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

Against the background of ZCCM’s privatisation and Zambia’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, this chapter deals with processes of material and social ruination and renovation in one of Luanshya’s former mine townships. Based on the story of the Serve Zambia Foundation, I juxtapose material and social decay with people’s private initiative in order to renovate their community. I trace the changing role of the foundation’s current headquarters, Mpatamatu’s former Section 21 Clinic, in healthcare provision and community formation with the collapse of corporate paternalism. Created as a material manifestation of colonial and corporate paternalist control over mine labourers and their dependants, the Section 21 Clinic also offered mineworkers and their families a level of healthcare provision denied to other Copperbelt residents, and as such became a sign of mineworkers’ aspirations and entitlement. Following privatisation, the building of the former Section 21 Clinic became a site of neoliberal abandonment and private initiative.

Based on Stoler and McGranahan’s reflections on ‘imperial formations’ as ‘a broader set of practices structured in dominance’2 Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, ‘Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains’ in Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan and Peter C. Perdue (eds), Imperial Formations (Oxford: James Currey, 2007), pp. 3–44, p. 8., Stoler’s development of the concept of ‘ruination’,3 Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’, Cultural Anthropology 23, 2 (2008), pp. 191–219; ‘Introduction “The Rot Remains”: From Ruins to Ruination’ in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 1–35; Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times (Durham NC: Duke University Press 2016), pp. 336–79. and Gupta’s work on ‘renovation’ complementing it,4 Pamila Gupta. Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), pp. 133–5. I investigate practices of appropriation and reappropriation in the context of Mpatamatu. The establishment of the Copperbelt as an ‘extractive space’ had been realised through a variety of corporate practices that represented ‘polities of dislocation, processes of dispersion, appropriation, and displacement.’5 On ‘extractive space’, see Tomas Frederiksen, ‘Unearthing Rule: Mining, Power and the Political Ecology of Extraction in Colonial Zambia’, PhD. Thesis, University of Manchester, 2010, p. 237; Stoler and McGranahan, ‘Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains’, p. 8. These practices were carried out by different agents of the British South Africa Company (BSAC) and were ultimately structured by British colonialism in Southern Africa. This context produced enclosed corporate living environments like Mpatamatu, one of many mine-built townships on the Copperbelt. The trajectory of buildings like Section 21 Clinic reflects the changing characteristics of such an enclosed living environment. It also illustrates what this particular material and social environment meant for its residents.

Finally, I show how, amid ruination, private initiative has opened up a process of local renovation and global reconnection in recent decades. This process has encompassed the reappropriation of corporate remains, such as the Section 21 Clinic, resulting in a renewed reference of such buildings to the township’s social context. The transformations in Mpatamatu from its construction in the late 1950s to my fieldwork in the late 2010s offer a unique perspective on social change among a mine labour force, on the industrial history of the Copperbelt in general and the social consequences of ZCCM’s privatisation in particular.

The first part of the chapter is dedicated to the inception of Mpatamatu, the township’s social provisions and the role of former Section 21 Clinic. I look at the building as a planned health facility within a company town of a mining corporation. In the second part, I focus on the disintegration of Mpatamatu as a company town. I consider the consequences of the separation of the mine’s social provisions from its core business of mineral extraction. Section 21 Clinic became a building left behind, not regarded as a social investment by the mine anymore but instead as a government liability. In the final third part, I follow the reappropriation of the building that was Section 21 Clinic and how it was turned into the headquarters of the Serve Zambia Foundation. The foundation’s story illustrates the renovative practices of people at work, which re-embedded a particular material building in local social life, reconnected the township with the outside world through a corporate ruin, and which restructured relationships of dependence within the former mine township of Mpatamatu.

The first houses in Mpatamatu were occupied in November 1959.3 In fact, this move was planned for July 1959. However, a handwritten note on the report reads: ‘Actual move made in November 1959’: ZCCM-IH, 11.2.3D, RACM, ‘Social Services at Mpatamatu Township (draft)’, 1960, p. 6. In contrast to Luanshya’s first African mine township Roan, Mpatamatu was a ‘“new” company town’.4 See Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 5, 6–7, 70–75, 151. It did not evolve from a mine camp with its makeshift huts for African mineworkers. On the contrary, Mpatamatu was planned in detail on the drawing board. Its location was a direct consequence of the ore extraction underground towards the west, as depicted on the map in Figure 7.2.5 The plan illustrates the proximity of the African mine townships to the three main shafts and the movement of residential area development with the ore extraction westwards: ZCCM-IH, 12.5.7E, RST Roan Antelope Division, ‘Contract CS19 for the Erection of 200 to 325 Houses and Services thereto in Roan and Mpatamatu Townships’, June 1964. The plans by Collings and Schaerer were rooted in the colonial spatial practices of zoning, i.e. the separation of different land uses, and of racial segregation. These practices had already been established within the gold and diamond mining industries of Southern Africa.6 See Hugh Macmillan, ‘Mining, Housing and Welfare in South Africa and Zambia: A Historical View’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 30, 4 (2012), pp. 539–50, p. 539; Harri Englund, ‘The Village in the City, the City in the Village: Migrants in Lilongwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies 28, 1 (2002), pp. 137–54, p. 140; John Gardiner, ‘Some Aspects of the Establishment of Towns in Zambia during the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties’, Zambian Urban Studies 3 (1970), pp. 1–33, p. 10. The self-sustaining character of Mpatamatu was the material realisation of RACM’s goal to create an enclosed residential environment that allowed for the supervision of its African labour force.

