Institute for History Annual Report 2010 - O - Universiteit Leiden

Institute for History
exploitation with a view to reinstating Africans as
independent economic agents. It thereby intends
to avoid the obfuscation of the full range of
Central African peoples’ social experiences which
has so often marred materialist interpretations of
the region’s history because they portray rural
Africans as mere pawns in the impersonal clash
between capital and organized labour.
The main planks of this project are, first, the
investigation of the history of firearms in history
of Central Africa since around 1800, which is the
task of the Post-doc within the project, Dr.
Giacomo Macola, and secondly, the Ph.D. project
of Ms Iva Peša on the social and economic history
of Mwinilunga, a district in the far north-west of
Zambia, which is concentrating on the changes
associated with, first, the ending of the longdistance
caravan trade and, secondly, the opening
of new labour and product markets in the
copperbelts. Her work is based on a combination
of archival research in Great Britain and Zambia
with extensive fieldwork and the collection of oral
history in Mwinilunga itself. In both cases there
has been significant progress. In addition, there
are a number of Zambian, Congolese and other
scholars associated with the project, who met in
Lusaka in July 2009 to discuss the development of
the project, as associated researchers.
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