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

Meanwhile, from 1971, Zambian children had access to Orbit (‘The magazine for young Zambians’), a magazine with an initial print run of over 65,000 copies,1 According to the The Europa World Year, it was published about nine times a year. which was commissioned by the Zambian Ministry of Education to be circulated in schools across the country. This was followed in 1984 by Speak Out! – a bimonthly produced by the Franciscan Mission Press in Ndola with a distribution of 40,000.2 Yvonne Malambo Kabombwe, ‘A History of the Mission Press in Zambia, 1970–2011’, MA Thesis, University of Zambia, 2015, p. 25. Not only are these magazines some of the longest-lasting comic magazines on the continent, thus allowing large numbers of children to engage with the medium of comics over an extended period of time, but they also provided local talents with the chance to produce their own. Yet Zambia is not known for its comics at all, while the Katangese Copperbelt continues to be much better known for its popular paintings.

As will be shown in this chapter, comics were a key component of a childhood spent on both sides of the Copperbelt’s border. They had played an important role in the imaginative development of the Copperbelt youth even before any of these magazines were published, which, in time, allowed key institutions – in this case, a powerful mining company, the Zambian State and the Catholic Church – to use the medium for their own purposes: as a tool to convey specific messages and values. At the same time, while comics were originally an imported medium to the Copperbelt, and were usually produced to ‘educate’ or ‘steer’ their African audience in a certain direction, their target populations were by no means passive consumers. In fact, Mwana Shaba Junior, Orbit and Speak Out! availed the primary space for comics in the region and provided aspiring Copperbelt cartoonists with the opportunity to ‘re-appropriate’ and transform the medium. Crucially, this reappropriation took place against the backdrop of the fast economic, political and social changes that followed the dramatic downturn in copper prices of 1974–75. In this context, comics became an avenue through which to have ‘conversations’ about these changes. In this way, as will be argued, a medium which had previously been actively deployed to promote a vision for an industrial and ‘modern’ future became a tool to critique the failures of modernity and the corrosive effects of economic decline.

Jacky Mulenda, for example, who worked for Mwana Shaba Junior in the 1980s, remembers from his childhood in the 1960s and 1970s that ‘everything was there: Bécassine, Spirou and Tintin [comic strips], Tintin and Spirou magazines as well’.9 Interview, Jacky Mpungu Mulenda, Lubumbashi, 14 August 2019. Other comics which informants recalled reading in the same period included Lucky Luke, Ric Hochet, Buck Danny, La patrouille des Castors, The Smurfs, Alix, Gaston Lagaffe and Bob et Bobette, the latter a French translation of the Flemish series Suske en Wiske. In other words, Katangese readers were familiar with the full range of mainstream comics published in Belgium in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Jacky Mulenda recalled,

Similarly, British comics loom large in the memory of Zambian informants who grew up on the Copperbelt prior to the 1990s. Most read Andy Capp, a funny strip centred on a wife-beating figure who never works, and Garth, an immensely strong hero who battles various villains across time and space. Both were originally published in the British Newspaper Daily Mirror, from 1957 and 1943 respectively, but also appeared in the Times of Zambia. Their presence in a national newspaper made them eminently accessible, and several informants remembered having kept a scrapbook. As one recalled, ‘I never wanted to miss those … I actually used to cut them out and paste them into an old phone book.’11 Interview, Henry Chitaika, Ndola, 18 July 2019. In addition, when prompted about the comics they read as children, informants on the Zambian Copperbelt almost invariably first cited Dandy and Beano, two children’s comics published by the Scottish publisher D.C. Thomson since 1937 and 1938 respectively. Angel Phiri, a comic enthusiast who now works in the televisual field, noted that Dandy and Beano ‘were the go-to magazines for children. If you were bringing anything for the kids, it would have been those.’12 Interview, Angel Phiri, Lusaka, 7 July 2019. D.C. Thomson’s main rival in the world of British comics, Amalgamated Press (renamed Fleetway Publications in 1959), appears to have been popular in the Copperbelt too. In the 1950s, Amalgamated Press had introduced the ‘Picture Library’ format, which consisted in one long complete story set in one of several set genres: westerns, detective/thriller stories, sport, science fiction, and war.13 For more on British comics, see James Chapman, British Comics: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011). Peter Kapenda, a cartoonist who later contributed many drawings to Orbit, was very fond of ‘Fleet Street comics’, particularly ‘Second World War and detective comics’, which, he says, inspired the development of his own style:

