CosmolocalOrientations: TricksterSpatialization and thePolitics ofCulturalBargaining inZambia

Critical Interventions Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture ISSN: 1930-1944 (Print) 2326-411X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcin20 Cosmolocal Orientations: Trickster Spatialization and the Politics of Cultural Bargaining in Zambia Ruth Simbao To cite this article: Ruth Simbao (2018) Cosmolocal Orientations: Trickster Spatialization and the Politics of Cultural Bargaining in Zambia, Critical Interventions, 12:3, 251-274, DOI: 10.1080/19301944.2018.1532379 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19301944.2018.1532379 Published online: 23 Aug 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 28 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcin20 COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS: TRICKSTER SPATIALIZATION THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL BARGAINING IN ZAMBIA AND Ruth Simbao, National Research Foundation Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, Rhodes University The spatialization of Africa is fraught, and places within Africa tend to be stereotyped by geographies of morality and simplistic rural/urban divides. Focusing on the spatial, cultural, and political bargaining of contemporary chiefs and cultural festivals in 21st-century Zambia, this article delinks cosmopolitanism and Afropolitanism from the city and associated attitudes of urbanity. Positioning place as a trickster character, it argues for a nuanced understanding of time-space imaginaries that refuses to bind people and identities to closed-down notions of place. In this article I propose the term cosmolocal, suggesting that the cosmolocal is an outwardengaging orientation that understands place as a profoundly discursive and situational process and that has the potential to exist anywhere. Many contemporary chiefs in Zambia embrace cosmolocalism, enabling them to escape the limitations of being viewed merely as custodians of culture who are limited to the space of the village framed historically as the warehouse of culture. SPATIALIZING AFRICA: STEREOTYPES OF PLACE Human ways of spatializing the world are fraught. Both seduced and repelled by the magnetism of place, many of us have rubbed up against place in undesirable ways. Often characterized as a “conservative haven” associated with denial and withdrawal in comparison to the relative abstraction and freedom of space, place tends to be stereotyped as a closed, fixed, and bound object that contains and binds human beings (Massey, 2015, pp. 5–6). Positioned sometimes as a bully, place has aggravated our restlessness, called us names, held us bondage, and discounted our worth. In the name of various forms of parochialism, antagonism, and sentimentalism, place has appeared retrograde, bigoted, possessive, reactionary, introverted, and even violent at times. The spatialization of Africa has been especially tangled up in the irrational and violent imaginaries of Euro-America, not only in the colonial era but also today.1 Africa as an illusory place is often framed as an oversimplified continent-as-object that mirrors the fears of people beyond its borders more than it reflects the complexity of daily experiences of Africans in diverse African places. From this perspective, Africans are bound by external spatializations such as “the African continent,” “the African nation,” “the African city,” or “the African village.” Growing out of 19th-century colonial supremacy and racism, villages in Africa were often assumed to be backward, primitive, and uncivilized. Even if those derogatory associations might be less explicit in contemporary vocabularies, villages still tend to be framed as slow in pace, hence culturally authentic, and slow to change, hence largely parochial. Villages are typically conceptualized as relatively heavy places—places that weigh down, contain, and hold onto things, ideas, and people, whereas cities are viewed as lighter. They are places that people aspire to reach and pass through, and when people do stay (for a while) they constantly move in, around, and through the city. Parochial people, it seems, remain attached, while cosmopolites shake their attachments loose.2 The former simply seem to remain, while Critical Interventions 12 Issue 3 2019 # 2019 Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture https://doi.org/10.1080/19301944.2018.1532379 252 | SIMBAO the latter proceed. Stasis and movement, as such, are pitted against one another. Within these stereotypical framings, villages are overdetermined by a placed-ness that reveals the stereotypes of place as “closed, coherent, integrated as authentic, as ‘home,’ a secure retreat” (Massey, 2015, p. 6). Cities, however, are often viewed as spaces of mobility, and the diversity, plurality, and fast pace typically associated with urban spaces positions residents as cosmopolitan (“of the city” or “citizens of the world”) or, in an African context, as Afropolitan—enacting a performance of worldliness (Mbembe, 2004, p. 374). Through an analysis of culture and spatialization in Zambia, I challenge the easy distinctions between villages and cities that mirror a heavy placed-ness and a more mobile conceptualization of space, respectively. Human geographer Doreen Massey (2015, p. 6) asked, “what if we refuse that distinction, all too appealing it seems, between place (as meaningful, lived and everyday) and space (as what? the outside? the abstract? the meaningless?).” The imaginary distinctions between place and space and their associated stereotypes, she argued, are merely “ways of taming the challenge that the inherent spatiality of the world presents” (Massey, 2015, pp. 6–7). The challenge of spatiality demands complexity that resists stereotypes that are easy to reproduce. It demands the appetite to seek and recognize situations that veer away from the expected and the norm. While cosmopolitanism is typically associated with an outward-looking approach, cosmopolitan spaces always hold the potential to turn inward—such as the Afropolis of Johannesburg being a site of Afropolitanism as well as a site of Afrophobia (Simbao 2016a). Delinking cosmopolitanism from obvious and Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 hence flattened associations with the city and from the Western notion of chronological time and progress, I develop what I call a cosmolocal orientation, and I argue that complex realities far exceed and outstrip the reductiveness of conventional spatial assumptions. Cosmolocal orientations are situationally (Simbao, 2016a) cosmopolitanism, and they adopt the stance of engaging outward whether situated in a village, a city, or anywhere in between, allowing for ongoing, process-based acts of spatial bargaining. Drawing from the work of anthropologist James Ferguson, who analyses the complexities of urban–rural distinctions in northern Rhodesia/ Zambia during the anti-colonial and early postcolonial decades, I analyze some of the cultural and spatial bargaining of the cultural festivals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in Zambia and argue that these events and experiences radically delink notions of cultural authenticity from “the village.” Even though many people view and deliberatively perpetuate the perception of these festivals as village-bound keepers of authenticity, I assert that an analysis of various experiences of these festivals, which deliberately seeks accounts beyond the surface layers of official scriptedness, enables progressive understandings of place. I view place as a trickster character that plays with, twists, and cuts through spatial stereotypes, and in so doing speaks back to problematic spatializations of Africa that continue to persist. BEYOND AFROPOLITANISM: PLACE COSMOLOCAL TRICKSTER AS A The stereotype of place as closed and coherent relies on a “traditional chronology … [that emphasizes] static places” (Warf, 2009, p. 75) and positions place as something that one needs COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS to get away from or to be freed from in order to progress. These misguided attempts to flee place result in a valorization of movement, but because these attempts are premised on an impossible split between space and time, the placed-ness of the world fails to recede. Pulling one or the other way in this scholarly tug-ofwar, two seemingly contradictory lines of thought simultaneously occur. Since the late 20th century, some scholars have championed a mobility turn (Faist, 2013; Cresswell & Merriman, 2013, p. 11),3 while other scholars have concurrently argued that a spatial turn “burst onto the academic scene” in the mid1990s (Soja, 2009, p. 23). Attuned to this apparent paradox, human geographer Tim Cresswell (2015, p. 84) pointed out, “Just when place (at least in the form of relatively stable wholes firmly rooted in the past) appears to be more or less irrelevant, it seems to be the word on many people’s lips.” Rather than rebuff place, a more radical conceptualization of place takes the notion of place very