4. Political Locations II: Citizens and Kin

We visited the school on the education of the masses on voting for the forthcoming presidential and general election.

By [i.e., because of] your visit sir, the road from the turn off to here has been graded and we request you to be visiting us once or twice a year.^[1]

A tradesman does not join a political party in order to do business, nor an industrialist in order to produce more at lower cost, nor a peasant to learn new methods of cultivation.

This chapter is about how the state, as embodied in the specific form of Zambia's Second Republic, was lived as a day-to-day reality in the rural Chizela of the 1980s. In it I explore some of the concrete ways in which the state was both a coercive power and engaged in the construction of hegemony. I also look at the complicated intertwining of the discourses of citizenship and kinship, at the kind of political landscape this created, and at how this landscape was gendered. I want to begin this mapping of rural Chizela's political terrain with a brief account of the revived Kaonde ceremony of Ntongo as I witnessed it in 1988.

Ntongo

Ntongo is a firstfruits ceremony in which each village headman takes a calabash of beer made from the newly harvested sorghum to the chief to whom he owes allegiance. The roots of the ceremony lie in the precolonial past, but during the colonial period it was either, as some people told me, forbidden, or more probably simply lapsed. It was revived in 1986, according to Chief Chizela, at the prompting of UNIP: “UNIP said our old customs like Ntongo should begin again” (Bukama, 2.xi.88, TK). The modern Ntongo needs to be seen not as the assertion of a surviving primordial Kaonde identity, but as a particular performance of “Kaondeness” within the arena of the postcolonial Zambian state. However much it may have drawn on some notional “tradition,” it was a modern event belonging to the moment in which it was taking place, and was a product of that moment. The meaning of “being Kaonde” in the 1980s was inextricably bound up with being a Zambian citizen, and as such could not but be caught up in the struggles of the Kaunda regime to sustain not merely a coercive power but also a genuine hegemony.

Kaonde chiefs may never have been very powerful, but in common with chiefs in much of rural Zambia they have continued to be seen locally as possessed of an ultimate moral authority within their region—an authority that UNIP was anxious to appropriate. One form this appropriation took was the encouragement of local “tribal” ceremonies, which were seen as helping to build an “authentic” Zambian identity that would both acknowledge the multiple precolonial regional “traditions” and also locate them firmly within the modern postcolonial state. Part of what these ceremonies conducted within the arena of the national state were about was the attachment of local and particular chiefly legitimacies to the wider legitimacy of “the Party and its government.”

Part of the pressure for the revitalization, resurrection, and in some cases creation of “traditional” ceremonies undoubtedly derived from the importance of these in the competition between different Zambian “tribes.” Officially, tribalism was denounced as an evil that “the Party and its government” was bent on rooting out wherever it was to be found. Inevitably, however, competition over scarce resources involves competition between different regions, and one way in which this expresses itself is in various forms of tribalism. Impressive and authentic “tribal” ceremonies have become an important assertion of “tribal” identity, particularly since the advent of television means that there is now a huge new audience to which the performance of “tribal” identity can be given, an audience that is national rather than local. Increasingly the form and character of a traditional ceremony is shaped to an important extent by its final destination, the nation's television screens. And the format used to locate the different “traditions” on the grand map of the national mosaic, particularly when the medium is television, is not a product of individual, local “traditions” or even a national Zambian one. Rather the format here draws heavily on the narrative devices and forms of representation developed in the West within the genre of documentary ethnographic film.^[2] As a consequence what qualifies as “authentic” and traditional, even within Zambia, tends to be filtered through a Western prism of “the genuinely African.” This is yet another example of what hegemony can mean in practice.

The Ntongo I attended in 1988 was the third since the ceremony's resurrection. It was held one afternoon in June at Chief Chizela's capital just outside Chizela township. The ceremony had not achieved the crucial accolade of being televised for the National Broadcasting Service but its staging as an event had clearly been influenced by other televised ceremonies. It did, however, have something else that has become a regular part of “traditional” Zambian ceremonies: the specially produced T-shirt printed with the ceremony's name and date, and a silk-screened photo of the chief. Those attending included, in addition to those headmen acknowledging allegiance to Chief Chizela, all the local dignitaries from UNIP, the Member of the Central Committee (MCC), the provincial parliamentary secretary, and so on. Much of the long afternoon was taken up with speeches by the various notables, all of which were first delivered in English and then translated by an interpreter into Kaonde.

The proceedings were opened with a dance by a well known local diviner dressed in a leopard skin. Most of the village headmen in attendance wore Western-style suits, usually far from new but carefully preserved for such formal occasions. A number of men on this hot afternoon wore heavy, worsted three-piece suits. The district governor, dressed like the other party notables in an elegant safari suit, then delivered his speech, stressing unity and how the people of Zambia are one no matter where they may live. It was then the turn of the MCC, whose performance illustrates the way the Party's rhetoric—in general a modernist one stressing the importance of “development”—was often interwoven with a different rhetoric appealing to notions of “authentic” Zambian “tradition.” He began by donning a chitenge—the two-meter length of cloth normally worn by women but also sometimes by village men when they dance—over his safari suit and launching into a UNIP “song of unity” to which the audience was invited to sing along, which a few duly did, though with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. While singing the MCC danced up to the chief and made the traditional offering, an action that within the local chief/headman hierarchy would be a clear statement of subordination on the part of the one making the offering. The fact that the MCC could do this without there being any danger of its being taken as anything more than a purely symbolic gesture of recognition of “our common Zambian heritage” indicates just how much chiefs have been stripped of any real power. Having, as it were, linked himself to Kaonde “tradition,” the MCC then began his speech proper, a prominent theme of which was UNIP and the coming presidential election. Kaunda (K.K.) was the only candidate for the presidency, and there was no possibility of his not being elected. Nonetheless, faced with Kaunda's rapidly declining popularity, the UNIP machinery had been charged with ensuring that people did actually cast a vote and that there would be the proper impressive number of “yes” votes for Kaunda. The MCC told his audience how important the coming election was, and how pleased he was to see that Chizela District was solidly behind K.K. He also stressed the importance of “traditional” ceremonies such as Ntongo in encouraging the development of agriculture.

