  |
|
||||||||
|
|
||||||||
© 1978-2002 Wim
van Binsbergen
In this paper I
shall describe classes and class formation in the Zambian rural
district of Kaoma[2], from the point of
view of modes of production, their articulation, the various
branches out of which some modes of production consist, and the
emergence of capitalism as a dominant mode of production.
It is useful to offer a few working
definitions of the main concepts which I shall employ. I have no
intention to dwell here upon the fundamental theoretical
questions such as dominate current Marxist debates concerning
these concepts. I merely make my concepts explicit for the sake
of my own argument, and to allow for comparison between my
descriptive data and those presented in the other paper of the
present seminar.
Classes, then, I would define not so much by reference to
specific attributes of their members: a particular life style and
consumption pattern (Weber 1969); differential evaluation in
terms of status or prestige, as consensually ascribed to a
particular group within a society (Warner & Lunt 1946;
Parsons 1951); nor indeed, primarily, by reference to legal
ownership or actual control over the means of production alone
— a specific form which class relations have taken in the
development of capitalism. Instead, classes define themselves
mutually, in relation to one another, through the specific class
struggle in which they are involved. Under the application of
means of production (tools etc.) and technical knowledge, human
labour adds surplus value to natural resources. Every
society shows a number of specific ways in which human labour is
subjected to control, and in which this surplus value is
expropriated from the producers. Basically such expropriation can
be effected by one group (class) monopolising one or more of the production
forces: means of production, resources, labour or knowledge.
The forms of monopolising and expropriation are defined by the
social organization of production, in other words the relations
of production. Class struggle is essentially this
expropriation process, and the producers’ reaction against it.
Wherever surplus value is created and expropriated, a class
struggle exists in an objective form. Typically, however, the
facts of surplus expropriation are concealed by all sorts of
arrangements in the superstructure (a kinship system,
patronage, cash wages, a legal structure defining ownership and
control, a political system, etc.), so that these involved need
not be consciously aware of the underlying infrastructural
reality. As to the specific combination of production forces and
relations of production, it seems useful to distinguish a number
of fundamental types: the modes of production, which are
each characterised by specific forms of class struggle, and by
specific superstructural arrangements both to pattern this class
struggle and to conceal it.
An important inspiration on this point has been Poulantzas
(1974), who offers a broad definition of modes of production
along Marxian lines. When the present text was conceived, in
1978, the neo-Marxist revival in anthropology had been going on
for a decade or more,[3] but the specific
recasting of Marx’s ideas on the Asiatic mode of production[4] into a general anthropological theory was only
beginning to bear fruit in the form of the first
empirically-based publications on modes of production and their
articulation.[5] It was only in the
1980s[6] that fully-fledged
studies on modes of production analysis set a standard which was
not yet available when the present argument was first conceived.
Most, perhaps all, societies consist of several modes of
production, which are linked to each other in such a way that
surplus value generated in one is used to reproduce another, more
dominant one. If each mode of production is characterised, in
addition to the material conditions of production, by a specific
class struggle stipulating in which way surplus value is
expropriated, then the emergence, in a local society, of a new
mode of production implies the emergence of a new type of class
struggle, in which new antagonistic classes define themselves.
The essence of class formation, then, seems to be the
historical development in which new modes of production present
themselves, link up with pre-existing ones, gradually gain
dominance over the latter or surrender to the dominance of other
modes of production. this process is not peculiar to capitalism,
and even if most studies (including the present one) emphasise
the contribution of the rise of capitalism in discussions of
class formation, this in fact presupposes the linkage
(‘articulation’) between ascending capitalism and one or more
pre-capitalist modes of production.
My case study initially set out to identify, tentatively and as
far as my incomplete contemporary and historical evidence allows,
the various modes of production that have existed in Kaoma
district over the past few hundred years, and the class relations
on which each has revolved.
However, modes of production may internally be differentiated
according to specific production forces (tools, methods, aspects
of nature to be appropriated by human production), and this
differentiation may be accompanied by specific forms of
superstructural underpinning. Strictly speaking such
differentiation means that the constituting class relations take
a different form and that one might be justified to speak of as
many modes of production as there can be more or less distinct
complexes of differentiation be discerned. One the other hand, if
every new tool, every new mode of livelihood were to represent a
different mode of production, capitalism as the major mode of
production confronting pre-existing African forms of production
would loose much of its uniquely distinctive position, and would
be reduced to just one mode of production among many. It is
therefore desirable to restrict ourself to distincguishing only a
handful of different modes of production, and to employ the term
‘branch of production’ to designate such internal
differentiation of a mode of production as gives rise to surface
specialisation within essentially the same overall complex.
Table 1 sets out the specific modes of livelihood to be discerned
historically in Kaoma district, central western Zambia. The broad
similarities between some of these various units (when they share
a basis in rural economic dynamics and all revert back to the
same few contradictions between generations, genders and status
groups), and their fundamental difference in this respect
vis-a-vis capitalism as the one mode of production completely
transforming the pre-existing local pattern, makes it preferable
to designate each of these modes of livelihood by the term
‘branch of production’ instead of ‘mode of production’.[7]
This usage gained currency in the literature on modes of
production and related issues from the 1970s onwards, e.g. Beach
1977. In is also in terms of branches of production that I have
reworked much of the same historical material in my Tears of
Rain (1992).
Within capitalism, as well as in some pre-capitalist modes of
production of considerable geographical span and internal
complexity (e.g. the trade-and-tribute mode), issues of class
formation are complicated by the existence, at the
superstructural level, of the state, which in
Poulantzas’ terms (1974) could be viewed as the crystallisation
of class relations: not the handmaiden of only one particular
class, nor a reified structure of apparatus wielding power in its
own right, but a structure of relations in which the fundamental
contradictions of the dominant (and presumably also of the other)
forms of class struggle within a certain society are expressed,
and in which therefore the conditions for this class struggle are
reproduced, i.e. perpetuated.
I wish to conclude this all too brief conceptual exercise with a
note on relative autonomy, one of the greatest problems in
current Marxist theory. At least two boundary problems, one
horizontal and the other vertical, confront anyone who approaches
class formation or related issues with a Marxist framework.
The first problem could be called horizontal, and concerns the
distinction between various coexisting modes of production. How
to distinguish them on the level of operationalisation? Looking
at the various production factors and the forms of surplus
expropriation in which people are involved, seems elementary
enough. Yet e.g. the very different interpretations which various
Marxist researchers have given to the relations between the
capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production in the context
of labour migration in modern Africa[8],
suggest the remaining difficulties in this field. Similar
problems are apparent from the present paper, e.g. the large
number of different pre-capitalist modes of production that I
initially felt compelled to distinguish, and which I later
subsumed under one common heading as distinct from the capitalist
mode of production.
The second, vertical problem concerns the much-debated relation
between infrastructure and superstructure. By opting for a
somewhat controversial definition of mode of production which
explicitly includes superstructural elements (and the same
applied when the refinement in terms of branches of production is
implemented), I have already implied that the autonomy of the
superstructure versus the infrastructure can at best be relative,
and their relation is intimate and crucial. But what form does
this relation take? Is it possible to pinpoint with some
precision, the ways in which infrastructural arrangements are
projected in the superstructure or the ways in which[9]
the superstructure reproduces the infrastructure? The state
exists by virtue of a particular relative autonomy between the
political and the economic order (‘level’, ‘instance’);
by the same token, religion exists by virtue of a particular
relative autonomy between the ideological order and the political
and economic orders. But what specific theory, beyond such
cryptic assertions of the type Poulantzas has to offer, have we
to understand the conditions, and the limits, of this relative
autonomy? In the study of class formation this issue is of more
than marginal interest. For it is precisely under conditions of
relative autonomy that non-Marxian analyses of class, such as
referred to in the first paragraph of this paper, remain
meaningful, even though ultimately they fail to link up such
superstructural elements as status, evaluation, legal ownership,
consumption attitudes, to the infrastructural realities of
production and expropriation. similarly, Weber’s eminently
influential analyses off forms of authority, the state,
bureaucracy, legitimation, and the routinisation of charisma,
even if entirely conceived in a superstructural idiom, may carry
weight even in Marxist contexts provided one attempts to place
them in a wider framework where the problem of relative autonomy
is neither ignored (as in the Weberian tradition), nor left
unsolved (as in current Marxism).
Table 1 gives a
systematic summary of the main branches of production which have
existed in Kaoma district since about 1800. In the light of the
above discussion, I have distinguished four main modes of
production:
•
the village mode of production
•
the petty commodity mode of production
•
the tributary mode of production, and
•
the capitalist mode of production.
In order to
accommodate the internal differentiation which may be perceived
within some of these modes of production, I have subsequently
differentiated the village mode of production into a number of
branches:
•
the household branch of production
•
gathering as a branch of production
•
hunting as a branch of production
•
fishing as a branch of production
•
agriculture as a branch of production
•
animal husbandry as a branch of production
Likewise, I have
differentiated between capitalist agriculture, which is pursued
on the farms of rural Zambia and Southern Africa as a whole but
including those relatively near to Kaoma district (e.g. in
Namwala district); and labour migration of an industrial nature,
which is typically pursued in distant urban areas throughout
Zambia and Southern Africa as a whole.
The various modes of production distinguished here differ
substantially from each other in their specific combination of
the four production factors. The fundamental contradictions which
define the relations of productions in each mode, differ from
mode to mode; and even if the same few social categories
(classes) crop up repeatedly (younger men versus elders; women
versus men), the contents and the direction of the extraction
process still differ. The same situation obtains, but to afar
lesser extent and with blurred boundaries and generous overlap,
between branches of production. Moreover, all modes of
production, and some branches of production as distinguished
here, turn out to be complex in themselves in that the
expropriation of surplus always takes place between more than one
pair of antagonistic classes; e.g. in agriculture it is not only
women whose surplus is extracted by men, but also slaves whose
surplus is extracted by masters, younger men by elders.[10] Given this considerable complexity, combining the
various pre-capitalist modes as described here, under the one
undifferentiated heading of the ‘domestic mode of
production’, such as is sometimes done, may obscure fundamental
issues of class formation. Only by acknowledging such differences
as can be detected in the empirical material can we meaningfully
deal with the historical changes which each of them underwent in
the last few centuries in the way of class formation.
Table 1 however presents modes of production regardless of their
distribution on a time axis. It is primarily a classification,
which forms only the starting-point for a more dynamic,
historical approach.
The patterns of
labour and extraction discussed so far do not cover the products
that rank highest in terms of the labour input they require:
houses, kitchens, granaries and men’s shelters: nor the
activity which, through the year, probably constitutes the
largest female labour input: the processing of the half-products
that derive from gathering, hunting, fishing and agriculture,
into digestible food. I would not look at the activities in this
truly domestic sphere, where the village communities takes its
specific shape, as merely revolving on consumption and
distribution, and therefore as epiphenomena of the more directly
productive confrontation between nature and human labour as found
in the other modes of production. I would rather regard these
domestic activities as a distinct mode of production in their own
right, characterised by its own production factors and its own
relations of production. The resources are the half-products
deriving from the other branches of production. Labour is
provided by women and children in the case of food processing,
and by younger men and paid labourers in the case of building.
