Do colonial people exist? Rethinking ethno-genesis and peoplehood through the longue durée in south-east central Africa
2011; Routledge; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/03071022.2011.566245
ISSN1470-1200
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1On folk sociologies and related ideas of ‘local theory’, see Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983); J. Clyde Mitchell, Cities, Society, and Social Perception: A Central African Perspective (Oxford, 1987); Loïc Wacquant, ‘For an analytic of racial domination’, Political Power and Social Theory, xi (1997), 222–3; Pier M. Larson, ‘“Capacities and modes of thinking”: intellectual engagements and subaltern hegemony in the early history of Malagasy Christianity’, American Historical Review, cii, 4 (1997), 969–1002; Hugh Raffles, ‘ “Local theory”: nature and the making of an Amazonian place’, Cultural Anthropology, xiv, 3 (1999), 323–60. 2On peoplehood, see Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge, 2003). 3Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (Manchester, 1992 [1953]), 24. 4For overviews, see Daniel N. Posner, ‘Malawi's new dawn’, Journal of Democracy, vi, 1 (1995), 131–45; Jonathan Newell, ‘ “A moment of truth”? The church and political change in Malawi, 1992’, Journal of Modern African Studies, xxxiii, 2 (1995), 243–62. 5Leroy Vail and Landeg White, ‘Tribalism in the political history of Malawi’ in Leroy Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, 1989), 182; Megan Vaughan, ‘Reported speech and other kinds of testimony’ in Luise White, David William Cohen and Stephen Miescher (eds), African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington, 2001), 55. 6Leroy Vail, ‘Ethnicity, language, and national unity: the case of Malawi’ in Philip Bonner (ed.), Working Papers in Southern African Studies, vol. 2 (Johannesburg, 1981), 149. For separate discussions of this trend, see Deborah Kaspin, ‘The politics of ethnicity in Malawi's democratic transition’, Journal of Modern African Studies, xxxiii, 4 (1995), 595–620; Wiseman C. Chirwa, ‘Democracy, ethnicity, and regionalism: the Malawian experience, 1992–1996’ in Kings M. Phiri and Kenneth R. Ross (eds), Democratization in Malawi: A Stocktaking (Zomba, 1998); Gregory H. Kamwendo, ‘Ethnic revival and language association in the new Malawi: the case of Chitumbuka’ in Harri Englund (ed.), A Democracy of Chameleons: Politics and Culture in the New Malawi (Stockholm, 2002); Harri Englund, ‘Between God and Kamuzu: the transition to multiparty politics in central Malawi’ in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger (eds), Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London, 1996). 7For discussions of postcolonial scholarship, see Vaughan, op. cit., 55; Terence Ranger, ‘Malawian perspectives’, Journal of African History, xiii, 3 (1972), 511. On the possibility of new work, see Jack Mapanje, ‘The orality of dictatorship: in defence of my country’ in Harri Englund (ed.), Democracy of Chameleons, op. cit. 8Vail (ed.), Creation of Tribalism, op. cit. 9Leroy Vail, ‘Introduction: ethnicity in southern African history’ in Vail (ed.), Creation of Tribalism, op. cit., 1–19. 10Lord Hailey, Native Administration in the British African Territories: Part II. Central Africa: Zanzibar, Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia (London, 1950), 25. 11On Malawi's pre-colonial history see, for example, Edward A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (Berkeley, 1975); Elias C. Mandala, Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A History of the Lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859–1960 (Madison, 1990); Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa, 1750–1920 (Portsmouth, NH, 2004); Joey Power, Political Culture and Nationalism in Malawi: Building Kwacha (Rochester, NY, 2010), 8–12. 12For a global view, see Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, 2005); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana, 2009). 