Introduction

The post–World War Two heyday of social scientific research on the Central African Copperbelt was shaped by a sustained period of global economic growth, the ‘long boom’. This enabled a steady growth in copper production and company profits and, to a lesser extent, mine employment, living standards and the wider manifestations of urbanisation identified by policy-makers and academics.Footnote ¹ Politically, the long boom both resulted from and enabled a period of unprecedented co-operation between global capital, nation-states and organised labour, which sought to prevent or manage capitalism’s propensity for economic crises, ensure effective governmental support for economic ‘development’ and more fairly distribute the benefits of growth between companies, workers and wider society. Variations of this ‘tripartite’ or Keynesian model of economic co-operation, with its origins in World War Two but applied in overcoming post-war austerity and combating the ills of poverty and backwardness, were implemented across the world until the mid-1970s, a ‘win–win’ policy wherein wages, profits and tax revenue could supposedly all rise simultaneously.

In late colonial and post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa, such co-operation took the form of development planning, a set of policies rooted in the assumed desirability of following a Western path, through stages that ‘developing’ economies could take to achieve ‘take-off’ towards advanced industrialisation. This influential approach disregarded the fact that no Western economy had developed in this way and that the distinct inter-linked imperial histories of Western and African economies meant that they started from very different places.Footnote ² Contemporaneous analysts of the Copperbelt nonetheless extrapolated from the region’s soaring economic growth and output to suggest that it was developing a Western-style industrial economy and society. Today, after nearly three decades of economic stagnation and decline, the Copperbelt’s long boom is recalled nostalgically as a golden age of growth, development and shaped prosperity. As this chapter will show, both the optimistic vision and the fond memory are significantly at odds with the region’s actual, highly uneven socio-economic development during the ‘long boom’, a period in which copper mining failed to stimulate a self-sustaining industrial economy comparable with those of the West.

There are many reasons why the Copperbelt’s own long boom did not provide the basis for fully fledged regional or national industrialisation. The failure of Zambia’s mining industry to spark sustained national development has been the subject of sustained analysis: while some claim that state interference and political manipulation undermined the industry’s competitiveness, others argue that a coherent industrial policy could have overcome mineral dependency.Footnote ³ While these explanations help us understand the failures of post-independence economic development, both downplay the structural difficulties of transforming a mining industry created in the interests of Western-controlled global markets, in which the colonial extraction of raw or semi-processed minerals was designed to serve already established metropolitan industrial economies. What matters for this study is that, even during the period of the Copperbelt’s now fondly remembered golden age, the inability of copper and cobalt mining to provide the basis for large-scale formal employment and self-sustaining economic development was already evident to many state and company observers.

This chapter provides a brief history of the Copperbelt’s supposed ‘long boom’, emphasising the precarity of its actual development and showing that contemporary policy-makers stressed the inability of mining to stimulate the wider economy.Footnote ⁴ The post–World War Two mining industry did not itself create substantial new jobs and, during the downturn of the late 1950s, growing unemployment was a major concern for governments and mine companies alike. The need to increase productivity was explained in characteristically modernist terms, with workers blamed for their insufficiently evolved understanding of the work regime. While UMHK sought to improve its workforce by the application of ‘scientific’ knowledge, it was only in the late 1950s that Northern Rhodesia’s companies systematically invested in educating and training their African workforce. Following political independence, Zambia and Congo both saw their mining industries as vehicles for national development, but the constraints of a (post-)colonially connected mining industry undermined their governments’ attempts to do so.

This chapter also explores the profoundly uneven nature of urban employment, showing that the high living standards stereotypically attributed to Copperbelt communities were in fact the preserve of an unrepresentative group of skilled African mineworkers who were, as we have seen, the disproportionate focus of policy and academic attention. As interviewees reveal, most mineworkers, and the overwhelming majority of Copperbelt residents, scraped a precarious living through low-paid work and informal trading. The emphasis on a Westernised model of urban formal growth and employment concealed the region’s dependence on extraction – from the land certainly, but also from the wider ‘urban’ economy that was beyond the immediate purview of the mine, but dependent on it. The booming Copperbelt economy, often represented and recalled as a shared story of success, rested, in fact, on a highly stratified system of profound inequality and precarity. It is today more clearly understood that in capitalist economies in general and ‘peripheral’ economies in particular, formal employment was never the norm and that various forms of ‘informal’ or ‘precarious’ labour were and remain as central to the functioning of these economies as ‘advanced’ wage labour.Footnote ⁵ In historicising the representation of capital and labour in late colonial and early post-colonial Africa, it is clear that a range of actors – states, multi-national companies, trade unions, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and social scientific analysts – saw wage labour as a key signifier of capitalist modernisation, yet refused to recognise ‘unemployed’ Africans (many of whom were, in fact, ‘informally’ employed) as legitimate urban residents.

