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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
© 1997-2002 Wim van Binsbergen
The main purpose of this
paper is to confront the thesis of the resilient chief with a
limiting case from western central Zambia.
After sketching the peculiar position of contemporary African
chiefs as appearing to exist on a plane different from the
legislation, the political process and the bureaucratic structure
of the post-colonial state, the introduction highlights the
succession of approaches to African chieftainship in the course
of the twentieth century, contrasting dualistic and
transactionalist models.
Next, the descriptive framework of chieftainship in western
central Zambia is set. The argument examines in detail the local
chiefs’ power base and their room for manoeuvring. This power
base turns out to be declining and the chiefs are desperately
experimenting with new strategies in order to survive; among
these strategies, a recourse to nostalgic cultural forms is
conspicuous. The chiefs are driven into the arms of a variety of
new actors on the local scene (including national-level
politicians, churches, expatriate commercial farmers), against
whom they are rather defenceless. One of these new actors is an
ethnic voluntary association founded and controlled by the
chiefs’ most successful urban subjects, often their own
kinsmen. This non-governmental organisation has been amazingly
successful in bridging indigenous politics and the state in a
process of ethnicisation; gradually however the revival of
chieftainship which this non-governmental organisation has
brought about, is turning out to lead not to resilience but to
impotent folklorisation if not annihilation of chieftainship, and
as a result tensions are mounting between chiefs and the ethnic
association.
The conclusion examines the implications for the general
Africanist argument concerning chiefs’ resilience today. It
moreover seeks to pinpoint why specifically a formal organisation
such as Kazanga should provide a viable alternative to
chieftainship in linking the local communities to the national
state and the world at large.
African traditional leaders, or chiefs, were
a showpiece of classic anthropology,[3] and
thus revealed the links both chiefs and anthropology have
entertained with the colonial project. This may have been an
important reason why these chiefs did not feature prominently in
the post-colonial blueprints as worked out by constitutionalists
and political scientists in the 1950s-1970s. The emphasis was on
the unitary state with a unique source of authority: the people,
whose will was expressed through the regular secret ballot.
Chiefs have appeared to exist on a different plane, deriving
their authority and power from sources outside the post-colonial
nation-state, even if they are co-opted into the latter’s
institutions through subsidies, state control over procedures of
appointment, recognition and demotion, membership of governmental
bodies of the modern state sometimes including a House of Chiefs
(comparable to a House of Lords, or Senate, in North Atlantic
parliamentary democracies), and ceremonial respect extended to
the chiefs on the part of state officials. Post-colonial African
economies and systems of governance may have declined, but chiefs
have often risen to new levels of recognition and power. Still
their position does not systematically derive from, nor coincide
with, the constitutional logic of the post-colonial state.
Chiefs in Africa[4] have managed to
maintain for themselves a position of respect, as well as
influence and freedom of manoeuvre in the wider national society
far exceeding their formal powers as defined by post-independence
constitutions. This is obviously related to the legitimation gap
of a modern bureaucratically organised state based on mere legal
authority (Weber 1969), in a social context where for most
citizens the ideological, symbolic and cosmological appeal of
such legal authority is partial and limited. Considered to be
heirs to pre-colonial kings, the chiefs are co-opted in order to
lend, to the central state, some of their own legitimacy and
symbolic power. By virtue of occupying a pivotal position in the
historic cosmology shared by large numbers of villagers and
traditionally-orientated urban migrants, the chiefs represent a
force which modernising state elites have found difficult to
by-pass or obliterate.
This is only one side of a process of interpenetration of
traditional and modern political organisation. It is not only the
state which co-opts the chief as an additional power base. On the
strength of the respect their traditional position commands,
chiefs have also successfully penetrated the state’s
administrative and representative bodies, thus acquiring de facto
power bases in the modern political sector. Of this phenomenon we
shall encounter a striking example below, when we examine the
many modern offices our protagonist, Chief Kahare of Western
Zambia, has held since the 1960s.
Various approaches have tried to interpret
the situation of African chiefs.
One of the earliest attempts to make sense of the structure of
colonial society was that of dualism, which was thought to
inform not only the colonial economy for which it was first
conceived, but to apply also to the political and legal structure
of the colonies; these were thus depicted as plural societies,
with a hierarchical multitude of ethnically defined
socio-political and legal domains, integrated only by the
colonial administration.
Later the discipline of legal anthropology was to develop the
perspective of legal pluralism,[5] in
order to add subtlety to the concept of the plural society, trace
in greater detail its implications in the legal sphere, and
extend the analysis to the postcolonial situation and to North
Atlantic society. It is the legal emphasis which has made the
concept of legal pluralism has cast much light on the nature of
the chief in modern Africa: chiefs are defined at the
intersection between modern and traditional systems of
constitutional law, and one of their principal spheres of
activity is the judiciary.
Another attempt to cope with the chiefs’ being situated at the
intersection between two apparently independent and autonomous
systems, has been the neo-Marxist theory of the articulation
of modes of production, according to which each mode of
production hinges on its specific logic of exploitation
underpinned by symbolic and legal institutions while the
relationship between modes of production is one of exploitative
reproduction; while this approach has also been applied to
African chieftainship (Beinart 1985; van Binsbergen &
Geschiere 1985: 261-270) and illuminated the economic aspects of
chieftainship, it was less successful in tackling its many other
sides.
Both the modes of production approach, and the plural society
approach, have taken for granted — by the assumption of firm
boundaries between fundamentally distinct ‘logics’ or
‘systems — what perhaps needs most be problematised and
explained: the nature of constitutional and legal dualism in
modern Africa, and the way in which it is socio-culturally
produced and reproduced. Are the boundaries between the
traditional politics in which chieftainship defines itself, and
the modern state, not situational rather than absolute? Much of
the practice of African chieftainship consist not in the strict
observance but in the manipulation, crossing, even denial of
these boundaries. Is the insistence on two different spheres
perhaps not so much an analytical fact but an ideological
construct of interested actors, waiting to be exploded by
scholarly analysis? This leads, as a fourth theoretical variant,
to a transactional approach to African chieftainship,
which traces interactions and relations between the various
actors (individual and collective) in the contemporary African
states, and beyond the formal features and demarcations of legal
systems, traces the actual forms of their material exchanges,
power and influence.[6]
My use of the term ‘transactional’ could create confusion.
Broadly, the term is understood to denote at least two somewhat
different approaches in modern anthropology:
(a) The
departure, as from the 1960s, from rigid structural functionalist
models of social organisation in terms of enduring, well-defined
and strictly bounded institutions; and their replacement by much
more fluid conceptualisations of the social and political
process. In the latter, the social order springs not from
individuals’ blind and slavish copying of institutional
patterns, but from these individuals’ creative and strategic
enactment of such contradictory principles as are available in
the normative and symbolic systems at their disposal. The names
of Barth, Bailey and Boissevain[7] are traditionally
associated with this innovative departure, but there is much to
be said for the view that these three authors merely made
explicit a development which had already been implicit in much
Manchester School work from the 1950s onwards.
(b) A
rationalistic narrowing-down of the approach under (a) in such a
way that methodological individualism is claimed as
anthropology’s only analytical stock in trade; the wider —
partly unconscious — structural patterning of individual
perception and choice is swept under the carpet; the social
actors are presented as virtually omniscient, eminently rational;
and far from being confronted with a plurality of contradictory
cultural and cosmological orientations, these actors’ are
presented as subject to only one, unitary and consistent
orientation.
Clearly my use of the term
‘transactionalist’ throughout this paper is in terms of
variant (a), not of the reductionist variant (b). A
transactionalist approach does not make the actors in the field
of modern chieftainship any more rational than actors usually are
wherever in the modern world; specifically it leaves room for
actors aspiring — for local cultural and cosmological reasons
defining a man’s ideal career pattern — to a historical
political role as ‘traditional ruler’, even if — like in
Zambia today — the concrete benefits of such an office in terms
of financial remuneration and central state power are minimal.
The main advantage of transactional approaches over
structural-functionalist approaches, is that a transactionalist
approach does not already take for granted the conceptual
boundaries between the so-called ‘traditional’ and the
so-called ‘modern’ sphere of politics in colonial and
post-colonial African states. On the contrary, a transactional
approach invites us to study how, concretely, the actual
interactions between chiefs and their various interaction
partners at the local, regional and national level, in themselves
create and maintain these boundaries. By implication, much
as the distinction between traditional and modern politics
permeates the literature on chieftainship in modern Africa and is
often considered to be illuminating and inevitable, it is this
very distinction which needs to be explained most. A
transactional approach may come some way towards such an
explanation. It shows chiefs and non-chiefs constantly moving
back and forth in the so-called traditional and the so-called
modern domain, in demonstration of the fact that the boundary
separating these domains is far more porous and situational than
all these actors are prepared to admit in their own official
normative and ideological statements. A rigid institutional
approach takes the boundary for granted and as such risks begging
the question which is at the heart of the analytical problem
posed by contemporary African chiefs.
However, the case becomes more complicated, and transactionalism
less convincing, when the local actors at least believe in the
neat compartmentalisation which their interaction has thus
created — like in the Zambian case.
In the 1980s African chiefs were
rediscovered as exponents of a domain of legal and political
relations where the true, richly complex and contradictory nature
of contemporary African states can be confronted with the formal
and restrictive models of constitutional legislators and positive
political scientists. Here the details of the performance of the
African states can be studied, and formal defects as well as
informal remedies recognised. This resulted in a limited number
of studies of African chieftainship in a transactionalist vein,
highlighting the chiefs’ continuing and increasing power not
only outside but also within postcolonial African states.[8]
Such insights also allowed us to reinterpret the position of
chiefs under colonialism according to less static models (Chanock
1985; Prins 1980). In the present study the emphasis will
likewise be transactionalist, although an underlying theme will
be that at the background of such transactions as in fact occur
we may yet discern the existence, not of two but of three fairly
distinct socio-political domains: the postcolonial state, the
indigenous political system, and the civil society.[9]
The main purpose of this paper is to
confront the thesis of the resilient chief with a limiting case
from western central Zambia. After setting the descriptive
framework we shall examine in detail the chiefs’ power base and
their room for manoeuvring. This power base turns out to be
declining and the chiefs are desperately experimenting with new
strategies in order to survive. They are driven into the arms of
new actors on the local scene, against whom they are rather
defenceless. One of these new actors is an ethnic voluntary
association founded and controlled by the chiefs’ most
successful urban subjects, often their own kinsmen. This
non-governmental organisation has been amazingly successful in
bridging indigenous politics and the state in a process of
ethnicisation; gradually however the revival of chieftainship
which this non-governmental organisation has brought about, is
turning out to lead not to resilience but to impotent
folklorisation if not annihilation of chieftainship, and as a
result tensions are mounting between chiefs and the ethnic
association.
