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© 1974-2002 Wim M.J.
van Binsbergen
Abstract
Antagonism
between older and younger men is claimed to constitute a striking
feature of a rural community in independent Zambia. Against this
background we see, particularly in the local political processes
surrounding the 1973 Zambia general elections, a small group of
young men organize themselves within a framework suggested by
national party politics, and attempts (with unexpected support
from the elders) to construct a youth-centred social order which
could dissolve the inter-generational struggle whilst presenting
a blue-print for rural reconstruction. The paper attempts to
interpret these data: synchronically by reference to power
relations between rival national political parties and between
generations: and particularly diachronically, as the outcome of a
process of social change mainly shaped by labour migration. For
this purpose, it examines the precolonial career model, changes
in the rural leadership under colonial rule, the emergence of an
urban career model, the changing status of rural young people,
ideological change in the colonial era, and the post-colonial
situation.
1.
The Problem
1.1.
Introduction
As
part of a study of rural-urban relations in Zambia, rural
field-work was carried out in Chief Kahare’s village, Kaoma
district, Central Western Zambia, 1973-74. One of the most
striking features of this post-Independence society is the very
strong antagonism between older and younger men, pervading every
sphere of social life. Against this background we see a small
group of young men emerge, organize themselves within a framework
suggested by national party politics, and attempt (with
unexpected support from the elders) to construct a
youth-dominated social order which could dissolve the
inter-generational antagonism whilst presenting a crude
blue-print for rural reconstruction.
This paper intends to interpret these data as the outcome of a
process of social change in which labour migration has played the
main role.
In this short paper I can only present the bare outlines of a
complex and tentative argument; for ample case material, archival
and quantitative data.[1]
1.2.
The setting: rural stagnation
People
in this area live in villages of 1 to 25 households. Each head of
household is linked to the village headman by bilateral kinship
(often remote or putative). Staple crops are cultivated in dry
forests gardens and riverside gardens; there are indications that
pressure on the latter begins to build up now. Insignificant
quantities of surplus crops are sold locally or outside (in the
latter case through the government marketing agency, or the local
shopkeeper). There is hardly any cattle. Hunting, although
restricted by government action and the dwindling of game,
remains an important course of animal protein and cash. It is
supplemented by seasonal fishing, honey collecting, occasional
sale of domestic produce etc. A few local men (only one of them
under forty) find permanent employment at the chief’s staff.
Two young men help out at the shop. The only other employees are
strangers: teachers at the local primary school and the recently
arrived agricultural adviser.
Export of labour remains the main source of cash and manufactured
goods in this area, although recently opportunities for migrant
labour have greatly declined. Almost all adult men have been away
on migrant labour, and those under 45 all aspire to such
employment. All village claim absent members working or staying
in town.
The nearest township (Kaoma) is at a distance of 80 km. Nearly
400 km. away is the national capital, Lusaka: the main labour
market for this area since the customary migration to Rhodesia
and South Africa became prohibited at Independence (1964). A tar
road linking Lusaka and Mongu (the provincial capital) through
Kaoma was completed in 1972; the area is connected to this road
by a 20 km. track. A little developed associational life (in
which the Watchtower church is prominent), minimal exposure to
mass communication, a local language (Nkoya) which is not
officially recognized and in which there have been virtually no
publications save the New Testament, a high rate of illness and
death (the nearest rural clinic is 30 km. away), and a low
material standard of living in general, complete this picture of
a rather typical rural backwater in Central Africa.
1.3.
The contemporary generation conflict [2]
In
no sphere of life can older and younger men be observed to
interact without great tension, readily precipitation into verbal
abuse, sometimes violence.
Young men will resent, or refuse, their share in agricultural
work allotted to then by their senior kinsmen. Prolonged hunting
expeditions, once the main setting for the socialization of the
young men by elders, are now undertaken by agemates or
solitarily. Young men refuse to accept the elders’ advice, and
jealously guard what little resources (money, food, implements,
the labour force of themselves and their wives) they have. They
engage in drinking bouts, often start fights, damage property,
get themselves involved in adultery and paternity cases
(concerning women who, as wives, daughters, daughters-in-law, are
in the care of older men), abuse elders verbally. The patterns
also manifests itself in recreation, where the elders have become
self-conscious vis-a-vis the young men and feel to embarrassed to
sing and dance at parties; young men, with new songs which often
ridicule elder people, have usurped this old men’s privilege.
The young violate central values in this society, by threatening
village unity and challenging the headmen’s power. This is a
sin against the village dead, and is considered to make the
village more open to attack from illness, death and sorcery.
The elders are clearly at a loss as to how to maintain order in
this situation, whereas local norms and values still identify
their authority as the main focus of social control.
Part of the elders’ frequent complaints may refer to hurt pride
and material self-interest, but much of it appears an expression
of genuine distress over the future of their society. In their
despair the elders have taken resource to drastic means: when
their own, informal, domestic admonitions fail (as they often
do), inter-village courts of elders will consider the breaches of
etiquette and other offenses of the young against the old. This
often results in the cases being taken to the Local Court in the
periphery of the area. In extreme cases involving very close
kinsmen a young man in cursed and thus expelled from the village
(Van Binsbergen 1974: 5f, 27f).
Although young men tend to be more literate, better informed and,
in the modern, industrial sense, more skillful than the elders,
they do not accuse the latter of ignorance of backwardness. Their
antagonism is expressed, and rationalized, in terms of a symbolic
framework which carries no explicit reference to modernity and
which they share with the elders: in line with the common Central
and East African identification of power, wealth and sorcery (Van
Binsbergen, in press (a); Parkin 1968), they see the elders as
the main sorcerers. Their accusations are frequent, and often in
public (which is considered a criminal offense).
Especially when a cluster of villages is gripped by a crisis,
e.g. immediately after a death, it is the elders collectively, or
a particular close senior kinsman (often the headman), who are
indicated by the younger people as having caused this death
willfully, and as a plotting for more to follow.
