2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 279295

SPECIAL SECTION

Working with our

grandparents illusions
On colonial lineage and inheritance
in Southern African anthropology

Shannon Morreira, University of Cape Town

In the late 1950s my grandfather, Blair Ewing, a politician in Southern Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe), was one of the last people to travel down the Zambezi River before the filling
of Lake Kariba forever altered its route. His role was to persuade those people who had thus
far resisted resettlement that the only options left for them were to move or to die. It was an
episode that stayed with him, where the dehumanizing logic of colonialism and modernity
were laid bare, lessons that he imparted to his grandchildren through an often-told story.
As a young adult, I began to teach anthropology at the University of Cape Town. One of the
texts that I taughtElizabeth Colsons 1971 The social consequences of resettlement
brought this personal family history into conversation with the history of the discipline of
anthropology in Southern Africa. In this article I consider that encounter.
Keywords: History of anthropology, Zimbabwe, Elizabeth Colson, colonialism, modernity

Illusions: A personal preamble

My grandfather died when I was twelve years old, many years before I became an
anthropologist, and many years before I properly discovered the colonial and post-
colonial history of the country in which we (mostly) lived, and in which he died:
Zimbabwe, formerly known as Southern Rhodesia. I remember Grandad as a man
who oscillated between joviality and seriousness, sometimes tinged with anger, who
put great faith in intelligence and serious conversations, but who also liked to tell
naughty jokes and to laugh at the world and with his grandchildren. When I knew
my Grandad, he was a retired businessman. I knew that for a time he had been a
farmer, and that for a time he had been an opposition politician who had resigned

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Shannon Morreira.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.018
 Shannon Morreira 280

his seat in parliament during what was referred to around our house as the Smith
regime, although I didnt know exactly what that meant. But mostly he was just
Grandad, a fixture of the house in Southam Way, Harare; a man who liked to eat
pickled mushrooms (still a staple of our table and still referred to, twenty years after
his death, as Grandads mushrooms) and who liked to read the paper every day.
It was the 1980s, a time of great optimism in newly independent Harare, and so
not a time when children were exposed to the urgent political conversations that
peppered my late teenage years in the 1990s, or that punctuate the childhoods of
my own son and my nephews in post-2000 Zimbabwe. In the early 1980s we didnt
yet know about the Gukurahundi genocide that was happening down the road in
Matabeleland, and we were caught up in the heady atmosphere of the end of the
liberation struggle and the first years of postcolonial nation building. I had no idea
that my grandfather had tried very hard to avoid the armed liberation struggle that
was the second Chimurenga by pushing for majority rule more than two decades
prior to the 1980s, but that it had ended in disappointment and loss as conservative
white voters ousted the political party to which he belonged and voted in the ultra-
conservative Rhodesian Front (RF). Headed by Ian Smith, the RF, through racist
ideology and the desire to maintain white hegemony, had created the set of condi-
tions that made the liberation struggle unavoidable as black nationalists clashed
with white Rhodies in their struggle for self-determination.
But I get ahead of myself: in the 1980s, it was only occasionally that we not-
yet-grown grandchildren caught glimpses of the adult Grandad, and even then the
glimpses were usually of the joker rather than the ex-politician. I remember him
bursting into laughter upon hearing me refer to one of my soft-toys as a little
tart, for example, following (ill-advised?) exposure to a British television show,
and wondering what on earth this strange brand of adult humor was that found
a word as innocent sounding as tart amusing. But I also remember with great
clarity a conversation with him as we drove in our car down the winding Zambezi
Escarpment on our way to a family holiday on Lake Kariba, when he described to
me and my sister one of the tasks he had undertaken as Member of Parliament. I re-
member the sticky feeling of my leg sweating on the plastic car seat as he recounted
his expedition down the Zambezi River, tasked with persuading BaTonga people
who lived along the river and who had thus far resisted resettlement, that the only
options left open to them were to move or to die. I remember his pride that they
had managed to move people without bloodshed, unlike in neighboring Northern
Rhodesia (now Zambia), and I remember the seriousness with which he tried to
impart to us, his young grandchildren, that the lake that we now visited for pleasure
had once been someone elses home. His journey down the Zambezi was an episode
that stayed with him, and one that, through its narration to me, has stayed with me,
an uncomfortable part of my family narrative, part of the oral history of myself and
my clan of white (liberal?1) Zimbabweans.

1. As Dirk Kotze (2015) has noted, in the South African context, the term liberal carries
different connotations than it does in the American context. Liberals in South Africa
(but not, interestingly, Zimbabwe, where the term as I have used it and heard it used is
closer to the American) could be said to be closer to American Conservatives. During
apartheid the white liberals supported a more benign racism as represented through

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281 Working with our grandparents illusions

It was a conversation that taught mealbeit not in such academic terms as

the ones I use nowthat the march of modernity is not always positive and that
Kariba was embedded in a complex political economy. These are lessons that lie at
the heart of much of the work done by anthropology in Southern Africa over the
last century, as I discovered when I grew older, embarked on university study, and
emerged some time later with a PhD in anthropology. While an undergraduate,
I was introduced to a book that intrigued me because of its resonance with my
family history. Elizabeth Colsons The social consequences of resettlement (Colson
1971) examines social change as experienced by Tonga people in Gwembe as they
encountered the twin forces of colonialism and modernity, through the building of
Lake Kariba. It was a book that I later taught to undergraduates in anthropology,
as a young lecturer at the University of Cape Town. In what follows I consider the
ways in which Colsons text, in combination with my family history, enabled me
to teach the history of anthropology, and of its historical roots of entanglement in
and resistance to the logic of colonialism, in a way that allowed for an affirmation
of classic texts and techniques, and a simultaneous intense engagement with the
ways in which the discipline has provided a space for resistance to coloniality,2 both
during colonialism and in the present. Elizabeth Colson died in Zambia in August
2016, at the age of 99, while this paper was in process.

