The most dangerous moment for a cultural asset is not neglect. It is success. As Kuomboka grows from a Lozi ceremony into a marketed tourism and trade event, Zambia faces a trade-off it has not fully named: the same commercial growth that funds and elevates the ceremony can hollow out its meaning and leave the people who make it possible holding the smallest share of the value. Growth and public value are not automatically aligned. Sometimes they pull in opposite directions.
This is not an argument against commerce. A ceremony that earns nothing eventually struggles to sustain itself, and the visibility that Zambia’s tourism promotion, through channels such as the national tourism platform, helps build is worth having. The argument is for clarity about who wins, who is left out, and what would have to change for growth to raise public value rather than trade it away.
When Scale Overwhelms Meaning
A ritual carries meaning because it is performed for its own reasons, on its own terms. Turn it into a product and the pressures change. The schedule bends toward broadcast slots, the staging bends toward spectacle, and the elements that photograph well are amplified while those that do not are quietly dropped. The ceremony can grow larger and mean less at the same time.
For Kuomboka, whose entire commercial value rests on being authentic, that is not a soft cultural worry – it is a commercial risk. The moment visitors sense a performance staged for them rather than a tradition they were permitted to witness, the asset depreciates. Meaning is the product. Erode it for scale and there is less left to sell.
Winners and the Excluded
Growth produces a distribution, and the distribution is rarely even. The likely winners are those positioned to capture concentrated value: established tour operators, media and sponsorship intermediaries, hospitality businesses with the capital to scale, many of them based outside Western Province. The likely excluded are the diffuse contributors – small craft producers, food vendors, boat-builders, casual workers – whose labour is essential and whose bargaining power is weak.
The pattern is common to cultural economies everywhere: the value concentrates upward and outward, away from the community that is the reason the event exists at all. Naming that plainly is the first honest step. A festival can boom while the floodplain that hosts it barely moves.
The Reforms That Would Change the Split
If the default distribution is unfair, it can be redesigned. Community ownership of parts of the value chain – crafts, food, transport, homestays – keeps income local instead of routing it through intermediaries. Revenue-sharing arrangements tied to media rights and sponsorship give the Barotse Royal Establishment and local structures a contractual stake rather than a ceremonial one. Standards and organisation lift what small producers can charge.
None of this is automatic, and none of it happens without deliberate design and the will to enforce it. The reforms are the mechanism by which growth is made to serve public value rather than override it. Without them, the trade-off resolves itself the easy way – in favour of whoever already holds the capital.
Holding Both
The real question is not whether to commercialise Kuomboka – that decision has effectively been made – but whether Zambia will manage the commercialisation so that ritual meaning and local livelihoods survive it. That requires treating authenticity and community capture as things to be protected by design, not as costs to be absorbed by the community.
Growth can enrich the ceremony or empty it, and the outcome turns on choices being made now, mostly by people who do not live on the floodplain. The test of Kuomboka’s economy is simple to state and hard to pass: does the crowd leave the community richer, or only the ceremony busier.
