INTRODUCTION
As has been recently noted in the pages of this journal, the increasing interest in African self-representations, which has stimulated significant new insights into the colonial period, has not generally been matched by the identification and publication of autobiographical material by prominent Africans during the postcolonial period.Footnote 1 Few historians of Africa have sought to utilize the private papers of postcolonial African elites in a way that has occasionally been done for their colonial equivalents. Such writing can serve to challenge the apparently homogenous perspective of postcolonial ruling parties or leaders and demonstrate the significant extent of conflict and dissent within such parties and the wider polity. A recent boom in publishing on late colonial and postcolonial Zambian history has led to important ‘life story’ and biographical research.Footnote 2 Simultaneously, a number of former politicians and other elite figures have published biographies and memoirs in Zambia.Footnote 3 While such publications have the potential to aid our understanding of the realities of the workings of the postcolonial state, many recent autobiographies have been exercises in self-praise, being highly partial and offering only limited analysis of the problems that beset postcolonial Zambia. Indeed, there is a danger that such texts may reinforce the dominant nationalist narrative rather than aiding its deconstruction.Footnote 4 These memoirs and newly published private papers need to be critically examined by historians and analysed in relation to other source materials, something which this article aims to do.
In Zambia, recent research has identified the extent of opposition to and within Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party (UNIP), which ruled Zambia from independence in 1964 until 1991 (from December 1972, this was as a de jure one-party state).Footnote 5 The United Progressive Party (UPP), led by Simon Kapwepwe, provided significant opposition to UNIP before and after it was banned with the introduction of the one-party state.Footnote 6 Some former UPP leaders supported an attempted coup against the UNIP-controlled one-party state in 1980.Footnote 7 A significant strand of support for this coup was provided by a small group of elite Zambian intellectual and business figures. These men had played an important role in establishing the administrative institutions of the postcolonial state in the decade after independence. They were, in Zambia's First Republic, senior civil servants and the administrators of Zambia's first wave of nationalized industries. They helped establish new or adapted existing structures of governance and administration, utilizing dominant Western models but seeking to adapt them to a postcolonial African context. In so doing, they clashed with leading UNIP politicians who envisaged both a more radical Africanization of the state and its subordination to the ruling party. Many of their number became disillusioned with the decline and ultimate loss of limited state autonomy from UNIP and withdrew into private business careers.Footnote 8
This group was opposed to the introduction of the one-party state, but most of their number refused to join the UPP, distrustful as they were of Kapwepwe's perceived radicalism and keen to protect their relative privileges. As the 1970s wore on, however, they were increasingly critical of what they saw as a leftward shift in UNIP's rule, exemplified by the extension of state control of the economy, which suffered a drastic decline from the mid-1970s onwards, particularly as a result of the falling international copper price. In 1978–9, when many in this intellectual group tacitly or openly supported Kapwepwe in his last unsuccessful attempt to gain the Zambian presidency, President Kaunda identified them as a dissident force that was undermining Zambia through what he regarded as treasonous attacks on the ‘party and its government’.Footnote 9
Valentine Musakanya was a leading figure in this group. He was Zambia's first secretary to the Cabinet and head of the civil service. He was subsequently a deputy minister and a member of parliament, before becoming governor of the Bank of Zambia in 1971. Following his departure from public life, he worked for IBM and ran his own business. He was detained and subsequently convicted of treason, with ten others, for his supposed involvement in the 1980 coup attempt. He was acquitted on appeal in 1985, eventually dying in 1995.
Musakanya's private papers include correspondence written during his various ministerial and public appointments, critiques of government policies from various stages of his life, and an extensive autobiography, which he began writing during his detention and which runs to approximately 220,000 words.Footnote 10 These provide a valuable insight into his developing critique of the UNIP-dominated state, both before and after the declaration of the one-party state. They chart his growing disenchantment with the merger of state and party institutions and with the populist politics that he believed to be a betrayal of Zambian independence. However, the analysis presented here also seeks to explore a particular critique of Zambian political life that was shared (but not generally articulated) by much of the country's educated and Westernized elite.Footnote 11 Musakanya's writings therefore provide a useful contribution to the emerging literature on postcolonial African political history, illustrating the extent of dissent in Zambia and critical perspectives of the country's transition to and first five years of independence, a time inaccurately portrayed by many studies as one largely characterized by national(ist) consensus around the mostly successful rule of UNIP in general and President Kaunda in particular.Footnote 12
The article utilizes Musakanya's writings on issues of contemporaneous public concern and contrasts them with the retrospective analysis provided by the autobiographical text, revealing the multiple genres involved in the production of his ‘life history’.Footnote 13 As with all life writing and narratives of self-representation, the most important historical findings are not necessarily new objective truths but rather the ways in which one person's subjectivity and how that person constructs their narrative demonstrate the interaction between personal experience and wider historical change.Footnote 14 Musakanya's autobiographical approach, reflecting the capacity for self-reflection befitting a professed intellectual, charts a trajectory of personal success, prosperity, and self-realization. Yet his dramatic fall from grace, and the fact that the writing of the autobiographical text began in a prison cell – where Musakanya faced treason charges and a possible death sentence – means that the narrative of personal advancement is tinged throughout with a rueful air, an awareness of the fall that is to come.
