Police Modernization of the National Police of Zambia
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Brian Norris, Ph.D. Nov. 3, 2017 Providence, RI Int’l. Studies Assn./NE Regional Conf. The Citadel Police Modernization in Zambia Methods This is exploratory qualitative research based on 15 days in Zambia in August 2017. I conducted 22 interviews with Zambia Police, US Embassy personnel, non-governmental (NGO) workers, local Zambian officials, and others, all of whom I selected through a snowballing methodology. Direct observation of various facets of Zambian institutions, street life, and day-to- day interactions of its people complemented the semi-structured interviews. Six of the days in country I passed in Lusaka, the capital, with the remainder spent on a 40-hour round trip bus trek up through the Copperbelt cities of Ndola and Kitwe, and Westward through the frontier towns of Solwezi and Mwinilunga, the latter being on the Angola and Congo border and the field site of anthropologist Victor Turner.1 Review of local print-based newspaper articles and archival material completed in-country research activities. Because this is a single-N case, my analytical goal is descriptive, not causal. Modern Zambia The creation of the modern nation state of Zambia owes itself to the actions of 19th century British missionaries and colonialists who formed governing coalitions with the Bemba peoples in what was called Northern Rhodesia. The development of a modern copper industry and attendant railway in the 1930s created urban concentrations from Lusaka to the Copperbelt seemingly necessary for a post-Westphalian nation state with a complex economy at its base. Political scientist Robert Bates has suggested that rural-to-urban migrants in Zambia’s thriving 1 See Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). 1 Brian Norris, Ph.D. Nov. 3, 2017 Providence, RI Int’l. Studies Assn./NE Regional Conf. The Citadel Copperbelt were the shock troops of the nationalist period,2 and Kenneth Kaunda of the Bemba region would be the leader of the newly independent Zambia in 1964 and would preside over the one-party state represented by UNIP (1968-91).3 Long considered a relatively successful sub- Saharan democracy, Zambian politics became tumultuous with the death in office of Michael Sata (Patriotic Front, PF) in 2011. As of the date of the fieldwork of this paper, Hakainde Hichilema (United Party for National Development, UPND) contested the results of the 2016 national elections that put Edgar Lungu (PF) in office, and HH was incarcerated on “treason” charges for a portion of the field visits. According to at least one knowledgeable observer, this political feud is ethnically based, with the PF being a de-ethnicized label for a Bemba coalition and the UPND the same for a Tonga and Losi coalition. Police and Modernization: Two Conceptions Citing Daniel Lerner, Samuel Huntington in his classic Political Order in Changing Societies described modernization as “a multifaceted process involving changes in all areas of human thought and activity.”4 In many ways, Zambia has until recent times been a very traditional society. Consider that the 1969 census, the first after independence in 1964, reported that up to 9% of the population living in male-headed “African Households” in Zambia had between two and “5+” wives. No such similar figures were reported for female-headed 2 Robert Bates, Rural Responses to Industrialization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 65. 3 John M. Mwanaktwe, End of Kaunda Era (Lusaka: A Multimedia Publication, 1994). 4 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006 [1968]), 32. 2 Brian Norris, Ph.D. Nov. 3, 2017 Providence, RI Int’l. Studies Assn./NE Regional Conf. The Citadel households.5 There are two ways to frame the relationship of police to modernization. First, police may supersede an organizational pattern based on political loyalties, or social forces, such as those of the Boss Tweed ring and Tammany Hall in New York, and become organized based on principles of individual merit. The newer organizational form is characterized by identification with and service to a broader political entity and may include specific organizational characteristics, such as college-educated leadership cadre, reliance on scientific principles in forensic investigations, and civil service and pension systems. August Vollmer, his student, O.W. Wilson, and the Wickersham Commission Report of 1929 all represented the extension of these 5 “Table 5: African Households Classified by Sex of Head, Number of Wives Present (Male Heads) and Size of Houhold: Total Zambia,” in Republic of Zambia, Census of Population and Housing, 1969 (Lusaka: Central Statistical Office, August 1970), 89. Up to 18% of households were female-headed, according to this chart, and no female-headed household was listed with multiple husbands. Strongly defined sex roles, virtually universally associated with patriarchy, are well documented. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1:119; A.R. Radcliffe- Brown, The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 43; Robert Redfield, “The Folk Society,” The American Journal of Sociology 52, no. 4 (1947): 297- 8; and Bruce Mannheim, The Language of the Inka since the European Invasion (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991), 79. 3 Brian Norris, Ph.D. Nov. 3, 2017 Providence, RI Int’l. Studies Assn./NE Regional Conf. The Citadel principles of the Progressive Movement in government to the police sector in the US.6 To judge the universality of the appeal of this ‘modern’ form of police organization, consider that Mexican intellectuals translated to Spanish O.W. Wilson’s book on modern police administration.7 International analysts have seen African police institutions following essentially the same historical evolution as those led by August Vollmer, albeit with mixed success. David J. Francis has seen so-called “community policing” as a foil to neo-patrimonial policing—i.e., politically or ethnically based police forces—and non-state policing, to include religious police.8 Milan Pagon complained that “community policing” was not working in South and Central Africa’s transition to democracy.9 David Bayley has described the process of modernization for the police of India.10 National analysts, such as Nigeria’s Tekena N. Tamuno, have been more content to 6 Daniel Sabet, Police Reform in Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6-8; See also, August Vollmer, The Police and Modern Society (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1971 [1936]); and O.W. Wilson and Roy C. McLaren, Police Administration, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972 [1950]). 7 O.W. Wilson, Administración de la Policia (Mexico City: Editorial Limusa-Wiley, SA, 1963). 8 David J. Francis, Policing in Africa (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 13, 19. 9 Milan Pagon, Policing in Central and Eastern Europe: Deviance, Violence, and Victimization (Ljubljana, Slovenia: College of Police Security Studies, 2002), 89ff. 10 David H. Bayley, The Police and Political Development in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). 4 Brian Norris, Ph.D. Nov. 3, 2017 Providence, RI Int’l. Studies Assn./NE Regional Conf. The Citadel portray their country’s police institutions as modern in terms of equipment, technology, buildings, and iconography, with little or no reference to the political or patrimonial police institutions they displaced, or more likely, co-existed with.11 Such a nationalist literature is basically ‘constructivist’ in the sense that it wishes to call into existence the very institutions it purports to report on. Second, police institutions may, in late modernizing countries, be an institutional vanguard ushering the country into modern, complex society. Police, depending on context, are closely related to the military. Huntington wrote that in the early stages of modernization, “the military officers play a highly modernizing and progressive role” with regard to political development by challenging oligarchy, promoting social and economic reform, assailing “backwardness,” introducing middle-class ideas of efficiency, honesty, and national loyalty, managing technology well, and forging international contact, among other things.12 Morris Janowitz more narrowly celebrated the military as a mechanism for civic education, an assimilator of immigrants and as a school for nationalism.13 Police too may play this modernizing role. This seems to be the case when a Zambian Police executive in Lusaka recited the national slogan, “One Nation, One Zambia,” asserted that English is the national language in a country with 44 languages, and claimed that the national 11 Tekena N. Tamuno, The Police in Modern Nigeria 1861-1965 ([Ibadan, Nigeria]: Ibadan University Press, 1970). 12 Huntington, Political Order, 203-4. 13 Morris Janowitz, The Reconstruction of Patriotism: Education for Civic Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xiii-ix, 9, 14, 43, 48, and 54. 5 Brian Norris, Ph.D. Nov. 3, 2017 Providence, RI Int’l. Studies Assn./NE Regional Conf. The Citadel police force was unlikely to assign personnel based on tribal loyalties. “[It is] likely if you are from the North, you are not sent to the North,” he said.14 Fieldwork suggested his comments were accurate. A mid- to low-level Zambia National Police officer in Ndola described rotation in his own career. A 25-year veteran, the National Police had assigned him to Ndola for five