2.1 Pre-colonial and Colonial Era .1 Early mining activity
2.1.8 Transition towards independence
With Federation, Africans in Northern Rhodesia felt betrayed by a government they had not asked for but that some at least had come to view as benignly paternalistic. The process of devolution to black majority rule in Northern Rhodesia might have been plodding messily along, but it was apparently inevitable. Federation was a set back, if not worse.
And here a second problem emerged. Much about how the colonial system worked was never apparent to Africans. This was at least partially due to social distance and partially to physical distance. Unofficial racial divisions kept Africans from even seeing what went on in the upper ranks of European power and control and kept well-meaning Europeans from knowing Africans on more than a superficial basis. ' Since bureaucracies in Great Britain also complimented much of the local managerial work, it appeared on the ground that relatively few people ran Northern Rhodesia's quite complex society.109 And many of these people seemed just to sit in comfortable offices and talk. As Africans thought about what independent governance would entail, it may well have looked easier than it actually turned out to be.'10
There was also much about how colonial business was done in Northern Rhodesia, some said, that made Zambians less rather than more prepared to assume responsibility."1
Education was the perpetual problem; Federation had only made it worse. During that era, European children's education was a federal concern backed by considerable funding.
African children's education, on the other hand, was left to each territory. Northern
Powdermaker reports that she encountered a number of European women who were genuinely interested in learning more about Africans but were inhibited from doing so by systemic race and class divisions. Copper Town, 69ff.
109 The amount of control exercised by the colonial office was historically considered problematic for the small European population as well but for different reasons. Kaplan, Zambia, 29; Bates, "Patterns of Uneven Development," 10. The sparse European presence on the ground during the period of Indirect Rule, which began officially for Northern Rhodesia/Zambia in 1929, was one of the policy's most remarkable traits and testifies to what Karen Fields sees as an interdependency between the Europeans and Africans involved. "To the question: How did a notoriously small handful of white men rule gigantic territories? indirect rule offers a simple answer: by making black men with legitimate authority appendages of white men without it..." Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 30-31. By 1960, when the British administrative presence was at its height in Zambia, the United Kingdom's government was represented by 274 men in a territory of 290,000 square miles. Ibid., 33-34.
110 Because the colonial governments had limited interests in their territories, they deliberately kept representation there small. Appiah, In My Father's House, 164.
111 Wood, Northern Rhodesia, 135. In the final chapter of his work, Wood outlines a possible strategy for phased devolution of power and responsibility that would build upon Africans' traditions and institutional patterns, eventually leading towards assumption of the Western systems Great Britain would be relinquishing.
It is a creative and thoughtful exercise that would have been interesting to see in practice.
Rhodesia, already economically behind, spared few funds on African education and those funds went largely to support primary grades.112 Post-secondary schooling in Northern Rhodesia was even more difficult to come by since the nearest university was in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia.113 As a result, at Independence in 1964 Zambia had about 100 university graduates (including one lawyer, one engineer, and two doctors) and 1,000 secondary school graduates within a population of over 3 million. African education rates in all of Britain's colonies were low, but Zambia's were at the bottom.114 It was hardly a promising sign.
In addition to the education problem, there were structural governance difficulties.
The system was set up according to formulas that worked in Britain but that weren't necessarily realistic for conditions in Zambia. When, for example, Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party (UNIP) won a decisive majority of legislative seats in pre- independence elections,115 the parliamentary guidelines they had to work with dictated that in fairness to distribution 41 of the 55 total had to come from rural constituencies. But Zambians had been moving into the urban areas for decades and people with education and skills to take over government jobs weren't in the rural areas. Shifting so much electoral
Martin, Minding Their Own Business, 35; Roberts, History of Zambia, 218.
113 It bears further note that, with an African population of approximately 3 million and of the few schools that did accommodate secondary education, only one was a university preparatory school. Pallister, Stewart, and Lepper, South Africa, Inc., 45. Mission schools helped address some of this gap. Silavwe, Some Aspects of Personnel Management, 2; Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colonialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 86.
114 "Roan Consolidated Mines Limited" (unpublished paper, ZCCM Archives, Ndola, 1980), 9; John Kaoma,
"The Democratic Crisis in Southern Africa: A Challenge to the Church" (unpublished book manuscript, Mutare, Zimbabwe, 2001), 12. Roberts, citing these same figures, notes that Uganda achieved similar educational benchmarks in 1955 and Ghana in 1943. History of Zambia, 234. "It is the most damaging criticism of all against the colonial and federal governments that Northern Rhodesia, despite its possession of the richest economy in Africa north of the Limpopo, found itself at independence with a smaller number of educated Africans in relation to the population than virtually any other of Britain's African colonies." Martin, Minding Their Own Business, 49.
1 5 Africans were first allowed to vote in Zambia in 1962.
power out to the countryside considerably changed the caliber of people who would occupy parliamentary seats.116
2.2 Early independence era issues
Kaunda also appeared to hope that Zambia could create something new. In letters and essays from the early 1960s, he talked of offering the world a novel vision of a truly modern African state. He knew that the educational, managerial, and political ground was very soft on which to build.117 But the economy would be strong, despite its reliance on just one moneymaker. This was at least a place on which to stand.
So, with political independence inevitable, he made a gesture towards economic independence in a famously recorded encounter several hours before the official handing over ceremony. Following extensive legal research and a public relations campaign, Kaunda's new government gave the president of the BSAC 11 minutes to choose between £4 million net of tax to relinquish its mineral royalties or nothing. ' Kaunda founded his case in part on reasoning that the main treaty the BSAC used to protect its rights was made with a Lozi king. But the Copperbelt was Lambaland! Lewanika, the ruler who had dealt with Rhodes's men so long ago, never had jurisdiction over the Copperbelt to begin with.119 The BSAC took Kaunda's offer,120 giving Africans added reason to be jubilant when they officially became Zambians at midnight on October 24th, 1964.
Bates, "Patterns of Uneven Development," 19.
117 Kaunda, Humanist in Africa, 66ff. See also Boahen, African Perspectives; Cooper, Africa Since 1940; and Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden—Africa and the Curse of the Nation State (New York: Times Books, 1992) for interesting discussions on what might otherwise have been the case for the new independent African states.
118 In 1950 the BSAC had negotiated to keep all mineral royalties until 1986. Bostock and Harvey, Economic Independence and Zambian Copper, 43. The year prior to Zambian independence, mineral royalties earned the Company a net £6 million, twice the budget that went into African education. Roberts, History of Zambia, 222.
119 Bostock and Harvey, Economic Independence and Zambian Copper, 47.
120 Ibid., 48; "Roan Consolidated Mines," 108-109. The following year, Charter Consolidated was created by a merger of the BSAC, Central Mining, and Anglo-American's original parent company, Consolidated Mines