Why and how did the Machona leave their villages? Where did they walk for months in the dangerous savannah wilderness? Read this book to find the positive and negative impact of this migration.

Yizenge Chondoka, Machona: Returned Labor Migrants and Rural Transformation in Chama District, North Eastern Zambia, 1890 -1964, Lusaka: Academic Press, 2007, pp. 125, $14.00, K72,000.00, Paper.
There was a popular song “A Phiri Anabwera Kucoka Kuwalale” (Mr. Phiri Came Back from the City) by Nashil Pitchen that struck a chord among Zambians that played dozens of times per day on radio Zambia in the early 1970s. . The song describes a Mr. Phiri who left the village to look for a job in the far way city. He worked for many uncountable years without communicating with relatives back home. One day, he suddenly returned home alone with an empty suitcase to find the village gone or relocated , (kusama) and his parents were long dead. Mr. Phiri looked down and stared into the sky. No doubt teary eyed, feeling destitute and heart broken, he did not know what to do. The thousands if not millions of people who migrated from all over their villages in Zambia in search of wage employment in distant cities and stayed away for dozens of years were called Machona. In the book: “Machona: Returned Labor Migrants and Rural Transformation in Chama District, North Eastern Zambia, 1890 -1964,” Yizenge Chondoka, who was a history lecturer at the University of Zambia for more than 25 years, conducted ground breaking research using 200 interviews about the lives of Machona among the Senga people in Chama district in North Eastern Zambia. In the ten chapter book, Chondoka describes why and how the Machona left their villages. How in the 1890s they walked for months in the dangerous savannah wilderness to such distant cities as Lusaka, the Copperbelt, Bulawayo and Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) up to Johannesburg and Cape Town in South Africa. He uses maps to trace the Machona routes from Chama in Zambia and the Southern African region.
 The most interesting descriptions are the motivations for migrations, how the families and the kinship headed by women left behind in the village coped, and what the Machona brought back to the village on their return. The Machona brought change to the village. On page 105 and 108, for example, Chondoka lists some of the dozens of items a married man brought back to the village that included 3 children’s print dresses, 5 women’s blouses, 3 blankets, 11 bars of soap, 1 mirror, 3 saucepans. Some Machona brought back bicycles and used the money they brought with them to upgrade village houses so that some of the homes had wooden door frames and windows for the first time. Besides new material possessions, many of the Machona brought new ideas and social changes about different lifestyles, marriage roles, languages, food including tea, bread, and sugar, farming methods, education, politics, religion, and knowledge about the world outside or beyond the village.

Perhaps the most significant conclusions Dr. Chondoka arrives at after analyzing the data he had meticulously collected is that the positive aspects of labor migration or Machona outweighed the negative aspects. Machona benefited the people in Chama district. His conclusions for the first time contradict or debunk the Eurocentric narrative and economic determinism perspective of most of the Zambian history we learned in school; that labor migration initiated by European colonial industries always had an overwhelming negative impact on the village social, economic, and political organization. What is often overlooked in these main stream Eurocentric historical narratives of the Machona or labor migration is the reality that many Zambians may have been motivated by human curiosity. Beyond paying the compulsory colonial hut taxes, many of the Zambians may have been motivated by human drive and desire to explore, investigate, and experience change.Mbr/> It is a possibility that other future researchers of Machona experiences among the Lozi in Western province, the Kaonde or Luvale in the NorthWestern Province, the Tonga in Gwembe Valley, or Lunda in the Luapula Province may yield different results. But this is where other future researchers could carry out further investigations. There may be parallels of the Machona from the 1890s in rural Zambia to the wave of Zambians who left the country in the late 1980s to work in Southern Africa and in the Diaspora abroad. Are we the new Machona? If so, what do we bring back to Zambia when we return? Will we be like A Phiri who returned to the village alone with an empty suitcase, destitute and heartbroken?

