CONTENIDO DE LA GUÍA ALIMENTARIA

One of the issues that requires more research is the more metaphysical issue of appeals to the abstract notions of patriotism, duty, and so forth, which were deployed by the British administrators as they sought to convince people to support the war effort and enlist as soldiers or carriers in support of the British. The correspondence and personal papers of British administrators are awash with

patriotic sentiment in support of the war effort.80 But the extent to which the

sentiments contained within these appeals were grasped and shared by African audiences is a matter for debate. What exactly did African audiences think of statements by administrators, which we now know to be only partly true? In Luwingu, to the north of the Bangweulu swamps in 1915, District Commissioner H. Groad, in addressing chiefs, claimed that:

It was the custom of the English that in war every person did some work to further the common end, whether in the fighting line or in other spheres. It must be the same here and there must be no slacking.81

Groad’s words, which appealed to sentiments instilled in the boarding schools of England and Natal, made sense within that paradigm, but what they meant in central Africa is another matter altogether.

Similarly, when Magistrate E.S.B. Taggart and Native Commissioner J.F.A. Speedy addressed chiefs at Mumbwa and spoke of military operations on ‘our Northern Border in the neighbourhood of Abercorn and Fife’, which required the mass recruitment of war carriers, what exactly did the assembled chiefs understand? Did these men, at more than 1200 kilometres distance from, ‘Abercorn and Fife’, know of these settlements, let alone that they utilised or comprehended the concept of ‘our Northern Border’? Indeed, what did they think of the appeal that they ‘help to drive off the enemy and save their

country’?82 Similarly, how did the African men react to being likened to women

79 _{NAZ, KTJ 3/1, Mumbwa District Note Book, vol. 1, p. 423.} 80

Indeed a reading of these papers makes it clear that the sentiments expressed by the actor Hugh Laurie as Lieutenant The Honourable George Colthurst St. Barleigh MC in the television series

Black Adder Goes Forth are not particularly exaggerated.

81 _{NAZ, KSZ 5/1, Luwingu District Note Book, p. 125-6, Meeting with chiefs, 11 September 1915.} 82 _{NAZ, KTJ 3/1, Mumbwa District Note Book, vol. 1, p. 366, Meeting of chiefs, 2 September 1915.}

and children? In what can only be referred to as a patronising speech, Speedy and Taggart addressed their audience with a fantasy rendition of pre-colonial African practises and gave vent to their racist and sexist sentiments:

When they themselves used to go out to war they often started with their women and children carrying food for them but never took them into the fight, why should the whiteman do otherwise with the carriers of their supplies? In any case it was no time to wait. A man with an enemy on his boundary did not wait until that enemy had reached the threshold of his house – if he was wise. It was essential that carriers turn out at once.83

In addressing the chiefs, Taggart and Speedy further claimed that ‘there was not a chance of any of the men now asked for of hearing a shot fired – they would be

paid and fed for their work as they always were, but this was no ordinary work,

money was a secondary consideration, that they had to remember was that they were going to help the whitemen to keep the enemy out of the country and to

save the property and lives of their own people’.84 Given the attrition rates that

existed amongst frontline carriers, it is to be wondered if Taggart and Speedy

ever came to rue their needlessly optimistic words.85

Conclusion

In exchange for labour and food, the colonial administration supported and rewarded African chiefs and headmen, and thereby extended its control over Northern Rhodesia.

Anxious for carriers and food supplies, yet thinly spread across the territory, BSAC administrators needed to work through the chiefs and headmen, and were dependent on their support. In turn, in exchange for carriers and food supplies the BSAC administrators promised and undertook steps to support and increase the

authority and influence of the chiefs and headmen of Zambia.86 A decade and a

half prior to the formal introduction of indirect rule, BSAC administrators, operating under the pressures of wartime conditions, sought to administer the

83 _{NAZ, KTJ 3/1, Mumbwa District Note Book, vol. 1, p. 367, Meeting of chiefs, 2 September 1915.} 84 _{NAZ, KTJ 3/1, Mumbwa District Note Book, vol. 1, p. 367, Meeting of chiefs, 2 September 1915.}

Italics added.

85 _{Gelfand, Northern Rhodesia, pp. 274-5 contains a detailed breakdown of war carrier deaths.}

86 _{These events in Zambia mirror exactly what Frederick Cooper has described with regard to Indirect} Rule for other parts of Africa. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 184: In discussing colonial rule, Cooper summed up the background to indirect rule; ‘colonial states, …, were thin: they needed the legitimacy and coercive capacity of local authority to collect taxes and round up labour, and they needed local knowledge’.To this end chiefs or ‘people whom colonial rulers [sometimes] mistakenly thought influential’ were appointed to carry out the day-to-day administration of ‘their’ people. Cooper aptly provided the following rider, ‘such people had to enforce colonial power – under threat of dismissal or worse – but they could not be pushed too far or they would become too discredited to serve the regime’.

territory and its African population through Zambia’s chiefs and headmen.87 In this ‘marriage of convenience’ African chiefs and headmen were able to extend and expand their influence and authority through the acquisition of all manner of material and immaterial provisions from the BSAC administration in exchange for labour and food supplies. Yet there was a flipside to this in that the colonial administration did not loose sight of its goal to extend and expand its authority across the territory. Consistently the administration ensured that its labour recruitment, and the subsequent enhancement of the status of chiefs and headmen, was in keeping with its ultimate aims and objectives: to establish and consolidate its control over the territory.

For four years during World War One, labour was recruited all across Northern Rhodesia, from Mwinilunga to Chipata, from Mumbwe to Serenje, and in all of these places across Zambia the BSAC was able to extend its influence. In a process that covered four years, Zambia’s chiefs and headmen supported and assisted the British war effort through the supply of labour and food stuffs; in exchange the chiefs were rewarded in a number of ways, as outlined above, ranging from financial incentive through to the supply of messengers and policemen that were used in enforcing the will of the chiefs on their subjects. Through their alliance with the colonial authorities, chiefs and headmen were once again able to centralise their power for the first time since the ending of the long-distance trade in the 1890s. However, although the chiefs were able to extend their control over their subjects, at the same time, the colonial state, by supporting and working through the chiefs, extended its control over the chiefs and their people across all of Zambia.

87 _{Exactly when Indirect Rule was introduced to Zambia is a matter for debate: Fields, Revival and}

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