What have you been up to lately?

This entry has been long overdue. In fact, we all have to start questioning if this should be called a blog, since I have clearly failed to follow the blog format's most basic definitions: frequent, informal and from the top of your head. I'm obviously not fit to conform to these guide lines. Perhaps, this is a timely discovery. My all-time favourite blogger (and musician) Momus (Nick Currie) has recently announced that he will end his blog (Click Opera) on his 50th birthday in February next year, opting to concentrate his energy on making music and art, writing novels, and participating in seminars. And this guy probably writes the most lucid, entertaining, erudite and thought-provoking blog entries found anywhere - and he always does it in regard of the time constraints inherent in the format. (Momus must be said to be one of the pioneers of blogging, Click Opera began in 2004, while his monthly essays and columns were being published online beginning in 1995, before most people even in rich countries had access to computers at home or at work). Others all over the world have come to the same conclusion regarding blogging, that it has been overdone and we need to move on to other forms of expression.

However, the reasons to start this space was not to be in the forefront of internet media (clearly to start a blog in 2009 is hardly innovative…), but rather to increase my text production (I vainly thought this would benefit my research writing) and to be able to report on my activities to my colleagues back at the museum in Sweden. So, I'll make a last ditch attempt to continue. For the first entry after the (long…) intermission, I will give you an update on my research of late.

Time is flying. We are well into October, only three months remaining in Zambia and I'm getting nervous of failing to getting the work done! Partly, this has to do with the scope of my research project (A reminder: young people involved in transport and trade in Western Province, their subjective understanding of their livelihood and futures and how government and organizations have attempted to control spatial movement from a historical perspective). There are so many different entries to the topic and so many contexts and locations in which to pursue my inquiries. So far, I've concentrated on the following:

1. Young people working as transporters: Mainly bus drivers and taxi drivers in Mongu as well as barge paddlers and 'call boys' (ñwañwazi), whom I have interviewed or in a few cases tried to befriend (with limited success, as I'm always also a potential customer - and customers need to be kept at a distance unless they start to question the need of the middle man). In addition, I've experienced (mostly suffered) the variability of thousands of kilometres of public transport together with fellow-passengers between Lusaka-Mongu-Kalabo-Mongu-Senanga-Sesheke-Lusaka, using boats, buses, taxis, bicycles and pickups.
Driving a taxi is a man's job (Photo by Rose-Marie Westling)


2. Young people working as traders: Mainly petty traders in Senanga and Kalabo. I have 'hung out' with a few key informants, sat in their little shops (and sometimes haggled with a curios customer), visited their homes, attended funerals. I have interviewed a larger number of traders in Senanga, women and men selling rice, maize, shoes, fish, 'boutique' (new clothes, made in China), salaula (second-hand clothing from Western Countries), hard ware and groceries.
Obama jeans, made in China, in a market stall in Senanga


3. History of spatial mobility in Western Province: Mainly at the National Archives of Zambia in Lusaka, where I have been going through the District Notebooks from the beginning of the last century, to find information about how colonial government(s) interpreted the mobility of local inhabitants, how they tried to monitor, influence and control spatial movement and migration. I have also done (fewer than I'd wanted) interviews with council workers and government officials on the current situation.
"When they come, we just charge them!" Council workers at the main market in Senanga.


4. Interviews with former labour migrants in Kalabo District. This reflects point no. 3 above but also an interest I developed while carrying out research in Kalabo for my PhD (1999-2003). When doing surveys and interviews in the District, I found that up to three quarters of the male population above the age of 50 had long personal histories of periodic migration to (what is today) Zimbabwe and South Africa for work in the mines and fields. The narratives and recollections of these ageing gentlemen are important for what they tell us about the massive efforts to reorganize the physical (and mental) landscape of Central and Southern Africa, beginning at the start of the 20th Century and intensifying in the mid-1930s. The insatiable demand for cheap labour of the industrial centres of Southern Africa, led to huge investments in infrastructure, in institutions, roads and railways, that have shaped the way spatial mobility is imagined and how it is viable or possible even in the postcolonial state of Zambia.
"Returning from Johannesburg, we walked majestically into the village!"


