Giacomo Macola
Biographic Data
| ID | 225996 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Giacomo Macola |
| GIVEN NAMES | Giacomo |
| FAMILY NAME | Macola |
| SIGNATURE | MACOLA G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Kent |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6119-2016 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 52 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Party Politics and Populism in Zambia: Michael Sata and Political Change, 1955–2014
Nineteenth-century ‘trade guns’ in the Congo Estuary: Local refractions of a global trade
Throughout the nineteenth century, African communities in the Congo estuary displayed a consistent preference for ‘trade guns’, the rough-and-ready muzzle-loading muskets that European producers and traders regarded as obsolete and as an indirect proof of African backwardness. The first section of this article seeks to account for this consumer predilection. The second and third substantive parts of the article explore the provenance of these gun…
The Cambridge History of Strategy
Volume I of The Cambridge History of Strategy offers a history of the practice of strategy from the beginning of recorded history, to the late eighteenth century, from all parts of the world. Drawing on material evidence covering two-and-a-half millennia, an international team of leading scholars in each subject examines how strategy was formulated and applied and with what tools, from ancient Greece and China to the Ottoman and Mughal Empires an…
Strategy in the Wars of Pre-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa
As noted by Richard Reid, African military history remains ‘perhaps the last bastion of the kind of distorted Eurocentric scholarship that characterised African studies before the 1960s’. This is especially true of the pre-colonial period, on account of both the dearth and the inherent limitations and biases of the sources available for study. The purpose of this contribution is to show that, in both tactical and strategic terms, African pre-colo…
Pedro Monaville, Students of the World: Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo
An Africanist’s perspective on Priya Satia’s Empire of guns
Contributo ad una tavola rotonda intorno al libro Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, New York, Penguin Press, 2018. L'autrice, Priya Satia, e' Professor of British History alla Stanford University
Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa, by Scott MacEachern
In this original and timely book, archaeologist Scott MacEachern brings a (very) longue durée perspective to bear on the study of the Boko Haram insurgency in the southern Lake Chad basin, a region with which he has been intimately acquainted for more than three decades. Frequently presented in the Western media as a modern Islamist uprising in a hostile and remote part of the world, Boko Haram, MacEachern contends, can also be understood as the …
Guerrilla warfare in Katanga: The Sanga rebellion of the 1890s and its suppression
This article discusses the origins and development of the Sanga insurgency of the 1890s with a view to demonstrating that, contrary to commonly held stereotypes, pre-colonial warfare was neither simple nor unchanging. Its tactics, it is argued here, repay the sort of close analysis commonly reserved for other typologies and theatres of war. The Yeke, against whose exploitative system of rule the Sanga and their allies rose up in 1891, survived th…
The Colonial Occupation of Katanga: The Personal Correspondence of Clément Brasseur, 1893-1897
The Colonial Occupation of Katanga consists of a translated and richly annotated edition of the personal correspondence of Lieutenant (later Captain) Clément Brasseur, the military officer in charge of Lofoi, the first post of the Congo Free State in Katanga, between September 1893, the month of his arrival in the region, and November 1897, when his violent life came to a violent end. All of the letters included in the volume are addressed to Bra…
Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation by Matthew Ford
Reviewed by: Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation by Matthew Ford Giacomo Macola (bio) Weapon of Choice: Small Arms and the Culture of Military Innovation. By Matthew Ford. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 264. Hardcover $39.95. Matthew Ford's densely researched volume uses small arms development after WWII as a prism through which to understand broader processes of western military innovation. Adopting …
A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire
Firearms have been studied by imperial historians mainly as means of human destruction and material production. Yet, as suggested by constructivist approaches to the history of technology, firearms have always been invested with a whole array of additional social meanings. By placing these latter at the centre of analysis, the essays presented in A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire extend the study of guns beyond the confines of m…
From Royalism to E-secessionism
From Royalism to E-secessionism: Lozi Histories and Ethnic Politics in Zambia
