The Kazanga festival: Ethnicity as cultural mediation and transformation in central western Zambia

by
Wim van Binsbergen

The Kazanga festival

Ethnicity as cultural mediation and transformation in central western Zambia

A perennial and probably universal aspect of the human condition is that we give names,[ii] to elements of the non-human world which surrounds us and to human individuals, but also to the groupings into which we organize ourselves.[iii] Usually members of a society designate their own grouping by a proper name, and in any case they give names to other groupings around them. Such nomenclature is often vague, but it brings about a dramatic ordering within the wider social field which various communities share with one another. On the logical plane, projecting onto another grouping a distinct name which does not apply to one’s own grouping, denies that other grouping the possibility of differing only gradually from one’s own. Through the expression in words which make up the name, the opposition between groupings is rendered absolute, and is in principle subjected to the relentlessness of the dendrogram, of binary opposition which plays such an important role in human thought.[iv] By calling the other category ‘A’ one’s own category in any case identifies as ‘not-A’. The latter is usually also given a name, ‘B’, by those which it has called ‘A’, and third parties within the social field can either adopt this nomenclature or replace it by one of their own invention.

Every society comprises, among other features, a large number of named sets of people: for instance local communities, kin groupings, production groupings, parts of an administrative apparatus, cults, voluntary associations. We would call such a named set of people an ‘ethnic group’ only if certain additional characteristics are present: when individual membership is primarily derived from a birth right (ascription); when the set of people consciously and explicitly distinguishes itself from other such sets in its social environment by reference to specific cultural differences; and when the members of such a set identify with one another on the basis of a shared historical experience. ‘Ethnicity’, then, is the totality of processes through which people, by reference to the ethnic groups which they distinguish, structure the wider social and geographical field in which they are involved so as to transform it into an ethnic field.

The nature of the additional characteristics mentioned is gradual and not absolute. For their formulation and application is in the hands of the members of a society; the social scientist tries to identify these socially constructed characteristics through empirical research. In order to be effective the relationships which people enter into with one another, have to be not only systematic but also flexible and contradictory. The social process creates boundaries, but also in order to cut across them. For instance, most ethnic groups include a minority of members who have gained their membership not at birth but only later in life, in a context of marriage, migration, language acquisition, adoption, the assumption of a new identity and a new life style, religious conversion etc.[v] Ethnic fields turn out to be differently organized at different places in the world and in different periods of human history; there is a great variation in the way in which people demarcate ethnic groups through distinctive cultural attributes (for instance, language) and through historical consciousness.[vi] Ethnic groups may often have a subjective historical consciousness, but what they always have is an objective history open to academic enquiry, from their emergence to their disappearance,[vii] and this history cannot be understood unless as part of the history of the genesis of the encompassing ethnic field as a whole.

It is analytically useful to make a clear distinction, by reference to strategically chosen characteristics, between ethnic groups and other ascriptive groupings such as castes and classes, but we must not expect that such analytically-imposed distinctions stand in a clear-cut one-to-one relationship to analogous distinctions in the consciousness of the social actors themselves. For the distinction between such ethnic groups as exist, side by side, within the same social field is not limited to the logic of nomenclature (,which merely entails co-ordinative relationships, without hierarchy), but tends to assume a subordinative nature; within the overarching ethnic field, the participants articulate political, economic and ritual inequalities between ethnic groups in a way which the analyst would rather associate with classes and castes.[viii]

Ethnic nomenclature is a complex social process which deserves specific research in its own right. This is a position which anthropology has only adopted in the most recent decades. Until the middle of the twentieth century anthropology used ethnic names as labels marking apparently self-evident units of culture and social organization: within the units thus demarcated one defined one’s research, but the demarcation in itself was hardly problematized.

The card-index boxes and book shelves of the young anthropological science filled with an overwhelming production of ethnographic material which almost invariably was presented by reference to an ethnic name intended to identify a ‘people’ or especially a ‘tribe’. Colonialism produced a nomenclatural fragmentation of social fields in the colonized areas, with the implied assumption that each of the units so identified displayed absolute boundedness and internal integration, characteristics which allegedly were inescapably underpinned by century-old tradition. Such was the unit of analysis within which individual careers of anthropologists could come to fruition.

It was only in the 1960s that the concept of ‘tribe’ was subjected to profound criticism as an ethnocentric and reified designation of an ethnic group within the global ethnic field but outside the politically dominant civilization — in other words in the so-called ‘Third World’.[ix]

Since then much has been written about the rise and fall of the concept of tribe in Africa, in the context of political and economic processes in this continent since the end of the nineteenth century.

In a nutshell this body of literature revolves on: colonization (in the course of which the state created administrative units which were presented as ‘tribes’ — an optique which the Africans soon took over in their own perception and political action)[x]; the implantation of the capitalist mode of production by means of cash crops and migrant labour (which eroded local systems of production, reproduction and signification, and at the same time produced regional inequalities which soon came to be interpreted in terms of an ethnic idiom); urbanization (in the course of which a plurality of ethnic groups, and their members, engaged in urban relationships which, through a process of selective transformation, referred less and less to the traditional culture of their respective region of origin);[xi] decolonization (the rise of a nationalism which exposed ethnic fragmentation as a product of manipulation by the state); and, notwithstanding the previous point, the ethnic overtones of political mobilization and networks of patronage in the post-colonial states;[xii] the vicissitudes of military and one-party regimes which often presented themselves as the solution for ethnically-based domestic political problems; and most recently the rise of democratic alternatives which despite their emphasis on constitutional universalism would yet seem to offer new opportunities for ethnic mobilization.[xiii]

The Africanist literature on these topics is large and rapidly increasing, but at the same time we know far less of the processes of symbolic and cultural transformation which have informed ethnicity in these contexts.[xiv] It is these processes, specifically, which constitute the main topic of the present argument.

A common term in the context of ethnicity and ethnicity research is that of ‘identity’.[xv] As social scientists in the narrower sense, we might define ‘identity’ as the socially constructed perception of self as group membership. Everybody plays various different roles in various groupings, and therefore everybody has a plurality of identities, as acquired in the course of one’s socialization to become a member of these groupings.

Usually the rise of an ethnic group in Africa consists, as a project, in the launching of a new identity and the installation of that identity in the personalities of the ethnic group’s prospective or intended members. The project of ethnicisation presents the ethnic identity (as expressed by a group name) as the ultimate, all-encompassing and most deeply anchored identity, which is then supposed to incorporate all other identities which one has acquired as a member of the local society.