When slavery was still in existence, slave labour was to a
considerable extent employed for domestic activities. Technical
knowledge and skills required are considerable. Means of
production in house construction are: axe, hoe, knife, water
receptacles. The means of production required for food processing
include, in addition, pestle and mortar, a basin, and iron pots.
these latter implements are usually a woman’s personal
possessions, acquired through inheritance or through gifts from
her father or husband. Three-legged pots of cast iron, hailing
from the Portuguese territories, had supplanted earthenware
vessels well before the advent of colonial rule. Local
blacksmiths could not produce such pots; they therefore had to be
obtained through traders. The value attributed to these pots
approached that of guns (for which one slave was the standard
price). One pot constituted the main element of a fair
bride-price until the time (1920s) when labour migration was well
established and bride-prices were increasingly in cash. The
elders’ control of cooking pots (like that over hoes) gave them
power over the household mode of production, beyond such power as
they had over the labour of youth and women on the basis of the
kinship and marriage system.
The fact that until today no man consumes food that he has
processed himself, shows that one fundamental extraction relation
in this mode of production has persisted. However, the reverse
statement is no longer true. Not every adult woman in the village
today is involved in food processing for the partial benefit of
(adult) males. Divorce has become easy and common, and women are
often the initiators of divorce, these days. After a career of
domestic (as well as agricultural and gathering) labour for the
partial benefit of fathers, brothers, mother’s brothers and
husbands, a considerable proportion of women in their
mid-thirties or older settle independently in the villages of
moderately distant relatives, shunning further marriages,
engaging in agriculture on their own account. and waiting for
their children to grow up. Married wives of absent migrants who
receive remittances can display a similar independence even if
living amongst these close relatives.
Also in other respects the household mode of production has
altered. Slave labour is no longer available. The emergence, at
several places in the district, of diesel maize mills offers, for
those who can afford the cash, a partial release of female labour
from the hard and despised job of pounding. The demands made upon
the domestic labour of young men now have to compete with their
opportunities of earning cash by selling their labour, either in
distant towns or, locally, in agriculture. This means that an
increasing number of houses is built with the partial assistance
of paid labour. All houses depend on male labour for their
construction — women fetch the water, prepare the loam and
apply it to the latticework constructed by the men. This makes
unmarried women without cash dependent on the good will of their
male relatives — but other can now have dwellings built on
their own account.
No longer do all men of a village eat together in the men’s
shelter, where all women used to bring their prepared meals at
the sign of the headman’s wife. All but the smallest villages
now have multiple eating places, and the headman’s wife only
controls those younger women who reside in the cluster of houses
immediately around her; she benefits from their labour and with
regard to such tasks as fetching water, pounding, beer brewing
etc.
This mode of
production, whose local origins go back to the first human
habitation of the area, has survived until today. On the wooded
plateau of which Kaoma district forms part, a very low density of
population[11] has largely
preserved the necessary ecological conditions, although in the
immediate environment of the main inhabited valleys some major
bush products (firewood, grass for thatching) are no longer so
plentiful. State control and the necessity to stay near roads
which make participation in capitalism possible however prohibit
moving away to new areas. Gathering is the work of women and
children, while men share in their products, extracting, in other
words, the surplus. Gathering is the only mode of production
which yields, among other products, foods which can be consumed
without further processing within the household mode of
production. Moreover, it is the mode which requires virtually no
means of production. Because of these two aspects, gathering can
subsidise other modes of production in which the labour of women,
young men and formerly slaves is exploited: these producers can,
to a considerable extent, keep themselves alive by gathering.
thus old songs mention that fact that slaves, while involved in
subsistence agriculture, themselves were not allowed to eat crops
but instead had to rely on products from the forest.
Going back, like
gathering, to times immemorial, hunting has continued to
constitute an important mode of production in Kaoma district.
Until the late 19th century the means of production were spears,
bow and arrows, and traps. Long-distance trade introduced guns
only shortly before the imposition of colonial rule. Later,
purchase of a gun became a standard investment of money earned
through labour migration — and so was a bicycle, today the main
means to take meat over scores of miles of forest tracks back to
the village. Hunting is still a man’s true calling. The gun is
a main symbol of authority among headmen and chiefs, and features
centrally in many succession disputes.
Disputes of game due to the use of guns by both Africans and
European ivory hunters (Clay 1945); the creation of a very large
national park in the eastern part of Kaoma district; and state
control over hunting through licenses and game guards,
considerably reduced the yields from hunting. A situation such as
reported in the 1930s, of whole villages virtually subsisting on
hunting and gathering, nowhere obtains any more.
Only for the last fifty years has game meat been a marketable
commodity, sold both within the villages and to the outside.
Before that time, hunting was subject to three forms of surplus
extraction. First, boys and young men were trained by
accomplished hunters in faraway hunting camps. In situation the
elders expropriated their charges’ bag. Secondly, no hunter
could return to the village with game, without sharing out most
of his bag. This was a particularly strong norm, backed up by
elaborate symbolism and hideous supernatural sanctions. Thirdly,
certain larger species were sacred to the prince of an area, who
had to receive part or all of it as tribute: skins of lion and
leopards, tail of hippopotamus and eland, ground tusk of elephant
etc. (cf. Gluckman 1943). Until about 1800, when long-distance
trade and state formation were of no importance in the area,
these prestige objects would be added to the prince’s treasure,
to be buried with him at his death. The princes, very often
women, would exercise power over only a small area, and in
circulation processes their main function appears to have been
not recirculation, but withdrawal from circulation. During the
19th century, however, a trade-and-tribute mode of production
penetrated into Kaoma district. This altered the circulation of
hunters’ tribute: skins and tusks became the major commodities
which, extracted from local producers, enabled the princes to
become powerful interregional entrepreneurs.
Even with the virtual destruction of the trade-and-tribute mode
of production under capitalism, which put an end to princely
tribute rights, chiefs[12] have retained a
special relationship with hunters: possessing the very best guns
in the district (for both symbolic and financial reasons), and
still claiming historical rights (illegal but connived at by the
state) on certain species, the chiefs employ elephant hunters;
tusks and meat are sold along unofficial channels and the
proceeds go almost exclusively to the chiefs.
Since meat has become a marketable commodity (partly through the
contact with hunting groups were steeped in capitalism: foremost
the Luvale ethnic group), many gun owners have adopted a similar
policy vis-a-vis buffalo, duiker and the many kinds of bucks. In
exchange for wages or a share in the meat, a hunter is employed
to kill game with the owner’s gun and ammunition. Two factors
have led to the concentration of guns in the hands of elderly men
who themselves are not (or no longer) good hunters: succession to
high office implied inheritance not only of a prestigious title
but also of a gun; and many guns are owned by, or inherited from,
retired labour migrants (many headman fall under this category).
I estimate that about 50% of all hunters are thus separated from
their means of production. Outside wage labour, it is common for
younger men to use a gun belonging to some senior relative, to
whom the lion’s share will go. The norms on sharing the bag
within the hunter’s own village still exist, and are still to a
limited extent observed by hunters who use their own or a senior
relative’s gun. Considered from the viewpoint of the state, all
this hunting is poaching, so the circulation of the meat requires
some slight caution. Most of the meat is marketed in nearby
villages by the hunters and gun owners; some is sold to
middlemen, who transport it to parts of the districts were game
is less abundant or game supervision more effective — a very
small proportion of the meat, finally, reaches the distant urban
areas.
Thus the relations of production surrounding hunting since the
penetration of capitalism, have led to a proletarianization of
many hunters, defining themselves as a class vis-a-vis gun-owning
chiefs and elders. Some hunters till pursue a remnant of the old
hunting mode of production; whereas the remaining portion of the
hunters, possessing their own means of production, have entered
the market as entrepreneurs. In the field of circulation,
finally, a further extraction is effected by the middlemen.
Kaoma district
is an ideal environment for fishing, which however can only be
undertaken a few months per year. The places where fish can be
found are fairly localised, and this allows for a monopolisation
of natural resources such as did not develop in the case of the
hunting and gathering modes of production. It is not clear when
this monopolisation began. At any rate, until colonial times
pools were owned by princes and their spouses, while the rights
to streams were in the hands of village headmen. The main fishing
technique consisted of the collective emptying of a pool or a
dammed section of a stream. Men would enter the water using
fishing spears; women and children would keep to the borders and
catch the fish with their hands or with baskets. Methods were
rather haphazard and only the concerted efforts of scores of
people could yield results. The owner of the fishing grounds had
a right to a portion of the catch. Particularly princes and their
spouses could thus exact considerable tribute. As with game,
there were strong pressures to distribute the catch over an
extensive kinship network.
In several ways the penetration of capitalism has altered this
mode of production. The colonial state put an end to formal
tribute obligations. Collective fishing parties continued to be
held, but princes no longer received any tribute from them:
whatever fish they eat, they have to catch themselves, or buy.
For rather than distributing the fish over an extensive kin
network, participants in the fishing party now sell part of their
individual catches on the spot, particularly the women who have
no husbands, brothers or sons to spear fishes for them. Headmen
can still claim a portion of the fish caught at their dams. But
collective fishing parties in which members of a great many
villages participate, have partly given way to smaller units,
headed by a headman-owners and consisting of his close kin. The
extensive time-honoured fishing techniques are then augmented by
more intensive methods (final traps) derived from the Luvale.
Thus smaller groups produce in a short time much more fish than
they can consume. Rather than drying it for their own future use,
they sell the fish to outside, mainly via middlemen who visit the
area on their bicycles.
Oral records
referring to the early 19th century, when the present chiefly
dynasties were established in the area, already refer to the
cultivation of millet and kaffircorn. When Livingstone heard
about the area some fifty years later, he marked it on the map as
rich in staples and vegetables (Clay 1945). Yet one cannot escape
the impression that agriculture has a much shallower local
history than gathering, hunting and fishing. The case of whole
villages subsisting, in the 1930s, on hunting and gathering alone
points to viable alternatives to agriculture, which in the
pre-capitalist past are likely to have been even more important.
Contemporary methods of cultivation seem little complex,
especially when compared with the complex skills involved in
hunting.[13] In the case of
forest gardens the soil is enriched only by burned vegetable
material — the wet riverside gardens use the natural fertility
of the river sediment. Yields are very low. Land there is in
abundance, and it is easily relinquished or passed on to others
who want to use it. Land quarrels are virtually unknown, never
lead to court cases, and neighbouring groups (such as the Lozi)
who are known to quarrel over land are ridiculed for that reason.
Today’s main food crops (cassava, maize) are recent
introductions; elderly people have witnessed their arrival in the
area. By contrast to the ritual elaboration surrounding gathering
and hunting, there is only limited agricultural ritual: rain
ritual, significantly focusing on chiefly graves.