It is evidently the case that, as with all such personal histories, Musakanya's writings are inherently subjective and, in some respects, one-sided. There is a particularly instructive tension in his autobiography between the presentation of a broader historical narrative and the self-conscious and self-critical analysis of his particular role in the events described. Precisely because of this tension between the writing of ‘history’ and ‘autobiography’ in a single narrative, it raises (but does not resolve) questions regarding the role of the individual in public life and the capacity of one man to influence those events. Musakanya's steady demotion from the heights of government power; his victimization, and later experience of interrogation, detention, and torture at the hands of agents of the Zambian state, evidently affected his attitude towards those in control of that state. Alongside the autobiographical text (written during and after his detention), his earlier papers, treatises, and analyses of aspects of post-Independence governance and political culture (some of which are cited in this article) certainly suggest that his critical viewpoint did not begin with and arise from his personal downfall. This view is reinforced by his statements in parliament during his period as an MP, interviews with other members of this intellectual/business elite, and secondary materials on Zambia's First Republic.
MUSAKANYA'S EARLY LIFE
Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, attained independence in October 1964. Famously, it had just one hundred university graduates at the time, many of whom would, like Valentine Musakanya, go on to play a leading role in the new postcolonial administration. Born in 1932 and brought up on the Copperbelt, Musakanya recalls in his autobiography a childhood shaped in part by his mineworker father's boundless confidence in his son's abilities. He was, he tells us, a lonely and isolated child, whose profound desire for friends led him to trust individuals for whom ‘friendship’ functioned mainly as a means to their own advancement.Footnote 15 He attended Kutama College, a school run by the Marist Brothers in what was then Southern Rhodesia (Robert Mugabe, the school's first famous alumnus, attended Kutama in the 1930s). Musakanya praises his white teachers' exacting educational standards. He initially joined the Marists as a junior Brother, and remained at the school during holidays, discussing Rousseau and Voltaire; the school's emphasis on free thinking helped shape his critical approach to authority.Footnote 16 From this lofty vantage point, he and his fellow students angrily discussed the imminent imposition of the Central African Federation and idolized Hastings Banda for his opposition to it.Footnote 17
Returning to the Copperbelt in 1953, the year Federation was inaugurated, Musakanya stayed in Mufulira, where schoolteachers and civil servants were in the forefront of a ‘hot bed of political activity’. He abandoned plans for the priesthood, though without any clear idea of the career he would pursue, and settled in Chingola, describing this mining community as an ‘intellectual desert’. However, in contrast to the frustrated ambitions of earlier generations of educated Africans in the era of indirect rule, Musakanya's skills were recognized by a late colonial Northern Rhodesian state that belatedly sought the advancement of indigenous civil servants.Footnote 18 Accordingly, he secured a position as a senior African clerk in the local authority. In this prestigious position, Musakanya became widely known among the African population; he spent his wages building up a ‘small library’, and discussed political affairs with local union leaders, including Matthew Mwendapole and Robinson Puta.
In 1955, Musakanya enrolled with the University of South Africa (UNISA) on a correspondence degree; while Northern Rhodesia's handful of other undergraduates were studying law, education, or medicine, Musakanya chose philosophy and sociology. He married in 1957, demonstrating his unconventionality by refusing to engage in the customary marriage ceremonies of his Bemba ethnic group. In 1958, he was approached by Puta to help draft a constitution for the Zambia African National Congress, a task he later repeated for the drafting of UNIP's constitution.
As a civil servant, Musakanya was officially barred from involvement in political parties (though this did not prevent some of his colleagues from such activity). His political activity was characteristic of his moderate approach: he established a social and cultural club with his close friend, the Cypriot-born businessman Andrew Sardanis, to bridge the racial divide between educated Africans and whites.Footnote 19 There was, he later acknowledged, little room for such moderation in a situation where most whites stood directly in the path of black emancipation.Footnote 20 In 1959, Musakanya was promoted and moved to Kitwe, overseeing the mine township of Wusakile where he had grown up. He was responsible for resolving family disputes over the estates of mineworkers who died in service – he defended the rights of widows against the customary demands of miners' male relatives, identifying the dysfunctional impact of ‘custom’ in the new urban context.Footnote 21 Serving as a local magistrate, he was, he later claimed, uneasy in passing judgement on childhood friends: ‘… there was an indescribable gulf between us … I felt alienated and with an uneasy sense of having betrayed my class’.Footnote 22 This feeling of personal isolation, the bittersweet result of his education and personal success, is a common theme in Musakanya's autobiography, suggesting a sense of alienation from the excitement and energy that accompanied the struggle for independence that was then dominating public life on the Copperbelt. Given that he was writing two decades later in his prison cell, it is possible that the isolated context in which he wrote influenced his retrospective view of this period.