Access to such literature must, in part, have been facilitated by the presence of libraries and bookshops across the mining towns. Even Gécamines’ social centres (known as ‘cercles’) and youth centres had their own little libraries. Dominique Ilunga, who worked as a librarian for one of Gécamines’ cercles in the 1960s and early 1970s, recalled that comics such as Bob et Bobette and Tintin were his library’s most popular items, among adults and youths alike. Gécamines did not pay for these books however. Instead, ‘we would go to houses of the Europeans, or of the Congolese who liked to read. [We would collect] the books they had already read to add them to our library collection.’15 Interview, Dominique Ilunga, Likasi, 10 August 2019. On the Zambian side, while council and mine libraries reportedly prioritised novels over comics, one significant exception was the Hammarskjöld Memorial Library, which is attached to the Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation in Kitwe. This was a well-equipped library, which had opened in 1963 with funds from Sweden, and which, crucially, children could access for free.16 Orbit, 1, 6 (1971), p. 12. As Angel Phiri recalled, ‘almost half of Kitwe used to borrow books there’:

It is, however, a bookstore which seems to have played the most crucial role in disseminating comics on the Zambian Copperbelt: Kingstons Ltd. The successor to Herald Stationery and Book Store which had established bookstores in Kitwe and Ndola by the 1930s,18 William D. Gale, The Rhodesian Press: The History of the Rhodesian Printing and Publishing Company Ltd (Salisbury: Rhodesian Printing & Publishing Company, 1962). Kingstons was Zambia’s main source of newspapers, records, books, magazines, and comics, and was probably the main route via which D.C. Thomson and Fleetway Publications were distributed in Zambia. This is borne out by the fact that Fleetway comic magazines were published with a note stating that their ‘sole agent’ for ‘Rhodesia and Zambia’ was ‘Kingstons Ltd’. This also chimes with informants’ recollections that ‘Kingston was … the source of everything’ and ‘the sole supplier and distributor of all books from abroad’.19 Interview, Ben Phiri, Ndola, 15 July 2019. Cartoonist Peter Kapenda recalled:

In addition, when asked about what imported comics he read, Angel Phiri immediately came up with a list which suggested horizons going beyond what the former colonial powers produced:

This short list is enough to give an idea of the breadth of material on offer: Beano and Dandy are from the United Kingdom; Archie and Sabrina and Marvel and DC Universe are from the United States. Tintin is from Belgium, Asterix from France, and Apache is a photocomic from South Africa. It is perhaps significant that the informants who grew up before the 1960s do not remember seeing any translated Belgo-French comics, as this more or less corresponds to the period when these comics were first translated into English.22 The full process of translating Tintin into English was commissioned in 1958 by Methuen, Hergé’s British publishers, while the first translated album of Asterix was published in 1969 by Brockhampton Press. Other comics of Belgian origins which Zambian informants cited were Lucky Luke and The Smurfs. According to Austin Kaluba, a cultural journalist at the Times of Zambia, Asterix and Tintin were easily obtainable from Kingstons, circulated in schools and were ‘massively popular’. He went as far as saying that ‘you have not lived in Zambia if you have not read Asterix and Tintin’.23 Interview, Austin Kaluba, Lusaka, 1 July 2019.. Similarly, American comics were, by all accounts, largely available on both sides of the border. Even the oldest Zambian informant, who grew up in the 1950s, remembers reading Popeye, as well as Disney and superheroes comics (Marvel and DC universe) such as Batman, Superman and Spiderman. In Katanga, Jacky Mulenda recalled that,

In turn, South Africa’s main contribution to the Copperbelt’s comic culture, at least that of the Zambian Copperbelt, came in the form of photocomics. These enjoyed enormous popularity in South Africa in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.25 See Lily Saint, ‘Not Western: Race, Reading, and the South African Photocomic’, Journal of Southern African Studies 36, 4 (2010), pp. 939–58, p. 939. In Zambia, according to informants’ recollections, the most popular ones were: Lance Spearman (aka ‘The Spear’), a super-spy character, created in 1968 by Drum Publications; Chunky Charlie, a funny inspector character who carried fancy gadgets in his huge coat; and She, described as a ‘kickass character’ who ‘was always in a miniskirt with an afro and very high boots’.26 Angel Phiri interview.

From the mid-twentieth century, and especially from the early years of independence, comics circulated on the Copperbelt in many forms. The breadth and diversity of comics in circulation meant that the cultural trends that influenced Copperbelt children were equally wide. They consumed swashbucklers from the United Kingdom, and glossy adventure or humorous bande dessinée albums from France and Belgium, sword-and-sandals stories of ancient Rome and cowboy tales of the American West, photocomics from South Africa, and superheroes from America. Although comics appeared in Congo earlier than in Zambia, by the 1960s, they were a key part of the experience of growing up on both sides of the Copperbelt. Many children cut and pasted comic strips, redrew them, played games involving comic book characters, discussed them at school, and lent each other comic books. The fact that Copperbelt children were not passive readers of comics, but instead, played around with them, is an indication of how popular the medium was and how important a part it played in a Copperbelt childhood. In turn, the fact that a certain number of prerequisites were needed for comics to circulate, such as a knowledge of French or English or the presence of specific bookstores, made sure that comics would be, if not necessarily a Copperbelt-only phenomenon, then at least a mostly urban, and fairly middle-class, one. Henry Chitaika recalled that when he lived in Ndola with his parents,