As has become increasingly clear over the course of the past three decades, processes of ethnogenesis in modern Africa drew much of their impetus from the production of what van Binsbergen called ‘literate ethnohistory’ and what Peterson and Macola have more recently termed ‘homespun histories’, with a view to signposting the genre’s artisanal and composite character. 1 Because they convene audiences and summon up communities, books and other pri…
Meredith Terretta. Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon
Among English-speaking historians, the insurgency promoted by the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) since the late 1950s has not received the same degree of sustained scholarly attention as other coeval African armed liberation movements. But Meredith Terretta's brilliant monograph does more than fill a gap in the literature. Students of the decolonization era have long pondered the relationship between local and national dynamics in shapin…
Debating ‘The Rediscovery of Liberalism’ in Zambia: Responses to Harri Englund
In Africa 83(4) (November 2013), Harri Englund discussed several recent books on Zambia published preceding the country’s fiftieth independence anniversary. His article explored the ways in which recent publications by Zambian and Zambianist authors have launched a fresh research agenda, and he focused in particular on the scholarly engagement with liberalism. Below, we publish responses from David M.Gordon, Bizeck Jube Phiri and Giacomo Macola, …
Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late Colonial Zambia
Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late Colonial Zambia
Building on the foundational work of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, the essays contained in Living the End of Empire offer a nuanced and complex picture of the late-colonial period in Zambia. The present volume, based on untapped archival material and sources that have emerged in recent years, throws new light on some of the historical trajectories that the teleological gaze of nationalist scholars tended to ignore or belittle. By bringing to …
“The Father of Zambian Politics” between Padmore and Maala
?pon his return from London, Nkumbula, the modernizing cosmopolitan nationalist, was soon faced with the problem of securing mass support for the anti-federal agitation that he was planning to lead. In seeking to meet this all-important goal, Nkumbula was led to reposition himself vis-à-vis his ethnic locality and home province, the fears and ambitions of which he could no longer afford to dismiss as divisive and parochial. To be sure, the anti-F…
Resisting Unip: Liberal Democracy and Ethnic Politics in the First Republic
“?fro-pessimist authors such as Bayart, Chabal, and Daloz dismiss the public pronouncements and ideological orientations of contemporary African political leaders as purely rhetorical claims destined to mask the informal, but enduring, workings of patron-client networks, which they view as the “very stuff” of African “political life.” 1 For proponents of this approach to the historical relationship between the state and society in postcolonial Af…
Epilogue: Nkumbula’s Last Initiatives and Legacy
?he UNIP one-party state lasted for almost twenty years. Zambia’s eventual return to multipartyism in 1990–1991, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s first democratic transitions, attracted worldwide attention and has spawned a considerable literature. While primarily devoted to examining Nkumbula’s last years, this epilogue also wants to argue that to view the triumph of the Zambian Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) solely as the product of the 19…
Nkumbula, Unip, and the Roots of Authoritarianism in Nationalist Zambia
?his chapter focuses on the UNIP-ANC competition of the early 1960s. A close examination of UNIP literals ture during these heady years—the subject of the first part of this chapter—reveals the fundamentally authoritarian character of the brand of nationalism espoused by the party’s leaders and activists. With party and nation seen as coterminous, the assertion of minority views and alternative political projects was viewed with profound suspicio…
Imagining the Nation: Methodism, History, and Politics in Nkumbula’s Early Years
?he bulk of this chapter explores the dense relationships between Harry Nkumbula’s Methodist upbringing, his first political activities and a series of literary experiments that culminated in the compilation of “Life and customs of the Baila,” an anthropological and historical text on which Nkumbula worked intermittently between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s.1 “Life and customs of the Baila” provides an opportunity partly to overcome the diffi…
The Explosion of Contradictions
?arry Nkumbula— most Zambians outside the Bantu Botatwe areas of the Southern and Central Provinces would today argue—was a likeable but irresponsible leader. Somehow, before his many weaknesses got the better of him, he briefly managed to embody the newfound unity of purpose of his countrymen and countrywomen during the anti-federal battle of the early 1950s. The rise of a younger—more militant and morally upright—generation of leaders from the …
“The Last Battle I Will Ever Fight”: Nkumbula and the Drive toward the One-Party State
