Under the heading “Black Englishmen?” the newspaper Nkhani za kum'mawa in January 1960 published a letter to the editor from Benjamin Jere of Fort Jameson (now Chipata in Zambia's Eastern Province). Writing in English in this predominantly Chinyanja-language publication, Jere reported, “I have observed that many educated Africans do not want to speak their own languages even if two were of the same tribe. They prefer English to their tribal languages.” He continued, “I have also noticed that educated Africans have no regard for their fellow uneducated Africans and yet they advocate partnership with Europeans. How can a European accept partnership when there is no partnership among the Africans?” Jere's final paragraph read, “The African by speaking European's [sic] languages in his home is accepting ipso facto that he must always be subjected to European ideas of superiority. The educated African is to blame in this respect.”
This challenge to subjection to “European ideas of superiority” appeared in a newspaper published by the colonial Department of Information in what was then Northern Rhodesia. The message it conveyed, in elegant English and spiced with a Latin phrase, would hardly be anticipated by those who dismiss such publications as weapons of propaganda. Andrew Roberts has recently remarked on the dearth of research on the variety of ways in which “Africans made themselves heard” in colonial Zambia (Reference Roberts, Gewald, Hinfelaar and Macola2011: 19), notably through vernacular presses and broadcasting. Government-sponsored publications in African languages, in Zambia as elsewhere in colonial Central and East Africa, have attracted little more than cursory comments on their alleged tendency to “help keep Africans ‘native’” (Primorac Reference Primorac2012: 61) and on their efforts to “capture the hearts and minds” of African subjects (Frederiksen Reference Frederiksen2011: 163). Such assumptions foreclose investigation of the insights these publications can provide into issues of concern to both Africans and their colonial masters (Hunter Reference Hunter2012). Vernacular newspapers, whoever their sponsor, were challenged to connect mutual strangers in novel ways, often in languages in which secular written literature was still in its infancy. The growing interest in new kinds of addressivity and emergent genres in Africa, such as Karin Barber identified in her work on the development of Yoruba print culture in Nigeria (Reference Barber, Peterson and Macola2009; Reference Barber2012), demands that we take a more balanced look at government-sponsored vernacular newspapers.Footnote 1 They may not furnish uplifting examples of the colonized “turning colonial modernity against the colonizer” (Goscha Reference Goscha2012: 801; see also Smith Reference Smith1998), but we must examine them as cultural and political artifacts in their own right.Footnote 2
After the Second World War, colonial Zambia became a site of intense experimentation with emergent possibilities in economic and cultural life. Increasing government investment in education and welfare services, coupled with the pull of Zambia's copper mines, created circumstances in which resistance to colonial oppression and exploitation coexisted with enthusiastic appropriations of new styles, tastes, and opportunities (see e.g., Epstein Reference Epstein1992; Mitchell Reference Mitchell1956; Pritchett Reference Pritchett and Englund2011). Yet precisely because colonial racism had not dissipated, it is a mistake to read such appropriations as expressions of mimicry.Footnote 3 The African editors and readers of Nkhani za kum'mawa debated what it meant to be an African in this era of both opportunity and discrimination, and they did so through texts whose modes of addressivity were as new as the circumstances they grappled with. Insofar as they became collaborators with the colonial government, they illustrate what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has said about collaboration between unequal partners more generally: “There is no reason to assume that collaborators share common goals” (Reference Tsing2005: 13). Tsing's concept of friction captures important aspects of the experimentation that went on in the pages of Nkhani za kum'mawa, particularly the insight that the emergence of novel possibilities requires friction to produce creative tension. To understand the present case, it is vital to realize that such friction did not necessarily occur around anti-colonial sentiments.
The postwar era saw an escalation of claim-making in colonies across the globe. This was a moment of moral as well as political ferment, whose “alternative languages of claim-making” (Cooper Reference Cooper2005: 234) have remained poorly understood under the weight of scholarly attacks on Eurocentric models of development. In this regard, there is an uncanny resemblance between Marxist-nationalist strictures against “Westernized” Africans (Magubane Reference Magubane1971), postcolonial theorizing about mimicry, and the emphasis of subaltern studies on the conditions of knowledge (see Cooper Reference Cooper2005: 50)—despite their divergent political and epistemological commitments, all begin and end with the categories of colonial rule itself. The study of government-sponsored vernacular press in late-colonial Zambia offers an opportunity to recover some of those alternative languages of claim-making. Crucial to that recovery is the realization that many items published in Nkhani za kum'mawa may have been about friction less as an anti-colonial sentiment than as a claim to social and economic membership in a society whose racial, spatial, and moral boundaries were under intense deliberation (compare Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006: 166–67).Footnote 4
Recent revisionist history of Zambia has heeded the warning against reading history backward.Footnote 5 The authoritarianism of the post-independence government is no longer seen as the inevitable consequence of a particular kind of nationalism. The study of vernacular press and emergent possibilities extends this insight from nationalism to anti-colonialism as a meta-narrative that may have been unduly dominant in scholarship. To question anti-colonialism both as a meta-narrative among scholars and a sentiment among the subjects of their scholarship is by no means an argument for disregarding colonial oppression and exploitation. Instead, as when Clifford Geertz addressed the American Anthropological Association with his thesis on “anti anti-relativism,” it is “an effort to counter a view rather than to defend the view it claims to be counter to” (Reference Geertz1984: 263). By defying “the law of the double negative,” Geertz proposed to reject anti-relativism without thereby committing himself to what it opposes, namely cultural and moral relativism. I emphasize anti-colonialism here, in the first instance, as a meta-narrative ordering scholarly pursuits, often with detrimental consequences for engaging with topics, such as the government-sponsored press, that do not seem to indicate anti-colonial sentiments among African subjects. Importantly, we should not assume that the absence of anti-colonial sentiments is evidence of any particular commitment to the colonial status quo.