seriously and, in doing so, views place as foundationally entangled with time, thus being process-based (Casey, 1997), situational (Simbao, 2016a, 2017), and extroverted (Massey, 1991, p. 28). Far from resulting in a reduction of place, an increase of travel and global flows actually multiplies human connections with place, even if these connections might be lighter than they were previously perceived to be. “Flows by definition,” wrote Warf (2009, pp. 71–72), “involve more than one place; hence, in a networked world, places have little meaning as isolated entities. Places are not locales as much as they are processes in which different forms of interconnections are established.” While the outward approach of cosmopolitanism might have relatively loose connections to place when | 253 compared to fervently territorial approaches, it should not be assumed that this renders cosmopolitanism and the flows of contemporary globalization de-placed. Nor should it be assumed that cosmopolitanism is experienced or performed only in certain types of places, such as fast places, large places, wealthy places, wellknown places, or privileged places. Such assumptions rely, I submit, on simplistic stereotypes of place and space and reductionistic notions of interconnectedness, movement, and time. When exhibitions such as Distant Relatives/ Relative Distance (Tuakli-Wosornu, 2006) and Flow (Hassan, 2008) used Afropolitanism to frame contemporary art of Africa, the emphasis was largely on contemporaneity and urbanity. The Flow exhibition and the accompanying catalogue (Kim 2008) employed a predominantly a-spatial lens of global flows, positioning “global Africa” as a consequence of Western-driven globalization rather than seeing Africa as having its own much deeper history of movement and cosmopolitan engagement (Hassan, 2008, p. 31; Mbembe, 2007). Cosmopolitanism, argued art historian Marıa Fernandez (2014, p. 1), “must be theorized in the light of geopolitics” and in terms of deeper histories of engagement.4 Distant Relatives/Relative Distance, which was produced by the Stevenson Gallery in South Africa, was an important counterpoint to the dominance of off-shore “Africa exhibitions.” However, its focus on African artists living overseas and the use of Tuakli-Wosornu’s essay “ByeBye Babar, or What Is an Afropolitan?”5 in the exhibition catalogue positioned Afropolitanism predominantly in the urban spaces of the north. According to Tuakli-Wosornu (2006, p. 56), Afropolitans are a “new demographic—dispersed across places like Brixton, Bethesda, Boston, Berlin—[that] has come of age in the 21st Recollection 254 | SIMBAO century, redefining what it means to be African.” Asserting that the question “Where are you from?” will result in many different answers, she wrote: “Home” for them is many things: where their parents are from; where they go for vacation; where they went to school; where they see old friends, where they live (or lived this year). Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many. (Tuakli-Wosornu, 2006, p. 55) This quote is remarkably similar to James Ferguson’s (1999, p. 131) response to the question “Where is ‘home’?” in his work on Zambian migrants, particularly retired copper miners, who needed to relocate to their villages or home areas following the crash of copper prices in 1975. By the late 1980s, hardly any ex-miners planned to remain in town, as many held the view that “There is no life in town anymore” (Ferguson 1999, p. 129). Ferguson (1999, p. 131) wrote: In such a situation, where is ‘home’? Is it the village you were born in? Or the one your mother lives in now? Or the one where your brothers and their wives are staying? Or the place where your sister stays, where her son has just become headman? He argued that the notion of “going back to the village” was complex and concealed more than it revealed (Ferguson, 1999, p. 131). While miners talked about their “home villages,” some of them might never have lived in a village before, for the “home village” was an ancestral home or the home of some relatives. Further, Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 people from rural northeastern Zambia (where many mineworkers hailed from) typically moved around quite a lot. Both men and women relocated several times in their lives, either due to marriage, divorce, conflict with neighbors, or taking over an inherited farm, and at times entire villages moved for agricultural reasons (Ferguson, 1999, p. 131). Moore and Vaughan (1994, p. 173) used the term home area and argued that this could mean a variety of different things: “For some, it means anywhere within a particular chief’s area, while for others it can mean anywhere within the district … A further complication results from the high levels of residential mobility and choice that exists in the area” (Moore & Vaughan, 1994, pp. 131–132). A comparison of Tuakli-Wosornu’s urban Afropolitan in European or American cities in the early 21st century and Ferguson’s “localist” and “cosmopolitan” migrants in Zambia in the late 20th century reveals that there are striking similarities in the ways that urban and village spaces are experienced as unfixed places-in-progress. Tuakli-Wosornu’s use of the term Afropolitanism in her popular essay has received significant critique (Eze, 2014, 2016; Hassan, 2008; Nzewi, 2014; Santana, 2013; Simbao, 2008a, 2009; Tveit, 2013; Wainaina, 2014), and—like cosmopolitanism more generally—it has been criticized as perpetuating elitism.6 While her notion of Afropolitanism tends to uphold a rural/urban spatial dichotomy in relation to cosmopolitanism and parochialism (Simbao, 2008a, 2009), what is critical in Ferguson’s work on Zambian mineworkers is the way that he breaks apart dichotomous stereotypes of parochial, settled villagers and cosmopolitan, “moveous”7 urbanites: Speaking of style breaks with the old dualist concern with traditional and COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS modern orientations by making it possible to talk about cultural difference without smuggling in assumptions about social typology and evolutionary teleology. Conceived as modes of signifying practice, the styles I have called “localist” and “cosmopolitan” are not the sign of membership in two co-present societies, one traditional and the other modern, (the famous “men [sic] of two worlds” fallacy so familiar in African urban studies). Nor is there any assumption that the two somehow form a necessary historical sequence— successive rungs in the ladder of urbanisation and modernization. Cosmopolitans and localists alike are members of a single society; they represent not the co-presence of two different social types or evolutionary stages, but contrasting styles within a single social setting. Both cosmopolitanism and localism are thus understood as coeval social phenomena (Fabian, 1983)—both live options in the present, with neither owning any monopoly on the future. (Ferguson, 1999, p. 102) It is important that cosmopolitanism in this framing is not bound8 to specific ways of spatializing the world; it is neither tied to “the city” nor pitted against “the nation” or “the village.” Progressive ways of spatializing the world enable place to be delinked from dated Western concepts of traditional chronology and related notions of “progress,” and drawing from Henry Louis Gates’s description of Esu, the West African trickster, I argue that place itself can be conceived as a trickster character and a wandering signifier (Simbao, 2016a, 2016b). Despite the stereotypes that fix and reduce place, place usually does not | 255 behave as we assume it ought to behave. Rather than a location in the traditional sense of physical geography, place is more of an event (Cresswell, 2015, p. 71; Massey, 2015, p. 140) and an ongoing process, an on-the-go conversation between living beings and spaces, between subjects and objects, and between space and time (Simbao, 2016a, p. 8). This in-the-moment interrelatedness is thus radically prospective, as new conversations continually unravel. To be in conversation is to discourse, to run back and forth with ideas.9 Far from static, the ongoing making of place is constantly on the move; conceptually meandering, it is a wandering signifier that assumes a geographic orientation that is profoundly discursive. Rather than being associated with or bound by particular types of spaces (such as the polis), cosmopolitanism can be viewed as an orientation (Delanty, 2009, pp. 16–17), an affect (TuakliWosornu, 2006), a performance of worldliness (Mbembe, 2004, p. 374), a voluntary affiliation (Anderson, 2001, p. 32), a style (Ferguson, 1999, p. 102), an attitude, or “an evolving complex of power relations (Fernandez, 2014, p. 1) that cuts into and across narrowly demarcated spaces, yet remains situated and embedded (Simbao, 2017). It is important, however, not to romanticize this orientation, as when it comes to voluntary versus forced movement, “choice, of course, does not belong to everyone equally” (Kwon, 2008, p. 165). As Salah Hassan (2008, p. 31) warned, the contemporary use of the term