“The Father of Zambian Politics” between Padmore and Maala

Abstract

?pon his return from London, Nkumbula, the modernizing cosmopolitan nationalist, was soon faced with the problem of securing mass support for the anti-federal agitation that he was planning to lead. In seeking to meet this all-important goal, Nkumbula was led to reposition himself vis-à-vis his ethnic locality and home province, the fears and ambitions of which he could no longer afford to dismiss as divisive and parochial. To be sure, the anti-Federation crusade that marked Harry’s rise to prominence between 1951 and 1953 was a “national” campaign, drawing as it did on an idiom of interethnic unity and solidarity that was explicitly meant to secure the allegiance of the largest possible number of Northern Rhodesian Africans. Yet, a detailed exploration of the dynamics of the constitutional battle and the practical examples of inequality and oppression by which it was fired reveals a significant degree of ethno-regionalist ambiguity within Nkumbula’s overall universalist framework. From the early 1950s onward, to put it differently, Nkumbula shifted repeatedly between two levels of political discourse and principles of affiliation. By foregrounding the poly-valence and plasticity of Nkumbula’s thought, this chapter seeks to go beyond formalist, evolutionary approaches (the “tribe to nation” axiom of the 1960s and 1970s) with a view to presenting a more profound and historically grounded analysis of the contradictory forces and motives that shaped the pattern of his political engagement in the early 1950s.