibility to active participation. At all
other occasions we hear, polyphonically, next to one another many
slightly different voices and texts, and also with regard to the
dancing forms one could speak, by analogy, of ‘polychory’.[lxii] There is never any
question of stage direction, orchestration or choreography.
Musicians, singers, dancers and spectators change places
according to their own needs and preferences. Leading men and
women only see to it that the solo roles, if any, are not too
much obscured in the general melee. In time and space these
musical expressions are self-evidently integrated in the social
and geographical space of the village, and they constitute a very
frequent part of the life cycle of the village and of its
individual members.[lxiii]
In everyday village life in Kaoma district the roles which one
plays in material production and reproduction are little
formalized, with ample freedom for personal interpretation, weak
social control, and constantly erupting conflicts for which
moving to another village is the standard solution. Local society
is an example of the somewhat amorphous social organization which
the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and the Manchester School
considered characteristic for South Central Africa.[lxiv] The expressive culture
ties in with this. The ceremonies and rituals into which song and
dance are structured refer, largely implicitly and non-verbally,
to symbols which yet impose a cosmological ordering, and thus
meaning, to the loose social structure.
As a structure of activities the domain of music and dance offers
for many hours, sometimes days, at a stretch situations of
uninhibited articulation — often characterized by great
virtuosity — of the individual as member of a group which,
assembling for symbolic production, largely coincides with the
local group within which material production and reproduction
find place. Without the slightest exaggeration, the expressive
domain forms the pivot of the village society.[lxv]
8.2. Expressive culture in Kazanga
What of all this can we find back in
new-style Kazanga? Much less than one would expect if one were to
view the festival as an authentic expression of tradition.
The festival is dominated by ‘the performance’ as a
cosmopolitically produced format of symbolic production. We may
define this format as: a specialist activity which is structured
and standardized in detail by stage direction; disconnected
in space and time from the habitual local context of material
production and reproduction; and with a strict separation between
(a) controllers, (b) direct producers i.e. performers, and (c) a
crowd of symbolic consumers who have been reduced to productive
incompetence and non-participation.
Such a production format denies the characteristics of the
expressive domain in the village society. It offers a modular
matrix in which disconnected parts can be entered and replaced ad
libitum; these parts are made into objects and are consumed,
in order to gain — in the midst of similar performances — a
market value in the outside world, which is seen as a market of
‘performative’ products. The constituent parts of the
performance could be derived from a local idiom, but they come to
function in a context and in a manner which is so radically
different that any idea of continuity vis-a-vis the tradition has
to be given up. Kazanga is the uprooted performance, the
playing-back full of ostentation, of the local domain of symbolic
production. Under the guise of articulating the vitality of the
local culture in the world today, it offers a format within which
that culture runs the risk of being turned into a meaningless
folkloristic cultural product.
A closer analysis of the chiefs’ four entrances reveals how
Kazanga is a carefully directed performance, in which the
suggestion of a traditional model (that of the ‘royal
procession’) is achieved with the patent means of the
cinematographical industry. The naive spectator sees four chiefs
in a row, each followed by his own orchestra and retinue and by
representatives of his people, sufficiently numerous to raise
clouds of dust with their dancing. In fact however this
impression is only correct for Mutondo and Kahare. The other two
chiefs turn out to make their entrance in front of Mutondo’s
orchestra, and because they have only been able to bring a few
subjects from their distant capitals their procession consists
mainly of local ‘extras’ who have just been part of the
previous chiefs’ entrances! In view of the emphasis, in this
society, on one’s exclusive allegiance to one specific chief as
a method of social placement, and in view of the rivalry between
the chiefdoms, it is clear that Kazanga, as a planned
performance, demands from the performers that they take an almost
cynical distance from their own cultural logic.
Let us now look at the three roles of controller, performer and
spectator, starting with the last.
8.2.1. The spectators
Within the format of Kazanga the spectators
along the borders of the festival grounds have been reduced to
passive consumption, a state which the directions blasting from
the loudspeakers helps them to maintain. With enthusiastic cries
they respond to the chiefs’ entrances and to most performances,
and many cannot help themselves and inadvertently move in time
with the music. But is is only a few elderly women who do claim
their birthright, and dance and sing wholeheartedly along with
the performances. Their dancing movements are fierce and without
inhibitions involve the entire body. One or two of them have
actually dressed in genuinely traditional dress made out of
gameskins or bark, or wield a miniature hoe as a dancing prop.
8.2.2. the performers
Of the fifteen performances listed in the
programme only a few are presented by full-fledged villagers,
notably from Kahare’s area. These articulate their expressive
culture with a minimum of stage direction and choreography, in
their everyday clothes, and many on their bare feet. However, by
contrast to the village situation they do not engage in this
expressive production because in the space and time of their
community a self-evident reason for such production has presented
itself, but merely because they have been coopted by ethnic
brokers. In these hard times the prospect of financial gain
appeals to them, and after the festival they are deeply
disappointed when they are sent home with each barely enough to
buy a packet of cigarettes. However, this in itself suggests that
also the villagers begin to be accustomed to the performative
model, and begin to see their own dancing as productive wage
labour.[lxvi]
They have been brought to Shikombwe at the eve of the festival
upon an open truck, and for them the height of the festival lies
in the two nights before and after the festival, when the
combination of instruments, musicians and a crown in the same
open space produces a spontaneous celebration virtually
indistinguishable from the village ruhnwa. The large
xylophone flanked by drums, the crowd which spontaneously wheels
around the musicians and improvises (!) joking songs, the women
who peddle their village beer and scones, the absence of
artificial light which makes one time and again run into
unexpected kinsmen and friends from sometimes hundreds of
kilometers away — all this retains the taste, smell, sound and
effervescence of the village ceremony, articulating a cultural
identity at the village, valley and regional level which has not
yet been transformed by ethnic mediation.