Afropolitan in relation to contemporary art and culture can too easily be associated with “the middle-class and the offspring of well-to-do diasporic Africans” in a way that ignores earlier waves of African diasporans who probably do not “share any affinity with the seemingly privileged Afropolitans,” and whose “earlier struggles Recollection 256 | SIMBAO for civil rights and social and economic justice” have paved the way for contemporary Afropolitans as described by Tuakli-Wosornu. Delinking cosmopolitanism from simplistic associations with the city, from Western centers of privilege and from attitudes or mannerisms of urbanity, and extending it beyond the shallowness of contemporary movement associated with modern, Western-driven globalization, enables the activation of what I call a cosmolocal orientation. The cosmolocal is an outward-engaging and worldly-wise orientation or attitude that has the potential to exist anywhere—in a city, a village, or somewhere between; it reflects the world through or via the local, and if the local is “here and now, and wherever I am,” as Tariq Ali suggested,10 then the cosmolocal has the potential to splice through static spatializations and associated positions, approaches, and stereotypes. While the term glocalization is a portmanteau of the words “globalization” and “localization” and indicates the coming together of universalizing and particularizing trends, cosmolocal is not simply a portmanteau of the cosmos (the world or the universe) and the local (in the typical sense of relating to a restricted or particular area). Instead, the bringing together of these two words aims to challenge and reject “the local” in the standard English sense of being “limited to a particular place,”11 or “localism” in the sense of “limitation through local attachment, provincialism.”12 It draws from the late 14th-century meaning of “local” that pertained to position and situation rather than locale, and it was used in medicine to indicate something positioned on the body. As such, cosmolocal is more about embodied orientation, attitude, and interrelatedness than about a locale, for place itself is constituted in relationship, in on-the-go conversation between living beings13 and environments, and in ongoing Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 processes that are simultaneously tangled up in time and space. Linked to the body, the local is indeed situational—here and now,14 and wherever I am. In her 1997 book, The Lure of the Local, arts writer Lucy Lippard (1998, pp. 5–7) revealed that even local spaces are always entanglements of space-time and here-there: “Each time we enter a new place, we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity, which is really what all ‘local places’ consist of.”15 Place as such can be viewed as a trickster character that outruns the stereotypes of Western, modernist theory. Understanding place as a trickster character means recognizing place as constitutive (tricksters are often creative, generative, and inventive shape-shifters); as not easily pinned down (tricksters are subversive, boundary-less, multiple, liminal, and mischievous troublers); and as dynamic (tricksters can be nimble, adaptable negotiators). As a trickster, place beguiles and bamboozles; place is between us, beside us, inside us. In his book The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates (1988, pp. 23, 31, 35, 79) described Esu as embodying the dialectical principal, always multiple, simultaneously right and wrong, and acting as “a kind of reconciliation of opposites of discourse.” Linking these characteristics to a reconceptualization of place challenges simplistic ways of spatializing the world and complicates clear-cut distinctions between villages and cities, between supposedly traditional and modern spaces and attitudes, and between cultural and political spheres. COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS OF “TRADITIONAL CEREMONIES” When I conducted research from 2002 to 2007 on some of the then over 6016 annual, gazetted festivals commonly known as “traditional ceremonies” in Zambia, I was struck by the COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS contradictions that existed in the complexities of urban and rural spatializations. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was “an explosion”17 of gazetted traditional ceremonies, and these annual events have been framed, on the one hand, as performances of authentic traditional culture that entrench ethnic fixity18 and recall customs since “time immemorial,”19 and, on the other hand, as pseudo-cultural events that are marred by spectacle and inauthenticity. These contradictory views tend to revolve around spatial splits between “the cultural logic of village society” (van Binsbergen, 1994, p. 121) and the dominance of Zambian urbanites through activities of related cultural associations (van Binsbergen, 1994, p. 119). The official gazetted ceremonies usually take place in the district or village of the hosting chief or chiefs. Cultural associations linked to the organizing of the festivals are usually composed of village-based and city-based subcommittees. Committee members who are city dwellers travel to the annual festivals, as do urban-based politicians and other visitors. The little scholarly writing that exists on these gazetted cultural festivals in Zambia tends to emphasize a one-directional move from the city to the village where the main events usually take place. Some scholars regard these events as inauthentic due to the flurry of urbanity that is seen to be imposed by elites on village spaces— spaces of purported cultural authenticity and morality. In his study of the Nkoya Kazanga festival in the 1990s, Wim van Binsbergen disparagingly referred to cultural festivals as being merely commodified and folklorized spectacles. He suggested that “the hegemony expressed by the dominant group—of the urban middle class—is quite explicit. The urban group consider it their right to constantly intrude on other performances” (van Binsbergen, 1994, p. 119). | 257 Referring to the girl initiates who perform at Kazanga, he argued that the Nkoya “pseudoinitiates” take part in “uprooted performance” that “asks performers to distance themselves … from their own cultural logic” (van Binsbergen, 1994, p. 117)—a cultural logic that, for him, is specific to the village. The result is an “exotic, cosmopolitan formula” (van Binsbergen, 1994, pp. 120–121) that comes from beyond the local village space and is thus contaminated by a global, capitalist system that causes alienation and imposes something onto performers as if they were passive puppets simply allowing commodification and modernization to happen to them. He wrote: One might consider new-style Kazanga as an example of ‘bricolage’ or of the ‘invention of tradition.’ In anthropology ‘bricolage’ has become the term for an innovation, which selectively brings together elements from a culture’s repertoire in a new combination while more or less retaining the pre-existing underlying logic. Kazanga is not bricolage, because it involves the profound transformation of all elements and their utilization in a way that violates the cultural logic of village society. (van Binsbergen, 1994, p. 121) While there are, indeed, different and sometimes opposing attitudes toward the role of culture in different spaces, it became evident to me that even though people might be based in either a rural or an urban context, they were neither bound to those social spaces nor entirely dictated by those spaces, and they were often “conditionally, partially, and situationally of ” particular places (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2001, p. 634).20 As discussed further below, perceptions of rurality or urbanity are at times Recollection 258 | SIMBAO misleading. In order to see beyond simplistic framings of place in relation to time-bound gazetted events and performances—such as “the village” as the “warehouse of culture”21 and “the city” as the domain of national politics—I paid close attention to the downtimes and offmoments of these festival events and the happenings in the wings of performance. I considered the paths between these spaces and purposefully tuned into unofficial, unnoticed, and underplayed happenings and experiences. I looked beyond the official scriptedness of ceremonies that dominated newspaper stories and television documentation, and besides attending 19 traditional ceremonies in their respective villages or rural areas,22 I attended a number of associated urban events that functioned as fundraisers for the main festival.23 Further, I spent time with women and children who on the surface held little sway in the hierarchical, masculinist power politics of both the government and traditional leadership, but who played a significant role in revealing the cracks in the main-stage façade of state or chiefly power. The downtime spent with people in village spaces during the off-season of their festival calendars also enabled me to experience the fluidity of these spaces outside of the heightened rush