Painting by Stephen Kappata (1936-2007) depicting the spectacle of labour migrants returning home in mid-1900s Zambia


The particular reason for writing about this right now, is a conference that will be held in Lusaka in August 2010. "A History of Consumption and Social Change in Central Africa 1840 – 2000" is organized as an element of the social historical research project "From Muskets to Nokias: Technology, Consumption and Social Change in Central Africa from Pre-Colonial Times to the Present" based at the University of Leiden, Netherlands and which encompasses several individual projects. Since these projects aim "to reinstating the African in the position of independent economic agent-independent economic agents engaged in the domestication of material products of the industrial world", my topic for the conference paper will be the material things that labour migrants brought home from the urban centres of Southern Africa and how these objects became entangled in the social changes that were taking place.
A hand bag sent to an elderly mother in Kalabo by a present-day migrant in Canada


Apart from the research as such, I suppose it is natural that I've also become deeply entrenched in the lives of communities, friends and informants (especially with the handful families that I've known since 1998). This means I've bailed out friends in jail, helped mediate in disputes, given business advice (!), given education advice, attended several funerals, taken a battered wife to the Police, and (on numerous occasions) been asked to give my financial 'assistance', loans, gifts, or what you would like to call it. All this is at times very difficult, since I'm afforded (often contrary to my wishes) a position of authority and status that I dislike (or perhaps feel inadequate to fill). But let's face it: from the Kalabo perspective, I just turned 40, I am married with two children, I'm European, I drive a car, live in "a mansion" in Lusaka and (although I perceive myself to be a poor museum worker) I earn more in a month than most people in Kalabo do in two years. More importantly, my old friends in Kalabo are now important men and women in their families and communities and since I'm regarded as their age mate it is logical that I am deemed to be of similar stature. So perhaps I should just get used to it!
A young Senanga family in their home


In August my family and I (and my mother and my sister and her family) tried to travel to Kalabo, crossing the Zambezi plain on a day when it just wasn't advisable. So we got stuck in a stream and had to turn back for a few days of irritating wait while the car was repaired. I suppose it sums up some of the conditions of travel in this marginalized region (by historical and current political neglect) For those interested, see the videos my sister and my brother-in-law made of the whole calamity.
My Toyota Hilux Surf having a bath


And on this note of seeming disaster, I end this entry with hopes that this blog will live yet another day.

A body journey

I'm back in Lusaka after two intense weeks in the West. Tired and confused after the 8 hour nightly bus journey, I thought I would put some of this confusion into perspective by offering some thoughts on the bodily aspects of my work in Zambia.

Doing ethnographic fieldwork, in the contemporary meaning of the term, is all about the body. Movement or stillness. Either I'm walking around or I'm sitting down for long periods in travel, conversations, interviews, or note taking and writing. But this is an aspect of all human life and not in any way exclusive to anthroplogists.

Somewhat unique for anthros is that many of us self-consciously use our bodies as instruments to perceive and experience social life, in lieu of more formalized techniques like questionnaires (which some of us do use as well) or instruments found in a laboratory. In this sense the anthropologist's body is an instrument, albeit an extremely social (and imperfect) one. Observing and seeing 'others' is intensely social and (as any person belonging to a visible minority in any country might testify to) has a lot to do with power.

European so-called 'explorers' travelling through Africa in the 19th and early 20th century seemed to represent a form of seeing and registering that was not in the least self-conscious of these social and political dimensions. Their exploring was, according to their own understanding , an objective and impassionate project, a self-less endeavour for the benefit of civilization and progress.


Swedish Count Eric von Rosen (1879-1948) in what today is Zambia during his Cape to Cairo expedition (1911-12). Photo: Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm

Newer readings of some of 19th century travelogues, however, suggest that the rational and objective nature of such travels was largely a public image, created by authors after the fact to legitimize and canonize their achievements. This amounts to a particular literary style, forged by influential figures like Henry Morton Stanley and constantly reproduced by travel writers up to our own times. German anthropologist Johannes Fabian argues forcefully in Out of our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa that the encounter between people like Leo Frobenius and his African hosts were not simply characterised by logic and impassionate observation, but also by ecstasis. Ecstasis, in Fabian's view, is a dimension of human interaction, of shared time and mutuality often made possible (in these situations of extreme and often violent power inequality) by sexual relationships, drug taking, music, dance and ritual. While often completely absent in published travel writing, records of such events and relationships may be found in diaries and travelogues.



