Miles Larmer has emerged as one of the leading authorities on post-colonial Zambian politics and history, and especially on Zambia's opposition political movements. His latest work, Rethinking African Politics, confirms his reputation. In this fascinating study, he traces the evolution of political opposition in Zambia, and convincingly deconstructs the ‘myth of UNIP supremacy’. (UNIP is the United National Independence Party – the nationalist movement that ruled Zambia from 1964 to 1991 under founding president Kenneth Kaunda.)
Larmer skilfully demonstrates the breadth and diversity of opposition to Kaunda and the then ruling party's authoritarianism, including the valiant efforts mounted by Simon Kapwepwe's United Progressive Party (UPP), militant trade unions led by the influential Zambia Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) under Frederick Chiluba, and business-oriented, class-conscious Zambian elites such as Valentine Musakanya and Edward Shamwana, who rose above the spectre of ethnicity to challenge UNIP and Kaunda's political hegemony.
Although a large part of the material in Rethinking African Politics has appeared elsewhere, it is the compelling manner in which Larmer has fused these previously isolated efforts into a comprehensive monograph that challenges our understanding of African political studies in general. Put in the context of current academic work on opposition parties in Africa, the study is a significant volte face on how we understand African political change. In contrast to works mostly by political scientists which have focused narrowly on systemic factors and the individuals and movements in power, Rethinking African Politics takes opposition movements seriously. In doing so, it remedies the woeful neglect of this important area within existing studies. Given the several factors that militate against them in post-colonial Africa, Larmer reveals the ability of opposition movements to build useful coalition strategies and working alliances with other autonomous bodies such as civil society, political parties, the church, the independent media and trade unions. He uses a multitude of sources including rare materials (UNIP archives, personal collections, court documents, intelligence reports on Zambia in the South African archives) seldom consulted by most researchers on post-colonial Zambia.
Larmer's goal is ‘to shed new light on the political history of post-colonial Zambia by presenting substantial new evidence regarding the realities of late-colonial and post-colonial history which challenges the dominance of UNIP and the leadership of Kaunda in that history’ (1). He accomplishes this goal with rare elegance and sophistication, and to be able to achieve it within a space of 321 pages is remarkable.
The book does have some problems, however. The first is the scope suggested by the title. The pressure from publishers to employ overarching book titles to render relatively narrow studies more commercially viable is well illustrated here: the title is Rethinking African Politics: a history of opposition in Zambia, but with the exception of the conclusion there is very little space allocated to broader African politics and experiences. Even when it comes to the opposition in Zambia, the core of the book, the focus, is limited to the Bemba-speaking areas: Copperbelt and Northern Provinces, where UPP retained its support. Research was also conducted in North-Western Province for the chapter on the Mushala rebellion. However, no fieldwork was conducted in other parts of the country to supplement the findings from mainly Bemba-speaking areas. As a result, Larmer neglects significant opposition from areas such as the Southern and Western Provinces.
The work would also have been enhanced by an examination of why certain Bemba-speaking constituencies were more prone to Kapwepwe's (and more recently to Michael Sata's) populist rhetoric than others, and why the UPP failed to command political support across the entire ‘Bemba nation’, in spite of the systematic attempts of its leaders to effect an ethnic mobilisation campaign.
The second problem is that, although this book addresses opposition movements in Zambia from independence to the first decade of the twenty-first century, it does not explain the electoral failures of opposition parties throughout Frederick Chiluba's decade-long tenure (1991–2001). These occurred in spite of the existence of the sort of economic conditions that a few years later enabled the opposition Patriotic Front, led by the charismatic Michael Sata, to wrestle power from the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and terminate its twenty-year hold on power.
While factors such as the nature of the MMD coalition, the donor-driven liberalisation programme and Chiluba's constitutional manoeuvrings contributed to the absence of a viable opposition in Zambia from 1991 to 2001, opposition leaders also played their hands badly. A closer examination of the nature of leadership during this period would reveal that many of the most prominent opposition actors were elitists who failed to take politics out of the boardroom and onto the streets. They lacked a language with which to connect their political agenda with the demands or concerns of the electorate, the majority of whom lived in abject poverty, and so failed to build grass-roots support networks.
Furthermore, by largely focusing on class-conscious actors like Musakanya and overstating, as in some of his previous writings, the contribution of the Mineworkers Union of Zambia (MUZ), Larmer downplays the crucial role played by the church in both challenging the authority of UNIP and forming the MMD. Although there is a chapter on church, labour and civil society opposition to the state, the bulk of the analysis is devoted to the latter two actors. Another impressive recent publication on post-colonial opposition movements, One Zambia Many Histories (Jan-Bart Gewald et al., 2010), better represents the integral role of religious movements in the history of opposition in Zambia.
Overall, however, Rethinking African Politics is a welcome, thought-provoking and useful contribution to our knowledge of African opposition movements, and one that has wide-reaching significance for how we think about African history and political change. In short, Larmer's latest monograph deserves to become required reading throughout African studies.
