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van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, ‘Minority language, ethnicity and the state in two African situations: the Nkoya of Zambia and the Kalanga of Botswana’, in: Fardon, R. & Furniss, G., red., African languages, development and the state, Londen etc.: Routledge, pp. 142-188.
1.
Introduction[1]
Language
differences often provide an anchorage for ethnic identity.
Ethnic self-articulation tends to have a linguistic component:
propagation of the language spoken by a national minority, in the
face of lack of recognition of that language in a
nation-state’s language policy covering such domains as formal
education, the judiciary, contacts between the state and its
citizens in general, political discourse, freedom of expression
and the media. Language policy — even if appealing to
‘objective’ considerations of linguistic analysis,
constitutional equity and socio-economic development — is often
formulated and implemented in a political and ideological context
partly defined by ethnic parameters. In the present paper I shall
briefly trace, and contrast, the ethnic aspects of the language
situation in two contemporary African communities: the Nkoya of
central western Zambia, and the Kalanga of northeastern Botswana.
The choice of these two cases is inspired by more systematic
considerations than personal preference alone: while my own
current anthropological and historical research happens to
concentrate on these two communities, their choice here is
strategic in that — looking at their linguistic, ethnic and
political situation within their respective nation-state — they
are rather comparable, yet display striking differences with
regard to the role language has played in their respective
processes of ethnicisation in the twentieth century. Thus the
comparison is hoped to have heuristic value in that it
highlights some of the crucial variables informing the interplay
between language, ethnicity, the state and development, even
though, of course, a two-case comparison can never in itself
yield viable generalizations.
The comparative empirical data concerning
the two languages, and the ethnic groups of the same name which
focus on these languages, are compiled in a elaborate matrix (Appendix).
It has the disadvantage of being unreadable but the advantage of
accommodating more information than could be presented in a short
article. Against this descriptive background, I may be forgiven
if my discursive argument turns out to be somewhat selective.
My argument is set, implicitly, against
the background of studies of ethnicisation and inter-ethnic
relations in Zambia and Botswana. While the relevant literature
on Zambia is considerable (including classic studies in this
field by Mitchell and Epstein),[2] the
multi-ethnic dimension of contemporary Botswana society has been
very much ignored by scholarship. Researchers have themselves
internalized the image of a peaceful, ethnically and
linguistically homogeneous, thoroughly Tswana country — an
image propagated by the national elite under conditions of Tswana
linguistic and cultural hegemony. The notable exception, of
course, is a considerable attention for the plight of the
Khoi-San (locally called Sarwa), under conditions of social
humiliation and economic exploitation at the hands of the Tswana.[3] The
claim of Botswana’s homogeneity has also been accepted by
linguists (e.g. Alexandre 1972: 89) and can still be found
expressed today:
‘The
rest of the Southern African states are very much less
interesting because they are typical/normal anglophone African
countries. Perhaps the only noteworthy feature is that (without
talking English into account) all three of them (i.e. Botswana,
Lesotho and Swaziland) are virtually monolingual.’ (Mkangawi
1991: 10)
2.
The Nkoya of western Zambia[4]
The language we
call Nkoya today (with its constituent dialectical variants such
as Nkoya-proper, Mashasha, Lushange, Lukolwe, Mbwela), now a
scattered minority language in central western Zambia with c.
30,000 speakers, is generally accepted to have been a language of
people who were relatively early to trickle down — like so many
others in the past half millenium — from southern Zaire into
the savanna of South Central Africa as from c. 1500 AD.[5] On
the strength of political and cosmological notions deriving from
the Zairean homeland (Kola), some of these immigrants soon began
to involve the local population (partly mere earlier immigrants)
in a process of state formation, which — along lines which
shape up quite distinctly in recent research — from the late
eighteenth century, if not earlier, led to a number of small
polities in which Nkoya was the court language. Most probably,
the language and the people identifying by reference to it were
early on known not as Nkoya but as Mbwela. The origin of the name
Nkoya itself remains somewhat obscure: it is associated with a
forested area near the Kabompo/Zambezi confluence, later became
the toponym for the entire region (roughly coinciding with
today’s Kaoma district) where Nkoya is spoken by the majority
of the population, and may well be a dialectal variant of the
magical name of Kola itself. At any rate, our first record of its
use for the political elite of one of these polities dates back
to c. 1840: in the praise-name under which a female ruler, Mwene[6]
Komoka, acceded to the major Mutondo royal title. Only a few
years later these polities in the eastern fringes of what later
(e.g. in Max Gluckman’s famous anthropological studies) became
known as Barotseland, were made tributary to the Kololo state, by
which immigrants from what is today South Africa had supplanted
the earlier Luyana administration. The original Luyana ousted the
Kololo immigrants again in 1864 but largely retained the
latter’s southern Sotho language, amalgamating it with their
original Luyana to form today’s ‘Lozi’ language. It was in
the context of political incorporation into the Lozi state that
‘Nkoya’ (in its Lozi form Mankoya, which was also extended to
become the name of a district capital, to be renamed Kaoma in
1969) became the name of one particular Lozi ‘subject tribe’
and of the latter’s language — myopically uniting, under this
Lozi-imposed label, not only a certain dialectical variation but
also several incapsulated polities who has never before
identified as ‘Nkoya’. Favoured by the colonial state which
was imposed in 1900, Lozi administrative and judicial
subjugation, social humiliation and economic exploitation of the
people in the eastern Barotseland fringe even increased during
the colonial period. While the Luvale (another ‘subject
tribe’, to the north of the Lozi core area) were allowed to
secede from Barotseland and form a district of their own, Lozi
colonisation of Nkoyaland went on through the creation of a Lozi
court at Naliele near Kaoma in the 1930s, where the son of the
Lozi Litunga (King) was put in charge of the newly created
Mankoya Native Authority; Mwene Mutondo Muchayila who opposed
these developments, was ousted from office and for ten years
(1948-1958) exiled to a remote part of Barotseland — only to
return to office in the years 1981-1990. Under the unifying
impact of this shared negative experience within an overall
administrative and political framework, it was in the period
around World War II that the name ‘Nkoya’, now reflexively
used by the people themselves, became a rallying cry of an
increasingly comprehensive ethnic identity facing a common
perceived ethnic enemy, the Lozi, whose language as used in the
Lozi indigenous administration including the courts had become a
main instrument of control and humiliation.
Nkoya was a minority language in the
Barotseland Protectorate, whose indigenous administration
retained considerable autonomy under colonial rule. Meanwhile,
throughout Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) of which Barotseland
formed part, seven languages had come to be recognized by the
state as vehicles of formal education, broadcasting, the
judiciary, and state/subject interaction: Bemba, Tonga, Nyanja,
Lozi (throughout Barotseland and in the region of Livingstone,
the early colonial capital in the south), Lunda, Luvale and
Kaonde. At Independence the colonizer’s language became the
country’s official language. For fear of ‘tribalism’ and in
the service of ‘nation building’, in the first decades after
Independence strictly no other language but English was used in
state-citizen communication — which went to the extent of
President Kaunda addressing crowds in his native Chinsali
district not in the local Bemba language but in English. Nkoya
found itself among the sixty-odd languages or dialects in Zambia
to which no official status was accorded. Thus the Nkoya language
had become doubly peripheral: a minority vis-a-vis Lozi which
remained dominant in Barotse (later Western) Province in most
formal situations including education, local government and the
courts; and vis-a-vis English. Peripheral also in terms of
participation in the modern economy, minimum access to national
markets of labour, produce and power (while the regional ones
were totally dominated by Lozi speakers), the Nkoya ethnic
identity (defined by speaking the Nkoya language, and by
allegiance to local chiefs — the encapsulated heirs to the
independent polities of the 18th and 19th centuries) in the 1960s
was characterized by great resentment of continued Lozi
domination and by rejection of the independent nation-state of
Zambia which (from the parochial perspective of Kaoma district)
had allowed itself to be captured by the Lozi aristocracy.
Circulation of people of great distances
has been a constant feature of Nkoya rural society. It is an
essential feature of the social organization that young men and
women continually move from village to village in search of
kinship-based patrons and spouses, until they become less mobile
by middle age. The geographical scope of this intra-rural
migration has extended beyond the areas where Nkoya is spoken by
the majority of the population, and as a result many Nkoya were
and are bilingual or trilingual in the languages of western
Zambia. Meanwhile, the local language and ethnic situation has
considerably diversified since the beginning of the twentieth
century. Lozi domination had facilitated the immigration of Lozi
speakers to the fertile and well-watered, scarcely populated
lands of Nkoya. Angolan immigrants (speaking such languages as
Luvale, Luchazi, Chokwe and Mbundu and ethnically identifying by
these same names) likewise flooded the region as from the late
1910s. As a result Nkoya soon became a minority expression even
at the newly-created district capital. The influx of immigrants
(whose agricultural and hunting methods tended to be more modern
and aggressive) for the first time in history created pressure on
the local land. Incapsulated within the Lozi indigenous
administration (which moreover controlled part of Nkoyaland
directly, through Lozi indunas[7]), Nkoya chiefs were unable to curb this
invasion. After Independence (when their power was further eroded
by the institution of Local Courts over which the chiefs had no
longer formal control)[8] the selective granting of
land to ethnic strangers was adopted by the chiefs as a means
towards prestige and additional income. Appointed as members of
the new Rural Council which after Independence supplanted the
Lozi-controlled Mankoya Native Authority, the chiefs facilitated
a major development project, which in the eastern fringe of Kaoma
district led to a massive agricultural scheme attracting
thousands of ethnic strangers from all over western and southern
Zambia in what was to become the new rural town of
Nkeyema. Not only did this further diversify the local language
situation; it also confirmed the Nkoya as linguistic and economic
underdogs, serving — usually in a language other than their own
— immigrant farmers on their own lands as casual labour; or
pursuing, in their nearby villages (and then in their own
language), the meagre yields of an eroded historical agricultural
production system which because of the depletion of the forests
could less and less be supplemented by the time-honoured
techniques of hunting and collecting.
In this linguistic, ethnic, political and
economic desolation the local Nkoya-speaking groups, as from the
1920s, found an ally in Christian missions and (since the local
Catholic Mission was rather Lozi-orientated) especially in the
fundamentalist evangelical South African General Mission, which
shifted to Nkoyaland from an increasingly hostile Angola. In its
wake, the mission brought Mbundu immigrants to the district, thus
contributing to its ethnic and linguistic differentiation;
however, in the context of this mission, ethnic strangers would
adopt Nkoya as a second language. Establishing excellent
relations with the Nkoya chiefs, the mission pioneered in Nkoya
literacy, published school primers, had hymns and part of the
Bible translated into Nkoya,[9] and was largely
responsible for the creation of a climate in which peasants would
go about their Christian activities and their social contacts
(especially in the form of letters to the many relatives who were
temporarily absent as labour migrants) in their native language.