?n contrast to the previous chapter, which has revolved around the analysis of the ANC’s and its key constituents‘ postindependence ideological choices, the present chapter adopts a more explicitly chronological perspective with a view to surveying the complex events that enabled Nkumbula to emerge from the enfeebled position in which he had found himself in the mid-1960s and to finally threaten the continuing dominance of the Kaunda regime in al…
Introduction: Historical Biography and Rival African Nationalisms
?y exploring the complex life and thought of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula—Zambian nationalism’s prime instigator in the 1940s and 1950s and, following the country’s independence in 1964, the tenacious leader of parliamentary opposition—this book seeks to make a contribution to the development of political biography, agenre the potentialities of which remain to be fully realized in the field of Central African historical studies. 1 That this should be t…
Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa
This book transforms our contemporary understanding of the recent political history of Central Africa. It charts the complex life and thought of Harry Nkumbula (ca. 1917-1983), the first openly nation
It Means as if We Are Excluded From the Good Freedom’: Thwarted Expectations of Independence in the Luapula Province of Zambia, 1964–6
Based on a close reading of new archival material, this article makes a case for the adoption of an empirical, ‘sub-systemic’ approach to the study of nationalist and postcolonial politics in Zambia. By exploring the notion of popular ‘expectations of independence’ to a much greater degree than did previous studies, the paper contends that the extent of the United National Independence Party's political hegemony in the immediate post-independence…
The Kingdom of Kazembe: History and Politics in North-Eastern Zambia and Katanga to 1950
The first full-length study of the pre-colonial and colonial history of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe
Debating ‘The Rediscovery of Liberalism’ in Zambia: Responses to Harri Englund
In Africa 83(4) (November 2013), Harri Englund discussed several recent books on Zambia published preceding the country’s fiftieth independence anniversary. His article explored the ways in which recent publications by Zambian and Zambianist authors have launched a fresh research agenda, and he focused in particular on the scholarly engagement with liberalism. Below, we publish responses from David M.Gordon, Bizeck Jube Phiri and Giacomo Macola, …
Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late Colonial Zambia
Building on the foundational work of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, the essays contained in Living the End of Empire offer a nuanced and complex picture of the late-colonial period in Zambia. The present volume, based on untapped archival material and sources that have emerged in recent years, throws new light on some of the historical trajectories that the teleological gaze of nationalist scholars tended to ignore or belittle. By bringing to …
Reassessing the Significance of Firearms in Central Africa: The Case of North-Western Zambia to the 1920s
Based on a close examination of European travelogues and the evidence produced in the wake of the formulation of colonial gun policies, this article contends that the significance of firearms in Central Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been unduly played down in the existing literature. The first substantive section of the article charts the movement of the gun frontier in nineteenth-century north-western Zambia. It fore…
The Historian Who Would Be Chief: A Biography of Simon Jilundu Chibanza Iii, 1899–1974
By recovering from obscurity the life story of an early Zambian historian, this paper makes a case for the adoption of a biographical approach to the study of Africa's colonial history. It argues that Simon Jilundu Chibanza III's trajectory provides valuable insights into the ambivalent social location and intricate motivations of the Zambian intelligentsia during colonial rule. An examination of his background and variegated career accounts for …
Historical and Ethnographical Publications in the Vernaculars of Colonial Zambia: Missionary Contribution to the 'Creation of Tribalism
This paper examines the chronology and attributes of literate ethno-history in Northern Rhodesia. While the earliest published authors were invariably members of missionary societies whose evangelical policies were predisposed towards the Christianisation of local chieftaincies, the expansion and Africanisation of vernacular historiography from the late 1930s owed much to the intervention of the colonial government in the publishing sphere. A sur…
Guerrilla warfare in Katanga: The Sanga rebellion of the 1890s and its suppression
This article discusses the origins and development of the Sanga insurgency of the 1890s with a view to demonstrating that, contrary to commonly held stereotypes, pre-colonial warfare was neither simple nor unchanging. Its tactics, it is argued here, repay the sort of close analysis commonly reserved for other typologies and theatres of war. The Yeke, against whose exploitative system of rule the Sanga and their allies rose up in 1891, survived th…
Literate Ethnohistory in Colonial Zambia: The Case of Ifikolwe Fyandi na Bantu Bandi
