Rethinking African Politics

A History of Opposition in Zambia

Miles Larmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138251144
• eBook ISBN: 9781317064411
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

In 1964 Kenneth Kaunda and his United National Independence Party (UNIP) government established the nation of Zambia in the former British colony of Northern Rhodesia. In parallel with many other newly independent countries in Africa this process of decolonisation created a wave of optimism regarding humanity's capacity to overcome oppression and poverty. Yet, as this study shows, in Zambia as in many other countries, the legacy of colonialism created obstacles that proved difficult to overcome. Within a short space of time democratisation and development was replaced by economic stagnation, political authoritarianism, corruption and ethnic and political conflict. To better understand this process, Dr Larmer explores UNIP's political ideology and the strategies it employed to retain a grip on government. He shows that despite the party's claim that it adhered to an authentically African model of consensual and communitarian decision-making, it was never a truly nationally representative body. Whereas in long-established Western societies unevenness in support was accepted as a legitimate basis for party political difference, in Zambia this was regarded as a threat to the fragile bindings of the young nation state, and as such had to be denied and repressed. This led to the declaration of a one-party state, presented as the logical expression of UNIP supremacy but it was in fact a reflection of its weakening grip on power. Through case studies of opposition political and social movements rooted in these differences, the book demonstrates that UNIP's control of the new nation-state was partial, uneven and consistently prone to challenge. Alongside this, the study also re-examines Zambia's role in the regional liberation struggles, providing valuable new evidence of the country's complex relations with Apartheid-era South Africa and the relationship between internal and external opposition, shaped by the context of regional liberation movements and the Cold War. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, Dr Larmer offers a ground-breaking analysis of post-colonial political history which helps explain the challenges facing contemporary African polities.

CHAPTER 1
Becoming Zambia – UNIP and the transition to independence in Northern Rhodesia, 1952–1964

Introduction

The emergence of Zambia as an idea of nationhood in the British colony of Northern Rhodesia is a story that has been told many times by journalists, politicians and academics.1 Indeed, it is not only the dominant narrative of Zambian history as a subject of study; it also provides the foundational myth of the political and economic development of the ‘nation’ from 1964 onwards. Out of the fragmented, disparate societies residing in a arbitrarily defined territory, the borders of which were established in a series of opportunistic encounters and conflicts between African leaders and colonial officials, a new sense of belonging supposedly emerged out of the steady acceleration of physical migration, social and cultural integration and economic development, within both the territory itself and with the wider world.

As these processes gathered pace during and immediately after World War Two, a greater urgency was given to the self-conscious development of a sense of national identity, with a growing awareness – first, amongst African ‘modernising’ elites, and then via them, the wider African population – that, as elsewhere in the late-colonial world, adoption of the unit of the nation as the basis of political expression was key to the achievement of indigenous political advancement. By the 1950s, the increasing adoption of tactics of mass activism, coupled with the growing international illegitimacy of formal imperial rule and the retreat of declining European powers from what had become colonial burdens in Africa, led to the establishment of new African nationalist parties, led by charismatic and intelligent men who were perceived as spokespersons for their territories and to whom fell the responsibility of leading their emergent countries into a state of national independence. In Zambia, this task fell initially to the ANC, led by Harry Nkumbula and then to UNIP and its leader, Kenneth Kaunda.

As noted in the Introduction to this volume, historians of Africa have now challenged these narratives of national belonging and unity that dominated the literature on late-colonial Africa produced in the 1960s and early 1970s. Divisions within nationalist movements, the considerable gap between nationalist leaders and more subaltern sections of their movements, the impact of cultural, geographical and socio-economic differences within African territories and other factors have all demonstrated the extent to which both this sense of proto-national identification and the authority of nationalist movements to speak for their peoples were heavily circumscribed.2 There has, however, been no systematic attempt to revisit this period of Zambian history in order to reassess the basic facts of Northern Rhodesian nationalism within a postcolonial framework. The edited volume One Zambia, Many Histories provided a first major step towards an understanding of the contested nature of Zambian nationalism.3 Giacomo Macola’s recent biographical study of Harry Nkumbula was a decisive step forward in this regard, establishing beyond reasonable doubt the ‘forgotten fractiousness of Zambian nationalism’.4 Because Macola has provided authoritative analysis of the role of Nkumbula and the ANC in both the colonial and post-colonial period, this study provides only limited analysis of this particular political formation and concentrates instead on the less well-explored dimensions of conflict within UNIP itself.

This chapter builds upon Macola’s work in its analysis of the contested nature of UNIP nationalism in the run-up to independence in 1964. Far from giving unified expression to some underlying sense of national belonging, UNIP was only ever representative of particular strands in nationalist thought, and articulated only some Zambians’ vision of national independence. Its accession to power was the result of a series of historical contingencies – sometimes reflecting calculating, skilful and courageous leadership, but at least as often resulting from the largely unmanaged actions of the party’s local official and rank-and-file supporters in its heartland areas, over which the leadership lacked control and about which they were decidedly ambivalent. Similarly, Kaunda’s accession to the party’s leadership and subsequently to the national presidency reflected not only his substantial internal support, but also his image as a particularly unifying and moderate figure to external agencies and to the party itself. This facade of unity was intentionally papered over the party’s profound cracks, but was most clearly exposed in the decisive period of the nationalist struggle in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The ‘Cha Cha Cha’ unrest of mid-1961, which forced decisive constitutional concessions by the colonial authorities, took place entirely outside the control of the UNIP leadership, which was itself divided in its reaction to this violent display of nationalist militancy. Just as Zambians had no singular idea of the nation, so UNIP was itself divided by class, region and education, as well as over strategy and tactics. The party only briefly sublimated its internal differences to ensure the successful transition to independence; alternative forces and visions (within and without the party) remained in the wings, ready to re-emerge in the post-independence period in ways which ultimately led to its division and to the declaration of a one-party state (see Chapter 2).