Not by accident, such an ethnic identity reminds us strongly of the concept of culture in classic anthropology, often defined as: ‘everything one acquires as a member of a society’. However, the local culture need not in the least be limited, in place and time, to a specific named ethnic group; often it has a much wider distribution. For instance, in the savanna belt of South Central Africa, which will be the scene of most of my argument, scores of ethnic groups have been distinguished one next to the other since the nineteenth century; yet if one were to concentrate on the distribution of patterns of production, reproduction and signification one would perceive such an underlying unity that there is every reason to speak of one large cultural area in this part of the world.[xvi] Within this far-reaching regional continuity distinct ethnic groups have distinguished themselves — almost in the way one may cut several differently shaped cookies out of the same slab of dough. Among those sharing in this regional cultural continuity, self-perception will be anchored in ethnic names (which do not define cultural boundaries), and moreover, rather diffusely, in references to kin groups and local groups at various levels of inclusiveness and scale, in a landscape, a language, a poly-ethnic state system etc.

Ethnicity comprises the process of taking consciousness (which for many people means being actively persuaded to do so, by ethnic leaders and brokers), in the course of which a plurality of diffuse, accumulated, often cross-cutting, identities are brought under the denominator of one ethnic identity, which is then marked by a specific name. The ethnic name is constructed so as to mark a cultural boundary, and therefore pre-existing culture (or at least a selection of items from that culture) has to be partly reconstructed so as to fall within that boundary and to offer distinctive cultural attributes. In the bundling and reshuffling of identities the personal experience of self and of the world of transformed: the discovery of ‘I am a — Fleming, Azeri, Yoruba, Nkoya’ etc. offers a ordering perspective in which powerlessness, deprivation and estrangement such as one has experienced earlier on in all kinds of situations, suddenly appear in a new light: as if the collective historical experience suddenly makes sense of them, and as if there is reason for hope that these negative experiences will be turned in their opposites through ethnic self-presentation. Viewed in this way ethnicity has many parallels with other ideological phenomena such as nationalism, the awakening of class consciousness, religious conversion and religious innovation.

Ethnicity displays a remarkable dialectics which I am inclined to consider as its engine.[xvii] On the one hand, the binary opposition through nomenclature offers a logical structure, which is further ossified through ascription and which presents itself as unconditional, bounded, inescapable and timeless;[xviii] on the other hand, the actual processual realization (through the construction of a culture coinciding with the group boundary, through distinctive cultural symbols, through a shared historical consciousness, through that part of membership which is non-ascriptive but acquired) means flexibility, choice, constructedness and recent change. Both, entirely contradictory, aspects form part of ethnicity. This dialectics renders ethnicity particularly suitable for mediating, in processes of social change, between social contexts with are each of a fundamentally different structure, and particularly between the local level on the one hand, and the state and wider economic structures on the other.[xix] The ethnic name and the principle of ascription produce the image of a bounded set of people. Therefore integration between the local level and the national and international level, which poses such bewildering problems of structural discontinuity, under conditions of etnicization, no longer remains a challenge which the vulnerable individual must cope with on his own on the basis of his inadequate skills and perceptions geared to the local level; on the contrary, such integration becomes the object of group action. Internally, a set of people is restructured so as to become an ethnic group by designing a cultural package which, in its own right (i.e. not just because of its symbolizing more abstract power relations such as exist between the local level and the more global levels) constitutes a major stake in the negotiations between the emerging ethnic group and the outside world. One takes a distance from rival ethnic groups at the local and regional scene through a strategic emphasis on cultural and linguistic elements; and on a more comprehensive, national level of socio-political organization one competes for the state’s political and economic prizes (primarily: for the exercise of power and the benefit of government expenditure) by means of the state’s recognition of the ethnically constructed cultural package.

In this process the ethnic group more and more articulates itself as just that. But although all persons involved in this process are in principle equals as carriers of the ethnic identity, the contact with the outside world, precisely if it shapes up successfully, causes new inequalities within the group. The mediation takes place via political, economic and ideological brokers who (through greater knowledge, better education, more experience, better political contacts and more material means of sustaining such contacts) are more than their fellow-members of the ethnic group in a position to exploit the opportunities offered by the outside world.[xx] These brokers develop ethnic leadership to an instrument of power formation which works in two directions:

— externally, towards the outside world, where these leaders claim resources in exchange for an effective ordering of the local domain;[xxi]

— and, internally, within the ethnic group itself, where the brokers trade off a limited share of their outside spoils for internal authority, prestige and control at the local level.

The leaders negotiate both with the outside world and with their potential followers in the local society. In this context of brokerage between local community and the outside world, that which constitutes one’s own identity becomes problematic, and asserting the ‘traditional’, ‘authentic’ (but in fact newly reconstructed) culture appears as an important task and as a source of power for the brokers. Ethnic associations, publications, and such manifestations as festivals, under the direction of ethnic brokers, constitute widespread and time-honoured strategies in this process.

The insistence on ethnic identity produces powerful ideological claims, which the outside world sometimes meets with more sympathy than with analytical understanding. These claims may not be recognized as a recent, strategic, and rhetorical product, but may be idealized (as they are idealized by the ethnic brokers themselves) as, for instance, ‘...the courageous expressions, worthy of our deepest respect, of an inescapable identity which these people have acquired in childhood socialization and which takes a desperate stand against the encroachments of the outside world...’ For instance, in today’s thinking about intercontinental development cooperation a fair place has been reserved for such claims and the associated cultural expressions.

It is really the mediation of a deeply anchored tradition, which is at stake here? Is that the reason why ethnic processes deserve the kind of sympathy and support which we, in a rapidly changing world, are inclined to extend to forms of culture threatened with extinction? How do these ethnic manifestations reveal the details of the negotiation process between the outside world and the local community? How do they express new inequalities? Can we find here new arguments for the classic thesis of Marxist researchers and politicians, who claim that the ethnic process produces a false consciousness which prevents the actors from realizing the underlying structures of exploitation such as should be interpreted in class terms?[xxii] What does the analysis of the ethnic negotiation process teach us about the characteristics of the wider political and economic system in which this process is embedded in the world today?

I invite the reader to come with me to an ethnic festival in central western Zambia, to which these questions are eminently applicable, and where they may find some provisional answer.

3. The emergence of the Nkoya as an ethnic group, and the ‘Kazanga Cultural Association’[xxiii]

Since 1988 every year on the first weekend of July a peculiar ceremony, by the name of Kazanga, takes place in Kaoma district, in western Zambia.