A remarkable form of ethnico-religious discourse emerged, in
which local Christian leaders would also be the articulators of
the budding Nkoya ethnic identity, and improvised prayers in
Nkoya would mix pious and political elements in fervent
evocations (full of predictable biblical parallels) of their
ethnic plight at the hands of the Lozi. In this context the first
Nkoya pastor, Rev. Johasaphat Shimunika (1899-1981), nephew and
son-in-law of the first Mwene Mutondo to be baptized, not only
was largely responsible for Bible translation but also collected
Nkoya oral traditions, collating them into passionate statements
of Nkoya ethnic identity and anti-Lozi manifests, which
circulated among the Nkoya since the late 1950s. His main work, Likota
lya Bankoya (The history of the Nkoya people), was
recently published by me (van Binsbergen 1988, 1992a: parts II
and III).
Away from their rural homeland, Nkoya
labour migrants had no choice but to reproduce the peripherality
which was their fate at home. A few years of mission education in
Nkoya hardly compared with the splendid educational facilities,
in the empowering languages of Lozi and English, which the Lozi
aristocracy had managed to attract and develop in the centre of
Barotseland. The Nkoya’s small numbers and lack of specialized
skills made it impossible for most of them to capture substantial
portions of the urban labour markets, which were controlled by
the Lozi and other dominant ethnic groups. Occasional urban
success often involved ethnic and linguistic passing,
dropping the (still only emergent) Nkoya ethnic identity for that
of Lozi or Bemba, and loosening the home ties. The majority of
the many Nkoya labour migrants however remained insecure
strangers in town, and continued to rely heavily (in times of
unemployment, illness, bereavement and personal conflict) on such
security as the intensive (and costly) cultivation of rural ties
would accord them. Regrettable as this state of affairs may be
judged from a perspective as personal achievement in modern,
capitalist relations of production, this state of affairs was
largely responsible for the continued vitality of Nkoya rural
society. With the persisting investment, on the basis of
migrants’ access to cash, in rural-based institutions (kinship,
marriage, chieftainship, old and new cults of affliction), Nkoya
rural society remained the relational, symbolic and therapeutic
power-house of dispersed Nkoya-speaking individuals, and thus a
viable basis for an increasingly vital Nkoya ethnic, linguistic
and cultural identity.
Twenty years ago, when I started research
among the Nkoya, the lack of recognition of their language was
still felt by them as the major sign of their powerlessness at
the national and regional level, which they interpreted
exclusively in terms of Lozi oppression. Primary school teaching
was no longer in the hands of the mission but had become the
responsibility of government, and as a result it took place in
the recognized language of Western Province and Livingstone,
Lozi. Very few Nkoya primary school graduates found their way to
secondary school and fewer still matriculated: largely because
educational success depended on the mastery of two languages
(Lozi and English) hardly used in the Nkoya rural milieu, but
also since schoolchildren’s attendance was poor both in numbers
and in frequency — due to the Nkoya’s emphasis on boys’
hunting and musical skills, and girls’ domestic chores and
puberty ceremonies. In the collective Nkoya consciousness a large
and sinister place is occupied by a district educational officer,
inevitably (like the majority of local teachers) of Lozi
identity, who allegedly rounded up and burned virtually all Nkoya
school primers. Neither was the Nkoya language used in any of the
provincial or national media. Since the early-19th century the
Nkoya royal orchestra has been a standard element in court
culture all over western Zambia, and as a result the folklore
programmes of Zambia Broadcasting Corporation often featured
Nkoya songs. Requests of specifically Nkoya-language programmes,
however, were systematically turned down with reference to the
country’s formal language policy. Nkoya-speakers only occupied
the most lowly jobs at the district headquarters and UNIP party
office, and any dealings between Nkoya villagers and the outside
world, for administrative, medical or judicial purposes, would
have to take place in Lozi, of which only half the adult men and
very few women had more than a smattering. Political meetings,
too, had to be conducted in Lozi or English. At one, held in
preparation of the 1973 national elections which for the first
time brought a Nkoya into Parliament,[10]
the District Governor (of eastern Zambian extraction), when
challenged why the meeting could not have been held in Nkoya,
spoke out in anger:
‘This
nonsense has to stop. Chief, you must control your people. There
is no Nkoya. Nkoya does not exist!’
Various processes combined to change this
situation substantially in the course of two decades, even if
Zambia’s language policy formally remained the same.
The integration of the Barotseland
Protectorate, its traditional ruler the Litunga, and the Lozi
aristocracy, into the independent state of Zambia had been
difficult, and had had to be bought at the onerous conditions of
the Barotse Agreement. One section of the Lozi aristocracy had
promoted UNIP in Barotseland, which had been a reason for many
Nkoya to side with UNIP’s rival, the African National Congress
(ANC),[11] in addition to
short-lived political organizations of a specific Nkoya
signature. The commitment to the struggle for independence had
been massive among the Nkoya, not so much for disgust with the
colonial state (whose blessings were to form a standard topic of
conversation among the Nkoya in the post-independence period —
despite the fact that Lozi domination had been greatly reinforced
by the colonial state) but for the hope that independence would
bring the end of Lozi domination. Until the late 1960s the Lozi
played a major role in the successive factional coalitions around
which the Zambian national politics revolved. The prohibition of
the habitual labour migration from Barotseland to Rhodesia and
South Africa increased ANC sympathies among the Lozi, at a moment
that UNIP was already contemplating one-party rule. The Lozi were
outwitted of their political power at the national level, and
UNIP found in the Nkoya welcome allies in an otherwise hostile
province.
The Nkoya’s ethnic claims of access to
regional and national representative bodies, restoration of the
prestige of their traditional leaders, and increased development
efforts in their area, were met to a considerable extent, and
such few Nkoya as could be considered to constitute a traditional
and modern elite (e.g. the royal chiefs, and Mr Kalaluka) soon
found themselves in a position where, as brokers between the
modern world and the local villagers, they could combine ethnic
mobilization with personal economic and political advancement.
UNIP branches, and ward and village development committees
mushroomed, and for the first time the repertoire of UNIP
political songs was translated and sung in the Nkoya language.
Political meetings in favour of the ruling party were locally
held in the same language. The increased economic opportunities
in Nkoyaland increasingly contrasted with the bleak situation of
many Nkoya migrants in the declining economy of Zambia’s towns,
and people began to re-migrate home.
Moreover, at the national political and
ideological level, the earlier universalist insistence on English
and fear of ‘tribalism’ gradually gave way to considerations
of authenticity and pluralism, and the more the impoverished and
disintegrating Zambian state proved unable to mobilize popular
support on the basis of services and benefits extended to the
citizens, the more passionate and desperate the appeal to a
composite cultural heritage to which each ethnic and language
group was now agreed to contribute, even outside the established
happy few of the seven state recognized languages.
While the political acceptability of the
Nkoya language increased, at the major Christian mission
establishment in Kaoma district the work on the translation of
the Bible continued steadily. Largely under the supervision of
Rev. Shimunika until his death, and carried on by his former
associated since, draft translations were made of th entire Old
Testament, and these have been discussed at general conferences
which the church organized in Kaoma and Lusaka in the late 1980s.
The text has been ready for publication for some years now.
Although a subscription campaign has been launched, funds are
still lacking to place a print order.
While this translation work, and the
enthusiasm it generated over the years, certainly testifies to
the vitality of the Nkoya language, the organizational framework
for the text consultations was no longer exclusively that of the
mission and of the Evangelical Church of Zambia which it has
engendered. In fact, the editorial process of the Bible
translation in recent years, as well as similar consultations in
the context of my edition of Rev. Shimunika’s Likota lya
Bankoya, took place within the context of a new Nkoya ethnic
association.
Ethnic associations had thrived in
Northern Rhodesia but had been discouraged after Independence.
After 1980 they became viable again, and with the restored ethnic
pride, the return of educated manpower to the rural homeland, and
the fruition of the ethno-historical seeds which Rev. Shimunika
had sought to plant for so many years, the time was ripe for the Kazanga
cultural society to be initiated in the early 1980s. The society
derived its name from an ancient Nkoya institution, the king’s
first-fruits festival, which (partly because of the connotations
of ritual murder which it shares with all royal ceremonies in the
Nkoya context — among others) had hardly been held in the
twentieth century. While continuing (in vain, so far) the
campaign for the Nkoya language in the media and schools, while
joining hands with Nkoya politicians in their attempts to further
the cause of Nkoya chieftaincy, and formalizing an economic and
social support structure for urban-rural migrants on a modest
scale, the society’s main project was to develop a newly
‘bricolaged’ form of kazanga as an annual festival,
bringing together all Nkoya chiefs (especially the four royal
ones, who under historical conditions would scarcely meet but
observe a strict avoidance, each in his own area), and presenting
to the crowds of urban and rural Nkoya, other locals, government
officials and hopefully tourists, a densely packed programme
encompassing the entire (if slightly orchestrated, folklorized,
and electronified) repertoire of Nkoya music and dance (van
Binsbergen 1992b).
Thus the festival was to form the Nkoya
answer to the famous Lozi Kuomboka ceremony, which
has attracted large crowds since the beginning of the twentieth
century. At the second Kazanga festival, in 1989, the
triumph of the Nkoya language could hardly have been more
complete: not only did the junior Minister of Culture, Lazarus
Tembo (of eastern-Zambian background, once Zambia’s most
popular folk singer, and a blind man), attend in his official
capacity, but he seized the opportunity to be the first-ever
high-ranking state official to address a local crowd in Nkoya —
mispronounced and apparently off the cuff, but in reality
touch-read from the braille notes hidden in the Minister’s
pocket. The previous night the state had declared a 100%
devaluation of the Zambian Kwacha, and villagers who later that
week went shopping at the district capital had to return to their
homesteads empty-handed since their money could no longer buy
even what little was available in the shops. But the state could
not have chosen a more effective way to impress the Nkoya with,
in Mr Tembo’s words, ‘how much we have to be thankful of.’
In October 1991 the Kaunda era came to an
end when UNIP lost the national election to the new MMD coalition
party, and Mr. F. Chiluba became state president (Baylies &
Szeftel 1992). The Nkoya of Kaoma district were divided. In his
last year of office, President Kaunda had successfully intervened
to protect Nkoya chieftaincies against the Litunga’s mounting
aspirations, and this is a major reason why UNIP is still a
remarkable presence in the area. However, especially among the
peasants there was and still is considerable support for MMD. The
new administration offered new national-level opportunities to
politicians from the area, including some who are full Nkoya, and
those who are not make a point of expressing themselves in Nkoya
and to further the cultural and traditional-political aspirations
as articulated by the Kazanga society. Gradually shedding
their underdog image, the Nkoya are becoming increasingly apt at
the situational manipulation of their ethnic identity at the
regional and national level, and begin to command considerable
political resources. At the regional level, ethnic antagonism now
occasionally gives way to a more comprehensive ideology of ethnic
solidarity between the groups of western and northwestern Zambia
— as against the ethnically dominant centre and especially
north (Bemba, Aushi), on which the Chiluba administration leans
heavily. Although it is still too early to make predictions, it
does look as if the upward movement of the Nkoya identity in the
1980s will continue under the new regime.
3.
