Anatomy of economic underdevelopment of Lyaluyi area, 1890-1924

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Date
2011-09-06
Authors
Kamayoyo, Njekwa
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Abstract
As this dissertation includes a preface, what prompted the development of this study appears in the preface. The abstract briefly focuses attention on the following content. This study is a contribution to the current debate on underdevelopment. The area under review is Lyaluyi in the western province of Zambia. The study amplifies the dominant role of the British South African company (BSAC) capitalist policies and practices in firmly planting the roots of economic underdevelopment in Lyaluyi area in particular, and Bulozi as a whole. The focal point of the BSAC’s strategy of economic underdevelopment was that it had set out to frustrate the progress of any sector of the Malozi economy which threatened to diminish the role of Bulozi as a source of cheap and regular labour for capitalist economic enterprises, particularly in Southern Rhodesia (SR) during the first quarter of the 20th century.The study highlights how the monetary system ruined the Malozi economy and led it to paths that no longer served its own internal reproduction, but fulfilled the needs of capitalism. Cattle keeping (pivot of Malozi economy) was deliberately and seriously dislocated. Agricultural and technological development was also consciously misdirected and retarded. There were also price and trade manipulations. Furthermore, double tax in the same year for recruited migrants, while they were predominantly working in SR and when they returned to Bulozi; and tax payment for the so called concubines, contributed considerably to the economic misery and underdevelopment of Lyaluyi area, Bulozi and Zambia as a whole. Worse still, the so called Malozi Trust Fund (MTF) was essentially for paying the salaries and pensions of the BSAC European functionaries. Capitalist education natural served the economic and ideological interests of capitalism. For instance, the so-called Barotse national School (BNS) was a skillful extension of the Public works Department. Essentially the BNS produced allies and tools of a capitalist cause who graduated as a misfit in the dynamics of the Malozi society.The central argument of the study is that the BSAC managed unequivocally, to change the direction of the Malozi society from that society’s own objectives and goals to those of the company. And once this was done, the path of distorted, irrelevant and superficial development was firmly based. This is the essence of underdevelopment. This study has another objective. It develops a methodology (positive romanticism) which demonstrates that romanticism and nostalgia are not only morale-booster or escapism; they may be used as positive tools of development while, at the same time,the victims of negative romanticism and nostalgias are helped to drill out that negative aspect of their life. The intimate relationship between methodology, ideology and nationalism is stressed and the so-called academic neutrality is scoffed at. Antagonistic ideologies and classes do not produce neutral scholars anywhere. This is essentially interpretative, based on documentary and oral data. The foremost contribution of this study is to expose the historical capitalist conspiracy against sorghum agriculture in Lyaluyi area. Secondly, this study amplifies capitalist roots of irrelevant education in Lyaluyi area, with particular reference to the misdirection and retardation of technological development. Thirdly, the study highlights the negative aspects of price and trade mechanism so that the party and its Government may pull up its socks; while working against the current adverse effects of price and trade intricacies. Fourthly, this study effectively argues in favour of developing history for decolonization or liberalization of the mind rather than domestication of the mind. A liberated mind develops viable strategies for social development of which economic development is a facet.An important point emerges from the implications of this study. Capitalist BSAC; capitalist neo-colonialist policies, economics and scholarship (to mention only a few) are all birds of the same feathers: exploitative capitalist ideology. To regard neo-colonialist scholarship as an exception is to be a victim of education for self-defeat. A real fight against neo-colonialist social formation does not exclude neo-colonialist scholarship and its allies and tools. Institutionalized capitalist (stiff and demoralized) competition, elimination, monopoly and self-preservation is not confined to the field of neo-colonialist economics.
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Keywords
Economic Development- -Lyaluyi , Developing countries- -Economic conditions - -Zambia
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