Reflections on the intercontinental circulation of knowledge and ignorance inspired by the situation in Kaoma district, western central Zambia
Wim van Binsbergen
|
The Janus situation in
local-level development organization in Africa Reflections on the intercontinental circulation of knowledge and ignorance inspired by the situation in Kaoma district, western central Zambia Wim van Binsbergen |
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Wageningen conference on ‘Decision-making in natural resources management, with a focus on adaptive management’, organised by IUCN-SUI, Tropenbos and the Department of Forestry of Wageningen Agricultural University, 21-24 September, 1999
© 1999 Wim van Binsbergen
Fig. 1. Janiform headdress mask, Ekoi, Nigeria. Wood and antelope skin, height 15.75’’. The British Museum, London (Trowell n.d.: 62).
In
the course of the twentieth century, immense changes have taken
place in the African countryside. Systems of production
(agriculture, hunting, fishing, the collection of such forest
products as honey, wax, wood, medicinal herbs), systems of
circulation (trade, tribute, raiding, marriage), the social
organisational forms in which these systems were embedded (the
kinship-based homestead, the localised clan, the chief’s
court, the specialist guild, the trading network), still viable
by 1900 although under increasing attack from the slave trade,
intercipient labour migration, and the onset of colonial rule,
have now largely broken down. They have given way to contemporary
alternatives controlled by the intercontinental economic system,
development agencies, non-governmental organisations, local
elites, capitalist agricultural enterprise, and such remnants of
the postcolonial state as may be capable of being incorporated in
this radically altered rural environment. Natural resources
(land, surface waters, game, fish, timber, medicinal plants)
which in many parts of Africa used to be abundant by the turn of
the 19th century, have been rendered scarce by population growth,
appropriation by capitalist enterprises and/or by local elites,
and sheer devastation as a result to misuse.
Meanwhile
these natural resources have come under the attention of
intercontinental agencies, from a number of complementary
developmental and income-generating perspectives: tourism as an
extension of North Atlantic consumerism; environmental
preservation as the extension of North Atlantic and increasingly
global ecological concern; the identification, preservation and
commercial exploitation especially of unique local forms of
biodiversity (e.g. medicinal plants). In development thinking,
evolving views on agency, self-determination, identity, culture,
empowerment and gender have led to increased insistence on the
involvement of local personnel and organisational resources in
these contexts; this ideologically-motivated move has converged
with the realisation that such local involvement might also be
attractive in terms of efficiency and cost reduction.
What does one need to know about the local rural society in order
to implement these ideas? What systematic risks are there for
misjudging the local situation, so as to produce an
organisational and ideological artefact which completely misfires
in terms of the stated developmental objectives? How may one
reduce these risks? These are the questions at the back of my
contribution to the present conference.
I have no pretension of speaking for Africa as a whole. The
points I will make are inspired by two of several strands in my
research over the past thirty years: an intensive anthropological
and historical study of the countryside of Kaoma district,
western central Zambia; and reflection on the conditions and
pitfalls of intercultural communication and knowledge production,
especially in the encounter between African and European
contexts. A description of relevant aspects of Kaoma district
will help us focus on the more systematic and general message I
seek to deliver.
Kaoma district is situated in
western central Zambia, due west of the Zambezi/Kafue watershed.
It has the size of a minor West European country, and its
population has rapidly increased since the beginning of the
twentieth century, when population density was well under 1/km2.
The well-watered savannah, characteristically wooded with the
Brachystechia tree, has eminent agricultural opportunities
lending to Kaoma district the proud identity of ‘granary of
Western Zambia’; it also produces a very rich game and
fishing environment.
Throughout the colonial period (1900-1964) modern agriculture
concentrated in the western part of the district, while in the
homesteads elsewhere in the district a complex historical
agricultural system was combined with emphasis on fishing and
especially hunting -- the latter constituting the male identity
model of the region’s main ethnic group, the Nkoya. Before
colonial rule and before precolonial state formation such as took
place as from the late eightteenth century, ecological resources
were largely administered at the level of localised clans.