My argument echoes the connection Aijaz Ahmad (Reference Ahmad1992) has drawn between metropolitan intellectuals' neglect of writing in non-European languages and their emphasis on national allegories as the staple of the so-called Third World literature. Exasperated at “the kind of impoverishment that is involved in the a priori declaration that ‘All third-world texts are necessarily … to be read as national allegories’” (ibid.: 113),Footnote 6 Ahmad outlines the history of Urdu literature in India to demonstrate how the movement of critical realism within it from the 1930s onward was by no means wedded to the idea of the nation. What this literary movement demanded, according to Ahmad, “was that a critique of others (anti-colonialism) be conducted in the perspective of an even more comprehensive, multifaceted critique of ourselves: our class structures, our familial ideologies, our management of bodies and sexualities, our idealisms, our silences” (ibid.: 118). The “impoverishment” involved in the scant scholarship on African vernacular newspapers is the expectation that their ethos would revolve around only a small number of possible claims, such as anti-colonialism, mimicry, or nativism. Superficial readings of the columns and letters carried in Nkhani za kum'mawa would indeed lend support to the view that those Africans who were not explicitly nationalist in orientation tended to regard Europeans as the principal patrons to cultivate and emulate. However, as Benjamin Jere's letter has already indicated, and as many other examples below will demonstrate, the editors and readers of Nkhani za kum'mawa had other issues in mind than the desire to become “almost the same but not white” (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994: 28). By the same token, their vernacularism, even when (or perhaps especially when) defended in Jere's sophisticated English, was as distinct from nativism as it was from mimicry. The world described in Nkhani za kum'mawa extended far beyond the linguistic, ethnic, and racial boundaries of the Chinyanja-speaking readership.Footnote 7
We must begin by exploring the deliberations that gave rise to African newspapers in colonial Zambia. A sense of experimentation seized colonial officers, too, as can be seen in the extensive correspondence about the specimen issue of Mutende, the first government-sponsored newspaper for Africans in Zambia, published from 1936 until 1952. The colonial government consulted provincial and district commissioners as well as native associations, missionaries, and mine officials about the specimen issue. How to balance government propaganda and popular participation was subject to diverse views in this correspondence, making the notion of one uniform approach to colonial print culture decidedly suspect. Rather than using the correspondence as a way to launch into a content analysis of Mutende's subsequent issues, I take it as providing a set of insights into the colonial situation in which Nkhani za kum'mawa began to appear two decades later.Footnote 8 By then, an incipient African editorship had replaced the white editors of Mutende. Through its regular columns and readers' letters, Nkhani za kum'mawa came to address a public that was not provincial in any straightforward sense, and offered profiles of prominent persons in the province whose exemplary conduct indicated new ways of making claims, ways that had little to do with nationalist and other anti-colonial pursuits.
IMAGINING THE AFRICAN NEWSPAPER
Colonial Zambia was a pioneer in radio broadcasting for African audiences—Radio Lusaka blazed a trail for the rest of the continent by beginning to broadcast in African languages in 1941 (Fraenkel Reference Fraenkel1959)—but it came late to introducing an African newspaper to its subjects. By contrast, mission-educated African elites in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone were all publishing newspapers by the mid-nineteenth century, following the first in Sierra Leone in 1801 and Ghana in 1822 (Hasty Reference Hasty2005: 9). In East Africa, the earliest newspapers appeared in Uganda, again as a result of the spread of mission education, with Sekanyolya, a Luganda monthly first published in 1920 (Scotton Reference Scotton1973). Muigwithania was the first African-owned newspaper in Kenya, started in 1928 and edited by Jomo Kenyatta (Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale and Falola2005). African-owned newspapers in East and Central Africa were preceded by, and coexisted with, journals and newspapers published by white settlers, the colonial government, and Christian missions (Smythe Reference Smyth1983: 33–34).
The 1920s witnessed the first government-sponsored newspapers for African readers in the region: Habari in Kenya and Mambo Leo in Tanganyika (Brennan Reference Brennan2006),Footnote 9 followed in 1930 by Zoona in what was then Nyasaland (now Malawi). In colonial Zambia, the earliest mission newsletter was Mafube a Ba-Rotse, launched in 1904 to cater for Lozi readership in the west of the territory. Newspapers catering to settlers included the Livingstone Mail, founded in 1906, followed in the 1930s by the Copperbelt Times and the Northern Rhodesia Advertiser (Smyth Reference Smyth1983: 30–31). To supplement the diet of local, white-oriented news these papers provided, Europeans and educated Africans would turn to the more substantial Southern Rhodesian newspapers Bulawayo Chronicle and Rhodesia Herald.
A number of reasons account for the relatively late development of print culture in colonial Zambia. One is the low level of formal education in the colony, where only 0.5 percent of the population had completed primary school at independence in 1964 (Tordoff and Molteno Reference Tordoff, Molteno and Tordoff1974: 8). Because the first secondary school for Africans was not established until 1939, Zambia entered independence with fewer highly educated Africans than any other former British colony. A related reason was settler pressure on the administration to maintain the segregation of white and African education. Colonial Zambia also lacked a sizeable Indian business community, which had been a significant sponsor of newspapers in Tanganyika and Kenya (Brennan Reference Brennan2011; Frederiksen Reference Frederiksen2011). The vastness of the colony, much of which was rural, also posed a challenge to communications and the distribution of print material. Finally, Southern Rhodesia alone employed more Zambians than did the Copperbelt until the 1950s (Smyth Reference Smyth1983: 39), and labor migration resulted in widespread male absenteeism and a minuscule pool of potential readers.
The launching of Mutende in 1936 was one of a series of initiatives by the colonial administration to create mass-mediated fora for its dealings with the African population. Others included the African Literature Committee and the Native Film Censorship Board, both established in 1937 (ibid.: 20). The war added urgency to these efforts to channel and monitor information and subsequently led to a mass-education drive, which was often financed from the Colonial Education and Welfare Fund in the interest of “community development.” A more immediate trigger for the government-sponsored African newspaper was a 1935 strike by African mine workers on the Copperbelt (Fields Reference Fields1985; Smyth Reference Smyth1983: 40–41). Its violent end spread fear among the European population and appeared to them all the more ominous when it was thought that pamphleteering by the Watch Tower movement had contributed to its eruption.