The Kalanga of northeastern Botswana
Like the Nkoya
language, the western Shona dialect cluster known as Kalanga and
today extending from northwestern Zimbabwe all the way into the
North Central and North East districts of Botswana (where it
mainly exists in the form of the Lilima dialect) boasts a
considerable local presence. While much of the history of this
language and of the ethnic group who identifies by it remains to
be written,[12] it is a
well-established fact that Kalanga, already called by that name,
was the state language of the Changamire state which in the late
seventeenth century succeeded the Torwa state; the latter
produced the archaeological complex known as the Khami culture,
and was historically closely associated with the earlier
extensive state system centring on the famous site of Great
Zimbabwe.
When as an aspect of the Zulu expansion
the Changamire state was supplanted by the Ndebele state in the
early nineteenth century, Kalanga speakers lost their association
with dominant political power. The southern part of the Kalanga
area then found itself in the overlapping and competing spheres
of influence of the Ndebele state in the northeast and one
particular expanding Tswana polity, to be known as Ngwato, to the
south. While these powers were more or less in balance, the
relative no-man’s land on the Tati river became a major area
for White prospecting and mining, agricultural enterprise and
urban settlement: the Tati district, later known as the North
East district, focussing on the new town of Francistown. Land
alienation and in general the implantation of the capitalist mode
of production went on here on a scale equalled nowhere else in
the Bechuanaland Protectorate during the colonial period.
Attempts to annex the Protectorate as a whole for South Africa
failed as much as attempts to incorporate the Tati district into
the Southern Rhodesia of which it was so reminiscent. After
Botswana’s Independence (1966) the Botswana/Rhodesia boundary
from an administrative formality became rather more impenetrable,
and under UDI, during the Zimbabwe war of liberation, and during
its violent aftermath in southwestern Zimbabwe (when local
Kalanga suffered along with the Ndebele under the ZANU state’s
aggression) the experiences, and political and cultural concerns,
of Kalanga on either side of the border more and more diverged.
Yet massive emigration of war and post-war refugees, dispelled by
violence in Zimbabwe as much as attracted by the
post-Independence economic boom of hitherto tranquil and rustic
Botswana, kept the lines of contact open.
In at least one respect the Zimbabwean
Kalanga immigrants found an unpleasantly familiar situation in
Botswana: their ethnic and linguistic identity made them, along
with the original Botswana Kalanga, stand out as politically and
socially suspect in a country which for fear of appearing
disunited, emphatically proclaimed to be a monolithic Tswana
state — by the adoption of Tswana as its national language, by
its ruling party’s (BDP — Botswana Democratic Party) populist
imagery centring on the Ngwato royal family (whose one-time heir
apparent, Sir Seretse Khama, was to be BDP’s leader and the
country’s first president), and by its very name of Botswana,
i.e. ‘Tswanaland’. In Botswana, Kalanga is very much a
minority language, in which no formal education is offered, which
is not used in the media, practically not admissible for use in
courts of law except in outlying villages, and with hardly any
published material circulating in that language.
The Kalanga (comprising c. 120,000
speakers or 13% of the population (Picard 1987: 5) constitute the
largest non-Tswana-speaking group in the country, but by no means
the only one: e.g. in the north, northwest and west Mbukushu,
Yei, Koba, Ndebele, Subiya, Herero etc. defied ethnic and
linguistic classification as Tswana, and so did the Khoi-San
(called by their Tswana name ‘Sarwa’) scattered all over the
country. The Kgalagadi are a borderline case in that their
language is similar to standard Tswana but as a separate branch
of the Sotho-Tswana peoples they are not counted among the eight
constitutionally recognized Tswana groups,[13]
and they share with the Sarwa a history of serfdom and
humiliation at Tswana hands (Gadibolae 1985; Mautle 1986).
Under the Protectorate the Tswana had
formalized a model according to which the entire country’s
territory was neatly parcelled up among themselves, each
‘tribal’ area administered by a hereditary chief.
Consolidating the realities of Ngwato expansion in the second
half of the nineteenth century, the area where the Kalanga lived
(with the exception of most of the North East district, which had
become freehold land of the Tati Company) fell under the kgotla
(‘tribal’ headquarters, court) of the Ngwato chief (kgosi).
Kalanga traditional authorities were incorporated in the Ngwato
indigenous administration as mere village headmen (sing.:
kgosana, ‘little chief’). At Independence the Tswana
chiefs’ constitutional and juridical status was re-defined as
complementary to the modern central state and its democratic
institutions. A House of Chiefs was instituted as the apical
structure of tribal administrative and judicial organization, and
in terms of the Constitution (Republic of Botswana 1983) only
senior members of the Tswana tribal administrations qualify for
membership. Kalanga activists read into this section of the
Constitution a denial of groups and languages within the national
territory, other than the eight Tswana groups explicitly
mentioned by name.
In that part of southern Kalangaland which
lies in present-day Botswana, the influx of relatively small
offshoots of other Tswana groups (primarily the Khurutshe, since
the late eighteenth century, and the Rolong in the early
twentieth century)[14] and of non-Tswana
(especially Kalanga, Ndebele and Tonga) recent immigrants from
the north and east, had turned the ethnic and linguistic
situation of northeastern Botswana into a complicated mosaic. The
Kalanga ethnic identity and language, which had such a long local
history, had a considerable but not total attraction for these
immigrant groups: Khurutshe in the village of Ramokgwebane, and
Rolong in the nearby Moroka, soon adopted Kalanga identity,
whereas the offshoots of the same groups in Makaleng, Tonota,
Matseloje and Borolong retained their original ethnic identity
and their Tswana tongue (Schapera 1952; van Waarden 1988;
Malikongwa & Ford 1979). The Khurutshe kgosana of
Makaleng came to represent the local population, including the
Kalanga, in the Ngwato indigenous administration and in the House
of Chiefs. This means that the Kalanga were and are not
represented, in their own right, in the far from nominal
traditional political structures of the country (cf. Gillett
1973; Silitshena 1979).
Especially in the second quarter of the
twentieth century, under the rule of the regent Tshekedi Khama
(Seretse Khama’s paternal uncle) Ngwato overlordship in
northeastern Botswana was resented and often challenged,
especially over church matters (Benson 1960; Chirenje 1977; Wylie
1991). Not unusual in Protectorate Botswana, the Ngwato
administration did not permit any Christian diversification and
upheld the monopoly of, in this case, the London Missionary
Society. African Independent churches, therefore, which were
already flourishing in South Africa where thousands of Botswana
labour migrants became acquainted with them, in this part of
Protectorate Botswana inevitably acquired overtones of ethnic and
tribal defiance of Ngwato dominance. The Tati concession, however
miserable in other respects, offered a White-controlled sanctuary
from Ngwato rule, and it is here that Christian Independency
first flourished in the country. In the historical consciousness
of contemporary Kalanga in Botswana much is made of the
high-handed way in which a particular immigrant Kalanga group
around John Nswazwi, defying Ngwato overlordship both in
religious and in tributary matters, was beaten into submission by
Tshekedi’s regiment in 1947.[15]
The Kalanga’s reliance on agriculture
rather than animal husbandry made their children more easily
available for such schooling than, for instance, the Tswana,
whose school attendance had to be balanced against the need to
herd cattle. In the Protectorate period, ideas and people moved
freely between Bechuanaland and Rhodesia, and while educational
services (or any other services to be provided by the colonial
state and the indigenous administrations it upheld) were kept at
a minimum in the Protectorate, Christian missions in nearby
Rhodesia were flourishing, translated the Bible into Kalanga, and
offered a great many Kalanga both the formal education and the
ideological outlook on the basis of which to advance in colonial
society, while increasingly challenging the premises of
inequality on which that society was based (Bhebe 1973). The
great Zimbabwean politician Joshua Nkomo, for instance, is very
much a product of this situation (Nkomo 1985). But so are others
(e.g. Mssrs K. Maripe, T. Mongwa, P. Matante, D. Kwele) who
later, as commercial entrepreneurs, Kalanga ethnic activists and
national-level politicians, were to play a prominent role in the
modernizing and highly proletarianized situation of Botswana’s
northeast, with its rapidly growing town of Francistown. After
Christian Independency, Francistown became the cradle of the
first major independence party, the Botswana People’s Party,
which from the start was highly critical of Tswana ethnic,
administrative and linguistic hegemony (cf. Nengwekhulu 1979;
Murray et al. 1987).
It testifies to the complexity and
situationality of ethnic identity, that most of these leaders
could also, and did, adopt other, non-Kalanga, idioms of
mobilization. Nkomo could identify as Ndebele as much as as
Kalanga, and it is in the latter identity that he gained
world-wide renown. Maripe completed a doctorate in industrial
relations in Belgium and, long before gaining local prominence as
a Kalanga novelist and as BPP president stood out as a trade
unionist active not in Botswana but in the Federation of Rhodesia
and Nyasaland (Meebelo 1986: passim); in other words he
could have identified, and probably did at one time, as
Zimbabwean and even Zambian. Mongwa is Pedi as much as he is
Kalanga. Matante was prompted to form the BPP on the inspiration
of his membership of the South African African National Congress
(ANC), as was moreover active as the leader of an independent
African church in Botswana; so we might have heard from him as a
South African black politician or as a minister of religion. All
this reminds us of the fact that appeal to an ethnic idiom in the
context of formal, national-level politics is not the expression
of the primordial attachments ingrained through socialization in
early childhood — as first-generation studies of ethnicity in
Africa and the Third World in general tended to stress (cf.
Geertz 1963) — but is often a deliberate and strategic choice
of a particular political instrument, identity and career from
among alternatives.
After Independence, Botswana rather
unexpectedly saw an economic boom, largely based on the diamond
industry (in which South African capital and expertise was wisely
matched with Botswana state control) and the beef export
industry, against the background of open economic relations with
South Africa which were guaranteed by a Customs Union putting
Botswana (along with Swaziland and Lesotho) in an awkward but
economically favourable position among the Southern African
front-line states. The BDP government, which gained power
democratically in the drive for Independence and retained it ever
since, therefore had plenty to offer to the Botswana state elite
and to the population at large, and prudently but consistently
delivered enough to ensure stability, economic progress and
popular support. In the process, the multi-party system was
nominally encouraged and gained the country international esteem
and donor support. In reality however, with every national
election which was held at the constitutionally stipulated times,
the impotent opposition parties — including the BPP and the BNF
(Botswana National Front) increasingly became an ornamental
fringe to a de facto one-party, populist and rather
authoritarian political regime (cf. Picard 1987; Holm &
Molutsi 1989). Repeatedly, when the outcome of democratic
elections had led to opposition majority at the district and
town-council level, the dilution of representative bodies by
state-appointed BDP representatives, and the persuasion of
elected opposition representatives to cross the board to BDP
while retaining their seats, proved standard tactics to retain or
regain BDP control.