During much of the argument we shall be guided by a
transactionalist orientation. However, towards the end we shall
have to admit the limitations of a transactional approach as
indicated above. We shall have to concede that the contradictions
of modern African chieftainship cannot be fully understood within
a transactional framework. The need for further theoretical work
in this field will be manifest from my continued inability to
convincingly resolve the contradiction between the
transactionalist and the structural functionalist perspective.
Here the role of the chiefs’ urban, elite subjects may be that
of a deus ex machina, saving our analytical day because,
transactionally, their cultural and organisational bricolages
around the Kazanga festival and the Kazanga Cultural Association
in general, at the same time
• help
to construct the dichotomy between the traditional political
domain and the modern state, and
• dissolve
that dichotomy by involving the chiefs in a process of
ethnicisation that essentially bridges these domains in the
context of the elites’ political and symbolic manipulation.
Today there are no independent states on the
fertile, well-watered, only slightly elevated lands on the
Zambezi/Kafue watershed: western central Zambia. Around 1850 the
several small-scale local states came to be politically and
economically incorporated in the expanding state system of the
Kololo (militarily organised South African immigrants who had
captured the Luyana state of the Lozi or Barotse, whose centre
was the Zambezi flood plain between today’s towns of Kalabo and
Mongu). While the Luyana state was recaptured on the Kololo in
1864, its hold on the local states persisted; it even tightened
with the advent, in 1900, of the colonial state, which allowed
the indigenous Lozi administration considerable freedom. Only two
royal titles in the region managed to survive, as senior royal
chiefs, the incorporation into the Lozi state: Mwene (‘King’)
Kahare of the Mashasha people and Mwene Mutondo of the Nkoya
Nawiko. The proper name Nkoya originally referred to a stretch of
forest near the Zambezi/Kabompo confluence, then became the name
of a dynasty associated with that area; the latter in turn gave
its name to the Mankoya colonial district, and finally the name
became an ethnonym for all non-Lozi original (i.e. pre-1900)
inhabitants of Mankoya (as from 1969 Kaoma) district. The many
other royal titles were replaced by Lozi representatives. Two
other royals who were closely related to the Mutondo dynasty has
in time moved their capitals to outside Barotseland (now
Zambia’s Western Province): Mwene Kabulwebulwe and Mwene Momba,
who from the outset had been recognised by the colonial state in
their own right.
A decisive year in the development of ‘Nkoya’ to a
self-assertive ethnic group was 1937, when the Lozi king
established, smack in the middle of Mankoya district, a filial
branch named[10] Naliele of his own
court in order to control the local chiefs, judiciary and
district finance. Another such year was 1947, when Mwene Mutondo
Muchayila was demoted and exiled for ten years by the Lozi king
on grounds of restiveness. Lozi arrogance, limited access to
education and to markets, and the evangelical South African
General Mission, stimulated a process of ethnic awakening. As
from the middle of the twentieth century more and more people in
eastern Barotseland and adjacent areas came to identify as
‘Nkoya’. The usual pattern of migrant labour and urban-rural
migration endowed this identity with an urban component, whose
most successful representatives distinguished themselves from
their rural Nkoya nationals in terms of education, income and
active participation in national politics. While the Lozi
continued to be considered as the ethnic enemies, a second major
theme in Nkoya ethnicity was to emerge: the quest for
political and economic articulation with the national centre,
by-passing the Lozi whose dominance at the district and
provincial level dwindled only slowly.
Since they shared (albeit very modestly) in the Barotse subsidy,
in return for which the Lozi king (and his successors, the Lozi
Paramount Chiefs) had accepted incorporation in the colonial
state in 1900 and in Zambia in 1964 (cf. Agreement 1964), court
culture was preserved through much of the twentieth century at
the capitals of Mwene Mutondo and Mwene Kahare. The complex
historic organisation of their courts has continued to define
such offices as the king (Mwene, plural Myene), his
sisters (Bampanda wa Mwene), his wives (Mahano),
princes and princesses (Bana Mwene, any offspring born to
the incumbent Mwene or previous Myene while in
office), his Prime Minister (Mwanashihemi), senior
councillors with titled ranks as judicial, protocolary and
military officers, priests, executioners, musicians and hunters.
In addition the court houses clients, many obliquely
reputed to be of slave descent. If court offices have continued
to be coveted and contested until today, it is not only because
they have offered virtually unique opportunities for salaried
employment in the local countryside, but also because the
political and symbolic order these offices represent is still
vital to the subjects of the Myene. As a distinctive physical
structure (marked by a royal fence with pointed poles (Lilapa),
within which the Mwene’s palace, audience/court room, regalia
shelter and royal shrine are situated), with at a conveniently
short distance[11] the sacred grove
where the graves of earlier Myene are administered by the
court priests, these capitals (zinkena, sing. lukena)
have constituted the spatial centres of Nkoya political ideas
through much of the twentieth century. The main element of court
culture which disappeared from the surface of tradition politics
in the area is human sacrifice, which played a prominent part in
the nineteenth century. The Kazanga royal harvest
festival, whose falling into disuse during the colonial period is
not unrelated to the central role human sacrifice played there,
was only reinstated in 1988, in greatly altered form, and not by
the chiefs but by an ethnic association enlisting the chiefs’
support. Formally, slavery and tribute labour (the two main
sources of labour at the zinkena in the nineteenth
century) lost their legal basis in the 1910s, and in practice
they ceased to exist in the 1930s; but the chief can and does
still command inputs of free labour time when it comes to such
tasks as the maintenance of the royal fence, the construction of
shelters at the lukena, and similar productive labour
undertaken in the context of development activities (erection of
schools, clinics, maintenance of roads) concentrated around the lukena.
Formal tribute (ntupu) is no longer levied by the Myene,
but in practice the customary greeting of the Mwene by villagers
and returning urban migrants tends to be accompanied by gifts
(still designated ntupu) in the form of cash or
manufactured liquor, while in local production by villagers
around the lukena (e.g. beer brewing, alcohol distilling,
hunting, fishing, agriculture) the Mwene’s prerogatives are
often recognised by a gift of produce. However, even in this
cash-starved rural environment these material prestations cannot
be considered anything but minimal; they no longer come close to
the order of magnitude of court-village exploitation in the
nineteenth century. Of the military, political, economic and
ideological structure of kingship of that time, it is mainly the
ideological elements which have persisted, no longer effectively
supported by, nor supporting, material exploitation.
Of course, at present, at the end of the twentieth century, it is
virtually impossible for the local villagers to maintain the view
— which must have rather well corresponded with the realities
of the first half of the nineteenth century — that the lukena,
in a largely implicit but well developed ritual, political and
economic spatial cosmology, is the hub of the universe. The
present-day Myene have themselves been active in the
outside world, usually pursuing salaried careers there before
acceding to their royal office; and after accession their
involvement with distant state institutions, organised on a very
different footing from the lukena, make it clear that the lukena
is now very much only a periphery of the world. Admittedly, most
of these royal activities occur outside the gaze of the subjects.
The subordination which these outside involvements imply for the
Mwene’s position is seldom made explicit but usually covered
under traditionalist decorum with plenty of respectful squatting
and hand-clapping on the part of modern state officials and other
visiting outsiders. As late as the 1970s many of Mwene Kahare’s
subjects could therefore still cherish the illusion that whenever
he was summoned to the national capital Lusaka to attend a
meeting of the House of Chiefs (an advisory body to the
government with hardly any formal powers) he went there ‘to
rule Zambia’. But the villagers could not fail to notice that
preciously little benefits from this ‘rule’ were coming their
way, in the form of improved roads, clinics, produce markets,
educational opportunities etc.
According to a stereotype current in South Central Africa, chiefs
are the focus and the leaders of an ethnic group, and guide their
subjects in ethnic self-articulation. At first glance, such a
situation also obtains in western central Zambia. On closer
analysis, however, the situation is more complicated. Under the
precolonial conditions of the 19th century, kings were often
ethnic strangers (cultivating a Lunda identity e.g. by the Lunda
language, allegiance to the Lunda king Mwatiyamvo in what is now
Zaire, and circumcision; cf. Bustin 1975), heading multi-ethnic,
sprawling and shifting local polities based on tribute, military
force, and chief-controlled ritual. Only in the 20th century did
the emergence of the concept of ‘tribe’ under the combined
efforts of colonial administrators, missionaries, and African
Christian intellectuals, produce a situation where the chiefs, as
heirs to the precolonial kings, were the administrative and
judicial heads of the areas they administered and whose
inhabitants came to be conceived as one ‘tribe’. The
successive incorporation, more or less at minority status, in the
wider state systems of the Kololo, Luyana and British, served to
blur the cultural and structural distinctions between the
‘Nkoya’ court and the local villages, since now the court was
no longer the exploitative ‘other’ but, to the contrary, the
instance from which the local population derived their ethnic
name and their increasingly vocal ethnic identity amidst the
inimical and exploiting wider world. Yet the equation of ethnic
group and chief was not self-evident and therefore remained
capable of being challenged or at least ignored by actors (like
the Kazanga Cultural Association, as we shall see below) seeking
to capture Nkoya ethnicity as a resource for their own political
game. In the 1930s and 1940s, the local struggle against the Lozi
was largely concentrated at the royal courts. In the process
however, chiefs gradually lost the initiative to church leaders
and successful urban migrants — a new elite largely composed of
their own junior kinsmen. An ethnic voluntary association, the
Kazanga Cultural Association, emerged among successful urban
migrants as the latter’s main instrument of ethnicisation in
the 1980s.
Before we can examine the interaction between chiefs and this
non-governmental organisation, and interpret it in terms of the
central theme of African chiefs’ performance in today’s
social and political landscape, let us first discuss the
chiefs’ power base and, in the next section, the details of the
ethnic association.
