Introduction

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.1 Larry J. Butler, Copper Empire: Mining and the Colonial State in Northern Rhodesia, c. 1930–64 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 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 Minière 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.2 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. 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 for UMHK was 17,074.3 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. 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.4 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).

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.5 Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa – The Human Situation on the Rhodesian Copperbelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 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.6 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). 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.7 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). Racial and economic inequalities fuelled struggles for labour and political rights, influencing the struggle against colonial rule in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia.8 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). Following independence, new one-party state regimes in Zambia and Zaïre (as the Congo was later renamed) nationalised the mine companies and sought to impose authoritarian control over these economically vital regions.9 Wolf Radman, ‘The Nationalization of Zaire’s Copper: From Union Minière to Gecamines’, Africa Today 25, 4 (1978), pp. 25–47; Philip Daniel, Africanisation, Nationalisation and Inequality: Mining Labour and the Copperbelt in Zambian Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 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.

Following decolonisation (in Congo in 1960, and in Zambia in 1964), new independent governments saw their respective Copperbelt regions as vital drivers of national economic development, but also as places of social unrest and political opposition – and in the case of Katanga, outright secession. Conversely, local political forces sought to ensure that copper wealth remained in the region and rewarded those who produced it. During this period, development advisors to the Zambian and Congolese states generally shared politicians’ view of Copperbelt residents as materialist urbanites, unpatriotic and – precisely because of their urbanism – ‘un-African’.3 Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). The assumption that urbanism was un-African was a specifically southern African phenomenon and stands in revealing contrast to for example West Africa, where urban living and large mining towns such as Kumasi had a deep pre-colonial history. Social welfare experts worried about the ability of Copperbelt towns to ensure the stable reproduction of family life and sought to manage ‘urban’ problems such as divorce and crime. Authoritarian nationalism and nationalisation policies sought to bring these globalised mining regions under one-party state control. However, they struggled to overcome their dependence on global markets and to bring about a balanced form of development. When international mineral prices crashed in the mid-1970s with the onset of the global recession, both countries’ dependence on copper and cobalt exports was painfully exposed.

By the late 1980s the Central African Copperbelt, once heralded as the vanguard of modernisation, was characterised by international analysts as an industrial dinosaur, unable or unwilling to adjust to ‘market realities’. The indebted Zairian and Zambian governments were ‘advised’ by international financial institutions to structurally adjust the mining industry, to cut jobs and reduce social services, plans that were resisted by mining unions and communities. The resulting discontent generated criticisms of the corrupt manipulation of the mining industry for personal gain and fuelled demands for political reform. The Copperbelt was again at the forefront of demands for democracy in the early 1990s. In Zaïre/DR Congo, the violent suppression of these demands was followed by the military overthrow of President Mobutu and the devastation caused by ‘Africa’s world war’.4 See Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). In Zambia, a successful democratic movement was, once in power, unable to prevent continued economic recession. The Copperbelt region suddenly became the focus of academic studies of decline, as retrenched mineworkers and their families pursued ‘survival strategies’, including out-migration, hazardous artisanal mining and urban agriculture.5 Deborah Potts, ‘Counter-Urbanization on the Zambian Copperbelt? Interpretations and Implications’, Urban Studies 42, 4 (2005), pp. 583–609; Benjamin Rubbers, Le paternalisme en question: Les anciens ouvriers de la Gécamines face à la libéralisation du secteur minier katangais (RD Congo) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013).

In the twenty-first century, the Copperbelt has, in the context of rising mineral prices fuelled by Chinese demand and investment, experienced partial economic recovery but largely without growth in mining employment. Enduring questions regarding the uneven distribution of mineral wealth and Central Africa’s place in the global economy have – for Copperbelt residents, academic observers and political activists alike – become enmeshed with concerns regarding, among other things, the environmental impact of current and historical mining. Following the sale of nationalised mine companies in the late 1990s in sometimes corrupt privatisation processes, new private owners have refused to provide the social welfare programmes of their predecessors.6 John Craig, ‘Putting Privatisation into Practice: The Case of Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Limited’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 39, 3 (2001), pp. 389–410; Dan Haglund, ‘In It for the Long Term? Governance and Learning among Chinese Investors in Zambia’s Copper Sector’, China Quarterly 199 (2009), pp. 627–46; Rubbers, Le paternalisme en question, pp. 48–9. Copperbelt communities have, however, continued to demand that new investors address the effects of their extractive activities, often comparing their record to the paternalistic predecessors.7 Rubbers, Le paternalisme en question.

