6. Imagined Locations: The Dangerous Community

Those that work hard are the ones they point at as balozhi [witches], those who work very hard and produce enough food. They just say, “s/he is using bwanga [substance or knowledge associated with witchcraft].” Even now they are saying that the person who has a lot of maize is a mulozhi [witch] who is putting children in his maize sacks [i.e., killing children to increase the yield] so that he can have a big yield. But me I am not discouraged, because I know that these people are simply backward.

To the extent that ideologies are historically necessary they have a validity which is “psychological”; they “organise” human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle etc.

Part One: Devouring Kin

The most feared ones [i.e., as balozhi] are the relatives because they know them very well, they know how they live, they know how they eat, they have known them from their childhood up to their growth time. That's how the fear comes in.

The first two chapters of this study focused on its theoretical location, my own location within 1980s rural Chizela, and the naming of the people of North-Western Province by colonial administrators and academics. The next three chapters were my attempt to map out some of the broad contours of Kibala's and Bukama's economic and political landscape. In this chapter I want to shift the focus to how those within that landscape themselves imagined their location, and how they themselves named their world. The particular site I have chosen to look at here is witchcraft (bulozhi). I chose this site, firstly, because a belief in the reality of witchcraft was an inescapable part of day-to-day life in Kibala and Bukama. The names associated with this dark realm were central to many of the explanations people gave of why certain things, above all any kind of misfortune, had happened to them. A second reason for focusing on witchcraft is that this way of understanding the world was so entangled with the whole discourse of kinship.

As I have tried to show in earlier chapters, while the national state was certainly a very real presence in the lives of the people of Kibala and Bukama and people clearly thought of themselves as Zambian citizens, their primary imagined community remained the community of kinship. The basic assumptions underpinning this community of kin were threaded through the accounts people gave of their lives and their world. But because these assumptions were so taken for granted they were often an implicit rather than an explicit presence; an unspoken substratum informing that which was actually said. There was an elusiveness here stemming from the very indisputability of these “facts” of kinship. These were the kinds of “facts” that Bakhtin was talking about when he stressed how “fundamental social evaluations” are not that which is spoken about. “If an evaluation, is in reality conditioned by the very being of a given collective, then it is accepted dogmatically as something understood and not subject to discussion. Conversely, where the basic evaluation is expressed and demonstrated, it has already in that case become equivocal…it has ceased to organize life” (Bakhtin 1988:13). Given this elusiveness, where might such structuring threads have nonetheless revealed themselves (even if only in indirect ways) in the everyday life of Kibala and Bukama? One place where it seemed to me that some of the deepest assumptions about kinship had left their traces was in local beliefs about witchcraft (bulozhi).

What I argue in this chapter is that these beliefs can be seen as holding up a mirror, albeit a cloudy one, in which the bonds of kinship were shown in a reversed and distorted form. In the world of bulozhi the relations between witches (balozhi) and their victims were the relations of kinship, but a kinship that had assumed a fantastic and negative shape. Through an exploration of these beliefs it is possible to glimpse a little of what it meant to live embedded within the hegemony of the community of kin—and what this meant not only intellectually but also emotionally. What kinship meant in 1980s Chizela, however, was very much shaped by the reality that the community of kin was embedded within a wider world of markets, citizenship, and the state.

What this chapter is about is a world of kinship turned upside down: the world of bulozhi. I begin with an incident that illustrates both the omnipresence and the essential ordinariness of bulozhi for the people of Kibala and Bukama. I then explore the basic contours of the local discourse on bulozhi, and some of the images and metaphors at its heart. I go on to look at the relationship between the suspicion of bulozhi and certain tensions inherent in the social world of 1980s rural Chizela. Tracing out the links between the suspicion of bulozhi and these tensions helps reveal something of the contours of the imagined community of kin and the nature of its entanglement with the market forces already present within it—market forces that were eating away at some of its deepest roots, or rather maybe forcing them to grow in different directions. Through this tracing out it is possible, I hope, to provide some glimpses at least of what it meant to live this complicated reality.

Everyday Evil

For the people of Kibala and Bukama the reality of bulozhi was a hegemonic fact. Bulozhi was an omnipresent reality that cast its threatening shadow over the most basic interactions of daily life. Its everyday, unremarkable nature for local people was brought home to me in an interview I had with the agricultural extension officer in Bukama, Takawali, about the history of the Bukama settlement scheme. He began by giving me a list of all those who had been registered with the scheme since its inception. Among those listed were six men who by 1988 had died. According to Takawali, who had himself come to Bukama only a few months before I arrived, all but one of these deaths had been the result of witchcraft (since we were talking in English, Takawali used the English term). The sole exception was a man who had been beaten to death, and there were rumors that he too had been killed by bulozhi. Apart from this man, who may simply have been murdered, it was generally believed that all the plot holders who had died had been killed by bulozhi. And this fact was recounted by Takawali in exactly the same matter-of-fact tone in which he went on to tell me about the size of the scheme, the amount of land that had been cleared, and so on. That this was not seen by Takawali, or anyone else in Bukama, as in any way unusual illustrates how in both Bukama and Kibala almost all deaths were attributed, at least by some of those involved, to bulozhi. In Kibala, for instance, it seemed to have been commonly agreed that a six months' pregnant woman who died after drinking a full three bottles of lutuku (the locally distilled, and fiercesomely strong, spirit) had been killed by bulozhi. And, as Takawali illustrates, a belief in the reality of bulozhi was not limited to unenlightened “villagers,” but, in some form or other, was shared by many, if not all, the government employees in both Bukama and Kibala.

Just as kinship relations were seen by the people of rural Chizela as providing the basic ties that wove individuals into a community, so bulozhi can be seen as the shadowed underside of that kinship fabric. Bulozhi was what happened when individuals substituted their own selfish greed for a proper concern for the well-being of their kin. The local discourse on bulozhi can be seen in part as a moral critique that gave people a set of powerful, and morally charged, images and metaphors with which to attribute blame for the various misfortunes and differential success of everyday life. Misfortune and bad luck could always be explained as the result of the personal malevolence of particular individuals and in particular their perversion of the normal obligations of kinship. In other words, a perceived denial of proper respect (mushingi) and failure to fulfill the expectations inherent in the mukulumpe/mwanyike hierarchy took on a gross and caricatured form in the concrete image of the mulozhi (witch). The notion of bulozhi provided people, as it were, with a way of naming the failure of kinship.

But while the discourse on bulozhi may have had its deepest roots in the community of kinship, it also had its own autonomy. The assumption that malevolent individuals are able to harm others in ways that are undetectable except to those with specialist knowledge of “witches” and their ways has become a basic element of how many people throughout rural Zambia (and much of sub-Saharan Africa) understand causality in general.^[1] At the same time the particular stress put on this kind of causation and the specifics of the beliefs associated with it vary enormously. For those growing up in a community saturated by such an understanding of causality it provides an immensely persuasive explanation of misfortune and bad luck, as is demonstrated by its hold even over those, such as Takawali and other local government employees, who were normally not part of the local kinship community.

An interesting example of the power of such beliefs and their ability to impose their names on misfortune and sickness at the expense of those of modern “scientific” understandings was the unhappy experiences of the clinical officer in Kibala, Bateya. Bateya was a stranger with no kinship links in Kibala; he was not even Kaonde. Since 1983 he had lived and worked in Kibala, and when I met him at the beginning of my fieldwork he was awaiting his transfer to another clinic. He had completed the full five years of secondary school and a three-year medical training. He very much defined himself as a man of science, and when I first met him he immediately introduced me to his infant son Leon, named for Leon Trotsky. Trotsky's writings, Bateya told me, had transformed his thinking. When I interviewed him about his work in Kibala he assured me that most local people had now come to realize that illnesses are caused by germs not witchcraft, and that they were relying less on traditional healers. I later found out, however, from one of the teachers who was a close friend of Bateya, that the reason why he had asked the Ministry of Health for a transfer was his conviction that local people were attacking him with bulozhi. The form these attacks took was insomnia; either he would be simply unable to sleep or, when he did manage to snatch a few minutes' rest, he would be tormented with terrible nightmares. Later I confirmed with Bateya that this was indeed why he wanted to leave Kibala.

One of the difficulties in casting off these kinds of beliefs is that, since they are centered around the problem of misfortune and its causality, they tend to suggest themselves as explanations precisely at those times when individuals are feeling insecure and threatened. A child fails to thrive, someone suddenly falls sick or has an accident, and some kind of emotionally satisfying answer has to be found for the question of “Why me, why my child?” Then again, it may be, as perhaps with Bateya, that someone living in an alien place far from his own kin simply feels isolated and vulnerable. It is understandable that someone who has grown up in an environment in which the reality of witchcraft is taken for granted, who lies tossing and turning in the small hours unable to sleep night after night, finds it hard to silence the voices in his head insistently telling him that somewhere, out there in the dark, someone is actively stopping him from sleeping.

Similar beliefs to those that tormented Bateya are undoubtedly common throughout Zambia.^[2] My specific focus in this chapter, however, is on the Kaonde discourse on evil and how this was linked to the ways in which people in Kibala and Bukama lived the community of kin. As regards its fundamental assumptions, this Kaonde discourse is probably similar to those to be found among a number of neighboring peoples, but what I am interested in here is what this particular Kaonde variant can tell us about the meaning kinship had for those living in Kibala and Bukama in the 1980s.

A good place to begin is with some basic Kaonde terms associated with the domain of witchcraft. However, in attempting to introduce these terms and providing glosses for them we at once run into the problem of finding English equivalents for terms for which there are seldom straightforward synonyms—only words such as witchcraft itself, carrying their own baggage of often misleading, but for the English speaker difficult-to-discard, associations.^[3] The way I have tried to deal with this problem is, in general, to avoid English language terms such as witchcraft, which are so suffused with preexisting European meanings, and, after providing a brief gloss in English, to use the Kaonde terms themselves. The main exception to this rule is when I am quoting from people who were speaking English. It might be objected that since English terms such as witchcraft have become a normal part of Zambian English, why not use them? However, the associations conjured up for most English-speaking Zambians by words such as witchcraft or bewitch, I would argue, remain those of the local discourses on witchcraft rather than those of Europe. I apologize for any difficulty all the unfamiliar words may cause my readers, but it seems to me that this extra effort is worthwhile if it enables the non-Kaonde-speaking reader to begin to understand this set of beliefs in its own terms.

My glosses on the Kaonde terms come from definitions of them I was given in my various fieldwork trips to North-Western Province, and from how I have heard them used in different contexts. The terms I am dealing with here are all very basic ones, and there seemed to be general agreement about their definition. These were the ordinary, everyday names that to local people simply identified the “facts” of this aspect of their social world.

The Vocabulary of Bulozhi

There is a basic root-lozhi, which as an abstract noun bulozhi is commonly translated as “witchcraft,” and as a personal noun mulozhi (pl. balozhi), as “witch.” ^[4] For people in Kibala and Bukama a mulozhi was someone—who might be either male or female (the term is non-gender specific)—who deliberately causes harm, most typically death, to others in ways that do not involve an obvious physical means such as a weapon, but something hidden and impossible to see with the naked eye.^[5]Balozhi were said to act most commonly at night when it is dark and their victims are asleep. They were believed to kill either for their personal gain (or for that of their fellow balozhi since balozhi, it was explained to me, often act together with others of their kind) or simply because it is in their nature to kill others. They were described as using various kinds of intermediaries to effect their nefarious ends. There were tuyebela (sing. kayebela), little creatures that come in a variety of forms, sometimes being described as dolls, sometimes as small animals but always as having the power to transform themselves into a whole variety of shapes. Tuyebela were said to be owned by individual balozhi, who were believed to send their tuyebela out at night to selected victims; sometimes to steal from them, sometimes to injure or kill them.

As well as tuyebela, which could be owned by either men or women, there were also milomba (sing. jilomba), which normally only men were said to own. A jilomba was described as a human-headed snake that enabled its owner to achieve great power and success. The jilomba's head was said to have the features of its mulozhi owner, and the two were believed to be so closely linked that if a man's jilomba were killed, he too would die. As evidence of this I was told about a man from Bukama who had rapidly sickened and died when the dogs belonging to some boys out hunting cane rats by the river found his jilomba and killed it. The exact spot where the dogs had found the creature was carefully pointed out to me, the whole story being told to me partly as dramatic proof of the dangers of something so undeniably powerful, but also so evil. Interestingly, this man was one of those deceased plot holders whom Takawali told me had been a victim of witchcraft. A jilomba (I never heard of any mulozhi owning more than one jilomba) was said to be far more dangerous than the tuyebela, which were always talked about in the plural.

In addition to the ordinary jilomba there was also a double-headed variant that some married couples were believed to own, one head resembling the wife and one the husband. There was also the kimanyi, which was described as a special type of jilomba that helped someone in business amass money. Explaining the kimanyi, Mukwetu added the gloss: “People can't have businesses without medicine, they would fail in a year or so” (Mukwetu, Bukama, 15.xi.88, NE). The English term medicine here is the usual translation for the term muchi, which can be used in a very wide range of contexts. It can be used, for instance, to refer to any kind of curative substance, whether this belongs to western or local medicine, for fertilizer, for yeast—I even heard it used to refer to my deodorant, muchi wa kwapa (armpit medicine). In general it seemed to be used for any physical substance used in relatively small quantities to effect some kind of change in or on something larger. On its own the term muchi had no necessary connection with bulozhi but it was frequently used in a context that in local ears unambiguously gave it that meaning.

There was another term, bwanga which had a far more limited field of meaning than muchi in that it was only used of things having to do with bulozhi, but it was at the same time more inclusive in that it included not only material substances but also knowledge and skills. Both muchi and bwanga could be used both offensively by balozhi and defensively by those trying to protect themselves from such attacks. The more intangible aspects of bwanga were possessed not only by balozhi but also bañanga (sing. ñanga), the ritual specialists whose trade is to combat and defeat balozhi. Anyone who was ill and suspected bulozhi, or who wanted to discover who caused a relative's death or had any problem that seemed to call for the specialist knowledge of someone skilled in this dark realm, could consult a ñanga to divine the cause of the problem. Depending on what the ñanga found the cause to be, an attack by a mulozhi or perhaps some offense to a particular spirit, the ñanga's client would then take the appropriate action, taking the mulozhi to court, appeasing the offended spirit, or whatever. Although people relied on bañanga to combat balozhi, the exact relationship between the ñanga and the mulozhi tended to be seen as more than a little murky. People tended to wonder: Just how had the ñanga acquired his or her skills? How could anyone not a mulozhi know so much about their ways? This suspicion of bañanga skills can also be seen as part of a more general distrust of any kind of out-of-the-ordinary knowledge or skill. This distrust was another significant strand in the fabric of rural life.

People in Kibala and Bukama took it for granted that all adult men and women had the skills to carry out all the basic tasks defined as appropriate to their sex. While it was accepted that some people were more skilled than others in certain areas, at fashioning a certain basket, thatching a roof, or brewing beer, for instance; anything that was seen as a genuinely exceptional skill tended to be explained as the result of muchi. In other words, such out-of-the-ordinary skills could only have an extraordinary origin. This muchi did not necessarily involve bulozhi. There were many forms of muchi seen as legitimate; in particular there was the whole range of self-defensive muchi used solely for protection against attack by balozhi. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate here is, however, a blurred and shifting one. What might be seen by some as clear evidence of bulozhi could be defended by the presumed mulozhi as no more than sensible precautions against attack by others.

One exception to the lack of specialization was the whole area of healing and divination, a realm that certainly was seen as having links with muchi and bulozhi. Apart from this the only real exception were the skills needed for hunting. Not all men hunted and not all those who did were referred to as “hunters” (pl. bakibinda, sing. kibinda); the term kibinda was reserved for those who were recognized as being successful at killing animals. And this ability was seen by most people, it seemed, as very probably linked with some kind of dealings with dark forces. A central image of the mulozhi was in fact that of a perverse and evil hunter who eats not animals but people. Mukwetu provided a vivid image of this perverted hunting:

When balozhi are moving about at night in search of victims, they see those they attack as animals. Tall, big people are sable antelopes [the biggest of the antelopes], little short ones are duikers [one of the smallest antelopes] and so on.

A number of people assured me that if he were to be successful in killing animals a man needed some kind of medicine. At best, this involved various kinds of legitimate muchi; at worst, this meant that a hunter's killing of animals also brought about the death of his relatives. And here again there was something of a slide between legitimate and illegitimate muchi. What was apparently clear to everyone was that ordinary human skills, whether acquired through experience or learned from acknowledged bakibinda, were not sufficient in themselves: something more was required.