The social dynamics around Nkoya
chieftainship can hardly be characterised in terms of resilience.
There are signs of attempts at active adaptation to new political
and economic conditions, but these attempts are desperate and
largely unsuccessful. Often the chiefs are mere marionettes in a
play stages by outsiders. This will be clear from the following
detailed examination of the chiefs’ power base today; we shall
concentrate on the situation of Chief Mwene Kahare. For this
purpose I shall discuss, with varying degrees of detail, the
following topics:
• the
chief among his kinsmen, including royal councillors;
• chief,
subjects and land tenure;
• judicial
aspects of chieftainship;
• the
impact of the existence of another royal chief in the district;
• the
Lozi indigenous administration;
• the
modern state;
• chiefs
strategies for enlarging their scope for manoeuvring, by
embarking on new modes of action
• the
role of encroaching outsiders
Among other roles, the chief is a kinsmen.
His kinship obligations have a double effect: they impose upon
the chief, as upon all other heads of families in Zambia today,
the burdensome obligation of providing financial resources in a
steadily declining economy; but they also remind the chief that
as a kinsmen he is only the equal or the junior of many of his
kinsmen, and has to be heedful of the advice (ku longesha)
especially from those of his kinsmen who are senior headmen
themselves.
The very fact that the royal successor is not determined by
inflexible rules but depends on election (with candidates being
chosen by senior headmen from among a pool of half a dozen or so
serious contenders, all of them — not necessarily very close
— bilateral consanguineal kin of previous incumbents; cf.
diagram 2) makes the power base of these chiefs in traditional
constitutional law relatively weak, and liable to factional
machinations from defeated candidates. This is, incidentally, a
major reason why the chiefs of this region have individually
welcomed the protection from a superior political power (be it
the Lozi king, Paramount Chief, and the colonial and postcolonial
state) as from the second half of the nineteenth century.
Membership of the royal council (only its two or three most
senior members are remunerated and recognised by the district
secretary) is a prerogative of certain village headmanships;
incumbents of any village headmanship are selected by the
village’s secret council of elders, subject to recognition of a
village headman by the chief as holder of the communal land.
Chiefs have always been very much aware of the dangers they are
under at their own court, and it is the chief’s sister’s
obligation to act as cup bearer, tasting all food and beer and
ensuring that it is not poisoned. Nor are the stories of regicide
entirely a thing of the past:
Mwene Mutondo Chipimbi’s autocratic nature.
The new chief’s failure to accept such criticism and to stick
to court protocol within a few months created such disenchantment
between Mwene Mutondo Chipimbi (elected in 1991) and his
councillors, that his own and his wife’s death within a year
after his accession was readily attributed to these courtier’s
aggression, either through sorcery or through poisoning.
In the eyes of his subjects, the chief’s
most obvious characteristic is his hereditary status as
legitimate, elected successor to (in fact, the incarnation of)
the Kahare title, which is at least 200 years old; this ensures
him of the unconditional support of his subjects in so far as
they have no aspirations for the throne themselves. His royal
status has a direct implication for his subjects’ access to
land as the principal agricultural resource. Despite the reform
of land tenure in Zambia in the 1970s, the chief has retained the
right to issue land to individuals, regardless of ethnic
affiliation, residence or citizenship. This makes him the
benefactor (and beneficiary of the usual, irregular, and usually
very small tribute in money and alcoholic beverages), not only of
his own local people identifying today as Nkoya, but also of a
considerable number of Lozi immigrants who since the 1970s built
their village in one of the valleys under chief Kahare’s
authority. He was also a key figure in the creation of the
massive Nkeyema Agricultural Scheme in 1970. In Kaoma district,
agriculture is not just subsistence agriculture; already around
1970 the transition to producing hybrid maize for the market was
made on a very small scale, with a few bags per household, but
due to the poor performance of the marketing organisation which
never pays up in time, market agriculture has become very
unattractive.
The need to provide cash as the head of the extended family of
royal kinsmen (especially classificatory sisters) converging on
the palace, coupled to the state’s failure of providing a
stable and sufficient income, may bring the chief to abuse his
powers in desperate egoistic acts such as large-scale issuing of
land to ethnic strangers, of which we shall see a striking
example below.
Shortly after independence, Kahare’s
customary law court was moved dozens of kilometres away from his
palace and (like all other chief’s courts) put directly under
the supervision of the Ministry of Justice; officially the chief
merely retained the right to endorse the appointment of the
members of what was henceforth called the Local Court.[12] In the late 1980s a customary court was reinstated
at the palace; its members are senior councillors (the chief only
acts as a distant advisor not present during the sessions) and
although its jurisdiction is limited and shady, the court enjoys
great popularity and authority.
Besides the Lozi chief of Naliele, Kaoma has
two royal chiefs identifying as Nkoya. The competitive nature of
these two royal chiefs’ relations means that — in a typical
zero-sum game situation — one’s chief ascendance implies the
other chief’s decline, and even if it does not (specifically,
when ascendance is due to new, national-level political resources
opening up, outside the district level, so that the zero-sum game
situation no longer applies) it is still interpreted in these
terms by either chief’s subjects. This severely limits the
possibility of enlarging the chief’s power bases by inter-chief
alliances.
Gwyn Prins (1980) made a name for himself in
African history by proposing a transactional model of active
strategy on the last independent Lozi king, Lubosi Lewanika
(1878-1916), in order to supplant the image of passive and
impotent submission to the imposition of colonial rule, at the
turn of the twentieth century. At present, almost a century
later, and encapsulated in the postcolonial state, Lewanika’s
successor the Lozi Paramount Chief is a prominent member of the
Seventh Day Adventist Church, and in all respects an example of
the resilient chief found elsewhere in Africa today.
The constraints from the part of the Lozi traditional
administration upon the chieftainship of Mwene Kahare and Mwene
Mutondo are clear from the fact that as from 1994 (when new
incumbents acceded to both titles) both royal chiefs and their
courts have been without remuneration from the state for lack of
recognition by the Lozi Paramount chief: they had refused to go
and prostrate themselves before him in the traditional manner.
This reflected unprecedented escalation of the Lozi-Nkoya
conflict (including a war of newspaper articles, occasional
ethnic violence, the construction of the major royal drums by the
new Mwene Mutondo — denied to the Nkoya chiefs such drums since
the mid-19th century! — and the death of chief Litia attributed
to Nkoya sorcery). Lack of recognition by the Lozi Paramount
Chief made it impossible for the Kaoma district secretary to
confirm the new appointments and to pay out the salaries. At the
Kahare capital, the musicians are no longer paid and (disrupting
a virtually unbroken tradition of at least two centuries)[13] they have allowed the royal drums to remain
silent, — except for a few occasions when a prominent visitor
manages to bribe the unemployed and absent musicians to once more
go through the motions, for a few minutes, of what used to be a
honourable and coveted profession. This stands in sharp contrast
with the situation in the early 1970s, when half an hour of
ceremonial drumming and singing by the chief’s orchestra, every
sunrise and every sunset, was the reassuring signs that the king
was alive and well. Meanwhile, the Paramount Chief’s court, and
the Naliele court, continues to function as an appeal court in
traditional constitutional matters and as the only court where
royals can be tried (even in cases involving traditional family
law); ethnic and regionalist defiance of Lozi overlordship is not
enough to terminate this situation, and even if it did it would
leave a legal vacuum of the very sort which instigated the
colonial administration to create the Naliele court in the first
place, in the 1930s.
Once recognised by the Lozi Paramount chief,
the incumbent of the Kahare title further requires the
recognition from the President of the Republic, who has the new
incumbent gazetted as a condition for his remuneration through
the district secretary’s office. That office also recognises
and pays all other court officials eligible for remuneration.
With his virtual monopoly over state motor transport in the
district, the district secretary also regulates the chief’s
access to governmental bodies and to the outside world at large.
In fact, the chief is not allowed to leave his area without
formal permission from the district secretary.
In exchange for this massive dependence the chief receives a
remuneration far lower than the legal minimum wage in formal
sector employment. Moreover, payment of salaries has been
dependent upon the availability, at the distant district capital,
of cash and transport for the paymaster arrears of several months
have not been unusual. This irregularity, added to the fact that
not the chief himself but the district secretary controls
remunerated court appointments, has left the chief with little
practical power over his courtiers and their ceremonial and
judicial activities. As a result, the chief is in an incessant
financial crisis. His main source of cash for the upkeep of
himself and considerable numbers of royal kin is from irregular
tribute. In the 1970s chiefs were still heavily involved in
hunting and the ivory trade — a remnant of their extensive
precolonial rights over natural resources and natural species. By
1990 this source of income had entirely disappeared, due to the
extermination of game in the 1980s (not only by poaching locals
but also by ethnic strangers using machine guns), and by the
tightening control of the ivory trade under the CITES
international treaty.
However, dependence of the chief upon the state at district level
used to be only one side of the medal. Between 1960 and the 1980s
Chief Kahare held the following impressive modern offices, all of
them for many years in succession: he was a Trustee of the United
National Independence Party (UNIP, which ruled Zambia between
1963 and 1991), a member of the House of Chiefs, a non-elected
member of the Kaoma Rural Council, and a member of the Provincial
Development Committee of Western Province. Unfortunately, this
substantial power base in the modern state did not survive into
the 1990s. The link with UNIP ceased to be an asset when this
party lost out to Mr Chiluba’s Movement for Multi-Party
Democracy (MMD) in 1991. The resignation from other modern
offices reflect not only the ageing chief’s gradual retreat
from public life but also the effect of Lozi and Mbunda/Luvale
political mobilisation against the Nkoya at the district and
provincial level, despite the considerable overall political
success of Nkoya ethnic politics since the late 1970s.
All this suggests that the chief’s power base is fairly
limited, and declining. He does not have many options for the
execution of their own authority. it is remarkable that such
attempts as the Nkoya chiefs have shown in recent years to
enlarge the scope of their options have all been in the field of
nostalgic symbolic production. Principally this includes
responses triggered by the successful emergence of the Kazanga
Cultural Association; these we shall discuss below. But there
have been other responses in a similar vein in the course of the
1990s.