My analysis below (2.1) will show that the present generation
conflict partly relates to persisting inter-generational
structural tension dating back to precolonial times. There are
however strong indications that what we witness here is not so
much a historical pattern (which some colleagues might wish to
call ‘traditional’), but ‘a possible sign of radical change
and crisis’, as Gluckman (1967: 426) says after describing his
impressions of a similar generation conflict in the Mongu area,
1966. These indications include the elders’ confusion: clinging
to a seniority centred value system which they increasingly
realize to be out of touch with the realities of contemporary
distribution of status, power and wealth at the local and
national level; my informants’ recollections of the past; and
particularly the recent, explicit attempts, by a small group of
young village people, to forge a new, youth-centred system of
power and legitimation.
1.4.
The unip Youth branch: the quest for a youth-dominated social
order
Since
the 1950s (Van Binsbergen 1975) the people of this area have
identified with Zambia’s first nationalist party, African
National Congress (anc).
In the late 1950s the United National Independence Party (unip)
developed out of a break-away from anc. Unip became the largest
party under a ‘one-party participatory democracy’ in 1972. By
then anc was still the only party with a local branch in this
area. Chief Kahare, with hardly any unip supporters among his
people, had been made a Honorary Councillor of the district, and
a unip Trustee, shortly after Independence. But his two main
opponents in local politics focused on the chieftainship, were
members of the local branch executive of anc. Due to the
preponderance of unip supporters among immigrant ethnic groups
outside Chief Kahare’s area, unip carried Kaoma (then Mankoya)
district as a whole in the 1968 general elections. District
headquarters began to exert strong pressures on the local anc
branch, and the branch was forced to dissolve when Zambia became
a one-party state. Most local people however continued to
identify with anc and to reject the unip government from which,
they claimed, they had only suffered: losing their hunting
grounds, and their employment opportunities in the South.
It was only early in 1973 that unip’s persistent organizing
attempts from Kaoma carried a minimum of success in the area.
A young widow from Kaoma took up residence with here uncle near
Chief Kahare’s village and started a unip women’s Brigade;
the members, a handful, are mainly unattached women. Two local
young men created a unip Youth Branch of some ten agemates, who
generally shared the following characteristics: they are between
20 and 30 years of age, have completed the higher grades of
primary school have some urban experience, and are newly married.[3] The
executive officers receive minimal token remuneration from Kaoma;
they are occasionally visited by experienced organizers and taken
to district headquarters for meetings and training.
In the absence of an ordinary branch of mature men, ‘the
Youth’ (Ba-Yusi) soon came to regard themselves as the
local representatives of the ruling party, and of government
itself. Their activities, although incompatible with the
customary role of young men, and which claim to represent a
political party rival to anc, are yet looked upon surprisingly
favorable by the general population, including the elders. Elders
who express their bitterness about the local men in general, may
yet praise the members of the Youth branch for such constructive
action as: going around the villages asking the people what
problems they have, urging the people to co-operate, being on the
lookout for harmful strangers, etc.
But this can scarcely suffice to explain the elders; resined and
moderately positive attitude vis-a-vis the Youth branch. For on
closer observation, the primary aim of the members of the Youth
branch appears to constitute a direct challenge of the elders’
role in society. In the Youth branch’s contacts with the local
population, campaigning for unip is seldom emphasized; neither do
the members aspire (at least not ostensibly or within a
short-term perspective) to great wealth nor to high formal status
as historically defined within the local status system. Their
primary goal, phrased in sociological terms, appears to be to
impose themselves locally, by means of unip, as the central focus
of power, legitimacy and social control. They try to assume the
role which the existing value system has assigned to the elders.
Below we shall reconsider the elders’ rather amazing reaction
to this aspiration.
In pursuit of their goal the Youth branch has to challenge the
two main local institutions that carry relatively high power and
prestige and constitute rival representations of the central
government: the chief and the primary school. The Youth
branch’s alliance with either will confirm the young men a
dependent position:
The chief has an exalted status in the seniority-based local
political system, in modern district administration, and, if only
nominally, in unip; moreover he is a member of the House of
Chiefs.[4] The teachers command resources of information,
skill and outside backing which the village youth cannot equal;
moreover the headmaster has been assigned to the Youth branch in
an advisory position.
In this struggle the unip Youth branch does, on the other hand,
seek alliance with the most senior headmen under the chief (the
former anc executive).
These have their own interests in attacking both the chief, their
more successful rival, and the teachers: these headmen are on the
local school council and derive political credit, among the
parents, from challenging the professional and performance of the
teachers; but these two senior headmen themselves do not
represent a threat to the Youth branch, as long as anc remains
prohibited and the present chief remains in office.
The Youth branch completely ignored the chief, repeatedly
harassed the teachers, and held closed meetings with the two
senior headmen. Finally, six weeks before the elections, the
Youth branch organized a most dramatic mass meeting at the school
compound. Here, in front of the majority of the local population
(including all headmen) several members of the chief’s faction,
and finally the chief himself (all of them elderly men with a
cash income) were publicly accused of sorcery by the Youth branch
executive. Subsequently the Youth executive brought out the
general grievances against the teachers. Both attacks were
assisted by the two senior headmen, who turned the meeting into
an informal court session with cross-examination of the witnesses
and the accused, although no verdict was pronounced. Concluding
the meeting the Youth branch secretary read a list of rules with
the Youth branch from then on would impose on the people:
e.g.
visitors must be reported to the Youth branch; weekly youth
meetings would be compulsory for everybody; all worries[5]
would have to be reported to the Youth branch; everybody must
co-operate with the increased; older men must physically assist
young people in their projects (building a youth branch office,
clearing a football fields) etc.
