Introduction: Zambia ’s Postcolonial Historiography

Document Abstract / Summary Overview

If colonial anthropologists produced knowledge essential to the exercise of colonial power, colonial historians no less denied the existence of African history before colonialism than assumed that the history of Zambia and of the African continent in general, was the history of Western imperial entrepreneurship (see, for examples, Gann 1964; Gann and Duignan 1967; Gelfand 1961). Given the denial of African history by the architects of colonial historiography, it is unsurprising that in the immediate aftermath of independence, most political scientists, historians, and other keen observers shared a deep commitment to place Africans back in their history