5. Economic Locations: Men, Women, and Production

The wife grows food to feed our bodies. I grow food to sell for money to clothe our bodies. So we just combine; she grows food for my consumption, and I get the money to clothe us.

The economic landscape of rural Chizela, like the political landscape described in the previous two chapters, was one in which women and men were located very differently. This chapter traces out some of the basic contours of this economic landscape, paying particular attention to the ways in which these were gendered. Central to my mapping here is the exploration of two key forces that have played a major role in the shaping of rural life: monetization and commoditization.

Kinship and Commodities

While it can be assumed that communities in rural Chizela were never, even in the precolonial past, completely self-sufficient and always engaged in exchanges of various kinds with their neighbors, before the slave and ivory trade brought guns, cotton cloth, and other trade goods into the region there were probably relatively few goods that were not produced locally. Kaonde men smelted and worked iron and made the bark-cloth that, together with the skins of the animals they hunted, provided clothes and other coverings. In general, it seems safe to say that in this period the bulk of the necessities of daily life would normally have been produced and consumed outside market relations.

Gradually, however, a range of imported trade goods began to establish themselves as ordinary, everyday necessities; they became the way people expected to satisfy certain needs. This process began in the precolonial years of the slave trade when cotton cloth began to displace bark-cloth, and guns to replace spears. Through such changes the region began to be linked in structural ways to the often distant places from which these goods originated. It was these kind of structural linkages that began the process of turning whole regions, such as present-day North-Western Province, into rural peripheries locked into unequal (although not unchanging) relationships with other more powerful economic regions. This process was accelerated with colonization and the development of a migrant labor system that sucked vast amounts of male labor out of the rural areas while simultaneously providing a flood of cheap mass-produced goods on which the wages of those migrant laborers could be spent. Not only did industrially produced hoe blades, metal cooking pots and water containers, blankets, and ready-made clothes increasingly come to replace locally produced iron, clay pots, bark-cloth, and animal skins; there were also a whole range of new goods such as the bicycles, Bibles, and soap that now became an established part of rural life. At the same time, those who could afford them began to favor cement and other imported building materials for house construction, and iron sheets rather than local grass for roofs.

With various imported goods increasingly being seen as necessities, access to some kind of a cash income became ever more necessary. Economic life in 1980s Kibala and Bukama was certainly monetized; nonetheless, there was still a significant difference between rural life and town life as regards the degree of monetization. Production in Kibala, and even on the Bukama farm settlement scheme—particularly the production of food—was still to a significant extent geared around the production of use-values for the producers' own consumption, or for nonmarket forms of distribution. That is, rather than being bought and sold, goods were distributed through a network of acknowledged claims of kin either to particular use-values or more generally to a share of any surplus produced. These were claims embedded in the very definitions of marriage and kinship. Also very important, it was still primarily through such nonmarket relationships that people gained access to land and to labor. How those living in Kibala and Bukama saw the uneven process of monetization within their communities varied considerably, as the following three extracts from my interviews illustrate.

The first comes from Sansoni's response when I asked him about the differences between urban and rural life. Sansoni, the teacher who had spent most of his life in town, began by saying,

In the town most of the things that are found there, they need money. If you want to buy some cassava, you have got to produce something to get it, but here in the rural areas you can go to your relative, and he will give it to you free of charge…in town you cannot live without money so it requires that every day you must have money in your pocket to enable you to make a living, but in a rural area you can live for one year without touching a 10ng^[1] but still you can manage to survive.

He went on to explain that it has taken him time to adjust to rural life.

Before I used to feel bitter because I was used to the town life whereby there are not so many people who come to bother you … the thing that has caused a change [in Sansoni's attitude] is that if you become stingy in an area like where we are, Kibala, people will begin giving you names, they will be saying “that man is selfish, he doesn't want to share things with other people”, sometimes they will be saying “no, he is proud because he is educated, that's why he does not want to share things with other people”.

Then there was Banyinyita. An elderly man with little formal education, Banyinyita had grown up in Kibala returning there in the early sixties after working for a number of years in town. He, like Sansoni, stressed the lack of monetization of rural life.

Because of the hunger we had last year. This is what made me cut trees for a new field. I said these things [i.e., being part of a local pit-sawing co-operative initiated by the IRDP] will make me die of hunger. Who will be moving with a bag of money in their pocket? Having a bag of money in the house, am I in town? Here in the village I do not want a bagful of money. I want my wife to do well [ie. produce more grain]. Let her pound and pound, and the children will eat and become happy.

Kyakala was another elderly man with little formal education who was living at Bukama. He had worked as a migrant laborer on the mines for some years but had spent the majority of his life in the rural areas. Unlike Sansoni and Banyinyita, what Kyakala wanted to stress to me (at least in this context) was how much town ways of thinking and behaving had spread to the rural areas. I had asked him why he had moved to the settlement scheme. His answer was in part a lament for what he saw as the breakdown of the old morality and the new overwhelming dominance of money.

If you stay in the village where do you find money? These days you can only expect your own child to give you things or assistance. In those days every member of a village was a child of the headman.…But it's different these days, even your mwipwa [sister's son, a man's heir in the matrilineal Kaonde system] will only help if you pay him money.…The difference is simply that these days people are more interested in money. You cannot send [i.e., on an errand] your friend's child without giving him money as a payment. In the past people were not interested in money; they were only interested in eating [i.e., production for direct consumption] and helping their elders. The difference I have seen nowadays is with money. Unless one has money one cannot expect anyone else to help him. That is why even we old people are here in farms [i.e., Bukama] just hoping to make a little money to buy a cake of soap to wash with.…These days even children are not concerned about their parents because they are just interested in wealth. That is why you find even very old people still dragging hoes just to make a little money for their future. If you have no money nobody will come to your aid. These days if even your child killed an animal you do not expect him to send you a piece if you have not money to pay for it. In the olden days someone who killed an animal first thought of the headman or his parents for fear of being punished.

Whether or not Kyakala is romanticizing the past is not the point here; what is is the underlying assumption in all the passages quoted that there exist two quite different ways of organizing the flow of goods and services: one based on market principles, money and exchange-value, and one based on a web of reciprocal obligations between kin, out of which the very names of kin categories are woven. At the heart of what the names mwisho (mother's brother) and mwipwa (sister's child) meant was this inescapable reciprocal obligation. Another important characteristic of this kinship-based flow of goods and services was that it often involved access to specific goods and services, such as a piece of meat from an animal killed or being able to send a young child on errands. In other words, what was involved was access to particular use-values, not easily substitutable for each other. Sansoni and Banyinyita may have wanted to stress to me how little monetized rural life is compared to the way things are in town, and Kyakala the extent of monetization in modern-day rural Zambia, but all three were agreed that there were two different, and often incompatible, mechanisms of distribution and access to resources operating. One of these mechanisms relied on money and the exchange-value of goods, while the other depended directly on the relationships between people created by kinship. Let me emphasize that what I am drawing attention to here are the kinds of relationships seen as underlying the processes by which individuals obtained access to resources and the social product was distributed. In both Kibala and Bukama the actual transactions of day-to-day life were a complex tangle of both kinds of relationship. In mapping out the broad economic contours I have attempted to trace out the way in which the different strata laid down by market and nonmarket relations in practice continually interacted with one another to create a complex mosaic. Running through this mosaic were complicated, and strongly gendered, patterns of inequality and hierarchy.

Let me also stress that what I have tried to do in this chapter is to map out the basic economic landscape within which the people of Kibala and Bukama found themselves in the 1980s. The paths that particular individuals carved out for themselves within that landscape cannot of course be read off from its contours in any mechanical way, but nonetheless those contours helped shape individual trajectories. It is those shaping effects on which I have focused rather than the rich diversity of individual paths.

A crucial dimension of economic relations in rural Chizela was the significantly different location of women and men. And this was true both in the case of monetized relations and those organized through kinship. The economic landscape of Kibala and Bukama in 1988 was a deeply gendered one. Just as men and women were assigned different roles within the political domain, so too were they allotted different tasks in economic life, or, to put it more precisely, certain tasks were associated with women, while others were associated with men. There were tasks seen as female tasks, and tasks seen as male, even if in practice women might sometimes carry out male tasks, and men female ones. In addition, the effects of monetization and commoditization were themselves gendered. Where production had become commoditized, for instance, as when crops were grown specifically for sale to the national market, women tended to be systematically disadvantaged. In general, whether it was a question of generating a cash income by selling labor or the produce of that labor, women tended to have fewer, and less profitable, options than men. Of course, just as the communities themselves were not homogenous and undifferentiated, neither did the women of Bukama and Kibala constitute a single category; but nonetheless there were certain general ways in which the location of women was systematically different to that of men, and it is on the basic pattern that I want to concentrate in this chapter. Inevitably this has meant a certain flattening of the differences between women, but a proper examination of these would require yet another chapter.

I want to begin by looking at the particular nature of the economic interdependencies that defined Kaonde marriage—in other words, the basic interdependencies to which both women and men in Kibala and Bukama would normally refer when I asked them about the meaning of marriage. I say Kaonde marriage here because in this predominantly Kaonde region it was the Kaonde notion of marriage, including its ideological stress on a sorghum-based cultivation system, that was dominant. However, although the specifics of the interdependence of wives and husbands may vary, a similar general interdependency could probably be found throughout much of rural Zambia.