The garden-like character of Luanshya’s European areas had been already noted before Mpatamatu was built.7 Malcolm Watson, malaria expert at the Ross Institute for Tropical Diseases in London, noted that RACM had constructed ‘townships laid out like garden cities’. See Malcolm Watson, ‘A Conquest of Disease’ in Malcom Watson (ed.), African Highway: The Battle for Health in Central Africa (London: John Murray, 1953), p. 69. The city’s layout was influenced by the British Garden City movement, however, as Bigon noted on the diffusion of these particular town planning concepts, as an ‘anti-social’ implementation of the original Howardian idea rooted in the racial residential segregation of colonial Africa.8 Liora Bigon, ‘Garden Cities in Colonial Africa: A Note on Historiography’, Planning Perspectives 28, 3 (2013), pp. 477–85, pp. 480, 482. British town-planners promoted the ‘garden city’ in colonies like Northern Rhodesia especially in the inter-war years, turning colonialism into a ‘vehicle’ of urban planning models.9 Robert Home, ‘From Barrack Compounds to the Single-Family House: Planning Worker Housing in Colonial Natal and Northern Rhodesia’, Planning Perspectives 15, 4 (2000), pp. 327–47, p. 330; A. D. King, ‘Exporting Planning: The Colonial and Neo-Colonial Experience’ in Gordon E. Cherry (ed.), Shaping an Urban World (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 203–26, p. 206.

On the Copperbelt with its corporate mining settlements, the ‘garden city’ represented a twofold twin composition: separate government and corporate parts of town with each comprising European and African townships. Following Schumaker,10 Lyn Schumaker, ‘The Mosquito Taken at the Beerhall: Malaria Research and Control on Zambia’s Copperbelt’ in Paul W. Geissler and Catherine Molyneux (eds), Evidence, Ethos and Experiment (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), pp. 403–28, p. 413. I see a substantial influence of town planning ideas going back to the Garden City movement on Luanshya and more specifically on the plans for Mpatamatu. Figure 7.3 depicts the original 1957 plan for section 21. It includes tree-lined streets, hierarchised roads, alternating house directions, changing street layouts and garden-like playgrounds.11 This illustrates the self-sustaining character of the township’s sections and shows the influence of elements of the Garden City movement in British town planning on Collings and Schaerer’s work. Section 21 Clinic was opened in 1959 on the plot originally reserved for a church at the centre of the section: ZCCM-IH, 21.6.2F, drawing number NR.RA2, RACM, ‘Proposed New African Township: Report on Outline Advisory Development Plan and Detailed Planning of First Portion’, April 1957. Sections 22 and 23 were separated by a park belt. However, these traces of the Garden City movement were only visible in the older sections of Mpatamatu. Budgetary limitations in the 1970s resulted in a rather spartan layout for the township’s sections 25, 26 and 27 that were developed later to accommodate labour for the Baluba underground mine.12 The difference becomes quite obvious after a single glance at a map of Mpatamatu, see Open Street Map (OSM), ‘Node: Mpatamatu’, n.d.: www.openstreetmap.org/node/2567143540 (accessed 2 October 2020). Map data on the township in general and the social welfare buildings in particular was collected by myself during fieldwork and entered into OSM by Erik Falke.

As the conflict over African unionisation increased in the 1950s, mining companies attempted to prevent the organised mobilisation of the labour force through paternalistic provisions of social welfare.13 See Jane L. Parpart, Labor and Capital on the African Copperbelt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), pp. 140–43, 152. This drew on and extended earlier corporate attempts to use welfare provision to compete with Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK) in Katanga for experienced mine labour. ‘Welfare’ is an ambiguous term in this context. The provisions were not acts of charity by the mining companies. They did not represent the materialised Polanyian ‘counter-movement’ by the colonial government in order to ‘check the action of the market’.14 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 2001), pp. 136, 79. Rather, these provisions were corporate means of social control. As shown above, point 3 of Collings and Schaerer’s development plan explicitly references those social welfare buildings, among them the Section 21 Clinic.

Given this history, in Luanshya, social welfare buildings, except schools and churches, represented a particular type of corporate infrastructure.15 My understanding of ‘infrastructure’ goes back to Larkin’s conceptualisation of it as an underlying ‘technical system’ below (Latin infra), see Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 5. Moreover, the term allows me to relate it to ‘organized practices’ in Star and Ruhleder’s relational understanding of the term, see Susan L. Star and Karen Ruhleder, ‘Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces’, Information Systems Research 7, 1 (1996), pp. 111–34, p. 113. As such, I use the term to grasp a material network of buildings that was related to corporate practices underlying the social life in a mine township. This infrastructure was planned, constructed and maintained by the mining company. It was preserved in Mpatamatu through many changes in mine ownership, from RACM in colonial days, to the Roan Selection Trust (RST)’s Luanshya Division after Zambia’s independence in 1964, and then Roan Consolidated Mines (RCM) and ZCCM Luanshya Division after the copper industry’s nationalisation in 1969/1970. Four bars, two mine clubs and a sports complex were meant to keep the dominantly male labour force in Mpatamatu occupied after work. Three community centres integrated mineworker’s wives and children into the mine structures. Most importantly, first-aid stations and mine clinics monitored the labour force’s health and reproduction for the mining company.