13Charles van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914: New Ninevah, vol. 2 (Johannesburg, 1982), chap. 1. On the issue of inter-racial relationships and ‘black peril’ scares see, for example, George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford, 1981), chap. 3; Jonathan Hyslop, ‘White working-class women and the invention of Apartheid: “purified” Afrikaner nationalist agitation for legislation against “mixed” marriages, 1934–9’, Journal of African History, xxxvi, 1 (1995), 57–81; Norman Etherington, ‘Natal's black rape scare of the 1870s’, Journal of Southern African Studies, xv, 1 (1988), 36–53; John Pape, ‘Black and white: the “perils of sex” in colonial Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, xvi, 4 (1990), 699–720; Gareth Cornwell, ‘George Webb Hardy's The Black Peril and the social meaning of “black peril” in early twentieth-century South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, xxii, 3 (1996), 441–53; Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington, 2000). 14J. F. Ade Ajayi, ‘The continuity of African institutions under colonialism’ in T. O. Ranger (ed.), Emerging Themes of African History (Dar es Salaam, 1968); see also Steven Feierman, ‘Africa in history: the end of universal narratives’ in Gyan Prakash (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton, 1995); David L. Schoenbrun, ‘Conjuring the modern in Africa: durability and rupture in histories of public healing between the great lakes of East Africa’, American Historical Review, cxi, 5 (2006), 1403–39. 15I am thinking of Ann Laura Stoler's work in particular. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009). 16Malawi National Archives (subsequently MNA) s1/705I/30, Folio 44a, 4, 5. See also MNA s1/705I/30, Folio 46, Copy 9. 17Stoler again is a useful example. For a critique of Stoler's emphasis on colonial mores, see Tamara Loos, ‘Transnational histories of sexualities in Asia’, American Historical Review, cxiv (2009), 1314. 18Vail and White, op. cit., 153. 19Y. B. Abdullah, Chiikala Cha Wa Yao [The Story of the Yao], ed. and trans. Meredith Sanderson (Zomba, 1919); George Simeon Mwase, Strike a Blow and Die. A Narrative of Race Relations in Colonial Africa, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Cambridge, MA, 1967); Megan Vaughan, ‘Mr Mdala writes to the governor: negotiating colonial rule in Nyasaland’, History Workshop Journal, lx (2005), 170–88. 20Mary Tew, Peoples of the Lake Nyasa Region (London, 1950), ix. 21Margaret Read, Children of Their Fathers: Growing Up Among the Ngoni of Nyasaland (New Haven, 1960), 25–8; Margaret Read, ‘The Ngoni and western education’ in Victor Turner (ed.), Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960, vol. 3, Profiles of Change: African Society and Colonial Rule (Cambridge, 1971). 22Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, 1985), 31–4. For an overview of the Rhodes–Livingstone Institute, see Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, 2001). 23J. Clyde Mitchell, Foreword to J. van Velsen, The Politics of Kinship: A Study in Social Manipulation Among the Lakeside Tonga of Nyasaland (Manchester, 1964), vi, vii. See also T. Cullen Young, ‘Tribal intermixture in northern Nyasaland’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, lxiii (January–June 1933). 24For more recent interventions on the challenges of ethnic history, see Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola (eds), Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa (Athens, OH, 2009); Paul S. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (Cambridge, 2010). 25Chanock, Law, Custom, op. cit., 33, 34. 26Jean-Loup Amselle, Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere (Stanford, 1998), x. 27See, for example, Jan Vansina, Paths Through the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990); Sandra Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (Portsmouth, NH, 1996); David Lee Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change, Gender, and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, NH, 1998), 101; Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, 2001), chap. 2. 28Jane I. Guyer, ‘Wealth in people, wealth in things – introduction’, Journal of African History, xxxvi, 1(1995), 83–90; Jane I. Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga, ‘Wealth in people as wealth in knowledge: accumulation and composition in equatorial Africa’, Journal of African History, xxxvi, 1 (1995), 91–120. 29Spiritual control over land was a crucial source of social power. See, for example, Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison, 1990); J. Matthew Schoffeleers, River of Blood: The Genesis of a Martyr Cult in Southern Malawi, c. A.D. 1600 (Madison, 1992). 30Schoenbrun, A Green Place, op. cit., 115, 174, 181, 184. 