The root cause of Zambia’s political divide

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 10:37:02 +0000

By Thembani M. Tembo

AS we embark on this auspicious journey of patriotic articulation, isn’t it ironic how after the invocation of Article 31 the storm has seemingly subsided? But we’ve learnt to be sadder but wiser and not misconstrue this elephant in the room for a fly, and attempt to kill it with a swatter, but rather hold it by the tasks for this may just be the lull before the storm.

The more the reason the Catholic Bishops lead by the opinionative Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu paid a courtesy call on the Head of State last week to seek an amicable solution to our contemporary political divide.

Last week, with the help of Pamela Paglia’s work in Sudan and other African countries, we discussed how colonialism shaped Africa’s postcolonial states in mainly six ways. We divulged how it left Africa with fragile economies; weak political institutions; legitimised patterns of exploitation; disrupted the African geopolitical scenario by introducing artificial borders; created or consolidated ethnically homogeneous elites; despite multicultural heterogeneousness of societies; and finally set in motion mechanisms of identity awareness; such as pan-Africanism; in response to a Western imperialist domination based on racial and cultural superiority.

Now this week, we have arrived at a critical political crossroad and focus on the devil in Zambia’s political detail. Invariably, we sought assistance from detailed research work by Robert Papstein and Daniel Posner to explicatively illustrate our arguments within a relatively sensitive sphere of intellectual debate

Historic ethnic and linguistic differences in Zambia

The slave trade encouraged small, lineage-based villages to come together into large, stockaded villages controlled by increasingly powerful chiefs. The emphasis upon ethnic identity was a potentially protective element in avoiding enslavement, as enslaving the follower of a chief struck the base of his newly enhanced authority.

The hallmark of the modern tribe was a severely curtailed hierarchy of  “recognised” “‘Senior” and “Sub” Chiefs (and, after the 1930s, “Native Authorities”), with new types of control over their populations through the expanded power of chiefs’ courts, tax collection, implementation of colonial education, health, public works, and agricultural policies.

Specific actions and administrative policies undertaken by the colonial state and its missionary and mining company allies helped shape the contemporary Zambian linguistic landscape. These actions and policies led to the consolidation of the language map from dozens to just four and to the four language groups’ physical location in Zambia

When the first Europeans reached the territory that comprises present-day Zambia, language use corresponded almost perfectly with tribal affiliation. By the end of the colonial era, patterns of language use had consolidated considerably.

As early as the late 1940s Lord Hailey could report the emergence of a set of distinct regional languages in Northern Rhodesia: Silozi in the west, Chichewa in the east, and Chibemba in the north. Although Hailey was silent on the extent of linguistic consolidation in the south, others writing during this period noted the emergence of Citonga as the dominant language there.

By the time of Zambian independence in 1964, Bemba (what Hailey called Chiwemba), Nyanja (Chichewa), Tonga (Citonga), and Lozi (Silozi) had achieved the status of first among equals. By 1990, the first year for which reliable information is available, fully 78.8 percent of the Zambian population used one of these four languages as either their first or second languages of communication. Since probably no more than a quarter of the population spoke these languages a century before.

By 1990, however, these four languages dominated the others. Close to 40 percent of Zambians used Bemba as their first or second language of communication by 1990; just over 30 percent used Nyanja; about 12 percent used Tonga; and just under 10 percent used Lozi.

After these four languages, language frequency dropped off considerably. The next most frequently used languages, Tumbuka and Lamba, were used by only 3.8 and 3 percent of Zambians, respectively.

Part of the reason why Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, and Lozi look as dominant as they do is because people came to learn and use these languages in lieu of the languages that were traditionally spoken by members of their tribes.

Another important reason is that, over time, Zambians came to develop multilingual repertoires, usually speaking one language at home (often their tribal language) and one or more others for commercial or social exchanges with members of other tribes.

Bemba and Nyanja and to a lesser degree Tonga and Lozi emerged, along with English, as the key languages that played this second role.

While a small part of the growth of these four languages came from stealing shares from others, much of it came from the acquisition of Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, or Lozi as second languages of communication. Yet postcolonial consolidation continues a trend that originated before independence. Three colonial era forces, in particular, were responsible for the consolidation of language use in Zambia: missionary activity, colonial education policies, and labor migration

Reasons for consolidation of Language use

Missionary Activity

Between 1885 and 1945, nearly two dozen different missionary societies set up shop in Northern Rhodesia, establishing more than a hundred mission stations around the country Although formally established as evangelical outposts, these mission stations had as important an impact on the territory’s linguistic landscape as they did on its religious life.

Because the transcription of an African language required an enormous investment, “it was only natural to amortise it by maximising the diffusion of the standardised language forms to neighbouring groups, where possible.” Missionary societies did this by locating their stations, when they could, in areas where large numbers of people already spoke the same language.

In addition, once they had prepared a grammar and translated religious texts into a local language, they extended the use of that language to neighbouring peoples who spoke structurally similar dialects.

The local vernaculars into which the Bible was first translated and for which grammars and dictionaries were first written were thus “exported” from the domains where they were originally spoken to adjacent areas, where they came to coexist with or replace the languages that were previously in use.

The principal mechanism through which this “export” of vernaculars came to affect actual language use was mission-sponsored African education. By 1925, the year the colonial government entered the education field for the first time, missionaries were operating close to 2,000 schools throughout Northern Rhodesia with combined enrolments of more than 89,000. Over time, areas where mission stations proliferated tended to coincide with increasing linguistic homogeneity.

Districts with long histories of exposure to missionary societies that were committed to African education showed significantly greater evidence of language homogenisation by 1990 than other districts.