The other performers are solo dancers impersonating a traditional
court jester, hunter or warrior in apparel which one has not seen
around for many years, and moreover women’s dancing groups: two
from a village school, one consisting of female members of the
Kazanga association in Lusaka, and one consisting of two young
village women who perform the dance of the kankanga. The
latter are led onto the dancing ground in a stooping position and
concealed under a blanket, as usual in girl’s puberty ritual,
but they are clearly no longer kankangas: their breasts
are mature and contrary to tradition are covered under
conspicuous white bras; the ladies display nothing of the shy
grace and the fear of failure of the adolescent debutante, but
towards the end of their dance wave white little scarves almost
in the manner of revue artists. The urban dancing group is
conspicuously urban: all wear shoes, they have expensive
coiffures, some are donning sun glasses, and all wear — over
the chitenge wrapper skirt which is an inevitable
concession to village taste and norms of propriety — a uniform
T-shirt with the stencilled text ‘Kazanga 1989 — Nkoya
cultural ceremony’. Their inhibited movements refer to
North Atlantic middle class ideas and to cosmopolitan
Christianity: an unmistakable attempt to construct an ethnic
culture which is capable of being mediated to the wider society
also in this sense that it emphatically does not confirm
stereotypes of ‘paganism’ and ‘primitiveness’; there is
no shaking of breasts and bottoms in their performance.
The members of each women’s group are dressed identically, and
they take every effort to keep time with the others, making the
same movements and taking the same steps, along the geometric
figures of circle and straight line. This lends to their joint
performance a flat unity, predictability and poverty of form
which stands in flagrant contrast to the traditional expressive
culture.
The urban women are coordinated by a male dancer, Mr. Tom, who
— for all his wearing women’s clothes, a blonde nylon wig (!)
and dancing rattles on his lower legs — constantly emphasizes
his male leadership over dancing and singing women, something
again completely unthinkable in the village situation. He also
dances along with the other women’s groups, even with the
pseudo-kankangas. Although his attire and behaviour are
reminiscent of the historic figure of the jester at Nkoya courts,[lxvii] his role is truly
unique and without proper precedent — just like the Kazanga
festival as a whole —, and can only be understood by the fact
that Mr Tom is generally considered a musical and choreographic
genius, the composer (‘dreamer’, in the local conception) of
all the Kazanga songs — so evocative of Nkoya ethnic
consciousness —, and director of the Kazanga dancing troupe
from Lusaka.
As an aspect of its mediating nature, and largely through its
reliance on visual and otherwise non-verbal symbols, the festival
is capable of presenting, within one and the same framework of
space and time, contradictions which could not be grasped within
the same repertoire of meaning. On the level of the performers
Kazanga expresses, despite the proclaimed quest for pan-Nkoya
unity, contradictions which divide the ethnic group in several
camps: contradictions between an urban and a rural lifestyle,
between classes, between men and women, and between autochthonous
religion and Christianity.[lxviii]
Somewhat to our surprise these contradictions are hardly
concealed or coded under a smoke-screen of symbolism; on the
contrary, the subordination as exerted by the dominant group
(urban, middle-class men) is explicitly made manifest. An
interpretation in terms of a ‘mystifying false consciousness’
which conceals the real contradictions, as is sometimes applied
in the study of the cultural dimension of ethnicity, does not do
justice to this state of affairs.
Only Christianity remains implicit as a reference;[lxix] nevertheless it has
obviously succeeded in debarring from the festival programme the
music and dance of syncretistic healing cults, even though at the
village level such cults have constituted the dominant religious
expression for half a century or more,[lxx] with singing and dancing forms which closely
follow those of the historic expressive domain. Those attributes
which are considered to be acceptable to the wider society
(shoes, sunglasses etc.) are particularly manifested by the urban
dancing group, who considers it their right to mingle constantly
in the other performances, and who welcome the chiefs during
their entrances. As members of the Kazanga association they are
among the ethnic brokers, and they assert themselves as the
owners of the Kazanga festival and of the Nkoya ethnicity; and
they do have a point there.
A small group of performers, finally, incorporate in stance and
apparel another crucial contradiction: the uniformed kapasus,
who stand and salute militarily when everyone else kneels and
claps, who strut in rigid parade fashion when everyone else walks
or dances, and who thus constantly emphasize the contradiction
between the local level and the state (whose authority they
directly represent at the local level).
8.2.3. the controllers
Part of the Kazanga leadership we have
already encountered, dancing in T-shirts, giving speeches,
administering the festival programme and instructing the public
via the intercom system. Besides the T-shirts with their special
imprint, formal European costume with tie is their characteristic
apparel. During the festival they constantly and without signs of
friction deliberate, all the time clearly visible as a distinct
category near the microphone, with the court dignitaries of
Mutondo, who are also formally dressed and more often than not
are the Kazanga leaders’ kinsmen. Their attitude towards the
national politicians is less uninhibited, and in this respect the
bulk of responsibility is carried by Mr Mupishi, who accompanies
the high-ranking guests, and who prompts diplomatic statements to
his fellow-members of the executive. None of the leaders in ties
can be persuaded to dance or to give the royal salute —
superior distance from the cultural product as offered by Kazanga
appears to be a necessary component of their mediating role.
8.3. The performative format as ready
cash in the outside world today
Of course examples could be quoted of
Third-World societies in which stage-directed performance by
specialists has traditionally been a local culture trait.