From its inception to 1991 Shikombwe was the scene of Kazanga. Shikombwe is the capital of Mwene (i.e. Lord, Chief, King) Mutondo. That Shikombwe is a royal residence (lukena, plur. zinkena) is clear from the lilapa surrounding the inner part of the agglomeration: a reed fence supported by pointed poles, which is a royal prerogative. Inside the lilapa we find a simple four-room house serving as a royal palace, and moreover a reed audience hall, and a shelter where, as principal regalia, the instruments of the royal orchestra are kept and where they are played twice a day. A large open space outside the lilapa is dominated by the modern court building, in front of which a rough flagpole has been erected; here the kapasus — constables attached to the royal court — hoist the Zambian flag every morning. This open space is the scene of the Kazanga festival. Around it lie the residential compounds of the courtiers and members of the royal family. A narrow track connects Shikombwe to the tar road over a distance of fifteen kilometers, and along the tar road it is another twenty kilometers to the district capital Kaoma, which until 1969 was called Mankoya. Kaoma district is part of Western Province (formerly called Barotseland), whose modern and traditional capitals by the name of respectively Mongu and Lealui lie at the end of the tar road two hundred kilometers west of Kaoma; at the other end, four hundred kilometers east, lies the national capital of Zambia, Lusaka. Mutondo’s area, about ten thousand square kilometers, consists of fertile wooded savanna, inhabited by peasants in small villages that are mostly concentrated along the many rivers and streams. Many (by no means all) inhabitants of this chief’s area consider themselves subjects of Mutondo and members of the Nkoya ethnic group, and speak preferably (but seldom exclusively) the Nkoya language; others identify with the Lozi group [xxiv] which is politically and socially dominant in western Zambia, or with the groups which since the beginning of the twentieth century have en masse immigrated from Angola: especially the Luvale [xxv] and Luchazi.

Mutondo derives his hereditary title and hence royal status from a kingdom which was established in this region in the eighteenth century A.D. by his ancestors, who were dissidents breaking away from the famous Lunda empire in southern Zaire. The dynastic group adopted the name of Nkoya, which was originally [xxvi] the name of a forested area around the confluence of the Zambezi and the Kabompo rivers. Given the cultural continuity in the region the name ‘Nkoya’ certainly did not designate a distinct and bounded culture; the formation of the Nkoya as an ethnic group was still a thing of the future. After Mutondo’s state and subjects became tributary to Barotseland’s rulers in the middle of the nineteenth century, they were, as a so-called ‘Lozi subject tribe’, incorporated in the colonial state of Northern Rhodesia in 1900 under the name of ‘Mankoya’. In 1964 the colonial state became the independent Republic of Zambia. At incorporation Mutondo became a relatively high-ranking title within the Lozi aristocracy. The lukena and its court retinue are still subsidized by the national state on the basis of treaty which the latter concluded with the Lozi king in 1900 and 1964.

Nonetheless Lozi-Nkoya relations have largely been experienced as antagonistic and humiliating the Nkoya, especially under the colonial state, which allowed the indigenous Lozi administration considerable freedom. Mankoya district then sighed under Lozi domination.[xxvii] Besides Mutondo, only one royal title in the region managed to survive the incorporation process into the Lozi state: Mwene Kahare of the Mashasha people. The many other royal titles were replaced by Lozi representative indunas. Two other princes who were closely related to the Mutondo dynasty has in time moved their seat to outside Barotseland: Mwene Kabulwebulwe and Mwene Momba, who from the outset had been recognized by the colonial state in their own right, but of course could not share in the Lozi subsidy which was strictly limited to Barotseland.

A decisive year in the development of ‘Nkoya’ to a self-assertive ethnic group was 1937, when the Lozi king established a filial branch of his own court smack in the middle of Mankoya district, in order to control the local chiefs, judiciary and district finance. Another such year was 1947, when Mutondo Muchayila was demoted and exiled for ten years by the Lozi king on the grounds of restiveness. In the same time the Rev. Johasaphat Shimunika, the first autochthonous pastor of the Evangelic Church of Zambia,[xxviii] translated the New Testament and the Psalms [xxix] into the local language which by then was already called ‘Nkoya’ along with its speakers. Despite much effort from the missionary side it proved impossible to have this language recognized for use in education and in the media — understandably, since its speakers comprise less than 1% of the Zambian population, in a country which in addition to English as the official language has recognized as many as seven regional languages including Lozi. In the years 1950-60 Rev. Shimunika also processed oral traditions into writings which depicted a glorious past for the growing ‘Nkoya’ identity.[xxx] He explicitly extended his pan-Nkoya efforts to include, besides Mutondo, the princes Kahare, Kabulwebulwe and Momba along with their subjects, and exposed Lozi domination as historically unjustified.

The Nkoya during this formative period as an ethnic group regarded Zambia’s struggle for national independence primarily as an opportunity to end Lozi domination at the regional level. Their political initiatives, presented under a Nkoya emblem, were immediately prohibited.[xxxi] Their choice in favour of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), as opposed to Lozi power, fired back when in Barotseland UNIP itself came under Lozi domination. Then many Nkoya went over to the opposition. Thus in the first years of Zambia’s independence they were estranged from the UNIP-ruled national state. With the decline of the Lozi in national politics as from 1969,[xxxii] and the disunity among Luvale and Luchazi voters in the district, the Nkoya gained their first and only parliamentary seat and ministerial position in the 1973 general elections, shortly after Zambia had become a one-party state under UNIP. Afraid of ‘tribalism’, the government was still hostile to expressions of Nkoya ethnicity. In the same period a large development project was started in Nkeyema in the eastern part of the district. The villagers hardly gained any direct benefits from Nkeyema, by contrast to the enterprising African farmers who flocked in from other districts, as well as the members of the modern and the traditional political elite of the Nkoya, between whom close kinship ties existed. This elite brought the villagers to great enthusiasm and loyalty by formulating ethnic goals such as increasing the subsidies of state-recognized chiefs , the reinstatement of some titles which had disappeared, and the propagation of the use of the Nkoya language in education and the media. The growth of local UNIP branches under the leadership of this modern elite rendered the expression of Nkoya ethnicity acceptable to the national state. For the first time the Zambian national anthem and the UNIP marching songs could be heard to be sung in the Nkoya language.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century part of the life of the inhabitants of this region would be lived outside the region, on the commercial farms and the mines, and in the urban areas, of Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. The local people’s low level of education, their limited job experience, small numbers as migrants, and low ethnic status made it virtually impossible for them to collectively and lastingly occupy niches of their own within the capitalist labour market. Although before third parties they could pass for Lozi, the latter highly successful group denied the Nkoya access to Lozi resources in the towns. Nonetheless one was forced to go to town: it was there that one could find cash for consumption articles and bride wealth, and also a refuge away from the tensions within the village community — which were experienced in terms of sorcery. Because of the uncertainty of the urban labour market the migrant usually maintained a strong orientation on his village to which he expected to return only too soon, and on his ‘homeboys’ in town, who constituted his only support upon arrival, and in times of unemployment, illness and death. Wherever in town their numbers present allowed for collective ceremonial to be staged, healing rites, puberty ceremonies and funerals offered the opportunity to keep alive the contacts with their homeboys, in a context marked by their own music and dance from home. For those who had a measure of success in town the Evangelic Church of Zambia offered an urban network, power base and identity; this church was mainly active in their home area, and through its mission schools had offered a modest channel of upward mobility. Most villagers and urban migrants however participated intensively in autochthonous and syncretistic cults, which might or might not be combined with a nominal form of Christianity.