Kaonde Marriage

The primary division of labor in rural Chizela was one based on gender. There was very little specialization of labor; with a few exceptions, such as hunting, healing, and divining, adult men and women were expected to know how to perform virtually all the tasks appropriate to their sex and age. At the same time, it was accepted that their levels of skill would vary. Each sex had its own range of allotted tasks. Men were responsible for clearing the bush and making fields, women for the bulk of day-to-day cultivation; men built houses, women cooked and “kept” house. The whole texture of daily life was, so to speak, woven out of a basic interdependence between men and women; if adults were to live a life in accordance with local norms, men needed access to women's labor, and women to men's. And the primary relationship through which this access was obtained on a day-to-day basis was marriage. The most powerful claims as regards meeting daily subsistence needs were those of a wife on her husband and a husband on his wife (or wives). It was a husband's duty to make fields and build a house for his wife (or wives); it was a wife's duty to “feed” her husband. Failure to fulfill these responsibilities—which were considered quite as central to marriage as sexual services—was grounds for divorce. It was in fact marriage and its reciprocal obligations that played the central role in organizing the large part of production that was noncommoditized. It was above all as husbands and wives that adults met most of their basic consumption needs that they were unable to produce themselves.

In their daily lives husbands and wives, as it were, continually confronted each other with claims to various goods and services; the legitimacy of each spouse's claims depending on the honoring of their own reciprocal obligations. A woman who did not feed her husband could not expect him to provide her with clothes; a man who did not clear fields for his wife could not complain of her empty granary. It should be stressed that what was involved here were not the carefully defined and bounded terms of a legal contract, but rather a series of general and somewhat vague moral precepts. In any given context the precise meaning of these precepts could be endlessly argued about; they created, as it were, a moral reservoir to be drawn upon to defend or oppose particular behavior or actions. The household was necessarily, therefore, a site of struggle. Sometimes the struggle might be open and explicit, sometimes implicit and unacknowledged, but whatever the nature of the struggle it was always informed by this reservoir of moral assumptions. Households were not, of course, only sites of struggle; the mutual benefits of interdependence so stressed in the Kaonde ideology of gender relations were also a structural reality. To see how this complicated interdependence played itself out in the day-to-day lives of actual households, it would be necessary to look at the specific histories of particular households. My concern here, however, is simply to identify some of the key forces shaping those ultimately unique histories.

One important reality was that the interdependence between women and men, and their need for each other's labor, was far from symmetrical. In general, men's tasks tended to be one-off ones, such as making a field or building a house, which could then be used for a number of years. Women's tasks by contrast tended to be those of day-to-day reproduction, tending the crops in the field, food processing and preparation, collecting water, and such like. Men, therefore, needed access to women's labor on a daily basis. An adult man who had to collect his own water, cook his own food and so on would be seen either as rather pitiful and ridiculous, or, if he appeared to have made a conscious choice to live like this, as eccentric. Although unmarried men could appeal to their female matrikin for help with certain female tasks, such as pounding grain for nshima, from time to time, it was only a wife who would perform the routine “domestic” tasks on a regular basis. As a result a man had to be married if he was to be accepted as a responsible adult (mukulumpe) who would be taken seriously as a player in the formal arenas of political life.

But while a man needed access to female labor on a daily basis, a woman could manage with only periodic access to male labor. The stereotypical formulation for the reciprocal obligations involved in marriage was that a wife “fed” her husband while a husband “clothed” his wife. By implication the term clothe here included not only actual clothing, but also the provision of a range of tools and implements, such as hoes and the harvesting and winnowing baskets, which a woman needed to fulfill her responsibility of “feeding” her husband. In addition, a husband was expected to provide his wife with fields, a house, a cooking shelter, and granaries. As regards her day-to-day subsistence, however, it was perfectly possible for a woman to live without a husband and to live a life that did not contravene local norms. It was unlikely, for reasons I will come to, that a woman on her own would be prosperous, but her daily routine of working in the fields, pounding grain, preparing food, fetching water and firewood, and so on would follow the same basic pattern whether or not she had a husband.

When I asked local men about polygyny and its advantages and disadvantages, the stereotypical answer I was given began: “A man with more than one wife eats better than a man with one.” Whereas in industrial societies marriage tends to be seen as centering on the mutual fulfillment of sexual and emotional needs, in Chizela the sexual and emotional dimension of marriage was seen as only one strand, albeit an important one, of a relationship that was seen as being equally, and even predominantly, about the meeting of basic material needs. This difference was brought home to me one morning when I was walking to Chizela District Centre with Mukwetu and another local man, Wilson. The conversation turned to Ubaya, the only man in Bukama apart from Chief Chizela to have three wives. In tones of wonder mixed with disbelief Wilson told us how he had been walking past Ubaya's place at about 6 a.m. and had seen him sitting in front of his house eating nshima. Enviously Wilson and Mukwetu told me how Ubaya regularly ate nshima and relish three times a day: in the morning, the middle of the day, and the evening. Even the more prosperous in Kibala and Bukama usually only ate nshima twice a day, at lunchtime and in the evening, and many only had one nshima meal a day. To eat three such meals a day represented an almost sinful indulgence. Wilson went on to explain to me how each of Ubaya's wives would cook once a day, one in the morning, one at midday, and one in the evening. Mukwetu and Wilson then agreed that this was the benefit of having a number of wives—there was always nshima ready to eat—and explained to me that this was why Ubaya had married three women. For men, not only was marriage the expected way of satisfying a whole range of basic consumption needs, it was often the only way of satisfying these needs. Even if the increasing monetization of economic relations in the rural areas meant it was possible to buy various kinds of labor, male access to female labor still depended very much on marriage.

But if men tended to fantasize about having more than one wife, women were decidedly less enthusiastic about the prospect of sharing a husband. For a woman, being a co-wife meant having to compete not only for sexual attention, but for her husband's labor, and the money and goods with which he “clothed” his wives. Very important, a co-wife did not have the same power to put pressure on her husband by withholding her labor since he would just go to one of his other wives. There was very little economic cooperation between co-wives; normally each would have her own fields, her own house, and her own cooking shelter. Women were extremely critical of a man who failed to provide all of these for each wife, describing it as not showing proper respect (mushingi) to the wives, as shaming them. From what I observed in Chizela, most women tried to prevent their husbands from taking other wives, and there were often bitter fights over a husband's attempts to do so. Those women who did become co-wives seemed prepared to accept this either because, like Ubaya and Chief Chizela, the man in question was particularly prosperous or of high status; or because they had decided that even a share of a husband was better than no husband. Ubaya and his three wives were seen as something of a prodigy in Bukama because they all seemed to live together in such harmony, and apparently had done so for many years. Mukwetu assured me, and this seemed to be a general belief, that Ubaya must have very powerful medicine (muchi) to be able to maintain such harmony. (In the next chapter beliefs about muchi are discussed in detail.) There was another polygynist, Abraham, who, it was agreed, did not have the necessary medicine, and his problems illustrate the kind of struggles that polygynous marriage often involved, and the different power resources of husbands and wives.

The Unhappy Polygynist

Abraham, an elderly man and the chairman of the Bukama settlement scheme, had two wives; one he had married in 1960 and one in 1975. Both wives had had numerous children by him. My time in Bukama coincided with the beginning of the cultivation year when work on the fields should have been starting in earnest. But despite this for most of my stay Abraham and his two wives were absent. Like some others in Bukama, Abraham was also the headman of a village that had its primary location elsewhere, and he divided his time between there and Bukama. Normally however, people told me, he would spend the majority of his time on the settlement scheme. Since I was anxious to interview Abraham as the scheme chairman, I continually asked when he was likely to arrive in Bukama, and continually I was given the answer “soon” or “any time now,” but still he failed to appear. He would occasionally turn up briefly when there was a specially important meeting, but only to return to his village, some twenty kilometers away, immediately after the meeting was over. After some weeks of this I was finally told why Abraham was finding it so hard to return to Bukama: his wives were being “difficult.”

Abraham and his wives were very fond of beer, and whether in Bukama or in his village all three of them tended to spend a good deal of time at beer drinks. Although both wives lived together with Abraham in Bukama, only the senior wife, Finesi, was currently living with him in his village; the junior wife, Niva, preferred to stay in the nearby village of one of her matrikin. Particularly in the case of polygynous unions it was quite common for wives to live with their matrikin, receiving periodic visits from their husbands, rather than moving to their husband's home. It seemed that neither of Abraham's wives (who were on very bad terms with each other) were particularly keen on living in Bukama. Then one night when Abraham made one of his regular visits to Niva he found her with a man in delicto flagrante, and after this he decided he had better stay with her to make sure she did not stray again. This continued for some time until Abraham began hearing reports that Finesi was now taking advantage of his absence to “play” (kukaya) with other men, as the local term had it. Abraham was therefore faced with two recalcitrant women, in two separate places, neither of whom could be persuaded to accompany him to Bukama to begin cultivating, and neither of whom, it seemed, could he compel to do so.

In general Kaonde women in the 1980s seemed to have a considerable degree of freedom as regards whom they married, and whether or not they stayed married. Divorce, whether initiated by wife or husband, seemed to be frequent and relatively straightforward; in the last chapter I cited the case of my neighbor in Bukama who had had eight husbands, and children by six of them. Within marriage, however, all the women of Kibala and Bukama seemed to accept that there must be at least an outward show of deference by women toward their husbands. For a woman not to show respect (mushingi) would bring shame (bumvu) on both her husband and herself. But while it may have been accepted by women as well as men that a husband was senior (mukulumpe) and a wife junior (mwanyike), getting a wife to submit in practice was not always easy, as the case of Abraham illustrates. And, as I have already argued, within the accepted hierarchy women would struggle for what they saw as their just claims. For instance, as I noted in chapter 3, while I never heard a woman claim that a man did not have the right to beat his wife, women would say that he should not beat her in public, or so as to draw blood, or when she had a baby on her back and so on. In any given instance, therefore, a woman and her relatives could usually find some reason why a particular beating was unjustified. Another factor that probably helped to keep marital violence within some kind of bounds was the public scrutiny to which almost anything done by anybody was subject. In the small communities of rural Chizela it was hard to keep anything private and, as with parents' chastisement of children, there was a clear understanding of what constituted reasonable punishment of an erring wife, even if the limits tended to be clearer in the case of others than when it was oneself.

