Asking Appropriate Questions, Reconsidering Research Agendas: Moving between London and Lusaka, in- and outside the Archive

In the earlier stages of my career, I worked on 19^th-century missionary sources. I particularly dealt with the ways in which German mission societies worked themselves into South African society and learnt how they were eager to convert Africans into beings with new understandings of their selves and their social, economic and political surroundings. The missions tried to refocus the individual, and through him and her instil new meanings of everyday practices, local politics and identity in broader societal settings. A number of institutional rules existed by which the missions pursued their endeavours. The majority of these, however, were yet clad in terms of personal relations.

How much the record differs to which I have turned more recently through my work on housing policies in late colonial Zambia.

This contribution was written as part of the FWF-granted project »Employment-tied Housing in (Post)colonial Africa« (Project no. P29566–G28). For further information see https://housing.univie.ac.at. I would like to extend thanks to three anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to shape the argument of this article.

I also sensed a general distrust between individuals on the different levels and in the different sections of the apparently unconsolidated and at times unreconciled apparatuses of government and administration. On the levels of both local and central governments, however, European addressees of rule were eager to assert the privileges of settlers and set the worth of local and intimate knowledge of ›the African‹ against the perceived intrusion from a colonial metropole deemed distant or from academic experts harbouring other aims than the pure consolidation of white privilege. Such actors were deemed ›external‹ and out of touch with the realities and necessities on the ground. Different from Stoler, I dealt with the product of a state veering towards development, rationalising its increased interest of extracting labour and benefits by propelling the idea of providing social welfare. Moreover, I encountered the correspondence of a metropolitan state in need of (economic and social) recovery from war ravages back home. The state was eager to legitimise its rule over Africans to both the international community (and its developing institutions) and the African population itself. To maintain and reorganise rule in a changing colonial setting, it needed data, scientific knowledge and an administrative apparatus to manage all this.

Why do I start like this? I think one can start a new research project. As regards knowledge acquisition, however, one can never start from scratch. My previous research trajectory fed into my newer research – different as it was from previous projects. Against this backdrop, it is perhaps not really surprising that I ended up identifying individuals’ contributions to easing the administrative process into the social and political worlds of late colonial housing.

On the following pages, I deal with the question of how issues of planning and administering late colonial housing in Zambia were passed through various parts of an encompassing, yet imperfect colonial administration and how in fragmented segments that process, the path along which it was (re)-directed and its outcomes become retraceable for the researcher. I stress that walking that path means more than finding answers to originally posed research questions. It necessitates adjusting inquiries, looking at the archival record from various angles and across archival findings of project colleagues before assigning the material its significance. In our collaborative project on late and postcolonial housing for workers and civil servants in Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of Congo), Thika (Kenya) and Livingstone/Lusaka (Zambia), we engage as a team of four in a view on housing, which extends across different colonial settings. We take less concern with the complexities of colonial administrations within one colony but emphasise administrational resonances to be detected between our case-specific research and a broader set of relevant secondary literature.

In the Zambian case study, the research path extended into the archived version of a state and its colonial bureaucracy as rendered available today in two major national archives, one in Kew (London) and the other in Lusaka.

In Ndola, the archives of Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines are housed. They are particularly important with regard to housing in mining compounds and adjacent African towns. Issues of Copperbelt housing are taken into consideration through the use of secondary literature. No primary research is intended on this kind of housing within our three-year project which for the Zambian case focuses on Livingstone and Lusaka.