The first report of the ‘African Welfare Clinic’, later Section 21 Clinic, in Mpatamatu that I found in the archives dated to December 1959. It was issued only one month after the first residents had moved into the township. The report registered a total monthly attendance of 158 men, 400 women and 1705 children.16 ZCCM-IH, 12.7.3B, Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland Ministry of Health – Northern Rhodesia, ‘African Welfare Clinic: Mpatamatu Clinic R.A.C.M. LTD: Report for the Month of December 1959’, December 1959. Based on Demissie’s, Home’s and Njoh’s understanding of the Foucauldian notion of power translated into built environment,17 Fassil Demissie, ‘In the Shadow of the Gold Mines: Migrancy and Mine Housing in South Africa’, Housing Studies 13, 4 (1998), pp. 445–69, p. 454; Home, ‘From Barrack Compounds to the Single-Family House’, p. 327; Ambe J. Njoh, ‘Urban Planning as a Tool of Power and Socio-Political Control in Colonial Africa’, Planning Perspectives 24, 3 (2009), pp. 301–17, p. 302. I understand Mpatamatu’s social welfare infrastructure as the groundwork of the mine’s disciplinary architecture that defined social life in the township. Buildings like Section 21 Clinic provided for ‘the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of phenomena of population to economic processes’.18 Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin Books, 1998), pp. 140–41. At the same time, the buildings of social welfare represented an aspirational architecture that provided certainty and opportunities. Buildings like Section 21 Clinic were places where mineworkers were born and where they returned for the birth of their children. The quality of the healthcare services was superior to local government clinics. Extended family members living with mine employees could be registered as dependants, expanding corporate healthcare far beyond the directly employed household. This particular corporate infrastructure established what Epstein identified as the ‘“unitary” structure of the mine’ during his fieldwork in Luanshya from 1953 to 1954:

The ‘unitary’ structure of the mine was a representation of institutionalised corporate paternalism. The mining company did not only employ men as mineworkers but also ‘cared for’ them after work. It ‘cared for’ the livelihood of their dependants. The social welfare buildings were one of many ‘strategies of inclusion and exclusion’20 See Günther Schlee, How Enemies Are Made: Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflicts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), pp. 35–42. within the fatherly (Latin paternus) relationship of the mining company to its labour force. Corporate paternalism on the Copperbelt was built on a shared identity, i.e. being employed by, part of and dependent on the mine. Management and labour force were part of the same ‘body’ (Latin corpus). In biographical interviews with Mpatamatu’s residents, it became clear to me, as to Ferguson before, that these ‘paternalistic relations of dependence were … central to workers’ identities’.21 James Ferguson, ‘Declarations of Dependence: Labour, Personhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2013), pp. 223–42, p. 228. I learned how mine employees’ identities in Mpatamatu had been informed by a material, social and financial interconnection with the mine before its reprivatisation in 1997.

Boniface Mwanza explained to me how he had not only been a miner under ZCCM’s Luanshya Division because he worked as a sampling supervisor. Every major step in his life unfolded within the corporate material provisions: from his birth at Roan Antelope Mine Hospital in 1960 to his consultations as a boy at Mpatamatu’s Section 23 Clinic, the housing allocations relative to his pay grade, marital status and family size, to the birth of his first child at the very same Roan Antelope Mine Hospital and the healthcare services provided to his wife and children at Section 25 Clinic. Looking back at this integration of social life and material environment, he recalled: ‘The company had a human face.’ He told me about the ambulance service available in Mpatamatu and how patient cards were transferred to the nearest clinic from one’s mine house. The health facilities followed mineworker families, whenever they were allocated a different house due to changes in work, marital or family status. Boniface Mwanza felt that he and his family were taken care of by the mine.22 Interviews, Boniface Mwanza, Mpatamatu, 28 April and 3 May 2016.

Most mine employees were men, and mine company policies helped to establish them as successful husbands and fathers, whose families relied on them for access to housing and healthcare. But, as the life of a former typist born in 1964 illustrates, women’s employment with the mine could disrupt this gender hierarchy. She had been successful in a secretary course in 1986 and first worked at ZCCM Luanshya Division’s General Office before joining the Engineering Department. She was allocated a mine house. When she married, her supervisor made sure her husband was transferred from Nkana to Luanshya Division and not the other way around. ‘We were a good team’, she remarked. This was an extraordinary move in the male-dominated industry of the time. However, with the birth of her children she retreated to the domestic, albeit still contributing to the household income by tailoring.23 Interview, resident of Mpatamatu, Luanshya, 22 September 2016.

Most enduring, however, was the construction of the mineworkers’ self-image through the financial dependence on the mine. It generated opportunities that vanished after ZCCM’s privatisation. These opportunities were what people missed in general and employees of the new Chinese mine operator in particular. Martin Mulenga, a former accountant at RCM’s General Office from 1971 to 1981, first introduced me to what many Zambians consider the economic favouritism towards mineworkers. Mineworkers enjoyed benefits far beyond those available to most Zambians, won through continuous union activism going back to the early days of the mine. Electricity was free, staple food was available at reduced prices, with one 50 kg bag of mealie meal included in the salary.24 Interview, Martin Mulenga, Mpatamatu, 13 July 2016. Later, I found its successes to be mirrored in the pay slips I discussed with two of my research participants. ‘They were very proud, the miners’, the wife noted with a glance at her husband’s pay slip. She was a teacher and knew about the tremendous differences in remuneration and privileges.25 Interview, residents of Mpatamatu, Mpatamatu, 4 August 2016. Erik Kazembe, a former mineworker and trade unionist, further unpacked the specificity of the financial interrelationship with the mine for me when we studied the ‘deductions’ side of the pay slip together: a subsidised rent, a savings scheme, a loan scheme and additional subsidised mealie meal rations on top of the company’s free ‘mealie meal assistance’ mentioned above.26 Interview, Erik Kazembe, Luanshya, 20 September 2016. These possibilities left their mark and helped construct an identity around mine employees and their entitlements.