As might be expected, the whole area of bulozhi was suffused with a certain secrecy and danger, and people often used euphemisms when talking about it, fearful of being too open and invoking the wrath of those who possess these secret powers. However, it is easy to overemphasize this secrecy, particularly if we are carrying with us the folk models of European witchcraft. Watching how people in Kibala and Bukama used the various concepts within this domain in their daily lives, I was struck both by the omnipresence of this dimension for those around me and at the same time its overwhelming ordinariness, its essential banality—as with the agricultural extension worker who in such a matter-of-fact tone told me that virtually all the Bukama plot holders who had died had been killed by witchcraft. For those living in Kibala and Bukama in 1988 bulozhi was simply an unavoidable, but in no way abnormal, hazard of village life. This ordinariness makes this belief in “witchcraft” something quite different from the witchcraft of the folk models of modern Europe or North America. In these modern Western folk models witchcraft is seen as quintessentially strange and bizarre, something that is not part of normal life and that contradicts all the ordinary laws of cause and effect of the natural world. For those living in rural Chizela there was nothing alien about bulozhi, it was simply an unavoidable part, albeit a very unpleasant one, of living with other people. Its dangers were as mundane to people as the threat of influenza in the winter is to the inhabitants of London or New York.

Beliefs about bulozhi, however, should not be seen simply as some kind of survival of a precolonial past that owe nothing to the colonial or postcolonial world. This is a point that needs stressing. As a number of recent works on witchcraft in Africa have reminded us, such beliefs have apparently not only continued to exert a considerable power over many people in many different African societies, but have often taken on dynamic new forms in colonial and postcolonial contexts. And this is not a phenomenon that has been confined to the rural or “backward” sectors of society; witchcraft, it seems, is often just as much at home in the most modern urban settings. Indeed, it can sometimes be found in the highest echelons of government.^[6]

It is important to remember that little of the evidence about African witchcraft beliefs comes from the precolonial period, even if those who recounted such beliefs to the missionary, administrator, or anthropologist claimed to be describing precolonial realities. My information about Kaonde beliefs and practices connected with bulozhi comes primarily from conversations I had with people in the 1980s and bishimi I recorded then, supplemented by accounts in the colonial archives. The bulozhi with which I am concerned is very much a contemporary phenomenon. At the same time, however, I would argue that it draws on an older discourse on evil with deep historical roots. This discourse can be seen as having provided people with a basic grammar of causality and some key vocabulary with which to name a certain area of experience. At the same time, the accounts people gave of specific instances of bulozhi were not narrowly determined by this grammar and vocabulary. And as with any living language, not only was vocabulary continually being added, over time even the grammar might change. In the next section, however, I focus on certain key images that ran through all the different accounts of bulozhi I heard, and seemed to lie at the heart of the discourse. I also discuss the kind of associations these images seemed to conjure up in the minds of people in rural Chizela.

Bulozhi Images

As I have stressed, fear of bulozhi was a powerful presence in the daily life of Kibala and Bukama. When illness or misfortune struck, people would invariably speculate as to whether this was bulozhi, and on who might be responsible.^[7] Such discussions suggest that the possibility of attack was always present as an underlying, inescapable anxiety. When people talked about bulozhi there were certain continually recurring images and metaphors that can be seen as constituting a basic core around which a whole discourse on bulozhi was elaborated. My account of these key images comes from several different sources. There were the explanations I was given when I asked specific questions. I had normally asked these in a context in which the topic came up spontaneously and I would ask for additional explanations. There were also various disputes I observed, some involving formal court cases brought before Chief Chizela, in which accusations of bulozhi were made, or were part of the background to the dispute. Such cases made it possible to see the discourse on bulozhi in action; how the ideas and metaphors were deployed in specific contexts by specific individuals.

Another place where ideas about bulozhi found expression was in bishimi (Kaonde folktales) of which I recorded fifty-seven. After someone told me a story, I would ask them to tell me what they thought the story meant, and what lessons it could teach listening children, for instance. As I stressed in chapter 2, despite the thorny theoretical issues raised by using such explanations, it seems legitimate to me to pick out of such explanations certain very general patterns of association. I make no claims to have done more than to identify some basic ideas and images embedded in the stories that seem to throw light on what bulozhi “meant” to people in Kibala and Bukama in the late 1980s. Bulozhi, as I shall argue, was a frequent theme in the stories I was told, although it was normally there as an implicit rather than an explicit presence. Characters die or are killed, for instance, and the audience would apparently assume that what the story was talking about was bulozhi even though this was not directly mentioned.

When local people described balozhi and their habits, perhaps the most dominant image was that of eating. What balozhi and their familiars were believed to do to their victims was above all to eat them. The male mulozhi, as I have already mentioned, was commonly linked with the hunter, but a hunter who hunts not animals but people, maybe with a special gun made of human bones. One popular story, of which I recorded four variants, is a good example of the image of the devouring mulozhi. I have called the story The Greedy Father.^[8] The essentials of the story were the same in each variant I was given; the differences had to do with the length and degree of elaboration.

The Greedy Father

There was once a woman who was married and taken by her husband to his village. She became pregnant and gave birth to a child, but her husband, who had been left to look after the child, ate it. Each time the woman had a child the same thing happened. Finally, when she became pregnant again and the time came for her delivery, she stole off into the bush and gave birth alone. She then hid the child in a hollow tree and went back to the village, telling her husband she had miscarried. Every so often she would then slip away secretly to the hiding place and feed the baby. Fearing, however, that the husband would discover the hidden child, she determined to take her child and return to her own kin. As soon as her husband discovered her flight, he set off in pursuit. The wife, however, had taken the precaution of carrying some gourds filled with different grains, and every time the husband began to get close she would spill one of these on the ground and, unable to control his greed, he would stop and eat. At last she reached her own village and told her relatives [i.e., her matrikin] what had happened. They then dug a pit, which they covered with branches and concealed under a mat. A rich meal was prepared and when the greedy father arrived he was lured onto the mat and offered food. As he ate the branches beneath him gradually began to collapse until at last he fell into the pit and was killed by his in-laws in just retribution for his murdering ways.

To a local audience it seemed that one of the things this story was clearly about was bulozhi. One of the four people who told me this story confined her explanation to a simple plot summary, but the other three glosses on it all mentioned bulozhi explicitly.

It means that when a person marries a woman, that is where bulozhi can come from.…When her [final] child grew up a little, she thought she should run away with the child in fear that her husband would kill it.…That is when she went and told her relatives.…Her relatives said he is wicked, a mulozhi…[as they killed him they said] you have finished killing our people, you will now sleep underground. Even now, these things are there, they say a person is a mulozhi.

There are some men who are very greedy. They like eating…[a man can have] a jilomba and put it in his house to be eating his children

Just like us in this country we do this, you are in a village and a man comes to marry you. You refuse all the good men. Then someone comes who is like a mulozhi and you accept him. When he takes you to his village he starts eating your children. When you produce a child he eats it. Now then you go back and tell your parents, “That person was not a proper person but a mulozhi.”

These three explanations—by a very old woman, a middle-aged man, and a young woman, respectively—would seem to suggest that whatever else the story might have “meant” to its local audience, the murdering father represented a powerful image of the mulozhi. The fact that this was so clear to its listeners even though the story never referred directly to bulozhi is, I would argue, a reflection both of the way this naming of the cause of sickness and death as bulozhi suffused the whole of rural life and of how certain events and phenomena were automatically seen as synonymous with bulozhi. To local eyes, it was bulozhi that was the “real” cause of almost all deaths. A story such as The Greedy Father can be seen as providing a vivid and compelling image of what it is that balozhi do. A child may seem to have died from some illness, but really it has been killed by its father's jilomba. For someone belonging to this community of belief, the story presents directly the more profound “truth” that the father has eaten his child.

Central to this community of belief were certain general assumptions that run counter to those of the discourse of “scientific” rationalism associated with the development of modern industrial society. For those socialized into this rationalist discourse, it is a taken-for-granted assumption that there is a natural physical world that is governed by fixed and unalterable laws, such as the law of gravity. Such laws are outside the domain of human morality; no breach of human laws, no matter how horrendous, will suspend or alter the law of gravity, any more than any human being can willfully interfere with its operation. By contrast, one of the basic assumptions underpinning the belief in bulozhi in Kibala and Bukama was that the human world and the “natural” world are part of one seamless whole; there was no splitting off of an impersonal domain of nature that exists outside, and is indifferent to, the sphere of morality. Within this all-enveloping moral web the essential human community exists as a community of kin bound together in a web of reciprocal moral obligation; but the moral web of expectations reaches out to include the nonhuman. Adultery, for instance, could lead to a woman having a particularly difficult childbirth. Crucially, the notion of causality (A causes B, B is the result of A) embedded in this general discourse centers on a moral rather than a mechanical relationship; causality tended always to be enfolded in morality and human intentionality. If a nephew (mwipwa) shows his uncle (mwisho) proper respect (mushingi), then the uncle ought to reciprocate by helping and supporting his nephew. There is no kind of law-like certainty, however, about his doing so. If a field is properly planted and tended, it ought to produce a good harvest, but sometimes it does not. In the space between “ought” and outcome lurks bulozhi.

