Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T06:42:24.318Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Anti Anti-Colonialism: Vernacular Press and Emergent Possibilities in Colonial Zambia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2015

Harri Englund
Harri Englund*
Affiliation:
Division of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
*
hme25@cam.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

African newspapers published in vernacular languages, particularly papers sponsored by colonial governments, have been understudied. A close reading of their contents and related archival sources provides insights into diverse ways in which the colonized framed and made claims. New kinds of claims were mediated by the government-sponsored vernacular press no less than by nationalists. Just as vernacularism was not nativism, African aspirations that posed no direct challenge to the colonial order did not necessarily entail mimicry. I show also how Europeans who debated a newspaper for Africans in the 1930s Zambia voiced diverse approaches to print culture, addressing a variety of objectives. The newspaper that emerged, Mutende, was replaced by provincial newspapers in the 1950s, and I focus on one of these: the Chinyanja-language Nkhani za kum'mawa, published under African editorship in Eastern Province between 1958 and 1965. Its modes of addressing African publics were neither nationalist nor colonial in any straightforward senses. Its editors and readers deliberated on what it meant to be from the province in an era of labor migration, how African advancement and dependence on Europeans were to be envisaged, and how relationships between women and men should be reconfigured. To hold divergent views on a world in flux, they had to keep something constant, and the order of governance itself remained beyond dispute. But this did not preclude emergent possibilities. The newspaper's columns and letters to the editor reveal claims on novel opportunities and constraints of a sort that mainstream nationalist historiography, with its meta-narrative of anti-colonialism, has rendered invisible.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 221 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. 2007. The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. 2009. I. B. Akinyẹle and Early Yoruba Print Culture. In Peterson, D. R. and Macola, G., eds., Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. 2012. Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel: I. B. Thomas's “Life Story of Me, Sẹgilọla” and other Texts. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bayly, Christopher. 1996. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Boyer, Dominic. 2003. Censorship as Vocation: The Institutions, Practices, and Cultural Logic of Media Control in the German Democratic Republic. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 3: 511–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brennan, James R. 2006. Realizing Civilization through Patrilineal Descent: The Intellectual Making of an African Racial Nationalism in Tanzania, 1920–50. Social Identities 12, 4: 405–23.Google Scholar
Brennan, James R. 2011. Politics and Business in the Indian Newspapers of Colonial Tanganyika. Africa 81, 1: 42–67.Google Scholar
Chakanza, J. C. 2000. Wisdom of the People: 2000 Chinyanja Proverbs. Blantyre: Christian Literature Association in Malawi (CLAIM) for Kachere Series.Google Scholar
Chanock, Martin. 1985. Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2002. Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Englund, Harri. 2013. Zambia at 50: The Rediscovery of Liberalism. Africa 83, 4: 670–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Epstein, A. L. 1992. Scenes from African Urban Life: Collected Copperbelt Papers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Fields, Karen. 1985. Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fraenkel, Peter. 1959. Wayaleshi. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Google Scholar
Frederiksen, Bodil Folke. 2011. Print, Newspapers and Audiences in Colonial Kenya: African and Indian Improvement, Protest and Connections. Africa 81, 1: 155–72.Google Scholar
Gadsden, Fay. 1980. The African Press in Kenya, 1945–1952. Journal of African History 21, 4: 515–35.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. 1984. Anti Anti-Relativism. American Anthropologist 86, 2: 263–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gewald, Jan-Bart, Hinfelaar, Marja, and Macola, Giacomo, eds. 2008. One Zambia, Many Histories: Toward a History of Post-Colonial Zambia. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Gewald, Jan-Bart, Hinfelaar, Marja, and Macola, Giacomo, eds. 2011. Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late-Colonial Zambia. Leiden: Brill.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, David M. 2012. Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Goscha, Christopher. 2012. Wiring Decolonization: Turning Technology against the Colonizer during the Indochina War, 1945–1954. Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, 4: 798–831.Google Scholar