For a long time the urban component of the village community was not formalized into an ethnic association, despite the fact that colonial Zambia knew many such associations, which only later became suspect in the post-colonial crusade against ‘tribalism’, and subsequently disappeared. Only in 1982 the ‘Kazanga Cultural Association’ materialized as a formally registered society under the patronage of the Nkoya minister. This was an initiative of a handful of people from Kaoma district who, by their middle age, and against all odds, had made the grade from insecure circulatory migrant labourer to member of the capital’s middle class. With the drop in copper prizes in 1975 Zambia entered into a crisis which has lasted until today. Therefore even the urban middle class could not ignore the economic developments which were meanwhile taking place in Kaoma district. Some returned to the district forever; other started a farm there but continued to live in town. Their enthusiasm for the Nkoya identity which became ever more articulated brought these urbanites in close contact with the district’s political elite, and brought them new credit in the eyes of the villagers from which they had earlier taken a distance through their class position and urbanization. They adopted the ethnic goals as mentioned above. In addition the Kazanga association continued to offer a support structure to migrants. Also did it offer the infrastructure for a few conferences meant to validate the Nkoya translation of the Old Testament, a project which Rev. Shimunika had not been able to complete before his death in 1981. However, the association’s main goal is the propagation, through an annual festival of the same name, of the local culture which, inevitably, was labelled ‘Nkoya’ as well. From the name of a forest, via that of a dynasty and a district, that name had developed to designate an ethnic group found in several districts, and at the same time a language, a culture, and a cultural project intended to articulate this newly emerged group at the regional and national level.

In the remainder of my argument I shall limit myself to the 1989 Kazanga festival, on which I have detailed information.

In the open space around the court building reed shelters have been erected, offering a refuge from the winter’s sun to a minority of the audience, numbering in total roughly one thousand. Also two ‘loges’ have been constructed out of the same material: one for the chiefs, and, at the other side of a reed wall, another one for a handful of state dignitaries, including two ministers.[xxxiii] The two-sided strategy of ethnic mediation could not be expressed more eloquently: the construction of ethnic identity towards the chiefs’ loge coincides, along a parallel axis in the same viewing direction, with the assertion of that identity towards the state loge.

Since in 1989 the media were still disappointingly absent from Kazanga, no special recording facilities are required. However, there is a loudspeaker installation, which constantly squeals and thus leaves no doubt about the fact that the local music, song and dance are now to be produced in a format different from the usual one. The audience does not pay an entrance fee — the costs are paid out of spontaneous contribution from the audience during the dances (when people come up to the dancing ground to place their coins and bills on the head or shoulders of the dancers), from a general collection, and from money which the Kazanga association has earned by the sale of Nkoya-language calendars depicting ‘heights of Nkoya culture’: the dance of the kankanga (which marks the end of the life phase between a woman’s menarche and her becoming nubile), and the traditional hunter complete with his bow and arrow, axe and tinderbox.

After the spectators have installed themselves on the festival grounds the four chiefs one after the other make their dramatic entrance. The festival direction tells the people to kneel down for the traditional royal salute. Directly in front of a small thatched shrine which is situated in the centre of the festival grounds, musicians produce the unique sounds of the snare drum (ngoma ntambwe) and the royal bell (ngongi) — which are very rarely heard even at the royal courts. Preceded by a kapasu walking with measured parade steps the chief struts onto the festival grounds, followed by a procession of subjects which, in front staying narrowly behind the chief, towards the back tapers out to the left and the right, where the stately steps go over into dancing. The women in the retinue ululate thrilling guttural sounds. The musicians immediately behind the chief are all but pushed away by two members of the festival direction who on their shoulders carry a cassette recorder like one carries a relic shrine — in order to record at least in sound every aspect of Kazanga; in 1989 the urban middle class which makes up the core of the Kazanga association not yet possessed video cameras (a situation which ended in 1991). When the chief has traversed the festival grounds halfway, a few other members of the Kazanga association step forward to welcome him. Cheered by the crowd, and while the chief’s traditional praise names blast from the loudspeakers, he takes his place in the loge. After a few minutes of silence (which several more owners of cassette recorders use to place their equipment, in recording position, near the musicians) the crowd claps the royal salute, after which the musicians, kneeling behind their instruments, sound one of the praise songs from their habitual repertoire. This sequence is repeated for each of the four chiefs.

Besides the chief’s entrances the day’s mimeographed programme as distributed displays the following items:

— an official part featuring the Zambian national anthem (of course in Nkoya) and speeches by the chairman of the Kazanga association, and the minister of culture; and

— performances by various dancing groups, solo dancers and the accompanying orchestra composed of xylophones and drums, in order to present a representative sample of Nkoya expressive culture.[xxxiv]

We shall first look at the official part, in which Kazanga clearly appears as mediation towards the national state. Then we shall assess how the festival, by virtue of its organizational structure, selects and transforms the local culture. We shall see how it does not only express new inequalities, but also exerts a decisive influence on the hierarchy of the traditional chiefs. Finally we shall pay attention to the specific nature of the symbolic production which characterizes the festival and in which its mediatory nature is most acutely expressed.

The mediation around which Kazanga revolves is exclusively directed, vertically, at the state and not, horizontally, at other ethnic groups.

The festival no longer carries any explicit reference to the Lozi as ethnic enemies or as a reference group.[xxxv] Meanwhile the Lozi at the district level have been partly supplanted by the Luvale and the Luchazi, who in 1988 conquered Mr Kalaluka’s parliamentary seat. Their makishi mask dances, which are never absent from cultural manifestations at the district level, are excluded from the Kazanga festival as non-Nkoya, even though male circumcision (a widespread ritual complex throughout the region, of which the makishi dances form part) was still practiced as late as the end of the nineteenth century, by the ancestors op those now identifying as Nkoya, and particularly in the Mutondo state.[xxxvi]

In his address the Kazanga chairman expresses his disappointment about the absence of the media, which, he claims, is even more unjustified since Kazanga is not a tribal ceremony:

‘Kazanga ceremony is a ceremony of the Nkoya people like any other ceremony that are [sic] held in other parts of the Republic. I wish the government could help us organize this ceremony as the other kinds[xxxvii] have received the same help. And I would have wished the TV to cover this ceremony and at the same time the radio. But unfortunately enough this has not been the case on our ceremony for the second time. The party and its government have been made to believe that Kazanga is a tribal ceremony. [xxxviii] I say: No! And it is quite unfortunate that people have said so. Kazanga is merely a ceremony of the Nkoya people just like any other ceremony as I have said.’ (applause)[xxxix]

The Junior Minister of Culture, Mr. Tembo, hails from eastern Zambia, and like 95%[xl] of the Zambian population he does not know Nkoya. Until a few years ago his speech would have been simply in English. But many things have changed in Zambia. Before the ceremony, therefore, the Minister has had one of the Kazanga leaders (the ex-trade unionist and now game-skin dealer Mr D. Mupishi) dictate a number of appropriate Nkoya phrases to him, and these he now pronounces — not visibly from paper but from braille notes in his jacket pocket. This is the very first time that a state representative in an official capacity addresses the Nkoya in their own language. The acclamation is overwhelming.