Hunting was in the hands of a hunters’ guild, initiation
into which offered both technical and magical expertise. In the
course of their ascent to power, kings and nobles increasingly
appropriated the prerogatives of earlier clan leaders, by virtue
of which kings could pose as having privileged rights on selected
natural resources (leopard, elephant, eland, fishing ponds; as
well as the distribution of land). In order to realise these
rights, the kings would employ hunters, organise collective
fishing parties, exact tribute in kind and labour, and issue land
to their subjects.
In the early colonial period, the proclamation of the Kafue
National Park, traversed by the Kafue river, caused kings and
their people to shift their capitals and villages to the east and
the west, and -- in addition to game legislation applicable
outside the game reserve -- reduced all hunting to poaching,
ideally prevented by the state’s game wardens. However,
until well into the 1970s game meat - partly from big game
straying from Kafue Park- continued to be a prominent part of the
village diet; villagers would have a main source of cash income
from the covert sale of bundles of dried meat throughout the
region; and kings (designated chiefs under colonial conditions,
and deprived of much of their political, economic and judicial
power) would continue to supplement their income considerably by
the sale of ivory. In addition to the chiefs’ hunters, most
adult male villagers would have amazing hunting skills, and
although nineteenth-century Portuguese muzzleloaders were still
in use, a modern rifle would be the standard proceeds from a
villager’s spell as a labour migrant at the distant mines
and capitalist farms of Southern Africa. These guns also
constituted major heirlooms, paraphernalia of royal and chiefly
office, and hence bones of contention in succession and
inheritance disputes. As major local means of production they
were instruments of inequality, since the junior kinsmen and the
hired hunters using these guns had to surrender most of their bag
to the owner of the gun.
It was only in the course of the 1980s that big game disappeared
from the region, which is attributable to a number of factors:
• the expansion
of agricultural activities (especially the Nkeyema Agricultural
Scheme in the eastern part of the district)
• the slowly
accumulating effect of historical, ‘artisanal’ forms of
hunting, and
• the increase
of scale brought about by immigrant ethnic strangers (Luvale,
Luchazi, Chokwe from Angola) using machine guns.
A similar increase of scale can be seen in the use of local
timber resources: although large, commercial, capital timber
exploitation has existed since colonial times in the adjacent
Sesheke district south of Kaoma district, and although obviously
the local forest was the main source of timber, bark rope, etc.
for the villagers of Kaoma district, is was mainly from the late
1970s that the district’s high-quality timber resources were
exploited for regional and national markets, by local
entrepreneurs using power saws.
There is an important process of class formation to be
appreciated here. Until the 1970s, Kaoma district had nothing to
offer to ambitious young people with such (limited) formal
education as the mission schools could provide -- the only career
was far away, temporarily as a labour migrant, and more
permanently in urban formal sector employment. However, by the
1970s the first generation of Nkoya urbanites was in their
forties, approaching habitual retirement age, and looking for
opportunities to employ their urban skills of organisation,
enterprise and politics, as well as their pension money, in their
home area. The Nkeyema agricultural scheme was just what they
were looking for, although from the beginning it was mainly
accommodating ethnic strangers, besides the Nkoya post-urbanites.
The local idiom of kinship and kingship, patronage and clientship
offered the returning would-be elites major opportunities for
labour mobilisation and exploitation among their rural kinsmen.
These politically sophisticated returning urbanites greatly
insisted on the elaboration of Nkoya ethnic consciousness --
exploiting the local feelings of resentment and inferiority, both
(a) vis-à-vis the central state and (b) à-vis the Lozi ethnic
group which had been politically, militarily, judicially and
economically dominant in Western Zambia (including the Nkoya
region) since the mid-nineteenth century, and had begin to invade
Kaoma district. The new, post-urban local elite started to rally
the local rural population under the banner of Nkoya-ness,
bringing these ethnic followers to accept, and to publicly
identify with (e.g. in the context of annual cultural festivals),
the postcolonial state and its ruling party (then UNIP). This
strategy brought the post-urban elite considerable political
resources from the centre, -- resources readily to be converted
into economic privilege with regard to lucrative local natural
resources: agricultural land, game, timber.
Brokerage between the local rural periphery, and the outside
world, promised to be a rewarding source of income and power for
these post-urban local elites, in addition to their urban
formal-sector superannuation schemes and such urban assets (house
rentals especially) as they had acquired prior to their rural
retirement. In this brokerage, they followed a large number of
intersecting organisational channels at the same time.
• political
parties (at first the all-successful UNIP, later the MMD which
was to supersede UNIP, and more recently also opposition parties
rival to MMD)
• bodies which
were part of the local state presence: the rural council, ward
and village development committees through which agricultural
loans are made available to deserving local farmers
• statal or
parastatal agricultural schemes such as Nkeyema
• a
non-governmental organisation sprung from local initiative: the
Kazanga Cultural Association, staging annual ethnic festivals at
which regional and national politicians are guests of honour who
are wooed for their access to [ developmental resources
• the structure
of traditional leadership: the chief -- often a close kinsmen of
the post-urban elites -- with his senior court officials, royal
council of nobles and council of village headmen
• national
non-governmental organisations in the field of development,
seeking to broker, in their turn, between the local scene and
intercontinental donor agencies
• local
branches of these intercontinental donor agencies acting without
the intermediary of national NGOs
• national
branches of internationally operating world religions, such as
the Seventh Day Adventist Church and the Evangelical church
• foreign,
North Atlantic, researchers (anthropologists, entomologists) who
lack the financial backing of donor organisations yet can offer
skills, contacts and respectability.
For most of these organisations it is true that they were under
external, especially intercontinentally articulated constraints
to justify the local activities of their personnel (often highly
remunerated by any standards) in terms of access to, as well as
participation, development and empowerment of, the local
population, and of furthering the latter’s cultural and
ethnic identity. Here the post-urban elites’ closeness to
the traditional rulers (often their close kinsmen) and their
control over the Kazanga Cultural Association enabled the elites
to claim to represent ‘the people’. This was especially
emphasised in symbolic behaviour such as the organisation of the
Kazanga annual festival, in the kindling of local anti-Lozi
resentment (leading to violence directed at the district Lozi
chief’s court, and some of its branches in the district, and
in the organisation of a local movement to prevent the expansion
of ethnic strangers in the surroundings of the Nkeyema scheme, on
‘Nkoya ancestral land’
Meanwhile the promise (and sometimes the fact) of these
elites’ access to outside resources (via the other, more
outer-directed organisational contexts in which they sought to
insert themselves) guaranteed them of the villagers’
ostentatious public support if. This occasionally entailed
considerable conflict at the village scene and in the kin groups
thus mobilised, away from the public gaze that was allowed to
outside politicians, experts, missionaries etc. What the elite
brokers were doing amounted to the active and creative
structuring of the contradictory, confusing, complex and highly
eroded social field -- once historically arranged around kinship
and kingship -- into the semblance of a transparant, formal, and
ideologically acceptable structure whose apparently clear lines
of organisation, authority and identity made it eligible for
outside organisations (NGOs, development agencies) as a
honourable, deserving context for their activities. With their
considerable urban experience of global empowering idioms, the
elites understood full well that the outside agencies were in
need of qualified and mediated access -- at least on paper,-- to
the local population.For these outside agencies needed to deploy
their activities, in a form which was intercontinentally
monitored and evaluated in terms of currently fashionable
development ideologies, in which ‘the people’, their
culture and identity happened to play a major role. And for the
villagers starving for income, access to markets, infrastructural
facilities and consumptive opportunities, the elites seemed to be
their only chance: they largely control the access to the outside
world.
