Eurafrican Invisibility in Zambia’s Census as an Echo of Colonial Whiteness: The Case for a British Apology

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Eurafricans’ invisibility in Zambia’s national census, history, and social framework is an echo of colonial whiteness stemming from the destructive legacy of illegitimacy perpetuated by British officials in Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia) during the colonial era (1924–64), which continues to the present day. This is evidenced by the absence of Eurafricans in the Zambia national censuses. This contribution calls for the British government to apologise to the Eurafrican community for the legacy of illegitimacy and intergenerational racial trauma it bestowed on the community. Zambia’s tribal ‘ethnic’ and ‘linguistics’ census classification options prevent a comprehensive understanding of Zambia’s multi-racial history and the development of a hybrid space that embraces a ‘mixed-race’ Eurafrican (of European and African heritage) Zambian identity. Through an autoethnographic account of my Eurafrican uncle Aaron Milner, I reflect on Zambian Eurafricans’ historical racial positioning as ‘inferior interlopers’, which has contributed to their obscurity in Zambia’s national history and census. However, my reflection goes beyond Milner’s story in Zambia. It is my entryway to highlight how race and colonial whiteness interconnected and underpinned racial ideology in the wider British Empire, and to draw attention to its echoes in various contemporary sociopolitical contexts, including census terminology in Australia and Zambia and Western nations’ anti-Black immigration policies.

1. Introduction

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my mixed-descent paternal Eurafrican uncle Aaron Michael Milner, a political activist, played a substantial role in Zambia’s fight for independence from Britain alongside the nation’s first president, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda (Macmillan and Shapiro 1999; Milner-Thornton 2014). Despite his significant contributions to the independence struggles of both Zambia and Zimbabwe and his service as a minister in Kaunda’s government, it was only after he died in Harare, Zimbabwe on 22 June 2024 that 92-year-old Aaron Milner was formally acknowledged for his prominent role in the independence struggle of both African nations (Republic of Zambia, Cabinet Office 2024).

President Emmerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe expressed his personal condolences and those of the government to my cousins (Madzimure 2024). A week later, on 1 July 2024, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema declared a day of national mourning and attended Aaron Milner’s state funeral in Lusaka, Zambia (Haambokoma 2024; Madzimure 2024).

Before his death, Aaron Milner was sidelined from Zambia’s national history for over 40 years. Was he excluded because he was Eurafrican, of mixed European and African descent? This is a reasonable question considering the Zambia Statistics Agency (ZamStats) 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2022 censuses’ ethnic classification options of 73 Zambian ethnic ‘tribal’ groups and seven linguistic affiliations (Milner-Thornton 2020, p. 496). These options prevent a comprehensive understanding of Zambia’s history and the development of a hybrid space that embraces a ‘mixed-race’ Eurafrican/Coloured Zambian identity. In Zambia, the country’s mixed-race ‘Eurafrican’ community, colloquially termed ‘Coloured’ (Milner-Thornton 2012, pp. 205–39), is conspicuously absent from the national census. Since 1980, ‘Coloureds’ have not been provided with statistical identification in Zambia’s census data collection (Milner-Thornton 2020, pp. 249–516). During the colonial era, Eurafricans attempted to self-define as Eurafrican, but the colonial administration denied them this privilege and imposed the South African term ‘Coloured’, which Eurafricans eventually adopted in political solidarity with South African, Southern Rhodesian (present-day Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) Coloureds in their joint anti-colonial activism (Milner-Thornton 2012, pp. 205–37). I will not repeat these reflections here; however, it is important to note that even in the twenty-first century, mixed-race people still experience intense resistance when they self-describe and embrace their mixed ancestry. As an example, in the recent US presidential campaign, the former US president, Republican presidential nominee, and current president-elect Donald J. Trump questioned the racial identity of his political opponent, Democrat presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. He falsely claimed that she had always identified as Indian and not Black. His remarks were subjected to public outrage by Harris’s supporters. Trump’s fallacy is refuted as Harris has always embraced her Black and Indian heritage and identified accordingly (The Guardian 2024).

So even though ‘race’ is no longer a census category, ‘ethnicity’ eradicates Eurafricans’ history, identity and cultural practices by imposing rigid boundaries of national belonging to the 73 Zambian tribal groups. There is no longer a distinct group of ‘Coloureds/Eurafricans’ in Zambia; by removing the ‘Coloured’ category, I argue that Eurafricans have been invisibilised, to borrow Farida Fozdar’s words (Fozdar 2022, p. 5). Fozdar explains that, in terms of policy and practice, multiculturalism was a way of ‘invisibilising race’ in Australia. She maintains that Australia’s policy of multiculturalism restricts the ability to count race-based mixedness, thereby promoting a racialised ‘colour-blindness’ towards ‘mixed-racedness’, and by this means evading the legacies of colonisation, including racist immigration policies and the forced removal of children of mixed Indigenous and European descent to government-funded institutions and Christian missions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Fozdar 2022, p. 5). Zambia’s national censuses have similarly restricted the ability to count Eurafricans since 1980 (Milner-Thornton 2020). Their exclusion and invisibility stem from the legacy of colonial whiteness, specifically the racialised ideas about mixed-descent people’s supposed abnormality and illegitimacy that have seemingly permeated contemporary Zambia’s racial consciousness.

This Special Commemorative Issue invites engagement with the ‘breadth and depth’ of Peter J. Aspinall’s work across multiple disciplines. In this article, I engage with our shared interests in ethnicity, race, identity, mixedness, and census classifications and terminology. I have engaged with these topics before (Milner-Thornton 2020). I expound on them here because, since my 2020 publication, Zambia has held an additional national census titled ‘Everyone Counts’, in 2022 (Zambia Statistics Agency 2022). As in previous national censuses in 1990, 2000 and 2010, Eurafricans/Coloureds were excluded and not provided with a census classification.

2. Structure, Themes, and Terminology

I am a historian, university teacher, and autoethnographer. My work provides insights into my Eurafrican family and community’s history, social life and cultural meaning in Zambia (Milner-Thornton 2012, 2014, 2015, 2020). Deborah Reed-Danahay (2019, p. 2) notes that an autoethnographer’s ‘main contribution to understandings of human experience is that it troubles the persistent dichotomies of insider versus outsider, distance and familiarity, objective observer versus participant, and individual versus culture’. I utilise autoethnography to demonstrate the ‘double-sidedness of collective and individual experience and the doubling up of public and private memory’ (Milner-Thornton 2012, p. 5). Likewise, in this article, I display how the echoes of colonial whiteness continue to harm Eurafricans and contribute to their contemporary invisibilisation in Zambia.

There are four recurring themes in this article: mixed-racedness, whiteness, census terminology, and the echoes of colonial whiteness, as they are intertwined in the British imperial and post-imperial world. The themes support my overarching argument that Eurafrican individuals’ invisibility in Zambia’s census is an echo of colonial whiteness; it mirrors their historical experience of exclusion and delegitimisation by British officials, according to whom persons of European and African heritage were ‘unauthentic’ and ‘illegitimate’ children of European men. This assertion was in contradiction to African customary law, in which Eurafricans’ white fathers married their African mothers by participating in African traditional marriage practices of paying lobola or bride price. In the early twentieth century, John Edward ‘Chiripula’ Stephenson, a Northern Rhodesian British administrator, unreservedly participated in lobola, ‘the moment the money left his hands and lodged in those yellow palms, Loti would not only be [Chiripula’s] outright property, but, by African law, his wife’, (Stevens Rukavina 1951, p. 61). Chirpula’s Eurafrican descendants, some of whom are my first cousins, currently reside in Brisbane, Australia, the UK and Zambia. Nevertheless, colonial African society similarly discredited Eurafricans as a racial anomaly by claiming they did not know who they were and demeaned them as a ‘rider of two horses’ (Milner-Thornton 2012, 2014); this is seemingly still occurring, as evidenced by their exclusion from the census.

I compare the historical social and political injustices faced by mixed-race individuals in Australia (where I live) and Zambia (my native homeland). I link mixed-racedness to the ‘echoes of the colonial past in the present day’, a term coined by Nicolaidis et al. (2015, pp. 2–4), who state that the ‘memory of the colonial past and its meanings now lives on in other political guises’. The ‘tribal’ ethnicity and language classifications in Zambia’s census are one such political guise, rendering Zambia a racially homogeneous nation and promoting ‘racial black nationalism’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2009), leaving no room for racial diversity.

The remnants of colonial whiteness intertwine with the configurations of whiteness in Australia and Zambia. Whiteness offers an analytical framework to discuss the complex interplay of race, power and identity that shaped our histories and continues to shape the contemporary world, including national census terminology and Western nations’ anti-Black immigration policies. The census should encompass every individual, offering a complete country snapshot, but in Zambia and Australia, it is difficult to account for mixedness in the census because of the available terminology.

In the final section of the article, I discuss various examples of historical injustices to explore whether the official acknowledgement of historical wrongdoing heals intergenerational trauma and promotes recovery. I also advocate for an apology from the British government for the painful intergenerational racial trauma, and enduring legacy of illegitimacy, experienced by my Eurafrican/Coloured family and community under its rule.

