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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'Tribes' and the People Who Read Books: Managing History in Colonial Zambia
Author:Crehan, KateISNI
Year:1997
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:23
Issue:2
Period:June
Pages:203-218
Language:English
Geographic terms:Zambia
Great Britain
Subjects:attitudes
Whites
Africans
ethnic groups
colonialism
indirect rule
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637618
Abstract:A central organizing concept in the colonial notion of 'traditional African culture' was that of the 'tribe'. It was assumed that prior to colonization Africans had lived in 'tribes' and that the social order of colonial rural Africa remained an essentially 'tribal' one. This article is about this taken-for-granted notion of the 'tribe'. The author looks at some of the ways the notion of the 'tribe' was used in a particular time and place, the British colony of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), during the period of indirect rule from 1931 to independence in 1964. She focuses on three different groups: colonial officials stationed in northwestern Zambia; the rural Africans over whom they ruled; and the professional anthropologists of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute. She explores how the different usages of the notion of the 'tribe' informed and shaped each other in the course of a complex three-way dialogue, and traces the substantive and sometimes contradictory nature of the category 'tribe' and how it shaped, and was shaped by, the untidy and dynamic realities it supposedly explained. A central question underpinning the article is: to what extent was the 'tribe' an invented category imposed from above on rural African realities; and to what extent was it rather rural Africans themselves who filled 'the empty boundary marker' of the 'tribe' with their own imaginative meanings? Notes, ref., sum.
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