The African newspaper became desirable also as a means of distracting readers from these inflammatory and millennial texts with more innocuous readings. Mutende, meaning “greetings” in several Zambian languages and “peace” in Chibemba, began as a monthly newspaper in March 1936 under the editorship of a seconded district commissioner and contained articles in English and four Zambian languages. Two African clerks assisted the editor, and when it became a fortnightly newspaper during the war more Africans took up duties including the writing and translation of contents. Mutende came to provide local and world news, editorial comments and explanations, and pages devoted to women, children, sports, and health, as well as letters from Africans, advertisements, and a good supply of pictures. The editor was responsible to the secretary for Native Affairs, and Mutende came to be run by the new Information Department established in Lusaka in 1940.
Before these developments, Mutende existed as a specimen issue that was circulated in late 1935 and early 1936. It was accompanied by a circular from Chief Secretary Charles Dundas, based in Lusaka, who announced, “It is proposed to start a native newspaper for the purpose of supplying literature for the African population of Northern Rhodesia.”Footnote 10 He added, “It is not … intended that the paper shall contain merely ‘Government’ news.” His invitation for comments and suggestions on a variety of issues—including the title, pricing, methods of sale, languages used, and contents—brought with a flurry of responses from provincial and district commissioners, authorities responsible for African education, African welfare associations, and representatives of missionary and mining organizations. Taken together, these letters convey a diversity of viewpoints and opinions that would be difficult to reduce to one uniform design for colonial control over the African hearts and minds. Although it is unclear to what extent the various parties consulted were able to deliberate with one another, their letters give ample evidence of a vibrant debate over an emergent method of addressing an African public. The debate's foundation was unanimity concerning the need for such a publication; nobody, not even the plain-speaking welfare officer at Nkana Mine Compound, H. Cecil Nutter, disputed the proposal to start a newspaper for Africans. Nutter thought it pertinent to end his comments with offers of empathy to “the unenvied long suffering martyr who shoulders this additional portion of the White Man's Burden.”Footnote 11
In accordance with the chief secretary's injunction that the newspaper would not contain only government news, several correspondents reflected on the extent to which Africans should participate in producing their own newspaper. Nutter was again characteristically wry when he suggested, “Natives should be allowed to write to the paper and make some contributions—provided that the ditor [sic] has a sufficiently large waste-paper basket and liberal supply of patience.”Footnote 12
Others were less patronizing in their enthusiasm for African participation, such as the district commissioner (hereafter DC) in Mporokoso, who assured the provincial commissioner in Kasama, “I should be only too glad to encourage natives, clerks and chiefs to send in contributions.”Footnote 13 His call for “accounts of incidents in native life as told by natives” was echoed by several other DCs, such as the one in Mpika who recommended, “Stories of home happenings should be told as much as possible in the way they would be told by a native bringing the news to the village.”Footnote 14 Some proposed serialized short stories, like the DC in Kasama, who referred to the novel by S. Y. Ntara as an example of African literature that could be harnessed in the newspaper.Footnote 15 The DC in Chinsali, quoting the principal of Lubwa Training School, expressed hope that the newspaper “will not become too official and that there will be room for considerable freedom in expressing views on the part of the Native.”Footnote 16 The same DC proposed to “go further” and suggested inclusion of “a story in the shape of a ‘thriller’ or something ‘snappy.’” The DC in Mumbwa was particularly articulate in defending the principle that the newspaper should be an “African paper” (his emphasis).Footnote 17 To this end, he asserted, “As many of the contributions as possible should be by Africans—edited as necessary.” In an interesting reversal of mimicry, he also advised, “Articles written by Europeans should as far as possible be written from the African point of view—even to the point of the writer identifying himself with the Africans. An African will often listen to another African when he will not listen to a European.”
It is no coincidence that the articulate DC in Mumbwa, K. G. Bradley, was appointed colonial Zambia's first information officer in 1939 (Smyth Reference Smyth1983: 43). In his 1935 missive, the DC gave clues as to how the new African public ought to be addressed, not least “to counter the persistently destructive attitude of the European local press towards every activity of the Government.”Footnote 18 His view indicated the widespread frustration in the colonial administration over not only Watch Tower activism (which he also mentioned) but also the settler press whose negativity was feared to influence the African opinion. It was in response to these fears that the “African paper” would become a propaganda tool, but only, he wrote, if particular sensibilities were maintained: “The pills of propaganda and education must be well sugared if they are to be popular. There is a danger of this paper being entirely serious and ‘uplifting’ and constant care must be taken to preserve a lightness of tone. The African is always being preached at and he is no more attentive to a dull sermons [sic] than the rest of us.”Footnote 19 A number of correspondents recommended tactfulness, such as the provincial commissioner in Central Province, who emphasized, “Native susceptibilities should not be offended either in the title or the contents of the paper.”Footnote 20 The acting director in the Department of Native Education thought “The adoption of the convention that ‘Native’ shall be written with a capital would be much appreciated by readers.”Footnote 21 He also advocated a designated column for his department, noting that the majority of readers were likely to be teachers, teachers in training, and students.