A Late Colonial Economic Boom: Growth Without Development

There is no doubt that the Copperbelt experienced profound economic expansion and demographic change in the post–World War Two period. Fuelled by global economic expansion, UMHK copper production, for example, doubled, from 150,840 tonnes in 1947 and 247,000 tonnes in 1956 to 302,300 tonnes in 1960.Footnote ⁶ Cobalt production also rose considerably.Footnote ⁷ Mineral production made a huge contribution to the soaring value of Congolese exports, which rose from BFr 10 billion in 1948 to BFr 27 billion in 1956.Footnote ⁸ In Northern Rhodesia, where 268,551 tonnes of copper were produced in 1941, production rose to 700,000 tonnes by independence in 1964. The African workforce of Northern Rhodesia’s mines numbered 26,023 in 1940, rising to 37,237 by 1954 and 38,465 by 1961.Footnote ⁹ The workforce of UMHK was more stable: having employed 16,300 workers as early as 1930, the company’s training polices enabled it to achieve greater output with a similar number of workers – in 1952 it employed 19,008 African workers, a figure that rose to 23,312 in 1958.Footnote ¹⁰ The wider population grew much quicker: Northern Rhodesia’s urban Copperbelt population tripled between 1946 and 1956, with some towns such as Bancroft (Chililabombwe) created from scratch.Footnote ¹¹

This rapid growth fuelled the representation of the Copperbelt as a region experiencing the transformation of African bush into Western-style towns, understood as an intensified and accelerated version of the Industrial Revolution. In 1941 RLI researcher Godfrey Wilson suggested that the growth of Northern Rhodesian mine towns such as Broken Hill (Kabwe) heralded a more balanced global economy

Mine company publicity, for example the propaganda films produced by UMHK, conveyed the message that the Copperbelt was adopting Western-style modern industrial infrastructure, housing and societal norms and contrasted this to images of African rural poverty.Footnote ¹³ The disproportionate attention given to ‘advanced’ workers by social scientists (Chapter 1) reinforced the idea that Copperbelt employees were rapidly achieving the employment and consumption patterns of their Western counterparts.

There were, however, many reasons why economic and demographic growth did not easily translate into Western-style industrialisation and development. The Copperbelt had been conceptualised from the start as a colonised region that would supply raw materials to the West’s industrial heartlands, not itself become a region of industrial growth. While the post–World War Two period did see expansion in the local processing of copper ore, with refineries and smelters adding value by enabling the production of finished copper, this continued to be exported for use in products manufactured elsewhere. While conceptualisations of the Copperbelt as ‘remote’ are problematic in their reproduction of a Western-centred perspective, the region was indeed remote from its key markets, linked to them by a transport network controlled by colonial investors and states. As Parpart notes: ‘[m]ining equipment was usually purchased abroad; the skilled European labor force spent much of their large salaries on expensive imported goods; and transportation difficulties and poor land limited economic opportunities outside the line of rail’.Footnote ¹⁴ The region’s economy was a machine designed to transfer wealth from colony to metropole. Revenue flowed to mine companies based in Johannesburg, Brussels, London and later Salisbury, which mainly paid tax and royalties in those places. In 1938, 60 per cent of the tax levy on the Northern Rhodesian mining industry went to either the UK government or the British South Africa Company.Footnote ¹⁵ Bézy noted that, despite Congo’s growth, capital – £60m between 1948 and 1951 – was continually exported as dividend payments to the large companies (UMHK uppermost) that dominated the economy.Footnote ¹⁶ The low taxes paid by mine companies meant that much of the increase in local developmental spending was financed by borrowing: Congolese government debt quintupled during the 1950s.Footnote ¹⁷

After World War Two, consistent with the developmental turn, efforts were made to strengthen urban infrastructure and – in Haut-Katanga in particular – to stimulate secondary industry. By the mid-1950s Elisabethville was home to a wide range of manufacturing industries: cement, brickmaking, metal and carpentry, textiles, explosives and tobacco, as well as food and beverages. While officials were characteristically positive about these developments, they recognised that these goods were consumed by the mining industry, its workers and the wider community that depended on them.Footnote ¹⁸ Late colonial policy, while seeking to expand urban economic and employment opportunities, equally wished to prevent accelerated migration from rural areas to the towns. Across the Copperbelt there was continuing anxiety that, as missionaries and colonial officials had argued during the interwar period, the loss of productive (male) labour to urban areas would undermine rural societies. As discussed earlier, a key question for CEPSI researchers was whether African society could withstand the dislocating effects of rapid urbanisation. Doucy and Feldheim illustrated the dilemma of ensuring economic development in this context:

There was, however, a powerful belief, in Belgian Congo at least, that development planning could overcome these problems. The pioneering Plan Décennal, adopted in 1950, set ambitious goals for higher African living standards and industrial output. By the early 1950s demand for workers in the capital Léopoldville and elsewhere soared, so that by 1952 more than one million workers were employed in Congo’s towns.Footnote ²⁰ The number of workers in Katanga rose from 108,111 in 1945 to 144,184 in 1950 and 178,664 in 1954, with virtually all this increase taking place outside the mining industry. The population of the non-mine areas of Katanga’s towns was, however, rising faster, from 242,537 in 1945 to 368,535 in 1950 and 509,327 in 1954 – so that a much larger urban population was dependent on the relatively modest growth in waged employment.Footnote ²¹