However, in the case of Kazanga the performative format is an
exotic, cosmopolitan formula which was propounded since the
beginning of the twentieth century, and with considerable
political and ideological force, also in Kaoma district, by
mission and formal education, and which subsequently was
furthered by the post-colonial state in the context of the
celebration of national festivals, agricultural shows etc. Little
wonder that this formula facilitates mediation towards the state,
which for its own legitimation leans heavily on performative
cultural production.[lxxi]
The formalized performance, a one-way traffic which is no longer
routed in a practice of material production and reproduction, and
which relegates the target group of consumers to passive
incompetence, is nothing but a metaphor of the relationship which
exists between the modern state and the citizen. The Zambian
consumers are daily confronted with the performative formula via
radio and television, from performances by the National Dance
Troupe to the North American television serial Dallas and the
international Top-ten of pop music. It is the formula of
today’s mass culture on a global scale as propagated by the
electronic media. It is that part of the contemporary African
experience which is in line with, even coincides, with the
experience of North Atlantic media consumers and cultural
consumers, in a market of commercialized, stage-directed and
estranged symbolic products, among which incidentally modern
African products are increasingly conspicuous.
Behind the electronic gadgets (which are represented in Kazanga
through the intercom system and the cassette recorders, and most
recently also through video recorders) stands the globally
dominant capitalist mode of production, with such relevant
characteristics as the separation between immediate producers and
their product, the ensuing alienation, the market as the
principal basis for the formation of value, and with its emphasis
on standardization and modular replaceability — as applies to
an industrial product, or a worker under capitalist conditions.
These traits are so conspicuous in Kazanga,[lxxii] that the festival must be seen as mediating
not only between the local community and the state, but also
between the non-capitalist production of that community, and the
global capitalist mode of production.
9. Conclusion
An unprepared researcher who in the course
of field-work in Kaoma district would stumble upon the Kazanga
festival, would probably be inclined to consider the phenomenon
as an integral part of the local culture, and in doing so would
miss much of the political and cultural implications of the
ethnic mediation process. However, anthropological research in
the district over the past twenty years gives us a touchstone for
what is being presented today as ‘the traditional Nkoya
culture’. Kazanga turns out to be anything but the expression
of a well defined, traditional cultural identity. It is the
relinquishing of diffuse local identities, in exchange for the
construction of an ethnic identity which makes for ready cash in
the outside world because there its products are recognizable.
One might consider new-style Kazanga as an example of ‘bricolage’
or of the ‘invention of tradition’. In anthropology,
‘bricolage’, the French word for artisanal do-it-yourself,
has become a technical term for an innovation which selectively
brings together elements from a culture’s repertoire in a new
combination but while retaining, more or less, the pre-existing
underlying cultural logic.[lxxiii]
Kazanga is not bricolage because, as we have seen, all
elements have been profoundly transformed and have come to
function in a way which grossly violates the cultural logic of
village society. ‘Invention of tradition’ was introduced a
decade ago by Hobsbawn and Ranger as a technical term for the
phenomenon that newly-invented symbols of group identity and of
political legitimacy tend to be represented as traditional and of
considerable antiquity.[lxxiv]
This term would at first sight seem to fit Kazanga, especially
when we consider its being named after a nineteenth-century
ritual. Uninitiated visitors including state dignitaries do have
the impression that what is offered to them in the form of the
festival is ‘the traditional Nkoya culture’ — a fiction if
only because of the recent emergence of ‘Nkoya’ as an
ethnonym.
However, my detailed analysis has shown that the festival, whose
extremely recent nature nobody denies, revolves no so much around
legitimation towards the past, but around the mediation of
the local culture towards the outside world today, while
in the process that culture is radically transformed, and new
inequalities are created and emphasized. Calling this process
‘invention of tradition’ would risk overlooking these
essential features and mistaking the prime direction of the
ethnic processes involved in Kazanga: they look to the future
more than towards the past, and are extrovert rather than
introvert.
The analysis of Kazanga does more than merely offering one
illustration of a model of cultural selection and transformation
in the context of ethnic mediation — even though that model
appears to have wide applicability, from the Afrikaner and Zulu
movement in South Africa[lxxv]
to patterns of leadership in the multi-cultural society such as
has emerged in, for instance, the Netherlands over the past few
decades.[lxxvi]
Kazanga poses a question which is of the greatest importance in
today’s growth towards a global society. Is there for the
cultural riches of the peripheral, powerless societies of the
Third World any other future left than to be encapsulated, more
or less as folklore, in the outside world under an alien
(performative) format? Detachment from the original context
is inevitable in the process of cultural exchange, and cultural
exchange would still appear to constitute the only means left —
not only to document and explain (as is our job as
anthropologists) the priceless accomplishments of the numerous
distinct cultures in the Third World, but to incorporate these
riches as part of the universal inheritance of mankind.
One important factor in our longing for distant cultures, one
reason why in every new generation there are North Atlantic
anthropologists ready to go to Africa, lies in the hope to
experience a totally different culture in its own context,
coherence and meaning, to the greater glory of human culture as a
whole and as enrichment of our existence. Such a quest has often
been denounced as romantic and egoistic, and it hardly tallies
with the subordination which for centuries has determined
south-north relationships. This hope has produced an ethnographic
literature which, although highly specialist and rarely giving
rise to esthetic gratification in its own right, often succeeds
in mediating between the local society under study, and the
cosmopolitan or global society. Every ethnographer in the
writing-up process takes a distance from the immediate experience
in the field — just like Kazanga takes a distance from the
expressive domain such as it functions at the village level.[lxxvii] Are there any
conditions under which this process, in Kazanga, in other
attempts at cultural mediation, and in ethnography, can be
completed without throwing away the baby with the bathing water?
Adherent of a world religion are by definition inclined to give
an affirmative answer to this question: their universalism
implies that the organizational and ideological core of such a
creed, despite its becoming detached from the environment in
which it was originally founded, can be introduced into a new
environment, in starkly different local societies, and yet remain
equal to itself, and recognizable.[lxxviii] As someone who after growing up in Dutch
society has acquired — at the price of great and lasting
conceptual and emotional discomfort — a certain competence in
two local societies in Africa (in Zambia and Botswana) and has
scratched the surface of two more (in Tunisia and Guinea Bissau),
I am far more sceptical on this point.