The responses diverged most regarding questions of language and news, and here they reveal different ways of envisaging the African public. The chief secretary's circular announced that while “items of special importance might appear in other dialects,” the newspaper would be printed in English and Chibemba in the first instance.Footnote 22 Few respondents supported this precise allocation between languages, and some advocated the use of English on the grounds that Africans would turn to the newspaper in order to learn the language. The ethno-linguistic divisions among the African readership were the paramount concern for many respondents. In this regard, the provincial commissioner in Southern Province recommended the identification of an English title and observed that while a “native name” might be acceptable for a newspaper in Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, where “one language will carry one over the greater part of the Territory,” the linguistic complexity of Northern Rhodesia allowed for no such convenience.Footnote 23
Others reflected on the kind of English the newspaper should carry, with several insisting on simplified expression. The Department of Native Education's acting director offered his department's expertise in providing “simple English based on a standardized and restricted vocabulary,”Footnote 24 while others called for similar expertise to be used for the benefit of Zambian languages. “The average native Clerk,” the DC in Mporokoso submitted, “does not yet know a great deal about his language.”Footnote 25 In his view, a certain hierarchy should be observed among the different items in the newspaper, with the leading articles kept as the prerogative of the linguistically competent white editor—“just as a school boy in England would not be expected to produce a leading article in the ‘Times.’” Others had more confidence in the linguistic abilities of the Africans they knew and reported several critical comments on the quality of Chibemba in the specimen issue.Footnote 26 The inclusion of Chinyanja, and the exclusion from the specimen copy of Chitonga, exercised some respondents, but such was the tendency of each to speak in favor of the main language in their respective areas that the comment from a district officer in the Copperbelt, a predominantly Chibemba-speaking area, represented unusual pragmatism: “North Western natives form 32% of the Mine employees and the majority of them are not familiar with Chibemba.”Footnote 27 This same pragmatism led him to suggest different editions for different parts of the colony, something implemented two decades later through separate provincial newspapers. The defense of local languages or “dialects” was often an extension of the argument for keeping the supply of news relevant to local concerns.
Yet some respondents, in a manner that seems prescient when one considers the contents of Nkhani za kum'mawa, cautioned against assuming that the African public was prone to parochialism. The DC in Abercorn was one of the few to push for devoting substantial space to world news, arguing, “The parish magazine side should not be overdone.”Footnote 28 “To the native,” he explained, “Northern Rhodesia is tantamount to a parish.” This DC based his argument on observing popular reactions to the Bantu Cinema's visit to Abercorn. It showed that “the Native was bored with the reproduction of familiar scenes and most keenly interested in pictures quite beyond his experience.”Footnote 29 While others also suggested that Mutende should contain world news, it is surprising that the widespread labor migration did not make them reflect more on the possibility of popular demand for stories not local in character. Most still imagined and addressed the African public as parochial, only complicated by its internal ethnic and linguistic diversity and by the millennialism of the Watch Tower movement.
Such ideas of parochialism would be put to rest over twenty years later by the profiles of prominent people from Eastern Province featured in Nkhani za kum'mawa, but the correspondence about Mutende already conveys considerable uncertainty as well as enthusiasm over the new medium. No one mentioned other African newspapers as providing models to emulate, although some indicated awareness of them. Some correspondents envisaged a distinct identity for the newspaper by contrasting it with the region's other African newspapers, including Mambo Leo, which, the DC in Ndola opined, was a “semi-educational journal” and not a newspaper.Footnote 30 What recurred in general comments was the sense of experimentation that the new initiative entailed. “It is impossible to foretell,” remarked the Central Province's provincial commissioner, “what the future of the paper will be or what demand there will be for it.”Footnote 31 “The only way of finding out what the native public wants,” the district officer in Nkana added, “is to offer the newspaper for sale in its present form and modify it according as [sic] native tastes are discovered.”Footnote 32
After the war, Mutende sought consolidation by becoming a weekly newspaper, but it soon found itself in the middle of a bitter dispute between the government and white settlers as talk about amalgamation with Southern Rhodesia intensified. New African opinion leaders, such as Dauti Yamba, Godwin Mbikusita Lewanika, and Harry Nkumbula, had had their letters published and featured in the prize lists of Mutende essay competitions (Smyth Reference Smyth1983: 203). By 1948, after settler representation had been included on the Mutende advisory board, the editorial policy had been declared non-political, but letters from settlers continued to be published while “the many African letters sent in got no further than the files” (ibid.: 289). The last issue of Mutende appeared in December 1952, its subscription base curtailed and its mandate as the African newspaper of colonial Zambia in doubt.Footnote 33
PROVINCIAL COSMOPOLITANS
Mutende's place in history has been determined solely on the basis of the way it faced its demise—as a compromise between European interests rather than a forum for African concerns—and the nuances of its initial imagination have been ignored. In a typical case of reading history backward, the facts of biased reporting and censorship were given precedence over finding out what the colonial archives say about the paper. This would make the meta-narrative of anti-colonial sentiment irresistible, as though the only interesting question was how Africans carved out a space for their self-expression against such a condition. Yet the case of Nkhani za kum'mawa shows that the imagination of African participation that existed within colonial rule could create a space for modes of addressivity that neither vilified nor vindicated colonialism. Political expediency and government propaganda were in evidence on its pages, changing their hue from the newspaper's launch in 1958 to its folding in 1965. The duly translated statements by colonial authorities—from colonial secretaries, to governors, to provincial commissioners—gave way to increasing space for nationalists, with Kenneth Kaunda smiling at the readers from the front page in January 1965. At the same time, Nkhani za kum'mawa provided ample scope for the exploration of what the publics it addressed would consist of. Although suffused with the excitement of a new era, the modes of addressivity most congenial for that exploration carried few explicit references to either colonial or anti-colonial sentiments.
Those genres and modes of addressivity flew in the face of the expectation, criticized by the DC in Abercorn quoted earlier, that Nkhani za kum'mawa's public was primarily a provincial one in the parochial sense. Yet when Eastern Province stood out for poor sales of Mutende in the 1930s, its administrators were quick to point out the relative absence of Chinyanja and stories from the province. The other reasons cited were male absenteeism and the paper's high price, and the DCs proposed a separate Chinyanja edition for the province.Footnote 34 In response, Mutende's second editor S. R. Denny provided evidence of the relatively large proportion of Chinyanja material, remarking, “The only area that really has a right to complain is the Tonga area,” and suggesting, “The people of one area will not buy the paper unless there is news of that area.”Footnote 35 Denny described his efforts to solicit news and articles from the province but lamented, “There has been remarkably little response.”
