2.1 Pre-colonial and Colonial Era .1 Early mining activity
2.1.7 Federation's impact
officially joined the Rhodesias and Nyasaland into a single political union based on a publicly presented theory that Federation would benefit the entire region's development.
In practice, it created just the sort of domination Northern Rhodesians had feared. A satirical cartoon from the time described how things looked from their vantage point. It depicted a cow with its face down, grazing on the Copperbelt while being milked in Salisbury and tended by workers from Nyasaland. And, in truth, even more money than before did begin flowing out of Northern Rhodesia to fund massive infrastructure development south of the Zambesi River.91 The first such projects were railway transport systems and roadways that, for decades afterwards, remained markedly superior to those up north. Later, a dam and power plant for use by the mines and originally planned for near Kafue was relocated south to Kariba. " The project entailed forcible removal of 30,000 people and thousands of animals from their lands. Simultaneously it made a statement about the comparative worth of the two Rhodesias.
Epstein saw Federation as not only supported by the BSAC but directly related to the Company's handover to the British government some thirty-one years previously (Politics in Urban African Community, 158). Anglo- American and other mining companies with British and American interests were all enthusiastic supporters of Federation. Pallister, Stewart, and Lepper, South Africa, Inc., 44. Frederick Cooper asserts that Great Britain hoped Federation would halt the rising power of South Africa's white ruling class from taking control of more territory within the region. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 74. See also Wood's discussion of the issue in Northern Rhodesia, 68ff.
90 Interview with long-term resident, departmental and divisional manager, Copperbelt mining company, 2005.
91 From 1954/55 to 1959/60, the net drain on Northern Rhodesia due to taxes on the mines for Federation was
£56 million. At the same time, Northern Rhodesia could only spend £50 million on capital expenditures within its own territory and, in all, lost £97 million in taxes. Martin, Minding Their Own Business, 36.
92 See map in the appendices.
93 Ibid; "Copper and the Copper Mining Industry," 15; Roberts, History of Zambia, 213. Shrewd observers have noted that colonial authorities aligned with Southern Rhodesia revealed their priorities about whom they considered important even when engaging in the famed Project Noah that removed wildlife from the area prior to its flooding. The wildlife went to Southern Rhodesia's game parks while the Tonga people were deposited in a dry, barren region on Northern Rhodesia's side of the Zambesi. A few other historical points of note concerning Kariba Dam deserve mention. The £20 million cost of construction was, in part, funded by the Anglo group of mines. Pallister, Stewart, and Lepper, South Africa, Inc., 45. In the 1970s as tensions between Rhodesia and Zambia increased, the World Bank funded construction of a power station on the north side of the Zambesi that was understood as an effort to give Zambia more autonomy over its electrical power. Peter Stiff, See You in November (Alberton: Galago Publishing, Inc., 1985), 85-86. In the mid-2000s, this power station was owned by one of Zambia's remaining parastatals, ZESCO. Further, the population displacement ripple
Africans had always been opposed to Federation and the Kariba Dam seems to have encapsulated just one reason why. The displacement of Africans from their traditional lands caused by the Dam's construction foreshadowed in microcosm what Federation would do on a much grander scale. Federation prompted such heated discussion on land rights that Westerners had to take notice. Different outside observers tried to figure it out. One said that, whatever the root cause, modern progress hadn't overtaken it.
Fear of losing land was widely shared among Africans in Northern Rhodesia.
Of all their reasons for opposing amalgamation or federation, this fear carried the greatest emotional force, and it crystallized other fears which were perhaps less easily defined. Land was still of absorbing interest to almost all Africans.
The growth of industry on the Copperbelt had done nothing to undermine this interest; rather, indeed, it had strengthened it.94
Other assessments appear to demonstrate Schutz's map theory in action. For instance, one analyst explained the situation in Freudian psychoanalytic terms—familiar territory to many Westerners. When sugar sales fell off after word that it had been poisoned and Africans refused to drink beer that they also feared poisoned, he concluded that all these signs had something to do with Federation. And Federation was about something else as well.
[T]he Federation issue produced on Africans an impact akin to trauma which reactivated intra-physic conflicts that had once centered on the earlier stages of libidinal development.
Another commentator saw the subject of land rights as involving territory largely unfamiliar to 20th century Westerners.
effect was still apparent in small, but important details. One concerned the manner in which Tonga people were able to cross the Zimbabwe-Zambia border. Unlike other travelers, they could move between the two countries using just certain paper documentation rather than having to obtain official passports. Another interesting detail concerned responsibility for maintenance and upkeep of the Dam itself. This hadn't been such an issue under Federation or even for decades afterwards as long as Zimbabwe was flourishing. But by the mid-2000s, with that country's economic and political stability shattered, questions began to arise concerning which country actually owned the Dam.
94 Roberts, History of Zambia, 209.
95 Epstein, Scenes from African Urban Life, 172-177.
When I began my field work, the meaning of the new political union became quickly apparent to me because the fear of federation and the loss of land was dragged into almost every interview and conversation, regardless of context or relevancy...The mystical relationship among land, fertility, and power has already been discussed. Land was life, and it is therefore easy to understand that loss of land is a symbol for annihilation.
Perhaps Africans in Northern Rhodesia felt this threat most keenly. Many had worked in Southern Rhodesia and were familiar with the territory's restrictive policies on land and trade unions.97 Federation, it was feared, would simply speed up the white settler's
OR
land grab. Southern Rhodesians were also a different breed from their northern neighbors.
Many expatriates who came to work on the Copperbelt immigrated from mining communities in England, Scotland, and Wales and frequently returned there upon retirement." Southern Rhodesia, by contrast, was increasingly being settled by farmers descended from Dutch ancestors who had gone to South Africa about the same time that the Puritans had come to America. Over the generations, these Afrikaners, as they became known, developed large farms and strongly held ideas—backed by Scripture reading—about the innate superiority of white people.100 In all, Africans saw a significant contrast between Northern and Southern Rhodesians. It was one thing to be related to as an inferior economic class by a shorter-term population that liked golf and lawn bowling and quite another to be thought racially inferior by a permanently settled group of well-armed farmers.101
Powdermaker, Copper Town, 63-64.
97 European farming had rapidly expanded in Southern Rhodesia after World War 1 and tens of thousands of Africans from Northern Rhodesia had migrated south over the years for mine work elsewhere. Roberts, History of Zambia, 91.
98 Powdermaker, Copper Town, 62-63.
99 By 1960, only about half of all white expatriates were staying in Northern Rhodesia for the duration of their work lives; and only about 16% of the expatriate population retired on the Copperbelt. This was largely due to cost of living and being in an undeveloped area with not a lot of amenities for seniors. "The Attitudes of White Mining Employees Towards Life and Work on the Copperbelt," National Institute for Personnel Research, in Association with the Institute for Social Research (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal, 1960), i.
100 Some of their rationale was no doubt similar to defenses of America's slavery system and post-Civil War racial segregation policies.
101 Interview with independent technical consultant assigned to ZCCM privatization project, 2005.
With Federation, Africans in Northern Rhodesia felt betrayed by a government they had not asked for but that some at least had come to view as benignly paternalistic. The process of devolution to black majority rule in Northern Rhodesia might have been plodding messily along, but it was apparently inevitable. Federation was a set back, if not worse.