Did you ever realise a visit to your local museum can be quite revealing or instructive, perhaps? That was my discovery when I visited the Livingstone Museum which I, like most Zambians and travellers passing through the tourist capital, had previously ignored or simply dismissed as a place of special interest only to overseas tourists who bring into the country the much-needed foreign exchange.
After paying the mandatory entrance fee, I entered the hall of the makeshift museum (as the main Livingstone Museum was then under renovation) and was greeted by a display old copies of the Northern News awash with photographs of a beaming former Rhodesia Railways (RR) locomotive driver Sir Roy Welensky, a son of Polish migrants in Southern Rhodesia who became Prime Minister of the defunct Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (1953-1963).
How did Sir Roy get knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth when he did not have a single drop of British blood in his veins? I asked myself as I stood there, wondering what criterion Whitehall or Buckingham Palace used to select him for the knighthood – a top honour reserved for the intrepid Britons who must have sacrificed their lives to ensure the preservation and safety of the British Empire.
However, it later dawned that I was probably being unfair to Sir Roy because African independence heroes such as Sir Abubakar Tafawabalewa of Nigeria and Sir Seretse Khama of Botswana had been knighted by the Queen even though they, too, did not a singe drop of British blood in them.
“So there is still chance for Dr Kenneth Kaunda to be similarly knighted by the Queen with whom he was pictured dancing and smiling gleefully at a dinner during the 1979 Commonwealth Heads of Government and Leaders summit that paved the way for independence of Zimbabwe,” I muttered to myself.
It is a well known fact that Dr Kaunda had sacrificed Zambia’s resources by supporting the Zimbabwean liberation struggle and more importantly, perhaps, helping smash the rebellion against the British Crown by Ian Smith who, despite repeated warnings by the international community, seized absolute power when he proclaimed Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on November 11, 1965.
Zambia, which also gave sanctuary to Zimbabwean freedom fighters, became a target of marauding rebel Rhodesian troops who raided Zambian territory with impunity, killing innocent Zambians and destroying property.
Surely this man (KK), who even went further by venturing where other African leaders would not dare and implemented comprehensive United Nations (UN) sanctions against the ‘rebel Smith regime deserved the knighthood, as a thank you by the British, for the price he paid for his principles, I opined as I moved to the next room in the museum.
In this room I found myself for the first time gazing at the ‘Kaliloze’ gun – a traditional shotgun which, according to local legend, witchdoctors and wizards in old Barotseland (Western Province) used to ‘fire’ at the enemy as he/she slept at night. I was particularly attracted to this exhibit on display because a former colleague on the Times of Zambia, Mr Gibby Mukelabai, who hails from the area, once wrote a feature article on witchcraft and the use of this ‘lethal weapon’ by aggrieved villagers seeking to exact revenge.
Appropriately named after Scottish missionary and explorer Dr David Livingstone, who discovered (which some people dispute) the ‘Mosi -o-Tunya’ – the ‘Smoke that Thunders’ and named it the Victoria Falls, after Britain’s Queen Victoria, the museum also has a special section devoted to the life of this remarkable European philanthropist who died at Chitambo Mission near Serenje District, Central Province.
Some of the items preserved in this room that I saw included Dr Livingstone’s black steel-trunk; placed next to the makeshift bed on which he died. The marks left by a fading-burning candle were still visible on this trunk in which he also kept medicines and other personal belongings.
The Livingstone Museum had yet another surprise for me, as a first-time visitor. For in the next room, I found an improvisation of a scene from the 18-19th century Slave Trade during which millions of Africans were abducted and later marched in fetters to the East or West African coasts and shipped to work on cornfields and sugar plantations in America.
It was a painful reminder of how Africans, in leg-irons, were whipped and frog-marched through hostile terrain, like sheep for slaughter, before being sold by Arab and European slave traders.
While still in the room, reflecting on the dark days of the infamous trade in human beings, which did not end until abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and President Abraham Lincoln stepped in, a group of African-Americans, probably on a special packaged trip to retrace their African roots, joined me.
Looking sternly at a group of African slaves, who are manacled and yoked together, being shepherded by two whip-wielding Arab slave traders (one in front and the other at the rear to ensure no one escaped) a young American girl in entourage could not contain her emotions.
She wanted to know how the civilised world could have allowed such naked brutality to take place; upon which one of the adults in the touring party, assumed the role of curator and started to relate events in history, explaining how their ancestors found themselves in North and South America, the Caribbean islands and the Diaspora in general.
It was a moving and an unforgettable experience for all of us who were listening to his narration during which he recalled how hapless Africans – mainly from West African countries like the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nigeria – were bought as sold like second-hand clothes at a London or New York City flea-market before being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean as cheap labour.
