A Lobby for Zambia: The Fortunes of the Zambian Brand and the Politics of Decolonization in Central Africa

In the aftermath of Zambian independence, the nation and its president, Kenneth Kaunda, enjoyed relatively high esteem in Britain. However, the Rhodesian crisis of 1965 and the onslaught of propaganda associated with the settler state’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence—in the form of pamphlets, newsletters, political broadcasts, and the Anglo-Rhodesian Society—damaged Zambia’s brand. As criticisms and caricatures of Zambia and its leadership intensified during the mid-1960s, Kaunda’s government and party organized a series of responses for British and Zambian audiences alike. The former consisted of attempts to replicate the Rhodesian lobby’s successes by creating an informal lobby to promote Zambian political (and to a lesser extent economic) interests in Britain. The latter consisted of developing a narrative, through broadcasts and a variety of genres of official publication, that portrayed Zambian activism on the global stage in a glowing light. Both sets of responses invoked Kaunda’s humanism and the country’s diverse democracy, but also sought to paper over provocative divisions within the country, with implications for Zambia’s success at maintaining its brand in Britain. The shifting distance between the efforts of Zambia’s ‘lobby’ in Britain and changes in political culture and economic fortunes in Zambia illustrate the dilemmas of a young nation caught between an investment in preserving its leverage with its former colonial ruler in order to influence events in southern Africa, and attempts to disentangle its economy and security sector from the same. Research in Zambian and British national archives, as well as pamphlet collections and private papers, illuminates trends particular to Zambia, but which also shed light on the broader dilemmas of decolonization and nation-building in Africa during the 1960s and 1970s.