However, who shall say where the limits lie beyond which, in a
process of change, one refuses to recognize, and to claim as
one’s own, that which originally pertained to one’s own
identity? In the construction of identity one is, per definition,
not accountable to others. The anthropologist may find that
ethnic mediation produces a cultural product which fundamentally
differs from ‘the real thing’ — but who is to deny the
participants in that culture the right to be happy with the
transformed product, to recognize themselves in it, and to send
if off into the wider world? The performative format, and more in
general any kind of mediation which is largely informed by the
structure of the cosmopolitan outside world, offer opportunities
for negotiation with the state and the global economy which,
given the latter’s dominance, may well mean the only chances
for local cultural elements to survive at all.
The unmitigated enthusiasm with which the villagers acclaimed the
chiefs at their entrances, and with which they pressed to give
money even to the pseudo-kankangas, suggests that they are
likely to disagree with that part of my analysis of Kazanga which
puts so much emphasis on the breaches of their own cultural
logic. Their lack of rigidity vis-a-vis traditional canons, their
implicit trust that whatever really counts may not have to be
lost despite selection, transformation and the burden of new
inequalities, may give us as social scientists courage in our own
attempts to intellectually mediate between local societies in the
Third World, and the intimidating globalizing structures of
today.
That the actors’ optimism is partly justified — that the
ethnic mediation produced by Kazanga is revitalizing rather than
destructive, can be gauged not only from the unexpected way in
which the Kazanga dances and songs — with their dramatic and
explicit evocations of Nkoya ethnic consciousness — are now, in
their turn, invading musical expression in the villages
themselves, but also from the most interesting innovations which
are, under the impact of the Kazanga festival and association,
recently taking place in the Nkoya kingship. In the early 1970s
the Nkoya neo-traditional court culture was marked by a rigid,
wholly introverted splendour. The maintenance of nostalgic
historic forms of protocol and symbolic, particularly musical,
production (which no longer correspond with any real power
invested in the kingship under conditions of incorporation by the
Barotse indigenous state and by the colonial and post-colonial
central state) reflected the fact that the need for boundary
maintenance vis-a-vis the outside world was at its peak. All
this strikingly contrasts with the laxity of court life at the zinkena
today. Of course, the kingship, based on a local vision of
the political and cosmological order, could only lose out when
the subjects came to participate more effectively and
whole-heartedly in a national political and economic order based
on very different constitutional principles. However, at the same
time a fervent reconstruction process is going on. Kazanga’s
effective negotiation between the state, the kingship and the
villagers insists on a new symbolic and ceremonial role for all
four Nkoya kings together along lines which are all bricolage and
thoroughly unhistorical, but which do result in restoring the
kings to a level of emotional and symbolic significance perhaps
unprecedented in twentieth century Nkoya history. Mwene Kahare,
who used to be a somewhat pathetic, stammering and alcoholic
figure dressed in a faded suit with ragged shirt collar, now, in
his seventies, appears at the 1992 Kazanga festival covered in
leopard skins and with a headband adorned with regal zimpande
— regalia he has probably never worn since his installation in
1955 — formidably brandishing his royal axe in a solo dance
that keeps the audience breathless and moves them to tears. He
does so not at his own lukena nor at that of his rival,
Mutondo, but at newly inaugurated Kazanga festival grounds which
are neutrally situated at the banks of the Luena river at the
border between either chief’s area. The suspiciously untimely
death of Muchayila’s successor Mwene Kanchimpi in 1991
prevented Mutondo control over the 1992 festival (a successor is
seldom installed within a year), and anyway rendered the Mutondo lukena
inappropriate as festival grounds in this time of mourning.
Mwene Kahare’s royal dance centres, of course, on a shrine
situated at the hub of the festival grounds; but it is no longer
the Mukanda-related thatched shrine of Mutondo, nor his
own wooded pole adorned with buffalo trophies, but a neutral
shrub of the type found in most Nkoya villages.
In 1992 the state delegation to the Kazanga festival was led by
the Cabinet Minister for Education, the Hon. Arthur Wina M.P., a
Zambian politician of very long standing, now a member of
President Chiluba’s MMD cabinet, and son of a former Lozi
Ngambela (traditional Prime Minister).[lxxix] In his speech, Minister Wina explicitly joked
that, with the recent shortage of water in the Zambezi flood
plain (where the Lozi Paramount Chief’s residences are located)
there was little point in going to Kuomboka, Kazanga providing an
adequate alternative. In coded language this was understood by
the audience as a statement on the limits if not decline of Lozi
power under MMD conditions (although Mr Wina, and for instance a
former Lozi king’s grandson Mbikusita-Lewanika, are clear
examples of Lozi ethnic prominence in MMD circles) and of the
full acceptance of Nkoya ethnic aspirations also after Mr
Kaunda’s political demise.
With such a high-powered state
delegation the courtiers from Mutondo could not persist in their
earlier refusal to attend Kazanga in a form which so effectively
denied Mutondo hegemony; in fact, the Kazanga executive (in which
MMD and UNIP supporters now work hand in hand) made it clear that
staying away would be interpreted by the new government as a
anti-MMD demonstration and might therefore have unpleasant
consequences. From a distant enemy, the state has become an ally;
and from being introverted and divisive, ethnicity, at least in
the form of ethnic mediation it has taken in Kazanga, has come to
combine inward symbolic reconstruction with confident
participation in the national space.
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[i] An earlier, Dutch version of this argument served as inaugural lecture at the chair of ‘ethnicity and ideology in development processes in the Third World’, Free University, Amsterdam, 20 March, 1992 (van Binsbergen 1992b; a much shortened French version was published as van Binsbergen 1993a). The present version was expanded in the light of additional insights gained during two short visits to Zambia in May and October 1992, as well as correspondence with members of the Kazanga cultural association, a perusal of the association’s files as kept by its Hon. Secretary, and analysis of videotapes and photographs of the Kazanga ceremonies in 1991 and 1992 as kindly made available by Messrs J. Kapangila and W.M. Shihenya.