Efforts were made to accelerate the growth of an indigenous middle-class Christian elite that, again following Western ideals, would stabilise urban society and act as a buffer against the influence of radical politics and religious extremism.Footnote ²² In his annual report to the Provincial Council meeting in 1955, outgoing Katangese governor René Wauthion declared: ‘A major factor in the stabilisation of these centres [CECs] lies in the presence of houseowners, of shops, restaurants, workshops etc. which constitute the embryo of a middle class that is, by definition, the enemy of adventure and disorder.’Footnote ²³ As so often however, the idealised vision of African society clashed with the practical difficulty of securing the right type of advanced African. Of the 5,656 enterprises operating in Katanga in 1954, 2,764 – roughly half – were run by Congolese.Footnote ²⁴ The other half were run by European settlers, the number of whom tripled in post–World War Two Katanga, reaching 35,507 in 1958.Footnote ²⁵ The authorities were convinced that African-run businesses would struggle because of ‘the general rudimentary training of many founders of indigenous crafts or industrial enterprises in our large CECs’.Footnote ²⁶ As noted in Chapter 1, a survey of indigenous business published by CEPSI in 1955 sought to analyse not African entrepreneurs’ own experiences but instead their contact with European traders, who, it was assumed, they were imitating, for the following reasons:

By 1957, African members of the Provincial Council were requesting that European traders were banned from retail in the CECs, so as to open up opportunities for Africans. However, few African entrepreneurs had access to sufficient capital or credit to run businesses such as petrol stations.Footnote ²⁸

Indigenous commercial agriculture was a major focus of post–World War Two development planning across colonial Africa, consistent with ‘take-off’ models in which surplus generated by agriculture was then invested in nascent industry.Footnote ²⁹ As early as 1932, Katangese authorities had identified peri-urban areas near Elisabethville in which to encourage indigenous commercial agriculture.Footnote ³⁰ After 1945, the expanded Institut National pour L’Étude Agronomique du Congo Belge (INÉAC) promoted scientific agriculture, with European experts charged with raising the living standards and knowledge of indigenous farmers. The Institut established a peri-urban development project in Kipopo that included a fishery. It also ran an experimental station at nearby Keyberg, seeking to overcome both Katanga’s poor soil and its supposed degradation by indigenous farming methods:

The multiple aims of these initiatives were, according to a 1956 CEPSI journal article by Governor Wauthion, the promotion of an indigenous middle class of commercial farmers, traders and artisans; improving the fresh food supply to Katanga’s towns; and reducing the urban population by attracting city residents to these communities. Wauthion criticised previous efforts to promote commercial African agriculture, which were ‘never strong enough to disengage the indigenous population from its primitive methods of work, so that they remained practically frozen in a subsistence economy’.Footnote ³² The developmental projects of CEPSI in peri-urban areas near Elisabethville and Jadotville also faced familiar problems of low population density and poor soils, but also the continued, if diminished, authority of chiefs over land use and allocation, which supposedly prevented its effective commercial utilisation.Footnote ³³ By 1955, CEPSI was co-ordinating government-funded programmes worth BFr35m in Katangese peri-urban communities.Footnote ³⁴ These efforts were complemented by UMHK’s funding of health centres to make these areas desirable for retired workers and their families to relocate at the end of their working lives ‘and to avoid in this way an increasing growth of the urban centres’.Footnote ³⁵ When such efforts failed to stem the tide of migration to town or to increase agricultural productivity, that failure could always be blamed on Congolese farmers’ alleged lack of an enterprising mentality.

At least Belgian Congo had a plan for economic development. Northern Rhodesia’s rural areas had historically been labour-sending areas: first to Katanga and then to its own mines, as well as to South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Agricultural development in the Copperbelt, with its poor soil and low rural population, was a particularly low priority.Footnote ³⁶ Northern Rhodesia’s integration into the Central African Federation in 1953 handed considerable political power to Southern Rhodesia’s white commercial farmers, to whom state farming subsidies increasingly flowed and whose economic position rested on the marginalisation of their African counterparts. Retail opportunities for Africans were similarly limited by European domination and the predisposition of urban Africans for consumer goods:

While official concern was expressed about rural–urban migration and the general failure of non-mining economic activities, no-one in power seriously thought of Northern Rhodesia as a proto-national economy, or intervened to alleviate the territory’s overwhelming economic dependency on Copperbelt mining.

The Changing Nature of Mine Labour: Creating the Ideal Worker

One of the major advantages of Copperbelt mines, relative to its global competitors, had always been cheap African labour, enabled by a colonial regime and the labour recruitment practices it facilitated. Mine companies across southern Africa established and/or employed recruitment agencies with preferential access to rural communities that needed to earn cash wages to pay colonial taxes. Labour initially took migrant form because unskilled men could be easily replaced and because African urban settlement was politically undesirable. Single African male mineworkers housed in temporary work camps and employed on short-term contracts were paid wages far below subsistence level, with housing and food (‘rations’) provided.

In Haut-Katanga, where industrial mining started in the 1910s, this approach changed at an early stage. From 1919, when the defeat of a European strike led to a shortage of skilled labour, UMHK gradually trained Africans to replace them.Footnote ³⁸ Once Africans were trained, it became useful to retain them for longer periods, to provide them with housing and services and to allow them to resettle their families – or find new ones – in town. The company’s stabilisation policies meant the costs of employing African labour – while still lower than European workers – rose considerably. From the late 1930s, UMHK sought to reduce the number of African employees, seeking ongoing profitability via higher productivity. These efforts were accelerated by post–World War Two Belgian intervention: the governmental Commission Provincial pour le Travail et le Progrès des Indigènes (TEPSI) regulated not only salaries but also the provision of food and housing for workers and their families.

