At least four points from these narratives deserve mention even though we will reserve fuller analysis of the situation for further on in the study. The first is a palpable sense of life and death threat that seemed to arise in both accounts. We might view worries about white sabotage and efforts to reduce the Zambian population as demonstrative of sheer
91 For instance, in 2004, a senior executive commenting on a multiple fatality incident said he had sent three emails to the corporate headquarters that day and received no reply.
92 "Public Inquest for BGRIMM Victims Fails to Take Off," The Post (My 7, 2005):
http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200507070875.html; "AF Plane Crash Report Inquiries Concluded," Times of Zambia (July, 19 2005): http://allafrica.com/stories/printable/200507190340.html. The official report on the series of mining accidents during the main spate of accidents was completed and sent to government late in the year ("State Receives Report on Mine Accidents," Zambia Daily Mail (December 6, 2005): 2.
" Mpatamatu was traditionally a township where miners working at the Luanshya sites had lived. Since only miners would have had access to explosives, this incident was further indication of the community's volatile frustration.
paranoia or political opportunism. But why would such thoughts occur in a nation state that was, by then, more than two generations old and how would opportunistic politicians know that these ideas could so effectively manipulate the citizenry?
Second is the prevalence of connecting what to our minds may appear as unconnected ideas and events to draw conclusions about why the tragedies happened. In the Mufulira Disaster story, popular views linked Kaunda's mine nationalization program to racial tensions and those two things together formed at least a partial basis for why the sinkhole happened. During the 2005 spate of accidents, not only was the Mufulira Disaster itself resurrected but also the air crash in which Zambia lost its football team figured in as did links between accidents in seemingly unrelated settings throughout the country. Before we dismiss these as more indication of undue paranoia, poor education, or political opportunism, what if there was a way of understanding things that did make the connections reasonable?
We know what Schutz said about points of relevance as being more topographical than linear, allowing people to make mental leaps between mountain peaks of meaning while passing over areas underneath. We also know that ancient and well-respected scholarly practices such as traditional rabbinic Midrash can find importance and meaning everywhere.94 If philosophers and theologians can justify such inter-relatedness intellectually what about the experiential inter-relatedness of ordinary Zambians? What if a systematic reasoning out of the related and unrelated in these Zambian incidents was not so much the method for discovering meaning as was something else?
Jacob Neusner, for example, maintains that traditional rabbinic Midrash operates on the assumption that everything in Scripture was recorded for a reason. Therefore even ostensibly superfluous passages contain important teaching elements. Further, all Scripture is inter-related and a verse from the prophetic writings may be used to explain something in the Torah and so on. The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism, (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1993), 54-63.
This leads to a third note of consequence. The complex relationships and motivations among the various actors involved defied dualistic or binary divisions between management and labor; black and white; expatriate and national.95 How well would economic, political, or historical analyses on their own deal with this variety of tensions and sympathies? When we think about development policy and planning discussions of the sort inspired by Sachs, Bono, and Diamond where should we fit such factors as the brutally incisive analyses of ordinary Zambians concerning their own government leaders? What of the passionate protectiveness the people had for the mines? On the other side, what about the stymied frustration of expatriate managers who encountered resistance and silence from both ends of the working spectrum and from the government that had ostensibly invited them in? What, further, can be made of the government's stated aim of wanting the mines to be restored to pre-eminence followed by its antagonistic actions towards the workforce and managers?
Finally, both stories incorporated religious as well as economic thinking.96 It was well known, for instance, in 1970s Zambia that supernatural elements were suspected in the Mufulira Disaster. That suspicion lingered more than 35 years later. During the 2005 spate of accidents, mention of supernatural or spiritual involvement was unabashed and apparent in public as well as private conversations. And also by this time, mission Christianity's God appeared involved as well. Moreover, such analyses by Zambians appeared unmatched by similar counterpart thinking within the expatriate community. What might this suggest for efforts to arrive at broad consensus over why things happened?
5 See Ellis and Ter Haar on the propensity for Westerners to think in such terms. Worlds of Power, 5.
This study presumes a link between the spiritual, the supernatural, and religion generally, although sociologists of religion have debated this point. Willis, for example, points out that Emile Durkheim "rejected any definition of religion in terms of the supernatural" ("Like Ships Passing," 81) while Weber asserted that unhooking the supernatural and magical from "religion" came as part of society's overall modernization. (The Protestant Ethic, 86). Willis himself assumes that worldviews, cosmologies, religious memories, and the supernatural are interrelated. "Like Ships Passing," 131. See Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, on this as well.
This last point becomes more noticeable when we summarize the different attitudes about accidents exhibited by both studied groups. So, the table below illustrates key points derived from the first two sections of this chapter. In addition to exhibiting different categorical starting points—the workforce beginning with more outward, encompassing explanations while managers focused on individual issues before moving outward—the table shows what appear to be substantive differences within categories.