The unique position of the Copperbelt in imagining industrial modernity in Africa has over the last century generated a vast body of Copperbelt studies, shaped by constant interaction with the changing social, economic and political environment of the region, its nation-states and the wider world. These studies have distorted as much as they have revealed the underlying realities of Copperbelt society, as they have changed and developed from the 1940s to the present day.8 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity. The simplistic characterisation of the Copperbelt region as a space of inherent urban modernisation, qualitatively distinct from an equally problematic rural ‘other’, has prevented a clear appreciation of the many ways in which the region and its residents’ actual experience of modernity has been uneven, diverse, subject to reversal and constantly contested. While some town dwellers certainly severed ties to their areas of origin, many ‘quintessential urbanites’ remained closely connected to rural areas via migration and ethnic identities, and the flows of kin, remittances and ideas between town and village – with rural areas themselves experiencing profound social changes as a result. Ethnic identities continued to develop and in new ways remained relevant to urban society, affecting Katangese and Zambian mine towns in very different ways. The rigid rural-urban binary that long dominated academic interpretations of social change was not fully shared by its residents, who made sense of their complex and dynamic social realities in more creative and dynamic ways that reflected the multiple, ambiguous and open-ended forms of modernity that Copperbelt society involved.

While the modernisation narrative surrounding Copperbelt history has been widely critiqued, it has nonetheless continued to pervade political, cultural and intellectual characterisations of social change. When the Copperbelt ‘failed’ to develop according to conventional models derived from Rostowian ‘take-off’ theories, World Bank analysts judged this a deviation from normality and in need of explanation in pathological terms.9 Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). When unionised mineworkers, heralded as a vanguard working class, failed to fulfil the expectations of Marxist sociologists, they were dismissed as a selfish labour aristocracy.10 Giovanni Arrighi and John S. Saul (eds), Essays on the Political Economy of Africa (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973). When women refused to play their assigned role as housewives and instead engaged in entrepreneurial farming and trading, they were patronisingly dismissed by some colonial and company officials as having brought village practices to town.11 Iva Peša, ‘Crops and Copper: Agriculture and Urbanism on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950–2000’, Journal of Southern African Studies 64, 3 (2020), pp. 527–45 By unhelpfully comparing the Copperbelt to an idealised version of ‘Western’ urbanisation, generations of social scientists and international (and many national) observers have problematically distorted the realities of Copperbelt society.

Meanwhile, Copperbelt residents have, in fluctuating and often unpromising structural contexts, gone about the business of making lives and communities for themselves. Copperbelt towns share some of the characteristics of other cities that have developed in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa over the past half century. They are places in which manufacturing, trade and farming exist side by side, in which enthusiastic engagement with global socio-cultural phenomena, new technologies and material consumerism are no barrier to widespread millenarian beliefs or an embrace of reconstituted ethnic identities. Yet Copperbelt cities equally display their own specific form of urbanism that can only be explained by close attention to historical developments.12 Robinson, Ordinary Cities; Garth Myers, African Cities: Alternative Visions of Urban Theory and Practice (London: Zed Books, 2011).