Underpinning the discourse on bulozhi was the assumption that the moral conduct of human beings can bring about effects in the nonhuman physical world; what balozhi do does not, therefore, violate natural laws, but rather moral expectations. This is why the most sensible and level-headed people, who in other contexts, such as the promises of development planners, could display a conspicuously healthy skepticism, had no problem at all in believing in balozhi who can summon thunder, fly about at night in their own magic airplanes, kill people at a distance, and so on. How balozhi do what they do was not a question that people found particularly puzzling, the answer was simple: they can do these things because they are balozhi. The more pressing question was, How do you cope with balozhi and protect yourself against their attacks? A story like The Greedy Father, I would suggest, addresses the omnipresent fear of bulozhi, providing a satisfying representation of the struggle against, and ultimate defeat of, the evil mulozhi.

It is important to stress, however, that the discourse on bulozhi is by no means rigid or unchanging. Precisely how balozhi, and what they do, are imagined can shift and change, as do the contexts in which such fears can come into play. The belief that some people are able, at a distance and using no obvious means, to kill or bring about all kinds of misfortune provides, as it were, a basic root from which many different narratives of bulozhi can grow. Balozhi in the 1980s, for instance, were described as traveling about in invisible airplanes and cars. Similarly, as in the case of the clinical officer in Kibala, complaints about attacks by bulozhi were very common among the teachers and other government employees throughout Chizela District, even though they were not normally members of the local kinship community. In general bulozhi, as might be expected, has a tendency to collect around tensions and contradictions wherever these may occur.

The story of The Greedy Father, for instance, can be seen, at least in part, as an expression of an underlying structural tension between the members of a matrilineage and the men marrying into it. This tension was inherent in the combination of matrilineal descent and virilocality whereby the children of a marriage belonged to and reproduced the wife's matrilineage, but were outsiders within the husband's kin group among whom they were likely to live. While it was accepted that there would be strong bonds of affection and obligation between fathers and children, ultimately, despite the undoubted strengthening of patrilineal links over the course of the colonial and postcolonial years, it was still the link between a man and his sisters' children that people described as the most binding. In chapter 3 I quoted a proverb that refers to the contradictory pulls on a man as father and as brother/uncle: “Eat with the chickens, the guinea fowl will fly home.” The guinea fowl here are a man's biological children, and the chickens those of his sisters. From the point of view of his wife's kin group a man's commitment to his biological children—particularly as regards providing them with access to any surplus he had produced or acquired—was always suspect. It is not surprising, therefore, that people found the image of the father who sacrifices his children to his own selfish greed so powerful, just as it seemed “right” in the story that it was the wife's matrikin who protected her against the outsider husband.

The suspicion aroused by the stranger-husband with his conflicting loyalties was, so to speak, built into the structure of Kaonde matriliny. But this ambivalence can also be seen as a particular instance of a more general tension around the reciprocal obligations of kinship. Obligations that are at one and the same time vague and diffuse, yet wide-ranging and absolutely binding, cannot but open up a wide space both for resentment of expectations seen as unfulfilled and anxiety that indeed one has failed to fulfill one's obligations. The social fabric woven by the threads of moral obligation embedded in kinship is likely to be very different from a social fabric in which the dominant thread is that of the contract. After all, part of the essence of the contract as a social relationship is—at least at the level of ideology—its clearly defined and limited nature. While ambivalence is no doubt inherent in kinship relations in all societies, the emotional charge this carries is likely to be particularly intense when access to basic resources and the distribution of surplus is to a significant extent organized through kinship relations rather than the market, so that individuals' access to basic resources and distribution of surplus actually depends on the honoring of the reciprocal obligations of kinship. It was this kind of highly charged ambivalence, I would argue, that helped to imbue belief in bulozhi with such a powerful emotional plausibility.

Part Two: Of Mushingi and the Market

Kyo wapana kibwela

What is given away returns

Kakote wa mukwenu mankumbila

Your friend's old relative is a rotting mushroom [i.e., no one wants to take care of someone else's aging relative]

In the first part of this chapter I explored some of the basic contours of the Kaonde discourse on bulozhi. In this second part I want to focus specifically on the links between accusations of bulozhi and tensions around the distribution of surplus. Overall the amount of surplus produced in Kibala and Bukama was small; but while this was true in absolute terms, surplus was nonetheless, as in any economy, a crucial part of the system. I am defining surplus here as that portion of the social product that is in excess of producers' direct consumption needs. This definition would include, for instance, everything that is necessary to meet the needs of those unable to participate in production, such as the very young, the old, and the sick; as well as everything that is invested in future production.

Individual households in Kibala and Bukama may have been responsible for meeting the bulk of their day-to-day consumption needs through their own production, but this did not mean that households in general were necessarily self-sufficient even as regards basic foodstuffs. There were always labor-poor households that found it difficult to produce much, and even labor-rich households might face difficulties from time to time. Then again, the labor resources of a single household would vary over the course of its developmental cycle.

A basic reality that was part of the texture of day-to-day life in Kibala and Bukama was the coexistence of, on the one hand, independent households generally reluctant to combine with others in joint productive enterprises; and, on the other, a deep awareness that from time to time any household, even the most prosperous, was likely to find itself needing access to the surpluses of others. Harvests, for instance, were always unpredictable. Crops could fail for a myriad of reasons: drought or rain at the wrong times, disease, animal predators, or because a producer had fallen sick at a crucial moment. Sickness—and people were often sick—was a particularly serious problem because of the individualized nature of cultivation and the difficulty of mobilizing extra labor. But just as crops might fail, so too there could be unexpectedly high yields when everything went right. In short, about all that was predictable was that there would be wide fluctuations in yields, both between households in any year and over time within the same household. As a result there were always some households that had not produced enough to satisfy their own consumption needs and others that had produced a surplus. If they were to meet their needs, those suffering a shortfall needed access to that surplus, and the primary mechanism by which this distribution was effected was the network of kinship claims. Those with surplus were expected to redistribute at least some of it to their kin, whether in the form of “gifts” ^[9] or loans, or simply by selling it. In an economic environment in which goods, particularly the crops of kujima (local sorghum-based cultivation), were not produced in order to be sold, even persuading someone to sell some of their sorghum could depend on the moral pressure of kinship obligation.

Despite increasing monetization and the growing role of the market, a reciprocity based on “gifts” traveling along the paths of kinship from those with surplus to those in need was still a crucial element in the distribution of the social product. For such a system of distribution to work it was of course essential that people accepted that they did indeed have an inescapable obligation to make their surplus available to their kin, an obligation that was part of the wide-ranging concept of mushingi (respect). One aspect of mushingi, for instance, was the general acceptance that, while people tended to work on their own, the products of these individualized labor processes did not belong in any absolute way to the individual producer. In other words, individuals were not seen, and did not see themselves, as having unfettered rights to what they produced. Rather each producer was surrounded by a host of relatives all with some kind of potential claim to a share of his or her surplus, claims described in terms of the obligation to show mushingi. Let me go back to the complaint by Banyinyita I have already quoted in chapter 3.

We Kaonde people used to live very differently. In those days elders were given a lot of respect [mushingi]. We are not given that respect. It seems the world has changed, they say Zambia now. This is how we lived in those days: we lived in villages with respect. Have you seen people respected nowadays? In those days we used to be given breast meat as gifts [i.e., if a hunter killed an animal]. The young people used to bring us breast meat.

Another elderly headman in Kibala, Mukulu, also stressed the obligation of seniors (bakulumpe) to share with juniors (banyike). In the past, he told me, those headmen who were hunters did not sell the meat when they killed an animal but gave much of it away to those living in their village.

If you kill an animal, you as an elder [mukulumpe] have to give them meat because they are your children [bana; figuratively, all those belonging to a village are the headman's bana]…you have to share with your children in the village.

Mushingi ran both ways along the mukulumpe/mwanyike relationship. Banyinyita may have stressed the obligation of the young to their elders, but, as is implicit in Mukulu's explanation, banyike (juniors) also had legitimate claims on their elders. It was not, however, the weight of moral obligation alone that persuaded people to redistribute their surplus. “Gifts” were also a way of building up concrete relationships of obligation that could be called on in the future when those with surplus might themselves be in need. The distribution of surplus to kin was in part an investment in the creation and maintenance of a network of relations that both constituted the only way of establishing some kind of security for an inherently unpredictable future and beyond bare survival could also be the foundation for the creation of a power network. Mushingi can be seen as a way of naming a key mechanism within a “culture” of generalized reciprocity through which certain economic and political relations produced and reproduced themselves. Like any “culture” this culture of reciprocity needed to be continually produced and reproduced through being lived by individuals in their daily lives. Although relatives might have claims on one another simply by virtue of their kinship relation, the transformation of these nominal claims into something more tangible required that these claims be, as it were, continually reactivated through actual material flows and displays of deference.

