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van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1986, ‘The post-colonial state, “state penetration” and the Nkoya experience in Central Western Zambia’, in: W.M.J. van Binsbergen, F. Reijntjens & G.S.C.M. Hesseling (eds), State and local community in Africa, Brussels: Cahiers du CEDAF, pp. 31-63.
©
1986-2002 Wim van Binsbergen
1. Introduction[1]
Statehood,
deriving from either the endogenous dynamics of local political
processes, the incorporation of local communities in expanding
state systems originating elsewhere, or from a combination of
both, is a much more common and much older phenomenon on the
African scene than would be suggested by the application of the
‘state penetration’ metaphor to political processes at the
local level in that continent today. In this chapter I shall
contrast two phases in Zambian peasants’ attitudes towards the
post-colonial Zambian state. One phase, of aloofness and apparent
‘non-penetration’, related to the early 1970s; the next phase
is that of the much greater ideological and active support for
the state state amongst the same people, less than a decade
later. At first glance, one might be inclined to interpret the
phase of aloofness as a base-line of a process of political
incorporation; the changes leading to the next phase would then
appear to amount to some sort of increased ‘state
penetration’. A historical analysis of political structures in
Central Western Zambia over a much longer period of time will
reveal the spuriousness of such a view, and illuminate
contemporary options in the light of collective political
experiences that, in this case, have merged with pre-state
notions of sacred kingship to articulate a contemporary ethnic
identity.
[insert diagram 1
about here]
2. State and local community in Central Western Zambia
in the early 1970s[2]
Central
Western Zambia, roughly coinciding with the present-day Kaoma
(formerly Mankoya) district, is a region the size of Belgium or
the Netherlands, and characterized by a considerable ecological,
socio-economic and social variety: ranging from the well-watered,
wooded and fertile Kafue/Zambezi watershed in the East to the
fringes of Kalahari sands in the West; from illiterate fishermen,
hunters and subsistence farmers in remote villages to
sophisticated managers and civil servants at the district capital
and the state-initiated agricultural schemes; from the
Nkoya-speakers (with various constituent groups such as the
Mashasha, Mbwela, Lukolwe etc.) whose ancestors have inhabited
the district from one and a half centuries or more, — via Lozi
(Luyi, Barotse) people who from their homelands along the Zambezi
flood-plain have expanded into the district as members of a
politically dominant ethnic group since the late 19th century,
— to, finally, Luvale, Luchazi and Chokwe people, mainly first,
second or third generation immigrants from Angola, who have
flooded Western Zambia since the early decades of this century.
The district was virtually inaccessible for modern means of
transport until, in the 1930s, the Mankoya-Mumbwa all-weather
road was built, then reducing the effective distanced to Lusaka
(the new colonial capital) to only two or three days or driving.
Meanwhile, as an indication of more comprehensive changes, this
travelling time has been reduced to scarcely so many hours. Since
the early 1970s, an excellent tar road has connected the district
capital, also called Kaoma, with Mongu (Western Province’s
provincial capital), and with the national capital. In 1973, a
proud sign at the Kaoma exit read:
‘Kaoma
District — Granary of Western Province’.
And
it was true that in terms of cash-crop output the district
compared favourably with the other parts of this province, one of
the more stagnant provinces in Zambia. This relative agricultural
success was largely due to the efforts of peasant and
‘middle’ farmers belonging to the newcomer ethnic groups; the
Nkoya had, until then, shown less initiative in the way of modern
agricultural production.
In Nkoya villages away from the tar road, the modern state at the
time appeared to be rather absent from the surface of rural life.
State initiatives in the field of agricultural extension work
were viewed with suspicion by the villagers, and met with hardly
any positive response. UNIP,[3] the national party,
failed to inspire enthusiasm and, with the exception of a few
unemployed youths, had little of a local foothold (van Binsbergen
1975). Villagers tended to absent themselves from the 1973
national elections. Ten years after the country gained
independence people would still refer to the country’s
political centre (Lusaka, the Line of Rail with its towns,
industries, mines and large-scale capitalist agriculture) as
‘beyond
there, in Zambia’,
—
thus shockingly reducing the independent state of Zambia to a
distant affair of people who were, ethnically, aliens.
In conversations Nkoya villagers would spontaneously elaborate on
the great economic, educational and moral decline their region
had seen since independence...: manufactured commodities that has
found their way into the village economy (e.g. clothing,
blankets, implements, certain foodstuffs) were claimed to have
been much cheaper during the colonial period; job opportunities
both in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) and ‘down South’
(on the farms, mines and in the urban centres of the then
Southern Rhodesia and South Africa) were claimed to have been
unlimited, and people would still bitterly complain of the loss
of labour migration opportunities due to the closure of the
Zambia’s southern border shortly after Independence.
One could hear people (and not just the elders, but also young
adult of both sexes) condemn the modern politics centring on the
party and the ballot-box as evil and mercenary: the only politics
that seemed to convince them and carry legitimacy in their eyes
was that of the neo-traditional chiefs (Nkoya: Mwene, pl.
Myene) and their councillors, firmly grounded in the local
culture, its symbolism and cosmology. In addition to the
state-recognized status of chief (with only a handful of
incumbents in the district), a large number of traditional
political titles existed, whose incumbents (often headmen at the
village or valley level) would likewise be called Mwene,
but who beyond the narrow confines of their communities would
lack the prestige, let alone the income, that could justify the
enormous amount of attention and conflict generated around these
traditional titles. As far as the few state-recognized titles
were concerned, the villagers could not totally ignore the links
between the state and traditional politics: chiefs’ royal
establishments (Nk.: lukena), consisting of a palace,
councillors, retinue, an orchestra[4])
were maintained by means of a 100% state subsidy; moreover, one
of the two major Nkoya chiefs, Mwene Kahare, had been a
UNIP Trustee for years, and more recently had been appointed in
the national House of Chiefs; in the latter context he made
frequent trips to the national capital.[5] But
however hard people wanted to believe that in this capacity he
had a lion’s share in modern government, the miserable state of
his palace, his very limited local powers (which since 1966 no
longer included judicial powers, for instance), the way he was
treated by district officials, and the lack of seizable
improvements (roads, clinics, cash income) of their own rural
life conditions told them otherwise.