Terminology is important. Through autoethnographic narratives, I illustrate how the words we use to describe ourselves and how others describe us wield significant power over our identity, life chances, and inclusion/exclusion in a national census because of the way we are seen by others. I acknowledge Zambian cultural diversity by using the terms ‘African’, ‘Zambian’, ‘Eurafrican/Coloured’, ‘Eurafrican’, ‘Black’, ‘white/European’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Indian’ to reflect different historical contexts and their common usage in Zambia and the diaspora. I prefer the term ‘Eurafrican’, as it is historically my family and community self-descriptor, and currently it is my self-label in the reappropriation of my identity in my recovery and healing from intergenerational racial trauma, and to recognise my lived experience as a mixed Eurafrican person, with a paternal African grandmother, Esther Cele, whom I loved dearly, and a Lithuanian Jewish grandfather, Joseph Milner, who I did not know. But Granny Cele spoke about my grandfather Joseph with love and fondness, and instilled pride in our Jewish and African ancestry. In Australia (as well as in the United States and Britain), the term ‘Coloured’ is offensive and considered a racial slur, so it sits uncomfortably with me. Eurafrican is how we self-identified during the colonial era to acknowledge our mixed European and African ancestry and cultural practices (Milner-Thornton 2012, pp. 205–37). Furthermore, Coloureds of Indian and African descent have married into the Eurafrican community, thus forming complex family bonds traced to our European and African ancestors (Milner-Thornton 2012, pp. 205–37).

Let us now proceed to my paternal Uncle Aaron’s Eurafrican story in British colonial Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe) and his experience of removal from his African mother, Esther Cele, to Embakwe, a Christian ‘orphanage’/boarding school in Plumtree, and the Southern Rhodesian government official’s resistance to formalise interracial marriages, thus generating a hostile 100-year legacy of illegitimacy in my family.

3. Aaron Michael Milner’s Story

Aaron Michael Milner was born on 31 May 1932 in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. He was the second child of my grandfather, Joseph Milner, and my grandmother, Esther Cele. At that time in Southern Rhodesia, interracial marriages were not condoned by the colonial administration. Thus, Aaron’s parents were prevented from legally formalising their marriage. Despite these restrictions, Joseph registered his mixed-race children with the white authorities of Southern Rhodesia. Tragically, he passed away in 1939, leaving Esther to care for their four children, Rebecca, Aaron, Japhet and Michael. Aaron’s younger brother, Japhet, was my father.

Following Joseph’s death, the Milner children were removed to Embakwe, a Catholic missionary school in Plumtree, Southern Rhodesia. The school was intended for Cape Coloured and ‘orphaned’, so-called ‘half-caste’ children—many of whom, like the Milner children, were not in fact orphaned but were considered so due to the absence of their white fathers. According to Ibbo Mandaza (1997, p. 235), ‘in contrast to government schools, missionary schools were literally “homes” or “orphanages” for children who, in almost most cases were removed from their native background and cut off their family milieu. As a consequence of their complete dependence on the aegis of white paternalism’. As Mandaza (1997, p. 279) points out, Southern Rhodesian government officials decided that for ‘half-caste’ children whose ‘colour and feature resemble its European father rather than its native parent, we consider that it should be sent to a Coloured school and maintained there’.

This was the fate of 14-month-old Anna Tweedie who, on 21 August 1935, was forcibly removed from her African mother, Mary Chambasi, and detained in St Johns missionary in Avondale Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia (Mandaza 1997, p. 227). St Johns was a Dominican orphanage for half-caste and Cape Coloured Children. Anna was a school friend of my mother, Nellie Milner (nee Bloomfield), at St John’s. Anna’s white father, James Stephen Tweedie, a farm employee, sought advice from the Assistant Native Commissioner on how to provide for his daughter, and under their advice and with the agreement of Sister Wilhelmina, the Principal of St Johns, one-year-old Anna was ‘admitted’ to St John’s (Mandaza 1997, p. 227). My 88-year-old mother, Nellie, recalled Anna’s mother visiting her, and described how much it saddened her that Anna and other ‘orphans’ like her had to spend their annual Christmas holidays at St John’s (Nellie Milner, personal communication, 31 August 2024). Declared orphans by the government and the nuns, the children were banned from returning to their African mothers’ villages and lost contact with their mothers, as well as losing their natal languages, thus forcibly assimilating them (Milner-Thornton 2012). In Australia, the Stolen Generations, children of mixed Indigenous and European descent, experienced a similar fate to Eurafricans of forced removal and assimilation, but, in their case, into white Australian society (Gilbert 2019).

My mother, Nellie, explained to me that at St John’s, the children were not permitted to speak their African languages, and if caught doing so by the German Dominican nuns, they were punished. She recalls only the Goanese girls from Beira, Mozambique, and mixed-race girls from Nyasaland (present-day Malawi) conversing in their own languages (Milner 2024). My mother’s childhood experience was paralleled by my own in Kabwe Convent and later in Embakwe: the nuns who taught me enacted a similar policy of not allowing us to speak African languages, but only English. As a result, we lost my mother Nellie’s maternal Lenje and paternal mixed-race Ngoni and Baluchi grandmother’s African languages, and Ndebele, my Granny Cele’s language.

Aaron graduated from Embakwe in 1953 and was awarded an operatic scholarship in Italy. Before departing for Europe, he travelled to Ndola in Northern Rhodesia to say goodbye to his older sister, Rebecca Rosen, her husband, Morrison, and his younger brothers, Japhet and Michael. In Ndola, he met my mother Nellie’s childhood friend, Phyllis Lurie, and fell in love, thus abandoning his opera singing career. Aaron and Phyllis married in 1955 and are survived by their children, Ignatius, Sylvester, Phillip, Patrick, Jackie and Michelle, and their respective families. Uncle Aaron often reminisced about cycling 116 kilometres from Chingola to Ndola to see Auntie Phyllis. When he narrated that story, she would smile and roll her eyes. Interestingly, Phyllis and Morrison also shared Lithuanian Jewish and African heritage. Phyllis’s father, John Yankele Lurie, was a notable figure in the Ndola Jewish Community. The Milner, Lurie, and Rosen (anglicised from Rauzen) families hailed from Šilalė in Lithuania (Milner-Thornton 2012, p. 241).

Aaron Milner’s political journey began in 1956 when he was elected the first chairman of the Euro-African Association of Northern Rhodesia (EANR), a political lobby group. He initially campaigned for the rights and interests of Eurafricans and mixed-race South African Cape Coloureds. He transitioned to full-time politics in 1962, joining Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (UNIP) and encouraging Eurafricans and Coloureds to join forces with the African nationalists. He played a significant role in Northern Rhodesia’s independence campaign from Britain, with independence achieved on 24 October 1964 (Zambian Observer 2024). Like many Southern Rhodesians, Nyasalanders and South Africans living in Northern Rhodesia during this historical period, Aaron Milner became a Zambian citizen.

From 1964 to 1980, Aaron Milner held numerous leadership positions within UNIP and President Kaunda’s government. He was the first deputy Secretary-General of UNIP. Milner’s government roles were extensive, including as Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs and the Public Service, Minister of State for Presidential Affairs, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Cabinet Minister overseeing the Home Affairs, Local Government and Housing, and Defence portfolios. He also served as Secretary-General to the government (Milner-Thornton 2015).

However, in 1980 Milner was dismissed by President Kenneth Kaunda amid accusations of plotting a coup and violating Zambia’s Leadership Code. Milner denied these charges and maintained that he was falsely accused. Macmillan and Shapiro state that Kaunda ‘encouraged’ Milner to relocate to Harare, Zimbabwe, so he could assist Joshua Nkomo in his first political campaign (Macmillan and Shapiro 1999, p. 248). According to Sishuwa and Money (2023) ‘deportation orders and racial nationalism against racial minorities are strategies adopted by the political elite during periods of weakness’ (Sishuwa and Money 2023, p. 33). Sishuwa and Money (2023, p. 33) define ‘racial nationalism’ as referring to ‘nationalism in which the only legitimate members are black—a strategy adopted by political elites when their positions are threatened’. Seemingly this is what occurred to Milner in the political context of 1980. Nevertheless, Milner’s name remained under a cloud despite the accusations never being verified.

In October 1980, Milner’s UNIP colleagues Edward Shamawana and Valentine Musakanya were accused of attempting to overthrow Kenneth Kaunda. Milner was advised by President Robert Mugabe not to travel to Zambia and remain in Zimbabwe. Instead, he returned to Zambia on a Zimbabwean passport to defend his colleagues (Macmillan and Shapiro 1999, pp. 248–49).

According to Macmillan and Shapiro (1999), in the 1970s, Milner was Kaunda’s ‘most powerful and effective minister’. His diverse heritage ‘—Jewish, Zulu and Ndebele roots—and his self-identification as an African nationalist from Zimbabwe, his birth country, and Zambia, his adopted country, meant he had no tribal affiliations in Zambia’. This ‘ethnic versatility’ rendered Milner particularly ‘useful’ to Kaunda (Macmillan and Shapiro 1999, p. 247).

Milner acted as Kaunda’s emissary, engaging with prominent global figures such as Queen Elizabeth II, US Senator Robert Kennedy, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah, Egyptian President Nasser Hussein and China’s Chairman Mao Zedong, to name a few (Milner-Thornton 2015). He also facilitated communication between Kaunda and the leaders of frontline states Mozambique, Angola, Botswana, Tanzania and Zimbabwe (Milner-Thornton 2015). Aaron Milner’s political achievements were celebrated at his state funeral in Lusaka; however, many Zambians remain unaware of his legacy, political career and significant contribution to Zambia’s peaceful national status.

