Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa
368
Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822376378 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2015 |
| Series: | Radical Perspectives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
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Unreasonable Histories
Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa
By Christopher J. Lee
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7637-8
CHAPTER 1
IDIOMS OF PLACE AND HISTORY
Historical insights present themselves when you least expect them—often beyond the appointed rooms of dust-filled archives and tranquil libraries. In 1999 I walked up to the home of an informant located on the outskirts of Blantyre, Malawi. The daughter of a person whose life I had been researching at the national archives in Zomba, she had provided useful personal details and background about his life and politics and the colonial period generally. Though cellular telephones are ubiquitous today, they were not then, and my visit, after two long minibus rides, was unannounced. As I approached her thatch-and-concrete house, with several scattered dogs reporting my arrival, a man came out and asked who I was with some degree of suspicion. I answered that I was doing historical research about which my informant had been quite helpful, since it related to her father. The man briefly explained that he was her son and that she was away for the afternoon. To break the awkward silence that followed, I said that I was interested in the Anglo-African community and asked if he identified himself as "Anglo-African." No, he replied, he did not. After a moment's pause, he said he considered himself instead "philosophically Jewish," insisting that the genealogical portions of the Old Testament explained his views. Conjuring a secular interpretation and use, the sense of identity he embraced could be paraphrased prosaically as who-I-am-is-who-I-am-related-to. Nothing mattered to him in terms of social categories, to put it in academic terms. As I listened, his conversational views that afternoon gradually emerged as an example of how certain global forms of knowledge could be reconfigured into local, common-sense notions—an observation that intersected with the archival work I was pursuing at the time.
His grandfather was none other than Henry Ascroft, one of the founders and past presidents of the Anglo-African Association of Nyasaland, whose intriguing ideas had set me down this path toward the past. Ascroft's speeches to the association, his occasional articles in the Rhodesian Tribune published in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, and his petitions to the Nyasaland government conveyed a similar sensibility of kinship and identification, reflecting defiance toward conventional colonial categories of racial difference. It is unclear whether Ascroft directly influenced the perspectives of his grandson, or if his grandson's rationale confirmed a truth about Ascroft's colonial-era thinking. Kinship as a social idiom is not unique. Indeed, its use signaled a set of practices shared by this ephemeral social group and other African communities in the region. The biblical folk sociology his grandson imparted to me was unsurprising, given the pervasive influence of Christian missions in the region since the late nineteenth century. Yet it demonstrated continuity across generations. This occasion created an early dialogue between the archival documents I had been reading and the remaining legacies of colonialism I encountered through family memory. A genealogical imagination was at work in both instances despite the passage of time, suggesting the ongoing, transformative ways that local traditions converged with outside forms of social knowledge—whether racial or religious thought—to meet the needs of individual people and communities.
This chapter departs from this fieldwork moment to consider interrelated questions of memory, generation, and historical beginnings. In doing so, it presents three contexts for situating these subaltern histories—precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial—with the purpose of outlining the different meanings these consecutive periods bestowed on these issues. Each context underscores shifting senses of transgression and normality vis-à-vis interracial sexual relations, dependent on time, place, and perspective—a critical intervention against colonial views that classified such relations as always illicit. Colonialism for multiracial people was a family experience. It provided an origin story. It formed an integral part of personal histories with genealogical connections that extended regionally from Malawi to Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, and beyond to Europe and South Asia. The habitation of colonialism within family histories signals its persistence beyond moments of decolonization and, more generally, its different temporalities. But these intimate ontologies also raise fundamental questions about a social group with no perceptible precolonial history. Not only is the Anglo-African community subaltern in a classic postcolonial sense—numerically marginal, excluded from nationalist politics, and virtually absent from Malawi's postcolonial historiography—but this status is reinforced by the backdrop of the longue durée, having no deep history prior to Western colonial intrusion. The Anglo prefix in the term Anglo-African indicated a distinct chronological beginning. This predicament of historical shallowness challenges key presumptions about doing African history—namely, the importance of histories prior to colonial rule and the role of social reproduction in anchoring historical dynamics internal to the continent. This community approximates Eric Wolf's definition of "people without history"—in the sense of not being written about, of being left out of history—but this expression also appeared to apply in a more literal sense. This experiential unlikeness, compared to established ethnic communities, has contributed to its marginalization. This chapter consequently introduces the question of weak forms of peoplehood—their emergence, role, and decline within certain contexts of power over time.
INDIGENOUS EPISTEMOLOGIES AND RACIAL FRONTIERS
God made white men, and God made black men, but the devil made half-castes.