The initially eager adoption of the format for self-assertion
which the Kazanga Cultural Association accorded them, suggested
that outside the domain of nostalgic symbolic production the
chiefs had little option for manoeuvring. This is also clear from
the other nostalgic initiatives which they showed in the
mid-1990s and which shall be summarised below: the construction
of new kettledrums, the sending of a punitive expedition, and the
appropriation of the Kazanga festival premises by an enterprising
chief’s son.
Mwene Mutondo’s new kettledrums (1994).
In 1994 Mwene Mutondo, only acceded one year previously, for the
first time since ca. 1850 defied the prohibition from the part of
the Lozi indigenous administration and its Kololo predecessor,
and ordered major royal kettledrums (maoma) to be made.
Following the surviving traditions to the letter (van Binsbergen
1992: passim), the drums were sculptured with the images
of a lizard and a python, in a very crude fashion because
woodcarving as a craft disappeared when witchcraft eradication
movements in the interbellum cleared the region almost entirely
and permanently from all wooden effigies (the only exception
known to me being the Mutondo royal shrine). In making the drums,
the historic pattern was emulated even to the extent that two
small children were sacrificed to the new drum. While other,
minor royal drums are played by court musicians with client
status, Mwene Mutondo took it upon himself to beat this central
symbol of chieftainship. Significantly, the new drums were kept
at the palace for over a year before being exposed to the public
gaze at the Kazanga annual festival which the ethnic association
of the same name has organised in the district since 1988.
Mwene Kahare Kubama sends a punitive
expedition (1994). The year 1994 again saw a similar
emulation of a precolonial historic pattern. Mwene Kahare Kubama,
a few months after his accession, was confronted with the
usurpation of one of his sub-chieftainships, that of Mwene
Kakumba, by a Lozi incumbent who had simply ousted the original
incumbent during his life. When protests from Mwene Kahare’s
Ngambela (Prime Minister) were not heeded, Mwene Kahare told
young men from around his palace to arm themselves, travel to
Kakumba’s village across a distance of 35 km, and remove the
Lozi impostor from the subchief’s palace by force: a punitive
expedition (Nkoya: nzita; the Sotho/Lozi word impi
is more familiar) to issue from the palace, for the first time
since the 19th century. This was also the first time that ethnic
tension in the district actually led to bloodshed. The desperate
and unrealistic nature of the attempt is clear from the fact that
the dozens of Nkoya men involved in this violent action were
arrested, and that a year later they were still awaiting trial.
Clearly the chief can still rely on his subjects as a power base,
but to little strategic avail. Yet the move was not totally
rejected by the state: the Kaoma district secretary, who as a
Lunda entertains a felling a ethnic affinity with the Nkoya
chiefs, issued a decree to the district’s Lozi chiefs (apart
from the Naliele royal chief) to the effect that they had to obey
the Nkoya chiefs as their overlords — in itself a unique
triumph for Nkoya anti-Lozi militancy.
That the backward-looking, nostalgic nature
of these moves is not incidental but reflects the general
orientation of Nkoya traditional politics today is further
brought out by the following case, even if this one involves not
a ruling chief but his son.
An enterprising prince. Mr Daniel
Muchayila, in his late thirties, is a son of Mwene Mutondo
Muchayila; as we have seen above, the latter was one of the main
heroes of Nkoya identity. Daniel is merely a Mwana Mwene,
i.e. a prince, and on two occasions (1991, 1993) he failed to
succeed to his father’s throne. This did not prevent him from
taking up residence at the new festival grounds which had been
created for the Kazanga annual festival, and specifically in the
branch court building reserved there for the Mutondo chief and
his staff. Here Daniel even tried cases for the benefit of the
surrounding villagers, charging fees and fines and keeping the
proceeds for himself. Not being a chief, by such action he
polluted the sacred quality of the Mutondo chief’s court at the
festival grounds, even if this constituted a totally new
situation unforeseen by traditional rules. Although the
prince’s action had tacitly been condoned by the Mutondo court,
the building had to be relinquished. During the Kazanga festival
of 1994 Chief Mutondo had to make use of either of the buildings
erected for Mwene Momba or Mwene Kabulwebulwe, who had not been
able to attend. It is as if the traditional outside forms of the
imitation royal courts at the festival grounds demand being
filled with traditional forms of socio-political behaviour (such
as holding court), endowing such forms with a deceptive
appearance of reality. And against the background of 20th century
Nkoya history the episode reminds one inevitably of the founding,
in the 1930s, of the Naliele court — the most hated symbol of
Lozi suppression, a branch of the distant Lozi Paramount
Chief’s court over which Yeta III appointed his son as branch
manager.[14]
In addition to nostalgic and ineffective
ways of responding to the changing political landscape of today,
the chieftainship of western central Zambia is becoming the toy
of other categories of actors representing different fields of
socio-political organisation than the indigenous political
system. The most conspicuous actors in this connexion are:
expatriate commercial farmers, and the Seventh Day Adventist
Church, besides of course the Kazanga Cultural Association.
A refuge for apartheid. In the early
1990s Mwene Kahare put himself in the debt of a dozen South
African White, Afrikaans-speaking commercial farmers, to each of
whom he issued a farm (a section of the people’s communal land)
of the general Zambian standard size of 2500 ha i.e. 25 km2 (!).
After surveying this land is registered as freehold land in the
hands of these stranger entrepreneurs, who have already managed
to establish apartheid-style rural labour relations in Mwene
Kahare’s area. However, the local peasants are prepared to turn
themselves into underpaid farm hands, despite the obsolete and
racialist labour conditions offered. Small-scale subsistence and
commercial farming is therefore grinding to a halt and entire
villages resettle near the farms because they constitute the only
source of local cash income. These short-term economic
opportunities have persuaded the average villagers to accept the
alienation of their communal land; protests, and accusations to
the effect that the chief has actually sold the land to the
immigrant Boers, are only heard from educated locals with a
senior-ranking urban career behind them and themselves engaging
in commercial farming. They realise, more than their kinsmen in
the villages, that Nkoya/Lozi ethnic conflict in Zambia
Western’s Province is increasingly going to be a conflict over
arable land as a major economic resource, so that the
introduction of a third party, the stranger farmers, in the long
run can only be to the detriment of the local peasants.
A Paramount Chief’s church. Another
actor on the local scene since 1990 has been the Seventh-Day
Adventist Church (SDAC), whose close association with the Lozi
Paramount Chief made it an unwelcome but insistent newcomer in an
area which in the 1920s-1950s was missionised by the evangelical
South African General Mission (which led on the Evangelic Church
of Zambia), as from the 1930s has seen a militant Watchtower
movement settle down to become the emphatic religious identity of
selected local villages, where the Roman Catholic Church also has
made some inroads as from the 1940s, but where by and large cults
of affliction and other historic forms of African religiosity
have constituted the dominant religious expression also in the
second half of the 20th century. Near Mwene Kahare’s palace,
the SDAC quickly finished a self-help clinic project initiated as
long ago as the late 1970s. In return, the chief who had
frequented the Evangelic Church of Zambia services prior to a
spell of polygamy, had no option but to join the SDAC and to
allow his orchestra to be silenced on Saturdays — before the
drums were finally silenced throughout the week for the
musician’s lack of remuneration.
One group of actors which significantly have scarcely bothered to
woo the chiefs are national and regional politicians. The end of
the Kaunda/UNIP administration and the coming to power of
Chiluba/MMD in 1991 further opened national opportunities for the
Nkoya; they obtained one fully-fledged Nkoya MP for one of the
district’s three wards, and one MP/junior minister who is half
Nkoya half Mbunda) for another. The third ward was carried by a
candidate representing the Luvale, Mbunda, Chokwe and Luchazi
groups[15] which since the
1920s have immigrated into the district and which are now
numerically dominant. With the rallying for votes, and for a
lasting following on a regionalist and ethnic basis, the
political new men of the MMD government as from 1991 made a point
of visiting the chief’s capitals from time to time, kneeling
and clapping hands in ceremonial respect, and leaving some
tribute. It was however clear to them that the key to voting
support was no longer to be found at the chief’s capitals but
at the meetings of farmers’ co-operatives and development
committees both in the villages and at the Nkeyema agricultural
scheme, and among the politically ambitious chief’s relatives
who, after successful careers in the urban formal sector, had
returned to the district to be commercial farmers. The latter
have dominated the executive meetings and the massive annual
festival of the Kazanga Cultural Association, the ethnic
association which bundles local ethnic resentment. At the highest
national level a similar attitude towards the chiefs could be
discerned, when in 1993 the Brigadier-General G. Miyanga, as
Minister without Portfolio third in rank in the Zambian
government, went on a fact-finding mission to Kaoma district in
order to ascertain the extent of Lozi-Nkoya ethnic conflict. The
trip was covered extensively on Zambian television,[16] in a way which was greatly partial to the Nkoya
point of view. Chief’s capitals were visited, but most time was
spent with vocal, educated Nkoya familiar with court circles but
with an open eye to the wider world, and prominent in the Kazanga
Cultural Association.
The SDAC was neither the first nor the most conspicuous
on-governmental organisation to encroach on the Nkoya
chieftainship. For with their limited and dwindling power base,
the failure of nostalgic initiatives to enlarge it, and while
they are exploited, bullied or ignored by outside actors, the
chiefs of western central Zambia at first welcomed the
initiatives of the Kazanga Cultural Association as a possible
solution to the predicament of having to adapt to current
political and economic circumstances.
In postcolonial South Central Africa, ethnic
associations have been rather less conspicuous than in the
colonial period. The colonial state was suspicious of all forms
of African self-organisation which might have political
implications, and became all the more so during the struggle for
independence in the 1950s and early 1960s. The postcolonial
state, whose functioning was based on alliances between broad
regionalist blocks, feared expressions of what was then called
‘tribalism’; they might upset that delicate balance —
although they were discouraged in the name not of existing ethnic
relations, but of a pretended constitutional universalism which
supposedly rendered all ethnic particularism anathema. In the
first fifteen years of independence open expressions of ethnicity
were therefore frowned upon, and if involving a small and
powerless minority like the Nkoya, were effectively discouraged.