It took time to get into the beat of the documentation. A lot of information was repetitive. There were copies of the same minutes, drafts and notes in various files – operated by clerks of different echelons and in different departments and offices of one complex, not necessarily well-oiled administrative setting. As I grappled with the material, research questions specified. Mainly, I had to come to terms with a language as well as with communication and decision-taking processes of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s that followed a technocratic impulse. From the late 1950s onwards, this technocratic impulse faced mounting political opposition by a consolidating African nationalist movement whose representatives vied for independence. Through this web, I realised that to understand the matrix of power required me to engage with the individuals representing colonial and administrative power and with those who subverted it or who transmuted it into relationships. In fact, quite a range of actors accommodated impersonal policies, and administration-instigated policies only worked smoothly if there were men or women, African or European, who transformed them into a relationship. This is not to deny that the bureaucratic system operated within the confines of codes of conduct and guidelines – which cannot always be identified in a straightforward manner. Taking concern with bureaucratic individuals, or pairs of individuals, ready to seize opportunities will be my means to highlight certain aspects of such structures.

Jean Allman has reminded us that Africanist historians especially have contributed in substantial ways to the comparative and theoretical discussion of oral sources, agency and subjectivity. Generally accepting the power of the colonial state, they have engaged much less with a critical examination of the colonial archive and its structures and inherent weaknesses. She also has encouraged researchers to not only doubt the messages contained in archival material but also follow their track and take seriously the possibility of research engagements emerging from the archival record. They offer points of entry to the past as well, even though perhaps not in complete accordance with the research aims set up in the beginning.

Jean Marie Allman: Phantoms of the Archive. Kwame Nkrumah, a Nazi Pilot Named Hanna, and the Contingencies of Postcolonial History-writing, in: American Historical Review 118/1 (2013), pp. 104–129, at p. 107.

Last but not least, this contribution will set out to touch upon the ways original research inquiries receive a new edge not only through encounters with the archive and learned discussions among colleagues but through interaction with people outside the immediate realm of academic pursuits. Research unfolds as researchers encounter individuals related to either the institutions holding the documents or the people knowing about the topic of investigation through lived experience. Let me stress that this article represents an early formulation of findings we are currently moving back and forth in our project. This being work in progress, I will have to refer to our blogs, preliminary project reports and personal communications that we are currently channelling into academic publications. The formulation of final results is still underway.

Major strikes in Northern Rhodesia (1935, 1940), Kenya (1939), Ghana and other African territories had taught the British that their political and administrative grip over Africans need to change if the metropolitan centre wanted to continue extracting economic benefit from the colonies. While the Second World War still held Great Britain under sway, awareness rose that Britain ought to alter its financial commitment to the colonies. It had become necessary after the ending of the First World War already to legitimise continued foreign rule over African societies in new ways. As a result, ideas of development first grained ground. What was originally intended to reinvigorate colonialism gradually turned into the central process by which colonial elites convinced themselves that it was possible to give up colonies.

Frederick Cooper: Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept, in: Frederick Cooper / Randall Packard (eds.): International Development and the Social Sciences. Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley, CA 1997, pp. 64–92.

Development, framed in notions of scientific and technological advance, depended on manageable data. In fact, »[p]ostwar imperialism was the imperialism of knowledge.«

Cooper: Modernizing Bureaucrats, p. 64.

In Northern Rhodesia, the provision of housing became a main topic in the 1940s. The war had necessitated increased labour input in the mining towns on the Copperbelt, where the companies accommodated their workforce – not always to the satisfaction of the colonial power. While the mining corporations sought profit and control over workers, the British colonial administration favoured a slightly more paternalist exercise of rule and was basically »questioning the morality of handing over control of its people to a foreign profit-making company.«

Emmanuel Mutale: The Management of Urban Development in Zambia, London 2004, p. 90.

To achieve a more ›stabilised‹ presence of African workers in towns in the 1950s, the idea was to erect family housing rather than continue with hurdling up workers in dormitories and hostels.

Robert K. Home: Of Planting and Planning. The Making of British Colonial Cities, Oxford 2013, p. 186.

In 1948, the Housing Act was passed in Northern Rhodesia. It decreed that employers were responsible for housing their workforce. Most employers in Lusaka and Livingstone, however, were unable or unwilling to sink large sums of money into the provision of housing. Soon the state and local governments stepped in. They built the houses – never enough, though – and made employers pay rent for their workforce.