The use of physical force, and the threat of its use, was an important reality in the relationship between husbands and wives, but as with any well-established relation of domination, for much of the time it remained in the background, an unspoken presence emerging only when the more subtle fetters of male hegemony proved inadequate. At the same time, if a woman wanted to leave her husband, there was relatively little he could do about it, particularly given the absence of large bridewealth payments and that men as well as women accepted that when a marriage ended the children stayed with their mother. Precisely because divorce did not involve a women's matrikin having to refund a husband anything, a woman could always rely on finding sympathetic matrikin with whom she could settle.

The fact that a woman could leave a husband and take her children with her defined certain limits to a husband's power. A man's designated heirs might be his sisters' children, but there tended also to be strong bonds between fathers and children. During the colonial and postcolonial period there has been a growing emphasis on the role of the father as the assumed head of household and on the basic nuclear family of mother, father, and children, at the expense of matrilineal family structures and the authority of mwisho (mother's brother). It is difficult to know how different things were in precolonial times but the tendency of state institutions and laws—whether of the colonial or postcolonial government—to take as their basic units male householders and the nuclear family has undoubtedly been an important force encouraging a greater recognition of the links between fathers and children.^[2] In addition, the new possibilities for individuals to create and hold onto personal wealth of one kind or another, whether this wealth comes from wage-labor, market production or business enterprises, has led to some individuals, particularly the more successful ones, trying to prevent their wealth flowing out to their matrikin and keeping it within the more clearly bounded unit of spouses and children.^[3]

Whatever the reasons—and whether or not things were different in the past, or merely seem so because the matrilineal ideology obscures the real relations that existed between fathers and children in the past—in the 1980s there was a recognition of the bond between fathers and children that represented something of a contradiction within the overarching matrilineal hegemony. Many fathers perceived themselves as making considerable investments in their children, particularly in terms of the costs associated with modern education in government schools, and in return looked to their children to provide them with support in their old age. Although children in Chizela, once they had reached an age where they were capable of making decisions for themselves, had considerable freedom of choice in deciding where to live, in people's minds the fundamental tie was still that to mother and matrikin. If divorced fathers wanted to attract their children to them, then they had to be able to offer them “a better life” as it were, which usually meant certain material inducements. In other words, what actually happened after a divorce tended to be that children would go with their mother unless their father was able to offer them something more attractive. Older men, therefore, tended to be reluctant to divorce women with whom they had had numerous children even if the women were proving “difficult.”

Another reason that made older men more hesitant about divorce was that, unless they were able to offer considerable material inducements, they were likely to find it difficult to find another wife. However much it might be agreed that age was a reason for respect (mushingi), Chizela women did not seem to consider age in itself particularly desirable in a husband. In addition, a number of older women claimed to prefer living alone to taking on all the extra work entailed in having a husband, even though living without a husband probably meant living in greater poverty. For older men, however, lack of access to female labor not only meant that they had to carry out for themselves demeaning female tasks, it also robbed them of a key part of what defined a male elder (mukulumpe). In the case of an older woman, the respect (mushingi) she was given and the amount of authority she had seemed to depend almost entirely on her own personal qualities. Whether or not she was married seemed to be irrelevant except to the extent that not being subordinate to a husband may have made things easier for certain powerful women.

What was necessary for a Kaonde woman to be accepted as adult was for her to have her own fields, and in particular her own sorghum field. The expectation was that it was a woman's husband who provided her with these fields. Although a woman's responsibility to “feed” her husband implied more than simply the provision of food, ideologically at least it centered on the provision of the Kaonde's preferred staple, sorghum; what a wife “fed” her husband was sorghum. The cultivation of sorghum was, as it were, the symbolic heart of the interdependence between women and men; and this cultivation was described by both women and men as primarily the responsibility of women. This is not to say that men's role in sorghum cultivation was denied, but ultimately sorghum was seen as a woman's crop; it fell within the moral domain of women. This female moral domain was also seen as concerned with cultivation for subsistence, that is, the production of food as a basket of use-values for direct consumption rather than for sale. The cultivation of sorghum was, it seems, regarded as something that ought not to be part of the world of the market and cash transactions, even if in practice sorghum was sometimes sold, paid labor occasionally employed, and new fields prepared for money. The following quotations from two Kibala men provide a male gloss on the interdependence between men and women in cultivation.

The wife grows food to feed our bodies. I grow food to sell for money to clothe our bodies. So we just combine; she grows food for my consumption, and I get the money to clothe us.

Crehan:

In the case of a sorghum field which husband and wife have cultivated together, does it belong to the wife, or the husband, or to both of you?

Kijila:

Traditionally a sorghum field belongs to the woman. We [men] just help them to make sure they finish in time for the cultivation of other crops, like maize. When we come to LIMA [crops] and soya beans, these automatically belong to me.

I will come back to the relationship between the cultivation of sorghum and that of the crops grown for sale, but first I want to focus on sorghum.

Everyone I talked to in Chizela agreed that sorghum was the quintessential Kaonde crop, and its shifting cultivation the basis of the “traditional” Kaonde way of life. This sorghum-based cultivation system also included a variety of subsidiary crops, such as maize, millet, and a range of vegetable crops, but sorghum was its ideological heart, and here, following local usage, I have taken sorghum as standing for the system as a whole. The primary role of men in sorghum cultivation, as described by both women and men, was the initial bush clearing and preparation of fields (kutema). And the primary context within which a man cleared a field for sorghum was as a husband preparing a field for his wife. One of the criteria people used, at least in conversation, to define when a young man was old enough to marry was whether or not he had the necessary physical strength to undertake the arduous labor involved in kutema—felling mature trees with a hand axe and stacking them carefully in rows so that they would burn well and provide the bed of fertile ash in which the sorghum would be planted.

A woman without a husband could appeal to one of her male matrikin or a son-in-law to clear a field for her. This was recognized by both men and women as a legitimate moral claim, and was indeed how most of the women I asked who did not have husbands had acquired their sorghum fields. In practice, however, getting a man other than a husband actually to clear a field, rather than merely promising to do so, could require considerable persistence on the part of the woman, and sometimes even payment. The way monetization was creeping in here was characteristic. Because it could be so difficult to get this kind of kinship obligation fulfilled, women with the necessary cash (often someone who had recently moved from town where they had managed to acquire some small stock of funds) would sometimes prefer to pay. However, this cash payment might well be combined with the pressures of kinship. What was seen locally as a “fair” price for such a task tended to be extremely low, so that a man might only be prepared to take it on, even for money, because the woman was his kinswoman. Also, the payment might well be less than he would have expected had she not been kin, and he was likely to be more ready to accept that he might have to wait a long time for his money. While it had become accepted, as by Kyakala (see above, p. 146), that nowadays you often had to pay people, even kin, to do things, it was also accepted that “payment” might well take the form of a long-term, and hard to collect, debt. To a certain extent it was as if the new monetary transactions had been partially absorbed into the older and more diffuse obligations of kinship. Another way of seeing this complicated reality would be as the principles of the market and the law of supply and demand struggling to assert themselves within what was still in many respects the overall hegemony of a moral universe of kinship.

Once prepared, the responsibility for cultivating a field shifted to the woman for whom it had been cleared. As one old woman put it, with an expressive wave of her hand, when I asked her about the role of the man once a field has been burned, “He is gone [waya]” (Inamwana, Kibala, 26.vii.88, NK). This was one of the areas, however, where women's perceptions were sometimes different from those of men. Some husbands in Kibala and Bukama did work hard in their wives' fields, but as the quote from Kijila suggests, even by men this labor input tended to be seen as “help” that enabled a woman to carry out her responsibility of feeding husband, children, and herself in the coming year. In general, apart from whatever “help” her husband might decide to provide, a woman could expect her dependent children to give her some assistance with the routine tasks of cultivation such as weeding, planting, and bird scaring. Access to the labor of children was an important resource for women, and since children living with their mothers depended on them for their food, mothers had some degree of coercive power. There was a strong moral expectation (at least on the part of adults) that children should work in the fields of those who fed them, even if in practice there was often a good deal of struggling over this obligation. Struggles were particularly common between women and their adolescent sons, who were chafing to break out of the female domain of their mothers and enter the higher-status world of men. There could also be a tension between whether children should be working in the fields or going to school.

Women might also get some help on their fields from their kinswomen. Adult daughters and their mothers, for instance, quite often helped one another, especially if they lived close by; or a granddaughter might be sent to help a grandmother. But although husbands, dependent children, and other kin might give varying amounts of help with cultivation, women were quite capable of carrying out these tasks alone, and often did. As I walked around Kibala and Bukama I would pass field after field in which a woman, often with a baby on her back, was working alone. A key point here is that it was almost always through claims based on marriage or kinship that women were able to mobilize labor on their sorghum fields; it was very rare for a women to pay for labor on these fields.

Nonetheless, however hegemonic the notion that kin ought to help each other, this alone was not always sufficient to mobilize labor. Building up the kind of strong links that transformed the abstract principles of kinship into active flows of goods and services required work. Kin ties needed to be nurtured, as a number of bishimi (folktales) reminded people; those who are hard and unfeeling toward their kin are likely to find themselves deserted in their hour of need. This, after all, was a system based on reciprocity—not immediate or precisely specified reciprocity, but reciprocity nonetheless. Such a system depends on people having the confidence that ultimately those who are currently beneficiaries will eventually, in some form or another, be benefactors. At the same time it is also important that people do not attempt to quantify or itemize the details of this reciprocity too precisely.

