A major feature of the Colonial Service literature over the past two decades is what
has grown to be labelled 'CS memoirs'. Leaving aside the perennial parade of
gubernatorial reminiscences, it is hard to think of more than a score of personal accounts
of the life and work at the District Officer level published before 1950. Today they
number nearly a hundred. The genre may be said to comprise four categories. These are:
(i) biography, predominantly of governors and rarely of DCs; (ii) autobiography, a
personal account of one's life, frequently 'written for our children' and thus often
overburdened with family history and domestic details; (iii) the memoir, a narrative
account of one's memory of certain events and people and so of wider appeal than (ii);
and (iv) a newcomer, the collective or service memoir, an edited volume of short
memoirs by a dozen or more associated contributors. This model was launched by
Brown and Brown for the Uganda Administration (1996), since followed by multiauthored
collections on the services in Eastern Nigeria, Sudan, Kenya and Northern
Nigeria.
In a number of ways Eugenia Herbert's brilliant narrative of Barotseland in 1959,
taken as the "high noon" of empire on the upper Zambezi for both the DC and his staff
and for the Barotse Native Authority, represents a related form of colonial administration
memoir. She draws extensively on the memories of and interviews with DCs and on
their files and reports, much of it unpublished and quite inaccessible outside Lusaka. The
theme, handled in an original and telling manner, is the examination of the year 1959 as
it was lived and viewed, simultaneously and serially, from four linked perspectives.
These are, in ever-widening circles of focus, the Kalabo boma, the NA headquarters at
Libonda, the settler-dominated capital of Salisbury, and the Whitehall network in
London. This is local administrative and metropolitan history at their mutual best. Based
on a huge knowledge of the literature on colonial administration and a close reading of
boma files, the story is told - presumably for reasons of graphicness, though it is open to
question whether the strategy is successfully sustainable over 140 pages - in what
anthropologists have long described as the 'ethnographic present', all the way from the opening sentence "Noontime ... The DC comes home for lunch" (pll) to the closing
"The Prime Minister is playing a dangerous game ... Many DCs are pleasantly surprised
by the news of the [Monckton] Commission" (p149).
In her choice of the view from the territorial capital as the staging post between
District and Colonial Office, Dr Herbert opts for Salisbury and not Lusaka. This
highlights, of course, the dominance of the settler-centred Central African Federation in
the constitutional growth of Northern Rhodesia in the 1950s. While this downgrading of
Lusaka in no way masks the importance of the aims of Kaunda or the activities of UNIP,
and deliberately allows full attention to the ambitions of Welensky, it does mean that the
positive figure of the Governor, Sir Arthur Benson (no friend of the imposed
Federation), barely features in the vital chapter on the territorial view, leaving him to
appear principally in the view from London. This was not the opinion of most DCs who,
as Robin Short shows in his African Sunset (Johnson, 1973), vigorously respected
Benson's empathy with them and the encouragement of his hands-on attitude to the
imperative of maintaining law and order in the districts. Where Herbert notably breaks
the mould in analysing colonial field administration is in her imaginative decision to
complement 'the view from the boma' by portraying 'the view from the kuta', the
Barotse Native Authority headquarters. In this, the Kalabo District Tour Reports
between 1954 and 1960 have been scrupulously examined and rewardingly trawled.
Here, then, is her neat concept of an "antipathy, even cacophony, of voices, all eager to
tell their version of what happened" (p.xix). The result will enable students of colonial
rule to replace the arid abstractions of 'coloniaUsm' and 'nationalism' with compelling
insights into the realities of what it was like on the ground for both the rulers and the
ruled.
Twilight on the Zambezi offers a prismatic insight into what the late colonial period
meant, at the local boma and NA and at the imperial capital levels, in one up-country
district of Central Africa. As such, it will deservedly earn recognition as a valuable
contribution to the literature on colonial administration at the eventide of empire and as a
classic portrayal of what the shift into imperial reverse gear meant to those involved,
above all those in the boma and the kuta.
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