Since the 1980s, historians and anthropologists, building on and engaging with ongoing social scientific research on the Copperbelt region, have made important contributions to our understanding of these changes. Many early studies of the colonial period focused on capital-labour relations, exploring the tensions generated by international businesses and the region’s ‘working-class in the making’.13 John Higginson, A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise, and the African Mineworker, 1907–1951 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1989). Following the independence period, the focus shifted to the centrality of the region to African anti-colonial politics and to the economic development of new nation-states. Miles Larmer established the continued prominence of the Zambian Copperbelt and its mine communities in challenging political authoritarianism in the postcolonial period.14 Miles Larmer, Mineworkers in Zambia: Labour and Political Change in Post-Colonial Zambia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). Over time, and reflecting broader historiographical innovations, analysis shifted to historicising the social development of copper mining towns, particularly gender relations between mineworkers and their wives, who were shown by Jane Parpart (for Zambia) and Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu (for Katanga) to have played an underappreciated role in shaping social relations in mining towns.15 Jane L. Parpart, ‘The Household and the Mine Shaft: Gender and Class Struggles on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1926–1964’, Journal of Southern African Studies 2, 1 (1986), pp. 36–56; Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu, Bana shaba abandonnés par leur père: Structures de l’autorité et histoire sociale de la famille ouvrière au Katanga 1910–1997 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001); Dibwe dia Mwembu, Histoire des conditions de vie. Charles Ambler studied the social and cultural aspects of Copperbelt society through the lens of alcohol, particularly beer consumption.16 Charles Ambler, ‘Alcohol, Racial Segregation and Popular Politics in Northern Rhodesia’, Journal of African History 31, 2 (1990), pp. 295–313. Haut-Katanga’s distinctive cultural and artistic output has been intensively studied by Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Johannes Fabian,17 Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ‘Collective Memory and Its Images: Popular Urban Painting in Zaire – A Source of ‘Present Past’’, History and Anthropology 2, 2 (1986), pp. 389–400. while the University of Lubumbashi (UNILU)’s ‘Observatoire du Changement Urbain’ has conducted extensive research into the changing societies of Katanga’s mining towns as they experienced economic decline and the effects of political and military conflict.18 Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu (ed.), Les identités urbaines en Afrique: le cas de Lubumbashi, R.D. Congo (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009). In particular, UNILU has been the centre of extraordinarily rich and successful research on the social history of urban Haut-Katanga since the year 2000, in the form of the Mémoires de Lubumbashi project implemented by Professors Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu. This project has not only gathered a significant body of invaluable oral histories, it has also helpfully decentred the authority of the academy by treating artists – musicians, theatrical performers and visual artists – as legitimate historians in their own right, bringing such actors together with local residents and university researchers in initiatives to co-create the city’s diverse social experiences. This volume is enriched by the contribution of Dibwe dia Mwembu (Chapter 11) in which he locates the Mémoires de Lubumbashi in UNILU’s history of knowledge production, inextricably bound up as it has been with Katanga’s own tumultuous history.

Meanwhile, Patience Mususa, Alice Evans and Jeroen Cuvelier have in different ways revealed the diverse impacts on gender relations of the collapse of company paternalism and its model of ‘modern’ family life.19 Patience Mususa, ‘Contesting Illegality: Women in the Informal Copper Business’ in Alistair Fraser and Miles Larmer (eds), Zambia, Mining, and Neoliberalism: Boom and Bust on the Globalized Copperbelt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 185–208; Alice Evans, ‘Women Can Do What Men Can Do’: The Causes and Consequences of Growing Flexibility in Gender Divisions of Labour in Kitwe, Zambia’, Journal of Southern African Studies 40, 5 (2014), pp. 981–8; Jeroen Cuvelier, ‘Men, Mines and Masculinities: The Lives and Practices of Artisanal Miners in Lwambo (Katanga Province, DR Congo)’, PhD Thesis, University of Ghent, 2011. While Walima Kalusa has paid attention to the cultural meanings of death on the Zambian Copperbelt,20 Walima T. Kalusa and Megan Vaughan, Death, Belief and Politics in Central African History (Lusaka: Lembani Trust, 2013). Naomi Haynes has explored the twenty-first century Pentecostal boom which has provided Copperbelt residents with new ways of dealing with challenging urban realities.21 Naomi Haynes, Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Since the 1990s, attention has also focused on the history of knowledge production by social scientists. Lyn Schumaker demonstrated the ways that African researchers – and to a lesser extent, ordinary mine town residents – decisively shaped the work of RLI.22 Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology. James Ferguson’s influential Expectations of Modernity exposed the modernist assumptions that distorted the findings of both RLI and subsequent researchers, clearing the way for a more open-ended history of Copperbelt society.23 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; Miles Larmer, ‘Permanent Precarity: Capital and Labour in the Central African Copperbelt’, Labor History 58, 2 (2017), pp. 170–84. For Katanga, Marc Poncelet and Benjamin Rubbers have demonstrated how the modernist assumptions of CEPSI and other researchers – as well as their relations with colonial states and mine companies – strongly influenced their understanding of Katangese urbanism.24 Marc Poncelet, L’invention des sciences coloniales belges (Paris, Karthala, 2008); Rubbers and Poncelet, ‘Colonial Sociology in the Belgian Congo’.

This volume, and the Comparing the Copperbelt project of which it forms a central part, builds on these historiographical insights, thereby providing a multi-dimensional approach to understand the Central African Copperbelt’s history of social change.25 For the Comparing the Copperbelt project, see http://copperbelt.history.ox.ac.uk. Relying on a century of studies on the social and urban dynamics of the Copperbelt, it provides both a retrospective account, and a contemporary understanding of, the kinds of knowledge produced on the region. Without claiming to offer a comprehensive analysis of this complex and diverse urban milieu, it proposes a multi-dimensional analysis of Copperbelt society that overcomes some earlier weaknesses and limitations. This book equally provides new insights into social change in urban Africa as it affects a far wider range of actors than have previously received attention from Copperbelt studies. In so doing, the collection offers a critical analysis of existing scholarship, while demonstrating how innovative approaches and new methodologies can be applied.