Carole Rakodi: Colonial Urban Policy and Planning in Northern Rhodesia and Its Legacy, in: Third World Planning Review 8/3 (1986), pp. 193–217.

Generally, the provision of housing focussed on the ›emerging‹ respectable class of labourers and their families. It was not a means to alleviate the poverty of the masses who had to continue fending for themselves.

Karen Tranberg Hansen: Distant Companions. Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900–1985, Ithaca, NY 1989, p. 120.

There is a lot on late colonial housing policies in the metropolitan archives in Kew, where for practical reasons rather than strictly methodological ones I started research. The place was nearer, and I was able to commence before funding for the lager project became available. Minutes, telegrams, reports of both formal and informal discussions, loads of correspondence, extracts from letters or applications for posts make up the polyphony of matters through which policies, knowledge and their communication were orchestrated. Central to making housing policies, knowledge accumulation and its dissemination work was the establishment of a research post for experimenting with material and defining building standards. Nearly two dozen specialist advisers and consultants in areas such as social welfare, labour, economics and cooperation boosted the Colonial Office after the war. In all these fields, technical and research services increased substantially.

Joseph M. Hodge / Gerald Hödl: Introduction, in: Joseph M. Hodge / Gerald Hödl / Martina Kopf (eds.): Developing Africa. Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-Century Colonialism, Manchester 2014, pp. 1–34, at p. 15.

The Colonial Liaison Officer was appointed to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research’s Building Research Station.

The institution existed since 1921 at East Acton, near London.

In his responsibility as Colonial Liaison Officer, George Atkinson became a critical figure in managing, creating, processing and sharing knowledge about the building of houses in the colonies. Without him, whose »appointment was in the nature of an experiment,«

NAUK, CO 927/131: Building Research. Appointment of Colonial Liaison Officer to D.S.I.R. Building Research Station, 1951–1952, file summary at the beginning of the record, 4. 6. 1952.

In his daily routines, he responded to both postal enquiries and personal visits of Colonial Officers. He established an information service by means of which a variety of information bearing on colonial building problems was brought to the notice of recently appointed colonial correspondents. Atkinson studied house designs in hot climates and inquired into town planning legislation, the behaviour of new building materials under tropical conditions and the use of local resources, and committed himself to many more matters.

NAUK, CO 927/35/7: Building Research. Appointment of a Colonial Liaison Officer to D.S.I.R. Building Research Station, 1949, extract from a letter received from the Director, D.S.I.R. Building Research Station, Garston, Watford, 23. 11. 1948.

The allocation of funds was another sphere of crucial administrative activity. The Colonial Office was prepared to have the Northern Rhodesia Government launch schemes for home ownership through which they hoped to prompt the »emergence of a property-owning class of Africans.« Related to this aim, they were also prepared to start an »Owner Housing Loan Scheme.«

NAUK, CO 1015/1154: Proposal to Grant Loans to Purchaser in Northern Rhodesia, 1954–1956, Colonial Office Government House, Lusaka, to Secretary of State for the Colonies, London, 8. 11. 1956.

These were some of the starting points identified in Kew. How would they relate to the archival threads retraceable in Lusaka?

»What is your church?« The two young men chuckled as they asked me the question. Their names were Lukas and Thomas, and they were lower staff of the archive. We got to know each other by our first names and church affiliations.

The first names are pseudonyms. The names of their churches are not.

Encounter is knowledge, is getting to know each other. The ice was broken. I would be welcome to join them on Sunday at the Catholic Church or for one of the Assemblies of God services. Would I come? Ann Laura Stoler has drawn our attention to the importance of personalised accounts to get a fuller grasp of administration and bureaucracy. She made use of letters exchanged between »a lowly civil servant stationed on the north Bali coast« and his far-away daughter back in the Netherlands and read them as »personalised inflections.«

Stoler: Along the Archival Grain, p. 263.