In 2005 I travelled to Zambia, and Uncle Aaron kindly took me to meet and interview Dr Kenneth Kaunda at his home in Lusaka. It was wonderful to witness their lifetime friendship. I saw Auntie Anna Nathanson (nee Tweedie) on that same trip. In a Lusaka Mall carpark, my sons Cameron and Dion walked ahead of me, and I saw Auntie Anne immediately behind them. I heard her questioningly call out to 13-year-old Cameron, ‘Hey, you’re a Milner? Who’s your parents?’ Cameron was astounded by her recognition of his distinct Milner family features and was surprised by this random older Coloured woman’s question. I hastened my pace and greeted Auntie Anne, and she recognised me. The St John’s bonds are strong and lifelong. Auntie Phyllis and my mother Nellie, as eight-year-old children, were first transported by rail from Ndola Northern Rhodesia to boarding school in Southern Rhodesia (Personal communication, Nellie Milner, September 2024). In their assimilative attempts to breed out European lineages and assimilate Eurafricans into Black society, until the 1950s the Northern Rhodesia administrators refused to build schools for Coloured and half-caste children in the territory (Milner-Thornton 2012). From the 1940s, the Northern Rhodesian children were railed out of the territory to Coloured missionary boarding schools Martindale, St Johns and Embakwe, where they remained for ten months each year, returning home once a year for the Christmas holidays.

Aaron Milner’s story is a testament to the complex legacies of British interventionist benevolence procedures of mixed-race child removal, the devastating traumatic legacies of illegitimacy and the role of colonial whiteness in shaping Zambia’s (and Zimbabwe’s) national narrative. Next, I examine whiteness in varying contexts to identify common patterns and unique variations in the configurations of whiteness and white supremacy ideology, and to demonstrate how it entwined the vast British Empire, particularly through restrictive exclusionary immigration legislation.

4. Whiteness: A British Imperial Venture

Whiteness was not just a racial identity but also a cultural and ideological construct. It established norms and values that were considered superior and universal, thus marginalising and devaluing the cultures and identities of colonised peoples. Whiteness was the cornerstone of racial configurations in the British Empire. Richard Dyer illustrates how whiteness and white racial privilege coalesced in the colonies, unifying disparate groups ‘across national cultural differences and against their best interests … it [created] a category of maybe, sometimes whites, people who may be let into whiteness under particular historical circumstances’ (Dyer 1997, p. 19). Dyer is not alone in asserting that whiteness was conceived and legitimatised in the colonies. Benedict Anderson makes a similar point:

Colonial racism was a major element in the conception of ‘Empire’ which attempted to weld dynastic legitimacy and national community. It did so by generalising a principle of innate, inherited superiority on which its own domestic position was (however shakily) based on the vastness of the overseas possessions.

(Anderson 2006, p.150)

Whiteness shaped the identities of colonisers and the colonised. Colonisers established racial boundaries of difference underpinning their beliefs, interests and domination by imposing

binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘strangers’ and ‘friends’, ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’, and fixed borders to define each space. Power allows those outside of ‘us’, the others, to be engulfed or spat out, to be devoured/assimilated.

(Tascon 2004, p. 243)

British colonial societies in Australia and Zambia were structured by race; racial groups were assigned positions within a social hierarchy. White men constructed and reinforced racial positionings in their ‘divide and rule’ colonial political agenda. Whiteness facilitated distinct racial divisions, which intensified in the Empire. For example, in 1901, Australia became a federation, with the Immigration Restriction Act—the foundation of the so-called White Australia Policy—one of the first pieces of legislation passed. The Act included the controversial ‘dictation test’, designed to limit the immigration of non-British people, particularly Chinese, thereby formalising the White Australia Policy to privilege Anglo-Australian culture. In turn, this set in motion assimilation policies of the forced removal of mixed-race children from their Indigenous mothers and biological engineering incentives to ‘breed out’ indigeneity, with devastating intergenerational social, health and economic impacts, including the ‘Stolen Generations’ of First Nation Australians (Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) 1997).

Australia was not alone in legislating racial immigration restrictions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; these restrictions reverberated throughout the English-speaking world. For example, the United States prohibited Chinese immigration with The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Canada had The Chinese Immigration Act of 1885, New Zealand passed The Chinese Immigrants Act of 1881 and South Africa legislated The Transvaal Immigration Restriction Act of 1902 and The Cape Chinese Exclusion Act of 1904. Similar restrictive immigration measures were enforced in Northern Rhodesia when ‘the 1904 principle of “literacy testing” in a European language was introduced administratively’ to exclude Indians and reduce their immigration (Ghai and Ghai 1971, p. 3). Literacy testing was a spin-off from racialised exclusionary immigration policies in Australia and South Africa. Northern Rhodesian immigration legislation was carried over from neighbouring Southern Rhodesia,

where as early as 1904 an ordinance was passed directing that no person should be admitted who was unable by reason of deficient education to write out and sign within his own hand in the character of any European language an application to the satisfaction of the Administrator. This excluded all but a few of the Asians. A complete ban was imposed in 1924 as one of the first measures taken by the settlers on the attainment of self-government.

(Ghai and Ghai 1971, p. 3)

Race and immigration were deeply entangled in the British Empire and at home in Britain, as has been revealed by the recent release of ‘The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal’ (British Government Home Office 2024). Under the leadership of British Prime Minister Theresa May (2016–2019), many descendants of Caribbeans who entered the United Kingdom legally to rebuild the nation after World War II were unlawfully removed from the country to the Caribbean. As noted in the report:

Gradually, the politics of race and immigration became intertwined with one another to the extent that during the period 1950–1981, every single piece of immigration or citizenship legislation was designed at least in part to reduce the number of people with black or brown skin who were permitted to live and work in the UK.

(British Government Home Office 2024, p. 4)

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration policies are the template for contemporary Western nations’ restrictive immigration legislation, whereby the non-white body is racialised as the border and boundary of exclusion. Bodies, Mbembe (2019, p. 9) argues, are marked by

‘borderisation’ … the process by which certain spaces are transformed into uncrossable places for certain classes of populations, who thereby undergo a process of racialisation; places where speed must be disabled and the lives of a multitude of people judged to be undesirable are meant to be immobilised if not shattered.

An example of Mbembe’s ‘borderisation’ of the racialised body is an incident that happened to Mohammed Kamil Shaibu, a Ghanaian man, in 2023. Shaibu was ‘paged’ by Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) in Paris while waiting to board his flight to Toronto. A CBSA official informed Shaibu that his ‘temporary resident’ Canadian visa was revoked. As a result, he had to return to Ghana as he would not be allowed entry into Canada (Paperny 2024). Another example is the UK government’s controversial Rwanda legislation to forcefully transfer asylum seekers from Britain offshore to Rwanda, a country with a deplorable human rights record—as a former genocide site within living memory (Magnarella 2005). The British Parliament has passed legislation but is facing legal challenges (Hansard 2024). Britain has taken a page out of the Australian border restrictions playbook, and scaremongering by former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s ‘stop the boats’ and John Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’, which led to the incarceration of asylum seekers and refugees in Australian onshore and offshore detention centres in Pacific nations (Turnbull 2023). The borderisation of bodies is essentially an echo of colonial whiteness, as borders extend beyond the national boundaries of Western nations to keep out the Black body.

According to Diego A. von Vacano (2012, p. 17), race has become the successor of ‘the modern process of racialisation’ by utilising ‘observable aesthetic categories’ to make racialised distinctions. He points out (von Vacano 2012, p. 17) that ‘race is an illusion that stands in lieu of invisible relations to power, identity, membership, and citizenship’. Nevertheless, racialised identities have real-life political consequences: they do not just determine who can visit a country, as we have seen in Canada, but can also determine who is included and prohibited from belonging to a nation.

First Nations Australian scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s insightful comments are relevant here:

The White Australia Policy made Anglocentric whiteness the definitive marker of citizenship, and a form of property born of social status to which others were denied access, including Indigenous people. Through political, economic and cultural means, Anglocentric whiteness restricted and determined who could vote, who could own property, who could receive wages for work, who was free to travel, who was entitled to legal representation and who could enter Australia. These devices of exclusion did not articulate who or what is white but rather who or what is not white.

(Moreton-Robinson 2004, p. 79)

Jon Stratton (2020, p. 3) made a similar observation to Moreton-Robinson about the societal construct of ‘whiteness’ in Australia’s ability to marginalise those who do not conform to the traditional notion of Australianness—particularly Indigenous Australians, African Australians and Australian Muslims. He also reiterates Fozdar’s view about the exclusionary foundations of Australian multiculturalism policy. Stratton (2020, p. 16) explains that ‘official multiculturalism was white. It was designed to integrate the broadened category of white people into the Australian nation.’ Whiteness was equated with cultural similarity, specifically European ancestry and Christianity. In 1973, Gough Whitlam’s Labor government officially renounced the White Australia policy. In 1975, the Whitlam government enacted the Racial Discrimination Act, which prohibited racially based selection in immigration, marking a significant legislative move towards racial equality.

The exclusionary racialised measures in Australia described by Moreton-Robinson were correspondingly applied in colonial Zambia. Eurafricans, along with the predominant African community, were designated British Protected Persons; as such, they were excluded from the franchise and British citizenship—the citizenship of their white fathers (Milner-Thornton 2012, p. 200).

Seemingly, white ancestry excludes Eurafricans in Zambia’s national census as colonial narratives prevail about their mixed-race heritage as ‘inauthentic’ racial abnormality. Indigenous ‘mixed’ Australians of the Stolen Generations also experience questioning about their authenticity. Yin Paradies, a self-described Aboriginal-Anglo-Asian Australian man and a descendant of the Stolen Generations, writes the following:

This intense questioning of authenticity, which can hit you with the force of a sledgehammer, is due to the profound disruption that white-skinned Indigenes represent for the Black–White racial dichotomy, so fervently clung to in Australia.