The response of the sizable audience who had gathered to watch the proceedings was difficult to gauge. The attendance of party and government officials at all important public occasions was accepted and expected, just as they were expected to deliver the same well-worn homilies that they always repeated on their periodic rounds of local ward meetings. Speeches within the public arena, whether by representatives of the state or anyone else, were expected to follow certain rhetorical forms. When local people questioned visiting politicians they would normally use a highly deferential mode of address (patterned on that of the mukulumpe/mwanyike hierarchy) even when they were trying to press certain demands. This deference was reflected in a speech of welcome given to the MCC in 1987 and recorded in the minutes of the Kibala ward record. Prior to listing a long series of complaints and demands, there was a fulsome preamble part of which ran as follows:

Today is an important occasion in that we are able to share ideas and also to carefully and properly map out a future and right course for the Party's activities in Kibala ward. This is a step in the right direction since you will educate us on many matters concerning the Party and its government on which perhaps we up to now had been ignorant.

For a westerner, and particularly a Britisher, it is difficult not to hear at least a hint of irony here, but this is probably to respond ethnocentrically. Occasionally someone, often someone who had been drinking, would ask questions of a visiting dignitary in a more straightforward and less deferential way. But this always seemed to give rise, after the important personage had departed, to a lot of head shaking and condemnation of this shocking breach of manners that would bring shame (bumvu) on the whole community. Perhaps the most important effect of all the UNIP speeches to the grass roots was that just by their physical presence, and their repetition of the expected phrases, politicians and bureaucrats reaffirmed the reality of the state. They were tangible proof that “Zambia” did indeed exist.

Not that the sighting of officials at such events was the only evidence people had of the state; the state, as embodied in UNIP and the apparatuses of government was most certainly a real presence in Kibala and Bukama. People understood very well the hegemonic power it represented, symbolized, for instance, in the official registration cards that everybody was supposed to carry, and virtually all did. While the bureaucratic hierarchy of UNIP and the kinship hierarchy of chiefs and headmen did not in reality occupy distinct spheres, local people nonetheless made a clear distinction between them. Despite the colonial overtones everyone in rural Chizela continued to use the term Boma to refer to the world of officialdom associated with the modern Zambian state. Also normally included within the category “Boma” were the IRDP and magermani. In Chizela local people made a clear distinction between Chizela, which meant to them Chief Chizela's capital, a small settlement located just outside the district center, and the district center itself, the town of Chizela. Nobody in Kibala or Bukama would ever say, “I am going to Chizela” to mean they were going to Chizela town; they would say, “I'm going to the Boma.”

The officials might have been Zambian rather than British, but to most of those living in rural Chizela in the 1980s the world of the Boma still represented a distinct and different universe, and one that often seemed to be in opposition to their own world. Even if the Boma was no longer associated with a colonial state, it still represented the concrete reality of the state at the local level. It was still the embodiment of all those things that the government in Lusaka tried to get local people to do, like producing more maize for the national market, building their own schools and clinics; and everything that it tried to prevent people from doing, such as unlicensed hunting, distilling spirits, or spending part of the year living by their fields out in the bush. Not that the Boma was only an oppressive presence; it also represented a state that, as local people saw it, had clear obligations towards them, its citizens. It ought to provide schools, hospitals, and roads, not to mention the marketing facilities essential if the grain they were continually being urged to produce was to be sold. The Boma was all those official institutions such as the District Council and the Department of Agriculture that controlled so many of the key resources on which villagers depended. There was no doubt in people's minds as to the value of those resources or to the reality of their dependence on the Boma.

At one meeting organized by the IRDP that I attended, for instance, an IRDP official explained to those assembled how they should organize themselves through various self-help schemes so that projects begun by the IRDP would continue after the program was phased out. As usual, after the speeches questions were invited from the audience. One of the small minority of women present expressed a certain skepticism, although her question was framed in properly deferential terms, in line with the conventions of the mukulumpe/mwanyike hierarchy. The LIMA groups were still young, she said, and if the IRDP abandoned them now, how could they manage? Local people had no idea how to produce fertilizer, for example (Chizela, 23.vi.88, NE). Those living in the rural areas and those belonging to the Boma can be seen as engaged in an ever continuing dialogue of claims and counterclaims. It was, however, the language in which the Boma voices spoke, and the Boma's naming of rural reality that was hegemonic. It is what those Boma eyes saw when they looked at the rural areas, and how they named those who lived there, that is the subject of the next section.

UNIP at the Grass Roots

If what the people of Kibala and Bukama saw when they looked toward the world of officialdom looming in authority over them was the “Boma,” what the politicians and government officials saw when they looked toward the rural “masses” was likely to be “villagers,” whom they of the Boma had a duty to mobilize, lead, educate, and generally control. Politicians, government officials and the educated elite often used the term villager in a disparaging sense to mean someone who, rather than embracing the ideals of progress and development, clung stubbornly to an outmoded and backward-looking tradition. To make it clear where I am speaking of “villages” and “villagers” in the negative tones of the Boma, I have used quotation marks. The pejorative Boma tone echoed through an interview I had with Chizela's district governor. It was apparent, for instance, when the governor was explaining to me how his main concern as regards the Bukama settlement scheme was the amount of marketable surplus its farmers were producing. As so often, it seems that the farmers here are assumed to be male.

Mainly we want to look at the results every year, what are they producing. If the production goes down then we have to go in to say, “Gentlemen, what's happening? You are turning these places into villages.”

And the answer to this problem? In the eyes of those in the Boma it was above all education, as the district governor went on to tell me with particular reference to the failure of “villagers” to increase the area cultivated each year and generally engage in accumulation: “Unfortunately, as I was saying, we are still having problems because some people are still having this village thinking. We need to be continually educating.” (26.xii.88, TE)

In the day-to-day struggles between the Boma and those in the rural areas, with local people asserting their claims on the state and the politicians and government officials striving to implement government policy—such as greater production for the national market—this cry for education was continually heard from those on the Boma side of the divide. The dominant image of the relation between the state and those in the rural areas was that of teacher and pupil. The state was seen as an educator leading “villagers” out of the ignorant dark of backward thinking into the shining day of development. This is how the district governor put it when I asked him to define development:

You [KC] have seen these people in the rural areas, you have been in Kibala, you have been in Bukama: first of all we have to develop their minds, to conscientise them, to make them know how to live a better life. That is also development.…This is how I look at development, it is some sort of movement from a primitive level to an enlightened level. You see?…Some people would like to go on scratching a piece of land; one lima as long as it is enough for the person to eat that person is happy, but that is not good. We want them to produce more, let them eat and the surplus should be sold so that they can meet other commitments.