31On the similar ‘invention’ of tradition, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). On the possibilities of gendering the ‘invention’ of tradition see, for example, Margaret Jean Hay and Marcia Wright (eds), African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives (Boston, 1982). Vail offers some discussion of gender and ethnicity: see Vail, Creation of Tribalism, 14, 15. 32Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi (Cambridge, 1987), 142, 143; Kings M. Phiri, ‘Some changes in the matrilineal family system among the Chewa of Malawi since the nineteenth century’, Journal of African History, xxiv, 2 (1983), 257–74. 33For comparative perspectives, see Ramón A. Gutiérrez, ‘Honor ideology, marriage negotiation, and class-gender domination in New Mexico, 1690–1846’, Latin American Perspectives, xii, 1 (1985), 81–104; Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, 1991); Martha Hodes (ed.), Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York, 1999); Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, 2006). 34MNA s1/7051/30, Folio 27, January 4, 1934. 35Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Cambridge, 1990), 158. 36MNA s2/62/19, Minutes Section, No. 18. 37MNA s2/62/19, Folio 1. See also Ibbo Mandaza, Race, Colour, and Class in Southern Africa (Harare, 1997), chap. 3. For differences in Portuguese and French African colonies, see Gerald J. Bender, Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality (Berkeley, 1978), especially chaps 1 and 2; Owen White, Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (Oxford, 1999). On the issue of disease and sexuality in the British Empire, see Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003). 38George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, and Other Essays (London, 1950). 39For this issue in Southern Rhodesia, see Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (Portsmouth, NH, 1992), 174–8; McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue, op. cit., 73. As McCulloch notes, one definition of ‘white peril’ in Southern Rhodesia concerned ‘degenerate’ white women with black men, essentially the same white woman/black man formula as with ‘black peril’. 40For an overview of this trend in Southern Rhodesia, see Diana Jeater, Marriage, Perversion, and Power: The Construction of Moral Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894–1930 (Oxford, 1993); Carol Summers, From Civilization to Segregation: Social Ideals and Social Control in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1934 (Athens, OH, 1994). 41National Archives of Zimbabwe (subsequently NAZ) A 3/18/35, Letter from the Native Commissioner, Plumtree, to the Superintendent of Natives, Bulawayo, 16 June 1921. 42NAZ A 3/18/35, Letter from the Native Commissioner, Chilimanzi, to the Superintendent of Natives, Victoria, 16 June 1921. 43On women's mobility, see especially Schmidt, op. cit. and Jeater, op. cit. 44MNA s2/31/20, Folio 1, 25 September 1920. 45 ibid. 46MNA s2/31/20, Folio 1, 12 October 1920. 47MNA s2/31/20, Folio 1, 16 October 1920. For a discussion of Ngoni marriage practices, see Margaret Read, The Ngoni of Nyasaland (Oxford, 1956). 48For British Central Africa, see Chanock, Law, Custom, op. cit. For a general overview, see Richard Roberts and Kristin Mann (eds), Law in Colonial Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 1991). 49Terence Ranger, ‘The invention of tradition in colonial Africa’ in Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds), Invention of Tradition, op. cit. For related discussions, see Sally Falk Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: ‘Customary’ Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, 1986); Sara Berry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, 1993); Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, ‘Criminal justice, cultural justice: the limits of liberalism and the pragmatics of difference in the new South Africa’, American Ethnologist, xxxi, 2 (2004), 188–204. 50Barbara M. Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 (Portsmouth, NH, 1997); Richard Roberts, Litigants and Households: African Disputes and Colonial Courts in the French Soudan, 1895–1912 (Portsmouth, NH, 2005). 51For further commentary on this period in Malawi, see Power, Political Culture, op. cit., chaps 1 and 2. 52MNA s2/31/20, Minute Comments 2, 21 October 1920. 53NAZ A 3/18/35, Letter from the Native Commissioner, M'Toko, to the Superintendent of Natives, Salisbury, 24 June 1921. 54For a study of the repercussions of this kind of inversion of authority, see Michael Crowder, The Flogging of Phineas McIntosh: A Tale of Colonial Folly and Injustice, Bechuanaland 1933 (New Haven, 1988). 