With their small numbers, as yet, and their lack of sanctions
(they threatened with violence but, in contrast with urban Youth
branches, have never used violence so far), there is little
wonder that this piece of juvenile legislation did not carry much
immediate effect. Those accused of sorcery were shortly
afterwards publicly (through informally) confirmed in their
status and government backing, when the District Governor visited
the area in order to finalize preparation for the elections. At
the elections themselves the returns from this area were very low
and largely anti-unip.[6]
The enlisting of the two most important local anc supporters, and
the attack on the very rural institutions (chiefs and school)
upon which the unip government hopes to base its support and
legitimacy among the rural people of Zambia, suggests that the
Youth branch activities carry no clear-cut relation with national
politics and can certainly not be explained by reference to unip
directives. The Youth members’ use of sorcery accusations,
attacks on the school, and their complete lack of insistence on
whatever symbols of modernity (education, smart clothing, urban
experience) they might claim for themselves, shows that their
action neither relates to a cleavage between ‘progressive’
and ‘traditional’ elements in the rural population (which is
sometimes claimed to be a major phenomenon in post-colonial rural
Africa). In fact, judging by criteria such as literacy;
membership of a modern religious association, use of
autochthonous medicine, and cash-crop farming, the members of the
Youth branch are by no means more ‘progressive’ than their
fellow villagers of the same age or even much older.
When these more obvious viewpoints do not offer an explanation, I
would suggest that the crucial issue in this episode is that here
we have a small group of young people, who probably for
the first time in local history not only attack their elders
(young men have done so often before, individually and in
isolated events), but now identify themselves as youth, develop a
solidarity and rudimentary organization on that basis, and
proceed to work out and present a blue-print, however crude, for
a new, youth-dominated social order. Moreover they are taken by
the elders. Indeed the most striking aspect of the episode is
that none of the older people is known to have challenged the
Youth branch publicly or privately, and many openly approved of
their action.
Even if the Youth Branch’s action did not yet carry spectacular
and lasting effects, it is obvious that the members have already
attained a position of considerable power. Otherwise they would
not have been able to organize a mass meeting, level attacks
against the school and the chief, ignore the habitual role
patterns of young men, and yet earn public support and praise
instead of being ignored, ridiculed, or taken to court. whence do
they derive this power? Not from their weak economic position,
which precludes their acting as patrons for a following of
clients. Obviously, in an area where people generally continue to
identify with the now defunct anc, the Youth branch’s power is
partly based on the fear of unip, with which they identify and
with whose regional headquarters they keep up frequent contacts. unip
is government now, unip has been able to eclipse anc on the
national level and to forcibly put an end to the local anc
branch; therefore, if the unip Youth branch were not treated
well, the repercussions might be very unpleasant.
But this can only be a partial explanation. For in the
infrequent, direct dealings with district headquarters and unip,
people of this area may openly defy the central government, unip,
and their senior officials; in fact they are notorious for this
(e.g. Van Binsbergen 1975: 18f). Moreover, the local Youth
branch’s action is greatly at variance with unip policy, and
the fact that this action was largely undone during the District
Governor’s visit, suggests that the branch runs the risk of
losing the support from regional headquarters. While admitting
that identification with an outside focus of power may generate
power locally even if the identification is instrumental and is
disclaimed by the outside agent, all this suggests that the
dynamics behind the local Youth branch’s power to a large
extent derive, not directly from an outside focus, but from the
internal structure and history of the local village society
(which of course indirectly reflects outside relations,
throughout).
Depth interviews, and observations of the elders’ dealing with
the Youth branch, reveal the elders’ attitudes vis-a-vis the
Youth branch as an important basis for the latter’s power. The
elders are facing a standard situation of anomy. They see their
historical authority system fall apart, are distressed and tired
of inter-generational bickering, and seem prepared to accept,
sometimes even welcome, the lead of the young people.
Responsibility as regards the integrity of the community and the
avoidance of sorcery-generating internal conflict, is a dominant
value in the role definition of these elders. This value allows
them now, without losing face too much, to stop back in the
interest of the harmony and future of the community — even if
this means that younger people adopt role patterns (initiative,
sanctioning, avoidance of sorcery, constructive social
organizing) that used to be the elders’ prerogatives.
This may explain, to some extent, the power of the Youth branch
once formed; it does not explain however the more fundamental
determinants of the present situation. Why does this severe rural
generation conflict exist? Why did there emerge, from among the
young men in the village, a social movement which (under the
rationalizing disguise of a local branch of the national party)
seeks to create a new, youth-dominated social order?
In my view the historical development of labour migration offers
the major explanation here. The remainder of this paper will
argue this point.
2.
Labour migration and the career model
2.1.
Career model and inter-generational relations in the precolonial
period
Prior
to colonial rule, villages in Central Western Zambia comprised up
to a few hundred inhabitants, who were tied, by bilateral kinship
or slavery, to the headman, usually the incumbent of a political
title of high prestige. Residence, mate selection and succession,
rather than being governed by fixed narrow rules, were highly
optional, involving strategic choices out of a fairly large pool
of bilateral kinsmen, many of whom would reside at considerable
distances. Succession to a title (outcome of a formal process of
selection and appointment, guided by elders under strong
factional pressures) depended not upon ascription but upon
achievement, power. Any man born into this society would face the
challenge of a standard career model, which would culminate in
him becoming headman of a large village.[7]
This general struggle for individual ascend formed the central
structural theme in this society.
In the absence of a hereditary aristocracy, and of fixed rules of
succession, competition was fairly open, even to include slaves.
Material property was limited and ephemeral (e.g. cattle would
die because of the young man had to start from scratch. Social
relationships and manipulatory skills were a man’s main
capital; whatever differential social opportunities one had in
shaping one’s career lay in the specific properties of one’s
network of kin.
In the pursuit of this career of a man would have to follow a
complex strategy throughout life. In his youth he would become
attached, as a co-residing junior client, to a senior kinsman
from either father’s or mother’s side often this kinsman was
his prospective father-in-law, in whose village he was to render
bride services. (Bride-wealth was not practiced until colonial
times). Subsequently hunting, trading and participation in
military exploits provided opportunities to acquire, not so much
wealth, but political credit and experience, and especially
additional wives (mainly from among captive or slave women). In
this marginal subsistence economy polygamy provided the main
condition for an agricultural surplus, on the basis of which a
man in his forties could begin to attract from elsewhere clients
of his own, and form his own faction in local politics. Freed
from immediate economic commitments by his wives and clients, but
controlling their economic activities and checking conflicts
between them, he could now dedicate much of his time to political
affairs, successfully compete first for minor, then major titles,
and end up with his own large village — either as a chief or as
a chief’s senior client who himself controlled a considerable
following.[8] Death due to disease,
hunting accidents or warfare, and departure (as captives, slaves,
or ambitious dissidents) would continually thin out the ranks of
those advancing in status — while those replacing them were
usually of low status: newborn children, slaves, and clients from
elsewhere. Therefore, even if the number of possible positions of
chief and chief’s senior client was of necessity limited, a
man’s chance of attaining high status late in life was very
considerable — provided he survived!