While Across the Copperbelt is at its core a history of changing urban society, it is equally an interdisciplinary volume. Contributions and approaches drawn from social anthropology, development studies, human geography and cultural studies examine the interchange of past and present in the lived experience and everyday discourse of Copperbelt residents. While in the 1950s and 1960s the rural past served as a negative counterpoint to hopes for modernisation and development in the urban Copperbelt, since the 1980s economic decline and political discontent – and in DR Congo, political violence – have fuelled nostalgia for a late-colonial/postcolonial ‘golden age’ when authoritarian one-party states and paternalist mine companies provided stability and social welfare. Analysts of the contemporary Copperbelt are constantly confronted with the potency of this historical memory, while historians must be aware of how this nostalgia, and the current state of the region, shape residents’ recall of the past. In bringing together this wide range of disciplinary perspectives, and making use of innovative methodologies and approaches, the book provides a more holistic understanding of the region’s historical development and current situation.

First, the desire to identify a Western-style Copperbelt working class led to a disproportionate focus on a minority of skilled African male mineworkers, which resulted in the neglect of the lived experience of the vast majority. The scholarship of the 1950s, for example that of RLI scholars such as A. L. Epstein, did so because this ‘transitional’ class was thought to be a sign of a future in which formal, skilled industrial workers would dominate the urbanised Copperbelt. A similar bias is visible in the works of CEPSI, which aimed to produce knowledge on the ‘adaptation’ of local communities to urban and industrial modernity.1 Rubbers and Poncelet, ‘Colonial Sociology in the Belgian Congo’, pp. 98–9. Yet this approach marginalised the diverse experience of most Copperbelt residents: those employed in less skilled or casual labour, itinerant traders, shop owners, domestic workers, drivers, bar and sex workers and the tens of thousands of predominantly female farmers whose experiences form a central but neglected part of the Copperbelt story.

The focus on workplace and formal employment certainly reflected a disproportionate interest in the working class as a potential agent of historical change. The facilitation of access and sometimes the direct funding of social scientific research by mine companies, keen to know the ideas and intentions of their employees, equally played a role. For subsequent generations, accessing male mineworkers and union leaders was made easier by the impressive archival practices of mine companies. Zambian mine company records are publicly available at the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines archives in Ndola. In Haut-Katanga, the records of Générale des Carrières et des Mines (Gécamines) are partially accessible in Lubumbashi and smaller mining towns. These records provide data on mine company townships, where workers and their families resided. These areas were provided not only with housing but with healthcare, schooling and welfare and leisure services, all of which were assiduously documented. But from the 1960s at least, the majority of Copperbelt residents lived in non-mine areas, run by local authorities, that can be understood as symbiotic with – and sometimes parasitic on – the formal mining sector. Non-mine residents had an ambiguous relationship with mines and mineworkers: they recognised that their own fortunes were partly dependent on the fragile prosperity generated by copper mining and they sometimes envied the employment and residential security of mineworkers, but many chafed at their dependency on mine company paternalism and sought a more independent way of life. Many mineworkers’ wives equally earned their own income, but their experiences largely went unrecorded in the official record.

Accessing the experiences and attitudes of these multitudes requires both a more critical reading of the official record, and a wider range of research techniques, particularly including oral histories. The Comparing the Copperbelt project conducted significant new interview-based oral histories with long-term residents of the mining towns of Likasi (DR Congo) and Mufulira (Zambia), that are utilised in this volume, particularly in Chapter 1 (Peša and Henriet). Earlier social scientists certainly used interviews, but the data they generated was heavily influenced by the modernist perspective that dominated their research. The researchers contributing to this volume have used a wide range of methods to access their findings: archival and interview-based research, long-term participant observation, as well as a critical re-reading of the data and findings of earlier social scientific research.