[ii] Cf. Genesis 2:19.
[iii] Fardon 1987 however denies the existence of universals in the study of ethnicity.
[iv] Cf. Levi-Strauss 1962a, 1962b.
[v] Cf. Salamone 1975; Schultz 1984. The few migrants from Kaoma district who are successful in town sometimes seek to pose as members of a more prestigious ethnic group: Bemba or Lozi. Such posing (‘passing’) is a much studied aspect of ethnic and race relations in North America; e.g. Drake & Cayton 1962: 159f.
[vi] As stressed by, e.g., Horowitz 1975; Fardon 1987; Prunier 1989.
[vii] Cf.
Chretien & Prunier 1989; Tonkin e.a. 1989; Vail 1989a, 1989b.
[viii] A famous example of such ambiguity is Leach 1953. Further cf. Barth 1970; Doornbos 1978; Mitchell 1956, 1974; Lemarchand 1983.
[ix] Gutkind
1970; Helm 1968; Godelier 1973, especially pp. 93-131: ‘Le
concept de tribu: Crise d’un concept ou crise des fondements
empiriques de l’anthropologie?’.
[x] E.g. Ranger 1982; Vail 1989a, 1989b.
[xi] Among many studies I only cite the classic Mitchell 1956.
[xii] For an excellent analysis, see Bayart 1989, especially pp. 65-86: ‘Le theatre d’ombres de l’ethnicite’.
[xiii] Cf. Buijtenhuijs 1991; Buijtenhuijs & Rijnierse 1993.
[xiv] A trend in recent Dutch and Belgian research of ethnicity seeks to address this onesidedness by stressing cultural aspects; cf. Schilder & van Binsbergen 1993.
[xv] In the limited scope of this argument I cannot do justice to the very extensive, multi-disciplinary literature on identity. One of the most influential authors on identity has been the psychiatrist Erikson (e.g. 1968). Valuable anthropological studies on ethnic identity include de Vos & Romanucci-Ross 1975; Horowitz 1975; Jacobson-Widding 1983. For Zambia specifically, cf. Ethos and identity (Epstein 1978), which dissociates itself from the earlier emphasis on more classification in the ethnicity research of his close colleague Mitchell (1956, 1974). A masterly approach, with emphasis on expressive culture, is Blacking 1983. For an inspiring French contribution, see Amselle 1990.
[xvi] Such continuity was especially stressed by Vansina in his pioneering work on the history of the southern savanna in Africa (1966); van Binsbergen 1981 is an attempt to explore the religious dimension of this continuity.
[xvii] For a similar insight, cf. Uchendu 1975: 265.
[xviii] Early researchers of ethnic phenomena in Africa have been persuaded, precisely by this aspect, to analyze ethnicity in terms of primordial identity — a view exploded by Doornbos 1972.
[xix] Marxist anthropology analyzes the mediation between such fundamentally structured social sectors in terms of the articulation, or linking, of modes of production; cf. Geschiere 1982; van Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985; and references cited there. Although the study of ethnicity demonstrates that the symbolic domain cannot be regarded as clearly subordinate to production and reproduction, the articulation of modes of production perspective remains inspiring in this field — cf. van Binsbergen 1985.
[xx] The central role of this type of brokers is discussed in an extensive anthropological literature, in which Barth 1966 features as a classic.
[xxi] In ethnic mediation, the outside world does not merely consist of the state and nothing more. Peel 1989 describes Yoruba ethnicity as a nineteenth-century project in which an early church leader played a leading part — just as was the case among the Nkoya. Vail 1989b mentions, besides local politicians and church leaders, also academic researchers as mediators in many ethnicisation processes in Southern Africa; cf. Papstein 1989; van Binsbergen 1985. The mediation process is also a theme in Ranger 1982. Recent studies of Afrikaners or Boers in South Africa have also elucidated the role of creative writers, and in this respect there are numerous parallels with other parts of Africa, e.g. Okot p’Bitek as a champion of Acholi ethnicity in Uganda (van de Werk 1980).
[xxii] Cf. Edelstein 1974; Saul 1979; Kahn 1981; van Binsbergen 1985. Until recently, the Marxist approach has dominated the study of ethnicity among South African Blacks. The struggle against the apartheid state as a manipulator or even creator of Black ethnicity has led analysts — in a way which is laudable from a political point of view, but too reductionist from a scholarly point of view — to deny the status of ethnicity as an independent variable: ethnicity for them could not be anything but perverted class consciousness (e.g. Simons & Simons 1969; Mafeje 1971; Phimister & van Onselen 1979). In the last few years we witness a gradual change away from this position among South African students of ethnicity (e.g. Beinart 1988, who presents a detailed biography of a labour migrant, and in the process pays ample attention to the ethnic strategies of the Black population).
[xxiii] Field-work in Kaoma district and among migrants from Kaoma district living in Lusaka was undertaken in 1972-1974, and, during shorter visits which were generously financed by the African Studies Centre, Leiden, in 1977, 1978, 1981, 1988, 1989 and 1992 (twice); to the Netherlands Foundation for Tropical Research (WOTRO) I owe a debt of gratitude for financing one year of writing-up in 1974-1975. On the local society and its history, cf. van Binsbergen 1981, 1985, 1987a, 1991a, 1991b, 1992a; van Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985b (especially pp. 261-270, ‘production at a Zambian chief’s court’); and references cited in these publications.
[xxiv] On the Lozi, especially known from the work of Max Gluckman, cf. e.g. Prins 1980 and extensive references there.
[xxv] On the Luvale, cf. Papstein 1989 and references there.