Given a distribution system that relied so heavily on the diffuse, unbounded, and ever-shifting but always binding obligations of kinship, there were bound to be struggles around access to surplus. Inevitably there was something of a structural tension between those claiming a share of some surplus and those on whom such claims were made. The definition of what constituted a “surplus,” could itself be a source of contention; what a producer might see as no more than a bare sufficiency could look like more than enough to a hungry relative. And claims to surplus were not limited to basic consumption needs; money to pay school fees, medical expenses, or even help with some business venture were all potentially legitimate claims. For instance, Desa, an elderly widow in Bukama (one of the group of three widows whom I have already mentioned in connection with the Bukama Multi-Purpose Co-operative Society) had in the past engaged in various business ventures in the course of which she had made use of a car belonging to the son of one of her matrikin. When I asked if Desa had perhaps had to pay something for this, those listening obviously found my question absurd. Very patiently Mukwetu explained to me that since the father of the car owner was Desa's (classificatory) sibling, in a sense the car also belonged to Desa; of course she had access to it. Although over time various socially accepted strategies to limit these kinds of claims by kin have evolved, the form they took tended to be that of concealing the extent of surplus that existed. I have never in any of my trips to North-Western Province heard anyone question the basic moral principle that people have a claim to the surplus produced by their kin.

The ties of kinship that were so crucial, indeed precisely because they were so crucial, contained within them a profound ambivalence. On the one hand, it was to their kin that people in Kibala and Bukama automatically and invariably looked for both material and emotional support; it was kin to whom people turned when they had run short of food or anything else—and in the absence of a state-provided safety net kin were essentially the only recourse people had. On the other hand, precisely because the web of kinship obligation was so diffuse and unbounded and yet so binding, inevitably kin could be seen as not having fulfilled their obligations, as having deprived their relatives of what was morally theirs—particularly since individuals were likely to be faced with a number of competing claims by different relatives. The demands of kinship were so all-encompassing that, as people very well knew, it was virtually impossible for any ordinary mortal to fulfill them all to the satisfaction of everyone. Consequently, relatives tended to be profoundly suspicious of one another. Whether or not this suspicion was openly expressed or remained latent, the web of kinship always cast an ambivalent shadow. And one of the explicit forms such suspicion took was accusations of bulozhi. As Sansoni put it,

the most feared ones [i.e., as balozhi] are the relatives because they know them very well, they know how they live, they know how they eat, they have known them from their childhood up to their growth time. That's how the fear comes in.

And what people tended to be especially suspicious of was wealth. For instance, when I asked Sansoni what kind of people were likely to be accused of bulozhi, he began his answer by saying,

the first ones to be accused [of witchcraft] are those who have achieved something in their lifetime, because most local people think that someone cannot build a ten-roomed house, to them it is impossible, or they cannot believe someone can have a car. Local people do not think anyone can have a very big shop so if they see that you have a shop, then they will say, “No, that one he has used witchcraft to obtain such a thing”. If you buy a car they will say, “Ah no”, they will accuse you of witchcraft.

Just as the people of Kibala and Bukama were distrustful of exceptional skill, so too were they suspicious of exceptional wealth. The feeling that wealth could only be acquired through some form of bulozhi, or at least required the possession of some kind of bwanga or muchi, could extend to very minor successes. Nearly everyone kept a few chickens, which were not given any special feeding or care, and apart from being shut away safely at night were left free to forage around the homestead and reproduce themselves as best they could. As might be expected, the mortality rate was high; only the toughest survived. There was one man in Kibala who was noted for his large number of chickens, a success that more than a few in Kibala saw as clearly linked to the possession of some special, and possibly dubious, muchi.

There was then a distrust of any accumulation of wealth, and of those who had in any way raised themselves up above their fellows. Any such accumulation, people seemed to feel, must have been achieved at the expense of others—a way of thinking that can be linked to the reality that the distribution of the social product did indeed depend to such an important extent on those in need having access to the surplus of those (however temporally) more fortunate. Given the absence of a state-provided safety net, if those with surplus did not make it available to those in need, how were the latter to survive? Those with surplus who did not redistribute it, those who, as it were, denied the culture of reciprocity, were a profound threat to the system as a whole. One way this threat was imagined was in the form of balozhi, who in a grotesque reversal of kinship reciprocity kill their kin to create wealth for themselves. There were, for instance, the suspicions that surrounded Temwa, Kibala's richest man, who, as I described in the last chapter, so eagerly embraced the LIMA program. Many people, it seemed, were convinced that Temwa was killing children, whom he then put in his maize sacks to swell them—a wonderfully powerful and vivid image of the entrepreneurial accumulator. I will come back to Temwa and how his attempts to take advantage of new economic opportunities were seen by others in Kibala in the final section of this chapter.

Living with Mushingi

If exceptional prosperity was one sign of the mulozhi, another was age itself. In local eyes there was a strong association between age and bulozhi. After explaining how “the first to be accused are those who have achieved something in their lifetime,” Sansoni went on to say,

The other thing [apart from having become prosperous] that causes people to call other people witches is when they develop white hair on their heads. This is very common. You find someone who maybe grew up in town when he comes to the village with hair white on the head, if anything wrong happens in the village, like a child passing away, then they will say, “That one is the one who is a witch.” So the most common characteristic is the age of someone; if he becomes old definitely that name [i.e., witch] is there. Even us who are still growing, that name we are expecting it will be given to us.

Similarly, when I was trying to explain to one woman in Kibala how in Britain there were relatively far fewer children than in Zambia, but many more old people, her response was, “Here we would just accuse all those old people of being balozhi.”

The identification of old people as balozhi—apart from throwing an interesting light on the sometimes romanticized picture of attitudes to the old in rural Africa—contained two rather different images of the mulozhi. On the one hand, there was the elderly, but powerful, male authority figure, the headman, the chief; on the other hand, there was the lonely, old woman, often living by herself with no place in any of the formal power hierarchies. Each of these images of the mulozhi can be seen as reflecting tensions around the obligation to show mushingi (respect) to bakulumpe (elders). Both images, I would argue, can be seen in fact as distorted mirror images of the mukulumpe/mwanyike hierarchy. Through such mirror images we can perhaps catch a glimpse of what the obligations bound up in mushingi could feel like to those living them.

I want to begin with the image of the mulozhi as a poverty-stricken old woman (kakulukazhi). The figure of the aged crone—this figure seems always to be female—who lives alone, often deep in the bush, poor and neglected, too old to look after her house or herself properly, appears in many bishimi. A common narrative has two protagonists, both young (mwanyike), who while traveling through the bush come across a pitiful old woman living in squalor. She asks them to help her, to sweep her house clear of its accumulated filth, cook her some food, and so on. One of the protagonists is kind to the old woman, willingly performing the rather demeaning tasks, and in return the old woman provides the dutiful (since the old [bakulumpe] should be shown such mushingi) youngster with some kind of special knowledge, sometimes in the form of an actual object such as a magic feather and sometimes simply instructions. Armed with this knowledge the virtuous protagonist overcomes various obstacles and dangers and acquires an eligible husband or wife, great riches, and generally prospers. This virtuous one is then contrasted with the second protagonist, of the same sex and again young, who takes exactly the same journey, meets the same old woman but scorns her and refuses to help her, and in consequence is not given the crucial knowledge. As a result, in the adventures that follow, which again are precisely those of the first character, this arrogant and foolish person instead of finding riches and happiness meets only trials and tribulations, sometimes even death.

The ambivalent image of the old woman beneath whose repulsive outward appearance lurk potent forces, and who if treated well can reward with riches but can also punish if she is denied proper mushingi, reflects a general ambivalence toward the old. On the one hand, everyone acknowledged that the old should be shown mushingi. While their physical powers might have declined, they were the ones with the greatest knowledge and wisdom—although, as I have stressed, knowledge itself had a certain ambivalence, always tending to carry the taint of having been acquired illegitimately through bulozhi. On the other hand, given the continuing significance of distribution mechanisms based on the claims of kinship, those who still had a whole range of claims, but were no longer able to produce much with which to reciprocate could well be seen as something of a burden and simply as a hungry mouth demanding food.