All economic benefits and all state power seemed to go to other
people, especially to the hated Lozi who for about a century had
dominate Western Zambia — to the extent of lending, during most
of that period, their ethnic name to that vast area (it was
called Barotseland until 1969). The modern state was further
perceived as a collection of ethnically alien officers who
(expressing themselves in English or Lozi, but not in Nkoya)
would arrogantly confront villagers in need of medical treatment
or official documents — or who (occasionally, and rather
ineffectively) would try to enforce government prohibitions on
local hunting and trade in dried meat and ivory (redefined as
poaching and the sale of its illegal proceeds), the collection of
firewood (redefined as the illegal felling of trees), or peddling
goods without a license. Only in selected domains did the state
get the villager’s full support: police and medical officers
from the district capital would meet with their eiger assistance
when dealing with cases of stealing, physical assault,
manslaughter (if by physical violence and not by magical means),
insanity and endemic infectuous diseases such as leprosy and
tuberculosis. In these areas of public life the modern state was
considered to rightly discharge some of the functions that were
at the root of Wene: the maintaining of social and moral
order, as a source of physical well-being. But for most other
dealings with the state the villagers did not deviate far from
the example set by the Watchtower minority among them, who in
theocratic expectation of the Kingdom of Heaven shunned the
educational, medical or political traps of some earthly kingdom,
be it headed by Blacks of by Whites.[6]
It would not be difficult to identify, in that situation of the
early 1970s, a number of factors explaining this not too
a-typical form of ‘imperfect state penetration in the African
countryside’. On a synchronic plane, and with emphasis on
individual perceptions and motivations, one could try to explain
the predicament of Nkoya villagers in terms of the forces
determining contemporary markets of labour, agricultural produce
and bureaucratic support — all of them perceived to be
virtually closed to Nkoya villagers by a combination of
geographical distance, lack of education and skills (particularly
agricultural and entrepreneurial skills), and lack of access to
mass media and decision-making bodies.[7]
Failing
to mobilize state power in order to manipulate these market
forces for their own interest, the villagers had turned away,
playing at ‘uncaptured peasantry’ (cf. Hyden 1980; Geschiere
1984), and trying to scratch from their subsistence farming,
illegal hunting and rich musical and ritual life such a
livelihood and self respect as is denied them in the context of
modern life. Or, turn away? Would not the very notion of state
penetration suggest that they had never yet really been part of
the state, and were they lingering in some limbo of pre-statehood
in which the colonial state had found them three quarters of a
century earlier...? Such a view could even lead to the hopeful
thought that, even if the modern state had as yet failed to
penetrate these villages, the time might come when (perhaps as a
result of the turning tide of market forces; or, failing these,
more determined and stern state action; or, again, as a result of
the villagers’ own increasing Verelendung) the people
would finally ‘see the light and come out of their hiding
places’ — to use a formula of the type cherished by senior
Zambian politicians and civil servants. Whereas their situation
in the early 1970s seemed to be characterized by the absence of
the modern state (which apparently failed to reach out that far),
they might one day wholeheartedly partake of its blessings...
From their naive statal virginity, through the perhaps painful
but necessary defloration of state penetration, the Nkoya peasant
communities might yet graduate to the adult delights of state
participation. Or, in a more radical version, the state might
appear not as a subtle and experienced lover but as a raping
satyr, and the image of conjugal bliss of civil participation
would distort into the state’s pimping on the local
community’s encroachment by capitalism; however, the
penetration metaphor (and its implicit complement of statal
virginity
The change was not brought about by factors of a primarily
economic nature. In the district itself, the material rewards of
civil participation had yet to be reaped — as they have to this
day. And along the Line of Rail employment opportunities for
Nkoya migrants were diminishing if anything; in fact, many urban
dwellers saw themselves forced to retreat to their rural homes as
they could no longer maintain an urban livelihood. The new
Nkeyema Tobacco Scheme near the district’s eastern border
further boosted the district’s agricultural output as from
1971; but while tenants were recruited from all over Western
Zambia, opportunities for Nkoya participation therein remained
very limited — confined, in fact, to a handful of ‘middle’
farmers belonging to royal families. Outside the schemes, peasant
production did not increase dramatically. The misery of rural
life continued as before: lack of transport, of cash, of medical
care, occasionally even of food. But now it was tinged with hope
and optimism.
The only real changes that had taken place were of a political
and ideological nature. They formed the aftermath of the
effective diminishing of Lozi domination (see below), and the
corresponding dramatic increase of Nkoya access to modern
representative bodies at the district, provincial and
particularly (with the election of the first Nkoya Member of
Parliament in 1973) the national level. Significantly, in a
district that for years had been the distant constituency of the
Southern Province politician Mwainza Chona (then Vice-President
of Zambia), certain Nkoya candidates for the Kaoma District
Council did not have to run for office but were nominated
directly by the State President. Their office came to carry real
power, also at the grass-roots level, where they became involved
in Ward Development Committees (through which the state allocated
for instance agricultural credit), Village Productivity
Committees, and party branches. This handful of political New Men
(several of whom were Women) became powerful organizers of UNIP,
and the first effective brokers between the modern state and
Nkoya villagers — a role the Myene had been expected
to play but never did in a more than half-hearted and ineffective
manner.
But their relation to the Myene was more complex than one
of simple substitution. Mobilization along regional lines has
been a dominant feature of Zambian post-Independence politics,
and the peculiar ethnic composition and ethnic history of Kaoma
district (with Lozi and particularly Luvale dominating the party
at the district level), left the New Men no choice but to narrow
down their regional appeal in terms of Nkoya ethnicity. Thus in
the 1973 general elections, that were to be a turning point in
Nkoya attitudes to the national state, the successful candidate
identified as Nkoya, as against his two contenders, one Luvale
and one Mbunda. But what is more: very close association with
traditional chiefs appeared, in all cases, a condition for
success. Little of the antagonism that has so often characterized
the relations between chiefs and local New Men elsewhere in the
Zambian context, could be detected here. The former counted Myene
and prominent chief’s councillors among their closest kin. They
conducted their local campaigns from the lukenas, and towards
these traditional office-bearers meticulously observed the many
rules of court etiquette that come natural to any Nkoya but that
had never before been put to practice by any representative of
the central state. Not only in front of villagers, but also in
the representative bodies of district and provincial government
they advocated an increase of Nkoya chiefs’ subsidies, and the
restoration of certain Nkoya chiefly titles (foremost the
Shakalongo title) that had failed to receive state recognition in
the colonial period.[8]
In other words, the New Men seemed to realize that they could
only aspire to successful brokerage between Nkoya peasants and
the state, if they narrowed their ethnic claims further down to a
point where they virtually became the modern, junior
representatives of the chiefs. They were versed in modern state
structures, and on that side their legitimation consisted in such
bureaucratic authority as derives from modern constitutional and
administrative procedures. But at the same time, towards the
villagers they had to be legitimated by the only source of
political authority that Nkoya society recognizes: the
institution of chieftainship (Wene). For close to a
century, the political history of the humiliation and
powerlessness of Nkoya villagers has centred on the humiliation
and powerlessness of their traditional rulers, under conditions
both precolonial and colonial. A revival of Nkoya society was to
find a political expression, since locally its downfall was
primarily perceived in political terms. It was not as if the
modern state could not penetrate before, but as if now for the
first time relations with that state offered spoils that so far
had seemed to be utterly out of reach: a restoration of local
political forms in which the Nkoya had invested not only their
total conception of social order, but also their self respect.
The modern state could be accepted and positively embraced, if
that process included an affirmation of a much older, local form
of political organization, of which the latterday Myene
were the focus and the heirs. This break-through in the mid-1970s
could bring the Nkoya to revise their attitude towards the modern
state, because it finally allowed them to take a distance from,
and to redress, their experiences with earlier situations of
statehood. Thus the changes that took place in the course of the
1970s did not consist in a transition from pre-statehood to
modernity through ‘state penetration’, but constituted a
gradual transformation (lagging a few years behind the more
tangible political events that enabled it in the first place),
allowing the Nkoya villagers to review their earlier denunciation
of the modern state, to re-establish continuity with a
traditional form of statehood that formed the essence of their
historical identity, and to strike a new balance (through the New
Men) between their own old state structures, and the new Zambian
one.
Two issues are, then, at the back of this political process we
might only most superficially describe as ‘state
penetration’. First, we ought to take a closer look at Nkoya
precolonial states in their endogenous dynamics. Secondly, we
have to consider a process of political incorporation that, far
from starting in the 1970s, in fact has a history of at least a
century; of this sustained and complex process, both the apparent
rejection in the early 1970s, and the more positive state
participation of the late 1970s, are but temporary options
realized in the course of the prolonged and cumulative Nkoya
experience with statehood.
3. Nkoya Precolonial States
Precolonial
Nkoya states emerged as a transformation of a pre-state pattern
of sacred kingship (Wene). In an early wave of migration from
Southern Zaire, perhaps around the middle of the present
millennium, Wene was established on the Upper Zambezi by members
of a matrilineage which much later, probably in the late
eighteenth century, was to produce the Nkoya heads of states. The
pre-state Myene were not political leaders but land
priests, whose special links with the natural environment — as
central figures in an all-encompassing cosmological and symbolic
system — allowed them to assume coordinating and redistributive
tasks in the local relations of production, which hinged on
hunting, fishing, collecting and some limited agriculture, and
which were largely structured by clanship. (cf. van Binsbergen
1985b and in press).
Likota lya Bankoya, a large collection of Nkoya oral
traditions (Shimunika, in press), tells us how Wene was put to a
decisive test at the time of the Humbu[9]
war:
The Humbu war was the first war the Nkoya fought against
other tribes. This war started when the Humbu wanted the Nkoya Mwene
and his people to be circumcised. When the Nkoya people refused
this the war started. (...) The Humbu came from Mwantiyavwa and
they wanted to kill all the Nkoya Myene. The Humbu invaded
Nkoyaland and killed most Nkoya people from the Kasheta clan,
including female Mwene Shilayi Mashiku and many other Myene,
both male and female. When the war became very fierce Mwana Mwene
[Prince] Luhamba and his sister Katete Mashiku ran away and went
to hide in the village of the Kambunze clan. (...) The war went
on and the Nkoya defeated the Humbu. The latter declared that
they had not wanted to fight against all the Nkoya but only
against the Kasheta of Luhamba lya [the son of] Shilayi.
It
is very unlikely that by this time the group under Humbu attack
already identified as Nkoya as it does today (cf. van Binsbergen
1985a); probably they were still known as Mbwela.
Although the ‘Nkoya’ are claimed to have come out victorious,
the Humbu war brought home the great vulnerability of their
underdeveloped socio-political system in the face of military
attack. Also, many Myene (apparently not all of them
female: circumcision in this part of Africa is an exclusively
male affair) are said to have been killed. The Humbu war is a
watershed in Nkoya history: it marks the emergence of
fully-fledged states. For whereas Wene is already described for
an earlier period, it is only with reference to periods after
that war that all the characteristics of Nkoya states appear in
the traditions.
They trace the emergence of male leadership, and its taking on
secular and military overtones, to this dramatic event. For the
early decades of the nineteenth century, female leaders are still
reported, male rulers’ close ties of descent and affinity with
the female leaders of an earlier stage are still emphasized, and
these men’s sisters (likewise called Mwene), occupy such
prominence in the accounts that one gets the impression that the
brothers can only rule on their sisters’ behalf (and sometimes
hardly with the latter’s blessing).[10]
Whereas this lack of clarity in the definition of political
competence between siblings in one generation was subsequently to
be decided to the advantage of males, a more lasting vagueness
attended the transfer of political office. In principle, an
adelphic system was followed: all siblings of a generation
succeeding each other until that generation is exhausted and the
eldest sibling of a new generation takes over. The ramifications
of classificatory and (with regard to joking relationships
between clans) fictitious kinship spread so widely that
succession amounted to the selection, by a council of elders, of
a suitable candidate from among a rather numerous pool of
possible incumbents — members of a predecessor’s
consanguinean kindred in the widest sense of the word.[11]
With reference to the period after the Humbu war, the traditions
being to make mention of what until today constitutes the central
characteristics of a Nkoya royal court: the royal village,
distinguished from other villages by a generic name (lukena), a
peculiar appearance and spatial arrangement (a reed fence
supported by pointed poles), and regalia reserved to Myene:
the mpande — a shell ornament —, and besides primarily
musical instruments: xylophones, iron bells, and various types of
drums. So much did the lukena become the spatial expression of
this apparently new style of leadership, that upon a ruler’s
death the lukena became the royal grave: it was deserted and left
to be swallowed by the forest, while the successor (who could not
risk contamination with the predecessor’s death) sets out to
construct a new, specifically named lukena elsewhere, typically
at a distance of scores of kilometers.
As a verbal emblem of a ruler’s individual identity, the lukena
was complemented by a ruler’s praise-name (lizina lya litanga),
many of which have been well preserved by tradition; their
archaic and dense language contains in a nutshell a wealth of
historical information.[12]
The movable regalia were symbols not so much of an individual
ruler, but of a royal name, a dynasty, and the state as a whole.
As such these paraphernalia inspired awe and fear in subjects and
enemies, and human sacrifices were made to them; their capture by
enemies spelled doom for the dynasty involved and is a cause of
ethnic shame to this very day.
The lukena was in the first place the dwelling of the immediate
royal kin. Gradually, however, the lukenas became peopled with
other functionaries. The offices of royal musician and
praise-singer (with connotations of low status, if not slavery)
can be taken for granted from as soon as the royal instruments
appear on the scene. The office of Mwanashihemi (Principal
Councillor, the Mwene’s spokesmen in front of the
people, and emphatically a non-royal) is first mentioned in a
context referring to the mid-19th century. Moreover, throughout
that century selected male rulers are reported to have divided up
their territory over their male kinsmen, who served them as
councillors and territorial representatives (silolo). These
offices, of an obvious political and military nature, were
complemented by those of the court priests (banga), and the
ruler’s much-feared secret executioners (tupondwa).
The set-up is reminiscent of Lunda court arrangements (cf.
Vansina 1966; Hoover 1980; Papstein 1978), although the principal
structural features of these courts according to Schecter (1980:
vi-vii), were hardly developed among the Nkoya: perpetual
kinship, and positional succession. It is very likely that the
virtual absence of these features had a negative influence on the
political survival of the Nkoya states: their structure remained
brittle and fragmented. Moreover their emphasis on consensual
democratic procedures repeatedly checked such autocratic
tendencies as certain Nkoya Myene displayed in the course
of the nineteenth century, and which, if they had been allowed to
persist, might have given rise to more enduring state structures
or a wider geographical scope. Instead, the nineteenth-century
history of the lukenas is full of cases of regicide, impeachment,
abdication, of Myene who had lost their subjects’
support.
