Imagined territory: Demarcating the local state in colonial northwest Zambia ASC Research Seminar

Dr Achim von Oppen is a historian and social scientist of Africa, working as deputy director and research fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin. The seminar paper presents some aspects from a book-length study, completed in 2003, on Bounding villages. The enclosure of locality in Central Africa, 1890s to 1990s. A related recent publication is Cinderella Province. Discourses of locality and nation state in a Zambian periphery, 1950s-1990s, In: Making or Shaking the State? The power of locality = Sociologus 52 (2002), No. 1, pp. 11-46.

One of the most powerful imaginations of (post-) colonial governments is the assumption, underpinned by more or less forceful action, that the institutions and identities of the governed could (and should) be defined as bounded "local" territories. The case study presented here examines this process of spatial demarcation in the perspective of a small but significant locality on the Zambian border with eastern Angola. This place, Chavuma, has been the scene of a series of local boundary disputes throughout the 20th century, coinciding with crucial steps in the establishment of local authorities. The paper will concentrate on the first two episodes in this series, in the mid-1920s and in the early 1950s. They illustrate not only the contradictions of administrative attempts to redefine locality as territory. They also demonstrate how modern territoriality was actively appropriated and reinterpreted "from below", as an expression of belonging to the emerging nation state and, indeed, to the modern world at large.