‘Our culture’, says Mr Tembo in laboriously, but imperfectly, pronounced Nkoya, ‘is the Nkoya culture, the culture of Zambia, a great culture which is very dear to us.’[xli]

Soon switching to English, which Mr Mupishi translates into Nkoya, the minister praises the festival organizers for the excellent reception they have given the politicians, and declares their ethnic mediation successful:

‘We are here to express the party’s policy of cultural unity through diversity. Kazanga is a Zambian ceremony.’

He calls upon the elders to educate the youth ‘on the meaning of Kazanga’, and exhorts the youth to show interest.

This year, 1989, the silver anniversary of Zambian Independence will be celebrated, and the minister praises God’s great blessings and the wisdom of President Kaunda:

‘When we think of the miraculous — er — escape from certain tribes [!]. When we think of the wisdom of our leadership — our great beloved President’s wisdom. (...) We will meaningfully praise God if we treasure what we have. God wants us to look after our nation by following the party’s policy, the party’s direction; by treasuring our leadership; to listen to them especially when they tell us over and over again: ‘‘love one another’’, ‘‘love one another’’.’ [xlii]

The Zambian state is bankrupt and needs all the support it can get. The Kaunda regime is near its end; in the democratic elections in 1991 UNIP, after controlling the state for almost thirty years, will be defeated by a national democratic coalition named MMD (Movement for Multi-party Democracy) led by Mr F. Chiluba. In the night before Kazanga in 1989 the Zambian currency was once again devaluated by 100%. The religious idiom must conceal the fact that politically the minister has nothing more to say. But that does not disqualify him in the eyes of his audience. Particularly in the light of Nkoya humiliation during the colonial period, and the initial distrust between the Nkoya and the post-colonial state, Minister Tembo’s message of the unconditional acceptance of Nkoya ethnicity by the state is more than sufficient.

At the end of his speech the blind minister, once Zambia’s most popular singer, calls upon the public to sing — in Nkoya, and to a tune that accompanied a dancing group of schoolgirls earlier in the ceremony — a simple song on Zambian development which the minister just wrote. His call is answered reluctantly, while in accompaniment he strikes the folding parts of his blindman’s stick in front of the microphone. Ethnic mediation is something this minister understands only too well; he was my final-year student at the University of Zambia in the early 1970s.

Let us now analyze the details of the ethnic mediation process as it presents itself at the Kazanga festival.

It is essential for ethnic mediation that the brokers’ leadership can assert itself not only through serving the ethnic group in an organizational capacity but also through cultural selection and transformation.

In Zambia, as almost anywhere in the modern world public life and the national political culture are dominated by the media, especially radio and television. Ethnic mediation towards the outside world seeks media access, and festivals are a time-honoured means to acquire such access. In the specific case of the Nkoya two important reasons must be added to this. Of old, Kaoma district has had an extremely rich musical tradition.[xliii] At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Nkoya royal orchestra was even permanently adopted by the Lozi. Therefore, music which the Nkoya rightly recognize as their own can often be heard at the Zambian media — but then as an attribute of the hated Lozi traditional establishment; all efforts which Nkoya have made over the years to have radio broadcasts in their own language, have been in vain until very recently. And, secondly, the principal public expression of that power is the Kuomboka ceremony, which is held every year in April at the occasion of the Lozi king’s (later paramount chief’s) moving, by ceremonial barge, from his summer residence to his winter residence. For a century Kuomboka has attracted the keen attention of the media and of national dignitaries. The Kazanga ceremony was meant as the Nkoya’s answer to Kuomboka,[xliv] just like the Kazanga association (up to and including printed T-shirts for the associations’ members and to be worn as part of the dancers’ uniform) is an attempt to emulate the much richer, more powerful, more numerous and more efficient Lozi association which year after year makes Kuomboka possible.[xlv]

Thus the Kazanga festival is a strategically chosen new form. In what ways does it select and transform the existing local culture?

The name Kazanga is derived from a ritual that has gone in disuse since the end of the nineteenth century.[xlvi] Through the ritual one hoped to gain supernatural permission to partake of the new harvest. The king was the ritual’s principal officiant. The climax was the sacrifice of one or more slaves over an anthill (a symbol of the fertility of the land); the blood was led into the ground along gullies dug for that purpose.[xlvii] Kazanga was the only moment in the year when the entire people came together around the king, and it was surrounded by extensive performance of music and dance. It is exclusively the latter aspects which the leaders of the new association have selected when designing a new and modern Kazanga ceremony.

Zambia is a post-colonial state insisting on its respect for human rights. The Nkoya try to articulate themselves as an ethnic group in a context of peripheral capitalism, where food and food crops have turned into commodities and where the fertility of the land has lost its sacred nature. The Nkoya identity first emerged within the Evangelical Church of Zambia, and Nkoya chiefs counted among theat church’s founding members. The integral revival of the old harvest ceremony was therefore unthinkable.

As an expression of the recent Nkoya identity the new-style Kazanga ceremony would only make sense if it was not limited to one chief or king (as was originally the case) but involved all four chiefs with their retinue and subjects. Here a major problem arose.

In western Zambia royal persons, as an expression of their incomparable political and ritual status, are separated from their subjects through strict rules of avoidance and respect. For instance, they must not eat together with anybody else (except very close kin), nor come in touch with death. They can only be approached through the intervention of court dignitaries, and on such occasions the visitor displays humility through the adoption of a kneeling, squatting or sitting position and through rhythmic clapping. The purpose of court life is not so much the handling of administrative affairs but the glorification of the king and the guarding of his prestige, protocol and person. The king is the living axis of the community, the lukena is the centre of the universe, in which there is strictly speaking only room for one king. It is this fundamental idea which was expressed by the old Kazanga ceremony.

Kings who are not each other’s vassal and lord respectively, but equals, can strictly speaking not visit each other, and must certainly not eat together or sleep under one roof.[xlviii] When nonetheless it is inevitable that they should meet, the visiting king is to have his own retinue and own temporary lukena at his disposal.[xlix] Bringing together, as in the new-style Kazanga, several royal chiefs was therefore a profound innovation, which required sacrificing much of the Nkoya cultural logic. At a considerable distance (ca. 1 km) from the festival location four temporary royal residences had to be erected. complete with lilapa. The royal procession and entrance in itself did follow a historic model,[l] but their fourfold repetition was unheard-of.