Graham, I. 1964. Newspapers in Northern Rhodesia. Northern Rhodesia Journal 5, 5: 421–31.Google Scholar
Hasty, Jennifer. 2005. The Press and Political Culture in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Hunter, Emma. 2012. “Our Common Humanity”: Print, Power, and the Colonial Press in Interwar Tanganyika and French Cameroun. Journal of Global History 9, 2: 279–301.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. 1986. Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism. Social Text 15: 65–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaler, Amy. 2001. “Many Divorces and Many Spinsters”: Marriage as an Invented Tradition in Southern Malawi, 1946–1999. Journal of Family History 26, 4: 529–56.Google Scholar
Kallmann, Deborah. 1999. Projected Moralities, Engaged Anxieties: Northern Rhodesia's Reading Publics, 1953–1964. International Journal of African Historical Studies 32, 1: 71–117.Google Scholar
Kriger, Norma J. 1992. Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Larmer, Miles. 2011. Rethinking African Politics: A History of Opposition in Zambia. Farnham: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Lonsdale, John. 2005. “Listen while I Read”: Patriotic Christianity among the Young Gikuyu. In Falola, T., ed., Christianity and Social Change in Africa. Durham: Carolina Academic Press.Google Scholar
Macola, Giacomo. 2010. Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa: A Biography of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Magubane, Bernard. 1971. A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa. Current Anthropology 12, 4–5: 419–45.Google Scholar
Mitchell, J. C. 1956. The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia. Rhodes-Livingstone Paper 27. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Henrietta L. and Vaughan, Megan. 1994. Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Mwanakatwe, John M. 1968. The Growth of Education in Zambia since Independence. Lusaka: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Newell, Stephanie. 2000. Ghanaian Popular Fiction: “Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life” and other Tales. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Newell, Stephanie. 2011. Local Cosmopolitans in Colonial West Africa. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 46, 1: 103–17.Google Scholar
Potts, Deborah. 2010. Circular Migration in Zimbabwe and Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa. Woodbridge: James Currey.Google Scholar
Primorac, Ranka. 2012. Legends of Modern Zambia. Research in African Literatures 43, 4: 50–70.Google Scholar
Pritchett, James A. 2011. Christian Mission Stations in South-Central Africa: Eddies in the Flow of Global Culture. In Englund, Harri, ed., Christianity and Public Culture in Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Ranger, Terence. 1985. Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe: A Comparative Study. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Roberts, Andrew D. 2011. Northern Rhodesia: The Post-War Background, 1945–1953. In Gewald, J.-G., Hinfelaar, M., and Macola, G., eds., Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late-Colonial Zambia. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Rotberg, Robert I. 1965. The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873–1964. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Scotton, J. F. 1973. The First African Press in East Africa: Protest and Nationalism in Uganda in the 1920s. International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, 2: 211–28.Google Scholar
Smith, James H. 1998. Njama's Supper: The Consumption and Use of Literary Potency by Mau Mau Insurgents in Colonial Kenya. Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, 3: 524–48.Google Scholar
Smyth, Rosaleen. 1983. The Development of Government Propaganda in Northern Rhodesia. PhD diss., University of London.Google Scholar
Smyth, Rosaleen. 1984. War Propaganda during the Second World War in Northern Rhodesia. African Affairs 83, 332: 345–58.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Thomas, Lynn M. 2006. Schoolgirl Pregnancies, Letter-Writing, and “Modern” Persons in Late Colonial East Africa. In Barber, K., ed., Africa's Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Thomas, Martin. 2008. Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Tordoff, William and Molteno, Robert. 1974. Introduction. In Tordoff, W., ed., Politics in Zambia. Manchester: Manchester University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Werbner, Pnina. 2008. Introduction: Towards a New Cosmopolitan Anthropology. In Werbner, P., ed., Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism. New York: Berg.Google Scholar