Inextricably bound up with the notion of the backward “villager” was its opposite, the progressive farmer, a tireless warrior in the struggle for development, who was defined by all that the “villager” was not. When government officials and the like used the term farmer they normally meant not simply someone whose livelihood is derived from the cultivation of a piece of land, but specifically one who sold at least some of his or her crop to the national market and whose cultivation was based on “modern” and “scientific” methods, such as the use of fertilizer. As we shall see in the next chapter this clear opposition between the categories “villager” and “farmer” was reproduced in the distinction that the people of Kibala and Bukama themselves made between ordinary cultivation (kujima) and “farming” (mwafwamu). This Boma definition of farming had the effect of excluding the majority of Chizela's rural inhabitants from being thought of as farmers, consigning them to the ranks of those who act as a brake on “development,” an inert mass of “villagers” to be educated. For instance, the Solwezi district agricultural officer told me when I first arrived in North-Western Province in 1988 how out of Chizela's total rural population (something over 10,000 in 1980 [GRZ 1988b]) his department was actually working with 2,700 people, little more than a quarter. These, he explained, were those belonging, in his words to “active farm families.” He went on to tell me in the same interview how there were some very enthusiastic farmers in Chizela District because “farming has not been long in Chizela” (NE). In other words, local sorghum-based cultivation with its long history simply did not count as farming.

While “the masses” may not have supinely accepted the Boma's view of them, the Boma and its naming of social realities nonetheless exerted a powerful hegemonic force throughout rural Zambia. So that even if local people had their own ways of seeing things, in their dealings with state institutions and officials it was difficult for them to escape Boma definitions of reality; if “the masses” wanted the state to hear them, they had to use the names and the language recognized by the state; and they had to speak from where the state located them. But even more insidious and difficult to overcome is the power of a hegemonic discourse to make its definitions of reality the only definitions, and its names the only names—as when people in Kibala and Bukama apparently accepted that their ordinary sorghum cultivation was not “real” farming (see p. 162).

The people of rural Chizela made a clear, if implicit, distinction between the world of the Boma and their own world structured around the community of kin. As long as they remained in the latter they felt at home and comfortable, and would resent Boma interference, but once they felt themselves to be on the Boma's territory this confidence tended to evaporate. The attitude was rather “the Boma is a foreign country: they do things differently there; and strangers in that country have no choice but to abide by its rules.” To avoid being misunderstood, let me stress that I am using spacial metaphors here. The Boma world was also very much a part of Kibala and Bukama. Not only were there people living there, particularly the teachers and other government employees, who were seen, and who saw themselves, as belonging to the Boma world; even within individuals themselves there could be this divide. In certain areas of their lives or in certain contexts a teacher, for example, might identify with the Boma and speak with the Boma's voice in exhorting local people to send their children to school, while in others, such as his own forays into the officially condemned fish trading, he might think of himself more as a member of the local community. Even those who were clearly not part of the Boma world might well use the pejorative language of the Boma to criticize the shortcomings of their neighbors or fellow kin, describing them as “uneducated” and backward, for example. Let me also stress that what I am concerned with here is a separation that existed primarily at the level of discourse—a separation that people used to name the basic reality within which they lived their lives but that did not necessarily correspond in any simple way to a dichotomy in that reality itself.

During the period of the Second Republic it was UNIP that provided the organizing framework for the Boma. The government was UNIP, a relationship summed up in the slogan that was heard everywhere, “the Party and its government.” And it was the Party's structure that constituted the country's administrative structure.

At the base of the administrative pyramid was the ward. Kibala with its thirty-something settlements constituted one ward, while Bukama was part of a larger ward. Each ward had a committee elected by all its UNIP members, the key members of whom were the chairman, vice-chairman, secretary, and treasurer. According to the UNIP constitution each ward was also supposed to elect a number of other officials, such as a publicity secretary, but in Kibala, and in this it was probably representative of many remote rural wards, the precise composition of the ward committee and the manner of its selection were determined by the ward's chairman, vice-chairman, and secretary decided was necessary or possible. In addition to the ordinary UNIP members there were also youth (men up to the age of 35) and women's sections. Since the ward chairman was elected solely by UNIP members, only a minority of the ward's inhabitants were involved—and an even smaller minority of women. In Kibala in 1988, for instance, there were a total of 329 UNIP members: 148 men, 46 women, and 135 youth (all men) out of a total adult population of close to 800.^[3] In all local political arenas, positions of power within the ward tended to be monopolized by older men. Although in theory a ward chairman could have been a woman, in practice this was virtually unheard of and there were no female ward chairmen in Chizela District. It was the ward and the ward chairman who provided local people with their primary representation within “the Party and its government.” In the late 1980s the main decision-making body at the district level was—at least in formal terms—the district council, and it was the local ward chairmen who made up its voting councillors. Decision making within the Second Republic always remained highly centralized, however, and in practice rural councils had very few real powers, particularly since they had almost no income of their own. Chizela District Council was particularly impoverished.

The ward chairman was both the primary UNIP representative within his area and at the same time the main representative of his area within the formal structures of government. This dual role necessarily involved a certain amount of conflict since the definition of UNIP's role down among “the masses” was rather different depending on who was doing the defining. For those looking down from the Boma a key theme, as always when officialdom contemplated “villagers,” was the mobilizing and educative function of local officials. From this vantage point the responsibility of ward officials was, as Kibala's ward secretary, the teacher Sansoni put it, “to encourage people to do farming, to educate them as to what their role is as citizens of Zambia and to teach them the modern methods of farming” (Kibala, 2.vii.88, NE). Or, in the words of the district governor, the ward chairman's role was

to organise the Party in his ward and to get involved in development projects. Now here we have agreed that we have to get some of these things done on [a basis of] self-help in view of our financial problems, now it is for the ward chairman to mobilise the people and come up with self-help projects…the ward chairman has to be very, very active in mobilising, but the most important thing is to make sure the Party is well understood in his area.

In sum, the Boma expected the ward chairman as UNIP representative to explain and implement the policies laid down by the Party, and to propagate “modern” notions of citizenship and “development.” At its most basic this could translate into simply ensuring that there was some kind of formal party structure at the village level. Kabaya, Kibala's ward chairman (a less sophisticated man than Sansoni and not as well versed in Party rhetoric) explained that what was important was

to persuade people to build houses so that it is easy to allocate branches and sections—if you do this even the Government will recognise you. Also to sell [Party] cards to local people and address public meetings.