In 1960, Musakanya graduated from UNISA, aged 26. He was one of the first Africans to be interviewed for promotion to district officer – he reports that he impressed his interviewers with his knowledge of Pasternak, and that he was the only candidate recommended for promotion. He was sent to attend the Devonshire Overseas Development Course at the University of Cambridge, thus taking a course on colonial administration just as British colonialism was drawing to a close.Footnote 23 He also took classes in law, economics, agriculture, anthropology, and history. He was particularly irritated by Audrey Richards' anthropological study, Land and Diet in Northern Rhodesia, and its characterization of Bemba dietary customs as ‘primitive’.Footnote 24 Musakanya gave his own ‘anthropological’ lecture entitled ‘The sexual habits of the English tribe’, which he claims was well attended.Footnote 25
KATANGA AND THE PROBLEMS OF INDEPENDENCE
In 1963, Musakanya was seconded to Britain's consul general in the Congolese city of Elizabethville (later Lubumbashi). He arrived in Katanga while Moïse Tshombe's gendarmes were still attacking the city. Musakanya was impressed by the British civil servants he worked with there, among whom ‘the … intellectuality and naturalness of class were self-evident; they were urbane and cosmopolitan in outlook. More impressive to me [was that] they showed no trace of racialism whatsoever’.Footnote 26 Musakanya claims retrospectively to have been dismayed by this first experience of a postcolonial African state:
I saw a wonderful rich country fall to pieces, ravaged by foreigners and its leaders. Ignorant men … whose greed and hunger for purposeless power were puppets of international politics and insensitive to the rape of their country and the … misery of their people … The Congo was a frightening forewarning of what might happen in other parts of the continent, all of which was galloping towards Independence.Footnote 27
Musakanya thereby drew on his experience of the Congo to warn of what could follow elsewhere in Africa, including in Zambia.
His analysis of the Katangese crisis was distinct from nationalist orthodoxy. While criticizing the Belgians' role in promoting Katangese secession, he rejected the principle that colonial borders should be sacrosanct. He argued that the people of Katanga were culturally closer to those of bordering Northern Rhodesia than remoter parts of the Congo and suggested that a loose federal structure should have been adopted at Independence.Footnote 28 Such ideas were anathema to nationalist politicians, whose priority was reinforcing the fragile boundaries of their postcolonial nation-states, subsequently expressed in the Organization of African Unity's 1964 resolution to retain colonial borders in their entirety.Footnote 29
MUSAKANYA THE POSTCOLONIAL CIVIL SERVANT, 1964–7
Following his return to Northern Rhodesia, Musakanya played a leading role in establishing the new Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He sought to select Zambia's new ambassadors from among a group trained at Georgetown University, but tells how he was pressured by UNIP leaders to appoint ‘freedom fighters’, men with limited education whose reward for their sacrifices in the nationalist struggle was to be an influential and prosperous position in the postcolonial state.Footnote 30 This was to become a central theme in Musakanya's disillusionment with UNIP governance. Just after Independence, he accompanied the new President Kaunda on his international tour to put ‘Zambia on the map’; he identified in hindsight the European businessmen, including Lonrho's Tiny Rowland, flocking around Kaunda:
… a number of European adventurers, businessmen and brokers made it their … business to invest money and friendship in African politicians they ascertained would come to power after Independence … The politicians desperately needed both money and European friends. … They ended up heavily indebted to such individuals to a point of blackmail. After Independence they presented the bill in terms [of] specially arranged contracts on behalf of client firms.Footnote 31
Musakanya's pointed criticism of Rowland was based on his subsequent observation of his influence over Kaunda in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Musakanya briefly served as Zambia's director of intelligence, but in 1965 he was appointed the first secretary to the cabinet and head of the civil service. UNIP's first cabinet was divided between the relatively uneducated freedom fighters of the independence struggle and younger, more educated men, whom Kaunda had initially appointed to junior positions following UNIP's entry into government in 1963.Footnote 32 Tensions between these two mutually dependent groups existed from the start. John Mwanakatwe, for example, a leading technocrat and Zambia's first minister of education, lacked a popular regional base within UNIP and was therefore dependent on Kaunda for his position. He struggled to defend himself against populist attacks and was periodically demoted, only to be brought back into office at a later date to address particular crises.Footnote 33
Musakanya's primary task was that faced by senior administrators across postcolonial Africa: establishing a new ‘professional’ civil service, oriented towards development but politically neutral and immune to special pleading and vested interests.Footnote 34 In this, he increasingly clashed with those senior politicians whose credibility rested on their status as freedom fighters and their capacity to direct resources to their provincial support base. He was, he later admitted, naive regarding the realities of political power, patronage, and clientelism. He was, he claims,
not aware that there were a lot of people both in the Civil Service and outside it who had … invested in the change and now expected reward in terms of positions outside the Civil Service criteria. They in fact assumed that at the advent of political change – Independence – they were the public interest.Footnote 35
Such a retrospective claim to naivety sits uneasily with Musakanya's otherwise apparently perceptive observation of events.