In sharp contrast, Northern Rhodesian mineworkers retained their essentially migrant status until the mid-to-late 1940s: although many thousands were skilled and experienced workers who moved from one short-term contract to another in a circulatory migration pattern, their skills went unrewarded and they were legally prevented from permanent settlement. This changed with the advent of stabilisation, as Heisler notes: ‘On the Copperbelt between 1948 and 1951 the number of African miners who lived with their wives in the towns owned by the mining companies increased by one half.’Footnote ³⁹ Northern Rhodesian mine companies took longer to come around to the idea of a stabilised and skilful African labour force, and did so arguably only because metropolitan political pressure forced them to do so and because mineworkers secured better salaries and conditions by industrial combination and action (see Chapter 4).

In both cases, however, the cost of employing an increasingly skilled African labour force, living permanently in Copperbelt towns with their immediate families, had risen substantially by the early 1950s. It was then necessary to ensure that labour force was as productive as possible, something that companies sought to achieve by the production and application of knowledge. In Haut-Katanga, the UMHK’s investment in copper processing and workforce training meant that, between 1942 and 1958, productivity grew four-fold while the number of mineworkers remained stable.Footnote ⁴⁰ The company justified its productivity demands by the privileged treatment it supposedly afforded its workers, as its 1952 annual report made clear:

The growing efficiency of UMHK was not mirrored in the wider economic development of Katanga and certainly not Congo, as the Provincial Council warned in 1957: ‘The productivity of our industries needs to be improved. It is necessary that the secondary industries work at full capacity and supply more and more exclusively the local market, at competitive prices’.Footnote ⁴²

In Northern Rhodesia, the sudden rise in African labour costs necessitated drastic action to improve productivity. In 1956 a report for AAC’s Rhokana mine claimed that, consistent with UMHK’s achievement, major increases in productivity could halve African mine employment. Its author, W. T. de Villiers, argued:

De Villiers found that, while production by the mine’s c.10,000 African workers had increased from 82,877 tons in 1944/45 to 92,033 tons in 1955/56, the cost per individual African shift worked had risen from £2 5s in 1945 to more than £15 in 1956. If rising costs were not offset by increased productivity, current profits of £84.2 per ton would fall to £27 per ton by 1960/61. The average length of service of each worker, which had risen from 3.42 years in 1954 to 4.48 years in 1956, needed to be significantly extended (by 1956, 39.6 per cent of UMHK workers had already worked for twelve years or more).Footnote ⁴⁴ De Villiers recommended the recruitment of more married workers to encourage stabilisation and incentivise long service, while ‘higher standard’ European personnel would need to make better use of and have better relations with African workers.

For this to be achieved, however, the divorcing of African workers from their rural societies needed to be accelerated. Although it had until recently been company policy to resist urban stabilisation, De Villiers blamed low productivity on an African mentality that remained wedded to ‘rural’ values and the southern African stereotype of the ‘target’ worker:

Achieving improved ‘productivity’ thus required not only technical changes but also a new mindset, enabling ‘the gradual evolution of the individual African’s productivity and approach to industrial work. … a system under which a higher standard of living and progression can be earned … This would necessitate changing not only employment practices but also the outlook of the African to industrial work’. This would, however, not be easy:

De Villiers was, however, pessimistic that such radical improvements could be achieved without increasing wages and conditions ‘due to the political and union set-up’. Certainly, by 1964, Rhokana’s African mine workforce still numbered 9,413, though its average length of service had increased to seven years.Footnote ⁴⁷ By 1959, it was also acknowledged that rising productivity would not be matched by increased investment, since global demand for copper was stabilising and more competitive mines elsewhere would meet limited additional demand:

The same report concluded: ‘There is little prospect that any large industry will soon set itself up on the Copperbelt comparable with the mining industry.’Footnote ⁴⁹

Delivering increased productivity, mine companies and their intellectual advisers believed, required the application of Taylorist techniques to the evaluation and design of job descriptions, training and recruitment processes.Footnote ⁵⁰ The pioneering job evaluation system introduced by UMHK attracted the attention of its counterparts to the south: in 1951 RST officials travelled to Haut-Katanga in the hope that they might be able to introduce such a system in their mines. They approvingly noted not only the sophisticated job evaluation structure but also the provision of education to mineworkers’ children. While impressed, they concluded that introducing such a system would be impossible in Northern Rhodesia, where every change to wages and conditions was challenged by an African union with its own view of advancement.Footnote ⁵¹

The company also pioneered the use of intelligence testing of its prospective workers and the children of its workforce, establishing its own Centre de Psychologie et Pédagogie in 1953.Footnote ⁵² Potential recruits were given psychotechnical tests that theoretically evaluated their capacity for specific areas of employment. David Mupanga, for example, recalls being asked to dismantle a cylinder and put it back together, but also drawing a picture of a village on which one was evaluated on where one’s house was pictured in relation to that of the chief.Footnote ⁵³ Mwanza Lukinde had to assemble parts into a cube and work out the most efficient route through town to buy specified products on a fixed budget.Footnote ⁵⁴ Stéphanie Mumba, who passed her test and was appointed as the head of the laundry at Panda’s hospital, recalls that many women who failed such tests were employed in more junior roles, for example as cleaners.Footnote ⁵⁵ Even in the Northern Rhodesian mines, new employees had to pass aptitude tests by the early 1960s. They were then allocated by the companies to appropriate training and employment.Footnote ⁵⁶