This situation was not entirely unlike
Ngwato/Kalanga relations in the nineteenth century and under the
Protectorate: occasional and dramatic Kalanga challenge of Ngwato
hegemony did not preclude that the ordinary, and widely accepted,
situation was one of peaceful accommodation, where the Kalanga,
as ‘Northerners’, had their assigned place in the Ngwato
polity, not only in distant homogeneous Kalanga villages at a
distance from the Ngwato capital, but also in the Ngwato
heart-land, even in specifically Kalanga wards at the capital
(Schapera 1952, 1984, 1988). A remarkable contradiction can be
observed on this point. Challenge of Tswana hegemony and explicit
proclamation of Kalanga identity were retained and became more
and more bitter as standard expressions of political opposition
to the BDP. That political opposition in the struggle over state
control had to be phrased in an ethnic and linguistic idiom was
also due to the fact that such religious and class oppositions as
had unmistakably arisen, at the level of people’s consciousness
were still not sufficiently articulate to serve as basis for mass
mobilization. In independent Botswana, a class idiom is mainly
propagated by the BNF, in intellectualist Marxist terms which
fail to attract mass support. Of course, the unsettled nature of
class contradiction as a basis for mass mobilization has, until
quite recently, been a general theme in post-independence
politics throughout Africa.
In fact, however, the Kalanga’s relative
educational and entrepreneurial success had led to a situation
where a disproportionately large percentage of BDP politicians at
all levels (including Cabinet Ministers and MPs) happened to be
Kalanga, who as a condition of political eligibility and
respectability played down their Kalanga identity and allowed
Tswana ethnic and linguistic hegemony in the country to go
unchallenged.
Thus the very people who, being affluent
and relatively well-educated, might have been involved in the
production and consumption of Kalanga symbolic culture (in the
form of literature, drama and ethno-history) inside Botswana,
tended to have vested interests not to do so. Maripe’s Kalanga
novels are nowhere to be bought in Botswana. Copies of the 1929
Bible translation in Kalanga for years could be seen to rot on
the shelves of the Francistown Bookshop along one of the town’s
main shopping streets. The collecting of Kalanga oral-historical
traditions, folklore and proverbs was largely left to foreign
researchers and had no market inside Botswana. It is commonly
believed that it would even be a legal offence to publish books
in Botswana in any language other than English and Tswana; not
being a jurist, I have however no information on jurisprudence
actually limiting down, in this specific sense, the section of
the Constitution dealing with the freedom of expression. And the
insights which modern scholarship, mainly on the basis of
Zimbabwean material, gained in the splendour and historical
depths of Kalanga history, highlighting its intimate link with
the glorious Zimbabwe state and the widespread Mwali cult which
is among Southern Africa’s major religious expressions,[16] so far never managed to be fed back into the
publicly articulated ethnic consciousness of the Botswana
Kalanga. There is an amazing contrast between the objective
riches of Kalanga history, and the poverty of the Botswana
Kalanga collective historical consciousness which seldom reaches
beyond the Nswazwi episode, never taps the sources of ethnic
pride history has so abundantly to offer, and even reproduces the
erroneous Tswana view[17] that the Kalanga in
Botswana are mere recent immigrants enjoying, but dishonouring,
Ngwato hospitality! Such inspiration as could have been derived
from ethnic identification with the Zimbabwean Kalanga across the
border[18] seems scarcely to have
been tapped after Independence. While along personal kin networks
assistance was offered to Kalanga victims of the Zimbabwean war
of liberation and its atrocious aftermath (mainly in the form of
accommodating illegal immigrants into Botswana), at the public
and national level the border communities went out of their way
to dissociate themselves from such violence as spilled across the
border, stressing — not always spontaneously — that their
first allegiance was to the Botswana state and not to an
international Kalanga ethnic identity.
The increasing entrenchment of Botswana
Kalanga within the national territory of Botswana was one of the
resons that prompted, in the mid-1980s, the Kalanga Bible
Translation Project, headed by White Lutheran missionaries
recruited from Germany and the USA, and with strong
organizational backing from the Lutheran mission in South Africa.
Justifications of the project included the incomplete nature and
linguistic defectiveness of the existing translation from 1929,
whose orthography, moreover, was judged inadequate. Draft
translations are undertaken in the Project Office variously based
in the town of Francistown (1987-88), the village of Zwenshambe
(1988-89), and Francistown again (1989-). The actual translation
work is mainly in the hands of Kalanga native speakers of
post-secundary education, with advisory committees throughout the
Botswana Kalanga area. Attempts to expand the project into a
revitalisation of Kalanga language and culture in general have so
far not taken wing, and the project has been severely hampered by
conflicts over external, White control, over conditions of
service, and over the conflicting national cultures and
management style of the various missionaries involved. So far the
project’s main achievement has been the development of a new
standardized Lilima orthography in consultation with Botswana
native speakers.
In the course of the 1980s Kalanga ethnic
and linguistic identity developed into a major issue, but more so
within the Kalanga community than between Kalanga and Tswana.
Students at the University of Botswana founded the Society for
the Propagation of the Ikalanga Language (SPIL), with
amazingly little government opposition: the required registration
with the Registrar of Societies was almost a matter of routine,
even though this was to be the only overtly ethnic association in
the country and one obviously not propounding Tswana hegemony.[19] On various occasions SPIL branches and
individual members (never the entire association as such)
challenged the Kalanga members of the government to speak out in
favour of the teaching of other African languages than Tswana,
and to identify publicly as Kalanga instead of submitting to
Tswana hegemony. This led to major outcries, in which the
official position with regard to the exclusive use of Tswana for
the sake of national unity and efficiency was repeatedly
expounded and defended, and local BDP politicians clamoured —
in vain, so far — for the prohibition of SPIL.
However, so far the SPIL initiative has
failed to engender massive ethnic support. It has remained a
pastime of middle-class people whose command of Tswana usually
equals that of Kalanga, and whose children often have been raised
to have Tswana or English as their first language. With the
exception of the few and far between issues of the mimeographed
journal Tjedza [Light], the society can boast
little literary or cultural production. Its annual meetings are
enlivened by performances of dance troupes but expert and
exciting as their repertoire is, their very presence brings out
the dilemmas of ethnic mobilization along Kalanga lines in
Botswana: traditional dancing is part of the general primary and
secondary school curriculum throughout the country, the movements
and songs hardly stand out as specifically Kalanga, and to the
extent to which elements are borrowed from territorial and
possession cults these, too, combine Kalanga references with
Ndebele, Venda and even Tswana ones.
My reading of SPIL is that it primarily
reflects a struggle, within the Kalanga middle-class community,
between those whose acceptance of Tswana hegemony has paid off in
terms of political and economic power — in other words has made
them share in state power —, and those (typically younger,
perhaps slightly better educated and perhaps with slightly
stronger roots in their rural home communities and the latter’s
traditional leadership) whose access to political and economic
power so far has been frustrated and who through insistence on a
Kalanga ethnic idiom seek to either capture their own share of
state power, or at least to discredit the state, proving it to be
less universalist, and more ethnically particularistic, than its
constitutional pronouncements would suggest. But these
ideological expressions mobilise less support in a context where de
facto numerous individual Kalanga have had more than their
fair share in the capturing of the Botswana state — even if
they could not publicly claim to have done so under the ethnic
label of Kalanga.
SPIL emphatically declares itself to be a
non-political society. Churches find themselves in a similar
position, and it is noteworthy that — even though my Botswana
research has come to concentrate on the religious domain — I
have no evidence of linguistic and ethnic antagonism playing a
dominant role in churches and non-Christian cults in northeastern
Botswana today. Multiple and situational ethnic and linguistic
identity, code switching, mixture of songs and texts from
Kalanga, Ndebele, Tswana (and even Shona and English) in the
course of one religious event, and the accommodation of potential
ethnic opposition within an encompassing idiom of religious
transcendence of disunity, — these are the catchwords to
describe the local religious situation.
Having concentrated on urban research, I
do not really know to what extent this pattern in the religious
domain reflects any relative absence of group conflict along
ethnic lines in other spheres of life in the rural
communities of northeastern Botswana today. My impression — not
supported by extensive field-work — is that there ethnic and
linguistic diversity, particularly the Kalanga/Khurutshe
distinction of long local standing, has no negative impact on
social relations; bilingualism, intermarriage, patterns of
residence, and the frequent passing of Khurutshe (of the Mpofu
totem) as Kalanga, support this view. However, my extensive
participant observation in the urban setting of
Francistown shows the religious situation there, as described
above, to be a remarkable departure from the ubiquitous, petty
confrontations on language and ethnic issues, in relationships
between neighbours and between friends, on the work floor, in
access to the informal sector of the economy, in amorous matters,
in drinking and nightlife, in the conceptualization of social
relationships in terms of sorcery. These frictions are clearly
reflected in the cases tried at the urban customary courts. As an
urban society Francistown is saturated not only with
African/White but also with Tswana/Kalanga conflict, where ethnic
stereotypes and the failure or refusal to learn and understand
each other’s language often adds an awkward dimension to casual
interaction between strangers.
In the face of this conspicuousness of
inter-ethnic conflict in everyday urban life, it is remarkable
that the political effectiveness of Kalanga ethnic mobilization
has remained so slight. While closely linked to the Kalanga cause
and always vocal on minority language rights (National Executive
Council 1984, 1988; Maripe 1987), the BPP’s nationwide
aspirations have prevented this party from identifying too
narrowly as a one-‘tribe’ affair. Daniel Kwele’s Botswana
Progressive Union (BPU) was specifically founded in 19... when
his being Kalanga prevented him from assuming the national
leadership of the BNF (which has a strong regional backing in the
south of Botswana), and among Botswana politicians today his
pronouncements were the most militant and unashamedly pro-Kalanga
— until his death in 1990. Never really successful, the
performance of BPP and BPU in the 1989 national elections was
extremely disappointing. There is little to suggest the imminent
failure of the BDP strategy of Tswana hegemony, populism, and
co-optation of potential opposition, as long as the state elite
remains in a position to ‘deliver’. The country’s language
policy is likely to remain as it is. In the long term, however,
the diminishing diamond resources, the impact of continued
drought on the problematic Botswana agriculture, the
paradoxically negative effects for the Botswana economy of the
dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, increasing rates of
inflation and unemployment, the increasing public arrogance of
the Botswana military, and the wave of democratic change and
popular participation in many other (far less liberal) African
countries since 1990, may bring Botswana to a critical point
where language and ethnicity may yet be turned into effective
political capital (Bernard 1989).
4.
Discussion
When comparing the
trajectory of Nkoya with that of Kalanga as minority languages,
underneath the many superficial correspondences considerable
differences can be detected.
First the correspondences. Due to the mfecane
upheaval which has affected the entire Southern African
subcontinent in the nineteenth century, in two regions a Bantu
language of considerable local antiquity and both structural and
lexical continuity with adjacent languages,[20]
is confronted by a Sotho language (of a very different group of
Bantu languages, and unintelligible for speakers of Kalanga and
Nkoya) originating from the south and carried by a group of such
power that it relegates the other local language to minority
status;[21] in the colonial and
post-colonial period this minority status is formalized in a
national language policy and implies exclusion of the language
involved from the state’s political and administrative
practice; the dynamics of state formation and hegemony, and the
introduction of Christianity as a literate world religion, then
engender an ethnic consciousness largely focussing on language;
the recent political and economic history of the people who carry
the minority language casts light on the extent, direction,
degree of organization, degree of cultural and ethno-historical
elaboration, and success, of the language-centred ethnic
strategies of each group.