As Szeftel and other critical political scientists argued in the early 1980s, the economic opportunities presented by the expanding post-independence state meant that it came to be viewed as the primary vehicle for advancement by those with political connections.Footnote 36 Such divisions expressed themselves chiefly along what Molteno terms ‘sectional’ lines, in which national leaders, under pressure from their local support base to deliver the material gains that they had promised would result from independence, utilized a combined ethnic and socioeconomic political discourse in which the continued poverty and political marginalization of their province or district was blamed on its (unfair) exclusion from centrally awarded appointments and the distribution of developmental largesse.Footnote 37 The recently opened UNIP archives provide considerable evidence of complaints from regions that believed they had been forgotten by the new government.Footnote 38 Musakayana, himself not a member of UNIP, observed with disquiet the party's growing internal tensions, resulting in large part from these pressures:
Faced with demands for some ‘spoils’ by their followers the Cabinet must have looked upon the Civil Service with distaste as an obstacle and also as an elite group which was reaping where it did not sow. It developed into an uneasy but inevitably antagonistic coexistence between the Party and the Civil Service. Regularly I received reports and requests from Ministers that such and such a Civil Servant was [a member of the opposition African National Congress] ANC and must be dismissed or not promoted. Civil service regulations could not however entertain such requests.Footnote 39
It is evident, however, that many UNIP loyalists were appointed to official positions at this time, while virtually no ANC sympathizers were.
In blocking the ‘pet projects’ of ministers for their home districts or provinces (which were usually found to be ‘full of holes’), Musakanya made himself unpopular with every faction of the government and party leadership.Footnote 40 Notwithstanding his Bemba ancestry, he particularly antagonized the Bemba-speaking bloc within UNIP led by Simon Kapwepwe, which was foremost in seeking rewards for its supporters for its disproportionate sacrifices during the nationalist struggle.Footnote 41 He later expressed criticism of the failure of African politicians to consider the specific implementation of the promises they made to electors.
Musakanya was equally sceptical about foreign development experts, ‘power seekers’ who flattered gullible African politicians with their schemes, when no country had ever developed through a Development Plan.Footnote 42 He describes Zambia's initial Development Plan as ‘essentially a listing of expenditures in various sectors supposedly to create infrastructures necessary for “take-off” … Decision makers had no vision of what they ultimately wanted the nation to be …’.Footnote 43 He rejected Africanist models, insisting that colonialism could not be wished away and that Zambia should use useful Western ideas to reach agreed targets. He emphasized the need for early, significant, and sustained investment in education, including technical and vocational education.Footnote 44 While acknowledging that Rhodesia's 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) was a significant challenge, which threw Zambia's development off course, he refused to accept this as the explanation for the failures he identified in long-term developmental vision. Musakanya also criticized Kaunda's proclamation of ‘humanism’ as a national ideology, viewing it as vague and unconvincing as a rallying point for national political mobilization. He later recalled:
I asked [him] what sort of humanism he meant … I must say in retrospect, I sounded arrogant … little did I know that politicians wish to put to their followers a philosophical slogan which neither themselves nor the followers understand or can define.Footnote 45
This offhand dismissal of Kaunda's philosophy was indeed typical of Musakanya's intellectual approach.
Musakanya worked and socialized with a peer group of young technocratic Zambians, employed either in senior government and state administration or in the growing ‘parastatal’ sector that expanded with economic nationalization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He and the other leading lights of this group established an informal gathering known as the ‘Wednesday lunch club’, which met to exchange information and opinions on political and economic issues. As time went on, its members became increasingly unhappy with the direction of government policy; they criticized the centralization of power in the presidency and the increasingly authoritarian nature of political life. Some of its members were later accused alongside Musakanya of involvement in the coup attempt.