This is more than an anecdote. These two men’s interference alerted me to the importance of individuals in the bureaucratic process. The rules of the archive were well set up. They worked well. However, it were Lukas from the Assemblies of God Church and Thomas from the Catholic Church who in their profession as archive staff members made them work out in a particular way that shaped my experience in the archives. They co-created the scope and the space of my daily working projects, accommodated my research path in a particular way. I started to watch out more carefully for individuals under the techno-scientific administrative acts from then on.

The encounter also helped me to reassess my visit to the National Archives in Kew. They were also much more than a building, signposts and institutional architecture.

Achille Mbembe: The Power of the Archive and Its Limits, in: Carolyn Hamilton et al. (eds.): Refiguring the Archive, Dordrecht 2002, pp. 19–27.

Of course, such perceptions and interpretations depend on the research inquiries one is occupied with. Caroline Elkins, who has worked on the violent character of repressing Mau Mau and on the pains of not letting this part of Kenyan history emerge into a sphere of memory, describes the National Archives at Kew – quite in contrast – as an »uncluttered interior governed by a hyper-monitoring system, identification cards, assigned seats, routinized systems for ordering and holding documents, proficient archivists, and security checkpoints.«

Caroline Elkins: Looking beyond Mau Mau. Archiving Violence in the Era of Decolonization, in: American Historical Review 120/3 (2005), pp. 852–868, quote p. 852.

The material one encounters in the National Archives in Lusaka was overwhelming. There were minutes, reports, correspondences, many newspaper clippings and photographs. George Atkinson hardly figured. It remained generally difficult to identify individual characters who would have turned the administrative or techno-scientific processes into some project of their own. In other places, fellow researchers have come across such figures in a few instances. There was Ernest Albert Vasey in Nairobi, Kenya’s Minister for Local Government in the early 1950s. It was him, in close connection with J. H. Thomas, the first appointed local housing officer, and a civil servant of the lower echelons who each according to his respective predispositions, envisioned, implemented, guarded and reported on the first homeownership housing scheme in post-war Thika, a small township near Nairobi. Homeownership schemes represented an adjunct to municipal housing projects rather than an alternative. On this pilot project, Thomas was the one to cooperate closely with African counterparts. He also selected future residents and debtors eligible for the related loan scheme.

Martina Barker-Ciganikova: Let Them Own Their Own: Design and Implementation of a Colonial Housing Scheme in Thika, Kenya, 1950–1953, unpublished project manuscript (intended for publication), April 2019.

In Livingstone, there was a parallel figure to J. H. Thomas. His name was R. A. Beaton, who acted as Location Superintendent in Maramba compound and, in later years, as Chief Officer of African Affairs.

National Archives of Zambia (Lusaka) [NAZ], SP 4/3/5: Livingstone Municipality: Native Affairs Committee, 1945; SP 4/1/33: Municipality of Livingstone: Minutes of Native Affairs Sub-Committee Meetings, 1948 and a number of other files with records ranging from 1945 to 1958.

This had been once different with a bureaucrat such as Eric Dutton, who jointly with Ajith Singh, Indian civil servant in both Zanzibar and postcolonial Malawi, managed to direct and design urban spaces in Zanzibar, Nairobi and Lilongwe. In the 1930s – before the provision of African housing took off in Northern Rhodesia – he had entertained »a kind of administrative menage a trois« with Northern Rhodesia’s Governor Hubert Young and his Chief Secretary Charles Dundas.

Garth Myers: Verandahs of Power. Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa, Syracuse 2003, esp. pp. 55–75 on Dutton’s time in Lusaka. The quote is taken from Dutton’s memoir rendered in this spelling on p. 59.

In Lubumbashi, a mining centre in the Katanga region of the Belgian Congo, it is possible to look at District Commissioner Ferdinand Grévisse’s scheme of giving incentive to working class families building their own houses. In an authoritarian setting, never designed to become more liberal, Grévisse fervently promoted the idea of the municipality buying building materials in bulk for Africans who would subsequently construct their homes under close supervision and according to a predefined list of restrictions and obligations on technical issues. The scheme, which can be credited for pushing homeownership possibilities, was intended less to promote the emergence of a new and self-reliant middle class but rather to enframe and welt workers who were expected to remain docile. Against substantial criticism, Grévisse pushed his initiative into a long-lasting project. Africans were excluded from decision-making, but they acted as builders.

