Abstract
This chapter turns attention to the African laborers living in Livingstone, close to Victoria Falls. Just as white entrepreneurs, colonial administrators, and Lewanika and Lozi elite developed their own agendas for Victoria Falls and North Western Rhodesia, so too did African laborers living around Livingstone. These cosmopolitan Africans engaged in appropriations of their own as they accessed and laid claim to various aspects of the colonizing culture. This chapter focuses on the choices Africans made regarding clothing and leisure activities. While attire and recreation may, at the outset, seem rather superficial in terms of African lives under colonization, both represented important choices exercised by colonial subjects. The first few decades of colonization in North Western Rhodesia marked a period when Africans aspired, as much as Europeans and the African elite, to shape the colonial culture and community in which they lived. Brought into close contact with whites around Victoria Falls, African laborers experienced a changing worldview and an evolving image of where and how they fit into that expanded world.
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Notes
- 1.
This use of the term “African” is, of course, imprecise and problematic. However, it would be misleading to use a more specific ethnic identification to describe the African population around Livingstone and Victoria Falls during this time period. Many of the migrants came from the vicinity around Victoria Falls, but even with that localized population there were multiple ethnic identifications. The Tonga-Leya were not the only ones to inhabit this area; some Lozi started working their way to the quickly developing town as did Africans from other groups in North Western Rhodesia. Likewise, the term “European” is also too general, but because there was such diversity in ancestral heritage among the white population, the broadness of the term is useful.
- 2.
Richard Werbner describes the importance of interethnic partnerships and mutuality in colonial cosmopolitans as replacements for the intra-ethnic relationships urban migrants left behind in their home communities. See Richard Werbner, “Cosmopolitan Ethnicity, Entrepreneurship and the Nation: Minority Elites in Botswana,” Journal of South African Studies (2002).
- 3.
Dinner Party article, The Livingstone Mail, February 20, 1909, No. 152, Vol. 6.
- 4.
Frank Worthington, Memorandum on Slavery in Barotseland, 1906 (Box G 18….G 33. G 19/5 Account 1876, Livingstone Museum Archives).
- 5.
Prins, Hidden Hippopotamus, p. 73.
- 6.
Frank Worthington, Copy of Journal kept 1902 May 19 to 1902 July 30 (G 19/6 Acc 1876 or 315, Livingstone Museum Archives), p. 74.
- 7.
Kambole Mpatamatenga, “Kasimbo ambaendaabo” (Vol. 2, Livingstone Museum Archives).
- 8.
Kafungulwa Mubitana, “Christian Missions and the Toka-Leya of Southern Zambia” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1977), p. 89.
- 9.
Livingstone District Notebook, 1904–1959 (File KSC4/1, National Archives of Zambia), p. 42.
- 10.
Bethell, “A Ride to the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi,” The Field, 68, October 0, 1886, 526 (File J631/4, Livingstone Museum Archives), pp. 41–42.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 42.
- 12.
Letter written to the Committee of the Directors of the British South Africa Company by L.F. Moore, F.J. Clarke, J. Osborne, D. Berton, and F.W. Mills, Chair and Leaders of the Standholders and Ratepayers Association, The Livingstone Mail, August 3, 1907, No. 71, Vol. 3.
- 13.
Merran McCulloch, A Social Survey of the African Population of Livingstone (Manchester: Manchester University Press and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1958), p. 4.
- 14.
Jane Parpart, Labor and Capital on the African Copperbelt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).
- 15.
For further reading on clothing as cultural expression, see Jean Allman, Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress; Margaret Jean Hay, Western Clothing and African Identity: Changing Consumption Patterns among the Luo; Hildi Hendrickson, Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post Colonial Africa; and Janet Andrewes, Bodywork, Dress as Cultural Tool: Dress and Demeanor in the South of Senegal.
- 16.
“The Death of Lewanika,” Journal of the Royal African Society 16, no. 62 (January 1917) on behalf of The Royal African Society, p. 151.
- 17.
Michael O. West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898–1965 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 122.
- 18.
Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
- 19.
Karen Tranberg Hansen, Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
- 20.
Natives standard of living article, The Livingstone Mail, November 2, 1907, No. 84, Vol. 4.