—David Livingstone and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries
Though sexuality has become an influential theme for addressing the gendered effects of colonialism, scholarship in this area has rarely ventured into precolonial practices to understand colonial-era trends. Intergroup contact, relations, and marriage were central dynamics of this earlier period. The region of British Central Africa was no exception. Nineteenth-century figures such as David Livingstone and Sir Harry Johnston noted the presence of "half-castes" and "mongrel races" in central Africa. These observations attracted only fleeting attention at the time, being a mere complication in the matter of identifying cohesive ethnic groups or, in Livingstone's case, explaining the degenerative nature of those who participated in the East African slave trade during his travels (figure 1.1). "Half-castes" actively participated in this commerce from the Zambezi interior to the coast, at times accruing significant wealth as a result. But passing acknowledgment of social and cultural mixture would continue. In his authoritative 1950 survey of British colonial rule in Africa, Lord Hailey cited the Nyasaland Protectorate as posing distinct challenges for the demographer, despite its small size. "Any study of the tribal distribution in Nyasaland is confused by the tendency to intermarriage," reported a 1945 government census, included in Hailey's summary. "This is especially true in the Shire Highlands [in southern Nyasaland], where the Anyanja, Yao, Angoni, Alomwe and Achikunda live side by side in the same villages. Patriarchal and matriarchal tribes in this area mix and intermarry in a way that is probably unique in East Central Africa.... On more than one occasion parents who claimed to belong to different tribes, the one patriarchal and the other matriarchal, were unable to agree as to which tribe their children should belong." The 1945 census concluded that the "sociological structure of the Protectorate is going through a most interesting period of adjustment to new conditions."
Yet this process of intermarriage was hardly new. The British were not the first to colonize the region, being outnumbered compared to African immigrants of the nineteenth century. The region of Malawi experienced the arrival, settlement, and cohabitation of a number of different ethnic groups—the Ngoni, Chewa, Mang'anja, and Yao among them. Indeed, these identities should be used cautiously, given their capacity to obscure patterns of demographic commingling and cultural creolization. The Mfecane—a period of state expansion and conflict during the first decades of the nineteenth century in what is today South Africa—sparked a social exodus across southeast Africa, one that converged with regional instability produced by the East African slave trade in the Lake Nyasa area after 1810. The impact of these changes was not only political, but cultural. Ngoni settlers were part of the former dynamic of migration, introducing patrilineal cultural practices to indigenous Chewa communities in central and southern Malawi that had followed matrilineal uxorilocality (the practice of a husband residing with his wife's family) and avunculate (maternal uncle, or nkhoswe) customs. Patrilineal traditions that asserted the authority of the husband and father were similarly introduced by the Chikunda from the Zambezi River valley and Muslim traders under the command of Salim bin Abdallah (known as the first jumbe, a term for ruler) from the East African coast. Both groups were involved in slave raiding. This trade that generated upheaval across the southern portion of the Lake Nyasa area not only affected structures of kinship through the introduction of new practices, but it encouraged growth in slaveholding, which provided an alternative means for gaining kin apart from marriage. These changes did not automatically displace uxorilocal marriage customs with virilocality (the practice of a wife living with her husband's kin). The cultural imprint of intermarriage worked in multifaceted ways. The Ngoni adopted local matrilineal traditions like mzinda (initiation rites) in some cases, while the matrilineal Chewa paid lobola (bride price), an agnatic custom, in others. Still, major transformations like the spread of Christianity and Islam, particularly among the matrilineal Yao, introduced patrilineal ideals that reinforced the authority of the husband and father. These and other elements of historical change—especially labor migration to the Rhodesias and South Africa—altered households and communities to such an extent that the prevalence of uxorilocality, which centered on wealth accumulated through small-scale landholding, had been modified, if not entirely diminished, by the postcolonial period.
Changing kin relations and practices consequently tell a history. These overlapping historical trends generated a demographic complexity that resisted state attempts to create legible ethnic groups. They challenged popular efforts as well. The production of ethnographic knowledge in Nyasaland as elsewhere was an activity pursued by a range of people—colonial officials, missionaries, anthropologists, and educated Africans alike. Nineteenth-century missionaries through their efforts to translate Christian gospel reported that they encountered "a Babel of linguistic confusion, the heritage of decades of movement by thousands of refugees and captives." Amid the later establishment of colonial indirect rule, intellectuals such as Y. B. Abdullah, George Simeon Mwase, and Kenneth Mdala sought to apply a native perspective to such matters. Pursuing inventive ethnohistorical work during the period between the two world wars, they positioned themselves as experts on local history in order to claim political authority. Sifting through this situation was not necessarily easier for trained social scientists. Mary Douglas (née Tew) produced one of the first comprehensive overviews of the Nyasaland region in 1950, in which she remarked that "its inhabitants have been confused by the raids and migrations of the last 100 years." Anthropologists based at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia faced similar problems in seeking ethnic clarity. An "unexciting prospect" is how J. Clyde Mitchell characterized the lakeside Tonga, with their "considerable tribal admixture in the past."
