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The Zambian Past

Andrew Roberts has already earned a name as an historian of the Bemba people. His History of Zambia will add to his reputation. It is more dispassionate than Robert Rotberg's tendentious Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa (1965). It is all of a piece, unlike the Short History of Zambia, a somewhat disparate collection of essays edited by Brian Fagan (1966). It attempts to cover the whole of human experience in what is now Zambia, unlike this reviewer's own History of Northern Rhodesia: Early Days to 1953 (1964) which, despite its title, is concerned mainly with Northern Rhodesia under British governance. Roberts's work blends original research with haute vulgarisation. The first four chapters cover the natural setting and the evolution of Zambia's early inhabitants from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. Another four chapters trace the country's history from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. Three chapters are allotted to British intrusion, colonial rule and decolonization. A concluding chapter deals with the first decade of independence. Such a work raises difficult methodological problems. The boundaries of modern Zambia date from the British colonial era. The country owes its shape to British politicians and administrators, many of them little known. As the author says, 'This is therefore a study of history in Zambia, rather than a history of Zambia', and he admits it may be doubted whether such a survey can be anything more than the sum of its parts'. He has had to face other difficulties. He has integrated into his work an impressive body of anthropological literature that does not readily lend itself to historical interpretation. He has embarked on the equally hard work of using specialized archaeological studies for the purpose of an historical narrative. He has made use of oral traditions, which also pose difficult problems of synthesis. As he explains, the average story of a 'tribal' migration is most unlikely to reveal the actual origins of the people who tell it. Such accounts more probably relate to the movement of state builders and of their followers. Their oral tradition may well overlay the longer, though forgotten history of earlier inhabitants. According to Roberts, the history of chiefdoms cannot generally be traced back earlier than the seventeenth century, but the archaeologist enables us to trace the ancestors of the present population at least as far back as the twelfth century.