This correspondence was no doubt precipitated by a directive the acting chief secretary's office sent to the provincial commissioner to, “Tell your officers that the wide circulation of Mutende is considered to be a matter of importance, and that it is the policy of the Government that its officers should use every endeavor to increase it.”Footnote 36 This had led to Mutende being promoted in the province to the degree that by the end of the 1930s the Chinyanja readership was thought to outnumber all others (Smyth Reference Smyth1983: 66). What Nkhani za kum'mawa came to reveal two decades later was the fallacy of assuming that a provincial public was confined to its particular province. It found readership beyond the colony's borders, just as the seemingly local events and personalities it reported on were inextricably linked to non-local experiences.
Nkhani za kum'mawa, “News from the east,”Footnote 37 was one of four government-sponsored provincial newspapers to replace Mutende, with Lyashi publishing in Chibemba, Intanda in Chitonga, and Zwelopili in Lozi (Graham Reference Graham1964).Footnote 38 Eastern Province had no mines or industries to employ workers on a large scale, and the backbone of its economy was commercial agriculture based mostly on tobacco, maize, and groundnuts. The distribution of Nkhani za kum'mawa built on the infrastructure bequeathed by Mutende, with white farmers bringing copies to their African workers and other readers finding them at dispensaries, mission stations, and post offices.Footnote 39 Although many of its potential readers were absent from the province, letters to the editor indicate that copies had also found their way to the Copperbelt, Lusaka, and cities and mines in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa as well as to colonial Malawi and Tanzania. Published by the Department of Information, editorial oversight rested with the white information officer, but in a significant contrast to Mutende the actual editing and reporting were the responsibility of African officers in the department, including Likhubwe Phiri, J. G. Kayamba, and Cecilia Mumeka, all stationed at Fort Jameson.Footnote 40
Nkhani za kum'mawa contained local, world, and sports news, readers' letters, a women's page, colonial authorities' statements, editorials, serialized short stories, quizzes and crossword puzzles, and commercial advertisements. Some of this material, such as the crossword puzzles and most advertisements, was published only in English, while the bulk of news and articles appeared in Chinyanja. Most items did not carry the names of the journalists who wrote them, but readers' letters were invariably published with their names and places of residence. Personalities were of special interest, as can be seen from the high frequency of news about particular personal fortunes and misfortunes in Eastern Province. This interest found a regular outlet in columns devoted to chiefs and prominent persons in the province; Mafumu alero (“Today's chiefs,” or “Contemporary chiefs”) offered not so much traditional lore as accounts of incumbent chiefs' life histories. Although they were identified as the leaders of particular “tribes” (mitundu), prominence was given to their personal achievements through exemplary behavior rather than to the customs whose guardians the chiefs were supposed to be.Footnote 41 The emphasis was in fact developmentalist, with a focus on the work the chiefs had done before their enthronement and on their efforts to improve their subjects' standards of living. Collaboration with the colonial government was an obvious theme in these columns, but equally important was their perspective on traditional authorities as entangled in thoroughly contemporary concerns over the delivery of development.
The link between exemplary behavior and emergent possibilities can be examined in more detail through Anthu odziwika (“Prominent people,” or “Famous people”), another regular column devoted to personalities in the province. As in Mafumu alero, the columns' subjects were rarely quoted directly, and the narrative usually gave a third-person account of their provenance, schooling, moves between different locations, and particular achievements through work and business. Geographical mobility is a strikingly common theme, with only one of the twenty sample columns published between 1960 and 1962 reporting on a life that had never involved residence outside Eastern Province; thirteen had lived outside the territory of Northern Rhodesia, and of the remaining seven who had not, six had lived outside the province. Although the subjects were at different stages in life, their prominence inevitably required a measure of seniority. Some were still in active service and others had retired, but the overall effect was to create a moment of reflection on their personal growth. Their current situation could not be derived in any simple way from the position from which they had started, but nor were the narratives mere rags-to-riches stories. The columns gave a perspective on emergent possibilities in an era of late-colonial developments, the aftermath of the Second World War, and the mining boom in Southern and Central Africa.
Achievement through one's own effort was a common theme, as was dependence on, and provision for, large families. Dick Musoni, for example, stressed the benefits of investing in cattle and urged labor migrants (machona) to use the bonus payments (ndalama za bonasi) they received in the mines to buy cattle in their villages of origin.Footnote 42 Musoni had been born in Southern Rhodesia some sixty years before the interview with Nkhani za kum'mawa, and as a child had moved with his parents to their village of origin in Eastern Province where he had looked after their cattle and goats. In 1927 he walked to Salisbury (Harare), where he eventually learned to drive and was employed operating an underground train on the Copperbelt. In 1958, after twenty years of service for the same company, Musoni retired to the village to open a tearoom and pursue agriculture with the ten heads of cattle he had accumulated.
In a similar vein, Misheke Soko's story emphasized the profit (phindu) to be gained from keeping cattle, of which he had twenty-five.Footnote 43 His had first combined business and agriculture when he learned to sew. The bangles (mafumba) he made for women proved a success, and he now lived in a brick house (nyumba ya njerwa) as a shopkeeper and keen farmer. The article ended by reporting, “He had no desire to work for anyone else because he made money from the soil as well as from the shop.”Footnote 44 Soko was also reported to “have a large family that helps him with all of his work.”Footnote 45
A proverb introducing Thedi Nthongwe's story summarized the ethos of many contributions to the Anthu odziwika column: “‘What-He-Can-See’ killed an elephant with a ball of soil” (Aonenji anapha njobvu ndi buma).Footnote 46 This proverb, used to illustrate the capacity of the destitute to gain admiration, led the column's author to remind “self-aggrandizing people” (anthu odzikuza) that “everyone has their own blessing” (muthu alieyense ali ndi mdalitso wace).Footnote 47 Nthongwe had received medals (mendulo) from King George in 1950 and Queen Elizabeth in 1953, yet his origins were particularly humble. He had been deserted in the mines as a young boy by his sister who had left with her husband and subsequently found work at the district headquarters when a European hired him to “kill flies in the office” (ka nchito kopha nchenche zamu ofesi). After learning to write and type, Nthongwe worked for several years in clerical positions on the Copperbelt until he was moved to Fort Jameson in 1940 to become the first African administrative assistant, a post he held until his retirement in 1957. Now the owner of a car, he was reported to be receiving a pension and looking after his large family in the village.