Though for many clients their attachment to a particular headman,
and their residence in his village, would only last for as long
as this served their individual strategies of ascend, the power
of the headman was very considerable: the inhabitants were
largely dependent upon him for food (particularly in the case of
wifeless clients, and in general during seasonal famine when the
headman’s granaries would have to see the village through),
conflict regulation, and protection against both human and
invisible assailants.
Competition between agemates was fundamental to the system. A
developed, institutionalized structure of solidary age groups, as
is found in parts of East and Southern Africa, is inconceivable
here. Between people of the same age, even if closely related,
there would be little solidarity. Brothers, cousins, would seldom
grow up in the same village for more than a few years. The main
enduring social relations in this society were between members of
different generations: between a man and his father,
classificatory fathers, grandfather, mother’s brothers, and
fathers-in-law.
However, there were also strong inter-generational tensions
within the system.
Wifeless clients coming to exchange their labour force for food,
protection and sometimes a wife, have little bargaining power in
a community where insecurity is high and seasonal famine is
common. Exploitation and the corresponding resentment form
recurrent themes in the oral-historical accounts. Several cases
are recorded of kinsmen giving their junior clients kinsmen into
slavery; senior matrilateral kinsmen were in fact formerly
entitled to do so. Conflict regulation was in the hands of the
elders: headman and their senior clients; in serious cases
payment of a slave was imposed (who could be taken from among the
junior clients). Junior clients would make love to the wives of
polygynous elders and, if exposed, be punished by mutilation.
Many cases concerned the breach, by younger people, of the formal
rules of etiquette in dealing with senior people. Younger men
were debarred from participation in the recreation and rituals of
the old.
This fragmentary evidence suggests that senior kinsmen wielded
great power over their junior, client kinsmen. This power was
rationalized by strong values. The judicial enforcement of these
values was in the hands of the elders. Younger people
occasionally challenged these powers, infringed upon the
prerogatives of older people, and by and large seem to have
displayed an instrumental attitude towards their patrons: they
would exchange them for others whenever this was in the interest
of their own advancement.
However, the young people were not in direct political
competition with the old, being to young to take the latters’
places yet. Occupying a high status was, and is, considered to be
risky because of attacks not from younger people, but from the
middle-aged senior clients who could hope to succeed a murdered
headman of their own age. Inter-generational tension took on the
more symbolic form we have already seen. The powerful old were
generally considered to depend for their success on sorcery: the
manipulation of the remains of, particularly young, human beings
killed for that purpose. The old, while indispensable providers
of food, security and order, and representing the ultimate career
model for the young, were considered sorcerers par excellence.
Among many other aspects (Van Binsbergen in press (a)), this
belief offered young people an explanation for the misfortune
which frequently befell them (as an underprivileged group in
society), and also a ready rationalization when one wished to
sever the relationship with a particular patron.
This system was affected by the upheaval in the region, and in
Central Africa in general during the last century. Insecurity,
illness and seasonal famine seem to have increased then. People
would gather in enlarged, stockaded villages around powerful
headmen who now adopted the Lunda chiefly paraphernalia to
glorify their status. The slave trade penetrated into the
interior and rapidly transformed both chieftainship and domestic
slavery by introducing the gun (the standard price for a deported
slave) as a major transferable commodity. The effect of these
changes was, after an initial expansion, a tightening of the
rather open opportunity structure, especially for the younger
people, at the eve of colonial rule.
2.2.
Changes in the rural leadership structure
With
the establishment of colonial rule around 1900, all headmen and
chiefs were affected, in their political and economic power, by
pacification, abolition of slavery, hunting restrictions, and the
disappearance of local trade. Some however gained considerably by
the colonial administrative system that supplanted the
precolonial political structure. The colonial administration, and
the Barotse state bureaucracy (whose influence in the region had
been limited prior to colonial rule, but had since been given a
tremendous boost[9] redefined the fluid,
competitive political system of the region into a fixed, formal
hierarchy of titles. Rapidly the gap widened between those few
headmen who received official recognition, and the others. The
former enjoyed, especially after the creation of indirect rule
(1929), considerable power, prestige and remuneration; their
succession became much more rigid and had to be confirmed by the
colonial and Barotse authorities. The only compensation other
headman received was the keeping of the village tax register,
which carried no remuneration and merely added a vaguely official
element to village leadership.
As a result the rural career model changed radically at the
higher levels.
The values of individual autonomy, leadership, a village of
client kinsmen, and succession to a glorious title, took a
modified expression. Deprived of economic, political and judicial
powers beyond the immediate local level (in sharp contrast with
their economic and military activities over a wide geographical
area, as a chief’s most senior followers in precolonial times),
and with virtually no chance of ever leading to the status of
government-recognized chief, village headmanship under the now
conditions yet continued to function as the main focus of
rural-orientated individual career aspirations. The greater
security in the region no longer necessitated the large villages
of the nineteenth centuries. A proliferation of small villages
took place, absorbing a large proportion of the middle-aged and
old men as headmen. The associated titles continued to be keenly
competed for. The power of such a ‘modern’ headman was much
smaller than that of recognized chiefs, and had a rather
different basis from precolonial headmanship. Yet the colonial
headman’s power was considerable, and represented a marked
dominance of the old over the young. The headman controlled land
and implements, usually more than one wife, unattached kinswomen,
clients, and much of the cash flowing into the village from
outside (his own savings from previous migrant labour,
remittances by village members[10]
abroad, and bride-wealth: see below). In addition to continual,
informal conflict regulation within his own village, he would sit
on inter-village courts where minor cases could be heard outside
the official Local Courts of the chiefs. His factual dominance
would be supported both by legitimating values of seniority and
respect (carrying judicial and supernatural sanctions), and by
the sorcery connotations of his high status.