Once the sorghum was harvested it was stored unthreshed in small granaries close to the fields. Each woman had her own granary (or granaries) in which to store her food crops. She would then collect grain from her store as and when she needed it. It was generally accepted by men as well as women that a woman's sorghum was hers to distribute, and there was a strong prohibition against anyone other than a woman herself taking grain from her granary. This did not mean, however, that it was her private property to do with as she pleased. Not only did she have to feed her husband and children, she also had powerful obligations to help any of her matrikin who were short of food; as long as there was grain in her granary she could not deny needy kin. This moral imperative made the subject of just how much grain someone had a touchy subject, since the only acceptable reason for refusing help was an empty granary. The excuse of an empty granary was understood by everybody as a polite form of denial that was not necessarily strictly true. It was her husband, however, who had the most powerful de facto claims on a wife. He might well put pressure on her to sell grain, or to use it to brew beer for sale, and this pressure—which could involve physical force, or at least the threat of force—was difficult for a woman to withstand.

The claims of a husband on his wife's surplus were a particularly gray area in an area of moral obligation that was generally gray and undefined. It was clear that a wife should feed her husband, and that in general she was subject to his authority, but whether that meant that a husband could demand that a wife's grain be sold, either directly or in the form of beer, tended to be decided by the particular dynamics of the specific relationship of actual wives and husbands. What needs to be emphasized is the basic recognition that men obtained access to their basic staple food through women. Women's de facto control here was strengthened by the fact that it was they who carried out the processing of the sorghum and other foodstuffs; it was they who threshed and pounded the grain to turn it into flour; it was they who cooked the nshima and brewed the beer. There was also the art of prevarication, which was such an important thread in the fabric of village life generally and which was a basic weapon in a wife's arsenal; without openly defying their husbands, women knew all manner of ways of putting them off. Marriage often involved protracted battles of will in which male “authority,” while never denied, could prove extremely difficult to enforce at a more concrete level.

The perceived location of sorghum cultivation within the domain of women, and a husband's inescapable dependence on his wife to “feed” him, was symbolically encapsulated in the harvesting of the sorghum. There were many tasks, such as fetching water, pounding, and cooking, that were seen as demeaning for adult men, but which men might do if there were no woman to do it for them. The final cutting of the ripe sorghum heads prior to their transportation to the granary, however, was something that was not only supposed to be done by women but, according to Kaonde ideology, could only be done by women. Men without wives—whether these were young men who had not yet married, or older men who were widowed or divorced—simply did not grow sorghum; and the answer I was always given if I asked why some man had no sorghum field was “He has no wife to harvest it.” And this was an ideological norm that seemed to be adhered to in practice. Apart from once during my Kasempa fieldwork,^[4] I never came across any man without a wife who grew sorghum. This one exception harvested his sorghum together with his only son, a teenage boy who lived with him, performing the domestic tasks that would normally be done by a man's wife. This man had lived without a wife for many years and was something of a recluse who was generally regarded as antisocial and an eccentric. When I pointed out to local people this exception to the rule they just shrugged and indicated that the man's general eccentricity was explanation enough.

Not only was sorghum cultivation located within the moral domain of women, it was also seen as not belonging to the modern world of agricultural officers, development planners, and production for the market. Neither the way women acquired sorghum fields nor how they obtained “help” on those fields nor the basic distribution of the harvested grain were seen as the kind of relationships that it was appropriate to organize through market mechanisms; these were relationships that were seen as primarily and properly organized through marriage. It was not so much that people saw the incorporation of sorghum into the world of market relations as transgressing some moral norm, but rather that it was so inextricably embedded in the nonmarket relations of marriage and kinship that people, as it were, simply could not imagine it outside those relations. Suggesting such a thing would have been analogous to suggesting to someone in the U.S. that relations between parents and children really ought to be organized on rationalist capitalist principles. In Kaonde eyes, the cultivation of sorghum was not about the production of commodities and exchange-value, it was about the production of food directly as use-values. It is true that exchange-value could be said to be struggling to emerge as economic relations in rural areas become more monetized and commoditized; but even though a certain amount of sorghum was sold, in theory at least, this was supposed only to be the surplus left over once the producing household's basic consumption needs were met. Sorghum was not grown in order to be sold. In local eyes sorghum was not a cash crop. As one elderly man told me, “We used to grow sorghum for our own consumption, but now we grow maize for money…” (Kibala, 14.viii.88, TK)

The development of “growing of maize for money” in Chizela District in the 1970s and 1980s was part of a more widespread expansion of maize production by small-scale producers in a number of the more remote provinces, where there had previously been little production of crops for sale to the national market. This expansion of production was dependent, however, on government support of various kinds, including the supply of inputs such as subsidized fertilizer and the collection of the harvested maize from local producers. Predictably, these support services have not been able to survive the new hard-nosed economic “realism” that has become so hegemonic a part of the economic “common sense” of the 1990s. The withdrawal of these services has led to this small boom in maize production collapsing as quickly as it developed.^[5] In the late 1980s, however, the “growing of maize for money” was seen by both those living in the rural areas, and those in the Boma charged with their “development” as absolutely central to that “development.” While a number of people in Kibala and Bukama may have had reservations about the practical value of this “development” in bringing about any real improvement in their lives, they had no doubts about its place in Boma thinking. A lack of “development” was how the Boma named their condition, just as the Boma named as central to its task the carrying of the gospel of “development” to backward “villagers.” Given this hegemonic naming, those named as “villagers” had no alternative when dealing with the Boma but to use its language of “development.” Indeed, this hegemony meant that local people had no other terms in which to talk about these kind of linkages with the wider economy. The “growing of maize for money” was a thing of the Boma, and even when struggling over the respective responsibilities of local “farmers” and government, those local “farmers” would frame their claims in the language of “development,” just as during the colonial period people had used the discourse of the “tribe.”

The production of maize for the national market, seen in the 1980s as such a key element in the “development” of rural Chizela, provides a good example of the kind of substantive realities into which commoditization and monetization can translate at the level of people's day-to-day lives. It also shows how strongly gendered these processes are. The next section explores this example, looking at the place of “growing of maize for money” within the local economy, and at how this economic opportunity was named. At the end of the section I also look briefly at three other foodstuffs, beer, fish and game meat. In the course of the colonial and postcolonial years all of these have—with little help from any “development” program—become ever more important as commodities. That is, they have come increasingly to be produced specifically for sale.

Kujima and “Farming”

The idea of producing crops for sale was not new in the Chizela of the 1980s, but cultivation for the market tended to be seen as something quite distinct and different from the ordinary cultivation of sorghum. This difference was marked in the term local people used to refer to it: mwafwamu (the English word farm with the addition of the appropriate prefixes and suffixes incorporated into Kaonde). The normal Kaonde term for cultivation or agriculture is kujima, the root meaning of which is “to hoe.” Mwafwamu was seen as quite different from kujima. The way the two terms tended to be counterpoised by local people is illustrated in this exchange I had with one elderly LIMA chairman:

Crehan:

You said that there are no women members in your [LIMA] group. What are the reasons for this?

Tyemba:

They do not like to do farming [nkito ya mwafwamu]…

Crehan:

Is it that the women here just want to cultivate sorghum?

Tyemba:

That's it, they don't want to cultivate farms only sorghum.

In this book I use kujima to refer to the sorghum-based cultivation system I have described, and “farming,” in quotation marks, to refer to the newer, market-oriented pattern of cultivation that used purchased inputs and cultivation methods laid down by agricultural extension agents, and that usually required access to credit from state agencies—in other words, what was referred to locally as mwafwamu. The basic differences between kujima and “farming” are summarized in table 2. This table shows clearly the high level of dependence of “farming” on services provided by the state, both as regards the production process itself and to ensure access to a market. While the sale of small surpluses had long been an inherent part of the local economy,^[6] the local demand—at least on the part of those with the necessary cash—was insufficient for the newer larger surpluses of “farming.” Sale beyond the local community required transport, and in this remote, sparsely populated region with few roads transporting sizable amounts of bulky grain needed some kind of state-subsidized transport.

The main crop associated with “farming” was maize. Maize has long been an important subsidiary crop in kujima. Since it ripens earlier than sorghum, it helped to shorten the hunger period, experienced by almost all households, when the previous season's sorghum had been finished and the new sorghum was not yet ripe. After the introduction of the LIMA program in the late 1980s, however, the production of maize as a cash crop for sale to the national market increased rapidly. Chizela District was part of the area covered by a German-funded Integrated Rural Development Project (IRDP) that operated from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. A central element of this IRDP was the LIMA program. This consisted of a package of measures involving input supply, technical advice and marketing, which were designed to increase the production of small-scale producers, enabling them to sell to the national market. Although the scheme originally envisaged a range of crops in addition to maize, in Kibala and Bukama as in most of the project area, in practice, apart from some soya beans, LIMA meant maize.

Inherent in the IRDP there was always an interesting tension: Just who controlled the allocation of resources? Was it the expatriate experts or was it the Zambian government? And if it was the latter, which government institutions?^[7] As an integrated development program in theory, the IRDP was supposed to work through local government institutions; in reality the German and other foreign experts working for the project always tended to exercise an ultimate control. It was they who had determined that the IRDP's primary “target group” should be the small-scale producer rather than “emergent farmers,” a priority not necessarily shared by local government officials. As the district agricultural officer in Chizela stressed to me, for instance, “in the case of the IRDP, what I would very much say to them is that instead of just concentrating on the small-scale farmer they should also even help those progressive farmers, or emergent farmers” (Chizela, 27.xii.88, TE). Even when a Zambian was appointed as controller of the IRDP in the mid-eighties the German project advisor continued to exercise a considerable degree of control over the project's budget. The Zambian officials themselves tended to have few illusions about the nature of the power relationship. As the Chizela district governor put it,

The IRDP confined themselves to the small-scale…so these complaints [that other IRDPs have done more], have been there, that the IRDP has not done enough, but as beggars you have no choice, you have to thank, you have to thank for even the little some countries can do for us.

