Across the Copperbelt

Front matter

ALLET re

3, DE Sd À

Enid Guene.

Part 1: Micro-studies Of Urban Life

Beyond Paternalism: Pluralising Copperbelt Histories Iva Pesa and Benoit Henriet

Being a Child of the Mines: Youth Magazines and Comics in the Copperbelt Enid Guene

Divergence and Convergence on the Copperbelt: White Mineworkers in Comparative Perspective, 1911—1963 Duncan Money

Football on the Zambian and Katangese Copperbelts: Leisure and Fan Culture from the 1930s to the Present Hikabwa D. Chipande

Beware the Mineral Narrative: The Histories of Solwezi Town and Kansanshi Mine, North-Western Zambia, c. 1899-2020 Rita Kesselring

Part 2:the Local Copperbelt And The Global Economy

Kingdoms and Associations: Coppers Changing Political Economy during the Nineteenth Century David M. Gordon vil vill

PART 3: PRODUCING AND CONTESTING KNOWLEDGE OF URBAN Contents

Of Corporate Welfare Buildings and Private Initiative: Post-Paternalist Ruination and Renovation in a Former Zambian Mine Township

Christian Straube

From a Colonial to a Mineral Flow Regime: The Mineral Trade and the Inertia of Global Infrastructures in the Copperbelt

Hélène Blaszkiewicz

Houses Built on Copper: The Environmental Impact of Current Mining Activities on ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Zambian Copperbelt Communities

Jennifer Chibamba Chansa

SOCIETIES

Select

Index

‘The British, the French and even the Russians use these methods’: Psychology, Mental Testing and (Trans)Imperial

Dynamics of Expertise Production in Late-Colonial Congo

Amandine Lauro

The Production of Historical Knowledge at the University of

Lubumbashi (1956—2018) Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu

The Decolonisation of Community Development in Haut-Katanga and the Zambian Copperbelt, 1945—1990 Miles Larmer and Rachel Taylor

Reimagining the Copperbelt as a Religious Space Stephanie Lämmert

Bibliography

373 403

Illustrations

Introduction Miles Larmer, Enid Guene, Benoit Henriet, Iva Peša and Rachel Taylor

Map 0.1 The Copperbelt region xxii

Beyond Paternalism: Pluralising Copperbelt Histories Iva Peša and Benoît Henriet

Table 1.1 Mufulira mine employees and total urban population 50

Table 1.2 Likasi mine employees and total urban population 51

Being a Child of the Mines: Youth Magazines and Comics in the Copperbelt Enid Guene

Figure 2.1 ‘Frida and Friday’, Speak Out! May-June 1986, back cover 74

Beware the Mineral Narrative: The Histories of Solwezi Town and Kansanshi Mine, North-Western Zambia, c. 1899—2020 Rita Kesselring

Map 5.1 Zambias North-Western province 123 Map 5.2 Solwezi town and Kansanshi mine today 124

Figure 5.1 European residents in Solwezi boma and Kansanshi mine 1910-1931 130

Figure 5.2 Number of African residents, Solwezi 1916-1929 132

Figure 5.3 Population growth Solwezi District and Solwezi Central Constituency 141

Kingdoms and Associations: Coppers Changing Political Economy during the Nineteenth Century David M. Gordon

Figure 6.1 Copper ingots from Sanga, Haut-Lomami, Katanga: from 13th to 15th century, 4cm in length 166 ix x Illustrations

Copper ingots from Sanga, Haut-Lomami, Katanga: likely 16th to 18th century, 6cm in length 167

Copper ingots from Sanga, Haut-Lomami, Katanga: 24.2cm x 18.3cm fishinkoro cross, likely 19th century 167

Mitako wire coil collected by Henry M. Stanley, in the style collected by Livingstone and described by Capelo and Ivens 167

Of Corporate Welfare Buildings and Private Initiative: Post-Paternalist Ruination and Renovation in a Former Zambian Mine Township Christian Straube

Figure 7.3 Figure 7.4 Figure 7.5 Figure 7.6

The coat of arms of the Roan-Mpatamatu mine township 183

1964 ‘locality plan’ showing Mpatamatu’s newly constructed Sections 21, 22, 23 and 24 as part of Luanshya’s corporate mine townships 184