Incidentally, the elites did not prove to be the local villagers’ only chance. Different opportunities opened up in the district in the early 1990s, when the eastern Nkoya chief Mwene Kahare issued farms (a section of the people’s communal land) each of the general Zambian standard size of 2500 ha i.e. 25 km2 (!), to a dozen South African White, Afrikaans-speaking commercial farmers. After surveying, this land was registered as freehold land in the hands of these stranger entrepreneurs, who soon managed to establish apartheid-style rural labour relations in that chief’s area. 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 local source of 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 the post-urban elitee who are themselves engaged 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 and cheap labor as major economic resources, 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-- and these local elites themselves!
Development
sociologist have repeatedly argued (cf. Quarles van Ufford 1993;
Cohen 1993) that current global development practices depend on a
system of interconnected, but compartmentalised, domains for the
cultivation of performative[1] non-truths. The funding, legitimation, and continuity
of local development projects, and the extent to which these may
further or harm their North Atlantic experts’ careers,
depends on the systematic control over the production and
circulation of particular forms of knowledge (or rather: of
ignorance), in a stepped system of impression management
extending from the local grassroots level in the South, to the
boardrooms in Washington, London, The Hague and Stockholm.
Brokers, like our Nkoya elites, constitute the interface between
one level and the next; they collect, transform and redistribute
information at the two levels at whose intersection they find
themselves, seeking to create satisfaction at both levels at the
same time -- which can only be done by concealing the truth of
one level from the other level -- , and exacting a financial and
social fee on that basis.
Without such compartmentalised control of qualified ignorance,
the various distinct levels of competence, decision making, and
relative autonomy, would fold together and collapse, and the
development industry as we know it would cease to exist -- unless
it succeeds in finding (which would be greatly to her credit and
would radically enhance our hopes for a better world) a new, more
effective and less manipulated structure for the intercultural
circulated of knowledge. With such control, organisation at the
grass-roots inevitably acquires a Janus face looking both sides.[2]Janus is the god of
thresholds, and what the brokers do is to create the threshold or
boundary, and hence articulate the separateness of the two
domains involved. They thrive by keeping apart, and by inserting
themselves as the sole connecting force between the domains thus
separated. The impression management on one level does not have
its bluff called at the next level, and the system thrives on
common interest between brokers and experts -- even though its
goals are formulated in terms of a third party whose benefitting
is now reduced to an accidental and inpredictable sidekick: the
villagers.
An eloquent but slightly side-tracking illustration of this theory can be seen in Kaoma district’s presence on the Internet. Of course, this medium’s infrastructure in the district and in most other places in Africa is still so deficient as to preclude its functioning as an expression of local popular identity. Under such marginal conditions, whatever on the local scene manages to penetrate onto a global medium like Internet, can only do so thanks to non-local inputs of interests, means, and formal and stylistic conventions. Hence Kaoma’s representation on Internet is a misleading travesty of the actual local situation, not a form of valid knowledge but a form of ignorance. The Kaoma district which speaks to us via Internet is merely a reflection of the intercontinental presence in the district, including: a Dutch development project parading, on its website, an exceptionally successful local woman farmer (but one belonging to the locally hated, non-local immigrant group of the Lozi); the USA-controlled evangelical parent body of the Evangelical Church of Zambia operates a major hospital in the district, and its matron shares her unmistakably Southern United States spirituality with the visitors of her website. And finally we spot, on Internet, an NGO in the field of local fauna management, directed in conjunction with the a North American scholar who is otherwise unknown to me -- by my enterprising adoptive cousin Mr Reginald Libupe.[3]
Predictably the element of ethnic identity and traditional culture is strongly highlighted in this NGO’s message. But we cannot read the Internet message for what it is worth, unless we have access to the kind of information that normally does not circulate on Internet and that is the fruit of intensive local participation for decades. Mr Libupe is the most conspicuous and typical Nkoya post-urban broker: retired managing director of Zambia Lake Fisheries (a major parastatal controlling, with its dried fish, much of the protein intake of Zambia’s lower-class urban population); a political adventurer in various political parties in succession; sometime member of the Kaoma Rural Council; owner of a ramshackle bar-motel at Nkeyema; owner of a thriving farm at the same agricultural scheme; once an exploiter of the lucrative hardwood reserves of the region wielding a power saw; initiator of the move mentioned above, to protect ‘Nkoya ancestral land’ from encroachment by ethnic strangers; leading member of the Kazanga executive; cousin to Chief Kahare and unsuccessful contender to the throne at the 1994 succession; and eminently lucrative entrepreneur who during several seasons in the 1990s has managed to convert the local small farmers’ hard-earned cash into nothing but the sheer promises of fertiliser to be delivered at the right moment -- but which never materialised. Internet allows us -- albeit only on context-less attendance lists -- a glimpse of Mr Libupe’s participation in international, donor-sponsored conferences, even all the way to Dakar, where his fauna management NGO, since it claims to be carried by the very people themselves, turns out be eligible for subsidy, qualifying under that other magical category of the development parlance of the 1990s: as a ‘rotating credit association’...