My grandfathers political dreams: Rhodesia in the 1960s

It can be hard to disentangle the personal and the academic, the work self and the
home self, the private and the political. The kind of work I have done as an an-
thropologist has often been impacted by personal factors, with my fieldwork often
informed by my position as a Zimbabwean living in South Africa, and my choice
of research topics often directly influenced by my anger at the ways in which politi-
cal wrangling in Zimbabwe had negatively impacted the livelihoods and possible
lifeworlds open to the countrys citizens. But it is only recently that I realized the
historical resonances at play in the work I do and the work done by my family
members, in sometimes deeply unsettling ways. Much like anthropologys history,
my family history is one of both coloniality and of resistance to that coloniality; like
ethnography, it can be read as a complex and tense engagement between individual
stories and broader political economies.

qualified franchise for black people, and in the present tend to support policies of the
free market without state intervention (Kotze 2015). White liberals in South Africa
were thus in opposition to white radicals, who more closely represent what the term
liberal often means elsewhere in the world. In Zimbabwe, then, my family presently
positions itself as liberal; in South Africa, the term is more loaded.
2. The notion of coloniality originated in the work of Latin American scholar Anibal
Quijano, and has subsequently been expanded on by Walter Mignolo, and refers to the
epistemological frameworks that underlay colonialism. The authors argue that while
colonialism demarcated a temporal period that has now ended, coloniality remains in
the way modernity is structured and organized (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2011).

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 Shannon Morreira 282

Let us begin, like any good ethnography, with the individual stories. I came to
my grandfathers autobiography by circuitous means. Upon being introduced to
my husbands grandmother for the first time (my marriage being a classic example
of endogamy within the grouping of white radical/liberals of Harare, for all that
my husband and I actually met as students in Cape Town, thousands of kilometers
away), she looked at me and said, Blair Ewings granddaughter? Your grandfather
was a wonderful man, but I never forgave him for abandoning us to Smith in the
1960s. He should have stayed to fight, not run off to Johannesburg when the Rho-
desian Front started winning, and (as an afterthought), Your grandmother always
wore the most fabulous dresses. My grandmother-in-law herself was a woman of
inimitable style, fiercely independent, immediately lovable, and with an unwaver-
ing sense of social justice. At this stage, I didnt know very much about my grand-
fathers political history, but my new grandmother-in-law did, and she began to
share it with me over afternoon tea in rainy season Harare. I remembered then that
my grandfather had written an autobiography for the consumption of family and
friends rather than for publication, and I decided to track it down. It was at this
point that I discovered that the colonial political history that I had read in academic
books and used in my own work was available in Technicolor here, in engaging
prose and personal detail, in my grandfathers words and from his perspective as a
person immersed in the norms, mores, and social hierarchies of the time.
My grandfather became a politician by accident. Born in Rhodesia to parents
with close links to England but whose own families had been situated in the col-
onies since their foundingmy grandfathers maternal grandfather arriving in
what became Southern Rhodesia with the first pioneer column in 1893he was
without doubt a product of British empire. He lived a transnational childhood,
moving between England and Rhodesia before being sent to boarding school in
Grahamstown, South Africa, from which he matriculated at the early age of fifteen.
Too young to legally go to university, he spent a year sitting in on lectures at Rhodes
University in Grahamstown before registering for a degree in mining engineering
at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg when he turned sixteen.
This he duly completed but never used, as he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship
to study toward an Honors degree in Jurisprudence at Oxford University. Upon
graduating with a First, he returned to Rhodesia, married my grandmother and,
after a brief stint at a law firm, found that not to his liking either and he thus re-
turned to the family tobacco farm to become a hands-on farmer. After a few years
of this, he fell into politics when Garfield Todd, then Prime Minister of Southern
Rhodesia, was ousted as leader of the United Federal Party (UFP) because there
was dissatisfaction at the sorts of liberal reforms Todd had attempted to introduce.
In the fallout from this, the Party split into the (more liberal) United Rhodesia
Party lead by Todd, while the old UFP was taken over by Sir Edgar Whitehead.
Elections resulted: cue my grandfather, who, from his farm in Banket, was asked to
sit for a rural seat in Lomagundi. The seat was going uncontested as the UFP was so
disliked in that area as they were perceived as too liberal (despite the fact that they
were less liberal than Todd). Given that the popular Dominion Party were, in my
grandfathers terms, a bunch of anachronistic right-wingers (Ewing 1987: 89), it
seemed to him to be worth contesting the Seat just for the experience of running
a campaign and so as to ensure there was some sort of middle-ground option for

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283 Working with our grandparents illusions