of urban visitors. One of the villages that I spent significant time in was Mwansabombwe, which is the home of the Lunda-Kazembe Mwata Kazembe XIX. A number of residents I spoke with proudly referred to Mwansabombwe as either “the largest village in central Africa”24 or “Little London,”25 and one resident told me that it is during the Mutomboko Ceremony “that our village becomes a town”26 (Figure 1). It is important to note that in this and other villages, as well as in a number of rural and semi-rural areas in Zambia, there is a deep history of movement, travel, and cosmolocal orientation Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 and engagement. This particular area in Luapula Province was referred to by the anthropologist Ian Cunnison (1959, p. 25) as “cosmopolitan; it is a Paris of pleasures,” and it is well known for its history as a hub for commerce and exchange (Bustin, 1975, p. 4). In the 18th century, the ruling Mwata Kazembe initiated trade dialogues by “gifting” examples of goods such as opaque stoneware beads received from the west coast via Mwata Yamvo, as a means of determining whether the Portuguese in the east had comparable or superior goods (Simbao, 2006, p. 28). As Burton (1969, p. 109) explained, these gifts were known as “mouths” and were seen to facilitate conversation and negotiation, sometimes blurring the distinctions between trade and tribute (Simbao, 2006, p. 28). In the 19th century, the Paramount Chief of the Lunda polity, Mwata Yamvo whose royal capital was in the Congo, is said to have demanded tribute in the form of salt, copper, and ivory, and he reciprocated with “gifts” of imported cloth and beads (Bustin, Figure 1. Mwata Kazembe XIX who lives in Mwansabombwe village, Luapula Province, is escorted into the arena during the Mutomboko ceremony. The annual ceremony celebrates the cosmopolitan history of migration, movement and trade of the LundaKazembe people. Photo: Ruth Simbao, July 2002. COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS 1975, p. 4). The driving force of these exchanges was, suggested political scientist Edouard Bustin (1975, p. 5), less focused on the materials themselves than the movement that cloth and beads facilitated, for it was the flow of relationships and the “circulation [that] kept the arteries of the [Lunda] empire open.” The 19th-century Portuguese in the region expressed surprise in terms of how cosmopolitan the Lunda people were, and Gamitto (1960, p. 21) wrote, “We certainly never expected to find so much ceremonial, pomp and ostentation in the potentate of a region so remote from the sea coast.” Contemporary annual festivals are as much about social networks and movement as they are about keeping “traditional culture” alive, and gift-giving remains important. Government ministers who sometimes attend ceremonies in traditional dress (either celebrating their own sociolinguistic affiliations or those of the host Figure 2. While annual ceremonies in Zambia usually take place in “home villages” associated with specific socio-linguistic groups, rather than perpetuating conservative notions of tradition, ethnicity and authenticity, ceremonies often reveal fluidities of spaces and cultural engagements. In 2004, then-Vice President Nevers Mumba (center) wore traditional Lozi dress to the Lozi Kuomboka ceremony even though he is Bemba. Photo: Ruth Simbao, April 2004. | 259 chief; Figure 2) might gift chiefs with bicycles and blankets, while chiefs often reciprocate with goats or chickens. Like the historical flow of relationships and circulation of trade/tribute objects that functioned as “mouths,” contemporary annual festivals play a significant role in nourishing cosmolocal movement and attitudes, as chiefs regularly visit the ceremonies of other chiefs, sometimes traveling vast distances to accept invitations. As such, even chiefs in seemingly remote rural areas find ways of keeping the arteries of their contemporary relationships and alliances open. Further, many annual festivals revolve around the celebration of historical movement and migration that extends beyond the national borders that were imposed by colonial authorities (Figure 3). Many Zambians historically migrated from what are today the surrounding nations of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, and Zimbabwe, as well as from South Africa, resulting less in autochthonous allegories than in stories of movement, where competition is framed not as who sprung from this particular piece of earth, but rather as who had the grandest movement to this place (Simbao, 2008b, p. 9). For example, a number of chiefs and performers from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo participate in the Lunda-Kazembe Mutomboko Ceremony due to historic ties with the Lunda Kingdom, and South Africans and Malawians attend the Ngoni Nc’ wala festival in Chipata, Eastern Province (Figure 4). Extensive national and international movement occurs with the now about 80 annual gazetted ceremonies, crisscrossing through urban, peri-urban, semi-rural, and rural areas in multiple directions. This movement is often ignited by chiefs. The contemporary Lunda-Kazembe Recollection 260 | SIMBAO Figure 3. Many of the annual ceremonies in Zambia celebrate historical and contemporary links that cross national borders. During the Lenje Kulamba ku Bwalo ceremony, the rooftops of “migration stations” represented maps that register pathways of migration. Photos: Ruth Simbao, October 2005. Figure 4. During the annual Ngoni Nc’ wala festival, cross-border connections are celebrated and a number of participants and visitors travel to Zambia from Malawi and South Africa. Photo: Ruth Simbao, February 2004. chief, Mwata Kazembe XIX, lives a 12-hour drive from the city of Lusaka, where he used to live and work as a banker before he became chief. He does not always have the transport to drive back and forth when he wants to, and at times he reminisces about his experiences in Kabwata—a residential and commercial area in Lusaka nicknamed “Dallas City”27 that is well known for its vibrant markets, bars, nightclubs, and blocks of flats. Although Mwata does not travel to Lusaka very often, his strong national networks enable him to bring “Dallas” to the village, so to speak. For example, he built his own getaway, Nakabamba Guesthouse in Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 Mwansabombwe village that he refers to as a “villa,”28 and this enables him to host his guests outside of the palace confines29 and retain his cosmolocal ties. As such, the outward-engaging cosmopolitanism that he experiences and creates is itinerant itself, and not only experienced in “Dallas City” in Lusaka. As a cosmolocal chief, Mwata Kazembe has an outward-engaging and worldly-wise orientation regardless of whether he is based in the city or the village, for he reflects the world through his local (his “here and now and wherever I am”) in a situational way. In doing so he outruns the lingering legacy of 19thcentury anthropology and its often conservative notion of “the village” and “the chief.” URBAN/RURAL RHETORIC: GEOGRAPHIES MORALITY AND DECOLONIALITY OF Anthropological thinking about the rural and the urban often replicates the “familiar storyline of ‘urbanization,’ with the urban conventionally understood as the site of modernization and change, and the rural, as the locus of tradition and continuity of the past” (Ferguson, 1997, p. 137). In the study of Zambia, the “contrast between the rural and the urban has long been taken as a commonsensical spatialization of such dichotomies as primitive/civilized, tribal/Western, traditional/modern, or precapitalist/capitalist” COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS (Ferguson, 1997, p. 137). However, Zambian conceptions of rurality or urbanity have changed at different times due to socioeconomic and political shifts (Ferguson, 1997, 1999), rendering these distinctions unstable and ambivalent. Further, there are multiple layers of perceptions even within one particular type of space such as “the village” (Cunnison, 1959). Zambia obtained independence from British rule in 1964, and during the liberation struggle years leading up to independence and the early nation-building years after 1964, a constructed moral geography served in some ways as a decolonial tool. Manifestations of place were pitted against each other in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and while the village was positioned as a site of good morals, authenticity, and purity, emphasizing the value of African traditions and the need for Africanization, the city was viewed as a space of foreignness, coloniality, and immorality. African nationalists deliberately used this dichotomy in an attempt to construct an “alternative modernism” that was not colonial and that could legitimate postcolonial rule (Ferguson, 1997, p. 144). Writing about migrants who went to the Zambian Copperbelt during the copper boom, Ferguson described two types of migrants—the “localist” migrant and the “cosmopolitan” migrant. For the former, “a rural home village was conceived as