- 21.
Interview with Wingrey Balengu Siloka, Mulubu Sampson Siansandu, and Dorica Makole, July 2006.
- 22.
“Privat [sic] Diary of D.W.G. Stuart 1914 Dec. 22–1915 Feb. 11” (Box G 70/1-G/83. Index 672, Acc. 160, Livingstone Museum Archives), p. 5.
- 23.
Forwarded copy of letter to Lewanika from Jose’ Maria Maraez, February 24, 1906 (A 3/24/9 Location 3994, Livingstone Museum Archives).
- 24.
Letter from Colin Harding to the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, January 16, 1901 (A 6/1/2 Location 4007, National Archives of Zambia).
- 25.
Journal of Frank Worthington, May 19–July 30, 1902 (Box G 18…. G 33. G 19/6, Acc 1876 or 315, Livingstone Museum Archives), p. 11.
- 26.
Margaret Jean Hay, “Western Clothing and African Identity: Changing Consumption Patterns among the Luo,” AH Number 2, 1989 (Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University), p. 11.
- 27.
Coillard, On the Threshold, p. 144.
- 28.
Arthur Baldwin, “A Voortrekker of the Faith: The Journal of Arthur Baldwin Pioneer Missionary in Northern Rhodesia” (Box G 70/1-G83. G 71 Acc 159, Livingstone Museum Archives), Chapter 5, pp. 17–18.
- 29.
Ibid., Epilogue, p. 7.
- 30.
“The Memoirs of Henry Rangeley” (Box 70/1-G/83 (Box 2). G 75/1 Acc 7548, Livingstone Museum Archives), p. 22.
- 31.
Class of clothing article, The Livingstone Mail, February 6, 1909, No. 150, Vol. 6.
- 32.
Frank Worthington, “Journal of Frank Worthington, May 19–July 30, 1902” (Box G 18…. G 33. G 19/6, Acc 1876 or 315, Livingstone Museum Archives), p. 16.
- 33.
Baldwin, “A Voortrekker of the Faith,” Chapter 5, p. 9.
- 34.
Preliminary Examination for the case of the King versus Mundiia (IMF 1/1/3, Vol. 1, National Archives of Zambia), p. 2.
- 35.
Memorandum from the Secretary for Native Affairs to the District Commissioner at Lealui, June 26, 1906 (A 3/25, National Archives of Zambia).
- 36.
Dinner Party article, The Livingstone Mail, February 20, 1909, No. 152, Vol. 6.
- 37.
Editorial on African dress, The Livingstone Mail, April 9, 1914, No. 419.
- 38.
Stirke, Barotseland, p. 115.
- 39.
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Cassandra Rachel Veney, eds., Leisure in Urban Africa (Trenton, NJ and Asmara: Africa World Press, Inc., 2003), p. viii.
- 40.
For further reading, see Phyllis Martin, The Social History of Leisure and Sport in Colonial Brazzaville; William A. Baker and James A. Mangan, eds., Sport in Africa: Essays in Social History; Ashwin Desai, Blacks in Whites: A Century of Cricket Struggles in KwaZulu Natal; Paul Tiyande Zeleza and Cassandra Rachel Veney, eds., Leisure in Urban Africa.
- 41.
Philip Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen: Conservatism and the Process of Urbanization in a South African City (Cape Town, London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 16.
- 42.
Of all the primary source data collected and reviewed for this study, there was little mention or discussion of outright hostilities among the various ethnic groups. Although many of the groups contributing to the urbanization trend were subjects under Lewanika and the Lozi, the issue did not appear to create divides among African town-dwellers.
- 43.
Percy M. Clark, The Autobiography of an Old Drifter (Bulawayo: Books of Rhodesia, 1972), pp. 230–231.
- 44.
Letter to Wilson Fox, January 31, 1906 (A 3/38 Loc. 4001, National Archives of Zambia), pp. 2–4.
- 45.
Stirke, Barotseland, pp. 55–56.
- 46.
Baldwin, “A Voortrekker of the Faith,” Chapter 7, p. 17.
- 47.
Clark, Old Drifter, p. 202.
- 48.
Letter to Lewanika, dated May 29, 1905 (A 3/24/4, National Archives of Zambia), pp. 7–8.
