Early Colonialism and Ethnic Stigmatization

There is little recent ethnographic literature on the Lamba or their neighbours. The two more recent accounts, with their emphasis upon acculturation, social

development and the traditional obstacles to modernity, accurately capture the anthropological preoccupation of the 1960s. Yet they contain valuable comparative information. Bourgeois, for example, describes the Lamba (together with the Seba, Lima and Swaka) as far more 'wild' and 'shy' (farouche ), 'mistrustful' (méfiant ), 'independent', and historically reluctant to seek urban employment than the other Katangan ethnic groups. He even mentions that the Luba of Lubumbashi consider the Lamba to be 'dirty' (sale ), 'ignorant' and 'lazy' (fainéant ),^[9] Van Waelvelde's study of Chief Kaponda's Seba is in much the same vein, focusing upon their suspicious mistrust of 'strangers,' regardless of their race:

For the Lamba, the civil authority is a force which tries to interfere in their own affairs. It never brings about anything good . . . This being the case, the Lamba often dream of living in some lost valley without roads or passage. There they live very primitively, but they are fond of this liberty, this tranquillity, one might say, their own sense of independence.

All development programmes clash with this desire for liberty and mistrust of authority. If one wants to build a social hall, erect a public service building, etc., one need not expect anenthusiastic reception. Psychologically, when the beni [strangers to the clan, in other words, the civil authority, townsfolk, whether white or natives] appear, it is when they have designs upon the residents, and they are never to the residents' advantage.^[10]

While these similar accounts of Lamba character are interesting in themselves, it is even more interesting to note that Europeans have described the Zairean and Zambian Lamba in remarkably similar, derogatory terms for the last 80 years or more: those in old Katanga as shy or wild, mistrustful and independent; and those in Northern Rhodesia as timid, lazy and backward. Furthermore, these stigmatizing Lamba stereotypes have not been confined to Europeans alone. African townsfolk on both sides of the Copperbelt have shared essentially similar invidious stereotypes about the Lamba for at least the last 40 years. Assuming that the Lamba neither were nor are inherently 'wild' or 'lazy', how were these stereotypes first established?

Given the circumstances in Ilamba around the turn of the century and their experiences of raids and attacks, it is not surprising that the early European traders, prospectors, colonial officers and labour recruiters came to regard the Lamba and their neighbours as wild, timid or mistrustful. They had every reason to behave in such a manner and very probably did. Villagers simply fled whenever 'strangers' came their way, and this, according to Captain Verdick's account of the 1897–98 campaign against Chiwala's Swahili, seems to have been the typical Lamba response:

There are several reasons why the [Lamba] natives leave their villages so precipitously: the fact of their disrupted way of life; the caravan men having become too demanding; the headmen or his subjects having committed some misdeeds; the diviner perhaps predicting some some calamity should they remain in the village during the sojourn of the Whites; the fear of having their women kidnapped, etc.

But generally one finds the villages deserted, or else a few men to supply you with some misinformation and to guide you further. But in no case do the women remain in the villages if there is any suspicion. It will take a long while to instil in them an absolute confidence in the representatives of the administration.^[11]

The demands of these new administrations, however, were hardly designed to inspire villagers' confidence. Plagued by smallpox and food shortages, they could

ill afford to provide the colonial officers, wild rubber collectors, sorghum traders or labour recruiters with the food, porterage or labourers they desired. Nor could they have been particularly willing to do so, given the strong-arm methods used to secure these demands.

Such methods were probably more common in Katanga, where a 1913 report on labour desertions claims that overly zealous labour recruiters resorted to kidnappings, involuntary conscriptions and even murder. Caught between mutually contradictory demands for food and labourers, the peoples of Katangan Ilamba suffered a continuous cycle of seasonal food shortages up until the mid-1930s.^[12] Similar strong-arm methods were, however, also employed in the enforcement of Northern Rhodesian hut, gun and dog taxes. Larger villages broke up into smaller fragments during this time, and the Lamba chief Kabalu Mushili I even fled to Katanga for a time to escape the corvée road-building projects of the BSAC's officer, J. E. 'Chirupula' (The Flogger) Stephenson. While an outspoken, if eccentric, advocate of the Lamba and Lala chiefs' rights in later years, Bwana Chirupula, 'the Devil's own' (mwana waSatana ), is best remembered for the freewheeling brand of justice he administered with his hippo-hide whip.^[13]

Tax-defaulters were one of Stephenson's biggest problems. Generally speaking, the peoples of Rhodesian Ilamba sought to avoid European tax and labour demands by every peaceful means. Their response of passive resistance best explains how the Lamba and their neighbours acquired their reputation for independence and indolence, as the 1903 BSAC administrative report so clearly suggests:

The Kapopo [Rhodesian Copperbelt] division is inhabited by several tribes, by far the most important being the Walamba. . . . Labour for local work is always plentiful, but it is almost impossible to get these people, who are both indolent and timid, to go long journeys.