a primary home, to which the worker might return at intervals” (Ferguson, 1997, p. 136; 1999, p. 135), whereas the latter, often the better-off worker, “regarded the ‘home’ region as a faraway place, rarely if ever actually seen or visited, to which one was connected more by nostalgia and sentimental attachment than by social and economic ties or life trajectory” (Ferguson, 1997, p. 140; 1999, p. 141). It was particularly the “localist” migrants—those who | 261 had stronger investment in the rural “home”— who constructed the dichotomy between the moral village and the immoral city. In a nationalist gesture, the idea of the authentic village was posed as the “real Zambia” (Ferguson, 1997, p. 152). As Henry S. Meebelo (1980, p. 23) wrote, “President Kaunda refers to the African village way-of-life as the paradigm of social organization which modern Zambia would do well to emulate. ‘We have got to be man-centered [sic], truly man-centered. That life I keep referring to in the village is “the key” … We have got to translate it to the national level.’” Kaunda used this moral/ immoral dichotomy to challenge those working in the city to work much harder, so that they could actively contribute to their “poor” relatives living in the village (Bates, 1976, p. 33). Writing about Luapula Province in the 1950s, anthropologist Ian Cunnison demonstrated that despite the broader rhetoric of moral geographies espoused by Kaunda and others, complex layers existed within particular pockets of particular places. Linking back to the abovementioned deep history of cosmolocal orientation in Luapula, even villagers created layered moral geographies in their areas with some village spaces being deemed more cosmopolitan than others. For example, in Luapula in the 1950s, there was a distinction between villages near the main road and villages “in the bush.” As Cunnison (1959, p. 24) wrote: The very phrase ‘in the bush’ (mu mpanga) has a derisive note when applied to the dwelling places of people. A house isolated from the main group of village dwellings, with uncleared ground around it, is ‘in the bush.’ Villagers sited outside hailing distance of neighbours, and with no Recollection 262 | SIMBAO well-made road or path to them, are also ‘in the bush.’ Those who live there without some good reason for doing so are the butt of scorn from others. Referring to Mwansabombwe (then known as Kazembe), Cunnison argued that smaller places with less access to roads were referred to as the “‘side room’ (ku cuba) as against the main room of the house with the front door,” although a place that is stereotyped as a “side room” is still not as bad as “the bush” (Cunnison, 1959, p. 26). A cosmolocal orientation was described as gregarious and open living (Cunnison, 1959, p. 25), which resonated with Massey’s (1991, p. 28) suggestion that more radical and less reductionistic notions of place view place as extroverted rather than closed and inward-looking. “Villages should be near other villages,” wrote Cunnison (1959, p. 25), and residents of Kazembe thought that village houses should be on the main road with doors facing the road so that people sitting on their verandas could engage with passersby. To live gregariously is to live openly. It is to be part of and interested in current affairs. It is to be at hand for markets, and beside the swirl of economic activities. It is to be modern and progressive, in touch with the development of the Copperbelt, for regular bus services from there ply up and down the road … There is the feeling that Luapula life is not rural, backwoods life: ‘It is the Copperbelt here’ (kuno ni ka migole). (Cunnison, 1959, p. 25) When the copper prices peaked, it affected rural as well as urban areas due to the largely positive ties that mineworkers maintained with their “home” villages. However, when the copper Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 prices crashed in the mid-1970s, causing drastic economic decline, “squeezed cosmopolitans” (Ferguson, 1997, p. 151) were not easily welcomed back to their estranged “homes.” Instead, the village became a “terrifyingly real destination. The village, far from being the locus of an authentic morality, appears rather as an object of intense fear, often articulated in witchcraft” (Ferguson, 1997, p. 151). Being situationally of their “home villages” some “squeezed cosmopolitans” did not return to live in the village but rather at the village. Many return migrants lived a few kilometers away or on the outskirts of the village, as the process of reintegration was difficult, and they were not always welcomed back (Ferguson, 1999, p. 132). Dislocation, wrote Ferguson (1997, p. 153) is … more often a partial and conditional state of affairs, an uncertain predicament … For the experience of displacement is full of ambiguity and indeterminacy; one might not know oneself whether one is a ‘temporary migrant’ or ‘permanent immigrant,’ an ‘exile’ or a ‘visitor,’ an ‘urbanite’ or a ‘villager,’ for such fixed statuses may hinge on the unknownable dice toss of the future. “Squeezed cosmopolitans” now had to bargain with the residents of their “home villages” who had gained a higher degree of bargaining power than before in their relationships with the return migrants. THE POLITICS OF SPATIAL BARGAINING: COSMOLOCAL CHIEFS Complex understandings of place, and navigations of the powers and stereotypes associated COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS with specific places, inevitably involve some degree of back-and-forth bargaining, particularly in the postcolony (Mbembe, 2001, p. 104). Revived cultural festivals in contemporary Zambia have become bargaining tools for chiefs, especially those who have or who aspire to have a certain amount of influence on the political stage as “national” chiefs with “national chiefly agency” (Gould, 2010, p. 108, 110). Chiefs in Zambia have had a complex relationship with government, and from the “government’s point of view … chiefs represent an authoritative link Figure 5. As Zambia’s first President, Kenneth Kaunda had a complex relationship with chiefs and village spaces. Referring to chiefs as “Custodians of Culture,” he upheld the African nationalist idea that the village was the “authentic” African space while the city was the foreign colonial space. However, constructions of “cultural authenticity” posed a threat to Kaunda’s nationalizing project soon after independence, and his newly formed government began to view cultural festivals as dangerous. Photo: Ruth Simbao, November 2004. | 263 to the rural grassroots—the Achilles heel of government—and thus a potential threat to the ruling party’s hegemony” (Gould, 2010, p. 107). Politicians who visit contemporary “traditional ceremonies” deliberately continue to uphold the notion of the village as the “warehouse of culture” through their speeches and actions (Figure 6). However, refusing to be contained by perceptions of “the village,” in the 21st century Zambian chiefs have increasingly “become visibly assertive in public debates concerning issues that transcend the boundaries of their immediate consistencies” (Gould, 2010, p. 98). Kenneth Kaunda’s relationship with chiefs and village spaces has been complex, varied, and at times contradictory (Figure 5). Leading up to independence, he wrote letters to a number of chiefs, trying to assuage the rumors that he would Figure 6. While experiences on the ground during annual festivals often reveal slippages between urban and rural spaces, official rhetoric continues to frame “the village” as “the warehouse of true Zambian culture”. Sylvia Masebo was the government representative and Guest of Honor at the 2004 Ichibwela Mushi ceremony, and she posed for the press as she drank katubi (traditional beer) and sampled chikanda (a traditional food). Photo: Ruth Simbao, October 2004. Recollection 264 | SIMBAO do away with chieftainship when he came into power.30 Referring to chiefs as the “Sons of the Soil” and the “Custodians of Culture,” he tried to persuade traditional rulers that he would value them and their important role of overseeing culture in their traditional spaces, for “the warehouse of true Zambian culture is the village or rural area.”31 This aligned with the African nationalist idea that the village was the “authentic” African space in contrast to the immoral, foreign city. However, the year after independence, Kaunda and the United National Independence Party (UNIP) established the House of Chiefs, which was seen by some as a way to seemingly lure yet actually neutralize the potentially threatening power of chiefs. While “cultural authenticity” that was framed by “ethnicity” was on the one hand powerfully anti-colonial, it also posed a potential threat to the nationalizing project of the newly independent Zambia, as reflected in UNIP’s fear of what it called the dangerous “mushrooming” of “tribal ceremonies.”32 Mulenga Kapwepwe asserted that Kaunda and the then-ruling party (UNIP) had to carefully walk a cultural tightrope between national unity and ethnic diversity, but, in the end, she said, the party eventually