Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa, 1750-1920

Abstract

Slavery and Beyond: The Making of Men and Chikunda Ethnic Identities in the Unstable World of South-Central Africa, 1750-1920. By Alien F. and Barbara S. Isaacman. Portsmouth N.H.: Heinemann, 2004. Social History of Africa Series. Pp. xii, 370, maps, figures, photographs. $99.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. Allen Isaacman has been writing about the Zambezi valley for 30 years, often in collaboration with Barbara Isaacman, and this study brings together many themes previously introduced around the history of the "Chikunda," the slave militias formed in the 18th century by Afro-Goan-Portuguese warlords, whose 19th-century descendants became the dominant ivory hunters and slave raiders of the area and then reacted in a variety of ways in the generation who had to come to terms with Portuguese and British colonial rule. Followers of these two formative figures in post-Salazar Mozambican historiography will recognize the prazo "estate" holders who recruited the original chikunda warriors, their status as "slaves," and the opportunities for themselves that these fugitives from the power of others created in the middle Zambezi area as "transfrontiersmen," their services as porters and canoemen along the river, and the enlistments of some in the early colonial military in Mozambique and (present-day) Malawi. All these moments have appeared over the years in articles and chapters, often written in collaboration with Alien Isaacman's able students at the University of Minnesota. The extensive research supporting this integrated narrative goes back to the late 1960s and includes thorough use of archives in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia (as well as Portugal and Britain) and the Isaacmans' characteristic and effective reliance on personal narratives of residents of the region, collected in well over a hundred interview sessions dating over the full span of their investigations and including a great many new ones conducted in 1997-98. What else is new is the sophisticated and careful integration of all this material around two issues of identity, as the title indicates: the term chikunda has had many and often contradictory meanings, as "slave" (thus shameful), as "warrior" (thus powerful), quintessentially "male" (thus proud), and as fully "ethnic" (female and young, as well as adult male) communities of several different "characters" in various parts of the valley and its environs. The Isaacmans offer a sophisticated theoretical basis for understanding ethnicity (and by extension the other kinds of identities conveyed by the label "Chikunda") as social boundary setting in response to rapidly changing circumstances. They then follow the decades of ivory trading, hunting, intervals of drought, and eventual colonial intervention in the distinct parts of the area, and the differing responses of various groups of chikunda to them, leading to the recent array of meanings attached to, and sometimes claimed by their modern descendants. This supple and detailed handling of ethnicity as history demonstrates the many bases on which people claim and elaborate commonalities, in Africa no less than anywhere else in the world: some by "origin" and reproduction (thus by natality, though not in this case), others by profession (here, for example, warriors, transporters, and ivory hunters), even gender (here strongly male, not unlike the Imbangala in Angola, the Segu slave cavalry along the upper Niger, or the Bobangi of the middle Congo River), or claims to land and the spiritized predecessor claimants (a critical factor, for the Isaacmans, for the main groups who retained the "Chikunda" name but abandoned all of its original connotations to marry and live by cultivating). …