A number of factors however made it possible that a thinly
disguised ethnic association like the Kazanga Cultural
Association was registered in 1980s:
• the
awareness that small local ethnic movements could erode far more
powerful ethnic blocks (especially that of the Lozi) opposing the
ruling ethnic alliances at the state’s centre;
• the
rise to prominence of one Nkoya politician, Mr J. Kalaluka, which
in itself reflected the previous point;
• the
growing awareness among Zambian politicians and UNIP party
ideologists that controlled expression of ethnic identity could
have a integrating, rather than a divisive effect on the
nation-state
• while
the state recognition that was the central goal of ethnic
minority expressions, was realised to win precious votes in a
situation of political and economic decline, such as UNIP was
facing in the 1980s.
For a long time the urban component of the village community was
not formalised into an ethnic association. Only in 1982 the
‘Kazanga Cultural Association’ materialised as a formally
registered society under the patronage of the Nkoya minister.
This was an initiative of a handful of people from Kaoma district
who, by their middle age, and against all odds, had made the
grade from insecure circulatory migrant labourer to member of the
capital’s middle class. With the drop in copper prizes in 1975
Zambia entered into a crisis which has lasted until today.
Therefore even the urban middle class could not ignore the
economic developments which were meanwhile taking place in Kaoma
district. Some returned to the district forever; other started a
farm there but continued to live in town. Their enthusiasm for
the Nkoya identity which became ever more articulated, and whose
political and (through access to rural land and labour) economic
potential they more and more appreciated, brought these urbanites
in close contact with the district’s political elite, according
them new credit in the eyes of the villagers from which they had
earlier taken a distance through their class position and
urbanisation. From the 18th-century name of a forest, via that of
a nineteenth century dynasty and an early 20th-century, colonial
district, the name Nkoya had developed to designate an ethnic
group found in several districts, and at the same time a
language, a culture, and a cultural project intended to
articulate this newly emerged group at the regional and national
level.
Founded in the Zambian capital, Lusaka, in 1982, the Kazanga
Cultural Association has provided an urban reception structure
for prospective migrants, has contributed to Nkoya Bible
translation and the publication of ethnic history texts, has
championed existing and dormant local chieftainships, and within
various political parties and publicity media has campaigned
against the Lozi and for the Nkoya cause. The association’s
main achievement, however, has been the annual organisation
(since 1988) of the Kazanga festival, in the course of which a
large audience (including Zambian national dignitaries, the four
Nkoya royal chiefs, people identifying as Nkoya, and outsiders),
for two days is treated to an overview of Nkoya songs, dances and
staged rituals. What we have here is a form of bricolage and of
invention of tradition (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983). The details
of the contemporary Kazanga festival I have treated elsewhere. In
the present context, it is important to look at the association
behind the festival.
The Kazanga Cultural Association is a
society registered under the Zambian Societies Act, and as such a
non-governmental organisation of the type so much stressed in
Africanist literature of the 1990s. Its formal nature however is
largely illusory. The Kazanga association has no paying members
and no membership list. Its minimal financial resources derive
from voluntary individual contributions, mainly from the members
of the executive themselves, who in this way gain popularity and
influence. On the other hand, an executive position accords one a
petty source of income via expense accounts. The Societies Act
requires an Annual General Meeting which is held at the evening
of the second day of the Kazanga festival. In the absence of a membership
list and of fee paying, this is in practice a meeting not of
members but merely of several dozens of interested persons.
Executive elections mean that from these several dozens of
interested persons groups of ten people are formed according to
place of residence or of origin. Depending on which people happen
to be present, such a group may comprise representatives from a
few neighbouring villages, from an entire valley, from an
official polling district as delineated by the Zambian state for
the purpose of official elections, from a town at the Line of
Rail (the urban areas of central Zambia), or even from the entire
Line of Rail. With greater of lesser privacy these groups cast
their votes for the available candidates, the votes are counted,
the result announced via the festival’s intercom system, after
which the departing executive leaves under scorn and shame, while
the new executive is formally installed and treats the voters to
a 200 litres drum of traditional beer.
As basically a self-financing clique of successful urbanites and
post-urbanites, the executive of the Kazanga Cultural Association
has a strong class element, which I have already stressed
elsewhere in my analysis of the Kazanga festival proper. Only
Nkoya who are high-ranking in terms of education, formal sector
career, church leadership, entrepreneurship, wealth, are eligible
as candidates for the executive. Traditional status including
royal birth or esoteric knowledge does not qualify. In principle
all male Nkoya regardless of status have a right to vote for the
executive, but in practice only a few score do vote who have the
stamina to spend another night at the festival grounds after the
two day’s festival, and have cash to pay for transport home or
have friends who offer to provide such transport. The class
element in the Kazanga executive is further reflected in the
shift, during the Kazanga Annual meeting of 1994, away from an
executive dominated by respected and educated, but economically
insecure urban dwellers, and towards an executive whose chairman
and secretary are successful entrepreneurs, retired to the
district after a brilliant career:
The composition of the Kazanga executive.
In 1988-91 national chairman was Mr M. Malapa, who after an urban
career as a state registered nurse has retired to Lukulu as a
peasant farmer trying to establish a rural barber shop. He was
succeeded by Mr W. Kambita, a town-dwelling aged lay pastor with
the Zambia Evangelical Church without a personal source of
income; Mr Kambita’s national secretary was Mr W. Shihenya, a
town-dwelling former accountant without a permanent source of
income. Both Mr Kambita’s son and Mr Shihenya’s wife are
employed in junior positions with Zambia Educational Publishing
House, formerly the Kenneth Kaunda Foundation, and a UNIP
stronghold. The election of the 1994 national executive marked
not only a move from town to rural district, but also to far
higher levels of career achievement (the new national chairman Mr
Mayowe being a former managing director of a parastatal, his
national secretary Mr Lutangu a former district secretary) and
wealth (Mr Mayowe operates a commercial farmer, a bar, and has a
lucrative trade in fertiliser; Mr Lutangu owns a thriving grocery
in Kaoma township; moreover, both draw substantial pensions, and
as well as rent from a formal-sector urban house.)
With all the attention for ethnic cultural
production at the Kazanga festival, it is clear that the Kazanga
executive does not for one moment lose sight of the fact that the
festival is primarily an attempt to exchange the one resource
which one locally has in abundance, competence in symbolic
production, for political and economic power. The national
dignitaries, and not the royal chiefs, let alone the audience,
constitute the spatial focus of the Kazanga festival, and a large
part of the programme is devoted to the dignitaries’ welcome
speeches and other formal addresses. Since the political arena is
indeed the right place (and not only in Zambia) to exchange
symbolic production for development projects, political
allocation and patronage, the harvest of the series of Kazanga
festivals since 1988 is by now eminently manifest in a marked
increase of Nkoya participation at the national level, in
representative bodies and in the media, and in a marked decrease
of the stigmatisation to which they used to be subjected under
Lozi domination until well after independence. Kazanga is an
example of how an ethnic group can not only articulate itself
through symbolic production, but may actually lift itself by its
own hairs out of the bog.
In 1992 the state delegation to the Kazanga festival was led by
the Cabinet Minister for Education, the Hon. Arthur Wina M.P., a
Zambian politician of very long standing, son of a former Lozi
Ngambela (traditional Prime Minister), and in the early years a
member of President Chiluba’s MMD cabinet. In his speech,
Minister Wina explicitly joked that, with the recent shortage of
water in the Zambezi flood plain (where the Lozi Paramount
Chief’s residences are located) there was little point in going
to the Lozi annual Kuomboka ceremony marking the Paramount
Chief’s annual move to higher grounds with the rising of the
Zambezi river; Kazanga was said to provide an adequate
alternative. In coded language this was understood by the
audience as a statement on the limits, if not decline, of Lozi
power under MMD conditions (although Mr Wina, and for instance a
former Lozi king’s grandson Mbikusita-Lewanika, are clear
examples of Lozi ethnic prominence in MMD circles, which are
however dominated by the Bemba ethnic coalition). Minister
Wina’s statement was interpreted as a sign of full acceptance
of Nkoya ethnic aspirations also after Mr Kaunda’s political
demise, and of the fact that the Kazanga leaders are taken
seriously by the state.
The members of the Association’s executive usually had a solid
urban career and, for their generation (born in the early 1940s),
a fair level of education. This makes them adept at operating
bureaucracies and politicians. At the same time they tend to be
the close relatives of the chiefs, usually spent their early
childhood at chief’s capitals, and have kept up contact with
the courtly milieu to a sufficient extent to be accepted and
understood there. This puts them in the unique position of being
able to mediate between chiefs and state bureaucracies, or in
general between the outside world of modern political and
economic life, and the narrow horizon of the village society.
Since village society contains, in addition to chiefs whose
powers were evidently declining, large numbers of voters, as well
as potential rural workers and clients of rural divisions of
bureaucracies, politicians have an interest to honour the
invitations to the annual Kazanga festival extended to them by
the Kazanga executive; moreover, the respectful treatment and the
colourful ceremony awaiting them there make them not regret their
trip.
Kazanga’s political agenda however could
only be conceived and executed within the wider framework of
ethnic processes in Zambia, and throughout sub-Saharan Africa,
today.
The formula of ethnic self-presentation through an annual
cultural festival built, with much bricolage, out of an historic
ritual, has been generally adopted in Zambia today. The
television audience is regularly reminded of a growing series
(now nearly a dozen) of regional festivals similar to Kazanga.
Since all these festivals are created and maintained by ethnic
associations, this reveals a recent revival of such formal
organisations. They are at the heart of current ethnicisation
processes in Zambia (cf. van Binsbergen, in press).
Ethnicisation constructs ethnonyms so as to mark ethnic
boundaries, and pre-existing culture so as to fall within those
boundaries and to offer distinctive boundary markers. The
cultivated sense of a shared history makes sense of experiences
of powerlessness, deprivation and estrangement, and kindles hope
of improvement through ethnic self-presentation. The ethnonym and
the principle of ascription governing ethnic group membership by
birth, then produce for the actors the image of a bounded,
particularist set of solidary people. The vulnerable
individual’s access to national resources, and the formal
organisations (in state and industry) controlling them, become
the object of group action. In postcolonial Central Africa,
ethnicisation increasingly includes cultural politics. A set of
people is restructured so as to become an ethnic group by
designing a cultural package which in its own right constitutes a
major stake in the negotiations with the outside world. One
dissociates from rival ethnic groups at the local and regional
scene through a strategic emphasis on cultural and linguistic
elements; and at the national level one competes for the
state’s political and economic prizes via the state’s
recognition of the ethnically constructed cultural package. New
intra-group inequalities emerge. The mediation takes place via
brokers who are more than their fellow-members of the ethnic
group in a position to exploit the opportunities at the interface
between ethnic group and the outside world. Asserting the
‘traditional’, ‘authentic’ (but in fact newly
reconstructed) culture appears as an important task and as a
source of power and income for the brokers. Ethnic associations,
publications, and festivals, constitute general strategies in
this process.