As the Boma saw it, grassroots party organizations were there to carry the word of “the Party and its government” down into the dark reaches of “village” ignorance; and ward chairmen were first and foremost their representatives charged with the task of imposing a Boma view of things on “villagers.”

As might be expected, what the people of Kibala and Bukama themselves wanted and expected from their ward chairman was not always the same as what the Boma wanted and expected. They tended to put far less stress on the educative function of ward chairmen. Also, not surprisingly perhaps, how people described the role of ward chairman tended to be very similar to the way they described that of headmen in the past. During the colonial years headmen had indeed had just this Janus-faced role of state representative at the local level and representative of the local within the state.^[4] Two of the LIMA group chairmen in Kibala defined the role of the ward chairman as follows:

The chairman's work is: one, to supervise the whole ward, are the people doing well? Two, to see how they are cultivating, does everybody have food? Three, have they built good houses? Four, to see how they are living, are they staying together in harmony and peace?

The ward chairmen are there to help the people in their areas, and to help them with cultivation. To help them live in peace without fighting.…Ward chairmen are doing the same work that was done by [chiefs and headmen] in the past.

It would seem that at least to some extent UNIP's administrative hierarchy had been mapped onto the older hierarchies of headman and chief, or at any rate onto these as they had come to be understood during the colonial period. This perceived continuity with the older chiefly hierarchy was similarly reflected in one elderly man's explanation of how Kibala became a separate ward: “We brought up the matter as to why Kibala who is a great chief had not been given a ward” (Kibala, 23.viii.88, TK).

Although the ward chairman was not a paid functionary of the state, as local representative of “the Party and its government” he had a responsibility to see that government policy was carried out. The coercive dimension of this was very clear to local people, however much the official rhetoric might frame it as “education.” In their daily life people were continually confronted by the state as a repressive presence. Local hunters were hedged around with laws telling them when they could and could not hunt, what methods they were allowed to use, and that they must buy licenses before killing animals. Even if these regulations were normally ignored, the game guards charged with enforcing them had become yet another hazard of the always dangerous business of hunting. Similarly, when local women wanted to take advantage of one of the few sources of income available to them, selling alcohol, in theory this was subject to state regulation. Many women brewed grain beer for sale, and some also distilled it into a fearsomely strong spirit, lutuku. Although the regulations seemed rarely if ever enforced, the distilling of lutuku was illegal and known to be so. Even the brewing of beer was supposed to be controlled by headmen (a legacy of their colonial role) and ward chairmen. Periodically word would come down from the Boma that there was too much beer brewing, and that this was preventing people from working in the fields and must be curtailed on pain of a fine by the local court. And for a short period women might be frightened off brewing.

Another point at which the state confronted local people—especially those attempting to run some kind of business—as a tangible and coercive presence was the price inspector. Until the late 1980s the price of many commodities, including all the industrially produced goods local shopkeepers brought back from town, were state regulated with party officials being given the task of ensuring that shopkeepers did not charge more than the permitted markup. Those found doing so could be fined or even have their trading licenses revoked. Enforcement of the price regulations depended on complaints of overcharging being taken by local people to UNIP officials in the district center who would then visit and check on the traders accused. Both the ward chairman and the most prominent entrepreneur in Kibala had had uncomfortable experiences with price control inspectors (this second case is dealt with in more detail in chapter 6). In practice a ward chairman seemed only to adopt an actively coercive role when directly pressured to do so by the Boma; and even then, as with the regulation of brewing, this tended to remain at the level of impressively fierce, but ultimately empty, rhetorical pronouncements. After all, not only had he to live with those subject to such prohibitions, and their likely anger, he also needed their votes if he were to be reelected.

In addition to representing UNIP within the ward, the ward chairman was also the primary representative of the ward within the wider party structures. In theory, it was through their ward chairman that people could articulate their demands and make claims on the state. A ward chairman was expected to fight for the interests of his community and to secure for them the maximum possible share of government resources. As Mulonda put it when I asked him about the role of the ward chairman in the Boma,

When the ward chairman goes to the Boma, his responsibility is to take a report^[5] to the District Governor telling him what is needed in the ward. The chairman should tell the District Governor about all the problems in his area and persuade him to help the people there.

But while local people may have seen their ward chairman as some kind of representative of their interests within the world of “the Party and its government,” for them UNIP was not an entity that articulated their specific interests or struggled for them. For people in Kibala and Bukama what UNIP represented was not so much a political party as a particular manifestation of the state itself. They would doubtless have agreed with Gramsci that “a peasant does not join a political party to learn new methods of cultivation.” It is true that there was a lot of official rhetoric along the lines of the following formulation from the section on co-operatives in the Fourth National Development Plan.

The overall objectives of the Co-operative Programme 1989–93, is to improve the standard of living and quality of life of the people of Zambia, especially the disadvantaged groups in both rural and urban areas, including women and youths through the successful practice of participatory democracy, equitable distribution and mutual self-help.

But however much talk there might be about “participatory democracy,” local people had no illusions about the nature of the underlying power relations. They never forgot that, in Gramsci's words, “there are rulers and ruled”; and as far as they were concerned, it was the Boma that wrote the rules while they were the ones who were ruled. Of course, they had plenty of ways of evading the Boma's rules, particularly when these concerned something like hunting which was felt most definitely not to be “a thing of the Boma,” but it is important not to confuse the ability to evade particular rules with the overturning of basic hegemonic power relations.

Beginning with the colonial period there has always been an underlying opposition between the state and local communities as regards access to resources of one kind or another and the nature of the respective claims the state and “the masses” have on one another. This opposition may often have expressed itself in hidden and unacknowledged ways, but these were struggles nonetheless, struggles stemming from a genuine structural opposition. The official channel through which local communities were supposed to have access to the ear of the state and its decision-making processes was that of the UNIP ward, making the ward chairman a potentially key figure. It was he who was supposed to take local claims on the state into the decision-making arenas of “the Party and its government” and press for them. In reality, however, the powers of ward chairmen to act as lobbyists for their community were very circumscribed. In theory their role as voting members of the District Council should have given them a certain leverage, but since the District Council itself was such a powerless body, little could be achieved through it, especially by a lone ward chairman.