1957 plan of Section 21, Mpatamatu’s first section 187

Photo, ‘Welcome to half China’ 197 Photo of Section 25 clinic as polling station 198 Photo of Section 21 clinic 202

From a Colonial to a Mineral Flow Regime: The Mineral Trade and the Inertia of Global Infrastructures in the Copperbelt Hélène Blaszkiewicz

Map 8.1

Schematic map of corridors linking the Copperbelt to international markets 211

Zambian copper export routes, 1966—1983 218

Houses Built on Copper: The Environmental Impact of Current Mining Activities on ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Zambian Copperbelt Communities Jennifer Chibamba Chansa

Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2 Figure 9.3 Figure 9.4

Water point in Kankoyo 242 Water point in Kankoyo 242 Cracked houses in Mufulira 245 Cracked houses in Mufulira 246

Illustrations xi

Figure 9.5 Northern settlement, Kalumbila 257 Figure 9.6 Northern settlement, Kalumbila 257

The editors, contributors and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed in the illustration captions for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Notes on Contributors

Hélène Blaszkiewicz holds a doctorate in geography from the University of Lyon. Her research focuses on trade and the differentiated uses of infrastructures networks which enable the circulations of things on the border between Zambia and the DR Congo. Her research interests also include African economic policies and industrialisation. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva (Switzerland).

Jennifer Chibamba Chansa holds a doctorate in African Studies and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of the Free State in South Africa. She also holds a BA in History and Library and Information Studies from the University of Zambia, and an MA in African Studies from the University of Basel in Switzerland. Jennifer’s research interests include mining, labour and environmental history, and African anthropology. Her PhD research focused on environmental pollution, management and regulation within Zambia’s ‘old’ (Copperbelt) and ‘new’ (North-Western) mining regions. Jennifer’s interest in the mining industry stems from her childhood experiences, having been born and raised in Mufulira town.

Hikabwa D. Chipande is Coordinator/Head of the African Union Sports Council at the headquarters in Yaoundé, Cameroon. He is also lecturer of sports studies in the School of Education at the University of Zambia. Chipande has written and published several journal articles and book chapters focusing on the political and social history of sport, particularly football in Africa. He has received several research grants, including the FIFA Joao Havelange Research Scholarship.

Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu holds a doctorate in History (from the University of Laval in Quebec, Canada). He is Professor of History in the Department of Historical Sciences at the University of Lubumbashi. Since 1990, he has researched the social history of Haut-Katanga, particularly focusing on urban popular culture. In collaboration with Bogumil Jewsiewicki, he initiated the project ‘Memories of Lubumbashi’ of which he is the president of the local scientific committee. He is also the Director- Coordinator of the ‘Observatory of Urban Change’, the research centre at xii

Notes on Contributors xiii the University of Lubumbashi. He has published several important publications on the history of the region and other topics.

David M. Gordon, Professor in the Department of History at Bowdoin College (Brunswick USA), is interested in the history of Southern and Central African encounters with global forces over the last two centuries: Atlantic and Indian Ocean trading networks; British, Portuguese and Belgian colonialism; changing property regimes; and Christianity. His 2012 monograph, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History (Ohio University Press), considers the influence of Christian spirituality on historical agency in Northern Zambia. His recent publications about Central African kingdoms, warlordism, and prophetic movements have appeared in leading journals. Currently he is enriching this research by investigating the diffusion of art and material culture across South-Central Africa during the nineteenth century.

Enid Guene is a Research Associate in Cultural History at the University of Oxford, as part of the Comparing the Copperbelt project. She has a MA in African Studies from the University of Leiden. Her PhD at the University of Cologne focuses on historical processes of cultural and livelihood change among East African hunter-gatherers. Her current research, building on her MA thesis on cross-border migrations in the Copperbelt, focuses on cultural production and exchanges in the mining regions of Zambia and DR Congo.

Benoit Henriet is Assistant Professor in Global History at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium. After completing a doctorate on labour and power relations in a palm oil concession in The Belgian Congo at Université Saint-Louis in Brussels, he was a research associate in the ER C-funded Comparing the Copperbelt project at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He is interested in the history of agency, everyday life and localglobal connections in (post)colonial Central Africa.

