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Grist for the Mill: On Researching the History of Bulozi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Gwyn Prins
Gwyn Prins*
Affiliation:
Emmanuel College, Cambridge
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Extract

Since African history began to be produced in quantity one-and-a-half academic generations ago, there have rarely been shortages of new explanatory theory, though sometimes there has been paucity of data, more often of field than of archival materials. Usually there has been little open discussion of the kinds of methodological problems that both of the other circumstances pose. This contribution to that debate attempts to be deliberately simple, perhaps naive, in order to permit general points to peer through specific examples. It is about the intellectual, technical, and personal complications of field work generally and is illustrated from my own research on the last hundred years in Bulozi, the western part of Zambia. In topic as well as technique, I hope that these experiences have a wider relevance, for much attention is focused on the times of colonial impact.

I have in the title purposely set limits on the discussion. I look at the grist being brought to the mill rather than at what is done with it after it has been ground, in the belief that if the quantity and nature of adulteration can be judged -- for no grain is entirely pure -- one may hope to compensate for it in the baking and so produce reasonable bread. Also, extending the analogy a little, I shall identify types of grain, for no amount of baker's skill can produce a wheat loaf from rye flour.

Type
Fieldwork in Zambia
Information
History in Africa , Volume 5 , 1978 , pp. 311 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1978

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References

NOTES

1. For a more extensive discussion of this point see my review of van Onselen, Charles, Ckibavo (London, 1976)Google Scholar in Social History 6(1977)Google Scholar, and “The End of the Beginning of African History,” ibid., forthcoming. See also Cobbing, Julian, “The Evolution of Ndebele amabutho,” JAH, 15(1974), pp. 607–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “The Absent Priesthood: Another Look at the Rhodesian Risings of 1896-97,” JAH, 18(1977), pp. 61-84.

2. Some examples are Beach, David, “The Shona Economy: Branches of Production” in The Roots of Rural Poverty, ed. Palmer, Robin and Parsons, Q.N. (London, 1977), pp.Google Scholar and Caplan, Gerald, The Elites of Barotseland, 1878-1969 (London, 1970), pp. 231ff.Google Scholar

3. Examples for central Africa would include: Arrighi, Giovanni, The Economy of Rhodesia (Hague, 1968)Google Scholar; Kosmin, B.A., “Ethnic and Commercial Relations in Southern Rhodesia: a Socio-Historical Study of the Asian, Hellenie, and Jewish Populations, 1898-1943,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rhodesia, 1974)Google Scholar; Baldwin, R.E., Economic Development and Export Growth: A Study of Northern Rhodesia, 1920-1960 (Berkeley, 1966)Google Scholar; Van Onselen, Chibaro, chs. 1-4; Hole, H. Marshall, The Making of Rhodesia (London, 1926; reprint, 1967)Google Scholar; Blake, Robert, A History of Rhodesia (London, 1977)Google Scholar; Gann, Lewis H., The Birth of a Plural Society (Manchester, 1958).Google Scholar

4. Various types are described in Prins, G., “Self-Defence Against Invented Tradition: an Example from Zambia” in the Proceedings of the International Congress of Anthropology and History, Bologna, 1976, forthcoming.Google Scholar

5. E.g., Dorward, D.C., “Ethnography and Administration: a Study of Anglo-Tiv ‘Working Misunderstanding’,” JAH, 15 (1974), pp. 457–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar