Tears of rain : ethnicity and history in central western Zambia

This is a book about ethnicity among the Nkoya people in central western Zambia, and about the historical stuff out of which that ethnicity is made. It studies in detail the ways in which ethnicity both creates, and feeds upon, ethnohistory. At the same time it assesses the possibility of reconstructing objective historical processes in that region since the sixteenth century, on the basis primarily of one very extensive source: 'Likota lya Bankoya', by Johasaphat Malasha Shimunika (c. 1898-1981), the first Nkoya pastor and principal bible translator. Besides his work as a pastor, Shimunika collected and collated Nkoya oral traditions. In the 1920s he started to collect Nkoya historical traditions. These materials were committed to writing in the 1950s and 1960s, under the titel 'Likota lya Bankoya'. The first part of this book is an analytical study of the manuscript, sketching its political, ethnic and ideological background and the problems of editing and translation which it poses. Part 2 is a critical edition of the Nkoya text, upon which the argument in part 1 is largely based. Part 3 offers the English translation of 'Likota lya Bankoya'. Part 4 contains reference material, including genealogies