Most precolonial African states were characterized by a manifest disparity of control between center and periphery. This was certainly true of the kingdom of Kazembe, founded as a result of the collapse of the Ruund colony on the Mukulweji River towards the end of the seventeenth century and the subsequent eastward migration of an heterogeneous group of “Lundaized” titleholders. A set of flexible institutions and symbols of power helped the ruler…
The history of the Eastern Lunda royal capitals to 1900
(2001). The history of the Eastern Lunda royal capitals to 1900. Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa: Vol. 36-37, No. 1, pp. 30-45
Historical and Ethnographical Publications in the Vernaculars of Colonial Zambia: Missionary Contribution to the 'Creation of Tribalism
This paper examines the chronology and attributes of literate ethno-history in Northern Rhodesia. While the earliest published authors were invariably members of missionary societies whose evangelical policies were predisposed towards the Christianisation of local chieftaincies, the expansion and Africanisation of vernacular historiography from the late 1930s owed much to the intervention of the colonial government in the publishing sphere. A sur…
The Kingdom of Kazembe: History and Politics in North-Eastern Zambia and Katanga to 1950
The first full-length study of the pre-colonial and colonial history of the eastern Lunda kingdom of Kazembe
The Historian Who Would Be Chief: A Biography of Simon Jilundu Chibanza Iii, 1899–1974
By recovering from obscurity the life story of an early Zambian historian, this paper makes a case for the adoption of a biographical approach to the study of Africa's colonial history. It argues that Simon Jilundu Chibanza III's trajectory provides valuable insights into the ambivalent social location and intricate motivations of the Zambian intelligentsia during colonial rule. An examination of his background and variegated career accounts for …
The Lunda-Ndembu: Style, Change, and Social Transformation in South Central Africa
It Means as if We Are Excluded From the Good Freedom’: Thwarted Expectations of Independence in the Luapula Province of Zambia, 1964–6
Based on a close reading of new archival material, this article makes a case for the adoption of an empirical, ‘sub-systemic’ approach to the study of nationalist and postcolonial politics in Zambia. By exploring the notion of popular ‘expectations of independence’ to a much greater degree than did previous studies, the paper contends that the extent of the United National Independence Party's political hegemony in the immediate post-independence…
One Zambia, Many Histories: Towards a History of Post-colonial Zambia
In contrast to the rich tradition of academic analysis and understanding of the pre-colonial and colonial history of Zambia, the country's post-colonial trajectory has been all but ignored by historians. The assumptions of developmentalism, the cultural hegemony of the United National Independence Party's orthodoxy and its conflation with national interests, and a narrow focus on Zambia's diplomatic role in Southern African affairs, have all cont…
One Zambia, Many Histories: Towards a History of Post-colonial Zambia
One Zambia, Many Histories: Towards a History of Post-Colonial Zambia
This book takes an impartial look at the postcolonial history of Zambia, examining political unity and dissent, the public role of religion (Roman Catholicism, the Charismatic churches, and Islam), the economy and the State, and new and old forms of politics in the Third Republic. It is the outcome of a conference organized by the network for Historical Research in Zambia, in Lusaka August 2005. There are contributions by Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja H…
“The Father of Zambian Politics” between Padmore and Maala
?pon his return from London, Nkumbula, the modernizing cosmopolitan nationalist, was soon faced with the problem of securing mass support for the anti-federal agitation that he was planning to lead. In seeking to meet this all-important goal, Nkumbula was led to reposition himself vis-à-vis his ethnic locality and home province, the fears and ambitions of which he could no longer afford to dismiss as divisive and parochial. To be sure, the anti-F…
Resisting Unip: Liberal Democracy and Ethnic Politics in the First Republic
“?fro-pessimist authors such as Bayart, Chabal, and Daloz dismiss the public pronouncements and ideological orientations of contemporary African political leaders as purely rhetorical claims destined to mask the informal, but enduring, workings of patron-client networks, which they view as the “very stuff” of African “political life.” 1 For proponents of this approach to the historical relationship between the state and society in postcolonial Af…
Epilogue: Nkumbula’s Last Initiatives and Legacy
?he UNIP one-party state lasted for almost twenty years. Zambia’s eventual return to multipartyism in 1990–1991, one of sub-Saharan Africa’s first democratic transitions, attracted worldwide attention and has spawned a considerable literature. While primarily devoted to examining Nkumbula’s last years, this epilogue also wants to argue that to view the triumph of the Zambian Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) solely as the product of the 19…
Nkumbula, Unip, and the Roots of Authoritarianism in Nationalist Zambia
