The Lamba in the Northern Rhodesian Towns

Like other late arrivals to the towns, most of the Lamba—75 per cent according to Mitchell's Copperbelt social survey—worked as unskilled labourers. But far more of the Lamba—35 per cent—worked as domestic servants (wash boys, garden boys, house boys or cooks) than any of the other seventeen ethnic groups enumerated. The Ndembu and Ngoni came closest, each with 31 per cent of their males employed in domestic service.^[49]

This Lamba occupational niche in unskilled labour has to be considered in terms of the limited educational, opportunities then available from rival rural mission schools. Six and eight year programmes (Standards IV to VI) did not exist until the late 1940s, and they were initiated by the Franciscan Fathers, the last of the major mission churches to work amongst the Lamba. Thus in my own casual survey of local farm and village residents near Masaiti boma, just 7 per cent of the 60 women born before 1930, and 39 per cent of the 92 men, had had more than two years' schooling; 62 per cent of the women and 50 per cent of the men had had none at all. For this generation, higher education meant a sixth or seventh year teacher training course, either at Musofu (Seventh Day Adventist) Mission, beginning in the late 1920s, or at Ndola Central School, beginning in the late 1930s. And neither of these were in the rural Copperbelt.

The district's dominant mission was that of the South African Baptists who, in 1932, were joined by the Scandinavian Baptists at Mpongwe. The former opened the district's first boys' boarding school at Kafulafuta Mission in 1907 and, thereafter, the 'native evangelists' affiliated with these two groups ran a network of more than a dozen village 'outschools', using Lamba pamphlets printed at Kafulafuta. But until the mid-1930s, the boarding school remained a two-year programme distinguished by a blend of religious and basic Lamba literacy instruction, together with 'industrial' training in brick, plank and furniture making, cattle tending, and fruit and vegetable growing. It is little wonder that some Lamba in every generation now critically regard this very first schooling system as having been little more than a training programme in domestic service (ubukaboi ).^[50]

Through the early 1940s, the wages paid to these bakaboi ('boys')—nearly one-third of the African urban labour force—were competitive with those paid to other African employees. There were, in addition, certain informal benefits attached to such work. Bakaboi were fed on the job. They often had first choice of their employers' castoff clothes, and some received on-site lodging in backyard servants' quarters. And judging from the photographic memorabilia of former Lamba cooks and house boys, domestic servants were able to adopt the same standards of sartorial elegance as the other African townsfolk.

Yet these bakaboi did not enjoy much respect among other urban Africans, at least when measured against the occupational ranking standards of Mitchell's and Epstein's sample of 653 African secondary, teachers' training and technical school students in Lusaka. Domestic servants, like messengers, hotel waiters and hotel boys, had low occupational prestige as compared with secondary teachers, headmasters or police inspectors (very high prestige), senior clerks, primary teachers or artisans (high), or boss boys and lorry drivers (neither high nor low). In their evaluation of thirty-one African occupations, these students ranked domestic servants in twenty-fifth place, and garden boys and scavengers (very low prestige) at the bottom of the scale.^[51]

Thus the Lamba bakaboi— with such colourful occupational names as Kapu (Cup), Foloko (Fork) and Sigaletti (Cigarette)—may have had considerable

familiarity with English and the European way of life, but they could never claim this style of life themselves. Nor could they bask in the prestige that the underground miners—mostly Northern or Luapula Province 'Bembas'—claimed for themselves by virtue of their hazardous work, more secure conditions and numerical dominance in the towns. Male occupational preferences may have been instrumental in determining the Lamba's low prestige ranking.

A much stronger case, however, can be made for women's role in establishing the Lamba's low esteem. As George Chauncey has shown, one cannot write a social history of the copper towns without discussing the role that Lamba women played in supplying the townsmen with sexual and other wifely services. It was no accident that Lamba women were renowned, first, for marrying outside their own ethnic group, and second, for not taking such marriages very seriously.^[52]

As indicated earlier, Lamba women were quick to take advantage of the shortage of women among the men in the towns. Unattached women from all over Central Africa eventually made their way to the Copperbelt towns, but in Northern Rhodesia the Lamba women—like the Lenje women at Broken Hill mine—were there from the beginning. There were, by the early 1950s, Native Authority Orders limiting the movements of unmarried women to the towns, but these were of little consequence, particularly since the mines and the administration refused to assist their repatriation. Chauncey's interview with a company policeman at Nkana during the 1940s probably describes the typical pattern:

We were not strict about girlfriends, because everybody had them and if we arrested a man's girlfriend it would lead to trouble between people. Most of these were Lamba girls. . . . Sometimes they'd cook a bit, sometimes they'd spend a night in the single quarters.^[53]

The urban authorities could afford to ignore these Lamba women, but this was not the case in the countryside where the women, by leaving for town before the November rains and garden work began and then returning after the harvest in early June, only worsened villagers' prospects of self-sufficient subsistence.^[54]

Unlike the Congolese 'Kasai, however, these Lamba women were temporary town wives rather than professional prostitutes. As such, they can be identified with that category of townswomen known as bakapenta —the beer and dance-hall girls who helped to 'make a business' out of marriage.^[55] And it was this reputation for casual marriages that won these women the ridicule of the Bisa-recruited dance team reported in Clyde Mitchell's The Kalela Dance .

Mothers, I have been to many Courts,
To listen to the cases that they settle:
They settle divorce cases,
They talk about witchcraft cases,
They talk about thefts,
They talk about tax-defaulting,
And refusing to do tribute labour.
But the things I saw at Mushili's court,
These things I wondered at.
From nine o'clock in the morning,
To four o'clock in the afternoon,
The cases were only adultery.
Then I asked the court messenger:
'Do you have any different matters to settle?'
The court messenger said: [sung in Lamba] 'No,

There are no other matters,
It is just like this in Lambaland—
There are no theft cases,
There are no assault cases:
These are the cases in the courts of Lambaland.'^[56]

The African townsfolk's stereotypes of the weak and backward Lamba country bumpkin are not so difficult to understand after all. While these undoubtedly reflect generalized urban-rural prejudices, as discussed by LeVine and Campbell,^[57] this externally ascribed and stigmatized dimension of the Lamba ethnic identity is best explained in terms of the African townsfolk's own struggle for economic betterment and social esteem. To the extent that the Lamba's rural isolation, impoverishment, and humble roles in the colonial industrial order tended to confirm these townsfolk's general prejudices, it is no surprise that the Lamba and their neighbours were looked down upon as people of little consequence.