Colonial Education Policies

The homogenisation of language begun by the missions was reinforced and expanded by the policies adopted by the colonial government when it took over primary responsibility for African education in 1925. In 1927 Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, and Lozi were formally adopted as the principal languages of instruction in African schools.

While the government recognised that some pupils initially would have to continue to receive their early primary education in vernaculars other than these four, it was assumed that Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, and Lozi would eventually become, with English, the sole languages of instruction at all levels

To give effect to this new policy, an African Literature Committee, the first of its kind in Africa, was established in 1937 to promote the publication of secular school books in each of these languages. During its 23-year existence, the committee and its successor, the Joint Publications Bureau of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, published or reprinted more than 1.7 million copies of 484 different titles, more than 92 percent of which were in Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, Lozi, or English.

The demand for these books was fuelled by the rapid growth of African education. Whereas only 25 percent of school age children were estimated to have attended school in 1924, by 1945 the share had reached 75 percent in some rural districts and exceeded that number in many major towns

Because the medium of instruction in these schools and literacy courses was Bemba, Nyanja, Tonga, or Lozi, every newly literate student who did not already speak one of these languages became a convert to one of them.

Labour Migration

The third major force that contributed to the consolidation of language use in colonial Northern Rhodesia was labour migration. The BSA Co. thus took advantage of its administrative powers to put policies in place that would ensure that an abundant supply of African labourers would be available for the region’s industries.

The principal instrument used by the company for this purpose was African taxation. By “consciously [setting] the rate of tax at a level that would successfully draw African males away from their homes to the usually distant centres of white agriculture and industry,” the administration forced thousands of Northern Rhodesians out of their villages.

To make certain, the government adopted a series of measures to channel Northern Rhodesian manpower to its own mines. The resulting intraterritorial labour flows had a profound effect on the country’s language map.

Once there, migrants’ patterns of language use changed. Since both productivity on the job and everyday social interactions required that people be able to communicate with each other, a single language naturally emerged as a common medium of communication in each urban area. And once such an urban lingua franca was established, newer migrants were obliged to learn it, too.

 A strong tendency towards linguistic homogenisation therefore emerged along Northern Rhodesia’s rail line. And the policies that brought thousands of laborers there thus contributed significantly to the countrywide consolidation of language use.

Linking Towns and Languages

But since more than 40 percent of Zambia’s population at the time lived along the rail line, it is necessary to look at the pattern of labour migration to account fully for the shape of Zambia’s contemporary linguistic map. Why did certain language groups dominate certain urban centers, and, in particular, why did Bemba-speakers dominate the Copperbelt?

Bemba emerged as the principal language on the Copperbelt and in the mining town of Kabwe, Nyanja in Lusaka, and Lozi in Livingstone

Why Bemba was the principal language on the Copperbelt and Kabwe

The direct link between government and mining company policies and the predominance of specific languages in particular urban areas is most evident in Kabwe and the Copperbelt, where conscious policies were enacted to encourage migration from Bemba-speaking rural areas to the mines.

In other parts of the protectorate, the government’s concern was simply to stimulate migrant labour flows of sufficient magnitude to allow taxes to be paid in the rural districts. But in the Bemba-speaking northeast-roughly, present-day Northern and Luapula provinces – the government and the mining companies conspired to ensure that outward labour migration would be channelled to Kabwe and Copperbelt-based mines.

The dominance of the Bemba language in these areas was a direct outcome of these policies.

A number of factors having nothing to do with government policies ensured that migrants from the Bemba-speaking heartland would be easy to attract.

Poor soils, the presence of the tsetse fly in much of the area, and the great distance that agricltural products had to be transported to the rail line ruled out cash cropping and animal husbandry to earn money to pay taxes.

Also, because of the dearth of European settlers in the area, local cash employment opportunities were limited. Thus, to an even greater degree than in most other regions residents of the northeast had few alternatives to labour migration

By focusing the bulk of their labour recruiting efforts on the northeast, and by protecting this region from competition by labour recruiters from the south, the Northern Rhodesian mining companies kept the wages less than half the prevailing rates in the rest of the region

When the Northern Rhodesian Native Labour Association (NRNLA) began recruiting labour for the Copperbelt and Kabwe-based mines in 1930, the largest share of recruits was drawn from Bemba-speaking areas.

When the mines came back on line in the mid 1930s after the depression, the first rural district officers instructed to lift their restrictions on issuing passes for migrants to travel to the Copperbelt were those in Kasama, Fort Rosebery, and Abercorn, three of the most populous Bemba-speaking districts.

And when, at the insistence of the colonial government, the mining companies agreed in 1939 to underwrite the construction of rest camps along labour migration routes to the Copperbelt and Kabwe, nine of the 10 were built along routes from the Bemba-speaking northeast. This decision both recognised the nature of existing migrant flows and invested in perpetuating them.

Given that by the time of independence the mining areas contained nearly a quarter of Zambia’s total population, the role of the colonial government and the mining companies in establishing Bemba as the principal language in the mining towns had a profound effect on the shape of the contemporary Zambian linguistic and also political map.

Why Nyanja was the Principal Language in Lusaka

Before the opening of the Northern Rhodesian copper mines, the colonial administration encouraged Nyanja-speaking migrants from the eastern part of Northern Rhodesia to forge links with the mines and farms of the south, particularly those in Southern Rhodesia.

After the late 1920s, the government and mining companies also began recruiting men from this area to the Copperbelt. The lack of roads directly linking eastern Northern Rhodesia with either Southern Rhodesia or the Copperbelt, however, meant that Nyanja-speaking migrants from the east had to travel along the Great East Road until it met the rail line in Lusaka before they could turn south or north towards their ultimate destinations.