2.3.
labour migration and the emergence of an alternative, urban
career model
The
necessity to pay a hut tax roughly equivalent to three months’
wages, the desire for manufactured goods, and the scarcity of
local cash sources, were the main factors turning large numbers
of men into labour migrants from the time colonial rule was
imposed. Soon labour migration had become an established
institution, sustained by many other than purely economic
factors, and interwoven in the total texture of this rural
society.
Migrant labourers from the region would seek employment at the
mines and commercial farms throughout Central and Southern
Africa. The majority went for short spells (a few months to a few
years); they kept up the home contact through remittances and, if
communication allowed this, participation in life-crisis
ceremonies. The frame of reference of such migrants remained the
village, where they returned regularly for longer periods of
residence and where they kept a stake, in the prospect of
retiring there and achieving high status according to the rural
career model.
This situation has been well described for other parts of Central
Africa.[11] But previous studies,
in their timely emphasis on urban-rural interrelations, have
somewhat overlooked the significant minority, from Central
Western Zambia and elsewhere, to whom this picture does not
apply. Admittedly the places of work offered little economic
security of retirement opportunity. But this did not deter
successful migrants from repeatedly extending their stay abroad,
travelling from working place to working place, letting their
rural wives come over or entering into more or less permanent
relations with local women (cf. Colson 1958: 67f). At least among
part of the migrants, urban life began to be appreciated not just
as a necessary exile from home but as an attractive way of life
in its own right. Both archival sources and the life histories I
collected demonstrate that already before the second World War
the urban centres of Southern Africa contained migrants from
Central Western Zambia who had secured permanent jobs, had not
been back for ten, twenty or more years, and had never sent any
money home. It was not uncommon for a newly-married woman to stay
without any message or money from her husband abroad for many
years; in fact, local customary law was revised to enable such
women to divorce and remarry. The bureaucratization of rural
political leadership, and hence the difficulty of rural career
advancement (even for mature men in their thirties and older),
with elders largely controlling both female labour and cash, had
caused a tightening of the rural opportunity structure, which
often manifested itself in the form of open inter-generational
conflict. Men would depart for work as a temporary withdrawal
from such conflict, i.e. without having to sever local ties
overtly and to commit themselves to another rural patron. Under
these circumstances successful migrants might reach a point where
high investment in rural relations, mobility and security seemed
no longer realistic. It would then no longer be good rural
relations and a continuous interest in village politics, but cash
saved in town (thus remaining under one’s own control), which
they hoped would provide a basis for their retirement (even
though many eventually found themselves retiring in the villages
of Central Western Zambia, where their cash was of much less
importance than their neglected social ties, which they then had
to reactivate and heavily invest in). While in town they pursued
individual careers as alternatives to the rural career model.
Neither did the smooth reintegration of returning migrants into
their rural communities, taken for granted in some studies
(Fortes 1938; Mitchell 1959), occur in all cases. In the region
under study returning migrants (especially, but no means
exclusively those who while in town had at one stage tried to
sever their rural ties) tended to face great conflicts after
their return; besides individual cases, the evidence for this
includes the statistically demonstrated tendency for returning
migrants to move to another village shortly after their return
— a sure sing of social conflict. A fair proportion of the
migrants did not return at all: many died in town before
retirement age,[12] virtually retired in
town by joining households of younger migrant kinsmen, or settled
in peri-urban or rural areas elsewhere.
In a manner eminently applicable to the migrants from Central Western Zambia, Van Velsen (1961) has discussed the apparent contradiction of migrants pursuing urban careers yet, in many cases, returning to the village. Once labour migration had become an institution, every migrant had been socialized into both career orientations, and depending upon his situation at various stages in life, either one would be dominant and the other suppressed. For the successful migrant the rural career orientation would remain latent and might even be ignored, until such time when he was to experience personally the insecurity of urban life: at the attainment of old age, dismissal from his job, or massive unemployment such as occurred e.g. during the Great Depression (from 1929 onward) and after Independence (see below). He would try to return to the village if he could secure no other place to go; and then would often reluctantly accept, and secretly cherish, a title which he might have ridiculed while still in town. Alternatively, even the migrant retaining his rural orientation and contacts, would while in town develop a somewhat relative view of his rural society, become aware of urban alternatives, and temporarily pursue these.
2.4.
labour migrant and the status of young people in the rural area
The
labour migrants exploring alternatives to the rural career model
were mostly men in the age 25-45 years old: adults who had
already made some progress in their rural careers, who had
married, possessed the necessary documents, and were often
themselves father or otherwise patrons of junior clients. Both
archival and oral sources suggest that formal labour recruitment
provided the main access to labour migration in this region.
Adolescents from this region seldom went as labour migrants —
mainly because as unmarried dependents they could not produce the
documents required by the labour recruitment agencies. These
documents depended on marital status and previous tax payments
(Heisler 1974: 58, 101); especially the favorite labour migration
to South Africa was heavily controlled and subject to red tape
(Prothero 1974: viii). Young men did try to find work in the open
market; e.g. as carriers; but here opportunities were small and
wages exceedingly low.
Thus men up to their mid-twenties were kept from earning money
— in a society which rapidly adopted a money economy.
Manufactured good (clothing, matches, implements) has supplanted
some locally produced life necessities. Transactions in the
village were increasingly on a cash basis (beer sale,
extramarital affairs). The rural economy was deeply affected by
the introduction of such high-yielding capital investments as the
gun (game meat) and the bicycle (local transport), which now
became available for the successful migrant and senior people in
general. The young men staying behind in the village, under the
control of elders who had retired from wage employment, had to
make up particularly for the agricultural work of the absent male
migrants within the rural economy: the preparing and maintaining
of forest clearings, in order to enable the women (including many
wives of absent migrants) to cultivate. For all these reasons the
relative standard of living of the youngsters deteriorated after
labour migration had been introduced, and they were increasingly
dependent on their senior kinsmen who either earned cash incomes
abroad or who, as headmen and/or bride-givers, controlled the
cash flowing into the village.