Rita Kesselring is a senior lecturer at the Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Basel, Switzerland. She currently works on new mining towns in Zambia’s North-Western Province, making visible the interconnection between global extractivism, commodity trade and urban life at the site of resource extraction. Her monograph, Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory and Emancipation (Stanford Universtiy Press, 2017) is an ethnography on apartheid victims in South Africa and its globally entangled system of human rights abuses. She is also co-editor of the journal Anthropology Southern Africa.

xiv Notes on Contributors

Stephanie Lämmert is a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. Her current research deals with the history of romance and intimacies in twentieth-century Copperbelt towns and urban Tanzania and its implications for broader discourses of nation-building and ‘modernity’. Stephanie holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She studied African Studies and History at Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her research interests include Eastern and Central African history of the twentieth century, the history of emotions, Swahili literature and popular culture, and intellectual histories from below.

Miles Larmer is Professor of African History at the University of Oxford and a Research fellow at the University of Pretoria. He has written extensively on the modern history of Central and Southern Africa. His most recent book, co-authored with Erik Kennes, is The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central Africa: Fighting their way home (2016). He is the Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project Comparing the Copperbelt: Political Culture and Knowledge Production in Central Africa.

Amandine Lauro is a Senior Research Associate of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), where she teaches African, imperial and gender history. Her research focuses on gender, race and security in colonial Africa and more specifically in the Belgian Congo. She has published a book and several contributions on these issues. Her latest research about colonial psychology is part of a new research project on the history of colonial expertise and gender-based violence in the Belgian empire.

Duncan Money is a historian of Central and Southern Africa with a particular interest in the mining industry. He is currently a Researcher at the African Studies Centre Leiden and holds a DPhil in History from the University of Oxford. He is the co-editor of Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa (Routledge, 2020) and is writing a book about white mineworkers on Zambia’s Copperbelt provisionally titled In a Class of their Own (Brill, forthcoming).

Iva Peÿa is an Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her current research is focused on the environmental and social history of the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt. In 2014, she completed her PhD at Leiden University on patterns of social change in Mwinilunga District, North-Western Zambia (published as Roads

Notes on Contributors XV through Mwinilunga, Brill, 2019). She has published on urban agriculture and environmental thought on the Copperbelt, cassava, labour migration and on the methodological struggles of using oral history.

Christian Straube is a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. He holds an MA in Chinese Studies, Political Science of South Asia and Macroeconomics from Heidelberg University. He completed his Doctorate in Social Anthropology, at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany in July 2018. His research engagement has been focused on the Chinese diaspora in South- East Asia, China-Africa relations, the postcolony in Southern Africa and post-industrial ruination on Zambia’s Copperbelt.

Rachel Taylor is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford, working on the Comparing the Copperbelt project, funded by the European Research Council. She has a PhD in African History from North- Western University (Evanston, USA) and an MA in Historical Research Methods from SOAS, University of London. She is particularly interested in how Africans build meaningful lives and communities in times of great social, political and economic change, and her research focuses on gender and labour in nineteenth- and twentieth-century East and Central Africa.

Acknowledgements

The development of this book project over the past five years would not have been possible without the sustained engagement and support of many dozens of researchers and colleagues. The majority of the chapters included in this book have their origins in papers presented at Comparing the Copperbelt project-related events between 2016 and 2019 (full details are available at: http://copperbelt.history.ox.ac.uk/events), as well as seminars held under project auspices at the University of Oxford, and many presentations at universities in Africa, Europe and the United States. These include conferences organised at the Nordic Africa Institute in December 2016; a panel organised at the European Social Science History conference held in Belfast in April 2018; panels in the Congo Research Network conference held in Oxford in April 2018; a major workshop held in Kitwe, Zambia in July 2018; panels organised at the European Conferences on African Studies held in Basel (June 2017) and Edinburgh (June 2019); a major workshop held at the University of Lubumbashi in July 2019; and a panel organised at the African Studies Association US conference held in Boston Mass. in November 2019.The editors and authors are grateful to all participants and audience members at these events, whose comments and questions helped improve both the individual chapters and the book as a whole.