- 49.
“A Whitsuntide Excursion to the Victoria Falls,” Tamworth Herald, August 5, 1905, p. 2.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Native canoes article, The Livingstone Mail, June 23, 1906, No. 13, Vol. 1.
- 52.
Letter from Acting Secretary to Fred Brown of Zambesi Boat Club, August 8, 1910 (A 3/38 Loc 4001, National Archives of Zambia), p. 104.
- 53.
Native dance article, The Livingstone Mail, August 15, 1908, No. 125, Vol. 5.
- 54.
Native church opening article, The Livingstone Mail, August 15, 1908, No. 127, Vol. 5.
- 55.
Native concert article, The Livingstone Mail, December 31, 1915, No. 509.
- 56.
Maramba beer brewing article, Mutunde: The African Newspaper of Northern Rhodesia, July 1936, No. 5. Though this incident took place in the 1930s, beyond the scope of the time period of this study, it is unlikely this was the first time it was discovered that Africans brewed beer in Maramba.
- 57.
Radio broadcast article, The Livingstone Mail, December 16, 1939. No volume or number included. Again, this anecdote comes from a later period, but offers evidence that the African population embraced European leisure and social activities and systems.
- 58.
Interview with Wingrey Balengu Siloka, Mulubu Sampson Siansanda, and Dorica Makole, July 2006.
- 59.
Interview with Wingrey Balengu Siloka, Mulubu Sampson Siansanda, and Dorica Makole, July 2006.
- 60.
Interview with Wingrey Balengu Siloka, Mulubu Sampson Siansanda, and Dorica Makole, July 2006.
- 61.
For selected reading, see Marc Epprecht, ‘This Matter of Women is Getting Very Bad’: Gender, Development and Politics in Colonial Lesotho; Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi; Kenneth Little, African Women in Towns: An Aspect of Africa’s Social Revolution; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women: A Modern History; and Phil Bonner, “‘Desirable or Undesirable Basotho Women?’: Liquor, Prostitution and the Migration of Basotho Women to the Rand, 1920–1945.”
- 62.
Interview with Wingrey Balengu Siloka, Mulubu Sampson Siansanda, and Dorica Makole, July 2006.
- 63.
Interview with Wingrey Balengu Siloka, Mulubu Sampson Siansanda, and Dorica Makole, July 2006.
- 64.
Interview with Wingrey Balengu Siloka, Mulubu Sampson Siansanda, and Dorica Makole, July 2006.
- 65.
Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- 66.
“Salaries of Warrant Officers. BSA,” January 21, 1899 (FO 2/246, Public Records Office, Kew).
- 67.
“Northern Rhodesia,” Article written by Sir Leopold Moore dated October 14, 1927 (Box 70/1-G/83 (box 2). G 73/3c. Acc. 161, Livingstone Museum Archives), p. 5.
- 68.
Reports, E 5 No. 0, 1998/1905 (Box D 1/7-F 1/7/3 BSAC, Livingstone Museum Archives).
- 69.
The Livingstone Mail, 1906–1915. Throughout this time period, the newspaper consistently dedicated space to the results of rifle association competitions and meetings.
- 70.
Letter dated January 31, 1906 (A 3/38. Location 4001, National Archives of Zambia), pp. 2–4 of file.
- 71.
Letter dated May 25, 1906 (A 3/38. Location 4001, National Archives of Zambia), pp. 7–9.
- 72.
Letter dated August 8, 1910 (A 3/38. Location 4001, National Archives of Zambia), p. 104.
- 73.
Letter dated August 23, 1910 (A 3/38. Location 4001, National Archives of Zambia), pp. 112–114.
- 74.
Letter dated March 15, 1910 (A1/2/12. Location 3978, National Archives of Zambia), pp. 96–97.
- 75.
The Livingstone Mail, 1906–1915. Several articles appeared over the course of a decade reporting on the pleasure of the town hosting numerous regattas.
- 76.
Ese, p. 26.
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Arrington-Sirois, A.L. (2017). Performing Europe or Redefining African: The African Social Life of a Colonial Town. In: Victoria Falls and Colonial Imagination in British Southern Africa. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59693-2_5
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