Still, in the 1960s and the early 1970s, a time when both Copperbelts were experiencing a period of economic boom and its populations enjoyed a comparatively high quality of life, the situation was ripe for various institutions to use this very popular medium for their own purposes, as the Catholic Church had already been doing for decades in the Congo. By this point, the youth of the Copperbelt had been exposed to a large variety of comics from various horizons while at the same time a large pool of disparate tastes had developed. This, therefore, is the background against which Gécamines and the Zambian State launched their respective youth magazines: Mwana Shaba Junior and Orbit.

While Mwana Shaba Junior similarly sought to steer the eyes of the youth towards science, technology and, by extension, the mining industry, it went further. Mwana Shaba Junior was published as a supplement to Mwana Shaba (‘Child of Copper’), a free monthly magazine created in 1957 by UMHK for its employees. Both magazines were part and parcel of the distinctive brand of corporate paternalism which the Union Minière had pursued since the 1930s but which, with the looming prospect of Congolese independence, was going through a new phase of intensification in the late 1950s. While Mwana Shaba’s role was to give company-related news, it also took pains to paternalistically emphasise topics such as the importance of discipline at work, a stable family life, and good behaviour. In other words, it played the role of ‘moralizer of the population’, as Donatien Dibwe dia Mwembu put it.6 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: Harmattan, 2001), p. 86. Mwana Shaba Junior was intended to play much the same role for the next generation of Gécamines employees. Every issue was introduced by an editorial, which, in the magazine’s own words, intended to give young people ‘moral, cultural and scientific’ advice.7 Mwana Shaba Junior, 349–50, March–April 1988, p. 2. These editorials cover a wide range of topics but it is the related themes of the importance of education and discipline which come through the most frequently and the most clearly. One editorial entitled ‘La réussite’ (‘How to achieve success’) stressed that ‘the path to success necessarily involves regular effort’, and with ‘effort’ comes ‘suffering, pain and sacrifice’.8 Mwana Shaba Junior, 327, May 1986, p. 2. Even articles on sport were turned into another opportunity to draw an analogy between discipline and success: ‘What matters if you want to achieve anything is discipline: to love making effort, work with perseverance, respect the property of others, observe the rules which are necessary for society to function properly’.9 Mwana Shaba Junior, 178, 1 December 1974, p. 3. Mwana Shaba Junior thus displayed a rather explicit brand of didacticism, the aim of which was to produce the hard-working employees of tomorrow while encouraging the Gécamines population to think of itself as a community with common interests.

These divergences in tone and choice of emphasis were reflected in the comics Junior and Orbit chose to publish. Comic strips published in Junior were fully incorporated into the magazine’s overall didactic mission: they were to serve, as the editorial team of the March/April 1988 issue revealingly put it, ‘as a support for the instruction and moral education of the young honest citizens of tomorrow’.10 Mwana Shaba Junior, 349–350, March–April 1988, p. 2. In this, they recycled the paternalistic and moralistic qualities typical of colonial comics but also of the mid-twentieth-century Belgian comic tradition as whole. Partly because of the influence of the Catholic Church and partly as a reaction to France’s very strict 1949 censorship law which closely regulated depictions of sex and violence,11 This had been enforced in response to the post-liberation influx of American comics, as a thinly veiled measure to protect the domestic comic market. It also came in handy to regulate the availability of Belgian comic magazines in France. See Philippe Delisle, Bande dessinée franco-belge et imaginaire colonial, des années 1930 aux années 1980 (Paris: Karthala, 2008), p. 6. Belgian comic artists carefully policed their work, producing comics intended to entertain the youth, but also to educate it, and to offer it good role models. Accordingly, the first comic strips published in Junior were realistically drawn stories set in antiquity, such as L’histoire merveilleuse, which depicted the lives of various Biblical characters, and Ben Hur (1965–67), which broadly told the same story of revenge, redemption and Christian awakening as the 1959 Hollywood film of the same name.12 Mwana Shaba Junior, 14 February 1966, p. 7. Along with these, Junior introduced in September 1965 a humorous series called Les aventures de Mayele, which quickly became the magazine’s flagship series. Mayele (meaning ‘clever’ in Swahili) was originally invented by two Belgian Union Minière engineers called Theo Roosen and Paul Baeke. That the makers of Mayele were influenced by the Franco-Belgian tradition is obvious. Mayele is friends with two young adolescents, a boy and a girl, who are dressed just like the two heroes of the Flemish comic Suske en Wiske. His ‘adventures’ consist of one-page gags, with many of the jokes drawing on slapstick-type humour and the main character’s clumsiness, just like Gaston Lagaffe, a lazy and accident-prone character from the Journal de Spirou. Mayele is an urban young man who owns a dog, and whose ‘adventures’ take place in the realistic setting of a person’s ‘normal’ everyday life, as they do in the series Boule et Bill. For example, in ‘Pas de chance!’, Mayele finds himself stuck between his garage door and ceiling in an attempt to show off his new electric garage door to his neighbour 13 Mwana Shaba Junior, 126, 15 May 1972, p. 1. Mayele lives in a big suburban house, owns a car and various technological items, which provide the basis for much of the hilarity (as they malfunction).14 E.g. in ‘Mayele tond sa pelouse’ (Mwana Shaba Junior, 82, 15 April 1970, p. 1), Mayele gets angry because he thinks the lawnmower his neighbour lent him is faulty when the issue is that he did not pay his electricity bill. He lives in a city, where he has arguments with friends in cafes,15 E.g. in ‘Elles existent’ (Mwana Shaba Junior, 178, December 1974), Mayele argues with a friend about whether ‘flying saucers’ exist, irritating another customer who throws his saucer, a ‘flying saucer’, at them. clashes with policemen,16 E.g. in ‘Une bonne occasion’ (Mwana Shaba Junior, 57, 15 February 1969, p. 1), Mayele is persuaded to buy a beautiful car for 6 Zaïres. He is then fined 6 Zaïres by a policeman because most of the car’s appliances do not function properly. and goes to football matches.17 e.g. ‘Mayele Supporter’ (Mwana Shaba Junior, 21, 15 July 1966, p. 1). Mayele’s stories, in other words, are largely aspirational aimed at an (aspiring) African middle class in the purest tradition of both Gécamines’ and mid-twentieth-century Belgian comic paternalism.