These latter anxieties found in the forewords, introductions, and addenda of colonial-era scholarship—a prose of colonial nativism—did not overrule state motivations to define and rule. But they highlight the risk of projecting group clarity onto the past from a postcolonial vantage point—the reproduction of a colonial-era mistake in the present—that can distort or conceal enduring patterns of intergroup conjugality. Reflecting on the Zomba History Project founded at Chancellor College at the University of Malawi in 1977, Megan Vaughan has pointed to this problem and the general challenge of a historically layered precolonial past—what Jean-Loup Amselle has called an originary syncretism. As part of a team seeking to uncover ethnic histories, Vaughan describes how they were essentially reversing historical processes of intermingling and assimilation. Intergroup marriage formed a central part of social and political life, with exogamy between groups providing crucial access to new sources of land, labor, and social knowledge. Autochthons—such as Chewa and Mang'anja communities—had the advantage of controlling land and could offer settlers like the Ngoni and Yao territorial accommodation in exchange for material needs or political status, resulting in strategic alliances. The potential decline of such connections after a generation favored maximizing the diversity of such arrangements. Negotiating this complexity embedded in local histories raised significant questions for Vaughan as to which was more important: reconstructing a presumed precolonial ethnohistory or understanding these processes that blurred distinctions. "In the nineteenth century Nyanja had become Yao," she writes, "in modern Malawi, historians appear capable of turning Yao into Nyanja." This continuity with past colonial efforts generated an uncomfortable self-consciousness about research intent and historical meaning. Indeed, Vaughan lamented the fact that her opening question to informants was the same as her colonial predecessors: "Who are you?"
This social history of regional intergroup relations provides a vital backdrop for interracial relationships during the colonial period. It provides an indigenous epistemology for colonialism's racial frontiers. Though the term marriage may not capture the full dimensions of colonial-era situations, the asymmetry of autochthon-settler power and the element of precarity involved propose continuities. These later experiences that are often perceived as deviant or exceptional were but newer versions of a preexisting tradition, based on reasoned motivations of exchange and building rapport. A strict focus on race and colonial social mores can obscure this normative perspective and the pragmatic meaning of strategic social experimentation among local communities. The Anglo-African community itself argued for this continuity to assert their social legitimacy. "There is no such thing as 'illegal miscegenation of races' in us whatsoever. What, and who, is halfcaste?" asked one member of the Anglo-African Association during the 1930s. "Is it a person born between white and black? Does the word halfcaste in its true sense not mean a person born between two persons each of whom belongs to a different nationality or race or tribe?" These rhetorical questions suggest a compelling interpretation of their own history. Although it is important to position Anglo-Africans as distinctive to the colonial period, situating this history within a deeper past underlines their affinity with other communities, underscoring persistent regional histories of sexuality. Multiracial Africans were not an aberration, but a twentieth-century variation of an enduring regional process.
COLONIAL PREDICAMENTS
Adultery is extremely common and in very few parts of British Central Africa is looked upon as a very serious matter, as a wrong which cannot be compensated by a small payment. Yet in a way the natives are jealous of their women; they are not at all anxious to encourage intercourse between their wives and white men, though they seem to be much more jealous about the white man than their brother negro. As a general rule it may be said that illicit intercourse with women on the part of Europeans causes great dissatisfaction in the native mind and invariably gives rise to acts of revenge on their part and even to serious risings. On the other hand if the European tries to obtain a wife in a legitimate manner by negotiation and purchase they are not at all unwilling to treat and no ill humour whatever results from his inter-marrying with them. In their eyes it is simply a matter of justice.
—Sir Harry Johnston, British Central Africa
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unreasonable Histories by Christopher J. Lee. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
A Note on Illustrations ixA Note on Terminology xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genealogical Imagination 1
Part I. Histories without Groups: Lower Strata Lives, Enduring Regional Practices, and the Prose of Colonial Nativism 23
1. Idioms of Place and History 27
2. Adaima's Story 53
3. Coming of Age 72
Part II. Non-Native Questions: Genealogical States and Colonial Bare Life 91
4. The Native Undefined 95
5. Commissions and Circumventions 111
Part III. Colonial Kinships: Regional Histories, Uncustomary Politics, and the Genealogical Imagination 141
6. Racism as a Weapon of the Weak 147
7. Loyalty and Disregard 175
8. Urbanization and Spatial Belonging 207
Conclusion: Genealogies of Colonialism 233
Notes 249
Bibliography 305
Index 337