The 'racial type' photographic genre. Photos by Eric von Rosen, Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm

In a third sense,the gendered, racialized and ethnified body comes into play. For instance, the transformation of my 'racial identity' (as perceived by others) involved in the travel from Sweden to the Zambian capital Lusaka, to the Provincial capital of Western Province, Mongu, and finally to the rural town of Kalabo, may be generalized and described in the following way:

This raises, on the one hand, many interesting social, cultural and historical features of the societies mentioned. On the other hand, it is also a personal psychological complexity that I have lived with for most of my life, at times painful and confusing, and thus not easily penetrated. I will return to this topic and discuss the "ethnic labels" in more detail in later blog entries.

There are other bodily transformations taking place in the journeys between Lusaka and rural Western Province that I would like to discuss here. My commuting life forces me to engage in intense body learning and un-learning.

Life in Lusaka for the well to do, like in many other modern social centres of the world, is geared towards controlling and shielding your body and avoiding engaging too closely with other people, or rather avoiding engaging closely with people of particular kinds and on terms that are uncomfortable to you. High walls, security guards, shopping malls, European high priced cafés, social clubs, sports clubs, international schools are all about such shielding. At the same time, contemporary life craves mobility and motor vehicles are what allows the affluent to be mobile while maintaining the required distance and privacy from the surrounding chaos of a third world country. In Zambia, people with means do not walk in order to get from point A to point B, they only walk (or the more adventurous of us) when excercising.


Photo: Rose-Marie Westling

In contrast, poor people walk everywhere, they fill the morning and early evening streets of the low density residential areas, on their way to or from their work places (as maids, gardeners, security guards). They cram themselves into minibuses and shared taxis, hustling and bustling and bumping into their fellow humans, sweating, arguing, laughing, eyeing one another. I don't want to romanticize this way of being in the world, it is often not enjoyed or entered into by choice, but at least it entails more talking, socializing, emotions.

My family and I fully participate in the affluent way of life when in Lusaka; we drive to school, to go shopping, visiting friends. We sit safely inside our electrified cement walls or inside the hull of metal, carefully locking the car doors (yes, the affluent warn each other about the dangers of driving through certain areas and of forgetting to lock the car doors) only disembarking at the shop or inside the gates of our homes (OK, unlike most other affluent people in Lusaka, we do not have a daytime guard or an automated gate, so we do need to get out to open the gate, contrary to much advice). Shopping centres without proper security (and thus the roaming ground for beggars, bums, street children and youth wanting cigarette money or your wallet) are gradually abandoned for secured ones.

The contrasts, deep inequalities and identity processes at play in this social system leads to resentments and feelings of inadequacy, which might explain some of the reactions I meet when I happen to break the expected patterns of mobility and the use of space. When walking in Lusaka, or using public transport, for example, people will stare and young men will sometimes laugh or jeer at the poor (or crazy) mzungu who is WALKING.

This does not differ much from life in Sweden, where some of the same mechanisms of exclusion, segregation and suspicion are in full sway, albeit with less stark and brutal expressions. My body can thus quite easily fit into the life of Lusaka, especially if I keep to the implicit script and do not try to confound the expectations of the people around me.

But turning to Western Province, things become a little more testing. Travelling from Lusaka to Mongu, to Kalabo entails transforming how I relate to people around me: from not interacting at all in Lusaka, to selectively acknowledging other people's presence in Mongu, to greeting and interacting with my whole body and all the time in Kalabo.

Learning new ways of being social (and constantly failing to act according to the established ways in the surrounding society) is sometimes an extremely tiring experience. After engaging (in body and mind) with the small town of Kalabo for eleven years, I'm still very far from knowing how to greet people properly and respectfully. Greeting is considered very important, since it confirms and expresses the particular relationships you have with a particular person. Not greeting respectfully therefore threatens such ties. But it is not an easy thing to get your body around, so to speak.