In the middle of the festival area we have seen a low round thatched shelter, inside of which a dozen sticks had been placed into the ground; each stick was segmented through a large number of transverse incisions. This was a shrine for the deceased members of the Mutondo dynasty. The shrine had been especially erected for the occasion of Kazanga, and at a most exceptional spot: for a village shrine should not be situated along the public road but at the centre of the settlement, between the village headman’s house and the men’s shelter (kuta); the proper place for a dynastic shrine is inside the lilapa — but it would be unthinkable to organize a massive festival in that secluded ands sacred space.[li]

For the conceptualization of space and time, and for the unleashing of the symbolic potential of new-style Kazanga, all this is of the greatest importance. The shrine adds to the festival the sanction of an ancestral past, a strong suggestion of continuity vis-a-vis the tradition, which helps to dissimulate such actual breaches of the cultural logic as we have already spotted. Revolutionarily situated in the open festival space, it turns the latter into a sacred space.

Thus a symbolic decrease of scale is brought about: the dynastic shrine poses as village shrine, namely of the entire region transformed into an imaginary Nkoya village; of this village the loges represent the men’s shelter; and the nearby lilapa represents the headman’s house, which implies that Mutondo — unjustifiably — is symbolically turned into the traditional leader not only of his own subjects but of all those who embrace the Nkoya identity — including the other Nkoya chiefs’ subjects. By articulating itself as the sacred centre of the entire social and geographical space within which Nkoya identity is being constructed and expressed, the shrine lends a cosmic significance to that identity. It is near this shrine that the most sacred, ancient and rare royal instruments are played.[lii]

Also in its new form Kazanga remains a glorification of the kingship, which hence remains one of the pillars of Nkoya ethnicity. But this idea is expressed by means of a shrine that symbolically replaces the sacrificial anthill in the old Kazanga ritual, and that should not be where it is; it represents a double breach of tradition.

While the ethnic brokers who organize Kazanga strengthen their own positions of power both in the outside world and within the Nkoya ethnic group, they also have an impact on the hierarchy of the traditional chiefs. The 1989 festival presented Mutondo in a position of seniority to which traditionally he can lay no claim.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century a fair number of royal titles defined as many independent states. The political relationships such as existed between groups at a particularly decisive moment in their genesis used to be expressed, within the Lunda sphere of influence in South Central Africa, as a permanent kinship relation between titles, in such a way that each holder of title Y, regardless of period, age, sex or actual biological relationship, would appear as the ‘younger brother’, ‘father’ etc. of each holder of title Z. This system of so-called ‘perpetual kinship’[liii] formed the basis for ‘positional succession’, according to which individual title-holders in the course of their career would be promoted from lower to higher titles as the latter became vacant through death or demotion. However, these time-honoured instruments of political integration were not applied within and between the states of Kaoma district;[liv] this led to an extreme political fragmentation which made these states defenseless against Lozi expansion and the colonial state. When locally only the two titles of Mutondo and Kahare survived, a sharp dichotomy arose with a strong rivalry between either chief’s following. The colonial district was named after the Mutondo dynasty, and in accordance with Kahare’s more peripheral geographical position Mutondo’s following claimed seniority for their prince. It is only from this early colonial period that Kahare (in a belated attempt at perpetual kinship, and despite the greater antiquity of his own title)[lv] addresses Mutondo as ‘elder brother’ (yaya). Also Kabulwebulwe and Momba follow this convention vis-a-vis Mutondo, and for somewhat better reasons since certain early incumbents of these titles are known to be have broken away from the Mutondo dynastic group as recently as the nineteenth century.[lvi]

This formal subordination is not confirmed by the outside world. In general, the hierarchy of state-recognized chiefs in Zambia comprises ‘Paramount Chiefs’, ‘Senior Chiefs’, and ‘Chiefs’; Mutondo and Kahare are each only ‘Chief; and as such each other’s equals. Also in the hierarchy of the Lozi indigenous administration they occupy the same, relatively exalted level, as royal chiefs entitled to a lilapa and to an orchestra but not to the most senior type of royal drums, the Mawoma kettle drums.[lvii] Under the post-colonial state, Kahare’s position [lviii] has always been even stronger than that of Mutondo.

The issue of equality among the Nkoya chiefs has played a great role in the choice of the location of the new-style Kazanga festival. The large majority of those identifying as Nkoya live in Kaoma district as subjects of either Mutondo or Kahare, and a location outside the district was therefore not contemplated. The district capital (where the Nkoya are politically and economically a minority as compared to the Lozi, Luvale and Luchazi) was rejected as a possible location, and initially preference was given to either of the two zinkena. In principle it was decided to have Kazanga alternate each year between Mutondo’s and Kahare’s capital. In practice however all festivals have taken place at Shikombwe between 1988 and 1991. It was here that in 1981 Muchayila, who had been demoted as chief in 1947, was re-instated after the death of his successor, a pro-Lozi figurehead; until Muchayila’s own death in 1990, i.e. in the formative years of Kazanga as an association and as a festival, the hale and hearty Muchayila was to remain the undisputed symbol of Nkoya ascendancy.

The shrine in the middle of the festival grounds explicitly referred only to the Mutondo kingship and its previous incumbents.

Despite the pan-Nkoya signature of Kazanga, and the presence of other chiefs with their retinue, it is Mutondo’s royal bell and snare drums which are being played here, by his musicians. The few solo dancers who will significantly touch the shrine during their performance are members of the Mutondo royal family, and so are the score of people who, as a separate item on the festival programme, are to dance around the shrine.

The subordination of the other chiefdoms under Mutondo hegemony in the context of Kazanga is also clear from other details in the course of the festival.

Mutondo is not only the chief who makes the first entrance (at the same time as the modern dignitaries, who unobtrusively take to their place in the loge) but it is also him who, standing in front of the royal loge, welcomes the other chiefs with a handshake upon their arrival. As compared to the historic clapping among the Nkoya this is a downright exotic gesture, which however has become a completely accepted aspect of the Zambian urban and national culture today; in the present context it underlines the lack of protocol for royals meeting. With the handshake Mutondo asserts himself as the host and as senior to the other chiefs at this pan-Nkoya festival. As if to stress that Mutondo, more than his colleagues, represents the link with the glorious past, he is the only one to wear historic regalia over his western costume: his breast and back are covered with leopard skins, and he dons three spiralled shell disks [lix] on his brow. However, all four chiefs carry an eland tail (hefu) as regalium, which they wield as a fly-switch when walking or sitting in state.[lx]

The presentation, in the context of Kazanga, of Mutondo as the most senior Nkoya chief is immediately taken over by the state representatives at the festival. Minister Tembo explicitly directs his speech to Mutondo, whom he erroneously calls ‘Senior Chief’ and whom he addresses by the Nkoya honorific ‘ba Hekulu’ (‘Your Majesty’). No doubt this is partly due to his preparatory conversation with Mr Mupishi, member of the Mutondo royal family.

