Education and Social Stratification in Northern Zambia: The Case of the Uyombe

Abstract

This paper explores relationship between formal western style education and developing patterns of social stratification in a community of northern Zambia. It examines manner in which a capitalist productive mode has affected indigenous occupational structures transforming millet cultivators into peasants and wage earners. ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION, SOCIAL STRATIFICATION, ZAMBIA, PEASANTS, CAPITALISM. The purpose of paper is to explore relationship between formal Western-style education and developing patterns of social stratification in Uyombe, a small chiefdom in Northern Zambia, as Yombe were being transformed from shifting millet cultivators into commercial peasant farmers and wage earners. More specifically, paper explores manner in which formal schooling has enabled individuals to enter into modern sector of Zambian society as skilled artisans, clerks, teachers, and civil servants. It describes adjustment of families to new social order and points to fact that educational and occupational achievements have been a gradual incremental process over several generations. Education in widest sense of term is a fundamental facet of all human societies and, thus, should not be narrowly conceived or defined. It occurs under numerous conditions in a multitude of places assuming a variety of forms. Cremin has defined it as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, or sensibilities, as well as any outcomes of that effort (1977: vii). In these terms it is part of historical process that binds individuals to society and imparts to them a shared cultural orientation. From this perspective it is superorganic, entailing intergenerational transmission of an inventory of accumulated sociocultural forms that prepare individuals to perform essential social tasks and assume social positions basic to their particular society. Education is a force for social continuity. It serves to reproduce basic arrangements of a society. In small-scale preliterate societies of type discussed later, indigenous education was informal and highly diffuse; it was intimately related to social institutions and production mode of society. There was education but no formal institutions of learning, since education was embedded in very fabric of social relationships. In Northern Zambia Western-style formal education was both cause and catalyst of social change. It was a markedly intrusive force, a vital element in processes of sociocultural transformation involving subsequent imposition of colonial rule and penetration of capitalism into Central Africa. The