Workforce/popular theories & concepts Executive/managerial theories & concepts Outwardly directed accident causes:
• Haste and greed of private companies
• Manner of treatment of the environment
Inwardly directed accident causes:
• Individual thought processes
• Mental conditions, physical, and emotional attitudes
Inwardly directed accident causes:
• Spiritual and supernatural forces
• Errors of omission/commission
Outwardly directed accident causes:
• Pre-existing poor physical conditions
• Haste and greed of other corporate actors Measures for protection and reprisal:
• Medicinal items, charms, and words
• The company as providing proper environment
• God
• Actions by mine spirits
Measures for protection and reprisal:
• Improving individual worker knowledge
• Provision and application of appropriate tools and equipment
• Interpersonal accountability
• Potential disciplinary action Post-incident investigation:
• Formal and informal inquiries
• Interpretation of seemingly unrelated past events
Post-incident investigation:
• Formal inquiries and fact finding
• Procedural changes for the future
Since life is never as tidy as a chart, the above summary is not meant to be definitive.
It should, however, help identify—in Schutz's imagery—some of our own mountain peaks of meaning. It should also highlight the extent to which religious elements as causative agents—supernatural forces such as chisomo, charms, mine spirits, and so on—figured into the way Zambians talked about why misfortunes occurred. Further, the table summary should help show the extent to which this was not the case for executives and managers.
Before jumping to any conclusions based on this evidence we will briefly compare and contrast the situation within a wider context to see how this case holds up. A quick look at what others have observed will show that this sort of causative analysis has appeared in
various African settings and Africans themselves understand it to be religiously or spiritually oriented. Another brief look at a similar American mining situation will further show some of the differences in this way of thinking when contrasted with an example of Western experience and analysis.
4.4.1 The African why?
Sometimes the ideas we are investigating here are discussed in terms of "witchcraft,"
a topic to be more fully investigated in chapter five.97 Here, and since this study concerns a broader religious perspective, we will work with more encompassing terms than "witchcraft"
alone. We will talk of spiritual or supernatural forces to designate a way of thinking about why things happen that hasn't seemed to figure into Western ways of reasoning for quite some time." Perhaps the best example of this difference may be seen in the way official explanations of the time and later expatriate analyses dealt with the 1970 inundation in Mufulira versus the way Zambians have continued to talk about it. In our more Western view, we can accept scientific theory as saying that something can trigger physical events that had precipitating circumstances in a series of human blunders and coincidence. In this view, we will never really know what caused the cave in to take place at the precise moment
See Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997); Max Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963); and Hoyt Alverson, Mind in the Heart of Darkness: Value and Self-Identity Among the Tswana of Southern Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978) for example. This study will address witchcraft more specifically in the next chapter.
98 Recall how Ellis and Ter Haar note that Tylor's definition of "religion" encompasses "magic" and other experiences of the supernatural. Worlds of Power, 3.
This seemed consistent with Ellis and Ter Haar's observation that the spirit world does not figure into "the secular frame of mind of most Western expatriates" regardless of their involvement with the continent. Ibid., 58.
it did,100 but we concern ourselves with finding out how it happened and preventing something similar from taking place in the future.
In the Zambian view, this was obviously not good enough. There had to be a more profound motive. And the Mufulira Disaster's popular link with sabotage, witchcraft, and ghosts appears to put such thinking in line with what scholars such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, Robin Horton, John Mbiti, and others have been saying all along. The same appears to be the case for the 2005 spate of accidents.
More than three decades ago, for example, Mbiti noted that the difference between general African and Western perceptions on the whys of misfortunes drew in spiritual or supernatural concerns. He said Africans typically ascribed these incidents to something most Westerners wouldn't consider. In this view,
there will always be accidents, cases of barrenness, misfortune and other unpleasant experiences. For African peoples these are not purely physical experiences: they are 'mystical' experiences of a deeply religious nature.
People in the villages will talk freely about them, for they belong to their world of reality, whatever else scientists and theologians might say. Nothing harmful happens 'by chance' everything is 'caused' by someone directly or through the use of mystical power.101
Max Gluckman, writing at about the same time and using the more restrictive
"witchcraft" term, described the thinking process this way.
For every misfortune, like every piece of good fortune, involves two questions: the first is 'how' did it occur, and the second is 'why' it occurred at all. The 'how' is answered by common-sense empirical observation: the son died because he was bitten by a poisonous snake. But this does not explain why that son was bitten by that snake and at that time and place, and
100 Evans-Pritchard discusses this sort of void in Western thinking, by contrasting it with Azande thinking. He notes the difference between our tendency to explain how accidents occur without addressing the specifics of why they do. Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1937), 70. See also Ellis and Ter Haar on this point: Science and technology provide good how explanations, but in the absence of answers to the why question in the West, conspiracy theories involving unseen forces (even if they arise from the material world of CIA plots, for instance) may surround misfortunes.