The Politics of Advancement

As already noted, there was a disjuncture between the overwhelming focus on advanced workers or évolués in company reports and analysis by social scientists, and their relatively small numbers in the mine workforce. Notwithstanding UMHK’s emphasis on skills training, in 1954, 61.4 per cent of the company’s total African workforce of 20,762 was on its lowest employment grades numbered 4–7, and 78 per cent on grades 4–9. By 1958, by which time the workforce had expanded to 23,312, 54 per cent were employed on grades 4–7, but three-quarters were still in grades 4–9.Footnote ⁵⁷

In Northern Rhodesia, where a similar structure obtained among African mineworkers, debates over their ‘advancement’ were racially framed. In 1951, the entire wage bill for the African workforce was c.£3m, less than half that paid to the mine companies’ approximately 7,000 European workers.Footnote ⁵⁸ Heated debates over the colour bar led to the 1954 Forster Inquiry into ‘advancement’. Of the total African mine workforce of 37,287, 73.7 per cent were in the lowest groups 1 to 3 and were paid between £4 and £7 per month.Footnote ⁵⁹ The highest paid Group 8 African worker earned £19, and it was these workers, with the potential to advance into European-reserved jobs, that received most attention. But less than one thousand Africans were employed in Groups 7, 8 and the ‘Special’ category. The minimum European monthly salary was over £99.Footnote ⁶⁰

Company representatives justified the racial wage gap by claiming that African workers were less adaptable, that their mechanical knowledge was inferior and that their periodic absence during visits to their villages meant they had to be trained afresh on their return to work. Some such limitations were ‘inherent and would require to be bred out of the African … Others, however could be eradicated by training’.Footnote ⁶¹ Thus, Africans doing the same job as Europeans were seen as less productive and it was therefore justifiable to pay them less for a ‘transitional’ period: to do otherwise would threaten ‘the national economy’. Although the main African Mineworkers’ Union (AMWU) (and, for its own reasons, the European union) demanded ‘equal pay for equal work’, the Mines African Staff Association (MASA), which was subsequently recognised by the Chamber of Mines as the representative body for clerical and senior African staff (see Chapter 4), explained to Forster: ‘Although they are all Africans, they do not belong to one class and they do not work under the same conditions. Therefore they are not on the same level’.Footnote ⁶² Partially accepting the logic of the mine companies’ argument, MASA argued that Africans should be paid 75 per cent of the European rate for the job.Footnote ⁶³ Despite the continuing exclusion of Africans from training opportunities such as apprenticeships, Forster concluded that Africans were partly to blame for their low pay:

Significant improvements were made to Northern Rhodesian African wages and conditions in the subsequent decade, often in response to organised industrial action: a pension scheme was introduced in 1954. Yet mine companies continued to justify slow African advancement in evolutionary terms. Ernest Oppenheimer, Chairman of AAC’s Nchanga Consolidated Copper Mines (NCCM), declared in March 1955:

Under the Advancement agreement signed that year, 185 Africans employed by NCCM were promoted to jobs previously carried out by Europeans.Footnote ⁶⁶ By 1959 the three lowest employment groups still accounted for 65 per cent of the workforce. Only 4 per cent of Africans were employed in the most advanced categories.Footnote ⁶⁷ Powdermaker found that, although Northern Rhodesian mineworkers experienced a real terms increase in their ‘income’ – their wages, together with housing and social provision – between 1950 and 1960, they continued to perceive themselves as badly off, compared with the observable standard of living of the Europeans who supervised their work and to whose jobs they aspired.Footnote ⁶⁸ Despite strenuous efforts at the ‘Zambianisation’ of senior jobs in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapter 6), many thousands of whites continued to occupy most of the senior positions (and earn many times more money) until the late 1970s.

It is impossible to directly compare the wages of African mineworkers on either side of the border: as a general rule, cash wages were higher in Northern Rhodesia than in Haut-Katanga for the same mine job, but UMHK provided a greater proportion of compensation in non-cash form, for example food ‘rations’, housing and other benefits. This difference was significant however, since UMHK’s use of non-cash wages meant that, alongside its lack of African union representation, it avoided direct engagement with its workforce over the value of its labour. Dibwe dia Mwembu notes that UMHK sought to manage the cost burden by providing different forms of cash and in-kind remuneration to each category of African worker: low-skilled workers received only a small cash wage with all other provisions in-kind; ‘middle’ workers received higher cash wages that now included their food costs; and more specialised workers under the ‘global’ system were paid entirely in cash.Footnote ⁶⁹ In these and other ways mine companies sought to avoid general improvements in wages and conditions across the workforce, and had a vested interest in promoting divisions among their workers that were justified through a meritocratic discourse. The UMHK’s managers constantly likened the company to a family headed by benevolent patricians, but this was a metaphor entirely compatible with hierarchy and inequality.

