Twilight on the Zambezi: Late Colonialism in Central Africa. Eugenia W. Herbert. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002. 196 pp.

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Eugenia Herbert sets out to provide a Rashomon-like study of the late colonial world, centered in the colonial Boma and Native Administration headquarters of Barotseland (Northern Rhodesia) in 1959, but ramifying outward to include the mental and political universes of the Federation in Salisbury (Southern Rhodesia) and the Colonial Office in London. This is a short book. It is also a very experimental history. Its principal aim is not to explain a specific incident, to provide a comprehensive vision of a small, remote place, or even to use a small place to explain a big phenomenon like nationalism. Instead, Herbert's cinematographically-written study depicts a time -- 1959 -- precisely because it was at the end of a period when colonial actors could see colonialism as stretching indefinitely into the future, without major upheavals. Herbert chose a place that was apparently a sedate, relatively contented backwater, with an elite closely linked to the symbols of British royalty and titles. While discordant elements pull at the edges of her portrait -- with ecological crises, massive labor outmigration by men, a small outbreak of sorcery by "Kalikozi gunmen," a disaffected educated elite, ambitious white builders of the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland and increasingly doubtful intellectuals, politicians and bureaucrats in England -- this is a sketch of a world in balance, not one about to be catapulted into crisis and change.

In the book's four major sections, Herbert pays respectful attention to the complexities and contradictions of the perspectives that she explores. The section on the Boma (District Commissioner's Office), for example, draws on the formal annual reports and tour reports that administrators filed, and also on interviews, questionnaires, unpublished papers, and pictures from a variety of the officials and family members who lived in the region at the time. This permits a discussion of what happened and also thick descriptions of official life on tour and in the outpost, down to the sports essential to local sociability and the messengers who taught official cadets and did much of the actual work. This evocative thick description style emphasizes not the big forces of history -- the isms of colonialism, imperialism, racism, nationalism and ethnicity that most readers know as the big stories of the time -- but the individuality of the DC who wanted to play squash; Roy Welensky as a boxer who headed the Federation; and Marjorie Perham as the colonial administration expert who should have been a governor.

While the author's approach produced a book that is a joy to read for historians knowledgeable about the outlines of the end of the empire and eager for a sense of atmosphere, it does have weaknesses connected to its strengths. For students unable to recognize major historical figures (such as Marjorie Perham, Roy Welensky, Hastings Banda or Kenneth Kaunda) it may be an unexpectedly difficult work, full of names and individual circumstances, and low on forward narrative drive. This is particularly true by the end of the book, where the most vivid single event described is the intervention of Rhodesian Federation troops at Hola, in Nyasaland. This intervention involved the killing of activists and produced both bad press in England and a nationalist backlash within the Federation (142-6). As Nyasaland protrudes into this study, Herbert loses her focus on Barotseland, and to some extent calls the work's premise -- that one can understand a colonial moment through a locally focused lens -- into doubt. Also, since the work's poignancy rests on the reader's awareness of the coming years of nationalist struggle and postcolonial crisis, students unfamiliar with the region in the 1970s and 1980s may miss some of the work's power. Landeg White's Magomero , with its drama and emphasis on local changes over time, probably remains a more effective work for introducing students to local history in Africa. Herbert is instead doing something quite different -- subtle, complex, and moderately subversive of the larger colonial typologies of "The Administration," the "Native Government," the "Missionaries" etc. In Herbert's portrait, individuals act, get into muddles, work out their idiosyncrasies, and -- in the process -- set the stage for large scale change.

Herbert's work is most effective as a multifaceted book about different sorts of elites, especially white ones. She tries to incorporate Lozi elites as well, in an entire section on "The view from the Kuta ," but that is the weakest section of the book, with limited sources on what elite officeholders did, let alone on the activities of their wives and clients. Educated African men, with the exception of major figures such as Kaunda and Banda, are mentioned but not discussed, and much of their motivation, action, and connections to other more ordinary farmers and taxpayers remain opaque. Herbert obliquely rejects recent efforts (eg. Frederick Cooper) to reclaim African nationalism as a popular initiative connected with labor.

Where this book is unobtrusively innovative, though, is its connection of Zambian and Central African nationalism to the politics and events of Federation and the Colonial Office. Herbert offers a nuanced portrayal of divisions between Colonial Service and Colonial Office, the complexities of Labour versus Conservative Governments, and the complicated roles played by experts like Marjorie Perham or heads of commissions like Patrick Devlin. Herbert maintains a focus on colonialism as a political system, rather than a cultural hegemony or system of social welfare control, leaving aside any serious exploration of missionaries, press, schools and clinics, or agricultural development planning. The implication is that despite colonialists' occasional delusions of their transformative impact, their presence sat lightly in Barotseland, and eroded quickly.

Herbert's study is not a nostalgic souvenir of colonialism, tied up with neat conclusions. Instead, it meanders through a historical moment, looking closely and sympathetically from a variety of perspectives, with detours into regions well beyond Barotseland's boundaries, before leaving threads dangling all over the landscape to intrigue future historians and trip them into more problems and work.

Carol Summers
University of Richmond