At the same time it was possible for a skillful ward chairman to use his formal and informal links with the Boma to secure for himself and his close associates preferential access to scarce state-controlled resources. Demand for the maize flour sold by the state monopoly often outstripped supply, and there was always a problem transporting it from the district center; an effective ward chairman could ensure that a supply (often for resale locally) reached him. Similarly, he could “persuade” the marketing lorries to visit his area. In a situation of scarcity, in which all state services were in chronically short supply, wards were necessarily in competition with one another. In line with the ethos of hierarchy and the mukulumpe/mwanyike relationship, it was accepted that those, like ward chairmen, in positions of authority were perfectly entitled to benefit personally from their office; what was important was, firstly, that they were effective in their struggles with the state, and secondly, that they did not monopolize the benefits. Local people demanded some “trickle-down effect,” even if they accepted that the amount trickling down would be concentrated among the power elite and would be pretty exiguous beyond that.

What little real de facto power ward chairmen had vis-à-vis the Boma stemmed primarily from the potential threat that “the masses” might withdraw their support from “the Party and its government.” Not that this threat was articulated explicitly either by local representatives or Boma officials, but it lurked as an unspoken presence in all relations between Boma and “the masses.” Zambia may have been a one-party state in the 1980s and organized opposition to UNIP may have been forbidden, but the government still needed to exert a hegemonic and not merely a coercive control. The legitimacy of “the Party and its government” rested on the assumption that in some sense it represented the interests of “the masses.” And indeed once it became clear—as was already happening during my fieldwork—that UNIP and Kaunda had lost the trust and goodwill of the vast majority of Zambians, the whole one-party edifice rapidly crumbled. UNIP's rhetorical definition of itself as “the militant vanguard of revolutionary peasants, workers, students and intellectuals” ^[6] necessarily assumed an implicit contract whereby the Party received the support of “the masses” in return for which the Party looked after “the masses'” interests. While both politicians and “the masses” understood that the rhetoric should not be taken too seriously, it did provide an important framework for the continual struggle between local people and politicians over their competing claims on one another. From the local community's perspective the basic character of their relationship with “the Party and its government” was essentially that of a mukulumpe/mwanyike relationship; it was their acknowledgment of the legitimacy (in principle at least) of the Party's claims on them that gave them their claims on the Party. And just as a headman (mukulumpe) who failed to provide the members of his village (banyike) with the expected help and support was liable to find himself deserted, once the Party disappointed too many local expectations it too was liable to find its “masses” absenting themselves, as was already happening in the late 1980s.

To lobby effectively for his ward, a ward chairman needed to be a skilled operator in the political world beyond his community. Although the politics of patronage were an important element in this world—as indeed, whether overtly or covertly, they also are to varying degrees in modern bureaucratic states—the formal structures of power and the language of power were bureaucratic. Local ward chairmen, who came out of a political environment dominated by a discourse of power explicitly based on the mukulumpe/mwanyike relationship of patronage, were often very skillful clients, but they nonetheless remained enormously disadvantaged in the Boma world. This was true not least because the language of officialdom was English, which very few in rural Chizela (almost none of whom were women) spoke and even fewer felt confident in. Since it was UNIP policy not to post officials to their home areas, within the Boma world English was a genuine lingua franca as well as the official language of government. In addition, even if “the Party and its government” were anxious to maintain some level of local support, those in a distant rural backwater like North-Western Province were certainly not an important constituency. As far as the UNIP politicians and bureaucrats were concerned, Chizela “villagers” had little with which to bargain.

Ward chairmen had to operate both in the Boma world and in their local community. They needed to be able to work within the bureaucratic structures of the Party and government, with their committees, minutes, points of order and their rhetoric of impartiality and equality, and within local hierarchies with their idiom of kinship and mushingi (respect), which took for granted an inevitable and necessary inequality. Kibala's ward chairman, Kabaya, was generally recognized as lacking the skills necessary to navigate in the Boma; he did not speak or understand English and had failed to win government resources for his ward. Nonetheless, he had been elected not once but twice. When I asked people about this, one reason I was given was his powerful standing within Kibala's kinship hierarchy. It was a basic reality of Chizela politics that no one stood any chance of being elected as ward chairman unless they had the support of local authority figures within the kinship hierarchy. In line with the powerfully held belief that chiefs and headmen as owners of the land exercise a pervasive mystic control, one of the mechanisms by which the dominant kin group in an area seemed able to exclude others from positions of power was bulozhi (witchcraft), which I discuss in detail in chapter 6. Just as bulozhi had always been an element in the power of headmen and chiefs, it also inevitably played a part in the struggles within the community over the new political power structures. One of the forms it commonly seemed to take was a pervasive fear on the part of those not favored by the established authority figures in the area, particularly the chief, that if they were to put themselves forward for office this would at once lay them open to attack from those authority figures' powerful bulozhi. Similarly, people were fearful of what might happen to them if they did not vote for the candidate designated by the chief or the other powerful elders (bakulumpe); going against their wishes in this way would necessarily represent a serious lack of respect (mushingi). A number of people I spoke to mentioned fear of bulozhi as a significant element in Kabaya's election.

Another important factor in Kabaya's success was that local people did not have the kind of knowledge that would have enabled them to judge in an informed way whether or not a potential candidate had the appropriate skills. Most people simply did not know how things were done in the Boma. When I asked Tyemba why Kabaya had been elected despite not speaking English, even though it was clearly stated in the UNIP rules that anyone standing as a candidate for ward chairman must be proficient in English, he replied:

We just saw it happen. Because at first he was in UNIP, standing on ant-hills and selling UNIP cards. Because people did not realise they thought he was very good. They did not know that things are changing. They thought in the [District Council] meetings they talk in Kaonde just like we do.^[7]

Tyemba's statement here should not be taken too literally however. When I asked people if they thought it was important that the ward chairman should be able to operate in English, they all said yes. Rather Tyemba was speaking figuratively both to criticize elements in the community he saw as less sophisticated—an example of how the Boma scorn for “uneducated villagers” was not confined to the world of officialdom—and to describe a more general unfamiliarity on the part of local people with how things are done in the Boma. While people may have been well aware of the importance of English, since so few of them understood or spoke English it was difficult for them to judge a candidate's language competence. Kabaya, I was told, had represented himself as knowing at least some English.

