Literate Ethnohistory in Colonial Zambia: The Case of Ifikolwe Fyandi na Bantu Bandi

Abstract

Most precolonial African states were characterized by a manifest disparity of control between center and periphery. This was certainly true of the kingdom of Kazembe, founded as a result of the collapse of the Ruund colony on the Mukulweji River towards the end of the seventeenth century and the subsequent eastward migration of an heterogeneous group of “Lundaized” titleholders. A set of flexible institutions and symbols of power helped the rulers of the emerging kingdom to maintain a degree of influence over much of southern Katanga and the westernmost reaches of the plateau to the east of the Luapula river. But in the lower Luapula valley, the heartland of the polity from about the mid-eighteenth century, eastern Lunda rule impinged more profoundly on the prerogatives of autochthonous communities and hence called for the elaboration of legitimizing devices of a special kind. In this latter context, the production and diffusion of an account of the prestigious beginnings of the Mwata Kazembes dynasty, its early dealings with the original inhabitants of the area, and later evolution served the dual purpose of fostering a dominant and discrete Lunda identity and cementing the links of subordination between foreign conquerors and local lineage or sub-clan leaders. This paper is an extended commentary on Ifikolwe Fyandi na Bantu Bandi, a mid-twentieth century offshoot of this royal tradition and a fine example of vernacular “literate ethnohistory.”Nowadays, Ifikolwe Fyandi is first and foremost the “tribal bible” that shapes the ethnic consciousness of eastern Lunda royals and aristocrats and stifles the emergence of alternative historical discourses. Ifikolwe Fyandi, however, is more than yet another manifestation of the “ubiquity” of “feedback,” for its local hegemony is mirrored by its pervasiveness within the historiography of the eastern savanna of central Africa.