Anthropology in Northern Rhodesia: Zacharia Johan Mawere and Godfrey Wilson at Broken Hill, 1938-1940

Abstract

In 1993, the anthropologist Roger Sanjek provocatively asserted that there was a “hidden colonialism” in the histories of social anthropology. By this he meant that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anthropology historically relied on local assistants, often from colonised or marginalised communities, to gather data and facilitate research in the field. However, he suggested that these assistants were frequently undervalued, exploited, and excluded from the academic recognition and benefits associated with the research they contributed to. Sanjek argued that these dynamics mirrored colonial relationships, where indigenous peoples were often instrumentalised for the benefit of colonial powers without receiving proper acknowledgement or compensation. In the context of anthropology, this dynamic perpetuated power imbalances and reinforced colonialist structures within the discipline itself. Several scholars have shown how anthropologists wrote out indigenous research assistants and informants in their published work. They did this to boost their ethnographic authority. And yet, the field materials such as diaries and field notes of many such anthropologists are breaming with the presence of these indigenous workers, showing their centrality to these knowledge production processes. This is certainly the case with the British anthropologist Godfrey Wilson who conducted pioneering urban anthropological research in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia between 1938 and 1941. Wilson’s research assistant Zacharia Mawere and a range of African informants did not feature in his published work. Based on in-depth archival research on Godfrey Wilson’s archival materials housed at the African Studies Library of the University of Cape Town, this article examines Zacharia Mawere’s work as Godfrey Wilson’s research assistant at Broken Hill. Mawere not only collected biographic sketches of fellow Africans at Broken Hill, but he also wrote about his siblings and their life histories. These family histories are incomplete not least because the narrations end in 1941 when Wilson left. Nevertheless, they allow us to recover the identity of Mawere and allow us to share his life history as one that needs to be told. In doing this, the article contributes to the growing literature on African research assistants in histories of scientific and anthropological knowledge production in colonial disciplines.