Similarly, at one District Council meeting when one of the ward chairmen was insisting that “the Germans” had come to work for the Zambian government, the same district governor tried to inject a little political realism, muttering with some irritation how this kind of misunderstanding was an example of “village mentality.” A key point to emphasize here is that wherever ultimate control over the IRDP may have been located, the program was never a neutral presence. As a potential source of what were by local standards a huge quantity of scarce and immensely valuable resources, the IRDP could not but represent a powerful intervention into local political arenas.

In the interests of efficiency the delivery of services to those participating in the LIMA program was organized on a group rather than an individual basis, and to this end local producers were formed into what were called LIMA groups. In Kibala there were five groups, the largest having eighteen members and the smallest six. In tsetse-free areas the IRDP had instituted a scheme that provided groups with oxen and ox carts to help with local transport. Chizela, however, had tsetse.

The most prominent “farmer” in Kibala, Temwa, embraced the LIMA program enthusiastically, and his account of the opportunities and problems of LIMA provides a view of how it looked to a male “farmer” anxious to expand his market production.

We were in luck when the Germans came.…I started farming and I saw that things were just moving in the right direction.…Even women were saying “Let's cultivate and make some money.”…I said, “Indeed, cultivation is good.” The Germans continued helping us with loans. The good thing about the Germans is that they came to help the poor. If a person lacks money, it is a good thing to give them a loan so that in the future they can stand on their own. When I started making money, I stopped getting loans. I used my own money to buy fertilizer. I would buy some food and call people to come and help me [i.e., give people food in return for agricultural work].

Transport, however, was always a major problem for Temwa, especially once he began producing eighty to ninety 90-kilogram sacks of maize. The marketing lorries of the North-Western Co-operative Union (NWCU, the provincial body responsible for buying crops for the national market) would come to Kibala to collect the LIMA crops, but they would only pick up from one of the designated collection points. Temwa talked to me at some length about his transport problem—my status as an influential outsider with access to the ears of those in power should be remembered here; this was in part an appeal. But nonetheless, his account reveals very clearly both the dependency of small-scale producers—and not only the small-scale—on a range of services, such as marketing, which they cannot possibly provide themselves; and also the kind of struggles in which they have to engage, and expect to engage in, to secure such services. It also illustrates the way claims on the government tended to be couched in a developmentalist and patriotic rhetoric.

It was a problem for me to transport my bags.…I cleared the road [the kilometer or so from Kibala school (where any visiting vehicles usually arrived) to Temwa's home] and said that if people want to help me they will come and collect the bags from here. They^[8] refused, telling me I must take my bags to the same place as the rest of the group. Now the bags were just too many, I said to myself, “What can I do?” I went there to implore them [nakapopwejile]^[9] and they came and collected those bags. I did not stop farming, I produced [the next year] 90 bags of maize. They again told me to take the bags of maize to the group [collection point]. Then I fought hard until they moved the collection point near to me.…Then the IRDP changed its policy and refused to collect from individuals [beginning in 1986 the IRDP cut down on the number of collection points]. I failed to transport my maize. I went there again to plead with them, saying that I had a lot of bags of maize and I could not manage to take them to the [new] collection point. There is a good road [i.e., the one cleared by Temwa] on which the maize can be transported. Help me so that I will also be encouraged to grow more food if the lorry will come and collect it from near here. I can produce 100 to 200 bags of maize. They refused to collect the maize but they were telling us to grow more food. President Kaunda is always calling on people to grow more food.…The only way that Zambia can go forward is by grasping the hoe and tilling the land.…The problem of collecting the maize continues.…There is no transport. If they had given us even oxen, but there are no oxen. Even they could have given us wheelbarrows, there are no wheelbarrows. People cannot carry 100 bags on their head and make a profit. Someone has to find people to transport the maize and pay them.…In 1988 I have not grown enough because of transport. I only produced 15 bags…maybe the Government will find another way of helping us…they should help us so we are encouraged to grow more food.

If sorghum and kujima were associated with women, “farming” and LIMA were seen by both women and men as primarily a male affair; and the large majority of those who engaged in production for the market on any significant scale were men. Out of the total of sixty-three LIMA group members in Kibala in 1988, thirteen were women.^[10] The statements by the two male LIMA “farmers,” Kijila and Mulonda, that I quoted above—“The wife grows food to feed our bodies. I grow food to sell for money to clothe our bodies”; and “When we come to LIMA [crops] and soya beans, these automatically belong to me” (see p. 156)—reflect the assumption that “farming” properly belongs to men. The point here is not that it was seen as wrong for women to engage in “farming,” but that their first responsibility was for the crops that would feed the household. If a woman could manage to do this and do some “farming,” that was fine. Mulonda indeed stressed that some cash crops could be grown by women: “Even a woman has the right to grow soya beans” (Kibala, 14.viii.88, TK). Soya beans were considered particularly suitable since they were planted late so that their cultivation did not interfere with that of the main food crops. The other side of women's responsibility for kujima is, of course, that married men who decided to engage in mwafwamu could rely on their wives to provide the household's basic food needs, take responsibility for childcare and generally do the day-to-day work of servicing the household, which left husbands free to concentrate on cultivation for the market. The problem for women, therefore, was not that they were forbidden to engage in cultivation for the market, but that in practice it was often difficult for them to do so.

And women's kujima obligations were not the only barrier to their participation in the LIMA scheme. Another problem for women was the need to engage with the highly bureaucratic world of government and IRDP officialdom. This was a literate world, policed by endless forms (usually in English) that operated according to rules and conventions that local women, most of whom were illiterate even in Kaonde, let alone English, found alien and intimidating. It is true that this was also an intimidating world for many men in Chizela, but women faced the extra problem that, as we saw in the last chapter, it was also a space that was named by the prevailing hegemony as essentially male. The “proper” way for women to participate in this formal arena was via men, husbands, brothers, headmen and so on.

An instance of the difference, in practice if not according to the rules, between the way the LIMA scheme operated for men and for women was in the way the loan system was organized. During my stay in Kibala I watched the local agricultural assistant register “farmers” for loans for the coming cultivation season. It was he who filled in the forms and told registering loanees where to sign or put their thumbprint. To obtain a loan it was necessary to have the signature of two local guarantors. For the men registering this seemed to be no more than a formality. The man registering would simply call on a couple of the crowd of men standing round, all of whom were known to one another, and with the odd grumble they would add their signature or thumbprint. One elderly LIMA chairman, Mulonda, who had been called to sign several times did once demur, arguing that one particular man was perhaps taking on more than he could handle with two lima and it would be better if he were just to register for one. Mulonda was, however, brusquely told by the agricultural assistant that he had already written down “two lima,” and in the face of the authority of the already written, Mulonda dutifully added his signature. In the case of women, however, whatever the official rules may have been, if the woman were married—and most women who registered for LIMA were married—then it was assumed by the agricultural assistant and everyone else in Kibala that one of the guarantors had to be her husband.

The development of “farming” (mwafwamu) can be seen as a particular example of a commoditization of cultivation geared around the production of crops specifically for sale to the national market. Local people themselves recognized this as something significantly different from the long-established practice of selling surplus crops produced as an integral part of the ordinary cultivation for consumption, as is shown by the clear distinction they made between mwafwamu and kujima. Maize, however, was not the only foodstuff that had become important as a commodity. Three others that had come to be seen as ways of generating a cash income were beer, fish, and game meat. From relatively early in the colonial period people had begun producing these for sale, and in the 1980s all of them were important both in terms of bringing cash into the local economy and in the local circulation of that cash. In all these cases this commoditization owed little to any “development” program. Even more than in the case of maize, however, these commodities were highly gendered: beer was produced and sold by women, while both fish and game meat were produced and sold by men.

The brewing and selling of beer was one of the main ways women managed to earn a certain amount of cash. Like the cultivation of sorghum, brewing was located clearly within the domain of women; providing beer for her husband and those to whom he wished to serve it was seen as one of the duties of a wife. And not only was brewing defined as a normal female task, it also fitted in well with their ordinary domestic responsibilities, and moreover there was always a local market for it, even if not an unlimited one. Women have been brewing grain beer, sometimes to celebrate a special occasion, sometimes for a communal work party (mbile), and sometimes just out of hospitality, ever since precolonial times. During the colonial period, however, women began also brewing beer for sale, apparently taking the idea from the bars of the urban areas. It has also become common for women to buy grain, either maize or sorghum, specifically to brew beer. In the 1980s beer brewing was so thoroughly commoditized that beer that was not brewed for sale or for a work party (later in the chapter I will have more to say about mbile), but simply to be offered to relatives and neighbors, had become the exception. The customers to whom the beer was sold were overwhelmingly male. In part beer brewing can be seen as a means through which women obtained a share of male incomes; even a husband would be expected to pay for the beer he consumed when his wife had brewed it for sale. The amounts of cash that women could earn through the sale of beer, at least in Kibala and Bukama, tended, however, to be considerably less than those that could be earned through mwafwamu.

Just as beer was seen as belonging to the domain of women, so fish and game were defined as the business of men. Like beer, both were important foodstuffs in precolonial times, and small-scale exchanges of meat or fish for grain seem to have been common. Then during the colonial period these exchanges started to become monetized. In the case of fish, the sale of dried fish to the urban areas developed early in the colonial period, more or less as soon as there were urban areas to sell to, and has continued to be an important source of income for many men. The great advantage of dried fish is its high value-to-weight ratio and its relatively good keeping qualities, both of which ease the problems of transport. Large and valuable bundles of fish can be transported quite long distances by bicycle. Temwa, the local entrepreneur who was so active in the LIMA scheme, got his start, as we shall see in the next chapter, as a fish trader.

Game meat too seems to have begun to become a commodity relatively early. Successful hunters—and only someone with a proven record of killing game was acknowledged as a hunter (kibinda)—always seem to have been few in number. This was one of the very few areas in which there was a genuine specialization. One of the great advantages of game meat (which like fish was often dried) as a commodity, which has remained fairly constant over the years, is that it is both a prestigious, highly valued food and it is in relatively short supply. Even though much of the hunting in the 1980s contravened the game laws—something that made its transport beyond the local area a risky business—there were always plenty of buyers for game meat, including Boma officials who would make special trips to the rural areas to buy meat. A hunter did not have to advertise that he had meat; word would quickly spread that this scarce and highly prized commodity was available, and he would usually soon have more eager customers than he had meat for. Apart from avoiding the game guards, the main problem sellers of meat faced was fending off the demands from kin for free meat, or for a specially low price.

The commoditization of beer and game meat had certain interesting similarities. Both beer and game meat can be seen as always having had a significantly social character in that these were foods that their producers expected to distribute among kin and neighbors. Prior to the commoditization of meat and beer, both, although not sold, were produced to be shared. A hunter who had killed an animal would normally have shared the meat, and been expected to share it, with his kin and neighbors, just as a woman did not brew for herself or even her household alone. A common occasion for the brewing of beer in the past was when a hunter had been successful, particularly if he had killed a notable animal such as an elephant or a lion. Significant here is the fact that both beer and game meat do not keep well and have to be consumed relatively quickly. In both cases, it seems this nonmonetized sharing transformed itself rather easily into selling, and into brewing and hunting being undertaken specifically to raise cash; even if, as in Kyakala's lament for the passing of the old ways, people would recall nostalgically a time prior to this commoditization.

A significant commonality in all the cases of commoditization I have considered was the importance of gender. Each commodity, whether maize, beer, fish, or game meat, was associated either with women or men. It was women who sold beer, men meat and fish, while, as we have seen, LIMA crops were seen locally, even if not in the eyes of the German architects of the IRDP, as primarily the business of men. The transformation of various goods into commodities represents a central thread in the story of monetization and commoditization but it was not the only thread. Another important part of this story was the commoditization of labor.

Commoditization and Labor

The buying and selling of labor has long been an established part of rural life in Chizela. Ever since the earliest days of colonialism local people have left the area in search of paid work, and a proportion of the money earned has always, in one way or another, found its way back to the migrants' home areas. The extent and pattern of the flow of migrants has varied over the years,^[11] but the money that has flowed back into the rural areas, however little in absolute terms, has always been a significant element in the local economy. Since Independence there has in addition been the handful of rural-based, salaried government employees: the teachers, health workers, agricultural assistants, and so on. There was also some local employment of casual labor, which had led to the term mapisweki (piecework) entering the Kaonde language. It had become possible for men and women—particularly those who were widowed or divorced, or who had yet to marry—to buy certain of the goods and services that previously would have been provided by a spouse or some other kin.

Just as in the case of the commoditization of goods, however, the effects of the commoditization of labor power have tended to be significantly gendered. Whatever the form in which labor power has been sold, and whether as sellers or buyers of labor power, women and men have found themselves located somewhat differently.

As was discussed in chapter 3, the colonial migrant labor system mainly sucked huge numbers of men out of the rural areas. After Independence more women may have migrated to town, but even by the time of the 1980 census they were still significantly outnumbered by men (GRZ 1981:7; Davies 1971:46). As the country's economic situation deteriorated in the seventies and eighties employment opportunities in general shrank, but for women things were even harder than for men (see, for instance, ILO 1981:31, 35–36). For most rural Zambians, particularly those in the more remote regions, the one road out of rural poverty and into a salaried job was that of education, although by the late eighties even jobs for the educated were becoming increasingly hard to come by. Salaried government officials in rural Chizela were overwhelmingly male, and those few who were women usually had jobs perceived as having to do with women, such as community development officer. In Kibala and Bukama all the twelve salaried government workers (nine teachers, two agricultural assistants, one clinical officer) were men.

Simply to acquire an education was more difficult for girls. Not all children in Kibala and Bukama went to school. A 1987 survey for the Ministry of Health, I was told by one of the teachers at Kibala school, had estimated that 78 percent of Kibala's school-age children were at school. Of those children who did attend school only a minority completed the full seven years of primary school, and of those the vast majority were boys. In 1988, for instance, Kibala primary school had forty-five children in Grade 1, of whom slightly more were girls than boys, but there were only twenty-eight children in Grade 7 and only six of these were girls. The small percentage of students from North-Western Province who passed the final exam well enough to be selected for secondary school were also mainly boys. An extra hurdle for those few girls (usually like their male counterparts in their late teens if not older) who did make it as far as secondary school was avoiding becoming pregnant, which for them, but not for the schoolboys often responsible, meant an end to their school career. The net result of all this was that there were far fewer educated rural women than men—something that had a considerable effect not only on their chances of finding any kind of salaried employment, but also on their ability to participate in the arenas of “modern” political life.

Women and men were also differently situated as regards local casual employment (mapisweki). Most male tasks tended to be one-off, periodic ones, and there were always men, particularly young unmarried ones, who were willing to clear fields, build a house, and generally to carry out such male tasks for money. Women without husbands, who could not persuade their male kin to help them, could—if they had the money—often buy the services they need. But just as in modern Western societies, the bulk of the day-to-day repetitive tasks associated with women (often servicing the needs of husband and children) did not seem to transform so easily into commodities as did the tasks performed by men. Given that local men tended to have readier access to cash than women, there was the somewhat paradoxical situation that while men were more likely to have the money to buy the services of women, they could only do this to a limited extent, whereas women tended not to have the necessary money. But those women who did, if they were prepared to pay what were seen in local eyes as scandalously high prices, had little problem in buying all the male labor they needed.

The fact that men had greater access to cash than women was another instance of the differential economic location of men and women. Men found cash easier to come by not only because it was easier for them to find paid work outside the local community, but also because they did not have the same day-to-day domestic responsibilities as women. In addition men also had a freedom of movement that was denied to women. A young man who had ceased to be part of his mother's household but was not yet married had few responsibilities and was free to use his time as he pleased. Such “youngsters” (banyike) had the added freedom that in their case, unlike that of more senior men (bakulumpe), there was no shame attached to their fetching their own water, cooking their own food, and so on. Also, they could often rely on a certain amount of help from their female kin with tasks such as pounding, particularly if they could supply the odd piece of game meat, or some fish, or help out with a male task such as building a shelter. Not only was it perfectly acceptable for such young men to roam about freely—in search of mapisweki, to go on hunting or fishing expeditions, or for any other reason that took their fancy—this was the kind of behavior expected of young men. It was not so easy for a woman, even one without a husband or children. Any woman, but particularly a young one, who attempted to travel around on her own, was likely to be branded a “loose woman,” if not something worse, and would indeed run the risk of being harassed or possibly raped. Should something like that happen a woman could expect little sympathy; such behavior was clearly “asking for trouble.” Even men who were married could quite easily fulfill their marital responsibilities and still be free to spend long periods away earning money in one way or another.

An interesting difference as regards the skills of women and men was that while men were perfectly capable of carrying out nearly all the tasks defined as “women's tasks,” these were simply demeaning for an adult man; women actually lacked the skills to undertake most specifically male tasks. There was a very practical reason for this. Since a woman's children were a significant source of labor to her, male children in the course of their early socialization were all taught how to do such female tasks as pounding, cooking, or cultivation; and young boys were expected to help their mothers with these tasks, particularly if there were no young girls in the household. At a certain point a boy would manage to detach himself from the world of women and children and would join the adult male world. It was only then, within this adult male world, that boys would learn the specifically male skills, such as building or hunting; since this world was inaccessible to girls, there was no opportunity for them to acquire these skills. Not that local women wanted to usurp male tasks—something that some Western feminists have difficulty understanding. As far as the women of Kibala and Bukama were concerned the allotted “female” tasks gave them more than enough work as it was, and they were not about to give up what they saw as their clear and morally inescapable claims to the labor of husbands and other male kin.

With the exception of beer brewing, women's opportunities to earn a little money were usually confined to the worst-paid mapisweki. They could earn small amounts of money working on the fields of others, most often being employed by men on mwafwamu. Quite often the payment for such work was not cash but small amounts of grain, or maybe some soap or salt. Within rural Chizela wage rates for mapisweki were generally low, and the lowest rates of all tended to be paid for the kind of cultivation tasks mainly done by women, such as weeding. Only the most desperate man, maybe one who was disabled or a little weak in the head, would ever consider doing such female, demeaning mapisweki.

One of the general characteristics of almost all labor processes in Kibala and Bukama was that they could easily be carried out, and frequently were, by individuals working on their own. I have already described the individual nature of ordinary cultivation (kujima that is, rather than “farming”), with men preparing fields on their own and wives being responsible for the growing of the crops. The processing of these crops into food, the pounding of grain, and its processing into flour, for example, were similarly tasks carried out by a woman working on her own with no more help than that provided by her dependent children. It is true that groups of women often worked together, particularly when pounding grain, but each woman would nonetheless have her own stock of grain that she alone pounded and winnowed to produce her own stock of flour. Sometimes a mother and an adult daughter, or an adult grandchild helping her grandmother, would work on a common stock of grain, but these were the exceptions rather than the rule. When women went to collect water or firewood, again, although most preferred the sociability—and the added security—of going with other women, as labor processes these were carried out by individuals. Male tasks, the building of a house or a granary, for instance, also tended to be undertaken by men working alone, or perhaps with a young boy as helper. Even hunting seldom seemed to involve more than two or three men, and again the pattern was often an older man accompanied by a younger one. Men also frequently hunted alone. The main exception here was fishing. Fishing, which only some men engaged in, was most commonly carried out with the use of fish dams which were usually constructed and owned by a group of men, normally relatives.