The first comic strips published in Orbit were more graphically sophisticated than what appeared in Mwana Shaba Junior, despite Congo’s supposed head start in comic-making, because they were produced by professional cartoonists. Wanting the magazine to be professionally produced, Valentine Musakanya had elicited the help of Peter Clarke, then Managing Director of the London-based news service GeminiScan Ltd. As a result, though the editorial copy was provided by the Zambia-based team and the magazine was printed in Zambia,18 Bond, ‘Mporokoso’, p. 209. all the artwork and editing were done in Britain by British artists commissioned or employed by GeminiScan. That this was the case was kept as discreet as possible. ‘One of the many things Peter insisted on was that there should be no indication to the young reader that Orbit was being produced in the UK’, John Egglesfield who was art editor for GeminiScan, recalled. ‘We wanted all the focus to be on Zambia.’19 John Freeman, ‘Discovering “Orbit” – Zambia’s Unique Science and Comic Magazine’, 6 February 2020, https://downthetubes.net/?p=114717 (accessed 21 June 2020). Thus, though John Egglesfield elicited the services of some of Fleet Street’s finest cartoonists and illustrators to produce the comics, their names never appeared in the magazine. ‘Space Safari’, Orbit’s flagship series which featured two Zambian heroes named Marion and Robert, was a space adventure written by Sydney Jordan with art by Martin Ashbury, both well-established British cartoonists known for their science fiction comics. In turn, Orbit’s emphasis on space is not random. Orbit had been conceived in an era marked by the moon landing (1969), the success of cult phenomenon series Star Trek (1966–69) and the release of two major science fiction films which revolutionised mainstream pop culture: Planet of the Apes (1968) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In fact, the very title ‘A Space Safari’ is a clear reference to Stanley Kubrick’s film. Science fiction’s appeal thus provided a convenient hook to attract children’s attention and ignite their interest in science.

In this way, not only were comic strips given pride of place in Orbit but, like their counterparts in Mwana Shaba Junior, they had a clear role to play, designed as they were to reinforce the specific message outlined by the magazine as a whole. Neither were they devoid of moralising contemplations. Tellingly, Marion and Robert’s mini-adventures combine science fiction with agricultural concerns. Marion and Roberts are plant experts who work for the ‘Pan-African Survey System’. In their first adventure, which ran over the first four issues of the magazine, they are called to help over mysterious meteor showers which have caused crops to die all across Africa. These showers are identified as missiles or ‘sand-bombs’ and traced back to one of Mars’ moons, to which Robert and Marion duly travel on an international space mission. In their second adventure entitled ‘Trojan Horse’,20 Orbit, 1, 5, 6 and 7, 1971, pp. 1–2. a mysterious spaceship shows up in African cities and offers all sort of expensive gifts: cars, tractors, etc. Robert and Marion are sent in a special plane to negotiate with the ship’s commander and are informed that offering worthless gifts had been used as a way to test people’s spirit ‘to see if you understand the supreme law of survival’: ‘to help one another – to work for the creation of the good life – to scorn the ready-made Baubles of the Gift-horse’. Robert is sent back with a spade and ears of corn which he describes as the ‘greatest gift’.21 Orbit, 1, 7, pp. 1–2. In this way, science fiction is harnessed to disseminate the government’s agricultural agenda. In addition, accompanying Marion and Robert in every issue were two pages of an adventure story drawn in realistic black-and-white style, stylistically similar to Amalgamated comics. These alternated between the aerial adventures of ‘Mike Chanda, Charter Pilot’ who works for an air company based in Ndola, the investigative adventures of Inspector Mark Phiri, and the sanitary adventures of ‘Jenny Moonga, Health Inspector’. These adventure stories must have given their young Zambian audience a sense of possibilities for what the future might hold: all characters have typical Zambian names and all have ‘cool’ modern jobs.