55MNA s2/31/20, Minute Comments 2, 21 October 1920. 56 ibid. 57MNA s2/31/20, Minute Comments 2, 21 October 1920; MNA s2/31/20, see Minute Comments 3 under Folio ‘Minutes’, 23 October 1920. 58 ibid. The letter was sent to Residents at Karonga, Mzimba, Chinteche, Kota-Kota, Mlanje, Dowa, Lilongwe, Dedza, Fort Johnston, Port Herald, Ncheu, Zomba, Blantyre and Neno. It was also sent to the Assistant Residents at Ngara, Liwonde, Chiradzulu and Chiromo. 59MNA s2/31/20, Folio 8, 1 January 1921. 60MNA s2/31/20, Folio 18, 20 December 1920. 61MNA s2/31/20, Folio 13, 31 December 1921 62 ibid. 63MNA s2/31/20, Folio 22, 14 January 1921. 64MNA s2/31/20, Folio 23, 27 January 1921, 1, 2. 65 ibid. 66MNA s2/31/20, Folio 7, 22 December 1920. See also MNA s2/31/20, Folio 11, 2 January 1920. 67 ibid. 68His emphasis. MNA s2/31/20, Folio 19, 21 December 1920, 1, 2. 69Chanock, Law, Custom, op. cit., 72. 70MNA s2/31/20, Folio 12, 10 January 1921, 1, 2. 71MNA s2/31/20, Folio 8, 1 January 1921. 72MNA s2/31/20, Folio 13, 31 December 1921. 73MNA s2/31/20, Folio 9, 1, 2. 74MNA s2/31/20, Folio 12, 10 January 1921, 2. 75MNA s2/31/20, Folio 18, 20 December 1920. 76MNA s2/31/20, Folio 23, 27 January 1921, 1, 2; MNA s2/31/20, Folio 16. 77MNA s2/31/20, Folio 17, 31 December 1920, 2nd letter. 78On the topic of masculinity in Africa, see Lisa A. Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher (eds), Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa (Portsmouth, NH, 2003); Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert Morrell (eds), African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (New York, 2005). On competing patriarchies see, inter alia, Vail,Creation of Tribalism, 14, 15; Schmidt, op. cit., chap. 1. 79Interview with Eunice Mussa, 4 October 1999, Zomba, Malawi. 80Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995), chap. 1. 81Interview with Jessica Ascroft and Ann Ascroft, 9 November 1999, Blantyre, Malawi. 82Interview with Eunice Mussa, 4 October 1999, Zomba, Malawi. 83Interview with Yusuf Ishmael, 17 October 1999, Blantyre, Malawi. 84Interview with Robert Jamieson, 15 November 1999, Lilongwe, Malawi. 85 ibid. 86The expression ‘small voice’ comes from the Subaltern Studies school and Ranajit Guha in particular. See Ranajit Guha, ‘The small voice of history’ in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds), Subaltern Studies, vol. ix, Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi, 1996), 1–12; Ranajit Guha, The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays, ed. and intro. Partha Chatterjee (Ranikhet, 2009). 87Interview with Dinah Coombes, 8 November 1999, Zomba, Malawi. 88Marc Epprecht, ‘Sexuality, Africa, history’, American Historical Review, cxiv, 5 (2009), 1258–72. 89For recent statements on this agenda, see Feierman, ‘Africa in history’, op. cit.; see also Steven Feierman, ‘Colonizers, scholars, and the creation of invisible histories’ in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (eds), Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, 1999), 182–216; Schoenbrun, ‘Conjuring the modern in Africa’, op. cit. 90On relational history, see Perry Anderson, ‘Agendas for radical history’, Radical History Review, xxxvi (1986), 26–45; Zachary Lockman, ‘Railway workers and relational history: Arabs and Jews in British-ruled Palestine’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, xxxv, 3 (1993), 601–27. On ‘situational’ analysis, see Max Gluckman, Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand (Manchester, 1958 [1940]). 91Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, op. cit., chap. 4; Igor Kopytoff (ed.), The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington, 1987). 92Mandala, op. cit.; Thomas Spear and Richard Waller (eds), Being Maasai: Ethnicity and Identity in East Africa (Athens, OH, 1993). For a more recent study, see David M. Gordon, Nachituti's Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa (Madison, 2006). 93Michael J. Watts, ‘ “Space for everything” (A commentary)’, Cultural Anthropology, vii, 1 (1992), 124; Stoler,Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power, chap. 7; Jennifer Cole, Forget Colonialism? Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar (Berkeley, 2001). For separate discussions of memory-work during the postcolonial period, see again Luise White, David William Cohen and Stephen Miescher (eds), African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington, 2001).
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