Introduction: A New Take on Late Colonial Northern Rhodesia

This introductory essay presents Living the End of Empire as the sequel to One Zambia, Many Histories (2008). In that volume, the same three editors and their contributors had sought to challenge the continuing hold of a UNIP-centred scholarship which did no justice to the complexity of post-colonial Zambian history and the many internal lines of conflict and contestation that characterized it. The present volume builds on this latter argument by locating the mainsprings of many of these conflicts in the late colonial era and by throwing new light on some of the historical trajectories that the teleological gaze of politically committed social scientists has tended to ignore.