Early issues of Orbit and Mwana Shaba Junior followed the comic canons of the former colonial powers. This is not surprising; not only were the artists who produced the comic strips European, but, as demonstrated above, literature of this type had been circulating on both sides of the Copperbelt for at least a couple of decades. As a result, its graphic and storytelling codes would have already been familiar to at least a part of Katanga and Zambia’s population, thus making it easier to re-purpose them for these publications’ new aims. Gécamines used Belgian-style one-gag-in-a-page and realistically drawn moralising adventures to reinforce its paternalistic vision. Orbit, meanwhile, used UK-type space and adventure stories to reinforce the state’s belief in a flourishing industrial future. These early comics, particularly Orbit’s, are emblematic of an era when, as James Ferguson put it, ‘Africa was “emerging”’ and ‘no place was emerging faster or more hopefully than Zambia’.22 James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 1. This was a time when, as Wendy Bond recalled, Zambia was ‘buzzing with optimism and opportunity’:

Thus, while Orbit was not a Copperbelt production, nor was it solely aimed at a Copperbelt audience, it is likely that this is where it was most widely read, along with Lusaka. It is also where it found its most fervent fans, as is suggested by the fact that many of those who later contributed comics to the magazines were Copperbelt natives. Besides, the aim was to inspire the country’s youth to aspire to live in a ‘Copperbelt-like’ society, one characterised by well-organised cities, state-of-the-art infrastructures, an educated labour force and – cherry on the cake – a self-sustained agricultural system.

The script of the Copperbelt’s ‘emergence’ via industrialisation and urbanisation was later confounded by the decades of steep economic decline which followed the fall in copper prices of the mid-1970s.24 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, p. 6. By the early 1990s, Mwana Shaba Junior had disappeared and Orbit had so severely declined in popularity that it was supplanted, at least on the Copperbelt, by a newcomer youth magazine produced by Mission Press in Ndola: Speak Out! Yet, until then, they had become the main vehicles through which the youth of the Copperbelt produced and consumed comics. For one thing, these magazines’ longevity and accessibility gave them enormous reach, allowing them to become an ‘official space for comics’, as Katangese cartoonist Tetshim put it.25 Interview, Tetshim, Lubumbashi, 14 August 2019. For another, from the early 1970s, when Congo and Zambia went through a period of ‘Africanisation’ and ‘nationalisation’, it was Zambian and Congolese artists who became the sole producers of comic art for the magazines. In fact, for a time, comics became one of the most lucrative activities available to visual artists in Katanga. Cartoonist Kika recalled that in the 1980s, while he and other artists continued to work on painting and metal work, comics were ‘what paid best’.26 Interview, Kika, Lubumbashi, 21 August 2019. Similarly, Kinshasa-born artist Michel Bongo-Liz ‘got stuck’ in Lubumbashi in the mid-1980s when he was on his way to Southern Africa because ‘Gécamines paid good money for the comics which we were producing’.27 Interview, Michel Bongo-Liz, Lubumbashi, 30 July 2019. As a result, these magazines provided local artists with the opportunity to ‘re-appropriate’ the medium and say with it what they wanted. Fatefully, they did so in a context of fast economic, political and social change.

From around the mid-1970s, Orbit and its comic strips started to change too, both in outlook and in subjects. These changes were claimed by the editorial team of 1977 to have been inspired by readers’ letters,4 Orbit, 6, 6, October 1977, p. 1. yet this was a period when Zambia too was experiencing important political changes. In 1973, Zambia had become a one-party state, and, as economic decline started to bite, its politics became increasingly centred around the person of the President and the ideologies of the nationalist struggle.5 Larmer, Rethinking African Politics, p. 167. This new party line was openly advertised in the Orbit of October 1974 which celebrated Zambia’s tenth anniversary of independence. For the occasion President Kenneth Kaunda penned a letter for Orbit’s young readers in which he grandly stated that ‘we older ones fought and won a battle for political freedom’ but this, he continued ‘was just the beginning – Not the end!’6 Orbit, 3, 7, p. 5. This was accompanied by a ‘special insert’, a comic advertised as an ‘exciting picture-story’ depicting

