TRIBALISM AND THE QUEST FOR NATIONAL UNITY IN ZAMBIA:
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Iearlier published this article on tribalism in Zambia many years ago which I am re-posting with a few changes as the issues such as the demands of the Linyugandambo, the demands of the Umozi Kumawa and the complaints of several citizens such as the President of the Socialist Party Dr Fred M’membe and others need to be addressed rather than being ignored.
The starting point is to define what a tribe is. What is a tribe? Does Zambia have tribes? What is tribalism and what are its positives and negatives?
Before colonial subjugation of Zambia, the Bantu people that occupied these lands were a mosaic of lineage groups, clans, villages, chiefdoms and kingdoms with indeterminate boundaries.
The earliest Europeans who considered themselves civilised such as Lacerda, Livingstone, Serpa Pinto, Cameron, Selous and Arnet who visited Central Africa which later became Barotseland-North Western Rhodesia in 1899 and North Eastern Rhodesia in 1900 and amalgamated into Northern Rhodesia in 1911 told stories of barbarism of the natives.
When the British finally took over the administration of Northern Rhodesia from the BSA Company in 1924, the colonial administrators had one challenge of how to manage the Bantu-speaking people.
They designed a system where they sorted out and divided these Bantu-speaking people who numbered 921, 063 persons when the first census took place on May 7, 1911 and divided them into what they termed as “tribes.”
The colonial administrators wanted to have units that they could control. Colonial administrators like Lord Lugard and ethnologists like Malinowski, Redcliffe-Brown etc in the quest for divide and rule the Bantu-speaking people, ensured that each Bantu unit so sorted, was under a “chief” appointed by the colonial establishment.
That is how one Soli chief in Zambia remarked, “My people were not Soli until 1937 when the Bwana D.C. told us we were.” (Quoted by Martin Meredith (2006, pp 155)). That is how many of Zambia’s “chiefs” were invented and tasked to work as agents of the colonial administration and keepers of the traditions of their people. That is how Medicine man Monze for instance became a chief because the colonialists identified him as relatively smart as a rain maker.
The colonialists were helped by the missionaries who then transcribed hitherto unwritten languages of the Bantu-speaking people into written forms and in the process reduced Zambia’s innumerable dialects to 73 and ascribed each to a “tribe.”
The 1933 annual report on the social and economic progress of the people of Northern Rhodesia published by His Majesty’s Stationary Office in 1934, pp3-5 observed as follows: “At present time the population of the territory has been classified into seventy-three different tribes, the most important of which are the Wemba, Ngoni, Chewa, and Wisa in the North Eastern districts, the Rozi, Tonga, Luvale, Lenje, and Lunda members of which are resident in both eastern and western areas. There are thirty dialects in use, but many of them vary so slightly that a knowledge of six of the principal languages will enable a person to converse with every native in the country.”
This is how “tribes” were formed in Zambia. Before that, the Bantu-speaking people in Zambia were simply Bantu speaking and were all related in their historical ancestry having migrated from their citadel in Cameroon.
In 1933, they numbered 1, 371, 213 inhabitants in Northern Rhodesia and to rule them effectively, the colonialists divided them into “tribes” and gave each “tribe” a name as a way of advancing and facilitating their “divide and rule” doctrine.
So, the bantu people who lived in the rocks around Mount Nsunzu were named “AMambwe” while the Bantus who were master smelters of iron around Lake Tanganyika were named the “ALungu” and so on.
After Zambia became independent, the nationalist leaders and the general Bantu populace had been so brainwashed by the colonialists that they did not abandon the colonial categorisation of our Bantu-speaking people into “tribes.” The new leaders of Zambia resolved to continue with this racist term which categorised Zambians into “tribes.”
The word “tribe” used by the colonialists to describe aspects of living of the Bantu-speaking was actually a racist term. It described the Bantu people as living in primitive societies. The description had derogatory meaning as it defined the Bantu-speaking “tribes” as uncivilised savages.
Having divided the Bantu-speaking peoples of Zambia completely, the Zambians up to today have been using the word in their political discourse. Today, Zambians still refer to their 73 groups created by colonialists as “tribes” and “tribalism” is often seen as an ideology where one puts one’s own group above every other consideration, including kindness or justice.
Explained in this way, tribalism has the potential to lead to bigotry, segregation, disunity of the people, and when taken to extremes, may even lead to strife and genocide.