Ethnicity displays a remarkable dialectics between inescapability
and constructedness, which largely explains its great societal
potential. On the one hand, as a classification system ethnicity
offers a logical structure, which is further ossified through
ascription and which presents itself as unconditional, bounded,
inescapable and timeless. This is what made early researchers of
Central African ethnicity stress primordial attachments.
On the other hand, the social praxis of ethnicity as
ethnicisation means flexibility, choice, constructedness and
recent change. Together, these entirely contradictory aspects
constitute a devise to disguise strategy as inevitability.
This dialectics renders ethnicity particularly suitable for
mediating, in processes of social change, between social contexts
with each have a fundamentally different structure. Because of
this internal contradiction, ethnicity offers the option of
strategically effective particularism in a context of
universalism, and hence enables individuals, as members of an
ethnic group, to cross otherwise non-negotiable boundaries and to
create a foothold or niche in structural contexts that would
otherwise remain inaccessible; this is how recent urban
immigrants (cf. urban markets of labour and housing) and citizens
(cf. bureaucracies) use ethnicity.
Ethnicisation amounts to a conceptual and organisational focusing
or framing, so as to make a social contradiction or conflict
capable of being processed within the available technologies of
communication, bureaucratic organisation, and political
representation. The emergence of ethnic associations is one
example at the organisational level.[17]
What the Kazanga Cultural Association basically does is to
provide an organisational framework for bridging the state on the
one hand, indigenous politics (and the rural society that it
stands for) on the other.
At this point, where we aim at structural
interpretation, our analysis has to proceed beyond the
transactionalism that has so far guided it. We are pressed to
admit that in the Kazanga Cultural Association as context of
ethnicisation, two contradictory processes occur at the same
time:
• the
state on the one hand, the chiefs (and the rural society they
stand for) on the other, are caused to be in constant interaction
with each other (which makes for merging and blurring of
boundaries in actual political and economic practice),
• yet at
a level of the explicit conceptualisations, by the actors
involved, this constant movement back and forth between what they
construct as a traditional and as a modern domain, only
reinforces their view that here two fundamentally different modes
of socio-political organisation are involved.
The following table presents the outline of
an actors’ model which, from the point of view of the Nkoya
elite, the Nkoya chiefs and most Nkoya commoners, would seem to
sum up the structural differences between chiefs and the
postcolonial state :
| postcolonial
state |
chief |
| legal
authority (the letter of the written word) |
traditional
authority |
| impersonal |
personal |
| universalist |
particularist |
| imported
within living memory |
considered
as local |
| culturally
alien |
considered
as culturally familiar, self- evident |
| defective
legitimation |
self-evident
legitimation |
| lack
of cosmological anchorage |
cosmological
anchorage |
Table 1. A
model contrasting chiefs and postcolonial state
This model allows us to make the point that
the Kazanga executive as brokers are, at least in their own
perception, truly bridging two fundamentally different
structures. Against the background of African ethnicity and
ethnicisation, it is no surprise that they do so in an idiom of
ethnicisation.
The important thing to realise is that such bridging consists in
the negotiation of conceptual boundaries through concrete
interaction, where objects and people are positioned at the
conceptual boundaries between two systems, where they can serve
as interfaces between the two. In the dialectics of social
praxis, conceptually different domains are drawn, first, within
such contradictory perceptions, motivations and exchanges as each
single actor is capable of; and secondly, these contradictions
are to be made convergent, predictable, and persistent over time
by their being imbedded in the social organisation of such
individual actors. In other words, structural bridging inevitably
requires, beyond conceptualisation, effective social
organisation. The modern formal organisation corresponds
morphologically with the organisational logic of the state; at
the same time, in the field of ideology and symbolism it can
maintain as much continuity as is needed towards structural
domains that are conceived according to a logic totally different
from that of the state (like chieftainship). Therefore the mode
of mobilisation which structurally bridges state and chiefs had
to take the form of a formal voluntary association.
Let us now examine what in practice was realised of such
bridging, by considering the actual interaction between the
Kazanga Cultural Association and the chiefs of western central
Zambia.
Up to a point of disaffection, which was
reached in 1995, chiefs have sought to use the Kazanga Cultural
Association for their own self-presentation. But the
complementary process has been much more manifest: the attempt,
on the part of the Kazanga Cultural Association, to use,
increasingly even to harness, chieftainship for its own combined
purpose of ethnic articulation, access to the state, and personal
ascendance in terms of political and economic power and influence
on the part of the association’s executive.
Kazanga’s effective negotiation between the state, the
chieftainship and the villagers insists on a new symbolic and
ceremonial role for all four Nkoya kings together along lines
which are all bricolage and thoroughly un-historical, but which
do result in restoring the kings to a level of emotional and
symbolic significance perhaps unprecedented in twentieth century
Nkoya history. At the annual Kazanga festival, the chiefs have
grasped the opportunity to appear with all regality which they
could summon and which their paraphernalia could earn them. Mwene
Kahare, who used to be a somewhat pathetic, stammering and
alcoholic figure dressed in a faded suit with ragged shirt
collar, finally, in his seventies, appeared at the 1992 Kazanga
festival covered in leopard skins and with a headband adorned
with regal zimpande shell ornaments — regalia he has
most probably never worn since his installation in 1955 —
formidably brandishing his royal axe in a solo dance that kept
the audience breathless and moved them to tears. At the climax
the king (for that is what he shows himself to be, in a
performative revival of early 19th-century royal autonomy and
splendour) kneels down and drinks directly from a hole in the
ground where beer has been poured out for his royal ancestors —
the patrons of at least his part of the Nkoya nation, implied to
share in the deeply emotional cheers from the audience.
The successful emergence of the Kazanga Cultural Association
initially promised to offer to the chiefs the opportunity for
self-assertion that was well in line with their anti-Lozi
sentiments. However, the competition between the two Nkoya chiefs
from Kaoma turned out to be a very severe constraint in this
respect. The first few Kazanga festivals were staged at the
capital of Mwene Mutondo, and were thus interpreted as a sign of
his seniority over Kahare and over other royal chiefs from
outside Kaoma district. A truce was struck by the adoption of
new, special festival grounds smack at the boundary between
either chief’s areas. But this led to further complications as
the above case of Mr Daniel Muchayila demonstrates.
Gradually, Mutondo dominance over the Kazanga festival and over
Nkoya ethnicisation in general has dwindled. The suspiciously
untimely death of Muchayila’s successor Mwene Chipimbi in 1992
prevented Mutondo control over that year’s festival (a
successor is seldom installed within a year), and anyway rendered
the Mutondo lukena inappropriate as festival grounds in
this time of mourning. Mwene Kahare’s royal dance centres, of
course, on a shrine situated at the hub of the festival grounds;
but it is no longer the thatched shrine of the Mutondo dynasty,
nor the Kahare dynasty’s own wooden pole adorned with buffalo
trophies, but a neutral shrub of the type found, as headman’s
shrine, in most Nkoya villages.
The traditionalist revival on the part of the Kazanga Cultural
Association is not limited to Nkoya circles and western Zambia,
as the following case reveals:
Kazanga, and Soli ethnic revival in central
Zambia. One of the most interesting developments around
Kazanga occurred in Lusaka in 1995. The Kazanga band under the
direction of Mr Tom Taulo, the composer and dance leader, also
gives paid guest performances in beer gardens etc. in the Lusaka
area. This has produced such popularity for the band that Kazanga
Cultural Association was invited to play a major advisory role on
the creation of the first Soli ethnic festival at Undaunda, 100
km. east of Lusaka. After extensive preparatory meetings in which
the experiences of the Kazanga Cultural Association since 1982
were lavishly shared, both the band and the executive of the
association’s Lusaka branch were major official guests at the
actual festival in October, 1995. It was almost exactly a hundred
years after Mwene Mutondo Wahila, in the context of a diplomatic
exchanges, across a distance of 500 km paid a state visit to the
Soli Queen Nkomeshya. It is still too early to draw conclusions
from the 1995 co-operation, yet is suggests that we are
witnessing the formation of one large ethnic coalition (a
‘mega-ethnic group’) encompassing the whole of Central
Zambia. The name ‘Kafue’ has already been suggested as its
name, not only because this is the major river of this region,
but also because this has been the historic name of various
colonial administrative centres, at various locations between
Lusaka and Kaoma district.
The Kazanga association has also been instrumental in reviving
royal titles which did not survive Lozi expansion around 1900:
the Shakalongo title, once senior to both Kahare and Mutondo, had
for many years been carried by a mere village headman, but has
now been reinstalled as that of a royal chief; and the
reinstatement of Mwene Pumpola in Lukulu district has been
imminent for some years. The Kazanga annual festival offers these
new chiefs the opportunity to articulate themselves publicly,
even if this means that for the time being they have to make
shift in a cosmopolitan three-piece suit instead of leopard skin
and other historic paraphernalia. However, their formal
recognition and remuneration depends on the Lozi Paramount, whose
refusal we have already discussed above.
Interestingly, the traditionalist and Mwene-orientated stance of
the Kazanga society enables its leaders to draw on this same
reservoir of tribute-related labour for the construction and
maintenance of its festival grounds, not only when these were
still situated at the lukena of Mwene Mutondo but also
when subsequently the festival was moved to a new site at equal
distances from the capitals of Mutondo and Kahare — which
involved the major task of clearing the new sit and erecting the
branch palaces and the spectators’ shelters.
