Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa: A Biography of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula

This is a study of the life and times of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula (1917?–1983), Zambian nationalism’s prime instigator in the 1940s and 1950s and, following the country’s independence in 1964, the tenacious leader of parliamentary opposition. The book foregrounds the creative intellectual work that enabled Nkumbula to imagine for the first time African unity in colonial Zambia and, later, to present a liberal alternative to dominant state-led models of political and economic development. By charting the long and convoluted trajectory of a counter-hegemonic liberal project, this work throws new light on the under-acknowledged fractiousness of Zambian nationalism and calls into questions the heuristic value of recent approaches to African contemporary politics that dismiss institutions and ideological orientations as mere epiphenomena of clientelism.