Introduction

Nearly every ethnographic account of the Northern Rhodesian copper towns makes passing mention of the indigenous rural Lamba and of how the African townsfolk in the 1950s scorned them as a people of little consequence. Little had changed by the late 1970s, for the Lamba of the rural Zambian Copperbelt, then, were still considered backward, weak and lazy country bumpkins, and their consequent resentment fuelled much of the reciprocal misunderstanding and invidious ethnic stereotyping between the area's immigrant, Shona-speaking 'Mazezuru' farmers and their local Lamba hosts. Curiously, such stereotypes first appeared in virtually identical forms and during the same historical period on both sides of the Congolese and Northern Rhodesian frontier. Whereas the Belgians saw the Katangan Lamba as 'wild' and 'shy' (farouche ), mistrustful (méfiant ) and independent, the British termed their southern brethren in Northern Rhodesia as 'timid', 'lazy' and 'backward'. These same stigmatizing, ascriptive stereotypes are still in wide circulation in Zaire and Zambia today and, as they are presumably grounded in historical fact, they must be taken seriously.

Yet contemporary scholars rarely take seriously particular stereotypes such as these. And this, according to Joshua Fishman, is because we habitually tend to associate this term with 'those classes of "pictures in our heads" that are essentially incorrect, inaccurate, contrary to fact, and, therefore undesirable'. Given this concept's pejorative connotations, the general tendency has been for scholars to focus upon the psychological traits of the holders of stereotypes—upon social prejudice, projective scapegoating, and 'authoritarian personality' types—rather than to examine the contents of particular stereotypes and what

they have to say about the social relations between groups of stereotypers and those they have stereotyped.^[2]

I shall argue that while these ascriptive stereotypes of the Lamba—and the resentment they generate—have a factual basis, they also reflect the salient affective sentiments and material concerns of those groups which have interacted with the Lamba. I hope to convince my readers that, while both the external-stigmatized and internal-resentful dimerisions of Lamba identity are best seen as unbalanced and one-sided, they are nonetheless relatively accurate representations of how the Lamba in general responded to the new relations established when, at the turn of the century, the lands and peoples of the Central African Copperbelt were incorporated into the new colonial industrial order.