One Zambia, One Nation, One Zamrock

This article reframes African postcolonial cultural history through the lens of popular music, examining how 1970s Zambian rock musicians contested and reimagined Kenneth Kaunda’s Humanism. Whereas existing scholarship on Humanism emphasizes its political and philosophical dimensions, this study reveals how ideology was performed and negotiated through sound, style, and stage. Moving beyond recent reissue and nostalgia-driven accounts, this article situates Zamrock within the politics of postcolonial Zambia as a form of cultural resistance and cosmopolitan creativity. It demonstrates that debates over musical style and cultural authenticity were central, rather than peripheral, to Zambia’s negotiation of postcolonial modernity. By redefining cosmopolitanism from below as a participatory and diasporic process embodied in performance, it restores Zambian musicians to the center of global rock history. Zamrock thus emerges as a critical, hybrid expression of postcolonial identity and agency.