Soon thereafter, Marion and Robert were taken down from their pedestal as Orbit’s star cartoon to be replaced by Fwanya, a young Zambian schoolboy whose two-pages-long stories were meant to be amusing and to educate children on good behaviour. In ‘Fwanya learns that laziness does not pay’, for example, Fwanya collects copies of Orbit which he is supposed to bring to his teacher so they can be sold. He stops to rest and to read them, allowing the wind to blow all the copies away.8 Orbit, 4, 3, p. 10. Just as Mwana and Shaba had stuck close aesthetically to earlier Belgian and Congolese comics, Fwanya’s realistic black-and-white aesthetics are only a stone’s throw away from the Fleetway-style comic strips which had previously been the norm in Orbit. Similarly, despite this aesthetic continuity, there is a change in content, in this case towards a new brand of moralistic didacticism.

The content of these comics also differed at times from their predecessors in being located in a more distinctly Zambian or Katangese context and making references to events and societal change experienced by Copperbelt society. For example, in January 1975, a new comic in Junior entitled Un espion à Lusaka featured a young girl foiling a bomb attack at a summit held in Lusaka, where delegations of all ‘African copper-producing countries’ met to discuss the impact of the fall in copper prices.9 Mwana Shaba Junior, 180, January 1975, p. 8. In fact, from the mid-1970s onwards, Junior’s adventure and detective stories took a darker turn and, by the 1980s, stories depicting a character struggling against crime and corruption grew increasingly common. Similarly, comic strips in Orbit had become much less ‘European-looking’ by the late 1970s and, apart from Fwanya, all now touched upon topics relating to the realities of contemporary Zambian life. The stories of Constable Mulenga, for example, highlighted urban dangers, such as going home alone from the cinema after dark.10 Orbit, 6, 6, October 1977, p. 3. In a story entitled Choose a Husband published in 1977, it was the tricky topic of marriage and the rift between cities and villages that was explored. Tisa, a chief’s daughter, decides to marry ‘a successful young man from the city who has come back to the land’, who, unfortunately, turns out to be a goat transformed into a man. ‘You had a lot of handsome young men to choose from’, the goat–husband teases Tisa. ‘You just wanted my money and my car and a goat for a husband Ha! Ha! Ha!’11 Ibid., pp. 22–3. This is consistent with the evolution of the depiction of the village-town relationship in twentieth-century Zambian literature identified by Giacomo Macola. Whereas there had previously been a tendency to assign moral superiority ‘either to the urban or to the rural space as a whole’, he argued, ‘the demise of social expectations of urban permanence led to both spheres of social relationships’ and was increasingly ‘perceived as fundamentally deficient and unappealing’.12 Giacomo Macola, ‘Imagining Village Life in Zambian Fiction’, Cambridge Anthropology 25, 1 (2005), pp. 1–10, pp. 6–7. Similarly, the story here serves as a cautionary tale for young women who get dazzled by the lures of the city, while it also criticises both city dwellers for their empty promises and villagers for their naivety and longing for material wealth.

Similar changes in perception were expressed in Junior’s Le Masque de la Tortue (1989–90), in which a young village man named Sadiki travels to the city to help his cousin, only to be disabused by the reality of crime and squalor he finds there. However, instead of going home as the heroes of such stories often do, Sadiki stays, and the message seems to be that people from the village and the city should help each other and are stronger if they do so. City life was further de-idealised with the arrival, in 1987, of a new comic character named Mafuta. As with Mayele, Mafuta’s comic strips are one page long, and consist of jokes derived from the frustrations of daily and domestic life. Yet this comic strip differs from Mayele in fundamental ways. Whereas Mayele’s jokes are slapstick-based, Mafuta’s play on (changing) societal mores and situations that Katangese readers may actually have encountered in real life. Mafuta jokes cover a large number of topics such as gender relationships, superstition, insecurity, and religion, and a great number find humour in family and social obligations. In L’heureux papa, for example, two drunk men come to Mafuta’s house and demand he offers them a drink since a child was born in his family. They pester him until Mafuta buys them one glass of beer, and when they complain, Mafuta protests, ‘what are you complaining about? I bought you “a” drink, didn’t I?’13 Mwana Shaba Junior, 366, August 1989, p. 5. In Les visiteurs, Mafuta receives the visit of his uncle, aunt and children from the village. While his uncle is busy listing all the items he requires from Mafuta (a sewing machine, a bicycle, a suit, a hoe, clothes for his wife and children), Mafuta thinks: ‘what a disaster! Now I have five additional mouths to feed … life has become too expensive … I will get rid of them, and quickly.’ In order to do so, he gives them a bad supper, leading the unwanted guests to decide to leave of their own accord.14 Mwana Shaba Junior, 372, March 1990, p. 5. Mayele and Mafuta’s jokes have in common that they take place in urban settings, mostly in and around the home. Yet, whereas Mayele’s jokes show a life of abundance and middle-class aspirations, Mafuta’s highlight all that is lacking.