In general, however, the process of production in both Kibala and Bukama was extremely individualized; co-operation at the level of production did not seem to be something people either expected or were comfortable with. This lack of enthusiasm was not, however, shared by the state, which has persisted in advocating the formation of co-operative societies and other forms of co-operative labor as a primary means of integrating those in the rural areas more fully into the national economy. The final section of this chapter focuses on the notion of “co-operation,” looking both at how this was understood by UNIP's Ministry of Co-operatives and at the place of co-operation in the ordinary economic life of Kibala and Bukama. It also looks at the actual organizations that had come into being in Kibala and Bukama in the name of “co-operation.”

“Mobilizing the Masses”: Co-operation in Theory and Practice

In Zambia as in many other third-world countries, the co-operative has had a long history as a favored instrument for fostering “development” and enabling the poor and disadvantaged to share in its benefits. And despite its dismal history, a long legacy of mismanaged funds, outright corruption, and disappointed hopes, UNIP never lost faith in the co-operative as a leading player in its development scenario. Included in the Fourth National Development Plan, published in 1989, for instance, was a Co-operative Development Plan “designed to mobilise the masses for accelerated development in Zambia” (GRZ 1989:423). Rather like EvansPritchard’s famous Zande witchcraft oracles (Evans-Pritchard 1930, however often actual co-operatives failed, this was always seen as the fault of the particular individuals running them; the idea itself and the assumptions underpinning it were never called into question. The importance of the co-operative in bringing “development” seemed indeed to have a hegemonic authority putting it beyond question. Both Kibala and Bukama had co-operative societies, but to understand the substantive reality these entities had assumed it is helpful to begin with some local forms of “co-operation” and the place of these in rural Chizela’s economic life.

The most common form of co-operative labor was mbile, the Kaonde term for the work party, common throughout Africa, where people gather to work on someone’s fields in return for beer. In Kibala and Bukama mbile for meat, dried fish, and soap were also common. In both places many people used mbile, particularly at the beginning of the cultivation season for the initial hoeing and planting of fields. At the same time there were plenty of grumbles both on the part of those attending mbile and those organizing them. I would frequently come across people returning from mbile complaining about how small a piece of meat or soap they were given, or how soon the beer ran out. From the other side I would hear complaints that people had done hardly any work before putting down their hoes. Such implicit struggles over what reward was “fair” for what amount of work can be seen as bringing about something like a local “price”; if people got a reputation for being too stingy then there would be few takers for their mbile, while if the amount of work done dropped below a certain level presumably people would not find it worthwhile to have mbile at all. In local eyes mbile seemed in fact increasingly to be seen as the sale of labor,group “mapisweki,” as it were, rather than a moment in a more long-term,nonmonetized relation of reciprocity. This shift could indeed be thought of as a concrete example of what the shift from an understanding of human relations based on a notion of reciprocity to one based on the notion of the contract means in practice.

Another work-sharing arrangement also common in other parts of Africa was termed in Kaonde kilimba. This is a system whereby a group of people agree to work jointly on each other’s fields for one cultivation season, commonly working together for one day in turn on the fields of each member of the group. But although it existed in Kibala and Bukama, it did not seem to be popular. People’s experiences of kilimba in Bukama illustrate the local distrust of such co-operation. Most people I talked to in 1988 agreed that kilimba was a very good system in principle, but hardly any were actually practicing this form of co-operation.I was told that a couple of years previously in 1986, when for the first time tractorploughing services had not been available on the settlement scheme, many people had tried it, but for most it had not been a particularly happy experience. The problem, as a number of people explained to me, is that those participating can only be relied on to work hard on their own fields. When the time comes for them to cultivate on other people’s fields they only work halfheartedly, complaining that the sun is too hot or discovering that they have left their hoe at home and have to go back for it. Then when they do start hoeing they do not exert themselves but just scratch around on the surface of the soil for a bit before stopping altogether; or, a frequent complaint, they suddenly develop some serious illness that prevents them from coming that day at all.This latter excuse was particularly tricky given the local prevalence of malaria and so many other endemic diseases; people were often genuinely sick.

The only circumstances it seems in which kilimba worked satisfactorily, at least in Bukama, was when those involved were close relatives, preferably who also lived close to one another. There were very few who were planning to use kilimba in the 1988/89 season. Among those were, firstly, the three wives of Chief Chizela, and secondly, a man who had been part of a kilimba in 1986 made up of his own wife and children, plus his full brother (same father, same mother), and his wife and children.These two brothers lived on neighboring farms, and their joint cultivation was confined to the two men’s LIMA fields, their wives’ fields being excluded. Thirdly,there was a man who had been involved in a kilimba in 1986 that had included several members who were not close relatives. In 1988 he was again planning to use kilimba, but this time the group was to be made up entirely from those within his own homestead, because, as he explained, this would make it easier to control people and to tell whether or not they are feigning sickness. In sum, if a system such as kilimba is to work, there has to be a high degree of trust between the participants, and it was precisely this trust that seemed to be lacking. It is not that joint productive enterprises were impossible, but in order for them to be successful there needed to be rather special circumstances. In other words, although co-operation at the level of the labor process could work,it was not, as it were, an organic part of local production, and those involved needed to have overcome the general deep-rooted distrust of others. This distrust, by contrast, very much was an organic part of Yibala’s and Bukama’s daily life.

The distrust of collective productive enterprises, and a certain general suspicion and lack of trust in others, can be linked to a basic characteristic of economic life in rural Chizela. On the one hand, while there was a complex interdependence between husband and wife, individual households had a high degree of autonomy as regards the provision of the bulk of day-to-day consumption needs. In the main, local labor processes did not compel individuals to come together to produce the basic goods of everyday life. On the other hand, people were crucially dependent on wider kin networks to meet longer-term security needs. In times of trouble, when there was sickness, when crops had failed, or for some other reason food was short, it was to their kin that people turnedand turned not for charity but for what was simply their moral due. A certain generalized reciprocity was in fact a crucial part of the distribution of the social product. Part of the very definition of kinship was the sharing of surplus; morally it was impossible to deny the appeal of a kinsperson in need. But this was not a reciprocity that involved cooperation at the level of production. Nor did people’s unquestioning acceptance that kin ougbt to help one another necessarily translate into the expectation that individual kin could always be relied on to live up to the highest moral standards.

The people of Kibala and Bukama tended to see co-operation beyond the household as inherently problematic, although not impossible. When people did succeed in working together the term that was used to refer to this ability was lumvwañano, which Wright translates as “agreement, concord, harmony, (bond of)fellowship” (Wright n.d.). Lumvwañano was invoked when people wanted to account for an instance of successful working together, or when they wanted to explain to me what was needed if something like a co-operative was to work. Several people explained the problem with kilimba in terms of a lack of lumvwañano (lumvwañano kafwako). Co-operation was clearly something that people did not take for granted and saw as requiring particular circumstances or particular people who were skilled in lumvwañano. This distrust, however, was not shared by either the government or foreign aid donors, and in the next section I want to look at the local organizations that had come into being as a result of their enthusiasm for “co-operation.” The unshakable faith of “the Party and its government” in the cooperative society had resulted in the creation of the Kibala and Bukama MultiPurpose Co-operative Societies, but just what kind of entities were these?

Two Co-operative Societies

The Kibala Multi-Purpose Co-operative Society was formed in early 1987, largely at the prompting of the Village Self Reliance (VSR) team, who had been visiting Kibala regularly since 1986. The VSR scheme was an IRDP initiative that involved a VSR promoter visiting selected wards with the twin aims of promoting “self-reliant development,” and establishing a ward secretariat that would serve as an information channel between the ward, the IRDP, and Boma officials generally.Within Kibala itself the driving force behind the attempt to establish a co-operative was the teacher Sansoni, who was both the society’s secretary and the secretary of the ward. By July 1988 the total membership was twenty-nine, mostly men, all of whom were supposed to buy three shares at K5o each, giving a potential share capital of K4,35o, of which K95o had actually been paid. When I asked Sansoni and the society chairman, the local headmaster, about the projects the co-operative was engaged in, Iwas told of plans to cultivate two hectares of maize, establish a fish-trading business,open a shop to sell goods brought from town, and buy a hammer mill. As yet,however, none of these projects had been realized. Although there had been a lot of talk about the hammer mill project, and local women in particular were very enthusiastic, the huge gulf between the almost K3o,ooo that the cheapest hammer mill would cost and the society’s actual funds made its realization highly unlikely. As for the other projects nothing so far had been done toward any of them; not one lima, for instance, had been cleared for the collective maize plot.

In comparison to the Kibala Society, the Bukama Multi-Purpose Cooperative Society was far more established; it was a member of the provincial-level NorthWestern Co-operative Union (NWCU), for which it had begun handling input distribution, marketing, and credit within Bukama. At the end of the eighties the provision of such services to the mass of small-scale producers had become the responsibility of the provincial co-operative unions and they tended to see the primary function of ward-level co-operatives as being the delivery of these services. Although the Bukama Society had various plans for a consumer shop and the like, the only activities it was carrying out at the time of my stay in Bukama were those it was undertaking on behalf of NWCU; or rather these were almost the only activities. Two lima, one of maize and one of soya beans, were cultivated as Cooperative Society projects in the 1987/88 season, but interestingly I only found out about these accidentally. They were not mentioned to me spontaneously by any of the members when I asked them about the society’s activities. The reason they were not seen as relevant is perhaps that they were not undertaken as joint projects by the cooperative as a whole but by small groups within it. The idea behind these collective plots was not to generate funds for the co-operative as a whole but to enable the individual participants to raise money that they could use to help pay their share capital. The story of these collective plots is a further illustration of local attitudes to collective production.

