Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation: The Kariba Dam scheme in the Central African Federation
本书基于大量档案和访谈，考察了中非联邦时期卡里巴大坝的建设，揭示了殖民与后殖民时代在民族国家建设、发展计划和非殖民化中的复杂纠缠。
While India achieved independence in 1947, it would be another ten years before Africa witnessed Ghanaian decolonization and a further three years before Harold Macmillan talked about the ‘Wind of Change’ that was supposedly sweeping the continent. One place that the wind seemingly bypassed was central Southern Africa, particularly Southern Rhodesia, which from 1953 to 1963 was the senior partner in the ill-fated multi-racial experiment, the Central African Federation (CAF). Consisting of Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland, Federation was conceptualized as promoting moderate politics; a middle way between African nationalism and white settler interests. Using Low and Lonsdale's framework of a ‘second colonial occupation’, Julia Tischler draws out the complexities of nation building, development schemes, and decolonization in her measured account of the construction of the Kariba Dam. Structured by four main chapters and based on extensive archival work in Britain, Zambia, and Malawi, as well as interviews with construction workers, Tischler's empirically grounded but conceptually focused monograph contributes to debates on the nature of modernization and development discourses and the ‘deep entanglements between the colonial and postcolonial eras’ (p. 6). Tischler is quick to warn the reader that this book is not a reductive account, which posits that modernizing impulses are inherently ‘bad’, only seeking to further oppress the subaltern. For Tischler, these processes are deeply intertwined and a variety of disparate actors other than the ‘official mind’ influenced the development and construction of the Kariba Dam.