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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | The Village as Territory: Enclosing Locality in Northwest Zambia, 1950s to 1990s |
Author: | Oppen, Achim von |
Year: | 2006 |
Periodical: | The Journal of African History |
Volume: | 47 |
Issue: | 1 |
Period: | March |
Pages: | 57-75 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Zambia |
Subjects: | villagization physical planning 1950-1999 History and Exploration Development and Technology colonialism Politics and Government |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/4100565 |
Abstract: | Planned villagization is a recurrent feature in modern Africa. Apart from their official goals, which were missed in most cases, rural settlement schemes can be seen as attempts by colonial and postcolonial States to inscribe a new territorial order into the countryside. Taking a group of villages in northwest Zambia as an example, this article examines the process and impact of territorialization in a long-term and interactionist perspective. It reviews the history of spatial 'enclosure'of the Mundanya-Kawanda area in Kabompo district between the 1950s and 1990s. The area has been the site of a succession of attempts to territorialize rural settlement, starting from 1956 when a resettlement scheme was launched along the main road to the Zambian copperbelt. The article illustrates the multitude of agencies and concepts that interacted in the territorialization of villages in that part of Africa. The result is a history of contestation about competing concepts of spatiality and sociality which opens new perspectives on the making of both locality and the nation-State in Central Africa. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract, edited] |