(Paradies 2006, p. 359)

Paradies’ profound depiction also applies to me as a Eurafrican. My racial heritage is mixed—in my case, European and Indigenous African ancestry. As a result, I am both coloniser and colonised. As previously shown, Eurafricans were similarly subjected to mixed-race child removal, such as the Stolen Generations. I, too, was questioned about my authenticity at a conference in the Netherlands. After being introduced to my fellow presenters, a Zambian professor and a Dutch professor challenged me about my paper abstract. Both implied that ‘Coloureds’, apart from my paternal Uncle Aaron Milner, had not contributed anything positive to Zambia. Their resistance surprised me. After my presentation, the chair asked whether the audience had any questions. Before anyone asked me any questions, I looked directly at the professors and asked whether I could clarify any issues. The Dutch professor had tears in his eyes and merely shook his head. The Zambian professor stood up and publicly apologised to me for his unkind remarks, and thanked me for my presentation and for bringing to light an aspect of Zambian history that was relatively unknown.

While white settlers were drawing a global ‘colour line’ across the British empire with prohibitive racialised immigration restrictions, their discussions about mixed-descent people’s political and social status intensified, and were bound up with and enmeshed in advancements of Indigenous dispossession and a superior white settler identity in British colonies.

5. Whiteness and White Body Supremacy

Whiteness is associated with the ‘ordinary’ embodiment of humanity, as remarked by Richard Dyer (1997, p. 223):

Whites can thus believe that they are nothing in particular, because the white particularities on offer are so obviously not them. Extreme whiteness thus leaves a residue, a way of being that is not marked as white, in which they see themselves.

Whiteness normalised as ‘ordinariness,’ ‘normality’ and ‘humanity’, is a product of the Atlantic slave trade, eugenics, imperialism, settler colonialism and scientific racism. Paul Spickard (2015, p. 24) notes that

racial distinctions are a necessary tool of domination … [and that] calling various African peoples all one racial group, and associating that group with evil, sin, laziness, bestiality, sexuality, and irresponsibility, made it easier for white slave owners to rationalize, hold their fellow humans in bondage, whipping them, selling them, separating their families and working them to death.

The Atlantic slave trade dehumanised Africans, setting in place a six-centuries-long, painful, ongoing legacy of anti-Black racism, including the current borderisation of the Black body, as pointed out by Mbembe (2019).

Ramón Grosfoguel (2007, p. 219) makes a comparable argument about the continuing impacts of colonialism:

One of the most powerful myths of the twentieth century was the notion that the elimination of colonial administrations amounted to the decolonisation of the world. This led to the myth of a ‘postcolonial’ world. The heterogeneous and multiple global structures put in place over a period of 450 years did not evaporate with the juridical-political decolonisation of the periphery over the past 50 years. We continue to live under the same ‘colonial power matrix’.

Grosfoguel (2007, p. 219) describes ‘the colonial power matrix as ‘global coloniality’ in the following:

Coloniality [is] the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations, produced by colonial cultures and structures in the modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system. ‘Coloniality of power’ refers to a crucial structuring process in the modern/colonial world-system that articulates peripheral locations in the international division of labor with the global racial/ethnic hierarchy and Third World migrants’ inscription in the racial/ethnic hierarchy of metropolitan global cities.

In my view, coloniality and whiteness are opposite sides of the same coin, as they uphold white racial hierarchies and exploit and exclude non-white people from equal participation in the global economy.

Whereas Spickard and Grosfoguel highlight the continuity of colonial racial harms, Frantz Fanon positions the psychological dimensions of whiteness and white supremacy’s drastic effects on the identity formation and self-perception of colonised peoples. Fanon (2007, p. 132) writes

The black man stops behaving like an actional person. His actions are destined for ‘the Other’ (in the guise of the white man) since only ‘the Other’ can enhance his status and give him self-esteem at the ethical level.

White body supremacy impacts are universal, as Fanon (2007, p. 128) reminds us, ‘the black man is unaware of [the deep-rooted myth about his blackness] … as long as he lives among his own people; but at the first white gaze, he feels the weight of his melanin’.

However, the white gaze does not exclusively denigrate persons of African descent. In Australia, Indigenous Australians were similarly treated, as noted by Moreton-Robinson (2004, p. 76):

The existence of those who can be defined as truly human requires the presence of others who are considered less human. The development of a white person’s identity requires that they can be defined against other ‘less than human’ beings whose presence reinforces their superiority.

Essentially, whiteness can only be reinforced by dehumanising the Black/Indigenous colonised body as undesirable, inferior and peculiar, in contrast to the normalised characterisation of white civilisation and humanity.

Like Fanon, African American literary critic and writer Ralph Ellison writes about the sheer weight and power of the white gaze in his award-winning book Invisible Man, first published in 1952. Ellison (1987, p. 1) makes the distinction of the invisibilising white gaze in the United States:

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me …That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those which whom I come into contact with. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.

Ellison’s poignant depiction of African Americans’ contradictory ‘doubleness’ of hyper-visibility and invisibility in the United States is powerful. Essentially, the white gaze sees the Black man but refuses to see or empathise with African Americans’ individuality, personhood and humanity.

As Homi Bhaba (1994, p. 101) reminds us, ‘the object of colonial discourse is to construe the colonised other as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction’. Moreton-Robinson (2004, p. 88) also deplores how the white gaze misconstrues knowledge about Indigenous people in the Australian academy. She challenges us to

recognise that whiteness has shaped knowledge production means academia would have to accept that the dominant regime of knowledge is culturally and racially biased, socially situated and partial.

Academia filtered through the Eurocentric and white gaze renders Indigenous people invisible through stereotypes of their supposed inferiority and criminality. Nevertheless, whiteness is visible to the Other through the systemic racialised policies and practices to which they are subjected. Eurafricans’ invisibilisation in Zambia is an echo of colonial whiteness and the racialised negative stereotypes of persons of mixed descent. Historically, racial anxieties extended to the private intimate space, fuelling public anti-miscegenation sentiment and mixed-race people’s global vilification.

6. Whiteness and Anti-Miscegenation Sentiment

In the twentieth century, mixed-race individuals faced social and political injustices in various parts of the world, including Australia and Zambia. Settlers viewed Indigenous peoples as their racial inferiors, thus extending this prejudice to mixed-race individuals, the product of interracial sexual unions. The term ‘miscegenation’ entered the American lexicon in 1863 (von Vacano 2012, p. 4).

Henry Reynolds (2005, p. 3) discusses interracial sexuality and the global anxiety generated by the presence of mixed-descent persons:

Few people have more opprobrium than half-castes in the European empires and their independent off-shoots. They faced deprecation and contempt from popular folk wisdom and scientific and scholarly opinion alike … An even more ubiquitous belief was that half-castes inherited the worst qualities of both parent races and the good qualities of neither. They were commonly assumed to be morally and physically defective, unpredictable and degenerate.

White administrators’ broad efforts to prevent interracial sex, the creation of mixed-race children, and the preservation of whiteness and racial hierarchies climaxed in anti-miscegenation laws. For example, in the United States, anti-miscegenation laws criminalised interracial unions because:

The opportunity of assimilation, which in the ultimate sense must include amalgamation, has been extended to Jewish, Italian and other white minorities; but colored groups-Black, Brown, Yellow and to a lesser extent Red-are considered unassimilable, and are denied intermarriage with whites.

(Browning 1951, p. 26)

Similarly in Australia, numerous ‘Aborigines Acts’ prohibited Indigenous women and white men’s interracial marriages (Parliament of Australia 2012). In Northern and Southern Rhodesia, there were no anti-miscegenation laws that purposely hounded white men’s sexual relationships with Black women, as it would have indicted the colonial elite who fathered Eurafrican children.

However, in 1903 the Southern Rhodesia Legislative Council passed the Immorality and Indecency Suppression Ordinance, imposing capital punishment for a Black man who ‘engage[d] in sexual intercourse with a white woman’ (Mbongoni 2019, p. 555). In sharp contrast, Southern Rhodesian British officials argued that ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws pursuing white men would be ineffective, and in 1934 took the drastic step of ‘deporting’ a white settler from the colony because he had applied to marry an African woman (Mandaza 1997, pp. 133, 279).

Northern Rhodesia did not have anti-miscegenation laws. Despite this, as Lawrence Mbongoni (2019, p. 91) points out, the ambiguity of clause 47 in Northern Rhodesia’s 1918 Marriage Ordinance made it difficult to marry across the colour line:

The provisions of this Ordinance shall not apply to natives and for the purposes of this Ordinance the word ‘native’ shall mean a person being a member of an aboriginal race or tribe of Africa but shall not include a person partly of European descent.

This clause is particularly interesting because it uses blood quantum, as Eurafricans are partly of European descent. Yet British officials in Northern Rhodesia and London, in their transnational debates on ‘how to’ categorise and ‘where to’ place Eurafricans in the racial hierarchy, refused to acknowledge Eurafricans’ European paternity. They declared them ‘Protected Persons’ and they were allocated the same status as their African mothers; this consequently disenfranchised them.

In 1948, Dick Snapper, a Eurafrican Northern Rhodesian of Jewish descent, son of Egnatz Snapper and cousin of Sid Diamond (Macmillan and Shapiro 1999, pp. 11, 247), wrote a letter to the Northern News newspaper challenging Eurafricans’ colonised status and disqualification from the franchise in Northern Rhodesia. Snapper wrote:

There is no need to introduce a Bill which will confer the status of British subjects on Eurafricans. The fathers of Eurafricans being British people the children are ipso facto British subjects by birth, and this principle is followed in all civilised British colonies. The contention that Eurafricans are protected persons is ridiculous. The Europeans did not find Eurafricans in Northern Rhodesia, they found Africans who asked for their protection. They could not also be regarded as foreigners while their fathers were administering the government of the Territory.

