Introduction: Material Culture and Consumption Patterns: A Southern African Revolution

Abstract

In the last years before the independence of Zambia and Malawi, the researchers of the renowned Rhodes-Livingstone Institute were contemplating writing a book to be entitled 'The Industrial Revolution in Central Africa'. There are substantial methodological problems in the historical study of African consumption. The study of material culture has tended to be one which exoticises its subject, which is concerned to actively ignore the changes to which we have been pointing. Museum collections do not include mass-produced Chinese enamel bowls, or even three-legged Birmingham cooking pots, despite their evident importance in African material culture. Nor can historians of Africa fall back on the classic European written sources for material culture, such as inventories of property made at someone's death. Rather Africanists have had to rely on ethnographic accounts, with the danger, not found in the reports of the Rhodes-Livingstone institute, that modern things are ignored. Keywords: African material culture; Chinese enamel bowls; classic European written sources