2.1 Pre-colonial and Colonial Era .1 Early mining activity
2.1.5 Industrial Era mining begins
The BSAC helped ensure its own survival by making arrangements that lessened its accountability to government and inhibited business competition. A series of developments around the time of Company turnover to government make this clear. When Northern Rhodesia became a protectorate, mining provided a majority—but not an economically profitable portion—of government's revenue.47 But there was no guarantee of the mines' consistency or longevity. So, the BSAC, anticipating that development and operations might continue in fits and starts, made sure it would receive royalty payments regardless of profitability. But the Company would only pay taxes when things went well. Further, the Company resurrected the old concessions taken from local African rulers to buttress claims for holding all the Copperbelt's mineral rights. Taken together, such arrangements kept the mining industry comparatively free from involvement with local government and thwarted smaller prospectors who might represent competition.4
Larger corporate backers were welcome, though, because geological exploration had begun to suggest that the Copperbelt's potential was enormous. By the late 1920s, financiers had organized two major companies that controlled Zambia's mining industry for the next four decades. Rhodesian Selection Trust (RST) was funded largely out of the United States and United Kingdom. Rhodesian Anglo-American Corporation, a subsidiary of Ernst
46 Oliver and Fage, Short History of Africa, 167. Kay (Social Geography of Zambia, 136) characterizes the mining communities of that era as consisting "largely of hard-headed Europeans and bewildered Africans who.. .succumbed easily and in large numbers to disease."
47 Bostock and Harvey, Economic Independence andZambian Copper, 33.
48 Ibid., 36ff.
49 Ibid., 39, 56.
Oppenheimer's Anglo-American Corporation also had American and British funding but was based in South Africa.50 Despite the relative cultural uniformity of their backers, these two companies were very differently run. RST had a more relaxed, open way of conducting business while AAC was more hierarchical and formal. As of the mid-2000s, the lingering influences of these contrasting managerial styles were still noticeable to Zambians with long- term experience on the mines.
Overseen either by RST or AAC most of the major Copperbelt mines, along with Kansanshi, opened for commercial production during the late 1920s and early 1930s.51
Some fairly promptly closed again as the Great Depression dampened the industrialized world's requests for copper. But they reopened as conditions improved and openings and closings became a pattern over the next several decades.52
From the start of the intensely industrial period, Africans came in droves from the rural areas to work on the mines. Such a major migration from the countryside into town could appear simply as proof that Weber's theory worked with Africans, too: New economic circumstances would produce opportunity, wealth, and additional wants in Zambians just as in Europeans and Americans. But the situation was more complex than that. Africans had to seek work on the mines because colonial government policies necessitated it. Pressure for wage work was created by the poll tax. This was a plan the British government regularly
"Copper and the Copper Mining Industry," 12-13; "Zambia's Mining Industry," 25-29; Kaplan, Zambia, 187.
51 Herbert, Red Gold of Africa, 25. Kabwe, or Broken Hill, as it was originally called, had begun commercial lead and zinc mining in the early 1900s but, until the Copperbelt expansion, mining was a relatively minor activity in Northern Rhodesia. Helmuth Heisler, Urbanisation and the Government of Migration: The Inter- relation of Urban and Rural Life in Zambia (London: C. Hurst and Co., 1974), 3; Kaplan, Zambia, 187; Robert Bates, "Patterns of Uneven Development: Causes and Consequences in Zambia," Monograph Series in World Affairs, The Social Science Foundation and Graduate School of International Studies 11, no. 3 (Denver:
University of Denver, 1974), 5.
52 "Zambia's Mining Industry," 34ff; Mendelssohn, Geology of Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, 9; "Copper and the Copper Mining Industry," 12.
