Debating ‘The rediscovery of Liberalism’ in Zambia: Responses to Harri Englund

In Africa 83 (4) (November 2013), Harri Englund discussed several recent books on Zambia published preceding the country’s fiftieth independence anniversary. His article explored the ways in which recent publications by Zambian and Zambianist authors have launched a fresh research agenda, and he focused in particular on the scholarly engagement with liberalism. Below, we publish responses from David M. Gordon, Bizeck Jube Phiri and Giacomo Macola, whose work was discussed in this article, and a comment by James Ferguson on more scholarly directions.

‘The Hour Has Come!’ was the slogan that brought Frederick Chiluba and his neoliberal government victory over Zambia’s long-time president, Kenneth Kaunda, in 1991. Less than a decade later Zambians riffed, ‘The Hour Is Sour.’ Zambians and Zambianist scholars alike have been ambivalent about the ‘rediscovery of liberalism’, the theme that organizes Englund’s review article. The latest generation of historians has not embraced a political programme, unlike their Marxist predecessors, or, perhaps to Englund’s disappointment, even cohered around a set of theoretical concerns. Liberalism might describe some common sensibilities, but it remains distrusted, associated with the corruption of Chiluba’s regime and the enforcement of free market policies by international agencies. Historiography, instead, reveals multifaceted forms of resistance to Kaunda and his administration alongside disillusionment with the neoliberalism that replaced it.

The heroics of opposition to Kaunda formed one angle of investigation, but so did the shortfalls of Chiluba’s government, whether in the form of IMF-inspired prophecies, or, in my case, Pentecostal prognostics. My book reviewed by Englund, Invisible Agents, shows how spiritual ideas inspired political opposition to secular regimes, including the colonial administration, Kaunda’s humanism, and potentially also liberalism. The intention was never to claim that spirits were the ‘mainstay’ of Zambian politics, as Englund asserts, but rather that they were one aspect of political discourse that inspired agency. Across a century-long history, spiritual ideas were a precarious basis for hegemony and domination but an effective form of resistance. Disappointment in and distrust of political rulers, I suggest, emerged out of this particular history of resistance.

The final chapter of the book, which details how Pentecostal-inspired political movements contributed to Kaunda’s downfall and provided a political ideology that engaged with the post-Kaunda regime, is most relevant to Englund’s focus. The neoliberal era in Zambia offered opportunities for some, along with the ending of older, sometimes more stable, livelihoods for many. Englund, like myself, thinks that such economic and religious processes need to be shown to be ‘mutually constituted’, without subsuming one within the other. The problem is not one of theory, but of the practice of historical writing grounded in sources that emphasize voice. Statements about economic conditions reveal little about how people perceived new patterns of impoverishment and wealth, and how they engaged the ruling class around these issues.

Scholars attuned to economic inequality often prefer to portray opposition as a direct materialist critique of those who acquire power and wealth at the expense of others. But this register of dissent hardly captures the nuances of oppositional voices. In the 1980s, Zambians criticized wealthy politicians, but they also reflected on their government’s failure to act against the forces that blocked opportunities and the realization of their desires, along with their government’s repression of those who could help in achieving health and wealth. Their government, some Zambians argued, was supposed to moderate capriciousness and harness uncertainty to serendipity; in short, rather than adopting the socialist and egalitarian emphasis of Zambian humanism, they wanted a government that helped them achieve individual prosperity. I argue that Pentecostalism – and perhaps liberalism for some – addressed these frustrations.

Englund finds this focus on achieving prosperity more reflective of globe-trotting English-speaking pastors of the era (in fact, a diverse bunch of West Africans, South Africans, Americans and Europeans) than of Zambian Pentecostals. In addition, he thinks that there are ‘spurious parallels between Pentecostalism’s alleged emphasis on individual salvation and neo-liberal economics’ (p. 684). But what might the politics...