Reconfiguring a Political Landscape

Reconfiguring a Political Landscape: Transforming Slaves and Chiefs in Colonial Northern Rhodesia Stuart A. Marks Introduction This paper is a discursion onto the colonial landscape in South-Central Africa as well as an exploration into the minds of the initial colonials and others who tried to transform it. It is about ideas and practice, about change and continuity, about means and resources, about attempts to (re)structure a hierarchy and an economy. It is about slaves, chiefs, statuses and resources in the landscape that predated the colonials’ arrival and it is about the colonizers’ attempts to (re)direct these earlier roles and resources towards other purposes and to integrate them into a different economy. These earlier structures were a foil to the colonial imagination as well as a key to the world the colonizers hoped to create. The central Luangwa Valley and the adjacent plateau in eastern Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century are the place and time of the described events. Slaves, skins, ivory, cloth, and salt separately and together had provided the wealth that stimulated trade and warfare between chiefs and others as the earlier means for connecting societies and groups. The colonials sought to free slaves so that their labor could build new structures and, as freedmen, they could participate in expanding commercial markets for local and European products. Ivory was an important source of natural wealth that the colonials hoped to monopolize for their own uses. The main “gaze” and recorders for this paper are white, male Eurocentric (mainly British) administrators and a few African associates. Their external observations and documents supplied the rules of representation, of inclusion and exclusion, of precedent and antecedent, of inferior and superior standing to those around them. From the viewpoint of the incoming colonials, the political landscapes of Luangwa and the adjacent plateau were both tragic and chaotic. The circumstances were tragic in that gangs of enslavers supported by foreign (Yao, Arab, Chikunda) and by neighboring more powerful groups (Bemba, Ngoni) had preyed upon smaller villages in this region for decades. The situation remained chaotic in that the colonials managed to subjugate the Bemba and Ngoni only in the late 1890s, were in the difficult process of implementing their administrative plans, and would soon be at war fighting with the Germans nearby.1 Although their political agendas stemmed from their European rivalries, colonial administrators felt morally compelled to change this African landscape, for it was here that David Livingstone had written so passionately about the evils of the slave trade and it was here that he had died in 1873.2 After a brief description of this territory from an outsider’s perspective, I review a colonial court case involving the dispute over the succession to a minor chieftaincy. This case involved the son of a captured slave who claimed legitimacy as a candidate and was appointed, over local objections, as a chief by a colonial administrator. I then discuss its context and aftermath for, despite the whims of the colonials, many of their initial decisions had to be re-examined and in some cases, as this one, recanted. The ending of the slave trade was a comparatively easy task relative to the more protracted tasks of reconstructing functional societies in the colonial image. The Immediate Pre-colonial Political Landscape The immediate pre-colonial landscape in South Eastern Africa has been characterized as a “rising tide of violence,”3 as the demand for slaves and ivory for internal use and external sale increased.4 The rise of the Ngoni, Yao, and Bemba states together with the emergence of roving parties of the Chikunda and Swahili greatly increased the numbers of conquered, captive, and enslaved people in these African societies.5 Political authorities and leaders of all types became increasingly involved in slave trading. Assuming dominance, new groups pursued “assimilation policies” whereby their defeated were turned quickly into subordinates, dependents, or pawns. As local rulers were defeated to become pawns in the larger alliances or as the dependents of others, their authority declined, creating stressful conditions of cultural uncertainty resulting in the reshuffling of communities, in increases in sorcery accusations, and in the

Archaeology · Colonialism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · African history and culture studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law

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