?his chapter focuses on the UNIP-ANC competition of the early 1960s. A close examination of UNIP literals ture during these heady years—the subject of the first part of this chapter—reveals the fundamentally authoritarian character of the brand of nationalism espoused by the party’s leaders and activists. With party and nation seen as coterminous, the assertion of minority views and alternative political projects was viewed with profound suspicio…
Imagining the Nation: Methodism, History, and Politics in Nkumbula’s Early Years
?he bulk of this chapter explores the dense relationships between Harry Nkumbula’s Methodist upbringing, his first political activities and a series of literary experiments that culminated in the compilation of “Life and customs of the Baila,” an anthropological and historical text on which Nkumbula worked intermittently between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s.1 “Life and customs of the Baila” provides an opportunity partly to overcome the diffi…
The Explosion of Contradictions
?arry Nkumbula— most Zambians outside the Bantu Botatwe areas of the Southern and Central Provinces would today argue—was a likeable but irresponsible leader. Somehow, before his many weaknesses got the better of him, he briefly managed to embody the newfound unity of purpose of his countrymen and countrywomen during the anti-federal battle of the early 1950s. The rise of a younger—more militant and morally upright—generation of leaders from the …
“The Last Battle I Will Ever Fight”: Nkumbula and the Drive toward the One-Party State
?n contrast to the previous chapter, which has revolved around the analysis of the ANC’s and its key constituents‘ postindependence ideological choices, the present chapter adopts a more explicitly chronological perspective with a view to surveying the complex events that enabled Nkumbula to emerge from the enfeebled position in which he had found himself in the mid-1960s and to finally threaten the continuing dominance of the Kaunda regime in al…
Introduction: Historical Biography and Rival African Nationalisms
?y exploring the complex life and thought of Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula—Zambian nationalism’s prime instigator in the 1940s and 1950s and, following the country’s independence in 1964, the tenacious leader of parliamentary opposition—this book seeks to make a contribution to the development of political biography, agenre the potentialities of which remain to be fully realized in the field of Central African historical studies. 1 That this should be t…
Liberal Nationalism in Central Africa
This book transforms our contemporary understanding of the recent political history of Central Africa. It charts the complex life and thought of Harry Nkumbula (ca. 1917-1983), the first openly nation
Reassessing the Significance of Firearms in Central Africa: The Case of North-Western Zambia to the 1920s
Based on a close examination of European travelogues and the evidence produced in the wake of the formulation of colonial gun policies, this article contends that the significance of firearms in Central Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been unduly played down in the existing literature. The first substantive section of the article charts the movement of the gun frontier in nineteenth-century north-western Zambia. It fore…
Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late Colonial Zambia
Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late Colonial Zambia
Building on the foundational work of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, the essays contained in Living the End of Empire offer a nuanced and complex picture of the late-colonial period in Zambia. The present volume, based on untapped archival material and sources that have emerged in recent years, throws new light on some of the historical trajectories that the teleological gaze of nationalist scholars tended to ignore or belittle. By bringing to …
Meredith Terretta. Nation of Outlaws, State of Violence: Nationalism, Grassfields Tradition, and State Building in Cameroon
Among English-speaking historians, the insurgency promoted by the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC) since the late 1950s has not received the same degree of sustained scholarly attention as other coeval African armed liberation movements. But Meredith Terretta's brilliant monograph does more than fill a gap in the literature. Students of the decolonization era have long pondered the relationship between local and national dynamics in shapin…
Debating ‘The Rediscovery of Liberalism’ in Zambia: Responses to Harri Englund
In Africa 83(4) (November 2013), Harri Englund discussed several recent books on Zambia published preceding the country’s fiftieth independence anniversary. His article explored the ways in which recent publications by Zambian and Zambianist authors have launched a fresh research agenda, and he focused in particular on the scholarly engagement with liberalism. Below, we publish responses from David M.Gordon, Bizeck Jube Phiri and Giacomo Macola, …
From Royalism to E-secessionism
Political science (28 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (23 works) · History (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · African history and culture studies (20 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (20 works) · Ancient history (13 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Colonialism (11 works)