Second, the focus on macro-political and socio-economic issues in much of the classic Copperbelt literature meant that the wider social and cultural experiences of Copperbelt life, for example of leisure, literacy and religious belief, were hardly addressed. Although most earlier works focused on political change, industrial disputes and economic development, it was the quotidian, personal experience of change that was often uppermost for those seeking to make a new life for themselves in town. Copperbelt residents, like mine companies and researchers, appreciated that the meaning of ‘customs’ surrounding initiation into adulthood, courtship and marriage all required reinterpretation in a context in which multi-ethnic residential areas, divorce courts and the cash economy were dominant. Copperbelt residents sought, collectively and individually, to continuously negotiate their ‘rights to the city’. Certainly, trade unions, political parties and ethnic associations played an important role in such processes, but equally important were socio-cultural associations and initiatives in which changing gender, generational and other relationships were discussed and re-interpreted. The expression of such debates and ideas can be located in the meetings of groups active in social welfare; in newspapers, magazines and cartoons; in the gendered leisure activities (football teams for men; sewing and handicrafts for women) organised by mine companies and practised by thousands of residents; and the songs and paintings produced by Copperbelt artists. Learning from and studying such commentaries on everyday Copperbelt society enriches our interpretation of the ways in which social change was understood and experienced by its residents.

Third, the two Copperbelt regions were analysed, with only few exceptions, within their colonial or national Zambian or Congolese context.2 Exceptions to this general rule include Perrings, Black Mineworkers in Central Africa; Mwelwa C. Musambachime, ‘The Ubutwa Society in Eastern Shaba and Northeast Zambia to 1920’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 27, 1 (1994), pp. 77–99; Enid Guene, ‘Copper’s Corollaries: Trade and Labour Migration in the Copperbelt (1910–1940)’, Zambia Social Science Journal 1, 4 (2013); and Larmer, ‘At the Crossroads’. This has meant Copperbelt studies have largely failed to reflect the extent to which capital, people and ideas flowed across the Copperbelt border. The editors of this collection instead argue that the Copperbelt can best be understood as a single mining region, which provides an ideal comparative framework to highlight similarities and differences between the two national settings. This approach illustrates underlying dynamics of social change that might otherwise remain hidden. Although mine towns in Zambia and Congo evolved in ostensibly similar ways, comparative analysis reveals that the experience of these parallel historical changes was significantly different in the two regions. As noted, Katanga’s mine towns experienced an earlier and more sustained stabilisation from the 1920s than those in colonial Zambia, where permanent African residence was only officially accepted in the 1940s. In Katanga, the provision of comprehensive social services by the triumvirate of the mine company UMHK, the Roman Catholic Church and the Belgian colonial state created a system of paternalism which many mineworkers and their families genuinely regarded as generous. In Northern Rhodesia, similar services were belatedly provided and often only as a result of organised campaigning by African trade unions and nationalist parties. This fuelled a protest-oriented politics that, in overcoming a racial colour bar, created a militant political culture largely absent from Katanga.

The Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt’s unified African political activism led it to become the vanguard of Zambian nationalism and a consciously cosmopolitan melting pot. Katanga, in contrast, experienced ethnic conflict during Congo’s violent transition to independence, culminating in the Katangese secession and the international diplomatic and military operation that brought it to an end. Consequently, post-independence Congolese rulers, particularly Mobutu Sese Seko, saw the strategic mining region as requiring direct oversight from the capital Kinshasa and they overtly suppressed Katangese political aspirations. As the one-party states of both countries unravelled in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Zambian Copperbelt’s organised labour movement played a leading role in that country’s successful transition to democracy. In Katanga, a repressed democratic transition was followed by a new wave of ethnic violence and, following the military overthrow of Mobutu, a devastating civil war and disastrous decline in living standards which has yet to be reversed. The comparative approach applied in this volume enables exploration of the causes and consequences of these similarities and differences, and analyses how they have influenced social change in the cross-border Copperbelt.

In this respect, in Chapter 1, Iva Peša and Benoît Henriet draw on an impressive new body of oral histories conducted with long-term residents of the Copperbelt mine towns of Likasi (DR Congo) and Mufulira (Zambia), to provide a rich history of everyday life that reveals similarities and striking differences. In stepping away from mine work and mineworkers as the assumed norm of Copperbelt life, this study challenges the assumption that mine companies were ever able to dominate or control the lives of Copperbelt residents. This chapter shows the limits of paternalistic order, highlighting how individuals made their own way, economically and culturally. By including the voices of seamstresses, nurses, domestics, as well as doctors, artists and engineers, this chapter provides a wider and more nuanced understanding of Copperbelt modernity, influenced by but not limited to the mining industry.