The material, social and financial relationships of dependence illustrated above were exclusive to mineworkers and their dependants. African mineworkers, however, did not have access to the same level of service as did their European managers. Both groups were part of the same ‘corpus’, but in different hierarchical positions marked by job title, remuneration, residence, healthcare services and recreational activities. African mineworkers were simultaneously included based on corporate sameness and excluded based on racial difference. As such, corporate paternalism lived off a hierarchical power difference structuring the entire corporation based on the colour bar.

Until the nationalisation of Zambia’s copper industry, substantial promotion opportunities were out of most African mineworkers’ reach rendering job positions with major decision-making capacities unattainable.27 Michael Burawoy concluded that the process of Zambianisation in the post-independence years of the copper industry remained ineffective: Michael Burawoy, The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), p. 114. Even without a colour bar, promotion was only available to a few African workers as the number of higher paid, skilled jobs in the industry was low. Furthermore, real-term salaries for unskilled jobs did not rise sufficiently after Zambia’s independence in 1964 to meet mineworker expectations. The racial divide going back to the colour bar is still reflected in the Copperbelt’s spatial population distribution today. In fact, the colonial order has been revived by companies with an expatriate labour force. Socio-economic differences between Zambians and the migrant workforce from Europe, North America and Asia are mapped onto former colonial definitions of European and African parts of Copperbelt towns.

Section 21 Clinic was at the centre of the mine’s paternalist infrastructure in Mpatamatu. It was the primary health facility for residents of sections 21 and 22: sick mineworkers visited the clinic off shift, their wives and children could access care using a mineworker’s identification number, pregnant women were looked after and children were born, clinic staff vaccinated township residents and launched public health campaigns against parasites, malaria and tuberculosis. The clinic service for mineworkers’ wives, e.g. nutrition programmes,28 ZCCM-IH, 11.3.5B, ‘Community Development Report’, March 1970. was integrated with the provisions at the ‘women welfare centres’.

Clinics had been among the first corporate welfare buildings in the Copperbelt mine townships. The health of mine labour was crucial for production and its supervision part of employment relations right from the start. After the reprivatisation of Zambia’s copper industry and the neoliberal restructuring of the sector, clinics remained among the few social welfare provisions that, although selectively, continued to be run by the mines. They are the relics of corporate paternalism, now termed corporate social responsibility measures, within the mining companies of today.

The social welfare infrastructure was abandoned and no longer considered part of the corporation. This was despite the fact that the so-called development agreements, which legalised the transfer of ZCCM’s divisions from public into private management, explicitly stated that the successor companies ‘assumed ownership, operational control and responsibility for the social assets connected to the mine’.3 Quoted from the development agreement between the Government of the Republic of Zambia and Roan Antelope Copper Mining Corporation of Zambia (RAMCOZ), see RAID, Zambia, Deregulation and the Denial of Human Rights: Submission to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Oxford, 2000), p. 188, based on Clifford Chance, ‘Development Agreement: The Government of the Republic of Zambia and Roan Antelope Mining Corporation of Zambia plc’ (London, 1997), pp. 17–20, courtesy of RAID. However, investors primarily sought to generate capital on a short-term basis from copper production. They did not want to continue the mines as sites of social existence and to finance infrastructures unrelated to the production process. Based on Larmer’s work in Luanshya and a Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) report on the consequences of ZCCM’s break up,4 See Miles Larmer, ‘Reaction and Resistance to Neo-liberalism in Zambia’, Review of African Political Economy 32, 103 (2005), 29–45; RAID, Zambia, Deregulation and the Denial of Human Rights. Gewald and Soeters came to the following conclusion concerning the reprivatisation of Luanshya’s mine: ‘Through the relentless pursuit of profit for investment capital, the liberalization and privatization of the mines has led to the destruction of the social structure of the mines, not only in Luanshya/Baluba but more generally.’5 Jan-Bart Gewald and Sebastiaan Soeters, ‘African Miners and Shape-Shifting Capital Flight: The Case of Luanshya/Baluba’, in Alistair Fraser and Miles Larmer (eds), Zambia, Mining, and Neoliberalism: Boom and Bust on the Globalized Copperbelt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010), pp. 155–83, p. 165.

Luanshya and Mpatamatu, the residential township of the majority of Baluba mineworkers, deserve particular attention in this process of ‘the destruction of the social structure of the mines’. First, the mine in Luanshya was one of the oldest on the Copperbelt and the first to be sold. It had an extensive social welfare infrastructure. Its reprivatisation, and its management in the following years had an impact on corporate behaviour at other mines. Second, the reprivatisation process was overshadowed by corruption charges. ZCCM’s Privatisation Negotiation Team, headed by Francis Kaunda (not related to the former President Kenneth Kaunda), awarded the sale of Luanshya Division to Binani Industries. This company was a scrap metal dealer inexperienced in copper mining. It had not conducted underground studies at the mine in Luanshya. Third, as noted above, the development agreements transferred the ownership, control and responsibility for the social welfare buildings to private transnational corporations and their local subsidiaries. The new neoliberal mode of production with its far-reaching cost-cutting measures reduced the mine’s social assets to the status of being ‘redundant’ in Bauman’s terms: ‘supernumerary, unneeded, of no use’.6 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), p. 12. Only one year after the sale of ZCCM’s Luanshya Division, it was clear that the social welfare buildings’ maintenance would be permanently discontinued. Mpatamatu became the scene of civil unrest culminating in protesters fighting with the local mine police forces in 1998.7 RAID, Zambia, Deregulation and the Denial of Human Rights, pp. 154, 184.

Binani Industry’s subsidiary Roan Antelope Copper Mining Corporation of Zambia (RAMCOZ) used several clauses in the development agreement to avoid a direct engagement with the social assets connected to the mine. They contracted out the management of the social welfare facilities. This accelerated the abandonment of this particular corporate infrastructure, a practice that had already started under ZCCM,8 See ZCCM-IH, 12.8.9F, ZCCM, ‘Leasing of Mine Taverns’, 27 February 1985. and was continued after RAMCOZ went bankrupt in 2000 and the mine’s management was taken over first by a private and then a government receiver. When the mine was resold in 2003, the majority of the mine’s social assets remained with RAMCOZ in receivership and were not transferred to the new operator Luanshya Copper Mines (LCM). This legal position downgraded the buildings from an integral part of the mine to a government liability separated from it. Consequently, the buildings were legally detached from the company operating the mine. This separation, as Fraser and Lungu retraced, caused the unitary structure of the Copperbelt mines to collapse:

The break up of ZCCM completely redefined Mpatamatu. From an integrated urban mine township with corporate provisions, a company town directly linked to the extraction of copper and with little involvement by the government, Mpatamatu gradually dissolved into a disconnected settlement. Its inhabitants lost the ‘way of life’ they had practised under ZCCM and their living environment became marked by what Patience Mususa has described as ‘villagisation’. For Mususa, considering villagisation is a way of ‘thinking about place regardless of how it is politically categorised (urban or rural), [focusing] much more on what a place affords its inhabitants, and the affective experiences it generates.’10 Patience Mususa, ‘There used to be order: Life on the Copperbelt After the Privatisation of the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines’, PhD. Thesis, University of Cape Town, 2014, pp. 31, 38. Devisch first defined ‘villagisation’ in his work on Kinshasa in the 1970s as ‘a process of psychic and social endogenisation of modern city life, thus allowing the migrant to surmount the schizophrenic split between the traditional, rural and “pagan” life as against the new urban, Christian world’. René Devisch, ‘“Pillaging Jesus”: Healing Churches and the Villagisation of Kinshasa’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 66, 4 (1996), pp. 555–86, p. 573. Mpatamatu became a detached part of the municipality of Luanshya, full of abandoned corporate remains, with insufficient government involvement to make up for what the company no longer provided.

For Mpatamatu’s unemployed, day labourers, farmers and government workers, practices of subsistence, consumption and existence rooted in rural life regained prominence. Laurence Banda, a former mineworker under RCM, ZCCM and RAMCOZ and a community health worker at Section 26 Clinic at the time of my fieldwork, exclaimed: ‘The only hope we have is going into the bush!’11 Interview, Laurence Banda, Mpatamatu, 21 September 2016. Based on my further observations, I would add: ‘As well as bringing the bush to Mpatamatu!’ The situation was dramatic as these practices happened in a context of a lost urbanity formerly provided by the mine operators: vegetable and maize farming where once groceries were home delivered, water procurement from wells to houses that had once running water, cooking on charcoal with imbaula braziers where once electric stoves were used to prepare meals.

Mpatamatu’s residents experienced a process of being disconnected from important points of reference: the mines, its labour force, its townships and its global mining community. Ferguson had earlier termed this experience ‘abjection’ and defined it as a ‘process of being thrown aside, expelled, or discarded’.12 James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 236. Mineworkers and their families lost access to buildings like Section 21 Clinic. Simultaneously, these buildings lost the people who worked at them, maintained them and used them in their everyday lives. Wisdom Zulu, who had joined the Civil Engineering Department of ZCCM’s Luanshya Division in 1991, recalled how he carried out regular maintenance measures at buildings like Section 21 Clinic. This corporate investment in the social welfare buildings was discontinued with RAMCOZ.13 Interview, Wisdom Zulu, Mpatamatu, 18 September 2016. The social welfare buildings lost their social role for the mining community and became corporate debris in a township abandoned by the mine.

Stoler conceptualised the ‘corrosive process’ emanating from a ruinous material site in what she termed ‘ruination’. The concept provided a tool to catch the ‘material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities and things’ while at the same time shifting the focus ‘not on inert remains but on their vital refiguration’.14 Stoler, ‘Imperial Debris’, p. 194. I observed this ‘vital refiguration’ in manifold ways in Mpatamatu. However, the refiguring practices were very distinct from the material and social ruination around them. They were creative. Stoler has pointed to ruins as ‘epicentres’ of human actions,15 Ibid., p. 198. however, she still framed their creative refiguration under the concept of ‘ruination’ and a corrosive process.

Based on her study of the reappropriation of leisured spaces in postcolonial Beira (Mozambique), Gupta came to understand people’s actions as ‘distinct forms of renovation amidst ruination.’16 Gupta. Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World, p. 135. Similarly, Mpatamatu’s abandoned social welfare buildings represented sites of resourcefulness. Gupta rooted the concept of ‘renovation’ in the capacity of people to creatively tinker with their material environment and its twofold form of expression by being reviving and restorative. ‘Renovation’ described a reappropriation of buildings for both new and old usages. In this sense, Gupta’s exploration into renovative practices possessed the same multi-temporal dimension that Stoler saw in ‘ruination’ as a process of abandonment, decay and refiguration.17 Ibid., pp. 129–30, 133–4. This chapter mainly focuses on Serve Zambia Foundation’s headquarters, Section 21 Clinic. The building’s current usage represents one of the many ways in which the mine’s former social welfare buildings in general and the mine clinics in particular have been reappropriated. Interestingly, the developments at Mpatamatu’s four mine clinics (Section 21, Section 23, Section 25 and Section 26 Clinics) represent the three main trajectories of the township’s social welfare buildings after the reprivatisation of the mine: (i) continuation as a corporate facility; (ii) takeover by the government; and (iii) reappropriation by private companies and individuals. Therefore, I would like to put the story of Section 21 Clinic into the broader context of Mpatamatu’s other three former mine clinics. Private initiative, let alone joint community action, was only one of many ways how these buildings were reappropriated after the mine stopped maintaining a social welfare infrastructure.

Section 23 Clinic is now the only mine clinic in Mpatamatu. At the time of my fieldwork, it was managed by China Nonferrous Metal Mining (Group) Corporation’s (CNMC) subsidiary CNMC Luanshya Copper Mines (LCM). The Chinese state-owned company had taken over the mine in 2009. While in the past mine health facilities in Mpatamatu were superior to the single government clinic, they were now considered substandard and mine employees preferred the services of the government clinics. In conversations with me about the last remaining corporate health facility of the township, residents frequently noted Section 23 Clinic’s dilapidated state. During the time of my fieldwork, LCM’s corporate social responsibility programme was invisible in Mpatamatu as possibly indicated by the street writing in Figure 7.4.18 In 2009, Luanshya’s mine was taken over by China Nonferrous Metal Mining Corporation (CNMC)’s subsidiary CNMC Luanshya Copper Mines (LCM). The author of the phrase ‘Welcome to half China’ on the intersection of Kalulu and Kolwe Street between Sections 23 and 24 must have wondered what the Chinese management meant for the township of Mpatamatu.

Section 26 Clinic has become the central government health facility for the entire township of Mpatamatu. The Ministry of Health took it over in 2008. The clinic offered 24-hour services including vaccinations, family planning, deliveries, HIV testing, antiretroviral therapy and an outpatient desk. According to a clinic staff member, respiratory tract infections, diarrhoea, malaria and HIV/AIDS were the main health challenges.19 Interview, Section 26 clinic staff member, Mpatamatu, 9 May 2016. Section 26 Clinic’s importance to the township’s inhabitants has increased not only because of the relatively good service quality but also, and importantly, because the share of mine employees among Mpatamatu’s residents dropped significantly since the mass retrenchments in the early 2000s. Consequently, more and more people from all sections of Mpatamatu were not entitled to use mine facilities, and thus became reliant on the government clinic for healthcare.

Section 25 Clinic was first rented out by RAMCOZ in receivership from the early 2000s until the early 2010s. In 2015, when it was taken over by the Ministry of Health, the clinic was extended and renovated. It stood idle most of the time during my fieldwork in Mpatamatu in 2016. However, it was used as a polling station during the 2016 presidential elections as depicted in Figure 7.5.20 The building of Section 25 Clinic was used by the Serve Zambia Foundation for medical services from the early 2000s until 2015. After the takeover of the Ministry of Health, the building was extended and renovated. It stood idle during the largest part of my fieldwork. However, it was used as a polling station during the presidential elections on 11 August 2016, and reopened in 2018. Eventually, it reopened as a government clinic in 2018.21 Field notes by author, 11 August 2016. See also United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund Eastern and Southern Africa, ‘MDGi Hands Over Four Refurbished Copperbelt Health Facilities to Ministry of Health’, 5 June 2017, www.unicef.org/zambia/press-releases/mdgi-hands-over-four-refurbished-health-centres-ministry-health-lusaka-and (accessed 21 June 2020). What becomes clear from the trajectories of these three clinics is that mine company health facilities both declined in quality in the township, and became accessible to far fewer of Mpatamatu’s residents, increasing the importance of government healthcare facilities. This development contributed to the changing character of Mpatamatu from a corporate to a municipal township.

In 1997, when Luanshya’s mine was sold to Binani Industries and taken over by RAMCOZ, Andrew Kayekesi was working as a pastor in Mpatamatu. He observed the deteriorating health situation in the township. He was also aware of the consequences this would have for the areas around Mpatamatu. His occupational background was in nursing, so he started ‘Mpatamatu Home Based Care’ at a time when the central health infrastructure in the township was falling apart. The mine no longer sustained a community around central paternalist provision. Andrew Kayekesi’s aim was to overcome the healthcare divide that had been established and maintained by the mine during the colonial and state-owned era. During this period, there were relatively good urban health facilities for mineworkers and their dependants in corporate mine townships like Mpatamatu, but had been little or no health service available in areas close to but outside the mine townships. Andrew Kayekesi started his work in the Mpata Hills west of the township. With a mobile clinic that he manned together with volunteers, and supported by collaborations with regional hospitals, he tried to address rural health challenges and keep up health services in Mpatamatu.