Unease, Inequality and Influx Control, 1957–1964

Even during its great economic boom, therefore, the Copperbelt was never a region of generalised development or rising living standards. Capital outflow and mining’s skewed relationship with the wider economy limited the creation of jobs and businesses. The highly uneven distribution of wages, housing and other rewards intersected with racial segregation and profoundly unequal power relationships – between women and men, between skilled and unskilled mineworkers, mineworkers and other wage earners, and wage earners and the wider non-waged population – to create tension, conflict and social unrest. Northern Rhodesia’s Copperbelt towns were thought by the authorities to have very high crime levels: in 1958, the Mufulira Native Court handled 3,524 cases for a population of c.30,000 adults. Half of these offences involved ‘unauthorised residence’ in municipal or mine township areas, the second highest category involving identity certificate and registration offences, with other crimes including house burglary, theft of bicycles and an increasing number of driving offences. Of particular concern was the rising number of crimes committed by African adolescents, up from 104 in 1957 to 123 in 1958, evidence for the authorities of the quintessential Western social malaise of the 1950s, growing ‘juvenile delinquency’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Luise White details how rumours – about the kidnapping of children, poisonings and witchcraft of different kinds – circulated through tense and distrustful Copperbelt societies. Far from being a manifestation of rural superstition, such rumours reflected residents’ experiences of an economic and social order that was permanently in flux.Footnote ⁷¹ In Mufulira six cases were brought under the Witchcraft Ordinance in 1956, four of accusing others of practising witchcraft and two of claiming supernatural powers.Footnote ⁷² This was also a region of increasing political unrest and sometimes violence, as will be discussed in Chapter 4.

These tensions were heightened by a brief but punishing recession of 1957–8, when the global copper price fell dramatically and the assumptions underlying Copperbelt growth were severely tested. The 1958 Provincial Council meeting heard that ‘Katanga, despite the relatively significant development of its secondary industry, remains very sensitive to the fluctuation in the prices of raw materials, the export of which represents for the Colony, one of the most important sources of income’.Footnote ⁷³ Unemployment manifested itself in Katanga’s main towns, though the Provincial Council agreed that it could not be addressed as it was in Europe:

Programmes of public works were created to absorb the unemployed, who numbered c.3,500 in Elisabethville and 1,500–2,000 in Jadotville (later Likasi). Other actions included:

• rigorous measures to halt the influx into the towns;

• continuing the policy of ejecting from the towns in favour of return to the land;

• reduce the existing contrast between the living conditions in the towns and the rural milieu by raising the incomes of the rural Africans;

• inculcate in the young a love of manual labour.Footnote ⁷⁵

Katanga strictly controlled African movement, something that Northern Rhodesian officials desired to emulate. A meeting there on urban African unemployment in January 1958 proposed ‘a comprehensive system of identification, including full finger-printing … (on the Belgian Congo pattern)’.Footnote ⁷⁶ While official Katangese discourse tended towards optimism, identifying solutions in indigenous agricultural and peri-urban development, Northern Rhodesian officials worried about the negative effects of unemployment in both villages and towns. They called for development planning, as pioneered in Congo, but were more pessimistic that this would translate into an effective policy. C. Fourie, a senior government officer with responsibility for African affairs, stressed the need for a territory-wide approach to ‘influx control’ that would focus on ‘the social and economic development of rural areas parallel with urban areas, to enable them to compete with the attraction of the towns’.Footnote ⁷⁷

During the recession, employers searched in vain for the right kind of workers, for example in Kitwe in 1958:

A 1958 conference of local government officials resolved that it was necessary to tackle urban unemployment in rural areas:

The tripartite African Labour Advisory Board heard from companies and unions on the issue: ‘The three Employee Representatives agreed that the problem of work-shy parasites in employment centres was a big one. … ultimately the development of rural areas would be the best solution but [it was] agreed that this would take a considerable time to have its effect’. African trade union representatives expressed their personal familiarity with the problem: ‘Each referred to his personal experience of having to accommodate and feed “brothers” who came to the Copperbelt and were extremely difficult to dislodge.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Trade union backing was thought vital for action against the ‘loafer’ problem: by January 1959 c.6,000 African men had been ‘repatriated’ to their rural areas of origin, reducing the number of unemployed in Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt towns to c.5,000. It was, however, acknowledged that nothing could prevent them from returning.Footnote ⁸¹

Although a higher copper price enabled the economy to bounce back by the start of the 1960s, this was essentially a jobless recovery. From this point on urban unemployment was consistently highlighted in government reports both in Northern Rhodesia and Katanga. In Luanshya in 1959, ‘[r]ecovery from the recession has been very slow … There has been little expansion in secondary industry and African unemployment remains at a high level. When there is wind of work available the long queues at the local labour exchange are ample testimony’.Footnote ⁸² In 1960 in Mufulira, ‘the supply of labour exceeded the demand, and as activity slowed down towards the end of the year, so the position deteriorated and labour forces were reduced, with a resultant increase in the number of unemployed’.Footnote ⁸³ In Katanga, the 1959 Provincial Council meeting heard that unemployment had risen in Elisabethville to 7,142 and in Jadotville to 1,284. Katanga’s employment figure had fallen from its 1954 peak of 197,443 to 160,776 in 1958, while the ‘extra-customary’ population had risen from 509,327 to 570,079.Footnote ⁸⁴ There was growing alarm at youth unemployment: ‘The youth of our towns is one of our principal preoccupations. We are faced with a growing number, year on year, of young adolescent idlers who neither go to school nor are in work. It is estimated that there are at least 3,000 in Elisabethville at the moment’. There was then a need to ‘create new sites in the periphery to encourage the return to the land of a large part of this workforce that will never find employment in existing businesses’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Indeed, right up to Congolese independence, the CEPSI-linked initiative FULREAC (Fondation de L’Universite de Liège pour les Recherches Scientifiques au Congo Belge et au Ruanda-Urundi) continued agricultural activities in Mangombo, near Jadotville, one of a number of ‘projets de decongestion des grands centres urbains’.Footnote ⁸⁶

