Kaunda's Gaoler: Memoirs of a District Officer in Northern Rhodesia and Zambia

Kaunda's Gaoler: Memoirs of a District Officer in Northern Rhodesia and Zambia. By David G. Coe and E. Cyril Greenall. London: The Radcliffe Press, 2003. Pp. xxii, 221. $39.50. A few years after the end of colonial rule in Zambia E. Cyril Greenall's new, African "political master" synopsized British district commissioners as people who "may have acted like little gods but ... hard working little gods" (p. 187). This remark, included toward the end of Kaunda 's Gaoler is illustrative of a series of ambivalent dualisms evident throughout Greenall's twenty-five year career working as a district officer (DO) for the British Colonial Office in Northern Rhodesia, and in Zambia. While Zambian officials such as the resident secretary have voiced resentment of behaviors exhibited by colonial officials, many have also found admirable qualities in their job performances. Like many DOs, Greenall's tenure often required him to live in relative proximity to rural African villages, yet despite such propinquity in his memoir he often expresses an oddly cheerful yet admirably honest obliviousness to important events occurring within African communities. Greenall arrived in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia, in March 1944. He was by his own reckoning a newly married, imperialist ("though not I hope in the derogatory sense" [p. 8]) young officer, who was still disoriented enough from his sudden wartime transfer to remote colonial duty in Africa that his first step off the train into the land of his new employment was nearly a stumble "flat on [his] face" (p. 10). His early years as a DO were spent stationed in Kasama, the capital of Northern Province, and Kawambwa, a smaller borna (or administrative outpost) further west toward the Luapula River. Following these postings he was promoted to district commissioner (DC), where he assumed this senior colonial post for Mporokoso and later Luwingu districts (also in the northeast of the country). Greenall recalls these early postings with nostalgia, writing of spectacular scenery, remoteness from wartime Europe, and "superstitious villagers" (p. 54). He fills these pages with anecdotes of privileged rural living and descriptions of what he clearly views as peculiar and backward African beliefs and behaviors. In one case he recalls an encounter with an elderly lion found wandering through the Kawambwa boma. Upon preparing to shoot the lion Greenall was interrupted by an African voice in the darkness that first commanded him to back off, then proceeded to order the lion to "Go home! Go back to your wife." After some further prompting both the lion and the surprised DO obeyed. The man then emerged to explain that the lion was a reincarnation of a deceased chief, and that its killing would cause a local spiritual crisis (p. …