First published in 1992. This is a book about ethnicity among the Nkoya people in central western Zambia, and about the historical background out of which that ethnicity is made. It studies in detail the fascinating ways in which ethnicity both creates, and feeds upon, ethno-history. At the same time it assesses the possibility of reconstructing objective historical processes, in that region since the sixteenth century, on the basis primarily of one very extensive source, Rev. Johasaphat Malasha Shimunika’s Likota lya Bankoya, whose production (as a compilation and processing of local oral traditions) is intimately related to contemporary ethnicity. But most of all this is a book about that fundamental, and humble, condition of scholarship: reading.