Sofie Boonen / Johan Lagae: Ruashi, A Pessac in Congo? On the Design, Inhabitation, and Transformation of a 1950s Neighborhood in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in: Martina Barker-Ciganikova / Kirsten Rüther / Daniela Waldburger (eds.): Accommodating Workers and Urban Residents. The Politics of Housing in (Post)Colonial Africa, Munich 2019 (in print). Again, this is not the space to report on the scheme’s development itself.

In Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, yet again, Hugh Ashton, Director of the newly erected African Administration Department, self-confidently turned the city’s African housing policies into a project that differed substantially from the capital Salisbury’s procedures. Jointly with African staff trained in his department, with trade union leaders and major representatives of the Rent Payers Association, he pushed for the establishment of housing schemes in various becoming suburbs of Bulawayo.

Terence Ranger: Bulawayo Burning. The Social History of a Southern African City 1893–1960, London 2010, pp. 169–180.

The importance of African clerks, interpreters and more unspecialised intermediaries in the facilitation of colonial rule has been noted in other contexts.

Martin Klein: African Participation in Colonial Rule. The Role of Clerks, Interpreters, and Other Intermediaries, in: Benjamin N. Lawrance / Emily Lynn Osborn / Richard L. Roberts (eds.): Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks. African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa, Madison, WISC 2006, pp. 273–285.

For the researcher, this implies to refer to sources outside officially instituted archives. Clues towards grasping the eminence of Africans in such procedures of making formal administration work can sometimes be found in personalised archives, some of which Karin Barber has focussed on. She argues that it is particularly revealing to use such ›hidden‹ archives so as to engage with their guardians’ personality and self-conceptions.

Karin Barber (ed.): Africa’s Hidden Histories. Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, Bloomington 2006.

Colonial Zambia, at that time Northern Rhodesia, did not leave the scope for individual bureaucrats seizing opportunity. Even though the state could have relied on ground-breaking research by the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, these insights that in the academic sphere helped bring about a new understanding of African urban environments only gained acceptance among government planners partially and very slowly. Census methods, for instance, were more accurate with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute as compared to the government even though the technological innovation of the state and the mining companies made them invest in computer technology and calculation machine superior to what the academics relied upon in the 1950s. The lack of recognition was partly due to rising political tensions in the colony and partly a result of rivalries about who was the expert on Africans in urban surroundings.

Schumaker: Africanizing Anthropology, pp. 183–189.

Despite the racist character of rule in Northern Rhodesia, there were a number of liberally minded individuals not immediately aligned with the harsh settler racism of the time. They tried to act as interlocutors for the upcoming new African elite. Quite generally, there was a basic distrust of settlers and local administrators with regard to metropolitan political interferences and staff. The staff from Britain, in turn, often trained at elite institutions such as Oxford or Cambridge, well-paid and endowed with the privileges of expat civil servants, were a mobile force on secondment in the colony, not necessarily for the rest of their lives. Many of them did, in fact, leave Zambia once it became independent.

Pamela Shurmer-Smith: Remnants of Empire. Memory and Northern Rhodesia’s White Diaspora, Lusaka 2015.

I stumbled across one administrative protagonist on the spot who, like some of his colleagues, went to investigate homeownership schemes in neighbouring countries. In the end, however, they were unsuccessful to transplant such initiatives systematically to the country they had come from.

NAZ, LGH 1/16/57: African Housing Application of Elisabethville Housing Scheme, 1954–1956, Northern News on »Congo housing is for ›well-to-do‹«, 27. 9. 1954.

Like in other (British) colonial possessions, there had been a push towards reformed local government in the late 1940s. Lord Hailey’s ideas of the need to prepare for possible independence became a pronounceable option even though the time perspective involved was perhaps less clear.

