Harry Nkumbula has not enjoyed a good press. While his leading role as the father of African nationalism in Northern Rhodesia is widely acknowledged, his reputation has suffered by contrast with that of his erstwhile rival, Kenneth Kaunda. As everyone thinks they know, the affable, hard-drinking, and politically moderate Nkumbula and the African National Congress were outpaced by the ascetic, visionary, and radical Kaunda and the United National Independence Party in the race to win independence for what became Zambia. This received wisdom, embellished at the time and subsequently, has proved remarkably durable, even surviving the end of one-party rule in 1991. Not any longer, however. In this most accomplished of books, Giacomo Macola, Lecturer in African History at the University of Kent and Researcher at Leiden University, and one of the leading Africanist historians of his generation, has completely reworked the significance of Nkumbula's life and times. Eschewing any intention of writing a conventional political biography, Dr Macola, in his own words, has instead emphasized ‘the creative intellectual work that enabled … [Nkumbula], first, to imagine African political unity … and, later, to formulate a liberal alternative to UNIP’. But at no point are these intellectual processes ‘presented as unproblematic, descending automatically from a set of well-defined and invariable ideological premises’. On the contrary, what Macola stresses is the ‘overall adaptability of Nkumbula's thought and the extent to which the latter becomes intelligible only when the changing relationship is explored between this extraordinary figure and his local and ethno-regional contexts’ (p. 4).

Meticulously developed and clearly signposted, these lines of argument find expression in seven carefully constructed chapters. Following an opening section on historical biography and rival African nationalisms, the first four chapters trace the contested evolution of Nkumbula's politics and practice up to 1964. The remaining three chapters – successively dealing with liberal democracy and ethnic politics in the period of the First Republic; Nkumbula and the ANC's opposition to Kaunda and UNIP's drive towards a one-party state; and Nkumbula's last initiatives and legacy – conclude by cleverly explaining why the Southern Province continues to vote as a cohesive bloc in opposition to the rest of the country.

This approach places Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa in a position to cast new light on local, regional, and international historiographies. Dr Macola's erudite study is important for at least four reasons. First, it transforms academic understanding of the political history of Northern Rhodesia/Zambia between the late 1940s and Nkumbula's death in 1983. Second, by taking issue with the ‘cultural essentialism’ of Afro-pessimist accounts such as Jean-François Bayart's The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, it restores meaning to political ideologies. Third, its subtle treatment of the ambiguities of decolonization in Central Africa invites reflection on the manner and timing of imperial retreat. Finally, and perhaps most significantly of all, its deconstruction of authoritarian nationalism not only discredits the pieties of its local praise-singers, but also adds significant intellectual weight to critical studies of anti-colonialism elsewhere in Africa. Making inspired use of hitherto untouched UNIP Archives in Lusaka, Giacomo Macola successfully invests the study of nationalism with an historical complexity that until very recently had largely escaped its academic practitioners. There is no place here for the patronizing obsequiousness characteristic of those authors now belatedly insisting that they were never nationalist historians but always historians of nationalism.

Finally, this reviewer must declare a personal interest. Growing up on the Copperbelt, and specifically in Mufulira (which was something of an ANC island in a UNIP sea), it was impossible in the early 1960s not to be aware of the frequent clashes between members of rival nationalist parties in the dying days of British rule. With the achievement of Independence, the losers, as elsewhere in Africa, and as noted above, were very largely written out of the turgid celebrations of orthodox nationalism. But even these suffocating accounts never entirely extinguished my interest in the subject, and in recent years it was rekindled first by knowledge of Dr Macola's pioneering work in the UNIP archives and then by reading his thought-provoking chapter on the roots of authoritarianism in nationalist Zambia, first published, and somewhat reprised here, in the collection he edited with Jan-Bart Gewald and Marja Hinfelaar, One Zambia, Many Histories (2008). The publication of this biography of Nkumbula, then, is something I have been greatly looking forward to, and I was delighted to have the opportunity of reviewing it. If anticipation was keen, then consummation was better still. This excellent book rescues Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula from the condescension of posterity, even as it marks the coming of age of Central African biography. Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa stands as a benchmark of all that is best about critically engaged scholarship.