Lomagundi voters. Despite his confidence that he would lose, he won, making him
the countrys youngest MP at the age of 29.
It was in this capacity that he found himself on a trip down the Zambezi, a
moment that contributed to the shift in his political sensibilities that occurred
throughout his time in politics. During the election campaign, he wrote,
my views would have to be classified as fairly right wing, indeed I would
not have had a hope in hell of being elected had that not been the case,
not that this was a conscious posture. Then as I began to understand the
problems I must have shifted to a middle of the road approach; and later,
as I really grasped what was at stake and the forces at work in Africa, I
must have moved to being left of centre. All these classifications, I hasten
to add, relate to the perceptions of the White Electorate in the late 50s
and early 60s. From the viewpoint of the Blacks I may well have appeared
as slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. (Ewing 1987: 103)
It was while he still perceived himself as fairly right wing that he travelled down the
Zambezi, beginning his interest in the contradictions of the work of modernity and
the difficulty of questions of land in a colony. The decision to build a hydroelectric
dam on the Zambezi River between Northern and Southern Rhodesia was reached
in 1955, as it would be able to provide electricity to two of the countries within the
Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. The dam had originally been intended for
the Kafue River in Northern Rhodesia with an aim of powering the Copperbelt, a
cheaper project with less of an impact on persons and environment, but also a less
magnificent one. In his book Kariba: The struggle with a river god (1960), Frank Cle-
ments (strangely enough, the Dominion Party candidate whom everyone expected
to win but whom my grandfather had beaten in the 1958 election) made it clear that
grandeur, and not practicality, was an intimate part of the plan behind Kariba, such
that the dam would stand as a symbol of that ideal of modernity, progress.
My grandfathers description of the trip taken down the Zambezi to move those
people who lived in the path of progress provides a snapshot of the moment, and
gives unsettling insight into a colonial mindset that put the ideals of (white) mo-
dernity before (black) human cost:
Towards the end of 1959, the Kariba Dam was virtually finished, and all
that remained was for us to move out all Africans presently living in the
area to be inundated. The Northern Rhodesian Government had already
tried to accomplish the same exercise, but it had ended in disaster, as
people refused to move. They simply did not believe it was possible for
the mighty Zambesi to be dammed, and that the spirit of the River God,
(Nyaminyami) would not permit it. There had certainly been quite a
few indications that the River-God was angry, and in the earlier stages of
construction the Zambesi had flooded to such an extent that it looked as
if the coffer dams would be swept away. The N.R. endeavor had resulted
in the Governor arriving in his cocked hat with a platoon of askaris at
Gwembe3 and since nobody would cooperate there was shooting, and a
fair number of tribesmen had been killed and wounded.

3. Gwembe was where Elizabeth Colson, the other subject of this archival article, con-
ducted her fieldwork. The two texts then are not entirely geographically aligned, in that

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 Shannon Morreira 284

I went up with a small group consisting of the Parliamentary Secre-

tary to the Minister of Native Affairs, the Chief Native Commissioner, his
Secretary, and two MPs. It was a marvelous trip, real Sanders of the River
stuff, and we took a week travelling down the Zambesi in a large Govern-
ment flat bottomed barge, stopping all the time to talk to the relatively few
tribesmen that so far had refused to move. The Native Commissioners
handling of the reluctant headmen was masterly. He would conduct a long
and leisurely interview with him sitting on the barge, while the tribesman
would be standing on a sandbank up to his waist in the middle of the
Zambesi, with the current (and presumably crocodiles) swirling by. After a
while, the man on the sandbank must have figured that his life expectancy
was diminishing rapidly while the Native Commissioner continued with
his quiet and calm questions, and there would be a sudden capitulation.
All told, over 21 000 Batonka people were moved away from the
South Bank without the loss of a single life. But the strange thing was
to travel down this great river, knowing that nobody would ever do this
trip again, because when we reached the dam wall the sluice gates would
be closed, and the dam would start to fill up and the river bed we were
travelling down would never be seen again. (Ewing 1987: 1045)
The internalization of colonial classificatory hierarchies (cf. Mignolo 2011) can be
seen very clearly in this excerpt. I find it quite hard to read, as an anthropologist
descended from, and who feels a deep love for, this man who sailed down a river in
my countrys past. There is a blas lack of consideration for life, livelihood, and con-
nection to land in this telling of the journey, where the strange thing was to consider
the land flooded and the river gone, rather than to consider what this might feel like
to those people who had lived on that land, or what might be the effects on kinship
relations when a dam was placed between groups, or, indeed, the ways in which
crocodiles can be used as coercion. He was not alone in this lack of consideration for
people: the white population of Rhodesia mobilized behind Operation Noah that
rescued the wild animals that were being displaced by the floodwaters, but scant at-
tention was paid to displaced persons. Aside, that is, from the close attention paid by
anthropologists such as Elizabeth Colson and Thayer Scudder: more on this below.
To return briefly to my grandfather: over time he developed a much more radi-
cal view on the politics of land in the colony. Certainly, when he told me the story
of Kariba it was with a sympathetic awareness that seems missing from the excerpt
above. His first act on returning to the city from the Zambezi trip was to accuse
other members of the Select Committee on Resettlement of Natives of shirking
their responsibilities in the Committees attempts to find ways of dealing with the
problem of black settlement in urban areas. As an MP on the Select Commit-
tee, he had frequently clashed with other party and opposition members for his
take on the land problem, which resulted from the Land Apportionment Act that
designated specific areas of the country to specific groups of persons and specific
purposes. He conceptualized it thus:

Colsons ethnography examines the Northern Rhodesia side of the Zambezi, while my
grandfathers reports on the Southern. Nonetheless, the texts are commensurate and
provide interesting contrasts between the political position and the anthropological
one, which are telling. I will return to this below, where considering Colsons 1960s.