The co-operative’s original plan was to divide its forty-four members (twentyseven men and seventeen women) into four groups and for each group to cultivate a lima jointly, but only two of the groups actually carried out the plan. One of these was composed exclusively of men, and included most of the society’s board of directors, and the other centered around a rather remarkable group of three elderly widows and was composed only of women. Of the two, only the female group worked successfully together and was planning to repeat the experience. Both they themselves and others attributed their success to their lumvwañano (ability to cooperate). Of the three widows, who were the nucleus of the group, two were siblings and the other was the daughter of their mwisho (mother’s brother). The three plots on which they lived were adjacent to one another, and the women were unusual in that they often worked co-operatively with one another in all their day-today tasks. The experience of the male group was less happy; a little maize had been produced, but by the end of the cultivation season the group had disintegrated amid mutual accusations of failure to work properly on the plot and recriminations about unpaid money owed to individual members. Only in exceptional circumstances, it seems, such as the unusually co-operative living arrangements of the three widows,did such collective undertakings not fall prey to distrust and suspicion.

From the perspective of NWCU, however, the primary function of local cooperatives tended to be seen as the facilitation of the union’s delivery of marketing input supply and credit services to the small-scale producer. The 1988 marketing season was the first in which the Bukama Society handled the buying of crops for the union, and during my stay there it was engaged in handing out, mostly on credit, the inputs for the 1988/89 season. One of the main reasons why people in Bukama had joined the co-operative, it seemed, was that while at that time it was providing these services for members and nonmembers alike, in the fixture people thought members would be given special privileges. When I asked the chairman, for instance, about the benefits of membership, one of the first things he mentioned was that when the society got its hammer mill there would be a special cheap rate for members, and that, if there were a queue, members would be served before nonmembers. Also, when I asked co-operative members what would happen if inputs, say, were in short supply, almost everybody said that in such a case members would be given preference. The secretary later told me that although the society was currently providing credit for inputs to both members and nonmembers,in the future credit would be restricted to members.

The sense that membership in the society was likely to become important in maintaining access to the support services so crucial for those wanting to participate in “farming” was probably the main reason why those who had joined the cooperative had thought it worthwhile to invest a few kwacha in this way. When Iasked members about the advantage of belonging to the co-operative, people were likely to reel off a list of ambitious projects; but when I went on to ask about actual benefits already experienced, the most common answer, sometimes accompanied by a snort, was kafwako (nothing). The host of potential benefits to be derived from a cooperative, which people produced so readily for me, can be seen as an example of one of the ways hegemony works. It is an example, that is, of how people shape their answers to questions according to what they perceive to be the appropriate and “correct” ones within the particular context in which the questions are being asked.The local skepticism about the practical utility of the cooperative was also reflected in the rather small sums of money most individuals had invested; of the society’s fiftyone members more than half had paid less that 50 percent of the Kioo share capital demanded, and eighteen had paid only Kz,o or less.

An important part of the meaning of the co-operative society for the people of Kibala and Bukama was that, like other manifestations of the state at the local level,it appeared to offer a means through which people could link themselves into the powerful world of the Boma. Inevitably it was an entity that came from outside,carrying with it the authentic bureaucratic trappings of the modern world: a board of directors, meetings with agendas, secretaries who keep minutes (in English), and so on, all marks of that which is “modern” and “progressive” as opposed to “backward” and “traditional.”The “modern” is literate-consuming vast amounts of stationery, in the 198os a scarce and difficult-to-obtain resource in rural areas. It is bureaucratic and tends to operate in English. The forms of organization produced by the rural areas themselves were radically different; these were organizations rooted in the hierarchies of kinship and which were primarily oral. For those attempting to forge links with the misty world of power beyond the local, however, it was precisely the alien quality of an institution like the co-operative-an alienness that so clearly stamped it as a thing of the Boma- that gave it much of its legitimacy. This was how things were done in the Boma, and those who wanted to be players in that world would have to abide by its rules.

The co-operative was seen by many as a means, recognized as legitimate by the Boma world, through which it was possible to press claims on that world. What you do if you want the government, NWCU, IRDP, or whoever to provide you with a depot, a hammer mill, or something similar is to form a co-operative. How that cooperative is organized depends on criteria laid down by that external world-for instance, the need to follow certain bureaucratic procedures, at least in theory. The inability of most senior men to operate in English and their lack of basic accounting skills can lead to these procedures undergoing various changes. When I asked the treasurer of the Bukama Society, for instance, how much share capital members had in fact paid, he told me that he had not counted it yet. But a profound dependency on an external and foreign world, and the anxiety to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of that world, is, I would argue, a crucial reality that should never be forgotten if we want to understand the actual entities into which cooperatives have developed in rural Zambia. Nonetheless, the organizational form of the Kibala and Bukama cooperatives was also shaped by local assumptions as to the basic principles underlying any organization involving individuals; in particular they were shaped by the deeply ingrained belief in hierarchy and the deep distrust of co-operative productive enterprises. One way such suspicions manifested themselves was in accusations that the local co-operative was full of thieves, which was one of the reasons a number of people in Bukama gave me for not joining the co-operative. At the same time the fact that a co-operative was perceived as an organization run by, and for, the local elite could lead, as in the case of the Women’s League discussed earlier, to individuals becoming members primarily to demonstrate that they did indeed belong to that elite.

Reciprocity and Contract

In this chapter I have tried to map out some of the broad contours of the economic landscape inhabited by the people of Kibala and Bukama. These contours, as we have seen, were highly gendered; the economic opportunities and constraints women and men confronted were significantly and systematically different. Monetization and commoditization may have reached deep into virtually every corner of Bukama and Kibala, but the tectonic forces unleashed by them have had different effects on the lives of women than of men. In general, whether it was a question of earning cash by selling goods or by selling labor itself, women had fewer,and less profitable, options than men. Women, that is, faced a number of systematic disadvantages stemming in part from the specific ways in which commoditized and noncommoditized production intertwined with one another. Where men and women were located within those parts of production directly concerned with fulfilling consumption needs also tended to determine how they found themselves situated as regards commoditized production. On the whole, as in the example of “farming,”women tended to find themselves in a rather different place to that of men.

This differential location could lead to conflicts of interest between women and men, particularly between wives and husbands. For instance, how should labor be used? Should a husband invest his time in preparing sorghum fields and helping his wife with cultivation, or should he spend his time on his LIMA fields? How much time should a woman spend working on her sorghum fields, growing grain for consumption, and how much working on the LIMA fields (whether these were her own LIMA fields, her husband’s, or owned jointly)? The point here is that how access to markets beyond the local community is organized and the way this fits in with production for consumption (which involves such things as state policies on input supply and marketing services) tends to have different implications for men and women. Women, for instance, might have been more interested in expanding the market for sorghum surpluses, enabling them to integrate more easily production for consumption and for sale, whereas men might have preferred separate cash crop fields, where they were likely to have greater control over the profits.

Such conflicts of interest were not necessarily fought out in any open, explicit way, but the fact that such struggles may be implicit and hidden, present not in what people say but underlying what they do, does not make them any the less struggles.There might be a tussle, for instance, between a woman and her husband or son-inlaw as she tried to get him to clear a field for her when he would rather be working on his LIMA plot or catching fish to dry and take for sale in town; or husband and wife might quarrel over whether some of her sorghum harvest should be sold, and if it were, what the profits should be spent on. Such conflictual relationships between women and men were, however, entangled with supportive relationships that bound them together in various ways. A wife, for instance, might be just as keen as her husband that the marketing lorries should come and collect his LIMA crops since although the proceeds might go to him, this was money to which she had some claim.A wife had a certain claim to a say in how such money was spent simply because of the acknowledged obligation of a husband “to clothe his wife.” No man who received a substantial sum of money, from whatever source, could escape pressure from his wife (or wives) to spend some of it on her, or her children, maybe buying clothes or a blanket, or paying children’s school expenses. Such claims, however,were greatly strengthened when a wife had worked on her husband’s LIMA fields.This was indeed one explanation I was given for why some husbands were not particularly anxious for their wives to work on their LIMA fields.

I began this chapter by drawing attention to the coexistence in rural Chizela of two different ways of organizing flows of goods and services: one based on market principles, money, and exchange-value; and one based on a web of reciprocal obligations between kin. As I have tried to show, these two mechanisms of distribution can be seen as associated with two rather different sets of assumptions or indeed cultures; one of which can be termed a “culture of contract” and the other a “culture of reciprocity.” These can be thought of as “cultures” in that their basic assumptions have become, to use Bakhtin’s terminology, part of “the fundamental social evaluations which develop directly from the specific conditions of the economic life of a given group [which] are not usually uttered” (Bakhtin 1988:13). As we have seen, these two “cultures” co-existed in rural Chizela in a sometimes uneasy relationship.^[12] An example of this was the running battle of wills between fishermen trying to take their bundles of dried fish to sell in the more lucrative urban markets, and local women demanding that they sell to them, their kinswomen, at low prices. The moral pressures on the fishermen could lead to them engaging in all kinds of stratagems to avoid the sharp eyes of their kin, particularly their female kin-from creeping round the outskirts of settlements on their way to town at times when few people were likely to be about to sitting outside their house steadfastly denying that they had any fish despite an unmistakable fishy stench.

Having in the previous two chapters and this chapter mapped out some of the broad economic and political contours of life in Kibala and Bukama, in the next chapter I turn to the question of how the people of these communities themselves saw those contours. How did they themselves imagine their community?

Notes