The scanty historical evidence somehow suggests that extensive
subsistence agriculture as a mode of production particularly
gained ascendancy with the rise of the trade-and-tribute mode of
production (see below, 2.9). In this connection it is important
that current theories concerning the origin of princely dynasties
from the North (the southeast of the present Zaire), associate
their emigration from that area with population pressure brought
about by the introduction of new food crops from the Americas
(Langworthy 1972: 21). The exclusion, at some point in time, of
slaves from the consumption of crops points likewise in the
direction of an association between princes and crops. On the
other hand, agriculture provided the basic elements of such
general distribution in Bantu societies that it seems of much
older origin than the Luba and Lunda migrations (16th to 19th
century). By the same token, the symbolic significance of the
hoe, (e.g. as the general word for bride-price (Nk. makahu, =
hoes); in girl’s puberty ceremonials; and in cults of
affliction) suggests that subsistence agriculture has for many
centuries already formed an addition to gathering, hunting and
fishing. Princely expansion however seems to have boosted this
mode of production, and redefined its relations of production.
Subsistence agriculture is primarily women’s work. It only
requires an input of male labour for the cutting of trees, when
the clearing is first made or revived. Young men, and in the old
times slaves, often put in labour beyond the initial stage.
Agricultural products, however, are stored in the granaries of
the elders and nobles to whom these producers are or were
attached. The elders control the allocation of land, but formally
each resident daughter and wife has a right to a garden she can
call her own. agricultural work would normally be shared between
all women of one village, going round from one field to another.
In precolonial times, when ironware was scarce and expensive,
elders largely controlled the means of agricultural production:
they received hoes and axes in exchange for women.[14] Youths who were unable thus to pay for their
prospective wives, performed bride services, including
agricultural labour. These transactions are all the more
significant when we realise that marriage is, among other thing,
the transfer of male rights over female labour. Today, now that
the bride-price is in money and ironware is generally available,
the elders’ control over these means of production has waned.
Women and youths often own their own hoes and axes, and even if
they don’t, agricultural implements freely circulate within the
extended kin group, and within and between villages. Whereas
quarrels and court cases frequently concern, e.g., ownership and
use of guns, this is never the case for axes and hoes.
With the penetration of capitalism, agriculture as a mode of
production underwent considerable changes. Abolition of slavery
and tribute obligations by the colonial state greatly affected an
important aspect of the relations of production underlying
agriculture: extraction of agricultural surplus value from slaves
to nobles and from local communities to distant courts became a
thing of the past. Cassava, moreover, largely supplanted other
food crops, thus releasing (since it is a far easier crop) labour
for production in a capitalist context: cash crops for both
sexes, and in addition hunting, fishing and perhaps even labour
migration in the case of men. Being a poorer crop in terms of
nutritional value, the staple food situation declined markedly
under the impact of capitalism. Severe famines occurred in the
early 1930s and, quite recently, in the early 1970s.[15]
Male participation in capitalism threatened subsistence
agriculture, unless other males could be brought to put in the
initial clearing labour. For this purpose, contractual relations
entered the subsistence agriculture. A woman, finding herself
without a husband, brother or adult son within reach but having
some cash at her disposal, would contract male labour. Such
contracts were and are notoriously unreliable (cf. Allan 1949),
and remained without effective legal backing; if the male partner
did not put in his labour during the crucial few weeks
immediately preceding the planting season, the female partner did
not have to pay up, but more important she would not be able to
claim compensation for the loss of cultivation opportunities.
Not every household participate in capitalism to the same extent.
Those deeply immersed in it, can use their cash incomes from that
mode of production to purchase food crops from others. Thus a
limited but steadily rising proportion of the food crops enter
into cash transactions. In many cases the relations between
producer and buyer retain non-capitalist features: the price
would be agreed before the crops were ripe, one would buy a
certain acreage instead of fixed measured quantities, and the
price would be well below current market prices. Increasingly,
however, cassava, sweet potatoes and ground-nuts are marketed
through middlemen, and sold to the outside: mainly to other parts
of the district, that are more deeply involved in capitalism.
With food crops becoming, at least in potential, marketable
commodities, and with the various women from the same village
having to find, in principle, their own solutions of the problem
of initial male labour input, the penetration of capitalism lead
to a fragmentation of agricultural production. Nowadays, the
women of a village only rarely cultivate collectively. Nowadays,
the women of a village only rarely cultivate collectively.
Headmen claim, store and control agricultural products of their
wives and unmarried resident daughters, but no longer that of the
women associated with other mature men in their village, nor that
of mature unmarried women who are making use of hired male labour
and who cultivate independently. Hired agricultural labour is not
restricted to initial male labour inputs: a considerable
proportion of the village population, especially younger men,
sell their labour power in ‘piece-work’ arrangement with
fellow-villagers.
The details may
be found in Table 1.
At present the
district does not have a very rich material culture. As elsewhere
in Africa, the impact of capitalism which brought manufactured
products within reach, has greatly affected such petty commodity
production as existed before 1900. Some historical commodities
(such as the tinderbox which for hunters using muzzle-loading
guns are indispensable) have been completely wiped out. However,
three major types of petty commodity production are still very
much alive, albeit in a modified form: blacksmithing, weaving of
rush mats, and the construction of musical instruments.[16]
Rich surface deposits of iron ore created favourable conditions
for the development of a local ironware production. The products,
mainly hoes, axes and spears, circulated locally, and formed a
major element in bride-prices and in compensation payments in
case of conflict arbitration. They also circulated in a much
wider area. Thus ironware from this district is reported to be
sold by African traders in 19th-century Tongaland (Miracle 1959),
some 200 km to the east. This trade does not seem to have been
directly controlled by princes. It survived until the 1930s, when
a colonial officer found that it was almost extinct.[17] However, the tribute which princes extracted
locally included ironware: particularly ceremonial ironware such
as was associated with high office (gongs, ceremonial axes), and
in addition iron implements. Part of this ironware found its way,
through the interregional trade-and-tribute networks, to distant
communities and princely courts. This form of circulation
disappeared when the colonial state abolished tribute and
slavery, towards the 1920s. I have no data yet on the
organization of labour in precolonial ironware production; there
is no reason why it should have differed substantially, however,
from that described for a culturally similar group[18]. Ore smelting is no longer done today. Instead,
scraps of manufactured iron are used, particularly old Landrover
springs. Contemporary iron working is limited to the reshaping of
this half-product into finished implements, and their subsequent
maintenance. Nowadays the dealings between the blacksmith and his
clients are all in the form of cash transactions; the blacksmith,
who owns the means of production (thongs, bellows, hammer, anvil,
file etc.), is assisted by young relatives who are not paid. Thus
the fundamental extraction process is between blacksmith and
assistants. Between the petty commodity mode of production, and
those modes of production which require the products of the
former as implements (hunting, fishing, agriculture and the
household mode of production), linkages exist which, because of
the medium of money, are difficult to interpret in terms of
extraction, but which ultimately rely on some participation in
the capitalist mode of production from which this money derives.
Mat weaving and the construction of musical instruments are much
less encroached upon by capitalism. The products are made by
individual part-time specialists (who, in the case of musical
instruments, command very complex skills which it takes years to
develop). Mats and musical instruments are indispensable elements
in domestic and ceremonial life. They are often made by a member
of the family and then not paid for. Occasionally they are
ordered, and paid for, by the first owner, but once obtained they
circulate freely within an extended kin group and between
neighbouring villages, never becoming commodities that can be
circulated in exchange for cash. The drums of headman and princes
carry personal names and are, along with guns, central symbols of
high office; their ownership is determined by succession to such
office. In a less exalted way, succession to a name (ushwana) is
the standard way in which individual ownership over material
objects passes on to others after a person’s death — so that
the commodity character of these objects remain subdued virtually
forever.
When trade-and-tribute networks were still in existence, however,
mats and musical instruments were included in the series of local
products which local princes extracted from the local community,
and that were further distributed to distant courts. In that time
they were often the products of slave labour. Chiefly courts,
today, the remnants of the trade-and-tribute mode of production
as incapsulated in the modern state, have retained patterns of
commodity production reminiscent of this situation: junior
members of the court, including state-paid musicians, produce
such mats and instruments as are needed for court life.
I have already
referred to the emergence, in Kaoma district since the late 18th
century, of a trade-and-tribute mode of production. These
developments in the district must be seen against the background
of similar events all over Central Africa. In the preceding
centuries, interregional trade seems hardly to have touched the
area. But with such trade bristling all around the periphery of
the area, and with processes of state formation being well under
way all around the area, the time was ripe for the
trade-and-tribute mode of production to develop locally. The
royal courtly culture of the distant Lunda, introduced by
militant migrants reaching the district around 1800, provided an
organisational model, and an ideology of exalted princely states
marked off by exclusive paraphernalia (ceremonial ironware and
musical instruments), ceremonies (installation, burial, initially
also boys initiation ceremonies), and special magical claims.
On an interregional scale, the kingdoms developing in Kaoma
district were of minor scope. They displayed all the Lunda
organisational and cultural features. Relatively massive princely
capitals were created, where a prince with his court officials
(judges, councillors, military leaders, eunuchs, headed by a
Prime Minister) would reside with their wives and slaves. Slave
labour, and tribute both in labour and in the form of products
from the various local modes of production, formed the material
basis for these establishments. However, rather than becoming
interregional foci in their own right, treaties and military
expeditions soon brought these emerging kingdoms of Kaoma
district under tributary relations with other, more successful
states: foremost the Lozi (Luyana/Kololo) kingdom which benefited
from the extremely favourable environment of the Zambezi
flood-plain, and the trading contracts with the Angolan coast.
From the middle of the 19th century, tribute in the form of
skins, ivory, slaves, musical instruments, mats, honey, and
occasionally cattle raided from the Ila and Tonga to the east,
would irregularly pass between the local kingdoms and the rapidly
expanding Lozi state. In a less organized from, raids from the
Ndebele in the south, the Yeke and Kaonde in the north, and the
Ila would extract surplus value from the area, and threaten, to
the point of extinction, the local minor kingdoms.
The first detailed European reports on the area (Gielgud &
Anderson 1901) reveal a condition of flux. Political relations
were fragmented. A number of entrepreneurs, many with little more
than the mere aspirations to princely status but with
considerable economic and political power, competed for local
hegemony. Some princely establishments acknowledged Lozi
overlordship, many other denied the arbitrary claims of the Lozi
ambassadors who roamed the area with their retinue. Large
caravans of Angolan and Swahili traders likewise crossed the
area, exchanging slaves and ivory for guns, ammunition, pots,
calico and beads at the capitals of these princely entrepreneurs,
and stimulating raiding between the latter.