The tribes in the Kapopo division, and notably the Walamba, exhibit more criminal tendencies than any others in the portion of the Territory under report. . . . They are untrustworthy, abandoning loads which they have undertaken to carry, or work which they have agreed to do, without the slightest hesitation.^[14]

By the 1910s, however, European mining and farming interests were appropriating ever larger tracts of land, and the peoples of Ilamba had more serious grievances upon which to brood. In Katanga, for example, Seba and Temba chiefs Kaponda and Shindaika protested the loss of fallow garden sites to Elisabethville (Lubumbashi) farmers in 1916. So the Comité Spécial du Katanga, following the South African example, resolved the issue with separate native reserves in the early 1920s, and the lands near Elisabethville and all along the rail line from Ndola were vacated for an anticipated influx of colons agricutteurs .^[15]

Northern Rhodesia soon followed suit. With little to show for the many Copperbelt mineral claims staked in the early 1900s, the BSAC in 1922 opened extensive tracts in southern Ilamba to large-scale mining corporations—but only after reserving to itself the sites which soon became Chingola, Nkana and Chambishi (near Kitwe), and Roan Antelope (Luanshya) copper mines. The British Colonial Office assumed the administration of Northern Rhodesia in 1924, and the Native Reserves Commission began formalizing these land appropriations two years later under the explicit charge 'not to place "any avoidable difficulties in the way of the mineral development of the Territory" '.^[16]

Unfortunately, Chief Mushili's Lamba had no bargaining leverage with the Reserves Commission. Their claims were all ignored. The Lamba lands near Bwana Mkubwa and the Ndola Boma and railway depot had already been appropriated

by Chiwala's Swahili, 'the most expert [maize and rice marketing] agriculturalists in the country'. Thus, when the native reserves were instituted in 1928, old Chiwala's successor, the newly recognized Swahili chief Chiwala II, received a separate Swahili Native Reserve and was promised £910 in land loss compensations, while Lamba chief Chamunda Mushili II's people were removed from the mines and railway corridors and restricted to just 20 per cent of their former area.^[17] To this day, memories of this loss of land and its attendant hardships are the principal focuses of the southern Lamba's internalized sense of grievance and resentment.

The dominant concern in the establishment of the Lamba-Lima Native Reserve was the welfare of the Northern Rhodesian mining industry, the greatest problems of which were shortages of local food and labourers. And these shortages were attributed to the existence of the Lamba village produce trade. Beginning in the 1920s, the Lamba and their neighbours on both sides of the border were beginning to grow and sell substantial amounts of garden produce: sorghum, cassava and sweet potatoes in the main, but also, in the areas nearest the towns, European garden vegetables. Villagers were making new and larger gardens, and those in Northern Rhodesia had been moving their homes and gardens closer to the markets that developed around mines and railway sidings.^[18] Yet these produce supplies were necessarily sporadic and seasonal, and never offered the mines the opportunity to reduce their dependence upon imported southern African maize, the staple food. Yet there is little doubt that this local Lamba produce trade generated sufficient cash to permit those involved in it to avoid farm and mine employment in the earlier phases of the colonial era.

While some of Ilamba's people did seek occasional wage labour, neither the Katangan nor the Rhodesian groups showed enthusiasm for farm or mine employment.^[19] Their reasons for avoiding such employment were complex, and merit mention. The mines and white farmers, first of all, faced the common problem of luring labourers from small and scattered populations to unfavourable working conditions. The work on white farms was undoubtedly more onerous than that required on villagers' own slash-and-burn gardens, and the Katangan Lamba objected to the farms' three-year labour contracts.^[20] All the mines had problems with labour desertions in these early years. But those at Roan Antelope, where the average length of service in 1927 was just three months, were complicated by its high mortality rate and the fact that the local Lamba attributed these deaths to the funkwe, the monstrous water snake of Lamba legend. Roan Antelope, like Mufulira mine, was built on a malarial swamp. Until this swamp was drained in 1929, illness and death were so common that waggish Cape Town railway clerks discouraged European labourers travelling there from buying round-trip tickets. The local Lamba avoided the mines, especially underground work, so most African miners had to be drawn from far more distant areas.^[21]

As in Katanga, Northern Rhodesia's Lamba-Lima Native Reserve was designed to transform this situation by removing the Africans from the lands near the mines and railway corridors. It was meant to leave the Lamba 'undisturbed' while making room for future white fanners. Given the Reserves Commission's recognition of the 'large body of evidence that the native having his home up against a centre of employment tends to become a producer rather than a labourer', it appears as though the Reserve was designed to make produce marketing so difficult that Lamba villagers would be forced to abandon their gardens for farm or mine employment.^[22] The Commission recognized that the colonial demands for Lamba food and labourers, in the final analysis, were mutually contradictory.

The evidence given before the Commission vividly demonstrates how frustrated Europeans had fallen into the habit of blaming the Lamba for their own disappointments. As seen earlier, the Lamba had long been peaceful but never particularly cooperative colonial wards, so this example of Lamba scapegoating was not entirely new. Its tone is perhaps best illustrated by the unhappy testimony of the South African Baptists at Kafulafuta Mission in Chief Mushili's area. With only a dozen or so converts after twenty years of work, these missionaries were bitterly disappointed in the 'lazy,' 'degenerate' Lamba, and their 'lethargic apathy in all things save the grossest sensualism'. The accounts of the Lamba peoples in the Reserves Commission Report are a bit more charitable, but the Lamba nevertheless are viewed as 'backward', 'stupid' and wasteful of land.^[23]

These and other equally subjective judgments on the Lamba cannot be taken at face value. But they do demonstrate that the stigmatizing, ascriptive stereotypes of the 'wild' and 'lazy' Lamba were determined by the unreasonable demands of the colonial social and economic order. This point is best summarized by the perceptive remarks of a Northern Rhodesian colonial officer in 1926:

The local [Lamba] native is not very popular with a number of employers of labour who consider him particularly stupid and dislike his tendency to work only for a month or two at a time. Agricultural products have a ready market in an area with so much mining activity and the local man naturally prefers to get his money in this way by which he can live at home.^[24]