European contacts also provided a stimulus to the fortunes of Peter Mambwe. Though he became a policeman and a leader (mtsogoleri) in a number of secular and Christian organizations, he had at first found work in Southern Rhodesia “to look after Europeans' children” (nchito yolera ana a azungu) and then was “promoted to become a houseboy” (anakwezedwa kukhala house boy).Footnote 48 Andrew Kapatamoyo Jere, the first African policeman in Fort Jameson, was featured in Nkhani za kum'mawa in November 1961.Footnote 49 After describing his life experience gained from working in many different places, he was quoted addressing the readers as “my children” (ana anga) in order to explain, “We Africans and Europeans do not want to see trouble caused by bloodshed over wealth in the world.”Footnote 50
This positive perspective on the European presence, along with the fact that fourteen of the twenty subjects in the sample Anthu odziwika columns had worked for the colonial government, may seem unvarnished propaganda for colonial rule. But such a verdict might preempt investigation of what else the columns said. The lives of the exemplary persons who merited a column had involved many travels and travails, not simply work for the government. Wartime experiences featured in some columns. Lameck Phiri, for instance, was reported to have served in the 5th Battalion of the Northern Rhodesian Regiment from 1939 until 1945 in Kenya, Tanganyika, Burma, Ceylon, Somaliland, China, India, and Japan.Footnote 51 Webster J. Mvula went to war in 1942, first in Kenya and then in Ceylon, from where illness returned him to Kenya in 1944.Footnote 52 The main theme in the column on Ariel M. Phiri was a course in Public Administration he had recently completed in England.Footnote 53 His experience suggested the Commonwealth rather than the war or labor migration as a way to establish far-flung contacts, such as two Ugandans with whom he had shared a house, part of his cohort of thirty-eight students from different Commonwealth countries.
Many columns were structured around long lists of places where the subject had lived, and they often described how periods spent in Eastern Province were interspersed with migrations to other places.Footnote 54 Epifano B. Chokani, born in Chadiza in the province, pursued both religious and secular education in different parts of Nyasaland, and after working there as a teacher moved to Southern Rhodesia, “to do many kinds of work in several places” (zinchito zosiyana-siyana m'malo ambiri). This was followed by a period in the village where his parents had moved from Chadiza.Footnote 55 After a job in the Department of Agriculture, he had worked in five different locations in the province before becoming agriculture clerical officer in Petauke. Education as a path to travel and prominence was especially apparent in the column about Joseph B. Mwemba, who was presented as a Chitonga-speaking immigrant in the province.Footnote 56 He had been the first president of the Northern Rhodesia African Teachers' Association, and before relocating to Eastern Province as its schools inspector Mwemba had studied in South Africa and the United States and had visited Canada and several countries in Western Europe and North Africa.
Employment with the colonial government, in other words, could be the apex of a person's career, but the Anthu odziwika columns provided more detail than simply giving the government favorable publicity would have required.Footnote 57 As already seen—and as indicated by titles such as, “He did different kinds of work in many places,”Footnote 58 “He has visited other countries,” and “He studied in England”—the subjects were portrayed, not as mere servants of the government but rather as menFootnote 59 familiar with the ways of the world. They were, therefore, cosmopolitans, not in the sense of having cultivated a style that stood in contrast to the localism of their less-traveled peers (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1999), but rather as rooted cosmopolitans who used their travels and travails as a basis for their prominence in the province (see Werbner Reference Werbner and Werbner2008). Although the concept of cosmopolitanism, even after such a qualification, can retain a problematic association with whatever the analyst happens to find an agreeably open-minded disposition,Footnote 60 it allows for more attention to subjects' motives and perspectives than the concept of mimicry does (Newell Reference Newell2011). But the vernacular print culture that sustained such provincial cosmopolitanism in late-colonial Zambia was not simply an ingenious, let alone surreptitious, assault on colonial binaries. It introduced alternative languages of claim-making at a time when the future was very much an open question.
A PROVINCIAL PUBLIC?
By the time Nkhani za kum'mawa started publishing, nationalist campaigning had been galvanized by the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland (Rotberg Reference Rotberg1965). Although Eastern Province was too remote from the urban and mining centers to become a hotbed of nationalist agitation, political meetings and sporadic violent confrontations did take place there. A key rhetorical justification for the Federation was the “partnership” between Europeans and Africans. One example of that rhetoric taking on unexpected meanings is the letter from Benjamin Jere with which this article began. He called for a partnership among Africans to put an end to educated Africans' denigration of African languages. It is by no means inevitable that such appropriations of government rhetoric served the interests of colonial rulers. New possibilities in race relations were explored by various other letters and articles at the turn of the decade, not least by those that reported on African achievements. As the column on prominent people showed, stories about personal advancement at work were common, but more was at stake than an individual's sense of fulfillment. When Nkhani za kum'mawa printed news about Africans rising to positions where they earned the same salaries as Europeans, it played its part in making new kinds of claim-making possible.Footnote 61
That said, the claim to equal pay coexisted with a hierarchical order in which access to Europeans could bring security and prosperity. For instance, a published letter from B. F. Shawa to the editor from Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia praised “my European” (mzungu wanga) for giving him a cow when the European still owned a farm and for, upon selling the farm and relocating to town, buying him a bicycle for easy commute between his residence and the compound where Shawa lived.Footnote 62 “Even when I had my family here, I did not lack a thing because the European assisted me very well,” he wrote.Footnote 63 “Indeed, friends,” Shawa concluded, “what my European does impresses me and I do not want to abandon him.”Footnote 64
The nationalist complaint that the rhetoric about partnership relegated Africans to junior partners would seem to find ammunition in Shawa's apparent subservience. Yet when combined with news about equal pay, and Nkhani za kum'mawa's vibrant moral commentary on a variety of issues, the praise for caring Europeans was another way of making claims on those who had the capacity to assist others. Shawa's letter, and the ways in which Europeans appeared in serialized short stories, suggested what a praiseworthy European should do. Shawa's strongly possessive relationship to “his” European, coupled with his assurance that he would not “abandon” him, indicated not so much the passive expectation of charity as an active effort to render the access to the European productive. Race relations had long since lost whatever naivety they may have had, as the provincial commissioner highlighted in his “Report on Public Opinion” for 1944.Footnote 65 He described how the education officer while touring schools had “for the first time” been asked questions. “Sample questions were ‘If a European committed murder would he be hanged?’ ‘If he stole, would he go to gaol?’ ‘Why does a European travel in the front of a lorry and the Natives at the back?’” “By some,” the provincial commissioner wrote, “these questions are attributed as being due to Watch Tower propaganda but it may be that these are indications that the people are beginning to think on such matters.” This “thinking” about race relations was further enabled by Nkhani za kum'mawa's subtle depictions of new possibilities.