Photo: Rose-Marie Westling

To give you an idea, this is how a standard greeting may be performed in Kalabo between two Mbunda-speakers [translated Chimbunda-English]:
-Welcome!
[The visitor stops and crouches a bit, holding hands together in respect]
-Yes, Sir/Madame!
[the host will approach the visitor, and bow down to greet in the following manner:]
Clap
Brief handshake
Clap, clap
Brief handshake
Clap, clap, clap
-How are you this morning?
-We are fine, how are you doing?
-We are also fine.
-And your wife, how is she?
-She is fine.
-And your children?
-They are fine too? How about you, how's the family?
-They are just a bit [indicating a problem or illness of some sort]

If you are visiting someone, these greetings are followed by what is locally called muthimbo, which are short sentences, interspersed by acknowledgements, briefing on your recent travels and purpose of coming by:
-I came with my friend Michael here, he wanted to visit his friend Henry in Chimwaso [-eyo]. Michael is here to do research on the customs of our people [-aha]. So we borrowed these bicycles and set off around 10 hours this morning [-eyo]. We reached there around noon [-ehe]. Then we wanted to pass by the school and here to see how you were.
-Yes Sir/Madame. Thank you.
[Clap, clap, clap]


Photo: Rose-Marie Westling

Apart from the fine points of the Mbunda language (which I don't pretend to master in any way), greeting people in Kalabo requires knowing an array of body postures and signals that challenge those I've learned in my home society and also its ideas of sociality, gender and power. Crouching, curtseying, removing your hat when meeting an elder, holding hands with a male friend after the greeting has ended and we start walking down the street together, kneeling down and clapping in order to show exceptional respect (for example to chiefs or to a Mother-in-law) or accepting such courtesy from a woman who has served me a meal. Outside Kalabo, in the village universe, the (ideal) separation of male and female activities and bodies is so pronounced that daily life space is completely dissected into male and female spheres; men sit on stools or chairs, for example, while women sit on mats with legs outstretched before them.

As challenging and exhausting it may be to try to learn new ways of interacting with other people in the correct way, as gratifying it can also be when you feel that you are doing things in the right way. The positive confirmation and encouragement of your hosts, the relaxation felt in the company of same-age friends. But even then, such moments are fleeting and fraught with doubt or misgivings about things as they are.


Photo: Rose-Marie Westling

Travel in the margins

The last few weeks I've been in Lusaka, since Chris has been back to Sweden. So no visits in the flesh to Western Province. But I have been spending time at the National Archives of Zambia, studying the District Notebooks of what is now Western Province, previously Barotseland, so at least my mind has been in the region, albeit mostly in the past.

Anyway, it is high time for me to say something more about my research. So here goes: some thoughts about the human dimension of travel and transport in rural Zambia, illustrated by Rose-Marie Westling's beautiful photographs.

If I'm allowed to generalize, Zambians are usually quiet and cautious in public and seem to prefer sober and restrained manners. There are two exceptions to this. Any shyness and restraint disappear in the vapours of the local brew in bars or behind some reed fence in a village. Under the influence of alcohol digressions from proper conduct is often excused and "he/she was drunk" is often used in order to exhonorate a misbehaving person. The second exception is more specific and concerns the behaviour of young men (always men) involved in the transport of people and goods. Sure, they are (frighteningly often) drunk or high on marijuana as well, but the determining factor in this case seems to be the transport situation itself, which I like to think of as not very different from a hostage situation. That is, the relationship between passengers and transporters are similar to that between hostages and their captors: passengers are as powerless, uninformed and subject to random decisions and insults.






A person, having decided to travel from, say Kalabo to Mongu, goes to Kalabo harbour on the banks of the Luanginga River early in the morning on the day of departure. (During the flooding of the Zambezi plain, December to June, boats are the most common means of transport). There are several boats there and a hoard of young men, who will approach the traveller and quite aggressively try to persuade him or her to buy tickets on a particular boat. The boat is always leaving "very soon". If the traveller presses them on the exact time, they might reveal that the boat will leave "around 9 hours" or "any time, we're just waiting for a few more passengers". Then again, the seasoned traveler in these parts, knows that it will rarely depart before noon.