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285 Working with our grandparents illusions

The more you looked at it, the more inescapable the solution was. How
could we possibly go on spending millions of pounds just to remove people
from an area where they were quite happily settled, just to make sure
they were living in the right area of the map? I suppose it may be argued
that in the political climate of White Rhodesia in 1960 it [a document he
wrote that argued for the repealing of the Land Apportionment Act] was
in advance of its time, and that people were just not ready to accept it,
White people that is. Well, Im not convinced that it was premature, but it
certainly did contribute to our losing the General Election that swept the
Rhodesian Front into power. (Ewing 1987: 108).
In 1962, just before the Rhodesian Front came into power, my grandfather was ap-
pointed Cabinet Minister of Native Affairs and District Administration, where he
attempted once more to repeal the Land Apportionment Act in order that black
people not be moved from the places in which they lived, but was blocked from
doing so from within his party. He did succeed, however, in involving black peo-
ple in a more meaningful manner in local government, but such victories were
short-lived. After a fiercely contested election that effectively pitted those who
would see majority rule come about against those who would not, the Rhodesian
Front came into power in 1962. My grandfather remained in Parliament as an
Opposition MP for another year, at which point he tendered his resignation, tired
of parliamentary clashes which I didnt really enjoy, but I refused to let the RF
get away with their half-truths and evasions (Ewing 1987: 141). In August 1963
he left politics. In my final speech, he wrote, twenty-five years later, I tore Ian
Smith apart for his incredible insinuation that any Rhodesian who did not fall be-
hind the R.F. like sheep were disloyal. And I also said that UDI, then freely being
spoken about, would be a total disaster for the country, and totally unnecessary.
Not that it did me any good (142). It was this act of abandonmentleaving, in-
stead of fighting the policies of the Rhodesian Frontthat my grandmother-in-
law, herself involved in the politics of the time, remembered when she met me
forty-odd years later.
The Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) did indeed ensue, but only
after my grandfather and his family (my mother included) had left Rhodesia, not
to return until the countrys independence in 1980. My grandfather described the
move as a traumatic, wrenching process (Ewing 1987: 142)like the Tonga peo-
ple at Gwembe, then, he experienced what it is to feel a loss of place. Unlike Tonga
people, however, he had a choice. In 1965 Smiths UDI separated Rhodesia from
Britain and thus from the processes of decolonization that were occurring in other
colonies and that my grandfather had sought to see occur in Rhodesia. My grand-
father spoke of those years that led to and incorporated the second Chimurenga
(liberation struggle) as a wasted fifteen years for the country in which life and
livelihood were lost by many, when the transition to majority rule could have been
achieved differently. My grandparents and all three of their then grown children
only returned to Zimbabwe in the early 1980s, following independence, at a time
when many of the conservative white voters who had ousted my grandfather from
politics were leaving. I, myself, was born in Durban, South Africa, and moved
home to Zimbabwe when I was two months old.

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 Shannon Morreira 286

Mobilizing colonial family histories in teaching anthropology:

Encountering Colsons The social consequences of resettlement
The above then constitutes my personal and familial engagement with the history
of Lake Kariba, a historical vignette, if you will, of one particularized example of
the last days of colonialism in Rhodesia. How has this positioning impacted upon
the ways in which I have approached teaching the history of anthropology? Perhaps
the best way to continue is as I would do in seminars where I have used Colsons
text for teaching purposes: to move from my personal history to Colsons, and in
so doing speak to the ways in which the works of Colson and other anthropolo-
gists from the Rhodes Livingstone Institute were understood at the time, and have
been understood after the fact. In so doing, I introduce the work of intellectual
historian Lyn Schumaker, whose book, Africanising anthropology (2001), provides
a cogent and detailed analysis of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute and its intellec-
tuals. I also consider some of the critiques of anthropology as a colonial discipline
that emerged in the 1970s: specifically, Talal Asads (1973) Anthropology and the
colonial encounter, and, more locally, the critique of the Rhodes Livingstone Insti-
tute offered by South African anthropologist Bernard Magubane (1971). Finally, I
consider the ways in which present-day anthropological analyses of similar topics,
as seen in Alan Isaacman and Barbara Isaacmans (2013) ethnography of Cahora
Bassa Dam in neighboring Mozambique, have followed this genealogy of represen-
tation to allow for greater inclusion of bottom up voices. Moving between these
texts allows for a historical consideration of anthropology in the region, as well as
for a conversation about the value of detailed ethnography in challenging (and in
some instances reinforcing) colonial forms of representation.
Elizabeth Colsons take on the building of Kariba differed to that of the govern-
ment, and that of my grandfather. Her 1971 monograph, The social consequences of
resettlement, opens with the line, Massive technological development hurts (Col-
son 1971: 1). While most of the white population in Rhodesia, following the ex-
ample set by government and administration, steadfastly ignored the human costs
of building the Kariba dam wall, a sector of academic society did not: the anthro-
pologists. Elizabeth Colson joined the Rhodes Livingstone Institute in Northern
Rhodesia in 1946, when Max Gluckman was the director, at which point she un-
dertook a years fieldwork at Gwembe among a grouping of people who practiced
agriculture in the fertile soils along the Zambezis banks. She later returned to the
site in the 1950s at the time of resettlement, and her 1971 monograph thus draws
on fieldwork from the 1940s to the 1960s: prior to, during, and after resettlement.
The Rhodes Livingstone Institute (RLI) was founded in 1937 under Godfrey
Wilson, and was the first social science research institute in Africa, acting as a base
from which anthropological research could be conducted across Southern and
Central Africa. By the time Colson arrived there, it was under the Directorship of
Max Gluckman. Fieldwork was at the core of the RLIs activities, with anthropolo-
gists and assistants developing their methodology and theory in response to work
in the field, rather than conducting fieldwork that was driven by theory (Schu-
maker 2001; Colson 2008). In Colsons initial time there this was driven by Max
Gluckman, who was an intellectual descendant of Evans-Pritchard and Radcliffe-
Brown, but it was a characteristic of the RLI from its inception under Godfrey