Neither can the central Nkoya regalia be characterized as Lunda
in the narrower sense. Nkoya Myene did and do possess some
of the more strictly Lunda paraphernalia (cf. Papstein 1978: 91,
104, 137), such as the chimbuya (a miniature battle-axe), the
mukwale (the double broadsword) and the muchamo (crown), but they
have lacked the central Lunda symbol of kingship: the lukano (a
bracelet of human penises and sinews). However, it is the mpande
and the musical instruments, much more than the Lunda
paraphernalia, that dominate Nkoya royal symbolism and
ceremonial, and as such the Nkoya paraphernalia largely belong to
a series that has a much wider distribution over South Central
Africa than have the Lunda items.
However, Lunda connotations can be detected in the pattern of
ritual separation between ruler and subjects among the Nkoya,
which to this day is reflected in a great many taboos and
observances surrounding Wene. For instance, Myene are
reported to have tried cases in their lukenas; the Mwene
would remain in the inner recesses of the palace, and the
councillors, with the Mwanashihemi in the chair, would try the
case up to the final verdict, which was to be the Mwene’s,
but communicated to the public by Mwanashihemi.
The court priests were in charge of the royal medicine without
which no Mwene could hope to survive the attacks (through
both physical and magical means) that rivals and enemies would
level against the ruler, the latter’s life and fertility . The
priests would also be in charge of the shrine inside the royal
village (the place where a new incumbent would be enthroned upon
selection), and would make regular offerings at the more distant
burial shrines of the dynastic ancestors. Powers over the natural
environment were claimed for the latter shrines, in such a way
that the earlier, pre-state cult of the land, at the clan level,
was supplanted by a royal cult venerating deceased members of the
one royal clan.[13]
The new style of Wene (male, violent, dynastic, formally
organized: Wene in a context of statehood) sought to find
ideological support by such ‘ecological’ claims, but even
more so by the terror and violence, both manifest (as through the
actions of the tupondwa) and symbolic, that surrounded Wene:
human sacrifices to the lukena’s fence, to the drums, and at
the occasion of a Mwene’s burial; royal medicine
procured from hideous magical substances including human brains;
head-hunting, so that the Mwene and his courtiers could
drink from human skulls; notions of Myene’s incomparable
skills of trickery and magic (malele), including invisibility and
travelling through the air... Although still the incarnation of
the cosmological order of the pre-state period, and as such the
embodiment of all that is positive and ideal in Humanity, a Janus
image seems to have been added to this ideal: the Mwene,
guardian of morality and sociability, at the same time became the
greatest sorcerer, the greatest evildoer, of all. The institution
of Wene developed from an idiom of ecological concern into an
idiom of societal power. It is this redefinition that allowed the
older institution of Wene to become the focus of states.[14]
Along with these male-centred ideological props for statehood, we
see the political and ideological discrediting of women. From the
second half of the nineteenth century onwards the sources portray
female royals no longer as protagonists but[15]
as mere pawns in male exploits of war and diplomacy, causing
trouble and creating divisiveness between individual men and
between peoples. The movable regalia develop into objects of an
exclusively male connotation.
Also slaves begin to be mentioned, not only in a context of
pawnship for the indemnity of manslaughter, but (perhaps as a
perversion of this well-known institution throughout South
Central Africa (cf Douglas 1964; Roberts 1976) particularly as
commodities to be traded for beads, bangles, chief’s ornamental
shells, cloth, cooking pots, and (more typically towards the end
of the nineteenth century) guns and ammunition. While the
contemporary stigma of slave descent led to a repression of this
topic in the area’s formal court traditions, less official
family histories I collected make it clear that slaves made up a
considerable proportion of the lukena population. Along with
tribute (ntupu) in the form of foodstuffs, skins and ivory
brought in by subject peasant communities, slaves resident at the
lukena produced a large proportion of the court’s day-to-day
material requirements. Female royals would often marry slaves;
the issue of such a marriage would be irrevocably be tied to the
maternal lukena, with none of the residential optionality between
matrilateral and patrilateral relatives that has been such a
dominant feature in the area’s social organization. Through
their matrilateral ties with the Mwene-ship slaves could
occasionally accede to a senior political position themselves;
this, however, does not seem to have redeemed the connotations of
low status that have clinged to both slaves and their offspring.
Did this socio-political system amount to statehood? Students of
the ‘Early State’ in Africa would not hesitate to answer this
question affirmatively: many of the recurrent themes of African
precolonial states are manifest here, from prominent female
royals to the ecological connotations of the royal cult, from
ritual separation between ruler and subjects to slavery (cf.
Claessen 1981, 1984).
But how many Nkoya states were there? As soon as one lukena
has been reported, there have been more than one simultaneously
(cf. diagram 1). Female royals, Royal Escorts, and other
prominent members of the royal families built their own lukenas,
which were centres of factional conflict. While this could still
be seen as antagonistic elements with in basically the same
state, really distinct states emerged as the area’s original
dynastic stock (all tracing descent to the legendary Mwene
Libupe) split up, in the early nineteenth century, into four main
branches, which in the course of that century came to be
associated with the royal titles of Mutondo, Kahare, Momba and
Kabulwebulwe, respectively. Of these, the Mutondo dynastic line
mainly occupied the present-day Kaoma district during most of the
nineteenth century. The Kahare line was initially associated with
the present-day Mongu and Lukulu districts, from there moved to
the present-day Kasempa district during the reign of Shihoka
Nalinanga, only to move south again, to the Kafue-Zambezi
watershed near the headwaters of the Lwena River, in c. 1880. The
Kabulwebulwe line is associated with the Kafue River and the
Western part of Mumbwa district, and the Momba line settled far
south (see diagram 1). Between these four main courts relations
of diplomacy, marriage, sanctuary, extradition, dynastic
arbitration and occasionally[16]
succession existed. No tributary relations nor instances of
military assistance between these courts are recorded, although
nineteenth century accounts are full of military exploits. Thus
when the Mutondo lukena (whose system of marital law was,
incidentally, for some time very different from that of the other
Nkoya states — another indication of autonomy) was ransacked by
the Kololo,[17] and its royal members
led away in captivity, the Kahare lukena of Mwene
Shikanda did not rush to their assistance. Likewise, when Mwene
Kahare Kabimba was chased by invading Yeke, his wanderings
brought him within earshot of the royal drums of Mwene
Mutondo Shinkisha; but rather than invoking this kinsman’s
support, Kabimba turned back and allowed himself to be killed and
flayed by his pursuers. The four polities centring on the four
royal titles appear to have acted as independent states vis-a-vis
one another and the outside world.