Another problem was that the pool of people with the necessary skills was so small. In both Kibala and Bukama, apart from a few men too young to be taken seriously as political actors, the only people at ease in English and in the Boma world were the handful of teachers and other government employees, but they were not local men. Anyone without kinship links in Kibala, no matter how competent, had little hope of being elected ward chairman. In the ward of which Bukama was a part, for instance, the vice-chairman of the ward was a man who had settled in the area after many years of working in town and was widely acknowledged as being exceptionally proficient not only in English, but in the ways of the Boma—all of which, it was admitted, was in marked contrast to the ward chairman himself who was something of the same stamp as Kabaya. But this vice-chairman was a Bemba whose wife was from Chizela but who did not himself have any kinship links in the area. Local people, I was told, were happy to have him as vice-chairman, and for him to accompany the chairman acting as interpreter (not simply in terms of the language), but they were not prepared, it seemed, to have a stranger as their representative. A key factor in Kabaya's successful election, I was told, was the mobilization of his numerous relatives in Kibala. The election of ward chairmen can be seen in fact as another instance of how state structures had to some extent been reshaped to conform to the established—and in local terms hegemonic—hierarchies of the community of kin.

While the local community and the Boma may not have seen eye to eye on many points, there was one on which they were in full agreement: formal politics was the business of men. All the recognized decision makers—the headmen, chiefs, ward chairmen, government officials, development planners, and so on—were almost always male, and everybody assumed that they would, and should, be. The final section of this chapter maps out some of the gendered contours of the political landscape, and looks at the location of women within this overwhelmingly male political world.

The Political Location of Women

As far as I could tell, the women I talked to in Kibala and Bukama did not have anything like coherent and explicit, alternative female accounts of the world in which they lived with which to explicitly challenge the dominant male hegemony. While they often complained about men—particularly when no men were present—they seemed to accept the existing gender hierarchy as “natural” and unalterable. This is another example of hegemony as a dominant group's ability to make their way of naming social realities the only way, and to repress potentially counterhegemonic understandings—a power to stifle alternative accounts that tends to be especially effective when individuals are asked to verbalise their experience in a public setting.

In general the articulated accounts given by the people of rural Chizela—and I stress articulated—of “the way things are” looked at the world through the eyes of senior men. From this vantage point men and women were seen as necessarily and inescapably bound together in a mutually beneficial interdependence, which wound around them a diffuse net of reciprocal moral expectations. The nature of this interdependence meant that while there were many legitimate demands that rural women could make of their menfolk, the legitimacy of these demands depended on women accepting that there were also legitimate demands that men could make of women. The general shape of men's demands on women and women's demands on men, although not their precise demarcation in concrete cases, was laid down by the general norms of the sexual division of labor. For people in Kibala and Bukama, these reciprocal obligations between men and women were inherent in the very names “women” and “man”; they defined what it meant to be a woman, and to be a man. Part of what this meant for women was that it was only from within the existing sexual division of labor that they could make demands on men. For women to challenge the accepted allocation of tasks between the sexes would have been, in a sense, to deny their identity as women. It would also have been tantamount to questioning the legitimacy of their expectations of access to the labor of husbands and male kin. The problem as local women saw it was not the sexual division of labor per se, but how to make men fulfill their obligations as these were defined, albeit in a very general way, within that division of labor. As far as I could tell women did not seem to question the general male hegemony itself, or how this hegemony defined “being a woman.” Women, as well as men, seemed to accept that part of what being a woman meant was serving men. As little girls who were sitting doing nothing were likely to be reminded by their mothers, who would ask them sharply, “So, do you think you're a man?”

An important factor constraining the participation of women in formal politics was that the division of labor between men and women included not only a division of labor within the realm of production, but also an allocation of responsibility within the political domain. The whole sphere of “public politics” was associated with men; it was not “women's business.” This inevitably had the effect of inhibiting women and constraining their participation in formal political events, though it is important not to overemphasize women's exclusion. Women were normally present at such events, and some of the older ones (those, that is, who had attained recognized bakulumpe status) could indeed be highly vocal presences. The only public events in which women played a dominating role, however, were those in which only women participated, for instance, a special church service for women or, in the past, girls' initiation ceremonies.^[8]

Away from the public spheres of rural life when there were no men around, women tended to be less deferential but they still seemed to content themselves with ridiculing male pretension. While such mocking subversion may be seen as an implicit refusal to acknowledge the desirability and benignness of the dominant account, in no sense can this kind of ridicule be seen as amounting to a claim that relations between men and women could be other than they were. While individual women often came into conflict with particular men, husbands, sons, and so on, the tactics used by women tended to be those of passive resistance rather than confrontation. Wives were enormously skillful, for instance, in the art of prevarication. Faced with a demand by her husband with which, for whatever reason, a woman was reluctant to comply, a wife had all kinds of ways of not doing what she was asked without ever refusing outright.

An incident in Kibala illustrates a common pattern of private ridicule/public deference. One day when I was walking with a female research assistant we came across two old women busy in their fields. We started chatting and I asked about the role of men in cultivation; one of the women, Kyela, snorted and said very emphatically, “men just eat, women cultivate.” Since she seemed an interesting woman with decided opinions I was anxious to talk further with her, and we arranged a time when I hoped we could sit and talk at our leisure. But when I turned up at the appointed time, I discovered that it had been decided that her husband should be present. It was he who was sitting in pride of place next to the chair that had been put out for me, while Kyela was sitting some way off; and I had no choice but to interview her through her husband, most of the time with him answering for her. The opinionated old lady I had met in the fields was unrecognizable in this respectful and deferential wife. In Chizela, as Kyela well understood, it was men, not women, who were the main actors on any formal occasion: the hearing of court cases, the adjudication of disputes, church services, and encounters with anthropologists. The right to speak for the community in such public arenas was indeed central to the very definition of being a senior male (mukulumpe).

Women did have a very clear sense of their location within the prevailing hegemony, and that this gave them a legitimate set of claims on their husbands and male kin. But this was a political identity, I would argue, firmly located within the domain of kinship and the hierarchical structures of the mukulumpe/mwanyike relationship. Central to this political identity was a basic premise that the relationships between individuals are always relationships between brothers, husbands, wives, mother's brothers, sisters, and so on, all of whom are linked together in irreducibly hierarchical ways. In other words, it is assumed that the most fundamental of the socially recognized relationships that establish the basic network of claims people have on one another are woven out of the strands of kinship; and that the ordering of these strands is necessarily and inescapably hierarchical. According to this view of political life, it is impossible to tear individuals out of this kinship fabric to make of each an autonomous citizen, whose rights, as a citizen, transcend their gender and their kinship location.