(cited in Milner-Thornton 2012, p. 202)

Snapper voiced Eurafricans’ frustrations about the colonial administration designating them ‘illegitimate’ children of white men and highlighted that their fathers were the colonial elite. This explains why the colonial administration did not enact anti-miscegenation laws in the territory. Their hypocrisy and corruption would have been exposed.

In Zambia, Eurafrican’s white and black ancestry has historically and contemporarily been used to racially position them as the ‘inferior/outsider/racial interloper’. For example, during the colonial era, on account of Eurafricans’ Black ancestry, white administrators positioned them as ‘inferior’ to whiteness and thus disqualified them from the franchise and British citizenship. In the contemporary context, Zambian government statistical officials, on account of Eurafricans’ white ancestry, position them as ‘outsiders/interlopers’ by not providing them with a census classification and imposing rigid linguistic and tribal groupings, which implies that Zambia is a Black monoracial nation. Modern racial attitudes in Zambia continue to be shaped by outdated beliefs that unfairly depict mixed-descent individuals as racially inferior anomalies. Race and colonial whiteness facilitated distinct racial divisions, and these have invisibilised Eurafricans in Zambia’s national census. Eurafricans were/are marginalised in colonial and postcolonial Zambia as a consequence of their racial positioning as the racialised Other.

Eurafricans were/are excluded because of negative ideas that underpinned ‘miscegenation’. As von Vacano (2012, pp. 154–55) rightly argues, damaging historical miscegenation views should be cancelled:

We ought to accept race as artificial and make it explicit that when we use the idea of race, we are using a factious term’ [and instead recognise there is no purity of race]… so under this new normative lens of race, the idea of miscegenation loses its negative connotation. If no race is superior to any other, the mixing of ethnic or racial groups through intermarriage and procreation cannot be seen as immoral or corrupt as Gobineau argued. This lays the ground for possible vaporisation of miscegenation as a moral good, in the sense of creating a broad, universalistic human family without racial hierarchies.

Von Vacano’s ‘universalistic human family’ idea deserves consideration in light of the USA 2020 census. Improved inclusive ethnic USA census classifications accounted for a substantial 276% increase in its population self-identifying as multiracial (mixed-race), from 9 million people in 2010 to 33.8 million people in 2020 (Jones Nicholas et al. 2021).

Furthermore, illegitimacy is no longer stigmatised in the United Kingdom. The UK government enacted the Family Law Reform Act 1987 to reform illegitimacy law (UK Government 1987). Since then, children born outside of marriage have the same legal provisions as children born within a marriage (UK Government 1987). So the historical UK illegitimacy laws and ideas that illegitimised Eurafricans are no longer relevant, yet the ‘echoes of colonial whiteness’ continue to invalidate Eurafricans’ legitimacy—first as the children of white men, and currently because they are ‘mixed’, they are excluded from the Zambian census.

7. Census Terminology Definitions and Classifications

The representation of all ethnicities and cultures in nation-state censuses is essential to provide comprehensive national population data. The census not only counts but also classifies communities and individuals. The difficulty lies in applying appropriate census terminology and statistical classifications, as race and ethnicity are equally contentious. Paul Spickard (2007, p. 19) notes that race and ethnicity are:

social and political constructs based on real or fictive ancestry, which were generated in particular contexts and which have gone through particular histories … To distinguish between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ is to give in to the pseudoscientific racists by adopting their terminology. It is to conjure up visions of large physical, immutable races and smaller, cultural subgroups that are ethnic groups.

Race and ethnic classifications serve the common purpose of dividing people into distinct groups. While race is understood to be founded on certain physical characteristics such as skin colour, hair texture, and eye colour and shape, ethnicity separates people on the basis of a shared sense of group membership, language, history and ancestral geographical locations. However, as Paul Spickard (2007, p. 19) convincingly argues:

Despite such evident similarities between ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ groups, there is nonetheless a critical juncture in relationships between peoples when they come to see each other, and are seen by outsiders, as fundamentally, essentially immutably different from one another. At such a juncture, the differences are often laid on the body and the essential character. That is what I call the racial moment. At such times, that racialising move is accompanied by at least an attempt by one group to exert power over the other, or to highlight its own disempowerment. It is worth noting that ‘race’ is a term that seems static and essential, while ‘racialise’ emphasizes agency and process; ongoing action taken to make hierarchy, to position oneself and to create an Other.

Mbembe (2019) and Spickard (2007) make comparable arguments, according to which race is inscribed on the racialised Othered body by political actions to exert power.

How can we incorporate cultural differences without inscribing race on the body and racialising census terminology? Peter J. Aspinall’s reflections are helpful here;

Most ethnic/racial terms in use are the outcome of long-term processes involving the derivation of their terms … adoption by official agencies such as the Census and statistical offices, the media and other influences, and the wider acceptance of the community. Some of these processes involve pressures towards particularity or granularity, while others favour the pursuit of aggregation or lumping.

(Aspinall 2020, p. 14)

Accordingly, ethnic and racial terminology evolves and does not remain stagnant; it changes over space and time. However, Aspinall alerts us that when terminology is unchallenged by the wider community, it is officially adopted and becomes a mainstay. Once terminology is official, it takes root in public discourse as an established truth, leaving no room for people to self-identify and be appropriately enumerated in the census. A case in point is Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government’s recent backflip on Australia’s LGBTQ+ community’s campaigns to include sexuality and gender in Australia’s 2026 census (Linder 2024).

One way to explain Zambia’s statistical office’s choice is through their use of the term ‘ethnicity’ rather than ‘Indigenous’ in the census. Karolina Werner (2023, p. 1) insightfully comments that ‘many scholars who work on Africa continue to use terms like traditional, native, tribal, or ethnic in their writing’; as she points out, however, ‘these terms are not interchangeable with indigeneity’. She suggests that African governments’ resistance to the term ‘Indigenous’ is due to the historical negative connotations of the coloniser’s associated indigeneity with primitiveness and inferiority, and the argument that all Africans are Indigenous. They also refuse because they ‘jealously guard their elite status and power of the sovereign state, and they predominantly suppress diversity through assimilation’, as they perceive ‘the self-determination of Indigenous peoples as a threat to political unity and territorial integrity, and by extension, a possible tool for secession’ (Werner 2023, p. 393).

Terminology holds significant power. The words we choose to describe ourselves and others can shape perceptions, influence identities and impact our treatment. This is especially true for marginalised communities, where language can perpetuate stereotypes and exclusion or foster understanding and inclusion. Therefore, to have inclusive census data, groups and individuals not represented by a statistical classification category must speak out and campaign for their inclusion in the census.

Attention will now shift to the limitations of terminology in Zambia’s censuses.

8. Terminology and Classifications in Zambia’s Censuses

Zambia’s 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2022 censuses feature 73 Zambian ‘ethnic’ groups and seven linguistic affiliations (Barotse, Bemba, Mambwe, North-Western, Nyanja, Tonga and Tumbuka). ZamStats’ 2010 Population and Housing—National Analytical Report notes that

Zambian society is endowed with many languages; there are officially 73 ethnic groups, from which seven language clusters have been identified There are seven languages or language clusters used in Zambia besides English for official purposes such as broadcasting (both on radio and television), literacy campaigns and the official dissemination of information. These are (in alphabetical order), Bemba, Kaonde, Lozi, Lunda, Nyanja and Tonga.

(Zambia Statistics Agency 2010, p. 64)

ZamStat’s inclusion of the Zambian ethnicities and language clusters is warranted. Considering Zambia’s first national census after independence in 1969 (Zambia Statistics Agency 1969) and its second national census in 1980 (Zambia Statistics Agency 1980), in both these censuses, the ‘ethnic group’ census question relating to ‘indigeneity’ simply has ‘African’ as a classification choice along with ‘European’, ‘Mixed/Coloured’ and ‘Indian’.

The homogenised African category as one racial group is a residual of British administrative dealings with its subjugated populations. The African category disregards the linguistic affiliations and cultural traditions and practices of Zambia’s ethnic/tribal groups. In various government reports, colonial British officials repeatedly claimed that the African inhabitants in Northern Rhodesia were non-Indigenous, and that the region was terra nullius, meaning ‘no man’s land’. The legal concept of terra nullius was also utilised by the British in Australia and Canada to justify and legitimise the dispossession, displacement and inhumane treatment of First Nations peoples. The British falsely claimed, except for two tribes numbering only a few thousand, that Northern Rhodesian Africans were recent arrivals in the territory; like the British, they had arrived in the mid-nineteenth century (Milner-Thornton 2020, p. 506). However, as Patrick Wolfe (2006, p. 396) points out, portraying the ‘unsettled, nomadic and rootless native’ was a component of settler colonialism.

Seemingly, in Zambia’s 2022 ‘Everyone Counts’ census (Zambia Statistics Agency 2010), ‘ethnicity’ and ‘language’ questions were carried over from the 2010 Coding Manual;

The questions asked for the ethnicity of the respondents and the predominant language of communication. The codes for both these questions were the same in the Coding Manual. The problem with this question was that both the concept and the codes were a mix of ethnicity and language groups. For Zambians, it was ethnic groups, but for non-Zambians it was language groups. In addition, the space for writing was limited.