After the enthusiasm of the first years of the Kazanga festival,
it gradually became clear that the executive of the Kazanga
Cultural Association sought to use chieftainship as a resource
for ulterior aims, instead of furthering it as what the chiefs
and their councillors had been led to believe during the colonial
period: the hub of Nkoya ethnic identity. The dramaturgy of the
festival was revised so as to make clear that not Mwene Mutondo,
or the royal chiefs collectively, but the association’s
executive was hosting the festival; by 1993 the chiefs saw
themselves reduced to the status of picturesque ornaments who had
to put in a ceremonial presence, avowedly as exalted guests of
honour but in fact as the most senior performers at the
festival, who imprisoned in their royal shelter, next to that of
the national and regional politicians, did not even have a chance
to engage in conversation with the latter.
The interaction between the Kazanga Cultural
Association and the chiefs was not limited to the Kazanga
festival but gradually extended to traditional politics at the
chief’s capitals themselves. Against the background of the
postcolonial state and Zambian civil society, an extremely
complex pattern emerged whose outlines are presented in diagram
1. It is difficult to imagine a better demonstration of the
boundary crossings which are absolutely standard between the
so-called modern political domain and the so-called traditional
political domain. Moreover, the diagram makes it clear that the
mediation between these two domains presupposes a third domain:
that of the civil society, which in the Kazanga case concentrates
on the executive of the Kazanga Cultural Association.
click on the thumbnail to access the diagram
|
Diagram 1. Postcolonial state, indigenous
political system and civil society: The background of political
relations between Chief Kahare and the Kazanga Cultural
Association executive
A number of specific cases make clear that the Kazanga Cultural
Association tried not only to further and revise, but actually to
control chieftainship, and that this attempt was thwarted by the
traditional guardians of that institution, the royal councils.
Mwene Mutondo Chipimbi’s election, and its
aftermath. A life-long town dweller an a middle-ranking
officer with a Zambian parastatal, the later Mwene Mutondo
Chipimbi was initially one of the founding members of the Kazanga
Cultural Association in 1982. His accession to the throne in 1991
was the result of insistent rallying of the association’s
executive during the royal electoral process following the death
of the aged Mwene Mutondo Muchayila in 1990. As we have seen,
Mwene Chipimbi’s untimely death (which others, along with the
death of his wife around the same time, attributed to lack of
resistance to malaria, as town dwellers) was interpreted as sign
that the senior headmen greatly resented this intrusion from town
dwelling careerists into rural traditional politics. His death
was one of the reasons why the Kazanga festival had to be moved
from the Mutondo capital, where the Kazanga executive during
unavoidable personal and official visits in 1992-1993 literally
feared for their lives. Initially, of course, the Mutondo
courtiers refused to attend Kazanga at the new festival grounds,
i.e. in a form which so effectively denied Mutondo hegemony.
However, the Kazanga executive managed to bring a high-powered
government delegation to the Kazanga festival of 1992, and made
it clear to the Mutondo courtiers that their staying away would
be interpreted by the new government as a anti-MMD demonstration
and might therefore have unpleasant consequences. From a distant
enemy, the state had become an ally; and from being introverted
and divisive, ethnicity, at least in the form of ethnic mediation
it has taken in Kazanga, has come to combine inward symbolic
reconstruction with confident participation in the national
space. But although a success from the point of view of the Nkoya
ethnicisation project, its price was that the Kazanga executive
had to openly deploy their state resources against the chief’s
council, thus revealing the contradictions between executive and
chieftainship despite the former’s further of chieftainship on
less conflictive occasions.
The Kazanga executive at Kabulwebulwe’s.
Outside Kaoma district, at the Kabulwebulwe capital in Mumbwa
district where most of the Kazanga executive are strangers, they
did much better. They played a major part in the election of the
new Chief Kabulwebulwe, in Mumbwa district in 1994, and were
guests of honour both at the funeral of the previous incumbent
and at the installation ceremony of his successor.
In the same year the throne of Mwene Kahare had to be filled
after the aged Mwene Kahare Kabambi died in December 1993, after
having ruled for 39 years. Here again, like at the court of
Mutondo, the Kazanga Cultural Association’s offensive intended
to gain direct control over the chieftainship, but failed.
The Kazanga executive and the succession of
Mwene Kahare, early 1994. During the final two months of the
electoral process, the list of possible candidates had shortened
to only four names (cf. diagram 2):
[ insert diagram 2 ]
Diagram 2.
Simplified genealogy illustrating the succession of Mwene Kahare
Kabambi
(1994 contenders for
the chieftainship in italics; actual royal incumbents in
capitals).
• Mr J. Kalaluka (a former MP, former
Cabinet Minister and former Ambassador, awaiting trial for
embezzlement which forced him to leave state service; commercial
farmer; son of a Lozi father but, like the other three remaining
candidates, raised at the Kahare court and locally identifying as
Nkoya; founding patron of the Kazanga Cultural Association)
• Mr D. Kabanga (a retired state
registered male nurse, former UNIP ward chairman in Lusaka,
member of the Kazanga executive 1989-93, now a village farmer)
• Mr Kubama Kahare (peasant farmer
from Namwala district; belongs on his mother’s side to the
Kambotwe/ Shipungu line from the Kawanga valley, Kaoma district,
who are the original owners of the Kahare royal title)
• Mr S. Mayowe (a retired former
manager of Lake Fisheries, a major parastatal; former member of
the Kaoma rural council, commercial farmer, bar owner, general
entrepreneur, Kaoma representative of the National Party (a
Lozi-dominated opposition party), and member of the executive,
Kazanga Cultural Association)
Campaigning involved conspicuous gift-giving to
senior councillors and to royal women at the court, witchcraft
accusations, etc. Mr Mayowe, accused of having caused, through
sorcery, the death of Kabambi with whom he had repeated
quarrelled over land issues, found that he lacked support,
withdrew as a candidate and openly backed Kubama as the obvious
and ideal traditional choice; Mayowe thus hoped that he would
enhance his chances of succeeding Kubama, who was already in his
mid-60s and reputed to be of ill health. Mr Kabanga was the least
likely candidate of the four, for lack of wealth, ancestry and
achievements. Mr Kalaluka, whose genealogical position was
similar to that of Mr Kabanga, had already told his Lusaka elite
friends that he was going to spend the rest of his life as a
genuine chief, when the elders rejected him in favour of Mr
Kubama. The latter lacked personal wealth, but his three sons
were holding solid positions in government and industry, his
fierce and upright character recalled that of his father Mwene
Kahare Timuna, and considering his mother’s ancestry he was
indisputably the rightful owner of the title even in the eyes of
those senior headmen who still resented the title’s usurpation
by Mwene Timuna’s father Mwene Shamamano in the 1880s (!). When
a few months later Mr Mayowe was elected national chairman of the
Kazanga Cultural Association it was clear that the association,
while playing a major role in the election of Chief Kubama, had
given up hopes of controlling the chieftainship directly, but
instead had opted for a division of labour between complementary
sectors of modern and traditional politics, with close kin
relations and trust between the leaders on both sides.
It is interesting to note how the contradictions between the
royal courts and the Kazanga association, which became manifest
in the course of the 1990s, also have complements in the
religious and political affiliations of the people involved on
either side. The MMD had a strong appeal among aspiring
urbanites, the very category that makes up the Kazanga executive.
By contrast, the chiefs’ courts largely remained loyal to what
over the years had emerged as their main ally in the struggle
against the Lozi: UNIP and its leader Kaunda, who only as
recently as in 1990 had prevented a move by the Lozi Paramount
Chief to abolish the Nkoya chieftainships. Mr Mayowe meanwhile
dabbled in opposition politics and in 194 was the district
representative of the National Party, which carried the Mongu
by-elections in early 1994; this lonely political stance in a
UNIP-oriented rural environment helped to tilt the scales against
him at the royal election. In the religious field Lozi/chief
antagonism was temporarily suspended when Mwene Kahare welcomed
the oppressive intervention on the part of the Seventh Day
Adventist Church; however, most of the Kazanga executive have
remained loyal to the Evangelic Church of Zambia, the first
missionary presence in the region, since it had provided their
formal education.
The breaking point in the relations between the chiefs and the
Kazanga Cultural Association was reached in 1995:
The 1995 conflict between chiefs and the
Kazanga executive. On the first day of the 1995 festival the
chiefs refused to return to the shelter after lunch, under the
pretext that the royal wives had not been accommodated with them
in the royal shelter but had been seated, with other prominent
commoners, on the seats provided along the rim of the arena, in
July’s mild winter sun. Both Myene were new incumbents,
installed less than two years, and with only one Kazanga festival
behind them; in the earliest Kazanga festivals, the Myene were
old men without formal royal wives; on the occasion of the 1991
Kazanga, Mwene Mutondo Chipimbi had just acceded while his wife
was already seriously ill. So this issue of protocol had not
arisen before. For most of the remaining programme the 1995
proceedings took the form of a different historic Nkoya
performance: the court case. The conflict destroyed the 1995
festival; visitors left in anger.
Various contradictions
reverberate in this conflict:
•
gender, now beginning to be a modern political issue in this
rural area, has always been an underlying current in local
chieftainship: in the 18th and early 19th century, all Myene were
women.
•
the Kazanga festival as a celebration of viable royalty, of the
kingdom (the way the festival was celebrated in the 19th
century), rather as a mere nostalgic production of performative
fragments (as the festival has turned out under the Kazanga
Cultural Association)
•
conflict between court officials and Kazanga officials; the court
officials feel that their power over chieftainship is being
usurped by the Kazanga executive, and seek to reclaim control by
insistence on proper protocol.
These senior headmen may have spent many years in distant urban
employment but in middle age can afford to have no other
commitment than the preservation of shihemuwa shetu,
‘our custom’. Far from being a dying concern, traditional
politics (even if no longer remunerated) has remained a central
career goals for many men from western Central Zambia.
The interaction between the Kazanga Cultural Association and the
chiefs has made clear that ethnicisation does not necessarily
lead to resilience of chieftainship. In the Nkoya case it has led
to folklorisation: the reduction of chiefs to nostalgic ornaments
of symbolic production in a festival context which is dominated
by ethnic brokers orientated to the modern economy and the state.
In the early 1970s the Nkoya neo-traditional court culture was
marked by a rigid, wholly introverted splendour. The maintenance
of nostalgic historic forms of protocol and symbolic,
particularly musical, production (which no longer correspond with
any real power invested in the kingship under conditions of
incorporation by the Barotse indigenous state and by the colonial
and post-colonial central state) reflected the fact that boundary
maintenance vis-a-vis the outside world was at its peak. All
this strikingly contrasts with the laxity of court life at the zinkena
today. The drums are no longer played. Court protocol which
used to be extremely strict and enforced by physical sanctions
(only a century ago still by capital punishment), is hardly
observed today. Chiefs are no longer recognised nor remunerated,
and expatriate commercial farmers with their racialist labour
relations are literally taking over the land.