With the HIV/AIDS epidemic spreading, Andrew Kayekesi formally registered his undertaking and founded the Serve Zambia Foundation in 2000. The foundation trained community volunteers in order to enable people to support each other. When more and more parents died and the number of child-headed homes rose, he started a child care programme. He wanted to teach children concrete skills in order to secure their livelihoods in the future. The focus on skill training, long established with mining companies in the Copperbelt and represented by the mine’s crafts school in Luanshya, led to the foundation of the Mpatamatu Business and Technical College, an institution affiliated with the Serve Zambia Foundation. The college offered classes in auto mechanics, tailoring, bricklaying, plastering, metal fabrication and computer usage.

From the initiative in skills training, the Serve Zambia Foundation extended its work into household food security. It started to provide families with seeds, fertilisers and small livestock. It started its own farm. The focus on food illustrated how much life for Mpatamatu’s residents had changed. They had been urban consumers, who now did not even have the money to buy mealie meal. They had to grow their own crops and bring the maize to a local mill or pound it manually. Subsistence agriculture had always been the back-up strategy for food purchases based on mine wage labour in times of crisis, but its importance to family survival strategies increased dramatically during this period.1 These ‘rural’ practices had always been part of Copperbelt town life crosscutting the rural-urban divide; see Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: Changing Africa (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 124; Jane Parpart, ‘The Household and the Mine Shaft: Gender and Class Struggle on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1926–64’ Journal of Southern African Studies 13, 1 (1986), pp. 36–56, p. 48; and Iva Peša, ‘Crops and Copper: Agriculture and Urbanism on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950–2000’ Journal of Southern African Studies 46, 3 (2020), pp. 527–45.

Andrew Kayekesi and the Serve Zambia Foundation increasingly took over the provision of services formerly offered by the mine. When the formerly corporate pipes bringing water into Mpatamatu were mismanaged under the private successor company, the foundation drilled bore holes for residents to procure water. From 2009 to 2010, Andrew Kayekesi was the mayor of Luanshya. He witnessed the ongoing dependence of his town’s municipal budget on the operation of the mine, and so attempted to work with LCM to improve township facilities. In particular, he considered youth activities to be crucial, and was convinced that when sports was on the decline, the youth was on the decline. Unfortunately, I learned that LCM ceased its financial commitment to Mpatamatu’s local football club shortly afterwards, in 2012.2 Interview, Secretary of Mpatamatu United Football Club, Mpatamatu, 15 June 2016. For more on the relationship between football clubs and Copperbelt mining companies, see Chipande, Chapter 4. Kayekesi’s political engagement gradually increased and he ran, unsuccessfully, for the office of the local Member of Parliament in the 2016 presidential elections.

The Serve Zambia Foundation is financed with the help of churches overseas. As Andrew Kayekesi stated, ‘NGOs come, NGOs go, but the church stays’.3 Andrew Kayekesi interview. Mpatamatu was home to several churches. Very similar to Haynes’ field site in Kitwe, the largest congregations belong to groups established by missionaries: the Catholic and Seventh Day Adventist churches, and the United Church of Zambia. Other Christian groups such as the Baptist and Dutch Reformed Church as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses are also present. Moreover, there are more than a dozen Pentecostal groups.4 See Naomi Haynes, Moving By the Spirit: Pentecostal Social Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), p. 29. I mapped Mpatamatu’s church buildings during fieldwork, see Open Street Map (OSM), ‘Node: Mpatamatu’, www.openstreetmap.org/node/2567143540, accessed 2 October 2020. This explains why so many of the foundation’s projects addressed church communities. Although they had been present under ZCCM and before, these communities were relegated to a place under the corporate community established and maintained by the mine. The collapse of the corporate community brought forward underlying mechanisms of community building emanating from Christian congregations.

The Serve Zambia Foundation put Mpatamatu back on the map for people in and outside Luanshya. During one of my many walks across the township, I was asked: ‘Are you with Mr Kayekesi?’ Foreigners were associated with him, as he confirmed later, because of his many international acquaintances and donors.5 Field notes by author, 4 June 2016. Back in conversation with the staff member of Serve Zambia Foundation, she introduced me to the foundation’s current projects. They were all administered from the building of the former Section 21 Clinic (Figure 7.6).6 The Section 21 Clinic is close to the main road leading into Mpatamatu. At the time of fieldwork, the building was used as the headquarters of the Serve Zambia Foundation. The porch and area in front of the main entrance was used for meetings and group activities.

However, this particular site of renovation was surrounded by ruined materiality. The tarmac of the road leading to the clinic was potholed, street lights broken and dysfunctional. The plot next to the foundation, which seemed to have been never developed, was full of dirt-filled grass, criss-crossed by foot paths. The neighbouring Mpatamatu Primary School, originally founded in 1959 as a ‘government school for natives’,7 Interview, teacher at Mpatamatu Primary School, Mpatamatu, 9 August 2016. was in a dire state. No major renovations had taken place since its construction. The former Section 21 Housing Office opposite the clinic stood idle. A housekeeper dozed in front of its door. After ZCCM’s privatisation, it first had been rented out and later sold to Bayport Financial Services. After the closure of the underground mine at Baluba in September 2015, the branch office was placed under maintenance.8 Interview, Bayport Financial Services Luanshya Office Staff, Luanshya, 5 May 2016. The surrounding former mine houses were marked by shattered walls and patched roofs, showing obvious signs of material decay, mirroring the limited economic means of their now private owners and tenants.