The editors of this volume are, as a result, indebted to so many individuals and organisations that they cannot all be named here without us overstepping our word count beyond the breaking point of our patient publishers. Special mention is therefore necessarily reserved for the following. Dr Patience Mususa kindly hosted an early event for the project in Uppsala in December 2016. That event was co-organised by Prof. Benjamin Rubbers, whose own European Research Council (ERC)-funded “‘WORKINMINING’ project on the contemporary Copperbelt has run parallel to ours, and who has provided exceptional support and advice for our project researchers. Colleagues at the University of Lubumbashi, particularly Profs Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu and Germain Ngoie Tshibambe, provided crucial intellectual guidance and practical assistance throughout the entire course of the project. Colleagues in the History Department of the University of xvi

Acknowledgements xvii

Zambia, particularly Profs Walima Kalusa and Bizeck J. Phiri and (elsewhere at UNZA) Dr Hikabwa Chipande, provided important guidance and played a key role in the 2018 Kitwe conference. At Copperbelt University Zambia (CBU), Profs John Lungu and Owen Sichone and Drs Robby Kapesa and Edna Kabala Litana were equally important in guiding research, helping to organise the Kitwe conference and hosting presentations on the project in 2017 and 2019.

The authors are grateful to the many archivists and librarians who enabled access to their collections. There are too many to mention by name here, but those at the ZCCM-IH archives in Ndola, whose records are cited in many chapters, warrant particular thanks. We are grateful for the permission to reproduce images and figures from the collections of the ZCCM-IH archives; the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium; and Mission Press in Ndola, Zambia.

The editors would also like to thank their all colleagues at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of History and African Studies Centre for their unstinting support of the project. Claire Phillips, the Project Administrator, has been central to its activities and achievements throughout. Dr Stephanie Lammert played a vital role in the project’s early development. As well as contributing an important chapter to this collection, she kindly provided our cover image. Drs Thomas Hendriks and Ramon Sarré co-organised the Congo Research Network conference held in Oxford in April 2018.

The editors would like to acknowledge the generous funding by the European Research Council of the project, Comparing the Copperbelt: Political Culture and Knowledge Production in Central Africa (Grant Agreement No. 681657), based at the University of Oxford from 2016 to 2021. European Research Council funding enabled the research carried out by the editors, the organisation of project seminars and conferences, and the Open Access publication of this volume.

Thanks are also due to the following individuals: Mostafa Abdelaal; Wale Adebanwi; Kate Alexander; Miguel Bandeira Jeronimo; Karin Barber; William Beinart; James Belich; Filip de Boeck; Gavin Bridge; Deborah Bryceson; Alexander Caramento; John Darwin; Nicole Eggers; Kristien Geenen; Jan-Bart Gewald; the late Patrick Harries; Marja Hinfelaar; Nancy Rose Hunt; Bogumil Jewsiewicki; Emery Kalema; Sarah Katz-Lavigne; Brian J. Leech; Reuben Loffman;Tom McNamara; Christian Müller; James Musonda; Joël Noret; Margaret O’Callaghan; David Pratten; Francesca Pugliese; Katrien Pype; Corey Ross; Jeff Schauer, Miyanda Simabwachi; Sishuwa Sishuwa; Sarah van Beurden; and Daniela Waldburger.

xviii Acknowledgements

Finally, and most importantly, particular thanks are due to Grant Chisapa and Pierrot Monzi Kalonga, as well as the many other Congolese and Zambian researchers and translators who were vital to the research carried out by the editors and authors and to whom this book is dedicated. We recognise that, just as the history of the Central African Copperbelt rests on the unjust and unequal exploitation of the region’s people, injustice and inequality remains ineluctable to the work of social historians and the production of knowledge about it. We hope that our modest efforts in documenting that history and acknowledging these historical and contemporary inequalities play a small role in addressing it.