A census conducted in May–June 1963 revealed that in Northern Rhodesia there were 255,910 African men in paid employment, 275,570 who were self-employed and 74,480 ‘seeking paid employment’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Later that year a report identified ‘unemployment’ and ‘the drift to the towns’ as two of the three ‘tremendous problems’ facing Northern Rhodesia, ‘bearing in mind that all those at present out of work in Kitwe will never be absorbed no matter what industrial expansion takes place’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Of the city’s over-eighteen male population of 35,000, 8,936 were employed in mining, 20,000 in other jobs and 6,000 were unemployed.Footnote ⁸⁹ In Mufulira’s municipal area there were, in 1961, twenty-eight licensed African businesses, compared with none in 1956.Footnote ⁹⁰ African entrepreneurship was, however, restricted by a lack of access to credit and by European and Asian domination of retail, and what existed was negatively perceived: ‘The number of Africans hawking vegetables in the streets has increased considerably. They cannot make a living this way and are having an adverse effect on the legitimate marketeers’.Footnote ⁹¹ The prospects were not promising. In Mufulira, where the mine employed c.9,000 workers, an existing population of c.66,000 was forecast to rise to 97,870 by 1971, in a period when ‘there is unlikely to be an upsurge in employment in the established mining industry’.Footnote ⁹²

Uneven Development: Capital and Labour After Independence

Ostensibly, national independence created the possibility of breaking from the colonial extractive model on which the Copperbelt had been built. Zambian independence fuelled confidence about future economic development and the government signalled that it would invest in the economy and create a large number of jobs. A 1965 Copperbelt Development Plan confidently stated:

The region’s disadvantages for secondary industry, however, remained:

The post-independence governments of Zambia and DR Congo were fully aware of the difficulty of developing their economies beyond the mining industry. Early development plans warned about continuing dependency on mining and stressed the need for diversification. In the short term however, mineral production was expanded as the only way to raise revenue to fund a programme of diversification.Footnote ⁹⁵ Zambian copper production rose accordingly, from 568,000 tonnes in 1963 to 720,000 tonnes in 1969. There was also a significant increase in African mine employment, from 36,946 in 1963 to 43,500 in 1969, with many new jobs coming not in production but in processing and areas such as social services and education.Footnote ⁹⁶ In Congo/Zaire, President Mobutu drove up mine production in the late 1960s despite the risk of over-supply to the global market. Copper production, which fell from 300,000 tonnes in 1960 to a low of 269,000 tonnes in 1963 during the secessionist conflict, rose to 406,000 tonnes in 1971. Gécamines employed 24,586 workers in 1971, including 1,007 women. Of its 2,129 senior employees, however, only 720 were African.Footnote ⁹⁷

The redirection of mine tax revenue to independent governments created the potential for investment in non-mining sectors, but this did not overcome an export dependency on copper and cobalt mining, with its limited linkages to the local economy. Development policy instead directed mine tax revenue into state-directed or state-owned industries and substantial infrastructural investment to support them. In the late 1960s, Zambia’s Industrial Development Corporation (Indeco) oversaw nationalised and semi-nationalised companies outside the mining industry.Footnote ⁹⁸ But such initiatives were shaped by political rather than economic considerations: in Zambia, key industrial projects were distributed across the country rather than being concentrated in the Copperbelt. At a local level, ‘[n]o large scale industrial expansion is foreseen at Mufulira and its present light industrial service area should be adequate’.Footnote ⁹⁹

In newly independent Congo, the dislocating effects of the post-1960 crisis initially prevented meaningful development activity and led to the collapse of much of the rural health and educational provision built up in the late colonial period. The already fragmented ‘national’ economy was further disrupted by the Katangese secession.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Peemans characterised Congo as having industries but not industrialisation: it had developed an internal market for consumer goods and Haut-Katanga had industries that served the needs of mining, but the economy was oriented to export earnings rather than integrated national development. Although mining taxes accrued to the growing state and funded development programmes, mine revenue continued to flow out as dividend payments and was not invested in Congo’s wider economy, which lacked an effective local banking system that could have provided credit to entrepreneurs.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Under Mobutu, however, state control over the economy and society was consolidated and then considerably strengthened. In the late 1960s, the governments of both countries nationalised their mining industries, a topic explored in Chapter 6.

