What explains contemporary variations in African legislative institutions – including their strengths and weaknesses? Compared with the more powerful executive branches, legislatures throughout the continent have historically been classified as weak and largely inconsequential to policy-making processes. But, as Ken Ochieng' Opalo suggests here, African legislatures actually serve important roles, and under certain conditions, powerful and independent democratic legislatures can emerge from their autocratic foundations. In this book, Opalo examines the colonial origins of African legislatures, as well as how postcolonial intra-elite politics structured the processes of adapting inherited colonial legislatures to local political contexts and therefore continued legislative development. Through case studies of Kenya and Zambia, Opalo offers a comparative longitudinal study of the evolution of legislative strength and institutionalization as well as a regional survey of legislative development under colonial rule, postcolonial autocratic single-party rule, and multiparty politics throughout Africa.

Legislative Development in Africa: Politics and Postcolonial Legacies

The impact of the Second World War on Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), 1939-1953

Federation to new nationhood : the development of nationalism in northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, 1950-64

This is a study of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe, the political history of which has never received detailed treatment despite its indisputable regional significance between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century. This work differs from most monographic studies of the history of the eastern savanna of Central Africa in its attempt to examine both the pre-colonial and the colonial experiences of the Kazembe kingdom. This approach reflects awareness of the manipulability of historical consciousness and the extent to which oral sources were moulded by the colonial context. The implementation of a flexible set of symbols and institutions of rule was the principal contribution of the rulers of the Kazembe kingdom to the political transformation of the territory to the east of the upper Lualaba River. It enabled them to wield a measure of influence over peripheral societies in both southern Katanga and the plateau to the east of the lower Luapula valley, the heartland of the kingdom and an ecological niche conducive to the development of political complexity and centralization. The disparity between the articulations of political control in the heartland and the periphery, together with the role of long-distance trade and the growing importance of external influences and threats, are essential to understand the decline of the power of the eastern Lunda in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was a much enervated polity which faced British and Belgian empire-builders in the last decade of the century. The kingdom was easily subdued, but the aspirations of its rulers lived on throughout the colonial period. An examination of the interactions between Lunda leaders, British officials and subjects of both shows that the royal family was better placed than the aristocracy to take advantage of the new political circumstances and answer the challenges of economic change and mission education. The furtherance of a new ethno-history was another manifestation of the fundamental adaptability of the royal family.

A political history of the Kingdom of Kazembe, Zambia

Whereas many historians of British anthropology worried themselves about the complicity of anthropologists with colonial rule, and have tried to demonstrate a fundamental contradiction and gap between academic anthropologists and colonial administrators, a study of the professionalization of anthropology in Tanganyika Territory between 1930 and 1960 can show that the ethnographic tradition of Tanganyika indirect rule slowly attuned itself to classical academic anthropology, just as classical academic anthropology increasingly adopted the agenda of indirect rule. The setting up of a Government Sociology department by the Tanganyika government after 1945 epitomized this rapprochement, but also reveals another, rarely studied, type of tension between academics and administrators: their different attitudes towards publicity and secrecy, both in relation to the international critics of the British colonial empire, and in relation to the African audiences that administrators, more than anthropologists, had to reckon with.



Resume

Nombreux sont les historiens de l'anthropologie britannique qui se sont inquiete de la complicite des anthropologues avec la domination coloniale et ont tente de mettre en lumiere une contradiction fondamentale entre anthropologues academiques et administrateurs coloniaux. Une etude portant sur la professionnalisation de l'anthropologie dans le Territoire du Tanganyika entre 1930 et 1960 montre pourtant que la tradition ethnographique du gouvernement indirect au Tanganyika s'est progressivement alignee sur l'anthropologie academique classique, en meme temps que celle-ci se saisissait de plus en plus des themes du gouvernement indirect. La mise en place d'un departement de Sociologie gouvernementale par le gouvernement du Tanganyika apres 1945 marque l'apogee de ce rapprochement mais revele en meme temps un autre type de tension, rarement etudie, entre chercheurs et administrateurs : une attitude differente vis-a-vis de la publicite et du secret, qu'il s'agisse des critiques internationales de l'empire colonial britannique ou des relations avec les cercles d'opinion africains avec lesquels les administrateurs, bien plus que les anthropologues, devaient composer.

Global ‘experts’ and ‘African’ minds: Tanganyika anthropology as public and secret service, 1925‐61

Dauti yamba's contribution to the rise and growth of nationalism in zambia, 1941–1964

In an introduction to a University of Zambia publication entitled A Catalogue of Unpublished Materials in Zambia, published in 1978, J. K. Rennie observed that in Zambia there were “many depositories or collections of private and official papers, the extent of whose holdings are imperfectly known and the state of whose preservation was uncertain.” The Catalogue, which was supposed to be the first in a series and was intended to be a “guide to unpublished primary materials … and an aid to research in history and social sciences,” identified thirty government and non-government depositories located in various parts of Zambia. The wealth and diversity of materials held in these depositories were of immense value and benefit to researchers— academics and students interested in historical studies requiring archival research. Rennie, and others who assisted him in locating and documenting these depositories, made what they called a “humble minor beginning in a much larger enterprise. This paper is intended as a further contribution to this enterprise.In Zambia, one depository that is little known by social science researchers is the archives held by the ruling United National Independence Party (UNIP), located in Freedom House, the party headquarters at the southern end of Cairo Road, which forms part of the Research Bureau of the party. This archives holds important files formerly held by the African National Congress (ANC) formed in 1948 and disbanded in 1973 after the Choma declaration which ushered in the one-party state and of UNIP, formed in 1960, which today is the only political party in Zambia.

The Archives of Zambia's United National Independence Party*

G. K. Gwassa states that research institutes in Africa constitute one critical factor of development in that they have to undertake the twin problems of research which involve the search for and the discovery of the process of social development. They also undertake purposeful functional research by (especially) studying and analyzing internal economic and social conditions in order to determine the characteristics, variables, and criteria for rational economic and political actions within a given country. These have become the functions of many social science research institutions in sub-Saharan Africa. The pioneer in all this is the University of Zambia's Institute for African Studies, the oldest social science-oriented research center in black Africa.The Institute was founded in 1938 as the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute for Social Research (RLISR). In its fifty years of existence the Institute has made contributions which have earned it an international reputation for its research work. The aim of this paper is to assess the contribution of the Institute to social science research in its first fifty years of existence. In undertaking this task, I propose to discuss the topic under three broad areas: foundation, aims, and objectives; publication and research; and problems encountered and their solution.

The University of Zambia's Institute for African Studies and Social Science Research in Central Africa, 1938-1988

It is well known that historians studying preliterate societies, in which oral traditions are the main sources of data used in reconstructing the past, have experienced problems in 'arranging' events in their order of occurrence. To establish chronology, historians have used a number of aids such as mnemonic devices and occurrences of eclipses and droughts which are then correlated to the western calendar. This paper discusses an aid which, used together with oral traditions, can be very useful in reconstructing the early colonial history of Northern Rhodesia between 1910 and 1927. This aid is the tax stamp given to all tax payers during this period. To understand the importance of the tax stamps to chronology, perhaps it is best to begin with a description as to how events were recorded in the precolonial period.

Mwelwa C. Musambachime

Papers

Dauti yamba's contribution to the rise and growth of nationalism in zambia, 1941–1964

The Archives of Zambia's United National Independence Party*

The University of Zambia's Institute for African Studies and Social Science Research in Central Africa, 1938-1988

Northern Rhodesia Tax Stamps as an Aid to Chronology