Death, Belief and Politics in Central African History

CHAPTER VI - The Killing of Lilian Margaret Burton and Black and White Nationalisms in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in the 1960s

CHAPTER VI The Killing of Lilian Margaret Burton and Black and White Nationalisms in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in the 1960s Walima T. Kalusa Introduction The violent killings of Europeans that marked the nationalist struggle for independence in some parts of Africa in the 1950s and 1960s have long attracted the scrutiny of historians. Most of these academics have been particularly concerned with charting the trajectories of violent African nationalism, the attendant murders of European settlers and Africans alike, and the draconian countermeasures that colonial regimes across the continent frequently employed to safeguard European lives and, of course, imperial hegemony itself.1 Admittedly, this scholarship has advanced our comprehension of the violent nature of African nationalism and of the impact that interracial killings had on the pace of decolonization in Africa. But the architects of this scholarship have seldom thrown light upon how killing sparked by the combat for political freedom shaped conflicting African and European political projects or visions. If historians have been slow to explore the links between nationalist projects and politically motivated killings, symbolic and political anthropologists have in more recent decades taken a growing interest in the centrality of death and mortuary rituals in structuring inclusionary/exclusionary politics, not to mention the related questions of citizenship, belonging and cultural identity in contemporary Africa.2 Wale Adebanwi, for example, adroitly highlighted the ways in which the powerful Yoruba elite in western Nigeria in the 1990s appropriated the assassination of a Yoruba military governor by northerners during that country’s 1966 coup d’état in order to reposition themselves in the endless contests for power against other equally powerful ethnic elite in the country.3 In so doing, the Yoruba elite, Adebanwi argued, sought to renegotiate the basis of Nigerian citizenship, national solidarity and political identity, as well as the exercise of post-colonial power. William Cohen and Elisha Odhiambo, too, have elegantly explored the myriad ways in which contending interest groups in independent Kenya mobilized the death of a prominent lawyer to interrogate state power, to reorder inter-ethnic politics, to craft new cultural knowledge around the management of death and to reconfigure gender and identity.4 Further afield, Matthew Esposito has convincingly demonstrated how the unpopular regime of Porfirio Diaz, which usurped power in nineteenth-century Mexico, employed death with its funerary rituals to secure a measure of political consent and legitimacy from indifferent citizens.5 This scholarship aptly attests to the truism that the dead enliven the politics of the living, even in so-called modern societies. This is contrary to the widely held assumption in some academic circles that contemporary societies are free from the clutches of the dead.6 That the deceased continue to play a central role in the drama of the politics of the living derives from the fact that human belief systems and allied practices often only take on their ‘effective and meaningful dimensions through complex symbolic processes’.7 Moreover, death itself is frequently so inextricably embedded in the (de) construction of political projects and visions that it cannot be 202 walima t. kalusa justifiably abstracted from the pursuit and exercise of political power, a point that is now not lost on a small but steadily growing number of academic analysts.8 This article calls attention to the ways in which the 1960 murder on the Zambian Copperbelt of a white housewife – Lilian Margaret Burton – by African political activists of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) informed white and black nationalisms after her murder. Building upon recent academic debate on the political significance of death and dying,9 the article, based mainly on colonial media accounts and the newly opened UNIP archives in Lusaka, asserts that conservative white settlers transformed Mrs Burton’s tragic end into a potent symbol around which they sought to solidify theirholdonpower,toobliterateAfricannationalistaspirations and to rid themselves of the political overlordship of the Colonial Office.10 To this end, they mobilized her death to reinvigorate their campaign to undercut the political control of the Colonial Office in London over British Central Africa, which they had long perceived as a major barrier to the attainment of self-rule and, ultimately, a dominion status. Conservative settlers and their political representatives came to see this project as the ultimate weapon they could wield to bolster their own position and thereby roll back the growing tide of black nationalism. But the settlers’ drive to reinforce their supremacy over the...