Negotiating sex and gender in Urban Zambia

Many studies of modern African towns are concerned with the changing relationships of women and men as they engage in the daily struggle to make a living. I Similar struggles took place during the coloinial era, and pre-colonial African societies probably also experienced conflict along gender lines. But there is no reason to assume that conflicts between men and women on the one hand, and between ordinary people and state authorities on the other hand, either took the same form through time or can be attributed to the same causes through time. The available studies of colonial and post-colonial Zambia invite a preliminary exploration of the changing nature of such conflicts. The specific concerns of this article are prompted by observations made during two periods of anthropological field research in a low-income settlement on Lusaka's outskirts, first in 1971 -72 and again in 1981.2 In the sense that malefemale relations in the domestic domain were strained and that men dominated the ranks of the wage-employed, my observations paralleled those made by others in urban studies undertaken during the colonial period. But parallel observations need not be due to the same combination of factors. Although its aim is largely empirical and descriptive, this article seeks to explain how low-income women and men in Zambia have made a living in changing economic and political circumstances. In order to answer the question of how livelihoods are made, it is necessary to explore issues of sex and gender which overlap with those of class in complex ways. At stake in this article is their imprint, specifically at the urban end, on the evolving structure of Zambian society, and the kinds of factors which have brought it about. Curiously enough, this issue was ignored by the contributors to an Edinburgh