The adolescents’ predicament is particularly clear in relation
to marriage.
In the past a man would take up residence in his prospective
father-in-law’s village in his late teens, render bride
services for several years and consummate the marriage at the
girl’s attainment of puberty. Thus he could obtain right over a
wife by his own powers, without needing substantial assistance
from his other relatives. However, under modern conditions the
marriage pattern changed drastically over a few decades. Whereas
the earlier marriage pattern tended to local endogamy, now the
geographical distance over which marriages were contracted
increased. Marriage with kinsmen (with bride-givers and
bride-takers retaining about equal rights in the offspring of the
marriage) was increasingly avoided. Being geographically distant
from the bride-takers’ village and increasingly lacking
effective kinship links with the latter, the bride-givers lost
much of their former control over the day-to-day actions of their
married kinswoman. Ever rising payment in cash came to replace
the former bride services (Van Binsbergen 1974: 11f). The factors
leading to these changes are yet imperfectly understood and are
currently being subjected to quantitative analysis. labour
migration, which impeded bride services in person, is one of the
factors of the introduction of marriage payments; but its
contribution to the marked decrease of local endogamy and of
marriage between kinsmen is less obvious. On the contrary, if
labour migration were the main factor changing the marriage
pattern, one might expect as a result a set-up in which the wife
could rely as much as possible on her own kinsmen while her
husband was away working: propinquity and consanguinean ties
underpinning the affinal ones.
In any case, a young men henceforth had to find a considerable
amount of cash in order to be able to marry. Unable, in most
cases, to go and work for it beforehand, he was completely
dependent on his kinsmen to contribute towards the bride-wealth,
and on his in-laws to arrange easy terms. Often indebted to both
sides, he would depart for work as soon as possible after the
wedding, leaving his young wife (whom he had had much less
opportunities to establish an adequate relationship with than
under the bride-service system) in his village. Data currently
being processed suggest a marked increase both in the average age
at first marriage, among men, and in the proportion of first
marriages ending in divorce.
In so far as a man’s marriage continued to form his basis of
rural economic security and political expansion (through
producing children and attracting, and feeding, other clients),
the situation had become much more difficult for young men in the
first phase of their career. Similarly, somewhat older men who
had already married, were finding it difficult to contract second
marriages.
Thus labour migration had the double effect of enabling some to
venture on alternative careers abroad, and subjugating those
staying in the village more and more to the headman and other
elders. The two effects reinforced each other and greatly added
to the inter-generational tensions.
2.5
labour migration and ideological change in the colonial period
If
migrants ‘dropped out’ of, or at least took a more relative
view of, the rural career model, this meant nothing less than a
challenge of fundamental normative and structural principle of
their rural society.
These principles were pertinent not only to economic security
power and status, but also to self-realization, mental health,
and the meaning of life in general. However, to what extent where
the centres of European activity where they found work, capable
of providing them with lasting and inspiring alternative value
orientations? While participating in the economic sector of
European life, they were debarred from full absorption of, and
participation in, European culture in general, through barriers
of language, socialization, segregation, and the colonial power
distribution. their existential problems were to be solved not by
wholesale adoption of European culture, but by creating in and
around themselves a new society on the basis of elements derived
from both their rural and their European experience.
This attempt to actively and explicitly create a new social
order, a new and inspiring participants’ model of the ideal
society, emerges as the main[13]
solution for the predicament of those whose rural social order
was no longer of overwhelming relevance to them, and forms one of
the central themes of cultural change in Central Africa since
1900.
The ramifications of this process reach from such secular aspects
as the emergence of a distinctly African urban identity and
culture; the trade union movement; nationalism, to the religious
sphere: the Watchtower movement (which touched a very large
proportion of the Central African population since the 1920s),
witchcraft eradication, healing movements, the eager adoption of
Christianity, and the proliferation of independent churches.
There is a tendency to fragmentize these various developments and
reduce each to a limited struggle for power and material goods:
Black against White, young against old, in the concrete,
particular arena of the mine, the church congregation, the
village etc. However, they all seem to form historically and
dialectically related aspects of the same social transformation
process, which necessarily entails a redistribution of power in
all these sectors of Central African society, but even more
comprehensive than that, aims at the creation of a new, eminently
inspiring, redeeming social order.
From the beginning of labour migration the places of work in
Central and Southern Africa functioned as ideological and
organizational labouratories, where migrant workers would try out
solutions for social reconstruction; and from there they would
penetrate the distant rural areas.
The social sciences have long recognized the role of religion as
a fundamental model of, and for, the social order (e.g. Geertz
1966). In Central Africa this model revolved around ancestral
cults and sorcery beliefs governing the world-view, community
integration and leadership (Van Binsbergen, in press (a), (b)).
With Christian missionary teaching forming the main selection
from European spiritual culture available to Africans, little
wonder that up to the 1950s religious movements constituted the
most numerous and popular responses coming out of these
‘workshops’.[14] But the more secular
ones, including those leading to political independence, followed
closely behind them and often merged with them.
From the urban centres the new ideas and movements would be taken
to the rural areas, not primarily by regular short-term migrants
with a strong rural orientation, but by more marginal people in
whom the ideological predicament described here was particularly
pronounced: long-term migrants who had been deeply committed to
the urban situation and who had often gone through a better than
average urban career; or strangers (largely with this same
background) who rather than returning to their own rural area
from town, made a career of propagating ideological innovations
elsewhere (Van Binsbergen in press (a)).