Expressing the pan-Nkoya identity in new-style Kazanga turns out to have as its price: giving in to the seniority aspirations of the Mutondo title and its followers. Integration of the geographically and politically highly fragmented local groupings under the Nkoya emblem does not produce a unity of equals. Presentation of one’s ethnic identity to the outside world does not do away with the internal contradictions but, on the contrary, reinforces the latter, within the new political space which opens up by contact with the state.

However, we shall see that this attempt at hegemony through Kazanga did not last, and most recently was resolved in a compromise which combined such potential for unity as could be derived both from village culture and from the meiation towards the state.

As a form of ethnic mediation Kazanga seeks to present a sample of Nkoya culture. What would we expect such a sample to look like, given the habitual forms of expressive culture in the village situation?

For two centuries the local music and dance (always with their song texts in the Nkoya language) have been a model for the whole of western Zambia. The riches in this field are in contrast with the fact that visual arts and ornamental architecture are virtually non-existent here.[lxi] Most forms of expressive culture are linked to specific ceremonial situations: girls’ initiation, marriage, therapy, name inheritance, royal accession, the twice-daily performance of the royal orchestra, the hunters’ guild’s celebrations. Besides there is a, fashionably changing, festival repertoire (ruhnwa) to entertain those villagers who take part in these situations playing non-specialist roles. Playing the main instruments (drums and xylophone) is reserved to men; the royal instruments are reserved to paid court musicians; the ceremonial situations enumerated above define for some participants solo roles as singer or dancer; and certain expressive forms (makwasha) are reserved to people of middle age or older. But apart from this relatively limited structuring of the expressive domain, each member of the community has both the right and the competence to make public and active use of virtually the entire repertoire of Nkoya expressive culture.

Singing along with others, dancing along with others, supporting the sound of drums and xylophone by clapping, by shaking a rattle or by shouting exhortations, criticisms and witticisms, and rewarding the dancers by dancing forward oneself and putting money on the dancer’s head or shoulders — for the villager music and dance always mean the actualization of a cultural domain in which he or she is in principle competent, both in the cognitive sense (of knowing how to appreciate and what to do) and in the normative sense of possessing an unchallenged birthright to participation. This does not mean that in every musical event everybody present dances and sings along constantly. Many of those present are content, most of the time, with a place at the men’s fire or the women’s fire, where people engage in conversation, where the plastic beer container, the cigarette and the snuff box are passed form hand to hand, and where ambiguous joking is standard; however, the expectation of active participation is there during the entire ceremony and almost everybody does participate at one moment or another in the course of the event.

In this domain, it is only in the context of the royal orchestra that one can witness pure musical and dancing consumption with exclusion of the possibility to active participation. At all other occasions we hear, polyphonically, next to one another many slightly different voices and texts, and also with regard to the dancing forms one could speak, by analogy, of ‘polychory’.[lxii] There is never any question of stage direction, orchestration or choreography. Musicians, singers, dancers and spectators change places according to their own needs and preferences. Leading men and women only see to it that the solo roles, if any, are not too much obscured in the general melee. In time and space these musical expressions are self-evidently integrated in the social and geographical space of the village, and they constitute a very frequent part of the life cycle of the village and of its individual members.[lxiii]

In everyday village life in Kaoma district the roles which one plays in material production and reproduction are little formalized, with ample freedom for personal interpretation, weak social control, and constantly erupting conflicts for which moving to another village is the standard solution. Local society is an example of the somewhat amorphous social organization which the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and the Manchester School considered characteristic for South Central Africa.[lxiv] The expressive culture ties in with this. The ceremonies and rituals into which song and dance are structured refer, largely implicitly and non-verbally, to symbols which yet impose a cosmological ordering, and thus meaning, to the loose social structure.

As a structure of activities the domain of music and dance offers for many hours, sometimes days, at a stretch situations of uninhibited articulation — often characterized by great virtuosity — of the individual as member of a group which, assembling for symbolic production, largely coincides with the local group within which material production and reproduction find place. Without the slightest exaggeration, the expressive domain forms the pivot of the village society.[lxv]

What of all this can we find back in new-style Kazanga? Much less than one would expect if one were to view the festival as an authentic expression of tradition.

The festival is dominated by ‘the performance’ as a cosmopolitically produced format of symbolic production. We may define this format as: a specialist activity which is structured and standardized in detail by stage direction; disconnected in space and time from the habitual local context of material production and reproduction; and with a strict separation between (a) controllers, (b) direct producers i.e. performers, and (c) a crowd of symbolic consumers who have been reduced to productive incompetence and non-participation.

Such a production format denies the characteristics of the expressive domain in the village society. It offers a modular matrix in which disconnected parts can be entered and replaced ad libitum; these parts are made into objects and are consumed, in order to gain — in the midst of similar performances — a market value in the outside world, which is seen as a market of ‘performative’ products. The constituent parts of the performance could be derived from a local idiom, but they come to function in a context and in a manner which is so radically different that any idea of continuity vis-a-vis the tradition has to be given up. Kazanga is the uprooted performance, the playing-back full of ostentation, of the local domain of symbolic production. Under the guise of articulating the vitality of the local culture in the world today, it offers a format within which that culture runs the risk of being turned into a meaningless folkloristic cultural product.

A closer analysis of the chiefs’ four entrances reveals how Kazanga is a carefully directed performance, in which the suggestion of a traditional model (that of the ‘royal procession’) is achieved with the patent means of the cinematographical industry. The naive spectator sees four chiefs in a row, each followed by his own orchestra and retinue and by representatives of his people, sufficiently numerous to raise clouds of dust with their dancing. In fact however this impression is only correct for Mutondo and Kahare. The other two chiefs turn out to make their entrance in front of Mutondo’s orchestra, and because they have only been able to bring a few subjects from their distant capitals their procession consists mainly of local ‘extras’ who have just been part of the previous chiefs’ entrances! In view of the emphasis, in this society, on one’s exclusive allegiance to one specific chief as a method of social placement, and in view of the rivalry between the chiefdoms, it is clear that Kazanga, as a planned performance, demands from the performers that they take an almost cynical distance from their own cultural logic.

Let us now look at the three roles of controller, performer and spectator, starting with the last.

