TRIBES AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ BOOKS - MANAGING HISTORY IN COLONIAL ZAMBIA

This article examines the notion of the 'tribe' and how it was used in colonial Zambia by three different groups during the period of indire ct rule from 1931 to independence in 1964: colonial officials statione d in North West; local Africans; and the anthropologists of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute. I explore how these different usages informed and shaped each other in the course of a complex three-way dialogue, t racing out the substantive and sometimes contradictory nature of the c ategory 'tribe', and how it shaped and was shaped, by the untidy and d ynamic realities it supposedly explained. A central question underpinn ing the article is: to what extent was the 'tribe' an invented categor y imposed from above on rural African realities; and to what extent wa s it rather rural Africans themselves who filled what Ranger has refer red to as 'the empty boundary marker' of the 'tribe' with their own im aginative meanings?