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| Title: | Elders, young men, and David Livingstone's 'civilizing mission': revisiting the disintegration of the Kololo kingdom, 1851-1864 |
| Author: | Kalusa, Walima T. |
| Year: | 2009 |
| Periodical: | International Journal of African Historical Studies |
| Volume: | 42 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 55-80 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Zambia |
| Subjects: | Lozi polity generation conflicts missions colonial history |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/40282430 |
| Abstract: | Christianity, with its economic and political underpinnings, was as often understood in ways that were at variance with the expectations of its European emissaries as it was differently used to manage African people's conflicting social, economic and political concerns. This paper places the disintegration of the Kololo kingdom in the mid-1860s at the foot of the conflicting ways in which Kololo king Sekeletu, his chiefs, and their vassal subjects drew on David Livingstone's 'civilizing mission' - particularly its economic underpinnings and its moralistic Christian disourse - to recreate their society in the Bulozi flood plain between 1853 and 1864. The paper argues that while young Kololo men perceived the 'civilizing mission' as a new means to access the wealth, authority, and power that their social organization denied them, their elders ironically saw it as a grave danger to the raiding economy on which their own influence, status, and authority depended. These conflicting reactions deepened pre-existing intergenerational tensions within Kololo governing hierarchies. The rhetoric of redemption and salvation of Livingstone's 'civilizing mission' even fired Lozi and Tonga insurgents with visions of a future free of Kololo domination and inspired them to act against foreign misrule. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |
