Into Exile and Back

African Studies Review, Dec 2004 by Herbert, Eugenia W

MEMOIRS & BIOGRAPHY

Simon Zukas. Into Exile and Back. Lusaka: Bookworld Publishers, 2002. Available from D. Zukas, 189 Mountview Rd., London N4 4JT. 220 pp. Photographs. Select Bibliography. Index. £8/$12.00. Paper.

Simon Zukas deserves to be better known than he is. One of the earliest in the white community to work actively for majority rule in Northern Rhodesia, he was expelled from the colony and forced to live in exile for eleven years before returning to take part in a newly independent Zambia. His memoirs, completed at the age of seventy-seven and written in a direct, if somewhat workmanlike, style offer a vivid picture of the turbulent struggles of the fifties, exile in London, and finally his engagement in the not always edifying politics of the postindependence period.

Zukas was born in Lithuania in 1925, then moved with his family to Northern Rhodesia in 1938, thereby escaping the fate of so many of his relatives who died in the Holocaust. A youthful fascination with bridge-building probably determined his future as a civil engineer. He seems to have been born a radical. After an apprenticeship in the Zionist-Socialist movement in Lithuania and eager participation in left-wing activities at university in Cape Town, he was ready to throw himself whole-heartedly into the nascent African nationalist movement on the Copperbelt. As a soldier in East Africa during World War II, he had acquired a profound distaste for racism and the assumptions of white superiority that seemed to him part and parcel of the colonial enterprise. Overcoming African suspicions, he helped organize opposition to Federation, one of the few whites to work with African groups. This cannot have been easy since clearly Zukas was far better educated than his African peers and, indeed, far more radical than many of them in looking ahead already in the early fifties to self-government and majority rule. It cost him most of his white friends at a time when it was difficult to be accepted on familiar terms by Africans.

In 1952 his opposition to Federation led to his arrest and imprisonment for eight months before he was deported to Great Britain, where he lived until he was able to return to Zambia soon after independence. He gradually became disillusioned with UNIP and Kaunda's one-party state and became one of the founders of the MMD. After the party's triumph in the elections in 1991, he served as an MP and a member of the government in several positions, finally resigning after the government tried to prevent Kaunda from contesting the presidency in 1996 on the grounds that he was not a Zambian citizen!

Zukas looks back on his fifty-five years of political activism in sadness rather than in anger. He has no regrets, he declares, "about my involvement in the struggle for emancipation of the Southern African region from colonialism" (203), nor has his wife, who is very much a part of this memoir. But he pulls no punches both about the ill-conceived policies and blatant corruption in the decades following independence that reduced the Zambian economy to a shambles. To blame all the country's misfortunes on its support of liberation struggles in Rhodesia and South Africa simply will not wash.

Because Zukas was so intimately connected with many of the key players, his book will be useful to students of recent Zambian politics. He provides interesting material, for example, on that most ambiguous of early nationalist leaders, Godwin Mbikusita Lewanika, who was widely believed to have tipped off the police about Zukas's agitation against Federation. He also confirms Henry Kissinger's account that Kaunda and his cabinet switched their support to Jonas Savimbi and UNITA in 1975: Kaunda even went to Washington to lobby President Ford to provide military assistance to Savimbi in his war against MPLA, citing fears of Soviet influence in the region. Kaunda's intervention was thus influential in changing American policy toward Angola.

Eugenia W. Herbert

Mount Holyoke College

South Hadley, Massachusetts