MUSAKANYA AS A MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT, 1968–71
In the late 1960s, rising disillusionment with the inability of the new state to address the expectations of the population for social and economic change created heightened political competition.Footnote 46 The UNIP leadership addressed such problems by the increasing subordination of state institutions to the ruling party. The civil service, portrayed as a colonial hangover blocking radical change, was a useful scapegoat for the frustrations of political aims.Footnote 47 In 1968, as Musakanya organized Zambia's first post-independence election, he became aware of Kaunda's plans to replace many civil servants with party officials, appointed by and accountable to the president. These reforms, involving inter alia the appointment of district governors directly accountable to President Kaunda, came to be seen as a decisive step towards the undermining of the separation of party and state and the centralization of power in the hands of the presidency.Footnote 48 Musakanya sought to ensure that his opposition to the plans was not viewed as self-interest by tendering his resignation.Footnote 49 In his autobiography, he reflects on these proposals, which were implemented after UNIP's election victory:
What the administration needed most was better educated personnel and not political propagandists. I was, it is now clear, talking at cross purposes with the President's intention which was total politicization of the administration to ensure [the] Party[‘s] and his own continuity in power. My motives were to meet political power halfway but ensure eventual creation and stabilisation of a national administration to serve the people impartially and equally so the politicians might come and go … [Instead] I was expected to think of UNIP as a permanent institution … and should therefore create an administrative structure such that any change of Government by another party would be impossible …Footnote 50
Kaunda's civil service reforms, presented to parliament in the Constitution (Amendment) Bill in January 1969, came to be viewed as a key turning point towards a more overtly UNIP-dominated Zambian state.Footnote 51
Following his resignation, Musakanya was then nominated as a member of parliament and appointed minister of state for technical and vocational education, a position he took up in 1969 following a reshuffle in which a number of technocratic ministers, including Mwanakatwe and Arthur Wina (the minister of finance), were effectively demoted.Footnote 52 In a parliament that, despite the vocal expression of dissent by opposition ANC MPs, was increasingly becoming a rubber stamp for governmental decision-making, Musakanya was one of the few UNIP MPs to challenge his party's orthodoxies. He defied the party whip in opposing the extension of automatic reviews of detentions under the Preservation of Public Security Act from six to twelve months. Moreover, he criticized the anti-urban discourse of René Dumont that was so influential on Zambian development planning,Footnote 53 as well as the widespread assumption that rural–urban migration was inherently undesirable:
The Copperbelt has got 900,000 people … and those people have made Zambia; those people have lived there for a generation now … These people constituting twenty-five per cent of our population are the most productive Zambians. They deserve to be recognised as such and let no economist come to this country and say, ‘You have got urban people consuming too much.’ These people in the urban areas on the Copperbelt are consuming what they worked for … They are the ones who have helped the political cohesion which we are now having … Zambia's … blessing is urbanization …Footnote 54
Such remarks, noteworthy in a debate in which every other participant spoke only for the rural area he represented, did not have a significant impact in a parliament increasingly marginal to the centralization of Kaunda's power in State House.
Musakanya did, however, make headlines by speaking out over what was briefly a major public controversy. Women and girls wearing short skirts were physically assaulted by male youths, at a time when such skirts were being banned in a number of other African countries.Footnote 55 While some senior politicians effectively endorsed the youths' actions, railing against this breach of traditional ‘African’ modesty, Musakanya, in comments to the press and this subsequent letter to Kaunda, dismissed such concerns:
… the militants … assert that ‘Mini-Skirts’ are indecent, violate African culture, and Zambian modesty and sense of values … even in my lifetime I have seen my grandmother … in the nude without this state raising the slightest eye-brow …Footnote 56 Those who desire that as a public policy … our national dress comes down to the knees or ankles are unfortunately looking at us through the eyes of the colonial era … the colonisers and missionaries found our nudity incompatible with their trade and contrary to the religious doctrines preached by the missionaries … As time went on … we copied and accepted the ‘Bwana's’ dress … cultural conservatism is in inverse proportion to economic and technological development; the more culturally intolerant a nation is the less capable it is to advance.Footnote 57
Musakanya's analysis was unmistakably cosmopolitan, suggesting that postcolonial Zambia could usefully draw on elements of Western culture and strengthen its own in so doing.Footnote 58 Such views further alienated him from many senior politicians. His disquiet at such politics stemmed, he later suggested, from his own background:
My contempt of politics as [it] started to be practiced [sic] in Zambia was only matched by my ignorance of its power, how much it could harmfully be abused in [the] wrong hands. Perhaps understandably as [a] colonial civil servant, I believed it was the civil servants who ultimately ruled … it just goes to reveal my individualistic upbringing and an education of modern European thought at the expense of what has become [sic] to be called ‘African realities’.Footnote 59