In the meantime, different groups of these young men are hotly debating and arguing among themselves, while continuing trying to talk people into putting their luggage in their boat. Their behaviour is often erratic, frequently breaking out into bursts of physical violence or insulting language, and often quite disrespectful to the passengers and bystanders. People do protest to such behaviour, but rather half-heartedly and with obvious resignation.



Now, this does not mean that there is no formal order to these situations. In Kalabo, for instance, there is an officer placed in the harbour by the District Council and charged with keeping a waiting list of departing boats. He or she will also try to direct passengers to the boat which is next in line. However, while many passengers follow his advice, this does not prevent other (often half-empty) boats from leaving. This happened when Rose-Marie and I were leaving Kalabo in March: Wanting to speed up the process, we asked where a particular departing, half-empty boat was going. The District representative as well as a few of the boat people answered: "that boat is only traveling as far as Mpungu [about 30 minutes from Kalabo], not to Mongu", while some other men stealthily (and very confusingly) whispered to us: "no, it's actually going to Mongu!" Obviously, we did not board that boat, but found out later the same night that it had, indeed, gone to Mongu, arriving several hours before we did.



There are many interesting leads for further research to be found in the tensions and conflicts in such transport situations, all of which I will spend the rest of my (quickly vanishing) research time looking into.

1. The social roles and sociality of the transport sector personnel. This social world has its own hierarchies , ranging from the "spanner boys" (apprentices), fuel boys, and conductors to drivers and operators. It has its social conventions and cultural values, coded in localized versions of global ways of being masculine, urban, and modern. These values are intimately connected to "vehicle fetishism" - the global social and cultural value attached to motor vehicles, often seemingly surpassing any "rational" value or utility.

2. Deregulation of transport: Zambia used to have a state-operated transport network (UBZ) that extended even to remote areas, far outside District Centers. I have met several people from Kalabo who spoke in amazement of the twice daily bus service between the District capital Kalabo and Sikongo (a remote border town with Angola) in the 1970s. I certainly do not want to downplay the improvements brought about by the deregulated transport system nor the problems (frequently voiced) Zambians experienced with UBZ . But what has followed in the wake of liberalization of the transport sector seems like a bewildering combination of (moral and institutional) structure and market anarchy.

3. The role of Government workers in controlling and monitoring mobility: the Police, who call busses "ATMs " (since they are reliable sources of bribe money), the administrators, tax collectors (self-proclaimed or not) and planners who manage the wider infrastructure.

4. The economics of transport: it seems to make perfect economic sense from the transporters' point of view to let the hostage situation continue! At the end of the day it is in their interest to maximise the number of passengers in their vehicle at every time, whether these passengers are furious or not….the owners have faith in the fact that there are simply no other alternatives for the dissatisfied customer! Drivers in rural areas usually wait to buy fuel until all the passengers have paid and are seated in the sun waiting for departure…whether this is a problem of liquidity or lack of trust between operator and staff remains to be seen.

5. The moral economy of transport: The logic of competition in this transport system cannot be fully understood in terms of formal economic theory. There are moral and cultural grounds for how transporters view competition with their peers and success in business. Their lives are often entangled in many ways other than the one-dimensional model of economic man supposes. An obvious factor is the common fear of magical retribution, but ideas about risk, wealth, and social standing certainly also play a part.

There are also more intangible reasons why rural travelers comply with, frankly lousy services. These reasons have everything to do with the inhabitants of Western Zambia being long-standing subjects, to pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial masters. But that is something I will return to in a future entry. Next week, back to Western Province for some serious fieldwork!

A few photos

Some photos from Western Province in Zambia by Rose-Marie Westling. Would have published more, but the connection is just too slow...

Are you ready for the Cockpit country?

Although anthropological fieldwork often has been portrayed as a journey to an external world, its inhabitants and social relations, for me it has always also been a highly introspective affair. I know this sounds pretentious. But everytime I have left the familiar and comfortable for the unfamiliar and uncomfortable it has put the spot light on the strange and exotic aspects of my own life. Family, friends, work place, society, emotions, relations, memories. All of it usually locked up and sealed in my mind. Now placed in a light in which I seem to discern structures, patterns, contours. Rarely do I get as strong impulses to look into myself in my suburban, academic middle-class, commuter life between Uppsala and Stockholm.

