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

Abstract This article deals with the question of how issues of late colonial housing in Zambia were passed through various segments and between various layers of an encompassing colonial administration. It is equally about the question how the researcher retraces that process of administering housing. The main argument is that a discourse clad in techno-scientific language in the colonial metropole assumed undertones of development and morality in the colony. The text pays particular attention to the bureaucratic individuals seizing opportunities – often in cooperation with one or two colleagues, or across racial dividing lines. Furthermore, the contribution ponders on the significance of the researcher's encounters with both archival staff in London and Lusaka as through these interactions initial research agendas become redirected and adjusted.


Prelude: In Partly Disclosure
In the earlier stages of my career, I worked on

Introduction
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. 3 The knowledge of additional archives in Brussels or Nairobi came to the fore while my understanding of these two state archives  This is not to deny that the bureaucratic system operated within the confines of codes of conduct and guidelineswhich 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 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. 14

Interlude: Personal Communications in Archival Settings
»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.  In the National Archives in Kew, I always carried a colourful notepad with me for taking handwritten notes.
After the second or third day, whenever in the morning I entered the large reading room through the turnstile and had my belongings checked by the personnel, there was an extremely solicitous elderly employee, whose name I never got to know, but who commented with a regularity that could soon be foreseen, »Oh,  In such a case, other facets of the encounter form prominent part of the picture -even though they do not abrogate the deeply ingrained colonial inequality and sense of exclusion breathing in this building.

Bureaucratic Individuals Seizing Opportunities
The material one encounters in the National Archives According to this study, ›management‹ was anything but an anonymous procedure. 58