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287 Working with our grandparents illusions

Wilson. Wilson and Gluckman also both imbued the work of the Institute with a
sense of moral imperative, in that the work they did was directed toward solving
the problems experienced by Africans as a result of rapid social change4 (Schu-
maker 2001). Although based in Livingstone, the RLI had close links to academics
from a multitude of disciplines working in South Africa, such that the cohort that
Colson originally worked with in 1946 began their stay with a series of study ses-
sions (Schumaker 2001: 87) at the University of Cape Town. Here, under Gluck-
mans guidance, researchers were introduced to the intellectual work (and often,
the persons themselves) of South African thinkers such as Hilda Kuper, Monica
Wilson, and Ellen Hellman, among others.
Gluckman, who went on to develop the Manchester School of anthropology
when he left the RLI for Manchester in the late 1940s, is of course renowned for
the method of situational analysis. The best known exemplar of this, his Analysis
of a social situation in modern Zululand, (1940; also known colloquially as The
Bridge) gives insight into the ways in which activities at the RLI were influenced by
a recognition of the effects of the wider political economy of empire on everyday
happenings in colonial Africa. In the article, Gluckman describes the opening of
a bridge in a district of Zululand in South Africa, and a later magistrates district
meeting on the same day. In his description of the two events Gluckman analyzes
the interactions between white and black African groups at the two settings as part
of a single Southern African social system that was in turn part of a global system,
rather than considering the Zulu to be a bounded whole that were somehow re-
moved from the wider social context as was common to anthropology at the time.
In essence, the article showed the ways in which people existed within local, na-
tional, and global political economies, and the sorts of conflicts that emerged from
such (Gluckman 1940). Gluckman (1946: 38) considered the area in which the RLI
was located to be a human laboratory across the Zambesi within which it was
possible to conduct comparative research on urban-rural connections and the dif-
ficulties arising from urbanization. He stressed that the different racial and tribal
groups, as they were categorized at the time, were all members of a single com-
munity that was characterized by circular migration patterns themselves driven by
colonial capitalism. These were radical ideas for the time.
This was the disciplinary and intellectual context into which Colson arrived, and
to which she then contributed, joining the team of new researchers at the University
of Cape Town in 1946 before they dispersed into the field, assigned by Gluckman to
various sites. The RLI was interested in social changeas Schumaker notes, Few
untouched societies remained to be studied in Britains colonial territories, and an-
thropology had to justify its growth as a profession by demonstrating the need for
research in areas where European penetration and resulting social change were far
advanced (Schumaker 2001: 23). This intellectual quest was also one informed
by the logic of colonialismfunding for fieldwork in Africa became available at
this period due to the need to gain knowledge that would be useful for processes
of governance in the colonies (Schumaker 2001: 23). The impetus of modernity
and development also impacted, with anthropologists from the RLI engaging with

4. In some ways, a sense of moral urgency has imbued Southern African anthropology
ever since. See Spiegel (2005); Morreira (2012).

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 Shannon Morreira 288

colonial African development policy that was informed by ideals of agricultural

practices that more closely resonated with a romantic vision of English vision life,
transferred to Africa (Schumaker 2001: 25) than the realities of agricultural and
social conditions in Southern and Central Africa. Gluckmans choice of field sites
for RLI researchers was thus influenced by intellectual considerations, such as test-
ing the theories of other anthropologists or finding spaces for comparative work
on the effects of urbanization, migration, and social change, but he also chose sites
based on the advice of colonial government officials about the places that, in their
estimation, would be most useful to investigate (Schumaker 2001: 80). In some
inescapable ways, then, the RLI was entangled in the colonial context of its time
and was without doubt immersed in a project of knowledge making about Africa
and Africans that carried colonial influence. The very name of the institution re-
flects two main projects of colonialismthe economic and the cosmological/civi-
lizing missionas exemplified by the missionary Stanley Livingstone, and the co-
lonial capitalist, Cecil John Rhodes. It was thus nicknamed the Saint and Sinner
Institute by Evans-Pritchard (Schumaker 2001: 52). In many ways, then, the RLI
was immersed in the broader projects and discourses of colonialism. Talal Asads
(1973) seminal critique of structural functionalist anthropology focused on this
entanglement and on the ways in which the categorizations of colonialism resulted
in an objectification of the subjects of anthropology: the people. Anthropology, in
this reading, was a colonized and colonial discipline. It could be argued, however,
that the real focus of Asads critique was not the discipline per se but rather the
discourses of modernity that frame topics and order society, and academic dis-
ciplines, in particular ways. The researchers of the RLI, for all that they were im-
mersed within it, were not necessarily convinced that modernity was such a good
thing. Thus, while without doubt entangled in colonialism, the RLI was also able
to be a space of resistance. Gluckmans single society approach was a radical one:
to contextualize it in terms of prevailing ideas of the time, Schumaker notes that a
magazine that Gluckman often wrote for in order to get his ideas across to a popu-
lar audience, Libertas, carried articles at the same point in time that described the
Bushmen as living human fossils and outlined the duty and the mission of white
mans civilization in Africa (Schumaker 2001: 286).
Colonialism, for all its heft, was thus not a system without internal variation.
Analyses of anthropology as the handmaiden of colonialism, Schumaker notes,
often portray colonialism as a hegemonic system, more or less uniform in its dis-
courses, motives and practice. In these accounts, anthropologists are implicated
by their position in the system, and little scope is given for their own agency or
the agency of the people they study (Schumaker 2001: 7). Contrary to this sim-
plistic view, Schumaker shows the ways in which anthropologists present at the
Rhodes Livingstone Institute were both a part of colonialism and resistant to it;
ones position within the racialized hierarchies of the global colonial system did not
necessitate agreement with others in those same positions. This is not to say that
cultural and social factors didnt influence the ways in which such anthropologists
conducted ethnographic fieldwork and generated theory.
A return to Colson, and the building of Kariba, can help to illustrate this. Col-
son had taken over the Directorship of the RLI from 1947 when Gluckman left for
Manchester: like her predecessors, she maintained a commitment to research-based

