In Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia), colonial authorities, mining companies and other industries, and some missionaries sought to “civilise” and impose order on African populations in towns such as Livingstone and the emerging Copperbelt urban centres. After the Second World War, these efforts produced an ostensibly urban and “modern” social order. During this period, a small minority of highly educated, middle-class African ‘elites’ emerged, increasingly asserting themselves in the governance of African urban life and displacing the “traditional” authorities to whom the colonial state had originally delegated such roles. These ‘elites’ later spearheaded the independence struggle, and after independence, the ruling faction advanced its own vision of an urban and “modern” order through the framework of Zambian Humanism. Yet despite its rhetorical break with colonialism, Humanism in practice often reproduced colonial strategies of discipline and regulation.

At the same time, the wider urban African masses resisted these agendas, often refusing to conform to the “modernist” ideals promoted by some missionaries, colonial authorities, and nationalist ‘elites.’ In this presentation, my focus is on African men in Livingstone and the Copperbelt, examining how they navigated, pursued, and attained manhood between the mid-1940s and late 1970s, an era nostalgically portrayed by many of my older interlocutors and some scholars as a “golden era of modern manhood.” This presentation is based on a draft chapter from my doctoral thesis.