The creation of regular colonial administration in the area in
the first decade of the twentieth century (Until 1924 in the
hands of the British South Africa Company), almost entirely upset
the trade-and-tribute mode of production. Tribute obligations
vis-a-vis local princes, and vis-a-vis the Lozi Kingdom, were
soon formally abolished. So was slavery. However, it was to take
until the late 1930s before these forms of surplus extraction had
effectively disappeared. Great pains were taken, meanwhile , to
reshape the dismantled Lozi state into a ready instrument for
colonial rule. The Lozi king and aristocracy were compensated for
the loss of tribute and slave labour. A proportion of the hut tax
exacted from every adult male in their area was allotted to them
(later they were to receive a fixed stipend independent from tax
revenue). This area, the former Lozi state, was so redefined as
to include the whole of Kaoma district. Among the competing local
princes a small number were selected for official governmental
recognition, and these were artificially incorporated in the Lozi
neo-traditional bureaucracy. In so far as this meant Lozi
interference in court matters, the move was greatly resented. But
is also implied at least the recognized princes, henceforth
called ‘chiefs’, shared (directly or indirectly) in the
revenues on the colonial state’s surplus extraction through hut
tax. Due to these state subsidies, the chiefs could continue to
surround themselves with court dignitaries and musicians. While
on the surface much of the prestigious Lunda court culture was
thus perpetuated and even revived, the chiefs’ relations
towards their subjects had radically changed. Direct surplus
extraction, and trading, had been supplanted by taxation mediated
through the state, and by trading through a few private stores
including missionary establishments. Former slaves continued to
reside at or near the chiefs’ places, often as clients of the
chiefs, and subject to humiliation and threats because of their
slave origins. However, as there was land in abundance, and as
they were usually related to local non-slave families
(particularly those of chiefs and headmen) they managed to
assimilate in the local society, and today are only revealed as
slaves in circumstances of grave conflict. Elders, successors to
glorious titles which in the recent past had meant near-princely
status, and who had shared in the trade, raiding and tribute
proceeds of the princes, now saw themselves forever barred from
chiefly office (whose succession rules were, under Lozi and
colonial influence, greatly narrowed down so as to exclusively
favour close patrilateral kin), with only very limited chances of
occupying a remunerative position at the chiefs’ courts,
deprived from their slaves, and with no other compensation that
administering the village tax register. In the latter capacity
they acted, of course, as the unpaid agents of the
state-controlled surplus extraction. The administrative
requirement to be registered in some village home seems to have
given the elders some extra hold over the younger men,
particularly if these joined, as labour migrants, capitalist
production outside the district.
Through the vicissitudes of indirect rule; the creation of Native
Authorities; repeated conflicts with the Lozi aristocracy; the
struggle for Independence; the redefinition of indigenous chiefs
in the Zambia state, where their judicial and executive powers
were removed and only their advisory and ornamental functions
retained official recognition — through all this the situation
of senior chiefs in Kaoma district has not move far from the
colonial pattern described above. On the basis of the 1900 treaty
between the state and the Lozi king they still enjoy a state
subsidy which enables them, along with some other chiefs in the
Lozi hierarchy, to maintain so-called Royal Establishments at a
scale which still had its own measure of splendour around 1970,
although much of that has been lost in subsequent decades (cf.
van Binsbergen 1987, 1992, 1999; Brown 1984). In addition to a
formal staff of about ten people, a considerable number of male
clients and female relatives cluster around the chiefs,
discharging productive or ritual activities and sharing as
kinsmen in the state-provided wealth. Since, Independence,
however, the process of surplus extraction from which the chiefs
benefit has changed again. Village tax was abolished and instead
income tax is raised on all earnings in the formal capitalist
sector. Thus the class position of the chiefs and their retinue
now has to be defined by direct reference to the capitalist
relations of production in the urban areas. An assessment of the
state’s role in the articulation between industrial capitalism
and the various pre-capitalist modes of production found in the
rural areas such as Kaoma district, may indicate why both the
colonial and the Zambian state apparently have such high stakes
in preserving chiefs and courtiers, these remnants of the
trade-and-tribute mode of production.[19]
The recent
capitalist development within the (subsistence) agriculture mode
of production (marketing of food crops, employment of labour) can
be summarised as the modification of relations of production
;within a mode of production whose production factors have
largely remained the same. State-promoted capitalist agriculture
in the district, however, from the outset constituted a mode of
production which also in its production factors differed
considerably from historical, subsistence agriculture.
In its most salient form capitalist agriculture as a mode of
production is found today in two huge schemes located at the
western and eastern peripheries of the district. Cultivation is
carried out on large stretches of land, precisely delineated, and
alienated by state agencies from the local population; the latter
are relegated to the status of squatters, waiting for eviction.
On these schemes, the means of production are those of modern
rational farming: tractors, harvesters, large tool sheds, piped
water, etc. Their internal, very complex organization of labour
follows bureaucratic lines, with formalized relationships between
the workers involved, most of whom (save those occupying the
lowest positions) are recruited from outside the district. Almost
all labour in these schemes requires special technical knowledge
and skills such as are not available in the surrounding local
society.
One of the schemes is a state production centre; it main product
is high-quality maize such as constitutes the main staple of
Zambia’s urban population. In this context it should be noted
that, with the one-sided stress on mining development, Zambia has
for many years had difficulty to feed its urban population, and
has usually imported maize, even from white-ruled Zimbabwe. The
other scheme is run by a para-statal organization dealing with a
non-food crop, tobacco; its aim is to establish, upon and around
the scheme, various type of capitalist producers of tobacco, in
conjunction with maize. These producers vary in capital assets,
credit facilities, and strictness of supervision. The most
successful of them are enabled to build up, within the scheme,
impressive farms yielding very high incomes. The last successful
are local villagers in the vicinity of the scheme, who have been
persuaded to grow tobacco, receive limited assistance and gain
only very modest incomes. Common to all these producers is that
they are completely dependent upon the scheme for their supplies
and marketing; that their participation in the scheme can be
one-sidedly terminated if their performance falls below the norm;
and that they are dependent upon means of production which are
not their own and many of which may never become their own. Most
of these producers employ agricultural labour in addition to the
unpaid services of wives, children and co-residing relatives.
The schemes rapidly became veritable focal points of capitalism
in the district: on or near them, stores, beer halls, a market, a
small diesel maize mill, have cropped up to cater for the needs
of increasingly proletarian population.
Very few local find permanent, formal employment on the staff of
these schemes. Equally few qualify to become farmers within the
scheme. Many young men from the surrounding area find irregular
cash employment with these farmers, while most of the
entrepreneurs who flock to the environment of the schemes are
also from Kaoma district.
Outside the schemes, in the villages, capitalist agriculture is
less completely different from subsistence agriculture. Here it
takes the form of the production of cash crops (primarily maize,
with some ground-nuts), whose marketing is monopolised by the
state marketing board. These agency also supplies fertiliser and
hybrid seeds which are both indispensable for this type of
production. Then hoe remains the main agricultural implement, and
production per farmer is therefore very low (one or a few bags of
90 kg). Only extremely rarely, and at great expense, do a few
villagers manage to have a tractor come up from the district’s
schemes to plough their fields. Patterns of land use for cash
crop production in the villages is still essentially the same as
for subsistence farming. However, the most successful village
producers are beginning to expand their fields and to claim
exclusive use of them in ways which infringe upon the historical
claims of their neighbours. No legal form has yet been found to
deal with these mounting frictions. They are therefore still
fought in an idiom of gossip sorcery accusations, and sorcery
attacks. Cultivation of the new cash crops requires new skills,
which are taught by civil servants: agricultural demonstrators
resident in the area. On the village level, relations of
production in cash crop agriculture are similar to those
dominating the present-day cultivation of food crops. Women
provide most of the labour, men put in initial labour, production
is fragmented, villagers frequently sell their labour to each
other, married men claim and market most of the products. Not
only unmarried, but also married women, however, may occasionally
farm for their own account. The latter, instead of turning they
money over to their husbands, wish to spend it themselves on
clothes and food — which results in marital quarrels and
divorces.
If one look beyond the village level, considerable differences
appear between the marketing of food crops and that of hybrid
maize. Given the high initial expenditure on seeds and
fertiliser, the producers can never afford to consume the modern
crops themselves. They have no choice but to sell them, either to
the state marketing agency or, illegally and in small quantities,
to middlemen who pay a slightly higher prize. The farmers’
products are necessarily being extracted. Outside the area, these
products are used to feed an urban population, thus making
possible the latter’s participation, as proletarians, in
capitalist relations of production. The main relation of
production manifest in village cultivation of cash crops,
therefore, appears to be the extraction of surplus value, through
the state, for the benefit of urban labour in the capitalist mode
of production. The extraction relations within the village:
between men and women, younger men and elders, are only
subservient to this more fundamental form of surplus extraction.
Once involved in capitalist production, the peasant are becoming
entirely dependent upon state agencies that deal with supply and
marketing. This frequently leads to excesses, such as fertiliser
and seeds not being available at the required time, and marketed
crops not being paid many months after collection. The producers
fret over this, clamour for improvements, for tractors, better
roads etc. It is part of their class situation that these demands
are ignored. But why, then, should they involve themselves with
capitalist production at all? Because, with the general
penetration of capitalism (increased use of manufactured
products; wage labour in the village; monetarisation of
bride-prices and of many other transactions within the village,
e.g. healing, love affairs, court fines, food circulation etc.)
they need money. Cash crops are not the only way to get money.
Hunting and fishing, and selling one’s agricultural labour are
alternatives. Moreover, men from their late teens to their
forties can go to town to work; women from this area have only a
very limited access to urban income. Women and elderly men,
therefore, try to get a share of the migrants’ incomes through
general remittances, bride prices, and healing ritual. However,
this flow of cash into the villages is irregular, not very
voluminous, and tends to decrease as circulatory migration gives
way to more permanent urbanisation; and the latter shift has been
recognized as one the main structural processes in
post-Independence Zambia. Given, finally, the fact that earning
opportunities in hunting are limited to a few men who are either
accomplished hunters or gun owners, and that income from
finishing is limited to men and to a few months per years, it
becomes clear that capitalist agriculture is the main way through
which many villagers (particularly mature men, and women) can get
a cash income.[20]
This branch of
the capitalist production requires an extensive discussion in
relation with its superstructural underpinnings. This discussion
will take up the following section.
The colonial
state, with the neo-traditional Lozi state as its picturesque
ally, carried on, in a novel way, the interregional extraction
processes which had been developing within the trade-and-tribute
mode of production. Taxation was an important, but not the only
extraction device. Apart from the foodstuffs that were consumed
by colonial administrators, the district produced little that
could be marketed within a capitalist circuit. The local products
that had been sufficiently valuable to be the objects of
precolonial interregional trade, were only irregularly drawn
within the capitalist circuit. Such petty African trade as there
was, was drawn under state control by the introduction of trade
and peddler licenses. Promotion of cash crops (maize, and
formerly rice) was only seriously undertaken in the 1950s. Before
that time, a Lozi representative chief in the district (he
afterwards became the Lozi Paramount Chief), ingratiated himself
with the colonial government by vigorously promoting the
collection of wild latex, a strategic resource during the Second
World War (Caplan 1970); these rubber campaigns, however, soon
came to an end. No other direct exploitation of natural resources
took place. Beyond the southern boundaries very extensive
exploitation of timber forests was undertaken, which even
warranted the construction of a railway branch; but in the
district itself this only meant the creation, relatively nearby,
of a limited capitalist labour market.