Even at the time, Musakanya's self-image as an intellectual was, he believed, essentially incompatible with the day-to-day duties of a serving politician. Addressing the University of Zambia Political Association in 1969, he asserted that an intellectual
… is not an active revolutionary, he is not indeed a political or social leader, but more of an individualist … as soon as an erstwhile intellectual embraces group philosophy he thereby ceases to play the role of an intellectual … The words ‘intellectual’ and ‘activist’ are therefore exclusive – you can only be one or the other.Footnote 60
Musakanya later expressed his fear of political crowds and what he characterized as ‘mob politics’; this may, however, have reflected his own subsequent experience of UNIP-sponsored rallies that called for summary justice against those allegedly involved in the 1980 coup plot.Footnote 61
In 1970, Musakanya gave Kaunda notice that he intended to leave his ministerial post. He stepped down from parliament and initially sought a position in the business world. He was then appointed governor of the Bank of Zambia. During this time, Musakanya was, according to some interviewees, a secret financier of Simon Kapwepwe's UPP, which broke away from UNIP in 1971.Footnote 62 Musakanya, however, made no public expression of support for the party, nor for the opposition African National Congress, which at this time articulated a rearguard defence of liberal democratic norms strikingly similar to those espoused by Musakanya.Footnote 63 Such political abstention was common to much of the Wednesday lunch club group: Emmanuel Kasonde, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Finance from Independence until 1973, admitted (with the benefit of hindsight) that he and his coterie were ‘aloof, foolishly so’ from politics; he was approached to join UPP, but feared the disruption that party politics could bring, and believed that a successful developmental policy could still be implemented under the auspices of the proposed one-party state.Footnote 64 Andrew Kashita, while in sympathy with the UPP's analysis of UNIP's failures, believed that direct opposition only helped to justify Kaunda's centralization of power.Footnote 65 At a time when UPP supporters were systematically dismissed from state employment, the threat of being fired may (as in the colonial era) have deterred some civil servants from direct political participation. More importantly, this group did not see themselves as political activists; their elitist orientation prevented them from engaging in mass politics and thereby suffering the consequential loss of employment or liberty experienced by opposition figures during this period.
Yet, Musakanya did make a highly controversial submission to the Chona Commission, which held public hearings during mid-1972 to prepare a constitution for the planned one-party state. Although a number of submissions called for reforms that were implicitly critical of the direction of political travel under UNIP, few were as sweeping as Musakanya's public critique of postcolonial political thinking in Africa in general and Zambia in particular:
A claimed justification of our Enquiry is that many-party political systems are not suitable for Africa … This statement gives a feeling of peculiarity as African – that we are a world apart. Why do we think that we are so peculiar in our problems as Africans … It is probably because this is the easiest way to escape criticism of our actions and failures …Footnote 66
In rejecting African particularity, Musakanya emphasized what he regarded as the need to address Africa's postcolonial development through a universal model of Enlightenment political thought. This provided the framework for his analysis of the problems that had arisen in Zambian politics since independence, which included:
… the slogan ‘It pays to belong to UNIP’, which in its implementation turned Party functionaries into political mercenaries … [when] some individuals … [challenged] the ‘leaders’, they … were isolated as enemies of the ‘people’ … the power of the Party functionaries [was] unconstitutionally heightened and a system of hierarchy set in without bearing any relationship to merit, ability, education or true national sympathies.Footnote 67
In demanding meritocratic governance, Musakanya criticized tribal balancing in political appointments, arguing that it entrenched ethnic politics at the expense of good government.Footnote 68 He argued that no single party can be supreme above the state; this would constitute what he termed ‘the Rape of the State’.Footnote 69 Musakanya made specific recommendations for the new constitution, including: a separation of political policy-making from government administration, with an independent head of the civil service; the limitation of presidential role and powers; the publication of government records, to prevent corruption or bribery; specific guarantees of civil liberties; and educational qualifications for members of parliament.Footnote 70 He further recommended that the president should serve a maximum of two terms of seven years, and, most controversially, that the president should be of indigenous parentage, a recommendation that would have excluded Kaunda, whose parents were born in Malawi.Footnote 71 Musakanya's preparedness, as a senior official, to offer such an attack on the one-party state and the assumptions that lay behind it, was virtually unique at a time when many opposition leaders were still imprisoned and free speech was effectively curtailed.Footnote 72 It was therefore unlikely to go unpunished. Musakanya was quickly removed from his senior position at the Bank of Zambia and his government career was ended.Footnote 73
LIFE AFTER GOVERNMENT, 1972–9
