Nachituti’s Gift: economy, society, and environment in Central Africa (review)

Fisheries have often been taken to represent the epitome of Hardin’s thesis ‘the tragedy of the commons’. For fishermen, and women, the need to protect fish stocks for future utilization is undermined by the difficulty of ensuring that one person’s prudence is not in vain, where others simply exploit for immediate gain. Conventional responses to this dilemma suggest that only the imposition of private property rights can prevent ‘the inexorable logic’ (p. 6) of this ‘tragedy’ unfolding, but in open waters such rights are difficult to enforce, particularly on the geographical peripheries of weak colonial or post-colonial states. Some writers have challenged the assumptions of such arguments, defending the commons from a welfare perspective, and arguing that rarely, in fact, has ‘open access’ to communal resources actually existed; normally informal systems of management and access prevented environmental degradation. It is argued that it was the colonial imposition of inappropriate and authoritarian measures of control, and an accompanying capitalist ‘privatization of nature’, which exposed communal resources to environmentally degrading exploitation. But if the perspective of ‘tragedy of the commons’ theorists centred on essentialized assumptions of economic utilitarianism, then their opponents have sometimes stood accused of essentializing, and indeed romanticizing, ahistorical notions of indigenous natural resource management.

Entering into this affray with great panache, and thorough, sympathetic research, is Gordon’s excellent historical and ethnographic study of fisheries in the Luapula Valley and Lake Mweru, on the boundary of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Exploring the related themes of tenure, wealth and environment, Gordon’s study illustrates, in his words, ‘how particular industries based on natural commodities with distinct biological qualities affected patterns of ownership and wealth and held wide-ranging political and social implications’ (p. 5) in the colonial and post-colonial contexts of this border region. Bringing anthropology’s cultural and social sensitivity to the more material concerns of scholars of political economy, and vice versa, this study is situated amidst a growing resurgence of academic interest in the complex interplay of environment, economy, politics, culture and society, whilst simultaneously offering a profoundly empirical study of these inland fisheries in Zambia and the DRC. Overturning conventional notions of economic development, which propose a simple progression from wealth in people to wealth in money or commodities, Gordon describes how, in Mweru-Luapula, fishermen, traders and entrepreneurs have continued ‘to invest in a combination of human networks and capital resources appropriate to their social, economic and environmental worlds’ (p. 202). He concludes that ‘there is no reason to expect political economies based on investments in social relationships to disappear with economic development and the spread of commercial exchange-based economies, nor will forms of title become more clearly delineated’ (p. 202). Therefore, he suggests, neither secure rights to resources, nor increased investments in monetary forms of wealth, are prerequisite for economic development, nor are they its necessary outcome (p. 202).

The book is split into two parts, each containing three chapters. The first three chapters focus on tenure and economics in the changing political contexts of the move from pre-colonial polities to the different colonial states of Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo. Chapter 1 carries the title of the book: Nachituti’s gift refers to particular oral traditions that relay a complex history of encounters, negotiations and reciprocal relations between conquering clans who became ‘rulers of people’ and autochthonous clans who were the recognized ‘owners of the land and lagoons’. Picking up the opportunity offered by the Nachituti narrative ‘to explore the relationship between narrative and social agency’ (p. 29), Gordon discusses how this complex history of relations between the conquering Mwata Kazembe and Nachituti’s people (autochthonous clans generically labelled ‘Shila’) are remembered and retold in the context of changing environmental, economic and political circumstances. The story being told will be familiar to everyone who has ever looked at...