At this level of generality a similar
story could be told for scores if not hundreds of languages and
ethnicities in the modern world. Only on closer scrutiny,
systematic differences between the Nkoya and the Kalanga
trajectory are highlighted, which suggest crucial underlying
variables.
difference
in scale
Difference in scale
is very manifest: the 30,000 Nkoya-speakers constitute less than
1% of the Zambian national population, while the 120,000
Kalanga-speakers constitute 13% of the Botswana population. That
the Kalanga national percentage is almost twenty times higher
than the Nkoya one cannot be ignored if we want to understand the
difference between Kalanga and Nkoya in terms of access to the
modern state and economy, education, and privileged class
positions. The absolute numbers also point to a marked difference
in size in terms as a potential market for missionary efforts,
book production and marketing, creative talents to be mobilized
in literary production, although it can hardly be said that the
Botswana Kalanga have done better than the Nkoya in these
respects.
the
definition and historical restructuring of the national political
space
One important
aspect relates to the number of hierarchical
politico-administrative levels between minority speakers on the
ground and the nation-state, and the historical changes this
set-up has undergone in recent constitutional history — in
other words the definition and historical restructuring of the
national political space.[22] Nkoya-speakers in the
course of the last two centuries have had to accommodate to two
states relegating their language to minority status: first the
Kololo/Luyana state, which constituted the highest level of
political organization until 1900 (while much of this situation
was retained by the Barotse indigenous administration under
colonial rule), and whose majority language (in terms not of
number s but of power relations) was that of the Lozi elite; and
subsequently the colonial and post-colonial state, whose majority
language was and has remained English. The Lozi did not manage to
perpetuate their Protectorate in the form of a seceded
post-colonial state of Barotseland — an option seriously
contemplated by many at the time (cf. Mulford 1967; Caplan 1970),
and still lurking around the corner today — but had to accept
integration in the Zambian state on terms which were increasingly
similar to those applying to other regions in the Zambian
territory. This meant that the Lozi, after having increased their
ethnic and political domination over the Nkoya during most of the
colonial period, yet failed to capture the wider post-colonial
state; their own Lozi language was relegated, in political and
administrative status, from the supreme level as state language
to an intermediate level as one of the seven state-recognized
regional languages under the hegemony of the official national
language, English. It is the decline of Lozi power at the
national level that offered the Nkoya, after 1964, room to
enhance their linguistic status, their chieftaincies, engage in
ethnic organization and cultural and ethno-historical
revitalisation, and start, as an ethnic group, on a centripetal
movement towards the nation-state and its development
initiatives.
From the point of view of the
re-definition of the national political space, the Botswana
Kalanga trajectory has been fundamentally different: if Tswana
domination in southwest Kalangaland (i.e. northeast Botswana) in
the nineteenth century and under colonial Protectorate conditions
was rather similar to Lozi domination in Nkoyaland in the same
period, the subsequent difference between the Nkoya and Kalanga
linguistic and ethnic trajectories owes much to the fact that (as
a result of international political en economic relations
prevailing in the subcontinent since the late nineteenth century,
but also because of the undeniable presence of a Tswana language
majority over a huge part of what today is Botswana and the
Republic of South Africa) no intermediate level emerged: the
Tswana did capture the post-colonial state of Botswana, managed
to impose their language as the national language for use in its
state institutions along with English, retained their hold on the
state throughout the post-colonial period by a dextrous
utilization of democratic institutions and international esteem,
and thus ended up in a position incomparably more powerful than
that of the Lozi in Zambia today.
Tswana as a
national and as a regional language
There is a clear
contradiction between
(a) Tswana as a
national, state-backed language on the one hand, and
(b) Tswana as just
another regional language, at the sub-national level of
northeastern Botswana, spoken by Khurutshe locals and southern
urban immigrants, on the other.
This contradiction explains some of the
inconsistencies in the patterns of ethnic animosity (in everyday
urban life), ethnic accommodation (in everyday rural life, if my
reading of the scanty evidence at my disposal can be supported),
transcendence of ethnic opposition (in the religious domain),
antagonism over language in the formal political domain of party
politics, and the failure of mass mobilization over minority
language issues and Kalanga ethnicity in general. Tswana national
political hegemony empowers speakers in certain state-defined
situations in northeastern Botswana: BDP politicians addressing a
political rally, judges in the urban customary court, civil
servants in offices, school teachers, broadcasters; but (because
of the effectively constitutional functioning of the Botswana
state, which makes it difficult to openly mobilize state power
for petty particularistic interests of a personal nature) such
empowering is far less relevant in the day-to-day contacts
between urban neighbours who are ethnic strangers, and between
rural fellow-villagers who know that despite their different
tongues they have shared a local history for a century or more.
We must resist the temptation to consider ethnic phenomena in the
national political domain and those in the local domain as
necessarily converging to the same category of ethnicity.
traditional
rulers
Traditional rulers
have played a very different role in the ethnic and linguistic
trajectories of the Nkoya and the Kalanga. No matter how much,
and for whatever good reasons, the Nkoya turned the Lozi into
their main perceived ethnic enemies, the fact remains that some
Nkoya royal chieftainships survived the incorporation process,
and not with the status of mere village headmanships (as among
the Kalanga), but as senior members of the Lozi indigenous
administration, sharing (albeit to a lesser extent than their
Lozi counterparts, and at the cost of considerable contestation)
in the financial proceeds of the 1900 Barotse Treaty and the 1964
Barotse Agreement. They have largely retained their regalia,
royal enclosure, palace, subsidized orchestra, paid councillors
throughout the colonial period and until today.[23]
The creation of the Naliele Lozi court in the 1930s as a tangible
expression of Lozi internal colonization was greatly resented,
but it provided an administrative continuity when its Mankoya
Native Authority became Kaoma Rural Council, with the chiefs (or
their Prime Ministers) as appointed members — a situation again
persisting today. Thus the chiefs could continue to function as
foci of cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and historical identity,
and at the same time act (in collusion with their junior
relatives: Nkoya modern politicians such as Kalaluka) as
political brokers bringing together their people and the state.
Among the Botswana Kalanga Tswana domination effectively and
early rooted up everything of this nature, so local ethnic
consciousness remained without a traditional political focus,
which might also have served as a tangible connexion with the
splendid political history of the Kalanga over the past 500 years
or more.
An important lesson is to be learned here
in terms of the appreciation, from a point of view of national
integration and development, of the potential role of ethnicity
and of traditional leaders as foci of ethnic consciousness. One
cannot blindly generalize that all sub-national identity is
divisive and leads to centrifugal tendencies away from the state
— as has often been maintained both by African politicians and
by political scientists. Under specific circumstances, which
empirical sociological and historical research has to identify,
the road to increased participation in the state and its
development efforts leads via ethnicity and traditional leaders
— as in the case of the Nkoya. One can only speculate how
different Botswana Kalanga ethnicity would have been today if
Ngwato hegemony had not eclipsed Kalanga traditional leadership,
or if the latter had been restored when the opportunity to do so
arose at Independence. My guess would be that in that case
Kalanga ethnicity in Botswana might be more vocal and vital today
and less of a backroom middle-class pastime, that the status of
the Kalanga language would have been higher so that a Kalanga
elite could be more loyal to it, and that the Kalanga identity
and the Kalanga language would have developed into respectable
sub-national expressions with their own recognizably loyal place
in the Botswana nation-state, vehicles for qualified integration
rather than (as seen today by the Tswana) for centrifugal
disruption. It is for profound reasons that the position of
Kalanga traditional rulers in Botswana today is analogous to the
position of the Kalanga language today: powerless, peripheral,
without organic place at the national scene. And just as the
1980s have rediscovered the importance of traditional rulers for
an understanding of the contemporary African state and its
defects, it is likely that the near future will see the same for
minority languages.[24]
the state
has a discourse not only on language, but also in language
Given the
three-tiered complexity of the Nkoya ethnic situation (local
level/Barotseland/national level) Nkoya ethnicity could grow to
become centripetal vis-a-vis the state; given the two-tiered
make-up of the Kalanga situation (local level/national level),
the Tswana having captured the state could only mean that any
Kalanga ethnicity opposing the Tswana, would have to be
centrifugal vis-a-vis the state. This is an important reason why
language policy in Botswana is inflexible to an extent it did not
prove to be in Zambia. Speaking Nkoya does not in the least
directly threaten the constitutional premises of the Zambian
state, but refusing to speak Tswana can very well be interpreted
as a subversive act. Of course, there is plenty of room for
semantic mystification here: it is only by sleight of hand that
BDP politicians manage to convince their audiences that
(a) whoever is
constitutionally a Motswana[25]
(which includes all Botswana Kalanga except the most recent
immigrants), is
(b) linguistically
and ethnically a Motswana (which leaves out thirty percent of the
citizens of Botswana), and therefore
(c) would not wish
to speak any other language than Tswana!
Here we are
confronted with the highly significant fact, often overlooked in
discussions of language policy and ethnicity, that the state has
a discourse not only on language, but also in language — so
that the premises of elite power are subjectively implied in the
very social constructs that, in terms of language policy, are
being negotiated under the pretence of disinterested objectivity.
Language policy in Botswana may be formally enacted in English
documents, but it is largely prepared, thought out, discussed in
Tswana.
It is probably due more to naivety than to
cunning that semantically twisted syllogisms of the above kind
are propounded time and again in the national political discourse
in Botswana: the identification of the Botswana state with Tswana
ethnicity and the Tswana language is generally perceived by the
actors as an social reality, and whoever challenges that reality
threatens to destroy all the undeniable blessings which make
Botswana stand out as a stable and affluent country in a lost
continent (cf. Good 1992). Whoever is loyal to these underlying
premises, and shows such loyalty by submitting to Tswana hegemony
in public behaviour, is apparently welcome to use whatever
language in the privacy of his home. Of course, sophisticated
Kalanga activist (like Dr Maripe, or the lawyer Mosojane, member
of a Kalanga royal family, BPP presidential candidate in the 1984
national elections, BPP national secretary, SPIL member, and
daily confronting the Botswana state on behalf of his clients, in
court, in correspondence with the Registrar of Societies, etc.)
have on numerous occasions pointed out the constitutional flaws
in this widespread political reasoning (cf. Maripe 1987; National
Executive Council 1984, 1988), but to no avail. The fact that
most of their fellow-Kalanga in the same educational and income
bracket have chosen to submit to Tswana hegemony, is a major
reason why the non-Kalanga state elite can afford to ignore the
principled constitutional argument and perpetuate the existing
language policy.
one country
or two
Speaking of the
national political space, we also realize that the difference in
the Nkoya and Kalanga trajectory has to do with the concrete
geographical location of their speakers’ homelands on the map.