destabilized this careful balance and gave into fear.33 Reporting to the Secretary General following the request for the Chewa Traditional Association to be formally recognized, Hon. F. M. Chitambala (Chief Political Advisor to the Secretary General) wrote in 1985: Your Honour, my fear is that we are trying to build One Zambia One Nation of Zambia, but to allow such [cultural] associations mushrooming up in Zambia based on tribal [sic] is a very dangerous game … I therefore wish to advise that this matter be discussed by the Central Committee Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 and find an answer to put a stop to such attempts of forming Traditional Associations based on tribes.34 Since the significant proliferation of annual ceremonies, these events have been used increasingly as bargaining tools, for “a formalized ceremony gives you a word in national politics.”35 Subsequent to the revival of the House of Chiefs by President Mwanawasa and the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) in 2003, there has been intense debate about the relationship between culture and politics and associated village and urban spaces. As chiefs bargain and negotiate for more power and a stronger voice, many chiefs feel that they should not be kept out of politics, and they object to the fact that culture remains delegated to the village, while politics is seen to be the reserve of the city. In 2005 Senior Chief Ishindi asserted: “Politicians should not hijack the entire political system Figure 7. Refusing to be relegated to “the village,” Zambian chiefs in the twenty-first century have become increasingly visible as they bargain for power on the national stage. In 2004 Senior Chief Kanongesha of the Lunda people in Northwestern Province criticized government officials for enjoying the city life but ignoring other parts of the country. Photo: Ruth Simbao, December 2005. COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS because chieftaincy is also about politics. The same issues of food, water and land which politicians talked about are the same issues chiefs deal with in the villages. Therefore this system of saying chiefs should only concentrate on culture is not good.”36 Some chiefs now expect the same perks as Members of Parliament, as was expressed in 2004 by the Chair of the Royal Foundation of Zambia (RFZ) Senior Chief Nalubamba, who added, “Maybe we villagers are not equal to the MPs.”37 Similarly, Senior Chief Kanongesha of the Lunda people in Northwestern Province (Figure 7) complained about the degree to which politicians enjoy the fruits of urban living to the detriment of rural development: “They tell us that we should participate in politics, but when we elect them to represent us in Parliament, and once they test the sweet waters of Lusaka, they totally forget us” (Chipoya, 2004). In contemporary Zambia traditional rulers are in the process of shifting from their role as a “bridge” (van Binsbergen, 1987, p. 173) between (rural or semi-rural) subjects and (urban or peri-urban) politicians to being themselves increasingly active players on the political stage in a way that is “visibly assertive” (Gould, 2010, p. 98) and cuts into and across these well-worn spatializations. A bridge has been the dominant metaphor for chiefs in Zambian politics, particularly those who adapted to modern politics, and a quintessential “bridge” was the Lozi Princess Nakatindi, who became a member of UNIP’s Central Committee in 1962. When she died in 1972, Kaunda presented a speech at her funeral saying that she was both a “freedom fighter” and “among national-builders” (van Binsbergen, 1987, p. 173). According to van Binsbergen (1987, p. 173), “the leading image of the speech was that of “Nakatindi the bridge,” linking the | 265 old and the new, neo-traditional politics and the modern state and party.” Today chiefs seem to refute the rather passive metaphor of a bridge that facilitates a link between two discrete spaces—the “traditional” village as a space of cultural preservation and the modern, political space of the city. Instead, chiefs are active bargainers who engage in culture and politics in complex and entangled ways, and who demand to have a say in how this is done. COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS WHOSE TERMS? ON “National” chiefs such as Senior Chief Nkomeshya Mukamambo II of the Soli people in Chongwe, Lusaka Province (Figure 8), and Senior Chief Mukuni of the Leya people in Mukuni Village in Livingstone (Figure 9), play a significant role in breaking down stereotypes of “the village” and “the city,” and they subvert the idea that festivals merely allow politicians and other urbanites to control the shaping of culture. As cosmolocal traditional leaders, they both insist (in complex ways) on engaging with the contemporary politics of their respective villages in relation to the politics of the nation as a whole, and, to a large degree, they do this on their own terms. In light of state relations with traditional leadership, this increased agency is significant, and in light of the argument in this article, this shifted agency plays a substantial role in spatial and cultural bargaining. Elsewhere I have written about Nkomeshya Mukamambo II and her role in contesting stereotyped spaces within “traditional ceremonies” (Simbao, 2014). In the article “Cosmological Efficacy and the Politics of Sacred Place: Soli Rainmaking in Contemporary Zambia,” I argued that even sacred spaces in annual festivals Recollection 266 | SIMBAO are inevitably political to some degree, and they involve ongoing negotiation and bargaining. Although named chief in 1971, the following year Nkomeshya was handpicked as the Chilanga Constituency parliamentary candidate by the United National Independence Party (Nyaywa, 1998, p. 128) and enjoyed an almost 20-year political career moving between the city, Chongwe boma, and the village, as well as shifting between the roles of politician and traditional leader (Simbao, 2014, p. 44). While she usually lives in the boma along the busy Chongwe road, her village palace, Mukuyu Royal Palace (Figure 10), only becomes the official residence during the annual Chakwela Makumbi festival. As such, despite pressure from various angles, she has refused to be typed by place, and with the dexterity of a trickster character she mediates between a profoundly spiritual traditional role as a rainmaker and an artfully Figure 8. Senior Chief Nkomeshya Mukamambo II is a typical “national chief” who breaks down facile distinctions between “the city” and “the village”. While she is well known for her rainmaking powers that are showcased at the Chakwela Makumbi ceremony, she has been active in politics and national debates since the 1970s when she was a Member of Parliament. Photo: Ruth Simbao, October 2004. Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 navigated political role as a highly regarded Zambian citizen. Similarly—yet perhaps embroiled in more controversy—Senior Chief Mukuni of the Leya people in the Livingstone area cuts through the spatial divides of “the village” and “the city,” as well as “the local” and “the global.” As a successful if somewhat contentious entrepreneur, his actions raise important questions regarding perceptions of chiefs and their delegated spaces. In terms of the relationship between chiefly comportment and spatialization, he implicitly asks: How local is local enough, and how traditional is traditional enough? Figure 9. Senior Chief Mukuni of Mukuni Village is an activist “national chief” who rejects the official and often paternalistic rhetoric of government ministers at traditional ceremonies, and bargains for power on his own terms. As an entrepreneur with many elite business partners, he discards the stereotype of a rural traditional leader and is considered by many to be a controversial figure. Photo: Ruth Simbao, July 2007. COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS With unprecedented boldness Mukuni refuses to invite the government to his ceremony in an official capacity, claiming that politicians have nothing to do with Leya traditions. In a conversation that we had in Lusaka, he explained the following: We have invited the ministers to come and observe … not to come and give speeches. They are not part of the system … there is nowhere where they fit in, and for that reason we have never and will never invite either the President or Vice-President for the reason that we wont give them a prominent position … He has no place.38 Instead of currying favor with Lusaka-based politicians during the annual ceremony, as many chiefs do, at the 2005/6 Lwiindi ceremony Senior Chief Mukuni focused his attention on other “national” chiefs reflecting the “current wave of chiefly activism in Zambia” (Gould, Figure 10. While Nkomeshya’s “traditional” Makuyu Royal Palace is in the village and becomes the official residence during the annual Chakwela Makumbi ceremony, most of the time Nkomeshya lives in the boma along the busy Chongwe road, where she has easy access to Lusaka. Photo: Ruth Simbao, October 2004. | 267 