But if they were independent states with only a common cultural
and linguistic background,[18] they were very weak
ones, lacking, as we have seen, the organizational arrangements
that cemented the more successful states surrounding them,
including the Lozi state. The plurality of Nkoya lukenas
points to a fundamental problem: the Mwene’s monopoly to
royal status had only a weak constitutional, institutional and
ritual basis, and had to find additional support in such social
power as derived from military exploits, a political following,
diplomatic links with neighbouring states. Rivalry and
fissiparous tendencies were at the heart of the royal families,
as is the case throughout South Central Africa; but among the
Nkoya they were less effectively counterbalanced by ideological
and organizational means. The four royal titles were soon nothing
but emblems chosen by a particular incumbent when defining his or
her praise-name at the moment of accession. All incumbents would
select such an emblem, and all sought to establish, by their
deeds, a new title that would become permanent through the
generations. Within the seed-bed of the four dynastic clusters
— each roughly associated with a well-described part of Western
Zambia —, many royal kinsmen tried to build titles, lukenas,
in short a royal status, for themselves: on the basis of a common
socio-political culture, yet aspiring to autonomy. The economic
basis for this was partly offered by the exploitative nature of
the tributary relation between a lukena and village
communities in the wider environment — but an additional basis
was offered by opportunities for raiding (for cattle and slaves)
and the long-distance trade: the region formed a meeting ground
where the trade routes to the Atlantic Ocean faded into that to
the Indian Ocean, and especially as from c. 1800 long-distance
trade had a considerable impact. These economic relations allowed
for the emergence of entrepreneurs who aspired to convert their
economic success into the more lasting and honourable achievement
of a royal title, with all the trimmings (in the way of a lukena,
regalia, a royal orchestra, royal rights over Nature) of the
local political culture. Thus ascription, on the basis of the
ancient but recently transformed model of Wene, was not the only
side of political leadership: entrepreneurial Big Man (only
occasionally female) was the other side, and just as Big Men
aspired to be rulers, rulers sought to use their ascriptitious
political status for economic activities.[19]
Out of this turmoil of waxing and waning political and economic
power positions, the four main dynastic titles, emerged in a much
more accidental fashion than the latterday stability of and
permanence of this fourfold partition in the colonial period
would suggest.
A
good illustration of the vicissitudes involved would be the
history of the Kahare title after Mwene Kabimba. When he
had been killed, his lukena destroyed and his people
dispersed all over the southern part of the region, his son
Muyani and sister’s son Kalumpiteka settled in the present-day
Namwala district (at Isalama), among Lubanda (i.e. Ila) people
with whom their family had kinship ties. Muyani apparently gave
up all aspirations to ruler status. Kalumpiteka however tried to
impose himself as a ruler over the local population, but failed
and got killed in the process — significantly in an incident in
which he claimed the habitual royal rights over local fishing
pools. Kalumpiteka’s sister’s sons, headed by Shambanjo, then
sought sanctuary at the lukena of their kinswoman Mwene
Luwimbo Shakalongo, about hundred kilometers to the South West of
their residence. From here Shambanjo sought to revenge his
mother’s brother Kalumpiteka. The attempt brought him in
conflict with Mwene Kayingu, whose lukena in the
Hook of the Kafue River was then a major connection between the
Atlantic and the Indian Ocean trade route. Shambanjo’s
successful participation in the trade circuit is clear from the
fact that he was redeemed with Mwene Kayingu by the
payment of a gun and a slave. Still without Mwene status,
Shambanjo offered his military support to the Lozi Litunga
(ruler) Lewanika (1878-84, 1886-1916) in the latter’s great
cattle-raiding campaigns against the Ila (1878, 1882, 1888). With
an atrocity for which he is still well-known in local traditions,
Shambanjo took his revenge. And it was only on the strength of
Lewanika’s protection (part of the raided Ila cattle was
entrusted to Shamamano) that the latter managed to have Mwene
Shakalongo install him as Mwene Kahare Shamamano, after
the Kahare title had been dormant for several decades. He built
his lukena at the Yange river near the Kafue/Zambezi
watershed. And it was with the title of Mwene Kahare that
he became incorporated in the Lozi state and thus in the colonial
administration at the turn of the century.
5. The Nkoya Experience of External Political
Incorporation, 1860-1978
Shambanjo’s
exploits are not an exception in an otherwise stable and
well-defined political arena, but are rather typical of the fact
that the state-like political structure of the region was still
very much going through a formative period. There is no telling
where this process would have led had it been allowed to settle
on its own impetus. However, for the development of these states
only a short time span was available: the process was effectively
checked by the expansion of other, more successful states outside
the region, ultimately including the colonial state. This is
already clear from the repeated reference, above, to these other
states — that of the Lunda to the North (with various offshoots
on the Upper Zambezi), Kololo/Lozi to the West and South, Kaonde
states to the North West, and Mwengwa Msidi’s Yeke state to the
North. Another powerful influence was that of raids from
Lobengula’s Ndebele state to the South — a rival of the Lozi
in the competition over Ila cattle, and thus an important cause
of Lozi eastward expansion across and beyond the Nkoya region.
Ndebele influence did make itself feel in the eastern fringe of
that region (the Hook of the Kafue), and so did the Chikunda
states that emerged on the Lower Zambezi as a result of
Portuguese activities. Documentary evidence describes the Hook in
the later nineteenth century as a refuge where a fragmented and
ethnically heterogeneous immigrant population has stranded on the
run for Ndebele, Chikunda and Yeke violence, and where trading
lords in inaccessible lukenas (including the well-known
Lenje ruler Chitanda, but also Mwene Kabulwebulwe and his
senior councillors, e.g. Mwene Kapandula) tried to exploit
the slave trade and shape political power out of it. It is
difficult to make out whether here we still witness phases of the
original process of state formation in the region (as I would
suggest), or already[20] the
reverse process of statal decline. Whatever the case, the
combined effects of the encroachment of precolonial states and
the colonial state from outside the region checked the local
formation of Nkoya states entirely, and reduced existing
political structures to incapsulated, neo-traditional fossils.
Dynastic processes, hitherto based on a combination of ascription
and achievement, became frozen as a result of this incorporation,
and the titles of Kahare, Mutondo, Momba and Kabulwebulwe (rather
accidental and ephemeral condensation points of a political
system in flux) came to represent fixed administrative
arrangements within a wider state apparatus, reducing the bearers
of these titles to dependent office-bearers, whose powers were
static and limited when viewed in the totality of the encroaching
wider state, but who nevertheless far surpassed the other Nkoya
titles who even lacked such formal incapsulation.
The major incorporating agent prior to the colonial state was the
Lozi state. As we have seen, already during the Kololo occupation
the Mutondo lukena had been ransacked c. 1860; after the
eviction of the Kololo and the restoration of the Lozi dynasty,
Lozi-Nkoya patterns of overlordship were perpetuated, and further
extended to other titles such as Kahare’s. Although the extent
and the nature of precolonial Lozi control over the Nkoya states
remains an issue of heated debate among Nkoya today, it is
abundantly clear from the combined evidence of oral and
documentary sources that by the last decade of the nineteenth
century the Lozi state effectively controlled constitutional and
economic processes in the Nkoya states and that the two most
prominent Nkoya titles, Kahare and Mutondo, had become
incorporated into the Lozi state apparatus.