There are many reasons why these psychological processes intensify during my absences from Sweden. One is the occasional boredom of fieldwork (I have mostly lived and worked in rural areas of Africa and as much as I love these remote places...sometimes nothing happens there), a second is the loneliness one sometimes feels in a foreign envirionment far away from your family and without the social and language skills to function smoothly in the everyday or to express exactly what you're feeling and experiencing. Third, is good old evasion - trying your level best not to concentrate on the difficult task at hand, your research.

More important, however, is another key aspect of anthropological fieldwork and the ethnographic method: the constant swing between the familiar and unfamiliar in social life. Ethnographers enter social and cultural worlds unknown to them in order to gain an understanding of how people live and communicate through these worlds. The research and writing process means both to get closer to (to understand) and to distance oneself from (to analyze) social life. It is inevitable that this defamiliarization works both ways and that, as you gain familiarity with (for you) new ways of being in the world, accepted behaviour may be questioned.

This time round, I am distracted by my family history. A cousin in Jamaica, Karen, who was previously unknown to me, contacted me via e-mail. It turns out that she was doing some research into her own family history and, when googling her maternal grandmother's name (Josephine Minto), she found an entry which I had posted several years ago at a genealogical site. I was looking for information about the background of my now deceased father Clarence, who had been extremely vague or even secretive about his life history. Josephine Minto is also my (paternal) grandmother, mother to my father and to Karen's mother Daphne, although they have different fathers.


My cousin Karen, a Minto relative, and my Aunt Daphne in Martha Brae, N. Jamaica

Through my father's birth certificate and through a brief conversation with his older brother Eric, I knew that Josephine was probably working as a domestic servant in my grandfather's household in the village of Martha Brae, Trelawny Parish, but that she eventually left to live in St Mary Parish. Judging by the little I know about my grandfather Edward Goodwin Barrett, I imagine him to have belonged to the type of men we often find in novels about late 19th and early 20th century colonial society: self-centered, cruel but complex patriarchs ruling their little universe of subordinates - slaves, workers, women, children - through exploitative economic relations and oppressive political institutions. Allegedly, Edward had more than ten children with different women in the vicinity and none were with his legal wife (is it a coincidence that her name is unknown to me?). His nickname was "Busha", the local term for an overseer derived from the time of slavery but apparently living on through emancipation, apprenticeship and independence.

Beginning to understand my family history, my enigmatic father (whose life history spans continents, World Wars and social and racial boundaries) and in the end myself, means starting at this place and this time: the village of Martha Brae at the time of Busha Barretts courting of Josephine Minto - a mere 80 years after the abolition of slavery in the West Indian colonies.

It might be a story of great interest to me right now. But it is far from the whole story about me. As one of my close friends like to ask, does my dark skin and black hair prevent questions about my maternal descent, my equally formative family background in rural southern Sweden, dying fishing communities, domestic servitude, and the urban industrial proletariat of Malmo?

At a professional level, this gives me the opportunity to address some of the criticism (often fair, sometimes rather one-eyed) of social and cultural anthropology and humbly introduce my own vision of the discipline's quest for knowledge about human relations. The fair critique concerns anthropology's obsessions with the exotic others of the world, an obsession that should have been abandoned on both empirical and theoretical grounds (Shatanawi). It also concerns anthropology's alignement with colonialism and imperialism and its continued preference for "studying down" and avoiding "studying up" and "sideways" (Erikson). Here's where current theoretical developments within the discipline and my own Martha Brae case fuses together. An increasing number of dissertations in anthropology are about "our own" society, its institutions and social relations. Many of them are still focussing on the "others", the disempowered or exotic within. Very few are actually about the ethnographer him- or herself.

Very few anthropologists have taken the step to write, what Swedish anthropologist Shahram Khosravi in a recent article calls, an auto-ethnography. Shahram uses his own migratory history and that of his family to present a poignant and uncanny image of Fortress Europe and to analyse the paranoid security and identity politics which in effect lead to the harassment and systematic discrimination against people that look non-European/dark-skinned/muslim etc. My view is that anthropology can only become a truly universal endeavour when we as ethnographers abandon the high ground of being observers and allow ourselves to be the objects as well as subjects of ethnography.

