Laughing cheerily in our interview, Vernon Mwaanga painted a sunny picture of Sino-Zambian relations from the late 1960s to early 1970s. A seasoned diplomat who had served at the United Nations (1966-72) and the Zambian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1973-75), Mwaanga represented the first generation of Zambian elites, who were eager to boost the country’s international profile through engagement with powerful Cold War actors. Due to the fact that postcolonial Zambian history has until now primarily been understood through the prism of its regional context, China’s relations with Zambia have been packed into a grand narrative of an ‘all-weather friendship’ which could liberate southern Africa from both colonial and white minority rule. It is therefore necessary to understand not only Sino-Zambian relations during the Cold War but also the effect these relations had on Zambia’s foreign policy thinking and practices. How did ideology and geopolitics factor into Zambia’s relations with Communist China? Did the internal politics of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) adversely affect Sino-Zambian relations as we have observed in the case of KANU in Kenya? In what ways can non-state actors contribute to our understanding of China-Africa relations during the Cold War era?

No event was as significant in shaping Zambia’s foreign policy as Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). On 11 November 1965, the Cabinet of Rhodesia announced that that country (formerly Southern Rhodesia), a British territory in southern Africa that had governed itself since 1923, now regarded itself as an independent sovereign state. From then on, Zambia was implicated in the turbulent process of a struggle for liberation across southern Africa, made ever more difficult by ambitious, manipulative foreign patrons with conflicting global interests. There has been a tendency in existing literature to portray local liberation movements as ‘proxies’ for superpowers. Andy De Roche emphasised the key role of President Kenneth Kaunda in influencing US policy in southern Africa, but his analysis takes as its starting point 1975, the year after Gerald Ford replaced Richard Nixon as US President. This chapter shines a spotlight on the earlier period from Rhodesia’s UDI in 1965 to 1974, to examine how Zambia defined and developed its position in relation to the global ideological confrontation, a position that frustrated many Western leaders.