This kind of ambivalence toward the old is present to some extent in all forms of society, especially when there is no welfare state to provide a safety net. It is likely, however, to be particularly extreme when, as here, those who are older (the bakulumpe) had such powerful and indisputable claims to mushingi from those who are younger, and given that mushingi meant not merely verbal “respect” or a respectful demeanor, but the giving of goods and services. Contradictory feelings toward the old inevitably create a considerable space for feelings of guilt, feelings that an elderly relative has been wronged. Such guilt is easily projected onto the one wronged to become transformed into a conviction that he or she harbors resentment. Add to this the occurrence of some misfortune and, in an environment in which bulozhi was always hovering in the air, it was easy to suspect such slighted kin of practicing bulozhi.

Despite the general condemnation of bulozhi, there was always some moral ambiguity, with the illegitimate use of such powers tending to shade into their legitimate defensive use. Given this and the way belief in bulozhi suffused people's day-to-day lives, it is perhaps not so surprising that some people would admit to having and using such “knowledge,” or at least would make veiled threats. One woman in Bukama, for instance, threatened her ex-husband, a well known local hunter whom she felt should still give her gifts of meat, that he should be careful or he would “see” something when he next went hunting. To local ears this was a clear threat of bulozhi, for which she was taken to Chief Chizela's court. The way the elderly and impoverished might use such threats to defend themselves is illustrated by a story Mukwetu told me about Kwanayanga, an elderly woman living in Bukama who had been divorced for many years. Everyone in Bukama, it seemed, agreed that Kwanayanga was a dangerous mulozhi. When I went to her home in Bukama to record bishimi, one of the women who worked for me remarked how she would never go there for fear of Kwanayanga's tuyebela.

Kwanayanga and the Stolen Maize

Late one evening in 1987, the year before I came to Bukama, Kwanayanga was returning home after visiting her daughters in the district center. It was January, the height of the hunger season, when most people have finished last year's grain and this year's is not yet ripe. Kwanayanga was alone and on foot, and carrying a small sack of maize given her by a daughter married to a wage earner. When she was still some way from home, she became too tired to carry the maize any farther and left it by the side of the road, intending to return for it the following day. Before she could do so, however, a local man, Miyenga, happened to pass by and, seeing the apparently abandoned sack, carried it off. When she returned to collect her maize Kwanayanga was furious to discover it gone. On her way back home she announced to everyone within earshot that whoever had stolen her maize would surely die.

Meanwhile Miyenga had also returned home, but in the opposite direction to Kwanayanga so no one had heard her threats. Miyenga gave the stolen maize to his wife who, fortunately as it transpired, did not cook any of it immediately since she too had just collected a sack from the district center. That night there was a terrible storm and Miyenga's house was hit by lightning—a not uncommon occurrence during the rainy season. No one was killed, but everyone in the house was thrown out and Miyenga himself received a burn on the side of his head and down one arm. In the morning Miyenga, who was by now badly frightened (balozhi are commonly believed to use lightning to attack their victims) and fearing something worse might happen, went to the Chief, in whose farm village he was living, and told him the whole story, including his “finding” of the bag of maize. Some of those listening realized this must have been Kwanayanga's maize and she was summoned to the chief's presence. Asked by the chief if she was the one who had caused the lightning, Kwanayanga was unrepentant; indeed she had and it was a good thing Miyenga had not actually eaten any of the maize since if he had he would now not merely be burnt but dead. She defended her action by saying that she was old now and no longer able to cultivate properly and so depended on the food given her by her children in the district center. The chief gave judgment that as Miyenga was clearly in the wrong for having stolen the maize, Kwanayanga could not be punished in any way and she simply departed with her maize, having presumably provided a powerful lesson to all potential thieves.

If Kwanayanga illustrates the stereotype of the mulozhi as a poverty-stricken old woman, the stereotype of the elderly male mulozhi seemed to be particularly associated with male authority figures, such as headmen and chiefs. All the village headmen in Kibala, for instance, had at one time or another been suspected of using bulozhi, and Chief Chizela, as befitted his seniority (he was the ultimate mukulumpe), was said to have the most powerful bwanga of all. In the context of acknowledged authority figures the line between legitimate and illegitimate use of such powers was particularly blurred, tending to depend on the vantage point of the observer. This ambiguity can be seen as mirroring the generally blurred nature of the limits and legitimacy of the authority of headmen and chiefs. When I asked one headman (who was described to me as one of the most dangerous mulozhi in Kibala) about how headmen established a following that would enable them to set up a new village (muzhi), he told me, “Love. The people love him. He is humble. He likes people, “these are my bankasami [young siblings], these are mybakolojami [older siblings], let them come and live together” ” (Kibala, 7.viii.88, TK). The point here is not that the headman/junior kin relationship, either before or after colonization, was a totally benevolent relationship in which exploitation and oppression of various kinds never existed, but that Kaonde headmen probably always had rather limited powers of coercion. Compelling their relatives to live with them was simply not feasible, especially given their lack of control over access to land. Someone who was unhappy living under a particular headman always had the option of leaving him and settling elsewhere. Normally people always had a wide range of relatives from which to choose. Consequently a Kaonde headman's power probably always depended to a great extent on his skills in attaching his kinsmen and women to him; and as far as local people were concerned, these skills were likely to include not merely his ability to inspire love, but bulozhi.

It was assumed that an effective headman would almost certainly have special powers. Apart from anything else, how otherwise was he able to withstand the attacks of those under his authority—and inevitably since bulozhi was so pervasive, there must be some among them—who were themselves balozhi? As Mukwetu put it to me in a slightly different context:

It is like this, if you are boasting, you say bad things to old people…now people they will say, “Now, this one must have something [i.e., bulozhi]”…because you know that if you don't have anything, you don't have anything like jilomba and tuyebela…how can you insult somebody whom you know has got jilomba, tuyebela or nyalumanyi?^[10] Yes, you can fear to say, “No, if I insult this one he may kill me.” But if you know that you have also got something, then you can insult your friend.

To a local audience any kind of verbal or other expression of power was almost bound to suggest that people daring enough to assert themselves must have “something.” So too, it seemed to be agreed, must headmen, who by definition claimed authority.

The relative economic autonomy of households meant that individual households, at least in the short term, had no compelling economic need to combine with others in a village. At the same time, an individual's future security depended on their having built up an active network of kinship ties, particularly with those likely to have surpluses to distribute. Putting oneself under the protection of more prosperous senior kin by moving to live with them was one way of doing this. The powerful attraction of prosperity was brought home to me during my Kasempa fieldwork when I was walking one day with a young man, Kiboyi. As we passed one settlement my companion told me how he used to live there and what a wonderful place it was and how much he had enjoyed his time there. With my Western assumptions I asked him if this meant that the people were especially nice. Looking at me with a slightly puzzled air he replied, “No, there was always plenty to eat.”

Even if people in Kibala and Bukama did not tend to join together in productive enterprises, they nonetheless took it for granted that the normal way for human beings to live was embedded deep within a community of kin. Those kin need not live in a single settlement, rather they were bound together inextricably in an interlocking mesh of hierarchical mukulumpe/mwanyike relationships. That was what, as my elderly neighbor in Kasempa (see above, p. 87) made clear to me, distinguished human beings from brute beasts. As the most senior kinsman within a community, a headman was owed a particular mushingi, which of course included goods and labor. The lament of Kyakala, which I have already quoted in the previous chapter, shows us, albeit in a negative form, something of how the obligations associated with mushingi gave a headman claims on any surplus produced by all those within his village.

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.…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.…In the olden days someone who killed an animal first thought of the headman or his parents for fear of being punished.

However, although it might be agreed that a headman should be given mushingi (respect), there was plenty of room for debate as to what this meant in any specific context. Also, however hegemonic the obligation to show mushingi this did not mean that those in subordinate positions were never resentful of their subordination and never had feelings of hostility toward particular headmen. At the same time, prosperity, which ought of course to be shared with others, exerted its own attraction, as illustrated by Kiboyi's fond memories of plenty. Even this attraction, however, was not incompatible with a certain distrust; there was always the question of quite how such wealth had been obtained, just as generosity could always be seen to fall short. In sum, the headman could be both the benevolent provider and the authoritarian senior relative, selfishly withholding his surplus and coercing (possibly in the form of labor or material goods) “respect.” This negative aspect could be expressed in the image of the devouring mulozhi who kills relatives for personal gain.