The major influence of the colonial state upon the district’s
natural resources was not active exploitation, but the closing of
huge areas for human habitation, gathering and hunting. Besides a
few minor forest reserves, the agricultural schemes already
mentioned, and the township where the district’s headquarters
came to be located, the country’s main national park was
created in the eastern part of the district. This concession to
international conservationalism and the sportsmanship among
colonial civil servants had a tremendous impact. It cause the
forced resettlement of scores of villages, hitherto largely
relying on hunting and gathering, to parts of the district that
were more densely populated, had a poorer forest ecology and
soils. Hunters saw their richest and best-known hunting grounds
closed. Also outside the restricted areas, hunting and the
felling of trees was subject to licensing — which meant two
streams of extraction: one of license fees, and (as these were
seldom paid) a probably more voluminous one of fines.
Moreover, the total absence of human habitation and hunting in
the game reserves seems to have led to a rapid proliferation of
tsetse fly, which negatively affected the human and cattle
population in the eastern part of the district[21].
Also gathering was affected, not only by the creation of
restricted forest areas, but also by the state’s restrictions
on the movements of villages. This one could no longer move away
from the more densely populated valleys, where certain forest
products (firewood, grass for thatching) are however increasingly
scarce. Village resettlement campaigns, undertaken after
Independence, have a similar effect, and thus combine with the
‘free market forces’ that compel a population increasingly
participating in capitalism, to stay near the roads that connect
the local periphery with distant markets.
In still another way did the existence of the colonial state have
an important effect on the district’s natural resources. the
colonial state, of course, monopolised violence. This not only
put a halt to the competition between local princes with their
following, and made possible their definite subjugation to the
much resented Lozi administration, — it also meant that the
local population could not effectively ward off the many
thousands of Angolan immigrants who crossed the border between
1920 and the early 1970s. This district is separated from the
border by the Lozi mainlands. Refusing to accommodate the Angolan
immigrants (mainly Luvale( in their own areas, the Lozi, backed
by the colonial state, allocated to them parts of Kaoma district.
In later years, also increasing numbers of Lozi would themselves
move from their mainlands to this district. This encroachment not
only infuriated the original inhabitants and drove home their
powerlessness — the superior (in local eyes positively rash)
Luvale methods of gathering, hunting, fishing and subsistence
agriculture (cf. White 1956) resulted in rapid expansion which
further reduced the productive viability of the local population.
The results of this complex of state influences on the district
were manifold. Pre-existing modes of production were either
completely redefined (the trade-and-tribute mode of production)
or very substantially weakened (hunting, gathering, fishing,
subsistence agriculture).
This weakening made them less resistant to the penetration of
capitalist elements. As we have seen, all these modes have
acquired partial but unmistakable capitalist features: the
separation between labour and means of production, and the
emergence of labour as a commodity, paid for in cash. But these
capitalist features do not just derive from alterations in the
rural relations of production, at the mere village level. Where
does the cash come from that increasingly dominates the local
modes of production? Where do the products go to that are
extracted in exchange for cash? Introduction of capitalist
features in the rural relations of production is impossible with
?? the total district being drawn within a capitalist mode of
production which encompasses the whole of Central Africa, and
indeed almost the whole world. The minor introduction of
capitalist elements at the village level, can only be understood
against the background of the total district being assigned a
role in the capitalist world system.
The main extraction, then, effected by the colonial state in
Kaoma district, was in fact the extraction of labour. Initially
some of this labour was used locally, for the colonial state
itself: porters were indispensable for a district administration
in an area where, until the 1930s, most district travelling by
administrators was on foot or on bicycle. Far more important,
however, was the role of the colonial state in creating the
conditions for the local populations’ participation, as
migrants, in capitalist relations of production located outside
the district.
While Marxist analyses of labour migration all agree as to the
structural, ‘forced’, causes of labour migration
(interpreting individual migrants’ conscious strategies as mere
surface phenomena), they have stresses a number of different
processes as the main underlying explanation: the competition
between food crops and cash crops, which (due to price
manipulation in the centre) is tipped in favour of the latter —
so that the starving farmers have to flock to the towns in order
to sell their labour (Amin 1973); the systematic underpaying of
migrant labour, so that rural societies increasingly relying on
consumption of manufactured commodities become involved in a
spiral movement of ever increasing necessity to sell labour
(Arrighi 1973); and finally the exploitative device of the
subsistence wages, by which the capitalist mode of production
makes use of labour, the reproduction of which it has left to the
non-capitalist modes of production (Meillassoux 1975; cf
Gerold-Scheepers & van Binsbergen 1978). Kaoma district seems
to offer, in addition to all these factors, yet a further variant
which outside Africa has been recognized as the ‘backwash
effect’: capitalism, through the colonial or post-colonial
state, effects and erodes pre-existing modes of production of
such an extent that the local rural population is no longer
capable of effectively reproducing itself through the latter —
therefore part of this population is forced to participate,
outside the area, in capitalist relations of production, whilst
at the same time local relations of production assume capitalist
features to a more or less limited extent.[22]
However, the colonial state’s contribution to labour migration
was more specific than just creating the wider conditions implied
in an eroded local society. Without the state, migrancy from
Kaoma district would have been impossible. The state issued and
protected the money in which the capitalist relations of
production, such as between migrants and their employers, were to
be both expressed and concealed. It imposed taxes which formed an
extra impetus for wage labour. It provided identity cards, on
which spells of migrant labour and taxes paid were duly marked.
It provided the roads, airfields, rest camps along which the
migrants could move to and from their places of work. It provided
the legal means by which contractual relations between migrants,
recruiting agencies and employers were fixed and could be
enforced in court and by the police — practically always in the
interest of the employers and recruiting agencies. The state even
set, and on request might generously increase, an annual quota of
the number of recruits that were allowed to leave a particular
area. Returns on migrant labour form a recurrent item in the
district officers’ annual reports, and betray a keen official
interest in the matter.
Thus the colonial state acted as an instrument to spread and
reproduce the relations of production that define capitalism. It
is noteworthy that the state expenditure for this was, during
much of the colonial period, covered neither by hut tax revenues,
nor indeed by taxation of the various capitalist enterprises in
the territory. Thus the vicariously exploitative nature of the
state remained largely hidden from its own officers, who with a
free conscience, could pursue the lofty goals of Native
Administration, and who themselves often regretted the draining
of ‘able-bodied men’ from the countryside.
In this respect the administrators’ frame of minds was similar
that of European missionaries in the district, who, given the
governments’ slowness to provide schools except near the courts
of some senior Lozi representative chiefs, were the first to
introduce western education in the area.
Christian missions can be seen as the ideological counterpart of
capitalism. They endeavour to disengage people, as individuals,
from their non-Christian kin, and offer a morality in which grave
and salvation feature as spiritual commodities, monopolised by
the church but available to the converts provided the latter
show, in their symbolic beliefs and actions, a similar
unquestioning submission as capitalist relations of production
demand of the worker in the production process. By the same
hierarchical role, induced competition between equals, a fixed
patterning of the lives of those involved as to time and place,
etc., is an excellent introduction (in Africa in much same the
way as here) to the modern capitalist production process which is
likewise carried out within formal organizations. Moreover, the
mission school reproduces not just capitalist attitudes but in a
more direct way contributes to the reproduction of labour by the
teaching of basic skills (literacy, basic technology) which made
for the ready and profitable insertion of migrants in the
capitalist mode of production. Finally, this ideological and
cognitive preparation for capitalist functioning, in itself
weakens the non-capitalist modes of production in which the
labour of the pupils would have been involved had they not been
at school.[23]. This is all the
more relevant in an area like Kaoma district, where most primary
school pupils are older than ten, and where primary school
leavers are often well advanced towards twenty. Instead of the
direct extraction of their surplus by local elders (which
extraction they are beginning to perceive beneath the crumbling
ideology of historical modes of production encroached upon by
capitalism), these youngsters now eagerly submit (under the
promise of future gratification in the earthly or heavenly New
Society) to an anticipatory extraction process, learning (at
their own expense) to the proletarians — and often cultivating
the teachers’ and missionaries’ gardens into the bargain!
Not all graduates from schools and bible courses, however, became
directly involved in capitalist relations of production, as
migrants and proletarians. Some were absorbed in the mission and
school circuits themselves, thus reproducing the ideological
institutions whose direct link with capitalism I have made clear.
A larger number were absorbed by the state, to serve in the
political superstructure through which capitalism maintains and
reproduces itself, and penetrates other modes of production, From
a Weberian perspective, it might be interesting to trace all the
different self-perceptions, evaluations, aspirations, consumption
patterns, the internal bureaucratic organization through which
their positions are connected, and the various legitimation
devices through which their roles in the process of surplus
extraction is commonly concealed — in sociology as well as in
society itself. It is likely that a more penetrating analysis of
the superstructural institutions and their workings would reveal
a more subtle relationship between these superstructural
specialists, and capitalism. For in so far as the state, the
intellectuals and the churches, endeavour to assert a relative
autonomy vis-a-vis infrastructural conditions, they cannot just
act as handmaidens of the capitalists, but also have to link up,
in some way, with workers’ interests, and even with remnants of
the pre-capitalist modes of productions and with the various
diffuse classes implied therein. However, whatever the possible
gains of Weberian refinements to our analysis, from the Marxist
perspective tentatively adopted in the present paper the overall
class position of these African teachers, church workers, and
civil servants is fairly clear: they are the agents through with
capitalism reproduces itself on the superstructural level, and
for their livelihood they share in the fruits of such extraction
processes as capitalist relations of production entail.
The impact of the colonial state in Kaoma district resulted both
in labour migration and in the partial reshaping of rural
relations of production in a capitalist direction. The population
was launched on the path of proletarianization and
peasantisation. On the superstructural level, this process
resulted in a large number of ideological and organisational
responses that might be interpreted as manifestations of class
struggle, and which are just a diffuse and off the mark as one
would expect in the situation when class struggle is not (yet)
fought at the infrastructural level, does not yet challenge
relations of production.
Of course, the state-backed, dominating and arrogant Lozi formed
a ready target. Especially when the formal creation of a Lozi
senior representative chief for the whole district, in the 1930s,
shattered local hopes among chiefs and courtiers to enter into
direct negotiations with the colonial state as fully-fledged
Native Authorities rather than as a second-rate ‘Lozi subject
tribe’, a bitter anti-Lozi movement was launched in the area.
Nineteenth-century political conditions had not been conducive to
the emergence, locally, of a strong ethnic identity encompassing
larger areas than the individual kingdoms, which originally
(before the emergence of the trade-and-tribute mode of
production) may have coincided with clan areas, and which alter
rose and declined in their struggles for hegemony. However, once
the district was defined as a distinct unit within the state
administration, local ethnic awareness could develop, in
antagonism against the Lozi, in the course of the struggle for
such token prices as the administration had to offer: control of
the Native Treasure; roads; schools; hospitals, etc. It was only
then that the ‘Nkoya’ ethnic label gained practical political
significance. When the massive Watchtower movements reached the
district in the 1930s, its local protagonists combined an
eschatological message of sorcery eradication and the New
Society, with explicit challenges of the Lozi Paramount Chief.