From 1989, the year that the Kamoto mine collapsed, causing Gécamines’ total production to drop by 90% between 1989 and 1993, the implicit social and political commentary of Junior’s comic strips became distinctly more explicit. Les tribulations de Mashaka, published between 1990 and 1991, for example, straightforwardly dealt with the effects of poverty. Mashaka is a perennially unemployed character whose wife urges to go out and find work. Yet everything goes wrong for Mashaka. He loses the little money he had earned, breaks his leg yet continues looking for work, finds a job then gets fired, gets evicted from his house, and even tries to commit suicide. He is only saved when a rich uncle comes back from America and offers him a job on no other basis than the fact that he is family. The suggestion is that the only remaining way to get out of one’s situation is through a wealthy relative or going abroad. Similarly, Msumbuko Le syndicaliste, les victimes de la tentation (1989–90, by Mukiny Nkemba and Nansong Yav), deals with the effects of economic collapse. In this story, the protagonist is Masumbuko, the chief trade unionist for the textile company, I.T.M., which acts as a stand-in for Gécamines. The company originally does well but the salaries are too low and as one employee comments, ‘it’s impossible to make ends meet’.15 Mwana Shaba Junior, 364, June 1989, p. 9. As time goes by, an increasing quantity of goods goes missing from the company as employees help themselves to them to compensate for their low salaries. Masumbuko then summons all of his fellow employees and lectures them on having endangered the company’s survival and by extension the ability of all workers to feed their families. Another worker then takes the stand and expresses what must have a widely shared opinion among Gécamines’ employees: that the directors of the company shared a part of the blame since they had sold out to ‘the capitalist system of exploiting Man to extract as much profit out of him as possible’ and neglected their ‘obligation to think about improving the living conditions of workers’.16 Mwana Shaba Junior, 376, June 1990, p. 9. In that way, I.T.M.’s story is a thinly veiled reference to Gécamines’ contemporary struggle with debilitating thefts and underpaid employees.

On the Zambian side, meanwhile, Orbit had been largely been supplanted by Speak Out! A Christian Magazine for Youth, created by the Franciscan Mission press in 1984. It too contained comic strips, though fewer in number and of a very different kind than those contained in Orbit, having been conceived in a very different political context. Whereas there had hitherto been no significant challenge to the party and its government, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the unprofitability of the mining industry, rising foreign debt and periodic harvest failures finally led to rising discontent.17 Larmer, Rethinking African Politics, p. 82. In this context, Zambia’s Catholic Church found itself in the position of mouthpiece for the opposition to the one-party state. This it was largely able to do because of its ownership of independent media including magazines such as Icengelo (1971-present) and Speak Out! (1984-present).18 Marja Hinfelaar, ‘Legitimizing Powers: The Political Role of the Roman Catholic Church, 1972–1991’ in Jan-Bart Gewald, Marja Hinfelaar and Giacomo Macola (eds), One Zambia, Many Histories: Towards a History of Post-Colonial Zambia (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 127–43, p. 141. Like Orbit and Mwana Shaba Junior, Speak Out! had games, a questions-and-answers section (‘Dear Kabilo’), and competitions. The overall tone however was very different. Whereas Orbit was resolutely turned towards a vision of Zambia as a nation at the cutting edge of technology and fully incorporated in a global (or at least Pan-African) world, Speak Out! was very Copperbelt-focused, and resolutely turned towards questions of politics and morality. The educational articles on science, technology or history which were Orbit’s hallmark, were gone. Instead, the bulk of the articles consisted of thinking pieces, fictional and real-life stories often contributed by readers, and scripted conversations in which two friends debated a topic of interest. While political critiques were present in the magazine, with discussions about the education system19 Speak Out! March–April 1984, p. 10. or the extent of individual responsibility in the quest of employment,20 E.g. Speak Out! January–February, p. 2, pp. 3–4. these were now approached through the prism of topics that concerned the youth of the Copperbelt. As Danny Chiyesu, who has been producing comics for Mission Press since 1991, explained, Speak Out! stood for ‘speaking out on all the issues about youth: smoking, sex, marriage, romance, jobs … anything to do with the youth’.21 Interview, Danny Chiyesu, Ndola, 15 July 2019. It is thus meant to be educational, but in a very different way to Orbit. Much in Speak Out! was to do with life in the city, changing social mores, and surviving in a world marked by economic hardship. These, accordingly, were the topics which the comic strips published in Speak Out! also tackled.