However, the Lozi state’s influence among the Nkoya was still
to increase when that state was redefined in neo-traditional
terms with the advent of the colonial state.
Colonial policy strove to consolidate and streamline the
many-sided pre-existing forms of political authority, forcing
them in a rather uniform strait-jacket, with such elements as
state recognition, subsidies, fixed territorial ‘chief’s
areas’ of jurisdiction and authority, fixed (if not undisputed)
lines of seniority and succession between ‘chiefs’ (as the
incapsulated neo-traditional rulers were invariably called), and
subservience to the colonial state (cf. Apthorpe 1959). For
decades, colonial officers throughout Northern Rhodesia spent
much of their time on the often highly artificial codification
and formalization of these patterns of traditional political
organization, and time and again intervened in succession
disputes, conflicts over chiefly seniority etc., as for instance
the District Notebooks and District correspondence files in the
Zambia National Archives amply demonstrate. Clay’s (1946)
History of the Mankoya district resulted from such an exercise.
Nor was the exercise wholly limited to bureaucrats, as
Gluckman’s (1943) early work on the Lozi indigenous
administration shows.
This process of colonial incorporation raised some precolonial
rulers to positions of unprecedented splendour — with Litunga
Lewanika, and his successors, as the most obvious case, even long
before Indirect Rule became the general British policy.
Lewanika’s state had been described in many books and articles
prior to the imposition of colonial rule. In the final quarter of
the nineteenth century it was a centre of precolonial missionary
and European trading activities. It provided an apt condensation
point for the European illusion of the splendid ‘Sudanic
kingdom’ in British Central Africa. Lewanika not only fitted
European imagination, but European administrative, political and
economic interests. He was one of the very few Zambian rulers
with whom formal agreements and concessions had been signed, and
these formal justifications of colonial expansion in this part of
Africa would stretch all the further, the more Lewanika was
depicted as eminently powerful and effectively ruling over an
impossibly large kingdom — particularly over those distant
areas (hundreds of kilometers away from his capital, and clearly
outside his sphere of influence) where rich mineral deposits were
being discovered: the basis of Zambia’s relative industrial
wealth in later years. While the Lozi precolonial state and its
ruler was thus raised to artificial heights, other political
structures in the neighbourhood of Barotseland had to pass under
the yoke. Various shades of statelessness, independence,
diplomacy, occasional raiding activities, trading networks,
tributary relations and internal colonization were all forced
into the formula of ‘Barotse subject tribes’, extending all
over the Western lob of Zambia. This story has often been told
and re-assessed.[21]
In the process of accommodation to the colonial state the Lozi
state gradually had to give up part of its initial privileges,
both territorially and in terms of revenue; and many peripheral
groups, such as the Tonga, Ila, Kaonde and Luvale, in the
1910s-1940s managed to escape from Lozi overlordship as
reinforced by the colonial state. The Nkoya however did not, and
in fact each time the powers of the Litunga and his aristocracy
suffered a blow, Lozi overlordship on the Nkoya if anything
became more articulate. For the Nkoya, the coup-de-grace was the
establishment, in the mid-1930s, of the Mankoya Native Authority
at Naliele (near the Mankoya boma [22]),
by which move both the newly created Mankoya Native Treasure and
the Mankoya Appeal Court came under the direction of a Lozi
prince, a senior member of the Lozi royal family and (in the Lozi
system of positional succession) only a few steps away from
succession to the Lozi paramountcy.
Throughout the colonial period, the colonial state allowed the
Lozi ‘indigenous administration’ a fair measure of autonomy
in dealing with the ‘subject tribes’, including the Nkoya.
Thus the Lozi, more than the colonial administration, became the
Nkoya’s main perceived enemies, who humiliated (particularly
through the actions of Lozi representative chiefs — indunas —
in the Nkoya region), dethroned, exiled, and allegedly even
poisoned, the various major Nkoya Myene at the time. These
events distressed the Nkoya much more than the continuing
immigration of both Lozi and Angolans into their region: in this
sparsely population region, with its culture of hunters and
shifting cultivators, territorial notions were and are little
developed, and it was considered beneath a person’s dignity to
quarrel over land. Colonial officers at the district level could
keep up appearances of neutrality — to the extent that time and
again Nkoya Myene solicited the support of these officers
when seeking redress for grievances suffered at the hands of the
Litunga. For instance, in 1933 Mwene Kahare Timuna (who a
decade earlier had had serious trouble with the Litunga; cf.
Gluckman 1968) implored the District Commissioner, Mankoya, to
intervene on his behave with the Litunga to return the Nkoya
royal drums, i.e. the main regalia and central symbols of
political autonomy, which the Kololo had taken to the Lozi
capital and had never been returned. Of course, the request was
in vain. A further indication of the neutral attitude vis-a-vis
the colonial state may be that, in the 1930s, the same chief
under the aegis of the colonial state made a tour along the urban
places of work of Nkoya labour migrants, exhorting their
continuing support of both colonial and traditional authorities.
While strictly political expressions of discontent were rare
during most of the colonial period, it is significant that
Watchtower preaching in the district in the 1930s and 1940s, with
its emphasis on witchcraft eradication and the establishment of a
totally new, millenarian social order, was very vocally anti-Lozi
and anti-Litunga, and for that reason was effectively squashed
not so much by the colonial state but by the Lozi administration;
Nkoya chiefs initially sympathizing with the Watchtower activists
were threatened with demotion, and backed out. The extent to
which strictly political expression of local political grievance
was blocked by the combined effects of both Lozi and colonial
domination can also be gauged from a new wave of witchcraft cases
that struck the district in the 1950s: a self-destructive retreat
into obscurantism that was excessive even for late-colonial
Northern Rhodesia as a whole (cf. Reynolds 1963).
The rising tide of Independence politics throughout the Northern
Rhodesian territory in the late 1950s kindled, among the Nkoya,
hopes not so much of shaking off a colonial yoke they little
perceived as such, but of putting an end to Lozi domination. In
the late 1950s, the creation of an ANC branch in Mankoya was
still prohibited by reference to the threat of Nkoya separatism
that it might pose — for the Lozi administration, and not of
course for the national state, whose borders were nowhere near
the Nkoya region (Mulford 1967). The prohibition failed to check
nationalist politics in the region. However, soon a dilemma posed
itself that was to keep the Nkoya divided for fifteen years or
more:[23] on the national level,
UNIP soon turned out to be the political force of the future,
leaving far behind the ANC from which it had sprung; but then,
Lozi politicians like the Wina brothers occupied such conspicuous
positions within UNIP that this party could not form a likely
steppingstone for the political aspirations of the Nkoya people.