53 Bradley, Copper Venture, 23-24.
instituted in its colonies to support local administrative activities. Africans were assessed a tax that had to be paid in cash to the colonial government but since there was no cash in the rural areas, men had to go to work in places where they could be paid. Poll tax proponents saw the method as a "civilizing" influence on Africans. They said that it would help involve the local people in paying for services and amenities within their areas such as roadways, schools, and hospitals.54 While a miniscule amount by Western standards, the tax meant new ways of being and doing for Africans.55 For instance, it represented a new authority that undermined the traditional chiefs' authority. Migration to urban areas also interfered with the rural agricultural cycles. Farmers were now absent at key times of the season because they were taking stints as miners underground.5
As Africans began experiencing the labor environment's shift schedules, wage work, and taxes, they also adopted some of labor's reliable responses. With remarkable speed they learned to organize and take action where they could. They chose whom they worked for within the limited opportunities offered and founded support structures outside and inside the workplace.57 Western missionaries would have seen some of this activity as pay off for their
C O
own labors. For, even though the Copperbelt wasn't missionary territory, African miners independently established inter-denominational Christian church gatherings and began skills
James Eric Lane, Moment of Encounter (New York: Peter Lang, 1984), 51; Heisler, Urbanisation and Government of Migration, 4-5, 37ff.
' Bostock and Harvey, Economic Independence and Zambian Copper, 27; Roberts, History of Zambia, 177- 178. The tax was about 10 shillings per year. Payment for farm work could run about 4 pence and on the mines 6 pence. Roberts, History of Zambia, 24.
5 Lane, Moment of Encounter, 13.
'7 Roberts, History of Zambia, 178. See also Bostock and Harvey, Economic Independence and Zambian Copper, Heisler, Urbanisation and Government of Migration; Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity; and Kay, Social Geography of Zambia.
' Denis M'Passou, Mindolo: A Story of the Ecumenical Movement in Africa (Lusaka: Multimedia Press, 1983), 3.
• • • I l l
training programs/ On the job, miners adapted techniques of organized labor even before formal unions existed. By 1935, they were sufficiently well informed and coordinated to create a series of what official reports labeled "disturbances" in Luanshya and Kitwe regarding wage and labor inequities and a midyear tax increase. ° These protests prompted the British government to expand its tribally represented judicial and legislative systems and to institute a labor department.61 Within a few years, all the major mines had formal African labor unions.
While development of the mines and increasing sophistication of the workforce proceeded, there was not always corresponding build up or refinement in the region on the whole. This is another significant point to bear in mind relative to our present day thinking about development priorities and oversight. Northern Rhodesia's infrastructure expansion was consistently under funded as the British government and the BSAC drew revenue from
The non-denominational Union Church of the Copperbelt was established in 1925 by African miners who came from different areas of the country and who had different mission church backgrounds. Indigenous leaders of various congregations from throughout the Copperbelt periodically gathered for meetings at a shady spot known as Mindolo outside of Kitwe. The ecumenical training center eventually established at that site in the late 1950s was a direct outgrowth of collaboration between these Churches and the mining companies.
Ibid., 3-4.
60 Epstein, Politics in Urban African Community, 29. Roberts marks 1935 as the year in which the Copperbelt became the center of political gravity for all of Northern Rhodesia (History of Zambia, 198). It remained so into the mid-2000s. At the time of the 1935 disturbances, there were 855 Europeans and 6,556 Africans at Nkana; 383 Europeans and 3,078 Africans at Mufulira; and 595 Europeans and 4, 442 Africans at Luanshaya—
the three areas involved in work stoppages and demonstrations. "Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Disturbances in the Copper belt, Northern Rhodesia Together with the Governor's Despatch to the Secretary of State on the Report" (n.p., November 1935), 10, 17, 20. Evidence that such disproportionate representation played a part in European nervousness about their own situation derives from the force with which the "disturbances" were met. While work stoppages seemed to constitute the extent of the display in Mufulira and Nkana, at Luanshya about 1,000 Wemba (e.g., Bemba) "natives" were said to have attacked the mine compound. The Europeans opened fire, killing six and wounding others. The firing of arms came after a
"native" reportedly struck an armed soldier. Additionally, the Royal Air Force was called up from Salisbury along with 54 European police from Salisbury; 25 European police and 35 "native" police from Bulawayo.
There was also talk of securing an airplane that could carry tear gas bombs and the police patrolled the compounds for some time thereafter. Ibid., 7-9.
61 Kaplan, Zambia, 31.
62 In 1949, the various African unions came together to form Northern Rhodesia African Mine workers' Union directed by Lawrence Katilungu. Kaplan, Zambia, 31. European mine workers had their own representative bodies. Geoffrey W. Silavwe, Some Aspects of Personnel Management Practice in the Copper Mining Industry of Zambia (Ndola: Mission Press, 1999), 298ff.
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.