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The Fractured Community: Landscapes of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia

University of California Press

Human history is like palaeontology. Owing to a certain judicial blindness even the best intelligences absolutely fail to see things which lie in front of their noses. Later, when the moment has arrived, we are surprised to find traces everywhere of what we failed to see.

The problem arises of whether a theoretical truth, whose discovery corresponded to a specific practice, can be generalised and considered as universal for a historical epoch. The proof of its universality consists precisely 1. in its becoming a stimulus to know better the concrete reality of a situation that is different from that in which it was discovered…2. when it has stimulated and helped this better understanding of concrete reality as if it were originally an expression of it. It is in this incorporation that its real universality lies.

Individual consciousness is not the architect of the ideological superstructure, but only a tenant lodging in the social edifice of ideological signs.

For six months in 1988 I lived and carried out research in two small rural communities in the North-Western Province of Zambia, one of the country's poorest and most remote provinces. This was a return to the same province, and the same linguistic area, where I had done the fieldwork for my Ph.D. dissertation ten years earlier (Crehan 1987). I had stayed then for two years in Kasempa District. In 1988 I decided to base myself in one of North-Western's smallest and most impoverished districts, Chizela (see fig. 1), in two communities I have called Kibala and Bukama.1 This is a book about the lives of the men and women of Kibala and Bukama; and about the ways in which those lives were located within the larger economic and political order of postcolonial Zambia in the late 1980s. The book tries both to map out some of the basic contours of the landscapes of power within which lives were lived in rural Chizela, and also to trace out something of the complicated ways in which those contours shaped, and were in turn themselves shaped by, those lives.

This then is a book by an anthropologist based on two small and very specific case studies. The value of this classically anthropological, close examination of particular lives at a particular historical moment is that it enables us to glimpse something of what such large abstractions as “kinship,” “capitalism,” “monetization,” “commoditization,” and “the state” actually mean in the daily reality of people's lives. Michael Watts began a recent book by posing the question, “From what vantage point are we to understand the various guises, metamorphoses and reconfigurations of historical and contemporary capitalisms?” (Pred and Watts 1992:1). What I have tried to show in this book is that, however unlikely it might seem, the vantage point of this neglected corner of North-Western Province can throw an unexpected light on some of the concrete realities of “capitalism” in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. Before, however, saying any more about the broader themes of the study, and why I used the particular approach I did, let me briefly introduce Kibala and Bukama and their inhabitants so that the reader will begin to get some sense of where and whom I am talking about.

Both Kibala and Bukama were located in the heart of the region associated with the Kaonde people which stretches over much of Zambia's North-Western Province, and both were seen locally as clearly Kaonde communities in which a Kaonde way of life was followed. The large majority of their inhabitants defined themselves to me as Kaonde, Kaonde was the language normally spoken, even by the non-Kaondes, and it was Kaonde chiefs who were described as “owners” of the area. The all-important kinship links, which, in local eyes, were what provided a community with its basic armature, were dominated by the Kaonde matrilineal pattern of descent. According to Kaonde kinship rules, a child belongs to its mother's clan, and marriage is forbidden within the matrilineal clan. The fluid and multidimensional nature of “being Kaonde,” and how this was lived in day-to-day life, will, I hope, become clearer in subsequent chapters. But let me stress at the outset that, while this study focuses on two places in which there was a clear Kaonde predominance, it is not a study of the Kaonde.

The histories of the two communities were very different. Kibala was a long-established cluster of approximately thirty small settlements, crosscut by a dense network of kinship ties, with a population of close to 8002 in 1988 and its own chief, Chief Kibala. Indeed, the people of Kibala maintained that in the late nineteenth century, at the time the region first came under the control of the British South Africa Company (BSAC), the Kibala chiefdom had been one of the most important Kaonde chiefdoms and that it was at that time senior to that of Chizela. Its importance, however, declined during the colonial period, and in 1944 the colonial government ceased to recognize it as a separate chiefdom, amalgamating it into that of Chizela. To the people of Kibala, however, and to many other local Kaonde, Chief Kibala was still a chief.

The people of Kibala produced relatively little in the way of crops for sale. Chizela District, like much of the region associated with the Kaonde, was a tsetse-infested area, and in 1988 cultivation was still for the most part based on a hoe-based, slash-and-burn cultivation system. This pattern of shifting cultivation (often referred to throughout Zambia by the term for the Bemba variant, citimene) has a long history of being condemned by both colonial and postcolonial governments; only the degree of condemnation, and the reasons given for why citimene was wrong seem to have varied over the years.3 At the heart of the Kaonde cultivation system, at least according to local ideology, was the cultivation of sorghum. Central to the idea of Kaonde identity, both when Kaonde people were describing themselves and when they were described by their neighbors, was that they were “sorghum eaters.” “Being Kaonde” meant eating nshima (the solid porridge that constitutes the staple food throughout Zambia) made from sorghum rather than maize, millet, or cassava. In fact in the 1980s what people actually ate in Chizela was often maize, not sorghum, but in terms of ideology sorghum was still considered to be the “real” Kaonde staple. Chapter 5 looks at the local pattern of cultivation in some detail. The practice of shifting cultivation meant that the villages of Kibala had occupied many different sites over the years. The core meaning of the Kaonde term for village, muzhi (pl. mizhi), was not, however, a particular place but a particular kinship group, and as kinship groups many of the mizhi that made up Kibala were perceived as entities with histories stretching back into the precolonial period.

Bukama's origins were far more recent than Kibala's. It was established as a farm settlement scheme in 1977 as part of a Dutch-funded development project. The idea was to encourage “progressive” farming by providing properly “motivated”...