The newspaper did not, of course, address Europeans. For much of its six-year existence Nkhani za kum'mawa carried letters, columns, and articles that, in their various genres, were directed at a readership that had not been summoned before. Its maiden issue's front page not only carried statements of good wishes from the governor and the acting provincial commissioner but also expressions of gratitude from prominent Africans in the province.Footnote 66 A recurrent observation was that people in the province had been waiting for their own newspaper for a long time, and several contributors mentioned its promise to publish in Chinyanja. Editorials were often the most direct expressions of what was expected of the readership. Typical was the heading, “This is your own paper” (Ili ndi Pepala Lanu-lanu), followed by the statement that Nkhani za kum'mawa “publishes the news and views of people in/from Eastern Province.”Footnote 67 These editorials were often accompanied by exhortations to write to the newspaper, supported by the comment that it had insufficient staff to cover the vast province. Attitudes toward writing and reading in Chinyanja were also subjects of frequent editorial comment, such as when a heading urged, “Don't be ignorant” (Musakhale opulurika).Footnote 68 The editorial that followed this remarked that some readers were reluctant to read Nkhani za kum'mawa because they were able to read English. While acknowledging that those who could read English were “clever” (wa nzeru), the editorial denied that those who could not were necessarily ignorant. As in Jere's letter, the editorial turned the tables on educated Africans by noting, “By refusing to read about issues in the province or those concerning him/her, he/she shows that he/she is ignorant despite being able to read English.”Footnote 69
The public these editorials addressed was a provincial one, but many other items in the newspaper underscored the point that the provincial did not equate here with the parochial. In a July 1961 letter to the editor, L. Wazani Tembo wrote from Southern Rhodesia with the heading, “Is ‘Nkhani’ only for farmers?”Footnote 70 Addressing the editor, he asked, “Do you not want to hear from other countries?”Footnote 71 and “Have you forgotten other children?”Footnote 72 In response, the editor explained that because Eastern Province had no mines it was necessary to “encourage” (kulimbikitsa) farmers, but added, “We do still print all kinds of stories even if they do not concern agriculture.”Footnote 73
Letters from far afield were frequently and perhaps eagerly published, if only to demonstrate the provincial newspaper's geographical reach. Their authors were the province's sons and daughters in diaspora, such as Thomson Japhat in Tanganyika, who yearned for more news from Eastern ProvinceFootnote 74; D. Y. Chipepo writing from the barracks in Ndola to affirm that even soldiers stationed far away would like to receive letters from home;Footnote 75 Aaron Chilenga in Livingstone declaring, “If I don't read this paper, I am not able to perform any of my work”;Footnote 76 and A. C. Phiri in Southern Rhodesia, who said he was “tired” (kutopa) of hearing the complaint that the newspaper was only about agriculture and pointed to many other topics it covered.Footnote 77 Discussion between those in Eastern Province and those in its diaspora continued throughout the newspaper's existence, inspired by a variety of material and moral considerations. For example, Sailota Phiri, living in Fort Jameson and a regular contributor to the letters page, urged, “Migrants, come to create wealth here.”Footnote 78 Phiri asked rather cheekily, “Did you disappear to drink beer there?”Footnote 79 and boasted, “We sleep here on spring mattresses and we cover ourselves with expensive blankets.”Footnote 80 Upon describing how people in the province could make enough money through agriculture to buy suits, Phiri called on migrants “to come to see the gold mine of money here in the village!”Footnote 81
A sub-genre of these letters between the province and its diaspora was commentary on women's immorality, whether in town or, when left alone without husband, in the province. Women, too, participated in this evaluation, such as Falinara B. Chisale, who wrote from Nyasaland under the heading, “Women in towns drop your habit of destroying other people's families.”Footnote 82 “What makes our men do bad things is that we women don't look after our husband well,” she contended.Footnote 83 Women “forget the poverty that pushed them to towns”Footnote 84 and “start having affairs with other people's husbands.”Footnote 85 Such an analysis, along with other letters whose headings included “The chief of the household is the husband”Footnote 86 and “Wife must obey her husband in the family,”Footnote 87 reflects a preoccupation with changing gender relations that was characteristic of the period far beyond colonial Zambia.Footnote 88 Well established in the literature on colonial Zambia and Malawi is also the convergence between this preoccupation among Africans and the administrative and missionary concern over the apparently tenuous links of fathers and husbands to their offspring in predominantly matrilineal villages (Chanock Reference Chanock1985; Kaler Reference Kaler2001; Moore and Vaughan Reference Moore and Vaughan1994).
Nonetheless, just as Nkhani za kum'mawa's public was not provincial in any obvious sense, neither was it simply patriarchal. Here again it is worth reading the government-sponsored vernacular press instead of merely dismissing it, because the newspaper also carried letters and articles that could facilitate counter-claims against misogyny. Such possibilities were less the feature of the dedicated women's page (Nkhani za azimai; “Women's news”), filled as it was with recipes and advice on various household and childcare chores, than of recurrent pleas for women to contribute their views. One early editorial comment pointed out, “We publish every month in Nkhani za kum'mawa about women breaking families and the evils of adultery. When will the women reading this newspaper speak out?”Footnote 89 It concluded, “In Eastern Province there are many women who can read and think wisely. Your time is now to write to us so that others will read your thoughts.”Footnote 90 Similar entreaties came from editorsFootnote 91 and readers who, like Levison Mbewe in Lusaka, claimed that other provincial newspapers had more women writing to them,Footnote 92 and others like Batiseba Michael Banda in Mufulira on the Copperbelt who called for “girls” (atsikana) from a particular area in the province to contribute news.Footnote 93 No barrage of stories from women resulted from these appeals, but their very manner of addressing the female public as a source of desired comments and viewpoints contrasted with patriarchal opinions found elsewhere in the newspaper and beyond it.
