Lisa Cliggett

Survival Strategies of the Elderly in Gwembe Valley, Zambia: Gender, Residence and Kin Networks

Fundamental social and material reproductive activities take place in the domestic setting, especially in subsistence societies. For the elderly in these societies, residential arrangements significantly influence their well being because of the redistribution of resources that occurs within the domestic unit. This article examines the critical issue of how the elderly of Zambias Gwembe Valley organize their residential arrangements. The article also raises the issue of how gender influences elderly mens and womens relationships and support networks with their children and other kin. In the Gwembe Valley men and women employ different strategies in harnessing basic necessities, including their residence, which constitutes the primary setting where people negotiate their needs. Recognition of the variety and subtlety of relationships in the aging process, and the variety of individuals engaged in those relationships, allows for better understanding of the range of support systems and subsistence strategies in non-industrial settings. The analysis presented in this article emerges from the longitudinal Gwembe Tonga Research Project (GTRP) and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in three rural communities during the mid 1990s.

Migration Following Resettlement of the Gwembe Tonga of Zambia: The Consequences for Children's Growth

In 1958, 57,000 Gwembe Tonga people were forcibly relocated by a large-scale hydroelectric development project. The land on which they were resettled was insufficient to sustain their livelihoods, and many later chose to migrate to a frontier zone north and west of the Gwembe Valley to secure additional land for farming. Guided by human adaptability theory, we use child growth as a measure of success of the migration strategy, and find that in 2004, migrant children were growing better than pre-resettlement (1957/58) and post-resettlement (1993) Gwembe Tonga children. In addition, fewer migrant children were stunted and underweight than their earlier counterparts in the Gwembe Valley.

Aging, Agency, and Gwembe Tonga Getting By

Using a political ecology framework to explore the gendered nature of extended family support networks for the elderly, this article reveals the ways that older women and men negotiate their social and material worlds in the context of extreme ecological and economic conditions. The historical processes that shape the social and material worlds in which these elders move include development induced resettlement, postcolonial politics and economics, and catastrophic chronic illness and mortality of children. Drawing from ethnographic research from 1994 through 2008, the article explores how people living in economically and ecologically dire circumstances manage their social and material worlds to the best of their ability.

Adaptive Responses to Environmental and Sociopolitical Change in Southern Zambia

The Gwembe Tonga live in Zambia’s Southern Province, a region of climatic extremes including severe multiyear droughts over the past century, coupled with periods of flooding and pest infestation. This, together with political fluctuations over the last 50 years, has significantly influenced their livelihood choices and ecological impacts, and they have learned to anticipate difficulties beyond local control. The building of the Kariba Dam on the Middle Zambezi River in the late 1950s, initiated by the colonial government in conjunction with the World Bank, resulted in the forced and very unwelcome relocation of the Gwembe Tonga. Almost 50 years after this forced resettlement, which virtually overnight undermined the local livelihood system and resource base, and drastically altered their social world, we find the Gwembe Tonga voluntarily colonizing “frontier” regions in different ecosystems on the plateau above their original Valley home. It is thus possible to examine a long trajectory of adaptation to new ecosystems and look for patterns over time.