A subsistence society under pressure: the Bemba of northern Zambia

Abstract

Opening ParagraphThe research upon which this article is based was carried out over a period of four months in the Northern and Luapula Provinces of Zambia. Before that, I spent two years working in the area as an agricultural officer. One of the villages described in the article is situated on the western shore of Lake Bangweulu, the other 20 km south of Kasama, the major city of Northern Province, the homeland of the Bemba (Fig. 1). The area is almost exclusively devoted to chitemene shifting cultivation, an agricultural system where crops are grown in the ash from burning the collected, stacked branches that have been lopped and chopped from an pressure, vegetation is now chopped before it is fully regenerated, and the system seems to be starting to break down. A major task during my field stay was to describe the ecological (Stromgaard, 1984a) and economic (Stromgaard, 1984b) aspects of this change, but it soon became apparent that subsistence activity and social structure deeply influenced the village's economic activities.