Musakanya, aged 39 and unemployed, understood that state domination of economic activity severely restricted the prospects for someone who had fallen so publicly from favour. He later recalled with some bitterness that many of his supposed friends in politics and business now avoided him. Soon after his dismissal, he became managing director of IBM Zambia, a position he held from 1974 to 1978.Footnote 74 He travelled widely during this period, which he found a rewarding but lonely experience. In 1977, he agreed to work 50% of the time in Paris. His plans were scuppered, however, by the government's removal of his passport.Footnote 75 Musakanya eventually chose to resign from IBM; although his autobiography expresses no overt bitterness regarding the withdrawal of his passport, he certainly perceived the hand of Kaunda in the frustration of his ambitions.Footnote 76
During this period, Zambia's Western-oriented technocratic leaders were increasingly marginalized by populist veterans of the nationalist struggle, led by the pro-Soviet UNIP secretary general Grey Zulu.Footnote 77 Zambia played a leading role in supporting the liberation struggles of its southern African neighbours, but many Zambians felt this to be at their expense. Economic decline resulted from the dramatic fall in international copper prices, but there was a widespread perception that these problems were worsened by internal mismanagement, corruption, and the state's domination of economic activity. The 1977 report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Economy, chaired by the minister of finance, John Mwanakatwe, recommended cuts in public spending and the removal of consumer subsidies, but instead there was a shift away from both economic and political reform.Footnote 78
Prominent business-oriented and politically influential figures, many of them Wednesday lunch club members, publicly criticized economic policy and issued calls for reform.Footnote 79 Among their number was Elias Chipimo, chairman of Standard Bank, who in September 1976 launched a public attack on the political ‘indoctrination’ that he claimed would result from a new education policy.Footnote 80 Zambia's financial crisis was mirrored by rising political tensions in the run-up to the 1978 one-party state elections. After Kapwepwe rejoined UNIP in 1977, his supporters made an attempt to oust Kaunda and replace him with Kapwepwe. Hasty constitutional changes prevented any such challenge and in 1978 Kapwepwe's supporters were detained on trumped-up charges and tortured.Footnote 81
Musakanya came to know Kapwepwe well in the mid-1970s via his lawyer, Pierce Annfield, who also acted for IBM. From 1978, Kapwepwe regularly visited Musakanya; he was, he says, constantly followed by intelligence officers.Footnote 82 Musakanya claims that, at Kapwepwe's funeral, elder figures identified him as Kapwepwe's natural successor as leader of Zambia's unofficial opposition.Footnote 83 In his autobiography, he depicts himself as a reluctant actor in any opposition movement; he had nothing to gain except Kapwepwe's mantle of persecution. At some point, however, he appears to have accepted that it was impossible for him to live a life away from political engagement. This was because of state surveillance of and interference in his activities, but also because he could not refrain from criticism of the authorities. At the Lusaka Flying Club, Musakanya discussed Zambia's problems with his intellectual peers, some of whom would later share a cell with him at Lusaka's central prison on collective charges of treason.Footnote 84
THE 1980 COUP ATTEMPT
The extent of Musakanya's involvement in the 1980 coup attempt is not fully addressed in his writings. He began his autobiography at the time he was imprisoned and it was completed while Kaunda was still in power, so he was unlikely to incriminate himself. His autobiographical text suggests a reluctant actor drawn, partly unwittingly, into a plot initiated by close friends. This is consistent with much of the testimony presented in the treason trial, as well as the views of Musakanya's family today.Footnote 85 Musakanya denied involvement in organization of the coup – his writings on the issue suggest that his participation amounted to drunken hearsay and idle talk about how Kaunda might be removed from power without the use of violence.Footnote 86 Musakanya infers that the coup attempt represented a threat to the Zambian state only in the paranoid minds of UNIP leaders, who seized upon it gratefully to magnify the extent of the threat to the country and the need for constant vigilance against external enemies.Footnote 87
Musakanya was arrested in connection with the coup attempt on 24 October 1980. His autobiography records the humiliating experience of arrest and detention at Lusaka Central Prison. Although he and his fellow accused were allocated to Cell 15, the ‘VIP’ cell of the prison, the conditions experienced there by political prisoners were not significantly better than those of criminal inmates:
The cells were even smaller than the bathroom in my bedroom at home; flies crawled all over in hundreds and thousands from a headquarters in the toilet and a heap of rubbish in the corner … I saw black animals in a pen [like] the slave ships I saw in my boyhood films such as Captain Blood … over a thousand naked, half naked and battered bodies in an area of 900 square yards … I felt I had lost my self-respect as a black man, and I became bitter and ashamed of my race. We were capable of inflicting the worst degradation upon ourselves.Footnote 88
According to Musakanya, most of those who were detained for involvement in the coup attempt were tortured during interrogation. Detainees were taken away by ‘Special Branch’ officers and returned one or two days later, sometimes after a hospital visit; they were usually unable to talk about what had happened to them.Footnote 89 Musakanya was interrogated in December 1980, for about 14 hours. His interrogators did not, in Musakanya's view, seek to gain evidence for a legal process, but rather were focused on forcibly extracting a simple confession. They seemed convinced that Musakanya was the mastermind of the coup plot, but appeared to have little evidence of his involvement.Footnote 90 The resulting statement was ruled inadmissible on appeal, because it was extracted through the use of torture.Footnote 91