But, of course, the people of Kibala and Bukama were citizens of the Zambian state. As with any other modern state, political rhetoric in Zambia is underlain, firstly, by the assumption that the basic units within it (its citizens) are autonomous (and genderless) individuals; and, secondly, that all citizens are equal. Those who wish to operate in the formal political arenas of the state have no choice but to adopt the dominant egalitarian rhetoric. The problem for the women of Kibala and Bukama was that they did not have an articulated account of how things were for them as women that based itself on these kinds of egalitarian claims. Implicitly, it is true, their stress on their particular claims as women could be seen as the germ of a critique of the assumptions inherent in the rhetoric of citizenship. However, in the absence of the articulation of this germ into a coherent and systematic account capable of challenging the dominant hegemonies of the local community and the state, it was difficult for women's struggles to rise above the level of individual passive resistance.

If the women of Kibala and Bukama were in general relegated to the margins of public politics, their marginalization was especially pronounced in the case of encounters between the local community and those belonging to the world of the Boma. Both women and men took it for granted that those who speak on such occasions will be men. Women could speak on issues specific to women, such as “development” initiatives aimed exclusively at women, but men spoke for the community as a whole; theirs was the voice of authority, and a voice that women themselves tended to adopt, particularly in public contexts when men were present. It was this voice, for example, that tended to be adopted by those older women who did speak up on public occasions.

A practical reality that made it even more difficult for women to speak was the language used in encounters between the community and the Boma. Not only was the primary language English (even if there were normally also translations into Kaonde), but the idiom used was a bureaucratic one. Those unable to speak English and unversed in the mechanics of modern bureaucracy were, therefore, especially disadvantaged. While it is true that this applied to the vast majority of Kibala's and Bukama's inhabitants, there were at least a few men—usually those who had learned to operate in a modern bureaucratic world while working in town—who were reasonably comfortable operating in this world. There were no women. The assumption that it was men who were the community's “natural” decision makers, and it was they who should speak for the community as a whole, necessarily contributed to women's general lack of ease in such encounters.

Given the acceptance, by women as well as men, that on the public stage it is men who act, what then was the role of women in such public arenas? One way in which local women undoubtedly were a significant presence—and this was perhaps their major presence in such contexts—was insofar as men were well aware of wives' and kinswomen's de facto power to resist certain demands on them. Men, for instance, did not have free access to the labor of their wives. While there were a range of goods and services that husbands could expect their wives to provide, any demands on a wife's labor that fell outside the accepted range were likely to be contested, or at least to be the subject of negotiation. For instance, many women did not work on their husbands' LIMA plots. Those women who did, it was generally agreed, could expect a share of any profits.

There was, however, a formally designated space for women's voices within UNIP: the Women's League. The three types of UNIP membership, ordinary, Youth, and Women's, corresponded to three of the main cleavages in rural society: older men, young men, and women. The relationship between the three kinds of members was also an accurate reflection of the taken-for-granted assumption that power was the prerogative of those who were neither youngsters (banyike) nor female, that is, older men (male bakulumpe). A significant difference in the situation of women and youth is, of course, that women, unlike young men, do not automatically in the course of time become senior males. The UNIP category “youth” (which included men up to age 35) corresponded very closely to one meaning of mwanyike. When UNIP spoke, its “normal” voice was a male one. Youth and women were, so to speak, special interest groups, whose interests within UNIP were to be represented by the Youth League and the Women's League. But what were the reality of these organizations within Kibala and Bukama?

Every ward was supposed to have its own Youth and Women's Leagues (made up of the local “youth” and “women” party members) with a Women's League chairwoman and Youth League chairman; each league within a district having a representative who was a voting member of the District Council. It was through this representative structure that, in theory, women and youth could speak with their own voices within the formal political arenas of the state. It was not, therefore, that “women” and “youth” were excluded from the Party, but their participation was carefully contained within separate organzations whose purpose was defined by the hegemonic male UNIP voice. Whatever may have been the effectiveness of the Women's and Youth Leagues nationally, in neither Kibala nor Bukama did either have any real presence even to the extent of holding meetings, let alone actually doing anything. Nonetheless, at the time of my fieldwork there were Women's League chairwomen in both Kibala and the ward to which Bukama belonged.

Kibala's Women's League chairwoman was called Zamina. In the late 1980s Zamina and her husband were one of the more prosperous households in Kibala. Both of them had joined the LIMA scheme as soon as it was initiated in Kibala in 1980. I had hoped to interview Zamina on her own, but predictably it turned out to be a joint interview with her and her husband. It was he in fact who did much of the talking, concentrating his full attention on me while Zamina sat off to one side husking maize. He explained to me how his wife had become the local Women's League chairwoman in Kibala. Although she had not had any formal education, and could not speak any English nor read or write in Kaonde, “in discussions with Boma people she conducted herself like someone who has been to school,” and so when “the people in the Boma asked the ward chairman to elect someone as the Women's League chairwoman” (Kibala, 31.viii.88, NK), Zamina was elected. This election was clearly not the result of spontaneous organization among local women. Zamina, I could not help suspecting, had probably been made an offer she could not refuse. She herself complained to me how reluctant women in Kibala were to come to UNIP meetings, seeing them as a waste of time. When I went on to ask her what she personally thought was the value of these meetings, she told me, using the standard rhetoric of education, that she wanted to learn about the things that were happening in the Party.

UNIP itself defined the role of the Women's League and other women's organizations very much in the terms of education and mobilization. As, for instance, in the party constitution, according to which the Women's Affairs Committee was to formulate “policies for the development of women and children in political, social, cultural, economic, scientific and technological development” (UNIP Constitution, GRZ 1988:66). The coupling of women and children here is worth noting. The constitution does not seem to have in mind an organization that is concerned with women organizing themselves.

