virt_8

Wim van Binsbergen, Virtuality as a key concept in the study of globalisation: Aspects of the symbolic transformation of contemporary Africa

8. The village in the village (b): A rural ethnic festival in western central Zambia as an instance of virtuality

8.1. Introducing the Kazanga festival

My fourth case study takes us back to Zambia. It concerns an ethnic association in modern Zambia, and its annual festival. it shows us that even today's rural environment is affected by globalisation in such a way that the concept of virtuality helps us to make sense of the situation.70
In western Zambia a large number of ethnic identities circulate, among which that of the Lozi (Barotse) is dominant because of its association with the Luyana state. The latter had its pre-colonial claims confirmed and even expanded with the establishment of colonial rule in 1900, resulting in the Barotseland Protectorate, which initially coincided with North Western Rhodesia, and after Zambia's independence (1964) became that country's Western Province. Lozi arrogance, limited access to education and to markets, and the influence of a fundamentalist Christian 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'. In addition to the Nkoya language, and to a few cultural traits recognised as proper to the Nkoya (even if these traits have a much wider distribution in the region), royal 'chiefs', although incorporated in the Lozi aristocracy, have constituted the major condensation points of this identity. 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:71 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. In this articulation process the chiefs, with the lack of education, economic and political power, and being the prisoners of court protocol, could only fulfil a symbolic function. The main task fell to the urban Nkoya 'elite' (in fact mainly lower- and middle-range civil servants and salaried workers), and with this task in mind the most prominent among them formed the Kazanga Cultural Association in the early 1980s. In subsequent years, this association has provided an urban reception structure for prospective migrants, has contributed to Nkoya Bible translation and the publication of ethnic history texts, has assumed a considerable role at the royal courts next to the traditional royal councils, 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, Nkoya nationals and outsiders), for two days is treated to a complete overview of Nkoya songs, dances and staged rituals. Of course what we have here is a form of bricolage and of invention of tradition:72 for it would have been impossible to completely revive the nineteenth-century Kazanga harvest festival, which comprised only one royal, but also human sacrifices. The details of the contemporary Kazanga festival I have treated at length elsewhere, and I shall here mainly focus on the virtuality theme.

8.2. Virtuality in Kazanga73

The Kazanga festival revolves around the mediation of the local Nkoya identity towards the national, and by implication world-wide space, - a mediation which is to transmute the local symbolic production (one has hardly any other products eligible for exchange with the outside world) into a measure of political and economic power via access to the national centre. Besides the selection and presentation of culture, this involves the transformation of culture: the Kazanga festival has the appearance of presenting items of traditional Nkoya culture, but in fact all these elements have been totally transformed towards a performative format, orchestrated, directed, rehearsed, subjected to the streamlining ordering by an organising elite and its mobilising and mediating ambitions. The models for this performative format derive from radio, television, the world of Christian missions, agricultural shows, state intervention in national ethnic cultural production, and intercontinental pop media culture.

The Nkoya identity which is thus put on display, is not only recent and situational, but also 'virtual', in the sense that it does not at all coincide any more with what the participating and performing villagers do experience as the self-evident ordering (in terms of space, time and social relations) of village life, in whose context superficially similar (but on closer scrutiny fundamentally different) truly historic forms of symbolic production are engaged in which might be more properly terms 'Nkoya traditional culture'. The cultural production during the Kazanga festival is somehow suspended in the air, it is intangible, no longer anchored in the social and symbolic particularisms of concrete social groups nor available for effective appropriation by such groups. yet (or perhaps precisely because these features) it is passionately acclaimed precisely among the representatives of such particularisms.

When we see Kazanga as a response to globalisation, than perhaps we can better understand the transformation from spontaneous cultural production to performance, which characterises the festival. In twentieth-century analytical philosophy the concept 'performative' has acquired a special meaning, as indicating a type of statements which cannot be evaluated as true or untrue, e.g. 'I promise that I shall come'.74 In the context of a village society which is largely dependent on economic self-reliance through agriculture, hunting and gathering, such an interpretation of the performative quality of behaviour is of special significance. Performative behaviour does not follow the lead of empirical, productive thought techniques on which control over the environment, hence survival, depends; it takes a distance from these modes of thought, and moves in a space and time geared to the production not of food, but of imitation food, of symbols. Is this perhaps an answer to the question as to why in Kazanga, under conditions of globalisation, the performative, and not the productive, aspect of culture is so central? As if the productive factor, is deprived of all meaning in the modern context; in the festival today that factor is merely vaguely indicated by one or two hunting dances out of a programme packed with scores of dances, but originally, a century ago, Kazanga as a first fruits festival hinged on agricultural production. Such a transition does meet the ecological realities in the land of Nkoya toward the end of the twentieth century CE. During the 1970s and 1980s game, until then fairly abundant, largely disappeared through the massacres which ethnic strangers from Angola wrought with machine guns, while subsistence agriculture as a mode of livelihood has virtually collapsed in the face of drought, urbanisation, commercialisation of agriculture, and the monetarisation of the rural economy. In the erosion of the local production lies the dependence upon the outside world, which is confronted with non-productive performative behaviour. In the context of the village society of western central Zambia the shift from production to performance is the most obvious manifestation of virtuality as an aspect of globalisation.