The staff member emphasised that ‘the only thing we really do here [i.e. in the sense of a community service] is the computer lab’. It was used by students who were trained at the Mpatamatu Business and Technical College. This assessment was far too humble. In the reception area day-to-day work was coordinated and volunteers instructed. A secretary in Andrew Kayekesi’s office communicated with local, national and international partners. Posters on the walls graphically put the foundation into a network ranging from North American to European church organisations. Behind another door a tailoring workshop hid. Two staff members produced clothing for sale and school uniforms to equip children that were supported by the foundation. The porch and area in front of the main entrance was used for meetings and group activities. The plot and building teemed with activity.

In a church networking project, the foundation helped to raise awareness for orphans and vulnerable children, youth and people with HIV/AIDS among other church communities. Its aim was to mobilise communities to address these issues. Many people in Mpatamatu were ‘positive’, as a nurse put it. The project was funded by the US-American non-denominational megachurch Willow Creek Community Church. In the ‘Project Addressing Problems Affecting Child-Headed Homes’ supported by the Finland Swedish Baptist Union, the foundation specifically worked with double orphans (both parents deceased). The project involved 350 households in Mpatamatu. It focused on food security and education for the affected children. Foundation staff would go out, visit homes, coordinate with the grandparent generation, offer psycho-social support, and assistance with school fees, books and uniforms. In conversations with different head teachers at Mpatamatu’s schools, the Serve Zambia Foundation frequently came up as sponsor of particular students.

The third project ‘Expanded Church Response to HIV’ dealt further with how church communities could respond to HIV/AIDS. The programme was funded by USAID through the Zambia Family (ZAMFAM) project. Orphans and vulnerable children were the main target group. Among them, sexual abuse cases had been common. Orphans in their desperation, explained the staff member to me, tried to generate an income through the sale of their bodies. Generally, the situation had improved when looking back to the early days of the Serve Zambia Foundation. Awareness campaigns had increased people’s understanding of HIV/AIDS. The availability of antiretroviral therapy and T-cell tests in the township made life possible with the virus.9 Serve Zambia Foundation staff member interview.

From a building left behind by the mine, Section 21 Clinic became the headquarters of a local NGO with projects funded by international donors. Andrew Kayekesi and Serve Zambia Foundation’s staff members and volunteers revived the building with new usages such as the computer lab or a tailoring workshop. At the same time, the foundation restored past uses of the building by offering medical services and using it as the administrative office of home-based care projects in Mpatamatu. The space of the building gave people engaged with the community the possibility to react to the needs of Mpatamatu’s residents.

In view of Mpatamatu’s transformation after ZCCM’s privatisation, the Serve Zambia Foundation worked to fill the void left behind by the state-owned company. Its work reconnected the building with the community and facilitated a new social role for former Section 21 Clinic. An abandoned material structure was brought back into community service. The private initiative behind the foundation had turned around the direction of social embeddedness of the former corporate social welfare building. From a material manifestation of top-down corporate social control and exclusive healthcare provision in service of an entire bounded community, the building became the headquarters of a small-scale bottom-up renovation project seeking to provide healthcare to the poorest and most marginalised households of Mpatamatu as a whole. As such, the building of former Section 21 Clinic has ‘reacted’ to the tremendous social and economic changes in the township through the work of the Serve Zambia Foundation.

The Serve Zambia Foundation took over one of the corporate ruins in Mpatamatu. Its initiative first brought healthcare to homes, decentralising health services in the township. The abandoned Section 21 Clinic gave the foundation the opportunity to centralise its operations and professionalise its work. The foundation adapted the building to its projects and activities. Simultaneously, its focus on health issues revived the previous function of the building within the community. The restructured social embeddedness of Section 21 Clinic both catered to past aspirations under corporate paternalism, to present health issues within the community and to future challenges caused by the reprivatisation of Zambia’s copper industry and HIV/AIDS epidemic.

The local renovation at Section 21 Clinic resulted in a global reconnection of Mpatamatu. The process countered the ‘global disconnect’ caused by ‘abjection’,1 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, pp. 234–54. through a different type of incorporation. The work of the Serve Zambia Foundation attracted the attention of other church organisations in Zambia and overseas. Cooperation partners visited the township and brought back a picture of the situation in Mpatamatu. This enabled new financial inflows in forms of donations and a knowledge transfer on faith-based community service.

Andrew Kayekesi’s political commitment connected the situation in Mpatamatu with the political decision-making processes in Luanshya and Lusaka. Through its home-based care work, the foundation created new relations of constructive dependence. They offered Mpatamatu’s residents new opportunities and a new sense of belonging. In contrast to the times of corporate paternalism, these new relationships of dependence grew out of a bottom-up initiative. The Serve Zambia Foundation had been founded at a time when its staff members and volunteers had to attend to a dramatic number of deaths and far-reaching social decline in the community of Mpatamatu. Built on the material remains of the corporate paternalism that once created and maintained the township, the foundation created something new that integrated a past image of Mpatamatu, the present material environment and the future aspirations of its residents.