BSAC CADER CEDAF CELTA CELRIA CEPAC CEPSI CERDAC

CERPHA CGS

CML CSR CNMC DA

DC

DO

DRC, DR ECZ

Abbreviations

African Archives (Belgium)

Anglo American Corporation

Association des Agents de l’Union Minière et Filiales Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

British Broadcasting Corporation

Chemins de fer du Bas-Congo au Katanga

Bureau de l’enseignement catholique

British Museum

British South Africa Company

Corps des Activistes pour la Défense de la Révolution Centre d’études et de documentation africaines Centre for Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Centre for Studies of African-inspired Romance Literature Centre for Political Studies in Central Africa

Centre d’étude des problèmes sociaux indigènes

Centre for Studies and Documentary Research on Central Africa

Centre for Research in African Philosophy Confédération générale des syndicats du Congo belge Congo Mining Limited

Corporate Social Responsibility

China Nonferrous Metal Mining (Group) Corporation Development Agreement

District Commissioner

District Officer

Congo Democratic Republic of the Congo

Environmental Council of Zambia

XiX

XX Abbreviations

EPPCA Environmental Protection and Pollution Control Act ERC European Research Council

FG Football Club

FQM First Quantum Minerals

Gécamines Générale des Carriéres et des Mines

GIZ Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit HIV Human Immunodeficiency Virus

IFIs International Financial Institutions

IMF International Monetary Fund

ISO International Organization for Standardization KUL Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

LCM Luanshya Copper Mines

LMS London Missionary Society

MCM Mopani Copper Mines

MEF Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation

MP Member of Parliament

MMD Movement for Multi-Party Democracy

MPLA Movimento Popular de Libertaçäo de Angola MPR Popular Movement of the Revolution

NAZ National Archives of Zambia

NCCM Nchanga Consolidated Copper Mines

NGO Non-Governmental Organisation

NRMWU Northern Rhodesia Mine Workers’ Union OCU Observatoire du Changement Urbain

PPP Public-Private Partnerships

RACM Roan Antelope Copper Mines

RAID Rights and Accountability in Development RAMCOZ Roan Antelope Copper Mining Corporation of Zambia RCM Roan Consolidated Mines

RLI Rhodes-Livingstone Institute

RMCA Royal Museum of Central Africa RP Ronald Prain papers

RST SNCC SNCZ SUBS TAZAMA TAZARA TNA UMCB UMHK UNAZA UNESCO

Unescongo

UNILU UNIP UOC WAM ZCCM ZCCM-IH ZDA ZEMA ZTRS

Abbreviations xxi

Rhodesian (later Roan) Selection Trust

Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer du Congo Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer du Zaïre Solwezi Urban Baseline Study

Tanzania-Zambia Mafuta

Tanzania-Zambia Railway

The National Archives (United Kingdom) United Missions to the Copperbelt

Union Minière du Haut-Katanga

National University of Zaïre

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Programme d'urgence de l'UNESCO dans le cadre de l’action des Nations Unies pour le maintien des services éducatifs au Congo

United National Independence Party

Official University of the Congo

World Apostolate of Mary

Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines

Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines — Investment Holdings Zambian Development Agency

Zambia Environmental Management Agency

Zambia-Tanzania Road Service

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MILES LARMER, ENID GUENE, BENOIT HENRIET, Iva PESA & RACHEL TAYLOR

With a roller coaster history of economic boom followed by crushing bust, the Central African Copperbelt has come to epitomise Africa’s faltering ‘Industrial Revolution’.' Throughout the twentieth century, its large-scale industrial copper mines attracted people, capital and power across national and continental boundaries. Following a protracted period of expansion after 1945, which gave rise to what James Ferguson called ‘expectations of modernity’,* the region went through a deep and painful decline in the 1980s and 1990s, when world copper prices collapsed and retrenchment followed. Due to its industrial, economic and geopolitical significance, the Copperbelt has become a key case study from which to theorise about urbanism, development/underdevelopment and modernity in African studies. For a century now, the Copperbelt has been a site of knowledge production on industrialisation, labour relations and urban social change. The mining officials, government agents and social scientists who have studied the Copperbelt have produced cutting-edge and world-renowned studies, on trade unionism, kinship and gender.* The current volume seeks to contribute to this long tradition of knowledge production in new and innovative ways, by providing a broader and more diverse account of Copperbelt social change. Our interdisciplinary contributions extend focus beyond male mineworkers,

1 Reginald Moore and A. Sandilands, These African Copper Mines: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Northern Rhodesia, With Principal Reference to the Copper Mining Industry (London: Livingstone Press, 1948).