Within the format of Kazanga the spectators along the borders of the festival grounds have been reduced to passive consumption, a state which the directions blasting from the loudspeakers helps them to maintain. With enthusiastic cries they respond to the chiefs’ entrances and to most performances, and many cannot help themselves and inadvertently move in time with the music. But is is only a few elderly women who do claim their birthright, and dance and sing wholeheartedly along with the performances. Their dancing movements are fierce and without inhibitions involve the entire body. One or two of them have actually dressed in genuinely traditional dress made out of gameskins or bark, or wield a miniature hoe as a dancing prop.

Of the fifteen performances listed in the programme only a few are presented by full-fledged villagers, notably from Kahare’s area. These articulate their expressive culture with a minimum of stage direction and choreography, in their everyday clothes, and many on their bare feet. However, by contrast to the village situation they do not engage in this expressive production because in the space and time of their community a self-evident reason for such production has presented itself, but merely because they have been coopted by ethnic brokers. In these hard times the prospect of financial gain appeals to them, and after the festival they are deeply disappointed when they are sent home with each barely enough to buy a packet of cigarettes. However, this in itself suggests that also the villagers begin to be accustomed to the performative model, and begin to see their own dancing as productive wage labour.[lxvi]

They have been brought to Shikombwe at the eve of the festival upon an open truck, and for them the height of the festival lies in the two nights before and after the festival, when the combination of instruments, musicians and a crown in the same open space produces a spontaneous celebration virtually indistinguishable from the village ruhnwa. The large xylophone flanked by drums, the crowd which spontaneously wheels around the musicians and improvises (!) joking songs, the women who peddle their village beer and scones, the absence of artificial light which makes one time and again run into unexpected kinsmen and friends from sometimes hundreds of kilometers away — all this retains the taste, smell, sound and effervescence of the village ceremony, articulating a cultural identity at the village, valley and regional level which has not yet been transformed by ethnic mediation.

The other performers are solo dancers impersonating a traditional court jester, hunter or warrior in apparel which one has not seen around for many years, and moreover women’s dancing groups: two from a village school, one consisting of female members of the Kazanga association in Lusaka, and one consisting of two young village women who perform the dance of the kankanga. The latter are led onto the dancing ground in a stooping position and concealed under a blanket, as usual in girl’s puberty ritual, but they are clearly no longer kankangas: their breasts are mature and contrary to tradition are covered under conspicuous white bras; the ladies display nothing of the shy grace and the fear of failure of the adolescent debutante, but towards the end of their dance wave white little scarves almost in the manner of revue artists. The urban dancing group is conspicuously urban: all wear shoes, they have expensive coiffures, some are donning sun glasses, and all wear — over the chitenge wrapper skirt which is an inevitable concession to village taste and norms of propriety — a uniform T-shirt with the stencilled text ‘Kazanga 1989 — Nkoya cultural ceremony’. Their inhibited movements refer to North Atlantic middle class ideas and to cosmopolitan Christianity: an unmistakable attempt to construct an ethnic culture which is capable of being mediated to the wider society also in this sense that it emphatically does not confirm stereotypes of ‘paganism’ and ‘primitiveness’; there is no shaking of breasts and bottoms in their performance. The members of each women’s group are dressed identically, and they take every effort to keep time with the others, making the same movements and taking the same steps, along the geometric figures of circle and straight line. This lends to their joint performance a flat unity, predictability and poverty of form which stands in flagrant contrast to the traditional expressive culture.

The urban women are coordinated by a male dancer, Mr. Tom, who — for all his wearing women’s clothes, a blonde nylon wig (!) and dancing rattles on his lower legs — constantly emphasizes his male leadership over dancing and singing women, something again completely unthinkable in the village situation. He also dances along with the other women’s groups, even with the pseudo-kankangas. Although his attire and behaviour are reminiscent of the historic figure of the jester at Nkoya courts,[lxvii] his role is truly unique and without proper precedent — just like the Kazanga festival as a whole —, and can only be understood by the fact that Mr Tom is generally considered a musical and choreographic genius, the composer (‘dreamer’, in the local conception) of all the Kazanga songs — so evocative of Nkoya ethnic consciousness —, and director of the Kazanga dancing troupe from Lusaka.

As an aspect of its mediating nature, and largely through its reliance on visual and otherwise non-verbal symbols, the festival is capable of presenting, within one and the same framework of space and time, contradictions which could not be grasped within the same repertoire of meaning. On the level of the performers Kazanga expresses, despite the proclaimed quest for pan-Nkoya unity, contradictions which divide the ethnic group in several camps: contradictions between an urban and a rural lifestyle, between classes, between men and women, and between autochthonous religion and Christianity.[lxviii] Somewhat to our surprise these contradictions are hardly concealed or coded under a smoke-screen of symbolism; on the contrary, the subordination as exerted by the dominant group (urban, middle-class men) is explicitly made manifest. An interpretation in terms of a ‘mystifying false consciousness’ which conceals the real contradictions, as is sometimes applied in the study of the cultural dimension of ethnicity, does not do justice to this state of affairs.

Only Christianity remains implicit as a reference;[lxix] nevertheless it has obviously succeeded in debarring from the festival programme the music and dance of syncretistic healing cults, even though at the village level such cults have constituted the dominant religious expression for half a century or more,[lxx] with singing and dancing forms which closely follow those of the historic expressive domain. Those attributes which are considered to be acceptable to the wider society (shoes, sunglasses etc.) are particularly manifested by the urban dancing group, who considers it their right to mingle constantly in the other performances, and who welcome the chiefs during their entrances. As members of the Kazanga association they are among the ethnic brokers, and they assert themselves as the owners of the Kazanga festival and of the Nkoya ethnicity; and they do have a point there.

A small group of performers, finally, incorporate in stance and apparel another crucial contradiction: the uniformed kapasus, who stand and salute militarily when everyone else kneels and claps, who strut in rigid parade fashion when everyone else walks or dances, and who thus constantly emphasize the contradiction between the local level and the state (whose authority they directly represent at the local level).

Part of the Kazanga leadership we have already encountered, dancing in T-shirts, giving speeches, administering the festival programme and instructing the public via the intercom system. Besides the T-shirts with their special imprint, formal European costume with tie is their characteristic apparel. During the festival they constantly and without signs of friction deliberate, all the time clearly visible as a distinct category near the microphone, with the court dignitaries of Mutondo, who are also formally dressed and more often than not are the Kazanga leaders’ kinsmen. Their attitude towards the national politicians is less uninhibited, and in this respect the bulk of responsibility is carried by Mr Mupishi, who accompanies the high-ranking guests, and who prompts diplomatic statements to his fellow-members of the executive. None of the leaders in ties can be persuaded to dance or to give the royal salute — superior distance from the cultural product as offered by Kazanga appears to be a necessary component of their mediating role.

Of course examples could be quoted of Third-World societies in which stage-directed performance by specialists has traditionally been a local culture trait. However, in the case of Kazanga the performative format is an exotic, cosmopolitan formula which was propounded since the