Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa: A Biography of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula

This political biography foregrounds the creative intellectual work that enabled Harry Nkumbula to imagine for the first time a Zambian nation and, later, to present a liberal-democratic alternative to dominant statist models of political and economic development. It argues that both processes become fully intelligible only when the changing relationship is explored between Nkumbula and his local and regional contexts. By charting the long and convoluted trajectory of a counter-hegemonic political project with increasingly strong ethnic overtones, the book throws new light both on the under-acknowledged fractiousness of Zambian nationalism and on the fragility and authoritarianism of the UNIP-dominated post-colonial state. In so doing, it calls into questions the heuristic value of recent approaches to African post-colonial politics that dismiss institutions and ideological elaborations as mere epiphenomena of an ill-defined and fundamentally a-historical clientelistic political culture.