Patience Mususa’s book recounts the disaster that befell residents of Zambia’s Copperbelt after the privatization of the mining industry in the 1990s. It is a vivid and rich account of what happens when a way of life seen as secure and predictable suddenly ends. What she evocatively terms the ‘expulsion from Eden’ (p. 105) is also interwoven with stories from her own life. Her grandfather and father worked in the mines. She attended a mine school and lived in a house subsidized by the mine. However, the future that those of her generation anticipated never materialized.
The book is divided into six main chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. Following a chapter on the development and curtailment of social welfare provision by the mining companies, the remaining five chapters each cover a different aspect of the struggle to make a life in a new, uncertain world. Chapter 2 explains the theoretical underpinnings of the book through an account of the author’s efforts to buy a house. Chapter 3 covers varying strategies of earning a livelihood after the collapse of waged employment. Chapter 4 looks at altered gender roles at work as women and children were forced into gruelling work mining old dumps. Chapter 5 looks at the changing performance of gender in marriage and other relationships. Chapter 6 shows how the experience of hardship permeated music and dance through song lyrics. Each chapter is empirically rich, with detailed life histories and explanations of livelihood strategies. Mususa even devotes several pages in one chapter to instructions on how to dig a well.
The work of James Ferguson looms large in any account of the contemporary Copperbelt, and Mususa engages closely with his work. Expectations of Modernity Footnote 1 emphasized how economic decline altered the social expectations and future horizons of those who lived on the Copperbelt. Drawing on her own training as an architect and anthropologist, Mususa makes an original and valuable contribution by looking at how this decline changed people’s engagements with and perceptions of the material environment around them. Mining towns are very particular kinds of spaces. The Copperbelt towns had been built as company towns, and the paternalistic system fostered by private industry only intensified under state ownership. The mines provided housing, schools, hospitals and recreation facilities. This means that nostalgia has a literal ‘concrete dimension’ (p. 198), visible in the deterioration of the built environment.
Copperbelt residents experience a certain past and an uncertain future. Efforts to create a new life are bound up with nostalgia. Mususa presents nostalgia for the recent past and unrealized future as a continual presence in the lives of Copperbelt residents for whom ‘the most stable thing … was their memories of the past’ (p. 174). This is also informed by her own experience of the Copperbelt, which stretches far beyond the three years of fieldwork underpinning the book. She quotes from her own journal about her surprise and joy encountering, amidst abandoned recreation halls and potholed roads strewn with sewage, the old Olympic-sized pool ‘looking like yesterday, like the Copperbelt I knew then!’ (p. 2).
Mususa introduces the idea of ‘trying’ as a concept to explain the replacement of a world of industrial wage work, where life seemed predictable, with one where hardship is combined with unpredictability. This new world requires self-reliance and improvisation, and a conviction that people’s luck could change as opportunities emerge from chance encounters. Many residents maintained a hopeful stance towards the future bordering on the fantastical, such as the Luanshya couple who had undergone training in making ice cream and planned to establish an ice cream parlour at a time when many residents of the town struggled to afford a single meal per day.
There is a wider point about unpredictability here. The livelihoods of Copperbelt residents remain largely dependent on the price of a single commodity on international markets, which has soared and slumped since the privatization of the mines. Lives of individuals are tied closely to volatile forces beyond their control.
The hardships experienced in the years following privatization are illuminated in often understated ways. One couple, for instance, were deemed to have done comparatively well because ‘neighbors pointed out to me that the Phiris [the couple] had never become thin like the rest of them’ (p. 112). Mususa also shows that hardship was not uniform. Some people did seize potential from chance encounters. She relates how one ex-mineworker established a successful business as a mine supplier by appropriating smaller equipment overlooked by the company asset stripping the mine.
This is an excellent book filled with snapshots of life both entertaining and poignant. It is essential for anyone interested in the contemporary Copperbelt, or in other places that have suffered sharp socio-economic decline. Scholars working on the burgeoning topic of de-industrialization – which at present largely focuses on Europe and North America – would gain much from this work. The book also benefits from being unusually reasonably priced for an academic work, for which the publishers should be commended, and I hope that this means that it will be read widely.
