Roads Through Mwinilunga

Abstract

This book is the culmination of my road through Mwinilunga. It is the result of numerous conversations with people in and on Mwinilunga and I hope it does them justice. This remote corner of the world became vital to my understanding of capitalism, colonialism, and globalisation. By studying its history, I have learnt to challenge historiographical dichotomies between tradition and modernity, subsistence and market production, global and local. This book wishes to show how and why Mwinilunga and its people matter to broader historical processes. My road through Mwinilunga started in 2007 and since then I have incurred countless debts. Let me express long overdue gratitude to the people who helped me along the way.My first and most important thanks go to the people I met during my stays in Mwinilunga District. In 2008 and 2010, I received warm welcomes in all the places I visited and all the homes I entered. I wish to thank the people I interviewed in Ikelenge, Nyakaseya, Chibwika, Kanongesha, Kanyama, and Ntambu chiefdoms. Your words have profoundly shaped my historical understanding and I hope -despite the language barrier -that you find recognition in the pages that follow. Special thanks go to those families who opened their homes to me and with whom I stayed for weeks at a time: the Chiyezhi family, the Musanda family, the Chinshe family, the Kamuhuza family, the Jinguluka family, the Kalota family, and the Kambidimba family. Sharing nshima ya makamba together and talking about proverbs has taught me more than you will ever realise. Indispensable was the research assistance provided by Julian Chiyezhi,

Entangled Future Im/mobilities

“…Rural dwelling has mostly been treated as a default strategy or a symptom of lacking the resources to migrate to urban centres (Peša 2013;Hepburn 2016). In addition, although some research has been done on individual actors' aspirations (Peša 2019(Peša , 2020, neither immobility nor migration have been explicitly examined with an eye towards people's gendered constructions of the future and future-related attitudes.…”

“…The Eastern Province of Zambia is the site of a historical culture of migration (Peša 2019) dating back to the colonial era. As most other rural regions of Zambia, it supplied labour migrants to colonial Zimbabwe, South Africa, and later the Zambian Copperbelt and Lusaka (Zgambo 1992).…”

Women in Zambia

“…Nineteenth-and 20th-century accounts suggest that, generally, men cleared fields, whereas women did most of the cultivation and weeding, while harvesting was often done jointly. 15 Men's and women's tasks were thus distinct but complementary. It has been argued that men's activities, such as hunting or rearing livestock, garnered more prestige.…”

“…Iva Peša's work shows that in Mwinilunga District in the 1950s, when more than 50 percent of the male population was away at work, women marketed a record six hundred tons of cassava annually to feed the mining towns. 27 Male absenteeism thus did not automatically cause female impoverishment. The elaborate system of chitemene persisted, and gendered complementarity has continued to be important in agricultural production throughout Zambia.…”

“…30 Peša's work provides examples of female pineapple cultivators in the Mwinilunga District who managed to buy a fleet of trucks from their profits. 31 The marketing of beans, groundnuts, and green vegetables, in particular, is a highly profitable female niche. Rather than antagonistic gender relations in agricultural production can more usefully be seen as complementary-though this does not mean that they are always equitable.…”