The lives and outlook of Copperbelt residents were, like urbanites everywhere, shaped by the ideas they found in new publications: books, but also magazines and comics. The mine companies’ provision of schooling for mineworkers’ children, and the promotion of literacy, helped residents articulate new understandings of their society and lives. Enid Guene examines the experience of growing up on the Copperbelt. On the Katangese side, childhood was experienced in the context of UMHK/Gécamines’ cradle-to-grave policies. In this context, the company-sponsored publication of the free monthly magazine Mwana Shaba Junior featured the cartoon ‘Mayele’, which in humorous ways guided young people in the intricacies of town life. In Zambia, publications produced by the state and by Christian missions included their own cartoon characters. This chapter explores the ways in which companies, governments and missions sought to mould the ideas of the region’s inhabitants, but equally argues that such comics provided a venue in which Copperbelt residents created new popular art forms that blended local and global influences.

European mineworkers were of crucial importance to the development of the early Copperbelt. In the colonial period, skilled mineworkers from around the world brought to the booming mines of Central Africa a distinctive globalised perspective that combined radical socialist or communist politics with a strong commitment to racial segregation. In the mid-twentieth century, white mineworkers protected their privileged position against their aspirant African counterparts through a combination of racialised agreements (in Northern Rhodesia this amounted to an explicit colour bar) and periodic industrial action. In the Belgian Congo this cosmopolitan group was rapidly replaced by a largely Belgian group of senior mineworkers, whose numbers and influence were steadily diminished, however, by the advancement of Africans to more senior positions. In Northern Rhodesia, in contrast, settler political power and the colour bar enabled them to protect their privileges and remain an influential workforce up to independence and beyond. In 1945 UMHK employed just 1,100 European mineworkers in the most senior roles, while there were still c. 7,000 whites employed in the Northern Rhodesian mines in 1956. This hugely influential group has however been neglected in recent historical research, arguably because they were regarded – and therefore dismissed – by scholars as motivated solely by a narrow racialised worldview. Duncan Money argues, in contrast, that class and ideological perspectives were equally significant in shaping the outlook and lives of this privileged and little understood community, in a study that for the first time compares and contrasts the lives of white mineworkers in the Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia.

The provision of leisure facilities by Copperbelt mine companies extended to the provision of sporting facilities, designed to keep workers fit and distracted from more subversive activities. Drawing on the experience of towns such as Bournville, Saltaire and Port Sunlight in Britain, and Pullman in the United States, companies provided sports and leisure clubs, access to which was strongly determined by race and seniority. In his chapter, Hikabwa Chipande identifies the disciplining intentions behind mine company sponsorship of football teams, which were initially the preserve of European mineworkers. Over time, however, Africans sought and achieved access to – initially segregated – football fields of their own, and Chipande demonstrates how these provided important vehicles for the expression and organisation of collective African urban belonging.

Finally in Part 1, Rita Kesselring challenges many of the established notions that Copperbelt towns are simply the totality of the mine-as-workplace and the mine town-as-residency. She rejects the view that they should be understood as ‘enclave’ economies that could isolate themselves from wider spatial and political considerations. In the mid-twentieth century, the highly uneven prosperity of Copperbelt mine towns rapidly attracted a much wider urban population, which sought to benefit from the presence of the mine but who advanced the region’s urbanisation in new and unexpected ways. At the same time, late-colonial states sought to integrate mine towns politically and to ensure they contributed to the wider socio-economic development of their territories, a process that was rapidly accelerated by postcolonial nation-states that sought to underwrite their development plans with the proceeds of copper and cobalt mining. Demands on mine companies from states and communities shaped the ways in which mines and mine townships were integrated into the wider urbanisation of Central Africa. Focusing on the mine towns of Zambia’s North-Western Province, Kesselring demonstrates how the contested growth of Solwezi and Kansanshi’s built environment has been shaped over time by the interaction of the global mining economy, national and local political elites, and the urban community itself.

In the twentieth century, colonially connected companies produced minerals that were essential to Western industrial economies and indeed to militarism and warfare. Copperbelt copper was vital to war economies, and uranium from Shinkolobwe mine was used in the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The region was widely viewed as an island of hyper-modern industrial development in the African ‘bush’ and optimists believed it would develop into a region of urban industrialisation comparable to those in the Western world. Yet in practice the region’s economic development was highly uneven, skewed towards the production of raw minerals with little secondary industrial development. Northern Rhodesia/Zambia remained dependent on its southern neighbours, which provided the lion’s share of manufactured imports for the industry and consumer goods for the Copperbelt’s residents. Secondary industry was more developed in Katanga, but even here it was largely in the hands of Western companies and small businesses. Compared with West Africa, the development of an indigenous capitalist class was severely restricted. This unevenness was reinforced by economic policies that continued to drain off vast mine revenue away from the mine regions themselves, to the metropole exchequers and to Western-based companies. The region’s landlocked position further contributed to its long-term uncompetitiveness.