My own story has a twist in this general direction. In the course of my cousin's research into her family history, she came across (like I did) the wonderful book Martha Brae's Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (2002, The University of North Carolina Press) by Jamaican-born anthropologist Jean Besson (now at Goldsmith's College, London). One of the many merits of this book is the chronicles of some of the historically influential families of the village of Martha Brae (among them the Mintos and the Barretts). Karen believes (and I'm prone to agree with her) that it was no coincidence that Jean happened to be visiting Martha Brae last week, when she was taking my Aunt Daphne to see the village and the grave of our common ancestress, the African slave, Marrie. When Jean heard the story of my father and the continuation of the Barrett and Minto lines in Sweden, she, like any contemporary anthropologist would, asked Karen for my contact details. And I'm looking forward to her call and to becoming, finally, an informant.


Anthropologist Jean Besson on the left

A chance meeting with Enock Ilunga

On Monday, I went with my colleague, photographer Rose-Marie Westling - who is here to do a photo documentation of my research - for a belated visit to the new art exhibition "Living Memory" at Henry Tayali Gallery at the Agricultural Showgrounds in Lusaka. We enjoyed the variety of themes and techniques from the represented artists, all of whom have passed away but whose influence and stature in the Zambian art scen seems constant. In particular, I enjoyed the soft colours and sensitive capturing of movement in Godfrey Seti's work, as well as the tongue-in-cheek and highly critical rendering of colonial history in Stephen Kappata's paintings (I am not a collector of anything, but I still kick myself for not buying a few paintings by Kappata in 2000, as I thought of doing, when they were still available and at ridiculuously low prices).



Embarassingly enough, I couldn't honour the kind invitation to the opening a week ago given to Chris and me by the curator of the exhibition, Zenzele … (people in Lusaka seem to take such invitations much more seriously than I am used to from Stockholm), since we were, finally, moving in to our house on that day. Nevertheless, I hope to return to this event (and hopefully an interview with the curator) further on.

Instead, I intend to write about a chance encounter that took place, while my friend and I were browsing through the beatiful, but quiet and empty, exhibition rooms. The only other visitor to the exhibition was a well-built man in his mid-fifties, who was watching us discreetely from the other side of the room. After some time, he approached us and asked where we were from. As we responded, he blurted out: "Ah, kalles kaviar, do you have any with you? "

This turned out to be distinguished artist, Enock Ilunga, a long standing member of the Henry Tayali Art Gallery, with several exhibitions in Sweden and other European countries on his cv. A fascinating conversation ensued. He talked about money, the difficulty of making a living as an artist in Zambia (and in Sweden, though he spoke admiringly about a Swedish, commercially succesful, artist…who has a personal gallery at Drottninggatan in Stockholm), of not getting paid for paintings sold to political dignitaries, about Swedish cheese, snaps, his frustration about the lack of interest from the (growing) Zambian middle-class to buy art instead of fancy cars or extravagant mansions. He also did a striking impersonation of a Swede entering systembolaget (the alcoholic beverages monopoly) on a cold, winter's day.

Finally, he took us out in the back where Mr Ilunga, together with a rasta assistant, had been busy mounting canvases for his upcoming exhibition at Alliance Francaise in Lusaka (12 March, 2009). He did try, acting the stereotypical poor artist, to mildly persuade us to buy a couple of works before the show, but when we politely explained our poor financial status (and that of our institution, the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm) he turned to displaying his art. Canvas after canvas was turned for our viewing pleasure (to me, this was a new experience and I couldn't help but to feel immensely privileged). "Women washing their dirty linnen" "the refugees are not traveling for pleasure, but by necessity", "makishi"




Enock Ilunga is obviously a strikingly competent and experienced painter. With a few brush strokes, he catches shapes, postures and attitudes in the repetitive human forms that appears to be his favourite subjects. Often these forms are not visible at a first glance, but eventually emerge from the seeming chaos of colour. He refused (thank god!) my interpretation of the painting "the woman" as in any way related to the mwana pwo masked character commonly danced in the area of his origin (North Western Province). You have to excuse me, but I am after all an anthropologist prone to making such silly connections between cultural heritage and contemporary expressions, and I suspect that his objection was based on a political rather than aesthetical level. He refuses, like many contemporary artists and I am wholly sympathetic to the idea, to be a representative of his "ancient african heritage", a heritage which we Europeans are constantly imposing on African art. Collectivizing individual expression in other words.