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289 Working with our grandparents illusions

theorizing. Her work with people identifying as Tonga began in the late 1940s, fol-
lowed by a hiatus from Gwembe, which ended when she returned in 1956 with fel-
low researcher Thayer Scudder. The aim of fieldwork in the 1950s was specifically
to study the effects of resettlement once the plans for Kariba were finalized. The
ethnography Colson presents as a result of a number of years of fieldwork examines
life at Gwembe before the move, and life in the first few years after resettlement.
It stands as an excellent example of ethnography in a number of ways: the detail
is immense and extraordinary, from agricultural practices to drinking patterns to
livestock numbers to cosmological and kinship relations, Colson covers life in the
Zambezi Valley with a completeness that is not often seen in contemporary ethnog-
raphy, especially when the text is read in tandem with an earlier work on Gwembe
(Colson 1960). Her core concern in The social consequences of resettlement is so-
cial change and, like other RLI anthropologists, it is clear that her personal and
academic sensibilities are not aligned with the grand projects of colonialism and
modernity. In the introduction, she writes, If this book has a message, it is an old
one long sounded by other anthropologists and students of social change: that it
is folly to allow technology to determine policy (Colson 1971: 3). Her disdain for
the grandeur of Kariba as a politico-economic project is clear, as is her awareness
of the reach of global politics and global economics in affecting local spaces. It is
thus a useful text to use in teaching to highlight that even prior to the reflexive turn,
anthropologists were deeply aware of such issues:
In 1955 the Prime Minister of the new Federation announced the
decision to build a dam at Kariba, rather than on the Kafue River, where
it would have been entirely within Zambia. The dam would provide
power for the Copperbelt of Zambia and the growing industrial plant
largely centred in Rhodesia. It would also create the largest man-made
lake in the world. The great dam and the great lake would be permanent
symbols of the power of the new State and its dedication to economic
progress. The project was also a monument to the international nature
of the contemporary world, financed as it was by a loan from the World
Bank and other international banking houses, built by an Italian firm with
plans supplied by a French engineering company and with labour drawn
from Italy, Tanzania and Malawi. Its primary customers were to be the
mines controlled by financial interests based largely in the United States,
Britain and South Africa. For the international world of technology and
finance, Kariba Dam was therefore a triumph. Few bothered about the
implications for Gwembe people, even though some who lived outside
central Africa worried about the effect upon the wildlife of Gwembe
and organized expeditions to rescue wart-hogs and elephants, kudu
and snakes, baboons and rhinoceri from the rising floodwaters. If they
thought of the people of the region it seems to have been with the happy
expectation that they would adjust, while their loss would be offset to the
gain to those who would build the dam, use its power, or perhaps find a
vacation home upon its lake. (Colson 1971: 4)
There is a trend in postreflexive turn anthropology to conceptualize anthropology
and ethnography prior to the late 1970s/early 1980s as having little sense of global
politics, and having little sense of the fluidities and socio-political constructedness

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 Shannon Morreira 290

of the categories to which people in Southern Africa (and elsewhere) belonged.

