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THE VILLAGE AS TERRITORY: ENCLOSING LOCALITY IN NORTHWEST ZAMBIA, 1950S TO 1990S

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2006

ACHIM VON OPPEN
ACHIM VON OPPEN
Affiliation:
Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin
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Abstract

Planned villagization is a recurrent feature in modern Africa. Apart from their official goals, which were missed in most cases, rural settlement schemes can be seen as attempts by colonial and postcolonial states to inscribe a new territorial order into the countryside. Taking a group of villages in northwest Zambia as an example, this article examines the process and impact of territorialization in a long-term and interactionist perspective. The result is a history of contestation about competing concepts of spatiality and sociality which opens new perspectives on the making of both locality and the nation state in Central Africa.

Keywords

Central AfricaZambiacolonial policydevelopmentspatial patternsterritory
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 57 - 75
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The research for this article was part of the group project ‘Locality and the State’ at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin, supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Thanks for comments on earlier drafts go (in chronological order) to Heike Schmidt, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Axel Harneit-Sievers, Reinhard Kößler, Dieter Neubert and Carola Lentz; to James Scott, Peter Geschiere and members of their colloquia at Yale and Amsterdam respectively; and to the referees of the Journal of African History. Special thanks are also owed to Sunniva Greve for her careful language editing.