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Citation for published version
Macola, Giacomo (2006) “It Means as If We Are Excluded from the Good Freedom”: Thwarted
Expectations of Independence in the Luapula Province of Zambia, 1964-1967. Journal of African
History, 47 (1). pp. 43-56. ISSN 0021-8537.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853705000848
Link to record in KAR
https://kar.kent.ac.uk/7559/
Document Version
UNSPECIFIED
1
‘IT MEANS AS IF WE ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE GOOD FREEDOM’: THWARTED
EXPECTATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE LUAPULA PROVINCE OF ZAMBIA,
1964-1966
*
BY GIACOMO MACOLA
Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge
ABSTRACT: Based on a close reading of new archival material, this article makes a case for
the adoption of an empirical, ‘sub-systemic’ approach to the study of nationalist and post-
colonial politics in Zambia. By exploring the notion of popular ‘expectations of
independence’ to a much greater degree than did previous studies, the paper contends that the
extent of UNIP’s political hegemony in the immediate post-independence era has been
grossly overrated – even in a traditional rural stronghold of the party and during a favourable
economic cycle. In the second part of the paper, the diplomatic and ethnic manoeuvres of the
ruler of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe are set against a background of increasing
popular disillusionment with the performance of the independent government.
KEY WORDS: Central Africa, Zambia, Congo, ethnicity, nationalism, independence, post-
colonial.
*
Earlier versions of this article were presented to Africanist seminars in Cambridge (Nov. 2004) and Leiden
(Mar. 2005). Participants are to be thanked for their stimulating comments and critical remarks. The author is
also indebted to Joanna Lewis for taking the time (and trouble) to go through the paper and, more importantly,
for making his transition from Lusaka to Cambridge easier to cope with.
2
INTRODUCTION
Owing to the dearth of primary sources available for study and to shifting historiographical
trends and fashions, present-day historians of south-central Africa have proved reluctant to
engage with Zambia’s nationalist and post-colonial trajectories.
1
This paper ought to be seen
as a modest contribution to the rectification of this scholarly neglect.
2
As elsewhere in Africa,
the gap left open by historians in the 1970s and 1980s was plugged by political scientists
whose principal concern was the construction of ‘macro-political theory relevant to politics in
all places and all times by the application to empirical cases of such overarching notions as
“modernization”.’
3
But the adoption of what Bratton calls the ‘viewpoint of the centre’ came
at a cost, for it frequently provided the unwitting excuse for overlooking the real, lived
experiences of nationalist militants and other low-level political actors. However
sophisticated, nation-wide studies of major structural and political dynamics have taught us
very little about popular appraisals of nationalism and the ultimate meaning of independence
for the people who played a (more or less) active role in bringing this political transformation
1
Forty years after their compilation, R.I. Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The Making of
Malawi and Zambia, 1873-1964 (Cambridge [Mass.], 1965), and D.C. Mulford, Zambia: The Politics of
Independence, 1957-1964 (Oxford, 1967) remain the most comprehensive analyses of Zambian nationalism. On
the atrophied state of the historiography of post-colonial Africa as a whole, see S. Ellis, ‘Writing histories of
contemporary Africa’, Journal of African History, 43 (2002), 1-26, esp. 8.
2
For another recent step in the right direction, see M. Larmer, ‘Zambia’s mineworkers and political change,
1964-1991’(Ph.D. thesis, University of Sheffield, 2004).
3
M. Bratton, The Local Politics of Rural Development: Peasant and Party-State in Zambia (Hanover and
London, 1980), 10.
3
into being.
4
With the notable exceptions of Bates and Bratton – by whose perspectives this
paper is informed
5
– few social scientists have seen fit to emulate Epstein’s classic study of
militancy in Luanshya,
6
and in-depth analyses of the local articulation of broad processes of
political change have remained thin on the ground. Based mainly on the personal records of
Alex Kaunda Shapi,
7
the Luapula province’s Resident Minister between 1964 and 1967, and
the newly opened archives of the United National Independence Party (UNIP), Zambia’s
ruling party between 1964 and 1991, this paper makes a case for the adoption of an empirical,
‘sub-systemic’ approach to the study of nationalist and post-colonial politics in Zambia.
Two specific contributions descend from this general premise. The case of the Luapula
province calls into question the UNIP-centred narrative which has prevailed among students
of Zambian politics since independence. The argument which is often made or alluded to in
the specialist literature is that it was only the economic recession of the early 1970s that
weakened the developmentalist project of the ‘people’s party’ and seriously threatened its
hitherto secure political hegemony. Until then, UNIP had, so to speak, delivered.
8
This paper
takes issue with this view by placing the notion of ‘expectations of independence’ firmly at
4
The most representative examples of the literature I have in mind are possibly W. Tordoff (ed.), Politics in
Zambia (Manchester, 1974); C. Gertzel (ed.), The Dynamics of the One-Party State in Zambia (Manchester,
1984); and M.M. Burdette, Zambia: Between Two Worlds (Boulder, 1988).
5
Bratton, Local Politics. Chapter 10 of R.H. Bates, Rural Responses to Industrialization: A Study of Village
Zambia (New Haven and London, 1976) includes a masterly, though less detailed and geographically more
narrow, treatment of some of the same problématiques with which I am concerned here.
6
A.L. Epstein, Politics in an Urban African Community (Manchester, 1958).
7
Deposited at the National Archives of Zambia (NAZ), Lusaka, in 2003 and marked by the code HM 89.
8
The most explicit formulations of the argument are to be found in Burdette, Zambia, 67-8, and J.M.
Mwanakatwe, End of Kaunda Era (Lusaka, 1994), 48. But see also W. Tordoff and R. Molteno, ‘Introduction’,
in Tordoff, Politics in Zambia, 14-8; C. Gertzel, C. Baylies and M. Szeftel, ‘Introduction: the making of the one-
party state’, in Gertzel, Dynamics, 5. For a more realistic assessment of ‘growing peasant apathy to the party’
from the mid-1960s, see Bratton, Local Politics, 228-9.
4
the centre of the analysis.
9
In the Luapula province, where a high level of political
mobilization from the early 1950s had pushed the latter to their limits, the perception of a
failure on the part of UNIP to hand over the proverbial fruits of political freedom predated the
fall of copper prices from 1970. What is really staggering, in fact, is the rapidity with which
Luapulans grew disaffected with the party that had so successfully embodied their hopes for a
better future between 1958, when it first appeared on the political scene as the Zambia
African National Congress (ZANC), and 1964, the year of independence.
The UNIP government’s shaky start in the Luapula province was seized upon by the
seventeenth ruler of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe, Paul Kanyembo Lutaba, whose
complex diplomatic and ethnic manoeuvres in the early post-independence era form the
subject of the second part of this essay. In keeping with the general thrust of the paper, and
drawing inspiration from Caplan’s still unrivalled study of Lozi élites,
10
my reading of the
available evidence underscores the importance of the local context and the limited value of
neat generalizations concerning the relationships between ‘native authorities’ and the
Zambian nationalist movement and government. The tension between eastern Lunda royals
and UNIP was less the result of an automatic clash between ‘traditional’ and democratic
institutions (as implied, for instance, by Tordoff and Molteno
11
) than the consequence of
specific historical circumstances and, especially, the ability with which Paul Kanyembo’s
predecessors had taken advantage of the new opportunities provided by colonial rule.
9
I am indebted to Miles Larmer for bringing home to me the momentousness of this interpretative category.
10
G.L. Caplan, The Elites of Barotseland, 1878-1969: A Political History of Zambia’s Western Province
(London, 1970)
11
Tordoff and Molteno, ‘Introduction’, 20-1.