The personal ceremonial prices that some individuals, like Mwene
Kahare Kabambi, gained in the general rallying process around
UNIP, could not prevent that many Nkoya came to support the ANC
minority option, and that, with the increasing defeat of ANC in
the post-colonial political arena (e.g. a Nkoya parliamentary
candidate was defeated on an ANC ticket in the 1968 general
elections), the hopes they had initially derived from the
nationalist movement more and more gave way to disenchantment
vis-a-vis the independent state and its political process. A
crucial factor in this respect was the fact that the central
government of Zambia curbed opportunities of labour migration to
the South in such a way as to cut off a vital source of cash for
the whole of rural Western Zambia, Lozi and Nkoya alike.
In this disenchantment, traditionalist political and cultural
notions offered a regressive retreat that could easily be
mistaken for an unadulterated persistence of precolonial
socio-political structures. But at the time, most adult male
Nkoya had had, as labour migrants, years of experience with
modern political and economic conditions; modern education and
Christianity had made significant inroads. Aloofness vis-a-vis
the modern state could not have been an unadulterated persistence
of ancient structures (a case of non-penetration) — it is an
option within a modern framework (a case of rejection).
The great break-through was to come not from any specific
development of Lozi-Nkoya relations at the district or provincial
level, but from a shift in political relations at the national
level. In the late 1960s, UNIP politics had condensed around four
major regional factions, very roughly coinciding with the
‘neo’-ethnic labels of Bemba, Nyanja, Lozi and Tonga (cf.
Molteno 1974). The Lozi element continued to lean heavily on such
substantial remains of the Lozi indigenous administration as the
Barotse Agreement of 1964 had left intact — to the increasing
irritation of President Kaunda, whose conception of the modern
Zambian state proved irreconcilable with the royal presumptions
of Litunga ship and its ethnic if not secessionist connotations,
and who besides found himself challenged by new alternatives to
UNIP and international threats. In the years 1967-1971, the Lozi
faction was neutralized at the national level; meanwhile, in 1969
in a dramatic action well described by Caplan (1970), its
ethnico-regional basis was assaulted by Kaunda dismantling the
Litunga ship, depriving its of most of its remaining privileges,
and, to boot, altering major Western Zambian place names with
ethnic connotations, such as Barotseland (and, ironically,
Mankoya).
While thus an essential reason for Nkoya non-participation in the
national Zambian state was removed, the episode also constituted
a significant step towards the ‘one-party participatory
democracy’. After a brief transitory period of distrust and
limited violence between UNIP and ANC, the latter amalgamated
into its much stronger offshoot, UNIP, so effectively (after a
short conflictive transitory period) that certain earlier
contenders for political office on a ANC ticket, now became fully
acceptable UNIP candidates — and occasionally saw their earlier
hopes come true, as was the case with the first Nkoya Member of
Parliament, finally victorious in the 1973 general elections.
Because the successful Nkoya candidates could and did associate
with the Myene, they managed, for the first time, to
create a direct and vital linkage between the incapsulated Nkoya
states and the modern state. The energy that had hitherto been
invested in ethnic and traditionalist retreat and entrenchment
(and the above summary of Nkoya political history makes it clear
why such entrenchment would have to focus on the institution of
Wene), could now begin to flow through state and party lines.
What we have here is a case of attempted self-reconstruction of a
rural society in which a modern political idiom, via brokers,
manages to link up with the local socio-political system as
supported by the local symbolism and cosmology. In the light of
my analysis of the Lumpa rising (a case of societal
reconstruction where such linkage proved impossible) one would
wonder if, among the contemporary Nkoya, Watchtower did not offer
an alternative solution, besides party politics. Watchtower
retreatism has meant that local adherents have kept, for reasons
of Christian purity, a distance from central institutions in
Nkoya rural society, not only chieftainship but also girl’s
puberty ceremonies, name inheritance ceremonies, cults of
affliction — in short, with everything involving beer drinks,
nocturnal musical sessions, medicine and spirits. Watchtower
could not emulate the Lumpa example and attempt a total,
theocratic transformation of local village society (cf. van
Binsbergen 1981: ch. 1, 8), neither in the 1930s nor in the
1970s, because in the 1930s repression (mainly at the hands of
the Barotse indigenous administration) was too effective, while
in the 1970s a politically meek Watchtower ideology could no
longer accommodate the villagers’ desire of a form of societal
reconstruction that left intact and enhanced, rather than
denounced as pagan and evil,[24]
their central institution of Wene.
Such a linkage between Wene and the modern Zambian state needed
the brokerage of the Newer Man, and could no longer be achieved
by the Myene themselves. Some measure of participation of
traditional rulers in the modern state has always been taken for
granted in post-Independence Zambia. State recognition of chiefs,
and state subsidies, continued much as in the colonial period. By
the creation of the House of Chiefs it was hoped to bridge modern
and traditional principles of government at least in so far as
advice and information were concerned. The chiefs were to develop
into foci of political and developmental mobilization in the
countryside, and to lend, to the modern state, such self-evident
legitimation as they themselves derive from their rural cultures.
However, as the state entered upon more and more ambitious and
complex administrative and political tasks, most chiefs lacked
the education and dedication to participate in this process in
any meaningful way. Moreover, the modern state did not give them
the necessary power and status, feared them as foci of rural and
ethnic protest and secessionism (the Litunga is a case in point),
and ultimately had only use for them as ornaments of its own
secular, populist and bureaucratic conception of statehood.
Shortly after Independence, chief’s areas ceased to be units of
local government, and the chief’s judicial powers were taken
over by Local Courts in the interests of a more efficient,
sophisticated and uniform administration of justice. Although
most of the deliberations of the House of Chiefs could be shown
to revolve on the issue of traditional leaders seeking to define
and enhance their roles in a modern state, the solution could not
come from this point. Chiefs could only continue to ‘rule’
their peoples, to anchor the symbolic and cosmological structures
of their cultures and to focus their historical experience, to
the extent to which some boundary between local chiefly
structures and the modern state was both maintained and crossed
at the same time. The New Men have done just that.
5. Conclusion
Nkoya
villagers rejecting or embracing the modern Zambian state in the
course of the 1970s were not tabulae rasae, defining their
attitude towards the state for the very first time, but people
who had been political subjects and participants for a very long
time, and whose contemporary political responses (even when they
would at first glance seem to fit the metaphor of ‘state
penetration’), reflect the accumulated political experiences,
hopes and humiliation throughout their history.
A historical perspective was needed to bring out this accumulated
experience (the essence of being Nkoya), but at the same time
allowed us to interpret as a modern, temporary option a phase of
retreat and of rejection of the state which we might otherwise
have misinterpreted as ‘traditional’ and
‘non-penetration’. The concept of state penetration, as
commonly applied in a rather synchronic approach, cannot throw
light upon these relations. For while some basic Nkoya notions of
socio-political order date back to a pre-state phase of sacred
kingship, the dialectic of historical grandeur and humiliation
that has accrued to these notions stems from historical
experiences with other states, precolonial and colonial, a
century or more. My analysis also brings out the importance of
the selection of the appropriate social-structural level: often
studies of political penetration contrast small peasant
communities with the modern state, and thus are bound to come up
with clear-cut and partly artificial findings. It is not merely,
or primarily, at the level of the village, the household or the
individual peasant that Nkoya define and redefine their relation
to the modern state, but as members of more extensive and
permanent social units at a supra-local level: ethnic groups and
subgroups which cluster on precolonial polities, and whose main
distinctive feature is the awareness of a collective history of
statehood.
