Strong Bar,Weak State? Lawyers,Liberalism and State Formation in Zambia

Members of the legal profession exercise potent, though largely hidden, influence on political processes in modern societies. This is taken for granted with respect to established democracies but the political agency of lawyers remains a largely unstudied phenomenon in post‐colonial Africa. This contribution interrogates the role of Zambian lawyers and their Law Association in recent political developments in that country. The central focus of the article is on the Oasis Forum, a unique coalition of lawyers, clergy and feminists that blocked the incumbent president's unconstitutional bid for a third term in office in 2001. The article examines the rising importance of legal process and discourse in the political realm and reflects on the significance of an increasingly aggressive ideology of legalism for state formation in Zambia.     

Ida Vera Simonton's Imperial Masquerades: Intersections of Gender,Race and African Expertise in Progressive‐Era America

Ida Vera Simonton, a New York socialite, visited the French colony of Gabon in 1906 and 1907. Her subsequent narratives about her stay demonstrate a very ambiguous view of the horrors of European colonialism that she claimed to despise and the amoral nature of Africans. Simonton ultimately employed her stay in Gabon to claim a right to form female self‐defence squads in New York and to act as an independent defender of white women. By carefully shaping her public persona to alternately appropriate discourses of masculine regeneration through empire and to highlight her female vulnerability, she made herself into a provocative spectacle. In an ironic twist, given how much Simonton embellished on her own experiences, Broadway producers in 1925 plagiarised her 1912 novel Hell's Playground in their successful play White Cargo. Simonton successfully sued for damages, thus upholding her highly edited version of her trip in law. Her writings expose the intersections of racial anxieties, gendered visions of empire and feminist aspirations in the United States during the Progressive era.     

‘Between Two Fires’: Racial Populism,Indian Resistance and the Beginnings of Satyagraha in the Transvaal, 1902–06

In revisiting the historical circumstances leading up to the birth of satyagraha in the Transvaal in September 1906, this article seeks to place white popular protests against Asians within the same frame of analysis as Indian active nonviolence. In doing so it makes two interrelated arguments. First, I suggest that the evolution of satyagraha is better understood when examined in tandem with racial populism. Indian resistance to Transvaal laws was forged in a hostile, violent and racially charged environment. Gandhi and his followers were well aware of the power of white populism and its political influence over the Transvaal administration, and came to realise that some form of mass action of their own would be needed to counter this influence and achieve their political objectives. Second, I argue that it was the express intention of both white racial populists and the Gandhian resistance movement to exploit the competing imperial priorities of the Transvaal and British governments. The widespread agitation led by the White League and other organisations threatened the stability and authority of the colonial state; and so governors Milner and Selborne sought to appease settler opinion by enacting discriminatory legislation. However, London’s and Calcutta’s sensitivity to prejudice directed against British Indians in southern Africa also opened the door to anti-colonial protest, with Gandhi and his supporters generating support and sympathy in Britain and India by agitating for the repeal of unjust laws. The Transvaal administration was therefore forced to pick its way between white populists, Indian protesters, and imperial oversight and censure; and its anti-Indian policies were shaped by these contradictory pressures.