A House in Zambia

This is a new book (published 2010) but the approach of looking at the history of a space/ place has resonance

House in Zambia: Recollections of the ANC and Oxfam at 250 Zambezi Road, Lusaka, 1967-97’, edited by Robin Palmer: a reflection on ‘Southern Africa’s twin struggles for political freedom and economic development’ through the window of an ordinary house with extraordinary occupants.

Review: http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/65593

This book is something rather unusual, the biography of a house. Not some aristocratic family’s great residence. An ordinary house, a modern house, but worth ‘listening to’ because of the remarkable people who lived and worked in it. 250 Zambezi Road was for over twenty years witness to the longest and most daunting of Africa’s liberation struggles – the African National Congress’s (ANC) century-long fight to bring democracy and non-racialism to South Africa. For much of that time, and afterwards, 250 was also in effect Oxfam’s operational base in Zambia, as this most famous of Britain’s development charities played its part in Africa’s other historical battle: to win a decent standard of living for the poor.


This is not an ‘academic’ book, although historian Hugh Macmillan’s ‘Story of a House’ is a fascinating account of a little known corner of South Africa’s liberation story. Most of the book is written by a diverse group of Oxfam workers, many Zambians as well as Britons, who assemble their recollections of how they worked together. The reader only gets glimpses of the difficulties the ANC faced in exile, and learns too little of Oxfam’s unfolding perspectives and strategies in its development work. But beyond the occasional and probably well justified sense of nostalgia, there is a lot to be learned, particularly about how Oxfam worked in this part of the world. Victor Pelekamoyo perhaps sums this up best: ‘As an outsider, I wondered why Oxfam laboured so much to make the partners feel that Oxfam existed because of them, and not the other way round’. Dr Robin Palmer, who pulled this book together, and his contributors are to be congratulated on a remarkable and original work, and for arranging its publication in Zambia and not distant Europe.