REASSESSING AFRICAN POLITICAL ACTIVITY IN URBAN NORTHERN RHODESIA

Abstract

AS ALMOST any researcher studying African political development in colonial Africa has concluded, the emergence of nationalism and the attainment of independence did not happen as coherently or as directly as politicians might now like us to believe. Such movements were always fraught with divisions, contradictions, and reverses. Economic, geographical, and demographic factors, for instance, caused major variations in the development of nationalist institutions within a country and though the conclusion-independence-may have been superficially simple and inevitable, the process by which it was achieved usually had highly complex features, the repercussions of which sometimes continued long after the goal of political freedom was reached. In this article, the emergence of nationalism in Northern Rhodesia provides a focus for the consideration of some of these complexities. Now a one-party participatory democracy, the country is controlled politically by the United National Independence Party (UNIP), the organization which at the time of Independence (and for a few years before) had the support of the general mass of Africans, and which has come to symbolize the attainment and development of political freedom. The history of nationalism is very much tied up with the history of the party, which emerged in its original form in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Overt nationalism was a post-second world war phenomenon in Northern Rhodesia. However, the framework for the independence movement, the skills and structures of nationalist political activity, and the divisions which continue to haunt Zambia, were being worked out for thirty years before that. Nationalism and the demand for political independence were the logical (and ideological) consequences of the belief of an indigenous population that colonialism was unacceptable. But events and institutions which made no such direct expression of this belief could still be a consequence of that same reaction. As such, they were part of that same process, and indeed may have provided the necessary 'practice ground' without which overt nationalism could not have effectively emerged. For thirty years or more, this indirect fight against colonialism, which would provide the skills, leaders, institutions, and ideologies for attaining independence, was being carried on throughout Northern Rhodesia in one form or another. Research in this arena has, like much other work in Zambia, been concentrated on the role of the Copperbelt. Given the economic dominance of this area from the 1930s onwards, this is not particularly surprising. However,