The Economics of Social Organization in an Ethnic Border Zone: The Goba (Northern Shona) of the Zambezi Valley

Abstract

The Goba of the Zambezi Valley in South-Central Africa are a lowland group of Bantu speakers inhabiting a portion of the border zone between Zambia and the former British colony of Southern Rhodesia. They are an outlying northern division of the socalled Shona, a major group of patrilineal southern Bantu. Most of the Shona peoples inhabit the highlands of Southern Rhodesia, where conditions are favorable fc}r cattle raising. Beginning some hundreds of years ago, and continuing on a reduced scale into modern times, small groups of Shona have been migrating northward into the harsh Zambezi Valley, where ecological conditions are much poorer than on the neighboring highlands and cattle raising is not possible. On the Zambian highlands just northwest of the Goba live the Plateau Tonga, an important matrilineal group comprising part of the so-called matrilineal belt of Central African peoples. This paper describes Goba so cial organization as it has developed following their move northward to a territory between these major matrilineal and patrilineal ethniclblocks. Goba social organizaiion is an adaptation to their lack of cattle and represents an interesting transitional form between the main body of patrilineal Shona to the south and the matrilineal Tonga to the north. An unbroken and logical continuum of social forms exists between these patrilineal and matrilineal extremes) and small groups of migrating Shona appear to have been traversing this continuum for a substantial period of time.