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ABSTRACT
When attempting to mobilise supporters against the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1959, the months’ old Zambia African National Congress considered whether inciting mass violence of the Kenyan kind would prove a smart strategy. Doing so would mean altering their leader’s avowed preference for Gandhian passive resistance. This article provides fresh evidence that Zambian leaders in a secret conclave contemplated attacks on white settlers. It also shows that little action followed and examines why the Northern Rhodesian government imprisoned chief members of the Zambian Congress.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Benson, quoted in R.I. Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 292-302. A longer version of Benson’s announcement may be found in Andrew Sardanis, Africa: Another Side of the Coin; Northern Rhodesia’s Final Years and Zambia’s Nationhood (London: Tauris, 2003), 61.
2 Benson, quoted in Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism, 301.
3 N.C.A. Ridley, Report of an Inquiry into all the Circumstances which Gave Rise to the Making of the Safeguard of Elections and Public Safety Regulations, 1959 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1959).
4 Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism, 298.
5 See the details in Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism, 214–192; R.I. Rotberg, ‘The ‘Partnership’ Hoax: How the British Government Deprived Central Africans of their Rights,’ Journal of Southern African Studies, 45 1 (2019), 89–110.
6 Great Britain, Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry, Report of the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry, Cmnd 814 (London: HMSO, 1959), 86–88. See also the account in The Observer, 8 March 1959. For a fuller and contested discussion, see Colin Baker State of Emergency: Nyasaland 1959 (London: Tauris, 1997); Philip Murphy ‘A Police State? The Nyasaland Emergency and Colonial Intelligence’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36 4 (2010), 765–780.
7 Great Britain, Report of the Nyasaland Commission, 86–88.
8 C. Sanger, Central African Emergency (London: Heinemann, 1960), 242.
9 R. Hall, Zambia, 1890–1964: The Colonial Period (London: Longman, 1976), 134.
10 D.C. Mulford, Zambia: The Politics of Independence, 1957–1964 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 95.
11 R. Welensky, Welensky’s 4000 Days: The Life and Death of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (London: Collins, 1964), 116–119.
12 Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism, 298.
13 Ibid., 299.
14 Great Britain, Report of the Nyasaland Commission, 86–88.
15 Sikota Wina, interview by R.I. Rotberg, 14 December 1967, transcript of taped interview, 86–88; all quotes from Wina in the text from here on are from this transcript. Only recently did I rediscover, buried deep in my files, a 44-page typescript of an interview I had conducted with Wina in 1967. After I visited Wina in Luwingu in 1959, we developed a close relationship that included frequent discussions over 50 years or more, across Wina’s many periods as cabinet minister, deputy speaker, critic of the government of the day, and so on. In 1967, during one of my frequent visits to Zambia, I taped a lengthy interview with Wina. It includes all of the details of the farmhouse meeting. That transcript is being deposited in the Harvard University archives, where my papers reside. Wina died in 2022, aged 90.
16 See G.S. Mwase, To Strike a Blow and Die: A Narrative of Race Relations in Colonial Africa, ed. R.I. Rotberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
17 Max Gluckman, The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1955), 9–10, 14.
18 From Munali, Arthur Wina went to Makerere University College (later Makerere University) in Uganda, then to the University of California at Los Angeles, and finally returned home to become Zambia’s first minister of finance. He died young, in 1995.
19 Quoted in H.M. Chipembere, Hero of the Nation: Chipembere of Malawi, An Autobiography, ed. R.I. Rotberg (Blantyre: Kachere Press, 2001), 148.
20 For the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress and its internal battles, see Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism, 289–291.
21 Sardanis, Africa: Another Side of the Coin, 63.
22 For the state of emergency and its consequences, see also R.I. Rotberg, Overcoming the Oppressors: White and Black in Southern Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 14–21.
23 Quoted in Sardanis, Africa: Another Side of the Coin, 63.
24 Sardanis, Africa: Another Side of the Coin, 59.
25 For the full story of the drive to independence, see Mulford, Zambia; Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism.
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Robert I. Rotberg
Robert I. Rotberg is professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation. His latest book is Overcoming the Oppressors: White and Black in Southern Africa (Oxford University Press, 2023).