Underlying the thinking of UNIP, the Zambian government, and expatriate development organizations has been the implicit assumption that “women” are a specific and separate category within an otherwise genderless political domain. The powerful effects of such a hegemonic assumption are enhanced precisely because its unstated and taken-for-granted nature prevent it from being explicitly challenged. In line with this assumption, a key strategy that has been promoted as a way of reaching women, and meeting their specific needs, is the women's club. Both the Women's League and foreign donors have encouraged the formation of such clubs. The model for these women's clubs in terms of their organization and what they do is one originating from outside the local community. There is always a bureaucratic structure involving a chairwoman, treasurer, and secretary, and it is these English terms that are used. The impetus to establish a club has normally come not from rural women themselves, but from someone like a government employed community worker, a party official, or a foreign aid worker.

The activities engaged in have tended to be based on very traditional notions of the activities appropriate for women. One of the teachers in Kibala, for instance, saw the encouragement of women's work by the Kibala ward secretariat^[9] (of which he was a member) as meaning “knitting and so forth” (Kibala, 10.ix.88, TE). Apart from knitting, other activities seen as appropriate for women were such things as sewing, cooking, learning about nutrition, making vegetable gardens, candle making, and soap making. This view of the role of women can be seen as deriving in part from Western missionary models of the good Christian wife and mother, but it was also in tune with the local male hegemony, which stressed women's general subordination to men and tended to agree with the missionaries that the primary role of wives should be attending to the needs of husbands and children.

In Kibala, Zamina told me, there had been a women's club, but by the time of my fieldwork it no longer existed. The club had been founded by a former health assistant responsible for running the Kibala clinic. Once he was transferred, the club stopped functioning. When I asked Zamina what the club had done, she told me they had “knitted socks and some hats” (Kibala, 31.viii.88, NK). Given the fact that the impetus for women's clubs, at least in rural northwestern Zambia, does not seem to have come from rural women themselves, it is not surprising that the women I talked to did not explicitly challenge the form these clubs took. For many women they were simply irrelevant; and for those who were interested in being a member of such a club, the idea of transforming their structure and content would probably have seemed as absurd as that they should suggest the transformation of UNIP or the Zambian state. The women's club was a thing of the Boma, and it was the Boma that wrote the rules. As far as the women of Kibala and Bukama were concerned, they were faced with a simple choice: accept the club as it existed and make whatever use they could of it or ignore it. Women were always interested, for instance, in any possibility of gaining access to children's clothes, which were always in desperately short supply. At the same time, however, it is possible to discern certain implicit challenges.

Zamina, for instance, did not explicitly challenge the accepted model of the women's club, but she also referred to the hopes that she and a number of the women had had that the club might have become the nucleus of a co-operative that would have been able to acquire a small hammer mill for grinding grain. The co-operative is an institution that has been much favored by UNIP and foreign donors, and at the time of my fieldwork the IRDP had a scheme for supplying local groups with hammer mills on credit, the idea being that the group would repay the loan out of the profits it made. I will have more to say about the Kibala and the Bukama co-operative societies in the next chapter. The key points in this context are, firstly, that the idea of a hammer mill was particularly attractive to the women of Kibala since it was they who were responsible for the arduous work of pounding grain for the daily nshima with a mortar and pestle. There were no hammer mills in the vicinity of Kibala, and pounding was a task that regularly took up many hours of a woman's time during a week. But, and this is the second point, there was no possibility of local women actually being able to raise the initial capital necessary for such a venture.

The stereotypical response to my questions about the role of women's clubs, as in the case of other local-level UNIP organizations, was that they “educated” people (see Zamina's response above). In reality, however, a major attraction of such organizations has probably been that in some rather vague and general way they have appeared to provide a channel, or at least a potential channel, to the powerful wider world beyond the local community. It is also important not to overlook the vested interests of the elite women who have always dominated Zambia's official women's organizations, and who were anxious to retain their officially sanctioned role as women's representatives.

Another significant group of women belonging to the Boma world were those who were employed specifically to work with women, as community development workers, women's project officers, and so on. They also had their own interests and their own understandings of what women want. They were usually women with a secondary school education, and sometimes some further training. They were of course literate in English and at ease in a bureaucratic world; and their socialization into this world meant that they had also been socialized into the whole rhetoric of “development” with its stress on the centrality of “education” in the “development” of “villagers.” In addition, these women's very livelihood depended on them accepting both the basic premises of a separate women's sphere and the naming of what it is that women want and need in the terms articulated by the hegemonic male-accented voice of UNIP.

In theory women's clubs and the Women's League could have acted as a means through which local women were able to lobby for their interests in the formal arenas of power beyond their community, but they have not in fact done this. They have never directly challenged the structures of male power, either within their own communities or more generally. For instance, they have not questioned the accepted norms of the sexual division of labor, which, as I describe in the next chapter, were precisely what made it more difficult for women than for men to take advantage of new economic opportunities, such as selling crops to the national market. Nor have they argued for government policy and development programs in general to be specifically designed so as to enable women to benefit from them. The emphasis has always been on “educating” and “developing” women in line with an externally generated model. As the UNIP constitution put it, the role of the Women's Affairs Committee was, among other things, to “work out ways and means of instilling in women a sense of responsibility towards their work, families, country and the Party” (GRZ 1988:66). Women's organizations, therefore, have no tradition of operating as campaigning organizations. And yet, there were no other organizations in rural Chizela that provided any recognized space for women, and particularly nonelite women, to speak as women in the formal arenas of the state.

Embedded in the political institutions and practices of rural Chizela were two entangled but different discourses. One, associated with the world of the Boma, was structured around the notion of citizenship and the rule of law, before which all individuals are equal. The other was one that derived from the community of kin. This latter discourse was based not on the notion of autonomous individuals and equality, but on individuals who could not be torn out of their specific location within the overlapping, and always hierarchical, maps of kinship, age, and gender. In different ways both these discourses assumed a male vantage point that named for women what their role in public politics should be. The discourse of kinship and the mukulumpe/mwanyike (senior/junior) relationship of hierarchy recognized women as having their own interests and legitimate claims on men, although it also defined formal politics as essentially the responsibility of men. The discourse of citizenship, with its claim to transcend gender, in practice tends everywhere to translate into “the citizen” being assumed to be male unless specifically identified as female,^[10] in the same way that households are assumed to be headed by a male, unless, that is, they are specially marked as female-headed households. Within this apparently gender-blind discourse of citizenship and equality, that is in reality so strongly male accented, for women to draw attention to how the status quo disadvantages women and privileges men tends to be seen as the sectarian pleadings of a “special interest” group.

Notes