Forms of accumulation based on the claims of kinship were still a part of the economic and political landscape of 1980s rural Chizela, but increasingly monetization, commoditization, and the growing importance of market-based relations in general have opened up spaces for other forms of accumulation. These spaces have become new sources of tension in part because of the threat they offer to the old mechanisms of distribution based on mushingi. Ensuring security in case of future hardships, for instance, can now to some extent be achieved through savings, possibly stored safely in the post office, and not, as prior to monetization and incorporation into the national economy, solely through the building up of networks of obligation. For the ambitious there are now alternatives to old patterns of “accumulation” whereby surplus through the giving of “gifts” was, as it were, invested in kin so as to create networks of dependents to whose future surpluses the accumulator headman had claims. Monetization means that it is possible to transform surplus into capital; fish, for instance can be bought locally and sold in town, or manufactured goods can be bought in town for resale in the rural areas. Cash can be used to buy the fertilizer and other inputs necessary for “modern farming,” and to purchase labor power to be used in “modern farming” enterprises. The chairman of one of the LIMA groups in Kibala referred to this new form of accumulation when I asked him about the differences between the old patterns of cultivation and something like the LIMA scheme.

We used to grow sorghum to feed ourselves, but now we grow maize to sell with the idea that this money can be used the following year to extend one's lima. That's the difference.…If you have money and many lima it's not money that will do the work; you give it to someone to do the work, because if you just put K1 here it will not do any work, you have to give it to someone.

While there have always been tensions and contradictions over the distribution of surplus, the new economic opportunities for individual accumulation, however modest in absolute terms, have created a whole range of new, and rather different, conflicts of interest. Although kinship claims and the honoring of them still played a crucial role in the survival strategies of many individuals in Kibala and Bukama, the context in which these claims were made was changing; they were now having to compete with the siren call of capitalist forms of accumulation. Not surprisingly those trying to take advantage of the new economic opportunities tended to be accused of bulozhi. In the final section of this chapter I want to illustrate the local association between the newer forms of accumulation and bulozhi through the story of Kibala's foremost entrepreneur, Temwa. Temwa, whose keen embrace of the LIMA program I described in the previous chapter, was the most prosperous man in Kibala, but he was also a lonely and isolated figure with a fearsome local reputation as a mulozhi.

My biography of Temwa is taken from the narrative of his life as he himself recounted it to me (Kibala, 24.viii.88, TK). When I visited him to record his life history I began by explaining that I was particularly interested in his story because his way of life seemed so different from that of others in Kibala. How had he achieved his obvious prosperity? The narrative of his life, much of which was given to me in the form of a single uninterrupted monologue, was at one level a response to this question. He began in fact by remarking (before the tape recorder was switched on) how my curiosity about his success demonstrated my superior understanding, and how most people in Kibala would never bother to ask such a question but would just assume that it was all the result of bulozhi. These suspicions that attached themselves to Temwa are not only revealing about bulozhi beliefs; they also tell us a good deal about the ideology of kinship reciprocity. Part of what bulozhi represented in local eyes was precisely a grotesque perversion of this reciprocity.

The Story of an Entrepreneur

Temwa was born in Kibala in 1936. He never went to school, something he now very much regrets.

For me it was not given by God. I did not go to school; I liked where my father was rather than where there was a school. We did not know that there is wealth and goodness in education.

As soon as he was old enough, at the age of fifteen, Temwa went to town to try his luck in the urban labor market, and during the next three years he worked mainly in town. He then returned to Kibala, where he has lived ever since. He used the savings from his second stay in town to buy a bicycle and began trading in fish, buying dried fish from nearby fish camps that he then sold in one of the local urban markets.

Over the next few years his business prospered. He began taking his fish as far as Solwezi, the provincial capital. There he would buy manufactured goods, which he would bring back and resell locally. He also began taking his fish across the border into Zaire where he would buy two-meter lengths of cloth (an indispensable item of dress for all adult women throughout Zambia's rural areas), which he would then smuggle back to Zambia where they were much in demand. In 1966 Temwa began selling the goods he was buying in Solwezi from his house in Kibala. It was at this point that he obtained a trading license. As he became more prosperous he built himself a succession of larger and more substantial houses. First there was a house that still had a grass roof but was of sun-dried bricks; soon, however, the grass roof was replaced by more prestigious iron sheets. Temwa explained to me how he got the idea to “live better.” In his travels around North-Western Province selling fish, he saw the way other groups were living and this impressed him very much, especially the Luvale houses.^[11]

When we went to Kabompo at the time we used the car for fish trading, I saw that their [i.e., the Luvale] houses are built differently. When I saw that those who were living there were blacks just like us, I said I would also do the same. This thing was in my heart. Whenever I came back from there I carried a chair. Whenever I went to Solwezi I would come back with a chair. I saw that the Luvale people were living well and I said I would also live like them.…The difference between me and my friends [i.e., in terms of living standards] is because I work very hard. You cannot just sit and expect God to give things to you. You go and see how others have built their houses. I saw a house with glass windows; they were cleaning them and I said, “I too will have a house with glass.” I admired whatever was good and decided I should have them too.

Temwa also bought a sewing machine with which he made women's and children's clothes, and by 1968 he had saved enough to put down a deposit on a car, taking out a loan in the name of a relative in town. The car lasted for five years—about the maximum that can be expected of any vehicle on the rough, untarred roads of North-Western Province. This was the period of Zambia's postindependence prosperity and Temwa's fortunes were at their height.

I started buying many things using the vehicle and bringing them back here.…People were just fighting to buy them. I could go to Kitwe, Chingola and buy things from Tops Wholesale.^[12]

He also bought more iron roofing sheets with the idea of building more houses and extending his shop. With the car, transport was easy: “I could just pack them into my car with the Coca-Cola.” And indeed in 1988 his homestead stood out from others in Kibala by its general air of prosperity. The majority of houses in Kibala were simple pole-and-dagga structures with here and there one built from sun-dried bricks, normally with a grass roof. Temwa, however, had managed to construct three large cement-reinforced houses, and all with that much-desired marker of true modernity and wealth, the corrugated iron roof.

It was in the early seventies that Temwa began to face difficulties. In 1972, even before the demise of his car, there was a problem with the price control inspectors. At that time the retail prices of almost all goods were, in theory at least, strictly controlled—although the government's power to enforce this was always limited, particularly given the chronic shortages of so many essential commodities. In common with many small village shopkeepers Temwa was marking up his goods considerably more than the tiny amount officially allowed; there were complaints to the district authorities and a visit from the price control inspectors, and Temwa's trading license was revoked. This brush with authority thoroughly unnerved Temwa and he immediately ceased trading. As might be expected, Temwa defended his profit margins and put the blame for his troubles on “jealous relatives.” Temwa brought up the subject when I asked him how despite being illiterate he managed to keep a check on the profits and losses of his businesses. In answering this Temwa stressed that his lack of education had not hampered him from running his shop profitably, partly because in this he was helped by his literate children; no, it was only when it came to the bureaucratic regulations that he had run into problems and his enemies had been able to exploit his ignorance.

God gave me business sense and a knowledge of how to keep money.…When I bought things I would call one of my children and we would go through and see how much I had spent so that I would know how much profit I had made. The children helped me very much, even when I was packing things I would call my children to put on the price cards [the price regulations stated that all goods offered for sale must have a price shown]. This was from God. I was not making a loss. It was not that people were able to cheat me because I am not educated, no. I would know that I had bought things worth so much and will get so much profit. My children were helping me to check the prices. My problems with selling began when the price controllers came…and this was all because of not going to school.…I did not fail [in business] because I am not educated, I failed because of the price controllers. I was just selling at reasonable prices, but my relatives here in Kibala were jealous.…They saw that I had a lot of things and they did not know how I had managed to achieve this.

In addition to his trading activities, Temwa was also committing to growing crops for sale. In the last chapter I described how enthusiastically he embraced the coming of the IRDP and “the Germans.” As in the case of his other enterprises, Temwa attributed some of his problems with the LIMA scheme to others who were ill-disposed or lazy. “The [LIMA] group failed because the others were not working hard on the land; I was the only one working hard.” Temwa, however, insisted he was not discouraged. He even had plans to open his shop again and had applied for a new trading license, saying, “If God wishes then I will continue with the business.”

Temwa's account of his life did not mention any of his various marriages, and this was clearly a subject Temwa did not want to talk about. I did discover that he had had at least five marriages that had produced children, and I was told by others in Kibala that there had been a number of other marriages, but it was difficult to get a sense of the role played by his wives in his various business activities. Temwa did in a rather oblique way seem to refer to his somewhat troubled marital history when he was explaining some of his mother's bishimi, as in the following general complaint about modern women.

There is a difference in modern living and that of the old days because in the old days there was respect [mushingi]. Women were respectful; when they got married they married with respect. It's different now; these days they just meet on the road and get married. Then you just hear they have divorced. The woman just lives with the man for one day and the following day she leaves. Because they have not been taught by their mothers to stay with their husbands…women are difficult now, whether you keep her well or not, it's just the same.

From what others told me it was clear that while Temwa's unions were not very long-lived, he had had many wives, and was usually married—although never polygamously.