Colsons The social consequences of resettlement, and other work to come out of
the RLI, gives the lie to this generalized overcorrecting of old anthropology that
occurred postreflexive turn. RLI researchers, Colson among them, were deeply
aware of the political and economic contextwhich they had to negotiate in order
to undertake fieldwork at alleven while they were part of it. In their fieldwork
they had to deal with the ramifications of colonial racism and sexism, from an ag-
ricultural officer preventing Colson from putting her tent where she wished on the
Gwembe Plateau in a bid to protect her (Schumaker 2001: 134) to Gwembe Tonga
women living with the effects of racist epistemologies such that they insisted Col-
son witness the birth of children so that she could prove to white settlers in the area
that they were not born with tails like monkeys (Schumaker 2001: 135). While Col-
sons style, particularly her emphasis upon Gwembe as being a space for a scientific
case study through which anthropologists could explore the longitudinal effects
of a large-scale crisis upon members of a community, might not find favor with
postmodern anthropologists, the actual substance of her work is closely aligned to
any work that considers political economy important. Like my grandfather, Colson
was immersed within empire; like him, albeit in very different ways, she worked
simultaneously within and against the norms of that empire.
It is worth noting that while Colson may have come to the colonies as a for-
eigner and as a researcher, it is a place she made into her home and the place in
which she died, aged 99. As Laura Nader (2016) noted in Colsons obituary in An-
thropology News, For Colson, fieldwork was a way of life. ... Given that Eliza-
beth Colson considered her field site home, it is fitting that she worked, lived, died
and was buried there. The funeral took about 4 hours. Truckloads of Zambians
attendedtribal chiefs, university people, government people, Zambian singing.
They drummed and danced, drumming and singing to the grave. 100kg of maize-
meal was cooked, two cows were slaughtered and 100 cabbages cut. Elizabeth Col-
son would have loved this last ritual. In Colsons life, work, and death, the lines
between researcher and participant, outsider and local, are increasingly blurred.
In her anthropological work, Colson brought considerable evidence to bear
upon her position on the negative effects of resettlement on the people of Gwembe.
Unlike my grandfather, who encountered the Tonga as occasional nameless tribes-
men on the banks of the river, to Colson, Scudder, and their longtime field assis-
tants the people of Gwembe were real, knowable, and known men and women. She
documents the effects of resettlement upon kinship, both with the living and with
the dead (as seen through what she refers to as the Cult of the Shades) in order to
argue that while the wider kinship system made it through the move intact, rela-
tionships with The Cult of the Earth took serious strain as people moved from the
shrines and land they knew to areas not inhabited by Earth spirits. While the ances-
tral Shades were able to move like men, the Earth-bound spirits could not and were
overcome by the water. In such ways does technological development hurt. While
Colson ultimately shows the ways in which people resettled into new relationships
with each other and with the land, her ethnographic descriptions of the processes
that took place in order to get to that point show the ways in which the march of
colonial modernity displayed little sympathy for certain kinds of persons. Colson
relates the minutiae of daily life first to the wider societal context of Gwembe and

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291 Working with our grandparents illusions

from there to the wider politico-economic context of Southern Africa. As one re-
viewer of her work commented at the time, while societies are abstractions which
can effortlessly maintain themselves through periods of crisis, human beings are
not theoretical constructs and, as such, experience concrete suffering. Colson is
too much of a humanist to overlook this (Arens 1973). Her work thus allows the
reader to know the difficulties experienced and overcome by Tonga people in ways
that my grandfather, from his position on board the boat while the tribesman stood
in the water, was not able to do, or to see. To me, a descendant of that (for his
time, quite radical) politician, this is one of the reasons why anthropology mat-
ters. Anthropology in the present follows this tradition of giving academic space
to voices from the ground: for example, Isaacman and Isaacmans 2013 volume on
Cahora Bassa, Dams, displacement, and the delusion of development: Cahora Bassa
and its legacies in Mozambique, was based on long-term research and more than
three hundred oral interviews. The book aims to provide an alternative history of
Cahora Bassa, one that seeks to recover, or bring to the surface, what the master
narrative of Mozambique colonial and postcolonial state actors have suppressed
(Isaacman and Isaacman 2013: 7). It is exactly this kind of critique, based on voices
from below the master narrative, that Colson provided for Kariba, a dam on the
same river as Cahora Bassa, forty years previously.
For all its strengths, the work of the RLI has, of course, not gone uncritiqued.
Famously, in 1971, Bernard Magubane used the work of the RLI as a case study
through which to critique anthropology as a colonial pursuit; Magubane argued
that the categories used by RLI writers reinforced notions of primitivism, particu-
larly as seen through the use of the concept of tribalism. Both Schumaker (2001)
and Bruce Kapferer (2006) argue, however, that Magubanes critique was reactive to
colonial categories without taking into consideration some of the ways in which the
RLI approach fundamentally differed from these colonial categories, even while
it may have used some of the same terminology. Magubane thus glossed over the
ways in which the version of tribalism generated by RLI theorists referred to an
ethnic construct that resulted from colonial-era socio-economic power relations:
that resulted in other words, from colonial modernity rather than primitivism. In
this, the strength of the RLIs fieldwork-centered approach can clearly be seen. Un-
like other theorists working within categories generated by colonialisms internal
epistemological frameworks that categorized natives as somehow lesser, the RLI
categories emerged from on the ground work, which showed how tribalism was
situationally created within the context of colonial capitalism. Magubanes critique,
then, is unfair to the kind of radical theorizing that was done within and against
the constraints of the time. Magubanes opinion thus differed to the view taken by
African nationalists in Northern Rhodesia, who instead found the work of RLI an-
thropologists useful for the emergent project of nationalism that saw the creation
of independent Zambia.
Magubanes work is important, however, in that it raised issues of the repre-
sentation of Africans in anthropology. Some of the critique that takes context into
better consideration is thus more aptly viewed as a critique of the colonial con-
straints generated by disciplinary (and societal) conventions rather than a critique
of the authors themselves. For example, Schumakers (2001) book highlights the
fact that the anthropological knowledge that was generated by the RLI was a result