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[1] This chapter is based
on an oral presentation at the Workshop on State Penetration at
the Local Level in Africa, Antwerp, December 1984; later versions
were presented at the Institut fur Entwicklungssoziologie, Freie
Universitat, Berlin (West), 12 May, 1986, and published in W.M.J.
van Binsbergen, F. Reijntjens & G, Hesseling (eds.), State
and local community in Africa, Brussels: CEDAF, Cahiers du
CEDAF, 1986.
[2] Anthropological
and oral-historical field-work was carried out in Kaoma district
and among urban migrants in Lusaka hailing from that area, in
February 1972 — April 1974; September — November 1977; August
— September 1978. In the course of the field-work, a
considerable collection of local texts was made available to me,
mainly in the Nkoya language; here the piece-de-resistance
is Shimunika, in press. Archival data were collected in the
Zambia National Archives, 1974, and the Kaoma District
Secretary’s Office, 1978. For a full description and
presentation of these data, and extensive acknowledgements, see
van Binsbergen, in preparation, and my other publications cited
in the list of references.
[3] The United National
Independence Party, which in the late 1950s under the leadership
of K. Kaunda c.s. broke away from H. Nkumbula’s original
African National Congress (ANC), soon came to dominate the
struggle for Independence (which was to be successful in 1964),
and after a turbulent post-colonial phase in 1971 founded
Zambia’s Second Republic, characterised by one-party
participatory democracy.
[4] For a description of
a Nkoya lukena from an economic point of view, see van
Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985: 261-70.
[5] In fact the House of
Chiefs is an advisory body that only meets once in several years,
for a few days, — but, admittedly, in the Parliament building
—and whose deliberations (tightly-controlled by the government
executive), to judge by its published detailed minutes,
concentrate on chiefs’ subsidies, chiefs’ hunting rights,
chiefs’ abhorrence of scanty women’s dress, etc. Even so,
Zambian modern politicians are aware of the House’s importance
in legitimating the post-colonial state by linking the latter
with pre-colonial format of power.
[6] Imported from North
America via South Africa, the Watchtower faith (and syncretistic
derivations from it) has formed a major religious expression in
the rural areas of South Central Africa as from the 1920s. Its
confrontations with the colonial and post-colonial state form,
next to the Lumpa rising of 1964, a major instance of the
conflict between church and state in Zambia (cf. Cross 1973); for
Kaoma district, where since the 1940s Watchtower has been
characterised by religious and social retreatism and an absence
of political militancy, cf. Cross 1969; van Binsbergen 1981 and
in preparation.
[7] For a general
analysis of Zambian rural life in such terms, cf. Bates 1976, and
my critique in van Binsbergen 1977.
[8] In this they
foreshadowed in fact a development that would lead to the greater
and more effective participation of chiefs in modern political
and representative bodies elsewhere in Zambia in the 1980s.
[9] The Humbu or Amahumbu
constitute an ethnic group in Northwestern Zambia and Eastern
Angola. It is remarkable that in that environment, where
historical links with the empire of the Lunda ruler Mwaat Yaamv
in what is now Southern Zaire are stressed as a source of
political and cultural prestige, the Humbu, more than any other
group, have Mbwela connotations; the Mbwela, locally the
predecessors of the Ndembu Lunda, are considered the ancestors of
today's Nkoya in Kaoma district. Nkoya oral sources put the Humbu
in a very different position: that of the most conspicuous
exponents of a Lunda expansion that went at the expense of Mbwela
autonomy on the Upper Zambezi. Cf. Verhulpen 1936; McCulloch
1951: 6 and appendix map; Schecter 1980: 293f; Papstein 1978:78,
and references cited there.
[10]
Of course, the special ritual and political roles of female royal
kin is a recurrent feature in African ‘Early States’; cf.
Claessen 1981, 1984; for a Zambian example, cf. Shimwaayi
Muntemba 1970 (on the Mukuni Leya of Livingstone District,
incidentally close neighbours of the southernmost Nkoya, those of
Mwene Momba).
[11]
For extensive genealogies of nineteenth-century rulers see van
Binsbergen, in press.
[12]
It is in one such praise-name, of the female Mwene Komoka
who succeeded to the Mutondo title c. 1840, that the name
‘Nkoya’ appears for the first time: as the name for the
subjects of the Mutondo lukena. Only in the second half of
the twentieth century did ‘Nkoya’ become an ethnic label for
all people under Myene claiming descent from Libupe.
[13]
Cf. van Binsbergen 1981: ch. 3 for parallels all over Zambia.
However, among the Nkoya the cult of royal graves, and its
ecological connotations, remained rather limited, as compared
with other, larger states in South Central Africa, including that
of the Lozi.
[14]
Meanwhile it would be likely that the dual nature
(benevolence/terror) as found among the later Myene as political
rulers, could build upon a dialectical contradiction already
inherent in pre-state Wene, as is suggested by de Heusch (1972,
1984) , whose distinction between sacred kingship and statehood
is very much to the point here.
[15]
With few notable exceptions, such as Mwene Liwumbo Shakalongo and
Mwene Shikanda.
[16]
Only with regard to the most recent offshoots: Momba and
Kabulwebulwe.
[17]
A Sotho offshoot from what came to be called South Africa, which
in the nineteenth century occupied the Zambezi flood-plain, and
the Lozi state, for several decades.
[18]
Which did not preclude a certain heterogeneity on this point:
between rulers as against subjects, whose linguistic and cultural
features often appears to have been be more akin to present-day
Ila, Totela, Kaonde, than present-day Nkoya; between Nkoya clans
as against earlier inhabitants of the areas they moved into when
leaving the Upper Zambezi; and between local subjects as against
individual slaves hailing from distant ethnic groups, including
Lenje, Lamba, etc.
[19]
Not surprisingly, this side of nineteenth century state formation
in the region is little documented in the Nkoya official oral
sources; it is not only there that entrepreneurship and nobility
are ideally incompatible but in fact in collusion. However,
documentary and especially archival sources on the region are
quite specific on this point; cf. Gann 1958, 1964; Smith &
Dale 1920; Macpherson 1981; and the accounts of the
Gielgud-Anderson expedition to the Hook of the Kafue in
1900-1901, Zambia National Archives.
[20]
As it appeared in the eyes of European observers at the time —
whose ethnocentrism and need of imperialist self-justification
did not allow them so see, in the area, anything nothing but
misery and decay anyway; cf. Macpherson 1981.
[21]
E.g. Caplan 1970; Gann 1958, 1964; Mutumba Mainga 1973; Prins
1980; Stokes 1966.
[22]
In Zambian English, this is the term for the modern
administrative district centre.
[23]
And through which many local factional, inter-generational and
kinship conflicts were to find expression, in ways that fall
outside our present scope.
[24]
Incidentally, the rejection of chieftainship was also an
important element in Lumpa.
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