It was in this context of detention, degradation, and torture that Musakanya commenced his autobiographical writing, an initiative that arguably enabled him to defend his identity as an intellectual in circumstances that not only removed all external validation of that identity but that also situated him as a potential traitor. Shorn of the material comforts of his urbane lifestyle, isolated from the cosmopolitan milieu in which he operated, Musakanya sought to contest his persecution by re-creating himself via the autobiographical form in which, he knew from his education, great men reflected on themselves and the wider world and thereby validated, implicitly or explicitly, the historical relationship between the two.Footnote 92
CONCLUSION
A persistent question asked by Musakanya's friends and relatives is, what led such an individual to find himself embroiled, even in a minor way, in a dangerous initiative such as the 1980 coup attempt. This article has sought to chart Musakanya's professional career and personal trajectory, from child prodigy to questioning student; from urbane and cosmopolitan intellectual to a young professional thrust into a senior government role in a country on the brink of independence. Musakanya, although always distant from the orthodox nationalism of UNIP, nevertheless had his own hopes and aspirations for his newly independent country. These came under early and sustained pressure, frustrated by the realities of what postcolonial governance would involve. As with senior civil servants elsewhere on the continent, Musakanya's intellectual investment in a supposed British tradition of administrative neutrality and meritocratic advancement placed him in conflict with the new ruling party.Footnote 93 What he saw as the development of an efficient and politically neutral civil service was, for many politicians, the continuation of ‘colonial’ rule. What was for him the corrupt patrimonial distortion of government expenditure was, for many UNIP activists, the just reward for their independence struggle.
Musakanya's declared naivety in regard to postcolonial power and his distaste for mass politics was coupled with his mistaken belief that he could use the power of his intellect to convince his political masters by the sheer bravura of his exposition. In this, his entreaties to Kaunda and other UNIP leaders bear comparison with attempts by earlier generations of African elites to influence ‘native’ policy via well-researched memoranda that were perceived by more radical nationalists as an accommodation with colonialism.Footnote 94 The limited practical value of learnedness, an ability that Musakanya had been taught to value above all else and that had taken him, the son of a mineworker, to one of the highest offices in the land, contributed to his frustration and outspokenness.
Musakanya's obstinate refusal to kowtow to UNIP's fragile supremacy, his achievement of prestigious international employment, and the independence this gave him from state patronage, made him a particularly dangerous opponent of the ‘party and its government’. UNIP identified independent-minded lawyers, businessmen, and intellectuals as unpatriotic dissidents who had to be taught that postcolonial Zambia had no room for their cosmopolitan sensibilities. Musakanya's association with this group, and his preparedness to engage in what he may have regarded as idle talk regarding the removal of the president, suggests an impatient and at times arrogant individual whose courage in confronting his enemies was matched by a disregard for practical political realities.
Nevertheless, his early and sustained critique of the postcolonial state provides an acute and often acerbic contrast to the nationalist literature celebrating the achievements of Zambia's First Republic.Footnote 95 It is a particularly powerful analysis, albeit a partial and necessarily subjective one, because it is provided by someone at the heart of decision-making processes. Musakanya's depiction of the steadily increasing utilization of government resources for political ends; of the ‘purchasing’ of senior politicians by Western businessmen; of the ways in which development planning bypassed democratic politics; and of the manipulation of the masses in the name of African nationalism chimes with much of what more critical political scientists were writing at the time and with what historical research has since confirmed.
Musakanya's writings are as of much interest for what they reveal about him and the elite first generation of Zambians with advanced education. He was alienated from most of his countrymen by his schooling and Westernization, something he appears to have been ambivalent about throughout his life – he embraced learning, both secular and spiritual, but that learning hamstrung him in his relations with the community he sought to serve. His declared unwillingness or inability to engage with everyday politics prevented him from offering a practical challenge to UNIP; as a consequence, he became partially involved in a dubious project to remove Kaunda from power that, while it might have been welcomed by many Zambians, lacked popular roots and had the potential to be manipulated by hostile outside powers. This was the tragedy of a distinctive and extraordinary African man, whose writings illustrate a particularly important and generally neglected perspective on the nature of the postcolonial African state and its intellectual discontents. It is perhaps appropriate therefore that Musakanya's legacy is not the state he envisioned but instead a set of writings produced largely with the benefit of hindsight and from within the confines of a postcolonial prison cell. His ultimate hope was that these writings would reach an audience willing to learn from his experiences of governance and administration during Zambia's First Republic.