Whereas Icengelo, the ‘adult’ magazine, had a recurring comic character called Katona, whose jokes were written in Bemba and poked fun at daily life in a Zambian urban environment, the ‘comic’ strips that appeared in Speak Out! were not based around jokes. Most were produced by the same person, Ndola resident Michael M. Nkaka, and usually involved two characters, often a man and a woman named Friday and Frida, discussing an issue of political or societal relevance. Some of Friday and Frida’s comic strips were more on the straightforwardly moralising side. Nkaka, for example, chose to portray the dangers of drunkenness by having a drunken Friday slip on a banana peel and break his leg.22 Speak Out! January–February 1985, p. 20. Similarly, exhortations to avoid sex outside of marriage would be accompanied by warnings that it leads to abortion and AIDS.23 Speak Out! May–June 1987, p. 20. Yet, in most cases, the dialogue format enabled the expression of critical opinions on debates which do not have easy answers, and were sometimes used to air controversial points without appearing to do so. Some comic strips, for example, tackled the question of the legacy of colonialism. In that of March–April 1984, Friday comments to Frida that he does not like going to church as he dislikes the noise of the drums, and considers ‘Gregorian chant’ to be ‘the only suitable music for church’. In this case, it is Frida who was given the last word, arguing that ‘it seems you’re another one of those old colonials who can’t sever their ties with Europe. It’s about time you became an African!’24 Speak Out! March–April 1984, pp. 12–13. By far the most covered topics, however, were those of love, sex and changing gender relations. The May–June 1984 issue, for example, had Friday and Frida entangled in a debate about men and women’s role in society in which Friday argued that without a man, a woman is ‘a lonely old spinster’ while Frida exclaimed that ‘you men have ruled us like servants for far too long’.25 Speak Out! May–June 1984, pp. 12–13.

The village-town relationship is yet another topic which recurs regularly (see Figure 2.1). In the very first issue, Friday complained that he is forced to do manual labour whenever he returns to the village, feeling that, as the best student in his class, he is above such work. Frida responded: ‘you should be clever enough to see that manual work will make a man out of you. There are more ways of learning than out of books!’26 Speak Out! January–February 1984, pp. 12–13. These are but a few examples in a long list of such discussions published in comic form Speak Out! in the 1980s. The comic strips themselves had a simple graphic style and were drawn in black and white. Similarly, while Friday and Frida share space in Speak Out! with a series of other characters, they are all interchangeable: all serve as vehicles through which to discuss societal questions. In this sense, Speak Out!’s strips were an illustration of the extent to which comics, had, by this point, been fully ‘weaponised’.

In her 2016 article ‘Belgo-Congolese Transnational Comics Esthetics’, Véronique Bragard argued that post-independence Congolese bandes dessinées displayed what she calls ‘a re-fashioning of the genre’s form and themes, leading to new engaged postcolonial aesthetics.’27 Véronique Bragard, ‘Belgo-Congolese Transnational Comics Esthetics: Transcolonial Labor from Mongo Sisse’s Bingo en Belgique to Cassiau-Haurie and Baruti’s Madame Livingstone: Congo, la Grande Guerre (2014)’, Literature Compass 13, 5 (2016), pp. 332–40, p. 332. She cites the work of Mongo Awai Sisé, one of the first major comic artists who emerged in Congo in the second half of the twentieth century, as establishing the tradition of ‘the same but not quite’. By this she means that he borrowed a series of codes and aesthetics from the Belgo-French comic traditions but subverted these codes and aesthetics to tell his own story.28 Bragard, ‘Belgo-Congolese Transnational Comics Esthetics’, p. 334. Sisé’s Bingo series, for example bore some resemblance to Tintin, but in a reverse paradigm. In contrast to Tintin, Bingo does not serve as a spokesperson of any civilising mission but instead suffers the consequences of the colonial inheritance, for example when he migrates to the city to find work, only to be confronted with fraud, corruption and general inefficiency (Bingo en ville, 1981) or when a trip to Belgium confronts him with the North-South wealth gap (Bingo en Belgique, 1982). In that sense, Sisé used some of the codes of the Belgo-French comic traditions to highlight some of the grim realities which Congolese citizens faced.29 Ibid., p. 339. Similarly, the period of nationalisation and Africanisation, coinciding with a fast-changing economic and political environment, marks the beginning of a process of ‘re-appropriation’ of the medium by Copperbelt artists as they sought to distance it from its Western roots. The manner in which this reappropriation took place, along with the themes and stories tackled by the authors, evolved and varied over time, influenced by the intentions of the institutions for whom the comics were produced and also by the socio-political context in which they were produced. The faith in a future that would be urban, prosperous and technologically advanced, and the subsequent gradual deterioration of that faith, have been key features of contemporary Zambian and Katangese literature.30 Macola, ‘Imagining Village Life’, p. 23. It is not surprising therefore that they should also be central to contemporary Zambian and Katangese comics. Speak Out!’s comic strips represent the ultimate point at which, in a context of fast-changing societal and economic realities, comics become a means through which to have a conversation about these changes.