And this goes right at the heart of a problem we have frequently discussed at my Museum in the context of exhibiting (or not exhibiting) contemporary African/Asian/Aboriginal Australian/native American art. Can ethnographic museums when presenting art from Africa, for example, avoid framing art works in such collectivizing terms? Isn't the space tainted with these preconceptions at the outset?

On the other hand, can the powerful and expressive subjectivity of artists like Enock Ilunga really be held back by such forces? As they say in Zambia, I doubt.

Istället för antropologi: förvirring

Ett års fältarbete i Zambia. Jag befinner mig här i södra centralafrika för att utföra en etnografisk studie om internmigration och har lyckats lura med mina döttrar Martha Brae och Stella och min fru Chris. Vi bor i huvudstaden Lusaka, där barnen går i skola, men mitt "fält" ligger egentligen 60 mil västerut i Western Province. Dit kommer jag åka med jämna mellanrum för att undersöka hur unga människor använder sig av migration, resande eller geografisk rörlighet för att tjäna sitt uppehåll.

Att flytta en familj på fyra personer - med tillhörande viljor, psyken och prioriteringar - är ganska ansträngande. Särskilt när flytten sker över både kontinentala och språkliga gränser. Det här är fjärde gången vi i vår familj väljer att bosätta oss i Afrika för en kortare eller längre period, men utan tvekan den mest krävande. Det var lättare förr när både Chris och jag var doktorander och barnen inte hade börjat skolan ännu. Färre saker som höll oss kvar i Sverige (bostadslån, anställningar, barnens kompisar, gymnastik, pianolektioner och scouter) och förmodligen mer lättanpassliga familjemedlemmar… Trots detta lyckades vi äntligen slita oss från Sverige och nu har vi varit här i drygt två veckor.

Men, ännu inget antropologiskt fältarbete. Däremot har vi hunnit med en genomgripande undersökning av Lusakas bostadsmarknad och begagnatmarknaden för bilar och genomgått ett kulturellt stålbad i samband med barnens inskolning. Dessutom har jag blivit lungröntgad, gripen av polisen och kört mer bil än jag vanligtvis gör under ett år. Kanske det mest förvirrande är alla goda och välvilliga råd från Zambiska och Europeiska bekanta: "Amerikanska skolan är bäst!", "köp en Honda - köp för guds skull inte en Honda!", "ni kan inte bo i Rhodes Park, där bor bara tjuvar!", "köp en bil med lågt miltal", "lita aldrig på bilars miltal!", "Homenet Hollywood (ett mäklarföretag) är skurkar!"

Men vi har trots detta lyckats hitta ett hus som vi är nöjda med och som är relativt billigt (prisnivån på hyresmarknaden här påminner annars om Tokyo, Luanda eller New York) i stadsdelen Roma: nära barnens skola, universitetet, affärer och det administrativa centrat. Lusaka är en bilstad: utspridd, fragmenterad med nyckfull kollektivtrafik och fullkomligt livsfarlig för fotgängare och cyklister som måste nöja sig med smala vägrenar som plötsligt försvinner eller översvämmas av små smutsiga sjöar (det är slutet på regnperioden) och minibussar som girar för något hål i vägbanan eller helt enkelt kör förbi köer på trottoaren. Detta är vardagen för det stora flertalet invånare, samtidigt som privatbilismen ökar och de välbeställda har allt större och flottare bilar - något som jag tänker återkomma till i senare inlägg.

Den här bloggen kommer att utgå från vårt liv i Lusaka men också handla om saker som migration, den globala ekonomins lokala uttryck i fattiga länder, resandets fysiska och existentiella villkor, ungdomar, maskulinitet/femininitet, ras och rasism, historia, kolonialism, antropologi, konst och museer i Zambia.