(Zambia Central Statistics Office 2010, p. 15)

In 2010, respondents and enumerators faced difficulties interpreting the concepts and codes, and this presumably occurred again in 2022. Inter-ethnic Zambians who may identify with multiple ethnicities and languages could not self-identify because the concepts and codes were limiting, and there was insufficient space on the census questionnaire.

In 2010, enumerators were instructed as follows regarding questions about ‘ethnicity and language’:

P.12: What is (NAME’s) Ethnicity?

This question refers to the Tribal-Group the person belongs to. It is an easy question but can be misunderstood. If a person says his/her parents belong to two different tribes, ask which one he/she identifies himself/herself with. Write the tribe in the space provided and enter the code in the boxes appropriately. In the case of some Zambians (such as Asian origin) and Non-Zambians, write the major racial group to which the person belongs, i.e., African, American, Asian, or European, then write the code provided. Codes for tribes and racial groups are in Appendix 6.

(Zambia Central Statistics Office 2010, p. 30)

There is no mention of mixed-race Eurafrican/Coloureds, although there is acknowledgement of Indians and whites. Appendix 6, under the heading ‘Major Racial Groups’, provides the following groups and codes:

• AFRICAN 64;
• AMERICAN 65;
• ASIAN 66;
• EUROPEAN 67 (Zambia Central Statistics Office 2010, p. 67).

The racial groups are confusing, denoting a continent rather than a racial group, meaning African, American, Asian and European continents. For example, how would an African American or white American be enumerated in the census?

However, census boundaries can be ‘fuzzy’, as Peter J. Aspinall (2017, p. 2003) notes:

Ethnic group is a concept with fuzzy group boundaries, that is, ambiguity about the criteria of group membership, and is known to change depending on situation, context, and interpretation of underlying concepts. These problems are likely to be exacerbated in capturing mixed ethnicity persons as two or more racial/ethnic groups are involved.

ZamStats’ fuzzy ethnic and linguistic boundaries underpin ‘racial nationalism’ and the underlying concepts of colonial whiteness by invalidating the national belonging of Eurafricans, white/Europeans and Indian/Asian Zambians.

Identical to Eurafricans, white and Indian Zambians were last featured as separate categories in 1980, and ‘English, French, Italian, German, Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu’ were optional language choices listed along with the ‘seven language clusters’ of Barotse, Bemba, Mambwe, North-Western, Nyanja, Tonga and Tumbuka (Zambia Statistics Agency 1980, p. 14). Enumerators in Zambia’s 1980 census were instructed ‘(to write as given by the respondent)’ languages spoken. Since 1990, only English and Zambian linguistic options have been provided in the census.

The lack of representation of Eurafricans, Indians and whites in Zambia’s census is parallel to Moreton-Robinson’s (2004) observation that ‘whiteness is the definitive marker of Australian citizenship’. However, in Zambia, Eurafricans, Indians and whites are not excluded from Zambian citizenship, and nor are they excluded from holding a Zambian passport. The definitive markers of belonging and Zambianness in Zambia are tribal groups and linguistic affiliations. The tribal and linguistic classifications conclusively articulate who and what a Zambian is, and determine who is not a Zambian, and these divisive exclusions need to be urgently addressed so all Zambians, including Eurafricans/Coloureds, Indians and white Zambians, are counted in the census.

The tribal and linguistic components of the censuses represent ideologies of ‘racial nationalism’, defined by Sishuwa and Money (2023, p. 3) as ‘nationalism in which the only legitimate members are black’. This imposes Black African racial purity on Zambian national identity; is it what Spickard (2007, p. 19) means by ‘a racial moment and the ‘racialising move of one group exerting power over the other’? By employing ‘tribal ethnicity’, Eurafricans, Indians and white Zambians are racialised as Other, even though the Zambian Constitution 1964 declares the following:

3. Article (1) Every person who, having been born in the former Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia, is on the 23rd October 1964, a British protected person SHALL become a citizen of Zambia on the 24th October 1964. Furthermore, any person born outside Zambia’s borders, but whose father was born within Zambia’s borders, became a Zambian citizen and

(2) Every person who, having been born outside of the former Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia is on 23rd October 1964 a British protected person shall, if his father becomes, or would but for his death have become, a citizen of Zambian in accordance with the provisions of subsection (1) of this section, become a citizen of Zambia on 24th October, 1964 and finally

4. (2) Subject to the provisions of this section, any person who, on 23rd October 1964, is a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies, having become such a citizen by virtue of his having been naturalised or registered in the Former Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia under the British Nationality Act 1948, shall be ENTITLED, upon making application before such date and in such manner as may be prescribed by or under an Act of Parliament, to be registered as a citizen of Zambia.

(Republic of Zambia 1964, p. 9, my emphasis)

The Zambia 1964 constitution does not make racial, tribal or linguistic distinctions when it comes to attaining Zambian citizenship; it goes so far as to extend this inclusion to British citizens residing in the territory at the time of Zambia’s independence in 1964. So, according to the Zambia Constitution, every person born in or connected to Northern Rhodesia on the eve of independence, regardless of race, ethnicity and linguistic affiliations, was entitled to, and should be granted, Zambian citizenship, and consequently should be allocated a statistical classification, as they are Zambians.

Hugh Macmillan (2008, p. 195) points out that in the 1970s, in Kenneth Kaunda’s Zambianisation (nationalisation) endeavours regarding Zambian businesses and industries, the president encouraged Indians and other expatriates to apply for Zambian citizenship and throw their lot in with the nation:

While some Indians had been able to choose between British, Indian or Zambian citizenship at independence, very few Indian, or other expatriates, had been able to get Zambian citizenship since independence. A large number of Indians applied for citizenship immediately before and after the Mulungushi speech, but few if any of them obtained it.

The exclusion of Indian individuals contradicted Kaunda’s promise that they could attain Zambian citizenship if they aligned themselves with the nation.

Conversely, Duncan Money (2019, p. 860) points out that ‘exclusionary politics which justify the exclusion, suppression or expulsion of people identified as strangers who are perceived to be a threat’ are entangled with African nationalism more generally and Zambia’s mining industry specifically. He points out that during Kaunda’s early Zambianisation policies, a greater number of non-Zambian Africans from neighbouring countries than white miners were removed, and that ‘when, where and under what circumstances exclusionary nationalism and xenophobia emerge is not only a matter of historical interest but remains a live issue in Zambia’ (Money 2019, p. 873). The census confirms exclusionary nationalism in Zambia.

In 2015, the Zambia Constitution was amended, and similar to the 1964 Constitution, there are no racial, tribal, or linguistic affiliations for Zambian citizenship. For example, Part IV, ‘Citizenship’, declares the following:

33. A person who was a citizen of Zambia, immediately before the commencement of this Constitution, shall continue to be a citizen of Zambia and shall retain the same citizenship category from the date the citizenship was acquired;

34. Citizenship may be acquired by birth, descent, registration or adoption in accordance with this Part;

39. (1) A citizen shall not lose citizenship by acquiring the citizenship of another country [dual citizenship].

(Parliament of the Republic of Zambia 2015, pp. 7–10)

In light of this Constitutional Amendment, Zambia’s census terminology is short-sighted for a couple of reasons. First, the 2022 Census questionnaire subheading ‘Nationality [choice] number 2: The Zambian dual-nationality’ category has presumably been included to enumerate Zambian dual nationals at home in Zambia and the diaspora who predominantly reside in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States (Policy Monitoring and Research Centre 2016, p. 8). I assume that others in the diaspora share a similar experience to my 31-year-old son Cameron. Like me, he is Zambian-born, and his father, my husband Bob Thornton, is white (Australian); however, like other ‘mixed’ individuals in Zambia and the diaspora, Cameron is excluded from the census by the ‘tribal’ and ‘language’ options. Cameron does not speak Zambian languages because of our family’s history of Catholic boarding schools.

Second, the census options potentially prevent the Zambian diaspora from investing in the country. The Policy Monitoring and Research Centre (PMRC) in Lusaka points out that there are many in the diaspora ‘who are advanced in their levels of expertise and can provide great potential for much-needed assistance and development of the country’ (Policy Monitoring and Research Centre 2016, p. 14). Zambia has not recognised the economic potential of its diaspora, whereas the Ghanaian government has, and in 2017 ‘established a Diaspora Affairs Office’ to engage with diaspora associations and international partners, underscoring the importance of diaspora to the highest levels of government (Ghanaian Government 2021; Nieswand 2009). In 2019, Ghana’s remittance inflows were approximately USD 3.5 billion dollars (Ghanaian Government 2021).

An inclusive census would greatly benefit the Zambian economy, encouraging ‘tourism, investments, and knowledge transfer’ from the Zambian diaspora (Policy Monitoring and Research Centre 2016, p. 14). Eurafricans in the diaspora are not unlike other Zambians; they left Zambia as economic refugees seeking better educational and economic outcomes for their families (Policy Monitoring and Research Centre 2016, p. 6). However, as the descendants of British men, some Eurafricans could and did claim the ‘right of abode’ under the 1980s British immigration statutes, and immigrated to England (Milner-Thornton 2012), but in the last couple of years some who have now retired have returned to and invested in Zambia.

The next section examines how the Australian Bureau of Statistics defines ethnicity in the Australian national census, and questions whether these concepts can be applied in Zambia, so that all sections of its multiracial population are enumerated in its national census.

