Ruth First Prize: James Musonda’s radical analysis of the 2021 election in Zambia

The prize committee noted the article’s provocative and radical analysis of the 2021 election in Zambia when the ruling party was unexpectedly overthrown. With its foundation in extensive first-hand research, participant observation and activist immersion, Musonda’s account is a worthy example of Ruth First’s methodology in Mozambique in the 1970s as well as her commitment to class analysis relevant to a particular time and place.

In the article, Musonda takes on the way the Zambian political class held on to power through its ruling party, via bribery, violence and oppression and through its linkage with the copper mining companies which dominate Zambia’s economy. The gross failures of the Zambian government and its economic impoverishment of the population have sparked bitterness and a growing awareness that there might be means to resist. In this context, Musonda offers a nuanced account of class relations – never simply ‘elite/mass’ oversimplifications, but distinctions made and evidenced between the diversity of organised workers and auxiliary informal workers, bureaucratic and security state functionaries, and between voters of different backgrounds in terms of gender, ethnicity, economic standing and so on.

Most impressively, Musonda evidences their dynamic interactions as they move towards class alliance for more open confrontation with state power. Evidence of an explicit ideology of protest and rejection and a growing awareness of potential agency emerges. Through underground mobilising led by the trade unions, the corrosive impact of bribery was undermined with the subversive notion of taking the money, but voting for the opposition. Even if this plays out as sabotage rather than outright revolution, it worked and the ruling party fell. Musonda has provided a powerful analysis of resistance to class oppression which deserves to be documented.

James Musonda is a former trade unionist, born and bred on the Zambian Copperbelt where he also worked as a nurse at Mopani Copper Mines. He holds a PhD in Politics and Social Sciences from Liege University. His PhD thesis draws on his ethnography in two underground mines where he worked as a helper and in two mining communities on the Zambian Copperbelt. He dealt with the question of what it means to have a job and be a worker under the neoliberal dispensation tracking subjectivities through the workers’ everyday lives.

He is currently a senior researcher at the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) in South Africa, where he leads a project focused on labour and energy transitions in South Africa, Ghana and Kenya. He is the winner of the 2021 Terence Ranger Prize of the Journal of Southern Africa for the best article by a first-time author for the article ‘Modernity on Credit: The Experience of Underground Miners on the Zambian Copperbelt’.

Musonda’s full article is available to read for free online, “He who laughs last laughs the loudest: the 2021 donchi-kubeba (don’t tell) elections in Zambia“.

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