[xxvi] There are indications (whose linguistic plausibility I cannot judge) that the name Nkoya goes back even further: that it is a corruption of the name ‘Kola’ which designates the Lunda core area — the cradle of many dynasties in South Central Africa.
[xxvii] In the northern part of Barotseland in 1940 the Luvale group manage to break away from Lozi administration and to create their own district directly under the central state; cf. Papstein 1989; for the influence of this process on Nkoya ethnicity, cf. van Binsbergen 1992a: 39.
[xxviii] In fact: ‘Andrew Murray Memorial Mission’, later named ‘Africa Evangelical Fellowship’, whose mission church became organizationally independent under the name of ‘Evangelical Church of Zambia’.
[xxix] Testamenta 1952.
[xxx] Anonymous n.d.; and Shimunika’s magnum opus: Likota lya Bankoya, edited by me in both Nkoya and English: van Binsbergen 1988a, 1992a. The English translation in the 1992 edition was made by Mr M. Malapa (chairman of the Kazanga association in the years 1988-1991) and myself.
[xxxi] Two political organizations under a ‘Mankoya’ emblem were founded: the ‘Mankoya and Bantu Fighting Fund’ and the ‘Mankoya Front’; however, under reference to ‘tribalist’ agitation these were very soon prohibited. Also the creation of an ANC branch in Mankoya was initially prevented by the colonial authorities in collusion with the Lozi indigenous administration (Mulford 1967).
[xxxii] Caplan 1970; Molteno 1974.
[xxxiii] In 1989 the state loge was occupied by, among others: the Cabinet Minister for Labour, Social Development and Culture Mr. J. Mulimba, also member of the UNIP Central Committee; the Junior Minister of Culture Mr L. Tembo; Mr J. Kalaluka, a private citizen, until 1988 Member of Parliament for part of the district, and Minister of Economic Affairs; and Mrs S. Mulenga, wife of the Kaoma district Governor who was himself prevented from attending due to illness.
[xxxiv] According to the 1989 programme, the list of solo dancers featured Mwene Mutondo himself, whose royal dance was to constitute the festival’s culmination point. However, this part of the programme was cancelled — the explicit reason given was that the aged chief was not feeling well (he died of old age in 1990 two weeks after that year’s Kazanga festival), but probably another major reason was that the organizers were prevented from articulating Mutondo hegemony to an even larger extent than was already the case — as we shall see in section 7 — even without Mwene Mutondo’s solo dance.
[xxxv]
Remarkable is nevertheless the fact that the misisi, a
woman’s upper garment derived from the Victorian dress of early
missionary women in Barotseland and as such the neo-traditional
dress of the Lozi elite, is never seen to be worn at Kazanga,
although several prominent Nkoya women do possess a misisi and
do not hesitate to wear one at public manifestations at the
provincial level, which roughly coincides with the former
Barotseland. Even though the Lozi are not explicitly referred to
as ethnic enemies during Kazanga, elements suggestive of a
cultural heritage shared between Nkoya and Lozi are avoided at
Kazanga.
The absence of open expressions of Nkoya-Lozi hostility at Kazanga does not mean, however, that this is no longer an issue. In recent years such hostility is acerbated by the fact that individual Lozi farmers take possession (often with consent of the Nkoya chiefs!) of fallow land which the Nkoya consider as ancestrally theirs. Kazanga members claim that prominent Lozi are trying to discredit Kazanga by spreading the rumour that human sacrifice is secretly practiced on that occasion, as in the original form of Kazanga over a century ago (section 6.1). Moreover, early in 1991 Kazanga leaders helped Mwene Mutondo and Mwene Kahare appeal to President Kaunda to prevent the Lozi Paramount Chief from abolishing the latter’s chieftainship or at least making them totally subordinate to the Lozi establishment at Naliele. The President’s intervention reinforced his popularity in the district, to such an extent that even after MMD’s national victory (see below) in October 1991 UNIP continues to have a strong backing in Kaoma district. In the Kazanga executive, UNIP and MMD supporters have worked hand in hand the last few years.
[xxxvi] Politically and culturally the Nkoya are closely related to the Luvale. The sharp ethnic boundary which exists today with regard to male circumcision between the Nkoya (who now ridicule the custom) and the Luvale (who continue to practice it, along with the attending Mukanda initiation ceremonies) is largely a development of the last hundred years (van Binsbergen 1992a: 214 and passim; 1991d).
[xxxvii] Given the official abhorrence of ‘tribalism’ in the Zambian political culture the chairman in his speech (originally in English) avoids the charged word ‘tribes’, but replaces it by a word, ‘kinds’ which is the literal translation ‘mishobo’ (sing. mushobo); the latter word is used by Nkoya speakers to denote not only ‘species’, ‘kind’, but also ‘tribe’ or ‘ethnic group’. Because of the coinciding of these meanings most Nkoya speakers among the audience will have missed the subtle distinction between ‘kinds’ and ‘tribes’.
[xxxviii] Obviously the suspicion of tribalism was the official reason why the media had stayed away. The presence however of two ministers at Kazanga suggests that the opinions within the Zambian political centre were divided on this point. As from 1991 Kazanga received ample media coverage, both in regular announcements before the event (where Kazanga has been one of only five ethnic annual festivals in the country to be so announced) and in over one hour of television broadcasting of the programme itself.
[xxxix] Official address by Mr M. Malapa, chairman of the Kazanga cultural association, at Shikombwe, 1st July 1989.
[xl] Less than 1% of the Zambian population have Nkoya as a first language, but given the high degree of multilingualism in western Zambia we may assume the number of those who speak Nkoya as a second language to be somewhat higher.
[xli] The (correctly used) Nkoya word for culture here is shihemuwa, literally: ‘origin, descent, that which one acquires at birth (hemuwa)’; the word thus coincides with the analytical term ‘ascription’.