We are working towards the creation of African States, with African Governments, under forms determined by local conditions, in which European control or guidance will diminish until it reaches a vanishing point. In two cases at least, Kenya and Northern Rhodesia, the picture is complicated by the existence of a European resident community.

Lord William Malcolm Hailey: Native Administration in Africa, in: International Affairs 23/3 (1947), pp. 336–342, at pp. 338–339.

This played out in the politics of colonial Zambia. The first Urban Advisory Councils had been established in 1938 already – albeit with no scope for interference in urban politics. In the 1950s, Urban Advisory Councils were in a position to communicate to their respective Municipal Councils various needs arising in African townships. Their communication, however, was not direct. Each Municipal Council afforded an African Affairs committee in which a European representative of African interests articulated the demands and recommendations of the African Urban Advisory Councils over which he presided. The whole administrative setup was rather indirect and dependent on presumably well-meaning benefactors. Needs were listened to and got acknowledged in the minutes of the meetings. That was how the delays started. The matters were repeated over and again, which may be read as a sign that not much happened on the ground even though the minutes’ language suggests that they were tackled efficiently. Frequently, however, the strategy was to refer the matter to another authority that would also express determination to assess the problem in its totality and propose a solution.

On the level of central government, the scenario changed when in 1946, the territory-wide Federation of African Societies had been formed by Dauti Yamba. This umbrella organisation sought to bring various African traders’ groups, shop assistants’ associations, farmers’ associations and welfare societies into one association. Two years later, it became the Northern Rhodesia Congress, a forerunner of the nationalist political parties.

Mulford: Zambia, pp. 13–17; Andrew Roberts: A History of Zambia, London 1976, p. 204.

The nearest one comes to encountering such a personality was J. R. Brown, Acting Secretary of the Ministry of Local Government and Social Welfare in 1960, and Permanent Secretary of that Ministry in 1963. He and Jonathan Chileshe, member of the emerging African elite in Northern Rhodesia, had investigated housing schemes in Salisbury in 1952 and 1953.

NAZ, LGH 1/16/49: Housing for Eurafricans, 1949–1953, Report of the Committee to Inquire into the African and Eurafrican Housing Position in Lusaka [Nightingale Committee] sent to the Member for Health and Local Government, 5. 5. 1953.

This contribution set out to reflect upon the administrative rules and procedures connected to late colonial urban housing policies in Northern Rhodesia, particularly as they could be read off archival material with regard to Livingstone and Lusaka. It turned out that although the archival record was multifaceted and abundant, it did not immediately reveal the structures of a past and ›modernising‹ colonial bureaucracy. Instead, it became manifest in various fragments and different dimensions.

To approach the complexities of this process, I not only gained insights from ongoing conversations with colleagues occupying themselves in a larger research project with similar questions in respective case studies of other colonial settings but also drew on conversations with archival staff in various places. Their commitment and willingness to establish communicative ties alerted me to the crucial fact that institutions and administrative procedures ›live‹ from staff and specialists, a knowledgeable community seizing opportunities. Such individuals are not able to alter the structures, but they matter significantly with regard to whether a system’s capacities can be tapped. It does not need emphasising that such individuals may trigger ›good‹ as well as bad outcomes of the system.

Between the late 1940s and early 1960s, colonial Zambia lacked such individuals. This partly was a result of the racist and unopen colonial situation, and a general weakness of the state and its administrative apparatus. Successful or at least partly innovative urban housing schemes depended on the initiative of bureaucrats who managed to connect their zeal and wish to mould and frame to African or mediators’ skill and readiness to partake in such ventures.

The gathering of knowledge with regard to the planning, implementation and meaningful unfolding of late colonial housing schemes in African towns therefore takes researchers not just straight away into a set of rules and regulations. It requires us to engage with individuals and personalised group constellations within which such rules and regulations achieved societal impact. While we are engaging with that component, we are permanently asked to adjust our research questions. The adjustment of these questions will keep our mind open.