‘Tribes’ and the people who read books: managing history in colonial Zambia

Abstract

This article examines the notion of the ‘tribe’ and how it was used in colonial Zambia by three different groups during the period of indirect rule from 1931 to independence in 1964: colonial officials stationed in North West; local Africans; and the anthropologists of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute. I explore how these different usages informed and shaped each other in the course of a complex three‐way dialogue, tracing out 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 what Ranger has referred to as ‘the empty boundary marker’ of the ‘tribe’ with their own imaginative meanings?

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