Millions of ‘unlucky’ captives did not even reach the mainland America as they perished on the high seas through various illnesses while ring-leaders, those deemed to have fomented mutiny or rebellion on the slave-ships were summarily executed or thrown overboard and drowned. But the picture changed dramatically thanks to the work of men like Lincoln, who stopped the American Civil War, and helped abolished the Slave Trade.
This impromptu tutorial inside the Livingstone Museum reminded me of some eminent civil rights leaders of later years like Marcus Garvey, who launched a ‘Return-to-Africa’ campaign for freed American Negroes. To achieve his goal, Garvey established a shipping line that christened the ‘Black Star’.
Dr Kwame Nkrumah, who had studied in America, was so inspired by Garvey’s exploits and practical philanthropy that when he led Ghana to independence from Britain in 1957, he decided to name the Ghanaian national soccer team, the Black Stars, who have come to dominate the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON).
When Zambia gained her independence from Britain in 1964, the Black Stars flew into the country for a three-nation Independence Cup tournament involving the Zambian national team and the Harambee Stars of Kenya. I watched one of the matches played at what was previously ‘for whites only’ Mufulira Central Sports stadium on October 24, 1964. The arena, which is located on the Congo border, was packed to the rafters.
Born in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey was an orator for the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. Garvey advanced a Pan-African philosophy which inspired a global mass movement, known as Garveyism. Garveyism eventually inspired others, from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement.
he social activist was born on August 17, 1887, in St Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Self-educated, Garvey also founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association, dedicated to promoting African-Americans and resettlement in Africa. In the United States he launched several businesses to promote a separate black nation. After he was convicted of mail fraud and deported back to his native Jamaica, he continued his work for black repatriation to Africa.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey was the last of 11 children born to Marcus Garvey, Sr. and Sarah Jane Richards.
According to historical records, his father was a stone mason, and his mother a domestic worker and farmer. The old man was a great influence on his son, who once described him as “severe, firm, determined, bold, and strong, refusing to yield even to superior forces if he believed he was right.”
At 14, Garvey became a printer’s apprentice. In 1903, he travelled to Kingston, the Jamaican capital, and soon became involved in union activities. Three years later, he took part in an unsuccessful printers’ strike and the experience kindled in him a passion for political activism. To enhance his campaign he travelled throughout Central America, working as a newspaper editor and writing about the exploitation of migrant workers in the plantations. He later moved to London where he attended Birkbeck College (University of London) and worked for the African Times and Orient Review, which advocated Pan-African nationalism.
Inspired by these experiences, Garvey returned to Jamaica in 1912 and founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) with the goal of uniting all of African Diaspora to “establish a country and absolute government of their own”.
After corresponding with Booker T. Washington – the American educator who founded the Tuskegee Institute – Garvey returned to the US in 1916 to raise funds for a similar venture in Jamaica. He settled in New York City and formed a UNIA chapter in Harlem to promote a separatist philosophy of social, political, and economic freedom for blacks.
In 1918, when former African National Congress (ANC) and South Africa’s first Black president Nelson Mandela was born, Garvey began publishing the widely distributed newspaper, Negro World to convey his message.
By the following year, Garvey and UNIA had launched the Black Star Line, a shipping company aimed at establishing trade links between Africans in America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Canada and Africa.
Simultaneously, Garvey started the Negros Factories Association, a series of companies aimed at manufacturing marketable commodities in big industrial centre in the Western hemisphere and Africa.
Sadly in 1922, Garvey and three other UNIA chiefs were charged with mail-fraud involving the Black Star Line. Garvey was convicted and sentenced to five years’ in jail. Claiming to be a victim of a politically-motivated miscarriage of justice, Garvey appealed his conviction, but was denied. In 1927 he was released from prison and deported to Jamaica.
However, Garvey was undeterred as he continued his political activism and the work of UNIA in Jamaica before returned to the United Kingdom (UK) in 1935. But he did not command the same influence he had earlier. It is said that probably out of desperation, he collaborated with outspoken segregationist and white supremacist Senator Theodore Bilbo, of Mississippi, to promote a reparations scheme.
Garvey died in London in 1940, five years before the end of the Second World War (1939-19450) after suffering several strokes. Due to travel restrictions during World War II, his body was interred in London.
But at the time of Zambia’s independence in 1964, his remains were exhumed and repatriated to Jamaica, where the government proclaimed him Jamaica’s first national hero and re-interred him at a shrine in the National Heroes Park. But his memory and influence remain. His message of ‘black pride and dignity’ inspired many in the early days of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
To commemorate his many contributions, Garvey’s bust has been displayed in the Organization of American States’ Hall of Heroes in Washington DC while Ghana, as alluded to earlier, has named its shipping line the Black Star Line and its national soccer team the Black Stars, in honour of Marcus Garvey whose efforts must have inspired the group of African-Americans I met with when I visited the Livingstone Museum, a fantastic repository of Zambia’s arts and culture worth visiting by everyone eager to learn more about our rich heritage.
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