Around 1930 the first major wave of innovating responses reached
Central Western Zambia: Watchtower (Hooker 1965) and Mchape
(a complex of witchcraft and sorcery eradication practices)
(Ranger 1972). The central issue in both, extremely popular,
movements was the vigorous commitment to the creation of a
radically new society through the elimination of evil and the
preparation, in the Watchtower idiom, for the Second Coming. The
rural establishment of chiefs and village headmen would the
innovators in a bid to benefit from their enormous influence over
the population. This proved unsuccessful. By their origin,
recruitment and ideology these movements were anti-establishment;
not only did they try to expose elders as sorcerers, they also
provoked the colonial and Barotse administration to such an
extent that the chiefs and headmen were threatened with demotion
should they continue to associate with the new movements (Van
Binsbergen in press (a)). In the 1950s anc brought the second
major wave of innovating response. Migrants, and people of
corresponding age in the village, adopted the movement. anc came
to function as a unifying symbol of local ethnic identity against
the Barotse (Van Binsbergen 1975), and this seems the main reason
why at this stage anc was hardly used to express
inter-generational tensions. Not that such tensions had
disappeared; rather, they took the older form of Mchape-style
sorcery accusations of the young against the old, which were
particularly frequent and intense during the late 1950s in this
area (Reynolds 1963; Gluckman 1967: 422f).
While expressing the need for a new social order, none of these
movements (Watchtower, Mchape and anc) in colonial times
was successful in bringing about a thorough and lasting
transformation of the society in this region. It appears that in
order to achieve this, this kind of movement must satisfy at
least four requirements: and ideology which emphasizes
total innovation and offers a blue-print for the future society;
an organizational structure which defines leaders and
followers, their roles and the situations in which these roles
are to be played, and allows for expansive recruitment and for
adaptation to outside reactions to the movement; a mass
following; and finally specific ‘action of catharsis’
(baptismal or cleansing ritual, self-accusation, trial, combat
etc.) in which the transition from old to new order is enacted
symbolically, and in which individuals and structures opposing
the new order are isolated and eliminated.
In its initial stage, local Watchtower came closest to fulfilling
these conditions. But after strong external political pressures
it lost the impetus it originally acquired and it has now been
routinized: these days it forms the largest local denomination;
continues to dictate ritual, politics and much of everyday life
in a few local Watchtower villages; but no longer has anything
like a dynamic, general impact on the rural society throughout
the region. Neither did Watchtower, in these few village
congregations, inspire the economic development recorded for
Watchtower elsewhere in rural Zambia (Long 1968; Cross 1970). Of
the four requirements, Mchape only offered cathartic
action; despite its origin outside the local context this could
be easily accommodated within the existing culture, in which some
form of witch-finding has been a familiar institutions for
centuries. Local anc commanded mass following and an adequate
organizational structure, but after the ascend of the more
radical unip, its ideology (with the absence of anti-white
feelings which Gluckman (1971: 155f) has recently identified as a
dominant feature of rural society in colonial Africa; and with
its emphasis on specific, particularistic issues in district and
provincial politics (Van Binsbergen 1975: 18f) was conservative
rather than transformative; neither did it encompass cathartic
action.
By the time of Independence was gained, the communities of
Central Western Zambia had radically changed. They had been
incorporated into a complex, large-scale society comprising at
least the whole of Central and Southern Africa. Labour migration
(implying a movement of people, material resources, and ideas)
constituted the main link between these communities and the other
segments of this complex society. (Although, of course, it never
formed the only link: in particular, there was the direct impact
of the administration, which from the urban centres reaches into
the rural districts and even into the villages). The structural
changes represented a challenge to existing values and
conceptions, but they had not yet found articulation in a new and
explicit model of an alternative social order in the
consciousness of the participants — nor had these participants
found the means to actively bring about further changes instead
of accommodating the results of change induced elsewhere.
2.6.
The post-Independence situation
With
the Independence the structure of the labour market changed
considerably.
The replacement of European by African personnel was pursued at a
larger scale than ever before; meanwhile the existing
administrative and industrial establishments grew rapidly, and
many new establishments were created. The main demand however was
for skilled people with formal qualifications. Unskilled work in
the towns did not grow at the same pace, and with the departure
of White farmers unskilled farm work declined severely. Migrant
labour to the South became prohibited; on the other hand many
labourers who had worked outside Zambia for many years returned
to this country, attracted by the promise of new opportunities,
fleeing from mounting racial tension in Southern Africa, or
forcibly repatriated. labour recruitment ceased, hut tax was
abolished, and with the creation of the National Registration
Card issued at district headquarters any employable person,
regardless of age, sex or marital status, could compete for work.
A phenomenal urban drift ensued, which the urban employment
opportunities failed to accommodate.
The effects upon inter-generational relations in the area under
discussion were shattering. As regards access to work, the
balance swung in favor of the young, who have usually passed
through the higher grades of primary school (hardly ever more
than that), and speak some English, the official Zambian
language. Whatever limited skills the older men derive from
previous labour experiences (as farm hands, miners, compound
policemen etc.) were not acknowledged or no longer in demand.
There is now open competition between young men and the elderly;
the latter are usually at a disadvantage as compared to those who
are twenty or more years their juniors. Neither as keepers of the
tax register nor as major providers of cash and manufactured
goods can the elders dominate any longer over the young. The
former continue to control the rural women, for whom ever
increasing marriage payments are demanded; but the relatively few
young men who manage to live in town are reluctant to spend their
money on a ‘proper’ marriage (which ties them to a rural
network) and, as long as they can stand the pressures of social
control exerted by both rural and urban relatives, prefer
informal sexual unions with women of their own choice (Van
Binsbergen 1974: 23f). Thus a large proportion of the money
earned in town does not pass any more through the hands of the
rural elders, even if ultimately the majority of men from this
area end up with women from home.
Meanwhile the total amount of money earned in town and reaching
the village seems to be on the decrease (taking inflation into
account. Men of all ages find it almost impossible to secure any
job at all. The younger men soon learn that their achievements in
the village schools make no impression whatsoever on urban
employers; primary schools in this area are often of
non-competitive standards, and moreover the towns abound with
unemployed with qualifications far above the primary-school
level. In the still relatively large sector of the Zambian urban
economy were unskilled labour is sought, access to jobs is
largely controlled by entrenched townsmen from other parts of
Zambia, who act as brokers for mainly those belonging to their
own networks.
In general labour migration has stagnated. People continue to
travel to town, but their prolonged efforts to find a job or to
create a living by self-employment very seldom carry effect now.