The better one knows the district, the more one is surprised to
learn that Mr Libupe has worked such wonders, in this region
where male identity still hinges on hunting and the distribution
of meat, where a high level of meat consumption is a
time-honoured norm, and where the colonial and postcolonial state
was always resented for defining as poaching a simple act of
realising historical individual and collective rights over the
natural environment. In fact Mr Libupe’s NGO is largely
virtual: it mainly exists on paper and Internet, although his
kinsmen and clients are prepared to go through the motions of
formal meetings, and the actual performance of fauna management
duties, especially when outside visitors come along to assess
such performance. And such assessment tends to be positive: after
all, Mr Libupe himself will be there to welcome the expert
visitors, and his education, his winning executive style and his
perfect command of English as acquired during several training
missions to the North, inspire his foreign visitors with trust
and relief -- he is so much like themselves.
More such virtual, apparently formal organisations may be spotted
at the interface between Nkoya villagers and the outside world
today. The Kazanga Cultural Association itself is a perfect
example.
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 development 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 in this case 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.
Our
example of misleading Internet representation reflects of wider
problem in the production and circulation of valid knowledge
about contemporary situations in the African continent: the
existence of media (Internet, NGOs, development projects) which
only render onto the outside world, in the way of knowledge,
whatever that outside world has invested in that medium in the
first place. Internet is just as little a receptacle for valid
and representative knowledge on Kaoma district, as Mr Libupe is
representative of the people of Kaoma district, their fauna
management capabilities and organisational forms, and their
rotating credit associations: whatever appears under these guises
under his leadership or supervision, are predominantly extractive
devices, raiding both the local peasants and the international
development agencies for the benefit of his personal enrichment.
The compartmentalisation of intercontinental knowledge
production; the eagerness to believe claims cast in terms of
cultural and ethnic identity and people’s participation; the
great difficulty to establish direct links between the local
population bypassing the elite brokers which, largely for
personal interest, block up the free flow of valid knowledge from
one organisational level to the next; the eagerness to impose on
a local scene high-sounding ideals that reflect the latest
fashion in developmental ‘philosophy’; and the fact
that it is largely against an intercontinental development
agency’s interest to develop reliable locally-based
assessment procedures by which to gauge the realisation, in the
South, of goals and ideals formulated in the North -- all these
factors combine to empower the Misters Libupe of Africa in their
attempts to conjure up structures of participation, management,
and self-realisation which are largely fictitious and ineffective
-- in other words virtual.
Brokers like Mr Libupe link two levels or domains:
• the villagers
on the one hand,
• the
locally-operating representatives of national and
intercontinental development organisations on the other.
One
of the techniques employed in this connexion is to present to the
latter the image of a recognisable formal organisation with which
one can do legitimate and transparant business and which yet is
eminently acceptable in terms of popular grounding, cultural
identity, and tradition. To the villagers the same organisation
turns out to be in practice far more amorphous and to run along
familiar lines of local social organisation: patronage across
class lines, ethnic and feudal loyalty readily exploited -- in
other words, an inevitable aspect of the class situation
twentieth century social change has landed them in.