[xlii] Official address by Mr L. Tembo M.P., Junior Minister of Culture, at Shikombwe, 1st July 1989.
[xliii] Cf. Brown 1984; Kawanga 1978; and my own publications.
[xliv] Cf. below, concluding paragraphs.
[xlv] Cf. Brown 1984; van Binsbergen 1987b; and references there.
[xlvi] The morphology of the Nkoya word Kazanga is: Ka [nominal prefix, human person, singular] + _z [‘to come’] + anga [verbal suffix, iterative]: ‘the one who comes lastingly or repeatedly’. It thus refers to the chiefs’ entrances, to the people’s annual coming together on the occasion of the ceremony, but also to the ascent of the Nkoya who articulate their culture at the national level as a self-asserting ethnic group, and probably even to the ethnic brokers who hope to be ‘coming men’ in the political sense. Probably the word also contains a reference to the harvest (which comes repeatedly, i.e. annually), personalized as a concept or as a supernatural being — the principle which renders the new food inedible until it will have been propitiated in the right manner. Because of the association with ‘kwezanga mutena’ (‘the coming of the day, dawn, east’) the word Kazanga ties in with the national political symbolism of UNIP (whose slogan has been Kwacha!, ‘Sunrise!’) but especially with the old cosmological notions in Kaoma district (and not only there) as expressed in the standard prayer used in purification and healing ritual at the village shrine: the good things of life come, as the rising sun, from the east, whereas the bad things, like the day at sunset, must depart to the west (‘kwayanga mutena’). Incidentally Lusaka is east from Kaoma district, and Kahare’s lukena east from that of Mutondo; at Kazanga, Kahare’s temporary lukena was also situated east of Mutondo’s permanent capital.
[xlvii] Van Binsbergen 1992a: 49f. Incidentally, human sacrifice formed a usual aspect of the royal cult in South Central Africa: in the states of Kaoma district and the surrounding region slaves were ritually sacrificed not only at Kazanga but also to the lilapa and to the royal drums, on the occasion of royal burials, and for the preparation of royal medicine. Substitution of humans by sacrificial animals was not possible, since in this tsetse-infested region there were hardly any domestic animals, and hunting and fishing formed the principal sources of animal protein.
[xlviii] Around 1870, fleeing for Yeke raiders who were tributary to the formidable king Msidi (cf. Reefe 1981), Mwene Kahare Kabimba approached Mwene Mutondo Shinkisha’s lukena so closely that his party could hear the sound of her royal orchestra; however, Kabimba rather continued his wanderings, at the end of which he was flayed by the Yeke, than to appeal to his colleague who was even his kinswoman (van Binsbergen 1992a: 396 and passim).
[xlix] When around 1820 the Lozi king Mulambwa came to visit Mwene Kayambila, one of Shinkisha’s predecessors, in order to request royal medicine and a royal orchestra, a temporary royal court was built for Mulambwa and his retinue in an open space between two villages; the spot is still known today (van Binsbergen 1992a: 417 and passim).
[l] Capello
& Ivens 1886, i: 419; van Binsbergen 1992a: 131.
[li] During my visits to Shikombwe in the late 1970s there was no such structure at this central and public spot, the shrine being inside the lilapa. In an interview I conducted at the Shikombwe Royal Establishment, 5 May, 1992, with the Mwanashihemi and the Mwana Mwene (other courtiers presents), it was stated that when the shrine was deliberately moved for the occasion of the Kazanga ceremony, the original ancestral sticks — which appear to be of great antiquity, both as a type and as individual specimens — were uprooted from the lilapa area and planted on the new spot (a most irreverent and unusual procedure, I would add). In that interview it was emphasized that the dynastic shrine beslowed on the Mwene who owned the right to oversee the Mukanda male initiation ritual — which ties in with other evidence (see note below). Melland (1967: 133f, 167) describes a similar type of shrine for the Lunda of northwestern Zambia; the Lunda also practice Mukanda. For the Kahare dynastic shrine, which is totally different, see van Binsbergen 1981: plates 3a, b; the Kahare dynasty is claimed to have rejected Mukanda from its very beginning.
[lii] Situated
in that conceptual centre is no longer the earth as formerly
symbolized by the anthill, but are now representations of royal
ancestors. In this respect the shrine, despite the partial
christening of the region since the early twentieth century, is
really a belated step in a much older process which took place
over much of South Central Africa in the course of the past half
millennium: a process in which stranger rulers, in their search
for local legitimacy, seize power over the older cult of the land
by propounding their own dynastic ancestors as mediators of rain,
fertility and crops, as fighting against the forces (of murder,
incest and sorcery) which threaten these blessings, and thus as
guardians of the social and cosmic order. Cf. Schoffeleers 1979;
Ranger 1985; van Binsbergen 1981.
[liii] Cunnison 1956.
[liv] Primarily because, as break-away dissidents from Mwaat Yaamv’s Lunda empire, one rejected the idea of an overarching, inter-regional authority, as well as the central ritual basis for such an authority, the Mukanda complex of male circumcision; the latter was soon to be the occasion for a war with the Humbu branch of the Lunda, and remained a bone of contention between the Kahare title and the Mutondo title which came up later — the latter trying repeatedly to restore Mukanda; van Binsbergen 1992a and 1991d.
[lv] Van
Binsbergen 1992a: 234f.
[lvi] Van
Binsbergen 1992a: 295f and passim.