Meanwhile they live off the scarce resources of their urban
relatives, until they return home or (exceptionally can settle in
town on their own).
As a result the village of Central Western Zambia are now full of
mature men retired before their age, and without the status and
power formerly to be expected upon rural retirement; and of young
men desperate to enhance their economic and social independence
through urban wage labour, but grudgingly tied to the village
after unsuccessful attempts in town.
3.
Conclusion
For
the rural young, the urban career model (which after Independence
acquired pronounced elements of power, conspicuous consumption
and youthful success) had become the dominant frame of reference.
The mature frustrated migrants, and those definitely too old to
go working, should be orientated towards the higher level of the
rural career model; but while some clearly are, many fail to
derive inspiration from a status which is no longer surrounded
with the authority, power, sanctions, splendor it would carry in
their youth.
In the past young and old men constituted mutual reference points
as occupants of complementary statuses within an overall rural
career perspective. Now they have become threats to each
other’s identity.
The present, bitter generation conflict seems primarily the
result of two categories of people finding themselves trapped
together within the frustrated career perspective associated with
rural stagnation. This stagnation is the outcome of economic and
political incorporation processes in which labour migration
features foremost.
Social processes involve structural relationships between
individuals and between groups, but also participants’ explicit
models of the ideal social order and of their own place therein
(ideologies). In the past structural change in Central and
Southern Africa has precipitated numerous social movements which
offered new ideologies to replace obsolete models of the social
order. In colonial Central Western Zambia, Watchtower, Mchape
and anc constituted such movements, and none was a lasting
success.
In line with these earlier movements, the recent attempt by a few
young people to create a new youth-centred social order appears
not only a move to decide the generation struggle (by replacing
the obsolete domination of the young, and the present open
conflict between young and old, by a new domination by the
young), but also a first step towards successful rural
ideological reconstruction — which may well lead to material
development long overdue. The young people’s movement described
here represents an incipient formulation of a participants’
model that no longer takes rural dependence and migrancy for
granted, but instead stipulates (however crudely) a local future
to be realized through the action of local people. Eclectically
employing such apparently contradictory devises as the historical
framework of sorcery accusations, unip, alliance with elderly
senior headmen who support a rival party now defunct, and attacks
on the chief and the school, their attempt has a chance of
success as it combines, for the first time in the modern
ideological history of the region, the four requirements of
ideology, organization, mass support (if not yet an actual mass
following), and cathartic action, which I have suggested to be
crucial. A local follow-up study in addition to comparative data
could bring out to what extent my analysis if more than wishful
thinking.
Meanwhile this analysis is extremely tentative. The topics
involved deserve attention, however. Young people are more and
more identified as a major problem in developing nations (and not
just there); circulatory labour migration has largely given way,
in Zambia at least, to a structure where more stabilized urban
communities politically and economically dominate a stagnated
countryside: African governments proclaim a back-to-the-land
policy and actively undertake rural development. In this context,
examination of the potential contribution of rural young people
to the reconstruction of their society may prove of vital
importance for the future.
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[1]Van Binsbergen 1972, 1974, 1975, in press (a), (b), and
many subsequent publications not yet foreseeable when this paper
was written.
[2]Demographic conditions
important for a further understanding of inter-generational
relations in this area are: the very low reproduction rate of the
population (documented by both government censuses and by my own
demographic data currently being processed; the same phenomenon
has been reported from surrounding areas: Evans 1950; Spring
Hansen 1972); and the fact that all 35 Zambian districts, Kaoma
has the largest proportion of people older than 45 years, and
nearly the smallest proportion of people younger than 21 years
(Kay 1971).
[3]By contrast, members of urban unip
youth branches tend to be considerably younger, and unmarried.
[4]The House of Chiefs is an
assembly of some twenty Zambian Chiefs, with meets annually, at
the instigation of the President of the Republic, to comment on
government policy. It has no formal powers, and mainly seems to
represent a devise to channel whatever political dissidence
exists in rural foci of power that have not been created by the
central government, and to render the central government
acceptable in the eyes of the rural populations. (Constitution of
Zambia 1965; House of Chiefs debates 1971).
[5]The implication is: conflicts
and resentments which cannot be taken to court and therefore have
to be resolved informally or else will give rise to sorcery.
[6]People voted on two issues:
the selection of one Member of Parliament representing Kaoma,
from among three unip candidates (cf. Van Binsbergen 1975: 18f);
and whether the one, unippresidential candidate, H.E. Dr. K.D.
Kaunda who has been Zambia’s President since 1964, should or
should not be president. On this latter issue, people from this
area tended to vote ‘no’. Thus Zambia’s one-party
participatory democracy in fact allows voting against the ruling
party.
[7]For similar accounts about
neighboring areas, cf. Fielder 1969; Lancaster 1966.
[8]Terms like ‘chief’,
‘headman’, ‘senior client’, ‘senior headman’ are
rather inadequate attempts to represent shade of autonomy and
dependence within the shifting, competitive, nominally feudal
political system of the region under study, in precolonial times.
A more systematic use of terms would require a political analysis
which falls beyond the scope of this paper.
[9]Clay 1945; Caplan 1970; Stokes
1966; Van Binsbergen 1975.
[10]The
term ‘village members’ reflects the fact that among the
Nkoya, belonging to a particular village is defined not primarily
by actual residence, but by membership of the kinship-political
faction which centres on a particular village; changes in
kinship-political allegiance are reflected by frequent
inter-village mobility, rather than the other way round. Village
adherence as a poltiical rather than a residential concept is not
incompatible with urban residence.
[11]Gluckman
1960; Watson 1958; Van Velsen 1961.
[12]The
death rate among migrants was high: Heisler 1974: 40f.
[13]Alternative
solutions are: far-reaching participation in European culture (in
which a minority managed to succeed) or adoption of the local
African culture prevailing near the place of work — but then,
in this local culture the predicament described here would also
have made itself felt, and have precipitated specific responses
similar to the ones listed in the text below, by the time
migrants would adopt this local, African culture.
[14]
Taylor and Lehmann 1961; Sundkler 1948; Van Binsbergen 1972 and
in press (a).
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