2 James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

3 See below and for an overview, Miles Larmer, ‘At the Crossroads: Mining and Political Change on the Katangese-Zambian Copperbelt’, Oxford Handbooks Online (2016), DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935369.013.20.

to encompass religion, comics, social work and leisure activities. Together, they show that the Copperbelt has been even more diverse and dynamic than previous studies have suggested.

This book has three distinctive foci. First of all, it understands the Copperbelt as a diverse space of mineworkers, traders, farmers and housewives, paying attention to art and popular culture, in addition to the industrial workplace and trade unionism. Though other studies have certainly looked at the Copperbelt and its population, these works have disproportionately focused on male waged employment and have thereby overlooked other ways to build a meaningful life on the Copperbelt. Second, this book presents an analysis of the entire Central African Copperbelt region, encompassing both sides of the Congo-Zambia border. Although geographically contiguous and shaped by a connected extractive industry, the two sides have been studied as two separate regions, following the divisions and legacies of Belgian and British colonial rule, and subsequent Francophone or Anglophone scholarship. Third, in its attempt to write a more varied account of the Copperbelt region, this book brings together multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives on social and historical change from history, anthropology, human geography and social psychology.

What can the Copperbelt experience contribute to discussions about urban social history more broadly? Jennifer Robinson argues that the Copperbelt is a good example of what comparative urbanism has to offer, illustrating ‘diverse urban ways of life in cities across the world’.* As eminent social scientists recognised in the 1940s, the Copperbelt population ‘was highly mobile as well as diverse, and this made for a fluid, dynamic and very creative form of urban culture’. Scores of analysts have tried to understand Copperbelt residents’ uneven and diverse experiences of urbanism and modernity. Max Gluckman of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) maintained that “Central African towns differ only in degree from any town, anywhere in the world probably’. Within African studies, the Copperbelt has been fundamental to shaping ideas of what urbanism, development/

4 Jennifer Robinson, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 41.

6 Max Gluckman, ‘Anthropological Problems arising from the African industrial revolution’ in A. Southall (ed.), Social Change in Modern Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 67-82, p. 79.

underdevelopment and modernity look like on the continent.’ Studying the Copperbelt can thus enrich our understanding of what it means to be urban and modern, in Africa and beyond.’

From Boom to Bust: Historical Trends on the Copperbelt

The Central African Copperbelt, encompassing the urban mining towns of Zambia’s Copperbelt Province and the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Haut-Katanga region (see Map 0.1), has been a key case study of urban and social change in Africa for a century. The area’s mid-twentieth century transformation into an industrial mining region where a new multi-racial working class, equipped with cutting-edge industrial technology, produced minerals that were both highly valuable and of globally strategic importance, attracted the attention of analysts, academics and activists alike.

Copper, mined in this region for centuries by African societies, was — like mineral deposits elsewhere on the continent — an important impetus to the ‘scramble for Africa’. In the early twentieth century, surveyors and speculators exploited known and sought out new sources of copper ore in the heart of Central Africa.” Turning such deposits into profits required the concentration of capital, the construction of infrastructure and the recruitment of both skilled and unskilled labour. The profitable production of Katangese mines in the 1910s and 1920s by Union Miniére du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) fuelled the growth of new urban centres populated by skilled white artisans and thousands of African labour migrants — many from across the border in Northern Rhodesia — segregated by the racial logics of the colonial order. Wartime demands had spurred UMHK production to 14,000 tonnes by 1915, and a decade later this had grown to 90,000 tonnes.!° From the late 1920s and more particularly after the global depression, Northern Rhodesia’s own mines and mine towns grew rapidly. Production more than doubled from 116,600 tons of copper in 1936 to 268,500 tons in 1941, as did the size of its workforce: 7,459 African mineworkers in 1933 rose to 26,023 in 1940. That year the equivalent figure

7 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; Ulf Hannerz, Exploring the City: Inquiries toward an Urban Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

8 Robinson, Ordinary Cities, p. 63.

9 Larry J. Butler, Copper Empire: Mining and the Colonial State in Northern Rhodesia, c. 1930-64 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

10 Charles Perrings, Black Mineworkers in Central Africa: Industrial Strategies and the Evolution of an African Proletariat in the Copperbelt, 1911-41 (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 247.

for UMHK was 17,074.11 Central African copper production was vital to the expanding global industrial economy and vital to the allied war effort in the Second World War, comparable in global scale and significance to South Africa’s gold mines.!”

Over time, hastily constructed mine camps became large urban centres, where migrant workers and their families settled in increasing numbers and progressively acquired new skills. Copperbelt residents organised politically and socially, and mine companies, states and their academic advisors were forced to reckon with these new communities, leading to the provision of services such as healthcare, education, housing and social welfare.'* Mine companies also provided sporting and leisure facilities, while Copperbelt residents produced innovative music, dance and art that articulated their understandings of urban and social change." Racial and economic inequalities fuelled struggles for labour and political rights, influencing the struggle against colonial rule in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia.! Following independence, new one-party state regimes in Zambia and Zaire (as the Congo was later renamed) nationalised the mine companies and sought to impose authoritarian control over these economically vital

11 Ibid., pp. 117, 247, 253; Ian Henderson, ‘Labour and Politics in Northern Rhodesia, 1900-1953: A Study in the Limits of Colonial Power’, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1972, p. 130.

12 Robert E. Baldwin, Economic Development and Export Growth: A Study of Northern Rhodesia, 1920-1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Jean-Philippe Peemans, ‘Capital Accumulation in the Congo under Colonialism: The Role of the State’ in P. Duignan and L. H. Gann (eds), Colonialism in Africa, vol. 5: The Economics of Colonialism, 1870-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 165-212; René Brion and Jean-Louis Moreau, De la mine à Mars: La genèse d’Umicore (Tielt: Lanoo, 2006).

13 Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa — The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

14 Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu, Histoire des conditions de vie des travailleurs de l'Union minière du Haut-Katanga/Gécamines (1910-1999) (Lubumbashi: Presses Universitaires de Lubumbashi, 2001).

15 J. Clyde Mitchell, The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia (Manchester: Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, 1956); Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

16 Henry S. Meebelo, African Proletarians and Colonial Capitalism: The Origins, Growth and Struggles of the Zambian Labour Movement to 1964 (Lusaka: Kenneth Kaunda Foundation, 1986).

regions.” Boom was followed by bust with the global commodities crash of the late 1970s. Both Copperbelt regions experienced economic recession involving the loss of formal employment, privatisation and the collapse of social services provided by mine companies. Many residents endured a drastic decline in living standards and were forced to turn to alternative forms of economic activity. In the twenty-first century new mine investors came to the Copperbelt and to new mining areas in other areas of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (henceforth DRC or DR Congo), but they proved unwilling to provide social services, and have provided only a fraction of the jobs of their predecessors.

Studying the Copperbelt

This compelling story, the rise (and later fall) of the globalised Copperbelt, has drawn — like the mineral speculators who sought their fortunes in its rich red seams — generations of external analysts to Central Africa. In the 1950s, social scientists saw the Copperbelt as a test case for rapid modernisation and sought to assess the extent to which Africans could successfully adapt to a ‘Western’ way of life. Researchers from RLI and the Centre d’Etudes des Problèmes Sociaux Indigènes (CEPSI) carried out extensive research in the Copperbelt’s laboratory of modernity. Researchers from the two institutes disagreed — in ways influenced by the racial thinking of the time — about whether this adaptation was possible, but they agreed that momentous processes of social change were transforming the region and its residents from rural ‘backwardness’ to an urban industrial society.'® They also believed this was replicating within a generation a ‘modernisation’ process that had unfolded over a century or more in Western Europe. Colonial officials and mine company executives, having abandoned their earlier hopes of preventing or delaying urbanisation, aimed to control and/or guide these changes by social intervention, seeking with the help of social science and mission churches to create their ideal of a disciplined urban