Achim von Oppen

THE VILLAGE AS TERRITORY: ENCLOSING LOCALITY IN NORTHWEST ZAMBIA, 1950S TO 1990S

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. 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.

Introduction: Biographies Between Spheres of Empire

ABSTRACT Biographical research offers a promising approach to the study of empire, imperialism and colonialism. The careers and life stories of individuals and generations show particularly clearly the disruptions and constraints, but also the new possibilities and mobilities, that were created by colonial rule. This special issue focuses on practices and experiences of boundary crossing in imperial and colonial history. It explores how ‘ordinary’ individuals and groups navigated between the different imperial spaces and spheres into which they were categorised according to the ideologies and regulations of the well-ordered colonial world. Africa offers particularly interesting cases for studying these issues because, first, it was a field of particularly rigid colonial distinctions and, second, different colonial empires overlapped and competed there with particular intensity. This introduction outlines briefly the relevance of biographical research for new approaches in imperial, colonial and African history, and highlights the major themes of the five articles comprising this special issue. It is argued that these new biographical approaches tell us much not only about life in Africa on the eve of and under colonial rule, but also more generally about both the power and the permeability of imperial domination and of colonial categories.

Introduction – Religious Biography: Transcending Boundaries

Biographies have come to be acknowledged as a genre eminently suited to retrieving microlevel, everyday or subaltern perspectives on wider historical processes, that is, perspectives that tend to defy general categories and transcend established dichotomies. Colonial and postcolonial history, which often challenges problematic categorical distinctions, particularly invites the kind of differentiating and dialogic viewwhich biographies can provide. Life stories of individuals, groups and cohorts show especially clearly the disruptions and constraints caused by colonial and post-colonial rule, and by the boundaries they imposed. At the same time, life stories can be instructive in illustrating how, in personal practice, these boundaries often became porous or fluid, or even triggered new mobilities and continuities which transcended them. For Africa in particular, recent biographical research has shown that personal lives, as processes reconstructed by the researcher but also as narratives (texts) produced by actors themselves, havemuch to tell us about the production of new individual and collective identities in the face of different, changing and often oppressive conditions. Despite this, biography is still a somewhat neglected genre in the historiography of Africa. For a long time, there has been a tendency to privilege either outstanding political leaders or the lives of ‘typical’ representatives of particular social collectivities. Major reference works on African biography still tend to focus on prominent historical actors rather than the making of personal lives in and through history. There are, however, some stimulating new departures in recent biographical research on Africa. A common characteristic of these appears to be a greater interest in the many ways in which African lives, as well as their biographical reconstructions, engage with boundaries of different kinds. This work tends to emphasise more explicitly than before how personal lives have spanned politico-spatial boundaries of all kinds, against the backdrop of the deeply rooted mobilities that characterise the history of the continent. Such biographies also seem to take great pleasure in addressing the transcending of divisions between social, cultural and religious spheres as well as historical periods, i.e. divisions whose rigidity have been emphasised for too long in colonial and even post-colonial studies. These trends were explored in two