This Janus face of local-level organisations in contemporary
development endeavours is perhaps the one striking structural
feature which we need to keep in mind whenever mobilising
‘the people’, their ‘culture’, and their
‘traditional organisational resources’ for goals and
missions which were defined, in the first place, by development
policy makers in the North. As long as the Janus face remains
intact, a project organised on such a double agenda is yet
allowed to be filed, up in the North, as successful in terms of
whatever the current development ideology happens to be. Now, in
order to keep the Janus face intact -- in order to keep the local
villagers from shouting that the chief’s trousers are around
his ankles -- a measure of attractiveness and spin-off is
actually required to reach the local population. For even if the
forms of their attachment to the post-urban broker may be
different from what is being specified on paper and on Internet,
without minimum benefits even traditional ties of kinship and
kingship would not ensure the villagers’ support at the
(relatively few) critical moments when the broker has to present,
to a critical outside world, proof of the actual functioning of
his local-level development organisation.
The situation in Kaoma district is no doubt unique, and I am sure
that my readership can cite numerous examples of a very
different, much more tangible and less manipulative installation
of local organisational initiatives for the furthering of such
initially North Atlantic or global development goals such as
environmental conservation and protection of biodiversity through
fauna management.
A very special place may be claimed, in such initiatives, for
local culture and tradition, not only with regard to the
organisational forms and procedures, but also with regard to the
cosmology informing people’s perception of nature, game and
vegetation. The common assumption is that such a cosmology has
survived or may readily be revived, and that it not only
influences people’s actual dealings with nature outside
the formal and subsidised context framed for development
endeavours, but also within such a context. One of the main
reasons for self-congratulation which development thinking had in
the 1980s, was the discovery of culture as a factor explaining
the failure of development policies so far, and as hope for
future success in this field. The Nkoya case however suggests
that we should proceed very carefully here, and be aware of the
many pitfalls of manipulation, ambiguity and performativity which
await us here -- of the Janus face, in short. If traditional
culture, ethnic identity, local ways of going about
self-organisation, are stressed in Mr Libupe’s largely
virtual fauna management organisation, this is not because
he and his clients cannot help themselves -- not because they
happen to be slavishly programmed by a traditional culture which
inevitably must seep through in whatever they do or say. It is
because the play on tradition is recognised by them to have very
high currency in their dealings with outside development experts
under the currently fashionable development ideology. The
forms they mediate in the process are not genuinely historical
forms, but merely the ephemeral and shifting results of dextrous
bricolage, striking a balance between: (a) local structural
realities (the facts of inequality yet solidarity based on
kinship and kingship) and (b) the outsiders’ expectations as
perceived by the local brokers to be in terms of a combination of
ostentatious, exoticising traditional content and of rational,
transparent formal-organisational format.
At this level of abstract formulation I see no reason to consider
the Nkoya case unique, nay I would say that it brings out a
dominant structural feature of contemporary African social
contexts -- and one whose misreading may well be the greatest
pitfall of otherwise well-intended development endeavours
initiated from the North. Personally, I discovered the Janus
format not in Zambia, despite decades of intensive participant
research there, but in Botswana, where professional organisations
of diviners and traditional healers, posing as fully-fledged
professional formal organisations, present a similar Janus face,
one side looking to the state, the other side looking to their
membership who thus are facilitated to continue practices of
several centuries’ standing, within a new environment which
-- certainly in Botswana -- offers new ways of capital
accumulation and exploitation.
I can anticipate one likely objection to the extreme cynicism implied in my view of development in the Nkoya context, and of developmental organisational formats throughout Africa today. For surely, the reader would say, ‘traditional culture’ cannot be denied to play a role in contemporary African life? After all, the Nkoya chiefs are there in their palaces (more like four-roomed thatched houses without electricity, telephone, running water or toilet; virtual palaces, in other words) -- development experts tend to spend days and days visiting these chiefs and humiliating themselves in an attempt to emulate court etiquette. Also the royal council is there -- and the development experts, having learned to respect local culture and to be afraid of going against the will of the local elders, insist on discussing things out with the royal council before implementing any initiatives. Undeniably, some court cases are still taken to the chief’s capital for adjudication (most are not, though); land is still being issued by the chiefs even if they may be more generous in this respect to affluent ethnic strangers than to their own people; music, dance and possession ritual is still being performed in the villages -- and what is more invigorating in an expert’s life after a tiring day with the local counterparts in the fields! And the annual Kazanga festival brings out the total repertoire of Nkoya expressive culture with what looks as only minor sacrifices to orchestration and stage direction, and electrical sound amplification -- and also the experts have a good time there...