For the purpose of the present argument we have slightly
simplified the Nkoya situation so as to assume that all Nkoya
speakers fall within the Lozi territory — ignoring, that is the
less prominent royal chieftainchies of Mwene Momba and Mwene
Kabulwebulwe outside Zambia’s Western Province; it requires no
simplification however to maintain that the entire Nkoya-speaking
rural population is found in the heart-land of western Zambia.
People speaking languages close to Nkoya are found in southern
Zaire and in eastern Angola (Mbwela, Ganguela), but present-day
Nkoya speakers, even their ethno-historical specialists, are
virtually unaware of these connexions, and — as I have argued
in detail elsewhere (van Binsbergen 1992a) — they certainly do
not inform their ethnic consciousness. Kalanga, by contrast, is
spoken in western and southern Zimbabwe as well as in the
adjacent northeastern Botswana. Without going into a discussion
of Zimbabwe Kalanga ethnic and linguistic accommodation to the
other Shona languages of that country, to Ndebele expansion since
the nineteenth century, to Tonga and other trans-Zambesian
languages, it is clear that the trajectory of Kalanga
ethnicisation, since the creation of the Bechuanaland
Protectorate and especially after Independence in 1966, must be
seen in the light of their incorporation into an entirely
different national political space. Botswana Kalanga define
themselves not so much — through inclusion — by reference to
Zimbabwean Kalanga (with whom they continue to entertain kinship,
marital and ritual ties), but — through opposition — to
Botswana Tswana, particularly the Ngwato. This must be part of
the explanation why cultural and linguistic production among the
Zimbabwe Kalanga hardly seems to filter across the border; why
the exciting insights of Zimbabwe history (but relating to a time
when the Botswana/Zimbabwe border did not exist, and much of the
Kalanga-centred state system lay in northeastern Botswana) fail
to be incorporated in Botswana Kalanga consciousness. There is an
additional reason on the Zimbabwe side: although Kalanga is a
western variant of Shona, and the latter is the majority language
(numerically and politically) of Zimbabwe, the Kalanga
language’s status in Zimbabwe (and hence its organization and
resources) is weak and problematic since it is identified, by the
political centre, with anti-ZANU tendencies in the (largely
Ndebele) southwest of the country. The Botswana/Zimbabwe border
has increasingly hardened into a real boundary, even to the
extent of the expansion and growth to considerable local autonomy
of Botswana branches of the Mwali cult, which continues to have
its centre in the Matopos hills southeast of Bulawayo; the
influence of this cult on trans-border linguistic continuity may
be limited since its personnel is multi-ethnic and its archaic
ritual language is not today’s Kalanga.
The Botswana Kalanga mainly speak the Lilima dialect, which is
the standard for SPIL and for the Kalanga Bible Translation
Project of the Lutheran church in Botswana. The insistence on a
new Lilima orthography which (however arbitrary as all
orthography) is emphatically different from the Zimbabwe
convention, and the enormous investment in the translation of the
Bible into this dialect following this new orthography (even when
the New Testament is largely available in a 1929 translation;
Ndebo 1985), must be understood as an attempt at manifest
localization or Botswana-ization: to claim and define a place for
Botswana Kalanga within the national political space of Botswana,
with as little reference as possible to a Zimbabwe which, in
Botswana eyes, is poor, conflict-ridden, criminal, violent,
non-Tswana, in short subject to negative stereotypes. There is a
strong element of artificiality and uprootedness in this
accommodation to the Botswana political space, and one cannot
really be surprised if the exercise has not, so far, led to the
general cultural revitalization the White expatriate Lutheran
missionaries had expected, Instead the Kalanga Bible Translation
Project (with close links with SPIL in terms of personnel) is
ridden with conflict over White control and African initiative;
as if the opportunity to put one’s ‘own’ language on the
Christian and publishing map, condescendingly offered by the
missionaries at great expense and effort, is not sufficiently
redeeming in its own right.
the
objectification of language
Bible translation,
among the Nkoya and the Botswana Kalanga, is an example of the
convergence between ideological expansion of a world religion,
and the linguistic and ethnic processes at the local level. The
Nkoya case shows the potential, the Kalanga case the limitations
of this convergence. What happens to a language when it is
committed to writing, pummelled into the desired orthographic
shape, scrutinized for its potential to lexically and
syntactically convey the alien images of an imported world
religion with its alien theological classifications and nuances?
Above we have seen how this Christian/ethnic convergence in the
language process can be illuminated by the idea of a national
political space, in which the language is to claim and fill a
specific niche given prevailing political and language-policy
conditions. However, the same phenomenon could also (cf. Fardon
& Furniss 1991) be described as reification or
objectification — at the hands of academic linguists,
missionary linguists, administrators and educationalists but also
and primarily at the hands of native speakers themselves (cf.
Fabian 1986).
In the process, a language is named,
standardized, variants become perceived as dialects and subsumed
under the general chosen name (a form of hegemony in itself, but
one we cannot go into here), and the lexicon has to be deprived
of some of its capacity to endlessly incorporate new matter from
adjacent language communities: for language defines itself by
opposition to other languages at the local scene, so some
linguistic forms will have to become marked as one’s own and
other as alien. More than any other part of institutionalized
culture, language is encoded in formal rules whose infringement
almost immediately causes puzzlement, ridicule, rejection or a
breakdown of communication among listeners and readers. This
capability of encoding and displaying identity or alienness in
social interaction, incidentally, must be one of the reasons why,
among all possible culturally produced materials, it is primarily
language on which ethnicity feeds and thrives. Lexical and
syntactic purism is one of the hallmarks of ethnicity. For
example, when I edited the Likota lya Bankoya manuscript
in consultation with a few readers’ committees of native
speakers of the Nkoya language, the latter insisted that Rev.
Shimunika’s Nkoya text be cleansed of all anglicisms and
Lozi-isms, even if these were totally accepted in the
contemporary spoken Nkoya, and the ‘purer’ alternatives were
felt to be awkward, obsolete or not generally understood.
It is impossible to assign a definite
starting date to the process of linguistic objectification, even
with reference to a specific language and access to historical
linguistic data. It is difficult to see how any language could
maintain such minimum stability and persistence over time without
which it would not deserve the term language, if objectification
did not already exist in some inchoate form. One thing can be
said in this connexion however: the model of the nation-state, in
which a unique language coincides with state power, is alien to
most pre-colonial African contexts. Eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century states in central western Zambia outside the
Zambezi flood plain were multi-lingual and multi-ethnic;
political power was not linguistically or ethnically marked to
the extent it was to be in the Lozi state; and there are
indications that, as a result, language boundaries were more
fluid — as if the objectification process was still in an early
stage. Certainly the objectification process is very much
intensified in a context of political and economic incorporation
— the very cradle also of ethnicity.
When selected elements of collective
symbolic production (e.g. a language; a cult; a vision of the
past) are drawn into the orbit of a group’s identity formation
in inter-ethnic relations, these elements tend to be objectified
to the extent of fossilization. For the social analyst like
myself, who is not a linguist, there is even the risk of
overlooking the dynamics of language and treating it as if it
were an independent variable in the ethnicisation process, rather
than being shaped itself in that very process. Both Nkoya and
Kalanga are relatively ancient linguistic presences in the region
where they are found today. A discussion of the historical
linguistics of these languages is beyond my competence, but it is
important to realize that we have identified at least two
contexts in which objectification is particularly manifest: when
which the language becomes a focus of an emerging ethnic
identity, and when language is committed to writing for the first
time, often in a context of the dissemination of a world
religion.
identity,
commodity and proletarianisation in the context of language
In the
objectification process the named, standardized and purified
language becomes imbued with an emotive relevance, a
socially constructed sense of identity and of opposition
vis-a-vis other, rival expressions at the local and regional
scene. It is for this reason that I cannot entirely go along with
David Parkin’s (1991) otherwise illuminating idea of
approaching language objectification in Africa (specifically on
the Swahili coast) as a form of commoditification: as if
the language becomes a commodity which is cut and dried, strictly
demarcated and regulated like an industrial product, freely
exchangeable — and disposable — in a market of money, power
and prestige.
The ethnicisation process, viewed here as
the ideological and organizational response to incorporation in a
national political space, inevitably implies alienation: identity
only has to be constructed when it has become problematic, in the
face of the intrusion of an otherness so massive and powerful
that it can no longer be incapsulated by means of the usual
mechanisms through which the local society accommodates
newly-born members, in-marrying spouses, strayed travellers and
other isolated individuals. In the modern world, such alienation
often springs from material disowning, in the process of the
imposition of alien political power (e.g. the colonial state) and
the world-wide penetration of the capitalist mode of production.
In the process people lose (give up, often) much of what they
then subsequently realize was once their own: a supportive
kinship system, expressive art forms, a symbolically powerful and
meaningful cosmological order. This is the familiar context for a
discussion of commoditification (cf. van Binsbergen 1992b).
Perhaps in the final analysis, the
Botswana Kalanga’s underplaying of language, the submission to
Tswana linguistic hegemony and the lack of success of Kalanga
ethnic mobilisation along language lines, could be explained in
terms of the Kalanga language (in the highly proletarianised
situation of northeastern Botswana) having become a commodity,
easily exchanged for another (Tswana) whose higher market value
is undeniable. In such a context one makes a fool of oneself if
one were to publicly cherish a despised minority language as a
vehicle for literary expression, or evoke the splendour of a
medieval state which has long since disappeared and which cannot
be linked in other than negative terms to the present dominant
group (the Tswana) in the local nation-state.
Perhaps it is also as a result of
proletarianisation that Kalanga ethnicity primarily expresses
itself in the political domain rather than in the cultural,
literary, religious or ethno-historical domain. One of the most
disconcerting aspects of symbolic life in Botswana today is that
local historic (i.e. African) culture is largely absent from
public life; it is only allowed to enter public discourse in the
very form (fossilized, commoditified) which Parkin stresses for
language in the contemporary context. In order to be acceptable
for public consumption (I use this word purposely) historical
elements of African rural culture (e.g. the traditional judicial
process in the kgotla or village court, which features in
official discussions of the very different modern customary
courts)[26] have to be selected,
taken out of context, deprived of their meaning, reduced to
textbook truisms, and then added as harmless ornaments (as duly
processed packages of ‘identity’) to a consumerist life-style
whose principle reference group is the urban middle class of
nearby South Africa, known in detail through the media and
personal exposure. The prominence of this pattern among the
Botswana population especially in the urban areas is striking,
even if we realize that the difference with other African
societies is only gradual. The pattern’s contradictions are
particularly manifest in the racially-conscious environment of
Francistown (cf. van Binsbergen, in press (a)). The problem is
not that historical African cultural forms — referring to a
past rural order and its contemporary partial survival, real or
imaginary — are not there and do not decisively inform
people’s ideas and actions, but that they are largely
censored out of public reference: they have gone underground,
where they are safe from harassment by dominant White culture and
its local, predominantly African representatives. The cult of the
High God Mwali, the place of ancestors in everyday and ritual
life, healing cults, sorcery, ritual violence, divination, the
symbolic basis of family life and of production and consumption
— only at the cost of rather greater personal commitment and
patience than ordinarily required in other parts of the continent
is the expatriate researcher allowed a glimpse of the extent to
which the ‘Kuwayt of Africa’ shares in a general African
cultural orientation. Under such circumstances there is no
premium on a traditionalising and historicising symbolic
production as a venue for ethnic expression[27]
(the path the Nkoya have taken): instead, one confronts the
formally organized texture of social power, in the thoroughly
respectable, political domain, which is agreed to be organized
along modern principles.