There had been tensions between Temwa and a number of his kin. Originally Temwa had lived in the village of Mwalu, but he and headman Mwalu, Temwa's mwisho (mother's brother), had quarreled, and Mwalu and most of the village had shifted to a site some half a kilometer away, Temwa being left in what was a de facto village, although not recognized as a “real” one (muzhi mwine). Later when I moved from Kibala to Bukama I came across another piece of Temwa's history. My house in Bukama turned out to be very close to that of one of Temwa's younger brothers (a biological sibling), Webster. Until 1982 Webster had lived in Kibala together with Temwa, but that year he and his wife had fled from Kibala, accusing Temwa of killing their children with bulozhi. Apparently, several of their children had died, another had been sick for a long time, and both husband and wife were convinced that Temwa was murdering their children in order to enrich himself still further. After leaving Kibala, on the advice of Chief Chizela, they and their surviving children had settled at Bukama, where Webster's wife had some relatives. Both husband and wife were quite adamant that if they and their family had not left Kibala, all their children would now be dead.

The two brothers Temwa and Webster were very different in character. Webster seemed to have none of his brother's driving ambition. Webster and his wife, like most of the other Bukama settlers, had continued cultivating in much the same way they did in Kibala: growing sorghum for their own consumption—although, again in common with many others at Bukama, their harvest was never enough to see them through the year—and a little in the way of LIMA crops, maize and some soya beans, for sale to NWCU. The fields of Webster and his wife were anything but extensive. But while they might not have produced much in the way of surplus, they were very generous with what they did have. I experienced this generosity myself during my time in Bukama, receiving a steady stream of gifts from Webster and his wife: one day a basket of mushrooms, another a comb of wild honey or perhaps a piece of dried game meat or some other local delicacy. It seemed to be agreed by everyone I spoke to in Bukama that both husband and wife were a rare example of the kind of unforced generosity all were supposed to practice but few actually managed. Webster and his wife were also very sociable and were regular attenders at neighborhood beer drinks, another contrast with Temwa, who was a strict teetotaler and seemed seldom to leave his homestead. As far as I could discover neither Webster nor his wife had ever been accused of practicing bulozhi.

One of those who had remained with Temwa when Mwalu village split was Temwa's widowed mother, Inamwana. Renowned in her youth for her strength in cultivation, Inamwana remained a vigorous and hard-working old lady. She, however, like Temwa also had a certain reputation. As Sansoni explained,

The allegation that [Inamwana] is a witch, it is there. This is generally said by most of the people when they look at the way in which the son is doing the agriculture. Because he is a prominent farmer, producing sometimes 30, 40, 50 bags, so now the hard work that Temwa does has caused the combination of the mother and the son, [it is said] that the mother is assisting the son that they are practicing magic.

After disassociating himself from this kind of reasoning, Sansoni went on to explain the rationale behind the suspicion.

Sansoni:

Because of her own hard work she puts in, most of the time she does not run out of food, so now people accuse her saying, “No, she is using some medicines when doing the farming.”

Crehan:

So this is another suspicious thing, when someone doesn't run out of food in the hungry months?

Sansoni:

So that's one suspicion, when you do not go at all for food [i.e., have to buy food] during the hungry periods, because they will say that you used to get your friends' food. That's the food you were feeding on, then the food you had produced was kept safe. In other words, with some magic you were getting some maize from somewhere so the other friends are out of food because of the magic that was being practised.

However much Temwa himself might insist that his prosperity was due to hard work and God having given him “business sense and a knowledge of how to keep money,” this was not how others in Kibala interpreted his prosperity. As Temwa himself was only too well aware, to most in Kibala his obvious determination to pull himself up from his local roots and establish himself as a successful farmer and businessman was in itself the clear mark of the mulozhi.

Those that work hard are the ones they point at as balozhi, those who work very hard and produce enough food. They just say, “s/he is using bwanga [substance or knowledge associated with bulozhi]”. Even now they are saying that the person who has a lot of maize is a mulozhi who is putting children in his maize sacks [i.e., killing other people's children to increase the yield]. But me I am not discouraged, because I know that these people are simply backward.

Temwa has clearly paid a heavy price for his entrepreneurial drive. Despite his material prosperity, he was a lonely and isolated man. Something of his pain came through in his account of his life, as when he told me: “Truly, I know now that it was just lies when some of the elders were told they were balozhi. Some died from sorrow. Yes bulozhi exists, but some people are not balozhi ” (24.viii.88, TK). In a community where hospitality and sociability were so highly valued, he remained unvisited, almost shunned by his neighbors. Sansoni, who lived in Temwa's homestead for about a year, confirmed how almost no one visited him. Despite all his brave efforts to legitimate his economic ambitions—not only to an outsider like myself but also probably to himself—Temwa clearly suffered from the hostility with which he was regarded. In church once, I was told, he burst out in an angry denunciation of his fellow Christians within the Evangelical Church of Zambia (ECZ), who so unjustly ignore him.

A key thread running through Temwa's account of his life, as the passages I have quoted illustrate, was his identification of himself as a Christian. His Christian faith was central to his legitimation of himself and his way of life. It was his sense of living according to the fundamental truths of Christianity that seemed to give him strength to withstand the accusations of his neighbors. He told me, for instance,

God was with me when I was doing business in Solwezi. By taking fish to Solwezi I had made a good profit.…I was the first one to start a business here. The others who started earlier could not compete with me; God would not help them because they chased me from their shop.^[13] To me God was generous.

Not only did Temwa see his business career as divinely inspired and God as being on his side, he also saw himself as living in accordance with the government's gospel of development. For Temwa, it seemed, the precepts of church and government were virtually synonymous.

The Bible says we should not go and drink beer early in the day. That is why from my childhood on I wanted to do one job, to believe and to grow more food.

Temwa's church, the ECZ, which originated as the South African General Mission, draws on a fundamentalist Protestant tradition. However, the significance of Christianity for a would-be entrepreneur like Temwa, I would argue, lies less in the specifics of this particular brand of Christianity than in the general individualist ethos that was common to all the missionary churches. The point here is that all the different missionary institutions of the colonial and postcolonial period, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Jehovah's Witness, were the products of market-based societies, and entangled with their explicit religious messages are a powerful set of assumptions about individuals, individual responsibility, and what individuals can properly expect of society—all assumptions rooted in the basic structuring relationships of commodity-based societies. A phrase that Temwa used, and which I have heard from many entrepreneurs in rural Zambia, is “God helps those who help themselves.” It is easy to understand the attractions of this sturdy individualism for those trying to accumulate and to break free of their relatives' continual claims on their surplus. From the vantage point of those within the community of kin who see such entrepreneurial enterprise as only possible through the unjust hoarding of wealth that should be redistributed, however, such self-help can look more like the mulozhi who fills his maize sacks with the bones of dead children.

In this chapter I have taken bulozhi beliefs as providing a window through which it is possible to glimpse something of how the people of Kibala and Bukama imagined their social universe. The discourse on bulozhi gave people a language with which they could talk about and explain misfortune of any and every kind. It was those actual misfortunes that provided people with what they saw as irrefutable evidence of the reality of bulozhi. That people found this evidence so compelling is indicative, I would argue, of the extent to which local realities were viewed through a lens of kinship. Let me be clear here. As I have already stressed, I am not saying that the discourse on bulozhi was some kind of rigid and unchanging survival. Like any living language, the language of bulozhi was dynamic and was continuing to be pushed in various directions by people's need to describe new social realities. What I am saying is that the most fundamental assumptions about the nature of human society on which the whole elaborated discourse on bulozhi rest were intimately bound up with certain economic and political relations organized through kinship. At the same time, this powerful discourse also had an autonomy of its own: in 1980s rural Chizela it was part of people's basic mental furniture; it was how misfortune had been named to them from their earliest years. Its hegemonic power to explain why something had gone wrong was such that when misfortune hit, even those like Kibala's clinical officer who claimed to have escaped from such “superstition” (see above, p. 190) seemed to find it almost impossible to think outside it. Nonetheless, it seems to me that ultimately the emotional power of bulozhi—why people found it so persuasive as an explanation of misfortune—can be linked to a similarly deep-rooted belief in the inescapable obligations of kinship. For the people of Kibala and Bukama a belief in the fundamental role of kinship in structuring human society was one of those “fundamental social evaluations conditioned by the very being of a given collective” referred to by Bakhtin. What bulozhi represented was the shadowed underside of the bonds of kinship. Bulozhi was kinship reflected in a dark, distorted mirror. What I have tried to do in this chapter is to look into that mirror to show something of how a life embedded within the hegemony of the community of kin was experienced, and something of how the people of Kibala and Bukama named that experience.

Notes