What to respond to such an evocation of expatriate experience as
to the undeniable survival of authentic African culture in
Africa?
I would say this. Kaoma district is representative for the many
areas in Africa where the inroads of global economic and
political relations, and of global culture, have invaded and
virtualised the local scene yet where so much is left of the
traces of older historical local forms that the illusion may be
entertained that these forms have braved the decades without
undergoing major erosion, without major and decisive
transformations. But they have. The development experts cramping
their leg muscles emulating Nkoya royal etiquette (where all but
the chief himself squat or intricately fold their legs under
their buttocks and remain in that position for interminable hours
right until sunset), and who have blistered their hand in endless
hand-clapping as part of the same routine, are paying
lip-service, not so much to the splendours of ancient kings (for
their descendants -- at least in Kaoma district[4] -- are now powerless puppets
of the state and of the Kazanga association), but to the
principles on which the construction of local organisations such
as Mr Libupe’s depend - not by inevitable application of any
local reality such as the presumed inescapability of culture,
tradition, identity as enshrined in the kingship, but merely in
response to the essentialising, ethnicising,
authenticity-expecting ideological sets imposed upon the local
situation by the Northern development industry. And the brokers,
safely in their NGOs which guarantee them semi-North Atlantic
incomes and benefit, are good enough to oblige.
To
the development workers who, with the best of intentions and on
the basis of an enormous and enviable knowledge of ecological
systems, seek to find an enduring, equitable and if possible
profitable basis for their local management in the South, I would
propose the following advice -- if I have not already totally
alienated them so far:
• realise that
access to local rural populations is the major problem of your
organisation
• realise that
local brokers have already volunteered to construct the interface
between your organisation and the local rural population, and
that they do so by virtue of a dextrous Janus technique, in which
a sophisticated awareness of your own ideological and
organisational constraints and goals is utilised as these
brokers’ main strategic resource
• to the extent
to which tradition, culture, identity and authenticity are
explicitly built into the blueprint of your plans, please realise
that to that extent the brokers on which you rely will be tempted
to produce for you…tradition, culture, identity and
authenticity !
• realise that
both the brokers, and the people they vicariously represent
(often without being asked or empowered to do so), are not
passive slaves of tradition and ethnic identity, not any more
than you are yourself -- any attempt to tap or re-create
authenticity is bound to produce deceptive and potentially
exploitative artefacts, the opposite of the empowerment you seek
to help bring about
• realise that
not so much tradition and its time-honoured organisational forms,
but the dazzling interplay of modern contexts of (usually
defectively functioning) formal organisations in the political,
educational, medical, professional, and religious field, is the
standard bedding for much of contemporary life in the South; help
people to create the transparency, relative autonomy and
accountability that come with self-organisation along such
modernist lines (however much these are now called in question in
an increasingly post-modern North-Atlantic context!), but realise
that that would require such an escape from recent class
relations as can only be very imperfectly realised
• realise that
the best way to break through the manipulations and
mystifications of the Janus situation is by having your own,
reliable, extensive, more or less independent direct access to
local information
Such
access as stipulated in the last point needs highly specialised
skills of information collecting, processing and synthesising; it
needs local language skills; and most of all it needs time. It
suggests that fully-fledged anthropological techniques are yet
indispensable for the very realisation of the ambitious and
eminently praiseworthy goals which Northern development thinking
is increasingly setting itself. Since the late 1980s, the Rapid
Rural Appraisal and similar devices have become popular as
techniques, not because they solve the problems of knowledge
production and local-level organisation under Janus conditions,
but because they reinforce -- by its superficial and haste
exposure -- the restrictions on the flow of information; it is
these restrictions which breed the ignorance on which
perpetuation of the Janus situation depends. Evaluation
procedures at strategic points in a development project’s
time path tend to use similar techniques. Without realizing their
built in, Janus-ike problematical nature, your practical efforts
at the grassroots may be wasted.