Some of the articles in Nkhani za kum'mawa went as far as challenging prevailing gender stereotypes. The heading “Childcare is not only women's work” introduced a perspective that questioned men's habit of regarding their sole contribution to be the food and other commodities they provided their families.Footnote 94 After listing the ways in which fathers could participate in bringing up a child through play, giving milk in a bottle, and bathing, the article ended with the warning that otherwise “your child will grow up fearing you and will not love you as they love their mother.”Footnote 95 In another revision of gender stereotypes, Nkhani za kum'mawa reported that Vida Mungwira, upon completing her medical studies at Bristol University in England, had become the first female doctor in the province.Footnote 96 And the sole Anthu odziwika column in my sample that featured a woman reported that Mrs. J. B. Mwemba was on her way to further studies in midwifery in Birmingham, England, empowered partly by “money from her own pocket” (zinacokera mthumba mwao).Footnote 97
In sum, a palpable sense of experimentation sustained Nkhani za kum'mawa throughout its short lifespan. The Europeans who had debated two decades earlier the very idea of an African newspaper had already seen it as an experiment, but Nkhani za kum'mawa extended this attitude from the question of viability to an exploration of wider possibilities in a period of rapid change. Race and gender relations, along with the relations between people in the province and those living elsewhere, were revealed to hold contradictory, emergent possibilities that the dominant colonial and nationalist agendas left little space to consider. The editors and readers of Nkhani za kum'mawa deliberated on what it meant to be from the province and in its diaspora, how African advancement and the dependence on Europeans were to be envisaged, and how the relationships between women and men were to be reconfigured. In order to have divergent views on a world in flux, they had to keep something constant—the order of governance itself remained beyond dispute. But apart from government statements with an obvious propaganda purpose, its permanence did not preclude emergent possibilities. The newspaper's deliberations were concerned with other matters than the maintenance or overthrow of the colonial order. What interests us here, though, is not merely the documentation of experiments. What a meta-narrative of anti-colonial sentiment can render invisible are ways in which people made claims on new possibilities without deploying either anti- or pro-colonial idioms. For this short moment, the nation, and the colonial rule that stood in its way, were not the only parameters of claim-making.
CONCLUSION
Government-sponsored African newspapers such as Nkhani za kum'mawa have tended to land on the wrong side of history. Too closely associated with the colonial department of information to gain more than contempt from nationalists, they have also provided a poor match for the exciting new sources used in the revisionist history of nationalism.Footnote 98 The government-sponsored press in the colonial era resembles the “felicitous ‘otherness’ of the censor” in Cold War East Europe (Boyer Reference Boyer2003: 539). It enables a definition of what constitutes progressive politics and scholarship, notably the defense of political and intellectual independence against all forms of oppression and exploitation. While one can identify situations in which a failure to condemn oppression amounts to legitimizing it, the situation in 1950s and early 1960s Zambia was less clear-cut. To devote all scholarly attention to the question of how different actors during this period sought to end colonial rule is to succumb to a limiting meta-narrative of anti-colonialism, one that allows no conceptual space between colonial and anti-colonial agendas, and thereby keeps other possibilities inaccessible to the scholarly and moral imagination.
In the absence of other archival traces, one can only speculate as to how consciously the editors of Nkhani za kum'mawa tried alternatives to both colonial and anti-colonial modes of addressing their publics. Perhaps such speculation would be mistaken from the outset, because it would attribute undue coherence to what actually was a domain of experimentation. The future was an open question, and it would be wrong to begin analysis of Nkhani za kum'mawa as if the future was already known to its editors and readers. The newspaper addressed a provincial public, but the encompassing public had many different publics within it. Its contributions make clear that Eastern Province was not a polity in the sense that the nation would soon become. No cultural unity was forced upon a population that was understood to be ethnically and linguistically diverse, as is evident from the column on contemporary chiefs, among others. Nor was the province a discrete polity in a territorial sense. Its sons and daughters in the diaspora complicated any such notion, committed as they were to making themselves heard on the pages of the provincial newspaper.
Above all, determining moral authority was not the prerogative of a handful of leaders, such as in the nationalist movement, but instead was a matter of constant negotiation—between men and women, among women, between urban dwellers and village farmers, between educated and uneducated Africans, and among prominent persons. A similar sense of negotiation was apparent in the diverse views that Europeans expressed about the idea of an African newspaper. While all who were consulted supported the idea, their views on government propaganda and popular participation ranged from paternalism to warnings against “preaching at” Africans and appeals for the freedom of expression. Just as the choice of language in Nkhani za kum'mawa became a key issue from which to debate what it meant to be an African, so too did the Europeans explore sensitive questions of belonging and membership when they considered the merits of using English and African languages in Mutende.
The correspondence about Mutende shows how the enlightened paternalism of postwar colonialism was sustained by an unprecedented regard for African sensitivities and opinions. An emphasis on informing “the natives” about governmental schemes endured, and it would continue in the state media's monopoly on informing “the people” in independent Africa, but the African editors and readers of Nkhani za kum'mawa displayed little interest in being merely informed. They explored new opportunities and new ways of claiming membership. What they would be members of was an emergent possibility that took variable forms. It could be a society in which Africans and Europeans enjoyed equal pay, a relationship of dependence in which patrons owed their status to their obligations toward the disadvantaged, a marriage in which the husband took part in childcare, and a province that extended into urban centers. Independent Zambia it was not.
