From Royalism to E-secessionism: Lozi Histories and Ethnic Politics in Zambia

Abstract

As has become increasingly clear over the course of the past three decades, processes of ethnogenesis in modern Africa drew much of their impetus from the production of what van Binsbergen called ‘literate ethnohistory’ and what Peterson and Macola have more recently termed ‘homespun histories’, with a view to signposting the genre’s artisanal and composite character.¹ Because they convene audiences and summon up communities, books and other printed texts are deeply imbricated in the politics of a given locality. The relationship, indeed, is best understood in dialectical terms: books are the products of specific political circumstances, but they also have the potential for affecting and transforming the context of their compilation. A clear example of these dynamics is provided by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Barotseland, western Zambia, where vernacular- and English-language historical and ethnographical literatures have repeatedly been put to the service, or at least accompanied the consolidation, of particularist ethnic agendas. Though rooted in local circumstances, such projects have had — and are still having — considerable national resonance.