The Lozi neo-traditional administration was left to severely
punish these preachers; the chiefs who had supported the latter,
were reprimanded. In various forms, ranging from the shunning of
marital ties with Lozi residing in the district, to the emergence
of several short-lived Nkoya political societies, the backing of
the opposition party after Independence (the Lozi controlled
regional nominations for office in the ruling party),
remonstrations against local domination of Lozi teachers and the
use of the Lozi language in schools, factionalism within the
present day district rural council, and finally even massive
support for my own research, antagonism against the Lozi has
continued to dominate political thinking in the district until
today, and has concealed more fundamental causes of the local
predicament.
Ethnicity is thus the major local response[24], on
the superstructural level, to the new structures of surplus
extraction which capitalism imposed upon the district.
Ironically, it has recently turned into a powerful force for the
further incorporation of the population into capitalist
structures. The awareness of Lozi domination, coupled with
general ill feedings vis-a-vis the state that had deprived them
of hunting and gathering opportunities without offering
compensation in the form of modern amenities, had cause a rather
general withdrawal from political activities, and apathy
vis-a-vis the cultivation of cash crops, towards the 1970s. When
however, about the same time, internal conflict within the ruling
party seriously weakened the strength of the Lozi in national
politics, opportunities became brighter for local politicians.
They managed to secure a seat in parliament and some in the rural
council. Relying on close kinship ties with the local chiefs, and
strongly identifying as Nkoya, they managed to gain considerable
support and trust in the area. Driving home the message that
improvement of local conditions would be within reach if only
people were prepared to participate, as they (the politicians)
themselves were doing, in the structures created by the state and
the party, and to join in the cash-crop programmes advocated by
them, they contributed to a considerable rise in cash crop
production, and to a marked lessening of anti-government feelings
in recent years. In the process they were assisted by a small
number of local teachers, agricultural demonstrators, staff at
the agricultural schemes etc., who likewise identify as Nkoya.
Against the background of the local perception of recent history
as an unbroken chain of humiliation and expropriation, these
leaders have considerable appeal as examples of what the peasants
may yet stand to gain from the state and capitalism. These
leaders are not just active in politics. They are also deeply
involved in cash-crop production themselves: for this purpose
they enjoy state credit facilities (as politicians some of them
have a hand in the allocation of such credits to promising
farmers) and make full use of the opportunities offered by the
districts agricultural schemes, employing agricultural labour,
operating a store, etc. Having found their own niche in
capitalist production and in the state that promotes and
maintains such production, they induce their fellow-Nkoya to
follow them in that direction. In the long run, the latter do not
seem to have much of an option.
In order to
discuss classes and class formation in Kaoma district, I have
started out with a conceptual exercise, which links these key
concepts to that of the mode of production. Adopting the view
that classes define themselves in class struggle, and that this
struggle is given in the nature of the relations of production
which, in a specific linkage with production factors, define a
mode of production, I then set out to describe, one by one, the
various modes of production that Kaoma district has known since
about 1800. The number of different combinations of production
factors, and the different relations of production (revolving
around these production factors) took, necessitated to
distinguish a rather larger number than is common usage in the
literature. For each mode of production I attempted to identify
the fundamental extraction processes by which surplus value
produced by the labour of one class, is expropriated by the
antagonist class.
Frankly, the picture emerging is kaleidoscopic and dazzling. As
far as I can see, a strict application of the definitional
framework with which I started, would reveal every mode of
production in Kaoma district, now and in the past, to consist of
the superimposed class struggle between a number of pairs of
classes: elders versus younger men; men versus women; nobles
versus slaves; middlemen versus peasants, etc. The same pairs of
classes would feature again and again in the various modes of
production; e.g. that of younger men versus elders seems to occur
almost anywhere. What is more, the direction of the extraction
process between these classes is not the same everywhere: e.g. in
some women extract, but in most it is on the contrary their
surplus which is being extracted.
It is very possible that my use of the concept of class in this
contest is altogether wrong. Yet more seems involved than just
conceptual delusion. With my remarks as to the specificity of the
combinations of production factors in each so-called mode of
production as distinguished here, I hope to have shown that the
very real problem at hand is not resolved by simply calling the
whole of non-capitalist production in Kaoma district, past and
present, by the name of ‘domestic mode of production’.
Neither can the specific capitalist features which ‘my’ modes
of production have developed, be adequately dealt with if we do
not further analyse these modes as specific, distinct elements,
that should not be allowed to submerge completely into the
composite production system that constitutes the local society.
Classical anthropology has, in such terms as integration,
reciprocity, or homeostasis, a ready answer for the complex
enmeshing of gives and takes that emerges from my description of
Kaoma district, particularly in its pre-capitalist version. It
was an answer that merely rendered theoretical status to the
local Participants’ ideology by which the latter themselves
hide the underlying contradictions of their society, ultimately
based on labour and surplus extraction. So far for classic
anthropology? But surely, an answer like the present one, that
not only claims to make out classes in pre-capitalist African
society, but even lets the number of those classes amount to a
multiple of the already very high number of modes of production,
is not an acceptable alternative either.
One way out might be the following. Perhaps it is one of the
characteristics of a society like that of 19th-century Kaoma
district, that class-like elements in the relations of production
tend to be counterbalanced and dissipated, across the various
modes of production of which that society exists. Salient,
recognizable class relations would then only exist in those cases
where the same pair of classes stands in the same extraction
relation throughout the majority of the modes of production
involved — so that these class relations reinforce each other,
and in fact form the major form of linkage between these modes of
production. Viewed in this way, pre-capitalist society in Kaoma
district may still be said to have had classes, but only a few:
elders, younger men, women, nobles and slaves.
No matter the variety of schools and fashions, social science has
somehow become accustomed to conceive of classes as more of less
permanent, endogamous, broad subsets of society, membership of
which is determined by social action and not by such chance
attributes as age and sex. Slaves and nobles would be acceptable
classes according to this tradition, women and elders would not.
I believe that objections of this kind rely too heavily on the
type of class structure that prevails in industrial society. And
even so, women are increasingly being recognized as a class, and
so might be elderly people, in industrial society — not by
virtue of somatic or demographic attributes, but because of their
common role in the production process — more precisely, their
being relegated to the periphery of that process. This overall
picture is not greatly invalidated, I think, by the discovery of
a few women or elderly people among the leading capitalists. In
pre-capitalist societies, means of production and technical
knowledge tend to be of such relatively limited scope that the
individual labour power of humans is still a major datum in
production; under those conditions, why should sex and age
differences not be crucial in the relations of production? The
fact that, in the course of years, young men will become elders
may seem to indicate that the boundaries between those two
classes are blurred, that they are not ‘real’ classes.
(‘For do workers ever automatically become capitalists, serfs
masters?’) A man’s individual career is however not the best
entrance to an understanding of class relations — despite the
massive volume of non-Marxist sociology which deals with inter-
and intra-generational, individual social mobility. The fact is
that, in Kaoma district, wherever elders and younger men are
together involved in production, extraction of surplus takes
place which renders a class dimension to their interaction. that,
as years go by, the complementary class position stipulated by
these relations of production find new incumbents, is commonplace
and does not alter these relations. Finally, we ought to realise
that the transition from young men to elder is really not all
that automatic. The alternative is that younger men succumb under
the burden of their class position e.g. the very great risks of
big game hunting, or lack of adequate food. Survival would then
be synonymous to class struggle. This is certainly how, even
today, youths in Kaoma district see their situation themselves:
as a constant struggle to keep alive under the attacks from the
elders, which they conceptualise, however, not in terms of
surplus extraction but of sorcery. Every death of an elder is an
occasion for rejoice among the young men. Being dependent upon
the elders because of the latter’s control of land, female
labour, the household mode of production where food is processed,
and major means of production such as guns, young men consider
their attachment to any particular elder as temporary. No matter
how close the kinship tie with him, they are always prepared to
leave him and settle with some other elder if that promises to
improve their conditions of living both materially and in terms
of spiritually security. Much mobility between the villages
results from this, and even some urban-rural mobility.
Slaves and nobles as classes emerged only with the
trade-and-tribute mode of production, less than 200 years ago. No
longer were class relations contained within the scope of the
production process in the village: this newly emerging mode of
production marked to the incorporation, still at a very limited
scale, of Kaoma district in interregional processes of
extraction. It was only then that classes in the conventional
social-science sense became manifest under the grip of an
extraction process directed to the outside. The young princely
states maintained the conditions for this extraction process.
They were the expression of the class relations on which this
process hinged. The colonial state, with the neo-traditional Lozi
state as an important aid, stepped into this extraction
structure, reshaped it in capitalist terms, weakened pre-existing
modes of production, and thus, through the historical
developments I have attempted to trace, made Kaoma district
entirely subservient to the reproduction of capitalist relations
of production. The extraction of labour through migrancy, of cash
crops, game meat and fish in Kaoma district as elsewhere in rural
Central Africa, supplied the workers for capitalist production in
the towns, mines and modern farms elsewhere, and made it possible
(directly; or indirectly, i.e. through releasing food elsewhere
in rural areas) to feed this labour force; in the same way, it
contributed towards the reproduction of those superstructural
requirements (the state, education, Christianity) through which
capitalism is maintained.
Both indirectly through the effects of the colonial state, and
directly through their incorporation in capitalist markets, the
rural relations of production acquired capitalist elements: wage
labour, separation between producers and means of production, and
circulation of products as commodities. alongside these elements,
non-capitalist aspects manage to survive to some extent. For this
reason class relations in Kaoma district continue to display the
diffuse nature discussed above. Moreover many of those deeply
involved, as employers of labour (gun owners, villagers who have
their gardens cultivated of their houses built, farmers at or
near the agricultural schemes) and/or as superstructural agents
(chiefs and courtiers, politicians, teachers, church leaders,
civil servants) in the extraction process, are themselves
involved in productive labour and thus exposed to surplus
extraction. Given this complexity, easy formulas and sharp
distinctions are not going to help as very much. this is also the
danger of characterising the class situation that has developed
in the district, by such a heavy, emotionally-charged term as
exploitation. Such a term would moreover carry the suggestion
that the relations e.g. between chief and politician on the one
hand, and peasants on the other, is one of direct and purposeful
extraction, whereas in fact it is indirect and unconscious,
mediated through the state, and couched in terms of ethnic
(politicians) or feudal (chiefs) responsibility and calling.
Yet it is useful to distinguish shades of class position in this
context, even though all positions that are not wholly that of
peasant, have much in common. If we are to distinguish between
them, I suggest that the following are important dimensions:
— The
directness of the extraction of surplus involved. The gun
owners, the farmers, directly extract the surplus value created
by those working for them. The teachers and the chiefs, in those
capacities (they are likely to be gun owners, and farmers, as
well), may ultimately benefit from extraction of, among others, a
local surplus, but this escapes perception since this extraction
is mediated through the state — they receive an income based as
much on surpluses extracted elsewhere within Central Africa.
— The
dependence upon participation in capitalism. The villager,
even if he occasionally employs labour, and sells crops and meat,
is still for a considerable part capable of providing his own
subsistence: although no longer entirely. This is hardly the case
for the politician, the teacher, the civil servant — given the
minimal required consumption level at which he is able to carry
out his work (shoes, jacket, trousers, etc.).
