The study of Africa in the Second World War long reflected the interests and research agendas of the first generation of scholars who began to devote serious attention to the subject in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is only more recently that the literature has taken a turn away from what the historian Ashley Jackson once referred to as the longstanding ‘consensual view’ of the period. Instead, the war is increasingly seen as an important historical phase to be considered on its own terms rather than as an adjunct to other themes such as the rise of nationalist political movements and the collapse of colonial rule. A number of important recent contributions have therefore focused on some of the more complex and underappreciated implications of the war on the African ‘home front’.Footnote ¹ Alfred Tembo's War and Society in Colonial Zambia shares these concerns, noting that ‘it is only by means of in-depth case-studies that a full appreciation of the lived experience of Africans during the Second World War can be gained’ (7). His study is especially valuable, given the relative lack of attention devoted to the particular context of Northern Rhodesia and many of its neighbouring territories in the existing literature.

Tembo's book is structured around six self-contained chapters that ‘bring out the interconnectedness of international and local dynamics and events’ (169) by examining particular social and economic themes. Military service is a major issue in much of the scholarship and understandably receives considerable attention. Tembo focuses on the recruitment (Chapter One) and demobilisation (Chapter Six) of the roughly 15,000 men who served during the conflict with the Northern Rhodesia Regiment. In both chapters Tembo paints a convincing picture of the interaction between individual motivations and military service and, in particular, how the pursuit of personal advantage shaped African responses to both colonial policies and colonial propaganda, as well as veterans’ postwar political engagement. In these chapters and across the book, Tembo's work displays the benefits of his reliance on a rich array of textual and oral history sources from Zambian archives.

In relation to the civilian experience, the book explores the far-reaching effects of the war effort on the rural economy (Chapter Two) and the wider phenomenon of inflation and food and consumer goods shortages (Chapter Three) as well as the all-important copper industry (Chapter Five). These are perhaps the richest in the book. Tembo considers how the colonial administration attempted to stimulate indigenous peasant industries such as small-scale iron smelting to produce farming implements for local use as a form of import substitution. In this analysis, perhaps what emerges most clearly are the practical constraints on its ability to intervene in the economy. Tembo portrays a series of rather ineffectual and even slightly desperate attempts to respond to the demands of the war effort by imposing price controls on retailers or by coaxing Africans into collecting wild rubber. A comparable sense of the brittleness of the colonial system also emerges from his examination of the uneasy and rather hostile response of settlers and other British colonials to the 4,000 Polish refugees temporarily accommodated in Northern Rhodesia after being evacuated from the Soviet Union (Chapter Four).Footnote ²

Tembo engages well with the wider literature on the Second World War in Africa and clearly envisages his work primarily as a contribution to this rather than the broader historiography on Zambia. Although this choice is not unreasonable, it would have been helpful to situate the period more explicitly within its broader historical contexts for the benefit of non-specialist readers who might, for example, be unaware of the significance of 1953 as the year of Northern Rhodesia's incorporation into the Central African Federation. Tembo's choice to push the study's closing periodisation to this point beyond 1945 is an important reminder of the postwar afterlives of many supposedly exceptional wartime measures from state intervention in the copper market to the increased reliance on coerced labour. Nonetheless, this point is not developed and little space is actually devoted to the postwar years. Given the rapidly changing political and strategic imperatives within this period, more explicit consideration might also have been devoted to the substantial changes over time which affected all aspects of life in Northern Rhodesia and which contributed to the distinctive quality of the wartime period as a historical moment. This might have included the fear of invasion and fifth-columnists which gripped the territory in 1940, which looms over the analysis of the recruitment campaign, for example, or the far-reaching changes imposed in response to Japanese successes in Southeast Asia in 1942, which forms much of the backdrop to his section on the economic war effort.

Tembo is cautious about drawing general conclusions from his more targeted research. He does not go as far as other recent studies in disclaiming any causal connection between the war and the end of colonial rule. Rather, he frames his study as an attempt to ‘bring into sharp relief the contradictoriness of political processes on the eve of decolonisation’, by offering nuanced takes on received ideas about the period (175) — emphasising the lack of any serious link between the return of military veterans and the emergence of nationalist politics in Zambia, for example. Tembo has penned an engaging and thought-provoking study which demonstrates just how deeply the Second World War permeated all aspects of life in Northern Rhodesia. There is doubtless more to be said and his conclusions point to a range of further questions. His book will doubtless encourage scholars to explore it further.