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 Shannon Morreira 292

of collaborations between anthropologists, informants, and the fieldwork assistants

who are often invisible in the final texts. In this, we see an element of the construc-
tion of anthropological knowledge that is rooted in the colonial origins of the disci-
pline but that is still relevant today: the question of who is able to represent culture
and persons with authority and who is not. A recent biographical consideration of
the work done by Monica Wilson, edited by South African brothers Leslie Bank
and Andrew Bank (2013), has similarly shown the ways in which research assis-
tants were coproducers of cultural knowledge. Despite such coproduction in the
field, the name on the finished product, however, was that of the (usually white)
anthropologist, with acknowledgment of the (usually black) research assistant con-
fined to the acknowledgments pages or not present at all. Thus, while Colson and
other members of the RLI managed to produce works that critiqued colonialism in
important ways, in other ways their work was, of course, influenced by the norms
of the time. Moreover, these are norms that are still prevalent in anthropologi-
cal works today. To return full circle to the present moment of anthropology as it
is occurring in Southern African academies today, thento return to the under-
graduate classroom in which we teach our histories and engage with present day
debates it is worth highlighting the calls that are being made in the present by
anthropologists such as Francis Nyamnjoh (2012), Bank and Bank (2013), and
Schumaker (2001) for an acknowledgment of the ways in which anthropological
knowledge is coproduced.

A personal postamble
What I have provided here is a personal history of encountering and teaching a
particular text, and the ways in which that personal history led to engagements
with a (well-documented) history of anthropology in Southern Africa. Colsons
The social consequences of resettlement, in combination with my family history, has
enabled me to teach the history of anthropology, and of its historical roots of resis-
tance to the logic of colonialism, in a way that allowed for an affirmation of clas-
sic texts and techniques, and a simultaneous intense engagement with the ways in
which the discipline has provided a space for resistance to coloniality, even while it
was embroiled within it, both during colonialism and in the present.
Why does this matter? As I write this article, the students of the University of
Cape Town, where I teach, are engaged in a loud, effective, and meaningful protest
against institutional racism at the university. The protest began with a call to take
down a statue of Cecil John Rhodes, who donated the land on which the university
standsland that, the students argue, should not have been his to donate in the
first place. This matters to this articlewhich has touched on issues of land and dis-
possession, and throughout which the name Rhodes has resonatedbecause colo-
niality has not disappeared with the end of colonialism (Mignolo 2011). University
curricula draw on particular kinds of experience in their pedagogy and content,
and are designed for particular kinds of imagined students (Morreira 2015). The
students whom I teach this history of anthropology that I have narrated herejoy-
fully? painfully? tragically?are those selfsame students who even today are having
to call for colonial symbolisms to not be celebrated in our intellectual institutions.

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293 Working with our grandparents illusions

In many (not all) of the instances of this long-standing protest (which has spread
from the University of Cape Town to Rhodes University in Grahamstown, to the
Matopos region of Zimbabwe where Rhodes is buried in an area sacred to Nde-
bele people, to Oxford University in the United Kingdom), the students have made
their calls with an awareness of historical context and with an embeddedness in the
identity politics of the present. In those instances where they havent, and where
race-based essentializing has guided the response rather than a more nuanced
discussion of power and history, the history of how knowledge came to be made
matters even more. When I began to write this article, a core group of students had
situated themselves within what was the Universitys Bremner Building, the admin-
istrative center of the university, now renamed by them Azania House, where they
awaited the bringing down of the statue and in the meantime shared poetry and
discussed issues of the curriculum and how it might be decolonized. Many of the
students making this call were humanities and social science students; many of the
staff who supported the call were academics in humanities and social science dis-
ciplines. The historical context of our disciplines and of our gaze matters to those
students camped out in Azania House, and to those of us academics who watch and
join in where we are able: joyful, tragic, painful engagements with our disciplinary
and familial lineages are not instances of navel gazing into the past but are part of
the essential work of the present.

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Travailler avec les illusions de nos grands-parents: lignage et hritage

coloniaux dans lanthropologie sud-africaine
Rsum : A la fin des annes 50, mon grand-pre, Blair Ewing, un homme poli-
tique de la Rhodsie du Sud (Zimbabwe actuel), fut lun des derniers emprunter
le cours de la rivire Zambezi avant que le remplissage du Lac Kariba naltre dfi-
nitivement sa route. Son rle tait de convaincre ceux qui rsistaient la politique
de dplacement et relocalisation que leurs seules options taient de se dplacer ou
de mourir. Cet pisode le marqua de faon permanente: la logique dshumanisante

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295 Working with our grandparents illusions

du colonialisme et de la modernit y fut mise nu, et ce sont des leons quils

partagea souvent avec ses petits-enfants. Alors que jtais un jeune adulte, jai com-
menc enseigner lanthropologie lUniversit de Cape Town. Lun des textes que
jenseignais, The Social Consequences of resettlement par Elizabeth Colson, mis
lhistoire personnelle de ma famille en conversation avec lhistoire de la discipline
quest lanthropologie en Afrique du Sud. Dans cet article, je relate cette rencontre.

Shannon Morreira is a Zimbabwean academic who lives and works in Cape

Town, South Africa. An anthropologist by training, she works in an Education De-
velopment Unit at the University of Cape Town where she teaches and studies the
anthropology of education and rights. Her book, Rights after wrongs: Local knowl-
edge and human rights in Zimbabwe, was published in May 2016.
 Shannon Morreira
 Humanities Education Development Unit
 University of Cape Town
 Private Bag X3
 Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa
shannon.morreira@uct.ac.za

2016 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 279295