Similarly, most new urban migrants had little prospect of obtaining the formal employment, education and other markers of modernity that would make them full urban citizens. Most African urbanites scraped out a precarious living through trading, urban farming and other activities deemed unofficial, disreputable and ‘un-urban’ by most colonial and postcolonial officials. The disjuncture between the vision of the Copperbelt as a place of transformative modernity, and the underlying reality that became increasingly clear during the postcolonial period – of its uneven, unequal and precarious development – has been the dominant motif of Copperbelt society, the lived experience of which has been documented by Ferguson, Mususa and others.1 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; Patience Mususa, ‘Topping Up: Life Amidst Hardship and Death on the Copperbelt’, African Studies 71, 2 (2012), pp. 304–22; Rubbers, Le paternalisme en question. A golden age of growth that fuelled unrealistic expectations of modern development was rapidly and brutally displaced by economic stagnation and then decline in the 1980s and 1990s. This fall has created on the Copperbelt a profound sense of nostalgia for a late-colonial/postcolonial ‘golden age’ that perhaps never really existed. Copperbelt residents today experience a sense of living in a region left behind by a promised modernity that is perpetually out of reach.

Copperbelt residents however continued – and continue – to see the region as one that promised personal and collective advancement through formal employment, but also via the associated provision of social services by mine companies. In the ‘golden age’ of the 1950s and 1960s, mine companies provided housing, social welfare and a host of other extra-economic services that made urban residence possible and desirable. These then became the subject of demands by post-independence labour unions and mine communities. As economic decline led to increasingly savage cuts to the social wage, conflicts sharpened. Following mine privatisation in the late 1990s, new investors in both old and new copper mining regions refused responsibility for social investment, but have found themselves confronted by communities unwilling to accept this divestment. While employment numbers have fallen drastically as a result of technological change and new extractive techniques, international calls for ‘corporate social responsibility’ have become linked to the enduring belief among Copperbelt communities that investors must take responsibility for the effects of their investment.2 Tomas Frederiksen, ‘Political Settlements, the Mining Industry and Corporate Social Responsibility in Developing Countries’, Extractive Industries and Society 6, 1 (2019), pp. 162–70.

This however manifests itself differently on either side of the border. Zambians, notwithstanding the decline in living standards, continue to express expectations of a better life and to assert political claims on mine profits via collective protest and overt political action, characterised by the May 2019 decision by Zambian president Edgar Lungu to cancel the operating licence of Konkola Copper Mines.3 ‘Zambia president vows to wind up copper giant KCM’, News24.com, 4 June 2019: www.news24.com/Africa/News/zambia-president-vows-to-wind-up-copper-giant-kcm-20190604 (Accessed 19 June 2019). In contrast, the urban culture of Haut-Katanga appears to divide former mineworkers from other urban groups. Katanga’s mineworkers cling to their identity as respectable workers and have protested their redundancy not through political and mass action but via polite entreaties to Belgian and international authorities.4 Rubbers, Le paternalisme en question. More generally, the effects of mine company activity on communities remain both contested and under-researched, as do the ways in which communities organise to insist on the continued social responsibilities of multinational mine corporations to the places and peoples they use to make profits.

For many decades, the considerable negative impact of mining on the environment of Copperbelt communities remained under-researched, an extraordinary absence in the otherwise rich documentation of community organisation and academic research.5 Iva Peša, ‘Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950–2000’, Environment and History (2020), https://doi.org/10.3197/096734019X15755402985703 This has changed since the 1990s as new global and national environmental standards have intersected with the increasing expression of local grievances over the long-term effects of mine pollution on lives and wellbeing. Yet, given changes in both mine ownership and in environmental laws, who is responsible for the long-term damage wrought by pollution on, for example, mineworkers’ housing? In this regard, Jennifer Chibamba Chansa compares mines in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Zambian Copperbelts to explain the ways in which long-established and more recent mine communities articulate their environmental concerns to mine investors.