Under such circumstances, Nkoya ethnicisation could even lead to
the virtual destruction of the chieftainships that featured so
prominently as a sign of ethnic identity, ethno-historical
reconstruction, and the reinvention of tradition in the context
of the Kazanga festival. The near future will learn if and how
the current Nkoya royal chiefs, both of them new incumbents
although in advanced middle age, will meet these challenges.
In Zambia’s Kaoma district today, the two
royal Nkoya chiefs (Mwene Kahare and Mwene Mutondo) are reluctant
senior members of the Lozi indigenous administration headed by
the Lozi Paramount Chief. Their financial situation is miserable
and leads to the further decline of chieftainship and its courtly
institutions. Nor can it justifiably be said that the chiefs
exist on a plane outside the postcolonial state. Until recently
they participated in many governing and representative bodies of
the postcolonial state, and they have no formal source of income
except from the state. The latter largely controls the
reproduction (which is greatly defective, anyway) of
chieftainship. Besides indirect influence over the lowest law
courts with jurisdiction only in the field of family law and
traditional political structure, the chiefs’ main independent
source of power is their continued control over rural land.
However, this prerogative may be used, and is used,
destructively. Issuing land to strangers hardly benefits the
chief beyond covering part of his modest household expenses, but
does lead to proletarianisation among the chiefs’ local
subjects and destroys the territorial basis for chieftainship.
Thus royal chief in western central Zambia constitute a limiting
case for some of the general themes in African chieftainship
today, as emerging from the present collective volume as a whole.
They do not display the remarkable resilience of other African
chiefs in adapting to social and political change. Their power
base is small and diminishing. Whereas in the first decades of
the postcolonial era they effectively expanded into formal
administrative and representative bodies of the modern state,
this process has now been reversed, largely as a result of
regional ethnic conflict. These chiefs can certainly not afford
to consider the bureaucratic logic of the African state merely as
an accidental, foreign and imposed system. That they do not
actually hold such views, and in the recent past have effectively
blended with state institutions, is also partly attributable to
their own formal sector employment (often as court clerks or
low-ranking administrative officers at the district level) prior
to accession. Meanwhile they are financially dependent upon the
colonial state and upon recognition both by the state and by the
indigenous administration under the Lozi Paramount Chief. Under
these circumstances, chieftainship in western central Zambia does
not emerge as an obvious focus for democratisation processes.
Instead, it is subject to folklorisation, becoming a nostalgic
element in an ethnicisation process which creates new
inequalities (those between on the one hand proletarianising
peasants, and on the other successful post-migrant pensioners and
other agricultural and commercial entrepreneurs), while seeking
to abolish one particular form of politico-ethnic domination.
Under the circumstances, the annihilation of the particular form
chieftainship as found in western central Zambia is a serious
possibility, which opens up further horizons of analysis. At an
abstract level, the interaction between the Kazanga Cultural
Association (and other formal organisations, e.g. the SDAC) and
the chiefs may ultimately have to be interpreted, not as mere bridging
(which presupposes the continued independent existence of social
contexts — chiefs and state — to be bridged), but rather as
the replacement of one historic mode of organisation (that
of the indigenous political system centring on the lukena)
by another, formal, global mode of organisation (that of the
state-registered voluntary association). Both modes organise the
villagers of western central Zambia, by trading exploitation by
an elite (the chiefs, the executive) for old and new goals (the
chiefs: social and cosmological order, judicial and military
regulation of violence, regulation of long-distance trade; the
executive: ethnic cultural self-expression, economic and
political access to the wider world).
In less than a hundred years, the formal organisation has
established itself on African soil as the principal format for
social, political, economic and religious organisation,
complementing and often replacing time honoured, historic local
forms of organisation. I have often stressed[18]
that from a sociological point of view, this is one of the most
significant transformations of African life, and one of the
greatest blind spots in African studies today. We have largely
contented ourselves with demonstrating why (for informal
undercurrents, corruption, continued allegiance to older forms of
organisation, lack of appreciation of legal authority etc.) the
formal organisation cannot work in Africa, rather than
acknowledging that defective or latent functioning of formal
organisations is not peculiar to Africa, and can only be
understood once the formal organisation in itself has been
accepted to set the framework.
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[1] Earlier versions of this
paper were presented at the conference on Chiefs in Africa today,
African Studies Centre, Leiden, 7 March, 1996; and at my
postgraduate methodology seminar, Free University, Amsterdam, 3rd
June, 1997. I am indebted to Wouter van Beek, Albert Trouwborst,
Henk Meilink, Gerda Sengers, Thera Rasing, Ferdinand de Jong, and
especially to the editors Emile van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal and
Rijk van Dijk, for useful comments on earlier versions of this
paper.
[2] Anthropological and
oral-historical fieldwork was undertaken in Western Zambia and
under migrants from this area in Lusaka, in 1972-1974, and during
shorter periods in 1977, 1978, 1981, 1988, 1989, 1992 (twice),
1994 (twice), and 1995. I am indebted to the Zambian research
participants, to the members of my family who shared in the
fieldwork, to the Board of the African Studies Centre for
adequate research funds, and to the Netherlands Foundation for
the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) for a writing-up
year in 1974-75. For background reading and evidence on specific
points, cf. my publications as listed in the bibliography. On
Nkoya court culture especially music, also cf. Brown 1984.
[3] From the extensive literature
I mention: Apter 1961; Apthorpe 1959; Fallers 1955; Fortes &
Evans-Pritchard 1969; Mair 1936; Richards 1935, 1960; Schapera
1943, 1963.
[4] E.g. van Rouveroy van
Nieuwaal 1984, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995; Nana Arhin Brempong
c.s. 1995; and references cited there.
[5] Cf. Bentsi-Enchill 1969;
Vanderlinden 1989; Griffiths 1986.
[6] Here I have to admit to an
inconsistency in my earlier work to chieftainship, which perhaps
can be taken as an indication of the analytical pitfalls in this
field in general: although my comparative study of Zambian chiefs
and the state (van Binsbergen 1987) was implicitly conceived
along such transactionalist lines, with a wealth of detail on
boundary crossing, my specific work on the chiefs of western
central Zambia, by contrast — based on much richer data
gathered in the course of 25 years in a limited geographic area
— has been largely dualistic. I am afraid this inconsistence
has not been totally resolved in the present paper, due to my own
limitations certainly, but also to the analytical and theoretical
difficulties of modern African chieftainship.
[7]Cf. Boissevain 1968; Bailey 1969; Barth 1966, 1969.
[8] The work of my friend and
colleague Emile van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, as cited in my note 4
above, is an excellent example of this trend.
[9] The literature on
chieftainship in Zambia in far more extensive than can be
discussed in the scope of this article. In order to save space, I
refer to the extensive references in: van Binsbergen 1987 and
1992.
[10] Significantly, this name
derived from that of the 19th century Lozi capital. The new
branch court was originally headed by the Lozi prince Mwanawina;
when, following a system of positional succession, he had become
Paramount Chief of the Lozi, he was succeeded by prince
Mwendaweli, who had been Gluckman’s research assistant. This is
only one indication of the fact that Gluckman’s view of the
Lozi indigenous administration including its judicial role was
partial to its ruling elite (cf. Brown 1973; Prins 1980). For an
understanding of the Nkoya situation this is unfortunate (van
Binsbergen 1977); but in all fairness it has to be admitted that
such partiality in fieldwork is inevitable (my own work on the
Nkoya shows a complementary partiality); nor did it prevent
Gluckman from being one of the most impressive anthropologists of
his generation.
[11] This is only a twentieth-century
development, caused by the fact that under the colonial state a
royal capital could no longer, as in pre-colonial times, be moved
over distances of scores of kilometres after the death of the
king. However, pre-colonial royal burial sites surrounded by
deserted zinkena which have returned to bush, have
continued to be venerated even if at great distances from the
capitals of later incumbents.
[12] Cf. Hoover c.s. 1970a, 1970b;
Spalding 1970.
[13] Near the turn of the twentieth
century, Mwene Kahare Shamamano killed his drummers on the
suspicion of adultery with the royal wives; as punishment the
Lozi king Lewanika deprived Shamamano from the right to a royal
orchestra; Shamamano — one of Lewanika’s military officers
— had owed his accession since he was of the wrong lineage.
Only in the 1930s were the Kahare royal rums reinstated.
[14] This is not the only example in
the context of Nkoya-Lozi relations that proclaimed ethnic
antagonism is contradicted by actual rapprochement. Other
examples in the context of the present argument are Mr
Kalaluka’s Lozi ancestry although he was for decades the
highest-ranking Nkoya politician; and Mr Mayowe’s functioning
as the district representative of the Lozi-dominated National
Party, while he was running for the chieftainship of Mwene
Kahare. Many more such examples could be quoted. This highlights
the manipulative, strategic element in ethnicisation (cf. van
Binsbergen, in press), and will only puzzle those who have not
understood that the emphasis on ethnic identity — in the Nkoya
case and in general — as ascribed and inevitable is in itself
merely ideological and strategic, not factual.
[15] Closely related to one another by
language, male circumcision, and identification with the Lunda
heritage and with Mwatiyamvo; and as such much less different
from today’s Nkoya than the latter would care to admit; cf. my
study of the vicissitudes of male circumcision among the Nkoya as
an ethnic boundary marker, van Binsbergen 1993b.
[16] ‘An olive branch for Kaoma
district’, 26 minutes production, Zambia Broadcasting
Corporation, December 1993, videotape in the author’s
collection.
[17] However, ethnicity is not
unique in this respect. Elsewhere (van Binsbergen 1993a) I have
presented a similar argument with regard to African independent
churches and professional associations of traditional healers in
Botswana, both forms of formal organisations present an
organisational form in line with the logic of the postcolonial
state (via the latter’s Societies Act), while internally
supporting ideological positions totally at variance with the
principles informing the state.
[18] Van Binsbergen 1985, 1993a,
1993c, 1997.
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