2010, p. 100) (Figure 11). Visiting chiefs who attended the Lwiindi as well as Mukuni’s wedding rituals (Kufumpa Mukalya) included Senior Chief Kanongesha (Lunda Ndembu), Chief Simamba (Gwembe Tonga), Senior Chief Ndungu (Luvale), Senior Chief Mukuni (Lenje), Chief Chibale (Lala), Chief Mboromo (Swaka), and a few Lamba chiefs. At the 2005/6 Lwiindi that I attended, Mukuni completely eliminated the formal protocol of acquiescing to politicians and a guest of honor, and of all the traditional ceremonies that I have attended in Zambia, I found the relationships between various traditional leaders to be the most congenial and relaxed at the Lwiindi. While at other ceremonies the host chief sits on his or her throne while being formally presented with gifts and greetings from visiting chiefs and politicians, Mukuni casually walked around, Figure 11. Many contemporary chiefs in Zambia use traditional ceremonies as platforms for comradery as they strengthen their activist bargaining on a national stage. Instead of following protocol and hosting a government minister as a Guest of Honor at the 2005/6 Lwiindi ceremony, Senior Chief Mukuni focused on fraternizing with other chiefs, such as Kanongesha, Simamba, Ndungu, Mukuni of the Lenje people, Chibale and Mboromo. Photo: Ruth Simbao, December 2005. Recollection 268 | SIMBAO greeting and fraternizing with fellow chiefs one by one.39 As Gould (2010, p. 100) wrote, “Zambia’s traditional leaders are getting organized, they are pooling together their resources behind common political goals and their role as national political actors is being increasingly acknowledged by government. These are new and unprecedented trends in the history of independent Zambia.” When Senior Chief Mukuni told me that he refused to invite the president or vice-president to his Lwiindi ceremony in an official capacity, rather than suggesting that as a chief he cannot be politically active or that a politician cannot be interested in a cultural festival, what he was implying was that any political engagement would be on his own terms rather than the terms dictated by the layers of officialization associated with traditional ceremonies. This is in my view important, as it is the standard protocol, the official speeches, and the stock phrases of endorsed documentation that frame cultural festivals in stereotypical terms that bind culture to “the village” and to abstract yet weighty “time immemorial.” Demonstrating his political activism as a chief, in 2017 Mukuni invited the opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema—president of the United Party for National Development (UPND)—to the Lwiindi at Kazungula in Mukuni Village, Livingstone.40 Hichilema, who is a business partner of Mukuni, had just been released from prison after spending several months locked away for trumped-up charges of treason. Mukuni apparently rallied together chiefs when Hichilema was imprisoned, asking them to support the opposition leader. As a wealthy businessman, Senior Chief Mukuni purportedly told traditional leaders that he would personally pay their K15,000 monthly allowance Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 if President Lungu withdrew it due to their support for the leader of the UPND. A number of the “national” traditional leaders in Zambia now “share many of the cosmopolitan features of the professional elites of Lusaka” (Gould, 2010, p. 109). They ally themselves with “political actors who can support their many-stranded interests,” and their “mobility and visibility is based on advanced educational qualifications and, often, donor connections” (Gould, 2010, p. 109). While many questions remain unanswered in terms of the future relationship between traditional leadership and the liberal state-building project as well as between chiefs and their local constituencies (Gould, 2010, pp. 109–110, 126), the national agency and the cosmolocal orientation exhibited by Zambian chiefs in the Third Republic have played a significant role in destabilizing entrenched ideas about the Zambian village and the city space. This enables a reading of cultural festivals that goes against the grain of heavyhanded formulations of place and identity. Within their own contexts of traditional rule, though, chiefs are often viewed as the elites, and Mukuni’s political and entrepreneurial engagements, for example, are at times frowned upon and criticized for being un-chiefly or selfserving. Whether this criticism is legitimate or not, it is important not to simply perpetuate elitism through a simplistic celebration of chiefs’ cosmopolitan engagement with the state, without a more a considered regard for the complexities of cultural bargaining that involve multiple, overlapping layers that need to be negotiated at the same time. During “traditional ceremonies” the host chiefs are usually escorted, either on a royal hammock or someone else’s shoulders. At first glance this simply reveals the respect that chiefly leadership and power demands, and as such COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS it is easy to read chiefs’ ceremonies as hierarchical events that serve chiefs and politicians more than the people of the village. It is imperative, however, to understand the complexity of the action of escorting another human being. Being held up and physically supported by his people, a chief is dependent on them not to let him fall. As such, while physically lifting up a chief is a symbol of status and royalty, it also shows that a chief cannot rule without his own people, and that his power is dependent on the support of his community. Figure 12. A number of Zambia’s chiefs have recently gained national visibility and bargaining power in their activism and cosmopolitan engagement. As such, they are sometimes viewed as elitist and their traditional ceremonies are considered to perpetuate hierarchies. Villagers, however, find ways of expressing their discontent and exert their own bargaining through, for example, song. During the 2002 Mutomboko ceremony women informed Mwata Kazembe through song that they were “kicking up dust”. Photo: Ruth Simbao, July 2002. | 269 Symbols and actions that entangle promoting a chief and holding her or him accountable are demonstrated in other ways, too. During the Mutomboko Ceremony, for example, a group of women from Mwansabomwe enter the chief’s palace offering him tribute of traditional beer, but with the homage come cutting words of accountability in the songs that are sung, informing the chief that the people are “kicking up dust” (Simbao, 2008a, p. 439; Figure 12). Similarly, the Leya Senior Chief Mukuni is scolded by a group of elderly women during the tuntumana rituals that are held in the graveyard (Simbao, 2008a, p. 441). Further, when Mwata Figure 13. During the 2005 Chewa Kulamba ceremony in Katete, the then Agriculture Minister, Mundia Sikatana presented a speech in which he promised government support for development and education in the area. Frustrated with empty government promises, some of the Nya masqueraders pointedly walked out of the festival arena during his speech in order to register their protest. Photo: Ruth Simbao, August 2005. Recollection 270 | SIMBAO Figure 14. Nyau masqueraders are well known for literally and figuratively kicking up dust, for registering protest and for activating cultural bargaining. While these dancers literally kick up a lot of dust during their very energetic performances, the notion of “kicking up dust” can be used as a spatial metaphor for placebargaining – an up-in-the-air process that unsettles static notions of being bound by place. Photo: Ruth Simbao, August 2005. Kazembe approaches a sacred ritual site, a ritual specialist shouts at him and scolds him for not visiting often enough (Simbao, 2008a, p. 440), and his royal hammock is, at times, referred to as a coffin, suggesting that his dependency is so complete that it renders him virtually dead even when he is alive.41 At times actions and songs are used at “traditional ceremonies” to critique political rulers as well. For example, when the then-Minister of Agriculture, Mundia Sikatana delivered his speech at the 2005 Chewa Kulamba ceremony (Figure 13), the nyau masqueraders who are well-known for literally and metaphorically kicking up dust (Figure 14) made a very pointed exit from the festival arena, and some audience members booed his comments on government support for education. Kicking up dust can be used as a pertinent spatial metaphor in this analysis of place-bargaining, as it frames place as a process, an up-in-the-air action, and a troubler that unsettles problematic spatializations such as “the African village,” “the African nation,” and the “African continent.” As a trickster orientation, both over-determined notions of place and under-determined notions of space are refused, making sure that the dust is never allowed to Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 fall. Cosmolocal orientations delink cosmopolitanism from “the polis” and from linear time that falsely assumes progress, and they engage outwardly through the