Gender and Decolonisation in Zambia: Re-Examining Women’s Contributions to the Anti-Colonial Struggle

Zambia obtained its independence from British colonial rule in 1964. While significant portions of historiography focus on how the struggle was predominantly fought by men, some more recent literature examines the various ways in which women contributed to the movement. This paper re-examines women’s participation in the anti-colonial movement of the 1950s and early 1960s by taking a cue from the development studies theories of women in development, women and development, and gender and development (WID, WAD and GAD respectively). The paper uses primary interviews and archival sources to focus on specific woman-led protests and their participants to investigate how women contributed to the struggle. It assesses the ways historians have portrayed women’s participation in decolonisation through specific lenses, critiquing the historiographical framing of women’s roles in the movement. I assert that the existing literature compartmentalises women’s contributions into political and non-political endeavours, and this limits how we can understand their work. This paper addresses the question of how we can better understand women’s contributions to the Zambian independence movement by realising that historiography has framed female labour in terms of reflecting the WID and WAD paradigms and by reframing the narratives through a lens reflective of the GAD paradigm. I argue that we can see how women’s labour has been characterised in ways that prevent us from seeing the larger picture: that both men’s and women’s work were essential to dismantling colonialism. I argue that a gendered lens, which views male and female contributions together, is necessary to a comprehensive understanding of the movement.