There was a post-independence expansion of education of all kinds, nationally and in the Copperbelt in particular: an expansion of primary and secondary school places, but also of vocational training to address the massive skills gap that was, especially in Zambia, a legacy of the colour bar.Footnote ¹⁰² In Haut-Katanga the loss of many European educators, particularly in Catholic schools, did not substantially undermine UMHK-run primary schools, which workers’ children could attend for free. Schemes such as the Zambia Youth Service provided training in areas such as carpentry, bricklaying and farming.Footnote ¹⁰³ In Luanshya in 1968, a Youth Development Scheme run by the Mine Townships Management Board provided training in carpentry, bricklaying, welding, driving, motor repair and light engineering to at least 100 young people.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As well as primary schooling, mine companies provided adult literacy education; staff training for skilled work; apprenticeship schemes for aspirant ‘advanced’ Africans; and medical training for prospective hospital and clinic workers.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Mine companies also gave preferential access to the children of existing employees in filling vacancies, a policy that continued into the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The UMHK built on its ‘scientific’ recruitment procedures in its schools to identify and shape the education of its future workforce. The company’s schools were widely seen as better run and/or more disciplined than state schools, attracting the best teachers with higher wages.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Although Zambian mines lacked equivalent control over education, they ran an annual recruitment round of the minority of students who could afford to complete secondary school in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ For the educated children of mineworkers on both sides of the border, the demand for increasingly skilled African workers in the first decade of independence represented a one-off opportunity for social advancement. Levy Chushi, whose father worked for the Mufulira mine, started work aged nineteen as an underground lasher in 1965. He received training in mechanics, studied briefly at the new University of Zambia (UNZA) and, after successive promotions, acquired the senior position of Mine Captain in 1987.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Owess Nkhama, whose Malawian father was a rockbreaker in the 1920s and 1930s, became the leader of a mine social club in 1959, studied youth management and sociology under company auspices in the 1960s and was later a senior personnel manager.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Sara Léontine Bulanda became a Gécamines employee and managed the Panda canteen where her mineworker father had once eaten.Footnote ¹¹¹ In lieu of other opportunities, mine work remained one of the most attractive options for Copperbelt residents. While Zambian workers received cash-only wages after independence, the ‘final’ abolition of food rations in UMHK in 1962 was suddenly and permanently reversed in 1964 when, amidst soaring food prices, the company re-established indirect food supplies in the form of subsidised retail sales and canteen meals.Footnote ¹¹² This measure is widely recalled as an act of company generosity that showed it cared for its workers.

Despite the Copperbelt’s lack of sustained development, it continued to attract tens of thousands of new migrants, motivated as much by the continued poverty of rural villages as the availability of employment opportunities. Many new arrivals and some of those born in town found ways of earning a living outside paid employment. Morris Chimfutumba, born in Mufulira in 1930, worked first as a petrol attendant and then as a company salesman, before buying a European-owned bottle store and selling fish he brought from Luapula Province.Footnote ¹¹³ Thomas Kalimanshi, whose parents migrated from Katanga and whose father became a bricklayer and carpenter in Mufulira, started a taxi business in 1968 that became a highly successful transportation company, partly by providing transport services to ZCCM.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Michel wa pa Bowa established a sub-contracting company providing cleaning and refuse services to Gécamines’ hospitals, schools and camps, aided by his brother’s senior position in the company.Footnote ¹¹⁵

For many, a mine company job remained the gold standard, delivering as it did not only a salary and a secure job but also access to housing, schooling for children and other social services. Simon Kampamba, who worked for a series of small companies as a carpenter, applied unsuccessfully for a job with the mines on three occasions in the 1970s, hoping to benefit from its superior retirement package.Footnote ¹¹⁶ But for others, mining was a dangerous and low-status job to be avoided. Matthias Mutupa’s mineworker father promised to find him a job in the mines, but he instead became first a salesman and then a delivery driver for the Olympic milling company.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Evans Nsabashi chose to become a teacher, earning less than a mineworker, because teaching was less physically demanding.Footnote ¹¹⁸ One’s employment increasingly depended on one’s education or training, which partly reflected ability and upbringing but also fortune – the death of a parent or relative might mean school fees could no longer be paid or that one had to leave education to provide for the family.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Copperbelt towns were then places, if not of development along Western lines, then of possibility, whose residents envisaged progress and self-realisation in diverse ways, both within and beyond the constraints of formal employment. Kabwika Ntanda Kadisabula, whose mineworker father fled to his native Kasai with his young family during the secession, went on to work for the Banque Commerciale du Congo. In the mid-1970s he ran a petrol station, living and working in Kikula, and used this as a springboard to become a local MP.Footnote ¹²⁰ Musale Kibombo, whose father was also a mineworker, became a domestic worker for Europeans, a job he held throughout his entire working life. Rejecting the notion that this was a subservient position, Kibombo argues:

Even some successful mineworkers observed that, once trained and employed by ZCCM or Gécamines for specific jobs, they had no other option for local employment – there was nowhere else to go. But town was for many urban migrants a place not associated primarily with formal employment, which was in any case increasingly limited to those with schooling. Indeed, the education of one’s children, who might by such means better themselves and care for you in later life, was arguably a greater motive for urban residence than salaried employment.Footnote ¹²²

Conclusion

For government officials in particular, the Copperbelt boom was as much of a problem as it was a success: it brought to the region a growing population that was increasingly difficult to control and manage. Mine towns, designed initially for workers and then their immediate families, drew in a far larger population, prompted by rural poverty and the better life that could be achieved by a range of social and economic activities that were only indirectly related to the mining industry. This was in a context where employment opportunities were few and industrial development remained limited.

It must, however, be acknowledged that forecasts of stagnant or declining mine employment proved wide of the mark: both Zambian and Congolese/Zairian mine companies steadily increased their workforce in the independence period. This partly reflected governmental pressure to increase production for the purposes of state revenue, against the advice of company management. The mines did not, however, become the basis of a more fully fledged industrial system: the independent governments of both countries, for different reasons, tended to direct new industries away from the Copperbelt (see Chapter 6). In any case, the growth of the region’s population continued unabated and regardless of the availability of formal sector jobs: with the removal of colonial controls and in a context of continued rural stagnation, migration to the Copperbelt towns sharply accelerated after independence. Efforts to manage this population, as we will see in the next chapter, involved not only physical controls on their movement and settlement but also constant surveillance of the activities of legal residents. This was in turn underpinned by a highly moralistic discourse about those who did and did not deserve a place in the town, framed in the characteristically modernist terms of the Copperbelt imaginary.