All this sounds like praise rather than
criticism of Parkin’s idea. Yet, especially in a context of
alienation and proletarianisation, powerlessness in the face of
an authoritarian state, and the shattering — in modern
migrants’ consciousness — of a village-orientated symbolic
microcosm, language for the native speaker tends to be the
last refuge of owning and belonging, of competence and identity.
Cultural reconstruction and revitalisation, such as is at the
root of many ethnic movements in the form of literary and
ethno-historical production, seeks to rebuild an imaginary world
of belonging in order to combat the disowning that characterizes
the ethnic groups collective experience in the outside world. But
while this is eminently true for the Nkoya (whose language has
been objectified, but certainly not commoditified), it is far
less true for the Botswana Kalanga. Straddling both urban and
rural commitments, survival strategies and cultural expressions,
the Nkoya were never effectively proletarianized, and the
viability of their rural culture and their language testifies to
this. But why have the Kalanga responded so very differently? Was
it because they have been much more effectively proletarianised,
with no longer any viable rural society to return to, since land
alienation, over-grazing and drought have led to the collapse of
the local ecosystem? Or because, while they became
proletarianised and because of this condition, their success in
the modern world away from the lost village has been so
incomparably greater than that of the Nkoya?
5.
Conclusion: Language policy and development
Our argument has
perhaps illuminated the role of language in the trajectories of
two African ethnic identities, but does it also contain a lesson
for language policy?
One striking point which emerges is that
under similar conditions of withheld state recognition, the two
languages, Nkoya and Kalanga, and the ethnicities associated with
them, could traverse such different paths while the formal
language policy in the respective countries formally remained
unchanged. The existence of a restrictive Zambian language policy
did not prevent the Nkoya from engaging in cultural and
ethno-historical self-reconstruction, and on the Kalanga side we
have seen plenty of reasons why even if the Botswana language
policy would have been less restrictive, it would have been
unlikely for the Kalanga to have produced a less tepid ethnic and
linguistic response. The specific nature of the existing language
policy hardly explains what happened — instead, political
and economic factors cast much more light on the correspondences
and differences of the two cases.
In principle this means that the data
presented in this paper do not in themselves suggest a particular
ideal form for a national language policy in African states. The
following remarks therefore, although inspired by my research,
are basically personal.
Much as I love the two languages discussed
here, and would regret to see them disappear from the treasure of
universal human culture, I do not think that the only, or even
best, way to safeguard their future existence and to utilize
their present-day potential for self-expression, communication
and citizen participation, is to include them in a national-level
formal language policy. They must be acknowledged and
accommodated in policy, but only at the regional and local level.
The following two situations bring out the
dilemma:
(a) a peasant
farmer being forced to use any other language than his own in
first-line administrative, medical, judicial and developmental
contact with the state (which, however common in both Zambia and
Botswana today, constitutes an infringement of his human dignity
and human rights, and effectively prevents him from citizen
participation), and
(b) national-level
institutions (such as parliament, the university, the High Court)
being burdened with a multiplicity of languages, which may boost
ethnic pride but at enormous financial sacrifice and at the risk
of international isolation.
The latter even suggests that the national
political space within which ethnic and linguistic processes
evolve (since this is the constitutionally defined space for the
legitimate exercise of state power), might very well be too
narrow for a meaningful language policy to be defined. Botswana,
with only one million inhabitants, has risked to isolate itself
from international production and circulation in the
intellectual, artistic, and technological fields, by allowing
Tswana to be used at the national level beside English;
Zambia’s national-level policy, of not allowing any African
language to be used at the national level, seemed the better
choice, but we have seen how the decline of the state is forcing
it to compromise in this respect.
When the costs of thwarted citizen participation and frustrated
ethnic pride at the local and regional level are weighed against
the costs of consistent plurality of official languages in
politics and public administration, formal education, industry
etc., we have to look for a formula which balances efficiency
with equity: a graded model which insists on the use of
one official language at the national level, while for the
regional and local level making generous provision for the use,
preservation and propagation of such plurality of languages as
actually exists within the national boundaries. In this way basic
human rights are safeguarded; the obvious role of the mother
tongue in alfabetisation is recognized (even reasons of
efficiency — no modern state can afford to waste the
intellectual and technological potential of the youths who happen
to have a minority language as their mother tongue); the
requirements for effective local and regional communication in
social, cultural, religious and political matters — surely
essential in a democratic state — are met; and language-centred
ethnic frustration is far less likely to threaten the stability
and integrity of the state.
In post-colonial Africa, and in the world
at large today, there are numerous examples to show that such
threat a can be very real. A Kalanga activist like Kwele liked to
see the Kalanga case in the same light, and his standard ethnic
rhetoric included the phrase ‘or else the guns will speak.’
In the light of my analysis this prediction is, for the moment,
somewhat unrealistic, but the experience of humiliation on which
such utterances are based, is both undeniable and unnecessary,
and deserves our concern and our intellectual efforts.
The argument also has some bearing on the
issue of development. In the first place symbolic reconstruction
and social revival at the local and regional level — such as
language-based ethnicisation often entails — could be
recognized, more than is the case at present, as an essential
element of development. The practical design and implementation
of a graded unitary/pluralist language policy as advocated above
would qualify for an exciting form of development cooperation.
More often however, development is
conceived in terms of a population’s increased economic
opportunities. In this respect the lessons of my analysis are far
from straightforward. Among the Nkoya, the post-colonial
state’s positive if partial and opportunist response to ethnic
aspirations (a package including language, traditional leaders,
modern representational bodies at the regional and national
level) brought the Nkoya much closer, not only to the state, but
also to a modernizing economy which is clearly developmental —
even if most Nkoya villagers did not exactly benefit from this
type of development. Among the Botswana Kalanga, their relative
access to a modernizing economy and to the state (albeit not
specifically as Kalanga) prevented their ethnic and language
aspirations to take wing. In both cases one has the feeling that
the state’s formal language policy has remained rather
irrelevant since it failed to make provision for the local level
of peasants and poor urbanites; it is primarily at this local
level (where plurality of languages is a reality, especially in
Africa) that development is realized, or fails to be realized.
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Appendix.
Nkoya and Kalanga compared
variable |
Nkoya |
Kalanga |
1. basic language data |
|
|
Guthrie (1948) classification |
L62 |
T16 |
estimated number of speakers in national
territory |
30,000 |
120,000 |
percentage of national population |
0.80% |
13% |
formalized dialectical variation |
hardly |
yes |
orthography |
not an issue, rather standardized |
bone of contention between Botswana and
Zimbabwean native speakers |
close affinity with languages outside country
where this language is spoken |
Lunda, Luvale (Zambia); (Mbwela, Ganguela in
Angola) |
other Kalanga dialects in western and southern
Zimbabwe (the Botswana Kalanga is identified as the
Lilima dialect; the Kalanga cluster is considered to be
western Shona) |
2. inter-language relations |
|
|
national official language |
English |
English/(Tswana) |
state-recognized language |
Bemba, Nyanja, Lozi, LuvaleTonga, Kaonde, Lunda |
Tswana |
regionally dominant language |
Lozi |
Tswana |
language most speakers in local rural area speak |
Nkoya |
Kalanga |
language of official communication in local
rural area |
Lozi |
Tswana |
other languages in local rural areas |
Lozi, Luvale, Luchazi, Kaonde, Tonga, Ila,
Lunda, Mbundu |
Tswana, Ndebele, English, Afrikaans, Shona, San |
lingua franca of national urban centres
frequented by native speakers |
Lozi (Livingstone), Nyanja (Lusaka today), Bemba
(Copperbelt, pre-WW II Lusaka) |
Tswana/(Kalanga) (Francistown), Tswana (other
Botswana towns) |
3 ethnic self-perception |
|
|
language name in use as ethnic name since |
mid-19th century |
17th century |
is ethnic identity underpinned by historical
consciousness? |
yes, spanning the period 16th-20th century |
yes, but mainly with reference to colonial
period |
contemporary self-perception of ethnic group in
terms of local precedence |
claims historical precedence as the first group
to arrive in central western Zambia from Zaire |
dim historical awareness, many members accept
the erroneous Tswana claims as to the Bo tswana Kalanga
being recent immigrants from Zimbabwe |
4. inter-ethnic relations |
|
|
nationally dominant ethnic group |
Bemba, Tonga, ‘Nyanja’, Lozi |
Tswana |
regionally dominant ethnic group |
Lozi |
Tswana |
the language’s status in national society |
very low |
low |
main perceived ethnic enemy |
Lozi |
Tswana |
when native speakers ‘pass’, they pass as |
Lozi, Bemba |
Tswana |
economic position of average native
speaker/member of this ethnic group |
below national average |
at or above national average |
5. language and state institutions except
formal education |
|
|
is it allowed to use this language in the lowest
courts? |
allowed but discouraged in testimony; judges
prefer Lozi, clerks record in English |
formally yes but discouraged |
can state officials use this language in dealing
with the local population? |
not until late 1980s |
no |
is this language admissible for use in
Parliament? |
no |
no |
state attitude towards this language |
reticent but increasingly positive |
strongly negative and hostile |
is this language used in broadcasting? |
no, except in popular and traditional songs |
no |
6. language and formal education |
|
|
language used in schools |
Lozi (Nkoya only occasionally and informally |
Tswana (Kalanga only occasionally and
informally) |
school primers locally available in print |
not any more |
no |
relative educational level of native speakers of
this language |
far below national average |
well above average |
7. politics and language |
|
|
was this language ever the state language of a
pre-colonial state? |
yes, since late 18th century |
yes, from 17th to early 19th century |
is this language used in royal/courtly
ceremonies today? |
only by musicians but throughout western Zambia
(since early 19th c.) |
no, except at village level |
is this language used in local-level traditional
politics today? |
yes, by the district’s major traditional
‘rulers’ |
yes, but not the district’s major one |
do representatives of this ethnic group have
access to national-level traditional politics today? |
yes |
no |
do representatives of this ethnic group have
access to modern regional politics today? |
limited but increasing |
extensive |
do representatives of this ethnic group have
access to modern national-level politics today? |
limited |
extensive |
political party favouring this language |
UNIP, MMD (ruling parties) |
BPP, BPU (opposition parties) |
is language an issue in oppositional political
rallying? |
it was in the 1970s, not any more |
yes! |
8. language and expressive culture |
|
|
literary works available in this language |
none exist |
some exist but none are available locally |
pious literature available in this language |
rather abundantly |
no evidence except hymn book and part of
NewTestament |
ethno-historical literature available in this
language |
yes |
yes but not available locally |
is this language served by an ethnic/linguistic
society? (since) |
yes, Kazanga (1983) |
yes, SPIL (1984 ) |
profile of that society’s membership |
primary school teachers, local-level
politicians, paramedics |
university students, secondary school teachers,
highly-educated professionals |
is there a periodical in this language? |
no |
yes but moribund (Tjedza) |
does linguistic self-presentation take place in
conjunction with other cultural forms (music, dance)? |
yes, emphatically so |
yes, but problematically so |
9. religion and language |
|
|
was this language first committed to writing by
a Christian mission? |
yes |
yes |
Bible translation (year) |
New Testament and Psalms (1953); Old Testament
recently completed in MS |
Gospels and Acts (1929); new translation
currently in preparation |
language used in local churches |
Nkoya, Lozi |
Kalanga, Ndebele, Tswana |
(main) hymn book in |
Mbunda/Nkoya/Lozi |
Tswana, Sotho; Kalanga |
is there any church exclusively using this
language? |
no |
no |
is this language used in non-Christian cults? |
yes, but together with Luvale and Lenje |
yes, but together with Ndebele, Shona, Venda, |
Diagram 1. The Nkoya and the Kalanga in Southern Africa.