— The
security offered by one’s specific relation towards the overall
extraction process. the risks of the poacher, of the villager
who invests money (of the order of magnitude of a year’s
monetary income) in seeds, fertiliser and labour, in order to
produce literally a few bags of maize for the payment of which he
may have to wait half a year, are of a different nature from
those of civil servants — no matter how much the realities of
the latter’s work situation deviates from bureaucratic
prescription.
— A
breeding effect: the extent to which one’s specific relation
towards the overall extraction process, enables one to engage, as
capitalist, in direct processes of local extraction. Chiefs[25] and courtiers, with their state incomes, are
capable of employing wage labour for hunting or agriculture,
display high marital mobility and/or polygamy (through which they
can extract surpluses of from female labour). Civil servants
build farms, and upon retirement operate stores; politicians
secure plots in the agricultural schemes, credit facilities, and
likewise engage in trading. Most of this is beyond the means of
most villagers, even those who, as elders, are formally engaged
in class relations where they get the upper hand of women and
young men.[26]
From the viewpoint of an overall process of surplus extraction,
there is something to be said for viewing all these various
positions (chiefs and courtiers, politicians, civil servants,
church leaders, traders, and in some respects even elders) as
pertaining to one class. Their class position does not consist in
being the ultimate exploiters of the rural population (these I
have not here attempted to identify), but in maintaining the
conditions through which capitalist extraction can be realised.
As a class, they seem to move towards ever increasing exclusive
dependence upon capitalist relations of production. Today there
are still great similarities between those participating in
direct extraction and those who, through the state, are sheltered
from such directness; the breeding effect of their class position
causes many of them to end up in pretty much the same kind of
extraction structures. It is possible however that in the long
run this fundamental contradiction, between direct and indirect
extraction, may further develop, leading to a class of petty
capitalist entrepreneurs on the one hand, of salaried civil
servants on the other.
Allan,
William, 1949. Studies in African Land Use in Northern
Rhodesia. Rhodes Livingstone Paper No. I 5. London: Oxford
University Press.
Amin,
S., 1973, Le Developpement inegal, Paris: Editions de
Minuit.
Amselle,
J.-L., 1976, ‘Aspects et significations du phenomene migratoire
en Afrique’, in: Amselle, J. L., ed., 1976, Les Migrations
africaines, Paris: Maspero, pp. 9-39.
Arrighi,
Giovanni, 1973. ‘Labour supplies in historical perspective: A
study of the proletarianization of the African peasantry in
Rhodesia’. In: Essays in the political economy of Africa.
Giovanni Arrighi & John Saul, eds. New York: Monthly Review
Press.
Beach,
D., 1977, ‘The Shona economy: Branches of production’, in:
Palmer, R. & N. Parsons, eds, 1977, The Roots of Rural
Poverty in Central and Southern Africa, London: Heinemann,
pp. 37-65.
Brown,
E.D., 1984, ‘Drums of life: Royal music and social life in
Western Zambia’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Washington, School
of Music; University Microfilms, Ann Arbor.
Buijtenhuijs,
R. & Geschiere, P. (eds.) (1978), Social Stratification
and Class Formation, African Perspectives 1978, 1-2, Leiden:
African Studies Centre .
Caplan,
Ann P., 1982, ‘Gender, ideology and modes of production on the
coast of East Africa’, in J. de Vere Allen & T.H. Wilson,
eds., From Zinj to Zanzibar: Studies in history, trace and
society on the eastern coast of Africa, pp. 29-43. Paideuma,
28. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Caplan,
G. L., 1970, The Elites of Barotseland, 1878-1969, London:
Hurst.
Central
Statistical Office, n.d. [ ca. 1975 ] , Regional variations in
fertility in Zambia, Lusaka: Central Statistical Office.
Clay,
G.C.R., 1945, History of the Mankoya district,
Livingstone: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, Communication no. 4,
‘re-roneod’ [sic] 1955.
Gerold-Scheepers,
T.J.F.A. & W.M.J. van Binsbergen, 1978, ‘Marxist and
non-Marxist approaches to migration in Africa’, in: Van
Binsbergen, W.M.J. & H.A. Meilink, eds, 1978, Migration
and the Transformation of Modern African Society, African
Perspectives 1978/1, Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum, pp. 21-35.
Geschiere,
P.L., 1978, 'The articulation of different modes of production:
Old and new inequalities in Maka villages (Southeast Cameroon)'
in Buijtenhuijs & Geschiere (1978): 45-69.
Gielgud
Anderson expedition files held in Zambia National Archives,
BS1/93; cf. KTJ 1/1 outletters Mumbwa (Gielgud-Anderson Hook of
the Kafue expedition) also held in Zambia National Archives
Gluckman,
Max, 1943. Essays on Lozi Land and Royal Property.
Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No. IO. Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia:
Rhodes-Livingstone Institute.
Godelier,
M., 1973, Horizon, trajects marxistes en anthropologie,
Paris: Maspero.
Godelier,
M., 1975, ‘Modes of production, kinship, and demographic
structures’, in: Bloch, M., ed., 1975, Marxist Approaches
and Social Anthropology, London: Malaby Press, ASA Studies,
pp. 3-27.
Godelier,
M., 1977a, ‘Infrastructures, societes, histoire’, Dialectiques,
21 : 41-53.
Godelier,
M., 1977b, ‘Politics as ‘‘infrastructure’’: An
anthropologist’s thoughts on the example of classical Greece
and the notions of relations of producion and economic
determination’, in: Friedman, J., & Rowlands, M.J., The
evolution of social systems: Proceedings of a meeting of the
research seminar in archaeology and related subjects, held at the
Institute of Archaeology, London University, London:
Duckworth, pp. 13-28
Godelier,
M., 1978, ‘Infrastructures, societies and history’, Current
Anthropology, 19, 4: 763-771.
Godelier,
M., 1980, The emergence and development of Marxism in
anthropology, in: Ernest Gellner, ed., Soviet and Western
anthropology, London: Suckworth
Hailu,
K., 1994, ‘Rural development and agricultural policy in Central
Western Zambia: The case of Kaoma-Nkeyema tobacco scheme’, M.A.
thesis Free University, Amsterdam; subsequently published,
African Studies Centre, Leiden, 2001.
Hindess,
B. & P.Q. Hirst, 1975, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Housden,
J., & M. Armour, 1959, ‘Indigenous iron smelters in
Kalabo’, Northern Rhodesia Journal 4, 2: 135-138.
Houtart,
F., 1980, Religion et modes de production precapitalistes,
Brussels: Editions de l’Universite de Bruxelles.
Jewsiewicki,
B., with Letourneau, J., 1985, eds, Modes of Production: The
challenge of Africa, Ste-Foy (Can.)
Langworthy,
H.W., 1972, Zambia before 1890, London: Longman.
Lichtheim,
G., 1963, ‘Marx and the ‘Asiatic’ Mode of Production’, St.
Anthony’s Papers, No. 14, 86-112.
Meillassoux,
C., 1975, Femmes, greniers et capitaux, Paris: Maspero.
Miracle,
M.P., 1959, ‘Plateau Tonga Entrepreneurs in historical
interregional trade’, Rhodes-Livingstone Journal, 26:
34-50.
Mudzibganyama,
N.S., 1983, ‘Articulation of modes of production and the
development of a labour reserve in Southern Africa, 1885-1944:
The case of Botswana’, Botswana Notes and Records, 15:
49-5813574
Parsons,
T., 1951, The Social System, Glencoe: Free Press.
Pouillon,
F., 1976, ed., L’Anthropologie economique, Paris:
Maspero
Poulantzas,
N., 1974, Les Classes sociales dans le capitalisme
aujourd’hui, Paris: Seuil.
Rey,
P.-P., 1971, Colonialisme, neo-colonialisme et transition au
capitalisme, Paris: Maspero.
Rey,
P.-P., 1973, ed., Les alliances de classes, Paris:
Maspero.
Rey,
P.-P., E. Le Bris et M. Samuel, 1976, Capitalisme negrier: La
marche des paysans vers le proletariat, Paris: Maspero.
Reynolds,
B., 1963, Magic, divination and witchcraft among the Barotse
of Northern Rhodesia, London: Chatto & Windus.
Richards,
A.I., 1939, Land, labour and diet in Northern Rhodesia,
London: Oxford University Press.
Suret-Canale,
J., 1974, Sur le ‘Mode de Production Asiatique’,
Paris: Centre des etudes et de recherches marxistes.
Terray,
E., 1969, Le Marxisme devant les societes ‘primitives’,
Paris: Maspero.
Terray,
E., 1975, ‘Classes and class consciousness in the Abron kingdom
of Gyaman’, in: Bloch, M., 1975, ed., Marxist approaches and
social anthropology, London: Malaby Press, ASA Studies:
85-137.
Thorner,
D., 1966, ‘Marx on India and the Asiatic Mode of Production’,
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 9: 3-66.
Tokei,
F., 1964, ‘Le Mode de Production Asiatique dans l’Oeuvre de
K. Marx et F. Engels’, La Pensee, 114:7-32.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1976, ‘Religious innovation and political
conflict in Zambia: A contribution to the interpretation of the
Lumpa rising’, in: van Binsbergen & Buijtenhuijs 1976:
101-35. Revised reprint in: van Binsbergen 1981: ch. 8
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1981, Religious Change in Zambia:
Exploratory studies, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1987, ‘Chiefs and the State in Independent
Zambia: Exploring the Zambian National Press’, Journal of
Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, No. 25-26: 139-201.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history
in central western Zambia, London/Boston: Kegan Paul
International
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, ‘Nkoya royal chiefs and the Kazanga
Cultural Association in western central Zambia today: Resilience,
decline, or folklorisation?’, in: E.A.B. van Rouveroy van
Nieuwaal & R. van Dijk, eds., African chieftaincy in a new
socio-political landscape, Hamburg/ Munster: LIT-Verlag, pp.
97-133
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., & Buijtenhuijs, R., 1976, eds, Religious
Innovation in Modern African Society, African Perspectives
1976/2, Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., & Geschiere, P.L., 1985, ed., Old
Modes of Production and Capitalist Encroachment,
London/Boston: Kegan Paul International, greatly revised English
edition of the original Dutch edition: Binsbergen, W.M.J. van,
& Geschiere, P.L., red., Oude Produktiewijzen en
Binnendringend Kapitalisme: Antropologische verkenningen in
Afrika, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, 1982.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., & Meilink, H.A., 1978, eds, Migration
and the Transformation of Modern African Society, African
Perspectives 1978/1, Leiden: Afrika-Studiecentrum.
Warner,
W.L., & Lunt, P.S., 1946, The social life of a modern
community, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Weber,
M., 1969, The theory of social and economic organization,
New York/London: The Free Press/Collier-Macmillan, reprint of the
1964 paperback edition.
White,
C.M.N., 1956, ‘Hunting and fishing in Luvale society’, African
Studies, 15: 75-86.