For some areas of the Copperbelt, the recent revival of the mining industry has done little or nothing to resuscitate the ghost towns created during the late-twentieth-century decline. In this context, what might be termed post-mine communities have made creative use of the ‘ruins’ left behind by industry. As Christian Straube demonstrates for Mpatamatu in the mine town of Luanshya, the conversion of mine welfare buildings into a range of new forms – privately run schools, Pentecostal churches, the offices of non-governmental organisations and, representing a degree of continuity, drinking clubs and taverns – represents a collective spirit of creative response. It was also an assertion, Straube argues, of a continuing belief in urban community and belonging, even as their ‘town’ (once a byword for cosmopolitan connectedness) turned into a disconnected ‘village’.

In the contemporary Copperbelt, linkages to the global economy remain as vital as ever to its success. In the twenty-first century, economic globalisation and technological innovation promise to remove the barriers to frictionless trade. Certainly, Hélène Blaszkiewicz demonstrates how infrastructural innovation has enabled the historically rapid transportation of minerals to export markets, making it possible for Copperbelt minerals to remain profitable. However, her analysis equally demonstrates the continuities of recent challenges and changes with the colonial period. Blaszkiewicz makes a convincing argument for a shift of focus away from the study of mine production and towards the infrastructure and transportation companies that make market access and profitability possible.

This is not to argue, however, that this body of work represents a singular, coherent characterisation of Copperbelt society. Amandine Lauro’s critical analysis of intelligence testing in late-colonial Katanga shows how intelligence quotient (IQ) was used to discriminate between Europeans and Africans, and how ‘scientific’ rationality was for those involved entirely compatible with race thinking. She, however, also demonstrates that Western notions of intelligence, while always problematic, were far from monolithic. Lauro shows how disagreements about cultural and structural influences on performance in IQ testing are revealing of wider debates among Western and/or colonial actors regarding Africans’ supposed readiness for ‘modernity’.

Elite concern regarding the challenges of urbanisation was equally expressed in relation to familial social change. A central concern of social scientists was that the rapid transition from supposedly paternalistic rural communities to new cosmopolitan urban ones would threaten the reproduction of family life, bringing to the urban Copperbelt the social ills of Western cities, such as marital breakdown and juvenile delinquency. From the 1940s (in Katanga) and 1950s (in Northern Rhodesia) social scientists worked with a growing cadre of trained social workers and community development officers to intervene and manage such cases. Over the coming decades, as Miles Larmer and Rachel Taylor demonstrate, an increasingly Africanised and feminised social welfare community sought to address both the universal concern regarding the dislocating effects of urban development and, with political independence, specifically African concerns regarding rapid social change.

The decolonisation of knowledge production is, as previously noted, considered from a different perspective in Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu’s study of the history department of the region’s leading research institution, UNILU. Founded to serve the colonial state’s needs for knowledge production, UNILU evolved after independence to become Zaïre/DR Congo’s centre for research into historical and social change. Located in the Katangese capital of Lubumbashi, the region’s mine communities provided the ideal subjects for its historical research. Dibwe dia Mwembu’s chapter charts the intellectual development of this key centre of Copperbelt knowledge production, but equally demonstrates how it was itself shaped by historical, political, social and economic changes in the region that its researchers sought to understand.

It is a major assertion of the Comparing the Copperbelt project that ‘knowledge production’ is by no means an activity confined to the academy. New urban communities constantly sought to make sense and to articulate their understanding of the changes they experienced as they moved from village to town, from subsistence to waged employment, from proximate kinship ties to cosmopolitan inter-ethnic relations. While the late-colonial generation of social scientists, along with their political and mine company counterparts, tended to see these processes of change in rigid, binary form, Copperbelt residents, while certainly aware of the rapidity and degree of change, articulated those changes in more dynamic and creative forms, including in popular music and visual art. While social workers sought to manage the effects of dislocation from a supposedly rigid paternalist familial order, many Copperbelt residents engaged in religiously oriented discussions of morality, family and gender, as Stephanie Lämmert shows in the collection’s final chapter. Relying on a unique set of archival sources and interviews with key religious actors, Lämmert shows how Copperbelt cosmopolitanism extended beyond rural-urban migration and encompassed denominational flexibility, which she describes as ‘surfing’. While many Protestant denominations viewed the urban Copperbelt as a ‘threatening’ mission field, Catholics and Copperbelt residents themselves stepped in to offer religious comfort to the diverse urban population. Lämmert shows how grassroots interdenominational initiatives arose on the Zambian Copperbelt. She equally demonstrates how concerns over gender transformed into a particular reverence for the Virgin Mary. This final chapter illustrates how intimate considerations were of great concern both to elites and everyday residents, linked as they were to wider processes of social and urban change.