[1] Field-work among the Zambian Nkoya was undertaken in 1972-74, and during shorter visits in 1977, 1978, 1981, 1988, 1989. and 1992 (twice). Field-work among the Kalanga of Botswana was undertaken in 1988-89 and during shorter visits in 1990, 1991 and 1992. I am indebted to the African Studies Centre, Leiden, for the most generous encouragement and financial support; and to research participants, to assistants and government officials in both Zambia and Botswana and to members of my family, for invaluable contributions to the research. An earlier version of this argument was presented at the conference on ‘African languages, development and the state’, Centre of African Studies (University of London) and EIDOS, London, April, 1991; in this context I wish to thank the conference organizers, Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss, and the participants, for stimulating discussions; and the African Studies Centre, Leiden, for financing my participation. Rob Buijtenhuijs made useful comments on an earlier draft.
[2] Cf. Mitchell 1974, Epstein 1978, and references cited there; major recent additions to this literature in Vail 1989, including Robert Papstein’s (1989) analysis of Luvale etnicity which has considerable parallels with the Nkoya case. I have given an overview of rural ethnicity studies on Zambia in van Binsbergen 1985; 1992a deals with the interplay between twentieth-century ethnicity and the production of images of the precolonial past.
[3] Cf. Wilmsen 1988, 1989 and references cited there.
[4] On the Nkoya, cf. Brown 1984; McCulloch 1951; van Binsbergen 1977, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1992a, 1992b; Clay 1945. On the Lozi and Barotseland (Western Province, Western Zambia) in general, cf. Gluckman 1943, 1951, 1968; Prins 1980; Mutumba Mainga 1973; Stokes 1966; Caplan 1970. The only linguistic publication on the Nkoya language is Yasutoshi Yukawa 1987.
[5] This is not only the Nkoya’s self-image (cf. van Binsbergen 1992a), but also the opinion of, among others, the ethnologist McCulloch (1951: 93) and the linguist Fortune (1959: 26).
[6] Mwene: ‘ruler’, here: ‘queen’.
[7] Induna: office-bearer in the Lozi indigenous administration.
[8] Throughout the colonial period, those Nkoya royal chiefs whose chieftaincies had survived functioned as members of the Lozi aristocracy and in this capacity boasted their own courts; proceedings were preferably conducted in Lozi, but use of Nkoya was not ruled out. Shortly after Independence (1964), the central state instituted Local Courts, with state-trained judges and assessors who de jure were independent from the chief (not de facto, since they were members of the local aristocracy and appointed in consultation with the chief). At an unofficial level below the Local Court each valley would continue to have its court presided by a senior member of the chief’s council; proceedings there would mainly be in Nkoya. An interesting development in Nkoyaland in the late 1980s was the spontaneous, but state-tolerated institution of mabombola (‘palaver’) courts at chief’s palaces, administering a local customary law in the Nkoya language, but without any formal powers beyond reconciliation; cf. van Binsbergen 1977.
[9] Testamenta 1952. A list of published texts in the Nkoya language is given in van Binsbergen 1992a: 441f.
[10] Mr. J. Kalaluka, son of a Lozi father and of a Nkoya mother, sister of Mwene Timuna Kahare. On his career, cf. van Binsbergen 1992a.
[11] Not to be confused with the South African political organization of the same name, by which it was however inspired.
[12] The Kalanga have received considerable ethnographic attention (especially in the work of R.P. Werbner (e.g. 1970, 1971, 1975, 1989, 1990), but much work remains to be done on their history (cf. Malikongwa & Ford 1979; Tapela 1976, 1982; von Sicard 1954). In recent years, the Botswana Kalanga have been the subject of extensive oral-historical and especially archaeological research by van Waarden (1988), and linguistic and ethno-historical research by Wentzel (1983). Fortune was the first to describe the Kalanga language (Fortune 1949, 1956, 1969). Elements of Kalanga can also be found in the classic works of Doke (1931a, 1931b, 1954); a very early wordlist is Weale 1893. A first impression of the historical data on Kalanga as a language can be gleaned from Beach 1980: xi, 189, 243, 258-9, 265, 279 and passim. On ethnic relations in the area, cf. Masala 1985; on rural land alienation, cf. Schapera 1943, 1971.
[13] In the Botswana constitution, the section on the House of Chiefs is the only part listing ethnic groups, and (as is clear from the context) exclusively with a view of defining the composition of that House; these groups are: Ngwato, Ngwaketse, Kwena, Tawana, Kgatla, Lete, Rolong and Tlokwa (Republic of Botswana 1983).
[14] For the place of these groups among the Tswana see Schapera 1952, 1984. Khurutshe are a sub-group of the Hurutshe Tswana of neighbouring South Africa; the Rolong Tswana also originate in South Africa but now are found on both sides of the border in the south of Botswana. One particular, massive category of immigrants had no impact of its own on the language situation beyond swelling the numbers of the existing groups: labour migrants from Zambia and Malawi for whom Francistown was a major stop-over between South Africa and their homes, and many of whom settled permanently in and around Francistown. While some have retained or assumed a distinct ethnic identity (notably as ‘Rotse’, which refers to Barotseland), virtually all have adopted Kalanga or Tswana as their language.
[15] For an official reading of the episode, where its scope and violence are relegated to minimum proportions, see Tlou & Campbell 1987. A recent reading is Wylie 1991: 162-172; also cf. Ramsay 1987. The topic is also currently covered in work in progress by such prominent historians as T.O. Ranger and N.Q. Parsons.
[16] On the Mwali cult, cf. Blake-Thompson & Summers 1956; Daneel 1970; Fortune 1973; Werbner 1989.
[17] Which meanwhile has found its way to authoritative textbooks widely available in Botswana, e.g. Tlou & Campbell 1984.
[18] At present I have insufficient data on these developments in Zimbabwe. Mkangawi (1991: 1) suggests that they are substantial but does not give details:
‘In addition, it is significant to note that although governments are active in LP [language planning], individuals, groups of individuals, or non-governmental organizations can also be involved in it, by, for example, trying to unite people in the language question, particularly where a minority language is involved (as Nsala-Malaba is doing for Kalanga in Zimbabwe).’
The developments hinted at are far from recent. Already in the late 1950s Fortune (1959: 8) wrote with reference to Zimbabwe:
‘There are a number of Kalanga and Lilima-speakers who are anxious to preserve and develop their language and to have it as a medium in their junior schools.’.
[19] Registrar of Societies, Gaborone, file no. H 28/90/258; this society was registered on 7th August, 1984; also cf. van Binsbergen, in press (b).
[20] Cf. Guthrie 1948; Fortune 1959; the continuity on the ground was repeated brought out in a practical sense in the course of my anthropological and historiographical field-work, when I found that my language skills, however limited, enabled me to communicate somehow with local non-speakers of Nkoya or Kalanga.
[21] There is an interesting concrete link between the Kalanga and the Nkoya situations: the Wankie area, the northwestern extension of the Kalanga language region, in the second half of the nineteenth century was tributary to the Kololo and subsequently the Luyana, so that Holub (1879) could list Kalanga as another Barotse subject tribe.
[22] For a related discussion of ethnicity in an idiom of space, cf. Amselle 1985.
[23] This applies to the most senior Nkoya royal chiefs, Mwene Mutondo and Mwene Kahare, of Kaoma district. Outside the district, and outside Barotseland, the history of Mwene Kabulwebulwe and Mwene Momba has been rather different, but then they never suffered Lozi incorporation to the same extent as their Kaoma counterparts.
[24] A point made by Richard Fardon at conference where this paper was first presented; also cf. van Binsbergen 1987.
[25] The usual term, in Botswana English, to denote the personal nominative of Tswana-hood.
[26] Cf. Roberts 1972.
[27] On this point the Botswana situation as described has strong parallels with present-day South Africa, and reflects such dilemma’s of cultural and symbolic reconstruction as have only very late in the liberation struggle gained explicit recognition and respectability.
[28] Not being a linguist, I include this entry only in order to allow those who are, to identify the languages professionally. I am aware that the classification of African languages has evolved greatly since Gurthrie’s pioneering work (Greenberg 1963; Alexandre 1972).
[29]
Fortune contests Guthrie’s classification even if it is close
to Doke’s (1954):
‘There is need for a closer
examination of the Nkoya-Mbwela languages, scattered as they are,
and influenced by others, it is at the moment impossible to
indicate the true position.’ (Fortune 1959: 27).
Ohannessian & Kashoki’s authoritative Language in Zambia regrettably does not reconsider this question and comfortably classify Nkoya in a group of its own (H, comprising such minor dialectal variants as local speakers themselves would not hesitate to include in that cluster: Nkoya, Lukolwe/Mbwela, Lushangi and Mashasha) (Ohannessian & Kashoki 1978:20 and passim).
[30] Also cf. Fortune 1959: 8-9.
[31] Cf. Kashoki 1978: 20; van Binsbergen 1992a: 6; and references cited there.
[32] Based on Picard 1987: 5.
[33] Guthrie (1948) classification S21.
[34]
Guthrie (1948) classification K21, which however does not seem to
do justice to the fact, well recognized by Fortune, that Lozi is
‘a mixture of Southern Sotho and
Luyana, now the lingua franca of Barotseland
Protectorate and used in all African courts. It is mainly Sotho
in morphology but has a great number of Luyana words which seem
to be increasing. (...) The language Lozi, a combination of Sotho
and Luyana, grew up between 1869, the date of the expulsion of
the Kololo invaders, and 1919, at the Barotse court.’ (Fortune
1959: 41-42; cf. 1963).
On Luyana, the original court language of the Luyana kingdom with striking parallels with contemporary Nkoya, cf. Givon 1971.
[35]
This was the year of official registration; considering the
amount of time needed to prepare for official registration, the
actual founding initiative dated from 1981-82.
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