9. Census, Categories, Mixed Identity and Culture

Census categories are important because they actively construct social and cultural identity. The national census shapes and influences the national narrative and drives identity politics. Unlike Zambia, both Zimbabwe and South Africa—which, like Zambia, are former British colonies—had inclusive censuses in 2022 (Statistics Department South Africa 2022, p. 25; Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency 2022). In the case of South Africa, census classifications provided were ‘African, Coloured, Indian/Asian, White and Other’ (Statistics Department South Africa 2022, p. 25), while Zimbabwe provided ‘African, European, Asiatic, Mixed race and Other’ as ethnic choices (Zimstats, p. 15). In multicultural nations such as Australia, it is important for the census to enumerate ethnicities so the government can be more responsive to diversity and equity, and prevent racial discrimination in the workplace, and in health and justice systems.

However, Rocha and Aspinall (2020, p. 4) highlight the complexities of measuring persons of mixed descent in the census in different global contexts:

The classification of race and ethnicity by the state, often in the census, is a common way to organize and make sense of populations in many countries, with particular impacts on how mixed race and/or ethnicity have been included over time.

They contend that mixed-race populations can only be enumerated if the census provides a set of questions that can accurately determine the mixed-race population in a particular country (Rocha and Aspinall 2020, p. 4). Fozdar (2018, p. 411) makes a comparable point about the Australian census, as ‘mixed ancestries’ does not mean ‘mixed race’. She notes that calculating mixed race is almost impossible’.

Fodzar’s assessment of ‘colour-blindness’ and ‘not seeing ‘race’ is that Australia ‘pretends to prioritise universal humanity over racial distinction, and that racism is a thing of the past’ (Fozdar 2022, p. 4). She argues this stance is an ‘unwilful unseeing’ of race in Australia. Australian race averseness and colour-blindness are reflected in the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ (ABS) Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG), which does not provide a ‘race’ category but rather ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic’ characteristics (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2019). For the purposes of the ASCCEG, ‘ethnicity’ refers to the shared identity or similarity of a group of people based on one or more distinguishing characteristics:

• A long-shared history, the memory of which is kept alive;
• A cultural tradition, including family and social customs, sometimes religiously based;
• A common geographic origin;
• A common language (but not necessarily limited to that group);
• A common literature (written or oral);
• A common religion;
• Being a minority (often with a sense of being oppressed);
• Being racially conspicuous (Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) 2019).

It is unclear what ‘racially conspicuous’ means in this context, but one can assume it is ‘the commonsense view of race that it is defined by the color of skin and physiological characteristics of a person, which can be used to distinguish people among various groups within the human race’ (von Vacano 2012, p. 6). Amirta Malhi (2022) argues that ‘Australians are already categorised by ethnicity and race by the state, albeit without direct public acknowledgment’.

ASCEG ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethnicity’ definitions for ‘religion, geographic origin, ethnicity, and language’ are available in the Zambian census, but the following are not, and they should be included for the enumeration of Eurafricans, Indians and white Zambians:

• A long-shared history, the memory of which is kept alive;
• A cultural tradition including family and social customs;
• Being a minority;
• Being racially conspicuous.

Eurafricans are a minority group; they, too, are Indigenous Zambians, as they descend from the country’s 73 ethnic groups and share a common history of British colonisation with ‘Black’ Zambians. Furthermore, Eurafricans have a ‘long-shared’ history and memory, cultural traditions and social customs that are kept alive within the community in Zambia and the diaspora.

This begs the question of whether, by invisibilising and erasing Eurafricans from the national census, the Zambian government has committed cultural genocide. Genocide scholar Jefferey Bachman (2019, p. x) reminds us that Raphael Lemkin’s concept of genocide ‘recognises the cultural, biological, and physical as techniques and methods of genocide’. He notes that

culture as identity can be damaged, and potentially eliminated, by the deliberate disruption of these practices and relations. Policies that undermine cultural institutions, relations, and practices also undermine the preservation of the distinct characteristics of the group.

(Bachman 2019, p. 4, my emphasis)

Accordingly, cultural genocide is not only physical violence; it also includes government policies of forced assimilation and refusal to preserve the distinct characteristics and heritage of a group. Although Bachman addresses Indigenous communities’ risk of cultural genocide, this is also applicable to other communities who are erased from a national landscape and history. Lauren Carasik and Jeffrey Bachman (2019, p. 98) argue the following:

Cultural groups have unique histories, heritages, historical contributions, practices, languages, and values. Destruction of a culture and the coerced assimilation of the members of one culture into another could effectively destroy the group without employing means for its immediate physical destruction.

Eurafricans have a unique history, heritages, cultural practices, cultural values and traditions, and have made historical contributions to Zambia. As Carasik and Bachman (2019, p. 101) point out, cultural genocide is multidimensional; it includes the forced assimilation of a distinction cultural group. To succeed, ‘perpetrators of cultural genocide must attack the very foundation of the targeted group’s shared identity—its culture’ (Carasik and Bachman 2019, p. 101). This is even more reason for Zambia to include a Eurafrican census classification so it does not continue to commit ‘cultural genocide’. Bachman (2019, p. 12, my emphasis) argues that

a shift in genocide studies from the exclusivity of physical genocide to a concept of genocide that incorporates all the methods of group destruction will allow cultural genocide studies to move forward.

Group annihilation is perpetuated by the erasure of culture, history and contributions by government policies, including the census. It is not only Aaron Milner’s political legacy that is erased, but also other Eurafrican politicians and political activists—for example, Gaston Thomas Thornicroft, Tommy Thornicroft, Dick Snapper, Catholic Bishop Dennis De Jong, Eugene Goss, Walter Henry Hodgson, Lewis Krieg, Tom Sayer, Jack Thornicroft, Charles Wightman and many others (Milner-Thornton 2020, p. 511).

However, not only are Eurafricans erased, but also white Zambians, including Simon Zukas and Andrew Sardanis, and Guy Lindsay Scott, who made history as the first white Zambian to be elected Zambia’s Vice President from 2011 to 2014 and acting President from 2014 to 2015. The tribal and language options also up-end President Kaunda’s uniting national catch-cry ‘One Zambia-One Nation’, which incorporated all Zambians regardless of their tribal and linguistic affiliations or African, European and Indian ancestry.

Furthermore, Coloureds/Eurafricans have indelibly marked Zambian popular culture. In Zambia, ‘Lusaka slang’, spoken by Zambians, is actually the Coloured/Eurafrican lexicon. Because Coloureds shared historical experiences of ‘boarding schools’ in Southern Rhodesia, Malawian, Zimbabwean, South African and Zambian Coloureds interact with each other, and through these interactions Zambian Eurafricans/Coloureds have transported and transplanted Coloured vocabulary into Zambian popular culture. Consequently, Lusaka slang is derived from South African and Zimbabwean Coloureds and is also homegrown in Zambia by the Zambian Coloured/Eurafrican community. The following list of words shows some Eurafrican/Coloured vocabulary:

• Check—use ‘check it out’ meaning look at this;
• Cutting—phrase ‘hey what’s cutting?’ meaning ‘hey what’s happening or what’s going on?’;
• Barley/old barley—father or the old man;
• Barlies—old men;
• Boota—a friend/my friend;
• Exsay—a greeting;
• Gwat—a disreputable woman;
• Howzit—how are you? Used in a phrase ‘exsay howzit’;
• Hoolee—a scandalous woman;
• Lekker—good, great;
• Lightie—meaning child or younger person;
• Marty—a friend;
• Narfi—an acronym for ‘no ambition and fuck all interest’ in other words, a ‘loafer’;
• Old queen—mother or the old woman;
• Own—a person;
• Skate—a dishonest or disingenuous person;
• Swanking—showing off;
• Scheming—overthinking;
• Sharp—meaning a clever or intelligent person;
• Tune out—meaning telling off or scolding someone;
• Vit—a white person.

Moreover, Eurafricans’ vocabulary reached a global audience with the release of the successful, popular Netflix animation series Supa Team 4 created by Zambian and Lusaka resident Malenga Mulendema (Women of Rubies 2023).

The final section discusses the echoes of colonial harms in varying global spaces, and calls for an apology from the British government for the legacy of illegitimacy it imposed on Eurafricans.

10. Trauma, Apologies, and the Echoes of Colonial Harms

American psychiatrist and trauma specialist Judith Herman (2001, p. 3) argues that it is only when victims of traumatic experiences (war, domestic violence, etc.) speak out that their traumatic experiences are legitimised in the public forum. Herman’s insights are accurate in both the local and international contexts. For example, in Australia, Rosie Batty, whose former husband murdered their 11-year-old son Luke in 2014, became an advocate for victims and survivors of domestic and family violence. Since 2014, all Australian state and Commonwealth governments have tightened domestic and family violence laws to address this insidious issue (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) 2024; Wheildon and Flynn 2021). Similarly, colonial trauma has come to the forefront in the past couple of decades, with various governments being called to account for the painful, ongoing, traumatic legacies of colonialism. Some leaders have conceded their country’s roles in racist colonial policies and practices that continue to impact modern-day nations.

For example, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (February) and Canadian Stephen Harper’s (June) 2008 ‘Apology’ speeches to their First Nations Peoples are applicable in this context (Parliament of Australia 2008; Government of Canada 2008). Despite being continents apart, both prime ministers expressed contrition for their governments’ involvement in benevolent policies, including the forced removal of mixed-race children to Christian missions and state-sponsored institutions in Australia and Canada. They acknowledged the trans-generational and inter-generational trauma inflicted upon their nations’ Indigenous communities as a result of racism and white supremacy masked as ‘benevolence’. In Australia and Canada, ‘benevolent processes dispossessed and displaced Indigenous peoples’ (Milner-Thornton 2020, p. 501). On 25 July 2022, Pope Francis made a papal apology ‘recognising the abuse experienced at residential schools and the cultural destruction, loss of life and ongoing trauma lived by Indigenous people’ in Canada (American Jesuit Review 2022). Likewise, on 24 October 2024, United States President Joe Biden acknowledged and apologised to American First Nations communities for the significant devastation caused by the U.S. government’s 150-year administration of abusive Native American boarding schools (Singh 2024).