It is without controversy that after Zambia won its independence in 1964, there still survived clan/tribal consciousness and structures of past epochs such as backward customs, rituals, prejudices and superstitions. These vestiges cannot justify the continued describing of the Zambian Bantu-speaking people “as tribes.”
They have since developed and emerged as “nationalities” because of the advances in commodity production. It is shameful and unacceptable that these vestiges of the past continue to be used to divide the Bantu people of Zambia by spreading ethnic or tribal consciousness by some of the reactionary leaders.
However, over the years, there has been in Zambia ethnic mixing and unifying processes (consolidation, integration and assimilation) which have created broad national communities and lingua francas - languages and dialects. It is therefore disingenuous or untenable to employ the concept of “tribe” to describe the forms of ethnos in Zambia.
There has been developing broad national communities which can no longer be termed as “tribes” as languages and dialects of the several Bantu-speaking peoples have converged forming literary languages or lingua-francas which is an important condition for the establishment of broad national communities and the unitary nation of Zambia.
According to Denis Dresang (1974) what in the political arena are referred as “tribes” in Zambia are basically divisions in the society that group people according to regional background, language and subjective stereotype.
In this way, you have the Lozi-speaking nationality who occupy Western Province and comprise of more than 20 dialects who speak one lingua franca known as Lozi. Similarly, there is the Nyanja-speaking group in Eastern Province who comprise of several dialects including Chewa, Ngoni, Nsenga, Tumbuka and so on with a lingua franca known as Nyanja.
Then, there is the Bemba-speaking nationality from Luapula, Northern, Muchinga, Copperbelt and parts of Central Province who speak more than 40 dialects and have a lingua franca known as Bemba.
Then there is the Bantu Botatwe group in Southern, parts of Lusaka and Central provinces who comprise of more than 10 dialects and speak a lingua franca known as Tonga.
Then there is the Kaonde/ Lamba group in the Copperbelt and part of North-Western provinces with their own lingua franca as are the Luvale and Lunda of North-Western Province with several dialects and lingua francas.
In other words, because of ethnic consolidation, tribal consciousness only survives in false ethnic consciousness of brainwashed Zambians.
The former “tribes” as they were known under colonialism have merged into single large groups and this was fostered by the penetration of commodity-money relations and the conversion of rural areas from subsistence economy into modern small-scale commodity producing capitalist economy.
It is therefore not anymore tenable to describe the populations of Zambia grouped in nationalities as tribes. President Kenneth Kaunda tried to stop this racist undertone and tried to unite the country by encouraging inter marriages among Zambians, transferring public servants between regions, ensuring that students too were sent to other regions other than their region and so on.
And because of the multiplicity of lingua francas, the administration of President Kaunda adopted a foreign language English to be the official language in Zambia. It was hoped that English, though foreign, could play a unifying role of Zambians instead of wastefully developing the many Zambian ethnic dialects. All these policies were progressive and should be recommended that those privileged to govern Zambia do advance these policies that go towards uniting the country.
Many observers would want to do away with false tribal consciousness because of the divisive effects of tribalism. The divisive effects of tribalism are felt when leaders consciously or unconsciously begin by their conduct to discriminate between so-called ethnic groups as left to us by the colonialists.
This discrimination may be carried to extremes. One politician or leader may push one’s claims to leadership solely on tribal grounds. This is tribalism of the deplorable kind.
It manifests itself in several ways - in attempts to organise political parties on a tribal basis; in demands that political, cabinet or other posts should be distributed purely on a tribal basis, and, worse still, in demands for tribal quotas in the distribution of civil‐service jobs and in the showing of favouritism toward their fellow‐tribesmen by senior public officials.
These abuses harm the cause of national unity. They are roundly condemned and firmly resisted by leading Zambian opinion makers. Not a week passes in Zambia, for instance, without the newspapers calling for vigilance against the cancer of tribalism.
There has been hardly an address made to the nation since independence by all of our Republican Presidents that has not contained a warning to the effect that an overly tribal Zambia would very soon cease to be one country, and that the diversity of gifts possessed by our diverse peoples should be devoted to the task of building a great and unified nation.
It is evident that the processes of national integration are still far from being completed. Zambia is still faced with the challenges of resolving inherited problems from colonialism such as the ethnic and linguistic problems, establishing an order that will ensure equality and development for all the peoples and their cultures and languages.
To address the challenges meaningfully, we start from the known as provided by the Zambian government statistics. This notwithstanding that it can be objected to by some academics and observers. Table 1 and 2 summarises the population share of the so called tribal and language groups of Zambia according to government statistics.