2.1 Pre-colonial and Colonial Era .1 Early mining activity
2.1.6 The era of greatest activity
the Copperbelt while returning only a fraction to the territory. For the decade 1930-40 approximately £2,400,000 worth of taxes flowed out and only £136,000 returned in development funds.64 Northern Rhodesia's local administrators lived with this lopsided arrangement, yet cost conscious British government overseers sent out an expert on colonial administration to encourage operating expense cuts. Surprisingly, he returned to the UK suggesting a spending increase rather than decrease because "the essential social services are very backward and require to be largely expanded." 5 World War 2 interrupted any discussion on these recommendations, though, as Britain's need for copper made industrial production more urgent than social service provision for Copperbelt residents.
and complexities unimaginable across most of the continent. In the old days, hand tools, fire, and ritual had caused stones to melt7 and ultimately become bracelets and croisettes borne by itinerant traders. Now, headframes, vast underground networks, furnaces, and cooling towers produced out of crushed rock what eventually became long tons traded on the London Metal Exchange.
Since the mines were now so lucrative and the government so pecuniary, it fell to the companies to do the sort of environmental transformation that would attract both Europeans and Africans to the Copperbelt.71 For expatriates, the auxiliaries of mine life were staggering and represented the best of Britain in the bush.72
A mere list of the amenities must read like a guide-book or even an advertisement, but there is no avoiding it. At each of the mines there are, for the Europeans, spacious clubs with tennis courts, bowling-greens, billiards and swimming-pools; eighteen-hole golf courses (with green grass greens), cricket fields (with green grass pitches), and rugby and soccer fields; modern cinemas; extremely well-equipped hospitals and excellent schools.7
For Africans, the starting point was somewhat different. Increasing stays in town had gradually transformed the alternating rural-urban work pattern to one of more permanent settlement.74 And now the mine companies had a housing dilemma.75 When workers could return to the rural areas it held down the companies' operating costs, but the labor force's stay in town had potential advantages of its own.
' Silavwe, Some Aspects of Personnel Management, 5; Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, 49ff; Heisler, Urbanisation and Government of Migration, 2; Gavin W. H. Relly, "Background to the Zambian Copper Mining Industry," An Address by the Chairman of Anglo-American Corporation (Central Africa), Ltd. On the Producers Day at the Inter-governmental Copper Conference, Lusaka (Ndola: ZCCM Archives), 6.
70 Relating what made the traditional smelting process so mysterious a Colonial Era missionary is said to have remarked, "stones are not things which melt." As quoted in Bradley, Copper Venture, 36-37.
Kay, Social Geography of Zambia, 91
72 Outside consultants with worldwide mining experience who came to the Copperbelt in the 1980s remarked that they had never seen anything comparable elsewhere.
73 Bradley, Copper Venture, 22-23.
74 Heisler, Urbanisation and Government of Migration, 114.
75 For more on this rural to urban shift and Anglo's housing strategies, see Roberts, History of Zambia, 188ff and Pallister, Stewart, and Lepper, South Africa, Inc.
Anglo's Ernest Oppenheimer believed that the best means of securing a steady, submissive work force was by offering housing compounds with sufficient amenities to make mining jobs both attractive and necessary.76 Oppenheimer had set up a partial model of his workplace housing ideas in South Africa. The model included dining-halls and dormitory rooms with "new standards of nutrition, hygiene, and control"77 that the mining companies testified proved popular with the labor force. But South Africa's legally constructed racial divisions with their restrictions on where Africans could live didn't allow the Oppenheimer model sufficient latitude to demonstrate its overriding aim of providing just enough opportunity to maintain interest without relinquishing too much control. But Northern Rhodesia, free from codified apartheid systems, was an excellent place to attempt the full- blown vision.78 And, since labor tensions had for some time reminded Europeans of their vulnerability, corporate displays of good will towards the African labor force might help
7Q
diffuse any awkward situations that could arise.
So, eventually, the companies began supplying cinder block housing for families, plumbing, electricity, and regular distribution of the staple food, mealie meal, in quantities and qualities government simply couldn't match.80 Over time, cinemas, libraries, schools and community centers also were set up in the mining compounds along with endless organized sporting activities.
The Oppenheimer model worked—perhaps even better than could have been imagined. It also had some arguably unimagined consequences. One consequence was that
76 This overall philosophy was sometimes phrased as: "keep the country quiet, keep the copper coming out,"
Bostock and Harvey, Economic Independence and Zambian Copper, 17.
77 Anglo-American annual report for 1951 as quoted in Pallister, Stewarts- and Lepper, South Africa, Inc., 42.
78 Ibid., 42-43.
79 Further testimony to ongoing settler concerns about their safety may be found in the history of the mines' dispensation of blasting licenses. Zambian workers were not allowed to obtain such licenses until the 1970s.
Interview with independent technical consultant assigned to ZCCM privatization project, 2005.
80 Kay, Social Geography of Zambia, 136.
the very structure intended to keep workers docile seems to have helped their labor organizing. The physical closeness of township dwellings allowed workers easy means by which they could spread organizing information.81 That ease of communication was still at work in the mid-2000s when vibrant meetings could be manufactured apparently out of nothing just by miners stepping outside to gather in a few neighbors. Another consequence arose from organized labor's effectiveness. As the European mine workers' union agitated for better conditions of their own, the British government pressed mining companies to upgrade facilities within the African workers' areas. This prompted Oppenheimer to complain that things had gone too far.
The people entrusted with the opening of this enterprise (the N'Kana mine) did not create a mining camp, nor even a mining town, but a mining Utopia.
The layout of the town, the houses, the amenities, the free services to our employees do not exist anywhere else. The whole thing is a dream town, something which—if mining is carried on in Paradise—one imagines it might be like.82
Perhaps a third unexpected consequence was the model's endurance even long after Zambians had declared their great dislike for colonial patronage. In fact, under nationalization the Zambian run mining companies kept policies and practices begun for the colonial powers' benefit and declared "that a contented worker can be relied upon better than one whose memory is clouded with unsettled problems." Long after nationalization had ended, even more than ten years after the Oppenheimer model system had begun to crumble, what Zambian miners most frequently mentioned as the greatest loss associated with privatization was the townships' disintegration.
81 Interview with former ZCCM senior manager, 2005.
82 As quoted in Pallister, Stewart, and Lepper, South Africa, Inc., 45-46.
83 Mining Mirror, July 7, 1978, 8.