Abstract:
How and where were new African nations made at the moment of
decolonization? Focusing on the periphery rather than the center provides an
insightful answer to this question: imposing national identity in border regions
with mixed and mobile populations, dynamic migrant flows, and cross-border
linkages was a task fraught with contradiction. This article explores the establishment
of Zambian political and diplomatic space in the Democratic Republic of
Congo and the activities of Zambian political and diplomatic representatives in
the southern Congolese city of Elisabethville in the early-to-mid 1960s. It does
not assess how effective these officials were in imposing a sense of Zambian
national identity, but rather what their efforts reveal about the ideas and values
that informed state elites’ assertions of national identity and their relationship
to history, local identities, and moral codes regarding, among other things, customary
authority and gendered behavior. The article argues that nation-making
in newly independent states involved the assertion of not only state sovereignty
over territorial space but also symbolic power, the right to classify, and the moral
and political notions that underlay ostensibly bureaucratic, disinterested state
structures. Analysis of the attempts of Zambia’s first diplomatic representatives
to establish and assert their notion of Zambian-ness reveals the fragility of new
national identities and the extent to which elites sought to underpin these identities
by the assertion of moral certainties.