The fragmented basis of national unity

A previous generation of historians identified the extent to which the birth of self-consciously nationalist organisations in Northern Rhodesia occurred relatively late and only in direct response to the challenges of increasingly direct and repressive settler rule, particularly in the form of the Central African Federation in the early 1950s.5 Before this time there was little sense of a ‘Northern Rhodesian’ or ‘Zambian’ identity widely shared by the people of the territory. Indeed, the particular shape of Northern Rhodesia was itself the result of a relatively incoherent set of colonial initiatives and African responses that stemmed from broader imperial rivalries and opportunities, rather than any self-conscious attempt to construct a workable colony. As the late nineteenth-century ‘Scramble for Africa’ was realised on the ground in the effective occupation of central-southern Africa, the borders of Northern Rhodesia were largely constructed from without and by default. The British South Africa Company (BSAC) territories of North-Western and North-Eastern Rhodesia, which merged in 1911 to become Northern Rhodesia, were a relative afterthought in comparison to Cecil Rhodes’ priority: to secure control of the mythical ‘Second Rand’ in Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe). Longstanding Portuguese claims over central Africa were defeated at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, but the borders of its colonies, Mozambique and Angola, established the eastern and western boundaries of Northern Rhodesia in a lengthy process involving both negotiation and default. Belgian initiative was largely responsible for the peculiar contours of the northern border; the Congo Free State (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo) thereby secured territories rich in mineral resources in what became known as Katanga. Substantial mineral discoveries were only made in Northern Rhodesia some decades later.

The territorial borders drawn by colonialists cut through pre-existing African polities but did not remove the relevance of those polities to colonised Africans. The borders of Northern Rhodesia enclosed a diverse range of African societies – some were long-established kingdoms, others highly decentralised societies with no central authority. The legal authority of colonial rule rested in large part on dubious agreements signed with African leaders. The most important in this regard was signed by the Litunga, the king of Barotseland, with Rhodes’ British South Africa Company in 1890, which laid claim to wide swathes of land that did not effectively fall under his authority, most particularly the future Copperbelt. The heterogeneous character of the territory was not significantly reduced by the colonial administration – the relative weakness of governance under both the BSAC and subsequently (from 1923) direct British colonial rule, the utilisation of indirect rule via African chiefs and the limited economic development of the territory before World War Two all militated against the rapid development of a sense of proto-national identity.

The initially backward state of the colonial economy, coupled with the demands made on Africans to pay taxes, necessitated that many African males engaged in migrant labour outside Northern Rhodesia, primarily in the mines of South Africa and the Belgian Congo, as well as the mines and farms of Southern Rhodesia. The extent of migrant labour was, however, highly uneven, dependent as it was on the differential capacity of Northern Rhodesia’s African societies to pay taxes by other methods. In Southern Province, many Tonga-speaking peoples benefited from their relatively fertile land and entrepreneurial orientation to sell agricultural produce to the growing urban market. On the Copperbelt, which grew rapidly from the late 1930s onwards, local Lamba communities avoided dangerous mine labour by similar means. In contrast, northern Bemba-speaking societies, faced with relatively poor land and few economic alternatives, were drawn into migrant labour at an early stage, first across the border to the mines of the Belgian Congo, and then drawing on this experience to become the largest migrant group on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, with many settling their families there once this was allowed. Barotseland, a major indigenous economic power in the region in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, also had no alternative but to send many of its subjects to work in South Africa under the auspices of the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WENELA). Many of these participated in labour-related politics and significant social movements in the territories in which they worked; some brought political skills and nationalist ideas home with them when they returned. However, both the continued salience of cross-border cultural and socio-economic allegiances and the centrality of labour migration to the political economy of many of its African societies militated against the development of a distinctly Northern Rhodesian sense of identity.

Early African political organisation

The belated but rapid development of the copper mining industry from the late 1920s was an important spur to African self-organisation and political radicalisation. The opening of a series of large-scale copper mines by multinational mining corporations led to the rapid urbanisation of the new Copperbelt, initially to support thousands of new white skilled mineworkers and their families, with African migrants housed in camps and forced to return to their rural areas of origin at the end of their contracts. This South African-style migrant labour system ultimately proved unsustainable and, by the late 1940s, tens of thousands of Africans were permitted to settle in rapidly growing Copperbelt towns. These towns became a primary base for alternative forms of indigenous political organisation to the chiefly authorities, whose effective authority was eroded by their subordinate integration into the colonial system as de facto civil servants.

The first overt expression of ‘modern’ African political organisation was the creation of welfare societies, on the Copperbelt and elsewhere, by a small number of African elite men, most of whom had received their education in mission stations. These organisations generally sought to advance the position of educated Africans within colonial society – for example, to increase educational opportunities and to reduce or remove discriminatory legislati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Becoming Zambia – UNIP and the transition to independence in Northern Rhodesia, 1952–1964
• 2 UNIP Rule and Division in Zambia’s First Republic, 1964–1973
• 3 Disunity under the One-party State, 1973–1979
• 4 The Mushala Rebellion
• 5 Intellectual Elites and the 1980 Coup Attempt
• 6 ‘We Have to Think for Other People’: Zambia and South Africa
• 7 The State, Civil Society and Social Movements: Church and Labour in Post-colonial Zambia
• Epilogue: After UNIP: Political Change and Continuity in Zambia’s Third Republic, 1991–2010
• Conclusion: Towards a History of Post-colonial Politics in Africa
• Bibliography
• Index