Ian Manning
AH senior member
Zambia is a territory that has moved successively from an aboriginal occupancy by Bushmen and Pygmy, then by Bantu tribes, followed in 1889 by the British South Africa Chartered Company. In 1924, it became the British Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia and in 1964, the independent state of Zambia. Since then, Zambia has become a vassal and subsidiary state of Britain, America, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, myriad donors, and big business. This patrimonial neocolonial state is a bewildered inmate of the West’s making. It is a land of two parts: one Western capitalist, the other traditional ecosocialist. The customary people, girded by their kinship and spiritual customs, subsist on the wildlands in their ancient ecosocial way but, as I revealed in Volume I of God’s Country, are increasingly oppressed by the failings of a pre-modern state and its rent-seeking and land-grabbing through neocolonial conservation, some greedy chiefs, tourism, mining, industrial agriculture, privatizations and aid-project incursions, violating their subsistence needs, and sending them to horrific medieval prisons for + 5-years for eating the state’s game animals supported on their land. Like so much of the world’s customary commons, Zambia is a magical place, a term I use in the everyday Western sense. In Bangweulu, as an example, its pioneer people were the indigenous Twa (also found in other major wetlands of Zambia) - such as the man on the front cover - a resolute and religious band of people who never accepted slavery, the cruel rampages of warlike tribes, the arrival of the white man who took control of them, introducing laws punishing the benign Ng’anga witchdoctors - essential to keeping malign sorcerors under control - and forcing them to adopt capitalist ways. They, and the wave of immigrant Bantu tribes, were herded into large villages, forced to pay hut tax when such a thing as a job was unheard of, ‘recruited’ forcibly and sent to the newly established mines, their ownership rights to wildlife removed, their inter-tribal trade destroyed by imports. Yet, much of the British reign was enlightened, a fully formed country nurtured and delivered at independence in a mere 75 years. But unfortunately, an American-style executive presidency was imposed, which soon became big man patrimonial rule and corruption. It is time for the customary people to affirm their kinship and for the country as a whole to redefine its future along indigenous spiritual and ecological lines, not on Western grabbing capitalism. And to do this, they must take back their ownership of their land and natural resources - particularly the fish and game.
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