here, through the now, and wherever I am. NOTES Ruth Simbao (r.simbao@ru.ac.za) is the National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, the Head of the Arts of Africa and Global Souths research program (www.ru.ac.za/artsofafrica) and a Professor in the Fine Art Department at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her research interests include the arts of Africa, the geopolitics of art and society, ‘strategic southernness’ and global souths, and Africa-China relations and the arts. r.simbao@ru.ac.za Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ rcin. 1 In January 2018 Donald Trump was widely rebuked for referring to African nations, Haiti and El Salvador as “shitholes.” See “‘There’s No Other Word but Racist’: Trump’s Global Rebuke for ‘Shithole’ Remark,” Washington Post, January 13, 2018. COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS 2 3 4 5 6 7 Amanda Anderson (2006: 71–72) argued that a revival of a “new cosmopolitanism” is largely in response to identity politics, and in general cosmopolitanism “endorses reflective distance from one’s cultural affiliations.” Rather than pit parochial attachment against cosmopolitan lack of attachment, she prefers to talk about voluntary attachments that are partial and aware. Cresswell and Merriman (2013, p. 12) argued that the mobility turn in human geography is different from other types of mobility, as it is more careful about analyzing connections between mobilities in “a world too often generalized and homogenized as simply ‘mobile.’” Faist’s (2013) article “The Mobility Turn: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences?” considered the nexus between spatial and social mobility in migration studies. In her book, Fernandez examined four centuries of art and architecture through the lens of cosmopolitanism. This essay was first published in The LIP (5), March 2005 (www.thelip.org). Binyavanga Wainaina (2014), for example, argued that Afropolitanism is an elitist fashion statement that bears no responsibility and has little solid value outside of fashion and commodification in urban Western centers. In response to this critique, Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu (who now goes by the name Taiye Selasi) argued that her main intention in this essay was to simply create a space that some people could identify with. See “Afrpolitan—No Less and No More,” Enkare Review (http://enkare. org/taiye-selasi-afroplitan/). When I was in Mwenda in Luapula Province in 2001, a number of people spoke to me about Luapula’s Dona Fish in relation to “moveousness”—that is, the act of moving around regularly in terms of trade and/or travel (Simbao 2008b, p. 167). Importantly, this was used in the context of village spaces and not the city. 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 | 271 Here I employ Escobar’s (2001) distinction between being place-bound and place-based. To discourse (verb) is to be in a conversation, drawing from Old French discours, from Latin discursus “running to and fro” (in medieval Latin “argument”), from the verb discurrere, from dis- “away” þcurrere “to run.” Similarly, discursive (which I relate to a discursive geography), draws from medieval Latin discursivus, from Latin discurs-, literally “gone hastily to and fro,” from the verb discurrere. Personal conversation with Tariq Ali, April 2011, Grahamstown, South Africa. This meaning is from circa 1500. See https:// www.etymonline.com/word/local. This meaning is from the early 1800s. See https://www.etymonline.com/word/local. While in 2010 I used the term cosmolocalism, I now prefer to talk about a cosmolocal orientation or attitude rather than a -localism, as the “ism” is harder to rehabilitate than a more open sense of “a local” or “many locals.” I include the “living dead” here. I draw from Tariq Ali’s notion of the local being “here and now, and wherever I am,” and Massey (2015 [2005], pp. 139–140) wrote about “here” being an encounter in the entanglement of place and time. As such, she said, place is an event. This is also cited in Cresswell 2015, p. 85. This number is now well over 70. See http:// www.mota.gov.zm/index.php/features/arts-andculture/2012-12-22-03-04-35/traditional-ceremonies. According to the Department of Cultural Services, in the early 1980s there were only seven official annual traditional ceremonies that were recognized by the Zambian government: the Ngoni Nc’ wala, the Lozi Kuomboka, the Kaonde Kufukwila, the Kaonde Nsomo, the Lunda-Kazembe Mutomboko, the Luvale Likumbi lya Mize, and the Ila Shimunenga. Personal conversation with Mulenga Kapwepwe, Lusaka, June 2004. Recollection 272 18 19 20 21 22 | SIMBAO The Republic of Zambia Ministry of Tourism and Arts gazettes these now over-80 ceremonies according to “district,” “chief,” and “tribe.” See http://www.mota.gov.zm/index.php/features/artsand-culture/2012-12-22-03-04-35/traditionalceremonies. Many times when I asked people at cultural festivals why particular things are done, the answer was “because we have done so since time immemorial.” The Comaroffs refer specifically here to being situationally of nation-states. (Emphasis in the original). In the early decades following independence, village spaces were often referred to as warehouses of culture. See, for example, UNIP archives box 8/7 Central Committee/Foreign Affairs Social and Cultural, file 11 (Ad hoc committees), January 1976. Accessed in 2004. July 2002 to January 2006 I attended the following ceremonies: 2002 Lunda-Kazembe Mutomboko in Luapula Province, 2004 Ngoni Nc’ wala in Eastern Province, 2004 Lozi Kuomboka in Western Province, 2004 LundaKazembe Mutomboko in Luapula Province, 2004 Luvale Likumbi lya Mize in Northwestern Province, 2004 Lunda Lubanza in Northwestern Province, 2004 Chishinga, Unga, Ng’umbo, and Mukulu Kwanga ceremony in Luapula Province, 2004 Lala and Swaka Ichibwela Mushi in Central Province, 2004 Soli Chakwela Makumbi in Lusaka Province, 2004 Gwembe-Tonga Lwiindi in Southern Province, 2004 Shila Mabila in Luapula Province, 2004 Ushi Chabuka in Luapula Province, 2005 Soli Nkomba Lyanga in Lusaka Province, 2005 Lunda-Kazembe Mutomboko in Luapula Province, 2005 Tonga Lwiindi in Southern Province, 2005 Chewa Kulamba in Eastern Province, 2005 Lenje Kulamba ku Bwalo in Central Province, 2005 Soli Chakwela Makumbi in Lusaka Province, and 2005/2006 Leya Lwiindi in Southern Province. Critical Interventions 12, Issue 3 2019 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 I attended the Kuomboka braai at the Fairmont Hotel (2004), the Likumbi lya Mize makishi march from the Arcades mall to the Polo Grill restaurant (2004), the Mize braai at Central Park (2004), the makishi performances at the Kabwata Cultural Village (2004), and part of the Mutomboko dinner dance at the Intercontinental Hotel (2007). Numerous residents told me this when I lived in the village in 2002, 2004, and 2005. The Times of Zambia, July 21, 2003, and personal conversation with Lucian Ng’andwe, July 2003, Cambridge, MA. Personal conversation with Fernando Mwape in Mwansabombwe, June 11, 2004. Personal conversation with Mwata Kazembe, Mwansabombwe, July 2004, in which we compared stories of living in “Dallas City” in Lusaka. I lived there in 2004. Personal conversation with Mwata Kazembe, July 2004. This also affords him a bit of distance from the watchful eyes of the bakalunda—the traditional councillors, some of whom were at first not happy that Mwata would socialize with his guests at this venue outside of the palace grounds. UNIP did not go as far as TANU in Tanzania, which abolished the chieftaincy, or FRELIMO in Mozambique, who propagated the slogan “Kill the tribe and build the nation” (Gould 2010, p. 98). UNIP archives box 8/7 Central Committee/ Foreign Affairs Social and Cultural, file 11 (Ad hoc committees). January 1976. Letter from Hon. F. M. Chitambala to the Secretary General Grey Zulu, August 1, 1985, UNIP archives, Box 8/7 Central Committee/ Foreign Affairs and Culture, File 22 (Culture/Ceremonies). Personal conversation, Lusaka, June 17, 2005. Letter from Hon. F.M. Chitambala to the Secretary General Grey Zulu, August 1, 1985, UNIP archives, Box 8/7 Central Committee/ COSMOLOCAL ORIENTATIONS 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Foreign Affairs and Culture, File 22 (Culture/Ceremonies). Personal conversation Ally Mwanza, Chipata, Eastern Province, February 28, 2004. Ishindi in Kabwela, Chansa. 2005. “Chiefs Shouldn’t Be Used as Rubber Stamps— Ishindi.” The Post, June 2, 2005. Malupenga, Amos. 2004. “Chiefs Say Demands Are Justified – Nalubamba.” The Post, June 17, 2004. Personal conversation with Senior Chief Mukuni, Pamodzi Hotel, Lusaka, July 19, 2005. Usurping the largely accepted protocol of receiving gifts as the host, he asserted, “we don’t even have presents for the chief during our ceremony because the ceremony belongs to everybody … we see it as wrong to give gifts to the chief when the ceremony is for everyone.” Personal conversation with Senior Chief Mukuni, Pamodzi Hotel, Lusaka, July 19, 2005. 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