Worlds of Power, 25ff.
IOi John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1969), 200-201.
not by another snake at another time and place; or indeed why that man was bitten and not some other man altogether. Beliefs in witchcraft explain why particular persons at particular times and places suffer particular misfortunes—accident, disease, and so forth. Witchcraft as a theory of causation is concerned with the singularity of misfortune.102
More recent remarks specifically about mine accidents from a Western educated Zambian unfamiliar with these scholarly works suggest that such earlier theoretical analyses held in the mid-2000s Copperbelt:
[TJhere are the logical reasons why things happen and then there are those things which, "I won't talk about it but I'm sure there is something that we have not been doing that has led to this." Forget about "this was an unsafe act" or "unsafe practices" and so on....[T]here's always something behind.
There's no such thing as a natural death or a natural illness.l03
To what extent does this suggest a point of Zambian relevance, a spot on the miners'
"maps" that is unaccounted for in our current Western view? A brief comparison with an American mining tragedy that occurred the year after the spate of accidents will be helpful here.
4.4.2 The Western why?
On January 2nd, 2006 an explosion at the Sago coal mine in West Virginia, USA trapped 13 miners, 12 of whom eventually died from carbon monoxide poisoning.104 Private citizens, government officials, religious leaders, and—no doubt—mine managers began asking why questions from the moment of the disaster through its bitter conclusion and for weeks afterwards. As copper has long been recognized the lifeblood of Zambia, for the time this story dominated American news coverage coal was recognized for the prominent role it
1 2 Gluckman, Custom and Conflict, 83-84. See also Geschiere's discussion of witchcraft as being used to explain unexpected misfortune. Modernity of Witchcraft, 69ff.
1 AT
Interview with mine physician, Copperbelt mining company, 2004. See Ellis and Ter Haar on why discussions happen in African everyday life even if such talk, in the West, is typically left to theologians and philosophers. Worlds of Power, 26.
104 This was the state's worst mining disaster in 40 years. Ken Ward "Numerous Faulty Safety Checks Found,"
The Charleston Gazette (January 11, 2006): http://www.wvgazette.com/webtools/print/News/2006011026.
plays in this country's economy. As with the Zambian situation in 2005, blame was batted back and forth between the government and the private coal industry. Government investigations into why the accident had occurred acknowledged production pressures similar to those expressed by Zambians about their privatized mines.105 Additionally, some American critics recognized that the Bush administration and the mining industry had colluded to relax safety standards and these changes echoed the Zambian citizenry's critique that its elected officials pandered too much to private corporate interests.106
Religion also played a prominent role in the Sago Mine disaster's aftermath and the various ways this was true deserve mention. Miners' family members waiting for news gathered at a Baptist Church. At initial reports that the men were alive, the community's Christian faith appeared to be boosted; at later reports that the exact opposite was true, some people's Christian faith appeared to be severely tested.107 The major religious service that took place following the disaster was publicized as a memorial and healing service; not an emergency service to discern where the country had gone wrong.10 That issue seemed to be playing out in the political, rather than the religious arena. The only public mention of a possible link between a divinely caused incident and human responsibility in bringing on
Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia noted that there had been four years of cuts in federal funding for mine health, safety, and personnel resources prior to the Disaster. He also stated that profits should never come before protection and safety and raised questions about cronyism between the federal mine safety and health administration and the industry. President of the United Mine Workers of America, Cecil Roberts, stated that the federal agency was created in 1969 and, in 2001, the coal industry was put in charge of it. Since that time, 17 key safety regulations had been withdrawn. U.S. Congress. Senate. Appropriations Committee, Hearings on Mine Safety, June 23, 2006.
Ward, "Numerous Faulty Safety Checks"; Nancy Zuckerbrod, "Lawmakers Question Bush Choice to Head Mine Agency," Newsday (January 31, 2006): http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny—
mineadministrator0131jan31,31,0,6122657; Laurie Gindin Beacham, "Mining Deaths a Wake-Up Call to Preserve Civil Justice" (February 7, 2006): http://www.commondreams.org/egi- bin/print.cgi?file/views06/0207.
107 Susan Lenfestey, "The Hand of God—and Bush—at Sago" (January 12, 2006).
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0112-35.htm.
108 "A Service of Honor, Hope, and Healing" (Conducted at West Virginia Wesleyan College, Buckhannon, WV, January 15,2006).
such an attack came from a small fringe Baptist element based in Topeka, Kansas. This group was known for virulent opposition to homosexuality and members of the group picketed some miners' funerals claiming that the disaster represented divine judgment upon a
"fag-infested" state.109
Official post-incident investigations eventually concluded that a lightning strike had been the precipitating "cause" of the event.11 Undoubtedly, individual families pondered why their men had been at that particular place and time on January 2nd but the community's collective thinking seemed to stop at the point of trusting that God knew the answer.111