[lvii] The Nkoya used to have such drums prior to incorporation in the Kololo/ Lozi state in the mid-19th century; the Lozi Paramount Chief still has them. According to one rather convincing etymology, the Kaoma river which in 1969 gave its name to the nearby district capital and the district as a whole, was named thus by Mwene Liyoka ca. 1850 since its banks were the scene of the destruction of one of his Mawoma (van Binsbergen 1992a: 310 and passim). Thus President Kaunda’s 1969 attempt to ‘detribalize’ the name of the district by changing it from Mankoya to Kaoma, ironically ended up with a name which implicitly refers to a central Nkoya symbol of power and identity; however, for a Bemba speaker like President Kaunda, the name Kaoma would primarily evoke ethnically neutral associations with the High God, who is called Nyambi in Nkoya. Ever since Lozi incorporation, the capture and subsequent prohibition of the Nkoya Mawoma has been felt as the most tangible symbol of humiliation. Although enlightened Nkoya today, like those making up the Kazanga executive, are aware that the Lozi traditional authorities can no longer stop the Nkoya chiefs from re-adopting Mawoma, the latter have so far shunned from doing so.
[lviii] As a member of the national House of Chiefs, as a UNIP trustee, as a member of the Kaoma Rural Council, and as a close relative of the only Nkoya minister and Member of Parliament.
[lix] These disks, widespread in South Central and Southern Africa, are made from the polished circular bottom of the Conus shell as found in the Indian Ocean. They constituted major trade items in pre-colonial times, and have formed major symbols of royal status. In Nkoya they are called zimpande, sing. mpande; a general Southern African term is ndoro. Cf. Jeffreys 1953.
[lx] Only Mwene Momba dons an additional regalium: a loose black, red-bordered gown — the official garment which the colonial state issued to chiefs in Southern Province, i.e. outside Barotseland, and which has persisted ever since. For an analysis of the symbolism of dress and bodily stance of Zambian chiefs and modern politicians, as a key to their mutual relationships, cf. van Binsbergen 1987b.
[lxi] Further research is required (e.g. in the collection of the Livingstone Museum) in order to ascertain whether this absence of visual arts is mainly a result of the iconoclastic influences of Christianity and anti-sorcery movements since the beginning of the twentieth century. If there was a visual art before that time it probably consisted largely of objects from the sphere of the ancestral cult and of sorcery. To my knowledge the ancestral sticks in the Mutondo shrine — an unmistakable form of representational art — are unique in this district, but as said above they do occur elsewhere in northwestern Zambia — in fact they have a wide distribution on the African continent.
[lxii] From the Greek polu, ‘many’, en coroc, ‘dance’.
[lxiii] For instance, in 1973-74 in the valleys of Njonjolo and Kazo, comprising about forty small villages with in total hardly a thousand inhabitants, during the dry winter season from May to August hardly a weekend passed without a major, ritually prescribed musical event in one of the villages within walking distance. My impression is that the rate and scale of musical performance at the village level has since declined somewhat but not dramatically so.
[lxiv] E.g.
van Velsen 1971; Turner 1957.
[lxv] Cf. van
Binsbergen 1991a.
[lxvi] The commercialization of musical and dancing performance in the context of Kazanga is meanwhile far more prominent in the case of the Lusaka troupe, which performs not only in ceremonial and ethnic contexts but can also be engaged, against a negotiable fee, to perform in bars around Lusaka.
[lxvii] Van
Binsbergen 1992a: 407f.
[lxviii] One theoretically important contradiction, which is unmistakable in the village society of Kaoma district but which does not seem to be expressed in Kazanga is that between (male) elders and youth. Further reflection is needed on this point.
[lxix] However, there are among the spectators a few White missionaries from the Luampa mission station (the main focus of Christianizing in the district since 1923); after the festival they make use of the opportunity to peddle, to the assembled public, religious tracts and song books which the mission has produced in the Nkoya language.
[lxx] Cf. van Binsbergen 1981, 1992a: ch. 6. Likewise, any reference to these cults, despite their conspicuous dominance, is absent from Shimunika’s work.
[lxxi] On this aspect of cultural transformations in the African post-colonial state T.O. Ranger en R.P. Werbner organized an inspiring conference at Manchester in 1986, ‘Culture and consciousness in Southern Africa’, many of whose contributions have meanwhile appeared in the Journal of Southern African Studies; also cf. Kaarsholm 1989, 1990.
[lxxii] I remind the reader of the gleichschaltende stage direction of uniform and motor patterns, the suppression of polyphony and polychory, the financial reward, and the reduction to incompetent symbolic consumers of the majority of those present at the festival.
[lxxiii] Cf. Werbner 1986 in his review of Comaroff 1985.
[lxxiv] Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983; the concept formalizes a notion which earlier was expressed by the term ‘neo-traditional’.
[lxxv] On Afrikaners, cf. Moodie 1975; February 1991; Giliomee 1989; Hofmeyr 1988; on the Zulu and Inkatha, cf. Coquerel 1989; Mare & Hamilton 1987; Marks 1989; Schlemmer 1980.
[lxxvi] In the study of Dutch multi-cultural society special attention has been paid to ethnic brokers who do not belong to the asserting ethnic groups, but to the (Dutch) outside world — the ‘caretakers’ (Kobben 1983; van Borselen 1985); for brokers who come forth from these ethnic groups themselves, cf. van Wetering 1991; van der Burg & van der Veer 1986; Koot & Venema 1985; Bruin 1985.
[lxxvii] Cf Clifford & Marcus 1986; Geertz 1988. Personally I have been preoccupied with the idea of anthropology as cultural mediation between local societies and the cosmopolitan outside world, and have tried to explore some of the attending methodological, aesthetic, ethical and political problems; cf. van Binsbergen 1984, 1985, 1988b, 1988c, 1991c; van Binsbergen & Doornbos 1987.
[lxxviii] For a critical assessment of precisely this type of universalism in a context of African ethnicity, cf. Mbembe 1988: 44f.
[lxxix] The fact
that only a few months earlier the present author’s book on
Nkoya history and ethnicity (van Binsbergen 1992a) had been
officially presented to this minister may have been not unrelated
to his appearance at Kazanga; ethnic festivals do not evidently
fall under the ministry of education.
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