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W. van Binsbergen, ed., Maatschappelijke betekenis van
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Quarles van Ufford, P., & Schoffeleers, J.M., 1988, eds., Religion and development: Towards an integrated approach, Amsterdam: Free University Press.
Quarles van Ufford, P., 1993, ‘Knowledge and ignorance in the prctices of development policy’, in: Hobart, M., ed., 1993, An anthropological critique of development: The growth of ignorance, London/New York: Routledge, pp. 135-160.
Schültz, J., 1976, Land use in Zambia, Part I. The basically traditional land-use systems and their regions, München: Weltforum Verlag.
Trapnell, C.J., & J. Clothier, 1937, Ecological Survey of North-Western Rhodesia, Lusaka: Government Printer.
Trowell, M., n.d. [ ca. 1965 ] , ‘Form and content of African art’, in: Trowell, M., & Nevermann, H., African and Oceanic art, New York: Abrams, pp. 6-201.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1991, ‘Religion and development: Contributions to a new discourse’, Antropologische Verkenningen, 10, 3: 1-17.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, Kazanga: Etniciteit in Afrika tussen staat en traditie, inaugural lecture, Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit; shortened French version: ‘Kazanga: Ethnicité en Afrique entre Etat et tradition’, in: Binsbergen, W.M.J. van, & Schilder, K., ed., Perspectives on Ethnicity in Africa, special issue ‘Ethnicity’, Afrika Focus, Gent (Belgiè), 1993, 1: 9-40; English version with postscript: van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1994, ‘The Kazanga festival: Ethnicity as cultural mediation and transformation in central western Zambia’, African Studies, 53, 2, 1994, pp 92-125.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1992, Tears of Rain: Ethnicity and history in central western Zambia, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1993, ‘African Independent churches and the state in Botswana’, in M. Bax & A. de Koster, eds., Power and prayer: Essays on Religion and politics, Amsterdam: VU University Press, pp. 24-56.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1995, ‘Aspects of democracy and democratisation in Zambia and Botswana: Exploring political culture at the grassroots’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 13, 1: 3-33.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1995, ‘Popular culture in Africa: dynamics of African cultural and ethnic identity in a context of globalization’, in: J.D.M. van der Klei, (ed.), Popular culture: Africa, Asia and Europe: beyond historical legacy and political innocence, Utrecht: CERES, pp. 7-40.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1997, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa, The Hague: WOTRO; also available on: http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1998, ‘Globalization and virtuality: Analytical problems posed by the contemporary transformation of African societies’, in: Meyer, B., & Geschiere, P., eds., Globalization and identity: Dialectics of flow and closure, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 273-303.
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1999, ‘Culturen bestaan niet’: Het onderzoek van interculturaliteit als een openbreken van vanzelfsprekendheden, inaugural lecture, chair of intercultural philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam: Rotterdamse Filosofische Studies; English version: ‘Cultures do not exist: Exploding self-eidences in the research of interculturality’, in press in: Quest, Winter 1999; Dutch and English versions also available on: http://www.multiweb.nl/~vabin.
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/ Münster: LIT-Verlag, pp. 97-133.
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[1]
I.e. deliberately, ostentatiously and strategically produced, in
consciousness of the audience’s expectations.
[2] My discussion on this point somewhat coincides with that of Von Benda Beckmann et al. 1989: 210.
[3]
A pseudonym.
[4]
Cf. Van Rouveroy and van Dijk 1999 for convincing examples of the
revival of chieftainship throughout the African continent today
the Nkoya situation features here as an exception.
page last modified: 28-02-02