ABSTRACT
Highlighting the interconnections between discourses centred on public morality and politics, this chapter focuses on Zambian sexual citizenship. Overall, the chapter contextualises continuity and change in the discursive politics of sexual citizenship during two distinct periods in Zambian history. The analysis first offers an overview of political discourses envisioning Zambian humanism – as the national political ideology – and then moves to the more recent period when Pentecostalism grew and took on a profound public role and brought forward an ideology of Christian nationalism. The analysis offers a nuanced account that transcends the simplistic tendency to consider these two periods as two completely separate and opposite nation-building projects in postcolonial Zambia. The process of continuity lies especially in public and private morality relating to, for example, matters of sexuality and citizens’ respectability. In the conclusion, the chapter highlights how sexuality, in both narratives of nationhood, has been used as a key site to define Zambia’s identity status as an independent nation.