In 2023, German President Steinmeier expressed shame for the massacre of over 300,000 ‘Indigenous Maji-Maji people in Tanzania at the beginning of the twentieth century’ (DW 2023). Similarly, Britain’s King Charles III expressed his ‘deepest regret for the extreme violence perpetuated by British forces on Kenyans during Kenya’s independence struggle from Britain in the 1950s’ (BBC News 2023). King Charles and his son William, the Prince of Wales, also ‘expressed their personal sorrow at the suffering caused by the slave trade’ (Witchell and Andersson 2023). This is especially interesting as King Charles’s daughter-in-law, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, is biracial. She is of white and African American descent. Meghan Markle claimed that she had experienced anti-Black racism from a member of the British royal family when they discussed how dark the skin tone of their first-born son, Prince Archie, would be (BBC News 2021). Finally, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, has argued for repatriation from ‘slave-owning nations, including Britain, which gained vast wealth through the enslavement of Africans in the Caribbean (The Guardian 2023). According to Mottley (citing The Brattle Group 2023, p. 56), Barbados and other Caribbean nations are owed trillions of dollars by slave-owning nations: Britain ‘owes $24tn, Spain owes $17.1tn, France owes $9.2tn and the Netherlands owes $4.86tn’ (Independent News 2023). Mottley states that, ‘For the first time the world recognised that we could no longer ignore the trauma of four centuries of enslavement and barbarism and of denying people their humanity’ (Independent News 2023). Mottley has brought the demand for repatriations for the slave trade into the mainstream political arena.

All these colonial harms are a legacy of white racial supremacy. David Lloyd (2000, p. 214) argues that Herman’s indicators of trauma apply to mechanisms and legacies of colonisation, in the following:

It would seem that we can map the psychological effects of trauma on the cultures that undergo colonisation. By the same token, the after-effects of colonisation for a culture could be held to be identical with those for the traumatized individual.

Judith Herman (2001, p. 33) explains that

Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When that force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When that force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.

Herman aptly describes the powerlessness a Black individual feels under the weight of ‘white body supremacy’, and the distressing moment when you are racialised as the Other. For me, in Australia, there have been distinct racialising moments that still fill me with great traumatic anxiety, when I have been invisibilised and racially inferiorised by the white gaze. Examples include:

• Standing first in line and overlooked at the check-out counter as the white check-out person serves the white customer standing behind me—Ellison (1987) describes this as being invisibilised;
• A white student challenging the grade I had given their paper, telling me, ‘Juliette, I tutor Aboriginal students, so you have graded me wrong. Change it’;
• A white South African tutor failing me because, according to them, ‘you are supposed to regurgitate and not think’. The convenor re-marked my paper and I achieved a high distinction;
• Being told by a white administrator that I foolishly trusted, ‘Don’t apply for a PhD scholarship as people who get them never complete their PhDs’. Their advice cost me $100,000 of my own money and millions more since it snowballed. I have been blocked from postdoctoral research funding and full-time employment as I cannot earn research funding for a university;
• At Brisbane International Airport, after I went through customs and was waiting at my departure gate, I was called by name by a white Australian border security officer and told to accompany them to the front of the queue. I was shocked and humiliated when I was taken behind a curtain and unceremoniously body searched. I voiced my outrage and indignation. They apologetically escorted me to my seat on my departing international flight.

Unfortunately, my experiences of being racialised as the inferior Other are not unusual. According to Resmaa Menakem (2021), an African American trauma therapist, enduring ‘racialised trauma’ is experienced among people in Britain’s former colonies. Australia, the United States and Zambia are former British colonies, so they are a component of Menakem’s assessment of white body supremacy and racialised trauma. He contends that ‘racialised trauma’ stems from a long history of ‘white body supremacy’, which is deeply ingrained in our very being—manifesting in our bodies, cells and genetic expression, transcending skin colour (Menakem 2021, p. ix). Therefore, regardless of our race, we are all marked and influenced by white racial supremacy. Modern-day society is deeply ingrained by white supremacy, as we’ve seen with my own racialising moments, which support Spickard’s (2015) and Mbembe’s (2019) arguments that race is written on the body. I add that ‘race’ is written on the Black and non-white body by the gazer (who is not necessarily white) in a racialising traumatic moment. Chin et al. (2023) contend that race-based trauma is linked to post-traumatic symptoms such as hypervigilance, depression, hypertension and anxiety, and overlaps with multigenerational and transgenerational trauma.

Furthermore, it is widely accepted that trauma is transmitted intergenerationally. In her study of adult children of Holocaust survivors, Rachel Yehuda (2022, p. 4) discovered that they ‘were more likely than others to have mood disorders, as well as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)’. However, Kirmayer et al. (2014, p. 302) cautioned against applying the Holocaust as a one-size-fits-all for the historical and ongoing grief, loss and trauma of marginalisation and oppression experienced by survivors of residential schools in Canada, because ‘Indigenous peoples had the reproduction of cultural knowledge and traditions across generations disrupted by religious suppression and the residential schools.’ They argue that survivors of the Holocaust were able to take their religion, relocate and build new lives in different countries, while Indigenous Canadians were unable to do so as the atrocities, including a declaration of terra nullius and ethnocide, occurred on First Nations Canadians’ land (Kirmayer et al. 2014, p. 302). They caution that ‘applying the analogy with the Holocaust leads to distortions and blind spots … [as] specific historical wrongs require their own modes of understanding and have their own moral imperatives’ (Kirmayer et al. 2014, p. 313). They recommend ‘a typology of the kinds and mechanism of cultural oppression, group subjection and genocide the traces effects from ideology and policy to structural, institutional and interpersonal violence (and back) again’. The echoes of colonial whiteness continue to the present in ‘processes of nation-building, urbanisation, bureaucracy and neoliberal capitalism in Canada, so they are not a thing of the past but remain in the present’ (Ibid).

Yehuda and Lehrner (2018, p. 244) believe increased attention needs to be paid to intergenerational trauma, with global applicability and

a mandate for increased attention to this area, including prospective, longitudinal studies that can be designed in the future to determine the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon.

I agree with Yehuda and Lehrner that we need more studies on intergenerational trauma, and Britain should be made financially and ethically responsible for undertaking such a study, as the perpetrators of whiteness, the British, have impacted people globally in their former colonies.

Recovery from trauma follows a common pathway of storytelling, validation and safety within a community (Chin et al. 2023; Herman 2001). The intergenerational grief of cultural erasure can inflect racial trauma, and one way of recovering from identity stress is to self-identify—hence my appropriation of the term ‘Eurafrican’ (Chin et al. 2023). Racial trauma is a traumatic affliction of colonial whiteness and white body supremacy, and its impacts are current, ongoing, and not a thing of the past.

11. Conclusions

Britain’s official delegitimisation of Eurafricans perpetuates a destructive legacy of illegitimacy, contributing to their invisibility in Zambia’s current national census, history and social framework. Aaron Milner’s story of navigating his mixed-race Eurafrican identity and political career captures a key point from which to explore the echoes of colonial whiteness in colonial and postcolonial Zambia and the wider former British Empire. We are all indelibly marked by white supremacy through the continuity of colonial forms of domination in world systems—the ‘coloniality of power’.

In Zambia, the indelible mark of whiteness is especially evident through its exclusionary census measures that impose ‘racial nationalism’ through tribal and language options that racialise Eurafricans as the Other, or inferior/foreigner by employing outdated beliefs that they are a racial anomaly because they are of mixed African and European descent, and as a result, are not Indigenous Zambians. Nor does the census acknowledge or provide an opportunity to address Zambia’s multiracial history, thus causing unmitigated transgenerational grief through the eradication of Eurafrican culture and history. Eurafricans’ elimination from the census is cultural genocide. Government policies that erase and enforce assimilation are ‘a method of genocide which destroys a social group through the destruction of their culture’ (Short, cited in Bachman 2019, p. 4). Eurafricans’ elimination from Zambia’s census is cultural genocide as they are forced to assimilate into the 73 ethnicities counted in the census. Once more, Eurafricans are racially traumatised, but unlike in the past, it is not by the British but by their fellow Zambians who, by erasing Eurafricans from the census, reject the community’s collective history and mixed-race identity. Eurafricans are marginalised as non-Indigenous Zambians by racial nationalism.

King Charles’s admission of British colonial wrongdoing in Kenya should be extended to Zambian Eurafricans. The British government and King Charles must acknowledge and apologise for Britain’s historical racialised practices that have caused deep and lasting emotional wounds of the intergenerational stigma of illegitimacy and racial trauma. This legacy is an echo of colonial whiteness as it continues to the present day, as evidenced by Eurafrican’s invisibilisation in Zambia’s national census. An apology from King Charles would be globally impactful. This is not only for Eurafricans, but also for all persons of mixed descent, including his grandchildren, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet. An apology from King Charles would be a meaningful remedial step towards dismantling racialised negative stereotypes of mixed-race people’s supposed racial disparagement, addressing the injurious legacies of British colonial whiteness, and fostering a ‘universalistic human family without racial hierarchies’, as proposed by von Vacano (2012).