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ABOUT REVIEW AUTHOR: Mwizenge S. Tembo obtained his B.A in Sociology and Psychology at University of Zambia in 1976, M.A , Ph. D. at Michigan State University in Sociology in 1987. He was a Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Zambia from 1977 to 1990. During this period he conducted extensive research and field work in rural Zambia particularly in the Eastern and Southern Provinces of the country. Dr. Mwizenge S. Tembo is Professor of Sociology who has taught at Bridgewater College in Virginia in the United States for twenty years.
Dr. Tembo has authored 4 books: Titbits for the Curious (1989), Legends of Africa (1996), The Bridge (Novel) (2005), Zambian Traditional Names (2006). He is spearheading the building of a Zambia Knowledge Bank Libraries: Nkhanga Branch Village Library in Lundazi District in his native country of Zambia in Southern Africa. He is a weekly columnist for the Daily Newsleader Newspaper of Staunton in Virginia in the USA. He is a frequent column contributor to the Daily News-Record of Harrisonburg in Virginia in the USA. He was also a frequent contributor to the Sunday Times of Zambia in the 1980s. He has published at least 100 newspaper columns. He is a freelance photographer who has sold many of his works. He has written over a 100 articles and research papers which he has published on his web page: www.hungerfoculture.com . For more details: www.bridgewater.edu/~mtembo , www.bridgewater.edu/zanoba Dr. Tembo has also published at least 15 scholarly articles, 21 book reviews, and 10 journalistic articles.
He has just signed a contract for the romantic adventure novel “The Bridge” to be published this year by Linus Publication of New York.

 

In the long history of vicious and often deadly racism directed towards blacks by whites, the most hated, despised, anxiety-provoking real or imagined incident was that of sexual intercourse between a white woman and a black man. Whether in colonial Africa, apartheid South Africa, and during centuries of African slavery and post slavery period in the Americas, a mere allegation of sexual intercourse between a white woman and a black man often led to immediate death of the accused black man by lynching. The legacy of this extreme racial bigotry might still exist today among some people. It is sometimes reflected in strong public objections to and disapprovals of marriage between such couples. The public often inflicts hostile and curious public stares at such mixed couples when they walk together down the street.

In “Love In Black and White,” Mark and Gail Mathabane “explore the power of love over prejudice and taboo.” The authors explore the contemporary dynamics of love and marriage between a black man and a white woman. The intriguing twist to the exploration is that the couple uses the development of their own relationship as the foundation for the exploration of interracial marriage.

Mark Mathabane is author of the best-seller “ Kaffir Boy”. He grew up in the racially segregated harsh urban ghettoes of racist South Africa under extreme deprivation and poverty. His early childhood memories are of seeing his parents humiliated by white police raids at four in the morning in his ghetto shack to enforce apartheid Pass Laws.

Gail came from an opposite background. She is white and grew up in some of the most exclusively white Mid-Western suburbs of the United States. When the two most unlikely individuals met in college, they fell in love. The book is an inspiring saga of their love, the anguish and struggle against public and family disapproval, marriage, and devotion to each other and their continuing battle against racial prejudice and taboo. As a bonus, the authors at the end of the book explore mixed race couples in general and societal prejudice against them.

The book is a very refreshing and valuable perspective on the rather negatively

stereotyped marriages between white women and black men. The book debunks the traditional negative and for a long time racist psychoanalytic perspectives of such marriages. For example, Gail exposes the traditional rather widely accepted views about such marriages and expresses her frustration.

“So-called experts on interracial relationships had a plethora of absurd theories and explanations about white-black man marriages. The woman was too fat and ugly to get a white man, was acting out against a racist parent, had already been ostracized by white society, or had such low self-esteem that she felt like trash that belonged in a black ghetto.

The black man was denying his skin color attempting to be white. He was trying to avenge himself against white oppression by defiling a white woman. The children of such mixed up marriages suffered the cruel fate of being caught, trapped between two worlds, rejected by both races, traumatized by a perpetual identity crisis. Anger and disgust made me slam shut each book I read. Where was the human story? Why were mixed couples constantly analyzed? When will they finally talk openly about whom they really are and what they truly feel?” (p. 116)

Gail and Mark Mathabane contend and reconcile with many contradictory and controversial issues. They express views on children of mixed race being forced to choose between being white or black, stresses of a mixed couple adjusting to public American celebrity life especially after the popularity of the book “Kaffir Boy”, racially mixed marriages in South Africa and much more.

This book adds a very valuable and unique perspective on interracial marriages especially between white women and black men. Because of its largely non-academic approach, the book is able to effectively persuade the reader to reexamine the traditional prejudices and stereotypes that seem to be so deeply entrenched in society. The book really convinces the reader that interracial couples are just normal humans who fall in love for normal reasons and not for some deep sordid ulterior motive requiring deep and complex psychoanalysis. Interracial couples though have to fight against so much more just to maintain their marriage and family.

I strongly recommend this book for readers of all races. The book does not preach against racism and at best it will give you an intriguing peek into what may really go on in those interracial couples’ minds and relationships. This book is also suitable as a supplementary text for contemporary racial and ethnic studies, studies of the family, and psychology of love and intimacy, modem gender studies, and cross-cultural studies.

*****Mark and Gatl Mathabane. Love In Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo, New York: HarpetCollins Publishers. 1992. 262 pp. 20 US dollars, Hardcover.