War and Society in Colonial Zambia, 1939–1953

Making excellent use of neglected Zambian archives, Tembo surveys the impact of World War II on colonial Zambia, or Northern Rhodesia, as it was then called. Readers will find much to appreciate in this carefully argued account, full of interesting information. As the fourth-largest copper producer in the world, the colony would play a substantial role in supporting the Allied war effort. The war never came to Northern Rhodesia, but it shaped the colony, imposing an array of economic restrictions, price controls, and rationing while producing a burgeoning black market and inflationary pressures. The Northern Rhodesian Regiment would fight in East Africa and Asia, and many of its members struggled to reintegrate into Zambian society after the war. Tembo finds little evidence for the conventional wisdom that many veterans came back from the war politicized and ready to contribute to the fledgling independence effort. That said, the colony could not meet their heightened expectations, and the colonial state treated them much worse than it did the returning white veterans.