Wolpe,
Harold, 1980, ed., The articulation of modes of production,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Table
1: Summary of modes of production, and their constituting
branches of production, in Kaoma district since 1800
mode of production |
branch of production |
resources |
producers |
means of production |
technical knowledge & skills |
central relation of exploitation (producers/
extractors) |
products |
village mode of production |
household branch of production |
forest: unfinished products from gathering,
hunting etc. |
women, young men, slaves |
cooking pot, axe, knife, mats, sieves, mortar,
pestle, vessels |
considerable |
women/men; labourers/owners; slaves/nobles; men/
women; young women/elder women |
food ready for consumption (meals) |
|
gathering |
communal forest |
women, children, slaves |
hoe, axe, receptacles |
generally available |
women, children/men; slaves/nobles; women/others |
firewood, fruits, honey, wax, vegetables,
medicine, building materials |
|
hunting[27] |
communal forest |
mature men |
spear, bow & arrow, knife; since about 1850:
gun, gunpowder; recently: |
very specialized and relatively rare |
mature men/others; hunters/ gun owners;
hunters/ chief; women/others; hunters, gun
owners/middlemen |
fresh and dried meat; tusks, skins, medicine |
|
fishing |
pools and streams owned by either the local
group or a royal title |
men (women) |
fishing spears, traps, dams |
generally available |
men/women, children; fishermen/chief;
women/others; fishermen/middlemen |
fresh and dried fish |
|
agriculture |
forest gardens and riverside gardens; seeds
controlled by elders but privately owned (?) |
women, men |
hoe, axe |
generally available |
women/men; young men/elders; slaves/nobles |
staples (maize, cassava, kaffircorn, millet) and
vegetable relishes |
|
animal husbandry[28] |
cattle, dambos, open forest |
children, young men |
fenced kraal |
considerably specialized |
herdsman/owner |
skins, meat |
PETTY COMMODITY
MODE OF PRODUCTION |
petty commodity production[29] |
forest, distant car breaker’s plants |
men, women |
blacksmithing tools, woodcarving tools |
very specialized |
young men/elders; local community/court |
hoes, spears, tinder boxes, mats |
tributary mode of production |
trade and tribute branch of production[30] |
any |
local community |
from the local community: see above; from the
entrepreneurs/ princes: arms, charms (?) |
from local community: varies with product; from
entrepre neurs: knowledge of markets, languages, contacts
etc |
young women/elder women (beer); local
community/court; lesser court/ distant more powerful
court (e.g. Lozi, Ndebele) |
hoes, mats, honey, wax, mead (honey beer),
skins, tusks, fish (beer?) |
capitalist mode of production |
(a) capitalist agriculture[31] |
forest (seeds...?) |
women, young men |
(hybrid seeds), fertilizer, hoe; very
occasionally: scotch cart, plow, plowing oxen, tractor |
specialized knowledge required, as taught by
government agencies |
labourers/ farmers; peasants/middlemen,
peasants/ urban consumers (via marketing board, state,
farming schemes); women, young men/ senior relatives |
maize, ground-nuts, occasionally cassava |
|
(b) labour migration |
worker’s labour power; raw materials |
young men |
industrial plants, human bodies |
specialized knowledge an advantage as taught by
government agencies and on-the-job |
labourers/ industrialists |
industrial and mining products |
[1] An earlier version of this
paper was presented at the Seminar on Class Formation and
Stratification in Africa, African Studies Centre, Leiden, May
18-19, 1978. The descriptive and theoretical material in this
paper was later reiterated in my Religious change in Zambia
(1981) and Tears of Rain (1992), as well as in a
collective book on Marxist anthropology: van Binsbergen &
Geschiere, eds., 1985. The original paper appears now for the
first time, in a substantially revised and expanded version.
[2] Mainly the eastern part of
the district is referred to in this paper, which is largely under
Chief Kahare. Here and in later papers I prefer a geographical
identification of the social formation in which, among others,
people identifying by the Nkoya ethnonym are involved. Following
the anthropological usage of designating a local society by the
local actors’ preferred ethnonym, of even by some other
ethnonym imposed upn the local actors, obscures the essentially
dynamic and strategic nature of ethnic labelling.
[3] Cf. Godelier 1973, 1977a,
1977b, 1978, 1980; Terray 1969, 1975; Meillassoux 1975; Rey 1971,
1973, Rey et al. 1974. My own study of the Lumpa religious
uprising in Zambia (van Binsbergen 1976) was cast in the Marxist
terms of infrastructure, superstructure and class struggle, but
its main inspiration was South African combatant Marxism (as
mediated through my University of Zambia head of department Jack
Simons), largely unheedful of the neo-Marxist revival in
continental European anthropology.
[4] Cf. Lichtheim 1963; Tokei
1964; Thorner 1966; Suret-Canale 1974.
[5] Godelier 1975; Hindess &
Hirst 1975. Geschiere 1978, though cited in the bibliography, was
not available at the time since it was first presented at the
same seminar as the present paper; regrettably my paper did not
make it to that seminar’s publication by Buijtenhuijs &
Geschiere (1978).
[6] Caplan 1982; Houtart 1980; Jewsiewicki c.s. 1985; Mudzibganyama 1983; Wolpe 1980; van Binsbergen 1981; van Binsbergen & Geschiere 1985.
[7] Also cf. the discussion of
Pouillon 1976.
[8] Cf. Amselle 1976, who
explicitly contests the dualism underlying the highly influential
approach by Meillassoux’s 1975 treatment of labour migration in
Africa.
[9] Typically outside
capitalism, which is the mode of production in which, through the
separation between capital and labour, the economic level
(‘instance’) has become capable of reproducing the total
society.
[10] Although I do refer to
the circulation of women, bridewealth, and the role of elders.
the emphasis on detailed description in this paper does not leave
enough room to tackle a central problematic in
modes-of-production studies: the way in which they, sc. their
central exploitative relationship, are being reproduced. Lter
(van Binsbergen 1981, 1992) I treated this problem at greater
length, with special emphasis on the ideological c.q. religious
and ethnic factors of this reproduction.
[11] Of the order of magnitude of 1
inhabitant per km2.
[12] I use the word princes for the
political authorities in the precolonial period; chiefs are
princes incorporated into the colonial or post-colonial state.
[13] Miracle 1959.
[14] Oddly, I am not sure of the
formal ownership rules today, now that the bride-price is in
money and ironware is generally available; within the extended
kin group, and between neighbouring villages, agricultural tools
are freely used. Quarrels and court cases frequently occur with
regard to the ownership of guns but never with regard to that of
hoes or axes.
[15] Although in both periods
ecological disasters (locusts, droughts) contributed to famine
conditions, male capitalist participation seems a decisive
factor: in the early 1930s the return of unemployed migrants
after the 1929 Great Depression and the drying up of the stream
of remittances; in the early 1970s the massive participation of
young men in a Chinese road-building project. These famines were
decidedly more serious than the annual food shortages which, in
Central African production systems, tend to occur annually
(Richards 1939) and which locally have caused an entire season to
be called mwaka wa ndala: time of hunger. A very popular
song in the district at the time ran:
‘Hunger is paining us,
Hunger is paining us,
With
the implication: ‘For our men are working for the
Chinese...’.
[16] At the village level there is a
less specialised, continuous and diffuse circulation of
comodities such as tobacco, eggs, chickens, and beer, which
strictly speaking should be subsumed under the pretty-commodity
mode of production. Also we should remember that much circulation
of agricultural produce (especially cassave and older food
crops), meat and bear takes place not in the context of
commodified exchange but of ceremonial, more or less festive
(weddings, funerals, name-inheritance rituals) occasions when
family clusters and clans define their mutually complementary
relations.
[17] SEC/NAT/66A Annual
report native affairs Barotse province 1935 file held in Zambia
National Archives.
[18] Cf. Housden and Armour 1959 on
Kalabo, just west of the Zambezi flood plain.
[19] A related question which I shall
not here consider but which has been treated extensively in my
extensive later work on the Nkoya traditional authorities (cf.
van Binsbergen 1987, 1992, 1999, , is then: why is it that far
outside the circle in which the state subsidy to chiefs
circulates, the interest in and the competition for prestigious
titles continues unabated in Kaoma district? For the
overwhelming majority of headmen, the chances of ever joining the
royal establishment in a remunerative position are negligible.
With the fragmentation of production under the encroachment of
capitalism, village headmanship does not automatically enhance an
elderly man’s power to extract surplus value from younger men
and from women.
[20] A question I shall not enter into
here is why in the eastern part of the district capitalist
agriculture took so long to ‘take off’. It did eventually
with a vengeance: Hailu 1994, 2001.
[21] In the 1940s and 1950s, the
remainder of considerable cattle herds (which derived from Tonga
and Ila raids, of from Lozi royal gifts, shortly before 1900),
became greatly depleted by tsetse fly, and they became virtually
disappeared as they were bought by cattle traders who are alleged
to have paid one bicycle for each head of cattle.
[22] The extent to which reproduction
of the local society is problematic can be seen, e.g., from the
fact that the ethnic groups that constitute the 19th-century of
the area (foremost the Nkoya people) now the lowest reported
fertility in Zambia, according to a fertility survey undertaken
by the Central Statistical Office and published in the 1970s
(Central Statistical Office n.d.).
[23] This is an important point in the
Kaoma district up to the 1970s, where truancy was very high. Many
elders preferred to have their young boys accompany them on
hunting and fishing trips or, in cattle areas, to be herd-boys.
Girls at the age of 8 or 9 already made a considerable
contribution to household production. Many parents did not see
the point of a school education and are particularly resentful of
any physical work that children were made to do at school.
[24] There have been others, such as
prophetic and sorcery eradication movements in the 1930s and late
1950s, cf. Reynolds 1963.
[25] In the colonial era, new
incumbents of chieftainship tended to have had an earlier career
as petty civil servants, e.g. boma messengers.
[26] I hesitate to include patterns of
expenditure and consumption in this comparison. These are
manifestations of class relations, and should not, as in the
Weberian tradition, be taken as primary. Nor does it seem
meaningful to compare the various classes in terms of annual
monetary income, converting subsistence production in prices.
While such exercises may have a limited meaning in a social
context that is completely determined by capitalism, it would be
wrong in the present context, where the partial survival of
non-capitalist modes of production precisely means that not all
labour and not all products are commodities.
[27] Hunting forms a dominant theme in
male culture; people from this area excelled in hunting and were
renowned for it over much of presentday Western & Central
Zambia.
[28] This branch of production is
peripheral due to tsetse fly (very little accumulation or capital
increase possible from one animal generation to the next.).
[29] In principle includes the
circulation of humans as commodities (slaves), and the techniques
of capturing and marketing slaves.
[30] Slavery never formed a distinct
branch of production but, as a source of labour and as a relation
of production, was a continuous aspect of the gathering, hunting,
fishing, subsistence agriculture and trade-and-tribute modes of
production. Formal abolition of slavery affected these modes of
production, particularly the trade-and-tribute mode. Slavery was
generally couched in a kinship idiom, was strongly domestic, and
implied extensive legal and marital rights for the slave,
including the opportunity to succeed to high office. From about
1850-1920 slavery took on forms of commoditization.
[31] Commercialization as from
early 20th century; strongly encouraged as from 1950s, and
particularly as from late 1960s.
| page last modified: 20-04-13 12:21:46 |  |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
