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ix preface and acknowledgments When I first arrived in Mweru-Luapula, the fertile floodplains, rivers, and lakes that form part of the political boundary between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I planned to investigate how chiefs, businesspeople, and politicians had secured power and profit during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In graduate school, after reading the work of scholars like Janet MacGaffey, Jane Guyer, and Sara Berry, I had decided to study informal political and economic networks that rested on unrecorded or illicit economic activities. It took more than a few visits to the fish markets to change my mind. While bargaining over my evening meal, I practiced my Bemba language skills by asking about the fishery. Who caught the fish? Where were different species found? How were they caught, processed, and traded? As some of my questions were answered, I came to realize how crucial the fishery was to the subsistence and commercial economy of the Luapula Valley—it seemed to be the full-time occupation of nearly one-quarter of those who lived in the densely populated valley and a significant source of revenue and food for all. A study of the fishery posed questions key to understanding central Africa’s political economy, most notably how corporate groups controlled access to scarce resources and translated this access into forms of wealth. I was uncertain about this realignment of interests. A pioneer in the writing of Luapula’s history, Mwelwa C. Musambachime, had already written an excellent doctoral dissertation about the rise of the fishery during the colonial period. Perhaps an investigation of a fishery put too literal an interpretation on Jean-François Bayart’s “politics of the belly”? Yet if, as the popular African saying goes, a goat eats where he is tethered , my food for thought—and my food!—was Luapula’s fish. Patterns of wealth, patronage, and political power in Luapula revolved around the fishery; fish are to Luapula what cocoa is to parts of West Africa. The questions I had asked about rural elites in the abstract became grounded in the fishery. How had forms of ownership and control in the fishery been transformed during the colonial period? What cultural underpinnings helped to define and legitimize those who controlled access to the fishery? Had the insertion of the fishery into a colonial market economy in the hinterland of central Africa’s Copperbelt transformed older and more established meanings and manifestations of wealth, community, and identity? The fishery also rekindled an older interest that had been put on the back burner while I planned my doctoral research—environmental history , the changing relationships between people and natural resources. Before fish are hauled out of the river and lake, they have biological features not necessarily connected to human society. Why do some fish prosper in certain areas and not others? What are the feeding and breeding patterns of the fish? I would discover that such breeding and feeding habits held economic, social, and political implications. When economy and ecology were considered together, a more complete picture of historical change would emerge. While I would have to search farther than the fish markets for answers , source material for a contested arena of activity crucial to both everyday welfare and extraordinary wealth was not difficult to come by. The collection of oral testimony and songs formed a central component of my research. Over a fifteen-month period, between June 1997 and July 1998, I interviewed more than one hundred individuals in MweruLuapula , Lusaka, and Lubumbashi. I followed up this research with interviews in Luapula in December 2000 and January 2001 and in June and July 2002. I had learned rudimentary Bemba at the Ilondola mission near Chinsali (Zambia); however, to minimize errors in translation most of the interviews conducted in Bemba were transcribed with the help of a research assistant into either English or French. Of equal importance to formal interviews was participant observation; eating fish, trying my hand at catching them, and casual conversations with fishers and traders. There is a vast collection of written material generated over the last century by officials concerned with the fishery. I consulted the reports and correspondence of several colonial government departments at the National Archives in Lusaka, the Special Collections at the University of Zambia, the Public Record Office in London, and the Archives Africaines in Brussels. Postcolonial fisheries departments and aid agencies have continued to produce a number of reports not...

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